Insect Aside

“AND WHEN THEY STRIPPED OFF THE WALLBOARDS . . . our home , our own living room , where I picked out all the patterns and had drapes made. . . .” The woman sobbed, poked at one eye with a folded tissue and then managed to go on, though her voice wobbled up and down over a good octave. “There were jillions of them, just jillions , crawling and swarming out of these holes, like little caves, everywhere in the insulation and everything. And we had to move. Had to leave our home , because it had gone too far. Earwigs. I mean, earwigs ! I don’t understand how they could . . . I mean, our government. . . .”

The sobs overtook her again and she sat down abruptly. Her husband encircled her with a protective arm and looked almost accusingly at the young man standing behind the podium at the front of the room. There was a chorus of sympathetic murmurs from the crowd and a man called out, “Us too. They ate the place up, from the inside.”

Baxter did not join this chorus, though he shifted his feet in discomfort. All through the evening’s presentation, the charts and holograms and the young man’s smooth commentary, he had become increasingly uneasy. For some time he had known things were not going properly in the world at large, but he had always been able to count on himself at least, on his own standard of excellence and performance.

Now there were these interior . . . disturbances. Random thoughts that upset him. A vague but ghastly little mood. So he had come to this meeting as a concerned citizen, wanting a credible account of what was going so wrong with everything. Instead people were stirring up unhealthy ideas with their silly tales of earwigs and ants.

It was a neighborhood meeting at the Olive Terrace Community Center, sponsored by the campaign committee of the Progressive Party. The young man, in a sport suit with no tie, had presented the party’s views on the big issues of 2131, as outlined in an hourlong holo. Baxter watched colorful electronic models of new virus strains as they learned to enslave the antibodies hurled against them, saw crops seared by blight that originated in the untended Preserves and the irradiated Wastelands, heard alarming statistics on mutant species.

But the good citizens of Olive Terrace were stuck on bugs. During the question period after the holo, story followed story about the ravages of algae, termites, flies and moths. The most modern exterminators and sterilizers seemed to work for six months or a year and then signs of diabolical insect presence turned up again.

“It’s an epidemic,” the young Prog spokesman said knowingly. “Nobody knows how big.” He explained swiftly how termite populations had taken to building superfluous queen chambers even in soft plastic, and other species--earwigs and roaches most particularly--had quickly occupied these spaces. He hinted that the problem was the flawed Conservative policy of laissez-faire, the idiocy of setting aside Preserves and cultivating “unplanned diversity.” An attempt, Baxter could see, to segue back to the main subject--helping the Party of Tomorrow.

Glancing about the room, feeling furtive, Baxter became aware all at once of a barely perceptible change in the level of available light. His own eyesight was not good, yet he preferred old-fashioned rimless spectacles over contacts or implants. He believed the beveled thick glass transmitted and amplified peripheral light. He was thus, he felt, more sensitive than most to subtle alterations in ambient illumination.

Automatically he looked at the indirect light wells in the ceiling and saw that one of them had gone out. He blinked at this small inlet of shadow, then blinked again. A few motes of dust were now visible against this bit of darkness, caught in the rays from adjoining lights. One of these motes did not swirl and float like the others. A bit larger, it swayed in a long arc and then all at once dropped a few inches.

Baxter looked away abruptly and sat up straighter in his chair, trying to concentrate on what the speaker was saying. Instead he thought once more of his wife’s dog, Lancelot. A sprawling heap of fine, pale hair with two sad and rheumy eyes. Scrumptious Toodlums to his wife, but something far more sinister to Baxter. His discontent veered suddenly in the direction of dread.

For the third (fourth? fifth?) time in the last week an awful thought surfaced: Perhaps he should seek medical help. He’d already gone so far as to look up the name of what his problem could be. Saprophagy. His mind recoiled from the word and he shook himself. In the chair next to him a woman turned with a modest, encouraging smile.

“I know how you feel,” she said. “It makes my flesh creep too.”

Baxter stared at her in alarm. Had he spoken aloud? Was she reading his mind? But no, it was the young man still droning on, showing them now on a chart how certain ribosomes could be reprogrammed to spread intraspecies aggressiveness. Teach self-destruction at the cellular level, that was the Progressive solution. Those jillions and jillions swarming over each other, mandibles and barbed claws clacking, slashing and chewing, eating each other alive.

