Some Possible Solutions (17 page)

I have never tasted anything like this milk. It is better than beer, better than margarine, better than orange juice. Maebh says it comes from cows that were probably milked this morning, or maybe last night. This milk has never been powdered; there are no soybeans involved. Between the two of us we drink half a gallon. We rip hunks off the loaf of bread and dip them into the preserves. The plum and gooseberry are too rich for my taste, but I am fond of the pear. Maebh does not like pears, so I get it all. I shove bread deep into the jar to reach the last bit. When I look up, I see that she is watching me.

“I didn't know you were fun,” she says.

*   *   *

There are many
bedrooms at The Farm. It seems I ought to stay in one of the outlying buildings, where the family's servants have historically slept. But the farmer's wife prepared two bedrooms side by side in Main House. I do not know if Maebh's parents requested this arrangement, or if the farmer's wife decided on her own, but we shall go along with it because everywhere else is covered in pollen. The farmer's wife made the beds with white wool blankets, and put jugs of daisies on the bureaus, and spread rag rugs on the floors. All of this makes Maebh gasp with delight. If I ever expressed myself in gasps, I am sure I would gasp too.

“Night-night,” Maebh says, lolling against the doorjamb for an instant before slipping into her dark bedroom.

“Good night,” I say, before retiring into mine.

We had no proper dinner, but are still overfull with bread and milk. It is uncannily easy to fall asleep.

*   *   *

It is barely
light when Maebh wakes me, stomping her foot outside my door. I understand more than ever why Maebh's parents believe she is a prime target for these odd disappearances, even though she is nearly eighteen and thus almost out of danger, on the verge of donning her hood and trousers. It is always the wildest girls, the most vigorous and lean, those who enjoy stretching on the roofs of the skyscrapers, those who behave as though they are immune to the dangers.

I get out of bed and start to put on my hood and trousers, my fingers stumbling over the buttons and snaps. Maebh stomps her foot a second time, a third. When I finally emerge, Maebh grabs my hand. We have never before touched. I am aware of this. Maebh is not. Her blinding yellow sundress. She leads me down the stairs and out into the grass, which is wet.

“Did it rain last night?” I say, unable to control the thrill in my voice. It has been so long since there was rain in the city. I was only a child then.

“No,” she says. “That's dew. It happens every night in the countryside. You hardly know anything, do you?”

She really is a little bitch but it is not her fault.

When we get to the stream she slips out of her sundress. I avoid looking at her body. This is just my job. I will stand here to make sure she does not drown. Not that I could help her if she did, since I have never swum, nor taken a bath. In any case.

“You too!” she commands, up to her ankles in water so cold she cannot breathe.

It takes me much longer to undress than it took Maebh. There are so many buttons and snaps on my trousers, and my hood is tightly laced. She has gotten in all the way by the time I join her. The frigid water on my shins makes me feel as though I have drunk ten cups of coffee. Yet somehow I am not frightened. Maebh's curly blond hair has become brown and straight now that it is wet. This makes her appear more solemn, which I appreciate.

“Get in all the way,” Maebh instructs.

“No,” I say, “thank you.”

“I command you to get in all the way,” she says.

I try to maintain my impassive face, straight mouth and neutral eyes, but it is not easy. An unpleasant sensation swells inside me at the sight of her mouth, left open after she spoke the word “way,” her lower lip hanging down, her jaw loose in the casual manner of those accustomed to power.

“Just kidding!” she yelps, plunging her head underwater. She clings to handfuls of pebbles in the streambed and lets the water wash over her. She wriggles in the current. She splashes and surfaces. I am careful to keep my eyes off her body. It is not hard to imagine, after all: narrow hips and thighs, hard dark nipples and a rib cage like old architecture.

“I can look at you but you can't look at me!” Maebh says.

I cannot tell if I am more startled by her jubilant rudeness or by the conviction that she has perceived my thoughts. I feel her staring, and long for my hood and trousers.

“God,” she says, “you're so
smooth
everywhere.”

