Hold the Enlightenment (6 page)

Aside from the bees, there were tsetse flies, which can cause sleeping sickness, a disease characterized by fever, inflammation of the lymph nodes, and profound lethargy. Sleeping sickness is often fatal. And the insects that carry the disease are intensely annoying creatures.

They are long, thin, malnourished-looking flies, with skinny iridescent wings, and the ones I encountered moved so slowly I could actually bat them with a palm while they were in flight. Occasionally, I’d get a really good whack on one, and it would seem to falter in its aerodynamics, then wheel about in a lopsided loop, as if woozy and staggered. But it would stay on me. I could sometimes pop one I’d dazed three or four times using both hands—whap, bap, whap, bap—just like working out on a speed bag. The fly might back off, lose altitude, and then, as through an act of will, it would seem to
straighten up and fly right, zeroing in on me again, and willing to take any amount of punishment simply to gets its filthy, disease-ridden, blood-sucking proboscis into my flesh. It was like fighting Rocky in the movies. Tsetse flies never quit.

Worse, you can’t swat them on your skin, like mosquitoes. They have some kind of dorsal radar and, when threatened from above, simply fly away.

A pygmy who looked a little like a short, dark version of Jerry Lewis showed me the way to kill tsetse flies. Simple thing. Put a hand on your body some small distance from the fly and roll right over the son of a bitch from the side, like a steamroller. This process produces a nasty swatch of blood and bug guts. It is immensely satisfying.

Aside from the tsetse flies, we often encountered aggregations of fire ants, which are small and red and prone to swarming, gang stings. They frequently looked like pizza-sized hillocks of fungus on downed trees that lay across our path. Sometimes, walking along a nice, wide elephant path near such a tree, I’d see pygmies in the column ahead suddenly break into a strange hop-step sort of polka as they attempted to shake the fire ants off their bare feet and legs by stomping their feet. The convention was to yell
“Formi
,” or “ants.” In fact, watching someone out ahead do the Fire Ant Polka was all the warning anyone ever needed. It’s awfully funny. When someone else is dancing it.

There were also driver ants, of the type with two-inch-long pincers. It is said that various native people in Africa use driver ants to stitch up wounds. It’s supposed to work like this: The ant is held in the fingers and positioned with a pincer on either side of the wound. The ant then pinches, as ants will. Driver ants will not let go. At this point, one simply twists the nasty little body off the pincers. Instant sutures.

I don’t know if people actually do this or it’s just one of those oft-repeated travelers’ tales. I do know that a driver ant bite hurts a lot, and that once they grab onto flesh, you can’t shake them off, say, a sandaled foot, no matter how hard you stomp. I had to pick driver ants off my flesh, one by one.

Among the most unbearable of the insects was a kind of stingless bee, like a fruit fly, actually, called a melipon. Michael Fay said the word came from the Greek:
meli
, meaning honey, and
pon
, meaning, I think, incredibly annoying little sons of bitches. They arrived out of nowhere in clouds, so that, suddenly, every breath contained hundreds of melipons. They crawled into my ears and nostrils. Every time I blinked, there were several melipons ejected from my eyes, all rolled up and kicking their fragile little legs, like living tears rolling down my cheeks.

Sometimes, we crossed orderly columns of termites, thousands of them, marching along on some destructive mission or other. At night, they sometimes crawled in formation under my tent, and I could hear an unnerving clicking and clacking sound: termites, moving under my body in their thousands, all of them snapping their hideous little jaws.

None of these creatures ever caused me to produce a single distressed sound beyond “oww.” Halfway through my Congo walk, I believed myself almost immune to that universal human frailty, the bug scream. Vermin shrieking was something other people did, and they did it for my personal amusement.

I am, in fact, guilty of arranging certain situations designed to test and trigger the First Rule of Vermin Shrieking.

High school speech class, and here was my evil plan for the final assembly of my final year. There’d be four hundred students in the new auditorium, every seat filled, and I wanted to hear them scream.

