Tunnel Vision

13

Beetles were eating his brain.

He could hear them just inside his ears—a high-pitched electric chittering as they munched their way through the gray matter to the core of his head.

Hundreds of them. Maybe thousands. He could feel their thrumming just below his skull, nearly blinding him with distraction. He could barely restrain himself from making a scene in the back of the bus, from screaming and ramming his head into the balance pole.

As he did every morning at daybreak, he walked to Harvard Square from Boston and boarded the number 350 bus that took him down Massachusetts Avenue to the Alewife stop at the Cambridge/Arlington line, where he’d get off and walk half a mile to the intersection of Routes 16 and 2, his territory to panhandle the line of cars at the stoplight. It was a good place for handouts—maybe a buck or two for every twenty cars.

But this morning was the worst. The crackling and high-pitched chit-chit sounds and images of their little pincers boring tunnels had grown worse over the last week, so much so that he could barely hold up his cardboard sign:

PLEASE HELP

SICK AND HOMELESS

GOD BLESS

He could barely concentrate on his little walk up the worn path from the traffic lights along the line of stopped cars. Usually he’d eye the drivers, hoping they’d not pretend he was invisible and lower the window with a handout.

The lunatic scrabble on the inside of his skull had been going on for days, but today it was worse than ever—as if he had been slipped some bad tripping mushrooms. Then last night, he had a dream about falling off his bed and into a large dark funnel, moving at breakneck speed toward a misty gray light at the end. But it didn’t feel like a dream because he heard an electric crackling sound that got louder as he shot down the tube toward an end that he did not want to reach. As he neared the light, he tried to stop himself by dragging his hands and feet against the sides but broke through the end into a black pit buzzing with beetles.

When he woke, he stumbled his way to the bus stop, trying to shake the sensation that they were inside his head and threatening to eat their way out of his ears. By the time he got off at Alewife, the chittering had intensified to an insane level, leaving him rubbing his face and batting his ears. His whole world had been reduced to those little shiny bodies with pincer jaws beginning to stream out of his ears and nose.

He stumbled along the traffic line, frantically trying to wipe the things off his face and head, spitting and gasping for air against the hot drilling buzz.

He stumbled to the ground, totally unaware of the drivers trying to watch the lights while not being distracted by the spectacle of Wally, yelping and insanely tearing his hair from his scalp and skin from his face.

Through the crack of his eyes, he saw a huge green dump truck idling at the light, the large double wheels filling his vision.

At the moment the light changed and the traffic began to move again, Wally scuttled onto the road and pushed his head under the rear tires.