Another Insane Devotion by Peter Trachtenberg Read Free Book Online Page A

make a sound like that, steadily, for hours on end, and when I called the phone company, I was assured that their lines had never been known to whine. F. came into the room, listened quizzically in that way she has, standing very still with her small, dear head cocked to one side, and then said she thought the sound was coming from inside the house. “You’re crazy,” I told her. Then I put my ear against the wall. I recoiled as if it were on fire. Up close, the sound was enveloping. It wasn’t a whine; it was a drone, shrill enough to make the hair on my arms stand on end and at the same time inward, meditative, monastic.
    The wall was infested with bees. F. worried about being stung, but I thought it more likely we’d be driven mad, or I would be; I was the one who worked in that room. Now that I knew what was making it, the hum, which before had been merely puzzling, gave me the creeps. I asked the landlord for advice on driving out an infestation of bees. “Drive them out? Jesus, you don’t ‘drive them out.’” He was large and red faced, and his politics were to the right of the emperor Nero’s, but I respected his industry and lack of bullshit, and I think it amused him to see somebody who worked with his mind proposing to drive out vermin. He came over, drilled a hole in the Sheetrock, sprayed in some industrial-grade bug killer, then capped the hole with a butterfly screw. We waited for the humming to stop. It didn’t. Outside the window I saw a dark plume of bees issue from the side of the house like smoke and hang in the air, but it was just a detachment from the main colony. We pulled out the screw and quickly jammed the bug spray can’s
nozzle into the hole before bees could pour out of it and added a few more lethal squirts. This time, the humming seemed to get louder. It sounded angry. I told my wife, “We’d better not go outside.” Biscuit had jumped up on a chair and was staring with interest at the screw in the wall. F. picked her up. “And keep the cats in.”
    The killing took almost three days. When it became clear that spraying inside the house was only displacing small numbers of insects, the landlord sent over some workmen to drill holes in the outer wall, especially in the insulation around the chimney. Then they tore off a soffit and sprayed there. Even with the windows shut, the house stank. We worried about our central nervous systems, and about the cats’, which were more sensitive. Every time Biscuit raced across the floor for no reason or rolled onto her side and tried to disembowel a table leg with her hind feet, we thought the worst. The humming mounted; the bees stormed out in greater numbers, like cavalry making sorties from a besieged fortress. The workmen sweltered beneath the July sun in padded jackets and canvas gloves. The cats clamored to go out. At some point the extermination began to take effect. Soon there were no bees by the back door. Then, in a coordinated assault, the landlord drilled a second hole in the office wall, and the two of us sprayed in more bug killer in unison. Along with the cans of Bee Gone, he’d brought along a sprayer, the kind with a pump that you see in old cartoons, with no markings on it, but he didn’t use that yet.
    The buzzing surged, and for a moment it was as if we were inside a huge electrical transformer. A curtain of insects blackened the air from above the window almost to the ground. The
landlord threw the window open and worked the pump of his archaic sprayer. The curtain fell. It fell all at once, as if cut loose from an invisible rod, with a soft patter. Afterward the yard was crunchy with tiny, desiccated corpses. I worried that Biscuit would eat them and be poisoned, but she steered clear of them. She may have been repelled by the stench of whatever it was that had come out of that unmarked canister or simply been uninterested in something that was already