The $60,000 Dog: My Life With Animals

by Lauren Slater

  Benjamin arrived about an hour later, and that night, when the kids were asleep, I told him about the infestation, and he, after mulling over it for a moment or so, told me it was probably a one-time occurrence. “How can you be so sure?” I asked, and he explained his surety as he often does, by invoking some statistical principle, the specifics of which eluded me but the gist of which did not. Statistics, I have often found, are for the optimist; those who invoke its rules tend to believe the universe is an orderly, predictable place. I barely passed my statistics courses in graduate school, in part because I’m a numbskull when it comes to math but in part because I’m philosophically disinclined to believe in a universe all organized like some linen closet. My universe is full of wacky objects and cackling midgets and mules with wings. In my universe, nothing is predictable but anything is possible, which is why I was not in fact surprised to find, the following weekend when we arrived back at the house, a whole new crop of dead and dying wasps, hundreds upon hundreds of them in piles. And this time the hissing mounds and drifts were not only in the master bedroom, but in the two other bedrooms as well. While Ben kept the kids occupied outside I once again Hoovered all the rooms, slapping the sluggish live ones with a rolled magazine as I went. It had been an unseasonably warm September and I sweated as I worked, then stopped, stood straight, my hand on my lower back. Through the window of the kids’ room I could see the huge bluish mass of Mount Wachusett, its rocky top ringed by coniferous trees, and then further down the slope the trees all turning, and as I watched, and rested, and watched, in through the open window flew a plain pale moth. I’ve never minded moths and minded them less when compared to wasps. The moth headed straight up for the ceiling light and then settled on the fixture, warming its thorax. I looked away, back towards the mountain now painted with a pink streak, and when I looked up at the light again, the moth was pinned in place by a plump wasp straddling it, holding its wings down while slowly pumping its jointed thorax full of venom. I watched the moth struggle to get free and I saw its struggle slow as what was probably a paralyzing venom went to work, at which point the wasp removed its stinger and began to masticate his meal, the moth fully alive but unable to move. The wings broke into pieces and fell to the floor in flakes of dim glitter.

  That night, I found a dying wasp in one of the kid’s bed sheets. I crushed it hard and angry between two books and did away with the carcass before either child could see, and then I checked their beds thoroughly before they got in. But when it was time for me to go to bed I didn’t want to, and no matter how many times Ben and I shook out our sheets I was still convinced that there was a wasp hiding somewhere in there. “I hate wasps,” I said to Ben, and I heard a hiss in my own voice, a hiss somehow similar to theirs, which made me hate them all the more. I slept on the couch and the next day called an exterminator.

  “When you cathedraled your ceilings,” he said, “you removed the barrier between the second story and the attic. And there have probably been wasps overwintering in your attic for years, but when you removed the barrier, well …”

  I asked the exterminator why so many of the wasps were dead or dying when we found them, and he said, “Trapped. That’s why you’ve got so many on your sills, at your windows. They’re trying to get out. They come in for the warmth and then can’t find their way out.”

  “Can you take care of it?” I ask.

  “What you really need to do,” the exterminator said, “is seal every one of these cracks in your cathedraling, maybe put up seamless sheets of sheetrock instead of these wooden planks with spaces between them. In the meantime,” he said, “I can spray.”

  So the exterminator sprayed. He carried his poison in a backpack and he walked around our house pumping the trigger, spraying here and there, high and low, little lacy arcs giving glisten to the creases and the corners of the house, the odor so slight one could barely detect it, a smell that stung the back of the throat, just barely; and then he was done.

  “That’s it?” I said.

  The exterminator looked at me quizzically. “I did the entire house,” he said. “I can come back in six months.”

  “But aren’t you going to do outside the house too?” I asked.

  The exterminator looked out one of our windows. It happened to be the large picture window overlooking our thirty-two acres of fields and woods, the mountain looming blue behind it. We could see our pond, with a heron floating, so still he looked like carved clay.

