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Nathan Charles

Bee-Sting Orchestra
By Nathan Charles

The strains of Fur Elise resonated quietly throughout the dark flat. Sprawled across a red and black carpet lay a man, smelling of a red rose and weeping silently through shaded eyes, dark lashes glistening with the dewy tenderness of sorrow. His love. She was lost to him, forever lost for want of a heart that could stand the passion of his own. Never that she wouldn’t, but only that she couldn’t. Couldn’t. Couldn’t hold herself together against the breadth of his passion.
He wept, remembering the soft caress of her lips against his own. They had had their greatest passion listening to Beethoven, though there had been others, of course, to guide their bodies to the proper touch and flow. Their souls. She had once asked him why he couldn’t make love to her without the music and he had only sighed for the pain of it. The pain of such misunderstanding. But still, she did not object… not entirely. Only fussed now and again when she tried engaging him to no avail without the music. At these moments he could do nought but lay motionless, like an invalid submitting to the wanton caresses of some sick intruder. And she felt this same notion, he knew, for she relented after the first two occasions. The first time she had only laughed and shaken him gently, playfully… sickeningly. The second and last time she had ended screaming in his face to stop being so childish and then left his flat after seeing that he meant to carry on with these “little games”. And he had wept. But she had come back the next night and the culmination of their ecstasy had been so exquisite as to blot out all consciousness of the presence of a partner. At least it had done so for him. His Love had merely passed out for the fervor of it.
And now she was lost, forever gone to him. He wept. He felt the scars on his wrists, remembering the blood. The hospital and his mother’s tears. He had been a child then. A child without a father…
But the pain was too much and he pushed the memory aside. Get thee behind me, Satan. There was only her, his Love, his sweet memory and dream of times creating bliss. It mattered not that she was gone when the memory of the present was gone as well. He smelled of the rose and remembered her sweet scent and dulcet tones as they made love in his dark room amidst a tangling of sheets and thin sheens of sweat. Forever would these memories play within his mind. Forever would those moments last, so long as he did not open his eyes. So long as the music did not end. Oh, but there was a pang. Somewhere beneath the warm blanket of memory there lay the knowledge of his present woe and reality. She was gone…

He remembered the night they’d met. He’d been sitting in the coffee shop downstairs writing poetry and listening to the music of the place. Mozart’s Requiem had been playing quietly from hidden speakers. It had been her who had engaged conversation. In fact he had only said perhaps five or six words and they had ended up in his flat upstairs. She had been intrigued by his silence and once upstairs he had let her read of his poetry. He remembered she had read aloud:

“See him fall upon decay
All of this, the shadow part he plays
Should he throw himself away
Or play the martyr gone insane
To hold a portrait of this world
Emptiness entombed by hollow words
A womb to leave their vision blurred
A voice so quiet no one heard
The prophet dies
They see him now
The dead can’t lie
They listen now
The dead can fly
They love him now,
This newborn life inside the grave,
Whose throne is in the ground
In Death our Words become the God, we die to feed the Hungry Dogs, the Truest Martyr and the Light Beneath the fog…
Scars create their happy home
The star that fades is left alone
The one untouched will burn unknown
Tragic death is chaos on a throne
Another cross to feed the script
A bleeding child the world has stripped
And from this world, himself he ripped
The deeper scar upon their lips”

