CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Lulenne bent forward once more and, with a little less hesitation this time, I hitched my arms around her giant, hairy shoulders, in preparation for what would essentially become an improbable piggyback ride back to her office. A moment later, we were bouncing through the snow, into the forest, beyond the road and the ominous crystal that had inadvertently apprehended everything I held dear.

Though it was cold, the breeze from Lulenne’s bounding stride was unexpectedly relaxing. It reminded me of riding my motorcycle far later into the year than I should, on one of those days that was just nice enough that I could manage the trek without regretting it. I loved those days; they made me feel like I was somehow cheating nature out of its plan to deprive me of my favorite pastime.

Dawn was beginning to announce its presence, as we traveled deeper into the forest. Still, the darkness that had claimed the sky wasn’t quite ready to abandon its dominion just yet. Maybe another half an hour or so until that came to fruition, I mused.

Lulenne was quiet, as we traveled. She seemed determined to get to where she was going and I didn’t want to distract her so I kept silent too, admiring the massive, pristine, snow-covered trees that our journey provided. The deeper into the forest we traveled, the more the trees grew—in both height and girth.

Before too long, we found ourselves amongst row after row of trees far larger than I ever thought possible to grow, in nature or otherwise. They were so large, in fact, that I couldn’t even tell where they ended—for looking upward only revealed they were using the dark clouds above to disappear into the sky. Even with Lulenne’s high rate of speed, it took us somewhere between five and ten seconds to completely pass by one of them. Needless to say, I began to feel very small, next to these behemoths. It must have been what a chipmunk feels like, standing on the ground and staring up at a giant redwood.

After what I guessed was around a twenty-minute journey or so, Lulenne made a sharp left—our first turn of the trip—and took us back behind one of these colossal trees. There, at the back of the tree, sat what I can only describe as an enlarged beehive—one gargantuan enough that fifty or so people could easily fit inside. “Ever seen a hive like this, honey?” Lulenne proudly asked.

“No. Never seen one this big.” Of course I hadn’t but instead of the dismay and trepidation I usually felt in these encounters, I was mesmerized and wanted to know more. “I’ve never seen one on the ground like this either. Aren’t they supposed to be up in trees, or on people’s roofs?” I asked.

Lulenne bent forward again, indicating that she wanted me to let go and drop back to the snowy ground, which I silently did. “Pretty sweet, huh?” she said aloud, ignoring my question and gazing at the slightly dilapidated and seemingly discarded fortress. Her sharp forearms were resting at her sides. “I call it ‘The Hive.’ It was abandoned by its previous tenants. It eventually fell out of the tree but, other than that, there’s just a little structural damage here and there,” she insisted, pointing to the spots she was referencing, as she spoke. “I got a good deal on it, too—was just sitting there unused, after all—so I made it my own and moved the whole group in just a few weeks ago.”

“Oh. Okay. Good. Glad you like it!” And I was too. She seemed very proud and I didn’t know enough about her world to think otherwise so I assumed she had made a good decision in choosing this place to conduct her business. I was, however, curious about her “whole group” and was holding out hope that they would be just as friendly as she was.

“Don’t worry, honey,” she said, as if she had just read my mind. “They’re harmless.” She then took a moment, which seemed to indicate that she was pondering the best way to tell me something, before finally declaring, “Steel… he’s a bit of a hothead sometimes but he won’t do ya no harm. Promise.”

“Steel?” I questioned.

“Well, ‘Pike.’ That’s his real name but he prefers ‘Steel’ fer some reason or other. Been calling himself that so long, I sometimes forget what it even says on his official papers. Never did understand it but that’s his business, I s’pose.”

“Oh,” I replied. What else really could I have said? Having come all this way, I had already abandoned any other option I might have had to better improve my situation. To put it more bluntly, I abandoned any option I wasn’t keen enough to notice and, in doing so, I now found myself here with Lulenne and that put me at her mercy. There was no reason to pretend otherwise, for I was sure she knew it too.

“Well, c’mon,” she said, inviting me to follow behind her, with a wave of her deadly blade-like arm.

As instructed, I followed closely behind, while we walked through a set of automatic doors that had been installed into a clumsily cut hole, in the front of the imposing structure. The mechanical doors looked odd there, jutting up against the organic frame of The Hive. The juxtaposition of the natural world and the one that Lulenne had created was not lost on me, as I passed through them.

