“Bug”

Bug Litler was never a man of great consequence. He possessed a lanky body and meek voice, barely audible over the hum of a florescent light. Bug easily fell into the realm of hard to place faces and half-forgotten acquaintances. When he concluded the world was going to end, he didn’t tell a soul about his awakening. This was no religious epiphany (Bug had severed lines of communication with his creator many years prior). He simply awoke one morning, took a long look at the sky and knew the world was to end. And he resolved to go out and meet it.

After college, a Peace Corps recruiter walked Bug into an office and before he knew it, he had boarded a flight to Haiti, where he spent the next three years building houses and investing heavily in antacids, as the local cuisine made his stomach churn. He met a girl who saw his quiet demeanor as an opportunity to practice stringing together intricate combinations of words, which she’d later recite at office parties and family gatherings. Before long, she walked him into a church where they were married. At the altar he tried calling off the affair, but the organ drowned out his pleas, so he accepted his fate. She did all of the talking, so he didn’t have to, which made him happy. But she had died a few months ago. So at 42 years old, Bug was left to meet the end of days alone.

He needed supplies and journeyed to a local convenience store. He paced back and forth, down the lone aisle of the establishment, before settling on a beach chair, beer, and a cooler to store the beverages. He loaded his beer into the cooler, held the chair under his arm, and dragged his bounty to the nearest bus stop.

Bug thought of leaving notice of his departure, but couldn’t conjure a single name worth informing. He scoured his internal Rolodex and settled on the mailman. It was rather inconsiderate to allow bills and letters to clog his mailbox. But it was too late. He was at the bus stop and the mailman would disappear soon enough, as would the wooden box that stood at the curb, and the paper stuffed inside it.

A bus finally arrived. On the front, it read “Grand Oanda Desert.” Bug would later say the emptiness of the desert provides a man with the best view of the world’s demise. With a shriek and a shrug, the vehicle came to a stop. After passengers stampeded through the open doors, Bug entered the bus, purchased a ticket, and took a seat in the back.

The bus rumbled through the Grand Oanda Desert on a tortuous road, with a cloud of dust billowing behind it. Sand covered the roadway, making the bus’ route indistinguishable from the desert and forcing drivers to guide the bus by memory. Bug never determined an exact destination, but when the rocky structures had receded into the horizon and the desert opened up just right, he pulled the red cord. plain

“Next stop’s not for a few miles,” bellowed the bus driver.

“But I’d like to get off,” Bug replied, though no one heard him. Bug made his way to the front, dragging the beach chair and cooler behind him. He tugged the red cord again.

“No stop.”

“I need to get off.”

“What?”

“Please stop.”

Unable to hear Bug’s response from a mere foot away, the bus driver feared it was an emergency. Passengers were thrown about the cabin as the bus came to a halt. The bus driver turned to find Bug standing in the aisle with a grin upon his face. With a nod of thanks, Bug unloaded his cargo and trudged through the sand and wind, into the desert.

The bus driver waited, expecting the elements to force the man to return. But when Bug made so signs of retreating, the bus driver feared the worst. Maybe the gusts of wind would lift the man off his feet and carry him away to the great beyond. Maybe the sand would consume him, perfectly preserving his body until a team of archeologists could discover him and ponder why the man attempted such a trek. Or maybe something so fantastic would unfold that it existed beyond his realm of comprehension. But Bug simply walked toward the horizon until he found a suitable location to set up camp. He unfolded his chair, opened a beer, reclined, and soaked in the view of the end of times from his front row seat.

When the bus driver determined the man possessed no intentions of returning, he closed the doors and continued on his way. Bug sat and watched the ball of dust disappear into the horizon. He then turned his attention back to the sky, refusing to move, except to dig a hole that would serve as a latrine. Before him was a perfect, blue canvas, not a single blemish. Bug waited, sipping his beer. As the sun followed its path through the sky and disappeared, a shadow crept across the desert. It snuck up on Bug, tapped him on his shoulder, and enveloped him in darkness. His blue subject turned to black, speckled with balls of light. Next came the frigid wind that swept across the plain, carrying with it a wave of sand that stung as it crashed over him. Bug curled into a ball and covered his face as his chair rocked back and forth all through the night. But when day came and the sky turned to blue, Bug was still in his beach chair, a fine layer of sand clung to his skin, his eyes fixed on the heavens. The desert was still there. So were the rocks and the sand covered road. Bug never wavered in his commitment to greet the end of times and remained in his lawn chair, only moving to reach into the cooler and, with a snap, open another beer.

