Mad Honey

Prologue

When he came back to himself he was inside the cabin, stretched out on the narrow mattress where he had closed his eyes, the folded ridges of a scratchy wool blanket pressing into the thin membrane of his skin. There was a musty smell of damp pillows and wet wood, and the distant sound of tires whooshing along a gravel road. So he had ears, and a nose, and long limbs that extended from his torso, and sensitive nerves sending information to a brain that processed information in words. In those first moments, he remembered an altogether different sensory experience, and he dwelled on the details of the dream before abandoning himself to wakefulness, catching fleeting images in his memory like butterflies in a net before they became lost to him.

Beck was whole, but he could feel his pieces. They flew like miniature striped dirigibles, coming and going from the mothership of his hive-body. Instinctively he understood the hum and thrum of life, a pulse that moved not slick red blood, but sweet amber honey. Reflective thought was absent, but he was conscious, in a way humans are not, of the building up and breaking down of things corporeal. Each of his cells was a bee performing one specific duty, the task each bee was created to do: clean, eat, build, come or go. If he sensed his core overheating, he initiated the fanning of wings, maintaining the comfort of his queen. Beck quivered at the thought of her, unique piece of his pieces, part of his parts, reigning over the glorious ordered chaos of the hive, thousands of segmented black legs shuffling up and down aromatic waxen walls, nurseries of white larvae, and perfect hexagons of heavenly honey, sweet honey, rich honey, perfect food of light and love! For a few seconds Beck remembered what it was like to sense the dawn of the sun-day and reach outside himself, sending wavering lines of gold to every fragrant receptacle, every colour-exploding flower. There, inside the flowers, parts of him slipped along silky coloured petals, cushions of fuchsia, yellow, lavender, crimson, rose and white. Inside flowers, all those bits of him sipped, with ten thousand tongues, the nectar he needed and desired. Then he called his pieces back to himself, and deep in his core, waggles spread ripples of promise and pleasure.

The plywood walls of the cabin came into focus. His eyes slid right, toward the brilliance of sun glaring through a window, then left, to a cottage kitchen. A blue enamel kettle, flecked with white and blackened around its base from the propane stovetop, reminded Beck he had a mother who often prepared hot beverages in the emptiness of this space. Glossy photographs thumbtacked above the sink were evidence of a father whose habit it was to capture two-dimensional images for contemplation at some future time. Awareness of these people, his parents, came complete with a history Beck recognized as being his own: shunted from Canada to Cuba and back again a dozen times in his school years, a perpetual stranger, a friend who like a favourite toy got lost, only to turn up again in the yard, faded from weather and stained with mould.

His four limbs were jointed in the middle. He folded them at these junctures and redistributed his weight until he sat on his bottom, facing a chipped mirror screwed directly to the wall. A face Beck recognized as his own wavered in the mirror’s imperfections, toffee-coloured skin, long dark hair and beetle-black eyes. He remembered that kids in his Toronto neighbourhood used to call him Black, and sometimes mistake him for a girl because he was skinny and pretty, with big lips and long eyelashes. In the Havana suburb where his mother’s family lived, kids had called him white. He’d never risen to the bait of juvenile racial slurs, or used name-calling to start a playground fight, but he’d never complained or run away, thus avoiding a reputation as a coward. He had stayed quiet and peaceful, deflecting punches with his elbows in eerie silence, cementing his reputation as Beck Wise, weirdo.

He had been conscious for only a few minutes, but Beck’s identity was galloping back into the paddock of his flesh. He rubbed his eyes, amazed by the squishy resilience of eyeballs, and marvelling at the hard knobs of his knuckles. Little by little he shifted his centre of gravity from his bottom to his feet, straightening the ladder of bones inside his body. Pain ran along his muscles and shot complaints through his fingers and toes. His ability to be ambulatory returned and he took unbalanced steps, coaxing an unfamiliar anatomy closer to the window. Outside, the poplars along the road were shedding brilliant yellow leaves, and the grass around the cabin had the faded look of autumn. It had been early summer, late June, when he had come to the cabin to be alone and had reclined on the rickety bed. Where had he been?