Viral

by Emily Mitchell

  I let her go. I sat and listened to her small footsteps climbing the stairs, then pattering down the hall. I heard the door of her room open and slam closed. All right, I thought, I’ll leave her for a few minutes, let her cry . Then I can go upstairs and try to talk to her again. I cleared away her bowl of melting ice cream. I started the dishwasher. A strange feeling came over me and I realized that of course Spider was up there in her room, perhaps waiting at the center of its web over her bed. I felt suddenly on edge, though I could not have said exactly why. I listened for the sound of sobbing, any sound that might be coming from upstairs. But I heard absolutely nothing.

  I climbed the stairs two at a time and strode down the hallway. I banged on Lisa’s door and called her name. No reply came and so I pushed the door. It moved an inch or so, but then it stopped and would not open any farther.

  Through the gap between the door and the frame I could see a thick crosshatch of sticky, pallid threads so dense they were preventing it from opening.

  I called my daughter’s name again. I pushed against the door and it moved this time, but only a few inches. I got scissors and tried to cut the threads but the scissors just got stuck. All the time, I called to Lisa and heard nothing in reply.

  Finally, exhausted, I sat down on the floor. I thought: I’ll call the fire department, the police. They’ll know what to do. I stood up and was about to go downstairs to get the phone when I heard, quite close to me on the far side of the door, Lisa’s voice.

  “Mama,” she said. “Mama?” She sounded small and young. I came and put my face against the door to get as close to her as possible.

  “Lisa, sweetheart. I’m right here. Are you okay?”

  “Yes, Mama, I’m okay.”

  “I’m going to call the firemen to come and get you out,” I said.

  She was silent for a moment. Then she said: “No, mama. Don’t do that.”

  “But we have to get you out of there.”

  “You don’t have to call the firemen. Spider can fix the door,” she said. “He didn’t mean to make it not open. He was just making more webs to cheer me up.”

  “Well, in that case, tell Spider to make it open right now.”

  There was quiet for a moment and inside the quiet, the sound of whispering.

  “He doesn’t want to do it,” Lisa said, “unless you promise . . .” She trailed off.

  “What? Unless I promise what?”

  “All you have to do is promise that he doesn’t have to go away. He can stay with us forever.”

  “Sweetheart, I don’t know if . . .”

  “Mama, please!” I thought she sounded suddenly afraid. “Just say that he can stay.”

  What could I do? “All right. Your Spider doesn’t have to go away.”

  “Promise?”

  “Yes, I promise,” I replied.

  On the far side of the door I heard what sounded like somebody snickering with mean, dry laughter, but as I listened more I realized that it was the sound of many legs moving back and forth across the wooden surface. What was it doing? I could picture it: scuttling this way and that, gathering the threads up and consuming them, taking them back into its gut, material to be stored for later use. Finally the door swung open. Spider scuttled over and perched on the windowsill. Lisa was sitting on her bed looking little and bereft. I gathered her into my arms and hugged her and she hugged me back, but not with the enthusiasm or relief that I’d anticipated. She pulled away after a moment. I looked at her and now, instead of seeming young, she looked very old and tired.

  “Why did you get so scared, Mama?” she asked. “My Spider would never do anything bad to me.” She sighed. “If you want to take him back to where he came from, that’s okay I guess.”

  I looked at her astonished. She sounded so sad that suddenly I could not bear to do it, not that night anyway.

  “All right,” I said, “but not today. We’ve all been through enough already.”

  That night I woke to find myself swaddled in a pale and sticky substance that made it difficult to move or breathe. I struggled to free myself but the more I struggled, the more tightly bound I got. Something was moving above me in the dark, back and forth, but I could not see well enough to know for certain what it was. I panicked and woke myself for real this time and found that it was morning. Light was slanting in between the blinds. Everything in the room was as it had been when I went to bed.

