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Arachnida

by Marshall Piotrowski

“Our enemies are innovative and resourceful. And so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our people and our country. And neither do we.”
–President George W. Bush
Defense-Bill Signing Ceremony
White House, Washington D.C.
August 5th, 2004

   Hobo Spider. Eratigena argrestis. A funnel-web spider (as in they spin a web in the shape of a funnel, lurk in the back of it, then jump out to capture prey when it walks or flies by) with a poisonous bite commonly found in the Pacific Northwest —fuck— specifically in the states of Oregon, Washington, Utah, and Idaho —OH FUCK— which is miserably, exactly (Boise, specifically) where Alex Bandura can commonly be found as well. He’s heard the stories about this certified Bad Boy of an eight-legger, about how one particularly Bad one sent a very sweet, kind, all around well-liked fifth-grade girl, Lacey Michaels, all the long way from the schoolgrounds to the eerie, sterile, fluorescent halls of the hospital, sent there by school administrators and her parents just to make sure she didn’t get sick and die an early, fifth-grade death from its nasty, venomous bite. Everyone in Alex’s social circle agrees: this is gnarly, hardcore, demented, punk rock shit. Lacey’s absolute platinum hit of a story is still living the life of a multi-week chart-topping sensation at Washington Elementary. This is precisely the kind of sick, gothic, mind-melting horror pushing Alex and at least ten other members of Mrs. Lindell’s second grade class into a serious and worryingly overzealous Green Day fandom.

   It is mid-September. It is 2004. Summer tries to hang on but sort of palely withers. Fall threatens. Eighteen months have violently passed since President George W. Bush first ordered the invasion of Iraq. The John Kerry–John Edwards ticket begins a downward slide in the national polls amid rumors that Kerry’s experiences in warzones were not actually all that horrible. Green Day’s highly anticipated album, American Idiot, will be released in less than ten days. The nation awaits.

   Wolf Spider. Pardosa dorsuncata. Robust and agile hunters who usually go it alone, and who don’t spin webs. They use their astonishing speed to literally chase down and attack their prey. Sick, scary shit. Alex shivers. He’s seen these while overturning rocks in the backyard.

   Billie Joe Armstrong feels like he’s gonna yarf. Billie Joe Armstrong is gonna yarf. Billie Joe leans over the toilet and lets out everything he’s got. It smells acrid. It smells like hot orange vom. It is hot orange vom. Salmon. Tré Cool calls from outside the room: “You doin’ alright in there Billie Joe? Billy Joe?” Billie Joe is heaving. Billie Joe sweats.

    Alex really doesn’t like cleaning his room. He prefers to let his stuff pile up on the ten square feet of royal-purple carpeted floor he can call his own, to let clothes strew where they please, to let toys mix in with the textilian stew, to pretend his bed is a caravel floating on a sea of sweet simmering materialism, to have opened books floating in the surf so they might imbibe the stew with a sweet literary funk. This is fun. This is downright raucous. Rootin’-est Tootin’-est type shit. Cleaning is not fun. Cleaning sucks ass. Everything sucks ass. Organizing, pretending this space isn’t lived in, staging it for truly no good, legitimate reason, far as Alex can tell, mostly incase Mom or Dad might have to show off his room to some sorry adult: it sucks ass. It fucking sucks. It isn’t right. Adults, as far as Alex can tell, aside from being generally boring, are always deeply sorry for some secret bad thing they’ve done, and that makes them icky, scary in a way that vampires are scary but that spiders aren’t. Spiders are scary in a ridiculously obvious sort of way. Spiders have eight fuckin’ legs and eight goddamned eyes. Spiders are poisonous, venomous, and most can bite a human, and the bites hurt, and swell up all big, the skin bulging, and disgorge nasty green puss/slime/goo, and can apparently even send you to the hospital, or even KILL YOU, especially the local Western Black Widows (Latrodectus hesperus) and Brown Recluses (Loxosceles reclusa), both of which he’s also seen in the backyard.    
       You don’t have to be told that these scary little fucks like to trap and suck the very life-fluids out of their pathetic little victims. You can tell that just by seeing a spider. Spiders send spinal shivers with like, just the sight of them. And Alex hates spiders. And those spinal shivers. He finds them (spiders) in the house, lurking, ready to run fast, always away, but never quite in the direction he expects, or they’re perusing walls and ceilings, or doing that sick shit where they just hang at the bottom of a web-strand in the middle of a room, just at eye level, and he’s just waiting for the doomed day an especially bold spider decides to run right towards him, or infinitely worse, jump right at him or drop right onto him. NO THANK YOU. One of Alex’s parent’s friends, one of these icky, sickly, sicko, psycho, sick fucks of an adult recently told him a truly horrific, sick fuck of a story about seeing a big spider, but not just seeing it, having a fucking stare-down with the ridiculously obviously scary and large thing in the doorway of her bedroom, waiting on its six-too-many hairy haunches inside the fucking doorway right as she opened her bedroom door after a long day at boring work, and time stopped for a few seconds, and the whole world ran frozen, but just then hundreds—HUNDREDS—of baby spider fucks climbed off its back and flew across the floor in every fucking direction, flowing like individual molecules of scary water poured directly on the top of some heinous convexity. She wanted to stomp them all to death but instead she ran, which is understandable, but the worst part, the part of the story that really sank its fangs down into Alex’s psyche, was how she eventually had to go back into her room, back into her sullied place-of-sleep, with the grotesque knowledge that she now bunked with at least 101 spiders. Alex has seen some pretty scary Scooby Doo episodes, he’s seen Sleepy Hollow (not the Johnny Depp one) and has even dared to read an R.L. Stine’s Goosebumps once or twice, but none of that competes with this abomination of non-fictional, real life horror. Alex shivers.

