The Work
1. The Arrival
#1 is their alpha, their leader, their guru. Twenty-two women live with her in a two-bedroom apartment and now, on an early spring morning, Laura arrives. The white stucco building is in the hills behind Hollywood, the apartment at the top of a steep flight of jasmine-scented stairs. She climbs the steps, legs gelatinous with hesitation. Overhead a power line hums; otherwise it is silent. At the top, Laura turns left and walks past the first two apartments. She pauses in front of the open third door. Puts her hand on the cool steel railing. The murky brown air stings her nostrils as she breathes in and out.
Japanese wisteria foams over the roof and obscures a portion of her view. She ducks her head low and squints, like she’s looking out to sea. Inside the apartment she sees twenty-three women wearing loose-fitting clothing made of natural fibers in a range of earth tones. They are silent and busy, sweeping and dusting and folding clothes in the living room. In the kitchen they mop and chop carrots and dry dishes. Others water houseplants and wash the windows. Instead of a dining table there is an open space where several of them are doing yoga, knees bent, arms slowly cartwheeling. Hands and bare feet in motion, hair everywhere. The only sound is the tsk of the brooms across the oak floors and the thnk of knives making contact with cutting boards. Laura’s fingers twitch, already wanting a task of their own. Up here in the hills there should be a view, but when she looks to the south she sees only a stained drape of smog.
Welcome, says a silver-haired woman, her smile a carless garage. Laura hadn’t noticed her amid all the moving bodies. I’m #1, she says.
Hi, Laura says. I’m—
The woman interrupts her, hand up, motioning stop. Please, no names. When we are nameless we can more readily access the true content of life. If you stay, that’s what you have chosen as well. You will become #24. You came to us for a reason?
Yes. Yes, I’m here for a reason. I’m here for, Laura pauses, thinking of all the ways she could respond. The birdless tree next to the window of her studio apartment. The news she reads on the internet, which, as the smog became the new normal, shifted focus to cover different disasters in other places: floods caused by rising sea levels, mass shootings in schools and theaters and national parks, the outbreak of a particularly virulent strain of flu. The way she’d begun obsessing over every piece of plastic she’d ever thrown away; her recent habit of picturing her liver as a maroon and enlarged captive inside her body; the impression that she is no longer a single, stable self. These thoughts had always droned inside of her but in the smog they’d taken on a new and unbearable texture.
I’m here because I don’t know where else to go, Laura says.
You are in the right place, #1 says. I will show you how to live in a new world. A beautiful world. I am the only person who can help.
This comforts Laura—the idea that something can be done. She steps through the doorway, walks into the kitchen, and picks up a broom. There is no furniture. Apart from the women there are only yoga mats and houseplants. The walls are bare. The air is thick with a human smell.
*
A screen door slams. Disturbed by the noise, a bee lifts itself off the stamen of a crimson snapdragon in an abandoned, overgrown garden. It flies over the roof of an apartment building, then down the block and past a liquor store on the corner. Broken glass smolders on the sidewalk. The bee stops to examine a bag of rotting oranges and then loops through the intersection at Western and Hollywood. It flies past cell phone towers and unlit neon and a primer-gray El Camino on blocks. Past a faded billboard advertising a brand of celebrity vodka. The afternoon light is cream-colored, with a waxy cast.
2. The Numbers
We have so much to do here. There are no rules, but we have sorted ourselves into tasks and habits and, most of the time, silence. #5 sweeps. #19 meditates. #13 bakes our gluten-free ancient-grain bread and #4 makes the tinctures that heal us. #2 provides us with organic groceries and smog updates. #1 does not do any chores. It is understood that she is different from us, although she wants to help us become like her. When she is not in her room, #1 brushes our hair and tells us stories about acidic oceans and the commodification of privacy, about places where the crops don’t bend yellow in the sun and the rivers don’t shine like foil through the trees. She has a vision for a new world but doesn’t tell us, yet, what it is. We close our eyes as the wooden tines pull hair from our scalps. Sometimes #1 glides between us when we work, touching our foreheads gently. Her hands are dry, a little chalky.
