When I was eleven, I needed an antenna for a secret machine into the future. I wiggled one end of our TV rabbit ears back and forth until it was hot and soft, and snapped it off. I removed the top bead and glued it back on the main body with Elmers to hide the deed.  To make a new beginning, or a new end, so to speak. There would be hell to pay for this, but I it was my last chance.

I called my machine a fugue gun.

That night Bonanza rolled and buzzed. My dad scrambled for a cure in twitching dials, thumping fists, a waving of antennae in witchdoctors’ gyre over everyone’s head. I snuck away to my room. It only took a minute before he knew who to blame. The doorknob twisted and shook and there were pounds and kicks. My father shouted to come out this instant, his voice stabbing into the red. The zone rouge of war wound and rage. I jammed the captured antenna into the plug and threw the switch. My machine strummed the superstrings. A future was Now: Ben, Hoss, Little Joe, Adam, and my dad, and my mom, were long dead, and my son along with them.  I was sitting in my grown-up office, watching the slow goodbye salute of a dying stinkbug’s broken antenna on my grown-up office windowsill. From far off I heard a "Hey."  Billie my colleague was peering over the partition wall between our cubicles.  
   
“Tom? What’s wrong with Jeremy?” She gave all the office stinkbugs the collective name Jeremy.

“I think she’s had it.”

“Jeremy’s a she?”

“I think this one is.”

“Huh.”

We stopped breathing. Jeremy’s bent antenna gave a goodbye salute. I let out a breath and Billie said "Crap," lingering a little with her head doing that humpty-dumpty totter on the cubby wall between silence and something else, sometimes a question about nothing much, sometimes a little less of nothing into something I couldn't get: What's going on? What's doing? Trying to answer I always drew a blank. In my head. On a sheet of paper. Or with a flash behind my eyes, a buzzing retinal fatigue of the brain. I'd learned to smile it away. Talk bugs.

I'd been creating some lesson plans about insects for my advanced ESL class. Sort of. I sketched the failing Jeremy and googled more about stinkbugs. I’d already learned Jeremy belongs to the Pentamoidea super family of bugs, for its five-sectioned antennae. A lot of its brains are in the antennae. It’s also known as a stink bug for its defensive odor, likened to coriander, cilantro, or skunk. Since the only way I had ever learned was to teach, my days were spent stringing beads of teaching moments from stuff around me, at the moment bugs, and consciousness.  Lately the thread had broken, the moments and beads spilling out on the floor. Life was tidying up, wasn't it. Maybe this was a juncture moment, why my machine had delivered me to this now. Maybe the answer to why I kept going blank with Billie, with everything.

But for the moment I read on. Stinkbugs are classed as “Shield Bugs.” They have an escutcheon shape, like a coat of arms, in Jeremy’s case resembling some nomadic tribal armor made of brown cured skins stretched over cages of bone and branch. The leathery brinded shield is called a scutellum. Below a bump two thirds down it opens, theater curtain style. Filling out the bottom half of the shield are near invisible translucent brown wings tucked one atop another. They’re edged with a dun and black triangular checkerboard band of wing membrane peeking out, like the hem of an A-Line skirt caught in a shut car door. Across the top of the shield is a gray banner with five black spots. Males have bumpy spots, and females smooth. Jeremy’s seem smooth. Above is a little brown nub of a head housing two tiny ocelli, (simple eyes) and a pair of larger, compound eyes goggling out the sides. After a time I fell down other various rabbit holes of google, and strange.

Put down your weapon.

Where had I just been? A day fever-dream. I was on the border with the refugee kids again. They were wrapped in tinfoil like the dead stinkbugs in my drawer.

“Hey Tom?”

It was Billie on the other side of the wall.

“Yeah?”

 

“I just read that the last of the Wisconsin ‘Wonder Spots’ has closed.”  I'd never heard of them.  They were highway tourist traps big in the 1950’s and 1960’s that claimed to be among a few dozen power points on the Earth. The roadside signs said, ‘Where the laws of gravity have been repealed!’ Visitors standing upright looked tilted. Milk came out of cartons at a slant. A chair could balance on one leg.
 

“Huh.”

She e-mailed postcards, articles and billboard pictures online and said, "More realia for a lesson."

"Thanks."

“I wish they were still open.” Then we went back to work.

Composition Question: Do you believe the Wonder Spot was real?  What is happening in these pictures? What could it mean to “repeal the laws of gravity”?

There was something hot in the air.

Put down your weapon!

I remembered a graphic novel I had just read by the Belgian-French team of Francois Schuiten and Benoit Peeters, The Leaning Girl.  I wanted to tell Billie but decided to leave her alone. The Leaning Girl told of a young woman, Mary Von Rathen, who could only stand at an acute angle. Her gravity-defying condition proved to be an opening into another dimension. The storytelling and drawing beautifully visualized an elegant, Jules Verne/steam-punk world of “The Obscure Cities.” Maybe I could use a little of that.  A memory of envy and longing flitted by and was gone. I use to be hungry. Ambitions to build my own alternate worlds filled sketchbooks. But let's stay moored to facts, and the quotidian. Now my drawings doodle across my classroom handouts and whiteboards, like a leak in the pipes that I must get fixed. Fix things. Batten hatches. Katy bar the door. Attach that fourth leg to the chair. My son could float and lean and hang like that. Defy gravity. Of course, he loved free climbing. There was some kind of  accident. But back to the bug lesson:

The Brown Marmorated Stink Bug, Pentatomoidea Halyomorpha halys, is native to China and Japan, a stowaway to North America on some packing crate or farm machinery sometime around 1998.  Halyomorpa halys is an infestation, feeding on fruit and vegetable crops with a piercing, acid-spewing mouth inflicting “corky wounds.” A gnarling distortion results, called “catface” (so named because the surrounding healthy plant growth bulges around the poisoned hole like the puffy cheeks of a cat). Jeremy never uses his stabber on people, though one article warns of “irritation from the scraping edge of the wing membranes.”

The smell of overheated electronics. Something about to blow.

Put down your weapon!

Jeremy always accepted my outstretched finger for a trusting walk up my palm, a pilgrim with cat’s feet and doubt. This was not a self-portrait, but it would have been nice, I think, if it were, if this creature of a me lived a modest, gentle, beautiful and discrete lifetime on this earth, the very essence of a light footprint life, doing no harm and maybe a little good within a little realm about as big as my cubicle.

But outside this benign office is a predator. An invader. A blight on crops and households, poking and sucking out Corky Wounds and Cat Face disfigurements with the piquant calling card of cilantro, the penetrating tear gas of skunk. My national superfamily reeks of the colonialist and fascist, the biggest arms dealer in the world and one of the biggest polluters and resource gobblers, tear gassing asylum-seeking families at our border, putting children in cages and wrapping them in silver blankets, butchering families with drones, following the orders of the alpha bug.

When Jeremy takes flight, it is with a drone’s leisure, and I wondered when Amazon delivery drones would become as commonplace as stinkbugs. There would be an enthusiasm for shooting the drones down, I hoped. I dreamed.

I looked up and it was just there again, Jeremy, sitting on my tabletop or keyboard, peering over my cubby partitions, or trudging across the broad window sill or clinging to the glass between inner and outer panes. Jeremy had come to the office not to feed or lay eggs, but to stay warm. And to die.

I knew my research into bugs was a distraction, and a salve. My online clicks and scrolls were a digital descendant of my parents’ anxious coaxing of dials and antennae for a clear, true picture. Of something.

Something was definitely burning.

Billie had just said again, "Hey, if you want to talk…"

I said, "About what?" I wanted to be smiling.

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