Animals Strike Curious Poses

by Elena Passarello

  At a moment of horse-panic, the eyes appear to bulge, thanks to a system of muscles under the skin that expands, like a camera aperture forced open. Though terrified, the body tells the horse to look harder. As the eyes dart and roll, the white sclera around the iris becomes further pronounced. The new white makes them more like our own eyes, with their constant pearlescent frames. Perhaps we’re so moved to paint or sculpt a horse’s frightened eye because it best resembles our own.

  At 4:40, the drugs kicked in and took Oreo’s fear away from him. He lowered his top half, front knees bent but back legs kept straight, like a cat after a nap. From there, swaying a bit, he twisted until his back legs gave out beneath him. When his rump finally hit the black street, the crowd’s reaction was audible—a chorus of ohhhhs as Oreo curved into himself.

  “Once they go down, they hit,” the same deep voice said, which didn’t help anyone.

  “Look at that,” a higher voice said, which is perhaps closer to the point.

  Look at that. Look at the body on the pavement, that eye growing all-brown and still. After five thousand years of shading the horse from fear (for our own interests), we still cannot conquer it for him. We’ve spent fifty-six million years swallowing our human fear, but his whole body still revolves around it. Fear is the lens with which a horse sees the world; it’s moved him over six continents. Not the grace or power or intelligence we claim to prize in him, but this primordial fear, as old as either species. And if we’ve been close to his fear all this time, what did we do with our own?

  Look at him looking. Look at him searching us. What does this giant eye, set upon us for so very long, see that we still cannot?

  See the frightened kid who mistakes the gaze of six horses for God’s judgment, and then blinds them. See the apocalyptic visions in which the Lord swears to “strike every horse with panic” and “keep a watchful eye over Judah, but … blind the horses of the nations.”

  See the old Grimms’ tale of Clever Hans, who gouges every horse eye in his stable and then throws them into the lap of his beloved when she asks the dim boy to “cast a friendly eye” upon her. When she sees that she’s covered in the eyes of Hans’s horses, the beloved panics and takes off running.

  Human society, like Mike, is getting by on its resources.

  Time, October 29, 1945

  MIKE QUICKLY FIGURED out he could no longer crow. The few times he attempted to—hunkering into a center-stage chicken squat and flexing his wings—he only managed a low rumble in his belly. It felt like being buried under a mound of mud. It sounded like a kitchen sink with drain trouble. The gurgle and choke made Oley run for the eyedropper to squeeze Mike’s clogged neck-hole clear.

  A shame, thought Oley and Clara. They could’ve upped the admission at least a dime for crowing. I mean, look how the crowds clamored when Mike gave ’em the littlest wing flap. But charging more than a quarter for a bird that mostly sat there just wasn’t Christian, head or no head. Plus, the show already ran on sin; that head in the Mason jar next to Mike was bogus. Back home in Fruita, Colorado, Clara’s tabby had run away with Mike’s God-given head, so Oley pickled a decoy to take on the road.

  The newshounds came out to Fruita with their notepads, as did the zoological types with their magnifying lenses. They ate up Clara’s gravy pie and gawked at Mike’s spared brain stem and filed their stories from the field: “Beheaded Chicken Calmly Lives On” and “Headless Chicken Alive and Gaining Weight.” After the mentions in Life and the Guinness Book and the all-expenses-paid trip to the lab in Salt Lake—around the time tongues were wagging about Oley’s new-bought hay baler and his fresh-off-the-lot Chevy pickup—another rumor must’ve brewed that Fruita water helped chicken blood clot. After that, you couldn’t swing an axe without hitting some Fruitan who’d pinned down his own Wyandotte, first squinting himself as cockeyed as they imagined Oley to be. They’d miss the opening stroke on purpose to heat the blade, then they’d slice through the hackle feathers at a diagonal, sparing the base of the neck, where most of the chicken-brain hunkers low in a corner. Then the family would watch as the rooster’s head rolled.

  The birds usually staggered off the blocks and stepped—one, two, three—before toppling into the dirt. A few stayed alive for the afternoon, or past sundown, or maybe even into the next day—the whole farm white-knuckled and unblinking until the birds bled out, or bashed into the stovepipe, or fell off the porch, or something. Mike could’ve told them: staying alive without a head is tricky.