  “How far do you want me to go?” the exterminator asked. He gestured with his hand toward the acreage. “I can’t very well spray all your land. And even if I could,” he said, “I’m not sure the benefits would outweigh, you know, like what they say … the risks.”

  “Of course,” I said, and laughed, but inside I was not laughing. I kept seeing that pale moth, the pruning shear mouth, how the wasp had feasted on the juice of its victim. But the exterminator raised a good point. How far would I go to feel safe? Who, or what, would I dispose of in the process?

  “I’m not saying you won’t see any more wasps,” the exterminator said. “But you should see far fewer around here, for now.”

  His “for now” and “far fewer” hung in the air long after he’d left. I looked up at the planking of our handsome cathedral ceiling. We had tried so hard to make ourselves feel safe against big things, and now the world had been invaded by little things. The fact that the exterminator had already come and therefore supposedly solved the problem only made me feel worse, because the problem didn’t feel solved, not at all. All he’d promised us was a reduction, not an annihilation, and it was an annihilation I was after. A completion. And because there was no completion, I heard hisses everywhere in that house, and then I started hearing hisses in my sleep and then the hisses followed me to the city, where I swore I saw a wasp launch off the screen of my computer and swerve through the open window behind it. The world, my world, was all of a sudden abuzz in a most unfortunate way, so that even my clothing felt itchy, suspicious, my senses heightened, as though I had magnifying lenses pressed against my eyes, and I could see. It was as though for the first time I could see all the tiny terrors in the world; I could see the microbes in the packaged chicken parts in the frozen foods section of the supermarket; I could see the intricacy of a web in the corner of a living room and the scum on the furred feet of a blue-black fly. When I peered in places I normally would never look—under our stove, behind our dishwasher, peeling back bark outside, I saw evidence everywhere of a miniature vibrant violent world, a world where black widows liquefied their prey and rats left tracks of scat. I could see my own skin, how spotted and wrong it was, how what appeared as tanned flesh was really, upon closer inspection, a tapestry of swarming cells.

  Wasps live in cells and, though they are formally classified as predators who paralyze their prey with venom, they are far more complex than their category allows. I began to read about them as though by understanding them I could somehow get rid of them, or perhaps redeem them, because, I learned, their venom is used for many medicinal purposes; a paralytic, it is a component of most anesthetics, and in its distilled form it is used to make drugs for multiple sclerosis and muscular dystrophy; it is even a component of the drug fluoxetine, more commonly called Prozac, and what are we to make of that? Dozens upon dozens upon dozens of us daily drink down wasp and give it credit for our pleasure. I read the research. I drank it down. And yet even so I could not come to see those insects as anything but a threat: a creature with sticky wings and serrated legs, its belly segmented into three separate sections, its carcass armored like a car. It sings a rusty sound and builds its bloated nest from mud. Where is the sweetness here? Can we even classify a wasp, or for that matter any insect, as an actual animal? Something in me resists the idea, if only because I consider myself an animal lover even as I dislike the creepy crawlies who are, like it or not, a part of the kingdom, at least according to Linnaeus, who spent his life categorizing the planet’s living things.

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nbsp; Why is it that we are instinctively disgusted by most insects while we find those higher up the food chain so appealing they can elicit in us the cooing language of affection, and also love? Biologists call the mewing and high pitched voices almost all human beings use in the presence of babies and other furry things—be they human or not—the “cute response.” Ethologist Konrad Lorenz explains that the cute response is elicited in almost all people regardless of culture when in the presence of an animal that has certain physical characteristics: a head bigger than its body, short chubby limbs, and large eyes. Given that wasps of any age possess none of these features, one could say that we as a species are preprogrammed to either overlook or outright reject them, regardless of the fact that we rely on the medicinal properties of their venom, and that they are, in other ways, essential to the ecosystem that sustains us all. Given these facts I, for one, would like to overcome my revulsion with rationality, but I can’t. I propose that, just as we humans have a “cute response” we also have a “revulsion response,” and that it is hard-wired into us and, more problematically, that, were we to look deep down into its dark center, we would find in it the wellspring of human hatreds, the place from which prejudice springs and is sustained, a stinger, of sorts, filled with human venom for which there is no good use.