As we walked inside, I noticed the ground level of The Hive looked much like any other office building. Gray carpet covered the floor and gray cubicles were set up along the “bullpen” area, in the middle of the layout. In the exact center, however, one desk remained prominently displayed, with no cubicle padding surrounding it. It stood out and I would later find out why.

Both the right and left-hand walls were lined with offices that I assumed were for employees listed higher up on the internal hierarchy chart. Oddly enough, however, they all appeared vacant, as we walked by them.

Above the cubicles, on the second and third floors: more empty-looking offices. I had to briefly stop, arch my back and strain my neck to see them all. It looked as though someone had crudely dug the space for them out of the yellow, organic-looking walls. That observation signaled to me that the walls must have been much deeper than I had originally supposed they were.

There were also several soft spots where I could easily detect ugly, unintentional holes, which led through the wall, all the way to the early morning air outside. The dirty, old, rickety scaffolding beneath those holes told me that, at least at one point, someone, somewhere probably had plans to repair them.

The scaffolding wasn’t strictly reserved for the spaces beneath the tears in the edifice though. It also served as means of filling the spaces where the floor had apparently crumbled away—making a disjointed yet functionally congruent path comprised of both cheap, wooden scaffolding and much more stable walkways that were accented by ornate glass railings, designed to keep people from accidentally plummeting over the side.

Beyond the third floor, however, there were no more offices. There, The Hive looked more the way I would expect the inside of a hive to look. There, what I saw was a hollowed out shell of a hive, with bits of honeycomb sporadically lining the internal walls before me.

Rather than looking as though the place had been renovated, it looked more as though it had been ransacked and looted—presumable for that honeycomb substance. That theory also explained why so much more of it remained at the top of the structure—where it would have been harder to reach. Bits of it could be found all about the place but it was certainly most plentiful up toward the top.

For a moment, I marveled at the pragmatic absurdity of the dwelling but then redoubled my pace to catch back up with Lulenne, who had not stopped to sightsee, as I had.

Positioned behind Lulenne, with a little more space between us now, I stole a quick glance into the open room, at the end of the hallway, toward which we were moving. Inside, I saw several creatures, of various shapes and sizes, which I couldn’t quite make out yet. They appeared to be waiting for us.

As I rejoined my guide, I noticed that her imposing frame looked hopelessly awkward, standing fully erect, in front of a doorway, at the back of The Hive, which was clearly too small for her. She had stopped in front of it and, by default, forced me to remain stationary behind her.

While I waited there, behind her, she lowered her head and peeked inside. At that moment, the first of several new voices I would hear that day made itself known: “6:55, Lulenne,” the booming but decidedly feminine voice mocked, in a friendly barb. “We almost thought you were going to be late for once.”

Upon hearing this, the room full of unfamiliar voices began to expel that uncomfortable laugh that employees often force themselves to manufacture in front of their bosses. I always supposed people who fabricated faux camaraderie like this assumed that laughter and/or meaningless small talk helped to humanize them and redirect everyone’s minds—including their own—away from the clear and imposing imbalance of power in the room. I assumed they thought it had some sort of stabilizing effect, that is. The ironic truth, however, is when the kinship isn’t genuine, it only makes the dynamic of that imbalance even more prominent and easily perceptible—at least that’s the way I often observed those interactions and this one was no different.

“Yeah, yeah, all right everyone,” Lulenne fraudulently chuckled, cementing her leading role in the performance. Taking a couple steps, as she continued to stoop forward, she finally entered the insufficiently short doorway and lifted her head and neck somewhere up beyond my view. All I could see of her was her furry back, black shorts and kangaroo-like legs.

Once she was inside the room, she introduced me to what I could already tell was a room full of her subordinates. “Everyone, this is our newest guest, James. I had to save him this morning from another crystal. That’s why we weren’t here sooner.”

***

As she spoke, Lulenne stepped aside and granted me a berth into the room, which contained a small group of creatures who, upon entering, all simultaneously greeted me in what became a mostly unintelligible murmur. Their friendliness seemed legitimate though—much more so than their laughing from a moment ago—and so I adopted an outlook that told me they were genuinely pleased I was there.