    In the Oval Office, President George W. Bush reads a sheet of lyrics. He’s softly muttering derogatory slurs with a lovely Texan drawl. He wipes a bead of sweat from his gray forehead with a mostly white handkerchief. “Fuckin’ goddamned….Fuckin’ faggots. Pansy asses. I could blow them all to fuckin’ snot.” Real soft, real quiet stuff here. President George W. Bush picks up the phone.

    “Hey Billie Joe…” Mike Dirnt is timidly knocking on the bathroom door. “Billie Joe… uhh, I’ve got President Bush on the phone. Bush Double-You. He doesn’t sound happy. He sounds like he’d like to slap someone upside the head. He said that too. That he’d like to slap someone upside the head. He says he wants to talk to you specifically.”
    “Mike? Mike, he said he wants to talk to my ‘Punk Ass’ didn’t he? He said it all Texan like, right? He said it like that?” Billie Joe inflects a subtle drawl as he says this.
    “Pansy Ass actually, but yeah Billie Joe, yeah, he did.”
    Billie Joe sweats.

   Alex sits on the deck of his ship, floating above cotton, paper, petrochemical waters, and reads the Smithsonian Handbook of Insects, specifically the arachnid section, which he knows arachnids are actually their own actual thing separate from the usually six-legged insect and should probably have its own actual separate encyclopedia, but they’re all bugs or whatever. Reading the arachnid section is a self-concocted way he’s concocted up to face the mild arachnophobia he’s felt spreading through his blood and bones—like fucking venom mind you—ever since he heard the tale of the 101+ Spiders, which he now unfortunately associates, mentally and emotionally, with the 101 Dalmatians Disney movies, which are wildly popular, relevant, and often referenced in Alex’s social circle, but he’s not sure it (the self-administered exposure therapy) is necessarily helping. He keeps hearing this same discourse, whether from his parents or from his teachers at school or his counselors at the YMCA after-school daycare or from characters and narrators in the cartoons he watches, he keeps hearing all these catechisms about ‘Facing Your Fears’ and ‘Taking Tough Situations Into [his] Own Hands’. This, the world repeatedly tells him, is how to really be a Real Man, how to dominate life and the world rather than letting it happen the other way around, like some fuckin’ Wuss, like some type of Gay, and something had felt surefire in the whole logic of it, far as Alex could tell, but now that he’s been working through this insect book (he has a lesser but still bothersome thing about all sorts of creepy crawlies, centipedes and earwigs especially) he’s been dreaming more and more consistently about insects and spiders, usually bigger than him by at least magnitudes of ten, taking him into their brittle, bony, long-ass arms, always about to take a bite of his flesh or a suck of his blood—or alternatively, a kiss?—before he wakes up sweaty and squeamish, and he’s starting to think that maybe fixating on your fears just makes you downright more fixated on your fears. It’s a tough paradox, and Alex isn’t sure what to make of potentially no longer being able to trust the up-till-now always seemingly sound, unsolicited but generally welcome advice that tends to charge at him from all the corners of his rapidly expanding and simultaneously constricting world.
   Alex imagines himself a budding biologist sailing through the lonesome middle of the Indian Ocean, towards points north, maybe to Sri Lanka or Sumatra (such places he only knows about from his Leapfrog Globe, a sort of early 2000s American child’s digitized and interactive substitute for a world atlas). This budding biologist scenario gives him a solid reason to give out for learning all about these spiders incase somebody interrogates him on the matter, incase they suspect it might be some wussish self-concocted fear management strategy.
   “Hey Alex.” His mom—a busy, admirable woman with an emotionally heavy job, a husband, and two kids, one of whom will not stop swearing when he thinks nobody is listening—opens the wooden door, unknowingly threatening to let the entire Indian Ocean cascade into the rest of the home.
   “The Washbournes are coming over tonight, so I need you to clean your room today. Alex. Don’t give those eyes. Cindy’s gonna want a house tour, so I need you to clean your room, and I know you don’t care but it’ll embarrass me if she sees it like this, and I bet, if you do it fast, and don’t get distracted, it’ll only take like half an hour, tops. Can you do that for me?”

