Killed a spider in the bath last night. Flicked on the bright white lights to piss and saw her over my shoulder in the mirror. Didn’t have my glasses on but the dark smudge in my periphery against the cream color shower wall was enough to trip the sensors. Didn’t think. Sorry girl. Circle of life.
It’s not fair. By all rights my blindness should have made me a dead evolutionary end long before I bumbled into this perfect specimen of natural selection. This elite predator lovingly honed by uncountable epochs, fast, cunning, patient, terrifyingly fecund, dazzling and starry-eyed. Didn’t matter. Snuffed out by a half-crippled nearsighted nerd. 300 million years of wondrous gripping setae defeated instantly by the slipperiness of cheap bathtub acrylic invented by some other nerd. Only one of those nerds is rich. Life’s not fair.
She was big, too. Altogether with legs, bigger than a half dollar. Those hefty silver discs we used to thrill to find as children, hold them in our tiny palm like some lost currency of giants. Or maybe not—maybe my nocturnal memory wants her bigger, hairier. Shelob devourer of children playing her unwitting role in my little insomniac drama.
Big enough for the paranoia to kick in. You know. Lying awake in bed, every darkish spot or slight rustle a hundred more of them. Maman died today. Now they want revenge. Twenty more years of bad luck. You think your luck can’t get worse but don’t tempt Athena, it always can.
Still thinking about it in the morning. Feels like some kind of betrayal. A revocation of a certain unspoken arrangement. She leaves me alone during the day, I leave her alone at night. She handles the mosquitoes and I pretend there aren’t fifty thousand of her kin in the walls. Win-win. I’m not David and I have no holy mission but she did her best to protect her modest ward. In those magical quiet hours between 2 and 5 AM the harried mother to millions could finally let down her hair. Enjoy a drink and ponder the many heroic deeds of her race. That’s the deal she carried like a passport deep in her pulsing haemolymph, thick and cold and blue.
Broke my end of the bargain. Changed my routine. Keep waking up around 3, 3:30, 4. Can’t get back to sleep. My mouth dry and my heart pounding. Never used to do that. Never used to remember my nightmares either, though I always knew they’d come around by the tightness in my chest, the patina of dread only slowly sloughing off in thin sharp flecks like rust. Now I do. Images and afterimages flashing in the dim moonlit premorning. The images fade but not the memories of the images, which are formed in the waking not the sleeping mind.
As a kid I was terrified of spiders but these days I wonder if I really was or if it was just something I was supposed to be. If it was my congenital terror searching for incarnate form and lighting upon one readymade and blameless. A scapegoat sought in the hazy borderlands between the natural and the mythological. Natural enough to be concrete fact, mythological enough to house all the inchoate fears of childhood. Claustrophobia, disintegration, abandonment, curses from jealous gods. The kinds of blind fears that expand to fill the space and shape of the vessel provided them. Maybe I just didn’t know yet how to fear what I was really afraid of. If you’re lucky you learn that later.
Now there’s only a vestigial twinge of fear, the rest affection. These diligent creatures laboring always alone. One more thing in a long list of things I got totally wrong. They aren’t the swarming hordes of my unjust nightmares, but rather melancholy solitaries. Artists, hunters, sentries, unblinking buddhas keeping watch in the unloved places of the world.
Summer evenings I watch one of them spin silk at the joinery where my wood porch railing meets vinyl siding. I think she must be an Agelenopsis of family Agelenidae, the funnel weaver—a regular grass spider, as my old gaffer might say. Sporting the dark stripes down her back and demonstrating the characteristic pouncing action of the genus. She waits in her hidey hole at the sheltered end of a sprawling, chaotic web. I sit and wait and watch her wait and watch her after long aching waiting triumphantly spin and hoist some hapless prey into place along her charnel menagerie. She stops retreating when I come home as if she could possibly recognize me. Maybe the way she recognizes the shadow of a high pine branch passing harmlessly across her face. Or maybe the way hunters recognize one another, by a tense and fluid negotiation of separate territory, the hunter in each recognizing its image in the other, conversing somehow, as though through some sightless cribellate vibration, in a common wordless lexicon of death.
I leave her web alone until it grows raggedy and strewn with dry shells of corpse and then some thundercloud bursts and washes it away and she begins it again, always again. Until the first freeze destroys her home forever, what she knows of forever. If in her heart she nurtures some complaint against this universe I never hear it.
Startling that beautiful creature in the bath at 3 AM. Witching hour. An accident, tragic and indecent, like a man coming home early and surprising his wife in flagrante. Not his fault exactly but then again he wasn’t supposed to be there.
Life is architected around these tacit agreements more than you realize. The more you don’t realize it the more true it is for you. A strange child, somehow accurately extrapolating from his romantic misinterpretation of the natural world what others learn by social osmosis. You could call it a sort of intersubjective homeostasis, the mutual unconscious finding of levels. You could call it a demarcation of territories. You could call it fate, you could call it luck. Whatever you call it, the myths all talk about disrupting it, finding it again, paying the cost.
“I didn’t agree to that”—How should the spider know? She’s had the night to herself for going on two years. That’s her whole life. Like if you woke up one day and gravity changed its routine. What does she know about your nightmares? Does she have nightmares? Not anymore. But if she did they looked something like you.
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Fable of Arachne, Diego Velázquez, 1657