I Saw The Light

The japanese beetle fell into the jar of soapy water and began to struggle. I watched it struggle passionlessly, though not sadistically. It had been, after all, attempting to destroy our roses. The roses I hate. I don’t like the scent, I don’t like the thorns, and I wish I could just remove the bush and not be bothered. But my wife doesn’t agree. She doesn’t particularly care for roses either, but she subscribes to the common delusion that just because something is hard to take care of, it is worth taking care of. And so this beetle slowly dies, unable to crawl up the slippery glass, unable to use its wings. It’s not for the roses, I thought. These beetles are here to copulate, and their grubs will attract skunks and moles. And I like them less than I like the roses. 

The sun was still low in the sky, but its rays bore down on me like a weighted blanket. Is it this hot already? Or is it just the fever? COVID-19 first started popping up in my country four months ago, and we were able to isolate right away. But somehow we got it. Perhaps a trip to the store, or when my uncle dropped off some produce he had grown? My symptoms were fairly mild, except for the brain fog. I was standing in the heat at nine in the morning, knocking japanese beetles off the roses into a jar in my hand, and watching them struggle and drown. All the while, a repetitive loop of a song from Hamilton kept running through my encumbered brain. Is this a dream? Am I dead? Why didn’t any of my musicals win awards?

The bug’s death reminded of a kook I knew when I lived in a different city. A guy who called himself a sorcerer. He had a bunch of followers, some of whom had been friends of mine. They would all get high and do weird rituals, but they were mostly harmless. Once I saw this sorcerer step on a roach on the sidewalk, and as he did it, he dramatically exclaimed: “I slay thee in the name of Ares, and absorb thy energy into my being.” At the time, I thought an insect was a pretty paltry sacrifice. But in the heat, holding a jar of dying insects, I started to wonder… maybe I could make these deaths mean something?

I know now what a crazy thought that was, but it seemed one hundred percent reasonable in my delirium. I wanted to try it. I have always been attracted to fringe ideas. Not that I would say I’m a kook myself, but I love kooky ideas. I want to try them on, like clothes that are too expensive to buy. I know I’m not going to keep them, but I still want to see how I look. But I wasn’t sure what deity I should invoke. Ares seemed too violent for a time of global turmoil, and Satan seemed a little too on the nose. What other god could I invoke?

Just then, I caught a glimpse of a shadow passing overhead. I looked up and saw a hawk, or some bird of prey, maybe an osprey? I’ve never been good at identifying raptors. But anyway this bird goes into a nosedive and I see that it’s aiming right for a squirrel in the middle of my neighbor’s backyard.The squirrel turned to run (a little too late, I think… he’s pretty far from the trees), and right before he gets taloned, a crow came dive bombing from the other direction at the hawk, and rammed his beak into the hunter, who, flustered and losing a feather or two, aborted the mission and returned to his high treetop. The crow disappeared to wherever it came from. And just like that, the yard was empty. The whole thing took about eight seconds. Did I really just see that? Is this fever ruining my synapses?

I realized that my eyes were burning. Sweat was pouring off my forehead like Angel Falls and the world seemed now deserted, except for me and the japanese beetles. Everyone is in lockdown. There’s not a single car on the road. I looked at my weather app and saw that it was ninety-eight degrees. In Michigan! And it wasn’t even noon.

There’s a technique people use when they’re trying to learn to lucid dream, like when you’re in a dream, but you realize you’re dreaming, and you can control the dream. If you manage to stay aware without waking up, you can decide to fly or have sex with a celebrity or whatever. One of the techniques to get there is to periodically ask yourself, “Am I dreaming?” The idea is that you get in the habit of asking that question every so often, and sooner or later you ask it while you’re dreaming. Here’s the tricky part, though: when you’re dreaming, and you try to decide whether things are normal or dream-like, the dream will suddenly disguise itself to be normal. So you can’t just look around at what’s happening now, you have to think about what’s been happening for the last few minutes.

For whatever reason, I decided to ask myself, “Am I dreaming?” And thought about the heat, the jar full of struggling beetles, the hawk going for a squirrel and a crow fighting the hawk off… and I concluded that, yes, I am actually dreaming right now. So I decided since I’m dreaming and I can do whatever I want, I should sacrifice the beetles to a god and absorb their life force. In fact, since it’s only a dream, let’s go ahead and sacrifice them to Satan. I’m a horror movie fan and I thought it would be cool to have a scary dream where I summon the Lord of Darkness. Again, I had COVID, was full of fever, my brain was in a cloud and absolutely everything seemed normal and reasonable.

