I thought he’d notice the sound of my car pulling up, greet me of his own volition, but it looks as if I’ll have to get out and take the initiative. No trouble.
I strut like a dejected cat, the sun hangs low over the peaks and the evening chill is setting in, but the splintered shadow of Verwus’ shack can be made out all the same, and my shoes scrape against the cracked concrete slab that at one point in time, long ago, must have been a driveway. It’s dead silent, and for a moment I consider that last night may have been a dream brought on by the sedative, that this is a dead realm and I have no business here.
It must’ve been a dream, I realize as I mount the porch. This is an abandoned property. My shoe gives way and falls through, emitting a little cloud of dust. Both feet are aching as it is, I haven’t changed them since the lake and I’ve been cruising for a good long while, just to dry out as best as I can. I consider turning around and running, running away from all this, getting back in the car and driving at maximum speed back towards home where Sheila will be off her shift in three hours and she’ll come in and I’ll hold her, hold her tighter than ever before-
“Eddie!” I call out. “You there?” I cock my head to get a better look at the interior- just like yesterday, furniture exactly where I remember it, but no lights on inside. Long shadows cast in from the window, moth-eaten curtain rippling slightly through the layers of dust, gray ghost with a bright pastel color scheme. One solitaire tap.
“Oh, you,” comes a murmur from somewhere past the antechamber. “Wasn’t expecting you back so soon. C’mon in.” He sounds amicable enough, and against my better judgment I pry open the entrance, stick my head in, get a whiff of the rot and decay.
I step over an empty pizza box bearing some arcane Puebloan phone number with the iconic 719 prefix, which I had to memorize- emblazoned over this, in bright red cursive font, a cheery slogan. One more step and there’s a 1960s model rotary phone lying out, for whatever reason the front has been screwed off and I can see the bells and wiring inside. The sticker on the side reminds the user that the appliance is not personal property, but rather the exclusive property of the Bell Telephone Company.
Past that is a lone chair, absent of any occupant, one of the chairs we were sitting on- the chair I switched bodies in. So odd to look at it now, absent of the effects of the purported charcoal-smelling drug, absent of detail, blocky and abstract, no definite proportions or absolutes, a prismatic blur. I lack clarity now that I’m sober. Nothing is certain.
The record player still has the vinyl on it. I pick it up, blow it off. Looks as if it’s been lying there for weeks gathering dust, a thick cloud erupts from its grooved and warped surface, and through the dismal haze I make out the label. Yes- it’s the same record, Village Green, but no longer spewing visible patterns of neon color with fuchsia polka dots swimming around inside-
“What’re you doing, man?” I spin around and Eddie is there, brim of his cap pulled over his eyes, absent the trenchcoat- just his green long-sleeve and infectious grin. Leaning against the doorway towards some room I didn’t take the time to notice earlier, some adjunct. Yes, of course- there are other rooms in this house- other modes of being-
“Just checking out the vinyl,” I say. “I’ll put it away now.” Eddie walks over to a shelf behind the couch, pulls out a crate with a few other records in it. Can’t make the titles of any of them out- it’s dark in here. Or maybe everything is slowly fading, rather, becoming distant and obtuse- Eddie knows what he’s doing. He takes my arm and we stride forward as one.
“You notice the driveway?” he chirps. “Lot smoother now. I cleared it out for ya last night after ya left, went out there with a shovel and packed it down so ‘s more like a road now.”
“Yes, I guess that made a difference. Thank you.”
“No problem,” he ushers me forward towards the other room. “In here. I wanta show you something. Only take a minute.”
“Where’s Nadene?”
“Out getting groceries. She’ll be back in a couple hours if ya wanna hang.”
I’m blinded by the light of the refrigerator as Eddie opens it up, a dazzling frosted cave in this humid cesspit, and contrary to what I’d imagine nothing in there is rotten. Then again, there are barely any refrigerated goods to speak of. One can of soda, water droplets condensing on its aluminum hull, one sandwich in saran wrap, half a jug of milk, and butter.
“You want anything, man?” he pulls out the sandwich, unwraps it, takes a considerable bite, his jaw working furiously beneath his pencil mustache.
“No thanks,” I respond. “You- you have refrigeration way out here?”
“Oh, yeah,” he laughs. “Generator takes care of alla that, it can power a lamp, this fridge, anything. Real secret is not to overstock it, ‘cause the less there is in a fridge the colder it’s able to keep the food. Gotta keep how many watts are going in and that. Not an electrician, though.”
“How do you afford food?”
