Songs of the Dead Read online

  Once again, as the cricket walks slowly toward a pond, what is it thinking? Who’s in charge?

  And now I’m thinking about a certain solitary wasp. I’m not sure if you know this—I didn’t until my mid-twenties—but many species of wasps are not social creatures, but rather live alone. Further, many wasps hunt only one prey species. For example, a particular species of wasp may rely only on a particular species of spider. Typically the wasp paralyzes the spider with a sting, carries the spider to a nest she has prepared, lays an egg on the spider, then closes the nest. The egg hatches and the young wasp consumes the still-paralyzed spider (paralyzed, instead of killed, to keep the flesh from spoiling).

  But the wasp I’m thinking of takes things one step further. Instead of preparing the nest for her offspring, she gets the spider to do it for her. It all starts, as it does with these wasps, with a paralyzing sting, in this case on the mouth. The wasp then lays a single egg on the spider’s abdomen.

  This time, however, the paralysis is not final. The spider soon recovers and goes back to her life of spinning, weaving, waiting, eating. But now a wasp larva clings to her belly, making holes in her abdomen through which she can suck the spider’s haemolymph (blood). She injects the spider with an anticoagulant to keep the food flowing. This is how life goes on until the wasp is ready to kill the spider. On the evening of the last day of the spider’s life, the larva injects the spider with another substance. Soon the spider begins to spin a new web, a web that is different from anything she has ever built before, a web strong and durable enough to hold the wasp larva as she pupates. When around midnight the spider finishes this task, the larva injects the spider with yet another substance, one that kills the spider outright. The larva feasts until mid-day, then drops the spider’s body to the ground and waits in the web until evening. She spins her cocoon, where she will turn into an adult.

  If you remove the larva from the spider after she has injected the spider, but before the web is constructed, the spider will continue to spin this special web, and spin it again, and again, for several days, until the spell of the larva has worn off, and the spider can go back to as she was before.

  It’s not just these particular flukes, horsehair worms, and wasp larvae who influence or control the behavior of others. There are flukes and tapeworms who make fish swim near the surface of the water, so the fish—and thus the flukes or tapeworms— can be eaten by birds. There are barnacles who take over the bodies of crabs, make the crabs incapable of reproducing, and get the crabs to take care of the barnacles’ offspring. There are worms who move into the bodies of snails, reproduce, and whose larvae move into the snails’ eyestalks, where they glow in neon colors as the normally reclusive snails move into the open, where they can be easy prey for the birds, who are the worms’ next host.

  And of course there is the single-celled parasite Toxo-plasma gondii. These creatures normally cycle back and forth between rats and cats, as rats eat infected cat feces, and cats eat infected rats. The parasite doesn’t seem to deeply affect cat behavior— after all, the cat merely has to shit to pass on the parasite, and anyone who has ever kept company with cats knows that they already excel at this—but it does affect the behavior of rats. This single-celled creature causes infected rats to become less timid, more active, and to have a greater propensity toward exploring novel stimuli in their environment. Infected rats also lose their instinctual fear of cats. I’m sure you can see how all of these changes make it easier for cats to catch rats, and thus to catch Toxoplasma gondii.

  Cats and rats aren’t the only creatures who harbor Toxo-plasma gondii: they live inside humans too, who also can get them by ingesting infected rats, or far more likely, by ingesting infected cat feces, presumably accidentally through touching feces, then eventually touching fingers to mouth. You can also ingest them by eating undercooked pork, lamb, or venison. Most human carriers show no physical symptoms, but some people suffer severe damage to their brain, eyes, or other organs. Infants in the womb are especially susceptible to damage from infection, which is why pregnant women are cautioned to get someone else to clean the kitty litter. Toxoplasma gondii live inside 60 million Americans. Half the humans in England are hosts to these creatures, and 90 percent of the people in Germany and France.

  It may surprise those who believe that humans are fundamentally different than all other animals to learn that rats aren’t the only creatures whose behavior is changed by Toxoplasma gondii: the same is true for humans. Studies conducted at universities in Britain, the Czech Republic, and the United States revealed striking personality changes among some infected humans. Changes include an increased likelihood to develop schizophrenia or manic depression, and delayed reaction times that lead to greater risk, for example, of being involved in automobile crashes. There are more subtle changes, too. Infected men tend to become “more aggressive, scruffy, antisocial and . . . less attractive.” They are characterized by researchers as “less wellgroomed, undesirable loners” who are “more willing to fight” and “more likely to be suspicious and jealous.” Infected women become “less trustworthy, more desirable, fun-loving and possibly more promiscuous.” They spend more money on clothes, and are consistently rated as more attractive.

  One researcher even stated, “I am French, and I have even wondered if there is an effect on national character.”

  All from a single-celled creature.

  All from a hitchhiker.

  Who’s in charge?