***

Bug’s lone companion was the bus that made two trips through the desert each day. Early in the morning, a ball of dust appeared on the horizon in the west and traveled across the sand. Every night the dust retreated back to where it began the day. Bug took note of its travels in his periphery, never truly breaking eye contact with the sky. With each trip, the bus driver looked into the distance, where a speck of a man sat in a beach chair. None of his passengers noticed the man in the desert. Black specks on the horizon never garner the attention of weary travelers. The bus driver only saw Bug because he knew what he was looking for.

As the bus approached the spot where Bug departed, the bus driver anticipated the pull of the red cord. Surely someone was looking for the man, a loved one, a co-worker, possibly a member of law enforcement. He eased off the gas and prepared to brake. Yet no anonymous hand tugged on the red cord and the bus continued through the Grand Oanda Desert.

When the bus driver was a child, while his classmates were busy frying ants with their magnifying glasses, he was busy collecting them for his ant farm. He collected every species of beetle that crawled across his lawn and captured fireflies in jars for homemade lanterns. He drew charts in crayon to document his discoveries. Now he collected passengers: the lady with the dentures that clattered when she talked, the twins with the matching droopy eyes, and the man who urinated into plastic bottles, but swore it was apple juice. He noted their quirks and habits in the notebook he kept in his breast pocket. He did the same for his friends. He’d sit at bar tables, listening to his friends squabble over school budgets, mayoral elections, and whether the local swimming hole was really polluted. He’d return home and fill notebooks with his observations. He inserted his own opinions in the margins (how two independent studies found lead in the lake at twice the recommended levels), before tucking the notebook back into his pocket. But the notebook with the fewest words was the one that had the bus driver most curious. The cover read “The Man in the Desert” and inside he’d written, Quiet. Frail. Possibly Sunburned.

The bus driver finally succumbed to the nagging curiosity that had plagued him since Bug first left his bus. After anticipating the tug of the red cord for so long, he finally brought the vehicle to a halt himself and emerged from the ball of dust that orbited the bus. He was a portly fellow, with a buttoned down shirt tucked into a pair of khakis held up by suspenders, and a tie that didn’t reach far enough down his stomach to be socially acceptable. Sweat stains formed like impressionist paintings under his arms, as he trudged through the sand and wind until he reached Bug. The bus driver cast a shadow over Bug, who welcomed the shade, as his face was raw from the desert sun.

“Fella, what in the hell are you doing out here?” the bus driver asked.

Bug’s first answer was swept away with the wind, so the driver leaned in and just made out Bug’s second attempt at a response.

“The world’s going to end,” Bug said. “I came out here to meet it.”

“Do you mind if I join you?” inquired the bus driver.

“Pull up a seat.”

The bus driver kicked the sand back and forth to make a suitable seating arrangement. Then he plopped down next to Bug.

***

The passengers looked on, aghast at their predicament. With the engine off and the cooling systems shut down, the metal frame of the vehicle began to bake its inhabitants. It wasn’t long before these travelers would die of dehydration under the unflinching desert sun or roast inside this tin can. The passengers made frantic calls to friends and family, in search of rescue. Droves of cars arrived to usher the travelers to safety. The sun was setting over the Grand Oanda Desert when the last passenger was rescued, a traveling cosmetics saleswoman named Janice Winter. As her chaperone pulled away from the abandoned vessel, she looked back at the two specks on the horizon. She would later remark how the bus driver had removed his shirt to shield the pair from the sun.

Word spread of the two men sitting in the Grand Oanda Desert and staring at the sky. Some strains of the story lauded the two as devout Buddhists who had reached an advanced state of nirvana, while others portrayed the pair as experiencing psychotic breaks, mesmerized by the figments of their imagination that danced across the vacant sky. A few reports said the two were simply lost travelers who had yet to realize they were within a stone’s throw of a major motorway.

Curiosity about the man sitting in the desert and the bus driver who joined him peaked when Janice Winter tugged on the red cord in the middle of the desert. She used to take the bus across the desert, selling her homemade organic makeup. The bus driver wrote in his notebook about the correlation between her nail biting and the presumed importance of her client. She waded through the sand in her heals until she reached the men. The bus driver now wore his tie around his head like a bandana.

