Disquiet, Please!

by David Remnick

  Are you really certain that’s a shark in your bathtub? Dolphins and tuna also go for warm water, and hasty misidentification has caused many a panicked home bather to sheepishly call back the local Coast Guard to admit a false alarm. Rule of thumb: If it’s thrashing, it’s a shark. Petting it, or feeding it a bath toy or a sponge, will buy you at best ten seconds, so get out of the tub immediately. Now, here’s where some of those old wives’ tales about sharks come in handy. It is true that sharks hate soapy water, and the feeling of being toweled off does irritate the sensitive nerve endings in their skin. So, while you’re waiting for emergency help to come, toss as many bars of soap into the tub as you can while briskly rubbing around the beast’s gill area with a fluffy bath towel. Chances are that Jaws will beat a hasty retreat.

  An Australian couple who discovered that a shark had invited itself into the back seat of their car did exactly the wrong thing. They started driving at high speed and violently lurching from side to side, in an attempt to induce car sickness in their unwanted guest. This was a vain and unwise thing to do—sharks are immune to motion sickness. A shark in your car need not be fatal, though, if you follow a few simple directions: Turn the radio up as loud as it will go and start singing at the top of your lungs. Forget that you look, feel, and sound foolish. Keep it up, and you’ll soon overburden the shark’s ultrasensitive sonar hearing system and bring on a thumping migraine painful enough to take the starch out of a great white. He’ll soon close his eyes and probably slump down in his seat. That’s your cue to gently bring the car to a stop—remembering to roll up all windows as you do so—and vamoose.

  It’s a common myth that sharks fear nothing. In fact, they are terrified by any number of things. One is cats. Another is heights. Signaled by some primitive instinct that he is literally out of his element, the shark finding himself in an up elevator or on a penthouse terrace will lose all his fight. Remembering this will comfort you should you suddenly notice a shark sitting next to you on an airplane. You’ll probably even start to feel sorry for the poor limp creature groaning there beside you, oblivious of the food cart, of the in-flight movie, of you—of everything but his own misery.

  These tips can help mightily to even up the contest between man and shark, but they do not work in every instance. Nobody has ever mounted a successful defense against a shark-in-a-bed situation. Ditto for those caught with open cans of ham while picnicking. Yet, in all fairness, there is an upside to shark encounters. For example, did you know that there’s never been a single documented case of a shark attacking a Girl Scout troop without provocation? Or that you can set your clock by the sharks that show up for a burial at sea—and no, not just for the eats? (Mariners as far back as the fifteenth century knew that a shark will never bite an iron lung, a wheelchair, or any prosthetic device.) So be afraid. Be very afraid. Just don’t give in to hysteria; that’s exactly what they want you to do.

  2001

  ANDREW BARLOW

  ALL I REALLY NEED TO KNOW I LEARNED BY HAVING MY ARMS RIPPED OFF BY A POLAR BEAR

  FOR me, wisdom came not at the top of the graduate-school mountain nor buried in the Sunday-school sandpile. For me, wisdom arrived during a visit to the home of our trusted friend the polar bear. Actually, I suppose “trusted friend” is something of a misnomer, because last year I had my arms brutally ripped from my torso by a fifteen-hundred-pound Norwegian polar bear. How and why this happened is an interesting story. For now, though, let’s take a look at some fun lessons about our good friend Ursus maritimus, the polar bear. Here’s what I learned:

  —Share everything. You might be thinking, Really? Even with polar bears? Yes, share especially with polar bears. Actually, the word “share” does not exist in a polar bear’s vocabulary, which consists of only about three hundred words. Give everything you have to a polar bear and do not expect him to share it. It did not occur to the polar bear who took my arms from me to share them in any way afterward.

  —Polar bears are meticulous about personal cleanliness. A typical polar bear will feast for about twenty to thirty minutes, then leave to wash off in the ocean or an available pool of water. The polar bear who feasted on my arms did exactly this, leaving to scrub up in a nearby lake. Good hygiene is fundamental.

  —In nearly all instances where a human has been attacked by a polar bear, the animal has been undernourished or was provoked. In my case, the bear was plump but deranged. Consequently, my attacker bear was spared the execution that typically follows an assault. My proposal—that my polar bear have his arms ripped off by a larger polar bear—was rejected by the authorities. No lesson here, I guess.

  —The town of Churchill, Manitoba, is known as the “Polar Bear Capital of the World.” According to legend, when a bear ambled into the Royal Canadian Legion hall in Churchill, in 1894, the club steward shouted, “You’re not a member! Get out!” and the bear did. This story is almost certainly fictitious. During the first ten minutes that a polar bear was removing my arms from my body, I repeatedly shouted, “Stop!” “Get away from me!” and “Please—oh, my God, this polar bear is going to rip my arms off!” but the animal was unfazed. The lesson in this is that you can’t believe everything you hear.

  —Beware of blame-shifting. The authorities speculated that the nasty scene may have begun when I grabbed onto the polar bear’s fur. At first, I thought, Gee, maybe that’s right—I must have done something to get him so sore. But now I reject this suggestion. Why would I grab his fur?

