When You Are Engulfed in Flames

by David Sedaris

  “Gosh,” I said. “So it’s true! And what about India? That’s a place I’ve always wanted to visit.”

  “What do you think you’re going to see there?” Mr. Davis asked. “Poor people? Chaos? So much garbage you can’t hardly stand it?”

  When I told him that I was interested in the monkeys, he said that the country was lousy with them. “I was with my driver one day, and we passed by this tree that homed over two hundred of them. Baboons, I think they were, and I’ll always remember how they swarmed our car, banging on the doors and begging for peanuts.” A man with a cardboard sign approached, and Mr. Davis waved him away. “Another problem with India is the heat. The last time I was there, the temperature hit one hundred and fifty degrees, saw it on the thermometer with my own eyes. Had myself an appointment with some swamis, but come time to leave the hotel, I said, ‘That’s it. No meeting for me today.’ I’m telling you, it felt like I was burning alive.”

  I couldn’t have dreamt for a better in. “Speaking of burning alive, there was this retired man living in Vermont, see, and his home was overrun with mice . . .”

  When I had finished, Mr. Davis met my eyes in the rearview mirror. “Now, you,” he said, “are just a liar.”

  “No,” I told him. “The story is true. I read it in the newspaper.”

  “Newspaper or not, it’s a load of b.s., and I will tell you why: Isn’t no way that a mouse could cover all that distance without his flames going out. The wind would have snuffed them.”

  “Well, what about that girl in Vietnam?” I asked. “The one in the famous picture who’s just been hit with napalm or whatever and is running down the road with no clothes on? I don’t see the wind doing her any favors, and she just had skin, not flammable fur.”

  “Well, that was a dark period in our nation’s history,” Mr. Davis said.

  “But isn’t this a dark period?” I asked this question just as we entered the Holland Tunnel. The din of canned traffic made it impossible to talk, and so I sat back and tried to get a handle on my growing anger. Since when do politics affect a mammal’s ability to sustain a flame? That aside, who says a burning mouse can’t run a distance of twelve feet? What made this guy an authority? His fingernails? His jewelry?

  What really smarted was being called a liar, and so matter-of-factly. This from someone who’d reduced the Chinese to a bunch of people eating rice from bowls. Then there was the bit about the baboons. I’d heard of them attacking people for fruit, but doing it for peanuts seemed an idea he’d picked up from the circus. I didn’t believe for one moment that he was really at the World Trade Center on September 11, and as for the 150-degree heat, I’m pretty sure that at that temperature your head would just explode. All this, and I was the liar? Me?

  Leaving the tunnel was like being freed from a clogged drain. We were moving now, around a bend and up onto an elevated highway. Below us sat storage tanks resembling dirty aspirin, and as I wondered what they were used for, Mr. Davis pulled out his cell phone and proceeded to talk until we reached our exit. “That was my wife,” he said after hanging up, and I thought, Right. The woman you’re married to. I bet he’s really something.

  After New Jersey, I went to Connecticut, and then to Indiana. On and on for thirty-five days. I returned to my apartment in early May, and after closing the door behind me, I asked Hugh to go on the Internet and search for the world’s highest recorded temperature. He took a seat before his computer, and I stood at his side with my fingers crossed. Don’t be 150, don’t be 150, don’t be 150.

  Later that day, among my receipts, I found Mr. Davis’s business card. Someone needed to tell him that the hottest it’s ever been is 136, and so I wrote him a short note, adding that the record was set in Libya, not India, and in the year 1922. Before you were born, the subtext read. Before you could so casually call someone a liar.

  I thought I would send him the news clipping as well, and it was here that my triumph lost its luster. “Mouse gets revenge: sets home ablaze,” the headline read, and then I noticed the letters “AP,” and saw that while the story had been published in Vermont, it had actually taken place in New Mexico, which sort of ruined everything. Now, instead of a white, wood-frame house, I saw a kind of shack with cow skulls tacked to the outer walls. It then turned out that the homeowner had not fumigated, and that there was only one mouse, which he somehow caught alive, and threw onto a pile of leaves he’d started burning some time earlier. This would certainly qualify as thoughtless, but there was no moment when he looked at the coughing mice, running for their lives from the poisonous fumes. He did not hear the leaves crackling beneath their feet, or reach for his matches, thinking, Aha!