   Somewhere in California, Billie Joe Armstrong looks sternly at himself in a bathroom mirror that’s covered in splotches of dried white toothpaste. He slaps both his right and left facial cheeks with his respective right and left palms, palms dripping with some seriously cold water from the now frosty faucet. His hair is jet black and fairly long but in a mostly skywards propulsion and now clumps in tendrils in its anxious wetness. His callused finger pads feel abrasive and coarse on his soft, clammy cheeks and temples, where they now rest. He’s looking into his own eyes and beyond, trying to get deep inside his mind, trying to reach his innermost self. It is very important that he reach his innermost self right now. It is very important. It is very important Billie Joe. His cheeks are flushed red. From the slapping and the nerves. Steam rises from his face and palms. His body makes a big, sudden movement.
   “FACE YOUR FEARS BILLIE JOE”
   Echoes ring through the bathroom several times, creating a desperate, melodic, screaming round. No response from outside. Billie Joe’s got the wide stance, the one finger pointing at his reflection in the ‘from-the-hip’ style, of some lucky winner of a western shoot-out.

   Zebra Spider. Salticus scenicus. These black and white spiders can JUMP. They have one really disgustingly large pair of forward-facing eyes that help them see their sorry prey as they stalk and pounce and murder. Like most other arachnids, and some crustaceans, they have a cephalothorax, meaning the head and thorax are one body segment, which attaches to the abdomen. One class of arachnids however, the Opiliones, have just one round pill of body, which all eight legs attach to.
   “Okay, fine.” Seven-year-old Alex is fairly bratty, especially about this controversial issue. His mom tries to remember he isn’t so bratty about most stuff, and that kids should be allowed to be a bit bratty sometimes as long as it’s not about most stuff.
   “Okay, well I’m gonna come back in half an hour,” pointing to her watch, “and I wanna to be able to see your whole floor. And I wanna see some organization Alex, not just everything shoved under the bed.” She always speaks, without exception, with a nice, mesmerizing lilt, far as Alex is concerned. She shuts the door. Alex moans just loudly enough to be sure his mom can hear him from the hall, and then, feeling bad for doing so, lets out a sigh just for himself and tosses ‘The Racknid Files’, as he’s been mentally referring to them, aside. He reaches across his old microwave-stand-turned-bedside-table (complete with his chicken-scratched name engraved in several places onto the side facing his bed) and hits the play arrow on his boombox. Mid-90s Green Day sonically crashes into the room,—Dooo you have the Time, to LIST-en to me whine, aBout nothing and everything all AaAaT, once—guitars shred and drums bang, far as Alex is concerned.

   “Dick, you there?”
   “What can I do for you, Mr. President?”
   “Dick, I’ve got these punk ass bastards on the phone. They’re waiting on the other line. Dick, get your ass across the street. I’m gonna tear them a new a, a, a heh-heh, a new asshole. You hear that, Dick? Hell, I’m gonna make them shit.”
   “George, Dubya, Mr. President, you know I’ve got a country to run. But you go ahead and have some fun. Record it for me.”

