Tribute

I was the only one in attendance at the funeral for my dung beetle, Greg. I was saddened, as most are, at the passing of a dear pet. He was, of course, too big to flush in the toilet as if he were some common goldfish. One could not simply squash bugs of these sizes anymore, given the times in which we live, much less just toss them in the trash. Greg, having been such a powerful and enjoyable part of my last several months, I was compelled to give him a proper burial in the back lot of our bubbledome, where I dug a plot for him in the compost. There he would return to the earth and nurture our garden here at our house, in our bubble. Solemnly, quietly, and in our backyard inside the dome, I disposed of him while thinking of the fond times Greg brought me as a dear and dedicated pet — obedient, jovial, unaware of my own human oppressions from the outside world.

I wore my beige tracksuit, my all purpose gear for chores around the house, brisk walks and relaxed evenings around the house. Although a touch tearful, I chuckled a bit as I shoveled some of the decomposed vegetables from previous meals over the abdomen and thorax. This was was ironically similar to the many times I’d buried a few neighborhood cats that Greg had brought to my doorstep from out on the street when pets were let out of their owner’s bubbles as well. As cats take mice or small birds to their owner’s doorsteps, Greg had done the same with some of these smaller cats on our street. Those times though, I would, with a guilty delight, take those other pets killed by my oversized beetle and put them quietly into this same backyard compost pile. More often, my guilt would strike me powerfully when the inevitable notices via the online neighborhood messageboards would notify our community of a “missing kitty”:

“Tabby has been missing since Thursday, please contact if seen.”

“Violet was loose from our bubble, if found bring to…”

One couldn’t help feel guilty knowing, at some point shortly prior to that message, I had quietly bagged and buried Tabby or Violet, or any other smaller cats that Greg might have returned to the doorstep inside our bubble. Still, Greg didn’t do this with malice aforethought. This was just the natural inclination of a large six foot long beetle and it’s wild instincts on the neighborhood streets and gaps between our bubbledomes. I had been accused directly by several neighbors in their online posts of quietly burying their animals while I knew full well Greg had killed them:

“Mr. Loman, Sir, I found my so-and-so’s collar right outside your bubble. That’s what prompted me to ask you personally if you had seen my so-and-so.”

To this I would reply to the post in the negative. Other times, it might be even more obvious:

“Mr. Sam Loman, the last known GPS coordinates of my cat are actually in your bubble. In fact, the look to be in the back of your bubble. Please respond immediately as to whether this information is accurate.”

This only happened once. That is when I learned to remove the tracking chips from just under the skin under the animals’ necks and disable them with swift strikes of a hammer or the rock I would use to play fetch in the backyard with Greg. The process is less gross than it sounds, but it was a hassle. I laughed further, thinking how Greg had made me learn this new skill, along with how to blatantly lie to my neighbors as to the whereabouts of their disappeared pets. I considered the burying of all these animals mere shenanigans, which brought me a certain macabre joy. Like most activities with Greg, things like this took me away from the boredom and frustration of my domesticated life in my bubble with my family. Watching Greg awkwardly hang from the trees in the back or use his tibia and tibial teeth to eat through some of our family dinner leftovers gave me great pleasure. As I noted, just the simple act of him living out his life, unaware of the discomforts and pressures I dealt with daily as a human, were a valuable escape for me.

My family thought me crazy for being in love with Greg. He was an outdoor beetle who I domesticated but had to let out in the evenings and morning so as to excrete in the fashion that dung beetles do. I had little worry having read how to domesticate him, and successfully trained him from a pupae, to come back to the house, leaving water and food out for him just inside the entryway of our bubble so that he would know that this was his home.

My family, disturbed by my funerary process, still watched from inside our large house, the reward from my years of hard work as a salesman, climbing the ranks from mere assistant to top sales executive. I had been able to provide a comfortable life for my wife and daughter, who was named Greta after my great, great grandmother from Prague. Her namesake, the grandmother Greta, had outlived many other relatives, living long enough to raise me in my early childhood before passing away at the ripe old age one hundred and eighty-seven.