Baxter thought he was going to be sick. He forced his attention away from the easy, voluble singsong of the man’s narration and from the chart, where headless little snakes of molecules were squirming into knots of rudimentary, vicious intelligence. Only a few years back he had himself done a paper on the parallels between these molecular exchanges and the information flow patterns in large corporate and government agencies. Normally Baxter adored parallel and pattern. Charts and diagrams, in four dimensions, were his specialty, and to enter their endless intricacy and perfect predictability was for him the most exquisite joy life had to offer.

Normally. And Baxter had always considered himself paradigmatically, absolutely, inarguably normal. So when one day Phyllis had murmured, as she often did, that Lancelot was so sweet she could gobble him up, Baxter ought not to have even heard her. Or noticed how she took one of the silken ears between her teeth or buried her nose in the cloud of golden hair to root and make smacking noises with her lips.

But he did notice. And more than notice. It had occurred to him. . . . Baxter lurched on his chair, his mouth dry. As soon as the young man entertained another question he must use the interlude to flee. He could not take much more. He glanced again at the ceiling and immediately saw the tiny speck drop again. It decelerated smoothly and halted perhaps three feet above the young man’s head. For an instant a broken thread of brightness appeared in the air between the speck and the light well in the ceiling. Spider.

The young man was laboring through his explanation of how the whole notion of “wildlife” was misguided and perilous, of how there was only life, period, and life was simply the complex coding and configuration of proteins. The noblest of human aims was to understand and control this coding in order to enhance the welfare of society. And what most inhibited this aim was the wrongheaded philosophy of allowing unmonitored or debased populations to scatter deadly genetic material.

The residents of Olive Terrace looked variously desolate, angry and bored. And beneath his ingratiating smoothness, the young man was on the verge of boiling over. The effort of maintaining his pose of casual confidence was exhausting, and the absorbent agents protecting his suit from dampness were wearing off.

The spider had disappeared into the young man’s hair, though Baxter still glimpsed a sliver of light from the strand leading to the ceiling. Watching the insect’s final, jerking descent, he had completely forgotten his vow to escape from the meeting. The young man was urging the Olive Terrace residents to formulate some kind of petition. It was taking shape as a sweeping plea to do something about repulsive weed growths, high interest on remodeling loans and inferior surgical rejuvenations.

Neither watching the spider nor half-hearing these arguments had succeeded in clearing Baxter’s troubled mind. In fact, the dangle and sway of the tiny speck in the middle of the room somehow paralyzed him in his chair and pried open the lid on the horrible dark abyss at the bottom of his being; the voices in the room lost themselves in echoes and became a meaningless buzz and rumble that drove every single thought from his head, leaving only disconnected images.

More and more disturbing images: Scrumptious Toodlums lost his hair, became an obscene, naked gray worm. Then his wife’s face shriveled, though her body ballooned suddenly, popping buttons. Her skin underneath was also gray, before it ruptured to reveal an amazing jewel-cask of colors. Fascinated, he watched these blues and greens and dark satin reds slide over one another, contract, distend and then rupture in turn, releasing something opalescent and bubbling and aromatic.

He swallowed a mouthful of saliva and heard the woman next to him whisper anxiously, “Are you all right?” He didn’t answer. Couldn’t answer. The glancing thread of light seemed to billow toward him, and his eyes crossed slightly. He saw double, then triple, then quadruple. He thought of the two huge cockroaches and experienced a dreadful relief. He knew that all evening he had been trying to avoid them. They were always what he most wanted not to think about. They lived in his basement, where he kept his woodworking tools and paints and other household chemicals. He had told nobody about them, because nobody would have believed what they did, how they watched him from a shelf or the corner of the room or the ceiling, waving their antennae alertly, two dark hands cupped slightly as if to conceal something. How they watched and watched and then rocked their big bodies in approval or disgust.

He could not even explain the practical things, how creatures so huge squeezed into the tiny openings around electrical conduits or at sink outlets, or what they ate to make themselves so monstrous. Truly almost as large as his own hands, with delicate but powerful limbs, they scurried over the wallboard faster than Baxter could lunge after them.

