by Bennett Sims
‘Almost like a mother burying her baby, before baptizing it, is what you’re saying.’
‘Something like that. Anyway, that’s what was going through my head, when you asked me.’
‘Heavy.’
‘I mean I think Dad got over it pretty quick. He bought a basset hound about a year later. Hey—look at that. What’d I tell you?’
‘Come on. You’ve seen this before. How’d you know Cujo’d come crashing through the window like that? One last attack.’
‘I called it.’
‘You’ve seen this before.’
‘I called it.’
‘Turn this shit off.’
‘Yeah. Let’s check if Netflix is streaming Jaws.’
‘MacDougall afraid of sharks too?’
‘Now have I got a story about sharks.’
‘Oh yeah?’
‘Yeah. Here. Here. Feel my neck.’
‘Aw fuck you.’
‘That’s right.’
‘Yeah.’
City of Wolfmen
Directions
The city of wolfmen is the city of wolfmen only one night a month. For the rest of the month, it cannot be found on any map. Passing through a town of hirsute men, their forearms strong and calves thick, one may ask them where he can find the city of wolfmen: they will not know what he is talking about. If a gas-station attendant spreads a county map across the hood of the man’s car and points at the highway there, his finger will fall on emptiness. The city of wolfmen is illustrated in invisible ink. The ink is visible only in full moonlight. The dot of it rises out of the map’s paper one night every month, then withdraws, like a fever blister.
Museums
There are no museums in the city of wolfmen because no one remembers the city of wolfmen the morning after. Its citizens wake up naked in zoos and in parks, in beds of forest leaves and of jacaranda petals, in each other’s front lawns and in the middles of streets, and the city is governed for one day by stupefaction. Do you remember last night? they ask each other, and none ever do. The tattered clothes and shed hair, unaccounted for, are destroyed, and cold creams are rubbed into the soreness of thighs. There is nothing left over for a museum, no artifacts and no history, because the city lacks a memory of itself. It is a zone of amnesia.
Transportation
All citizens lope in the city of wolfmen. If a man is on bicycle when he transforms, he discards it, and if a man is within his automobile, he abandons it. The only movement is the movement of paw over earth. For this reason the city appears congested with traffic jams, though these are only streets of empty vehicles. In navigating the main roads, packs of wolfmen will run over car and bus roofs as over a frozen river. Sometimes a wolfman, still in his automobile, will find it difficult to unbuckle himself, and on hearing the thud of his brothers overhead, he will whimper helplessly and claw at his seatbelt, unable to join them: this is the limit of sadness in the city of wolfmen.
Language
In the city of wolfmen all speech requires response. Howl from field is answered by howl from forest, which is answered by howl from lakebed, such that howl necessarily begets howl and dialogues are like great stretches of echoes. The law of communication is that to hear is to speak, and to speak is to pass the burden of speaking to whoever has heard you, as in a room of men who have been given the word hello. Some nights it even seems as though there are not multiple howls but only one howl, which passes from throat to throat, leaving one and burrowing in another, like a locust.
Dining
The morning after, a man will wake up with blood and its iron taste in his mouth. He will gargle with water until it is gone. When he goes to pick up the newspaper, he will find a neighborhood dog, perhaps a golden retriever, laid out and gutted in his front yard. There will be nothing peaceful about the death: the dog’s whiskers will not move in the morning breeze, neither will its hair, and this will unsettle the man; the only part of its body that will look asleep will be its feet, paws curled in at the ankle, except for one foot, crushed and bloody, which won’t look asleep at all. He and the dog’s owner will bury it. When the man becomes hungry later that day, he will be reminded of the dog—of the way that it leapt and yapped at streams of gardenhose water—without knowing why.
Buildings
What are buildings for in the city of wolfmen? It is an everted city. Outdoors—joy of unrestrained movement and howling—the wolfmen cannot conceive of an inside: their houses seem to them like boxes of silence, as though four walls were erected around nothing, around nowhere, to contain it. The sight of their own houses makes them restless. When the wolfmen see the city from its outskirts, glowing through distance and dark like ghostliness, nothing seems more improbable to them than that they should ever return to it. But then dawn tires and weakens them, and they gather on hilltops, panting, to admire the city’s glistening buildings. Their same neighborhoods, built around nothing, around nowhere, seem finer now than forests or fields, and they trot home in exhausted packs. Under a sky pale as milk, thousands of wolfmen crouch outside front doors, whimpering to be let in.
Firearms
Few living wolfmen remember the village mobs that once hunted them. Only that the gunpowder of the rifle that fires the silver bullet is like grinds of nightmare, and the barrel smoke like a curl of nightmare, and the echoing report like the voice of nightmare, terrifying the very air.
Death
When a citizen dies in the city of wolfmen, his death bifurcates into two funerals. If a pack of wolfmen, prowling, finds a wolf’s corpse prone in the forest one night, they will circle it twice before dispersing. And if a group of men, jogging the next morning, finds that same body—a man’s now, nude and pale among the forest leaves—they will proceed to bury it. Even as a corpse the wolf metamorphoses: at dawn it reverts back to the man. Daylight depilates the body, shrinks its teeth. Coaxes the claws back into the hand. By the time the men find it, it is a man again and must be mourned anew. In this way the same death comes to inhabit two bodies. It moves, like a hermit crab, soft and white between its shells.
