Feverland, page 16
Furthermore, the following differences are manifest in their modes of living and in their actions
After cracking the door to the baby’s room open, I lean into the green-tinged dark. Felix is ten months old, and it’s two in the morning. Minutes before, I startled out of sleep. Wide awake, I lay beside my wife and over the monitor listened to Felix’s horse-clopping snores. The more I tried to fall back asleep, the more my head felt as if it were on fire, and when the snores stopped, a hot wire shot up my chest. And so, as I do almost every night these days, I slunk out of the bed’s warmth and tiptoed to Felix’s room. The plastic turtle on the floor projects dozens of stars and planets onto the walls and ceiling. I walk through the hazy galaxy and stand beside the crib. Since I can’t see anything, I lean over the railing, levering my face down until his scrunched face sharpens. I inch nearer, close enough to kiss him, close enough to feel his warm breath on my face, close enough to assure myself that everything here is indeed real.
Some are gregarious, some are solitary, whether they be furnished with feet or wings or be fitted for a life in the water; and some partake of both characters, the solitary and the gregarious
What do I consist of? I was born with 270 bones, and now have 206. Busted and bruised and sheared. Nearly seven hundred skeletal muscles, not including my cardiac muscles or organs. Around nine pounds of skin, and a hundred thousand miles of blood vessels. I hold within me the potential for hundreds of gallons of tears. Yet I have so little courage. I am bluster and blubber, confused and unsure. I am sick. I am tired and weak. I am scared. At the very top of my closet there is a shoebox. The Adidas that came in it are long gone, dropped off at the Goodwill in a white garbage bag filled with khaki pants and T-shirts. Inside the box now are hundreds of pills. All prescriptions I’ve stashed from early Rx refills and multiple doctors prescribing me the same painkillers. The box is full. Enough there to help me do whatever I might want with myself.
Gregarious creatures are, among birds, such as the pigeon, the crane, and the swan; and, by the way, no bird furnished with crooked talons is gregarious
Bird-watchers in Brazil observed a harpy eagle flying away from a dead black-bearded saki monkey. The monkey had two sets of puncture wounds, left by the bird’s claws: one across the head and neck, the other on the lower body. When it returns to a dead monkey, a harpy eagle will pluck its kill’s hair, making a pile of it next to the carcass. You may scare the bird off again, but the next time you pass by, the body will be gone.
Such social creatures are man, the bee, the wasp, the ant, and the crane
The acupuncturist taps needles into me and connects each to a power source. He slowly modulates the electricity, asks if I can feel it, turns it up, asks if it is too much, turns it down, before moving on. When he delicately closes the door behind him, needles are bobbing in my skin like metronomes and I feel as if I am watching the tick-tocking flesh of a stranger.
And again, both of gregarious and of solitary animals, some are attached to a fixed home and others are erratic or nomad
A cheap plastic Olympic medal hangs from a red-white-and-blue ribbon wrapped around a curtain rod on the other side of the room. If I lock my eyes on its glint, I can stay upright, balancing on just my right leg, for one one thousand, two one thousand, three one thousand. Then boom, the room tilts, the bookshelves spin, the floor rushes up, and I have to plant both my feet. Over my resting breaths I hear Felix maniacally pedaling his tiny bike through the kitchen. He whips around the corner of the living room in a sliding skid—he’s buck naked and red cheeked—and starts pistoning his bare legs, steering the Rocket right at me before jarring to a stop. I swing his sweaty body into the air and he laughs and tells me to stop. As soon as I perch him back on the bike he’s off. My gentle swat at his butt hardly touches him.
I try the other leg and don’t feel the earth swoop out from under me for six seconds, then eight. For over twelve years I have been doing this exercise, practicing with wobble boards and TheraBands and plyometric balls. I go back to the right leg. Two seconds. Again, two seconds. Again, two seconds, and then I have to drop my foot. From somewhere in the house my wife hollers, asks what that noise was and if I am OK. “Totally cool,” I shout, but it’s not. My life is full, teeming with everything anyone could want, but in moments like this, hearing Felix rumbling around the house and my wife saying he should think about slowing down, I am utterly, hopelessly alone.
