Bee-Loud Glade Read online

  Advance Praise

  “An allegorical novel that seems eerily contemporary. Thoreau meets Ballard, meets Huysmans and many more.”

  ∼Tom McCarthy, author of Remainder and C

  “With The Bee-Loud Glade, Steve Himmer has written a hypnotic and heartfelt debut novel, interweaving naturalistic beauty and postmodern complexity within this compulsively readable parable. Whether the story’s hermit-for-hire is a man approaching some form of enlightenment or merely the whim of an eccentric billionaire remains up for debate, but the novel itself is unambiguously ingenious and very clearly announces a shining new talent.”

  ∼Frederick Reiken, author of Day For Night, The Lost Legends of New Jersey, and The Odd Sea

  “Meet Finch: 10 years into his job as Assistant to the Director of Brand Awareness at Second Nature Modern Greenery, writer of dozens of blogs where he creates imaginary lives for himself—none as surreal as the life he’ll soon lead as a hermit. Enter Himmer’s humorous, carefully imagined world. Watch his skillful hand transform Finch into a postmodern Thoreau before your eyes. Sit still. Pay attention. Do all this, and you, too, will fall under this novel’s wondrous spell. I promise.”

  ∼Peter Grandbois, author of The Gravedigger, The Arsenic Lobster, and Nahoonkara

  “Featuring a faceless drone from the world of corporate America and an eccentric millionaire whose whims change by the week, Steve Himmer’s The Bee-Loud Glade is a wonderful novel that’s hard to describe, but that’s a good thing. Just go where this stunning book takes you and enjoy the story, the characters, and the language.”

  ∼Michael Kindness, host of Books on the Nightstand

  “In The Bee-Loud Glade, Steve Himmer examines the charm of inertia. He professionalizes hermitry, making it a spectacle that is equal parts sitcom and documentary. The premise is wild but the execution is contemplative, making this novel funny two ways: funny ha-ha and funny strange. ”

  ∼William Walsh, author of Questionstruck and Ampersand, Mass.

  An Atticus Trade Paperback Original

  Atticus Books LLC

  3766 Howard Avenue, Suite 202

  Kensington MD 20895

  http://atticusbooksonline.com

  Copyright © 2011 by Steve Himmer. All rights reserved.

  Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may

  be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written

  permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations

  embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Excerpts of The Bee-Loud Glade have appeared previously in Pindeldyboz,

  PANK Magazine, Emprise Review, Everyday Genius, The Collagist, Monkeybicycle,and

  Hawk & Handsaw.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-9845105-8-0

  ISBN-10: 0-9845105-8-3

  Ebook ISBN: 978-0-9832080-1-3

  Typeset in Berling

  Cover design by Jamie Keenan

  for my parents

  1

  Last night’s storm rolled through like it meant something, crackling and snarling and snapping down branches, howling outside the mouth of my cave like the coyotes I sometimes hear far away in these hills (they’ve never come close, and I’ve never known why). It was the loudest storm I’ve heard in the years I’ve lived here, or maybe it was only the first big one to pass since my eyes began failing and forced me to listen more deeply than I did before. There’s no way of measuring that sort of thing. I can’t return to when my eyes worked to find out. I can’t compare a storm known with five senses to a storm known only through four. Or four and a half, I suppose; I can still see, just not as well as I could. I can make out the flash of lightning but never the shape of its bolt. Some mornings it’s better and others it’s worse; some days I can see almost as clearly as I ever could, only to wake up the next morning to find my eyes are worse than ever. It’s like there’s a loose lens in my head that sometimes, by chance, slides into place for a while. But despite those day-to-day fluctuations in its decline, I’ve had to accept that my eyesight is fading from blurry to black and is taking the bright, green world around me down with it. It’s getting harder and harder to be on my own, and in this line of work—not that it is really work, though it started that way—being on your own is more or less the whole job.

  This morning I stepped out of my cave into a world that still smelled like fresh rain and burnt air. Something was different—a feeling, an itch at the back of awareness—and the left-behind lightning scent made me think of those old monster movies in which the scientist waits to see if his creature has been brought to life, and the audience waits along with him. Those crackling moments of anticipation, the knowledge that something has happened, but what? The same birds were singing as sing any day, the same treetops rustling in a light breeze as their leaves sprayed a shower of rain down onto my body. It was the same as any one of my mornings, except for that nagging feeling it wasn’t.

  I checked on my crops, to be sure they were safe and not torn up by wind or flooded too deep to survive, and to my relief the informal fence of blackberry bushes had once again done its job. Berries were scattered all over the ground, slipping and squishing between my bare toes as I circled the potatoes and carrots and beans with the stoop and squint it now takes me to get a good view, but the crops themselves were unharmed. I pulled a bright yellow squash from its vine, washed it off on the wet grass, and crunched through its crisp skin as I felt my way back to the gap in the bushes and set off to inspect the rest of my world. And for once, for some reason, I walked away from the river. I went against my usual route and my long-standing habit of starting each day in its waters.