Love and Procreation
There are no women in the city of wolfmen. The population increases only in relation to the number of tourists who, passing through the city of wolfmen, suffer nonfatal attacks and stay on as citizens. Sometimes the men take lovers among themselves, though this is neither here nor there. Sometimes the wolves take lovers among themselves, meeting every full moon, though who can say whether a man transforms into the same wolf every month: perhaps the wolf is born at the first light of the moon, and grows old in ascendance with the moon, and dies at the moon’s dissolution; perhaps a man has an inexhaustible number of wolves within himself and offers each month a new wolf; perhaps the love between two wolves is like the love of a man who falls in love in a dream, and if the wolves of the same two men should fall in love again the next month, then one might say that, as a coincidence, this is only like the dream that recurs, not that the two wolves remember one another, or the sweet smell of the other’s urine, or beautiful feeling of jaws against the nape of the neck.
Ghosts
The city of wolfmen haunts itself, though it is not otherwise conventionally haunted. If a wolfman breaks into his own house one night and sees a photograph of his human shape on the mantel—smiling at a friend’s wedding, wearing a tuxedo and no beard—he will growl at it, as at an intruder. Conversely, if a man detects the odor of wet fur lingering in his hallways, he will shiver, as at the presence of dead parents in dreams. In this way there are no haunted houses in the city of wolfmen, yet every house is haunted by something that the house remembers and the tenant forgets.
Astrology and Religion
Because the moon is the only influence and the only thing, the city of wolfmen considers the ocean its brother and considers itself an ocean of wolf. The wolfmen think of their city as a magnet that attracts moon: if a city of wolfmen were erected on the moon, the moon would close in on it, snapping shut like a rattrap. Or
else they think of the moon as a magnet that attracts city of wolfmen: if the moon were placed closer to Earth, the city—its buildings and streets—would detach and float airily toward it. Beautiful moon: howling is a form of prayer; dilated pupils are a form of prayer. During eclipses, the men are like dreams of themselves, and nothing anyone says makes sense.
Destroy All Monsters
Around midnight, unable to fall asleep, I abandon my bed to sit at my desk, an oak escritoire facing my apartment’s western windows. Lying on the desktop is my copy of Tom Jones, which I was reading earlier this evening. Now I sit with it again, trying to pick up where I left off. But I find that although I am not tired enough to sleep, I am still too tired to read, so I put down the paperback and recrease a flimsy page corner to keep my place. (I have reached the seventh chapter of the fifth book, when Allworthy, Tom Jones’s adoptive father, is convalescing on his sickbed. The last sentences I’ve underlined are those that Allworthy speaks to the friends gathered around him, whom he admonishes not to fear his death, for, he assures them, he has taken pains to spiritually prepare himself for it, unlike most men. ‘[I]ndeed,’ he aphorizes, ‘few men think of death till they are in its jaws. However gigantic and terrible an object this may appear when it approaches them, they are nevertheless incapable of seeing it at any distance’—‘Yes!’ I have written in the margin.) Giving up on Tom Jones, I stare out the two tall windows that overlook the backyard. But all that’s visible in the blackened glass is the reflection of my own sleepless face. Or rather I should say that my face is visible beyond the blackened glass: the image of my face, though technically reflected on or in the glass, has an odd and ghostly depth to it, so that what my face really appears to be doing is hovering about three or four feet beyond, levitating outside my window in midair. My face floats hugely where the wide backyard should be. The reflection incorporates not only my image, but also the distance at which I sit from the window—a space the breadth of my desk. Yet while my face is all that’s visible beyond the glass, I find that I actually can make out, if I peer closely enough, any number of visual details on or in the glass. The windowpane is dirty, for example, and I can distinguish all the particles of dust lit by the mellow glow of the desk lamp: little dots of gray constellating against the blackness behind them. Occasionally, too, insects will flutteringly alight on the pane, drawn to my room, no doubt, by the false moon of the lamp’s bulb. Some of these insects I recognize, such as the large brown moth resting now on the glass, its two wings folded together like closed eyelids, balanced like a blink on its thin legs (I say that it is resting ‘now’ because, just a moment before, it was beating its wings in stationary flight beyond the window, not far from where my own face still floats, effortlessly). But most of the insects that alight on the window—aside from the moth, I mean—I don’t recognize at all, couldn’t identify if I tried; they remain entomologically ambiguous, just these little splinters with legs. And insect life is not the only life visible in the window. Crawling onto the pane, from the wooden frame to the right, is a neon-pink gecko, the back half of whose body still lies outside my line of sight. Pressed against the glass, its torso seems unusually magnified. For some reason the creature appears so close (though it is in fact four feet from where I sit) that its three-inch body looks hallucinatorily huge. The slowness with which it lifts each leg, the effort and heaviness of each step: I could be watching not a real-live gecko on my windowpane, but film footage of Godzilla on a television screen. Of course if I compare the gecko to another object for scale (my desk lamp, for example), I can tell that it’s not much larger than my finger; but when I stare just at it, I’m able to magnify it to monstrous, macropsia size again. (At such moments I’m as fascinated by the sight of it as I first was by Godzilla, the 1998 American version of which I had to beg my father to bring me to see the summer it was released. Seated beside him in the theater, I remember peering up at the screen and waiting impatiently for Godzilla, whom I had only glimpsed in miniature—in tantalizing split-second flashes—in the television commercials. The movie’s marketing campaign, I remember, emphasized the enigma of the lizard, refusing to reveal his body in advance. Instead city buses bore full-width ads reading ‘HIS FOOT IS AS LONG AS THIS BUS,’ and skyscrapers were draped with banners reading ‘HE’S TWICE AS TALL AS THIS SIGN.’ The actual design of the creature was kept carefully shrouded in industry mystery: until the film was released, Godzilla remained invisible. I was anxious to see him for the first time, so my father took me to the theater on opening night. Whenever that gigantic and terrible lizard finally did appear onscreen, I could not look away. I would enter—my father told me afterward—a trance of attentiveness, during which I was able to go whole minutes without blinking.) Now I watch as the gecko works to pull its hind section onto my windowpane. With its two forelegs, it drags itself gingerly along the glass, taking tentative, cat-burglar steps, peeling its toes from the window’s surface. When the gecko raises and extends its right leg, it pivots its torso to the left, and when it raises and extends its left leg, it pivots its torso to the right, so that its body makes a sinuous, slow-motion swishing pattern as it swings its tail for balance (though I cannot yet see its tail, I can very well imagine its swishing, for the gecko’s distinctive, saurian sashay seems to mirror those of its skeletally identical ancestors: the lizard, the dinosaur, and the crocodile. Indeed, the little gecko resembles nothing so much as a windup toy crocodile, or rather—considering the rubbery texture of the gecko’s body—a gummi crocodile [for instance, the tricolor gelatin alligators that my father bought for me at the theater’s concession counter before Godzilla: their tails red, bellies yellow, heads green. I preferred these gummi gators to gummi bears because, being much larger, they had a real thickness and density to them, which made them more difficult—and thus more rewarding—to chew. The slow, writhing slide of a half-masticated alligator down my throat made me feel, in the dark of the theater, less vulnerable: for I, too, could devour my prey whole, no differently than Godzilla. In essence, what I felt like was Death itself: an all-powerful and -annihilating predator, plucking each gelatin creature from its candy-box habitat and thrusting it into my maw. At the time I even pictured Death, not as a robed and scythe-brandishing skeleton, but as a giant, invisible lizard, one who would pluck children like me from their habitats and devour them in one bite. As I looked up at Godzilla, it occurred to me that this was what Death must resemble, assuming Death were visible. It was only when I glanced over to my father—his face merely amused by the lizard onscreen—that I realized Death might take a different shape for him. ((And how strange to think that, when I was a child, before I had ever read or indeed heard of Tom Jones—before I had even, for that matter, encountered death—my own conception of Death [[as a giant, invisible lizard, a presence that you cannot see]] was already consonant with Allworthy’s))]). I see that the gecko has continued to crawl into my field of vision. About two-thirds of its body is on the window now, all four of its adhesive feet stuck to the pane. Where its toetips touch the glass the pressure makes them pale, so its feet seem to terminate in five little Tic Tacs of padded whiteness. If I lean in and squint at these pads, I can just begin to make out (or imagine that I can just begin to make out) their setae, the fernlike fronds of micrometric hair by which the gecko grips the glass, via so-called van der Waals forces. Afraid of startling it, I ease back in my chair and rest at my original distance. (Of course I have no idea whether it would even be possible for me to startle the gecko, since I can’t tell whether it can see me. On the one hand, it’s doubtful that it can see me, for its eyes aren’t visible to me [the spade-shaped underside of its jaw is resting perfectly parallel to the glass, such that neither of the gecko’s lateral eyeballs, welling out liquidly from either side of its skull, can be distinguished]; but, on the other hand, it might be able to detect me in its peripheral vision.) Even from four feet off, I can still make out almost every detail of the gecko’s belly, the skin of which—a paler shade of pink than
either its legs or back—is lilac, almost white in places, extending from groin to breast in a leotard of lighter-colored flesh. This skin of the stomach is so thin that through it I can see the dark forms of the gecko’s internal organs, sacs of amorphous blackness that bulge against the lilac when it breathes. Its ribs make a tiny cage around them, like a canoe of glued-together toothpicks, and in its chest its heartbeat is visible, its pulse tent-poling the skin with quick, furtive fidgets (it looks like a fist beating off beneath a bedsheet). Meanwhile, as I’ve been watching, the gecko has finished crawling onto the windowpane, so now its tail is visible as well: as it tapers, the tail darkens, turning a merlot purple at its tip, and the whole thing lies plastered against the glass like a strand of wet hair. Having climbed onto the windowpane, the gecko seems content to pause there, as if catching its breath. Though just when I think that the gecko is at rest (just when I think that it might even be falling asleep, when I am certain that it has nodded off and is dreaming on its feet [but do geckos dream?]), its head darts forward, taking a quick dig at the darkness. No other part of its body flinches (not even its tail), yet its head thrusts forward, like a snapping turtle’s, and snaps, its jaws opening and shutting in a swift bite, as if feeding, although I can’t see what—aside from the black air lying behind it in the night beyond the windowpane—it could possibly be feeding on, and yes, as its head darts, there it is, at last, its left eye, briefly visible and turned directly toward me, the lidless membrane turbid and pale, nor is there any question that the gecko saw me, for it was looking directly at me, unblinking, with its lidless, milk-white eye. No sooner has it retracted its head from this first jab, however, than the gecko darts it in another direction, snapping its jaws at the darkness again, and then again in another direction, and again, stabbing its triangular, spade-shaped head here and there in the night. It almost looks as if the gecko is stabbing its spade head into the night, as if the gecko were trying, with the tip of its blade, to dig into the dense night air, dark as garden dirt, and so as if it were trying, with the troweling of its snout, to loosen the night’s granules of packed blackness, to break the night up into clumps, as if digging a deep hole into the night. Again and again the gecko darts the blade of its spade head and retracts it, shoveling heap after heap of darkness, indefatigable