    Alex plops down into the fibrous, plasticky, literatus stew of the Indian Ocean and starts with clothes. He tosses the garments that don’t stink of sweat and play back into the designated Clean Clothes Cubbies in his closet and casts the noisome ones into his decidedly filthy wicker hamper at the foot of his bed. He gets distracted. He reads random paragraphs from random books, finds a swatch of hardened blue Gogurt smeared on one’s cover—plus the hardened plastic tube from whence it came—gawks at the disgustingness of it, and picks at his toes for a bit. He remembers his task is supposedly time sensitive. He almost finishes sorting the clothes before abandoning process to start on the toys. There are hundreds of toys, and objects that are not technically toys but that easily function as toys thanks to his seven-year-old levels of massive imagination, and these toys and non-toy toys vary in size from tiny two-stud LEGO pieces and impossibly small paperclips to Alex-sized stuffed animals, a Leapfrog Globe, and Alex’s skis and ski poles, which he kind of stupidly insists on keeping in his little, crowded room.
   Daddy long-legs are an interesting topic, Alex thinks. There is not just one species of DLL. Some are Opiliones, some are Spiders proper. There is a nest of the opilionid variety residing in the ground just outside his first-floor window, and while friends recently tried to convince Alex that this would be his death (they all ascribe to the popular school of thought that DLLs are the world’s most poisonous spider, but lack the fangal equipment to deliver humans the deadly venom), Alex knows they are actually quite innocuous. He knows this not only because of his worried studies into the matter, but because Trevor Handles, one of Alex’s friends from his soccer team, who goes to a different school, recently ate a DLL right in front of the whole team, and lived. Didn’t even get sick.
   The most common spider variety of DLL is the Long-Bodied Cellar Spider. Pholcus phalangioids. Alex unfortunately once ventured into the basement of his parent’s college friend’s home while visiting them in Portland, Oregon, and there were at least a thousand of these vampiric looking but harmless creatures in that godforsaken mildewy cavern, mostly up in the exposed rafters. The existence of a cephalothorax separate from the abdomen makes a big difference, menacing-wise. He much preferred his pill-bodied neighbors.
   Alex finds a U2 CD, a page of old crumpled up homework, a book he accidentally stole from the school by forgetting to return it before the last day of first grade, a soccer magazine in bad shape from the calamity of the open seas, stinky soccer shin guards, a spoon with some other brand of hardened yogurt, chess set with pieces strewn, crumbled remnants of severely dehydrated pizza crust.  
   Alex reaches for a Bionicle, which is a hard thing to explain, so the best I can do for you is that a Bionicle is a sort of Gothic-Architecture-meets-Sci-Fi-meets-Masculine-Violence warrior figurine, which much like a new LEGO set is purchased dismembered, in a plastic container, and with a set of instructions for assembly, and you follow the instructions and build yourself a small killer which you have play-fight other tiny plastic murderers. The pieces are larger and much more complexly stylized than regular LEGOs, and Bionicle is in fact a subsidiary of the Denmark-based LEGO Group. There is an entire multi-millennium, transgalactic story surrounding who the different Bionicles are and what values and virtues the different Bionicles stand for. You can find out these fascinating things by watching the TV show or made for TV movies or by playing the free Bionicle videogames that came as the Toy for Boys in Burger King kid’s meals for an extremely limited and lucky time in 2003.
   Alex likes Burger King, but not burgers. He likes the breaded chicken tenders, and he likes the fries. He finds burgers to be generally fucking disgusting.
   Alex reaches for a Bionicle, this one mostly black plastic, with bits of gray and some tiny, accentuated slits of bright, nuclear green. This Bionicle belongs to the Bohrok species of Bionicle. A Bohrok, with a simple manipulation, can form a nearly perfect sphere, and so can quickly roll around to wherever it needs to be for gruesome battle, much like (and maybe legally dangerously similar to?) the rolling Droideka droids of the Star Wars Multiverse.