The smog that descended over the city two years ago waits outside our windows, a shroud that covers Los Angeles. It started with the fires, which burned hard and fast and created a smear of choking smoke. Ash fell for weeks, accumulating in storm drains and eddying in even the slightest breeze. Everyone said that after the fires were extinguished the sky would clear, but it never did. Most people eventually left, finding they were unable to live in the toxic snow globe the city had become. Now the city is quiet, the air heavy and opaque as a slab of marble. The people who remain have acquired a wide-eyed, hungry look. The Numbers were born from the smog and #1 says that soon, because this purpose has been fulfilled, the smog will dissipate.
The situation had not alarmed #6 at first, but then the auras of everyone around her started blinking in and out, like neon signs on the fritz. Her job became impossible—how could you cleanse something you could not see? #11 had seen the smog as a sign that she needed to stop taking the psychotropic medications she’d been on since she was thirteen, when she was prescribed first Prozac and then Lorazepam, Lamictal, Lexapro, Ambien, Depakote and finally Seroquel. #3 had been curdled in the inertia of grief since the death of her son, who’d had a fatal asthma attack in the first months of the smog. We’d all seen the yellow fliers #1 had taped to lampposts across the city. She provided directions to the apartment, advertising it as a refuge from the smog and offering assistance for a variety of physical and emotional problems. We came slowly, mostly in ones and twos, although #13, #14, #15, and #16 arrived together. We settled into the apartment and accepted our new names. Whatever our reasons, however we got here, we were all drawn to her eventually. Water circling the drain.
*
The beehive is under the entrance arch of Franklin Elementary, on Franklin Avenue. When the colony was formed—a swarm surrounding their roving queen—the school was the center of neighborhood activity. Children shouted and ate sandwiches. Parents in air conditioned cars waited in line at pick-up time. Now the school is empty. The surrounding houses are left for the rats, who move back and forth under the faded sun. Cicadas make their noise and then go silent.
3. Laura
Several hours after she arrives, having swept longer than she previously thought possible, Laura needs to escape the invisible miasma hanging low over the body-filled space. She walks onto the eucalyptus-lined balcony, where she can see nothing but beige mist. The smog permeates everything until it feels as though even her body is constructed of vapor rather than such a solid material as flesh. There is no sound on the balcony, no flutter of wings or high-low call of a California towhee. Nothing except for a gentle thumping in the apartment behind her, where one of The Numbers is kneading bread. Laura’s nostrils flare with the pressure that presages crying.
Turning back inside, she weaves her way through the women sitting and standing and working. In one bedroom, Laura sees two large bookshelves she recognizes from Ikea. The cubbies are mostly empty except for piles of neatly folded clothing. Each cubby is labeled with a number and there, at the bottom, is #24. The next door is locked. The third door, at the end of the hall, is the bathroom. Laura looks at herself in the mirror, examining her teeth and pores. Then, as she pees, she pulls out her phone, which #1 has not yet asked her to surrender. Scrolling through her contacts, she considers texting someone, but she can’t think of anyone who would answer.
Laura learns later that first evening that The Numbers consume psilocybin mushroom tea or ketamine or LSD after dinner every Sunday. Even though it’s a Thursday, they take the drugs anyway—#1 explains that they must celebrate her arrival. The purpose of this ritual is to manifest something, either emotionally or spiritually, although at first she doesn’t catch what it is and later she’s too embarrassed to ask. Their stomachs, full of quinoa and vegetables and home-fermented sauerkraut, blunt the strength of the drugs, but still, every week they spend several hours wandering through their minds, vivid and full of melting, throbbing shapes. Then they sleep on the 23 yoga mats laid out in ordered ranks on the apartment’s floors. #1 sleeps in her room, where she has a queen-sized mattress. She keeps the door locked.