The room itself was uninspiring. From what I could tell, it seemed like a large office that they had converted, somewhat poorly, into a small conference room. One long table—complete with a set of chairs—took up the center of the room. Behind the table, there was some sort of graph (of which I could make little sense) that had been crudely drawn onto an old, beat-up, dry-erase board. There was also what I assumed was a closet door to my right and next to that, a stand that contained everything necessary to brew, drink and flavor one’s coffee. As banal and unremarkable as the room was, though, the characters who inhabited it were anything but.

“James,” Lulenne began, “This is Joy.”

The creature who sat directly in front of me, on the other side of the long horizontal table, then introduced herself with a “hello” and, even in that one-word response, I recognized her commanding voice. She was no doubt the individual who first prodded Lulenne about her arrival time.

Like Lulenne, Joy certainly appeared to be descended from somewhere inside the insect family tree; more specifically, she appeared arachnid in nature, though, for some reason (maybe experience) she seemed far less intimidating to me than Purple ever did. Unlike Lulenne, however, there was little about her to suggest she was mixed with any mammalian DNA except, perhaps, for her long, flowing red hair and the rounded, somewhat human-like features of her face. Her frame, too, was round, though it was much shorter than Lulenne’s. I guessed she was actually about a foot shorter than me.

As for her coloring, Joy was almost completely black, save for her clothing, her numerous, piercing orange eyes and some beautiful red spots, on her back. I saw them poking out of the back of her low-cut blue dress—made visible through the reflection of the window behind her. Also popping out of that dress, I observed many arms—too many to count, due to the fact that she kept so many of them in motion. They were all completing various tasks like holding and drinking coffee, writing on a tablet, texting on her phone and brushing back her hair.

Pleasantries between Joy and myself now exchanged, Lulenne motioned toward the next figure, seated at the head of the table, directly to my left, and said, “And this is Kidada.”

Now, Kidada’s appearance was the exact opposite of Joy’s. She seemed, from what I could tell, to be fully mammalian, without any trace of insect or arachnid heritage. She was much smaller than Joy too—maybe three and a half feet tall, at best. Despite having an incredibly long beak, not unlike a hummingbird’s, the rest of her facial features were pleasant and much more defined. While Joy’s features sort of blended into her facial area, Kidada’s were pronounced and would be much more familiar to any standard human; in fact, besides my own, hers was the closest to a human face in the room.

Her body, on the other hand, was anything but human. She did have slender arms and I could clearly count five fingers on each of her hands… each of her four hands that were connected to her four arms, all of which were covered in the same green and purple feathers that also sprouted out from her head. Feathers adorned her chest as well, although they were white. Her wings, I guessed, were mostly purple and white but I could not tell for sure because she was flapping them so fast they were nothing more than a blur.

She was beating them so fast, in fact, that they kept her effortlessly hovering, in place just above the table. At that moment, I wondered if she might be more comfortable in a chair but that’s when I realized she had no legs or feet. Seeing the genuine smile on her face, I told myself that this must be a resting position for her.

I barely had time to gaze at her, though, before she began to bombard me with a flurry of questions spoken as though her purpose in life was to be the fastest-talking auctioneer in history: “Oh my God! I’m really excited to meet you. How are you today? Do you need anything? Did Lulenne tell you abo—”

“Hold on there, Kidada!” The gruff and somewhat condescending voice that had interrupted her seemed to have emanated from Lulenne’s midsection. As I turned toward her, to investigate the auditory disturbance, I spotted a tiny but extremely muscular arm emerge from just above the waistline of her shorts. Although it was too small, in stature, to match up with any common primate with which I had any familiarity, the elongated hand and hairy arm before me gave that distinct impression of belonging to one nonetheless.

Another brown, thickly-covered arm then followed and, after that, they both immediately grabbed hold of Lulenne’s waistband. Now gripping the material, the emerging creature began to pull itself up and out from somewhere within Lulenne. As it did so—as just the top of its tiny head began to crest into the room—it bellowed, in a surprisingly loud voice, “Lulenne, did you just say he’s a guest?”

Until now, I hadn’t considered that Lulenne might actually be some sort of traditionally-functioning marsupial but there, in that moment, it was quickly becoming evident that I should probably reconsider my presumptions. Observing this scene, as it unfolded before me, made me wonder if she was wearing those shorts to hide her pouch or if she simply preferred them for some other—perhaps stylistic—reason. I would never have a chance to ask, however, because I was too flabbergasted by the materialization of the being before me, making its way into the room.

