A mosquito spent last night in my hair for no apparent reason.
Every time I turned over there was a startled buzzing near my ear and the
sounds of a short, desperate struggle. A few seconds later the mosquito would
escape the imprisoning hair and fly off into the night – hopefully, I thought,
to M’s side of the bed – but later I would turn in my sleep and another spasm
of frantic buzzing would erupt in my ear. The mosquito kept coming back,
risking life and proboscis, to camp on my head, and I would like to know why.
Generally mosquitoes prefer M to me so I don’t get a lot of bites when he’s in
the room with me. And when they do decide to go for me they get in and do their
blood sucking and get out again. Last night’s mosquito didn’t even bite me.
Maybe it was a male mosquito just looking for a swig of flower nectar. It
occurs to me now that I have just switched to a new brand of shampoo. Perhaps
some floral ingredient in the shampoo tickled the mosquito’s fancy. But if I’m
going to have winged insects checking into my hair on a nightly basis as though
I’m running some kind of bug youth hostel I’m going back to my old brand of
shampoo.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not above making friends with a bug. Sometimes
they can be a kind of companion to you when you’re home alone and have no pets
but the bug in question has to big enough to seem like a fellow creature.
Mosquitoes are closer to being specks than fellow creatures, in my opinion, and
anyway I could never learn to love them.
Last year I befriended a beetle that showed up on the balcony one day. I’d
never seen a beetle like this one out there before. He was green with a long,
tube-like mouth that made him look like a tiny anteater. I don’t know what he
was doing on the balcony or what his plans were, but he stayed for some days.
Every time I went out to hang up clothes I would see him in a different place,
just pottering around happily like an old man inspecting his rose garden.
One day I found him in the same place as he’d been in the day before, and when
I gently nudged him he only managed a feeble wave of his antennae. He seemed
like he was dying and I mentioned it to M later that evening. M immediately
looked regretful and said that he was sorry to inform me that he had probably
stepped on the beetle the night before. “I felt something crunch under my slipper,”
he said. “I’m sorry but there was nothing I could do. I would have told you
sooner but I didn’t realise you, ah, knew him.”
You would think an old, dense city like Beirut would be infested with rats but
the only one I’ve ever seen here was squashed flat on the road in front of our
old building, a perfectly two-dimensional form like Wile E. Coyote after a
steamroller has run over him.
I’ve never seen live rats – Norway rats – except behind bars. We don’t have
them in Alberta, thank heaven (and any sighting of one instantly raises
headlines and lynch mobs). I’ve always liked gerbils and hamsters and mice as
pets, and have heard that rats make even better pets than these, but the
difference between my own pet rat companionably munching popcorn beside me as
we watched tv together and a strange rat darting between my ankles when I
opened the pantry door would, I think, be stark.
Last year when I was cleaning out a shower drain I asked M why the drain filter
was screwed into place. I could see no reason it had to be secured like
that since it already sat snugly in a rubber-ringed depression. “I mean, it’s
not like the glob of hair and slime is going to try to crawl back out of
there,” I said, and then added in a less certain tone: “At least, I’m pretty
sure it won’t.”
That seemed to remind M of something. “I think they screw down the drain
filters in case rats try to come up through the drains into the house.”
“What!” I cried, grabbing at the screwdriver and scattering screws all over the
shower floor in my haste to get the filter screwed back into place.
“I’ve heard they can come up through the toilet as well,” M added thoughtfully.
“Though I’ve never seen it happen. But we should probably make sure to keep our
toilet lids down at all–”
But I didn’t hear the rest of his sentence. I was already gone, running from
room to room around the house slamming down toilet lids.