The first night, Laura vomits green chickpeas and watches blearily as they cascade away into the pink porcelain heart of the toilet. The next Sunday her mind expands into the darkness she’d hoped she was escaping. She thinks that the smog is coming for her, or, even more terrifying, that it is coming from her. These thoughts seem to have a goopy consistency; they cling to the ceiling and then drip, viscously, onto her. But the Sunday after that, she sees the colors and hears the laughter. The apartment becomes a forest. She watches the sunlight ooze through the trees in yellow shafts. When Laura wakes up the next morning, she is stiff from sleeping on the floor. A strand of someone else’s hair, thick and dark and curly, is in her mouth. Even so, she can feel her mind unclenching. The scaffolding of a new calmness takes shape inside of her.
Laura’s tasks over the next few weeks are simple things: sweeping with the sustainably harvested corn broom, peeling turmeric root, boiling water for infusions of oat straw and astragalus root. She watches the others as they wipe the windows and sanitize yoga mats and bake with hemp meal and chia seeds. There are so many of them that sometimes they make accidental contact with each other’s elbows or breasts or toes. Other times they move so fluidly it’s as though their work has been choreographed and rehearsed.
#1 is a charismatic and unpredictable woman. Her attention is an instrument of manipulation; it is offered as a reward and withdrawn when something displeases her. Sometimes she becomes, mysteriously, sick; at these times the activity in the apartment halts as all The Numbers sit and hold hands, directing their vibrations towards her. Although #1 remains aloof, Laura can tell that she is pleased.
In the beginning, Laura looks to #1 for guidance—asking her what to do, how to think. Then, as she spends hours and days sweeping and washing and tripping with The Numbers, it feels less important to do so. The Numbers need #1 to lead them, but the actual engine of them is them—the nearness of their bodies, the harmony of their repetitions and movements, act as a kind of animal reassurance. Laura has a dream in which #1 is facing away from her. When she turns around, she has no face, just a smooth blank plate of flesh.
In the kitchen, a month after she arrived, Laura sorts through nettles. As her hands work, she imagines her previous mental state as an underground river, something never meant to be experienced on the surface of the earth. Then she understands that all of them, all of The Numbers, must have had their own dark streams before they came here. She pictures their subterranean rivers pouring into an ocean of emotion seething just beneath the apartment. Her eyes shift to the walls and then the windows, where the smog silently waits. She slips off her glove and sticks her hand into the pile of acid green leaves. Her fingers tremble and there is a humming in her ears. Laura watches as red welts take shape on her skin. Vines of pain trace up her arm. Only after she becomes lightheaded does she put her glove back on to continue sorting. Nettle tea is consumed at 3 p.m.
*
In the hive, the bees are building cells onto the bottom of the honeycomb. Each hexagonal cell has a purpose. The cells store honey or pollen or the pupae of the workers or the drones. Honey is at the top of the hive, then the pollen, then the broods. At the bottom is where the queen lives. When she first hatched, the queen ate only royal jelly. This food was created for her by her workers, who knew exactly what she needed to become sexually mature. Now she is bigger than the others. The air outside the colony smells like eucalyptus and chemicals. The bees sense the smog, and with it, an unsolved problem.
4. The Crowns
#1’s teachings—untraining, is what she calls it—involve cleansing us, ridding us of the toxins accumulated during our years spent in the world, when we were people with jobs and bank accounts, people who watched TV and ate trans fats. #1 wants to fill the vacuum of what leaves us as we unlearn. She needs us to understand herself, but both of those things—understanding, self—become less important to us as the months progress.
As a part of the untraining, only certain possessions are allowed, and they must be made of natural materials: wood, cotton, hemp. Once #1 found underwear made of spandex and polyester in the laundry bag. She threatened to kick us all out of the apartment if no one confessed, but with a fractured definition of existential boundaries, we weren’t sure who to blame. We remained silent and the panties remained unclaimed.
One warm afternoon, two months after #24’s arrival, #1 stands at the kitchen counter. She is busy with scissors. What are you doing? we ask.
#1 has cut 24 stars out of yellow construction paper and is now cutting more paper, red this time, into long thin rectangles. As we watch, she wraps a band around her head, testing the diameter, and then staples the two ends together to make a crown. She labels one of the stars carefully with a Sharpie and then staples it onto the band. The star says, in large black letters, #1. Hers is the only one with a label.
