A quote comes to my mind:
“Normal is an illusion. What is normal for the spider is chaos for the fly.” Charles Addams
There is an icy wind flowing through graying fields and decaying farmland. It’s a landscape awaiting a morbid Bob Ross type to paint and hang in a funeral parlor. My family’s car speeds down the highway. My dad and mom sit in the front and then there’s me. The icy exterior more than matches the interior of the vehicle. No one speaks. I have nothing to say and decide to mute it all away with headphones on at a decibel too loud to drown them out even if they did speak to each other. My mother stares into her phone and for a while the music I’m listening to takes me away from the dull monotony of this current life.
A large deer carcass, a Buck with immense antlers, is on the roadside and my dad suddenly swerves away to avoid hitting the gory obstruction. Afterwards, he stares off and seems to contemplate where his life is going.
The GPS interrupts our shared silence by giving directions. Dad makes no motion but perhaps unintentionally makes eye contact with mom. And before I could notice the silence has gone on for many hours until there’s another sudden swerve of the vehicle, enough to make an earbud fall out of my left ear. I look outside the car window and see a sign: Welcome to Blank. Population 3,000.
“What a barren and uncreative name for a town.” I thought to myself and wondered if my parents shared that thought or maybe they didn’t want to remind themselves of this fact? The streets are bare and lack decoration or signs of life.
My dad catches me looking around and tries to engage: “Well? What do you think?” I don’t immediately answer. I feel complacent and bored and most of all slightly rebellious before deciding to reply in a tired and disinterested way: “I don’t know.”
Dad immediately follows up with a dad joke he got from a sitcom, a favorite pastime of his, and made himself laugh. There’s more silence in the car before the GPS informs us of our final destination at hand: a little two story four bedroom home. The car pulls up to the driveway where the house reveals itself as a place bereft of privacy with windows adorning every angle of the home. The lawn has no trees or shrubbery. Unlike our last house there’s no room for Christmas lights or to hang Halloween decorations. Meanwhile, the backyard is immense, ten acres so says my father, and dotted with burnt patches of grass on a mostly flat plane. My mom is annoyed at the lack of fencing and ergo lack of privacy. Father promises her to build a fence to retrieve our privacy from the neighbors.
We unpack our cargo, knowing the movers will be here tomorrow with the rest of the furniture, the chilly wind continues while there’s a noise of unknown insects that’s not too far away. That kind of stingy noise familiar to farmland but no one bothers to research what exactly it is where it’s just an accepted noise. I ask my parents if it’s okay to explore and they nod at each other before agreeing. My phone’s signal has diminished to uselessness and I know the internet won’t be installed until late tomorrow. It gives me an excuse to know my surroundings and figure out the best places to slink away to be best left alone. It was something I did more and more, especially at our last home and there was a spot near the fancy grocery store where the older burnouts would chug stolen Nyquil together.
As I look around I realize just how much of a drab cul-de-sac it is. One neighbor has the remains of a car permanently parked on the side of their home alongside a tiny shack housing firewood. It’s early November but feels more like winter. Every other house looks the same with a copy and pasted putrid color scheme. They’re all open to prying eyes with one being different in having a hardly used tennis court in the backyard.
Beyond over a small hill, I can see a little gas station maybe a mile or two away. I may need to go there when I need to be alone. As I walk along the neighborhood, by the outskirts of the cul-de-sac I can hear music reverberating from the one home that looks different from the rest. For one thing it’s the only one surrounded by trees.
Old rock music emanates from a silver home with a very large garage. As I walk closer to it I notice the signal on my Wi-Fi getting stronger with every step.
I look into a side window as the bars on my phone climb to 5G levels and I see an old man tending to what looks like a mad science experiment in his garage. The old man looks back and sees me. He opens the door to greet me and we hit it off immediately, recalling a shared plaintiveness towards people and having goals not understood by others. Pardon the extremely brief summation, I have had interactions before and they all feel the same now. In wanting to somehow impress this man in our ongoing conversation, I divulge something I haven’t told anyone: my desire to be a teacher. He congratulates me for having such lofty ambitions. I ask him what his favorite philosopher is and he regales in a blithe way, recalling that he never had never had the opportunity to discuss such matters in person. It was always over the phone or in purely academic meetings and it was very cursory.
I had never found the joy to discuss existential things amongst my peers. I once struggled to make my dad comprehend the concept of consciousness and the frailty of memory during a dark moment of mine. My father simply shrugged when I suggested that memory is tangible and when you remove that what is left of you? I asked him that and he took a second before responding “I am me.” He didn’t seem to get it and I couldn’t push the conversation any further.
My new friend, the Scientist, reveals to me his experiment: a mist that will engineer a self-cannibalism among insects using the genome of arachnids. That way, you don’t have to go with a GMF (Genetically Modified Foods) that are resistant to pesticides and other contaminants. Not to mention have it affect mosquitos and end malaria once and for all. It’s an impressive concept. He says, “I’m so close to achieving this. I can see the veil right in front of me preventing me from reaching this end goal of creation. And I feel like I just need the right tool to break through. Once we’re through, I can be content.”
I ask him if insects have emotion. “Yes and no. The insect, the arachnid, all that, they have some emotions. We thought they were all about instinct. Strong conquer the weak. Social Darwinism. Perversions of Nietzschien philosophy. You know… But they have elements of self-sacrifice. Even spiders will console their young which I didn’t think was even possible several years ago.” He say’s all of this mostly to himself in an almost broken monotone. The concept seems to get to him, the idea that the mindless that seem to be at the dispense of humankind may have intelligence that is of an equal merit. He relays experiments on measurements of fear in fruit flies and how such a demonstration would prove that fear is not just an instinct in all animals but something that can be accessed by a consciousness.
My phone goes off and it’s a text from my mom. I have to reluctantly leave. It felt good to talk to a peer for once. The dinner that night was colder than usual. The room has an uncomfortable chill and reluctantly my father is forced to turn up the thermostat. Nothing is spoken amongst us while the TV is left on to provide a comforting blanket of noise. By serendipity, the TV plays a piece on venomous spiders, specifically highlighting the Funnel Web from Australia. Dad talks out loud:
“They’re wrong you know. There’s a Brazilian spider that’s the most dangerous, and it’s a big sonofabitch the size of a dinner plate. I think that was the basis of a movie. But anyway, that spider can kill you in less than twenty minutes and they hide in bananas.”
No one’s interested in his trivia; I know I’ve heard it all before. The narrator on TV continues: “And now the most dangerous spider, the Brazilian Wandering Spider.” Dad says, “See! I told you!” “Luckily, the fatalities are much lower. While it may be the most toxic, it’s not the most dangerous to humans like the Funnel Web.” Dad looks on at the TV, saying nothing and dinner soon concludes without acknowledging his quiet humiliation. Later on, I hear them go to bed in silence, sleeping at opposite ends of the king size mattress. None of this is my business but I wonder why they keep going with this illusion of happiness.
There is a half-moon illuminating the dark neighborhood. There are no street lights. The stinging insect noise returns.