  I remember once, when I had cancer (and I don’t anymore) I asked my surgeon if I could see my cells on the slide. She took me to a large, cool room. It was dark inside, the light coming from the tiny bulbs beneath each separate microscope lined up along long counters. Test tubes hung in racks, some filled with blood, others with serum, still others with a liquid I could not identify but that looked to me lipidinous, like fat. On the wall hung an illustrated poster of a man, his skin peeled back in flaps to reveal rib and heart, knee and flank. Next to him, hung on a hook, was an actual skeleton, the screw in the skull that had cracks like continents. “Here,” my doctor said, pulling a microscope forward and swiveling a knob. I lowered my head to the oval eyepiece and saw, at first, just a staticky skirmish that looked like insects running every which way, and I recoiled and, as I did so, dropped into a place of despair, but, as the doctor adjusted the knob, the view slowly changed. My cells slowed down, turned around, and then blossomed before me, stained in blues, pinks and purples. There was my cancer and for that moment—a second spliced—it was not ugly, and its colorful clusters allowed me to make of it a metaphor, a living link, my cells massed like hydrangea, which I had at home, in full flower, my load now lightened even as I still had fear, and fear, and fear.

  We didn’t go back to the house for one week after the exterminator sprayed. September passed into October with the weather still unseasonably warm. The annuals, confused, kept going, putting out new blooms, petunias and nasturtiums growing in masses, overtaking boxes and beds. When we finally returned to the house it was the middle of October, apple season, the time when fruit drops to the ground and rots softly in the sun, the juices drawing everything from hornets to honeybees. Pulling into the driveway, I heard, as always, the satisfying crunch of tires on rubble. The first bats were just appearing; tiny mammalian creatures with webbed wings they swooped low and then hurled themselves high into the sky, their symphony octaves beyond what we could hear, the silence illusory, the air in fact teeming with sonar songs. Benjamin turned the motor off and we all just sat in the car for a few moments, the motor ticking as it cooled, the sky draining itself as the sun set in a crimson puddle.

  As always, we had left one light on in the house, and as the day grew darker that light grew brighter, warmer, the window a single square lit amber in the night. Our house looked lovely then, the exterminator having come and gone, the corpses cleaned up, we could, it seemed then, manage this, the inside and the out, this cleansed house and sprawling track of land that, as city goers, we in fact knew nothing about.

  That night we opened the home’s front door to the sound of complete silence. We slept in our sheets to the sound of complete silence. I awoke at dawn. I felt a finger of sunlight on my face and I heard, outside, what I believed was the soft step of a deer crossing our driveway to drink from our deep pond. Still lying in bed I looked first out the east facing window through which light was now gushing like liquid, so I turned—too much for my eyes—and instead lay on my back, head tilted up towards the skylight to catch some clouds. And that was when I saw. The skylight was blanketed by a moving mass of wasps, their wings erect or flat on their segmented backs, the whole crowd sizzling, a low sybaritic sound, almost alto, maybe mournful. I elbowed Ben. We lay there and watched our wasps, first just covering the skylight, and then, crawling out from between the cracks in our pitched and planked ceiling, crawling out high and low, left and right, the gaps jammed with writhing, the insects marching up and down, going every which way, wave after wave of wasp, the hissing growing louder as their numbers increased, none of them yet flying, although that would happen soon. We got up, left the room, making sure to shut the door—hard—on our way out. We collected our bed-headed kids and our snoozy pooches, and within five minutes we were packed up and, everyone in the car, we headed straight for the city.

  Back in Somerville, Benjamin made phone calls, took notes. He spoke at length with the exterminator we’d hired and then called three others for consults. He called the contractor who had put up the cathedral ceiling and came away from that phone call singing. “He’ll wasp-proof the ceiling for free,” Benjamin announced, and then he flipped open his notebook and drew a deft diagram of how the new vaulted ceiling would, this time, suture shut any gaps from above. “And we don’t have to go with sheetrock,” Ben said. “We can wasp-proof the place using planks. It’s possible.”

