The Trouble with the Truth

"I tried to save you," I whispered.

But it was a lie. The car had rolled, had come to rest there on the cliffs overlooking the sea, and I'd been thrown free. Kyle, buckled in his seat as always - safety first! - had reached through the shattered window for me. For a period of perhaps five seconds ... with the ground shifting out from under me and shifting out from under the car, with the sparse trees that had temporarily held the car in place popping free of the ground, with Kyle's cry of "Dad!" and that outstretched hand ... the world had simply stopped. I saw him release the seatbelt. I felt the snap of roots beneath my feet. I saw his hand ... there ... so close. And I felt the world fall away.

There was time then, in that last fraction of a second, to grab Kyle's hand, or to turn and grab for the shattered railing at the top of the cliff.

"I wanted to save you," I told Nanda, who wasn't Nanda at all, but just another fragment of the lie that Bahktur kept selling himself.

Sri Mani approached, reloading the musket, the great cloud of bees at his back, their song so anciently familiar, a sound that had heralded man's first decent from the trees.

I hadn't even been drinking, though Connie never believed me.

The truth was that Baxter Lewis had chosen life over death. He could have taken Kyle's hand. He could have gone over the edge with him. There wasn't time to pull him free - at least that's the truth that I've chosen to go with. There was only time to take his hand and follow him down.

Not a day's gone by that I don't regret my decision.

Sri Mani pulled the packing rod from the barrel and fumbled at the pouch on his belt for a percussion cap. I pushed Nanda's corpse aside and got to my feet.

"Is this what you want?" I asked, holding up the skull.

It was Kyle's skull. I'd killed him. No matter how carefully I reconstructed him in the dirt beside my mattress, no matter how hard I tried to make myself believe that he was there sleeping beside me ... he was gone. Nothing could bring him back.

"Is this what you want?" I screamed at Sri Mani.

Behind him, the great mass of bees seemed to pause. Their song changed. Though it remained as indecipherable as always, it seemed that a different chord had been taken up. Sri Mani heard it, too. Musket raised and sighted, he hesitated, looking back over his shoulder at the bees.

"They know," I said. "You killed your son to escape them. And now they know, Sri Mani."

He dropped the gun and tried to run, but the bees were far faster than he. They harried him through the woods, covering his body like a black mantle of death, at one point actually lifting him from his feet. Their stingers broke his weathered old skin, plunging their venom into his veins. They scrabbled at his eyes and filled his mouth, wriggled their buzzing bodies into his ears where their song must have been deafening indeed. His screams went on for a very long time, bouncing back and forth between the Himalayas and the trees. It would only be later that I'd discover how he ended his own pain by throwing himself from the cliffs.

And me?

I'm still here in Bahadur. I will stay here for the rest of my life, of that I am certain. The bees will never let me leave. The villagers have never truly believed the odd series of accidents that killed both Nanda and Sri Mani on that hunt. But they really don't want to know the truth, now do they? Besides, using Sri Mani's musket, the musket that his father passed to him and his grandfather had used before that, I continue to provide for them. And I bring them the honey that breaks up the monotony of their simple lives..

I've taken a wife from the Gurung. She is pregnant with our first child. I am hoping for a son.

But he will be my second son, for my first still sleeps in the dirt beside my straw mattress. Carefully arranged, every fragment of truth in place, his head pillowed across one arm and his legs tucked up like a sleeping baby, he waits for me to join him when all my truths have finally caught up to me.

His half-Gurung brother, of course, will be a honey hunter when I am gone. I have promised them that. The bees sing their song, Pholo smiles on me, and I seek out what hives remain, never stopping to consider what the bees ultimately have in mind. The symbiosis allows me my illusions ... my semblance of the truth.