I found a bug couple happily fornicating inside a rose bloom. I held my soapy jar under the bloom, reached out with the other hand, and shook them off, into the jar. As they fell, I intoned “I slay thee in the name of Satan and absorb thy energy into my being!” I felt a little dizzy, and felt my skin tingling, or… vibrating. The beetles struggled in the soup, trying to claw their way across the backs of their fallen cousins to escape, but the suds made it too slippery for them to do anything but flail comically in the charnel pit they found themselves in. Okay, that wasn’t bad. Let’s dial it up a bit.

I started sneaking. Prior to this moment, I was just walking right up to the flowers and looking inside. Some flowers had bugs and some were empty. But now that I was on a nefarious dream mission, I started to stalk and slink my way around the bush.

The popillia japonica is related to the Egyptian scarab beetle, sacred to the god Xepera. Some part of my trivia-collecting brain wondered if I were angering a different god by sacrificing his beetles, but I felt I had made the choice, and I needed to see it out. They’re not really scarabs, after all. Scarabs literally eat shit, and these beetles eat roses. Or, no, they go to the roses to mate. What do they eat? I was getting distracted. Maybe some part of me knew it wasn’t a dream, and that I really shouldn’t be doing animal sacrifice in modern America. I noticed as if for the first time that the bodies of these beasts were iridescent, almost jewel-like. In another context if I weren’t trying to save my hated rosebush, I might find them beautiful. I found another on a blossom about waist-height. I decided to drama it up. I whacked the flower, getting a couple scrapes from the thorns as I did so, and bellowed, “I sacrifice thee to my lord Satan and absorb thy life-force into my being, that I may attain magickal powers!” At this, I felt slightly engorged, like there was indeed a power flowing through me. The sun now seemed like a benefactor, radiating subtle energies that I was just now learning to sense. My sweat seemed like an unguent, a ritual blessing that was readying me for the next level of initiation. I had to get more of this feeling. Maybe this ritual will cure my COVID?

I slunk around to the back of the bush. Jackpot! There were three beetle couples on three petals of the same rose. I slowly moved my jar into position. Thankfully, I was using a wide-mouth pint jar that could accommodate the distribution. I took a deep breath, shook them in, and howled “O Satan, mighty benefactor, accept this my offering to your mighty diabolicalness! Give me the power of which I crave, and I shall be your friend and collaborator for all time!”

The jar began glowing, a pink light surrounding and suffusing the jar and its contents. The mass of bodies in the water was barely visible through the aura, and seemed like it was coalescing into a viscous potion or elixir. For a moment, I imagined drinking it, but nausea quickly corrected that impulse. The pink glow, however, seemed to be growing and spreading. It surrounded my hand, the roses, it climbed up to my face. As my head lolled backwards I saw the vestiges of blue sky receding in the wake of the pink tide that was overtaking the whole of my visual field. I felt like I was floating weightless, rising up toward the now-pink sky. I heard (or imagined?) a deep voice that was simultaneously the loudest thing I had ever heard and yet no more than a whisper, “I accept your offering, my young comrade, and you shall have the delights you desire! No more shall you toil in work that is unappealing to you. You shall be a creator, your luck will change, everything you desire that you truly pursue with diligence shall fall to you. This I swear by the first unveiling and by my name. Shemhamforash!”

I awoke lying on the grass, with a gentle hot breeze tousling my hair. The blue sky above was unblinking, and a bird, high enough that I couldn’t tell what kind, flew overhead. I lifted my head, and turned to see the empty jar next to my hand. There were a few bubbles on the grass, but no beetles that I could see. Had they flown away? At least some of them were surely dead. I looked at the rose bush, and didn’t see any activity. I sat up slowly, still a little dizzy, and stood up to look closer. I didn’t see a single bug on that plant. I looked at the sky, felt the rays of the sun, and looked at my phone. One hundred and two degrees, at ten in the morning. In Michigan. I felt like a heap of manure. I went inside to my air conditioned bedroom to take a dreamless nap.