Songs of the Dead Page 9

  Evidently—and of course this is true of conquerors in general, on every level from the most intimate to the most glob- al—Hitler could conquer Paris, but he couldn’t comfortably visit it. The act of conquest makes any sort of real visitation impossible. This is, once again, as true of those who rape individuals as it is of those who rape countries as it is of those who rape landbases.

  I don’t think I’ve told you yet about the bears and the apple trees. A family of bears lives in the neighborhood, and all of us humans have agreed to not call Fish and Game, because we know that Fish and Game would kill them. That’s what they do. The cliché is that a fed bear is a dead bear, but it’s more accurate to say that a bear who has been ratted out to the state or federal mobile killing units is a dead bear. The humans in our neighborhood who don’t like bears make sure to not leave trash where the bears can get at it. Those who do like bears leave offerings of corn or dog food, and are sometimes blessed by seeing a bear or, better, a mother and cub. At the very least we all get to see lots of bear poop.

  Allison and I decided to take this one step further. We kept thinking about the old adage about how if you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day, but if you teach him how to fish, you’ll feed him for a lifetime (and if you blow up a dam you’ll feed his descendants forever). Well, we knew we couldn’t teach bears to fish any better than they already do, and besides, the wétikos have killed the streams and rivers (where are the salmon, lampreys, and sturgeon?). And both Allison and I already work on dam removal and anti-logging issues, so we’re already helping the fish some, though obviously not enough. We wanted to do something more direct. We couldn’t figure out what we should do until bear poop gave us the answer.

  We noticed that each year during apple season we often see huge piles of poop that reveal to us all too clearly the inefficiency of bear metabolism. If I can venture perhaps too much detail, the poop looks like filling for apple cobbler. If you had enough patience and really liked three-dimensional puzzles, you could fit the apple pieces back together, glue them, put them on your kitchen counter, and no one would be the wiser.

  In any case, we decided that if you give a bear an apple you feed her for a day—or more accurately in a bear’s case about five minutes—but if you plant a tree you feed her and her descendants for many generations, maybe even long enough for civilization to crash and for what little wild that remains to begin to recover.

  So we planted apple trees. Spokane has hot, dry summers, and we knew the trees wouldn’t survive their first few years unattended, so we planted them near water sources. We planted some near Hangman Creek, and some near its tributaries. We planted some in a beautiful little meadow on a tributary that begins near our home, then winds down to cross beneath the Pullman Highway and open into Hangman Creek.

  We planted heirlooms. I’m not sure if bears find red delicious apples as bland as I do, but we wanted to give them and all the other critters a variety, and besides, the centralization and standardization of agriculture is destroying diversity of fruit and vegetable varieties just as it is destroying all other forms of diversity, so we bought bunches of different types of apple trees: Ashmead’s Kernel, Belle de Boskoop, Black Oxford, Calville Blanc d’Hiver, Cox’s Orange Pippin, Kandil Sinap, Pink Pearmain, Scarlet Crofton, and so on.

  Someday those trees will hang heavy over the grass and over the water. Sometimes I picture people—including nonhuman people—reaching to pick the apples and wondering at the bouquets of tastes. I picture the apples being eaten by bears, foxes, raccoons, opossums, coyotes, robins, jays, wasps, hornets, ants, flies, worms. I picture some of the apples falling into the streams and flowing down until they’re caught against branches, and then I picture those fruits being eaten by those who live in the water as well as those who live on the land or in the air. There is almost nothing that makes me happier than to give something back to the land where I live, something that the land can use for its own ends.

  There were others in Paris who wanted to kill Hitler. These included the staff of Field Marshal von Witzleben. Frantic plotters in Berlin often visited Paris to beg the officers to act. The officers assured them that everything was in place. The moment Hitler entered Paris, he would be arrested or killed.

  Their best opportunity came in May, 1941, during a planned parade of German divisions down the Champs-Elysées.

  The troops were assembled, and a saluting base was set up near the Place de la Concorde. Two officers were ready to shoot Hitler at the saluting base, and a third stood by with a bomb should the other two fail in their suicide attacks.

