Can you hum that tune?

Prologue

I’m going to tell you a story. It’s a good story, an important one, at least to me. It all started some years ago, although nobody knows exactly how many. Its main character is a little girl named Kat, or at least that was what they called her when the story began. When the story ended, her name was different. It was Reed, which is unusual, but that was her name, so that’s what we’ll call her.

Reed put blood, sweat, and tears into pretty much everything she did, never stopping to question whether it was worth it. Until one day she did begin to question the price she had paid…

Reed was determined to write a novel. She loved reading and was happiest when she had a book in her hands. She almost always had one with her, gripped tightly or tossed into the bag she slung over her shoulders. She felt like searching for words, but not like those games people play, which were so easy they made no sense at all. She wanted words with meaning, wanted to write them down, put pages together, bind them into a volume that would proclaim to the world that was an author, a writer. Such a a beautiful word, and she hoped with her whole being to be one some day.

The only thing was, she could never make it happen. The words and their sentences simply refused to settle properly on the pages. Still, she loved them, worshipped them, never gave up on satisfying her desire.

I lost at love before

Got mad and closed the door

But you said try just once more

Occasionally she thought she was close to being successful in her quest. Those were moments of sheer bliss. She often felt like humming.

You made me so very happy

I'm so glad you came into my life

The others were untrue,

But when it came to lovin' you

I'd spend my whole life with you

With words for company, she was never alone and she knew it. She was somebody else, she was strong, she sang, she was in love. She needed nothing beyond the sounds. And the sounds kept coming, humming, begging for her embrace. She hummed, too, a song that had become hers and part of her. One great, huge love affair. There was no greater bond between her and her words. 

Passion only partly explained what they had. David Clayton-Thomas filled her mind and through him or someone else she was drenched by something that flowed from her onto the table, the floor, into the air…

You touched my very soul

You always showed me that

Loving you was where it's at

Except none of it reached the page where she needed it to go. None of it was a novel. She was not a writer, just a singer of a song. Reed knew this was not life for her. And so the thing that had run out of her ran dry. It was dammed up within her and she had nothing to give.

She would never give up. Reed was never going to admit defeat, however. She had heard people say that if you wanted something badly enough, you had to work for it. She worked, she really did. She tried everything: walking on stony beaches barefooted, scribbling on the backs of envelopes like Emily, skipping stones on Maquoit Beach, reading tarot cards. Nothing helped, nothing gave her what she craved and needed. Nothing brought out the novel she was determined to find inside her. There was no way to the words she wanted in her life, it seemed.

Reed looked at the books in her life and wept because none of them was hers, none was one she had written. She had bought them all or had received them as gifts. She was getting desperate. She was perspiring from every pore in her body. She was becoming more and more lost. She had gone from her little house, her small town, to feeling like a stray cat that nobody would take in. In her panic, she barely kept herself from breaking into a yowl. She wanted to scratch things and people around her until they bled.

Then she heard a still, small voice that reminded her of something out of the Bible, or would have, if she’d ever read that book, which she did not consider to be a novel. She wasn’t aware that some versions call it a still, small whisper. A quiet sound, gentle, soft, not a dramatic roar of a book - a novel, a work of fiction, a great one - announcing its arrival on the page like a clap of thunder. Reed hoped it meant something, that tiny little slip of a voice that was entering her head like a ray of light.

Did you find (the) directing sign on the straight and narrow highway

Would you mind a reflecting sign

Just let it shine within your mind

And show you the colors that are real

Reed had no idea about where she could find straight or narrow, but maybe she could brush away the eternal cobwebs that dulled the hues of the words she wanted for her own. She wondered, too, what colors they might have. She didn’t want to get distracted by theories of vowel sounds and their shades (of meaning? ). Or Goethe’s Zur Farbenlehre, but Goethe, Newton, Schopenhauer, Wittgenstein and so many others were all men from other times and places and languages. She didn’t feel they could help her in her quest. For a novel of her own, along the lines of Virginia’s room.

Not for the Holy Grail, which probably never existed except in the spirit. But then again the grail might have been a cup, a receptacle, like a book is the receptacle for words. Was she looking for something similar? Or did san-graal (Old French or some other language?) refer to holy blood, to nobility? Reed did not want to think about these things, which clearly had nothing to do with her novel. 

A novel of my own, she murmured, returning to Virginia the Great, who had written "A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction" except she’d said that in an essay. Was she ever going to find a straight and narrow highway of her own?

Reed was becoming more and more afraid that she’d die without ever having completed her quest or journey, tour, cruise, voyage out, whatever it might be called. She was losing track of her time and place as well as her words. She couldn’t locate her friends, the ones she still remembered. She might not even need them. Her one obsession had become her novel, her niche in the world. Niche. Double meaning.

And when I die and when I'm dead, dead and gone, 

there'll be one child born and a world to carry on, to carry on. 

The song buzzed in her ears, like a bee, like the bees associated with the departure of a soul in Galicia, according to Alfredo Brañas. The family would dance around the deceased, singing, eating, drinking, praising the dearly departed. Somehow this was related to when the hives were cleared of their no longer living residents (abellas), but Reed stopped herself from going through the whole ritual. It wasn’t relevant, unless she wanted to consider the hive as a receptacle for word-bees or bee-words. 

At least that made her smile - something she hadn’t done for a very long time.

Then it came to her as if it had been waiting all along. A book was indeed a place where a writer put things for safekeeping. It was a safe place, it was a room of their own for the words that were like bees buzzing in the writer’s head. A hive was alive. No she hadn’t meant to make a rhyme, but there it was. 

It was what Reed had been looking for along a highway now many years old. So many years that her feet were bloody and scraped, the red blood - red had to be the color she was looking for - mingling with her sweat and tears. It was the right color. It was Ariadne’s thread, it would lead her to her book, which was her novel. Her own. She would finally achieve the goal of a lifetime.

All that remained was to find the right hive. It needed to be big enough, its sides strong enough to be good protection from the elements. Reed lived in Maine, which is far to the north. Surprisingly, once she’d found the right direction, the color that was real - a vibrant blood red, like the blood used as ink to write a certain number of books in the past - it was a quick process.

It was a huge beehive, as hives go. It was waterproof. It had walls of very sturdy cardboard, as strong as wood. It would be warm. The bees would be happy there, in that hive of their own. They might even become immortal, like Don Quixote’s or Virginia’s, like the ones in so many novels. They would be bees that belonged to Reed.

Only one thing remained: Reed would have to enter the grand beehive, close the covers or doors, and make herself at home. There was one child born, like the song: her novel, herself in a bookhive, to carry on.

Reed would be immortal. She had created her novel. Was her novel. She buzzed with excitement. It had all been worth it, every drop, scrape, and blank page.