Now in the 25th century, lifespans had extended well into the second century and so the opportunity to have my grandmother two generations removed care for me as a child wasn’t normal, but neither was it particularly strange. With the change in climates and the tropical span of weather having consumed all of the State of Texas, large beetles were very common. They were like many other changes the landscape had seen over the centuries of climate change in America. Beetles this size were no more uncommon than the year-long hurricane season, or damp, 140 degree Fahrenheit temperatures. The encroaching oceans from the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific Ocean, which had humidified the Sonoran desert, had vastly expanded the tropics and fully changed the ecology of the area. Where we lived was still inhabited though, but this is why we now had bubbles in which we lived. Things were very different than life some centuries before, when the land was arid and the temperature would never get up over 150 degrees. This was how, over time, the land evolved and without these changes I would never have been able to scientifically have Greg as my pet beetle. Larger insects would never have manifested.

Human life and civilizations hadn’t changed that much. I had still thought my daughter was innocent and perfect even though she was almost seventeen. My wife and I had grown together and apart as people do when they have a family and grow up and old together, the two of us fusing responsibilities and diversions, putting wants and needs together for the sake of their comfort and their children’s. Of course, you don’t always see eye to eye on everything, and this was how it was with Greg, my wife, and me. My wife wanted no part of my raising and caring for what was to become a domesticated six foot beetle, even if it was just for a few months. She found it unpleasant to the eye and a very uncommon housepet, even though I was not alone in domesticating a dung beetle. “Sam, dear, why not a cat?” or, “If you want something big, get a mastiff,” she would protest as Greg grew in size; getting blacker, stronger and even less appealing to her. I tried to explain that a person understands why they want to care for a beetle no more than why they want an aquarium for a fish or a terrarium for a lizard. As humans ourselves, we had now caged ourselves in our little domestic bubbles to protect ourselves from the raging environmental changes from the previous 300 years, and, as such, it only made sense to me that I would want a beetle as a pet, just like the ones we would see outside in the Texas jungles when camping, or even in the zoo if it had a wild beetle exhibit.

Greta was born when I was fresh out of college. My dear wife and I had fallen madly in love at Southern Methodist University. Being from religious families, although we were not particularly religious, my wife and I were promptly married as soon as I found out we had a little one on the way. Although a young man in my twenties, I set straight about looking for work. As with almost all young couples, we had very little, knew little about the world, and needed all that we could get if we were to feed another mouth.

As it turns out, I was quite good at convincing customers that my company’s products were of wide ranging use and value. So, in our conglomerate business I was able to make quite a good and stable living moving our products to this company or that. There was a point when I was proud of the signature line on my emails: “William Samsa Loman, Executive Director of Sales, U.S.” That was some years ago, before I had tired of the usual day-to-day work and spreadsheets. Now everyone called me by the name I’d grown up with: Sam. Samsa was the name of my aforementioned Grandmother Greta’s son, and she had given me his name; determined that I would be called by his nickname as well, Sam. Coming from a well-to-do upper-middle class household, my dear daughter Greta had turned into a materialistic teenager, the likes of which made me crazy, as it does many fathers of young, materialistic daughters. I believe I have only myself to blame.

This must certainly be why Greg was such a fascination to me over the last few months. He always seemed pleased that I would bring him dinner, never expecting it, always with a look of gratitude for me having brought his dinner. When I would be gone all day in meeting or in transporting some distance to sites, either at the company office or the offices of clients, Greg would twitch his horn and thorax wildly when I would come home, his eyes swirling about in delight to see me come into the backyard. My family certainly did not do that anymore. My wife, with her obligations in the community, and Greta, with her expectations of me as her father, would not celebrate my arrival the way they did when we were newlyweds or she was a child, respectively. Now though, I could see again the simple joy and contentment in Greg when I would come home, and this would bring me a happiness I no longer experienced as a hard working father grinding out workdays to provide for his family.

As I stared at the burial plot in the compost where Greg would now decompose as he began his eternal rest, I thought back to a significant conversation with my boss from a few weeks ago:

“Sam, I think we need to take it to the next level.”

“The next level, Boss?”

“Always calling me Boss. I love it. Anyway, Sam, as you know, we’ve had really disappointing sales of late.” Somehow calling him Boss always seemed to work between us. I didn’t much think of him like a friend, so it felt odd to call him by his first name. And I didn’t much like having to call him Mr. “Whatever”, so I always just called him Boss. Like he said, he loved it. “We’re not gonna let go of Rob, despite the slumping sales in his department… But we are gonna promote you to Vice President of Global Sales. That means that, for the time being, you’ll both be VPs. You’ll still report to me since I’m CEO. So that won’t change much. But we really need to elevate some of our sales numbers, and the board has always loved your work. You just never seem to let us down.”