  Hitler never showed up.

  I say, “I think the problem is God.”

  Allison opens her eyes wide, says, “Not. . . .”

  “No,” I say, smiling, “not seeing god, not with you. The problem is God with a capital G.”

  Allison says, “Do you mean a belief in some distant sky God. . . .”

  “No. . . .”

  “. . . the belief that God isn’t of the earth?”

  “No.”

  “That our bodies are shameful and that the earth isn’t our real home?”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “Can I say something?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t think the problem is a virus.”

  “No?”

  “I think viruses get a bad rap. Viruses are necessary, natural. Some are even beneficial to us as individuals: we couldn’t survive without them. We’ve got long relationships with them. And I think we can say that almost all, if not all, of them are beneficial to their landbases. Even the most predatory of them provide necessary checks, just like any other predator, or for that matter, just like almost any animal. You get too much vegetation, well, some bunnies have to come eat it. Too many bunnies, some lynx have to come eat them. If lynxes aren’t around, then maybe a virus will come along to keep the bunnies in check. And the vegetation says, ‘Thank you very much.’ So do the bunnies. So does the landbase. In fact, the vegetation exists in part for the bunnies, who exist in part for the lynx, who exist in part for the viruses, who exist in part for the plants. We all exist for each other. The point is that viruses aren’t malevolent. Whatever is killing the planet is.”

  Allison nods.

  “Which brings us,” I say, “to God. Let’s pretend that God really exists, and He’s just like the Judeo-Christians say. Well, what do we know about this God?”

  “That He’s one mean motherfucker?”

  “He hates women,” I say. “He hates sex. He’s a God of rape. He’s a God of war. He’s a God of conquest.”

  “He’s a projection of the patriarchal mindset,” she responds. “A bunch of abusers—male abusers—figured out that if they simply went around raping women and children, it wouldn’t take long for them to get called out. And maybe some of these abusers even had consciences, and felt bad about what they did. So in order to shut up their consciences and in order to get their victims to stop fighting back, they created this elaborate story of a God who gives them the right to rape and conquer and do all sorts of nasty stuff, who not only gives them the right, but the mandate: who tells them to commit atrocities, who tells them that if they don’t they’re not good servants of this God, and who tells their victims that they better not fight back, that if they do they will incur the wrath of God and be sent to hell, and tells them that if they are good enough victims, well, the meek shall inherit what’s left of the earth.”

  “No,” I say.

  “What do you mean, no?”

  “No. It means no.”

  Allison shoots me a look, then says, “This is all Post-Christian Feminism 101.”

  “But what if God is real?”

  “As in. . . .”

  “Real.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “What if the stories in the Bible are true? Oh, not all of them. God didn’t create the world. He—and this is so typical of a patriarchal male—just took credit for it
. But the smaller miracles, those are true. And the smiting. Lots of smiting.”

  “So you’re saying—”

  “Your muse really exists. My muse really exists. So why should we get so skeptical when it comes to the capital G God? Why are the spirits we experience real and the Big Guy is just a projection, a mass hallucination on the part of hundreds of millions of Christians, nothing more than an excuse to commit atrocities on the part of the powerful and a solace for the victimized?”

  “Because your muse is good. My muse is good. They haven’t told anyone to go forth and conquer. They aren’t responsible for the murder of hundreds of millions of human beings. They aren’t responsible for the mindset that’s killing the planet.”

  “Why do all of these spirits have to be good? Why do they have to wish us well?”

  Allison blinks hard, twice.

  I say, “The central questions become: Why does He hate us so much? And, Why does He want to destroy the earth?”

  eleven

  who’s in charge

  I’m thinking about pinworms, Enterobius vermicularis. If you accidentally—or I suppose on purpose, although I don’t know why you would—ingest pinworm eggs, the eggs pass down to the small intestine, where they hatch. The male and female worms then migrate to the large intestine, and live and breed near your rectum. Early in the mornings females crawl out of your anus and lay eggs, then crawl back into their nice warm home.

