The $60,000 Dog: My Life With Animals (34 page)

“Stay outside,” I said to the kids and before they could protest I shut and dead-bolted the door, leaving them on the stoop. Then I made my way down the hall, turning the lamps on switch by switch, the lights each time illuminating objects while underscoring interstices, in every room, everywhere.

Houses are filled with holes. You can seal and strengthen, insulate and fortify all you want, but none of these efforts will change the fundamental fact that houses—be they billion-dollar mansions or squatters’ shacks—are pocked and torn in too many places to count. The chimney, of course, represents one of the widest points of egress, large enough to let in reindeer and all other manner of mammals, and then there are the smaller chinks, the one’s neither you nor I can see with the naked eye, but were our vision bionic, well, would be able to view all the ripped and ragged seams of all our shelters everywhere. We would be able to see the hairline cracks and gaps that practically beckon roommates we’d rather not have.

I climbed the stairs to the second story, still flicking on lights as I went, the hissing growing not so much louder as stereophonic, surrounding me now, over me and below me, beside me, left and right, despite the fact that I still could not see the source of the sound. I checked the kids’ rooms, the bathroom, the bathtub; I even lifted the lid of the toilet, let it down, turned around, and then saw, right smack in the middle of the master bedroom floor, a squirming mass of humming … wasps, yes they were wasps, dozens, perhaps hundreds in huge, sizzling piles, their plump stingers wagging uselessly as they died, their wings glinting in the low light. I stepped inside the bedroom and heard a wet crunch under foot, and as I listened, and watched, a still living wasp rose from one of the corpse piles and floated drunkenly around the room, ramming its head against the window before falling back into a stupor on the sill, its stinger still pulsing. The window sills in the room were all pinkie deep with dead or dying wasps, and some were stuck to the screens in a desperate bid for freedom.

I ran downstairs and grabbed our shop vac, the one we keep in the basement, its capacity ten gallons, hauled it upstairs, calling to the kids, still outside, “Just a sec,” as I, back in the master bedroom, jammed the plug into a socket and started Hoovering my way across the floor, holding the hose hard as it sucked up the dried flakes and crunched corpses of the insects. I vacuumed under the bed, behind the dresser, taking every pile and scrap of wasp I could, regardless of whether it still showed signs of life. When I was done, the shop vac was full to capacity and humming hard. Disgusted, I banged its black bin once, twice, thrice against the wall, and the sound, as if sliced with a knife, ceased completely. I stood there, then, sweating hard, the night heavy with humidity, I stood there holding hundreds of wasps, some in all likelihood still alive. Suppose they escaped? They could climb out through the hose, could they not? I opened my dresser drawer, took out some socks and stuffed them deep into the tubing and then, just to be on the safe side, I opened a window and hurled the whole vacuum cleaner out into the yard. Dark now, I saw the machine fly through the air and then, oddly, drop onto the lawn with just the softest sound, tumbling down a slope and coming to rest by the red barn. I called to the kids then, and they came in and the bedroom looked as pristine as a princess’s so that they would never need to know.

Benjamin arrived about an hour later, and that night, when the kids were asleep, I told him about the infestation, and he, after mulling over it for a moment or so, told me it was probably a one-time occurrence. “How can you be so sure?” I asked, and he explained his surety as he often does, by invoking some statistical principle, the specifics of which eluded me but the gist of which did not. Statistics, I have often found, are for the optimist; those who invoke its rules tend to believe the universe is an orderly, predictable place. I barely passed my statistics courses in graduate school, in part because I’m a numbskull when it comes to math but in part because I’m philosophically disinclined to believe in a universe all organized like some linen closet. My universe is full of wacky objects and cackling midgets and mules with wings. In my universe, nothing is predictable but anything is possible, which is why I was not in fact surprised to find, the following weekend when we arrived back at the house, a whole new crop of dead and dying wasps, hundreds upon hundreds of them in piles. And this time the hissing mounds and drifts were not only in the master bedroom, but in the two other bedrooms as well. While Ben kept the kids occupied outside I once again Hoovered all the rooms, slapping the sluggish live ones with a rolled magazine as I went. It had been an unseasonably warm September and I sweated as I worked, then stopped, stood straight, my hand on my lower back. Through the window of the kids’ room I could see the huge bluish mass of Mount Wachusett, its rocky top ringed by coniferous trees, and then further down the slope the trees all turning, and as I watched, and rested, and watched, in through the open window flew a plain pale moth. I’ve never minded moths and minded them less when compared to wasps. The moth headed straight up for the ceiling light and then settled on the fixture, warming its thorax. I looked away, back towards the mountain now painted with a pink streak, and when I looked up at the light again, the moth was pinned in place by a plump wasp straddling it, holding its wings down while slowly pumping its jointed thorax full of venom. I watched the moth struggle to get free and I saw its struggle slow as what was probably a paralyzing venom went to work, at which point the wasp removed its stinger and began to masticate his meal, the moth fully alive but unable to move. The wings broke into pieces and fell to the floor in flakes of dim glitter.