“That’s what I wanted to show you,” he pauses, sets the sandwich down, grabs my arm yet again and guides me away from the kitchen, away from the last solitary window high up on the wall, away from the meager two-burner gas oven, and into some neighboring hallway. I feel strangely familiar in this hallway. There was another hallway like this a while ago. Dark, and extending out into the cold.
Away at the end, as we proceed, a faint green light comes into focus. Emerald, like a beckoning jewel, the shade of pestilence wavers from the recesses. Eddie seems happy enough, and I wonder what he’d do to me if I tried to leave, so I keep my mouth shut and put one foot in front of the other. My nerves are telling me I shouldn’t, that whatever is lit by that unnatural hue isn’t worth investigating, that my heart will give out if I venture too far into the wrong places.
“Here we go,” Eddie pulls a cord and a naked bulb flickers on a foot overhead.
There’s a peculiar sense of life in this new room, though I can’t see them I can hear legs crossing legs, antennae retracting, mandibles gnawing. Shelves bathed in the celadon ambiance, reaching back around twelve feet towards an impenetrable concrete wall. There’s no insulation here, the desert frost seeps in through a crack in the ceiling.
Eddie swirls in front of me, rubbing his hands together, eyes darting back and forth in brazen anticipation of what’s to come, and I stand with my arms on either side, frozen like a statue, tongue extremely dry. I need water, but can’t bring myself to interrupt the moment.
He mutters something under his breath, swishes one leg in front of the other, crosses to an old oak drawer and with considerable effort tugs the handle. I join him in the insufficient light, he licks his lips and points down at rows and rows of plastic tupperware containers, each with five evenly spaced holes poked into the lids. From within emerge the sounds- ever more pronounced now, a sea of rasps and chittering.
“Check this out,” he lifts one up, holds it aloft. “Leptinotarsa decemlineata. Common parlance, the Colorado potato beetle. Local legend. Say hi.” He pries the lid off, revealing a foul odor- around a dozen little crawling things stare out at me with their beady pupils, fat and resplendent.
They’re performing a lurid waltz on top of decaying potato leaves, some of which are starting to mold, and below that, a thick layer of fecal matter. Two of them are mating in the corner, undisturbed by the remainder of the population. He lifts one resident out and smiles, the harsh overhead fixtures glinting violently off his lenses.
“Love that stuff,” he muses. “These are the bane of the world beyond. You can’t put ‘em near potatoes if you don’t want ‘em to go to town. They’ve evolved to be effectively pesticide resistant. I see something in them, rest of the world denies their validity, tells ‘em they can’t enjoy the harvest, but they keep on all the same. All the same.”
The specimen crawls around on his palm, abruptly darts for the rim of Eddie’s sleeve. With lightning reflexes, he grasps it by its hind legs, holds it over my outstretched hand. It wriggles.
“I don’t know if I should-”
“Aw, c’mon,” he says. “Can’t hurt ya any. Make another friend.”
It plummets a few inches and then I can feel its legs on my flesh, probing around the whorls of my fingertips, walking across the dip as if it were some mighty historical landmark, taking the time and care to chart exact topography with its outstretched exoskeleton. I tremble, one bead of sweat cascades down my brow. I’m not used to insects. Not that they ever particularly cross my mind, but I rarely see them this close.
“Back in the tub for you, Pal,” Eddie chuckles, retrieving the traveler. “There we go. Let me show you around.” He closes the container with an audible snap and tosses it deftly back into the drawer, wanders further into the chamber.
I look to my right- there’s a piece of foam core with over 100 specimens tacked to it, motionless, all of their legs suspended with shellac, their divided wings glistening in the stagnant miasma, a crystalline pin driven through their midsection, fastening them eternally among their neighbors. He seems to be indifferent to this macabre spectacle, as if pinning living creatures to a display were rudimentary human behavior. Underneath each beetle is a hastily scrawled note in permanent marker, Eddie’s handwriting is frenetic and jumbled.
“Don’t worry about them,” he reassures me. “Those were the troublemakers, tried to infest the place. Not near as interesting as what you can do with ‘em while they’re alive. Check these out.” He rummages around on a shelf, swings his arm around wildly until his grasp settles on a glass jar with an old-fashioned vacuum seal, rendered useless by the air holes.
I lift my nostrils to it. Putrid stench. Back away several feet.
“You don’t want to meet these ones,” he hesitates and replaces the jar. “Ornery temperament. Never mind.”
“How do you-?” I gesture towards the racks of containers. “Where does all this-”
“I’m an exterminator,” he reassures me. “Collect them, nobody knows about my little collection here, of course. I scoop the survivors up from infested houses, start new populations in this room, control the breeding, keep ‘em from running into each other.”
“That’s your job? You’re an exterminator?”