  Now, you may wake up that morning, and you may have no idea that these pinworms are living inside of you—I mean, how many other creatures live in or on our bodies about whom we know next to nothing?—but here is what you will know: your anus itches. What do you do when your skin itches? You scratch it. If you use your finger to scratch your anus—and I know you’re far too sophisticated and health-conscious to do this (and besides, it would be just plain gross), but if you’re like me you weren’t quite so sophisticated when you were an infant or a young child, but merely knew that when something itched you scratched it with your scratcher—you get infectious eggs on your finger. If you happen to put your finger in your mouth, the eggs are home free. If you happen to touch clothing, kitchen counters, schoolroom desks, the eggs can come to rest there, waiting for someone else to touch that particular cloth, counter, or desk, then put a finger to a mouth.

  The question I’m asking right now is this: when a child scratches her itching anus, who is in charge? The pinworm is changing the child’s behavior.

  Not only that, but if the pinworm changes the child’s behavior, is the pinworm now a part of the child? At what point does someone else become a part of you? Is the flora and fauna in your gut part of you? How about the cells of your brain? How about the infection that—who?—makes you sneeze so you can expel aerosols to be picked up by some other host? “I need to sneeze.” Who needs to sneeze? You or the infection?

  Who is an invader, who is a hitchhiker, and who is a part of you?

  But of course, just because someone changes your behavior doesn’t mean they’re a part of you—otherwise Mrs. Purcell, my fourth grade teacher, would have become a part of me by holding me in during recess. I can change our dogs’ behavior by giving them treats, and they can change ours by begging. So there’s obviously more to the question of who is part of you than simply affecting your behavior, just as there is more to the question than simply being inside your skin.

  I got a pretty bad prostate infection last year. In retrospect, the earliest symptom was that I wanted to have lots of orgasms. Allison was gone, first for a long visit to her parents, and then to oversee the hanging of her works at a gallery in San Francisco, so I was masturbating a lot. I mean a lot. My historical average when I’m on my own is probably three times a week. I was masturbating three or four times a day, not stopping till long after the muscles in my forearm started to burn. I tried switching to my other hand, but that never seemed to work: not only was my right hand out of practice but I felt as though I were cheating on my left. And I knew there was no way I could keep one hand from knowing what the other was doing.

  At this point I didn’t know I had an infection: I thought it was a temporary obsession. A couple of weeks later, I started to feel pain in the tip of my penis. My first thought was that I had somehow hurt myself. The pain was sharp—not like a strained muscle, but I didn’t know what else it could be. Maybe some lubricant or stray bit of fabric had worked its way into my urethra and festered. I was at a loss. The pain kept getting worse. Finally I went to a doctor who, with no tests, insisted I had Chlamydia. Never mind that neither Allison nor I had been with anyone else since well before we met. I had myself tested: he was, after all, an authority figure. Negative. More tests. Negative. I went to a urologist who told me I had a prostate infection. He gave me a prescription for antibiotics, and he also—and here’s the interesting part—gave me an informal prescription for orgasms.

  He did this because it’s very difficult to clear infections from the prostate. The prostate’s weak blood supply combines with its shape—it has lots of long skinny tubes that lead to reservoirs of seminal fluid—to render antibiotics relatively ineffective: the antibiotics can’t get into these reservoirs. This means that if you don’t drain the reservoirs, they become safe havens for the infection. Thus the doctor’s orders. Allison was home by then, and very pleased with the prescription.

  Now here, for me, is where it gets exciting. I had started compulsively masturbating a couple of weeks before I had any other symptoms, and a couple of months before I got diagnosed. Even had I known I had a prostate infection, the healing properties of ejaculation wouldn’t have occurred to me: I’m embarrassed to admit that although I’d been ejaculating for years, I’d been ignorant of how it all works, with no idea the prostate was even involved. But my prostate knew it was infected, and it knew it had to be drained. What I thought was a strange and sudden obsession on my part was instead one part of my body attempting to rid itself of an infection. I asked before, “When you need to sneeze, who needs to sneeze?” I ask now again: Who’s in charge?