‘Let us down,’ the phrase landed on me harshly. The last many years I always felt like I was letting myself down. I wasn’t happy at work. I wasn’t doing many of the things I liked, so even this promotion frustrated me. “Alright, I can do that,” I responded in a monotone and placid manner.

“Well, I thought you’d be a little more excited, Sam.”

“Oh I am, Boss,” I tried to elevate my enthusiasm some, but although the boss may have been convinced, I knew the truth betrayed whatever I was trying to convey.

“Well, that’s a little better Sam. Here, have a drink with me to celebrate, and then take the rest of the day off. Tomorrow we need you and Rob to come in and meet with me and Operations, and we’re gonna do some real brainstorming.” He finished his sentence as he went over to fill two glasses with his usual ‘celebratory’ Scotch. This was the really good stuff, aged for decades, which he only pulled out for strong quarter-ends or for promotions — not that it mattered much to his bottom line; he always billed it to the company anyway.

I took the glass and quietly offered, “Cheers, Boss.”

“Cheers, Sam!” He took his arm and put it around me, “Sam, my boy, we’re giving you a 20% raise, and of course the bonus structure can only change in your favor. But that’s what I love about you. You didn’t even ask about that…. You’re just gonna keep working as if it’s all you ever should be doing.”

‘All you ever should be doing.’ Yet another phrase that singed the back of my mind. This just seemed all so melancholy to me. A chance to make more money? A chance to work even harder? And for what? That question gnawed at me as I transported the long distance all the way back home. I rarely went into the office for face-to-face meetings unless it was important. And of course this was important. Regardless, the office was long way away so my commute home was also long. The sadness of the ‘good’ news pulled at my heart and hope as I retreated back to my bubbledome.

I got home and went straight to the backyard of the bubble. There was Greg, hanging from the top of a tree. When he saw me, he flapped his elytron ever so slightly, came up, and then pawed at me with his front tibia. He stood excitedly on his hind tibia, his antenna wiggling back and forth with excitement. I took his rock that we would sometimes play fetch with, and I threw it further into the backyard. Greg scurried after it. Then he brought it back to me again. Something about this meaningless, repetitive behavior with Greg brought me so much calm; much more joy than work. I slumped into the chair on the small deck. I looked up out of the bubble. The fake sunlight was strong because I could see the harsh rain outside the bubble. I had watched it all the way home. When this happened our artificial light and Vitamin D provider would increase the light in the backyard.

Since my return from work I still felt bothered that I was here, trapped in this bubble, stuck with a family for whom I needed to provide. Yet, I still had nowhere to go. The sunlight was fake. The rain outside was daunting. Other large, wild birds and bugs flew around in the humid and powerfully hot environment. For better and worse, this bubble protected us from all those elements. We had such a large living space and such a great place in which to move freely about here on the outskirts of Fort Worth, Texas. The bubbles and other buildings in cities, especially now in downtown Dallas, or any major city for that matter, were so cramped and tight from people who had much less good fortune. That meant little to me at this particular moment though.

As I played with Greg, I watched the massive Texas palm fronds that slashed in the whipping wind at the sides of the bubble. Their lush and powerful movements made streaks against the side of the translucent siding. The tropical storm, this one the very tail end of a hurricane from the gulf, pushed those large plants back and forth. I could see a beetle much like Greg, but wild, land on the ground outside and start to eat one of the fronds. Greg ignored his rock and went to the side wall of the bubble to try and play with the other beetle. This activity was, of course, elusive to Greg. He was, like me, trapped inside, unable to enjoy the freedoms of life outside the bubble except for the couple times a day I would let him roam free in the neighborhood. I’m sure he would have liked to spend more time in the same fashion as this relative of his, eating at the frond that splashed against the side of my domicile. Even when he did get it out, it was a frustrating encounter. Elytron clipped so he could not fly away, hunting down smaller, more helpless cats or dogs and bringing them back to my bubble’s door in the morning at which point we both had to act like this was as good as it could be. Him killing other’s pets and me lying about it to my neighbors, using his fetch-rock to break their tracking chips.

