Sophomore Biology collection projects. We had three choices: leaves, fungi, or bugs. The lazy kids chose leaves—no shortage of trees in Wisconsin. The only hard part was pressing the leaves flat. My older sister had done fungi, and for weeks the house carried the dark-dust smell of spores as she dried her finds in the oven. Only a few of us picked bugs, those of us with time on our hands to scramble around with a net and a lidded glass jar full of cotton balls drenched in ethyl acetate—the killing jar. Notice the -ing, killing. We needed a lot of bugs.
***
Of course, it wasn’t a bug collection; it was an insect collection. Only one insect order—Hemiptera—contains what are called “true bugs,” and why they are truer than the others, I don’t know. Bed bugs are true bugs. The origin of the word “bug” is unclear. The word “bugger” however, seems to come from the Latin word Bulgarus, meaning Bulgarian or, apparently, heretic.
***
I was raised in the Lutheran Church, reciting the Nicene Creed: “We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, one in Being with the Father.” Begetting, the important distinction here. The Nicene Creed was adopted in Nicaea in 325 AD and then revised in 381 at the First Council of Constantinople. The original essentially establishes that Jesus and God are on equal footing divinity-wise, and the revision expands on the whole Holy Spirit or Holy Ghost idea, which confuses me to this day.
***
Unlike the true God, true bugs don’t get a capital letter. My favorite insect order isn’t Hemiptera, though I do love cicadas, with their bulgy eyes and buzzing. As nymphs, cicadas suck on tree sap. Depending on the species, they can suck from two to seventeen years before they crawl out of the ground and up trees, and discard their old skins. As kids, my sister and I would collect the root-beer-brown husks left stuck to tree bark after the shedding, crisp shells with the shape of the body intact, but split open from the head to back where the adult emerged. We kept them piled in baskets on our dressers, the little hollow legs still clasping.
***
In order to get an A on the bug collection, we had to gather a certain number of insects, representing a range of orders. I don’t remember what the number was, but I do remember that I was determined to get an A, because I was an A student and A students need to get A’s, obviously. Once we caught and killed the bugs, we were to mount them by piercing their bodies with pins and sticking them on a sheet of cardboard, so they would float above the surface, a host of shining exoskeletons.
***
According to my field guide, the insect orders of North America are as follows: Microcoryphia, Thysanura, Ephemeroptera, Odonata, Blattodea, Isoptera, Mantodea, Grylloblattodea, Dermaptera, Plecoptera, Orthoptera, Phasmida, Embioptera, Zoraptera, Psocoptera, Phthiraptera, Hemiptera, Thysanoptera, Megaloptera, Raphidioptera, Neuroptera, Coleoptera, Strepsiptera, Mecoptera, Siphonaptera, Diptera, Trichoptera, Lepidoptera, Hymenoptera. Or: jumping bristletails, silverfish and firebrats, mayflies, dragonflies and damselflies, cockroaches, termites, mantids, rock crawlers, earwigs, stoneflies, grasshoppers and katydids and crickets, stick insects, webspinners, zorapterans, barklice and booklice, chewing and sucking lice, true bugs, thrips, dobsonflies and fishflies and alderflies, snakeflies, antlions and lacewings and mantidflies and owlflies, beetles, twisted-winged parasites, scorpionflies and hangingflies, fleas, flies, caddisflies, butterflies and moths, and sawflies and horntails and ants and bees and wasps. The names sound like tribes in a fantasy novel.
***
On a visit to the Cappadocia region of Turkey, near Göreme, my husband and I wandered
around a complex of thousand-year-old churches carved from hills of volcanic rock—elaborate manmade caves. The hills were peaked, their conical tops carved by erosion. The churches inside had domes and columns and barrel-vaulted ceilings and apses. Some contained frescoes of biblical scenes. I heard many times that the eyes of the figures in many of these frescoes had been scratched out at some point in the past by people worried about the Evil Eye. I don’t blame them. In the churches, people-sized trenches lined walls and floors—graves, empty. When someone died, they kept the body in one of these graves for a spell, then moved it to a permanent site. The graves came in different dimensions; the thresholds of doorways often held child-shaped graves. At one church, an iron gate blocked the door. Peering through, I saw a grave within and recognized human bones. Then I realized I was standing next to another grave outside the door, a grave covered in a sheet of cracked Plexiglas; inside it, bits of bone and teeth.