  I asked the urologist why a prostate infection didn’t hurt in my prostate, but rather at the tip of my penis (and by then all along its length). He said nerves run past the prostate down the penis. At first this made no sense to me: it would be like pulling my hamstring but feeling the pain in my ankle. I went home and thought about it, and suddenly I understood. If the prostate needs to be stimulated in order for me to ejaculate, and if part of the purpose—at least reproductive purpose—of sexuality is ejaculation, then if the nerves extended no farther than the prostate, sex would be an entirely different and rather more complicated affair (and I don’t even want to think about what masturbation would be like from the perspective of a non-contortionist). In order for me to ejaculate, I or someone else would have to stimulate my prostate directly. While this can be done, it’s far more handy, if you will, to be able to stimulate the prostate externally. I think I’m stimulating my penis, and in a sense I am, but the real action happens elsewhere, in my prostate, as the prostate is stimulated almost by proxy.

  It sometimes seems that every time I learn something new, I become existentially more confused. Not only am I sometimes unclear as to who is in charge—when I do something, who is this action serving?—but now, when I feel something, I begin to wonder whether what I am feeling is what I am feeling. I wonder if where I am feeling it is where I am feeling it. Indeed, I sometimes even begin to wonder if when I feel something there might be others, too, who feel what I feel, only they feel it, like the prostate, by proxy.

  Lately I’ve been thinking about Dicrocoelium dendriticum, the lancet liver fluke. It’s a parasite with three hosts. The first is a snail, who, in the normal process of eating sheep or cow shit, accidentally eats lancet liver fluke eggs. The eggs hatch, develop into sporocysts and then into cercariae (stages of parasite larval development), then emerge from the snail coated in slime. The second host is an ant, who in the normal process of eating snail slime also eats the
larval flukes. The larvae continue their development in the ant’s gut, then chew their way out through the ant’s exoskeleton. Because the flukes don’t yet want the ant dead, once they’re out, they patch up the holes in the ant and cling to the ant’s outside. That is, all but one of them cling there. One fluke is chosen instead to chew into the ant’s brain, where it actually takes over the ant’s movement and control of the ant’s mandibles. Come sundown, this fluke guides—convinces?—the ant to climb to the top of a piece of grass and to bite down hard, then cling there, waiting for the third host, a sheep or cow. If no ungulate shows up that night, the ant climbs down in the morning to resume its normal life, until the next night, when the fluke once again takes the reins and sends the ant back up a blade of grass. When an ungulate eats the grass to which the ant is clinging, it accidentally eats the ant, and therefore all the liver flukes. The flukes—eventually there can be as many as 50,000 in a mature sheep—make their way to the cow’s or sheep’s liver by way of the bile ducts, and within a few months begin laying eggs of their own. The eggs are deposited on the ground in the creature’s feces, where they are eaten by snails and the story starts all over.

  By now you can probably guess the question that I ask as the ant climbs to the top of the grass: who’s in charge here?

  I’ve also been thinking about horsehair worms, nematode-like creatures whose name derives from the old belief that they generate from horsehairs that fall into water. They do look kind of like horsehairs, long and slender, and they often do live in water.

  Their story begins with eggs laid in water or on damp soil. The eggs hatch, and the young worms enter the body of an insect such as a beetle, cockroach, cricket, or grasshopper, either by being eaten or by simply penetrating the insect’s body. For weeks or months the worm develops inside the insect it is slowly killing, until it can often be many times longer than the host in whom it resides. By the end, the worm occupies almost the entire body cavity of the insect except for the head and legs. But the worm has a problem: if the host dies away from water, the worm will die with it. So what does it do? As it nears the end of this stage of its life, the worm drives the insect away from its home, and when it reaches water the worm causes the insect to jump in, where the worm can emerge, killing the host as it does so. Researchers have found that if you remove a host cricket, for example, from the edge of a pond, it will return and keep returning, until either it is dead or the worm has made its way into the water.