Maebh's parents thought it wisest to send a person of unspecified gender along to keep an eye on their daughter. It is widely believed that we are asexual.

*   *   *

Our days are
characterized by bees, by sunlight, by pollen, by water, by overripe fruit, by Maebh teaching me things she assumes someone eight years older ought to know.
That's just a spiderweb! Mud won't make your toenails rot. Outside the city the temperature can vary more than twenty degrees. Hear the frogs?

The farmer and his wife are frightened of people from the city, and leave provisions in the earliest hours of the morning while we are still asleep. We wake to find milk and yogurt and cheese and nuts and bread and preserves and honey on the heavy wooden table in the kitchen.

Sometimes Maebh goes hours without looking directly at me; other times she stares at me so intently that I feel as though her eyes are penetrating through to the inside.

The Farm is two hundred acres. A barbed wire fence encircles all its overgrown orchards and neglected fields. I hold in my palm animals I have only ever seen on a computer screen. Ladybugs are the most charming example, but also snails, daddy longlegs, dung beetles.

I do not live in the state of terror I anticipated when Maebh's parents proposed that, for a sum equivalent to five years' wages in my position as head window-washer of their skyscraper, I accompany their daughter out of the city, beyond the dome, to the ancestral farm where, in a different era, their grandparents lived the good honest life of the earth.

It is possible—in fact, it is impossible not—to forget about the dangerous times in which we live.

Meanwhile, the disappearances continue in the city, and are occurring ever more frequently. Maebh's parents command us to stay in the countryside and to enjoy The Farm. They thank me profusely, and apologize for the fact that this is lasting longer than expected.

Eventually, I—even I, who have always been careful of the days, who have kept a weekly calendar, who have measured out the hours with three clocks in a one-room apartment on the lowest level of an unclean skyscraper—lose track of time. I ask myself, is today the 11th? 15th? the 17th? the 22nd? the 29th?, grateful that I do not know.

We suck on blades of grass. We let our feet harden and get muddy. We find strawberries growing in glens. We notice ornate tapestries of moss and lichen on the rocks at the westernmost edge of the property. We see the clouds puffing themselves up into creatures that fill half the sky. We lie on the porch watching the bees weave through the late afternoon. Only rarely do they sting us, and when they do we do not mind. Some days I am more of a boy and some days I am more of a girl. We hardly talk, and then sometimes we do.

“I should've been born in a different time,” Maebh says, grinding a blade of grass between her molars, reclining on the hot wooden floorboards of the porch, her breasts flattening beneath her sundress as she stretches her arms above her head.

This is how Maebh is, I know that now. She frequently says this kind of thing. The kind of thing that is full of longing. She is thoughtful, nostalgic, and melancholy, all the traits I have valued most in my twenty-five years. She is not flippant (though every morning at the stream she sprays me with frigid droplets from her hair and grins when I wince) nor foolish (though whenever she starts dancing to the music inside her head I wonder if she has filled too much of her brain with those shows teenage girls watch) nor spoiled (though she does get angry whenever she is hungry), nor immature, nor unkind, nor any of the things I anticipated.

“We both should have,” I say eventually.

“Both should have what?” she says. Maebh is not accustomed to me saying anything that goes beyond the obligations of my job.

“We both should have been born in a different time,” I say.

“Oh, yeah.” She shuts her eyes and smiles. “Tha's right,” she coos. “We both shoulda been born in a different time. I coulda been a milkmaid. You coulda been a beekeeper.”

“I could have been a farmer,” I say, wishing to keep up. “You could have been a weaver.”

“Oh yeah,” Maebh says.

The next morning, we wake to find on the kitchen table a message from Maebh's parents, which requests that we return to the city six days from now so Maebh can pack for boarding school, as August has almost come to an end.

*   *   *

On our fourth-to-last
day, the bees disappear. There are only a few left, buzzing weakly above the long grasses, barely clearing the surface of the stream. Maebh is upset.

“Well damn,” she says, stomping through fields that have not been cultivated in half a century.