  The old men at Fruita’s Monument Café went on record that they couldn’t care less. Outside the Monument, though, the little girls with jump ropes demanded answers: “Mike, Mike, where is your head? Even without it, you aren’t dead!” One article answered the girls, saying Mike wasn’t dead because his will to live was “almost human.” But where in a headless chicken does this almost-human willpower lie? Nobody thought to ask that, and Mike obviously wasn’t talking.

  It can’t live in his cocksureness, since crowing was off limits and his gone head scared the hens away. Could the will be vascular, then? A coagulative will? The simple will of platelets, thrombin, and myelin to keep godlessly plugging and sheathing? Or could Mike have the same will of those brachiosaur bones hanging tough in the Fruita shale, waiting for their second acts as hair combs, figurines—curios you have to be careful not to break while dusting the mantel?

  He could have willed himself to fight the sure thing that is human folly, a noble course for any animal in the kingdom. Perhaps he already knew, that sharp night on the block, that Clara’s mother was visiting and making Oley’s axe hand anxious. He couldn’t help but reckon that, at some point, Oley would let that head-thieving cat out of his sights. He probably bet his bottom chicken dollar that one of these evenings, after the show, in one of these dank motor inns, he’d choke up, only to learn that Oley had left his crucial eyedropper at the last tour stop, two hundred miles in the dust.

  What if Mike stayed alive, ghost head shaking in disgust, just to see what those two would cock up next?

  But perhaps it’s best for all involved to think that Mike’s will was something else altogether. Some living things harbor another nervous system—one that pushes them past simply crowing, past just chasing hens, and even past the natural order. What’s the harm, really, in saying that Mike stayed alive for the promise of a tiny tent twisting with reverb? Or for cheers so loud he could feel them in the bumps of his skin? For the good burn of hot lights sizzling with moth wings, Clara’s starstruck touch on his back, or the soft fuzz of a hotel blanket in place of chicken wire and an apple box. For fan mail simply addressed to “the Headless Chicken in Colorado” that the post office knew to deliver to Mike’s farm.

  Let’s tell ourselves this was what pushed him forward—eighteen months past one final lap around the yard and a headless roast. Maybe that same will to remain a rooster for five hundred unseen sun-ups is the will of Ziegfeld, of flash bulbs, of Borscht Belts, of gotta-dance. Of take my hen, please, (badump bump) and “Doc, my head hurts when I do this!” “Well, then you better not do that,”(badump bump) and Momma always said don’t count your chickens before they’re axed, (badump bump) and Rooster? I barely know ’er! (badump bump).

  Maybe Mike always knew that, in this world, baby? You’re gonna need a gimmick if you truly wanna get ahead.

  The tiny insect had, in many ways, been Skylab’s star performer.

  Reuters

  IN EARLY SUMMER, once she has broken from her cocoon and spent a day or so in the huddle of her family, an adolescent cross spider feels ready to fly. She scuttles to some swatch of vegetation that faces outward—a leaf ridge, a twig—and she perches there. Then she lifts a significant fraction of her legs and pulls a silk strand from the spinnerets at the base of her abdomen. Ounce for ounce, that silk is five times the strength of reinforced steel and at least twice as strong as a human femur.

  When a June wind blows the silk strand into its current, she follows it with her body: a tiny b
alloon chasing its string. It is a journey that begins with a considerable jerk and ends only when her silk tether collides with a rooted object—a bush, a fencepost. This could be a one-yard trip, or it could send her half a mile away. A half-mile journey to a cross spider is like a man catching a wind from Milwaukee to Madison.

  Gravity left the bodies of the Skylab III crew without much warning. They had spent the early minutes of the launch pressed down into their command module’s “couch” while 7.7 million pounds of rocket thrust pushed away the Earth. Now, a small space separated their thighs from the seat fabric. If not for the straps of their harnesses, the three men would have risen like milkweed to the low ceilings of the transport pod.