as any gravedigger, as if what the gecko had to do—via the jabbing of its own head—was dig a grave in the night air. And this turns out to be not very far from the truth, as it so happens. For I see now that what the gecko is actually jabbing its spade-shaped head at are the little graynesses on my windowpane. Where the gecko’s head darts, a dot of dirt disappears from the glass. So the gecko is feeding: it is feeding on the dirt of my windowpane. It is devouring the dirt, not of the night air, but of my windowpane, and so it is digging a grave not in the night air but in my windowpane, digging a grave with its face in my windowpane. (And is this what my own face could be said to be doing? For one thing, the reflection of my face, as I have already described, appears to be floating not in or on the windowpane but three or four feet beyond it. That is to say, my own face deepens the glass by four feet: its reflection constitutes a four-foot-deep hole in the glass; my face is digging a hole four feet deep into the glass. Now, a four-foot-deep hole is by no means necessarily a grave. But the only thing needed would be for me to back up my chair an additional two feet from the desk, and then the hole that my reflected face would be digging into the glass would be six feet under. In which case anything that I touched to my face—a hand against my cheek, for instance—would perforce be thrown down into that grave: the hand’s image would tumble six feet deep into the windowpane, entombed in my face’s reflection. In this way, my face would be both the gravedigger and the grave at once, and it would be the coffin, too, for that matter, since it too would lie at the bottom of the reflection, at the very bottom of the six feet that it digs and that it is, deep in the windowpane where—being my reflection—its eyes would stare back at me. From the bottom of its plot, my face would seem to beseech me, unblinking and grim like a corpse’s in its coffin. For all these and other reasons I come to believe that my face is digging a grave in the windowpane, though admittedly in a different way than the gecko’s spade-shaped head, which—unbelievably—is still darting, feeding on the dust that speckles the dirty glass.) But no: the little graynesses on my windowpane aren’t dirt or motes of dust, as I have all this time been imagining. For I see now that many of these particles are actually moving, inching their way to the left-hand side of the window. What the gecko is really feeding on are living organisms, bugs too small even to be identified as bugs—mites maybe, or monads. Well, I say that the little graynesses are too small to be identified as bugs, but what I mean is that they are too small to be identified by the human eye, or at least let us say by my eye, my naked eye, for the gecko’s eye—its lidless, turbid eye—has certainly had no trouble identifying them, both as bugs and as sustenance, and in this respect the gecko’s eye has, unblinking, missed nothing. As it darts its snout at them, the bugs flee and scatter, barely escaping its bite. Squinting, I can just begin to make out (or imagine that I can just begin to make out) how legs radiate from all sides of the gray dots, how the monads unfold around themselves these ciliated fringes of hair, which (either by whipping like flagella, or undulating in that underwater way of swaying seaweed, or [in the case of one mite] rotating back and forth, clockwise then counterclockwise, like the buffers at a carwash) propel their bodies in leftward panic across the windowpane, away from the gecko, away from the face that is digging their graves, and toward the reflection of my own face. The gecko lumbers after them, rearing its head from side to side and snapping, such that its body recovers its initial illusion of hugeness. Its body even appears monstrous. Watching all these motes explode outward, like a sneezing, and watching their ruthless pursuit by a reptile whose own body is incalculable orders of magnitude larger than all of theirs combined, I am momentarily able to see the gecko through the mites’ eyes: to regard it as the gigantic and terrible lizard that, to them, it must appear. A great pity for the fleeing mites surges through me. And yet when I say that I am ‘seeing the gecko through the mites’ eyes,’ I’m presupposing that the mites actually have eyes, or else (since surely they must have something that could be anatomically classified as ‘eyes’) that they have something that I would recognize as an eye. In short I am presupposing that the mites can see the gecko through something like my eyes: not through photoreceptive pinholes that would merely register its motion overhead, identifying that darkling light condition as a threat (and thus not even seeing the gecko as a ‘gecko,’ just as an indistinct blurring above); but instead through foveal eyes like mine, which would take in the sight of the gecko, the full welter of its visual detail (its neonpink skin and spade-shaped face, its four legs, its tapering tail). And since the mites themselves are microscopically small, I am further presupposing that their eyes would appreciate the sublime size of the gecko. The mites’ eyes (I am presupposing) would render all the details of its body monstrous. So: no longer an indistinct blur (from the mites’ point-of-view), nor just a regularly sized gecko (from my own), this behemoth lumbering after them would appear (through the mixture of our visions) to be all thick and thundering tree-trunk legs, and the whiplash swishing of an infinite tail, and the death-dealing snap of a grave-digging snout, and, finally, the awful whiteness of that eye, hanging as full and as huge, in the darkness above them, as a moon. This is the image of the gecko that I see through the mites’ eyes, and that makes me feel pity for the mites, when I presuppose that they are seeing it also. But I am presupposing more even than this, I realize. For I must additionally imagine that the mites’ eyes are connected up to a more or less sentient brain, generating thoughts in its little mite mind, which mite mind might, it follows, be able to register the presence of this gecko, and not only that, but also experience fear, panic, and dread of death at the sight of it. Yet can I actually imagine—as I watch the dispersal of the little graynesses o