***
The first bugs in my collection were common—American grasshopper, field cricket, blue bottle fly, silky ant, honey bee, two-spotted lady beetle. But then I had to start searching, picking up rocks, swatting at grass, lingering near lights in the evening. I had a couple of nets I’d borrowed from someone. One night I saw my first golden-eyed lacewing, bright green, flapping its fragile wings along a dizzy path—slow, easy prey. How had I never seen one before? Twenty-five years later, I found a batch of lacewing eggs on an onion stalk, a line of dangling, individual threads, each capped by a tiny egg, a ladder of waiting life. How, too, had I not stumbled on these earlier? With each new bug I added to my collection, I asked myself the question: how had I missed this thing all these years?
***
The fall I collected bugs, I was fourteen about to turn fifteen. At the end of the school year, my family would move away to another part of Wisconsin, but I didn’t know this at the
time. That fall, my world was familiar, and I was familiar to my world. I blended in well with
the scenery.
***
On the same trip to Turkey, we toured the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul, built by Sultan Mehmed II in the second half of the fifteenth century. It’s full of displays of jewels, weapons, fancy clothes owned by the sultans, and relics (and purported relics) of religious significance, everything carefully cataloged. One of these relics is the rod of Moses; another is the arm of John the Baptist. Both of these sound more exciting than they looked. The rod was essentially a stick. The arm, whatever was left of it, was encased in some kind of gilded yellow metal shaped like an arm and hand—pretty, but somehow dissatisfying.
***
I really wanted to catch a dragonfly—Odonata—for my collection. One afternoon, my mom and I headed with our nets over to a nearby county park to hike the trails and bag some bugs. I didn’t usually hang out alone with my mom. For some reason, this weekend she wasn’t busy. It was sunny and mild, and we found a grassy slope where huge dragonflies buzzed just over us, swooping at our heads and then bolting in precisely the opposite direction. We lunged at them with our nets, but they’d spin away, only to return, tempting us. We jumped and jumped and jumped, waving the nets, and the higher we leapt, the more the earth felt like it was turning beneath us as we landed. At fourteen, I’d forgotten my mom could be so much fun. We didn’t catch a single dragonfly.
***
Once, in college, a friend of mine went to take his seat for a final exam. On the desk was a dead dragonfly. He wondered if it was a sign.
***
Topkapi Palace also possessed beautiful mosaics and courtyards. In one courtyard, off to the edge of the property, broken off pieces of ancient buildings littered the ground—decorative columns and basins and finials. They seemed to be waiting for someone to figure out where they belonged. When we were leaving the palace grounds, I noticed, near the gate, a giant abandoned-looking brick and stone building with dark arched windows and a central dome. It looked like it might’ve been a church, but I couldn’t find a sign saying what it was or any entryway.
***
The Lutheran church I grew up in was ugly, like many Lutheran churches in the United States, which seem to embrace nonstandard church architecture. Maybe it has something to do with a Scandinavian influence. But churches aren’t shelving units or dining room tables, and, in my opinion, should stick with arches and apses and stone and all that Gothic stuff. My church was round like a cake and covered in wooden shake siding. Triangular dormers poked out at regular intervals, with triangular windows of geometrically-patterned stained glass. The roof was topped by an odd conical spike with a cross, reminiscent of a lightning rod. I was told as a kid that it was supposed to look like a crown. Jesus was King of Kings. But the only crown he wore was a crown of thorns, which was also ugly; maybe the church was appropriately designed. Sometimes I have nightmares set in that church, and I’m running around and around its circular floor plan, from sanctuary to narthex to meeting hall to sanctuary.
***
The frescoes on the walls of the churches in Cappadocia depicted scenes from scripture, but not the scenes I think of when I think of Christian lore as portrayed on stained-glass windows, or at least stained-glass windows in more traditional, non-Lutheran churches. I think of plump baby Jesus on Mary’s lap; angels draped in white cloth who look essentially like people dressed up as angels; lambs; groups of robed disciples lounging around chatting; a bloodless Jesus sad on the cross. Sometimes Jesus is kneeling and praying; sometimes he’s got his arms outspread and is gazing up at an invisible Heavenly Father, represented by sunbeams.
