THE BUG ROOM – GLENN DUNGAN
The Cecil Train line went from a nameless, nothing special town to another nameless, nothing special town. It was the first public transport to dissolve in the restructuring of esoteric government bodies, with a cleaner, faster, and more efficient train opting to skip the town entirely in favor of siphoning capital and bodies into the suburbs and eventually into the city, some six hours away. Then the town stopped fighting for it, citing their own budget cuts that tumbled like loose ribbons to a lack of funding for schools and sports, bumpy roads, unkempt forests, the perfect cocktail of suburban anomie. Thus, the Cecil track became a symbol of Cog Hollow; forgotten, malnourished, existing purely on a concentration of collective neglect. It was here that Bobby Moynihand and Richard Blake walked, Bobby in between the rusted tracks, stopping over the crossties and stepping over the gaps in the splintered and mottled planks, Richard not failing to take the challenge for a low-stakes test of acrobatic balance. They walked underneath the increasingly damp stone bastions, the paint flaking houses looming over each bank, separated by a chain link fence. Bobby kicked littered soda cans and Richard inspected what was either a cigarette, which he had seen before, or a joint, which he hadn’t seen, until Bobby told him it was a joint and then Richard lost interest in the carcass.
**
The iron rail disappeared into the darkness of the underpass. The boys stopped in front of its maw.
Richard said, “Wonder where it goes.”
“All roads lead to somewhere,” Bobby said.
Richard hopped on one foot. “I gotta piss.”
Richard made to piss, his twinkling splattering on some plants that had mustered their way through the gritty sandstone that just now Bobby was coming to appreciate was the foundation of their stupid, little town. While his best friend relieved himself, Bobby felt a nameless magnetism towards the darkness, a strange loneliness. Bobby wasn’t dumb; he’d seen movies. He knew that the stoners hang out near the dam and the abandoned stop, but something was amiss here. The underpass was too far back, to vacant, to void-like. It was like staring at a giant cornea. Even the detritus of whomever was lawless enough to come down this way had ceased, the raw nature of the overgrowth now the sole proprietor of these parts of the track.
Richard appeared next to him and asked, “You wanna go back?”
Bobby looked over his shoulder, his eyes darting from the clovers to the weeds to the dandelions that had begun to colonize the ever-stalwart railroad. They could turn back. It wasn’t going to stay light outside forever, but what would they have to go back to? Bobby’s weeping mother, her lips stained with wine, and a brother who smoked whatever those rocks were called near the backyard shed with his pockmarked friends, the entire house clinging that their father will return? And what of Richard, his recently alleviated partner in a tribe of two?
Bobby turned to Richard, a beak-like snozz to a spider’s nest of zits, and said, “Let’s just keep going a little more.”
They entered the shadow of the underpass, rundown sneakers bending to the will at the rocks underneath their feet. The air turned damp and cold, and soon the rumbling of the overhead vehicles dissolved into total silence.
“Think we’ll find a homeless person?”
“In Cog Hollow? There are better places to camp out.”
Richard was silent for a while, then he said, “I feel sort of safe in here.”
“Me too,” Bobby said, and he meant it. Maybe this could be their new domain, two social recluses with a sort of secret club house. The underpass fit the bill; it was too long to be considered a smart move to traverse, too dark to navigate without a flashlight, and too boring and out of the way to warrant any interest from anyone else.
After a couple minutes Richard skirted to the wall again. “How long do you think this is? Shouldn’t we be out right now?”
Bobby waved his hand around in the black void, childishly amused at the pocket dimension he had invented himself to be in. He noticed a little pin prick at the end of the black. “Another couple of minutes.”
“Hey, Bobby?”
“What’s up?”
Richard knocked. A dull metallic echo sounded where Bobby had expected damp bricks to be. Bobby felt the cold exterior, grabbed a handle. He gave it an innocent tug, surprised first at his strength and then finding that it opened with only a modicum of rust obstructing its wingspan of entry. By now the light of at the end of each side of the long underpass, looked like a reflection of itself. A faint outline of a door faced them, perhaps nine feet in height.
“Spooky,” Bobby giggled.