  —Things change. As a child, I used to delight in early-morning “polar-bear swims” at my summer camp. Now I don’t even feel like swimming anymore, because I have no arms.

  —Summing up: 1. Do not run from a polar bear. 2. Do not fight back. 3. Don’t just stand there. Whatever you do, it will teach you a lesson.

  —Never judge a book by its cover. Polar bears hate this.

  —When a male polar bear and a human are face to face, there occurs a brief kind of magic: an intense, visceral connection between man and beast whose poignancy and import cannot be expressed in mere words. Then he rips your arms off.

  2002

  JACK HANDEY

  ANIMALS ALL AROUND US

  MOST people don’t realize there is an unseen, mysterious world all around us.

  No, I’m not talking about the world of invisible scary monsters. I am talking about the world of bizarre little animals that live alongside us right in our homes. They inhabit our clothing, our furniture, our piles of old rags, our pans of dripping rainwater—even our bodies themselves.

  Some of these creatures are so microscopic that you can barely even see them. Others are bigger, but you probably can’t see them without your glasses, if you wear them.

  We usually don’t even notice these animals, but they’re there. Take, for instance, the little creatures that are constantly flying around our heads all day. These, it turns out, are houseflies. They can live off the scraps of food that fall from our mouths while chewing. And they are able to reproduce right in the house, in dog droppings.

  Or consider an even smaller animal, which lives unnoticed among the hairs of our private regions. These are called crabs. No, don’t worry, they aren’t actual crabs. And they certainly aren’t large enough to eat, unless you could somehow get thousands of them. But they are with us, year after year.

  Have you ever noticed how old chili beans and ground-up pieces of potato chips will magically seem to move around on the living-room carpet? This is actually caused by ants. Ants? Don’t they live in caves or something? That’s what I used to think. If you look closely, though, you can see them almost everywhere.

  Some animals are masters of disguise. What you may think are raisins, stuck to your legs after hours of lying on the couch, are often what scientists call leeches. Where do they come from? Where don’t they come from is more like it. Most often, we pick them up wading through the basement.

  Some organisms even manage to get into our appliances and live there undisturbed. These are r
ats. Many times, the only clue to their presence is a zapping noise, some smoke, and a smell that can linger for weeks.

  Incredibly, some little animals are able to infiltrate the very liquids we drink. They are called yeast, and we consume them by the billions, hour after hour, every day.

  Although some of these creatures are tiny and unobtrusive, others are not. When you get up in the middle of the night for more bites of the chicken drumstick you left on the counter, you may have to fight a raccoon for it. One reason we rarely notice these furry interlopers is that they usually live in the basement or the attic and get into the kitchen through holes in the floor or the ceiling. Also, a lot of times when we fight them we’re drunk, and later we think we imagined it.

  You might suppose that at least when you climb into bed you would be free of the animal kingdom. But suppose again. There, too, they are watching us, crawling on us, waiting for the opportunity to bite. These are our cats, swarming over us throughout the night.

  Through millions of years of evolution, animals have adapted to thrive in every corner of our world, from our empty Cup-a-Soup containers to the dried-up branches and dusty ornaments of our Christmas trees. They inhabit the bristles of our toothbrushes, the bristles of our whiskers, and the bristles of our other areas.

  The temptation is to want to do something about them. But what? You can throw cats off the bed, but they just jump right back on. Virtually every kind of alcoholic beverage has yeast swimming in it. You can scrub the crabs off your body, but what are you going to do about your bedsheets, or your sweatpants? Wash them, too? You could drive yourself crazy.

  It’s true that some of these invaders can be harmful. One animal in particular can literally eat its way through the wood that holds the house together. This is the common beaver. He is attracted to the water overflowing from our basements, which he tries to dam up. Another harmful pest is the moth, which can eat holes in your clothing and fly in your mouth when you’re taking a nap.

  But many of the creatures living in our homes can be beneficial. Take drifters, for example. Sometimes they will go to the store to get you things (although they usually “lose” the change). Termites will often leave piles of sawdust around, which can be used to soak up stains. And mice entertain us by playing musical instruments. No, wait, I’m thinking of cartoon mice.

  Even if we could get rid of all these animals with a magic wand, would we want to? Yes, of course we would—why would you even ask that? Maybe the best answer, as with most things, is just to do nothing at all.

  However, that’s not what the health department thinks. They have hit me with a large fine and ordered me to “clean up” my property. Ultimately, though, we have to ask ourselves: Do we want to live in some soulless antiseptic world ruled by futuristic robots, where dishes are cleaned every day and sinks and toilets are an eerie, gleaming white? I don’t think that we do. I think people would rather live in homes where animals roam wild and free, in our hair, in our bags of things, and in our underpants.

  2003

  DAVID SEDARIS

  THE LIVING DEAD

  I WAS on the front porch, drowning a mouse in a bucket, when this van pulled up, which was strange. On an average day, a total of fifteen cars might pass the house, but no one ever stops. And this was late, three o’clock in the morning. The couple across the street are asleep by nine, and, from what I can tell, the people next door turn in an hour or so later. There are no street lamps in our village in Normandy, so when it’s dark it’s really dark. And when it’s quiet you can hear everything.