  How had I so misread this story, and why? Like a dog with a table scrap, had I simply wolfed it down too quickly, or do I believe, on some subconscious level, that eastern mice are inherently more sympathetic than their western cousins? Where did the fumigation business come from, and the idea that the man’s house was overrun? I recalled myself before the tour, sitting at my desk and lighting one cigarette right after the other, the way I do when time is running out. Garlands of smoke drifted into the next room and fouled the sinuses of our out-of-town guests, who’d arrived a few days earlier and were sleeping in our bed. The house was overrun, extermination was necessary. Had I somehow imposed my own life on the newspaper story?

  Despite my embroidery, the most important facts hold true: The mouse did run back indoors. His flames were not extinguished by the wind. The fire spread, the house was consumed, and these are certainly dark times, both for the burning, and those who would set them alight.

  April in Paris

  While watching TV one recent evening, I stumbled upon a nature program devoted to the subject of making nature programs. The cameraman’s job was to catch a bird of paradise in full display, so he dug himself a hole, covered it with branches, and sat inside it for three weeks. This was in New Guinea, where the people used to wear sexy loincloths, but now stand around in T-shirts that say “Cowboys Do It with Chaps” and “I Survived the 2002 IPC Corporate Challenge Weekend.” One villager might wear a pair of gym shorts and then add a fanny pack or a sun visor with the name of a riverboat casino stitched onto the brim. I suppose that these things came from a relief organization, either that or a cruise ship went down, and this was what washed up onshore.

  I’ll wager that quite a few sun visors found their way to Southeast Asia after the tsunami. One brutal news story after another, and it went on for weeks. The phone numbers of aid organizations would skitter across the bottom of the TV screen, and I recall thinking that if they wanted serious donations, they should have shown a puppy. Just one was all it would have taken. It could have been sleeping, its belly full of the malnourished children we’d seen on the previous night’s broadcast, but none of that would have mattered. People who had never before contributed to charity emptied their pockets when a cocker spaniel was shown standing on a rooftop after Hurricane Katrina. “What choice did I have?” they asked. “That poor little thing looked into the camera and penetrated my very soul.”

  The eyes of the stranded grandmother, I noted, were not half as piercing. There she was, clinging to a chimney with her bra strap showing, and all anyone did was wonder if she had a dog. “I’d hate to think there’s a Scottie in her house, maybe trapped on the first floor. What’s the number of that canine rescue agency?”

  Saying that this was everyone’s reaction is, of course, an exaggeration. There were cat people too, and those whose hearts went out to the abandoned reptiles. The sight of an iguana sailing down the street on top of a refrigerator sent a herpetologist friend over the edge. “She seems to be saying, ‘Where’s my master?’” he speculated. “Here it is, time for our daily cuddle, and I’m stuck on the SS Whirlpool!!!”

  I’ve often heard that anthropomorphizing an animal is the worst injustice you can do it. That said, I’m as guilty as anyone. In childhood stories, the snail grabs her purse and dashes out the door to put mon
ey in the meter. The rabbit cries when the blue jay makes fun of her buck teeth. The mouse loves his sister but not that way. And we think, They’re just like us!

  Certain nature shows only add to this misconception, but that, to me, is why they’re so addictive. Take Growing Up Camel, a program my friend Ronnie and I watched one evening. It was set in a small privately owned zoo somewhere in Massachusetts. The camel in question was named Patsy, and the narrator reminded us several times over the next fifty minutes that she had been born on Super Bowl Sunday. While still an infant — the football stadium probably not even cleared yet — she was taken from her mother. Now she was practically grown, and as the commercials neared, the narrator announced a reunion. “Coming up, the camels reconcile after their long separation.”

  In the next segment, the two were reintroduced, and the grumpy old mother chased her daughter around the pen. When the opportunity arose, she bit Patsy on the backside, and pretty hard, it seemed to me. This was the camels not getting along, and it wasn’t too terribly different from the way they acted when they did get along.