By far, it was the tiniest creature there. I wouldn’t have put it at more than eighteen inches long—at most (though I would later hear it claiming to be twenty-four). With the exception of its arms, it looked, more than anything else, like an insect of some sort. It was predominantly brown, with two dirty beige wings and multiple size-appropriate appendages, which it seemed to be able to utilize as either arms or legs. The first set, manifesting just below its shoulders, however—the first set I saw when it began to pull itself out, from within Lulenne—exhibited unmistakable muscular definition in the bicep and forearm areas, making it clear these were solely, without a doubt, its most dominant pair of arms.

It lacked any clothing, other than a pair of dark sunglasses, which, with the assistance of a giant brown mustache, obstructed all of its facial features. Its booming voice, however, did plenty to personify it and demonstrate its incontestable sentience. Although it doesn’t do it justice, the most succinct way I can put it is to picture a one-and-a-half-foot gnat, with one set of muscular, ape-like arms.

Once it had fully emerged, it flew to the opposite head of the table, across from Kidada, and landed in front of a miniature coffee cup, for which it causally began to reach. Lulenne then greeted it with a tone that suggested a mixture of both pride and mild adoration. “Good morning, sunshine,” she announced, to the newest member of the room.

Turning to face her, the strange little bug retorted with a simple, emotionless “Hey.” It then turned to me and, with much more zeal, exclaimed “And hey to you too! I’m Steel, Vice President of this establishment.”

Lulenne slowly plopped down in the vacant seat in front of her and sighed. She seemed tired. “James, Steel. Steel, James” she obligatorily commented.

“What’s up?” Steel replied in such a way that he was declaring it—not asking it.

“And these fine gentleman across the table,” Lulenne continued, “are Mark and Matt.” As she introduced them, Lulenne motioned her arm toward them to help me identify which was which.

First was Matt. Like, Lulenne, Matt was covered in brown and white fur but, unlike her, it covered all of his visible body, save for his nose, eyes and mouth. He was a bit taller than me, by maybe a few inches or so, and it would not have been a stretch to assert that he gave off the appearance of an upright, aging basset hound, wearing human clothing—a pink polo shirt, to be more precise. He also sported a pair of beat-up blue jeans that were hidden by his seated position but made visible when he stood to greet me. It was clear, however, that he wasn’t completely canine.

His left eye remained somewhat bland, while his right looked like it would have belonged to a giant fly. As I stared across from him, I could vaguely catch a multitude of my repeated reflection, on the kaleidoscope surface of his eye. On top of his head, two antennae protruded outward. Despite these anomalies, his doggish face seemed able to produce the full gamut of known human expressions; already I had seen him smile, laugh and, out of my periphery, I even caught him roll his smaller, human eye in a disrespectful way—a gesture he made shortly after Steel interrupted Kidada, from within Lulenne’s pouch.

Mark, on the other hand, bore more semblance to a green tree frog. He was slightly taller than Joy and his face, too, seemed capable of any and all human expressions, though, to this point, I had really only seen a pleasant smile. Underneath it, however, I could tell he was trying to suppress confusion. On the table, in front of him, was a yellow notepad, with several pages folded back, indicating he had been writing heavily in it.

Clearly the best-dressed of the cast, Mark wore a white button-down shirt, a black tie and black dress pants with black shoes. Mark covered most of his body with clothing but, from the parts of his body that were laid bare, I could see no insect-like qualities—only your everyday, run-of-the-mill, well-dressed, green, human-sized, talking tree frog.

“Why don’t you go ahead and take a seat next to me?” Lulenne offered, pulling out an empty chair to her left. Not wanting to appear rude, I obliged her, though my confidence in the situation, in which I now found myself, was beginning to quickly ebb away. Until now, my interactions with strange beings like this had been somewhat limited. Here, however, I was surrounded by an entire cast of mutated misfits. Instead of panicking, I reminded myself that, as an outsider, they likely thought me as strange as I did them.

As I contemplated this musing, I took a moment to study the ensemble before me. Straight across from me was Matt, the deformed basset hound. He sat directly between Joy (the spider-woman, with hazily drawn, humanoid characteristics on her face) and Mark (the well-dressed tree frog). Hovering to Joy’s right (my left), at one of the heads of the table, was Kidada (the four-armed bird creature with no legs). Across from Kidada, at the other head of the table, Steel (the gnat) perched himself, inspecting his clearly empty, tiny cup of nothing. Finally, to Steel’s left was Lulenne and to her left was me. What a group!