  As I lay in bed, I decided what I was going to do: the next time that I found Spider on its own, when Lisa left it by itself at home or when it crawled out of her room one night, I would drop something heavy on it, a cast-iron pan or our big dictionary. I thought with satisfaction about the crunching sound its shell would make when it collapsed, the sight of it, cracked and broken on the ground, looking finally like the machine it always was.

  That would be expensive, though. Since Companions are leased monthly, I would have to give the full cost back to the company, which would mean we could probably not get a replacement. It was going to be difficult enough helping Lisa to adjust to Spider’s loss. Maybe, instead of breaking it, I could just trap it underneath a mixing bowl and take it back undamaged. That should not be so difficult, I thought. I could buy one of those cardboard pet carriers to use to take it back to the facility.

  That was now three weeks ago—or is it four? I am still waiting to carry out my plan. Lisa has been keeping Spider close to her a lot. There have been a few times when I thought I could catch it, but each time there has been some reason that I hesitated too long and lost my chance: Lisa had a bad day at school the day before and I wondered if this was quite the right time; it was late at night and the noise might wake the neighbors. But I will do it sometime very soon. I just have to wait for the right moment.

  Through these past few weeks, Lisa hasn’t spoken to me much. It’s not that she’s been sulking or obviously upset. She kisses me goodbye when I drop her off at school, she kisses me goodnight. She helps around the house. She is the same polite and placid child she’s been since we first got her spider. But there is something perfunctory about the way she treats me, something dry, like it would not make much difference to her if one day I went away and did not return. Or at least, I think there is. Sometimes I find myself watching her and she seems to be unnaturally still, as if she has learned from her spider the art of infinite patience. I had a dream in which I saw her walking on all fours, her legs and arms arched up in angles that would be impossible for a human child, so she could scuttle forward at a rapid speed.

  Since that one occasion, Spider has not made another web, at least not one that I’ve found. It is as if it learned its lesson, although I don’t think it can learn. It acts exactly like it did before, and in fact there are times when I wonder what it would be like if I did nothing at all and we went on the way we are. Of course, I cannot let that happen. Sooner or later I will have to act. But there are evenings when I’m reading a bedtime story to my daughter and she is leaning against me and Spider is perched up on the wall above her bed and I forget that I am planning to get rid of it. For a moment, it is almost comforting to have another . . . I was about to use the word “person” but that does not make any sense. It is almost comforting to have another—what? Another someone in the room.

  If You Cannot Go to Sleep

  First, she tries counting. The numbers move sluggishly through her head in single file like people in a line at the post office or at the bank or at the discount supermarket where you can only pay with cash so the line is always long and she is always frustrated by the time she reaches the counter and so, to compensate, she always tries to be extra friendly to the cashier, to be sure to instruct him or her to have a nice day after he or she gives back her change, because it seems worse, somehow, to be a cashier in a discount supermarket than it would be to do the same job at a place that sold expensive, gourmet foods, although when she thinks about this now, so late at night she doesn’t even want to look at the clock to find out the time, she think
s why would it make a difference whether you ran a cash register at a place where people are buying brie and figs and Ethiopian fair-trade coffee or a place where people are buying Pampers and Wonder Bread? In reality, she thinks, working at the gourmet market is probably worse because of the annoying people who shop there, the men and women in stylish business-casual clothing, or athletic wear because they are coming from or going to the gym, all of them buying organic heirloom tomatoes and the latest variety of ancient grain that is supposed to make you live forever and exuding an air of self-satisfaction, of superiority, of knowing that they are worthy and admirable and enlightened beyond ordinary mortals, and wanting to chat with the cashier about his or her day and about the food they are buying and the fabulous, complicated meal that they are going to make with these ingredients, which is really just another way of showing off when you get right down to it. Do you really want to see those people every day? On the other hand, at the discount supermarket you might see people buying weird, sad, lonely food like the man who’d been in front of her in line the other week who was severely overweight and buying twenty frozen dinners for himself and nothing else, or else the unnaturally skinny woman buying a big crate of caffeine-free diet soda and nothing else, or else the mother with three children trying to figure out what she could afford with her WIC voucher, carefully watching the total as it came up on the screen, putting aside the things in her cart she could not manage to afford that week. For a cashier, that had to be depressing. Add to that the threat that any day now you will be replaced with one of those automatic swiper machines that don’t really work and always require the customer to be assisted before he or she can check out, and you have a pretty unhappy work environment as a cashier one way or another.