n my windowpane—that thinking is going on inside one or another of them? What’s likeliest is that the mites aren’t conscious at all (or at least not as complexly conscious as other creatures [not even as complexly conscious, for instance, as the gecko ((within whose shrewd, mucronate skull—behind whose lidless, milky eye—I can very well imagine all sorts of thinking going on [[or perhaps only one sort of thinking, cynegetic thinking, death’s-head thinking, the strategies and calculations and constant readjustments in timing that are required if it is to succeed at hunting mites]]))]). And once I admit to myself that the mites probably aren’t conscious, I can no longer conceive of their being ‘aware’ of the gecko in any sensate way. Certainly not via foveal eyes. But not via any other modality of perception either: not through little pinholes that could register its caliginous shadow overhead; nor even through little tympanic membranes that could hear its footsteps on the windowpane, or else detect the vibrations that each of those footsteps sends through the glass (in which scenario the mites’ bodies would be engulfed by the thrum of the gecko’s footfall, a seism similar to the iambic ‘foreboding rumble’ sound effect [‘da-DOOM da-DOOM’] that movies reserve for the laborious approach of off-screen giants [throughout Godzilla, I remember, I could feel this Dolby Surround Sound borborygmus, as if the darkened theater were itself digesting us]). Because if the mites were aware of the gecko, I reflect, they certainly would have fled from it long before it started darting its head and snapping at them. No, it’s obvious that their sensorium is too rudimentary to perceive the gecko, and that they didn’t even realize it was on the windowpane with them until some of the other mites began disappearing. It was likely just these traces of their brethren’s deaths that—in a kind of Stygian stigmergy—spurred each mite to flee. And even then, they were probably aware only that ‘something’ was causing the others to die, not the gecko specifically. What horror: what the mites experience themselves as fleeing from—namely, this face that is digging their graves—must have no face. The gecko must be an invisible or liminally perceptible threat, a blank cause whose effects they flee. (In which case it really would incarnate my childhood conception of Death, which of course I then personified as a giant, invisible lizard, which is exactly [horrifically enough ((it occurs to me now))] how the mites on the windowpane must be experiencing this gecko tonight. Lacking the sense organs necessary to detect it, they could not look it in the face if they wanted to. It is hidden inside Death’s spectrum, to the other side of the threshold of perception. And because the mites do not know to flee this giant, invisible lizard until it is basically already too late, they are like the men whom Allworthy disdains in the seventh chapter of the fifth book of Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, those men, he says, who do not think of death till they are in its jaws, and so who are incapable of seeing it at any distance. It is no different with mites than with men, I find myself thinking: when you bracket all thought of death within your mind, a blind spot must form, bracketing the sight of Death before your eyes.) Sitting up straight at my desk, I watch as the mites flee this lizard that they cannot see. The little gray dots of them on my windowpane drift steadily toward the reflection of my face, like iron filings swarming a magnet. Their cilia propel them slowly, though, and it will be a few minutes yet before the nearest of them reaches my right cheek. For its part, the gecko seems to have given up the chase. Or perhaps it is only resting a moment to digest. It stands now in the middle of the pane, its four feet planted firmly against the glass. Its sides expand and deflate in a shallow breathing, and its heart, again frantic, is visible once more beneath the lilac of its skin. It has fed well. I fold my hands behind my head and lean back in my chair, putting an extra foot of perspective between the gecko and me. Looking at it like this, I find that I’m unable to keep seeing it through the mites’ eyes. When it is not hunting the mites, the gecko (so far from resembling a Deathlike reptile) seems harmlessly small, stuck to my window like a stick-on star. Its stomach, chewy-looking and pale, is shrunk to gummi-gator size again. My attempts at magnifying it don’t seem to be working anymore. Which is a shame, for I had been growing—almost despite myself—hypnotized by the horror unfolding on my windowpane. It was as if a miniature kaiju film had been arranged for my private viewing: as if the mites were men, flooding the streets of an imperiled city; and as if the gecko were Godzilla, a nuclear lizard twice as tall as a skyscraper. Except now that it is impossible to believe that the mites are conscious and panicking, or that they are even aware of the gecko at all, the gecko cannot be construed, from any creature’s point of view, as monstrous. For me to feel any frisson at the gecko’s feeding, I realize (for the gecko to continue to incarnate Death), I would need to go further than simply anthropomorphizing the mites, pretending that they’re conscious like men. I would have to pretend that they are men, regarding each gray dot on my windowpane as a human life. Then, when I watched those dots fleeing the gecko, I might be able to experience some of the catharsis that I felt during Godzilla, when I could watch actual human beings fleeing an actual giant lizard. Now, as the gecko resumes its ruthless pursuit of the dots, I try to pretend that that is what I am watching: that Godzilla (the gecko) is pursuing humans (gray dots), all of whom only appear to be small (to be a gecko and gray dots) due to some virtual distance between us. It takes great imaginative discipline for me to sustain this illusion, and I find that, in my sympathies for the gray dots, I keep wavering, regarding them as men one moment and mites the next. What this instability and, indeed, double aspectuality of the dots (their toggling back and forth, I mean, between mites and men) reminds me of is that famous line from King Lear, which I was assigned to read in high school and haven’t read since, though I remember both the line in question and the juvenile marginalia that I scrawled beside it. The line reads—in da-DOOMing iambs—‘As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods,’ and my marginalia consisted of scribbling a line first through the the and then through the s of gods; replacing the little g of gods with an uppercase G; and then writing (trailing after the modified God) ‘zilla’; that is, I emended the line so that it read (with editorial markup) ‘As flies to wanton boys are we to the gGodszilla.’ I don’t know why I thought this was so amusing then (perhaps it was simply the collision of cultures, high [seventeenth-century English Renaissance theater] with low [Japanese kaiju films]; or perhaps it was that, even in high school, I had lingering associations between giant lizards and Death), but at that point in my intellectual development, the thought of a man in a Godzilla suit waddling out onto the Globe Theatre’s stage and vaporizing Goneril with his atomic breath was enough to make me bark with laughter, right in the middle of my second-period English class. Now, of course, the image doesn’t even make me smile; I have outgrown the joke. Nevertheless, I find its relevance to the spectacle on my windowpane (or rather the relevance, not of the image, but of the marginalia itself: ‘As flies to wanton boys are we to Godzilla’) fascinating. For, in their double aspectuality, the gray dots manage to occupy both positions of this emended simile simultaneously: when considered as they are in reality (mites), they are flies to wanton boys, and yet, when considered as they are in my imagination (humans), they are men to Godzilla. In the first of these aspects, I am the wanton boy, I suppose, and then the gecko—it goes without saying—is Godzilla. Though it must be said that the gecko does not in the least resemble Godzilla. Whereas the gecko crawls on all fours, Godzilla was traditionally bipedal; and whereas the gecko’s smooth skin is neon pink, Godzilla’s squamous skin was dark as charcoal; and whereas the gecko’s back is bare (though I cannot see the gecko’s back, I can very well imagine that it is bare), Godzilla’s was lined with that stegosaural cordillera of spiky dorsal plates, which studded the length of his spine down to the tip of his tail, where the dense aggregate of jagged spicules (like clusters of rock crystal) could be swung into his enemies to devastating effect; and, finally, whereas the gecko’s eye is turbid and pale, Godzilla’s own eyes were vitreous and clear, narrowed beneath his hacek-s
haped unibrow (a distinct V formation of lighter-colored scales, which gave him a constantly angry and aggrieved appearance). With that said, it’s still easier to pretend that the gecko is Godzilla than that the little gray dots are men. Refocusing on the windowpane, I watch the dots flee leftward toward my reflection, and as they run I can begin to imagine their fear, panic, dread of death. I am even able to summon surges of pity for them once more, visualizing the looks on their faces. What I’m technically visualizing is the looks on the faces of the Japanese actors in old Godzilla films, and one look and one face in particular: the look—which I seem to remember from these movies’ crowd sequences, whenever a mob of people is stampeding down a street with their backs to the camera—is that of the inevitable ‘Lot’s Wife’ (that is, the one man or woman who cannot forbear glancing back at what it is they are fleeing, and so who break off from the rest of the pack to pause briefly, turning their head over their shoulder toward the camera, just to steal a glimpse up at Godzilla, for which glimpse they pay a ghastly price indeed, not only because the sight is horrific [the expression on their face is always one of abject terror, the mouth hanging open in a mute howl and the eyes widened in shock ((though occasionally the howl is not mute at all, but shrill and diphthongal—a sustained ‘Aieeeeeeeee!’—often accompanied by a pointing finger))] but also because even the second or two that it takes for them to glance at Godzilla is enough time for Godzilla to catch up with them, that is, to be bearing down on them at that very moment, such that this poor Lot’s Wife has no time to do anything but stand there paralyzed, like a pillar of salt, looking their death in the face, as they wait for the shadow of Godzilla’s taloned foot to race down and consume them [when the foot itself races down, unceremoniously squashing the actor beneath it, I seem to remember that the accompanying foley effect was a ‘splat’ or ‘squish’ noise. That is doubtless what the people in the fleeing crowd would hear, along with Godzilla’s iambic da-DOOMing, and the sound of it would be like a whip at their backs: by the sound of each squash, they would know now not to turn around like Lot’s Wife, not to steal even the least glimpse of the giant lizard that was pursuing them; and so, unseen, Godzilla would be—in effect and in a manner of speaking—a giant, invisible lizard, this Death whose victims cannot look at it, at least not until they are already in its jaws]). At any rate, that is the expression that I imagine on the faces of the dots on my windowpane, the Lot’s Wife expression (the sight of which terrified me almost as much as Godzilla himself when I was a child, and which, for a while, I assumed all corpses bore on their faces [even years later I was unable ((last summer, at his funeral)) to look down into the coffin at my father’s face]). Nor would the dots’ Lot’s Wife expressions be unjustified, for even as they close slowly in on my own cheek, Godzilla—lumbering in the general direction of my face as well—closes in less slowly on them. But no: they may not be headed toward my cheek at all. For I notice, for the first time in many minutes, that that brown moth—the moth that had, earlier tonight, fatigued itself in stationary flight in the air beyond my window—is still poised in the exact same place on the glass, far to the left-hand side, such that it is in its direction that the men are fleeing and that Godzilla is moving. Though, naturally, the men and Godzilla cannot be moving in the direction of just any regularly sized moth. If human beings and a giant lizard were coplanar with a tiny moth on my windowpane, it would throw everything out of scale, disrupting the reality of the film. Rather, what I must try to imagine—in order to maintain the illusion—is that the moth, no longer a small insect, is in fact the same size as Godzilla. My only option, it would seem, is to cast the insect in the role of Mothra, that monstrous and lepidopterous island deity who appeared in her own series of Toho Company Ltd.’s films (which tended to portray her not as a monster, but as a benevolent protector or guardian angel of her island worshipers, a Phoenix-like symbol of resurrection and rebirth), and who also showed up from time to time in the Godzilla movies, typically to engage the so-called King of Monsters in battle (most famously, and originally, in Mothra vs. Godzilla). Indeed, this bit of casting should work out perfectly. Because if any monster movie is being microscopically restaged on my windowpane tonight, it is without a doubt Mothra vs. Godzilla. Was not the plot of that movie that Godzilla, roused from the sea by typhoon waves, arrives to terrorize a beachside city, where mobs of Japanese civilians flee helplessly through the