  It would be several more hours before a dot appeared in the navigational telescope, unmistakably white against the black of space. More hours still, waiting and hovering, until the dot became a shining oblong cylinder topped with a windmill-shaped telescope. Skylab. Here was where they would dock themselves: at the gate of this white and black and brilliant gold capsule, which was falling in the orbit of the planet they’d escaped at nearly one half mile per second.

  Not too long after landing, a cross spider spins her first full web. She casts a line outward, waits to feel it catch, and then secures the other end of the line to the spot where she rests. This creates a single-strand bridge that she can walk across, which she does, reinforcing it with a second bridge-line. Once suspended from the center of that bridge, she free-falls, still pumping silk to form a Y-shape. She then pulls strand after strand from her body, spinning and falling, climbing and plummeting, hooking each strand to the crotch of that Y. Soon, a dozen spokes branch from the Y-hub like a silken sunburst.

  Without stopping, she turns sideways and circles the spokes, connecting them in thirty cartwheeled spirals. Here is when she switches the gears of her body to produce a stickier silk—viscid enough to trap heavy prey. With this silk she weaves a second spiral. After that’s done, she eats the first spiral, then she eats the hub, and finally she arranges herself in the hub’s place. And though she will never rate a vantage to see her handiwork (even if she could, her eyes can’t focus at such a distance), the young spider has just filled her space with one of our Earth’s most spectacular pieces of craftsmanship, just as versions of herself have done for hundreds of millions of years. It takes her about half an hour.

  NASA spent almost a decade designing Skylab’s orbital workshop, and its final blueprint held limited consideration for up and down. Rather than separate the station’s two levels with a solid floor, a crosshatching of beams split the workshop like an open, metallic net. A long blue pole ran through the center, so the men could pull themselves along the workshop’s forty-eight feet, but the astronauts scrapped the pole shortly after getting their space bearings. They preferred pushing off the walls and steering with their arms, floating through that empty center to travel from the workshop’s fore level—site of the dinner table, the latrine, and the three booths in which they slept bolted to the walls—to the aft level—with its radio and TV equipment, its biophysics lab, its materials processors, and its plastic vial the size of a human thumb containing a young cross spider named Arabella.

  A spider was built to strum her web like a guitar. She was built to pluck a radial with one striped tarsal claw and feel how the pull of the world changes the vibration of her web. She was built to spin more sticky strands at web-bottom than at web-top, as gravity makes jumping down to prey less taxing than climbing up to it. She was built to drop a gossamer line and free-fall from danger, to walk the strands of her handiwork upside down, using her weight for propulsion.

  For nothing says “spider” more than this built-in vigilance, this innate knowledge of what pushes her into the earth and what lifts her away from it. Her legs, claws, mouth, the silk she unspools from inside herself, they all understand—with the hair-trigger sensitivity that comes from eons of experiments—the facts of our massive planet trying to collide with her body.

  It wasn’t until the eighth day of the mission that Science Pilot Owen Garriott floated over to Arabella’s little vial. NASA had custom-built her a fifteen-inch square cage, as narrow as a framed portrait, with a flat glass front. Around the frame were mounts for long fluorescent bulbs and cameras, and at the top right corner was an attachment point for Arabella’s transport vial, which would create a narrow tunnel for her to pass into the cage. Nobody wanted to risk releasing a tiny spider into the free space of the orbital workshop, which the crew knew had a mind of its own.

  She refused to take the tunnel for a full mission day. Though she was only the responsibility of the science pilot, the two other crewmen couldn’t help but keep tabs on her. Pilot Jack Lousma watched Garriott opening Arabella’s vial and floated over to assist. “It didn’t know where it was, poor spider,” he later remembered. Commander Alan Bean, one of the dozen men who have walked on the moon, noted her in his private journal: “Owen got the vial off the cage, opened the door, and shook her out, where she immediately bounced back and forth, front to back, four or five times, then locked onto the screen panels at the box edge. There she sits, clutching the screen.”

