In any case, a good rule with one’s own children is to communicate as little as possible, limiting oneself to simple precepts such as “Don’t say vulgar things—it’s easier to just do them.” Or “Don’t make up lies—you might accidentally tell the truth.” Or “Never say, ‘Look out, friend, it’s a hook’—it’s easier to find a new friend.”
My female companion had the bad habit of asking, “Do you love me, Viskovitz?”
To that question I replied with silence.
Because you’re never sure if that is even the question. If whoever is asking it is a walrus or a polyp, you can rule out love because of the context. But even if the speaker is a mother of your children, you’re better off not getting involved in a precise answer, because if whoever has coupled with you is someone who comes from another school, “love” for her surely means something different, like “scratch my swim bladder” or I don’t know what. Conversely, if she asks you to scratch her swim bladder, she may actually want a lot more from you, and you’re better off not assuming that responsibility.
Take for instance my first wife, Lara. She came from another atoll, and when I met her she didn’t even know what I meant if I said “sardine.” So I had to teach her everything, starting with concepts like “good” and “bad,” “fish” and “crustacean.” After which I proceeded to more recent idiomatic usages and to archaic expressions that retained a certain poetic value. One day after a year of marriage, just to make conversation, I tossed out, “There’s a certain guy in our school, Zucotic, who suffers from sea-sickness. What do you think of that?”
And she: “Yoga lessons? No, I don’t think they’d do you any good.”
Perplexed, I tried to change the subject, hazarding an innocuous “It’s a bit cool this evening, dear.”
And she: “Caviar? No, I’m against abortion.”
Then I understood that our whole love story had been a misunderstanding. At last I had an explanation for those many looks charged with hate, and others with bursts of love. And for that strange story of the grandfather who escaped from a sardine tin. I decided it would be better for us to separate, and to avoid further misunderstandings, I moved to a different ocean.
Then I got fished out and ended up in an aquarium. It was only there that things began to go better. It was there that I met my last wife, Ljuba, the most understanding of my female companions, the least ambiguous. At first we had our difficulties: her perfect beauty made me a little insecure, kept me in awe of her. Then, thanks to her patience, we overcame them. With time we worked out our perfect code of communication, made up of small gestures and long pauses.
I remember the day she opened her soul to me. I’d come up to her with a pirouette, as if to say, “I caress you with my mind. What deep enchantment binds me to you? I put my faith in your bewitching scales, I find in your tuna profile the secret of infinite sweetness.” She answered me with a languid and imperceptible movement of her tail, which could mean many things, but which I interpreted as “Never hold back, my love. My existence doesn’t enjoy peace but rather sexual ravening and freedom from all conventions.” So then I did something rare for a fish—I kissed her.
From that day, from that moment when I understood she was a cardboard cutout, our relationship became more serene, communication less burdensome and the sex fantastic.
YOU’RE A PRICKLY FELLOW, VISKOVITZ
Being born is never a pleasant experience, but for us it was a particularly ugly fifteen minutes. After she gave birth to us, Mama looked at us with disgust. Her first words to us were “Accursed monsters! Works of Satan! Vile creatures!” Then, lifting her claws to heaven, “Curse, Oh Higher Power, this unworthy offspring, and curse their seed! Cleanse your creation of their obscenity! May the Evil One take pity on them!”
Not exactly the sort of encouragement you expect from a mother. From a mom you expect some sort of arachnid affection, you expect her to carry you piggyback the way moms usually do with their little scorpions. You expect an upbringing. You don’t expect her to spit on you and disappear forever in a cloud of sand, leaving you to fry your postabdomen on the desert floor. She was so lacking in family feeling that she hadn’t even given us first names. Only last names: Viskovitz, Zucotic, Petrovic and Lopez.
It’s no wonder we didn’t really consider ourselves brothers and that we soon decided to cast our lots separately. We pointed our pincers in opposite directions. Petrovic went north, Lopez south, and Zucotic to the east. I, Viskovitz, followed the path of the sun and set off to win the west.