streets, and where the whiplash swishing of his infinite tail halves buildings at a blow (they collapse like scythed grass), and where the impotent Japanese air force sends squadron after squadron of sleek and expensive fighter jets to launch missile strikes against Godzilla (only to find that these same sleek and expensive fighter jets are, to Godzilla, ‘as flies to wanton boys’), and where it really begins to look as if that implacable lizard is going to stomp each and every building into the ground, until at last one brave group of civilians (the protagonists, in fact) fly to a nearby island where Mothra lives and beg the island’s animistic natives for a minute of Mothra’s time, beg them, that is, for the privilege of paying court to their monstrous and lepidopterous deity, whom the visitors are finally allowed to supplicate, and who finally agrees (Mothra does) to flutter over to the mainland and defeat Godzilla, or, failing that, at least to retard his awful rampage? And is that not the very thing that the men on the surface of my windowpane appear to be doing? Their little crowd of gray dots has been moving steadily toward Mothra: they seem to be fleeing Godzilla for her, for the goddess or guardian angel that—to them—the brown moth must appear (a life force perfectly matched against the gecko’s incredible death force). And once they do eventually reach her, their last resort, surely, will be to beg that insect to combat the giant lizard on their behalf. At this point I actually lean forward in my desk chair, as if in a theater seat, genuinely enthralled. It’s as if all the elements on my windowpane—the mites, the moth, the gecko—are staging an adaptation of this monster movie specifically, a 1964 kaiju film that I haven’t seen since I was twelve years old. And how faithful will it be, the adaptation, I wonder? I try to remember the film’s ending, but memory fails me. I can’t even remember who vanquished whom. All I can bring to mind are stray images from the climactic battle, fought in broad daylight, as I recall, on the sandy beach (I think) of the seaside city that Godzilla had been terrorizing. What I seem to remember is Mothra flying in place in the blue sky above Godzilla, hovering in the air beside him, and maintaining that stationary flight—just as my moth had—by beating her wings into a blur, such that the rapid blinking of these vast wings (not pale brown like my moth’s wings, but the deep orange of late pumpkin or dehydrated urine, and decorated all over with black eyespots) was powerful enough to generate heavy wind, downward gusts of vortical and (in Mothra’s case) gale-force wind, which not only sustained Mothra in her hovering, but actually knocked Godzilla over, after he could no longer go on stubbornly shouldering it and digging his talons into the sand. And I seem to remember how beleaguered and small Mothra looked as she struggled to hover in place, how as her great wings beat she was blown back by the recoil of the gusts she was unleashing and how she had to fight (curling her thorax into a comma of strain) just to stay put. As for Godzilla’s counterattack, I have no trouble at all recalling the blue-white beam of his iconic atomic breath, a cheaply animated flame effect that was employed in every film, postproductively rotoscoped from out of the costume’s open mouth, where it gushed forth in steady streams of flicker and glow, half-laser blast and half-bile, like some lightsaber of chyme that Godzilla was vomiting onto his enemies (he even sometimes doubled over, so that he could better direct the flow of his own atomic breath, spewing it across all the tanks at his feet), which energy beam you could always tell he was charging up whenever a cartoon blue aura began to outline his dorsal plates, and which was hot enough to melt the shells of the tanks. Whether or not it was hot enough to melt Mothra I am powerless to recall. I suspect that the reason I can’t remember the outcome of that climactic battle is not
only that I haven’t seen the movie itself (or any Godzilla film) since I was twelve years old, but also that, when I was twelve years old, the totality of my exposure to Toho’s Godzilla films consisted of a single sleepless evening: a Saturday that same summer, a week after I saw the American version, when a cable station was broadcasting a midnight marathon of the original Godzilla series (including Mothra vs. Godzilla, as well as the battle-royal entry Destroy All Monsters). Earlier in the week I had spotted the marathon’s listing in the latest TV Guide, a copy of which always lay on my parents’ coffee table. While I had never seen one of the Japanese Godzilla films before, I assumed he would be no less frightening (no less Deathlike a reptile) than his American counterpart. So when Saturday arrived I lay impatiently in bed until around midnight, after my parents had gone to sleep, and then crept out into the living room. The marathon’s inaugural entry (Godzilla) was already underway: the image onscreen, in grainy black-and-white, was a close-up of Godzilla’s face, the jaws of his snout—flat and sharp as a shovel—widened to emit his trademark roar. The sound of it was galvanizing (I lowered the volume so that it wouldn’t wake my parents). In that first flush of excitement, I was ready to stay awake all night, for the full eight hours of the marathon. In reality, I started flagging after thirty minutes, my head nodding against my will. I don’t remember when I fell asleep for good (at some point I was woken in the dark by my father, who turned off the TV and led me by hand back to bed), but I made it through at least two or three films in this half-conscious state, constantly jolting up and goggling my eyes. Eventually my mind must have become completely frayed with fatigue (the parentheses between dreams and waking turned permeable) because I could not blink even for a second without falling asleep. As soon as my eyelids lowered I began to dream, split-second dreams or micro-dreams, seamless continuations of whatever I had just been seeing. So if, with my eyes open, I saw on the television screen Godzilla lifting his leg to take a step, then the very moment that my eyelashes met I would see (or dream I saw) Godzilla lowering his foot to finish that step. And if, instead of jolting awake at this point, I simply kept on dreaming, then I would see Godzilla take another step, and another, leaving the television screen far behind him as he descended deeper into my mind. There, my unconscious would weave a dream around him, modeling it on the movie I had just been watching and so doing its best to construct a habitat amenable to the lizard, a kind of oneiric terrarium where