  The sixteen-millimeter film of Arabella’s earliest work on Skylab depicts not so much a spider as the specter of one—a black-and-grey arachno-ghost. Eight thin strands glimmer about her body: these are her legs. White dots sparkle from a dozen other faint pinstripes: these are her gossamer. In the film, she tries to free-fall and hang an early radial, with tumultuous results. You see her scurry along a horizontal line, half holding on and half bouncing, until she loses all footing; then weightlessness floats her above the line. A flailing of legs sends her tumbling in the other direction, sinking lower, though there is no “lower” to a spider somersaulting in a cage-in-space. She first flips head over abdomen, then corkscrews, so that her rolling turns sideways. Her legs reach outward in eight directions; then they all move inward, clutching the empty space as one desperate claw. Eventually, she finds the hard purchase of the cage’s corner, and tries to locate some stillness there.

  Science Pilot Garriott had spent months rehearsing his upcoming spacewalks on a drowned Skylab mock-up in Huntsville. On Mission Day 9, he shut the airlock room off to the rest of the station, opened the execution hatch, and exited to a place only twenty-five men had gone before him: out into the thermosphere, the “hard vacuum,” the emptiness between the Earth and its closest celestial neighbor. A sixty-foot cord spooled out from his abdomen.

  Slowed by the fat fingers of his gloves, he was surprised by the effort it took to pull a five-foot pole of thin steel from the hatch, then another, then another, linking them end to end until they made two fifty-five-foot-long booms pointing out into space. He then unhitched himself from the footholds to float a giant sail of thermally treated gold fabric to the attachment points at the poles’ ends. Next, he reeled the sail until it covered the orbital workshop like a golden duvet, shielding Skylab from the heat of the sun.

  Before returning indoors, Garriott swam to the end of the windmill telescope on the other side of the spacecraft. Since Huntsville, he’d vowed to find a moment in space to put his toes on the edge of Skylab and look down.

  And what he saw was, in a sense, a distance equal to the entire length of the Grand Canyon. In another sense, he saw the equivalent of a cross spider staring over a smallish asteroid, perhaps the size of the one named after the schoolteacher who died on her way to space. And in a completely different sense, the science pilot saw nothing at all.

  Once back inside Skylab, Garriott discovered Arabella had spun her first web in microgravity.

  The distance between a man and the moon is a spider hiking the Oregon Trail. The distance from a spider to the end of her six-inch silk tether is a man drifting on a sixty-foot umbilical. A man tumbling from end to end of a space station is a spider free-falling down a four-foot web.

  For a spider is a particle and a man is a particle and the spider attracts the man with a force directly prop
ortional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of their distances.

  For a man is least distant from a spider when the world he knows is multiplied by cosmic exponents.

  For a spider is most distant from a man when she no longer has the tools to refer to herself.

  The first web she made was loose and haphazard, a funhouse mirror of her gridded, Earth-spun work. Since she could not feel the weight of her body on the strands, the silk she spun was of varied and impractical thickness. Few of the lines were taut or straight. The web looked like the worn-out shawl of a sideshow palmist, or a sea net from which any fish could manage escape. It is the kind of web only spun on Earth when a spider has just molted, or is quite near her death. It is not unlike a web spun by an amputee spider, or the spider that a Swiss pharmacologist spiked with d-amphetamine in 1948.

  Space was a kind of stimulant for the Skylab crew, who, in the second week of their nine-week flight, radioed Mission Control for extra work. Science Pilot Garriott logged twenty-two hours in a single mission day. Though NASA had proposed sending them to space with a game console and movie projector, all the crew really wanted to do for R and R was stare out the window and monkey around in the microgravity. Because space awakens things in the human body. The men had become more dexterous and less nauseated. Zero-g decompressed their vertebrae; each man stretched at least an inch by splashdown.

  In the evenings, the men floated to the ring of hulking white lockers that encircled one end of the workshop and they ran laps, running the “wheel” from wall to ceiling and back down like three Astaire hamsters. Or they would tumble and flip in their white socks and boxers, gliding into one another, making water-ballerina shapes. They challenged each other to contests of floating—from the trash airlock, down past Arabella’s TV cage, past the kitchen and through the hatches, all the way to the command module that brought them to space—without flapping an appendage. “We might have had a shot at the Olympics,” Garriott later quipped. The science pilot called this feat “playing Spiderman.”