“What are you doing out here?” Janice asked.

When Bug’s answer was swept away with the wind, the bus driver turned to her and said, “The world’s going to end. We’re out here waiting to meet the end of days.”

“Like the apocalypse?”

“Not really.”

“Are you astronomers? Is there an asteroid coming?”

“No, not that.”

“What is it then?”

“Bug said the world’s going to end. And I believe him.”

After Janice’s reported her encounter to the local newspaper, it became a common occurrence for passengers to tug the red cord in the middle of the Grand Oanda Desert and visit with Bug and the bus driver. Bug would remain silent, leaving the bus driver to converse with their guests. Most visitors sat in silence and waited with the two men for the world to end. Others argued the universe was in a perfectly stable condition. These boisterous guests made the shortest stays at Bug’s camp, while others would wait until the sun set before retreating to the road, boarding the night bus, and returning to civilization.

At first, guests would bring food and water for the pair. But as the mythos of the men grew, and people believed Bug had correctly predicted the world’s end, they presented their spiritual guide with offerings. By the time a full inventory was taken, Bug had collected several full scrapbooks of personal portraits, family heirlooms, jewelry, paintings, sixty-four different forms of currency, a Super Bowl XVI championship ring, a diamond encrusted tiara, three pairs of alligator skin shoes, and an elderly woman’s taxidermied German Shepherd.

Visits grew longer. Strangers came prepared. They built fires and shared meals. The bus driver accepted the newcomers’ hospitality with a gracious smile while Bug’s gaze remained fixed on the sky. These followers rose early in the morning, fearing they would miss the spectacle they traveled so far to see. At night, campfires sprung up throughout the tent city, as visitors gathered to discuss the sights seen the previous day. After spending days looking into the sky, stories of a single bird breaking the monotony were met with the utmost curiosity. A tortoise once took three days to traverse the camp, igniting theories that the world would end the moment the creature left the community’s boundary. But it didn’t, and people went on speculating.

Lost in the fervent debates around the campfire were the conversations held each night on the outskirts of camp, between a frail man in a beach chair and his plump companion.

“And if you connect that last star, the one a little to the left of Mars, you get a praying mantis,” the bus driver said.

“Well done,” Bug replied.

“There aren’t many insects in the desert. Will they survive the end of the world?”

“I don’t know.”

“Will I survive?”

“I don’t know.”

***

The spattering of tents evolved into a self-sufficient community. People built stronger shelters to withstand the winds that carried away ill-constructed tents. Others designed schematics for a complex system of piping that would provide fresh water. After a year, each member of the community resided in a home, complete with running water and electricity. A few had fashioned tin satellites from empty beer cans to receive television signals. The bus driver kept a census of the community’s inhabitants in his notebook.

Although Bug ignored the people’s ingenuity, the people did not forget their founder. They constructed a house around him, on the fringe of the settlement, with a porch where they placed his beach chair. Each morning the community rose and spent their day sitting with Bug as they waited to see the world end. After they deemed their stay sufficient, the town returned to their homes and completed their daily chores. Only the bus driver remained at Bug’s side. After the town finished their routine tasks, cooking dinner, ensuring a steady flow of water, and sweeping sand from their homes, they would return to Bug and watch the waning moments of each day, before retiring for the night. Bug and the bus driver remained on the porch, creating new constellations and talking about the end of times.

The first school was built not long after the first child was born to them, a girl named Maya Marie. An argument broke out over who would be tasked with teaching the children. Amber Growhowski, a renowned astrophysicist who left her tenured position to join the colony, believed she should teach. However, Donald Borenstein, a former schoolteacher before leaving his job after an unfortunate incident with a class boa constrictor, wanted the position as well. The wind carried the squabbles through the center of town, past the marketplace and the watering hole, over the power lines and aqueducts, and placed them gently on Bug’s porch. Upon hearing the arguments, the bus driver turned to Bug. After receiving a nod of approval from his friend, the portly man rose from his seat and headed to the center of town.

By the time he arrived, the town was divided. The bus driver stated, matter-of-factly, that both Amber and Donald would hold positions in the school, with the former teaching the advanced courses and the latter barred from housing any classroom pets. The decision appeased both sides and the bus driver returned to Bug’s side. A week later, the bus driver was informed the town elected him their first mayor. There was no campaign, though the vote was unanimous.