He looked at Richard and in the rough silhouette of the underpass saw that Richard was facing him as well. “We should get a light.”
“We won’t make it back until dark.”
“We can go back tomorrow,” Bobby suggested.
“We’ll go after class,” Richard said, leaning into this. Tomorrow was the start of the gym mandated Volleyball, where the likes of Clay Rudrick and Rodney Marks, best friends counter to Bobby and Richard, preyed on the other boys that could not keep up with their physical merits, and the only sanctuary for either of them was the fortunate arithmetic that they had both been scheduled at gym during the same period on the same day.
Bobby stepped over the lip, felt his way around the edges of the threshold, assured himself that there were no sudden drops.
“Bobby, what are you doing?”
“Just seeing a little bit before we go back. What’s the harm?”
And Bobby did want to see a little back. They had come this far. He would be too occupied with school and life tomorrow and tonight and could not trust himself to muster the gusto to travel all this way, and their success at leaving school early to avoid the physical bullies like Butch and the psychological bullies like Greta and her possie might not prove fruitful in twenty-four hours. And, to be frank with himself, Bobby was curious. He felt that this was his defining trait. Bobby found a corner in the path and walked it, holding onto the brick, smelling the must of stale air.
“Bobby, come on!”
“My eyes are adjusting. It’s okay.”
“It goes back really deep!” Bobby yelled.
“What?” Richard yelled, his voice sounding far away, as if speaking through a door.
“I said…” Bobby pivoted, hit with a sudden clarity that he perhaps had gone too far deep. He made his way back, found the hallway that he had entered to be stretched, and chuckled to himself because how could this possibly happen!
“Okay, Rich, I’m a bit stuck.”
“Bobby?”
“Rich, come on.”
“Bobby!”
If curiosity was point A, and stupidity was point B, then what Bobby had traversed was surely the point C of whatever spectrum of utter idiocy he had tripped into. He backtracked, found the door no longer existent.
“Bobby,” Richard called again, now from the opposite side.
Bobby took a breath. He thought, with a surprising ounce of self-sufficiency that had somehow bloomed amidst the soil of self-doubt, that he could get himself out of this entanglement. He ventured towards Richard’s voice and found himself even further down the path. He did quick biological arithmetic; the human body could exist without water for this long, the human body could exist without food for that long, but really after a couple hours all Bobby needed to do was wait for help. So really, it was fine.
But fine it was not, and Bobby began to sweat underneath the chilled fog that had begun to occupy the empty space between the cement walls. He walked further into the depths, no longer hearing Richard’s calls.
He touched the walls, feeling at first the cement slabs that was in outer layer of the town infrastructure and finally into something smooth, like tanned crocodile boots. Then his hands moved into that slightly ribbed yet smooth feeling of stick-on wallpaper, and it was here that Bobby admitted himself both incredibly confused and lost, which fueled into one another like some nefarious feedback loop. An orange glow around the corner directed Bobby’s attention and he felt a strange and mixed-signal cocktail of confusion and alarm. He had not the body of Rodney or Clay, had not even the meatloaf-esque frame of Mitch, but he was pretty certain that he could at least not die at the end of a scuffle, his defeat more akin to an incredibly convincing play-dead that evoked the sympathy of even the cruelest assaulters.
Bobby turned the corner and found himself in the orange glow, moving into the depths, hyper-conscious of his footsteps. Before he could register, a thing in a cap looked up from a fan of cards held before it.
“Hello Robert.” Large antennae moved in frantic directions. Mandibles clicked and clacked and could not form the words that came out of its mouth. Ruby colored eyes the size of basketballs stared unblinking underneath a bowler hat; a black body reflected the dancing of the shadows from whatever produced the orange light source. Before it, surrounding the slightly furred green lawn of a poker table occupied with ruby chips and sapphire coins, were its similarly insectile companions. One was twice its size, large enough to combat Mitch. Another was taller and lithe.
Bobby stared at the onyx-colored trio. There were no doors out of the room except the one he was standing in. His mind attempted to wrestle with the logic of the sight before him, of the bugs playing poker, of the bugs being bugs.