  And that’s how I got into trouble: wandering away from routine, relying on an ever more obsolete image of what my home acres look like to guide me. As long as everything stays where I expect it to be, I can find it; as long as trees don’t walk off and my cave doesn’t move and crops grow where I plant their seeds, I can get by with only this foggy tunnel of vision. But last night’s storm shifted things; it laid branches across my familiar paths and uprooted bushes I’ve used as landmarks for ages. It knocked over the cairn of stones I’d stacked up a long time ago to mark the edge of my regular ambling, but I only realized it had fallen down later, on the way back to my cave, after wandering past the downed marker and into the tangled part of the forest where I don’t go very often with these failing eyes.

  I must have wandered for hours, long enough for the angle of sunlight to rise and fall as the day dragged on, and as I dragged myself through the forest. I may have crossed my own hidden trail dozens or hundreds of times, whipped in the face and legs by the same eager branches again and again, and I may have been on the edge of the woods, on the edge of the glade by my cave, for most of the day—how would I have known when all I could see was the green veil of forest before my eyes, hanging always a few inches ahead with all the world blurry behind it?

  Sometime in late afternoon, long after the sweet-smelling wild grapes I found for lunch had stopped filling my stomach, I was still out there walking. And that’s when I got an even bigger surprise than getting lost in my own landscape: two hikers, tramping between trees and pushing aside brambles and branches, snapping twigs and crushing pinecones and acorns with heavy boots, and squashing shy mushrooms with a heavy hiss under their soles. Every once in a very, very long while someone passes this way, proves persistent enough to climb a rock face or hop over a ditch into my secret world. Every so often I hear someone nearby, but I’ve never bee
n so close to any of them and they’ve never come so close to me; they pass through and pass on, out of my forest and out of my life, leaving nothing but a temporary tear that the resettled quiet soon stitches.

  I heard the hikers coming in time to crawl under some thick, dripping bushes, to slide my nude self off their crackling path. Lying on my belly and balls in wet leaves and cool mud, I watched as the brown blurs of their boots passed within the small sphere of my sight. They weren’t speaking, but they were breathing hard and sniffing and spitting and making all of the sounds humans make when they think they’re being silent, sounds I must make myself all the time without knowing because there’s no one around me to notice. The legs in the first boots were thick with muscles and hair, but the second pair was smooth and slender. My nose burned and I nearly coughed with the sudden rush of their smells—shampoo and soap, factory-made fabrics and leather and sweat from a body that was human but for the first time in years wasn’t mine—and for a moment I thought I might retch, but I held it down as they passed.

  They moved quickly out of my limited sight, though I could still hear the crackle and snap of their steps. And that’s when one hiker, the woman—the more slender and sleek pair of legs, I supposed—spoke a word. “Here,” she said, or maybe she asked it; the sound of a voice was such a surprise that I missed its tone altogether, and though no answer was given and she said nothing else, that syllable boomed in my mind and my garden so much more loudly than the storm had last night. The first word I’d heard spoken in so many years, long after I made peace with knowing I wouldn’t hear words again. I was stunned like lightning had struck me, and the hikers kept walking until they were out of earshot but their word stayed behind, echoing across unsettled canyons of quiet.

  I might have sprung out of my bush before it was too late. Before they had passed, I might have asked them to help me find the way back to my cave, to lead a nearly blind man to his home, but how on earth would I have done it? If they didn’t run from a nude, filthy mute leaping out of the scrub, it would only be because they’d cracked my skull with one of their walking sticks and so knew they had nothing to fear. For the first time in forever I had occasion to wonder how I might look to somebody else, calloused and tanned on parts of my body that no one would have any desire to see, a shaggy skeleton or a dirty old mop stood on end. I realized that if I saw myself bursting out of the woods, I might not offer help either. And if they knew I was here they might wonder why, they might find my cave and my crops. The less I disturbed them, I thought, the less chance that they’d disturb me.

  And if I asked for help, if I did it by speaking and breaking my vow or simply by signing my needs in some manner of gesture and dance, I would be giving up all that I’ve gained in this garden, all the faith the Old Man has rewarded so well, for a weak moment’s aid from a stranger. Better to be left behind in my blindness, waiting for silence to reseal the rent left by that hiker’s word, so I waited beneath the wet bush until their breathing and boots were long gone. I knew the Old Man would get me out of the woods in his own good time, and in the end—at the end of a very long day—I was right. He guided me out not long after the hikers had passed, pulling me from the forest right at the downed cairn so I could stop to rebuild it and avoid getting lost the next time I go walking, a task that needed doing before I could head to the river for a slow evening swim and to repent for my lapse in routine.

  I crouched at the base of the cairn, feeling around in the tall grass and downed twigs for displaced stones to restack, working slowly with care because one of the hazards of naked living is that even the most mundane tasks become dangerous to some delicate part of the body, and some of those stones were rough and all of them weighed enough to cause harm, and who knew what snakes and sharp sticks I might kneel upon in the grass.

  I was glad for the work, glad to keep my hands busy and to settle my fluttering thoughts after spotting those hikers and hearing that word. The adrenaline of surprise still shook in my bones, and my heart beat so hard I could hear rushing blood in my ears. I wondered where they were headed and how long it had been since I’d seen, heard, or smelled other people (the memory of their strong odors made my nose itch again), and that made me wonder how long ago this estate was abandoned to me. How long I’d spent happily here on my own.

