Hold the Enlightenment

by Tim Cahill

  I am, in fact, guilty of arranging certain situations designed to test and trigger the First Rule of Vermin Shrieking.

  High school speech class, and here was my evil plan for the final assembly of my final year. There’d be four hundred students in the new auditorium, every seat filled, and I wanted to hear them scream.

  We’d use the impressive new spotlights designed for stage plays. The best student actor I knew—and the only one I could trust to go along with me on this deal—was Dave Hanson, who would walk onstage wearing a funereal black suit. Stepping up to the podium under a single spot, Dave was to solemnly open a book, fix the audience with his best Vincent Price stare, and begin reading Edgar Allan Poe’s merry little contemplation of corporeal decomposition entitled “The Conqueror Worm.”

  We knew what would happen. My fellow students, fearing Culture, would no doubt fidget for a bit. The poem postulates “an angel throng” sitting “in a theater.” On the poetic stage, Poe has positioned “mimes,” in the “form of God on high.”

  At this point, we’d begin to shrink the spot on Dave. The auditorium would become very dark as he dug down deep for his best shuddery bass voice on the verses we needed to really hammer home in order for the prank to work.

  The mimes in the poem are—good Lord!—human beings. In their midst, Poe has “a crawling shape intrude.” Bloodred, it writhes, it writhes. “The mimes become its food,” and it—the bloodred crawling shape—is “in human gore imbued.”

  Dave could read that well, I knew. He’d pull the audience into the horrid realization of what this poem is all about. The last verse begins:

  “Out—out are the lights—out all!”

  Which is when we’d kill the spot altogether, leaving the auditorium in total darkness, while Dave gravely intoned the last lines, which are all about the poetic angel audience sobbing heavenly tears because they realize:

  “That the play is the tragedy, ‘Man,’

  “And its hero is the Conqueror Worm.”

  Here, timing was important. We needed to hit them in the silence following Dave’s recitation, but before the muttering and mumbling started. I had three confederates all set up for the nonverbal punch line. In the darkness, we’d run down the aisles of the silent auditorium, tossing out great handfuls of cooked spaghetti (still warm and a little damp). The spaghetti flingers all had a two-word line, a terror-filled scream, to be repeated as necessary: “THE WORMS … THE WORMS …”

  Do it right and they’d scream. Most of my classmates would scream. Four hundred flat-out bug screams, or, more precisely, worm screams. Different creature, same sound.

  One problem: along with the rest of my worm tossers, I needed a pass to be in position at the back of the auditorium. A damn fine teacher named Fred Metzner demanded to know why the four of us wanted these special passes. He wouldn’t accept “It’s a surprise” as an explanation. Fred Metzner had learned not to trust student surprises.

  And so, my plan was foiled at the last moment. Mr. Metzner described the idea as “juvenile,” though I thought it was a good deal more mature than that. It was adolescent at the very least.

  One night, several weeks into the Congo walk, I was just dropping off to sleep, lying in my tent, sometime around ten in the evening, when the half-pound centipede dropped from the fabric ceiling and onto my naked, sweating chest with an audible plop. Later, under my headlamp, I was to discover that it was not one of the poisonous ones. Just a normal Congo Basin jungle centipede and only about the size of an ordinary Polish sausage. It looked naked and pink, and was curled in on itself like something the dog left on the lawn. Under my light, the bug wasn’t something you’d necessarily scream about.

  But, half asleep, and in the dark, I had no idea what it was. Just something wet and heavy that seemed to have been dropped from a great height. I said “eeewaah.” I believe I said “eeewaah” several times in the darkness—a crescendo of half-awake terror—and when I brushed at my chest with blind, fluttering hands, I suddenly felt the heavy wormlike thing just above my wildly beating heart and swept it to the side. I said “eeewaah” several more times as I leapt to my feet, nearly stuck my head through the fabric of my tent, fell down somewhere near where “the unknown thing” had to be, then rolled over, and finally came out of my tent like a scorched cat. All the time saying “eeewaah, eeewaah, eeewaah.”