  “Did I tell you about the burglar who got stuck in the chimney?” That was the big story last summer. One time, it happened in the village at the bottom of the hill, the pretty one, bisected by a river, and another time it took place fifteen miles in the opposite direction. I heard the story from four people, and each time it happened in a different place.

  “So this burglar,” people said. “He tried the doors and windows, and when those wouldn’t open he climbed up onto the roof.”

  It was always a summer house, a cottage owned by English people whose names no one seemed to remember. The couple left in early September and returned nine months later to find a shoe in their fireplace. “Is this yours?” the wife asked her husband.

  The two had just arrived. There were beds to be made and closets to air out, so, between one thing and another, the shoe was forgotten. It was early June, chilly, and as night fell the husband decided to light a fire.

  At this point in the story, the tellers were beside themselves, their eyes aglow, as if reflecting the light of a campfire. “Do you honestly expect me to believe this?” I’d say. “I mean, really.”

  At the beginning of the summer, the local paper devoted three columns to a Camembert-eating contest. Competitors were pictured, hands behind their backs, their faces buried in sticky cheese. This on the front page. In an area so hard up for news, I think a death by starvation might command the headlines for, oh, about six years.

  “But wait,” I’m told. “There’s more!”

  As the room filled with smoke, the husband stuck a broom up the chimney. Something was blocking the flue, and he poked at it again and again, dislodging the now skeletal burglar, who fell feet first into the flames.

  There was always a pause here, a break between the story and the practical questions that would ultimately destroy it. “So who was this burglar?” I’d ask. “Did they identify his body?”

  He was a gypsy, a drifter, and, on two occasions, an Arab. No one remembered exactly where he was from, “but it’s true,” they said. “You can ask anyone,” by which they meant the neighbor who had told them, or the person they themselves had told five minutes earlier.

  I NEVER believed that a burglar starved to death in a chimney. I don’t believe that his skeleton dropped onto the hearth. But I do believe in spooks, especially when my boyfriend, Hugh, is away, and I’m left alone in the country. During the war, our house was occupied by Nazis. The former owner died in the bedroom, as did the owner before her, but it’s not their ghosts that I worry about. It’s silly, I know, but what frightens me is the possibility of zombies, former townspeople wandering about in pus-covered nightgowns. There’s a church graveyard a quarter of a mile away, and were its residents to lurch out the gate and take a left, ours would be the third house they would stumble upon. Lying in bed with all the lights on, I draw up contingency plans on the off-chance they might come a-callin’. The attic seems a wise hideout, but I’d have to secure the door, which would take time—time you do not have when zombies are steadily working their way through your windows.

  I used to lie awake for hours, but now, if Hugh’s gone for the night, I’ll just stay up and keep myself busy: writing letters, cleaning the oven, replacing missing buttons. I won’t put in a load of laundry, because the machine is too loud and would drown out other, more significant noises, namely the shuffling footsteps of the living dead.

  ON this particular night, the night that the van pulled up, I was in what serves as the combination kitchen–living room, trying to piece together a complex model of the Visible Man. The body was clear plastic, a shell for the organs, which ranged in color from bright red to a dull, liverish purple. We’d bought it as a birthday gift for a thirteen-year-old boy, the son of a friend, who pronounced it nul, meaning worthless, unacceptable. Last summer, he’d wanted to be a doctor, but over the next few months he seemed to have changed his mind, deciding instead that he might like to design shoes. I suggested that he at least keep the feet, but when he turned up his nose we gave him twenty euros and decided to keep the model for ourselves. I had just separated the digestive system when I heard a familiar noise coming from overhead, and dropped half the colon onto the floor.

  There’s a walnut tree in the side yard, and every year Hugh collects the fruit and lays it out on the attic floor to dry. Shortly thereafter the mice come in. I don’t know how they climb the stairs, but they do, and the first thing on their list is to tak
e Hugh’s walnuts. The nuts are much too big to be carried by mouth, so instead the mice roll them across the floor, pushing them toward the nests they build in the tight spaces between the walls and the eaves. Once there, they discover, the walnuts won’t fit, and, while I find this to be comic, Hugh thinks differently and sets the attic with traps I normally spring before the mice can get to them. Were they rats it would be different, but a couple of mice—“Come on,” I say. “What could be cuter?”

  Sometimes, when the rolling gets on my nerves, I’ll turn on the attic light and make like I’m coming up the stairs. This quiets them for a while, but on this night the trick didn’t work. The noise kept up, but sounded like something being dragged rather than rolled. A shingle? A heavy piece of toast? Again I turned on the attic light, and when the noise continued I went upstairs, and found a mouse caught in one of the traps that Hugh had set. The steel bar had come down on his back, and he was pushing himself in a tight circle, not in a death throe, but with a spirit of determination, an effort to work within this new set of boundaries. “I can live with this,” he seemed to be saying. “Really. Just give me a chance.”