The Bluest Angel

In the office, Bob is an acknowledged mess, an uncontrolled forager, ravager of malassadas, matcha green tea cream puffs, other people’s leftover curry rice. They can’t get him out in the field fast enough. He knows this. He just can’t help himself. Still, they like him, they call him Uncle, that was something. Have a doughnut, Unka Bob? 

Running a little late, preparing to go out on his daily trap run, rushing again, fumbling with pen, phone, data entry log, what should he do drop but the damn doughnut, of course. It bounced—imagine the chemicals in there, the preservatives, that gave it such tensile memory!—and rolled a few inches out of sight. He hesitated (late, running late) but there were cockroaches and mice in the office, a typical dingy state bureaucrat’s burrow, seventy-five years of human skin, dandruff, crumbs in suspension and floating, coating everything in a not-quite-microscopic film. 

He has to get it. His kuleana.

Sighing, he stooped and then, feeling the arthritis in his back and knees, lowered himself fully down. It was dark as a cave in there. On one knee, he peered under the piles of books, journals, research reports and white plastic bags that he’d hoarded when the state announced it was banning them. So many white bags… 

“Oh, look! Somebody’s been into the doughnuts!” 

“Bob. It has to be Bob. Look at the smears on the counter. Evidence!”

“He totally fingerprinted himself in sugar.”

“Totally Bob.”

“Bob the borer beetle technician.” 

“It’s a sucky job, forreal. But somebody’s got to do it. Better him…” 

“He kind of looks like a beetle, you know? The way dog owners start to look like their dogs?”

He grimaced. Couldn’t hold this position much longer. Couldn’t climb out from under his desk, either, and risk being seen. He hung his head between his arms and let his stomach sag. He’d wait them out.

They moved around the common table, cleaning up after him. “Such a slob, so unprofessional!” He winced. He shouldn’t have been in such a rush. But he’d gone down the rabbit hole studying alerts on new invasives from the state and federal Departments of Agriculture. There were so many new threats coming in from all over. It was fascinating. Appalling, but fascinating—climate change at work. The possible end of the Anthropocene.  

But they weren’t finished.  “He’s just so boring!”

“A borer beetle bug catcher—how could he not be?” 

He tracked the titter of his younger colleagues, a swarm, moving down the hall, humming with vitality.

He stumbled out into the sunlight. Day hot, light redoubled from the magnification of white cement sidewalk and mirrored plate glass—he took it full in the face, swayed, stunned. It was as if the tables were turned and he was a specimen slide under a microscope. 

The truck interior was roasting, the vinyl seat burning through his khakis like a hot iron. But what a relief to be outside. It always felt like flight. 

Out of the office, Bob is a Ranger Rick in full possession of his Swiss Army knife of faculties: bachelor of science, masters of this and that, twelve years flatfooting it as a lab assistant and teaching assistant, one giant step, a breakout move, going to the Big Island, to Indo, Satawal, going buggy, they joked, going for a doctorate. Insects. Insects on the brain. 

Still, it was worth it. Dr. Bob, if you please. 

And then… No jobs. A recession. A freeze on hires. No promotion. A change of priorities. Fifteen stutter-step years. And now he’s too old, they hint, to climb the upward track so could you please pipe down, step aside, give a chance to someone else more qualified (read: younger, less opinionated, who brings malassadas, doesn’t scarf them). 

He shifts the state truck into drive and heads off to make the rounds. Plant and livestock disease control, pest control, invasives control—that’s his kuleana, his responsibility. They put the Hawaiian word on it to make his demotion palatable, of course. Just like they justify destroying the reef with a dredged artificial beach and call it, “for the keiki”—the children. The tourist children, of course. It’s all a matter of perspective. 

His route takes him south and toward the water’s edge. He has a line of traps. Just like Jeremiah Johnson, one of his heroes, the best of the old Rocky Mountain trappers. Only instead of beaver, he traps bugs. 

His job is secure. There’s always another infestation. The coffee borer, the ‘ohia rust, the other plagues visited on Hawai‘i.  

He’s had a report of a coconut palm at a dangerous tilt at Le‘ahi park, at the foot of Diamond Head. Hollowed out into a gray husk over the course of a week, it’s a goner. The crew is scheduled to cut it down. And Bob is hanging up glue traps to capture the culprit. 