  The pygmies, all thirteen of them, were over in their camp, maybe fifty yards away. I could hear their battery-powered shortwave radio blasting out static-ridden music. The sound, as usual, was turned up into that range of irritating distortion in which it is impossible to tell reggae tunes from English madrigals. Pygmies, I had learned on my Congo walk, listen to the radio all night long. And they will always sacrifice fidelity to volume.

  I had started out on this long jungle trek determined to get close to the pygmies, to understand their lives, their hopes, their dreams, their music. Most of all, I wanted to absorb a small measure of their knowledge of the forest. But they kept the radio on all night, never seemed to sleep, and I generally camped some distance away, just out of earshot.

  So it was possible they hadn’t heard me bug screaming.

  But no, they were shouting and howling among themselves, and the howls were those of high-pitched and helpless laughter.

  “What?” one of them called out to me in French, our only common language. I think it was Kabo, who was handsome as a homecoming king and one of the leaders. “What has happened?” he called.

  I didn’t know the French word for centipede. I don’t know much French at all, but the word for insect isn’t particularly difficult for an English speaker.

  “Insecte,” I said.

  Kabo strolled over, along with half a dozen other pygmies. I had scooped the centipede up onto a machete, using my notebook to avoid touching the thing, and was about to dump it, alive, a good distance from my tent. But the pygmies had to examine the creature that had caused me to say “eeewaah” several dozen times.

  They aimed their one flashlight on the machete. The beam was very dim and yellow in color. The pygmies said some words to one another in Sangha, their native language, looked up at me, and, unnecessarily, I thought, began laughing again. They shook my hand and slapped me on the back and laughed until tears came to their eyes. It was, I thought, incredibly juvenile behavior.

  Later that night, I could hear them in their camp, shouting over the static on the radio. They used the word mundele, “white man,” which has about the same connotation that the word gringo has in Latin countries. The noun is sometimes merely descriptive and void of nuance. Sometimes, like gringo, mundele can mean greenhorn, oaf, imbecile, or doofus. The meaning depends on the context. In this case there was silence for ten or fifteen seconds, then one of the pygmies would say mundele, meaning me, and the rest of them would begin howling with a kind of hilarity that I believed to be entirely inappropriate to something as human and unaffected as a few dozen simple bug screams.

  It was in those moments of sweaty humiliation that Cahill’s Corollary to the First Rule of Vermin Shrieking was born, screaming.

  The Platypus Hunter

  Here is the wily Platypus Hunter, stalking the forests of the night. He steps carefully into the pulsing darkness, feeling for the trail with his foot. He breathes. Steps again. He doesn’t want to use his light yet, so he is moving slowly, slowly. The great eucalyptus trees all about soar two hundred feet and more into an inky, blue-black sky, but the canopy itself is unseen above, a grand weight of leafy life vaguely delineated by the unfamiliar stars of the Australian sky. He steps again, and there is a muffled thud, which, he deduces from long experience, is the sound of his body colliding with the trunk of a tree. It doesn’t even hurt. Not that much, anyway. The bark is peeling off the tree in great long strips: a stringy bark tree.

  In less than four hours, the Platypus Hunter will be another year older. He feels the seasons of his life slowly flapping in front of his face like the beating of some great dark wi
ng. You’re born, he thinks; you live, you die, and to what end?

  Is our journey through life a quest? For enlightenment, perhaps? For nirvana? For a Union with the One? This is why the wily Platypus Hunter is out walking into trees in the middle of the night. He’s pretty much clueless in the what-does-it-all-mean department, but figures that a series of small, highly defined quests—seeing a platypus in the wild, for instance—will one day accumulate into a critical mass and then there will be a blinding light like the collision of suns. In that radiant moment, the Platypus Hunter believes, he will be able to see into the Very Core of the Universe.

  I was about fifty miles north of Melbourne, on the far southern reaches of the Great Dividing Range, near the headwaters of the Yea River, where the platypus, so I imagined, frolicked. The sun had set some time ago. The moon had not yet risen, and the Hour of the Platypus was rapidly approaching.

