The Buzz: A Professor Deshpande Mystery

Wei’s soul awakens/The body quickly follows/Temptations beckon.

“What happened to postcoital pizza?” Professor Zhao demanded drowsily. Associate Professor Kalish chuckled.

“I was afraid it might get cold during your postcoital coma, so I stepped out to pick up a few things for our tenure celebration.”

“It smells wonderful, as always, though you didn’t need to go to the trouble,” Wei chided, rooting under the couch blanket for her loungewear. “We’ve known this was coming for months.” She tugged on her University sweatshirt and padded into the kitchen. “So where’d you go, anyway?”

“Woods just past the corn elevators. You like tempura, right?”

Wei peeked around Will’s broad back. “Sure they’re fresh?”

“I’m not sure you want to ask.” The entomologist peeled another shell, dumping the naked morsel into an ornate flowered bowl Wei had purchased her last trek to Beijing. “But they had a great selection of Broods XIII and XIIX. Always wait ‘til the confluence of breeding cycles, Mom used to say.”

“My mom used to say, use the Corel instead of the one-of-a-kind artisan cloisonne I spent my last yuan on.”

“A wise woman. Shit, is this even OK to use?”

“I think they’ve gone to food-safe enamel since the last trade deal. Not a huge thing — every one of these is one-of-a-kind, crafted by some poor woman who may be lucky to live past 50. And it was my last few yuans after a five-course dinner the night before.”

“So you’re the one who should feel like a shit,” Will sighed, relocating the cicadas. “You wanna wipe your blood bowl while I mix the sriracha aioli? Nothing’s too good for my academic overlord.”

“Dude,” Wei cautioned. “Is this for the conference?”

“Along with Korean bulgogi grasshopper, mealworm-based Samoan Moa Fa’Asaina with coconut rice, Thai cricket stir fry, and scorpion skewers. That isn’t cultural appropriation, is it?”

“It almost all is, but as you’re catering on a budget, you get royal dispensation.”

**

“There is one final matter I’d like to address, with your indulgence,” Professor Deshpande spoke up after the legalese subsided. Wei suppressed a flutter of excitement; the University counsel du jour leaned forward with a frown.

For a moment, the trio was again concerned Keith Hamamura’s end had locked up. Wei had no idea how reliable the coverage was out on Lake Millington, about 10 miles out of the city, practically in the deep woods beyond the corn and beans, though his audio was astonishingly crisp and clear. Which was fortunate as the old man largely murmured or muttered his few responses. She knew he was ill, perhaps gravely so, and he’d been a virtual statue for the last half-hour, seated with his back to a sun mirrored on the expansive lake beyond. His face appeared nearly featureless.

“Of course,” Hamamura finally murmured, weak but cordial. “Please.”

Saanvi smiled. “As you know, Professor Zhao is coordinating our annual Asian and Pacific Island Students Exposition, and in addition to works created by our own students and faculty, we’d like to include traditional pieces that reflect cultural and esthetic diversity of the 12 countries represented. Professor?”

Wei braced – though she’d helped inventory and catalogue the former auto executive’s extensive collection of Pan-Asian art and artifacts in anticipation of his endowment, she felt a bit like a vulture. “I guess what we’d like to ask is if you might be willing to loan us maybe 40 mixed pieces.”

The University attorney scrambled to catch up. “Of course, we’d indemnify you against any damage or theft that might--”

“Lawyers,” Hamamura chortled. “Always hoping to frighten the world into paralysis. Wei, whatever you wish is yours. It will be the University’s someday, anyway. Why don’t you come to the house today, if you are able.”

“We are in your debt, Keith,” Professor Deshpande amended. Counsel scowled, as if attempting to calculate the potential exposure inherent in her statement.

Hamamura waved it away. “If that’s all, I’m exhausted. If you’ll excuse me?”

Before anyone could respond, the old man, the cabin, the lake, and even the sun vanished.

**

Nature calls shrilly/Secrets hidden jealously/Man merely ponders.

“Gawd,” Wei said, crunching out of the limestone lot under the glare of a sunburnt F-150 pilot. Kalish grinned up, middle finger poised on the wheel. “It sounds like some kind of hellish jungle.”

