Dancing Naked in the Mind Field (14 page)

The concept that human beings are capable of causing the planet to overheat or lose its ozone seems about as ridiculous as blaming the Magdalenian paintings for the last ice age. There is a notion that our emissions are causing the temperature of the planet to go up, even though the temperature is not going up. Even if the temperature were going up, we would be foolish to think we caused it. We could just as reasonably blame it on cows. In the nineteenth century the temperature went down. In this century it’s gone up only about half a degree. The trend over the last two centuries is down. Down is
not warmer. So if you like to worry, worry that we might be moving into a new ice age. We could be.

Would that be something we would want to stop? We didn’t cause the last ice ages and we didn’t cause them to go away. We benefited from them. We don’t cause thunderstorms and lightning either. We don’t cause the El Niño years anymore than we cause the other years. We don’t cause floods. We live on a planet that has many mysteries, including the patterns of its changing climate. We are the children of those changes, and we derive from those mysteries.

We accept the proclamations of scientists in their lab coats with the same faith once reserved for priests. We have asked them to commit the same atrocities that the priests did when they were in charge. We have forced this situation by requiring that they bring us relevant innovations. We have turned them into something almost as bad as lawyers. Something to toy with us and our strange needs. Scientists could be something to entertain us and invent nice things for us. They don’t have to be justifying their existence by scaring us out of our wits. Can’t they be comforting? It’s up to us, not them, because they depend on us for support. We have to arrange them in such a way that they and we benefit from the arrangement.

Hundreds of years after Boyle’s experiments, we still haven’t learned to separate matters of fact from our beliefs. We have accepted as true the belief that we are responsible for global warming and a growing hole in the ozone layer—without scientific evidence. We have faith in disaster. Scientists have a considerable financial stake in our continuing to believe that these problems threaten our lives and must be solved. They get paid for it. What do we get out of it? Is it a
feeling of comfort, of knowing that our lives are being protected?

Perhaps the best solution for our anxiety is to do exactly what our ancestors did. Build some churches in the Gothic style. Fill them with nice art. I like pictures in bright colors of stern-looking people with halos, but whatever works is okay. Bring artisans from Sweden to build pipe organs and sponsor composers from Germany, Poland, England, and New Orleans to write some hymns, castrate some young boys for the descant parts, and come every Sunday to sing together and pray for our souls. Keep the Freon. We’ll need the churches to be air-conditioned in the summer.

I
LEARNED WHAT
would happen if I put my hand on top of a red ant hill. I was curious to know how it felt. I knew that if I kept my hand very still, the ants wouldn’t react. Ants don’t bite just for the hell of it. I neglected to consider how I would go about getting them off my hand. I should have had a bucket of water nearby to put my hand into when I was through with my experiment. Ants will float when immersed. Instead, I started scraping them off. Every ant on my hand decided it was time to bite. When I got home that afternoon, my hand was painfully swollen. My mother’s advice: “Don’t play with ants, Kary.”

After that, I was more careful, but I never stopped playing with ants.

My brother Robert and I would put insects together in a mason jar to see what would happen. We found out that if you put a black widow spider and a hornet in an enclosed jar, they go at it right away, and the hornet wins. If there is no lid on the jar, the hornet flies away.

A praying mantis is a fascinating pet and easy to catch. It is fun to watch her creep up on a fly and eat it. The praying mantis is delicate and masterful and quick. The fly scarcely knows
what’s got him. The mantis starts with the head so as to enjoy the meal without distraction and ends with the wings. Probably the dry, scaly wings are the worst part. But maybe, considering the flourish with which she finishes them—stuffing them in her rotating mandibles like a Frenchman savoring the last of a good Cognac—I wonder whether the wings aren’t possibly the best part.

She then cleans her mouth parts with her legs, and her leg parts with her mouth. Very civil.