  I tell all this to Allison. We’re lying next to each other. We just made love. She came. I didn’t. It’s the new doctor’s orders. The antibiotics didn’t work—I’d feel better for a couple of days, then quickly fall back into pain. The pain kept getting worse until it was always there, a needle running the length of my penis on good days, and a screwdriver (flat head) twisting inside my urethra on bad, with metal shavings slipped into my urine for good measure. My ejaculate— and those of you not grossed out by stories of worm-filled crickets and the pulsing eyestalks of snails might yet get pushed over the edge by this one—changed from its normal white to a snotty yellow.

  None of this was good.

  I tried everything, from expensive herbs on the internet to prostate massage (both by myself and with Allison’s help) to groin stretching exercises, to eating several bunches of celery per day, to drinking teas made of local herbs that—who—made my whole body flush in waves, to thinking only good thoughts, to begging the infection to go away, to asking evil spirits to stop harassing me, to almost paying $3,000 for a weeklong quack workshop where they teach that any illness—and the promoters said this was true for social ills as well—will go away if you can just put enough love in your heart.

  Yes, I was that desperate, and yes, I’m sometimes that stupid.

  Around that time, a friend introduced me to her Chinese herbalist. He talked to me, asked me questions, genuinely cared about my condition—how strange is that, to have someone in the healing profession who cares about you and your condition?—and prescribed multiple hot baths daily, a series of Chinese herbs, and a temporary reduction in orgasms to one every other day. I asked him what I owed him, and he said I shouldn’t be silly, money wasn’t as important as my health.

  Yes, he really said that, and no, I didn’t believe it either.

  So here I am a month later, my pain still present but reduced to more or less tolerable—I suppose the needle has been replaced by a thumb tack—my ejaculate back to more or less normal, my life again worth living.

  It hardly bears mentioning that a decrease in the frequency of my orgasms hasn’t led to a decrease in how often Allison and I make love. But there’s also a sense in which it does, since the man’s orgasm is seen by many as the point and conclusion of sex. Consider how silly the issue would seem if I were a woman and Allison were a man: of course we’d still make love, even though I wouldn’t so often have orgasms.

  Of course I still enjoy making love with Allison, whether or not I orgasm. I recall an int
erview I conduced years ago with Dolores LaChapelle, author of Sacred Land Sacred Sex: Rapture of the Deep. We spent almost all our time together talking about what a sacred relationship with the land feels like, and it wasn’t until I was standing to leave that it occurred to me to ask, “What is sacred sex?”

  She answered with a dismissive wave of her hand, “Sex without orgasm.”

  I sat back down, looked at her, said, “I don’t. . . .”

  I sat back down, looked She said, “You will.”

  I did. When I got home I asked Allison.

  She said, “Process.”

  “What?”

  “It’s all about process.”

  “What process?”

  She took my finger, put it in her mouth, curved her tongue to make a suction against the tip, took my finger back out, and said, “That process.”

  “I like this conversation,” I said, “but I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “What is the essence of industrialism?”

  I thought a moment. “I don’t know.”

  “How many books,” she asked, “have you written on this subject?”

  “But what’s the relationship between industrialism and sexuality?”

  “Forget sex,” she said, unbuttoning her shirt. “What’s the essence of industrialism?”

  “Help me out.”

  She wasn’t wearing a bra. She rarely does. She said, “Okay then, what’s the essence of science?”

  “Objectification. Quantification. If it can’t be counted, it doesn’t count.”

  “Bingo,” she said. “And orgasms. . . .”

  “Are quantifiable.”

  “Attraction, affection, emotion, feeling, sensation, communication. . . .”

  “Aren’t. Thus they don’t count.”

  “Now, what’s the point of industrial production?”

  “I. . . .”

  “Come on, you know this.” A button, a zipper.

  “Production?”

  “Very good. And what gets short-shrift in this emphasis on production?” She slipped off her shoes, slid her pants around her thighs, sat, lifted her feet off the ground, said, “Pull, please.”

  I did. “Life. Production is more important than life.”

  She removed her socks, stood, dropped her panties. “And where does process fit in?”

  “I’m having a hard time breathing.”

  “Production values product over process.”

  “Product over process,” I said distractedly.

  “Yes, orgasms—”

  I understood. “An emphasis on orgasms is a valuing of product over process. It devalues the actual process of sexuality, just as industrial production devalues the processes of creation. An overemphasis on orgasms desacralizes. . . .”

  “Sexuality. The sacred is always about process.” She sat.

  “What do you want me to do now?” I asked.

  “What do you think?”

  I sat next to her. “I like this.”

  She nodded.

  “But I don’t think I entirely agree.”

  She waited.

  “I don’t think sex without orgasm is necessarily any more sacred or sustainable than sex with. I think sex without orgasm can be just as product-oriented, just as dishonest.”

  She still waited.

  “We’ve all heard of men using sex only to get off, or men using sex as conquest.”

  “Yes.”

  “What about women who use sex to ‘catch’ a man? Isn’t that just as profane, whether or not she has an orgasm? I think orgasms are beside the point. The point is presence, and the point is honesty.”

  “It’s like in your dream.”