***

After Lulenne’s aforementioned introductions, Steel was the first to speak. “First thing: I’m going to need some friggin’ coffee. Kidada!”

“Yeah, Steel?” she confidently responded.

“Where’s the coffee?” he asked.

“It’s right behind you, Steel,” Matt plainly interjected, before Kidada could answer.

“This is the cruddy coffee,” Steel began to protest but abruptly stopped himself, as if he suddenly thought better of making a scene over his beverage options. I assumed that was for my benefit, for he seemed to be looking at me when he stopped himself, although I couldn’t be sure, due to the sunglasses he was wearing.

“All right,” he sighed reluctantly, almost as if it was a warning of some kind. Flying over to the coffee station behind him, he began looking for the correct button to press but he was having a difficult time.

Taking notice of his struggles, Kidada flew across the room, at blazing speed, and located the elusive button on the back and pushed it for him. “There you go!” she cheerfully exclaimed, just before she whizzed back to the other end of the table and resumed hovering in the same place she had been before she opted to assist Steel.

“Great,” said Steel. As a tiny stream of coffee, from an equally tiny nozzle, on the side of the unit, began to fill his cup, he then asked, “So, where are you from, James?” Then he flew back to his place at the head of the table and awaited my answer.

“I’m from…” But then I just kind of zoned out. I couldn’t concentrate. I couldn’t stop staring at him and the pouch whence he came. The quickly diminishing perspective that I was as strange to them as they were to me wasn’t holding the weight I had hoped it would.

Everything about the entire situation was just so odd. How did I end up in a board meeting, inside of a giant, dilapidated beehive, surrounded by strange, undocumented/undiscovered life-forms—like this small creature who just crawled out of a kangaroo-like pouch and was now addressing me, at the head of the table?

Afraid of where it might lead, I resolved not to wander the distracting, yet familiar “what if” path that began to bombard my mind: what if I hadn’t parked my truck where I did or what if I had just said “no” to Lulenne’s offer to come here? I needed a new, more receptive frame of mind.

I reasoned that, while certainly hypocritical, I could “fake it” and pretend this was all normal for me too. After having just sanctimoniously chastised this group to myself, for a lack of genuine emotions, the fact that I was now considering adopting a non-authentic role of my own made me feel sheepish. Despite feeling this way, I reasoned that faking confidence in myself and my ability to handle this situation—doing it consistently and believably, that is—might eventually generate a pure and truthful form of it. Even though I didn’t really believe this reasoning to be true, I needed to adjust to the environment before me because, as it was, I wasn’t fitting in at all.

Feeling thusly, I spoke with false bravado when I asked, “Do you want to know where I was born or where I live now?” As I posed this question, however, I couldn’t help but continue to stare at Lulenne’s midsection and Steel must have noticed. He must have noticed my shifty, shy and somewhat lowered eyes and he must have noticed how they didn’t match the illegitimate poise I had manufactured for myself.

So, instead of answering, Steel unanticipatedly blurted out, as confrontationally as a gnat could, “What?!?”

“Oh! It’s nothing,” I quickly replied. “It’s just I hadn’t heard… I mean… I…” Where was that confidence I had literally just convinced myself I could muster? I had always been terrible at faking anything.

“What?!?” he demanded again.

“Well,” I began, “I… Did you… That is, were you… in there this whole time?” As I asked the question, I looked, as harmlessly as I could, toward the black and white shorts that hid Lulenne’s marsupium.

“In my office?” Steel responded, in a tone that both sought to define my question and simultaneously confirm it. “Yeah; all twenty-four inches of me. I’ve been in there for a while now.” He then turned toward Lulenne and said, “Sorry about that, by the way. Laaate night last night. You know how it goes.”

He spoke his apology to Lulenne the same way a hungover, slightly-humbled alcoholic would speak one to the victim of his previous night’s debauchery—one where the newly sobered individual was trying to stifle his grin, while apologizing for transgressions he just then, in that moment, learned he committed; more specifically, his was the kind of recollection that feigned remorse but for which he was, to the keen observers who caught a glimpse of that grin, perceptibly happy. Yes: he was sorry he somehow inconvenienced someone but, more than that, he was secretly happy for the new and interesting anecdote that he had just acquired to undoubtedly tell again, to a new crowd, at a later date. I knew that type of empty apology well, for I had myself given it many times before.