   Alex loves fantasy worlds. He loves pretending. That stuff feels easy, really easy. It feels good. It feels a whole lot better than trying to figure out why exactly President George W. Bush can still be so revered by so many people if he is publicly stealing money from the poor and giving it to the rich—hadn’t everyone seen Robin Hood?—or about why the adults can’t agree if the Iraq War is either the most horrible thing imaginable on the one hand or completely necessary for our safety and our very continued existence on the other or why it is Gay to listen to Britney Spears but only if you’re a guy or why being Gay is such a terrible thing to be but it clearly is a horrible thing based on how everyone’s using the word or why you can’t yell “bitch” in public when it’s really just “pitch” with a “b” in the front instead of a “p” and “pitch” is such an important part of baseball which is such an important part of life or why a female dog is a bad thing to equate a female woman to when dogs are just so incredibly lovely or why some sick fuck might want to lure kids into some car and take them away forever and because of that he is only allowed to speak to people he already knows or why unlimited ice-cream supposedly isn’t actually a good thing to use a genie wish on, this one according to Mrs. Lindell. Endless ice-cream, in fact, sounds fan-fucking-tastic, far as Alex is concerned. The real world is boring as shit and full of mundane micropolitics, full of Home Depot, full of Office Max, incredibly full of Geico insurance and its weird British gecko who is so stupidly obsessed with something as yawn-inducing as insurance, full of the horrifically sad humdrum noise and dusty aesthetics of the This Old House television program on PBS, which seems to only inspire more and more successive trips to Home Depot in a satanic cycle of yawn-drool and tantrum inducing banality. The real world is buzzing with the soul-numbing atrocity that is National Public Radio, so full of weird, awkward, boring, angry adults, so fucking full of sick fucks who judge the cleanliness of other people’s children’s rooms. Dragons, cosmic criminals, wizards, listening to Green Day, building plastic warriors, reading stories about smart, witty seven-year-old protagonists on grand adventures, this is all so much fucking better, infinitely more interesting than trying to “know” what is happening in the war-torn world.
    Alex reaches for the Bohrok. The song “Welcome to Paradise” by Green Day blasts from the boombox. This song kicks ass, Alex whispers to himself. Guitars shred, etc. Alex picks up the Bohrok. Alex folds the Bohrok into a globose state. He tries to decide which Random Toy Cubby to stash the Bohrok in. Suddenly, his nervous system registers what the fuck is on top of the Bohrok, not even a whole foot away from Alex’s own eyes: Eratigena argrestis. Hobo Spider. A funnel-web spider apparently commonly fucking found in Alex’s own personal sea of endless paper nooks and plastic crannies. What the books don’t tell you is that Eratigena argrestis heaves menacingly under its own astonishing weight and size. Its long legs and cephalothorax are a light, almost translucent caramel brown color with a bare, shiny, tight-skin-like sheen which reflects light like only a truly bald head can, and its abdomen is splotched with a chilling, symmetrical, black, Rorschachesque pattern. Eratigena argrestis heaves menacingly under its potential for pure, inane, mind-melting violence and pain. Alex tries to scream but nothing is in him. It’s all gone. Everything in him. He drains empty; the nightmare fills full. Eight eyes meet two. Eratigena argrestis seems to enlarge by the millisecond. Two miles away Cindy Washbourne gets herself and her two kids, Daniel Washbourne and Melissa Washbourne, in the car, en route to the Bandura household. Cindy, whose frizz of curly hair is larger than her ass, will hardly be able to contain her sick, petty, parentally rivalrous joy if Jean and Davie’s kids’ rooms are messy. Alex’s floor is still completely submerged in underwater totality. There is a rapping knock at Alex’s inch and a half thick wooden bedroom door. There is a soft, inquisitive call of his name. His half hour is up. Billie Joe tells Mike Dirnt he’s ready. Billie Joe, It’s Big Boy Pants Time, Billie Joe thinks to himself, preparing an iron will. Alex does not wait to find out if this is the bold jumper he’s been dreading. President George W. Bush cracks his dangerous knuckles in wait. Eratigena argrestis menacingly shifts its menacing weight onto its four hind haunches, threatening a sky/faceward propulsion. Vice President Dick Cheney ends yet another human life (probably dozens actually) with just a few intentional words at some subterranean meeting of men.    
      Alex frantically, forcefully chucks the globose fucking Bohrok and its attendant obviously terrifying nightmare into the Indian Fucking Ocean and launches himself into a shipward propulsion. The hard outside knob of his right ankle strikes wickedly against the metal hull of the bedframe on his ascension. Guitars shred faster; drums band louder; etc. The young biologist sputters, wails, profanes like a pirate, clutches his screaming ankle, howls something truly fierce. His mother opens the door to see what is wrong. The storming seas churn fantastically more treacherous.