They know who it is, of course. The coconut rhinoceros borer beetle showed up from Southeast Asia a couple years ago. Like the coqui frog from Puerto Rico, it’s cute, kind of. If you like shiny beetles with interesting serrated legs and scary mandibles. 

He’s got one in each trap. The traps are big black boxes that hang like lanterns from tree limbs. Not from coconut trees, of course—they don’t have limbs, only fronds. But the surrounding trees.  

In the third trap, in Le‘ahi Park, there’s a third victim, same size, different color. He stops to check it out. This one is not just different—it’s totally different, as in species. And if a coconut rhinoceros borer beetle is kinda cool from an evolutionary standpoint, if ruthless and relentless, like all the invasives, this one is flat-out gorgeous in a weird, sci-fi way. It’s a one-and-a-half-inch Christmas ornament of shimmer, glitter, coruscating mirrored facets. With a drop-dead beautiful coloration scheme. Nature has done herself proud here. Metallic blue-green-orange, just outstanding. Good work, insect god.

It looks dead. He touches it. It wiggles. Moving its thick midsection on the glue trap as he pulls his fingertip back it convulses and he can see the chain of exoskeletal effort pulsing down to the stinger or arm, only one of its type. It’s a stinger, all right. The fucker was going for him. 

Well, he’s got the jump, the upper hand. Evolution is on Bob’s side today. Because Bob has a four-inch pin and with one deft move he impales the beetle to the glue trap. Sorry, buddy.

Ow!!! Jesus!!!

The thing just gave him an electric shock. Strange—weird. Impossible. So, yeah, unrelated. A tweak of his funny bone, that curious nerve. But it sure did hurt.

Back in the office, he goes over the types of invasives, and threatened invasives, lurking on every coast, creek and container ship from Hong Kong to Peru, vectoring subconsciously, fixating on Hawai‘i, always the Islands. What is it about this place. First the pristine archipelago. Then the Polynesian arrivals. And the rats, the pigs, killing off the indigenous birds—and what birds they must’ve been. The second wave of Polynesians from Tahiti arrives, subsuming the first. Who exist now as rumor, glimmers of DNA, a few linguistic fragments and yeah, fine stonework, those walls that preceded the second wave of Island settlement. It’s a universal story. What the Cro-Magnons did to the Neanderthals, the Romans did to the Greeks, the Greeks did to the Dorics, it’s change over time, the long view. A story composed of stories.  

It’s a wash. He can’t identify it. It’s not on anyone’s radar. 

He sighs. Sends a photo over. The internet insect specialists will hive mind on it. Too bad. He’d really wanted the glory of being the one to sound the alarm on a new intruder, this little blue-green-orange boy with the bright red arm like Popeye’s, like a prosthesis, like the Hulk’s.

“Congrats, Bob, they’re going to name a beetle after you!”

He’d imagined the email that might be in his box the next morning. If nobody could ID the beetle. 

No email, but he’s elated anyway. The longer this beetle goes without a name the likelier it will bear his. It’s true chickenskin. With his email time stamp as verification he really could get this one. The crowning achievement of his career. A thumb in the eye of his old tenure committee, a gold star the state’s Ag director won’t soon forget.

Agaporomorphus bob.

It’s not on his schedule, but he makes a detour during his lunch hour back to Le‘ahi Park and Diamond Head. The stubby tufa volcanic cone, iconic sphinx of reddish ochre, tourist magnet upthrust in the most expensive neighborhood on O‘ahu, lording it over Waikīkī, hardly looks fully capable of oneday unleashing devastation and fire on Honolulu. The volcanologists say the odds are slim to none, but he’ll take them. 

Bob likes disruption, the moment of transformation from one status quo to another. Let the urban interface burn; he’ll trust what comes of ashes.

Two more coconut rhinos, no specials.

And no email.  

He’s back a day later. Last night, suddenly, he thought about mutations. Birth defects. One-offs. Yes, that’s what they’ll say—if he can’t find a second bug. And he’ll be just another one-paragraph citation in The Journal of Irreproducible Results. An inside joke.  

He’s got to lay out more traps. 

He lays out more traps. Not strictly in the budget. But in his book he records it as: possible infestation. 

He’s convinced this will be one, an infestation. He’s got a newspaper story in mind now, then a promotion.