“It’s fine, sweetie,” Lulenne told him reassuringly—the way a mother might.

“Oh!” I exclaimed, picking up on the intimacy of their banter. “Is, uh, are you her… Is Lulenne your mom?” I asked Steel, as respectfully as I knew how.

For some reason, however, this made him openly contentious and, without any effort to mask it, he quickly shot back, “So what if that’s my mom?”

Sensing the tension in the room, Joy looked up from her phone and cautioned Steel, much in the same way one might caution a dog who was giving off the impression that he was about to do something he wasn’t permitted to do. “Hey,” she said. “C’mon now, Steel.”

Lulenne apparently felt the amplification in his temperament as well. “Steel,” she said, “just calm down, now. He didn’t mean nothin’ by it.”

And it was true. I didn’t. Hoping to defuse the situation before it escalated, I addressed the small creature, somewhat befuddled but fully apologetically: “I don’t understand what’s… Did I offend you? Really, I didn’t mean to sa—”

“I am the VP of this company!” he brazenly interjected. “I’m the VP because I’m the King of Bristles! The friggin’ king, baby!” he shouted out, to no one in particular, while standing on his hind two legs and beating his chest, with his two most dominant, ape-like arms.

“Okay.” I submissively retorted. I didn’t know what he meant by referring to himself as “the King of Bristles” but it didn’t seem like the right time to ask.

“Kidada?” Lulenne quietly called out, ignoring Steel’s behavior.

“Yeah, Lulenne?” the small, hovering, four-armed bird-girl, to my left, answered. Her voice was soft but it contained just the right amount of confidence. As I would get to know her, in that hive, I would even come to think of her as unflappable, which I realize is an interesting choice of words for a creature that literally didn’t seem able to stop flapping its wings.

“Be a doll and go and get my analyzer out of my office, will ya?” Lulenne requested/commanded of her.

“Sure!” Kidada vivaciously cried out, zooming out of the room so quickly that the breeze from her wake further disheveled my already messy hair.

Undeterred from the momentary distraction, Steel wasted no time in reappropriating his captive audience. Speaking as though he hadn’t even noticed the drop in conversation, he reestablished pontificating on his merits: “I’m in charge of five friggin’ people here and, if you’re trying to insinua—”

“Four actually, sorry,” Kidada corrected, whooshing back into the room, as quickly as she had left it. Once again, my hair flew even more out of place. As she spoke, she placed a small golden box, not much bigger than my hand, down on the table in front of Lulenne. On the front of it, I could make out an elegantly engraved plate that read: “Nuggets.”

“What?!?” Steel shouted at Kidada, not bothering to try and temper his annoyance.

“It’s four again, remember?” she asked/explained, while opening up the box for Lulenne. “Zeke’s not coming back,” she then added.

“I thought he was out, digging for coprolite,” Steel questioned in a tone that contained hints of both aggression and confusion.

“He was but he decided not to return, remember?” Joy chimed in, inserting herself into the conversation. “I e-mailed you about it yesterday, after you left. You shot me back a ‘thumbs-up’ icon.”

Clearly frustrated, Steel told Joy, “I need you to remind me of these things!”

“I did,” she answered, somewhat befuddled. “In the e-mail. You responded to it.”

“Remind me anyway,” he scowled.

“So, you don’t want an e-mail anymore?”

“Obviously, I want an e-mail but I want you to remind me in person too!” Joy was far less confrontational though. She simply shrugged and started chewing loudly on a piece of gum that she must have acquired while I was distracted with something else.

“Fine,” he then somehow muttered and yelled at the same time. “Four. Zeke was worthless anyway.” Then, turning toward his mother, he wailed, “Lulenne!”

Lulenne, from what I observed, though, didn’t seem quite as concerned with the discussion transpiring before us, in our makeshift conference room. While Steel had been speaking, she motioned Kidada over and whispered that she needed help locating the crystal shard she had gleaned from its larger source not long ago. Trying to be mindful of Steel’s tirade, I did my best to ignore them and keep my eyes on Steel, as a show of respect. While I did so, Kidada produced the object, from somewhere within Lulenne and placed it inside her golden box, on the table in front of her. Kidada shut the lid just about the time Steel bellowed his mother’s name.