The one with the cap pointed to the empty chair between the width laden and the height laden companion. Bobby did as told, seeing the oily shine of their shells, how it looked green and blue in the light, like when gasoline pools in water. Bobby took his seat, feeling dwarfed by the onyx totems. Bobby was unsure if these bugs were eccentric humans wearing highly detailed costumes, the quality mimicking that movie he and Richard had snuck into last week, Alien.
“Where am I?” Bobby mustered.
The giant bug said, “You are in the Bug Room, Robert.”
“Bug Room?”
“Bug Room. Everyone has a Bug Room. This is yours.”
The wider bug dealed Bobby a hand. The cards had strange symbols on them and were dotted with stars.
“What are we playing?” He felt stupid asking, but felt it was necessary.
The central bug exhaled. It’s basketball eyes stared forward, its neck unmoving, but still Bobby knew it was looking at him, however fractal. “Cards, Robert.”
“What kind of cards?”
“Well, whatever you like,” said the lanky insect to his left. “We were just finishing up.”
“And it’s your Bug Room, after all,” the broad-shouldered bug that was built more like a hulking Hercules beetle said with a gravely and deep voice.
“My Bug Room?” Bobby repeated.
“Everyone has a bug room,” the giant fly said, “and this is yours, dear Robert.”
“How do you know my name?”
“Because it’s your Bug Room.”
A lone lightbulb dangled from what appeared to be an adhesive ribbon of fly trap above the table, seemingly levitating an illuminated halo that reflected upon the carapaces of the three bugs. It was flecked with the carcasses of miniature versions of the table’s denizens, and this did not seem to bother any of the players. A radiator hissed in the corner. A kitchenette was stationed behind the cap wearing bug, the small sink filled with dishes and mugs that were covered with various forms of lichen and hosted their own galaxies of crawling insects. Bobby was struck to attention when a tea pot screamed its completion, and the cap wearing bug, still facing the table and looking at the cards, dismounted one of its reed-like arms and reached back to muscle memory the dial, turning the kettle off. Between the sudden stimuli of a screaming kettle and the bug’s dimensions and ease of movement, the possibility of this being a human in a giant bug costume dwindled closer to an unsavory impossibility. And even if this was a man sitting across and next to him, then it was three men in a bunker dresses like giant flies, and Bobby, having been smart enough to afford himself at least a modicum of common sense, told himself that his instincts for self-preservation would only succeed if he were to leave this place at once.
The bug in the cap dealt Bobby five cards. The others picked their hands up and moved their torsos to him. Bobby stood, the folding chair that seemed incredibly flimsy to hold any of the bug’s weights screeched on the cement floor.
He said, “I’ve got to head back now.”
“You haven’t even looked at your cards, Robert.”
A surge of electricity ran through him, and Bobby returned to the chasm from which he came, attempting to retrace his steps. By now Richard should have accepted Bobby’s misplacement and had gone for help, right? And until then Bobby needed to find his own way out, or stay away from that dreaded room and frightened him for myriad reasons. He rushed down the path, hearing the steady dripping of water from a crack in the cement. His eyes, once partially adjusted to the darkness, now had gone infantile in their usage, and he groped blindly, searching for angles, falling once or twice at single steps that he was positive were not there on his way around the first time and doubling back. He heard a steady scratching against the walls, a subtle scritch scritch scritch that sounded like pens scribbling on clipboard, or like something burrowing. Bobby punched the wall in anger more than once and set about moving now in random directions, searching for any source of light, no longer caring if he was shat out of the sewer system at the far end of town, no longer worrying about avoiding a potential two hour walk back with just himself, the ensuing confusion of Richard, the anger of what would definitely bring the police to his house and the anger from his mother that the pigs were occupying the lawn, which would unearth a tempest of other problems inherent in the house and undue all her hard work belaying the social workers from the last time. All Bobby wanted was to get out out OUT. As if some cosmic force had answered his angst, Bobby discovered an orange glow of the outside at the end of a long hall, and he stepped up his pace to separating himself from this waking nightmare.
“Welcome back,” said the bug as he rounded the corner and faced their three gazes. They looked as if they had never turned around since watching him leave. His cards were on the canvas, untouched. The teapot roared to a steam again and again the bug turned the kettle off without torquing its body away from him. the poker table might as well have been an ocean between him and the dealing, capped bug, with its tall and bulky companions like sentries.