I’ve heard, but never observed, that a female mantis will do something similar to a male mantis whom she has lured to her side. She starts with the head. The decapitated male body, in spite of losing his head, still does what all male bodies will do if given the chance. Secure in the knowledge that she will lay fertile eggs, she finishes off the libidinal feast.

Once I gave a caged mantis a huge South Carolina moth. I opened the cage door when they started banging around against the cardboard. The moth flew, towing the mantis under its belly like a 747 taking the shuttle back to Cape Canaveral. The mantis swelled up like a balloon and looked like it might burst. It was eating the moth. I captured the moth again in one of its low swoops and pulled the mantis off. I put it back in the box, and the next day it was dead. Probably of frustration.

I
T WAS
1996, and I was having lunch with David Fisher. “What’s that black stuff on your elbow, Kary?”

I lowered my elbows. There were two black spots on my right elbow. Tar black. They looked like scabs, only they were too black and too round. I knew I hadn’t scraped myself.

“I don’t know.” I picked at my new body parts tentatively. They were still attached, and we were at a nice Italian restaurant in Berkeley where people don’t lift off scabs. We dropped the subject.

After lunch I drove north on 101 to Mendocino. I kept checking my right elbow. The skin felt tight. The blackness was getting darker and the roundness wasn’t turning elliptical or smeared. Something odd was going on.

That evening, the first scab broke loose and revealed a shallow pool about a centimeter wide filled to the brim with my white corpuscles. It didn’t look like a healing wound. The pool seemed to be seething with life, and my elbow was noticeably warm.

I checked out the
Merck Manual
, a reference book that no cabin should be without. Years ago I had been frightened by an exploding capillary in my eye. It had appeared as a pin-head of blood under the layer of eye skin called the conjunctival membrane and it had spread under the membrane across the white of my eye in the gruesome redness that only blood can express. The
Merck Manual
had calmed me down. The book said it happened once in a while and was not an indicator that it would happen again. The worst part was that it looked scary.

This time the
Merck
was not so comforting. I seemed to have been in the company of
Loxosceles reclusa
, the brown recluse spider. The manual impersonally advised that I was in for some serious shit.

I had seen brown recluse bites on people’s faces in medical books where the bites won and the faces lost. Thank God I only had two on my elbow. The black scab appears about twelve hours after the wound and falls off in another six. I
must have been attacked in La Jolla. I was 600 miles from there now. I went to sleep feeling safe. I didn’t know that the northern California branch of the
Loxosceles
family, in touch with their southern California brethren via my suitcase and Southwest Airlines, was waiting for me in my greenhouse/bedroom. I guess I smelled like spider pizza.

The Mendocino recluses had their way with me. By morning I had eight new spider bites. They call them bites, but they are really excavations. Spiders don’t have teeth and they don’t bite. They had worked the old wounds from La Jolla—drinking my fluids and shooting in a little more venom to improve the flow rate. Then they dutifully punched a few more holes. The new wounds developed quickly. Well-nourished spiders make lots of venom. The venom, gently injected through the fangs so as not to damage them, kept me from making an immune response to the skin bacteria that had been scraped into the hole. The bacteria have names like Staphylococcus and my body knows how to defend me against them, but not in the presence of brown recluse venom. Without my immune system the staph can live happily on my epidermal cells. And they can go deeper. It becomes a dermis party. Staph will turn my skin into mush: spiders need liquid food.

One of the new holes was on the left side of my nose almost in my eye. I was very worried about that one. The
Merck Manual
suggested that I use hydrogen peroxide on the wounds, but it offered no real good news. It suggested that surgery might be a good idea and that the knife should go deep. A shallow excision of the wound would simply result in another, deeper, still necrotizing wound. Necrotizing means dying flesh, an expanding hole making more pus.

Jesus, I thought, pondering the effects of deep scalpels. I took some Vicodin for the pain.

On the Internet you can find a description of the brown recluse from the Nebraska Institute of Agriculture, which says without qualification that “spiders attempt to bite humans only as a last resort when threatened, injured or trapped in clothing. They prefer to retreat rather than attack and will generally avoid contact with humans.”

