Beetle Bitten

A man living alone in the country, Phillip, is disturbed from his listless, sad existence by the bite of an exotic looking beetle in his living room. The offense fires up his dormant angel. He plugs up the hole the beetle scrambled into,  then goes down to the highway tavern for a long-needed drinking binge. Later, stumbling drunkenly across the fields, bruised and cut and happy following a cathartic bar fight, he finds himself growing feverish. Hallucinogenically, he finds himself seeming to grapple with fenceposts and brush in order to keep from being yanked toward the rising full moon. At the last, he weaves himself into a stack of heavy chains on the back of a flatbed truck, not sure whether he should be frightened by his hallucination or amused.

The trucker comes out of the bar and starts off down the highway. Phillip is dislodged and goes floating skyward at the end of the heavy chains. An overpass is rushing toward them — he detaches himself from the chain at the last moment, the chain slaps the cement span violently, and Phillip dwindles into the night sky, a shrinking birdlike silhouette against the moon.

Still feverish, he seems to travel through outer space...then seems to find himself in a sort of gardened court, presided over by five tall, Grecian athletes. The athletes ask him to help them by finding a rare and crucial flying insect that has fled to Earth. Phil refuses. Then the athletes show him his dead wife, preserved in glass. Though it would be very costly to them to bring her back to life, they would gladly do so in exchange for their lost pet. Phillip, of course, agrees.

Awaking on Earth early the next morning — in the middle of a soybean field — Phillip is sick and weak. He stumbles into town and orders breakfast, ready to put the hallucination of the night before, and the years of being a grieving sad sack, behind him. For the first time in years, he tries to engage the resentful locals in conversation. But, based on his behavior of the night before, and his appearance this morning, they’re more suspicious of him than ever.

Back at home, feeling a little better, he begins a purge of the garbage and disorder that have accumulated in his home. He goes out to a particular big maple, tries vainly one last time to feel something, and then announces, “I’m moving on, honey. I’m letting you go.”

The next day, cleaned up and trying to recover his old clear-mindedness, Phillip is in town, pitching his services to a building contractor. And then to the people at the lumberyard. There’s no takers, but Phillip is determined.

He goes into the sign shop and orders a sign, “Phillip Box, Architect” The sign maker pulls out another sign, “Phillip and Gail Box, Architects” for reference.

Phillip is on his way back to life. And then he hears kids screaming. Running to investigate, he sees it.

The insect the demigods in his dream had described.

Phillip’s world seems to spin and turn upside down. For a few moments, we see him standing with his feet on the ceiling of an inverted Earth. And then it turns around again, and everything is different. This time the inversion of the world has been unquestionably his PSYCHIC experience — and he is truly embarking now on life anew.

He sets off through town in pursuit of the huge dragonfly. Shamelessly, heedlessly, hysterically barging and tearing through stores, homes and automobiles, making an utter lunatic of himself.

Later, he is released by the deputy sheriff on his own recognizance. “Mr. Box, folks around here understand how you must feel. At the same time, it’s been four years. People tend to think that’s long enough.”

“We said we’d love each other forever,” says Phillip.

“Well, everybody says that,” explains the deputy.

As the days go by, Phillip is forced to get more and more stealthy in his pursuit of the bug, becoming an out and out burglar, making himself as ridiculous and despised as a person can be. His local reputation as a talented but aloof architect, a self-pitying asshole, is now superseded by an even worse one: that he’s a truly dangerous psycho.

At last Phillip is able to corner the bug, and his remaining doubts are removed. This is definitely not a bug of this Earth. It makes a sound that is so much like a taunting snicker that even the little boy hiding behind the table is alarmed.

“It really is a bug from outer space,” says the kid. Phillip, startled at having an audience, loses his grip on the canning jar he’s captured it with, and the dragonfly darts away.

“Of course it’s from outer space! No nut in his right might would do half this shit I’ve been doing!”

Finally, it’s the bug who has Phil cornered. Phil must either release the bug, or rescue the nosy little boy, his only advocate in the whole town. Phil chooses to save the boy’s life rather than his beloved wife’s.

Weeks pass. Phillip, humbled by it all and bearing a sorrow even greater than his first one, resumes his occupation as a handyman, an odd-job man — performing the town’s most menial tasks. The people’s sympathy is still there, but it’s been severely strained.

Then one evening the boy shows up. He has captured the dragonfly.

But the bug is mortally injured.

Phil sends the boy away and, following instructions, goes out the big Maple and calls the demigods. One of them appears to him in a sort of watery-fiber-optic way and receives the insect. Enraged at the bug’s condition, he nevertheless honors the promise. Gail descends from the sky in the  chute of watery air and lands on the grass. “Only beware this one thing,” says the hologram of the demigod. “Speak not her name until she has first spoken yours.”

Gail is alive, but has no memory — and she is terrified. She leaps for the demigod, howling inarticulately but plainly wanting to return with him. Left behind with Phil, in a world she doesn’t recognize, she is enraged and in terror, and attacks him, drawing blood.

Days pass, and Phil is unable to reach her mind. She is like a different person...or like something less than a person. Finally breaking free of him, she runs across the fields, darting left and right inexplicably, like an insect in flight. His heart broken one time too many, Phillip abandons all hope for his own happiness and, nearly catching up with her, calls her name.

Gail turns, faces him with a look of devilish victory, and melts Out of the sodden grass and soil arises a dragonfly like the other one. And away it flies, healthy and free.

