IV

About a week ago I noted an insect, about the size of a thumbnail, crawling up the curtain in my bedroom. It looked like what in Indiana I would call "stink bugs," though they were about half the size of this bug. Its shell resembled a knight's shield, a grey and black diamond shape at the bottom and squared off at the top. With legs. In my old apartment they would crawl up the curtains, and sometimes fly from one end of the room to the other with a loud, not particularly graceful buzzing sound that ended in a thud when they landed on their target, which was usually the reading lamp behind my couch. Maggie (the cat) and I would look up from what we were doing, and then go back to our business. They were completely innocuous. They never landed on my person, touched my food, or multiplied in gross ways in the nooks and crannies of my apartment (though I would find dead ones in all the corners, on their back with their legs curled in). I mostly let them do what they did because there were never very many of them and they moved so slowly. They were almost cute. One day I asked my entomologist friend about them, where he thought they might be coming from. He said that they probably came from the trees outside, whose foliage was on the same level as my second floor windows.

These associations in mind, I regarded this Chinese stink bug similarly. It looked the same though a little bit bigger. I don't see very many bugs in my apartment, and generally haven't seen many bugs here in China asides from mosquitoes. I'm not sure why. At any rate, I tried to brush him into a cup, and therein, I would proceed to toss him out the window. I reached up to get him with the edge of the cup but he moved up the curtain just a little faster than I anticipated, out of reach. I got a chair and stood on it, but he had already moved to a place where I couldn't see him anymore. I opened the window and thought that maybe he would see himself out. He didn't. The next day when I woke up and walked into my living room he was walking slowly across the interior window ledge, halfway in-between the Pocari Sweat bottle that I'm growing an eggplant in and the window on the far end. The sun was shining. Wary of our last encounter and not wanting to dink around with him, I opened the window he seemed to be heading toward and went off to work. He didn't exit that time either. Over the next few days I saw him daily in my living room. Always in the morning. It felt like we were roommates, like an old friend. He also lived here and had his routines. And there he was again, walking slowly across the white tiled floor in a beam of sunshine. It was comforting and I imagined he was living the life he wanted.

Yesterday, Saturday, there he was again. I was washing dishes, making breakfast, and watching basketball. As my dishes were soaking in the sink I leaned against the couch to watch the game, and he seemed to be heading towards me. Unnerved, I got up to do things, and when I came back he was gone. For whatever reason, I wondered what he'd been eating or drinking. I wondered if the white tile floor was a good place to be, or if it was a strange landscape to him, a barren desert with no food or water or other creatures that looked like him. I wondered if he wanted to be here, or just didn't know how to get out. I thought about how he got inside, since my apartment on the 12th floor was too high up for the trees to brush against, it seemed unlikely that he had crawled up the side of the building. I thought that maybe he had hitchhiked, on my bike possibly, which when at school would be parked close to some dense bushes. Maybe he was looking for food, or a mate, on the underside of my bike, and suddenly his whole world began to move. By the time I had these thoughts he had wandered out of my view and I resolved that the next time I saw him I'd put him outside. And so this morning as soon as I opened my bedroom door there he was. I pushed him into a cup, took the elevator down, walked into the bushes, and shook him out onto the ground. Now you are where you belong, I said.