All the while I was asking myself, “How will I make it in a competitive place like the world without a family or an education?”
Mom had given birth to us right in the middle of the Mojave Desert, one of the hottest and most arid climates in North America. The surface temperature was over 140 degrees Fahrenheit, and the relative humidity was near zero. A place where you couldn’t afford to shed tears.
Suddenly the tarsal hairs of my eight legs felt the vibrations of a gigantic animal who was moving toward me, one who in all likelihood wanted my death.
A shame it’s over already, I said to myself, a shame that my birth was nothing but a waste of time. We arachnids aren’t whiners the way mammals are, but my first impulse was to find the abdomen of a nonexistent mom and whimper. Then I tried to hightail it out of there. But something wasn’t working. My legs, instead of following the signals of my cerebral ganglia, were carrying my sorry ass the wrong way, just where I didn’t want to go—toward suicide. Was it possible I was that clumsy? I popped up right under the nose of the monster, and there I watched in astonishment as my little body performed a series of lightning-fast moves over which I had no control. In the end, the beetle was stretched out on the ground, paralyzed with venom, my tail planted in his skull. He was still moving his antennae, but I’d already begun to suck up his lymph and eat his appendages.
So who was I? The answer is obvious: a predator, a savage beast programmed to kill. With a shudder of terror I realized I had no power over the firing of my reflexes, over those savage instincts. Was I a monster?
Two days later, while I was still stripping the flesh from my prey, I was visited by another scorpion, a mean hombre at least two inches long with a cocksure attitude.
He hissed, “I don’t cotton to your hunting in my territory, snot-nose. Let loose of that-there beetle and vamoose.”
In those two days I’d grown a lot, but not enough to get sassy with someone like that. It was one of those situations where you ought to put your tail between your legs and lower your claws.
I was about to say, “Excuse me, sir, I was just born a little while ago. I didn’t know this was your territory. I beg your pardon.” But the voice that came out of my spines actually sounded like this: “I don’t like the way you’re talking to me, stranger. Let’s see if your tail is as fast as your mouth.” Once again my body was disobeying me and I saw myself going forward in fighting position, my claws swinging and my tail cocked. With my lateral ocelli I saw a group of termites gather around us to watch the duel. What could I do? Nothing. Nothing but stand there watching myself like those peons, hoping my instincts knew how to do their job. My adversary made the first move, but his tail was still in midair when mine was injecting its poison.
“You’ll go far, kid,” the loser said with his last breath. “What do folks call you?”
“The name is Viskovitz,” I breathed. I left the carcass to the scavengers, wiped off my tail and instinctively cut a notch in its first segment. “God Almighty, Viskovitz,” I said. “Good God Almighty.”
That duel was the first in a long series. Each time a scorpion came along who was too big for his britches, calling himself boss of the territory that I was passing through, then each time my tail made it come out the other way. This useless bloodshed wouldn’t have been necessary if I’d been a stay-at-home, but I had itchy feet and couldn’t help going wherever they carried me. It got to be so no one dared to cross my path. One day I noticed thi
s two-clawed hombre keeping his distance. I heard him say to his kid, “Look, son. There goes Viskovitz—the fastest tail in the west.”
The desert folks began to come to me to right wrongs and break up fights, and there were quite a few who would pay any price in prey or territory to get on my good side. What I wanted most of all was to put my tail on the side of justice. So, when the good old Earp brothers asked me to help them protect their little snot-rag of land from the designs of the high and mighty Ewing boys, I was glad to take their side. That set-to got to be kind of famous. After I took care of the Ewings’ hired killers, one after the other, I faced off with the Ewings themselves near Boot Hill. I got rid of all four of them at one go. Just one shot with both my claws, my tail and my mandibles. If it had ended up that way, it would’ve been something to be proud of. But when the Earp brothers, all fired up on account of winning, came to thank me . . . I took them out, too. All of them in one shot, with both my claws, my tail and my mandibles.