Godzilla would not feel out of place. The settings of these dreams would be the same seaside cities that Godzilla had just, on the television screen, been terrorizing; and the characters of the dreams would be the same military personnel and scientists who, in the movie, had just been trying either to pulverize or to propitiate Godzilla; and Godzilla (oblivious that he had left behind his television habitat for my unconscious habitat: devoured live—so to speak—by my dreaming eye) would resume razing buildings and swatting at fighter jets without missing a beat. Given that these were the conditions under which I viewed that climactic battle between Mothra and Godzilla—hypnagogic and groggy—it’s no wonder that I can no longer remember the outcome. Even if the mites, the moth, and the gecko were to stage a perfectly faithful windowpane adaptation tonight—even if they were to behave exactly as their cinematic correlatives did—I would have no way of knowing. Watching them now, I rub my eyes to refresh myself, as if trying once more to stay awake for this movie. Of course, all I am really watching are some unsuspecting microfauna, comporting themselves in a thoroughly banal, nocturnal way: the moth resting, the mites fleeing, the gecko stalking and feeding. If the plotline of Mothra vs. Godzilla can be projected onto these activities, it is only because I myself am doing it. It is an adaptation staged by my eye (my two dark eyes, staring back at me from my reflection in the glass), or, more accurately, by my mind’s or my memory’s eye, which, like the astronomer’s eye, confronted with a night sky’s patternless points of light, casts constellations over all the chaos that it sees. (I remember my father teaching me the constellations in our backyard: he encouraged me to visualize those mythological silhouettes as nets, interpretive meshworks that could be cast over stars to ensnare them in narratives. As if astronomy were just a long slow mythological trawl, pulling in the heavy glittering, each night, of its mythological haul.) And how strange to think that my twelve-year-old self—fighting to stay awake throughout the conclusion of Mothra vs. Godzilla; falling asleep and dreaming brief Mothra vs. Godzilla dreams—was in a way preparing for a night like this one: when the same unconscious mechanisms that generated those Mothra vs. Godzilla dreams would be able to project them not onto the mind’s eye or an inner eyelid, but onto a second-story windowpane. For that is all that this window is: a kind of dream that I am having. The very moment that the gecko crawled onto the glass, I realize, it must have been entering its own oneiric terrarium. And presiding all the while over this terrarium—reflected in the windowpane, diffused throughout its surface, just as my identity would be dissolved through every inch of a dream—is my own face: huge, somber, and sleepless. Though the mites, the moth, and the gecko cannot see my face, it registers every movement of theirs in its transparent skin, which is as one with the glass that reflects it. Nothing steps that does not send a vibration through my face. Interestingly, however, none of the creatures have stepped yet onto my face. My reflection remains the leftmost element in the windowpane. Directly to my right, the moth is still perched in place, resting on its thin legs. Languorously it unfolds and refolds its brown wings, as if blinking. Directly to its right, a nebula of mites is just beginning to unfurl a tendril of gray dots toward its feet. And rightmost yet is the gecko. Pivoting its torso, the gecko unpeels the setae of the toetips of its left forefoot from the glass and lifts the leg up into the air. When it lowers its foot, I think, it will be as if it is stepping deeper into my dream. And the effect will become only more pronounced once the gecko, moving inexorably leftward, actually begins crawling over the reflection of my face. Then it will plant its setae onto my cheek, onto the bridge of my nose and onto my dark eyes; it will pivot its torso over the temples of my skull, suctioning and unsuctioning its feet; and as it crawls across my transparent forehead—its body showing through the reflection of my skin, visible within it like a star behind a cloud—it will be descending quite literally into my mind. Except why wait for it to reach me? I scoot my chair a few inches to the right, leaning my elbows onto the desk and positioning the reflection of my face on the patch of glass directly in between the gecko and the mites. Now if the gecko wants to reach its prey—or to confront their guardian the moth—it will have to cross my face. The gecko pauses. The foot that it has lifted is brought down again, precisely where it was. Its heart beats nervously against its skin. Its tail swishes from side to side. Did it somehow detect my reflection in the windowpane? Did it see my face rush toward it—this huge disembodied head, twenty times its size, gliding across the opposite side of the glass—and does it see it now, an obstacle between itself and the mites? No, it is impossible: my face, however gigantic and terrible an object, must be invisible to the gecko. And whatever it was that caused the gecko to stop short (perhaps the scraping of my chair against the wooden floor) must no longer be a consideration, for it lifts its leg again and steps forward. I lean back in my chair, putting another two feet between myself and the desk, such that the reflection of my face is not four, but, yes, six feet deep in the windowpane, and such that, even as the gecko approaches it, my face is digging a grave in the windowpane. Now, when the gecko finally does cross over, it will perforce be thrown down into that grave: its body will tumble six feet deep into the windowpane, entombed in my face’s reflection. I turn my head in profile to the right, so that my reflection is made to face the gecko in the glass. (Sitting like this, I can no longer look my reflection in the face: unable to see it there—lying at the bottom of the six feet that it digs and that it is—I feel as though I am averting my gaze from a grave just as I did last summer.) I squint at the window out of the corner
of my left eye, watching as the gecko advances toward my reflection. Tilting my chin, I open my mouth wide, as if saying ‘Ahhh,’ such that it will have to crawl right inside it. The gecko inches blithely forward, oblivious. Any moment now it will step into these jaws that it cannot see. That spade-shaped face points like an arrow toward my teeth. I open my jaws a little wider. Pivoting its torso, the gecko lifts its leg and steps. Now, now, it is happening: Godzilla crawls into my mouth, my face, my grave.