There will be no #25. With no new arrivals, we need crowns, #1 says. There is a whiff of vodka on her breath.
We’ve never had crowns before, we say.
It hasn’t been right until now, says #1. She puts the finished crown on low so that it covers most of her forehead. With twenty-four, we are a complete unit. My work has been successful, she explains.
We think about that word, my, its brief contour now strange in our mouths. Then we look over our shoulders, searching for #24. She is in the living room, sweeping and humming softly, wearing a shapeless linen dress turned buttery with turmeric dye. She looks and acts exactly like the rest of us. After a few seconds we hear the scissors as #1 starts cutting again. The crowns seem unnecessary but when they are finished we put them on one by one, docile as cows. Now that we’re all here, we are no longer afraid of the smog. We breathe in deeply. We never look out the windows.
*
The social structure of the bees ensures the continuation of the hive as long as there is a viable queen. A dying queen’s pheromones alert the worker bees that another queen must be prepared, but when they have this warning, the hive has time to nurture several potential queen larvae. When a queen bee dies suddenly, the hive has to work quickly to create an emergency queen.
5. #24
#24 falls into the rhythms of the apartment, accompanied by the sensation that she is borne along by something other than her own will. Her body knows what to do now, and side by side with the rest of The Numbers, she carries out her duties. #1 drifts around the periphery of the apartment or asks everyone to listen for a noise she thinks she hears or retreats to her room. #24 doesn’t notice her for days at a time; she doesn’t notice anything but The Numbers. Outside the windows the smog is whirling and throbbing against the glass like a captive animal. The paper crowns that #1 made become creased and covered with dirty fingerprints and eventually they end up in the garbage. #1 is the first to throw hers away.
As time passes, the facts of #24’s life take on a nebulous quality. Soon she can only connect to them through objects: the pink bike she learned to ride on warm summer nights, the Marlboro cigarettes she smoked behind the gym in high school, the spreadsheets she’d analyzed at the job she was always supposed to quit. Now she dreams about the wave of human movement around the apartment, about hands and shins and elbows, about stirring muffin batter or washing dishes or doing yoga. The Numbers all bleed at the same time and #24 likes to look at the streaks of blood left in the toilet bowl after they empty their menstrual cups.
There comes a time where there is almost no thought as she used to know it. Images and events move into her and back out, a constant swim of the present. The voice-over is gone. When she uses words, which is rarely, she speaks in the present tense and only uses verbs like do, go, put, wash, cleanse. The apartment, with its white walls and spotless Formica countertops and no furniture, is the only place she remembers.
*
The smog has sped up the queen’s biological clock. She reproduces faster, laying more eggs. She wants more daughters and sons, workers and drones. A surplus of bodies—insurance against the amorphous threat the air has become. She can modify the sex ratios within her colony to generate a workforce appropriate to the surrounding conditions. The hive gets bigger. The summer heat warms up the honey. It drips through the wax and pools on the concrete below.
6. The Field Trip
One afternoon—#24 has been with us for six months—#1 declares that we will leave the apartment. She has realized that she has one more teaching to do, she says, and to do it we need to be outside. Together we put on our shoes and face masks, and then, in numbered order, file down the stairs. Except for #2, it is the first time that any of us have left the apartment since we arrived. The smog presses against us, reminding us of the oatmeal with chia seeds and maca root powder we had for breakfast. We walk two blocks, past the burrito stand and past the art gallery and past the medical supply store, until we reach an empty lot. Grass blows in the wind. We touch our cheeks, unused to the feeling of air moving against our skin. The pollution stings our throats and our eyes.
#1 tells us to gather all the dandelions in the lot and then retreats to the corner, alone, to watch us wield our tools. The sun is lost in the thick brown paste of the smog as we work later into the afternoon. We can’t tell how much time is passing, but soon half-shadows stitch themselves across the lot. We pick leaves and flowers and pull roots and put it all into bags. When our tools cut into unyielding dirt, we dig harder. We hack at the earth until we get what we need.