We’d use the impressive new spotlights designed for stage plays. The best student actor I knew—and the only one I could trust to go along with me on this deal—was Dave Hanson, who would walk onstage wearing a funereal black suit. Stepping up to the podium under a single spot, Dave was to solemnly open a book, fix the audience with his best Vincent Price stare, and begin reading Edgar Allan Poe’s merry little contemplation of corporeal decomposition entitled “The Conqueror Worm.”

We knew what would happen. My fellow students, fearing Culture,
would no doubt fidget for a bit. The poem postulates “an angel throng” sitting “in a theater.” On the poetic stage, Poe has positioned “mimes,” in the “form of God on high.”

At this point, we’d begin to shrink the spot on Dave. The auditorium would become very dark as he dug down deep for his best shuddery bass voice on the verses we needed to really hammer home in order for the prank to work.

The mimes in the poem are—good Lord!—human beings. In their midst, Poe has “a crawling shape intrude.” Bloodred, it writhes, it writhes. “The mimes become its food,” and it—the bloodred crawling shape—is “in human gore imbued.”

Dave could read that well, I knew. He’d pull the audience into the horrid realization of what this poem is all about. The last verse begins:

“Out—out are the lights—out all!”

Which is when we’d kill the spot altogether, leaving the auditorium in total darkness, while Dave gravely intoned the last lines, which are all about the poetic angel audience sobbing heavenly tears because they realize:

Here, timing was important. We needed to hit them in the silence following Dave’s recitation, but before the muttering and mumbling started. I had three confederates all set up for the nonverbal punch line. In the darkness, we’d run down the aisles of the silent auditorium, tossing out great handfuls of cooked spaghetti (still warm and a little damp). The spaghetti flingers all had a two-word line, a terror-filled scream, to be repeated as necessary: “THE WORMS … THE WORMS …”

Do it right and they’d scream. Most of my classmates would scream. Four hundred flat-out bug screams, or, more precisely, worm screams. Different creature, same sound.

One problem: along with the rest of my worm tossers, I needed a pass to be in position at the back of the auditorium. A damn fine
teacher named Fred Metzner demanded to know why the four of us wanted these special passes. He wouldn’t accept “It’s a surprise” as an explanation. Fred Metzner had learned not to trust student surprises.

And so, my plan was foiled at the last moment. Mr. Metzner described the idea as “juvenile,” though I thought it was a good deal more mature than that. It was adolescent at the very least.

One night, several weeks into the Congo walk, I was just dropping off to sleep, lying in my tent, sometime around ten in the evening, when the half-pound centipede dropped from the fabric ceiling and onto my naked, sweating chest with an audible plop. Later, under my headlamp, I was to discover that it was not one of the poisonous ones. Just a normal Congo Basin jungle centipede and only about the size of an ordinary Polish sausage. It looked naked and pink, and was curled in on itself like something the dog left on the lawn. Under my light, the bug wasn’t something you’d necessarily scream about.

But, half asleep, and in the dark, I had no idea what it was. Just something wet and heavy that seemed to have been dropped from a great height. I said “eeewaah.” I believe I said “eeewaah” several times in the darkness—a crescendo of half-awake terror—and when I brushed at my chest with blind, fluttering hands, I suddenly felt the heavy wormlike thing just above my wildly beating heart and swept it to the side. I said “eeewaah” several more times as I leapt to my feet, nearly stuck my head through the fabric of my tent, fell down somewhere near where “the unknown thing” had to be, then rolled over, and finally came out of my tent like a scorched cat. All the time saying “eeewaah, eeewaah, eeewaah.”

The pygmies, all thirteen of them, were over in their camp, maybe fifty yards away. I could hear their battery-powered shortwave radio blasting out static-ridden music. The sound, as usual, was turned up into that range of irritating distortion in which it is impossible to tell reggae tunes from English madrigals. Pygmies, I had learned on my Congo walk, listen to the radio all night long. And they will always sacrifice fidelity to volume.

I had started out on this long jungle trek determined to get close to the pygmies, to understand their lives, their hopes, their dreams, their music. Most of all, I wanted to absorb a small measure of their knowledge of the forest. But they kept the radio on all night, never seemed to sleep, and I generally camped some distance away, just out of earshot.

So it was possible they hadn’t heard me bug screaming.