“Oh no,” Bobby said, aware of how feeble he sounded, how pathetic. “How did I end up back here?”
“Because it’s your Bug Room,” said the tall one. “We were waiting for you. You haven’t seen your hand.”
“Sit, Robert,” said the sturdy one. “Sit in your Bug Room.”
“Play the game with us, Robert.”
Bobby, feeling a little dizzy, stood in the threshold once again, shocked by how easy it was for his body to orient itself in the darkness back to here. There was a slight scritch scritch scratching in black infinities flanking him down the wall way, as if something was crawling its way towards him with a million tiny pincer-like legs.
“Play. The. Game. Robert.”
Bobby returned to the chair, itself askew from when he had made his first attempt at escape. He nestled in between the giant bugs, felt a strange warmth from them, heard a low hum as they breathed or salivated or simply existed. The strip of gooey fly catcher dangled next to the lone lightbulb above their heads. He counted six of them. Bobby began to feel a sourness in his eyes, felt the coming of a pebble of tears in the cornices. And here Bobby was, feeling foolish, because he was crying in the company of these bugs who were larger than any bugs he had seen outside of movies, and they acted as if Bobby was meant to be here, that it was his bug room, and in no logic could it have been Mitch’s or Rodney, or Butch and at the end of it all, Bobby was stupid enough to get himself trapped here, stupid enough to allow himself to believe he had some agency in his life. He was in his Bug Room.
“Look at your cards,” said the capped bug.
“Okay,” said Bobby, sniffling, keeping his eyes at his lap, his cheeks flushed. He gathered the cards, fanned them out. A fly was clinging to the trap, beating its wings uselessly, tiny thimbles of eyes capable of looking in a million directions but focused on Bobby, and he knew it. He could feel it on his core. The other flies began buzzing in unsteady beats.
“Don’t you hear them calling for you?” Said the lean one.
“Yes,” Bobby sniffled. Tears were trailing down his cheeks. He wanted to run but he knew he would make it back here again. “I think they are asking for help.”
“No, Robert,” said the capped one. It redirected its attention to its own cards. “They are praying for you.”
“Why?”
“They are preying for you,” said the bulky one.
“They are praying for you. Like a god,” the lean one chirped.
The kettle shrieked again. The light bobbed suddenly as if the rusted tether was shaken by the roll of vehicles above, and Bobby was reminded that they were somewhere in the stomach of an underpass. The scritch scritch scribbling was around the corner.
“Prey pray prey.” The lean one reached a slender antenna-esque hand and tapped on the green canvas.
“Pray prey pray.” The bulky one took up its own hand.
“Pray, prey, play.” Said the capped one.
Bobby shivered. He looked at the cards, found himself still capable of shock when it was not the typical playing cards he had expected, had seen in the backs of forgotten desk drawers. A hand of five tarot cards were joined together, pinned by his thumb and fingers. Bobby wiped a bead of tears with his free hand, keeping his elbow tight to not hit the lean bug. He angled the cards to get a look at the graphics underneath the lone, pendulum bulb.
“Which card do you want to play, Robert?”
“It’s your turn.”
Bobby swallowed the lump in his throat. His fingers felt sticky, paralyzed by the ebon figures next to him, the bulky one now rubbing its fibrous mitts together, looking conniving in posture, strangely innocent in how animal the gesture really was. Bobby scanned the cards. He had seen tarot cards in movies, in some comic books that Richard collected and kept underneath his stained mattress. Yet instead of royalty or knights or princesses or towers he found the human figures represented by bulbous figures with skin the color of ink and two ruby orbs atop their head like some strange helmet. The figures clasped together by his shaking hands were flies. Before him: The Tower, the Fool, The Emperor, The Hermit, The World.
“I don’t understand Tarot,” he said.
“You don’t need to. Pick your card.”