  Or maybe she is just being a snob and really being a cashier can be a fine job and only because of her particular, privileged background would she assume that it would be miserable to be a cashier, rather than fulfilling, because how does she know? The closest she ever came was waiting tables at a restaurant when she was in high school and that job was not terrible, she still has some good memories of the characters she met among the customers: the man who came up to the counter and asked her if she could recite any Shakespeare and she spoke aloud the prologue to Henry V because she knew it by heart, or the time she . . . well, actually that is her only good memory of that job, the rest of it was boring or unpleasant and involved mopping floors and stacking dishes and wiping down tables and laying traps for cockroaches and anyway she knew that she was soon going to go away to college and that this wouldn’t be her job for the rest of her life, she would be able to leave and go to something better or at the time she thought it would be better. She did go to college and she majored in French and lived in Paris for a few years after she finished her degree and now she works translating technical manuals and she used to be married to a man who appeared to be steady and reliable if a little dull, qualities that she told herself were a good antidote to her own tendency to fret too much about small and insignificant things, and who had a successful career in hospital administration but who decided suddenly, about six months ago, that he’d had enough of expending his energy and intelligence working in a healthcare system organized for the benefit of for-profit insurance companies and decided to move to France. She found this moderately ironic since, when she had been yearning a few years previously to ditch everything and go back to Paris, he had insisted that they could not do this because he’d put too much time and effort into developing his career in the United States and he did not want to throw away what he’d worked so hard to build. She pointed this irony out to him during the brief period after he’d announced that he was moving out but before he had actually departed for good, and although he readily agreed with her that, yes, there was some irony in his choice, he did not change his mind. He said that she worried too much and that he didn’t want to deal with it anymore. And she said: this won’t make me worry less. And he said: I know but it will no longer be my problem.

  For the first few months after he was gone, she had seemed to be coping admirably; in fact she seemed to be adjusting to their separation astonishingly well, even to be calmer than she had been before he left. She told herself and her friends and her mother that perhaps it was for the best, they had never been perfectly matched after all, she had always longed for someone more expressive and exciting, who shared her love of literature and art, who longed to travel, who had a greater capacity for amazement. Perhaps this could be a new beginning and a chance to find a truly fulfilling life. She sold the house they had lived in together, rented an apartment within walking distance of a good coffee shop and a discount supermarket. She saw friends. She saw movies. She started taking a swing dance class.

  But then, two days ago, as she was drifting off to sleep, her phone began to ring. Her mind surfaced from the soft, dark pool in which it had submerged, just in time to hear the last cycle of tones die away before her voicemail picked up. Her phone was in the kitchen and at first she thought that maybe she could burrow back down and find her way to the threshold of sleep again, but no, she was awake, wondering who had called so late. Her brain began to spin and gather speed. Could it be an emergency, something seriously wrong? A friend in trouble? Her mother in the hospital? She climbed out of bed and made her way down the hall and took the phone from the counter where she’d left it and stared at the string of digits on the screen. It was not a number that she recognized, but the country code was +33 and the numbers that followed were the area code for the town where, as far as she knew, her husband now resided. She knew no one else who might be calling her from there. Right now in western Europe it was early morning, well before dawn. She looked at the screen but there was no icon telling her anyone had left a message. She listened to her voicemail anyway, just in case. Nothing. She considered calling the number back but thought, suddenly, angrily, that she did not want to give him the satisfaction of having her jump to attention just because he dialed her number. Suppose he had not meant to call her at all; he’d only misdialed and that was why he hadn’t left a message? Or what if he had meant to call her but then changed his mind? When he answered the phone his voice would be dry and distant and polite in that way he could be when he wanted to protect himself. She could not bear the idea of having him treat her coolly, so instead of calling him and asking him what he wanted, she put the phone back down on the counter and left it there and went and climbed back into bed. She lay down and clicked off the light on her nightstand. She closed her eyes and tried to go to sleep again. But she could not, and all that night, and the one after, and now again tonight, she has lain awake, staring into the dark, her mind like something stranded on a beach, longing to swim out and get lost at sea but unable to reach the water’s edge.