As I sat there after work, I had no idea what to do except to accept my promotion and my responsibilities, because this was the life to which I had become accustomed. But still, it seemed empty. I called Greg over from the side of the bubble’s wall, “Where’s the rock, Greg? Where is it?” I continued to indulge in this one joy I had: tossing a rock towards my compost pile in my backyard so my pet beetle would fetch it. I threw it and he quickly lurched away after it. I could hear him rustling through some of the bushes we kept towards the back until he found it.

Thinking about work, I reminded myself that beetles don’t live long themselves, just a few months, in fact. At that moment I took specific note that I had had Greg for over three months already, so I knew that he wasn’t going to be with me much longer. Humans don’t have the same privilege. A person could live over 200 years, of course. Here I was, promoted in my late forties. I had a few more promotions to go in terms of climbing the company ladder, but then what? I could work for this company or that company for another one hundred years… maybe another one hundred and twenty-five? I felt depressed at the thought. It was at that moment I remember hearing my wife call me, “Sam!? I’ve got dinner ready. Greta and I just sat down. Leave that stupid beetle alone and come inside for dinner. And wash up. I know you say he’s safe, but I’ll never get used to one of those things living inside our bubble. Ugh. Anyway, hurry up, Sam!”

I went inside that night and as I explained the promotion and my new responsibilities, I couldn’t conjure any excitement.

“Sam, I would think you’d be a little more excited about this. Twenty percent raise? Another rung of the ladder climbed?”

“I just think that…”

Greta jumped in, “Think of that. All that money, Dad. Do you think you’ll be able to buy me a newer car? The one I have is fine, but if you’re getting a raise, I feel like we’ll need to get me something nicer.”

“Certainly, Honey. I’m sure we’ll be getting a variety of new things since your father has a new position.” I cringed, listening to the two of them already spending the money as if my time meant nothing to them. What should I have expected, though? This was the normal course. I would work hard; they would expect more things.

“Oh, well Mom, we can look online after dinner tonight and see what’s available.”

“Well, Greta, new models come out in a few weeks, so maybe we shouldn’t look to get something right away, but we can look at whatever’s new. I mean, if your dad is making that much more money, we shouldn’t feel as if we need to stifle ourselves.” Such a gut punch.

I pulled at the synthetic chicken and imported vegetables on my plate. They had no taste for me. I did not enjoy them. I usually had a glass of milk with dinner and to taste it tonight was to taste nothing. I just swallowed hard on the food and drink and listened as my wife and daughter planned on spending money, money that I did not care about from a job in which I felt completely overwrought and disgusted: my family making demands from my company making demands, and here I was, a meaningless go-between being treated as means of labor and commerce. I worked only to satisfy their material demands. I was worth keeping only because I satisfied their commercial needs.

I smiled blandly and as I finished early, “Yes, you two. You get online. See what might make you really happy,” I said. Maybe they could tell, maybe they couldn’t. They did not care either way, that much was clear.

“Alright, Mom. As soon as we’re done we’ll go look.”

“Oh, your father’s leaving. I have my local device. Scoot over here, and let’s pull up some things now to look at,” I heard my wife say as I walked back out to the back to throw the rock with Greg a little more before I went to bed. I had the long return to work in the morning so I could start on whatever new developments my boss, Rob, and Operations and I could come up with. Back in the backyard, as I threw the rock, the sunlight had dimmed and the storm clouds had started to actually pass. The moon was slightly visible through the translucent bubble, and at the apex of the bubbledome, a few stars sparkled ever so slightly between the passing clouds. I turned on a couple evening lights and called for Greg to come. I found the rock near my feet and chucked it back towards that compost pile again. Again, he chased after it gleefully.

Just a few weeks on from that night, there I was staring at the compost heap; the mound piled over Greg. I shed another tear thinking that Greg might have had it better. Even trapped in the bubble, he got out occasionally. Excited to see me come home, we would play fetch with his rock. I thought finally of the times I even trained him to roll over, no small feat for a beetle who is not supposed to be on his back. The first time he did it, I was so excited. We must have done that trick all afternoon, once we’d figured it out together. And now he was here, in the compost, being returned to the Earth. There wasn’t much more to say. I stood there silently thinking over my pet bug, that big six foot beetle, wondering if I should even bother to get another one. My wife and daughter so hated this one. But that was for another time. The sadness was more than I wanted, so I turned away to head back inside the house in our bubble.