Bobby swallowed again, and something within the threshes of his psyche told him that these bugs did believe in whatever game was playing, that they had belonged to the card with as much idolatry as scripture, that their religion was contained within this deck. The gravity of Bobby’s decision not lost on him nor the sentinels, and Bobby understood to pay particular attention to his hand. At first he was angry. He wished he knew how to play. He wished he had better cards, even though he did not understand the relationship of power between them. It was the way of things in his life. That the world in which he was planted was stacked against him, the cosmic odds dedicating themselves instead to cruel, pretty girls or confident, ruthless guys who toy with the feeble like Bobby and his best friend. By this sad logic, something swept in Bobby that whatever insidious forces were in play in the Bug Room, in his Bug Room, that they had power to damn him, or to save him, just as he, when confronted with the power of choice himself, had decided to venture into the dark halls, had decided to turn right instead of left and walk along the abandoned railroad safe within the cocoon of he and Richard’s friendship.
Bobby’s fingers meant to pluck The Fool, for he felt akin to the lute playing idiot. Then something evoked in him, confronted against whatever strange and nefarious happenstance had befallen him over this grimy poker table, and instead he grabbed the corner of the Hermit. Something about its totality sung to him more than the others. His mind lingered on the Emperor, even the World, but the Hermit was analogous to how he felt, an isolated Isola within the lonely town of Cog Hollow. The hermit bug on the card was clad in a dirty cloak, holding itself with a cane, scythe-like mandibles open to the night sky.
The bugs looked at Bobby’s choice and he was unable to discern if this was correct or not. Bobby started to weep again, the confusion overwhelming.
“I played. Let me go.”
The capped bug said, “You can always go. This is your Bug Room, Robert.”
“I want to go for real. I promise I won’t tell anyone you’re here. I swear to it.”
“No need to promise,” said the lean one. “Everyone has their own Bug Room.”
“And this one’s yours.” The bulky one reminded.
The three of them remained erect on the folding chairs. They stared at the Hermit. The fly catcher buzzed buzzed buzzed, the little sacrifices staring at Bobby, into Bobby.
“They pray for the Hermit,” said the capped one.
Scritch scritch scritch around the corner, at the edge of the blackness.
“They prey for the Hermit,” the lean one said.
The kettle whistled and it no longer bothered Bobby.
The bulky one said, “They play for the Hermit.”
“Am I the Hermit?” Bobby found that courage was no longer necessary to exist. The steaming kettle and the trapped flies and the scritch scritch formed an incomprehensible and overstimulating auditory kaleidoscope. He tossed the other cards onto the table, a menagerie of flies dressed in different garbs, illustrations of futures that he would never know tossed atop the Hermit and its lantern. Bobby wept, his cheeks red, snot dribbling down one nostril and curving at his upper lip. “What does that mean? What does that mean? Tell me! Am I the Hermit?
The capped insect said in its calm voice that pierced the shrieking of the environment. “Do you play, do you pray, or do you prey?”
“I pray,” Bobby said. He had never been someone to go to church, had only just breached those esoteric and complicated questions in those moments of pure vulnerability with Richard on their long walks. “I pray, I pray, I pray.”
“A preying Hermit it is then, Robert. Good game.”
“What game are we playing? Please, let me go.”
“The. Game.” The bulky one said.
“The only game.” The lean one whispered.
The capped insect kept its voice tempered below the whistling kettle, but still Bobby could hear him. “Those fools who had gotten themselves trapped on that ribbon pray for you. If we are but insects, what does that make you?”
Bobby sniffled, wiped his nose. A flurry of tap-dancing legs was now coming into the room, sounding their advance. Bobby did not want to look over his shoulder, although he could feel the presence of the lean and bulky insect, each holding their own tarot cards, flanking him. Hot air reminded Bobby of old hamburger pulsed at the back of his neck and in the corners of his eyes he saw something large, amorphous, black as tar.
His lower lip trembled ferociously. He said, “A god?”
The lightbulb exploded into stardust, turning the grimy bunker into a void of heavy, hamburger smelling blackness.
“Well done, Robert. Welcome to Bug Room.”
It was only twenty minutes later that the door opened, but Richard felt that he was waiting for longer than that. It was like some Egyptian slab; the rustle of cement against cement, smoothing itself out.
“Bobby?” Richard stood from the stones that had begun to poke into his hindquarters.