Six traps, one coconut rhino. And—he can’t believe it—a fat red arm, like Popeye’s, left behind in the glue. He takes it, despite knowing this won’t be enough to settle the question. They’ll just say the beetle—his beetle—Bob’s beetle—is a fluke. Or worse, symmetrical. Two fat arms. He knows how sexy asymmetry is to the bug lords, the peer reviewers in the journals. They won’t be easy to convince. He needs two one-armed beetles.

Eureka. His second Bob beetle. Caught in the glue in all its scintillating agony, convulsing as his pin approaches, trying to whip its stinger out before his can strike.

He takes a picture, sends it on to the internet, to the state’s overworked librarian of specimens, to the national data bank. Two identical asymmetrical beetles of unknown origin, found on Oahu, August 2 and August 6, 20—

Now it’s time to stake his claim before some weasel professor names it after, who knows, Jay-Z, or Billy Joel, or, yeah, Tyson Fury. He’d actually like to see a big-ass beetle named after Tyson Fury. Someday, not today. 

Today will be known henceforth far and across the land, as Agaporomorphus bob Day.

The beetle has landed.

Following week. Catches a few rhinos. No Bob beetles. The email and his photos and claim are now deep in the bowels of science. It may take a year, two, before action is taken—

Unless. Unless there is an infestation. For real. Bring it on! 

His wish is granted. A half dozen. In six traps. 

He’s studying his hand. Five aces. It’s too rich. Almost. You can’t be too rich. This is serious. An infestation. He wishes it wasn’t. Almost. His beetles. His responsibility. It’s almost as if he willed them into life.

What damage will they wreak on the Islands?

On the other hand: whatever they do, he’s the answer, the savior.

He heads up the hill on Diamond Head Road, imagining himself into the mind of a beetle. The air currents, the trade winds—does it fly?—if not, then who’s the random carrier? Perhaps a homeless guy. They’re endemic on the hill. This is where they live. Up and down, morning and evening, pushing their shopping carts hither and yon, usually a skinny mutt joyriding in the top basket. 

Or maybe it’s a jogging yoga girl in leggings and strappy sports bra, baseball cap and dark glasses, her pink counterfeit Gooch fanny pack from Singapore dripping beetles like jewels in her wake.

There are several gaps in the sea-grape and prickly desert shrubs that line the steep eroded highway cut through the volcano’s multiple layers of sediment and lava and limestone from ancient reefs. The gaps are where the homeless have pushed their way through and made paths up into the underbrush on the flank of the tufa cone. It’s a dry semi-scrub desert forest up there, skinny trees widely spaced but scraggly with thin creepers and vines, bright in the sun, oppressively hot and odorous. The smell of human feces dominates. 

He proceeds cautiously. There are many homeless up here, none too sane. The head count goes as high as one thousand. They clear them out once every three weeks, haul away their garbage and junk. Then they filter back. 

He sees a guy lying on a sleeping bag under an umbrella. He’s muttering silently to himself. His eyes are fixed, mad, bugging out. Best to go another direction. There’s another one over here, one over there, a couple of darkly tanned women in rags eyeing him suspiciously, seeing his uniform, perhaps thinking he’s a cop. On his guard, he thinks of how easy it would be for one of the crazy ones to get the jump on him. 

He feels anxious, doesn’t want to linger, look for bugs. Not today. And he hasn’t seen anything on the ground. Maybe it’s a coconut palm beetle, too. 

A flicker catches his eye up high. There, a shiny whirring object hovers in the sky above him, directly overhead in the sun. Lights blink and silver arms flex and twitch. A drone, he realizes. One of those off-the-shelf quadcopters.

Back in the office, then home: no email. 

Next trip back a couple days later he breaks through a layer of brush to see a good dozen homeless lying around, conked out, asleep at midday. No one stirs. They look like bundles of clothing arranged to look real, like dummies in prison cell cots by escaping inmates. Around them there are lots of shiny blue-green-orange beetles, moving, crawling on the ground. 

Damn. It’s here. An infestation!

Up in the trees bright shiny baubles, multiple necklaces of blue-green-orange, buzz away, in flight, flowing east, west, north. They can fly?

They can fly. 