  When the next break approached, the narrator hooked us with “Coming up, a tragedy that changes Patsy’s life forever.”

  I’d have put my money on an amputated leg, but it turned out to be nothing that dramatic. What happened was that the mother got bone cancer and died. The veterinarian took it hard, but Patsy didn’t seem to care one way or the other. And why would she, really? All her mom ever did was hassle her and steal her food, so wasn’t she better off on her own?

  The zookeepers worried that if left all alone, Patsy would forget how to be a camel, and so they imported some company, a male named Josh, and his girlfriend, Josie, who were shipped in from Texas. The final shot was of the three of them, standing in the sunshine and serenely ignoring one another. “So that’s what became of the little camel who was born on Super Bowl Sunday,” Ronnie said.

  She turned on the light and looked me in the face. “Are you crying?” she asked, and I told her I had an ash in my eye.

  Growing Up Camel had its merits, but I think I prefer the more serious type of nature show, the kind that follows its subject through the wild. This could be a forest, a puddle, or a human intestinal tract, it makes no difference. Show me a tiger or a tapeworm, and I’ll watch with equal intensity. In these sorts of programs we see the creature’s world reduced to its basic components: food, safety, and reproduction. It’s a constant chain of desperation and heartache, the gist being that life is hard, and then it ends violently. I know I should watch these things with an air of detachment, but time and again I forget myself. The show will run its course, and afterward I’ll lie on the sofa, shattered by the death of a doda or a guib, one of those four-letter antelope-type things that’s forever turning up in my crossword puzzles.

  Apart from leaving me spent and depressed, such programs remind me that I am rarely, if ever, alone. If there’s not an insect killing time on the ceiling, there’s surely a mite staring out from the bath towel, or a parasite resting on the banks of my bloodstream. I’m reminded too that, however repellent, each of these creatures is fascinating, and worthy of a nature show.

  This was a lesson I learned a few summers back in Normandy. I was at my desk one afternoon, writing a letter, when I heard a faint buzzing sound, like a tiny car switching into a higher gear. Curious, I went to the window, and there, in a web, I saw what looked like an angry raisin. It was a trapped fly, and as I bent forward to get a closer look, a spider rushed forth and carried it screaming to a little woven encampment situated between the wall and the window casing. It was like watching someone you hate getting mugged: three seconds of hard-core violence, and when it was over you just wanted it to happen again.

  It’s hard to recall having no working knowledge of the Tegenaria duellica, but that’s what I was back then — a greenhorn with a third-rate field guide. All I knew was that this was a spider, a big one, the shape of an unshelled peanut. In color it ranged from russet to dark brown, the shades alternating to form a mottled pattern on the abdomen. I’d later learn that the Tegenaria can live for up to two years, and that this was an adult female. At that moment, though, standing at the window with my mouth hanging open, all I recognized was a profound sense of wonder.

  How had I spent so much time in that house and never realized what was going on around me? If the Tegenaria barked or went after my food, I might have picked up on them earlier, but as it was, they were as quiet and unobtrusive as Amish farmers. Outside of mating season, they pretty much stayed put, a far cry from the Carolina wolf spiders I grew up with. Those had been hunters rather than trappers. Big shaggy things the size of a baby’s hand, they roamed the basement of my parents’ house and evoked from my sisters the prolonged, spine-tingling screams called for in movies when the mummy invades the delicate lady’s dressing room. “Kill it!” they’d yell, and then I’d hear a half-dozen shoes hitting the linoleum, followed by a world atlas or maybe a piano stool — whatever was heavy and close at hand.

  I was put off by the wolf spiders as well but never thought that they were purposefully out to get me. For starters, they didn’t seem that organized. Then too, I figured they had their own lives to lead. This was an attitude I picked up from my father, who squashed nothing that was not directly related to him. “You girls are afraid of your own shadows,” he’d say, and no matter how big the thing was, he’d scoot it onto a newspaper and release it outside. Come bedtime I’d knock on my sisters’ door and predict that the spider was now crawling to the top of the house, where he’d take a short breather before heading down the chimney. “I read in the encyclopedia that this particular breed is known for its tracking ability, and that once it’s pegged its victims, almost nothing will stop it. Anyway, good night.”