Though she was engrossed in the golden box, Lulenne managed to fumble out an absent-minded, “Huh? What?”

“Were you aware Zeke isn’t coming back?” he asked loudly but much more calmly than I had anticipated he would. I assumed he would have been angry at Lulenne and Kidada’s seemingly clandestine whisperings, while they fiddled with the analyzer, but he didn’t even seem to have noticed.

“Was he the fat one?” Lulenne questioned.

“Yes,” Steel quickly answered back to her.

Kidada, however, took it upon herself to correct them both: “Sorry; no,” she stated almost begrudgingly. I got the sense, at that moment, that she wasn’t fond of correcting one (or both) of them.

Joy, with her eyes in her purse, then responded, as she removed a tube of lipstick from it, and said, “That was Tommy.”

“Huh?!?” Steel challenged boldly.

Flying quickly back to the head of the table and hovering in place, where she had been before Lulenne summoned her, Kidada addressed Steel—the rambunctious insect across from her. “Yeah; Zeke was the one doing your digging.”

“’Some’ of my digging,” he gruffly corrected.

“’Most’ of it,” I then heard Matt, the fly-eyed dog mutter, from across the table.

Steel apparently didn’t hear him though. In a much more somber tone, he spoke once more: “We’re going to have to replace him, I guess. Lulenne?”

But Lulenne didn’t answer and, in her audible absence, everyone looked toward the giant, hairy, locusty creature, as we awaited her response. Her disengagement from us all caused a brief silence, for she was once again enthralled with the box in front of her. It was quietly dinging and ticking; the top of the box was even slowly and subtly changing colors. Noticing the lull in our banter, she looked up once more.

“Huh? Oh!” she then said, alerting us that her brain had just caught up to the question. “You know, sweetie, I’m not jumping up and down about taking another newbie on just yet.” What an interesting colloquialism for a kangaroo to make, I thought. “Besides, James is here now. Lemme think on it and let’s talk about it later, okay?”

“Yeah, fine,” he told his mother, though he was clearly agitated. Lulenne was already looking back down on the box and didn’t seem to notice—that, or she purposely paid no heed to Steel’s mood. Steel didn’t seem to need her validation, though, because, without even a moment’s pause, he addressed the well-dressed tree frog to his immediate right. “Mark!” he cried out. “You’re going to have to pick up his slack!”

Intruding on him once more, Kidada looked down on a clipboard she had somehow acquired, without my knowledge, and stated: “Mark and Matt are both super busy. You’ve already got them doing all of your—”

“They can speak for themselves!” Steel erupted. “Mark, you want to be a team player, right?” It was clear, in the way he asked the question, that there was really only one answer that Steel would accept and, for that reason, I was relieved when Mark gave it to him.

“Uh, sure,” he affirmed, though (I posited) not as enthusiastically as Steel would have preferred.

“I’d do it myself,” the tiny insect began to explain, “but I have another one of those meetings this afternoon.”

“Fooooour!” Matt, the figurative and literal old dog, called out. He seemed almost eager to clarify the details of Steel’s sacrifice, for his own benefit, as much as mine.

“First of all,” Steel seethed, “it’s an indoor driving range—not a golf course—and secondly, a lot of deals get closed there!” Steel retaliated—almost daring Matt to prolong their discourse.

With almost no hesitancy, Matt obliged him by simply uttering, “Apparently so.”

At this, Steel slammed his tiny coffee mug on the table, spilling the majority of its contents in the process. At the same time, his wings started beating furiously, though he kept his many legs planted there on the table. “All right,” he spat out at Matt. “Now you listen to m—.”

“What about this morning, Pike?” Lulenne interjected her monotone, lifeless question, without even raising her head.

Steel then turned toward Lulenne and, in a more somber tone, said, “What?” He seemed taken aback by his mother’s use of his birth name.

“What’ve ya got going on this morning?” Lulenne added. Although she asked her son this question directly, her eyes remained fixed on the pinging, whirling object before her.

“Oh my gosh!” Steel retorted, as though he was recounting something both laborious and also emotionally painful. “I am swamped! Where do I even start? Sooo much stuff! Uh… There’s the, um…”

Still not looking over at him, the half-mantis responded: “Maybe when the analyzer finishes telling us what we need to help James, you could assist in showing him what to do.”