The following year, they erected a bronze statue of Bug. They inscribed on its base, “In honor of the man who foresaw the end of the world.” Soon came a church to complement the monument, filled with rows of beach chairs. Most inhabitants were too busy to dedicate much time sitting with Bug. They visited the church instead, briefly in the morning and again at night. They would gaze through the open roof for a few moments and after they resolved the world was not in a state of imminent destruction, they carried on their way. Maya Marie was the first person married in the church. She married Ben Richardson, who moved to town with his family when he was still a child and held a steady job inspecting the structural integrity of the aqueducts. The whole town came to see them wed, except for Bug, who remained perched on his porch.

The bus driver still spent his days with Bug, staring into the sky and filling his notebooks with observations. But visitors invaded their silent sanctuary, asking their mayor to approve school budgets and to resolve petty squabbles that arose in town. The bus driver would turn to his friend and apologize before he was led away. Bug would always respond with a nod.

Each year they celebrated the town’s founding with fireworks. Tourists would board buses, pull a red cord in the middle of the desert and flock to the Grand Oanda Colony to watch explosions envelop the night sky. If someone needed a break from the noisy festivities, the quietest place in town was Bug’s porch. There you could sit in peace and observe the sky uninterrupted. Most residents reserved contemplating the world’s demise for the weekends, while others only attended gatherings in the church sanctuary a few times each year. The bus driver continued to visit with Bug, though his responsibility to the town now kept him away for weeks at a time.

***

The town was preparing for the first Founder’s Day parade when a pigeon landed on Bug’s porch, with a letter tied to its leg. Bug was startled by his guest and didn’t know what to do. He entered his home and returned with a bowl of water and slice of bread. While the bird recovered from its journey, Bug removed the letter from its leg. In child’s handwriting, it read: Please come home. I miss you.

The silence of the desert was broken by a clank, clank, clank in the distance. Bug saw a man hammering a large metal pole into the sand. Bug held the pigeon in his arms as he shuffled through the sand toward the man. He shielded the bird from the wind that howled along the plain and tried to topple the lone traveler. Bug stopped at the base of the pole, which stood on the edge of the sand-covered road. Attached to the metal fixture was a sign that read, “Bus Stop: The Grand Oanda Desert Colony.”

That evening, the bus driver stopped by Bug’s house. When he arrived, only an abandoned beach chair remained to greet him. When darkness thwarted his attempts to find his friend in the desert, the bus driver entered the house. He was greeted by the vast collection of trinkets and gifts Bug had collected over the years. Strewn about the floor were coins from every corner of the earth, jewelry made of the finest stones, and a deceased family pet, preserved in a state of eternal jubilance. But what the bus driver did not find was a bed, a dresser, or any semblance the building served as a home.

The bus driver ran into the sandy abyss, screaming Bug’s name. But his friend couldn’t hear him. By this time, Bug was sitting in the last seat of a bus, petting the pigeon that had fallen asleep in his arms.

The bus driver chose not to inform the town of Bug’s disappearance. No one knew until the parade reached Bug’s home and they found his empty chair. Most believed Bug merely turned to dust, due to his prolonged exposure to the unforgiving elements of the desert. Others believed his disappearance confirmed his prophecy and recommitted themselves to looking at the sky and meeting the end of the world. When confronted with these theories, the bus driver would smile and nod politely. But he never endorsed any of these beliefs.

It took the bus driver years to track Bug down. The frail old man was living in a cottage on the beach, on the outskirts of a village in Haiti. The bus driver stood on the porch, unsure if the answer to the question he had so long pondered lay behind this crumbling facade. Bug opened the door and, with a nod, invited his friend inside.

Bug led the bus driver into the one room home. Stacked to the ceiling were boxes of antacids. A pigeon cooed from a cage next to the bed. Behind the cottage were two beach chairs, sitting at the water’s edge. For the bus driver, it felt like old times, and he sat in silence, afraid to ruin the moment. But the sun dipped behind the trees and darkness encroached on the two friends.

The bus driver turned to Bug and asked the question that plagued him from the moment he discovered that empty chair in the desert.

“Why did you leave?”

Bug’s first answer was swept away with the wind, an occurrence all too familiar for the bus driver. He repeated the question and leaned in closer to hear Bug’s response.

“It was time to go,” Bug said. “I witnessed the end of the world.”

Brian Kraker is a New Jersey based writer of plays and short stories. He works in television making graphics. This is his first published short story.