The Bug Thing

© 2004 Josh Byer
All rights reserved.

It was late; an abominable evening, a night filled with insomnia and informercials: better lives through better abs, fast-tracking your way to career success, inform inform with six-part cassette series being pushed by a televangelist with a toothpaste grin and an imitation Gucci shirt.

Jose was tired, aggravated by sleep depravation, and craving a Coca-Cola. He creaked up off the couch, stumbled into the kitchen, and discovered the fridge was goddamned empty. It had been a terrible day, year, life. He'd been through a lot.

His past was military, a former infantryman for the good and glory of Mexico, a Third World army thriving off Third World misery. They'd kept him marching for three years through slums and city streets, increasing the "peace." He'd fled that life. Fled to assemble car parts, destined for the greatness that awaited him in the good old U.S. of A., the city Los Angeles, Los Locos, City of Lunatics.

His East LA neighborhood was the same of any Mexican burro, full of faces worn away by sun and wind, weathered Mexi-Americans who would never be GAP-ad dads, never earn a living by staring at Microsoft products on a 17-inch monitor. Jose smiled at the thought; office dwellers would wrinkle and perish in a mud field, climbing through trees, picking fruit and waiting for a cold dinner.

The television set barked out the stupidity of the English-speaking world, the late-late shows. Jose wondered how he'd averted the plague of cable television all these years, how he'd prevented his cynicism from being shaped from Jay Leno inspired ha-ha's. This is what made him un-American—he didn't laugh at people getting shot (although he'd still find himself entertained by hour-long episodes of big-breasted detectives cracking their latest case).

How unusual, then, that it should happen to him in a small rented one-bathroom one-bedroom, with only the picture window in his living room offering any view—and that was of shit, hordes of drive-by street youth strutting down claimed sidewalks in the dead of the dark, looking for gang battles.

That night, amidst an uninspired tirade from the long-faced Anthony Robbins (infomercial guru), in the middle of a gusto-speech about personal power and professional potential, the bug-thing crashed through his scenic picture window, shattering and spilling onto the floor. It was a terrific, horrible thing; a little roach-man made of a thousand insects, all gathered together and glistening in one uniform, bulbous body.

His first instinct was to kill it, smite the evil bug and get some dinner (sometimes eating would make him sleepy); yet there was a natural aversion to violence in Jose. He'd seen too much of the real thing to crave it. Besides, he wanted "it" to live—he was awake, sure, but at least he was no longer bored.

He wrapped it in La Casa del Muerto, a Spanish tabloid dealing primarily with dead things, placed it gently in his bathtub, and gave it half a cup of beans in case it was hungry.

Then, in Spanish, in the language of his country and the memories of his misery, the bug-thing uttered a single word. It was a sound so guttural and terrible it invoked bad childhood memories of fathers with belts, of prison guards drawing blood from his ankles in Tijuana. The word stung him like a terrible wasp.

The bug had asked for sugar.

Sugar was no staple of the Mexican diet. The standard meal was tomatoes, beans, rice, meat—these were things that sustained life. Sweaty days in a GM plant making quality American alternators required efficient and affordable calories. The bug, hungry, hurt, and writhing in instability, only wanted sugar.

To Jose, sugar was a luxury, a dessert, costing too much money and too heavy to carry home from the neighborhood grocery. Kool-Aid, on the other hand, was affordable, just as sweet, and came in handy little packets that were lighter than a five-pound bag of refined white powder. Kool-Aid it was.

The bug seemed ungrateful, disappointed, but not too proud to polish off the powder. It buzzed as it took on the pinkish hue of the peach flavor it had ingested.

Jose, now growing dim in the wee hours of the night, was happy enough his new pet had lived but was finding his mind collapsing from the mounting anxiety caused by sleep deprivation.

The bug-thing arose, testing uncertain feet, scraping on the porcelain floor of the bathroom. Its antennae extended from the top of its head, waving softly like biological TV rabbit-ears, picking up invisible signals whizzing through the air.

