The Bee Sting

by Paul Murray

Which of them realized there was still time to get to Paparazzi’s? Instantly they revived: they got up and made their way through the woods and to the road. From there, they ran all the way, hand in hand, screaming like banshees. The wind was in their hair; their heads were full of hash and supermarket beer; they ran so fast they became immemorial, amnesiac. They were racing above the town, away from their own stories, away from everyone who wanted to remember them; they were no one, they were together, and they were alive alive alive alive.

Dry ice Jägerbombs Bronzer Three hundred lads wearing Lynx That’s the smell of falling in love

she feels bad but it’s his fault And if you were going to write a book about their marriage that’s what you would call it

And in that moment Dickie learned something. This thing about looking into someone’s eyes. If you’re talking about making a connection, the term is quite misleading. He looked into people’s eyes all the time. What’s really happening in these moments is that you find yourself looking at their eyes – that is, the gaze stops at the eye itself, arrested by the beauty of it; and their gaze does the same at yours; and the two gazes and your souls behind them skate off each other, swirl over each other, like mercury on mercury, so that standing quite still you feel yourself spin out of control, around and around, like a car aquaplaning, until you come to rest again, and you show no sign at all that anything of note has happened, except to permit yourself perhaps a little smile.

You couldn’t protect the people you loved – that was the lesson of history, and it struck him therefore that to love someone meant to be opened up to a radically heightened level of suffering.

Maybe every era has an atrocity woven into its fabric. Maybe every society is complicit in terrible things and only afterwards gets around to pretending they didn’t know. When the kids ask, tell them that no one meant any harm.

Today, in the developed world, the great threat to political order is that people will pay attention to their surroundings. Thus, even slaves have access to entertainment. You could even say we are paid in entertainment. The novel was the first instance of what in the twenty-first century has become a vast and proliferating entertainment industry, an almost infinite machine designed to distract us and disempower us. We are presented with a virtual world powered, literally, by the incineration of the real.