The difference between men and bugs

I was aghast.

It wasn't a creature. The word "creature" implies little things with fur and teeth. This wicked amalgam of legs and chitin existed outside anything I'd even call "animal," but I'm no scientist; defining things isn't my gig.

Killing it would have been the work of a moment—the thing in the middle of my walk-in closet—but it held me in check, or rather my reaction did. I stood in the doorway rigid with awe. Taxonomically inclined or not, I'm aware bugs don't think very much. But I knew it was watching me, too, and anything that big, while it's staring back at you, is hard to exterminate. It would've been like squashing a puppy or a mouse. Fine to let some machine do the dirty work, but I didn't have anything like a trap or bug spray, not even a broom or magazine to strike with; I was confined to direct, physical violence and unequal to the task.

It just sat there, staring back. Black, smooth, glistening eyes.

I said it was big, but "huge" is a better word. Legs, wings, high-gloss and potentially poisonous protuberances, all of them focused and aware of this sudden presence opposite, some larger looming thing in the sudden light, a potential threat.

Maybe it was the heat and the hour. After midnight nobody thinks clearly, certainly not while suffering the malicious strokes of sultry, oppressively hot air in the second week of a record-breaking heat-wave. Not after walking through the dusk of a familiar hallway, casually throwing open a door and flicking on a light only to be confronted by that.

It was so completely evil a thing.

A drinking buddy of mine was saying just the other day that if there was a God, and he wasn't saying there wasn't, that whatever other feelings It had about life on the planet, It seemed to favor insects over us humans. "Beetles out-number us by millions to one," he pontificated.

Now admittedly Vic's not very good with numbers so I make allowances, but suddenly, as if summoned by that grotesque statistic, I found myself confronted by such a one, The Beloved of God. After a few minutes the first shock of horror subsided. It helped that the thing didn't move so I could consider its existence, its obscene proportions, its long antennae and crooked mandibles, its place in the divine order, my absolute powerlessness, all of them outside the obtrusion of time and our order. The desire to crush it subsided. Among other problematic counter-incentives, I was barefoot—completely naked, having capitulated to the heat . The gleaming, pointy surfaces of its body did not invite treading.

But then it slowly turned from me, having made up its unfathomable mind regarding my presence far more efficiently than I'd resolved mine. It's movement was execrable too: jerky, halting, simultaneously robotic and primordial.

I hated it all the more for its ambiguity. It contemptuously turned its back to me, proceeding towards the wall at a methodical pace.

Still fear held me there.

In college I had a lover named Gwynn who'd understood things like this. I wanted to hear what she'd have had to say at that moment; it would have made sense. On one particular night Gwynn and I stumbled into a confrontation with a gang of local street hoods. They'd been drinking or something and were ferociously screaming obscenities at each other when we imprudently entered the alley which served as their forum. They fell silent and studied us, obviously pleased at a prospective focus for their mutual frustrations. Six burly, chemically-altered, angry young men in leather and tatters turned on a skinny college gal leading her grumbling boyfriend along a shortcut home.

The scene might have turned unpleasant but Gwynn didn't blink or slow even as the men postured in a manner I recognized from wildlife documentaries, the complacent malignancy of the pack of coyotes as they close in on the wounded antelope yearling. I froze. Gwynn looked at the tallest, meanest, most slaughter-bent of the horde and asked in a voice both curious and accusatory "What are you arguing about?"

His answer should have been "None of your business!" followed immediately by unspeakable acts of violence, but after some moments of confusion he simply replied "What video we oughtta rent." Gwynn provided a few suggestions and politely excused us, the members of the pack stepping back deferentially to allow her passage. I followed meekly.

In retrospect, that might have been the night it happened: half my size I saw how huge she was. By the time, some months later, I realized I was in love with her, though, she was already gone. It wasn't an insufferable loss, after all; I'm still here to contend to this day that histrionics about love are just that.

But I found myself wishing she stood beside me as never before. I can't for the life of me guess whether she would have crossed calmly over to squash it, or crouched down studying it in fascination, or politely switched off the lights and left it to its privacy.

I continued to stare. Sweat was pouring down my body and I concede it wasn't merely the heat. What do such monstrosities eat? Where did it come from? How long had it been there? It had perhaps been weeks since I'd opened that closet door. Maybe more than a month.

The phone rang as the bug continued across the floor as indifferent to my existence as some asteroid adrift beyond Neptune. (Can they hear?) It rang again. It rang again. "It's past midnight," I said aloud to break the spell, "maybe it's something important."

I slammed the door and ran for the phone but when I picked it up all I got was a final click in my ear followed momentarily by a dial-tone.

I ran back upstairs to the closet and frantically pulled the door open. The light was still on, but the bug was gone.

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©1999 Nathan Barnett