Out came three hulking figures, themselves a resonance of black underneath the dark cover of the underpass. Richard’s heart dropped at the sight of these. He could not see their exact features, but he knew that Bobby should have come out, or rather, they should not have. They approached Richard, who was at the other side of the underpass, pushed to near paralysis because he was too afraid to alert the cops in case they caught wind of Uncle Marvin, too afraid to leave in case Bobby came back from the threshes.
The three unfolded themselves as silhouettes. They neared Richard and he cowered, embarrassed to do so, knowing it was proficient tactic against the likes of Butch and his friends.
They stared at Richard for moment, themselves looming like totems, and in this moment, Richard mustered all the courage he had for his only friend. He asked, “What happened to Bobby?”
The three of them remained silent. They lorded over Richard.
“You are meek,” said the larger one.
Richard whimpered.
“Do you know what they say about the meek, Richard?”
“How do you know my name?”
The three figures had the chemical smell that reminded him of bleach or fly traps.
“Don’t hurt me,” Richard said.
As his eyes adjusted, he figured that one of them was wearing a bowler hat. It was that one who spoke, “Rejoice, Richard. This is your Bug Trail.”
“Bug Trail?” His hands were latticed over his eyes. He drew his knees up to his chest.
“Do you play, prey, or pray, Richard?” That was the lean one.
“I don’t know. I’m sorry.” He did not know why he was apologizing but he found that regret, however forced, could be used as a successful shield.
The capped one said, “When the world dies, who will inherent the Earth?”
“I don’t know.”
“The meek,” the capped one continued. “You should rejoice, Richard. Aren’t we all just...insects?”
Richard whimpered.
The bulky one added, “And when the world ends, who are the meek?”
“I’m sorry, I should never have taken us here.”
“The hermits, Richard, the ones who never left the Earth,” the capped one sounded exasperated, which made Richard cringe.
“How can you inherent the Earth,” said the lean one, “if you’re too busy losing possession of it?”
“I won’t say anything, I swear.” Richard found himself openly weeping now, discovered in himself a weakness that was within a further depth of what he knew he could have displayed before.
One of the things bent down, its limbs thin lines atop an incredibly robust oval, scythes hanging from its collar. It reached behind itself and pulled out an arc of paper. “Would you like to play?”
“Or pray?”
“Or prey?”
“No.”
“Pick a card.”
“I don’t know what I’m picking.”
“It doesn’t matter to see, Richard. We’re here. This is your Bug Trail.”
“Pick a card,” the capped one said, pushing the cards forward.
Richard unraveled himself. He plucked groped blindly, stupidly, into the blackness. He pulled a card and cursed himself as he dropped it out of fear, afraid that it would be misinterpreted as an insult to this mysterious trifecta.
The large one picked up the card, a black rectangle in impossibly skinny hands. “The Emperor.”
The capped one adjusted itself to hold the cards with one hand and reached out to tap Richard on the shoulder. It felt like a pool cue. “Good game, Richard.”
“What were we playing?” He asked.
“What were we praying?”
“What were we preying?”
They stood and walked into the darkness. The smell of bleach and other chemicals dispersed, leaving Richard to his cowering. He looked in between the space of his fingers, found himself with a trembling lip. The three figures moved into the sunlight, positioned themselves for a brief moment as if they worshipped the open air, striking odd poses, limbs at strange, humanly impossible geometries, and Richard though for a second that they were dressed as giant bugs, the bulky one wearing a fly trap as a lei, and they walked the abandoned Cecil Train Station Line in reverse, towards Cog Hollow, and the lean one balanced on the rails as Richard did, and the bulky one twiddled with its necklace of dead brethren, and the capped one whistled into the coming twilight that had beset on Cog Hollow.
And Richard wept for his dead friend.
And the bugs walked. And Richard knew that they will never sleep, that whatever endeavor was set before them would never be impeded. And that they would never die.
And then, Richard stood, holding the card in his hand, folding it to fit into his wallet as he dried a tear with the back of his wrist.
GLENN DUNGAN
is currently based in Brooklyn, NYC. He exists within a Venn-diagram of urban design, sociology, and good stories. When not obsessing about one of those three, he can be found at a park drinking black coffee and listening to podcasts about murder.