Battling his incomprehension and yet another assault of grief, Phil tears his house apart looking for that old beetle that started it all. He finally finds where it has been living — in a space between the walls — and sees strange inscriptions where it has been gouging at the soft wood. And he finds the little opening it made to escape the house.

That evening, Phil is at his lowest point ever. And ready, at long last, to end his life as he has been living it.

“She’s gone,” he says. “She’s gone, and I’m not. I’m not going to live like this.”

And he looks like a man who has made a decision not to die but to live.

The old farmhand who rents the house trailer nearby — who’s funeral Phil had attended in the midst of his bug-hunting — appears out of the evening gloom. Phil staggers with disbelief. The old man takes a seat. “These bones just don’t want to be doing this,” he chuckles.

The old man is awkward and dazed, but he tells his story. He is the beetle Phil has been seeking. When the old man died, the beetle made its way to the cemetery and reincarnated itself in the dead body. “We not are used to digging with soft claws like these,” he says.

“What do you people want,” cries Phil.

“Please! I am some bugs. Bug.” He seems confused. “What we want are hard to explain. But in some particular way, maybe we want like what you want.

“Look here, I have to come down here and bite you. We I need you.We I’m not saying what us did was right. Not am saying it was wrong, neither. And what you want not more important than what we I want, probably. So bugs got no obligation to help you. But is going to. Like you did once.”

Phil doesn’t know what the old beetle is talking about.

“Look here, saw you do it. Was that little dischatoid [some scientific name for a Missouri bug] on a floor, you picked it up to took it outside. It didn’t want outside, but you thought it did. Well, that was a nice thing. So bugs gonna help you go where they think you wanna go.”

“Back up there?”

“Look here, might not like it what you find, but if that’s what you want.”

“I wanna kill those bastards. So if there’s friends of yours...”

The old beetle shudders. “Not friends. Bugs don’t friend. Bugs are bugs.”

Then the old man gives his gift. He takes Phil’s hand and bites it.

Phil gets feverish again, stumbles out into the field, and is sucked off the Earth toward the moon.

Not being drunk this time, he’s more clearheaded, can identify more of what’s happening. He is taken through the atmosphere and through outer space — insulated by a thickening of air and water. He arrives at the bug world — a big jellyfish-like dome of gelatinous matter full of plant life, connected to the sustenance of Earth by a long, gelatinous root.

The aliens are surprised to see him. Phil attacks with the shovel he has brought along, slamming them apart. Their robes fly open, and their bodies are revealed as a mass of clustered bugs. The bugs scatter, frightened and helpless, leaving only the skeleton-like wood of a tree root. The aliens are not humanoids after all, but puppets of the big, central tree. The faces and big, muscular arms are the only parts of them that are human-like. Their disguise exposed, the tree lets the demigods flounder, babbling incoherently. 

Phil barges through the garden, stumbling into a sort of aviary full of exotic dragonflies feeding and grooming a big throbbing mass of half-plant/half-insect brains. He realizes that the dragonfly on Earth, far from being rare, is something the aliens have in plenty.

And he confronts the big brain, which confesses its real purpose in all this has been to restore Phil’s desire for life. “As the spirit inside you died, so did the one inside us,” says the brain.

“Bullshit,” says Phil. “Like you could give a damn.”

“Not empathy stuff. Don’t mean that. But life in you was important to me in a way we can’t explain. You being alive in the world, being joy in your life, wishing to last — something in me responds to that, we depends on it.”

“What is it. Us or we?”

“We don’t know. We like your wife, though.”

“My wife?”

“Your life. It good for us. We never wanted to wish you bad.”

Phil almost buys it. Suddenly the tree begins to struggle, fighting within itself. It’s trunk bursts open, and a pulp of yellow blood gushes out. Out of the pulp rises a form, the body of a naked woman.

It is Gail.

She knows him, her eyes fix on him instantly, and every motion of her weakened limbs is a struggle to get herself near him.

Now it is he who is frightened of her, fearing she is another nightmarish manifestation.

But she calls his name.

And then they are embracing.

And then she is tearing herself away from him, speaking in a barking, choking language, causing insects and plants throughout the garden to converge on the tree, which is struggling to heal itself and attack.

“We only have a little time,” she says, “Can you believe in me just this once.”

“Actually, it’s sort of become second nature to me.”

She cries a heartbroken, “Goodbye!” and they leap through a pool into the abyss of outer space. Down through the transparent taproot, down through the atmosphere, suddenly veering into some kind of branch off the main root and shooting meteor like — a bright twinkling of incandescence rather than flame — above the gorgeous moil of Earth.

They come to themselves in a rice field among alien beings. Small, yellowish people wearing grass hats.

“I was what they lived on. My life,” she says. “As long as they let me feel you down by the Maple, I could go on living. But I finally let myself see what it was doing to you. I refused to keep touching you.”

“I knew you were there,” he says. “At first I just thought,’This is what people feel like when the person they love dies.’ But I kept feeling you. Year after year. Then you were just gone.”

“I wanted you to go back to living,” she says. “Even though you were the only thing that kept me living...trapped inside it.”

The horror of it hurts him.

“I had friends there. The simpler beings. The simpler parts of it. But it wasn’t enough to live for. They had to give me a reason to live. Watching you try to get me back.... That’s why they sent Kernolius...”

“The beetle.”

“You made such a fool out of yourself,” she laughs.

“Fool for love,” he says.

They look around. They are on the wrong side of the Earth.

“It’s good to be home,” she says.

“This is, uh, kinda far from Warren County,” he ventures.

“Honey, Warren County’s where the house is. This is where home is”

She enters his arms.