For of course--at first--he had tried to kill them. With poisons, traps, a swatter and, finally, a small hand-weapon. But they were always too swift, and seemed to know about the weapon even as he reached for it. He got the distinct impression they were mocking him, provoking him. After he blew a hole in the window and had to spend an afternoon replacing it, he found a small pile of droppings directly on the open pages of a manual at his workbench.

At some point he realized that the roaches were connected with the ghastly mood, the visions that had begun to haunt him. They appeared on those days, and finally it happened that even as he recalled a ripe smell or an ooze of something rotten he heard the rapid, excited click of their podia on the floor, so that he could not tell which came first. And when he wheeled to stare at them in horror they rocked and bounced in a furious glee.

He had hurried into the library, searching for some material on what he feared was a mental disorder, had run across a number of ancient legends and stories. Once some of the protohominids had worshiped beetles, while others held the devil was a fly. There was an old tale about a man who awakened after a nightmare to find himself. . . . He writhed on his chair, for the memory of this tale was insupportable. It was driving him mad. They were driving him mad.

The woman’s hand was on his sleeve, gripping him with surprising strength. The images of other faces turned toward him in sets of four, as if he were looking through a kaleidoscope. The voices in the room had ceased, except for the woman’s low hiss. “I said are you all right? Are you having an attack or something?”

The glint of light was directly over his head now. He thought he felt an infinitesimal touch in his hair, a brush as light as that of an imaginary wing, but his whole body was suddenly galvanized with a powerful, strange current. His very frame was humming, a million tiny voices were speaking to each cell in his being, speaking the high, thin squirrel language of fastforward. He was connected to an unimaginably vast system of beings whose whole purpose was the gathering and synthesis of information. Light, temperature, moisture, acidity, location, caloric value--these were only the crudest and most obvious assessments. Their aggregate, correlated in neuron and nucleus, soon reached an intricacy and subtlety beyond the scope of any instruments of measurement. In the abdomen of the tiny spider, for example, were parasites already digesting microscopic mites from the skin over Baxter’s skull, and so assimilating the fearful odor of all he had thought or dreamed these last two hours.

Thus the phantom roaches inside his thrumming skull were transmitting along the gossamer strand to their fellows crouched in the light well, and these in turn could gnaw a complex tracery on the wall of the basement trash compactor, a pattern that flies could read and around which slime molds could shape their commentary, so that spreading out as scattered egg cells, new colonies, the word of these two would go forth--the triumphant prophecy of careful, insidious conquests--a text amplified by every energy-release of organic decay, moving south 1,500 miles in the stored food reserves of monarch butterflies, or much faster under the fingernails of careless flight attendants, or still faster yet as an itch that interrupts a satellite transmission (a pause or dropped word as the anchorperson thinks fleetingly, uncontrollably, of scratching), a message absorbed and interpolated with countless other messages collected and flashed from cell to cell toward the great centers--the termite mounds of the desert Wastelands, the cliff-hives of Himalayan bees, the tremendous ant colonies beneath the ruined jungles.

Baxter knew none of this in the way that he might normally know what he thought he knew. But his body understood. It was on the floor, paddling on hands and knees toward the exit. His clenched teeth did not keep back a froth of drool. Even after the connecting thread had snapped, this new force propelled him smartly along the carpet. It was a terrible, exhilarating urge toward earth. Dark, damp, rich earth. The excrement of worms, a microbial glut, the fungal swarm--everything rotting, rooting, writhing, reeking, reaching to clutch and devour.

But there were claws reaching for him too. A surrounding cluster of eight-armed and eight-legged creatures. They bellowed a meaningless song of fear and revulsion and anger. They wanted to keep him from the earth, from the sweet, rank darkness, from his connection to this terrifying excitement. They wanted him back in the light, in the room, in his mind. He struggled, his spectacles flashing, but they carried him, bound, to a smaller room where a man came finally and held a bright metal tube to his forearm and then the darkness came to him, suddenly and overwhelmingly, but he knew that in the heart of it the two dark hands were waiting and he would join them, a third hand, just the same, flexing and rocking, brushing and touching, vibrating delicately in that tremendous current of intelligent energy.