*
Males develop from the queen’s unfertilized eggs while females develop from eggs fertilized with sperm the queen has stored in her body for this purpose. The result of this evolutionary orchestration is that females are more closely related to their sisters than they would be to their own offspring. It makes more sense to help the colony than to help themselves. Their social structure gets more complex the larger the hive gets, but the smog is affecting their internal clocks. Each foraging flight takes a little longer than the last. There is no garbage service and trash fills the streets. The bees are distracted by the bright colors of the accumulating wrappers, investigating each one in case it is a flower. In the hive, the queen lays more female eggs. Genetic bonds grow tighter.
7. The Departure
#24 kneels down, feeling gravel press into her kneecaps. She buries her spade into the soil around a dandelion and lifts out the root, setting it beside her. Soon she has a pile of the misshapen objects, dirty and furred like a stack of dead mice. It’s summer now, and hot. Sweat falls from her forehead and sticks in her eyelashes. She wipes her face with her forearm and then stops working and looks up.
#24 is tired. Nights in the apartment, with so many people in one room, are filled with movement; the boundary between dreams and wakefulness is fluid and shifting. Some of The Numbers twitch in their sleep, others get up to use the bathroom or to eat flaxseed and acai berry muffins in the dark of the kitchen. Last night #24 didn’t sleep at all, although now she remembers things that can’t really have happened: a tunnel dug in the kitchen floor; a massive, heaving lump of featureless, limbless flesh in the bathtub; a hornet’s nest bursting from an unfurled yoga mat. She’s been struggling against the tug of unconsciousness all day.
The rest of The Numbers are absorbed in their tasks. #24 settles into a cross-legged position and watches as an occasional car drives by. From one of them a man shouts and whistles and #24 jerks, momentarily confused. Down the street a dog barks. A breeze sends a crumpled receipt flying across the lot. The trunks of palm trees stretch up into the brown air. #24 is picking dirt from her fingernails when she sees #1 rise from her kneeling position and walk out of the lot and down the street. #24 watches as #1 recedes one block, two blocks away. Then she turns her attention back to her hands.
*
The worker bees fly over the freeway, which is less crowded now as most of the cars have already left the city. Their intricate movements, sometimes called dancing, communicate to their sisters where food can be found. The change in the quality of sunlight makes it harder to adjust the angle of their wiggles, which usually provide clear directions to pollen sources. The wiggles become less accurate. The map becomes less clear. In the middle of the night a strong gust of wind sends a Butterfinger wrapper careening up into the nest’s corner. A crew of workers dislodges it and goes back to sleep, the smog a toxic blanket. Below the hive a group of rats looks up, wondering what will happen next. The sound of buzzing fills the air.
8. The Emergency Queen
We are almost finished collecting every single dandelion root in the lot when #24 interrupts. She tells us that #1 is gone. She is calm as she points down the street. We squint and look that way but feel no tug, no sign that #1 wants us to follow her. The woman retreating further and further away could be anyone. Her back is slightly hunched and she walks with a slight limp. We won’t be needing her again.
In the low light of early evening we can’t read the expressions on each other’s faces but still, we know what to do. Slowly, and together, we surround #24. First the twenty-two of us join hands, forming a large circle with #24 in the middle. From there we move closer. We don’t rush or jostle, but we collapse ourselves in concentric rings to get closer to her. We shuffle nearer and nearer until we’re pressed tightly together, hands gripping elbows and shoulders to form a solid unit, skin heavy on skin. In the center, #24 is our nucleus. We look at her. We listen to the sound of her breathing. Her arms are pinned to her sides but she looks calm, her face neutral. Her eyes are closed and her chin is tilted towards the sky. She can’t move; she doesn’t even try. The street is empty now. The sun is setting and above us a streetlight clicks on, blanketing us with its lemony glow.
*
The bees spend more time looking for pollen and nectar. More workers leave the hive and never make it back. Without their pollinators, yarrow and sagebrush and milkweed and dandelion produce fewer and fewer fertile seeds. The bees fly past high-rises and gas stations and through Elysian Park. They’ve stopped calculating the shortest possible trajectory. The smog has altered pheromones and the workers can no longer assess the fitness of their queen. She either is or isn’t dying.