But no, they were shouting and howling among themselves, and the howls were those of high-pitched and helpless laughter.

“What?” one of them called out to me in French, our only common language. I think it was Kabo, who was handsome as a homecoming king and one of the leaders. “What has happened?” he called.

I didn’t know the French word for centipede. I don’t know much French at all, but the word for insect isn’t particularly difficult for an English speaker.

“Insecte,”
I said.

Kabo strolled over, along with half a dozen other pygmies. I had scooped the centipede up onto a machete, using my notebook to avoid touching the thing, and was about to dump it, alive, a good distance from my tent. But the pygmies had to examine the creature that had caused me to say “eeewaah” several dozen times.

They aimed their one flashlight on the machete. The beam was very dim and yellow in color. The pygmies said some words to one another in Sangha, their native language, looked up at me, and, unnecessarily, I thought, began laughing again. They shook my hand and slapped me on the back and laughed until tears came to their eyes. It was, I thought, incredibly juvenile behavior.

Later that night, I could hear them in their camp, shouting over the static on the radio. They used the word
mundele
, “white man,” which has about the same connotation that the word
gringo
has in Latin countries. The noun is sometimes merely descriptive and void of nuance. Sometimes, like
gringo, mundele
can mean greenhorn, oaf, imbecile, or doofus. The meaning depends on the context. In this case there was silence for ten or fifteen seconds, then one of the pygmies would say
mundele
, meaning me, and the rest of
them would begin howling with a kind of hilarity that I believed to be entirely inappropriate to something as human and unaffected as a few dozen simple bug screams.

It was in those moments of sweaty humiliation that Cahill’s Corollary to the First Rule of Vermin Shrieking was born, screaming.

H
ere is the wily Platypus Hunter, stalking the forests of the night. He steps carefully into the pulsing darkness, feeling for the trail with his foot. He breathes. Steps again. He doesn’t want to use his light yet, so he is moving slowly, slowly. The great eucalyptus trees all about soar two hundred feet and more into an inky, blue-black sky, but the canopy itself is unseen above, a grand weight of leafy life vaguely delineated by the unfamiliar stars of the Australian sky. He steps again, and there is a muffled thud, which, he deduces from long experience, is the sound of his body colliding with the trunk of a tree. It doesn’t even hurt. Not that much, anyway. The bark is peeling off the tree in great long strips: a stringy bark tree.

In less than four hours, the Platypus Hunter will be another year older. He feels the seasons of his life slowly flapping in front of his face like the beating of some great dark wing. You’re born, he thinks; you live, you die, and to what end?

Is our journey through life a quest? For enlightenment, perhaps? For nirvana? For a Union with the One? This is why the wily Platypus Hunter is out walking into trees in the middle of the night. He’s pretty much clueless in the what-does-it-all-mean department, but figures that a series of small, highly defined quests—seeing a platypus in the wild, for instance—will one day accumulate into a critical mass and then there will be a blinding light like the collision of suns. In that radiant moment, the Platypus Hunter believes, he will be able to see into the Very Core of the Universe.

I was about fifty miles north of Melbourne, on the far southern reaches of the Great Dividing Range, near the headwaters of the Yea River, where the platypus, so I imagined, frolicked. The sun had set some time ago. The moon had not yet risen, and the Hour of the Platypus was rapidly approaching.

There wasn’t much that could hurt me in this forest. I suppose that wild pigs, feral for generations, might leave me bleeding from a myriad of six-inch half-moon-shaped cuts, the scimitar tusks and upper teeth gnashing together like scissors in a cacophony of snorts and grunts. Local tiger snakes are venomous and potentially deadly, as are most Australian snakes, but I’d yet to see one in two weeks of prowling the parklands above Melbourne. What they had here were koalas dozing in the trees, shy swamp wallabies—a kind of junior-sized kangaroo—as well as lyrebirds, cockatoos, and burrowing wombats, an animal that can weigh up to seventy-five pounds and that looks a bit like a cross between a tiny bear cub and a Sherman tank.

My eyes adjusted to the darkness, my confidence expanded, and I began taking two and three steps at a crack. Which was when I stepped on the tiger snake.