***
In the fall before the year I collected bugs, I was confirmed in the Lutheran Church. I’d taken two years of confirmation classes, once a week in the evenings. The first year, a classmate’s mother taught us, and we spent almost the entire time reading a comic book version of the Bible called The Picture Bible, which was all a review for me because I owned a copy and had already read it several times. Almost everything I know today about the stories in the Bible came from The Picture Bible. Illustrated by André Le Blanc, a comics artist who’d assisted Will Eisner on The Spirit and worked on classics like Flash Gordon and Apartment 3-G, the characters possessed Hollywood good looks. As a kid, I had a crush on King David, though returning to the images of him in the book now, I have no idea why; he could pass for Barry Gibb from the Bee Gees.
***
One church in Cappadocia, the Church of Saint Barbara, was decorated with designs painted in red ochre, including lines meant to give the impression that the church was built from stone blocks rather than carved into the rock. On one wall, a crudely-drawn rooster leaned over what was maybe a budding plant. Beneath it, a monstrous creature lunged, arms held up as though fighting or searching for a snack of brains. The thing appeared to have horns and a scaled belly. It also looked like it was painted by a five-year-old. A woman touring the church asked her guide, “Are these a child’s drawings?” The guide explained that this creature was a locust. Really, it seemed more like a cockroach.
***
The second year of confirmation class we were taught by the church’s pastor, Pastor John. He was in his forties, a handsome, bookish man. We had to memorize a lot of things from Luther’s Small Catechism. We memorized the Ten Commandments and the explanation of each. “The Sixth Commandment: You shall not commit adultery. What does this mean? We should fear and love God so that we lead a sexually pure and decent life in what we say and do, and husband and wife love and honour each other.” We memorized the Apostles’ Creed and the Nicene Creed. We memorized the Lord’s Prayer. We memorized definitions of the sacraments. We wanted to please Pastor John, who was a nice guy, so we memorized and memorized. But we were eighth graders on the verge of becoming high school freshmen, so we also goofed off.
***
When I said earlier that I wanted to earn an A on my bug collection, that wasn’t exactly true. I wanted an A+.
***
The Picture Bible mentions locusts a few times. Le Blanc’s illustration for one passage about a plague of locusts on Judah shows a man in scarf and tunic waving his hands in the air at a small cloud of winged bugs. There’s no illustration of the plague of locusts on Egypt in the Exodus story, though there are a couple illustrations for the plague of frogs. Bright green frogs hop everywhere in the streets. It’s not clear what damage they’re doing. In one panel, a woman cries, “Ee-eek. A frog in my bread dough!” as a cute frog leaps into her bowl.
***
My bug collection grew and grew, my eyes always scouring surfaces for bugs. One night, I found an earwig on the wall of my bedroom. I found a silverfish among books in our basement, but it was too ephemeral to pin once dead; it seemed to be made of dust. I found a katydid and a praying mantis. Every bug went into the killing jar, then onto its pin. In order to get credit, for each bug I had to fill out a slip of paper containing order, genus, and species, as well as the collection location and date. Because I was an A student and wanted my A+, I also collected Gary Larson’s The Far Side cartoons about insects to include with my project. In one, two bugs stroll through a bug collection beneath dead insects on pins; one says to the other, “God, I hate walking through this place at night.”
***
The Church of Saint Barbara in Cappadocia is named after a saint whose father locked her in a tower as a young girl. I’ve read several variations of her story. The simplest version is that she was locked in the tower, converted to Christianity, and was tortured, then beheaded by her father, who was subsequently struck by lightning and killed. A much more complicated version involves Barbara ordering some workmen to put three windows in a cistern her father was building, which somehow was a symbol of her faith, after which her father tried to kill her, except she was absorbed into the stone and transported to a mountain where there were two shepherds, one of whom betrayed her and so he was turned into stone and his flock into locusts. And then her father caught her and put her on trial, after which her “paps” were cut off and she was led through the streets to be beaten; however, her father decided to steal her away and took her back to the mountain, where she prayed and rejoiced and whatnot, and then her father beheaded her. Upon returning from the mountain, her father was zapped to the point where all that was left was ashes. The Catholic Church dropped the Feast of Saint Barbara from the liturgical calendar in the 1960s because it appeared quite possible that she belonged to the realm of legend and not history.