Also, some are carnivorous, some graminivorous, some omnivorous: whilst some feed on a peculiar diet, as for instance the bees and the spiders, for the bee lives on honey and certain other sweets, and the spider lives by catching flies; and some creatures live on fish
The immortal jellyfish begins its life as a planula. This larva of Turritopsis dohrnii attaches to the sea bottom and sprouts a mob of polyps. Over the next few days, each polyp produces an eight-tentacled medusa, and each medusa buds off on its own, floating the oceans, maturing into an adult jellyfish that feeds on other jellyfish. Under stress—environmental or social, or even just old age and illness—the immortal jellyfish can reverse the biotic cycle, decaying its bell and tentacle cells, and—alakazam!—turning back into a polyp. It becomes again what it once was and lives forever.
Again, some creatures catch their food, others treasure it up
Slowly, as if they’re the tiniest, impossible bones of people I love, I slip the molted exoskeletons of two cicadas out of my pocket. The brittle shells drop to the bottom of an empty pickled-okra jar with a dull plonk. Cicadas are cryptic. At night male cicadas flex the tymbals—ribbed membranes, with the lined look of radiators or the mouths of humpback whales—on each side of their abdomen to sing to females. A click sounds every time the tymbal tightens inward, and again when it relaxes. It is amplified by echo chambers in the cicada’s trachea. I shake the skins back out into my palm like dice. I am wonderstruck by how alive they feel.
Some creatures provide themselves with a dwelling, others go without one
My headlamp illuminates specks in the morning dark. They zoom past like krill in submersible footage. The sound of my shoes on the dirt path is a ratchet and shake. I push harder, heaving, but I cannot catch myself.
Further, in respect to locality of dwelling place, some creatures dwell under ground, as the lizard and the snake; others live on the surface of the ground, as the horse and the dog
Loa loa, a parasitic river worm that causes fugitive swelling, is found in rivers in India and Africa. A person is infected with Loa loa filariasis when they are bitten by a vector deerfly, and larvae crawl into the broken flesh. The larvae mature in a person’s lowermost layer of skin. Sometimes an adult eye worm will move from the subcutaneous to the subconjunctival tissue, where it can easily be seen working its way across your sclera, the white part of your eyeball. Loa loa can cause itchy red Calabar swellings.
Some are nocturnal, as the owl and the bat; others live in the daylight
“We are marine iguanas today, Dada,” Felix says from beneath the blanket. “We must dive deep to get our food.” I peek my head under and ask him what we are eating. When he wakes in the morning, he yells “Mama! Dada! Mama! Dada!” until one of us comes to his room. Lying on my back in the living room at five a.m. today, I heard him, and hurried in so he wouldn’t wake my wife. The air is hot under the blanket and he whispers that we eat gold and dinosaur bones.
Moreover, some creatures are tame and some are wild: some are at all times tame, as man and the mule; others are at all times savage, as the leopard and the wolf; and some creatures can be rapidly tamed, as the elephant
The Norway rats use the pecan tree to get into the house, dropping to the roof shingles and scurrying about until they find a way in. The reinforced traps set in the garage look like open jaws and are called T-Rex traps. They snap down with such force that when one goes off in the middle of the night I am shocked awake, certain, until I hear another one go off, that someone is trying to break in.
For, whenever a race of animals is found domesticated, the same is always to be found in a wild condition; as we find to be the case with horses, kine, swine, (men), sheep, goats, and dogs
Lying in bed with my eyes closed, I feel as if I’m falling off the world. The vertigo has gotten worse. In the dark my sense of self is skewed. A hand feels sprouted directly from my shoulder. My feet are miles away. I have to open my eyes and see my stretched-out limbs to really know anything—hands: one right there on my chest, the other atop my wife’s hip, slowly opening and closing, like an octopus undulating away.
Furthermore, some are combative under offence; others are provident for defence
We live in “Panther City,” a nickname taken from an apocryphal story in which a late nineteenth-century visitor reported it was so quiet that he saw a panther asleep on Main Street.