  A few years before, I’d asked for a dream that would reveal my biggest fear in relationships. That night, I dreamt I walked into a tackle shop and asked if they had any worms. The man behind the counter said, “We don’t have any worms, but we have some lips.” He reached underneath, pulled out a styrofoam container, opened it. Inside were disarticulated lips squirming in some base material. He picked up a pair and put it on the counter, where it continued to wriggle. I woke up. The dream was clear. My biggest fear in relationships was lip service, was that someone would use her lips to deceive me, to hook me, to reel me in, whether through talking, kissing, or anything else. That someone would present herself one way to catch me, and then I would find out she was not what she seemed. The worm was no worm: it was a lure, with a hook attached. The lips were not lips: they were a lure, with hook attached. That’s something I’ve always loved about Allison: she acts the same now as she did on our first date, only better.

  “Those are all just different ways,” I said to Allison, “of valuing product over process.”

  “It’s even more complex,” she responded. “I’ve had a few female friends who said they’ve never had an orgasm with a partner. I’ve always thought that was sad. But what appalled me was that all of these women said none of their partners ever knew.”

  “Which means. . . .”

  “Exactly.”

  “Not a single one of those fuckers. . . .” I stopped, raised my eyebrows.

  “By definition,” she said.

  “Ever bothered to ask.”

  “Or if they did they believed the lie.”

  “The point isn’t orgasms. The point is mutuality.” I delicately pressed the skin on her shoulder with my forefinger. I love to look at the slight incurvation of her skin under this pressure, and its return when I release. I said, “It’s no wonder passion dies.”

  But that conversation was long ago, and now I’m lying next to Allison, still sexually hungry, but with an aching prostate, talking with her about who’s in charge.

  “Bacteria,” she says.

  “What?”

  “Bacteria create cities.”

  I shake my head.

  “Bacteria get into people’s minds and they change people’s behavior. They make people build cities, gather in large groups. All so the bacteria can feed. Cities are giant factory farms to provide food for bacteria, and in addition, the bacteria are slave drivers. It’s like the spider who’s been taken over by the wasp larva. She builds the structure in which she’ll soon die. Humans construct their own mausoleums, too, only they call them cities.” She pauses, then says, “We should just acknowledge that bacteria are the main beneficiaries of cities.”

  I start to say, “I don’t—”

  But she interrupts me, says, “Or maybe chickens are in charge. Chickens used to have a fairly small range in Southeast Asian jungles, and now they’re all over the world. I think the deal they made with humans is that we could eat some of them if we increased their range. That deal has worked out well for both of us, except that now factory farms are an abrogation of the deal.

  “Or it could be various plants. I’ve read that the plants we say we’ve domesticated have actually domesticated us, so they could increase their range.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Grains contain opioids, specifically exorphins. This has led some researchers to suggest that addiction is the genesis of agriculture. Really, no other explanation makes sense. Backbreaking labor for piss-poor nutrition? Why? Why did people ever start doing it? But in most places that the right plants (and animals) have existed, humans have done it. Why? Because we get a little happy hit.”

  “You serious?”

  “Dead. The effects of exorphins are qualitatively the same as those produced by other opioid drugs: reward, motivation, reduction of anxiety, a sense of well-being, and perhaps even addiction. Perhaps nothing. For some people, their brain chemistry is already so good that they don’t feel it, but others take one bite and fall in headfirst.”

  “What you’re saying is. . . .”

  “Yes. Maybe the plants produced substances that got us hooked, and humans have basically conquered the world on behalf of those plants, doing the plants’ will, by which I mean spreading their genes, in exchange for that happy little hit.
Maybe that’s the basis of civilization. Human culture was completely transformed, and not in a good way: we got hierarchy, militarism, slavery, starvation, disease. And, so the theory goes, annual grains are in charge.”

  I stare at her, stunned.

  She says, “If you don’t like that theory, I’ve got another. Maybe cats are in charge. I know that’s true in this household.”

  “I don’t. . . .” I sort of expect her to keep talking, but she doesn’t. I continue, “I don’t think it’s any of those, for the same reason it isn’t viruses.”

  She looks at me for a moment, then says, “Tell me.”

  twelve

  necrophilia

  The health of the landbase is everything. I’m thinking about the roles parasites play in maintaining that health. I’m thinking about parasites who take over the bodies of marine snails, and of the snails living full lives—fifteen years—but over that time, fostering more parasites instead of creating more snails. I’m thinking of the grasses those overpopulated snails would otherwise have eaten. And I’m thinking of parasites leaving the snails and moving into fish, and causing those fish to swim near the surface and flash their shiny underbellies to be seen by birds who eat those fish. Catching infected fish is ten to thirty times easier for those birds. If fish did not get infected, birds would starve to death. I’m thinking of birds becoming infected with parasites who lay eggs to be dropped off by birds in feces, and I’m thinking of the cycle beginning again. I’m thinking of how parasites help all these species—though not always individuals—and I’m thinking of how they help entire communities. I’m thinking they are absolutely crucial to their landbases, that their landbases would die without them. I’m thinking of the words of one former professor of parasitology and invertebrate zoology, “The irony is that to support healthy bird populations, maybe [the birds] need to be infected with parasites.”