She is convinced that the bees have some secret hideout on some far corner of the property to which they are retiring now for fall. All day I follow Maebh around as she searches for the winter palace of the bees. She says she will be fine if she just knows where they are. We do not return to Main House till after dark. By then, there are only two bees lolling around the porch. We are dehydrated, our skin cut by brambles and rashes emerging on our legs. Maebh plunks herself down in the rocking chair and I stand, nervous, in the doorway. I have never seen her so mad and so sad.

“Maebh,” I say, desperate to distract her. “What an unusual name.”

“Irish,” she says.

“Yes?” I say politely.

“It means: she who intoxicates.”

I grip the doorjamb.

She who intoxicates.

“My parents,” she says. She sighs. “They have dumb ideas.
B-h
? How's anyone supposed to know how to pronounce that?”

She looks out at the night, which already smells like dew. She has passed into that indifferent mode of hers.

“I'm going to sleep,” she says.

“I am going to sleep,” I echo.

*   *   *

Maebh comes into
my bedroom very early the next morning. Immediately I am fully awake, my skin burning. I believe that this is it, that she will lie down beside me on the white sheet and everything will begin. But she hovers in the doorway.

“Quick!” she says.

Her voice, her urgency, her sundress. I reach for my trousers.

“No! Don't!” she says. “Not necessary.”

Though I have often neglected to wear my hood at The Farm, I have never gone without trousers. The day is warm already—Indian summer, another phrase Maebh taught me—and it is not uncomfortable to be naked. Perhaps this is how she wants it to begin, in the tall dewy grass.

“Quick!”

I follow her down the path to the old orchard, which was overgrown at first but has been cleared by our feet. I am not one to tremble but I am trembling. She leads me to a twisted plum tree and points at a single woozy bee wavering around a speckled plum.

“Watch,” she whispers.

I stare at the bee. But it makes me dizzy. I look up at the strange silver clouds of morning, wondering how exactly it will begin.

“Watch!” she orders.

I obey, and suddenly there's something halfway between a flash and a snap, an instantaneous flicker, and nothingness where the bee had been.

This is just how every disappearance is described in the newspapers. The swiftness of it, the sound and the light, and—

I never thought to worry about the possibility that the disappearances might come to the countryside. I always assumed Maebh's parents knew something I didn't about the scope of the calamity.

Maebh stares, her face radiant and dark (how much sun we have taken here!), at the place where the bee just vanished.

*   *   *

We do not
send any message to Maebh's parents. We do not tell the farmer there will soon be a disaster here. We do not talk about anything beyond The Farm. I wish I could say that we share a bed, or that we tell each other certain things. However, I can say we spend enough time lying on the porch with our bare arms flung above us that I memorize the pattern of the long brown hairs in Maebh's armpits. I do not ask Maebh if she is scared. I know her well by now and I observe that she is not. She is waiting.

We enjoy large quantities of milk and preserves. Maebh consumes them with even greater zeal than before. Sometimes I am on the cusp of reaching out to stroke her. More than once I come close to blurting something. The words are right there, already in my mouth, swirling around on my tongue. But always Maebh stands up just then, or rolls away, or falls asleep.

These plums. This light.

*   *   *

On the day
before we are supposed to return to the city, at that time when the sunlight gets richer and darker with each passing second, Maebh is wading through the grass ahead of me—the grass that only comes up to her thigh, that comes all the way up to my waist—carrying a rock we found, a rock covered in green moss and orange lichen as though someone decorated it. I am keeping an eye on Maebh. I do not think of her thighs as thighs—in my mind, I call them haunches.
Haunches
, that is the word in my mind when it happens.

The snap and the flash. The flash and the snap. The colorful rock thudding to the ground. The air into which she disappears—it does not even shimmer. There is nothing, just nothing. No bees disrupt the low sunbeams. Nothing makes any noise.

Even my howl is restricted to my insides, passing through my muscles but not exiting my body. This howl moves into my leg and I take a step, lifting my foot over the rock, the first step of many that will take me in the opposite direction of the city.