***
The churches in Cappadocia seemed to favor stories of violence and pain. Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in the fiery furnace. Lazarus raised from the dead. The Slaughter of the Innocents. The betrayal of Judas. And of course, the Crucifixion. In one fresco, Jesus stands on what appears to be a demon, surrounded by spikes, chains, a cross. Or maybe these scenes stood out to me because they weren’t really the stories my own Christian upbringing lingered on much. The gaunt figures with their eyes scratched out hovered over graves dug into the floor of the churches. A mineral urine smell emanated from the rock walls. No one would ever chirp “Jesus loves me, yes I know, for the Bible tells me so” in these churches. The only sound that I could imagine here was wailing.
***
It turns out the mysterious brick and stone building on the grounds of the Topkapi Palace is the Hagia Eirene, first built in the fourth century by Constantine I. In the late fourth century, the First Council of Constantinople, at which changes to the Nicene Creed were confirmed, was held there. The original church burned down and was replaced in the sixth century. What stands now was mostly constructed after earthquake damage in the eighth century, three hundred years before the Church of Saint Barbara was carved into the hills. Over time it’s been a church, an armory, and a museum. Now it’s a concert hall, though I didn’t notice any signs for concerts. It seemed like what, I suppose, it is—an empty building.
***
At another ancient church in Istanbul, the Chora Church, my husband and I tried to decipher the mosaics on the walls, which date from the fourteenth century. The angels float but appear to be legless torsos, their robes ending where their waists would lie. A man covered in spots and wearing a loincloth appeals to a group of figures whose faces have fallen away with time. Another man stabs the throat of a bull, blood spurting. A seraph—a ball of wings surrounding a face—hovers over dead Mary. Christ descends into hell and pulls Adam and Eve from their tombs, his hands clamping their wrists, the gates of hell beneath his feet along with Satan, bound, lying among his instruments of torture. Every visage seems sad—disappointed, even. In one mosaic, guards rip a child from its mother’s arms, stabbing it with a dagger, while another guard pins a child to the ground and slays it with a sword. A little higher up—I had to squint to see it—a guard hoists a naked child on a pike which enters through its anus and exits through its head.
***
I needed one more bug for the A+, but how would I get it? I was running out of bugs. Then a neighbor who’d heard about my collecting brought over a perfect find—a walking stick. I’d only seen one once before. It was the coolest bug I’d ever held, its stick disguise perfect until it moved, crawling along my arm. It didn’t seem to want to flee, unlike most of the other bugs I’d caught. Order Phasmida—ghost. I let it crawl around, watching how its legs balanced the stick body. I hesitated. But I wanted the A+, so it went in the killing jar.
***
I studied hard for the confirmation test. I knew I didn’t want to fail—what would that
even mean? I wanted to do my best. I memorized. When the time came, I demonstrated what I knew on the test, which included a personal interview about my faith with Pastor John. I did well.
***
Despite my confirmation, I didn’t take to religion. I drifted from the church, appalled at the things I discovered were said and done in the name of Christianity. I didn’t understand—and still don’t—why one person’s salvation should be another’s persecution. The Christianity I’d memorized so much about wasn’t concerned with obstructing other people’s rights, as far as I understood it. But memorization and understanding are different things. In any case, I didn’t want to be included under that label.
***
Five years after my confirmation, Pastor John was removed from the church for having sexual relationships with women parishioners, including a close family friend, a lady I’d never thought of as anything other than dowdy. A year later, no longer religious, I was in Seattle, visiting a friend of mine from high school, whose family had moved from Wisconsin to Washington. I was twenty—relaxing in the hot tub, drinking a beer and wearing a bikini. Apparently, Pastor John had befriended this family and followed them out to Seattle, because there he appeared before me, in street clothes instead of clericals, standing next to the hot tub. He didn’t seem to sense my deep distress at his presence. What was I supposed to say to him? He knew what to say, though. He said, “I remember you got a perfect score on your confirmation test.”
***
We believe we’re one thing until we find out we’re another, when the story we’ve been telling ourselves turns out simply not to be true. I didn’t get the A+. One of my identification cards somehow went missing, so I was an insect short. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve thought of this, my hubris and cruelty, a quarter century from that first moment of realization. For nothing, I killed the walking stick, because I thought it would prove how much I’d learned. I didn’t need the A+. I could’ve settled for the A, sub-perfect perfection. I didn’t have to kill any bug, for that matter; I could’ve collected leaves. Instead, I put dozens of insects in the killing jar, pulled them out dead, and displayed them on pins. True bugs or not, they weren’t saved, and neither was I.