The trucker spit rock beating the professors to the road, but the bug up his ass had no chance against the millions blanketing every leaf and trunk along County Road 2100.

“But I was right about the bomb burgers,” the entomologist said.

“At times,” Wei lamented above the rhythmic racket, “the gap in our ages seems culturally vast.”

**

“Left at the crook ahead -- I said left,” she instructed over the chilling drone, cringing back as first one, then another, then a third fat shape exploded against the hybrid’s windshield. Kalish dutifully activated the wipers and wash, smearing an insectile laminate over the tempered glass. “Yeesh. You’ll see it – looks like Abraham Lincoln and Frank Lloyd Wright had a love child.”

“Would they could have,” he half-shouted.

“WHAT?”

“LEFT, RIGHT?”

Within a few hundred shrieking yards of the T, the thick wood surrendered to a clearing a football field deep, pinned at the lake end by a creation of wood, glass, and stone seemingly dropped Oz-style by the banks. The horizontal lines, low roof, extended eaves, and the band of windows that lined the front façade marked it as Wright, or, more likely, a skilled Wright imitation. Hamamura and Frank Lloyd seemed a natural fit – Wright’s Prairie School had been inspired by the calming aesthetics of Japanese gardens, and the Tokyo-born exec-turned-renewable fuels innovator had installed stone pathways and carefully allocated faux-Zen vegetative plots.

The home had no external identifiers, for good reason. The open floor plan provided a virtual ground-floor gallery encompassing 3,000 years of beauty and culture from throughout the Pacific Rim. Only widowed Hamamura, Wei, and his children knew just how many millions he’d poured into his collection. Neither heir had publicly contested Hamamua’s University bequest, but Wei guessed plenty of harsh words had passed behind these doors.

“AWESOME!” Kalish exclaimed as he rounded the paved drive toward the front portico. Wei jumped.

“What are you screaming abou—“ Professor Zhao snapped before her lips clamped and she cocked her head. She turned quizzically toward Will. “The bugs, the fucking cicadas.”

Kalish’s eyes narrowed as he glanced out over the lawn, the hedges, the thick walls of trees bordering the lot. A thousand, possibly a million red eyes seemed to peer back. Compound eyes, he reminded himself, two of them, plus three simple ocelli. Hundreds of millions of eyes, then, but the insects themselves were still. Curious? Wary? Poised? Shaking it off, Kalish eased his door open. Wei followed suit.

“It’s quiet,” the entomologist observed.

“Too fucking quiet,” Wei whispered. She moved toward the front of the Prius, wincing with each crackling step as she ground cicada-shaped shells into the pavers. She’d seen the shed exuviae clinging to trees or gates, but hundreds of exoskeletons had accumulated on Hamamura’s drive.

“Most likely answer is a predator threat,” Will drawled. “A flock of birds, praying mantises or other alpha insects ready to attack the swarm. The brood might suddenly go silent if it hoped the threat might go away. But I see no sign of anything like that, really of anything.

“A shift in temperatures might do it, but nothing like that’s happened around here for a week. There’s the possibility the male swarm collectively got some and took a break for a smoke or toke and some Gatorade before powering up for Round Two, but there are about a dozen reasons that’s pretty unlikely.”

 “You think maybe we’re the predatory threat? Would they attack us?”

Kalish shook his head clinically. “They’re harmless to humans -- even if you pissed one off, their mouthparts are made for sucking plant sap, not for ravaging flesh.”

And ten thousand, one million, 10 million cicadas abruptly shrieked, peeling from the grass, the foliage, the earth into a cloud that encompassed Keith Hamamura’s guests. Will and Wei’s own screams were absorbed by the banshee mating cry, and as the swarm dispersed, Will looked to his companion, who was mouthing something, fists clenched at her sides, glossy black hair mussed and tangled.

WHAT? Kalish’s lips shaped.

“RUN LIKE FUCKING HELL!”

**

A thousand more eyes greeted Wei and Will as they stumbled into Hamamura’s expansive foyer/parlor. Soapstone dragons and toads and swine; netsuke birds and snakes and fornicating lovers; icons and figures and a coterie of creatures real and imagined woven into rich tapestries and garments behind glass.

The ghosts of civilizations past held no fear for Wei, and she slumped into one of a pair of Meiji Period Dragon Throne chairs.