Further, some are crafty and mischievous, as the fox; some are spirited and affectionate and fawning, as the dog; others are easy-tempered and easily domesticated, as the elephant; others are cautious and watchful, as the goose; others are jealous and self-conceited, as the peacock
At thirteen inches long, quetzals are fairly large birds. Quetzal comes from the Nahuatl, an Aztec language that has been spoken since at least the seventh century. Numerous words have been passed down from Aztec through Spanish into English—avocado, chili, tomato. One study found the male quetzal delivered almost all food to the nest, alternating meals of tree frogs and fruit. There are six species of quetzal: crested, eared, golden-headed, pavonine, resplendent, and white-tipped.
One sense, and one alone, is common to all animals—the sense of touch
“I am a roadrunner,” Felix shouts, sprinting across the stretch of grass where we play soccer with the neighbor boys and their father. One of his shin guards has flopped loose, and he runs gangly, trying to keep the ball in front of him as he zigzags toward the open goal. It’s the Bigs versus the Littles (dads versus kids, who are six, four, and three) and the Bigs are doing their best not to win by too much. But I sprint to get between Felix and the goal, yelling, “Here comes the freight train” as I come up behind him. As I pass, we collide and his small body sprawls forward. “Why did you knock me down?” he wails from the dirt, his face streaked with tears. “You did it on purpose, I know it.” And part of me thinks he’s right. I hug him and feel the growing knot on the back of his head, and then suddenly—still crying—he laughs and points at the soccer ball he somehow managed to kick into the goal even as he fell.
Every animal is supplied with moisture, and, if the animal be deprived of the same by natural causes or artificial means, death ensues: further, every animal has another part in which the moisture is contained
I stand in the bathroom with the lights off, listening to the house sleep around me. My wife curled up with a body pillow. The baby monitor rattling. My eyes begin adjusting to the dark. I see the contours of a cup on the sink edge and an Uglydoll timbered on top of the toilet. I close my left eye and the room goes black. When I blink the right the entire room—the blue tiles, a postcard tucked into the cabinet door—is brighter than when I have both eyes open. A spider hovers below the faucet’s silver glow. In the mirror I stare where I know my face will appear and then I flip the switch. One of my pupils is huge, celestial. The other is a pinprick. I blink and blink and brace my arms on the sink. There is no spider. Maybe there never was. Who knows what I really see. The room wobbles and I knock the cup to the floor.
These parts are blood and vein, and in other animals there is something to correspond; but in these latter the parts are imperfect, being merely fibre and serum or lymph
The white tiger is a Bengal tiger that is missing the pigment pheomelanin. Its stripes are like fingerprints, which is true for all tigers—no two tigers have the same stripes—and are caused by skin pigmentation. If you shaved a tiger’s fur off, you’d see striped skin. In humans there are at least three types of naturally occurring pigment melanins: eumelanin, pheomelanin, and neuromelanin. They influence the color of eyes, hair, and skin. White tigers grow faster and larger than the normal Bengal tiger; they are often ten feet long and weigh over five hundred pounds. For a white tiger to be born, both parents must carry the rare gene that causes the pigmentation variant. Only one in ten thousand tigers does.
The chief parts into which the body as a whole is subdivided, are the head, the neck, the trunk (extending from the neck to the privy parts), which is called the thorax, two arms and two legs
The uakaris are of the Pitheciidae family, one of five families of primates that comprise the New World monkeys. They have shorter tails than most monkeys and are covered in long shaggy hair that makes their bald heads look emaciated by comparison, like miniature red skulls.
The skull consists entirely of thin bone, rounded in shape, and contained within a wrapper of fleshless skin
I have been a saddlebag, and the most delicate pages of an illuminated manuscript. Broil me and my blister will crackle. This body is a travelogue of cuttings.
When men have large foreheads, they are slow to move; when they have small ones, they are fickle; when they have broad ones, they are apt to be distraught; when they have foreheads rounded or bulging out, they are quick-tempered
Another bald-headed animal, the turkey vulture, or buzzard, finds carrion to eat using both its vision and smell. To defend itself, it vomits up stomach acid so full of bacteria that consuming it could kill a person.