"Sleep," it said, and a dangerous needle emerged from the front of its face, extending toward Jose. It dripped a terrible liquid, offering Jose its magical bug elixir. Normally he would have feared for his life, but Jose's frontal lobe was screaming for rest, and he took the needle and drank deeply.

He woke up five days later.

Scratching the new stubble on his face, Jose found himself awake and full of zest—aware, as he hadn't been since he was a child, and alert enough to view the world with sober, rested eyes.

A slime-filled tub was all that was left of his pet. Had it melted? Had it fled? When a light fixture landed on his foot, the answer was evident; the bug thing had built a nest in East LA, on the ceiling of a bathroom, in the home of an auto factory worker named Jose.

It bounded down from the ceiling and made his acquaintance.

"Sugar."

Ask and ye shall receive, and Jose was nothing if not a Biblical man—he watched the preaching on Cable 12, the "God Network," every Sunday. And so the bug took on a purple hue, the Kool-Aid of the day being grape, and Jose noticed his cupboard was close to empty. The bug flicked its antenna and understood.

"Paper."

It was an easy enough request to fill—the walls and floors, windows and tables, were coated in newspaper—some of it stopping the sun from entering through a window, some of it makeshift carpet to cover an distasteful piece of plywood sticking out of the floor. Newspaper was cheap decor for the poor.

The bug thing took the LA Times, the Post, all of the papers, and meticulously took them all apart, fiber and strand at a time, until all that was left of Sunday's Entertainment section was a pile of mucous with a tepid smell and snotty consistency.

It was two in the afternoon and the bug was incredible—dancing a gorgeous ballet of movement among the reconstituted, regurgitated paper strands. It was creating something from nothing, a small paper rectangle of bug-design, and by the time David Letterman muttered his opening monologue of the evening, it was completed. The bug had woven an American $100 bill.

Perfect in every regard, sewn with all the security features to prevent counterfeiting, it was undoubtedly a Picassonian piece of artist merit. Jose yelled in glee, realizing with his bug money factory he'd never have to return to work again.

"Bug sugar food."

Jose did exactly that, buying his pet Ho-Ho's, Hostess Cupcakes, Ding-Dongs, Coconut Snoballs, and at last his cupboard was full of glorious snacks—a feast of luxury among the bean pies and tomato enchiladas of the past. The bug thing feasted, changing color with every new artificial flavor and color. As it feasted, it began to speak.

What it said is impossible to reproduce, in structure or in tone—but it was the funniest, most entertaining spectacle Jose had ever witnessed. Sitting on the floor of his bathroom, he listened as the bug impersonated a thousand voices, his favorite scenes from his favorite movies in Spanish and English, reading his mind and providing a fantastic picture window if experience. Jose laughed and clapped as he relived every moment of televised and cinematic splendor he'd ever witnessed.

As the nights and days passed, a routine emerged. Jose fed the bug, would get a shot of his sleep-chemicals, rest and wake up, and leave to purchase more food with a fresh $100 bill. They would dine and feast together, Jose completely enraptured in the bug show.

The relationship lasted weeks, months, maybe years; Jose didn't know—every day looked and smelled the same in his little one-bedroom apartment. The bug languished on and on, changing its appearance as new types of junk food were sampled, absorbing each chemical and preservative of every exciting new snack product.

On a Thursday, while sampling a peanut butter Oh Henry bar, the bug turned a sickly shade of brown. It swung back and forth, vomiting and twitching, finally collapsing into a pile of wrappers and cellophane plastic. An odorless fluid, shining like spilt gasoline, slowly crept out of the corpse. Jose didn't know if it had been the Kool Aid, Twix, Crispy Crunch, or the Megablast Bubblegum. But he did know one thing.

The bug was dead.

Jose regained his seat on the living room couch and clicked on the television for the first time in months. Maybe the bug was the last of its species. Maybe it had been an alien or some sort of key to insect evolution, but now it lay rotting on a tile floor.

George Foreman was selling a new fat-free grill on Channel 14, and Jose smiled. He still had a picture window of entertainment.

It really didn't matter.

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