“You okay?” Will finally asked, meekly.

Wei regarded him wearily. “Nobody tried to suck the sap outta me, if that’s how you characterize ‘okay.’ The hell was that shit?”

“Anomalous behavior?”

“Clears that up. It’s also weird Mr. Hamamura would’ve just left the front door unlocked, you know, with all this.” She looked off into the dark shadowed corridors to either side of the atrium/gallery. “Mr. Hamamura! MR. HAMAMURA!!!”

**

He was in the master bedroom off the right-hand corridor. That is, the thing on the Tibetan Khaden rug was Hamamura the same way the soapstone and teak in the foyer had become rabbits and hogs and dragons, as the discarded chitinous wrappers on the trees and brick beyond were cicadas.

A shriek shattered through the driving carnal rhythm outside, and Wei recognized it as Will’s. The ostensibly calming azure woolen Khaden was of ‘70s vintage but likely had brought at least $3,000 through a dealer or online. Wei felt her heart slow slightly — this literal woolgathering was her ritual for fending off visceral reality.

If that’s what this was.

“This is Mr. Hamamura,” Wei stated. “How is this Mr. Hamamura?”

“Little outside my expertise,” Will swallowed, blood nonetheless returning to his deceptively cherubic face. “It looks almost like some kind of extreme dehydration, maybe even mummification. You guys just talked to him this morning, right?”

Wei considered. “Yeeeeaah. Of course, we couldn’t see his face too well, but I’m positive it was him.”

She mentally replayed the teleconference. Hamamura’s reticence, backlit shadows obscuring his features. The son lived on Chicago’s Gold Coast, but merely a three-hour jaunt south... The man on the call had been eager to carry through on the bequest --hell, had invited Wei to the house. But if it had been Kevin Hamamura, and his father had lain here dead for several days, the whole donation might be challenged.

“Could--?” Wei began. “Could they have done this?”

“Could who?” Kalish shuddered. “You mean the fucking cicadas? Like suck all the fluids out of the guy? Listen, Wei. Female mosquitoes need a blood meal to produce eggs. The vampire moth – Calyptra pseudobicolor – can feed on mammalian blood, but they live in the Mediterranean, East Africa, and South Asia. Bedbugs, ticks, fleas, assassin bugs, sand flies have been known to suck, but cicadas are just not built for hematophagy. They’re vegans; they don’t even feed on crops. They just essentially want to fuck.”

Wei laughed, her rhythm settling back into baselines.

“I could examine him for bite marks or punctures,” Kalish proposed. “If you want.”

“I don’t think we should mess,” Professor Zhao said, to Will’s visible relief. Then he knelt by the “corpse,” with a frown, and Wei joined him. “What?”

“It’s just,” Associate Professor Kalish mumbled. He looked up. “It kinda reminds me of… Nope, nope, disregard. Oh, fuck.”

Wei followed Will’s wide blue eyes, and scuttled back against the bed as the dark shape shifted under Keith Hamamura’s parchment skin. A second, a third, and a half-dozen other shadowy masses moved and vibrated, and Wei’s heart thumped asynchronously with the new chorus that joined the shrill overture outside.

She grabbed Will’s arm, nearly dislocating it as she tugged him back through the corridor, past the dead eyes of a thousand icons and totems, and out into the swarm… 

**

 “Holmes?” Wei said. “You mean like Sherlock Holmes? The dude on the Lucy Liu show?”

Saanvi smiled tolerantly at the Gen-Xer nestled on the newly-vacuumed couch opposite. “I cite Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Adventure of Silver Blaze, specifically the curious incident of the dog in the night-time. Holmes notes the conundrum of a canine that failed to respond to the violent murder of its master. The dog did nothing, and that in itself provided the solution.”

“Which was?”

“The precedent does not apply here. The relevant concern here is the curious incident of the cicadas in the day-time. Individual swarms generate noise levels of 90 to 100 decibels — roughly equivalent to a running lawnmower or at top drone a motorcycle or a tractor. The combination of 17-year and 13-year cicadas creates an even louder swarm that can damage hearing through long-term exposure.