  There wasn’t much that could hurt me in this forest. I suppose that wild pigs, feral for generations, might leave me bleeding from a myriad of six-inch half-moon-shaped cuts, the scimitar tusks and upper teeth gnashing together like scissors in a cacophony of snorts and grunts. Local tiger snakes are venomous and potentially deadly, as are most Australian snakes, but I’d yet to see one in two weeks of prowling the parklands above Melbourne. What they had here were koalas dozing in the trees, shy swamp wallabies—a kind of junior-sized kangaroo—as well as lyrebirds, cockatoos, and burrowing wombats, an animal that can weigh up to seventy-five pounds and that looks a bit like a cross between a tiny bear cub and a Sherman tank.

  My eyes adjusted to the darkness, my confidence expanded, and I began taking two and three steps at a crack. Which was when I stepped on the tiger snake.

  Everything happened very quickly. I was somewhere two or three feet above the trail, suddenly and involuntarily airborne. Gravity had no dominion over me. The tiger had twisted under my foot, and the rest of its body thrashed in the foliage to my left. Big snake, I thought urgently, five or six feet long. Lotta venom.

  In the fullness of time, I found myself some distance away, dropped effortlessly into a gunfighter’s crouch on the mute forest floor, right arm extended. The trigger seemed to pull itself, and the night exploded into light.

  And what the beam of the spotlight I carried revealed was not, in fact, a tiger snake. It was a wide, seven-foot-long strand of stringy bark shed by one of the eucalyptus trees. Had the big rechargeable halogen spotlight been a gun, I would have fired blindly into the night. The realization was a form of enlightenment I didn’t care to contemplate.

  Even worse: Had anyone seen me blow away the menacing strip of tree bark?

  I raked the forest with my spotlight. All the night things that crept and crawled below, that darted or soared above, were staring directly at me, in my solitary embarrassment. Their eyes, in the scalding beam of light, seemed vaguely demonic, as if the creatures in this forest were burning up from within, all their hearts on fire. Dozens of pairs of radiant eyes were focused on me, some of them red like glowing coals, others shining a pale, poisonous-looking yellow, and still others gleaming a cool and luminescent green. When I snapped off the light after about twenty seconds, the eyes in the forest faded into a darkness that was more impenetrable than before, more absolute. It would take twenty minutes or more for my own eyes to readjust. For the moment, I couldn’t see my hands in front of my face. I stood alone and still and silent. Listening.

  Frogs along the riverbank grunted out their lust in an irregular bass beat that croaked along in counterpoint with the high-pitched chirping of bats. Owls—there were several of them—worked the horn section, hooting out short, soft calls that seemed to arouse a kind of rage in various species of possum, which traded off in a series of angry solos: high in the trees, I heard the strange, strangled gurgling of a possum called the yellow-bellied glider, and then the piercing bark of a sugar glider.

  Above and unseen, there was an air war in progress, owls and possums in combat. A “flying” possum such as the greater glider can soar the length of a football field on a wing called a patagium, a flap of skin that extends from the wrist to the ankle. Flexing at the elbows, with the forepaws tucked under its chin, the possum spreads its wings and leaps from a perch high in the trees, falling into a gradually descending glide path and sometimes swerving off at right angles to its direction of flight. Greater gliders are pursued, and sometimes even taken in midair, by what’s called the powerful owl. The possum terminates its flight as a hang glider might, turning back upward into the night sky and using gravity as a brake. It lands on all fours against the trunk of a tree.

  There were greater gliders in the trees above, feeding on the eucalyptus leaves. I’d seen them earlier in my light, marking them by their eyeshine, which was a brilliant whitish yellow. They were known to turn away from direct light. The brush-tailed possums stared directly into the spot, and theirs were bright red horror-film eyes.

  Most animals native to Australia are nocturnal, and as it has with all nocturnal creatures, evolution has engineered their eyes to collect and concentrate available light. The retinas of night-adapted vertebrates are backed with a reflecting layer of cells called the tapetum lucidum, the “bright carpet.” What light there is enters through the pupil and is partially absorbed by the retina, the inside back wall of the eyeball. Light that is not absorbed by the retina is reflected back into the eye by the tapetum lucidum, effectively giving the animal a second chance to see the image.