It tore my heart out to watch them die. One of them said to me, “You can’t do a thing about it, scorpio. It’s just the way you are. You’re a crude life form, a Paruroctonus mesaensis. You get to go on living on account of the speed of your killer reflexes. You wouldn’t be so fast if you could think about what you’re doing. All it takes is a nothing—a vibration in the critical zone around you—and zak! Your blind reflexes just lash out. It’s the madness of this ecosystem that creates an uncontrollable and stupid machine like you, Viskovitz.”
That was pretty much the truth of it. I was a stranger in my own body, helpless before the automatism of my primitive nervous system. I shed a tear and cursed my fate. It came to me at last that the one good thing I could do for folks was to keep far away. That was why the Good Lord had put me in the desert—so I’d do the least harm to His creatures.
But pretty soon I reached sexual maturity and my feet got to taking me where there was the highest concentration of female pheromones. One day I came across a whole bunch of them coming from a real pretty pink scorpion called Lara. She had a nice curvy abdomen and a cute little pear-shaped telson. She came up to me, all skittish. She wanted to cozy up to me. “Don’t be afraid, Visko,” she simpered. “Sexual pheromones inhibit the predatory reflex.”
So I went on up till I was just about touching her. For the first time a living being was right there in my critical zone and kept on living. For the first time I felt the breath of another arachnid, the heat of her metabolism. It was a miracle; my killer instincts had been tamed by love and beauty. I felt the need to communicate to her all the throbbing of my soul, all the tenderness of my feelings, but the only thing I managed to express was a rough and all too short discharge of my copulatory reflexes. Which missed the target.
“Sorry,” I mumbled. “I guess I’m not as good at this stuff as with my tail.”
“These things happen. We scorpions are rather crude arthropods. You’ll see, it’ll get better with time.”
“With time? And what’ll happen if the sexual attraction falls off? The killer instinct will come back.”
“It won’t fall off. You’ll see. And I don’t believe this killer instinct is something that can’t be cured. I want to live with you, Visko, raise your children and grow old beside you.”
For a moment I saw my life in this new light. I would be a responsible head of a family, I’d keep my tail under control and live in harmony with the community. Sundays I’d go to church and not kill anyone during the sermon, and God would bless me.
“Okay, Lara. Let’s do it. Lara?” I thought she’d fallen asleep. Only later did I realize she had my stinger planted in her skull. Our relationship hadn’t stood the test of time.
Figuring it was the proper thing to do, I carried her body to her family. In my desert vocabulary I tried to find some words of condolence and apology, but all I managed to do was massacre her parents and rape her sister. I really wasn’t made for social life.
That episode was only the first disappointment in a wretched emotional life marked by the failure of every attempt at building a stable affectionate relationship, a family. Every time the script was the same. There always came that day when I’d come home from hunting and find my darlings massacred by some low-down varmint. Then I would swear vengeance on their tomb and set out on the trail of the killers. But every time those tracks came around in a circle. They led to me. I was the low-down varmint, the brutal executioner. Facing the evidence of my crimes, I raised my tail over my own head. In vain. The word “suicide” wasn’t in my genetic vocabulary. My killer reflexes mocked me. Who could put an end to those horrors and render justice?
We scorpions are at the top of the food chain, so I couldn’t hope to be killed by a predator. Only a tail faster than mine could punish me for my sins. Fortunately, because of my crimes—the rapes and murders I continued to commit—there was a price on my head. Bounty hunters began to show up. The best tails in the territory got together in bands of vigilantes and set out after me. Day after day, as I was splitting their skulls, I kept on hoping that someone with the right stuff would step up. Maybe one of my brothers. Or maybe that father I’d never known—the one who’d raped my mother and started this curse.