  I looked at his diagram but remained unconvinced, or confused, because I didn’t think it would work, because wood moves, first of all, and second of all because I’d been infected by fear and fear is not logical, and what I needed now was a way to keep the wasps out of both my home and my head, and he couldn’t do that, could he? What engineering solution would solve the problem of a hisss-ssss following me here and there, my senses on the alert, so I could smell more smells and taste more tastes and see more sights, everything all in bits, in dots, like a Pissarro painting, the world was made up of tiny blurs and edges. “Maybe we should sell the place,” I said. “We’re not farmers—”

  “Maybe not you,” Ben said, cutting me off sharply, in a way that is unusual for him. “Maybe you’re not a farmer, Lauren, but I am, or will be, or …,” he said, “at least I want to be.”

  That night in the shower, I felt a tiny lump on my chest, just to the side of my implant, a small saline-filled bag that took the place where my breast had been. The lump was familiar in my fingers in both its size and its consistency; it was hard, hard as a pinball, the kind of lump you can squeeze and roll between your thumb and first finger. The lump was painless, and yet its implications sent waves of pain and panic. The thought is not, “Oh my god, a recurrence.” In times of extreme stress, the mind, my mind, makes metaphors that are the handles on a cup too hot to otherwise hold. Hydrangea. I saw the lace-capped bloom, but before I could lock onto it, it dissolved into Pissarro points and went down some mental drain. I stood there, then, without anything for balance, the bar of soap slipped from my grip and foaming at my feet as the shower shot me, again and again. Steam rose around me and then I felt my body fade back, become tiny. I have always understood my flesh, myself, as a primary player on this planet, but in fact, I could now see, all our bodies are in some senses small; they are, we are, just the random vacant vessels for microbes and all other manner of minutiae with plans that, in all likelihood, not only diverge from ours but trump our intentions in almost every way. When I stepped from the shower I was swaddled in steam and needed to see myself in the mirror. I swiped the fog from the glass. Here I was, my body a host to billions of beings who simply could not care less.

  We met with the contractor and picked out new planking, I, hearing everything through the hiss in my head.
When I called the oncologist it was with that hiss in my head, so I had to keep saying, “Excuse me, could you repeat that?” so often I wondered if my ears were bound up by wax or otherwise infected with fluid. “She can’t see you until the eighth,” the receptionist kept saying, and I kept saying, “She doesn’t have anything sooner?” and she kept saying, “I’ve checked; she doesn’t,” hssssssss. In the meantime the planking we picked was cedar, for its aromatic oils and resistance to rot.

  The eighth was a Thursday—five days away. Certain tumors are especially aggressive and can grow millimeters in a day, but most proceed along a far more measured path. Tumors can lie dormant in the rafters of your bones for years, only to suddenly take flight and allow sight, the malignancy spreading in accretions too tiny to count, all the way down where quarks and nanos live. Such is the terror of tininess, and our huge super-duper newly planked ceiling seemed to me a sad effort against inevitable seepage. Our bodies, by the way, are all seep, ancient seep, we being made of atoms that were once a part of the Milky Way’s stars, atoms as old as the big bang itself; picture it, if you can. Once the whole world was tinier than a teaspoon, the solar systems, the galaxies, all of it folded up into something so compact it was probably not visible. And then someone flicked a switch, or said, Now! and the dark, dense dot containing all the universe within it exploded across the sky with such force that it all continues to expand today, pushed outward by its own original velocity. Anyone can look up into the night sky and see the hugeness of streaming space, but how often do we reflect on the fact that everything around us, including the mind-boggling grandeur of the universe, is powered by atoms, and that atoms exist at a scale so small we cannot quite measure them? People wonder: Is there life in outer space? The stars wobble in response. Is it not just as logical to ask, “Is there life in inner space?” Who’s to say that there are not entire societies living out of our sight, in another dimension, or simply at a scale so small we fail to see them or to consider their plans?