“Had we not been so focused on acquiring Keith’s collection, we might have noticed yesterday just how accommodating his insect neighbors were. He lives in an old home in a heavily wooded area thick with the cacophonous insect, but during our call, we did not hear an ambient peep. We saw Lake Millington behind him, but not only did the cicadas remain silent during our discussion -- every bird, mammal, and speedboater in the area showed extreme consideration.”

Wei unconsciously hooked a leg over the arm of the couch. “You saying he wasn’t at the lake house? It’s easy enough to use a fake digital background — I use Superman’s Fortress of Solitude when I haven’t had time to pick up the place.”

“And does this application provide you light and warmth? Keith’s face was obscured by the morning sun behind him. Even if we might deduce a rationale for his devising such a deception, how would a digitalized sun cast a halo effect?

“So we return to the essential question: Why could we not hear the cicadas sing? Professor Kalish eliminated predatory or climatological or sexual factors, and you two would agree Keith’s rustic Xanadu could not block out the cicadas’ symphony. So we come back to another Holmesian theorem. ‘When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.’ And as we know, nearly 99.9999999 percent of all truth is hidden behind the veil of our ignorance.”

“Yeaaah, do we actually know that?” Wei drawled.

“So, what factors beyond biology and environment might still the cicada horde? In accommodation of Keith’s needs, no less. Perhaps Keith’s will itself?”

Wei greedily drained her wine. “Mr. Hamamura is a Cicada Whisperer?”

“No, we established that Keith was the master of all creatures. Or of something else. Remember, we assumed Keith’s Zoom transmission froze on several occasions? Perhaps, subconsciously, we were taken in by a lack of any activity onscreen. No rippling waters, no shifting clouds or shadows. I assume you might know something of the cicada’s cultural significance?”

“I’ve seen Chinese stone carvings of cicadas that go back more than 3000 years, so I guess they must’ve been held in some kind of high regard.”

“The Chinese observed how cicadas shed their nymphal exuviae, leaving behind their empty shell, and then ‘transformed’ into their adult winged bodies,” Saanvi related. “To them, this process symbolized rebirth. This was a view held by the Greeks and many other Eastern and Western civilizations. Supposedly, some Chinese adherents carved cicadas out of jade and placed them on a corpse’s tongue before burial.”

Wei folded into a wary fetal wad. Saanvi nodded empathetically.

“The belief was the deceased would emerge from their decaying bodies like a cicada emerging from its old exoskeleton, but in their case achieving some form of permanent immortality. What if Keith found another application for such a totem in a dying person? Perhaps gaining extended life by suspending time within a confined existence? Effectively halting time, or operating outside it? Are you all right, Professor Zhao?”

“You’re fucking creeping me out,” Wei managed. “Do we need to cut you off?”

“From this delightful boxed Chablis? I’m simply outlining the possibilities beyond those we’ve eliminated. But I might note three new developments.

“I’ve inquired with my police friend Curtis about the eventual disposition of a jade carving a paramedic found under Keith’s dresser opposite the bed. I need you to consult your catalogue of his collection tomorrow, if you could.

“The coroner’s office found esophageal damage that may suggest Keith’s cause of death, as well some blood and tissue on his jade tchotchke and several broken ribs that along with a damaged bed board may indicate a clumsy but successful attempt at a self-inflicted Heimlich maneuver. Keith was in the final stages of metastatic cancer, and the excitement and exertion and possibly the loss of such a valuable object may have been too much for him. Or time simply ran out on him.

“Oh, and the pathologist confirms Keith died no more than an hour before or possibly even as you arrived, and he theorizes what initially appeared to be extreme dehydration or decomposition may be some anomalous dermatological condition, some sort of sloughing--” Saanvi paused as a gray Wei practically leapt for the wine box. “Well, the forensic details aren’t all that important, I suppose.”

“All right,” Kalish announced, bearing a trio of fragrant plates. “Who’s ready for scampi? What?”

Wei’s index finger wavered at Will. “I can’t believe you thought this was a great idea after yesterday. You…you missed one.”

Saanvi calmly crossed the carpet and plucked the bloated, red-eyed creature from Wil’s sweatshirt. The cicada buzzed and twitched in her delicate fingers as Kalish nearly dropped a platter of garlic and butter and pasta and Trader Joe’s langostinos...