But one day I saw a very different figure appear on the horizon. She was black as poison, fiery as hate, beautiful as death. She came down from the dune, silent as a mirage, slithering like a kootch dancer. Swinging her tarsi and flexing her chitinous plates like a queen of the desert, she advanced with the malice of a carnivorous phantom. She stopped five lengths from me. She rested the spines of her pedipalps on her tarsi and leveled four of her lobster eyes at me.
“Don’t kid yourself,” she hissed. “I’m here to kill you.”
Her scent put me in a daze and disarmed every one of my defensive reflexes. Her bewitching spell paralyzed me like the poison that rivets the prey before the coup de grâce. I had finally found what I was looking for: my defeat. The moment had come to welcome the end with gratitude. And yet in that moment my will to live had never been stronger. In those instants as never before my existence had meaning. And then there was this: what use would my death be if this diabolical temptress lived on, this exterminating machine even more murderous than I?
That thought gave me the rage I needed to cock my tail and get into my fighting stance.
We stayed still, staring at each other with cold eyes that were devoid of all consciousness, our bodies entirely given over to the one power they knew—the law of the tail, the law of the West. There followed a long silence, broken only by the scuttling feet of spiders, mites and other insects who gathered in a circle to watch that ritual as old as the desert. The whistling of the wind was sinister, like a dejuello, a song of death.
Then there was the vibration that our killer reflexes were waiting for.
Our bodies hurtled against each other and . . . in a state of amazement we watched them while they caressed each other, while they entwined in a tender and explosive embrace.
Afterward it was the huntress who was more embarrassed.
“I’ve never been so humiliated, this has never happened to me . . . I hate you, Viskovitz.”
“And I don’t like you, either. But you can call me Visko.”
“I . . . I am Ljuba,” she whispered.
In the hours, the days, that followed, we repeated this duel over and over, always with the same result. A tie. The winner was going to be whoever got tired of the other first. Ljuba was convinced it would happen to her, and she kept on jumping up against me to prove it—to the point of making me rather tired of her, and I ended up hitting her with my tail but with so little energy it seemed a caress. It went on like this for weeks until one day I said to her, “Ljuba, by now it’s clear that we have a crude form of passion for each other and that we don’t really want to see each other dead. So it would be better for both of us to separate before someone really gets hurt.”
“I think you’re right. But what about the babies?”
“Bab
ies? We’d be better off killing them as soon as they’re born.”
Ljuba gave birth to a little girl as black and mean as her and a little boy with a lively tail who looked just like me. It might have been that resemblance, or something to do with their scent, but I just couldn’t bring myself to come down on them with my tail. Each time I went to kill them, a discharge of involuntary reflexes made me carry them piggyback, sing them ballads and worry about their education.
Every day at dawn, as I watched Ljuba tuck the babies into the sand to preserve their moisture, I felt a horror. The first time they began to whimper, we would probably kill them. And if we ever disappointed them, they would kill us. Sooner or later somebody would lose patience.
Every evening I came home with my heart in my throat, expecting the worst. Other times I surprised myself by wishing for it, praying for the catastrophe.
But day after day, month after month, life went on peacefully. The babies went on growing up healthy, slaughtering their schoolmates. Ljuba and I went on adoring each other, massacring the next-door neighbors. Everything went on in perfect harmony, and there was no way to escape this intolerable, sinister happiness.
YOU’VE MADE A BAD NAME FOR YOURSELF, VISKOVITZ
It’s not an advantage to be named Viskovitz when the little life has to offer is handed out in alphabetical order. In our anthill that was the way they nourished us larvae. The only one worse off than me was Zucotic.
In return for giving us nectar, the nannies wanted our sugary fluid. Relationships were an exchange of secretions, not of affection. Because of this malnutrition and disillusion, my organs were atrophying. When I tried easing my hunger pangs by sucking my own exudations, day by day I found them more acid and bitter.
You're an Animal, Viskovitz Page 6