“‘Course,” he goes on. “How do ya think we afford food? Getting water, electricity- those’re easy. Food is difficult, Jer. Soil around here- well, we tried it, some time. Nadene tried building up a decent garden, kept a few trout, she’d water her tomato plants as best she could with our irrigation and they’d always turned out dead, consulted agricultural experts who came out from Rocky Ford, they say the pH balance of the soil is impossible to fix. So I said- when was it, 2018 or thereabout- I say, ‘I made a promise when we got here, that we’d be starting over and I’d take care of you. And that’s what I aim.’ So that’s what happened. I took this up, been doing it ever since.” He places his hands firmly astride his hips, taking solace in his life’s work.
“What got you interested in this?”
“The bugs?” He shrugs. “Dunno. Never paid much attention in school. Never cared about insects before I was a teenager. One day, I look down at the dirt, consider how small that world is to me, how I have power over it. Power, y’see.”
“Uh-huh.”
“These things, they hide in the in-between places, in the burrows and dens, they lay ova and pupate and people pay a decent amount to have ‘em removed. I walk everywhere, carry the canister of pesticide on my back, door to door, ask if they have problems, most of ‘em do, termites or lice or otherwise- I go in, spray a few pumps of death, get paid hundreds per house.”
“But those ones- the potato beetles- they can’t be killed, you said.”
“Not by conventional means, no,” he explains. “And so the ones that don’t, they find a new home here with me. Like I said, I admire their survival instinct, their mockery of the higher powers. Beautiful shit.”
I attune my ears, position my auricles just right-yes, they’re here- hundreds of thousands in the swarm, clacking, simmering like a boiling kettle steeping on a mammoth flame, desperately wanting to escape from the dark corners of this primordial sanctum-
“I don’t understand you,” I admit. “The more I see of you, the less I get.”
“Ain’t it the truth?”
“Look, Eddie,” I redirect, “I’m not here to hear about what it is you do in your spare time. I need advice, and I believe you’re in a general position to offer me advice. As a friend.” He appears legitimately miffed by this turn of events, the fun cut short by practical necessity. But then, he always appears vaguely annoyed.
“Do you ever feel trapped?”
“Alla time,” he says. “Like you wouldn’t believe. Trapped by this place, circumstance, her. The fix is not to worry about it, to accept the trap. To enjoy it, in a kinda perverse way.”
“No, I mean-” I hesitate, unsure of how to propose such a thing to him. “You’ve done a lot, invested time and energy into something, and you have to see it through to the end, even if you know the end will be horrible. Because you’ve come so far, and the curiosity gnaws at you, keeps you awake-”
“I’d follow the cheese,” he grins. “See where it leads. Can’t be any worse than where you are right now.”
“What if it is?”
“Embrace the dead ends of life, Jerry. There are only so many. Not nearly enough in life, I think. Because it’s one thing to live with regret, but to well and truly impact with a brick wall, an impenetrable obstacle- that’s magic, man. Plain and simple. Collision...” he guides his fists toward each other and then scatters his fingers in a stardust pattern.
“Yeah, well, thanks,” I murmur, turning towards the exit. “Have to go now. Get back before I’m missed. I’ll show up again here sometime, listen for my engine.”
“What do you think they want?”
“Who?” I spin around to see Eddie Verwus, burnout, strung-out junkie on the precipice of death, battle scars across the meteor-pocked canvas of flesh that comprises his thin frame, last remnant of a forgotten culture, heir to the 21st-century dynasty of mold. He’s bathed in a swarthy green of his own design and his lenses reflect little pearl orbs as the wiry trails of sweat trickle down his forehead.
“The beetles,” he trembles and I do the same in turn, an autonomic reflex. “Like, what do they talk about, plan? In those little boxes?”
“They eat and they die.”
“Yeah,” he exhales. ‘Yeah. That sounds about right.”
My index finger hovers over the final button, the last barrier to entry. It’s shaking, minute little tension making its descent onto the lit screen of my cellphone inordinately difficult. I think back down all the paths which have led me here- to the contingencies, the warning signs and the hope, and I realize that it was always going to turn out like this. It dawns on me that I have no will of my own. I’m fading into my own mind, screaming at myself, but the screams are dampened, and the icon vibrates-
“Hello?” his voice is dry, anechoic.
“Hi, Vern,” I recite, as if from memory. “I’ve thought it over. I’m prepared to take the assignment as you’ve outlined it.”
A moment of silence. He’s considering what this means for him going forward.
“Ah, Jerry,” in a warm and optimistic drawl. “I knew you’d come around. That’s the spirit. You report in Monday. Instructions will be up front.”