  They’d have been horrified by the house in Normandy, as would most people, probably. Even before I joined the American Arachnological Society, the place looked haunted, cobwebs sagging like campaign bunting from the rafters and curtain rods. If one was in my way, I’d knock it down. But that all changed after I discovered that first Tegenaria — April, I called her. After writing her name on an index card and taping it to the wall, my interest spread to her neighbors. The window they lived in was like a tenement building, one household atop another, on either side of the frame. Above April was Marty, and then Curtis and Paula. Across the way were Linda, Russell, Big Chief Tommy, and a sexless little speck of a thing I decided to call Leslie. And this was just one window.

  Seeing as I’d already broken the number one rule of a good nature documentary — not to give names to your subjects — I went ahead and broke the next one, which was not to get involved in their lives. “Manipulating,” Hugh would call it, but, to my mind, that was a bit too mad-scientist. Manipulating is crossbreeding, or setting up death matches with centipedes. What I was doing was simply called feeding.

  No spider, or at least none that I’ve observed, wants anything to do with a dead insect, even a freshly dead one. Its food needs to be alive and struggling, and because our house was overrun, and I had some time on my hands, I decided to help out. In my opinion, the best place to catch flies is against a windowpane. Something about the glass seems to confuse them, and they get even dopier when you come at them with an open jar. Once one was in, I’d screw on the lid and act as though I were shaking a cocktail. The little body would slam against the sides, and as Hugh went progressively Gandhi on me, I’d remind him that these were pests, disease carriers who feasted upon the dead and then came indoors to dance on our silverware. “I mean, come on,” I said. “You can’t feel sorry for everything.”

  The Tegenaria build what I soon learned to call “horizontal sheet webs,” dense trampoline-like structures that are most often triangular and range in size from that of a folded handkerchief to that of a place mat. Once my prey was good and woozy, I’d unscrew the lid and tip the jar toward the waiting spider. The fly would drop, and, after lying still for a moment or two, it would begin to twitch
and rouse itself, a cartoon drunk coming to after a long night. “What the fuck . . . ?” I imagined it saying. Then it would notice the wings and foreheads of earlier victims. “I’ve got to get out of here.” A whisper of footsteps off in the distance, and just as the fly tasted futility, the monster was upon him.

  “. . . and cut!” I would yell.

  Watching this spectacle became addictive, and so, in turn, did catching flies. There were days when I’d throw a good three dozen of them to their deaths, this at the expense of whatever else I was supposed to be doing. As the spiders moved from healthy to obese, their feet tore holes in their webs. Running became a chore, and I think their legs started chafing. By this point there was no denying my emotional attachment. There were nights that first summer when I’d get out of bed at 3:00 a.m. and wander into my office with a flashlight. Everyone would be wide awake, but it was always April that I singled out. If I thought about her a hundred times a day, it seemed only fair that she thought about me as well. My name, my face: I didn’t expect these things to register, but in the way that a body feels the warmth of the sun, I fully imagined that she sensed my presence, and missed it when I was away.

  “That’s all right,” I’d tell her. “It’s only me.” Often I’d take out my magnifying glass and stare into the chaos that was her face.

  Most people would have found it grotesque, but when you’re in love nothing is so abstract or horrible that it can’t be thought of as cute. It slayed me that she had eight eyes, and that none of them seemed to do her any good. They were more like decoration, really, a splay of beads crowded atop her chelicerae. These were what she used to grip her prey, and if you looked at her the right way you could see them as a pair of enormous buck teeth. This made her appear goofy rather than scary, though I’d never have said so in her presence. For a Tegenaria, she was quite attractive, and I was glad to see that Principal Hodges shared my view. He was a freshly molted adult male who traveled from the other side of the room and spent six days inside her inner sanctum. Why Marty or Curtis or Big Chief Tommy didn’t mate with April is a mystery, and I put it on a list beside other nagging questions, such as “What was Jesus like as a teenager?” and “Why is it you never see a baby squirrel?”