We don’t even have ants in our present apartment but they were permanent
residents in our old place. I think the walls of that building were so filled with
ant colonies that you could never be rid of them no matter how enthusiastically
you dumped noxious powders around your baseboards and window sills. Anyway, I
didn’t like killing them. In the beginning I would kill them wherever I
found them because I thought that if I didn’t my kitchen would be
overrun. But by and by I noticed that it didn’t seem to matter whether I killed
them or not. All that mattered was whether or not there was anything
tasty left out for them to eat. When there were no crumbs on the cutting
board or bits of egg left clinging to a dirty plate someone had neglected to
put in the dishwasher, their presence would fade to the odd sighting of a
tiny dot trundling up a wall, minding its own business. But if I were to carelessly drop a crumb
of ground beef on the floor while preparing spaghetti sauce, within an hour the kitchen floor would look like Woodstock, with hundreds of ants
milling around the dropped crumb, tiny tents being set up nearby and someone selling
t-shirts reading ‘Meat Crumb 23-09-12 I Was There’ near a
hole in the wall.
During the last year at our old apartment I began to suspect that the ants were
up to something covert and very possibly sinister. About twice a day while
using my laptop I’d notice a tiny ant strolling very casually across the back
of the keyboard. It was always just a single ant and it always acted like it
hadn’t a care in the world and was just doing a bit of casual crumb scrounging
but it seemed to me that it acted a little too disinterested, if you
know what I mean. Sometimes it would turn its dot-sized head up toward the
computer screen for a moment and just stand motionless for a moment like that,
as if it were reading what was displayed there.
Am I crazy? Listen, I killed a lot of ants before I mellowed into my present
passive stance. And let us not forget that I participated in the Bloody Sunday
massacre at my mother-in-law’s house when dozens of ants were boiled up with
the rice and partially consumed before M took a closer look at the ‘seasonings’
in the rice and sounded the alarm (his mom hadn’t had her glasses on when
making the rice). I mean who’s to say I’m not on the ants’ Ten Most Wanted
list?
A few weeks ago as we walked out through the garden beside our building Noonie
spied a very small lizard in the pool. It’s a decorative pool with water
continually flowing over the edges and down into drains, and we didn’t see any
way that the lizard could get out of it alive. How he had come to be in there in
the first place was a mystery. He was a good swimmer and seemed to tread the
water with tireless ease but sooner or later we knew he must become exhausted
and drown.
He watched me alertly with tiny, bright eyes as I slowly extended my sunglasses
out toward him. I thought if I could just get them close enough to him he might
have the sense to climb aboard. But as soon as the glasses got close to him he
swam quickly out to the middle of the pool.
“Oh no,” I moaned. “We’re never going to get him out of there. Look how he’s
looking at us. He’s feeling fine and in no immediate danger from the water so
he’s got no reason to climb onto anything we offer him.”
While I put my hands on my hips and began to think up elaborate plans of rescue
involving inflatable rafts and pasta strainers, M crouched down at the edge of
the pool without saying a word. The current of the water was slowly bringing
the lizard our way again. He was watching us as keenly as ever but M sat
motionless.
“Nobody move,” he said.
As the kids and I watched with held breath the moving water brought the lizard
closer and closer. His little eyes seemed too intelligent, too wary, to fall
for whatever M had in mind.
Then, with the abruptness of a crocodile leaping out of a Serengeti watering
hole onto the neck of a gazelle M’s hand shot out, there was a great splash,
and the lizard was sitting on the stone outside the pool in a quickly-receding
puddle of water.
What M had performed with perfect timing and execution was a high-speed scoop.
He waited until the lizard was within range and with a cupped hand scooped the
water around the lizard and the lizard itself, flinging liquid and beast
horizontally onto the stone tile beside the pool. The lizard was completely
unharmed but the shock of the incident had robbed him of his wits.
The little creature seemed confused to the point of stupefaction. Gone from his
gaze was the fiery hauteur with which he had regarded us from the pool and he
stared straight ahead with dull eyes. He didn’t even seem to notice us as we
crowded around him for a closer look.
“Do you think he’s all right?” I said.
M straightened and shook water off his hand. “He’s fine. Let’s go.”
And you know, he was fine. As we walked off I saw the lizard rouse himself, the way
birds do (the lucky ones) after flying into a window, and creep slowly away.
There was a thoughtful air about him which boded well for any future occasions
when the urge to take a swim in the pool might come over him, and I guessed he was going to be all right.