  Now, when she looks over toward the window, there is a blue glow seeping in beneath the blind. She does not know if she is angrier with her husband for calling her and unsettling her so much or with herself for allowing something as trivial as a phone call to make her come unhinged. She sighs. She looks over at the numbers on the alarm clock on the nightstand. Soon it will be time for her to get up. She might as well go and make some coffee and get ready to start work.

  Since counting didn’t work, the next night she tries imagining the sound of ocean waves. This is what it said to do on a website she found called Overcoming Insomnia when she should have been working on her most recent project, a book instructing engineers on the maintenance and repair of machines that shape the steel exteriors of cars and trucks on the assembly lines of the European subsidiaries of American car manufacturers. But she was too tired to concentrate and had drifted into looking online for answers to the question of what to do if you cannot get to sleep.

  Imagining the sound of the sea seemed like a good exercise when she read about it, even though she is extremely suspicious of the whole idea that you can “overcome” insomnia, which sounds as if you are supposed to triumph by an act of will, wrestle your sleeplessness
into submission, and which evokes intense concentration or brute force or both, when really what she needs is the exact opposite of this: a kind of soft dissolving of herself during which she turns from a person into a cloud of gold dust that hovers shimmering for a minute before dispersing into the dark with a sound like someone blowing out a candle. Insomnia is more like something you have to sneak under or find a hole in the fence of or find a way to flow around than something you can “overcome.” Also, the man who produced the website, Howard Francus, MD, whose smiling photograph appears on many of its pages, has written a book with the same title as his website, Overcoming Insomnia, and the site is really a promotional platform for his book. She can’t help suspecting that the information that Dr. Francus put on the website for free is only the peripheral stuff, the least effective and therefore least valuable insights and techniques he has to offer, because wouldn’t he want to keep the really good stuff, the real secrets, the magic surefire answers to himself so that you had to buy his book? What would be the point of using the website to promote his book if everyone just read the website and was immediately cured and no one needed to pay $24.99 plus shipping and handling to find out how to go to sleep at night?

  Nevertheless, in spite of her profound misgivings, lying in the dark, she tries to imagine the sound of the ocean. It has been a long time since she went to the ocean. As a child she used to live near the coast. Now she lives in a city that, although it is on a lake, is very far from the ocean. There are hundreds of miles of dry land in every direction. Before he left, she and her husband had been planning to go to the beach as soon as both of them could find time for a vacation. In fact, she loves the sea, the smell and sounds of it, the way it throws the light back up into the air so that all the objects near the shore, the houses and the people and the trees and the grass bowed over on the dunes, are tossed around inside a storm of light. How she misses the sea! And she and her husband never did get around to going there together because it always seemed like there was some reason to postpone the trip—either they needed to go and see his family or hers or there was some reason why he couldn’t leave work or she had taken on too many projects to go away from home for an extended time—and so they delayed and delayed and sometimes when they were in bed at night and felt close to each other either because they had made love or just because some of the cold distance between them seemed to give way a little, they would talk again about going to the ocean, they would promise to make the time, they would get down the calendar and mark off a week and determine that the next day they would each do what was necessary to ensure that they could go away. But then something would come up and it wouldn’t happen and after a while they stopped talking about it and then they stopped talking about anything at all.