  Given my chance to be spotted, I chose to hide in the scrub. I gave in to the same habit of disappearing that brought me here in the first place, but this time—unlike the last—I have something worth keeping to lose.

  2

  I knew I was about to be fired when the new submanager asked, “So what is it you do here, Mr. Finch?” Almost ten years in my job, nearly that many submanagers come and gone over time, and he was the first one to open my file or notice me working in his department. I’d had a long run of good luck.

  “Brand awareness,” I said. “I’m assistant to the director of brand—”

  “I know your title. But what do you actually do?” He tapped a fingertip hard on the manila folder spread open on his desk, and it made a sharp crack because there were only two or three sheets in my file including the résumé I’d applied with years earlier, when résumés were still sent on paper. My résumé looked almost as old as the new submanager, but if I updated it—when I updated it, the way that meeting appeared to be going—it wouldn’t change very much. There was only my current (for the moment) position to add, along with its start and end dates. A decade of my life would be condensed into a couple of lines aimed at convincing some other submanager in some other office to lay claim to my remaining years.

  What could I tell him that he didn’t know, that it didn’t say in my slim file? I’d been charged by one of his predecessors with making our plastic plants (we preferred “hyperefficient” to “artificial”) into household names. My employers at Second Nature Modern Greenery envisioned a world in which trees and rosebushes reminded consumers of our reproductions and comparisons were made in our favor. “Look at the spots on those leaves,” we wanted the plant-buying public to say. “My Second Nature trees never have spots.”

  When I’d started with the company, I spent my days writing letters to newspapers and trade magazines, sowing word of our products wherever I could. A letter to Paper Products Quarterly, for instance, about how breathtaking the new corporate headquarters of some company was, might mention in passing a potted plant spotted on the mezzanine level and refer to it as one of ours. Even if the actual plants in the actual building weren’t Second Nature, even if there weren’t any plants or mezzanines in the building at all, the brand might take root in the readers of that magazine.

  Over time the arrows in my quiver changed. I frequented newsgroups about business and gardening and home decoration, trolling for any topic I could connect our greenery to, however tenuous that connection might be. A science fiction forum on which some green moon arose in conversation allowed me to mention our greenest of greens, and an argument about urban planning in some city I’d never been to became fertile ground on which to suggest hyperefficient trees for its traffic islands.

  Later I kept dozens of weblogs, and post after post shared intimate memories of the imaginary lives I’d created. Sometimes my bloggers left comments on each other’s sites, and they commented on other sites, too, drawing more traffic and potential plant buyers into my marketing web. Unless those commenters weren’t actual people, but the inventions of others with jobs just like mine, the whole blogosphere a soapbox for a few busy schemers selling plastic palm trees and flavored milk drinks and guides to selling products online. Each of my imaginary bloggers had a backstory, a family or else an explainable absence of one; each had his or her own history of successes and failures. Second Nature’s viral campaign spanned the gamut of human behavior from borderline psychotic to contemplative, fractured English to erudition, and all of those voices and vices were mine.

  And the more I said through my ciphers, the less I spoke in real life. My cube was in a far corner of the department, near some
filing cabinets to which the keys had been lost, so apart from occasional walks to the bathroom and my twice-daily route between front door and desk, I was easy to miss. The faces changed around me without introduction, and in time no one knew who I was. There was no director of brand awareness for me to assist, and no one asked what I was doing. I’d been forgotten, become furniture in my far corner, and that’s how I held onto the job for as long as I did even after I’d stopped writing about Second Nature and had let my online shills take on lives of their own. Their weblogs grew longer, spanned months and then years as they made projects for high school and graduated from college, grumbled or raved about various jobs, and enjoyed visits from growing grandchildren. They took trips to Hawaii and endured bouts with cancer, enjoyed good days at work and suffered through awful blind dates. Some gave birth and others died, their comment inboxes filling with sympathy notes they would never read, but I read them all. Commenters asked where flowers could be sent, and others suggested—success!—Second Nature’s own hyperefficient arrangements.

  Years went by offline, too. Computers and carpets upgraded around me, but always at night so I never saw how or by whom. The restaurant across the street from our office changed from sub shop to low-carb to noodles to salads, then back to sub shop again, and I ate whatever it sold. I gave up my newspaper subscription and read only the headlines from my browser’s home page, then I stopped reading news altogether because the headlines were the same ones they’d been all my life.

  Sometimes I postdated a batch of blog posts so they’d appear across upcoming days, then I let my computer sleep as I sat at my desk doing nothing. I spent days watching a trickle of water rise up and wash over the cairn of reconstituted brown stone in my desktop fountain (a decoration I’d claimed after its owner, the woman in the cubicle beside me years earlier, never returned from vacation). The same few cubic inches of liquid flowed by me again and again, until the soft sound of water and the whir of the fountain’s electric pump carried my mind away from Second Nature and plastic plants to more or less nothing at all.