Although she said “maybe,” I got the sense this was more of an edict than a proposal. I believe Steel did too. “Absolutely!” he declared to Lulenne. “Sounds like a great idea,” he then added, in confident and emotionless permanence.

After awarding his mother with his acknowledgement, he turned toward me and spoke to me as though I was interviewing him on live TV and had just asked him a fan-generated question about how he got to be where he was today: “Listen to me, James. I got into the Vice President role by hard work, dedication and by knowing everyone in the business. Everyone! I’m the friggin’ King of Bristles and I’m here today to dig out the solutions you need.” Just as he finished his clearly rehearsed self-promoting answer, to the question I never asked him, he flew off of the table and landed right above the waistband of Lulenne’s black track shorts.

“Hey, I really apprec…” I began to tell him but I inadvertently stopped myself when I noticed him rooting around in Lulenne’s marsupium. His head and half of his body were inside, while his numerous appendages flailed for a foothold, in the air above. Lulenne seemed slightly annoyed but not enough to comment; instead, she simply repositioned herself to better avoid Steel’s kicking legs, while never averting her gaze from the analyzer in front of her. Inside her pouch, I heard him rummaging around, which was actually quite a bit louder than the softly pinging golden box that had captured Lulenne’s attention.

After taking all of this in, I slowly started once more, “Uh, that is, I really appreciate that, Steel. And, uh, I didn’t mean any offense. I just… I really don’t know what’s going on here.”

“It’s okay,” he replied, as he reemerged from what he had earlier described as his office. On his tiny head, he had adorned himself with what looked to be a weathered, cheap, plastic crown—the kind a parent might give to a child, in order to satiate its desire to parade around the house, cosplaying as royalty.

In a way that suggested he was joking—but also not really—Steel then delivered his royal decree to Mark. In short, he demanded that Mark copy, with a physical pen and paper, what, from my purview, sounded like quite a bit of information that apparently already existed in their computer system, via this Zeke fellow. Joy then looked up, with her new, bright red “lips,” and questioned why he would want Mark to do this and, to that, Steel simply pointed to his crown and said, “Cuz that’s the way I want it done.” She then shrugged, returned some type of mirror to her purse and began digging in it for something else.

And that’s how much of this meeting that I was observing was conducted: Steel demanded copies of various documents, which Kidada always provided, zipping in and out of the room, as she did so; he made demeaning and lascivious comments—one of which was directed at Kidada’s backside and he got into several arguments with Matt.

In each of their diatribes, Matt was calm (almost emotionless) and that passive but confident demeanor, for some reason, actually seemed to amplify Steel’s instability. At one point, he was nearly screaming about some rare stones that Matt maintained Steel had promised to evaluate, despite the fact that Steel denied ever making such a claim. Matt then consulted his phone and read aloud an excerpt that pointed to the exact date and time the promise was supposedly made. He even cited the unique circumstances around their exchange. Until Lulenne sided with Matt and told her son to check the stones—all while keeping her eyes affixed on the golden box—I thought the altercation had an actual potential for physical violence.

For as much as Steel clashed with Matt, however, the opposite was true with Mark. Steel would make ridiculous-sounding request after ridiculous-sounding request and Mark (the nervous tree frog) would always agree to carry them out; in fact, every time Steel would speak to him, Mark would frantically scribble everything he said, in his note pad, as if he was taking dictation. Steel really seemed to enjoy this. Several times, throughout the course of the meeting, I could tell he was elongating his allocution simply because he enjoyed the dynamic of a subordinate taking down his lectures.

It just went on and on. Steel and Matt continued to clash, Mark continued to drown in his notes, Joy played with her phone, Lulenne kept her head down (focusing on her box), and Kidada flew all about, bringing various things to the creatures of the room—keeping them on some sort of agenda and checking boxes off of a clipboard, as she did so.

It didn’t seem to matter what they requested either. Kidada always had the item or the information and, after giving it, she always made a note of it, on whatever was attached to that clipboard. Though I could only see the back of the board, it seemed like her checks and scribbles were getting closer to the bottom, which gave me hope this would all be over soon.

Although I tried not to, I couldn’t help but lament the fact that I was here. I felt indebted to Lulenne for trying to help me when I needed it but the mental toxicity permeating this room made it hard to remain grateful. Did it really matter though? Like it or not, I was stuck there.