But they cannot see red, the bees: the leonine velvets of the queen, dark red; they cannot see poppies or apples. Blind to the cover of his Oxford Shakespeare, blind to the heart of their house. Red is black, or simply blank. No red, but shifts of light and shadow invisible to a woman or a man. And swift—six thousand times swift, frame by frame. To the bee with its fast-forward eyes, the movie of human life is nothing but a series of stills: the incremental sway of the cloaks and hats, the blood splashing vermilion up the walls, the bits of paper fluttering down. Daffodils, the swinging golden chains of the laburnum—to bees, flowers blink off and on like stars, like real stars ticking south as the dawn of the waxing year approaches, the sky heaving to purple behind the curtains.

Mr. Crockett, her high school English teacher, pulled up a second tatty armchair to the card table where she sat in the patients’ lounge, her back to the view of McLean’s seasonally groomed grounds, the wooded landscape patchy with a shell of dirty snow and pine needles. After he sat down across from her, Mr. Crockett, the only visitor she requested during her six-month stay, turned out the bag of Scrabble letters that he had brought with him every week since she tried to kill herself in August. It was now almost Thanksgiving. Concerned about her slow improvement, Sylvia’s new psychiatrist had begun to wonder if further treatment might have to include another round of electric shock therapy. “All right, Sylvia,” Mr. Crockett said mildly, without pressure or expectation, turning the letters over, pushing them with one index finger into a random grid. The game had progressed over time from agonized attempts at a reintroduction to the individual letters of the alphabet, to identifying uncomplicated words—dog, in, and—or playing with anagrams, teasing out simple riddles. Bloated from months of failed insulin treatments, morbidly depressed, Sylvia could only manage an erratic engagement with language, alternately furious or demoralized by its cloaked indecipherability. “All right,” Mr. Crockett continued, “I wonder if you can see words in this group.” She leaned her elbows on the table and looked dully at the four letters before her, fingers tangled in the hair at her scalp, which she recognized, without affect, as greasy and unwashed. One hand dropped to the table, lowered slowly like a flag; she fingered the letters but did not move them. “How about T-O-P-S,” Mr. Crockett spelled, his voice in her head coming as if from a distant echo chamber. “How about P-O-T-S,” he spelled, “how about S-T-O-P.”

Six months at McLean. And then revival in pieces, in little bits, the words like stars surfacing, beading the expanse that had gone hopelessly, mindlessly blank.