That night, I found a dying wasp in one of the kid’s bed sheets. I crushed it hard and angry between two books and did away with the carcass before either child could see, and then I checked their beds thoroughly before they got in. But when it was time for me to go to bed I didn’t want to, and no matter how many times Ben and I shook out our sheets I was still convinced that there was a wasp hiding somewhere in there. “I
hate
wasps,” I said to Ben, and I heard a hiss in my own voice, a hiss somehow similar to theirs, which made me hate them all the more. I slept on the couch and the next day called an exterminator.

“When you cathedraled your ceilings,” he said, “you removed the barrier between the second story and the attic. And there have probably been wasps overwintering in your attic for years, but when you removed the barrier, well …”

I asked the exterminator why so many of the wasps were dead or dying when we found them, and he said, “Trapped. That’s why you’ve got so many on your sills, at your windows. They’re trying to get out. They come in for the warmth and then can’t find their way out.”

“Can you take care of it?” I ask.

“What you really need to do,” the exterminator said, “is seal every one of these cracks in your cathedraling, maybe put up seamless sheets of sheetrock instead of these wooden planks with spaces between them. In the meantime,” he said, “I can spray.”

So the exterminator sprayed. He carried his poison in a backpack and he walked around our house pumping the trigger, spraying here and there, high and low, little lacy arcs giving glisten to the creases and the corners of the house, the odor so slight one could barely detect it, a smell that stung the back of the throat, just barely; and then he was done.

“That’s it?” I said.

The exterminator looked at me quizzically. “I did the entire house,” he said. “I can come back in six months.”

“But aren’t you going to do outside the house too?” I asked.

The exterminator looked out one of our windows. It happened to be the large picture window overlooking our thirty-two acres of fields and woods, the mountain looming blue behind it. We could see our pond, with a heron floating, so still he looked like carved clay.

“How far do you want me to go?” the exterminator asked. He gestured with his hand toward the acreage. “I can’t very well spray all your land. And even if I could,” he said, “I’m not sure the benefits would outweigh, you know, like what they say … the risks.”

“Of course,” I said, and laughed, but inside I was not laughing. I kept seeing that pale moth, the pruning shear mouth, how the wasp had feasted on the juice of its victim. But the exterminator raised a good point. How far would I go to feel safe? Who, or what, would I dispose of in the process?

“I’m not saying you won’t see any more wasps,” the exterminator said. “But you should see far fewer around here, for now.”