A searing pain. Down, on his ankle. But he’s wearing socks! The telltale blue-green-orange shellac of the beetle glitters in the dappled sun filtered through scrub trees. The fucker stung him. He feels a burning creep up his calf even as he swings the clipboard sharply down and swats it off. A thin twig of red, the stinger, stays behind. It’s asymmetrical, this beetle. Like the giant claw of the Pacific land crab that has evolved into a club for sexual display; only this one packs a punch.

The pain fades. Good. He’s seen all he needs to see, he’s seriously spooked by the bodies lying around as they’re nothing more than bundles of clothing, piles heaped beside their other piles, of rags, soiled bedding, and blue tarps. Someone is flopped out every ten feet or so. This isn’t natural, everyone sleeping. A couple of people, sure, it’s the heat of the day, 2 p.m., thick and muggy. But everyone? Out cold? It feels wrong. 

Of course something is wrong. He decides he’ll inspect the closest bundle, call 911, and withdraw. He approaches cautiously. It’s a man, lying on his back, a typical burnt-out case; in his forties, face gaunt and filthy, he sports a reddish stubble beard and a poorly shaved head. His mouth is open, chapped lips parted; his eyes are turned upward to the sky as if searching for something. 

Whatever, it’s too late. He’s dead. Bob swings his head around to check out the next bundle before changing his mind and turning back to the first. He has to really force himself to focus, do the science, observe the deets. The man’s skin is papery, his cheeks hollow. Hollower. His body is too thin, already caving in like … like a scarecrow, no flesh on him. Like a dry corn husk. His face reminds Bob of the ocean desert mummies of Chile; like them, who’d just sat down and died millennia before, the facial expression remained fresh, drained of color but precisely delineated as a black and white photographic negative.  

And he’s smiling. It is a happy expression, or, at least, not an unhappy one. Certainly not an expression of agony.

How long has he been lying here is the next question. But something tells Bob not to get too close. His training having kicked in, up until now observation had come before analysis. But what the hell is this? Some new virus? The bubonic plague? To judge from the bodies lying about, in no particular grouping, but near each other, this disaster, this tragedy… 

Ah, but is it? A tragedy? Or is it simply the inevitable. The past year has seen tremendous disruption. The numbers of the homeless swelling since the evictions began, the clearances, pushing into neighborhoods, sometimes the very neighborhoods where they’d once rented. Here in Diamond Head, the most expensive real estate in the entire state, an itinerant population of sixty to one hundred had reached one thousand, at times more. The pushback and cleanups and sweeps were barely holding back the tide; the swarming petty thievery and nonstop mental crisis mode had soured everyone. Maybe having a mass die-off was a natural reaction, a thing like the toxic algae blooms in the Gulf of Mexico. 

The point was this: who even cared? It was coming to that. These deaths wouldn’t sting the public conscience for the same reason they didn’t his. Hadn’t there been a similar die-off in Waianae a few weeks ago, a batch of bad drugs blamed? 

One new thought makes up his mind for him and now it’s time to go. Because he has a gut feeling this is a mass suicide, a la Jonestown. The homeless making a last protest.

No. No, these folks were all crazy and on drugs. The opposite of organized, except to get high. That made it another mass overdose. Someone had scored some cheap stuff and it was contaminated by fentanyl.  

Five, seven, nine, ten, eleven bundles are in sight. More, he’s sure, are up the hill. This is a disaster and he’s in the middle of it. He reaches into his pocket for his phone, fumbles it as he enters the code to unlock it. He starts a video, turning in a 360-degree circle. Then he takes a still of the homeless man’s shrunken face. 

He stops. Is it his imagination? Or has it shrunk even more?

He glances around at the other bodies. They’ve shrunk, too, he’s sure of it. He bents over a half-naked man whose hairy grimy torso seems to have sunk into itself. His skin is ashy gray, looks crumbly. His bare legs look fibrous, like old cellulose insulation. 

They look the way the coconut palm trunks did 

Except those took a week, two. Not before his eyes. Instant mummification.

He peers into the forest around him, looking for any movement. Punching 911. He sees a flicker off to one side—in a brushy ravine off another illegal path the homeless use to access the hill from Diamond Head Road. He starts for it, punching 911 into his phone, already knowing the response: Out of Network. This whole side of Diamond Head, from Le‘ahi Park to Fort Ruger Park, is in permanent cell tower eclipse thanks to the overhanging volcano. He has to head down the road, a one-minute drive down the four hundred yards to the Kahala side. He’ll roll the calls as he goes. 