After they had made love to the strains of Beethoven’s ninth he had spoken of his early childhood. At one point amidst the exploration of their caresses she had inquired as to the scars upon his wrists. He had pulled away, suggesting that perhaps it was time for her to leave. She had apologized and hurriedly put on her clothes and headed for the door. But just as she was about to go he had called out to her and she had come to him. He had wept and she stripped once more and slipped between the warm sheets and held him all night. If only she had gone then. If only. He would not be weeping now for her had she slipped out of his life forever after that night. That sweet, sweet night. But she was lost. And so he wept. He had the insane notion that perhaps she’d come sauntering out of his bedroom, laughing, stripping, come to brush the suffering from his quivering lips with a single kiss. But this was madness. Such was an impossibility… he knew that she was lost.
There was a memory he kept close to his heart. A memory of mother and father. His first memory and the only memory of his dead father. His mother had been reading on the sofa in their living room those years ago and his father had come strolling up silently behind her, wrapping strong hands around her neck, gently kneading the white flesh. How she’d cooed, this memory still so pungent in his mind. His father had bent his head to kiss her pink lips. And how they had smiled when they saw their young fawn looking candidly at this display of matrimonial affection. He had crawled into his mother’s lap and proceeded to doze as his father came to sit beside her and she sang sweet songs; operas whispered sweetly to the child as he fell into a world of dreams. Sweet bliss. Sweet nothing. All fleeting in a chaos of blood and fire and a mangled corpse. The corpse that had once planted a kiss to his mother’s lips, hands clasped gently about her white soft skin, these hands flecked with course dark hairs, hands, strong hands, yet gentle, never lifted to strike in a sudden display of temper. Not ever. The child he’d been had never known such patriarchal tyranny existed. Those hands, streaked in the blood of death…
And he wept for the pain of it and hurled these memories to the depths from which they came. Better to think of the love of Her. His Love. Sleeping with her lips parted gently against his shoulder, breathing, sighing quietly with each brush of his fingers as they grazed her silky skin. He lay upon the floor, breathing deeply of the rose as Fur Elise continued to resonate its soft and melancholy strains of poignancy.
After the death of his father his mother never sang again. And how he’d wept, a poor lost child longing, straining for the memories to take the form of a reality, a salvation from infantile torments. Torments without perspective. Immense and looming dark over the landscape of his dreams. Nightmares of a sudden crashing force and a sound like myriad shot gun blasts. Nightmares of blood and flopping limbs and corpses’ eyes staring through a spattering of broken glass, staring at the young boy in the backseat who cried and reached out in supplication to his dead father. This child, badly shaken, yet otherwise untouched. He would awake to his room, black and comfortless. Weeping, yearning for those sweet songs and gently hummed tunes, weaved cadences to lull an utterly contented child to sleep. Longing to become that child again and believing in the delusional hope of an undeveloped brain that this was perhaps a possibility. Such had shaped the man, longing for the unattainable, portraying the semblance of normalcy, and secretly devising mad fantastical schemes and dreams of a world without pain. The pain of loss. Adolescence had seen the coming of a new hope. The hope of music. Beethoven, Mozart, Vivaldi, a whole myriad of songs to reclaim the tenderness of Mother Love…
Stinging needles of sadness ripped through him at the memory of her. His mother, kind but forlorn and distant….

“Do you love me?” he’d said to her, his Love, as they lay in a nest of warm sheets and the vivacious harmony of the music of Vivaldi.
“Yes,” she smiled under the gentle current of his breath.
“Say it,” he said.
“I love you,” she said, dropping all playful pretense.
“Won’t you make me feel it?” And so she did as they made love in the midst of a crescendo of impossibly rolling notes of the violin. The rolling notes of a long dead master of the ancient craft forever moving the minds and hearts of millions. But among these millions, who alone save he, our sordid tragic figure, knew the true passion of these moments? These moments when love transcended death in the very act of limbo between life and death. Who alone could revel despite the tragedy threatening on the other side of this precarious stance that some call love (a quote from Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Grey, whisked across the landscape of his mind, “Those who are faithful know only the trivial side of love: it is the faithless who know love’s tragedies”)? There would come a time, he knew, when he would fall to the other side of the peak of this harmony and at last find the peace his father was so violently hurled into. He was divided against himself with the knowledge of this contradiction. This intermingling of peace and chaos, this intermingling itself a tightrope of which we merely glimpse at the moment, and only in its perfection, when all passing imagery attained to its own strange sense of beauty. This culmination of two lives, one melting into the other. But always was he cheated of the true culmination. His lovers, falling away from him, one after the other, with the coming of this understanding of which he continually sought. He hated them, yet loved them always anew with the coming of another. Another chance to find the bliss of which was drained from his mother at the coming of his father’s death.
He smelled deep of the pungent rose and felt the sting of its thorns as his hand closed, holding fast to its pale green stem. The strains of Fur Elise continued to beckon him to the lighter side of memory and away from the terrible trembling, and quite verily crumbling, sadness of reality. His blood trickled, gently streaming down his wrist, as he wept and wept, silently relaying all of pleasure’s hand in this, his life. Such a fleeting caress, ending always in a culmination of pain.
At last the strains of Fur Elise ceased and his cassette rolled gently into further melancholy with a rendition of Moonlight Sonata. He opened his eyes, staring forlornly at the ceiling, gripping still within his bloodied hand the red rose and smelling of its aromatic perfume. And he arose, letting it fall unnoticed to the floor with tiny rivulets of blood spattered across its petals. There was light coming from the doorway to his bedroom and he walked slowly toward it, feeling the sting of his loss acutely as he did. And as he entered into the light he felt again, as always with the coming of his loss, the sting of death, dying as he did inside with every passing lover of his bed. But it was only a pale reflection of the sting he felt with the moment of her passing.
He stared at his bed, the bed in which her corpse did lie, staring into nothing, all passion passed away with the culmination of his own. He let the memory play out inside his thoughts, the passion of this moment, letting go, truly letting go, the sting of pleasure with his hands wrapped around her neck, spilling over into her, quite veritably bursting as never could be done without the sting of the pain of this loss. The loss of her. His Love. Always did he die with them in the release of his passion. Always did he love. His Love. Forever waiting for the next life and the giving over of himself in the death of her.