  When a bright artificial light is directed into such an eye, it will seem to glow, as if from within. The phenomenon is called eyeshine. Various droplets of colored oil in the cells of the eyes of different species give each a distinct eyeshine. Cats’ eyes seem to glow green, rabbits’ are yellowish, deer’s are a pale yellow, and wolves’ are greenish gold. The West Indian tree boa’s eyes are red-orange, and the Nile crocodile’s are bright red, as are the eyes of alligators and caimans.

  I once believed that the eyes of all nocturnal predators shone red. This, until very recently, was a matter of lifelong misperception. At night, in the wild, I did not want to catch the red eye, and more to the point, I did not want the red eye to catch me. In my mind, the association of predators and glowing red eyes has been reinforced by any number of flash photographs I’ve taken in which my friends’ true and blood-ridden souls seem to flash out of bright red pinpoints in their eyes. Humans are predators, these photographs seem to say, and you can see it in our eyes.

  The physics of the situation are not so damning. A flash is used in low-light situations, when the pupil is open wide so that the full force of blinding light enters the eyeball and reflects back out the still-open pupil at the same angle. What we see in those satanic red orbs staring back at us out of the latest batch of snapshots is not the predatory nature of the human soul. It is the reflection of the blood vessels in the back of the eye. Still, the camera companies have developed anti-red-eye technology in the hope, I suppose, that we will, in our photos, seem to be maturing into a kinder and gentler race.

  It took nearly a century for Western scientists to conclude that an egg-laying creature could, in fact, be a mammal. Because the platypus is such a biological oddity—web-footed, fur-bearing, and duck-billed—I had assumed it was rare and endangered. In fact, the most conservative estimate is that there are tens of thousands of them inhabiting rivers and streams along the eastern seaboard of Australia, all the way from Melbourne to Queensland.

  Platypuses spend their nights swimming and their days curled up in burrows dug deep into riverbanks anywhere from a foot to ten feet above the water. They dine on freshwater crayfish and worms, but the bulk of their diet consists of caddis fly larvae sunk in the mud at the bottom of the river. Diving with its eyes closed, the platypus roots around in the mud, looking for the larvae with its sensitive bill, which is soft and wet, blue-black in color, and more like a dog’s muzzle than a duck’s bill.

  In Australia, the platypus is protected throughout its range, but it�
�s threatened by pollution, riverbank erosion, and predation by foxes. I’d seen a few platypuses at the Healesville Sanctuary, northeast of Melbourne. It’s a place where injured animals—wallabies, wombats, the whole panoply of southern Australian wildlife—are brought for rehabilitation. Platypuses, whose diet is not significantly different from that of trout, are sometimes accidentally caught on a fisherman’s fly line. Some few, trapped in the stream that flows through the sanctuary, are on display in a nocturnal aquarium situation, where lights are dimmed and fragmented, like moonlight falling through foliage. There the platypuses seem to frolic, rather like otters, and they are much smaller than I would have imagined: A large adult male is about two feet long and weighs just over four pounds. The tail is broad and flat, like a beaver’s, and is used as a rudder.

  At Healesville, I spoke with the platypus keeper, a man who calls himself Fisk. Just Fisk. Handling a male platypus, he said, is problematic: it is the world’s only venomous mammal. There are two horny spurs on the hind legs, which are connected to venom-secreting glands. Males tend to use the spurs during breeding-season altercations, which can be deadly to one or both competing platypuses. The poison is not fatal to humans, but it is painful. People stung on the hand won’t be playing the guitar for several months.

  In Fisk’s experience, platypuses like to be stroked on the bill. They recognize individual humans and like to play. Fisk fondly recalled a platypus that would prop its little elbows on the rim of the enclosure and stare at him sitting at his desk. It’s hard to get work done, he told me, when a platypus wants to party.

  I had decided that, in Australia, the platypus would be my totem animal partially because of our mutual tendency to spend most of the day sleeping and most of the night frolicking about and eating. More to the point, there was something quintessentially “high school” about the creature, something endearing and adolescent and immediately accessible. Who didn’t feel like a platypus in sophomore English: so strange, so different from the rest, so inherently dorky as to be unclassifiable by science. Platypus boys and platypus girls confined to Platypus High, mammals all, and some of us filled with venom.