Last resort? Threatened? I was asleep in my own bed.

The University of Kentucky on the Internet naively underestimates the evil that lurks in the spider heart. “The brown recluse roams at night seeking its prey. It is shy and will try to run from a threatening situation but will bite if cornered.”

The fuck it will. It doesn’t bite; it has no teeth. It scrapes with the tools on its front legs, and whether it’s shy or not is irrelevant. It takes you in your sleep. You’re not embarrassing it with personal questions.

It’s a mother spider that first gets you and she wants a hole in you that oozes and expands and doesn’t ever heal. The females have the most powerful venom, according to the experts from the University of Kentucky, College of Agriculture, Department of Entomology. She wants that hole because her babies need a place to feed. They can dip their ugly little heads into the pool of nutrients that you are exuding and suck your vital fluids through their sucking tubes, and they can live. Nobody’s threatening the spider. After making the hole, she moves away and lays her eggs. It’s elegant biotechnology from the point of view of the spider.

For the human, it’s a flagrant disrespect of personal sovereignty. It’s an unnecessary surgical procedure being undertaken
without permission of the patient or the next of kin. It’s a hideous manifestation of unbridled biodiversity, and it is perhaps only the tip of the iceberg in human-spider relations. It bodes poorly for the likelihood of any kind of planetary arachnid-human diplomatic summit.

Next morning, with Vicodin pulsing through my veins keeping me calm, I found an oxygen tank in my shop and fashioned a fitting that would deliver oxygen to the left side of my nose. I figured that if hydrogen peroxide would be good, pure oxygen at high pressure would be better, and maybe it would absorb deeper into the receding skin. Every hour while I was awake, I spent fifteen minutes with this tube tightly pressed to my nose. The lesion there didn’t enlarge like the rest, which were getting bigger every day. If I had owned the right sort of fittings, I would have put oxygen on all of them. I was practicing a form of triage.

The third day, it hurt to move, and I took Vicodin just to get up in the morning. The spiders were out of it by now because I had blasted the house with spider bombs. I slept better, but I was still stuck to the sheets in the morning. The wounds don’t die with the spiders.

Shelly Hendler is my physician and my good friend. When I need a doctor, I have Shelly. Even in the middle of the night. And I trust him. When I first described the spider bites, he wanted to know how I had concluded it was the brown recluse. I told him that the
Merck Manual
described the lesions precisely. He was convinced when I told him a day later that I had killed every insect in the house with a spray bomb and that there were several brown recluses among the bodies.

Shelly checked the medical books, some friends, and the
Internet. There seemed to be nothing good that you could do for the brown recluse’s bite, short of surgery. Keep it clean, put peroxide on it, hope it goes away. Don’t count on it. Call a surgeon.

Shelly diagnosed me over the phone. He was 600 miles away in San Diego. He said it sounded like the wounds were infected with bacteria and that I should take penicillin. I said, “Shelly, penicillin doesn’t work against toxins.”

“Well, it sounds like bacteria.”

“I’m sure bacteria are there feasting on the wound, but they aren’t the problem.” I was right, but also I was wrong. The problem was that my immune system couldn’t defend me against bacteria. The spiders had fixed that with their venom. Penicillin could have killed the bacteria directly without need of the immune system, but I wasn’t thinking clearly.

Shelly asked me if I needed more Vicodin.

“It hurts like shit.”

“I’ll call it in. You sure you won’t take penicillin?”

“No. I think it might weaken me.”

Shelly was unsettled.

I took Vicodin for the next eleven days. The wounds got worse. Every morning I would check them with a ruler, and they were growing. No sign of any healing.

The pain got worse, especially the one on my right elbow. The pictures over the Internet of people with brown recluse bites were disgusting. Some had warnings:
The material you are about to see is graphic and disturbing!
Holes in skin, pus dripping. I was scared but not scared enough to return to San Diego and get medical intervention. Vicodin in large doses interferes with pain and with judgment.