A part common to the upper and lower eyelid is a pair of nicks or corners, one in the direction of the nose, and the other in the direction of the temples. When these are long they are a sign of bad disposition; if the side toward the nostril be fleshy and comb-like, they are a sign of dishonesty
Swimming laps in the university’s outdoor pool, I feel the left side of my body pull smoothly through the water. But my right side feels a half second behind, fatigued or weaker. I veer to the right and bump into the wall. Stop. Walk to the end. Start over. Halfway down I slam into the side again. To make sure my anger doesn’t ruin my day with Felix, I stop swimming, walk into the shallow end, and use the wall to stretch the muscles in my arms and shoulders and back. It’s summer and the pool is almost empty. Felix is taking a break from our races and our dives to the bottom to pick up rings. He sits at an umbrella-covered table, chewing a nubby carrot, goggles pulled up onto his crown. The red indentions around his eyes going purple as he cools. He waves, runs over, and gives me a handful of almonds. I kiss his forehead when he bends down. “Dada, look at all the bugs,” Felix says. He points to the water around me. “What are they doing, Dada?” I’m surrounded by tens of dozens of insects. It’s like a plague dropped out of the sky. I cup a dead cricket and swoop it up in a gush that splashes the concrete. “Going swimming, I guess,” I say. “What do you think?” He shrugs and crunches a piece of seaweed into his mouth. I bowl my hands around another speck, but shout and throw them above my head when it feels like my finger is cut. I notice that half the bugs around me are wasps. My middle finger is bright pink. The growing orbit of the sting swells. “Yowzer.” I show Felix my finger. “I’ve been got!” He grins. I pop out of the water and sit on the deck and Felix climbs on my back while I try to stretch my hamstrings.
The part that is sensible of taste is the tongue
I lie in our backyard hammock, shadow-splotched by the oak overhead. Felix sleeps curled beside me. Inside, my wife is reading in the air-conditioning—she is pregnant with our second child. I fall into a fitful, dream-thick nap. When I wake, all I remember is kneeling in front of Felix, trying to explain that there is a little girl growing in his mother, that in a few months he will be a brother. I try to get him to laugh by telling him that the house will smell of dirty diapers but he bristles, seems not to care, and asks if he can hit Wiffle balls. The first ball I lob at him he smashes right back. When I fall, a split grows down my neck and through my belly and chest, and out stream thousands of Xerces blue butterflies.
In betwixt the two openings comes the so-called epiglottis, an organ capable of being drawn over and covering the orifice of the windpipe communicating with the mouth; the end of the tongue is attached to the epiglottis
The average yak will live to be only twenty years old.
Such are the properties of the windpipe, and it takes in and throws out air only, and takes in nothing else either dry or liquid, or else it causes you pain until you shall have coughed up whatever may have gone down
Every fifty days I am newly fleshed. Ask me who I am today and I will say a saint. Ask me in two months and I will say I have always been a sinner.
The heart is not large, and in its general shape it is not elongated; in fact, it is somewhat round in form: only, be it remembered, it is sharp-pointed at the bottom
Out into this morning’s Texas dark. Sweat beads and then spits from me because it’s already eighty-five degrees and humid. Up Stadium Drive and for two miles down the bike lane of Trail Lake Drive. When I run there are flames in my bloodstream. By the time I get to the park by Westcliff Elementary the sky is pinking. Down the path and into the woods, I chase my old self. The one just ahead, always ahead. The one I will never again be—but my legs will not stop.
Those who imagine it to be empty are altogether mistaken; and they are led into their error by their observation of lungs removed from animals under dissection, out of which organs the blood had all escaped immediately after death
Almost every morning over breakfast, my wife and I play a game with Felix about favorites—“What’s your favorite nocturnal creature?” one of us might ask, or “What’s your favorite canine?”—and the three of us will each answer. Today I started talking about hybrids, about ligers and zebroids and wholphins, and his face opened big eyed. As he pedals the two blocks toward his preschool he asks again and again, “For real? For real? Are you teasing, Dada?” Walking beside him, I tell him about zedonks, too. Watching his happiness surges some incapacitating kind of love through me, so I don’t stop him from riding into the busy, strictly forbidden parking lot instead of up on the sidewalk.