But first, the figure moving in the brush. 

It’s a man, hunched over, as if retching. That’s what they do when overdosing. Maybe he can get the paramedics in time, Jesus, what’s he got, nine DOA? When has this ever happened except… well, during the past couple of years. The pandemic. So, logically, thinking like a science fiction movie, which is in his opinion no more than an extrapolation of the scientific method by other means—where’s he going with this—he’s feeling fuzzy—could be the bite—the heat—or, shades of Contagion or Outbreak or World War Z, a mutation, that’s right, could this be a fucking mutation? The next variation? The one that makes Delta Variation look like the common cold? Forget the beetle. Airborne COVID would be far worse.

His foot is dragging. His head, swimming. That fucker’s sting packed a wallop. He has a fatalistic premonition as he looks down at the foot that he’s now having to tug along, like a stubborn dog on a leash—a leash of muscle and bone and ligaments—because his foot is… 

He squints at the shifting rectangle of light. It’s where the bushes at the bottom of the steep rutted path frame a black patch of Diamond Head Road asphalt. Already he knows it will be a near thing, making it that far. His knee feels like a dried-up old coconut. One-hopping won’t cut it much longer, not when it reaches his hip. There is, he realizes, a self-cauterizing agent, self-annealing, in the toxin, and it has something that clots as the venom works its way up. Clots, and below the line, leaves a hollow husk. Amazing. 

He’s clutching at thin scratchy branches, willing himself to lurch through that door of light onto the road, waving his phone, calling for help, when he sees the bent figure straighten up. It’s a man, about six foot. Naked. Smooth-skinned, so not homeless. He must be one of those compulsive exercisers who walk around and around Diamond Head sweating copiously and turning golden and orange and then redder and… A bit kinky, they all are, the 90% naked walkers and runners… but he can help Bob get to the road. 

Only as the man comes his way through the leafy branches Bob sees that he’s not tan, not golden. This one? His legs are black. Tattooed or dyed black. His torso is molting, papery strips peeling off. Must’ve had a bad sunburn. 

The man pauses to look at him, a hint of blue, of green, of orange, coming through the chrysalis of dry flaking skin. He looks at him and his eyes twitch and bug out and, just then, Bob feels an electric shock, the funny-bone nerve twang, throughout his whole body. Just from a look.  

Blue crystals… why is he thinking blue crystals… No, he’s seeing them, inside his skull, his brain, like the strange shapes on the inside of your retina when you close your eyes… Prions, he guesses. Structures of evolutionary response, hard-wired, like exoskeletons. But why is he seeing them—and where?

The man steps forward, his lurching movements stretching his desiccated skin to the limit. Bob waits for the first tear in the cloak of parchment epidermis. When it comes it isn’t where he expected it.

Not out of the man’s back. 

But that’s where they break out, bursting after a sharp twist of the torso: twin fins of metallic blue. As peels of skin float away he sees that they are tight coils, curled up tight as fiddlehead ferns, only now, as the man flexes, they begin to slowly expand, loosen, unfurl. He keeps stretching them with peristaltic contractions of his body. The coils’ fern-like tips extend themselves shakily like the legs of a newborn fawn. They tremble. And then, gloriously, open.

Into wings. Wait—

He can fly? 

The faceless man rises, humming, off the dryland forest floor of the volcano. He—it?—looks at him—with counter-rotating eyes on blue stalks, no less—as it hovers a foot or two off the ground, testing the air—testing him?—before rising up and skimming away across the treetops, vanishing. 

Bob the scientist gets it: a larval stage that is followed by a hunt for a host who is then a chrysalis which cracks open eventually to yield the imago. Of course. The winged nymph then goes forth. To do its business, whatever that might be. Mate, propagate, colonize. Maybe even do science. 

Through the crystals in his brain Bob the host starts to see a hexagonal universe, tinted blue. But he has time. A nanosecond. Still time enough to appreciate that this species is going to be named after him, this Bob who’s still smiling as that smile turns to spongy desiccated deadwood and his soul is husked, harvested by what he’ll never know. Past caring, dying in hope because the stinger’s last portion in its cocktail of chemicals included oxytocin, the love hormone, he whispers: 

I can fly?

Because the sky is now full of the bluest angels.

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Images by Linda Söndergaard, Stephen Hocking, and James Wainscoat.