His “for now” and “far fewer” hung in the air long after he’d left. I looked up at the planking of our handsome cathedral ceiling. We had tried so hard to make ourselves feel safe against big things, and now the world had been invaded by little things. The fact that the exterminator had already come and therefore supposedly solved the problem only made me feel worse, because the problem didn’t feel solved, not at all. All he’d promised us was a reduction, not an annihilation, and it was an annihilation I was after. A completion. And because there was no completion, I heard hisses everywhere in that house, and then I started hearing hisses in my sleep and then the hisses followed me to the city, where I swore I saw a wasp launch off the screen of my computer and swerve through the open window behind it. The world, my world, was all of a sudden abuzz in a most unfortunate way, so that even my clothing felt itchy, suspicious, my senses heightened, as though I had magnifying lenses pressed against my eyes, and I could see. It was as though for the first time I could see all the tiny terrors in the world; I could see the microbes in the packaged chicken parts in the frozen foods section of the supermarket; I could see the intricacy of a web in the corner of a living room and the scum on the furred feet of a blue-black fly. When I peered in places I normally would never look—under our stove, behind our dishwasher, peeling back bark outside, I saw evidence everywhere of a miniature vibrant violent world, a world where black widows liquefied their prey and rats left tracks of scat. I could see my own skin, how spotted and wrong it was, how what appeared as tanned flesh was really, upon closer inspection, a tapestry of swarming cells.

Wasps live in cells and, though they are formally classified as predators who paralyze their prey with venom, they are far more complex than their category allows. I began to read about them as though by understanding them I could somehow get rid of them, or perhaps redeem them, because, I learned, their venom is used for many medicinal purposes; a paralytic, it is a component of most anesthetics, and in its distilled form it is used to make drugs for multiple sclerosis and muscular dystrophy; it is even a component of the drug fluoxetine, more commonly called Prozac, and what are we to make of that? Dozens upon dozens upon dozens of us daily drink down wasp and give it credit for our pleasure. I read the research. I drank it down. And yet even so I could not come to see those insects as anything but a threat: a creature with sticky wings and serrated legs, its belly segmented into three separate sections, its carcass armored like a car. It sings a rusty sound and builds its bloated nest from mud. Where is the sweetness here? Can we even classify a wasp, or for that matter any insect, as an actual animal? Something in me resists the idea, if only because I consider myself an animal lover even as I dislike the creepy crawlies who are, like it or not, a part of the kingdom, at least according to Linnaeus, who spent his life categorizing the planet’s living things.

Why is it that we are instinctively disgusted by most insects while we find those higher up the food chain so appealing they can elicit in us the cooing language of affection, and also love? Biologists call the mewing and high pitched voices almost all human beings use in the presence of babies and other furry things—be they human or not—the “cute response.” Ethologist Konrad Lorenz explains that the cute response is elicited in almost all people regardless of culture when in the presence of an animal that has certain physical characteristics: a head bigger than its body, short chubby limbs, and large eyes. Given that wasps of any age possess none of these features, one could say that we as a species are preprogrammed to either overlook or outright reject them, regardless of the fact that we rely on the medicinal properties of their venom, and that they are, in other ways, essential to the ecosystem that sustains us all. Given these facts I, for one, would like to overcome my revulsion with rationality, but I can’t. I propose that, just as we humans have a “cute response” we also have a “revulsion response,” and that it is hard-wired into us and, more problematically, that, were we to look deep down into its dark center, we would find in it the wellspring of human hatreds, the place from which prejudice springs and is sustained, a stinger, of sorts, filled with human venom for which there is no good use.

I remember once, when I had cancer (and I don’t anymore) I asked my surgeon if I could see my cells on the slide. She took me to a large, cool room. It was dark inside, the light coming from the tiny bulbs beneath each separate microscope lined up along long counters. Test tubes hung in racks, some filled with blood, others with serum, still others with a liquid I could not identify but that looked to me lipidinous, like fat. On the wall hung an illustrated poster of a man, his skin peeled back in flaps to reveal rib and heart, knee and flank. Next to him, hung on a hook, was an actual skeleton, the screw in the skull that had cracks like continents. “Here,” my doctor said, pulling a microscope forward and swiveling a knob. I lowered my head to the oval eyepiece and saw, at first, just a staticky skirmish that looked like insects running every which way, and I recoiled and, as I did so, dropped into a place of despair, but, as the doctor adjusted the knob, the view slowly changed. My cells slowed down, turned around, and then blossomed before me, stained in blues, pinks and purples. There was my cancer and for that moment—a second spliced—it was not ugly, and its colorful clusters allowed me to make of it a metaphor, a living link, my cells massed like hydrangea, which I had at home, in full flower, my load now lightened even as I still had fear, and fear, and fear.