Thanatosis

It’s called thanatosis. When threatened, organisms play dead, go stiff, freeze. Like the Cryptoglossa—death-feigning beetles that tuck in their legs and antennae when a predator is near. Frank’s move is to slip hands in his pockets, drop chin to his chest, and stand there almost catatonically, sometimes for a few seconds, sometimes longer. As soon as the memories come, he freezes. While in “the haze” as his wife had called it, he enters the paddies, the muddy, disease-pocked water, and he feels the heaviness of the heat above and his bloated feet below; smells the stench of shit and piss, of four-legged rot, of two-legged rot.

When he first arrived in the delta over fifty years ago, so far from a future, he bullshitted himself and pretended he was there to conduct research, making notes in his head about the wild ecosystem of the rice fields. Thousands of organisms to observe. The mosquitoes, the Culicidae, almost did him in—he’d scratch like a cur with fleas, hundreds and hundreds of bites—but it was the Hirudinea that did it. Leeches. They found all the entrances: pant legs, shirt sleeves, a slight opening in his boot; they were relentless, traveling until they found the perfect blood-beating spot, and there they’d drill through the skin with three jaws and sharp teeth, anesthetizing the area with their saliva. They’d get after it until they hit gold. You couldn’t feel the fourteen, sometimes eighteen, inches of swollen worm until you got out of the water or woke up. Lit cigarettes were the best way to pry them off. It was the leeches that made Frank want to kill.

A bag of groceries in his arms, Frank stares at the image of his younger self on the side of the van: he is thinner, his hair fuller; he looks loved. René had convinced him to salute for the photo they gave to the auto body shop. “It shows you’re in command,” she said. “People will trust you, respect you. It’ll be good for business.” He had felt so stupid, saluting to his snapshotting wife, wearing a uniform that was really a jumpsuit that was really a onesie with his name embroidered in cursive over the lapel. Pest Sergeant had a nice ring to it—better than Pest Soldier, Pest Warrior, Pest Killer—but it gets awkward when people ask if he had served because what they really want to know is if he had led. Ninth Infantry Division, he’d answer, I was a grunt. In command of nothing. Ancient history, René used to say whenever he drifted.

He drives out of the parking lot before Helen Lewis can stop him. He hasn’t seen her since he took care of her rodent problem several months back, just before he retired, when he didn’t have the heart to tell her those massive creatures throwing parties in her attic weren’t mice. The tails alone gave it away. Plus, droppings shaped like aspirin. He had left the invoice on her kitchen table: Roof rat infestation. Those rats were his last kill. When it became clear that René was dying, he had made a pact with God that he would never kill another living thing if God would just keep her alive. Now that René is dead, maybe that pact is too.

Grief is like its own infestation, turning him into something else, something arthropodal—he shapeshifts depending on the time of day. It’s easier to inhabit the diurnal species, warmed by the light of day, buzzing around constantly, like the western honey bee, relieved by motion. Nocturnal grief pecks at him second after second. Not so different from the male cricket stridulating until the female answers him. Frank’s calls remain unanswered.

René’s car is still parked under the basketball hoop. The net is long gone, just a pole with a rusted rim. When they bought the house some forty years ago they both imagined their children dribbling and shooting around the driveway, coming in for lemonade and cookies. Kids from the neighborhood would ride their bikes around, but no one ever played basketball. When they began to realize they might not be able to have children, Reverend Robinson told them God’s plans were mysterious and that sometimes offspring were not part of his design.

He hears the whimpering before he sees her and puts down his groceries. Nessie—the kid next door—is crouched over something on her back deck. He can see only her big brown curls.

“What’s troubling you darlin'?” Frank asks as he climbs the few stairs of the deck. A plastic net lies a few feet away from his six-year-old neighbor.

“I killed it. I killed a butterfly,” Nessie cries. A giant silk moth lays lifeless, as flat as the roses René would press in the pages of his 500-page Textbook of Entomology. It’s beautiful: psychedelic swirls of red and brown and white falsely suggest the insect might still be alive.

“Well, I’m sure you didn’t mean to,” he says. He couldn’t tell her about all the killing he used to do every day. On purpose.

It’s what René had asked him to do to her when the pain became unbearable. “End it,” she had said. “End me.” He thought it was just the morphine talking, but when she brought it up a second time four weeks before she died he got her in the van and told her he was taking her out for a surprise.

“Are we going to pick out a headstone?” René had asked, as he put her walker in the back seat. When he ignored her, she tried to laugh and asked him where his sense of humor had gone. Saigon, he thought.

He took her to an ice-cream shop, a place not so different from where they had their first date. “The only decision you need to make today is chocolate or pralines n’ cream.” Frank held her chocolate cone as they made their way down the sidewalk. The chemo had made René so weak, but he wanted to show her that she could still find joy in this life. Even if it was just a moment, wasn’t that moment worth it? They paused every few steps and he held the cone out in front of her as if it were a microphone and she licked it like it was the last one she’d ever have.

“It looked stuck on the screen door, so I tried to unstick it with my net, but now it’s dead,” Nessie says.

“You know they don’t live longer than two weeks anyway. And that’s no butterfly. It’s a Cecropia moth, the largest of its kind in this continent.” The Cecropia is nocturnal, rarely seen during the day. Something had messed up its circadian rhythm.

“There are seven.”

“There are a lot more than seven kinds of moths.”

“Continents. There are seven.”

As she names the continents, using her fingers to count them, Frank envies the ease with which she can move on from her sadness.

“My mom said we couldn’t get a dog. Or a cat. Or a hamster. Not even a fish,” she says as she kneels and gets so close to the moth her nose almost touches it. “But she didn’t say anything about a butterfly.”

“Moth.”

“Or a moth.”

“You know they start out as caterpillars?”

“She didn’t say I couldn’t have a caterpillar.”

“And they spin these amazing cocoons—”

“I know that.”

Frank laughs. What a funny little creature.

“And they break out and become beautiful butterflies,” she yells, and jumps up from a crouch into an airborne jumping jack.

“Or moths.”

~

An hour later, Nessie is standing on the front step holding up a book. Ladybug Girl.

“Is that your favorite book?” he asks through the screen door.

She nods and says her mom calls her a little ladybug. She also lets him know her mom calls him the bug man and therefore she thinks he’d like this book too.

“Does your mom know you’re here?” Since the two of them moved in about a year ago, he has never seen a father in the house.

“She’s at work.”

“So, who’s watching you?”

“The babysitter.”

“And where’s this babysitter?”

“She’s usually in the kitchen on her phone when I wake up, but she wasn’t there today.”

“Do you like apricots?”

“I dunno.”

“Do you like strudel?”

She stares at him, like she is trying to translate, and shrugs.

“I’m gonna warm up the best thing you’ve ever tasted,” he says as he ushers Nessie into the kitchen and pulls out a chair for her. He tells her to read her book while he looks for her mother’s phone number in the neighborhood directory.

After he leaves a voicemail for Maura, he retrieves the pastry from the refrigerator and puts it in the microwave. He had found René’s frozen strudels after she had died. The funeral reception was at the house and when he ran down to the basement freezer for extra ice he saw the note taped to one of them—bake at 375 for 45 minutes—and melted onto the floor. Every few days he’d find another note. He started getting angry at her, and yelled at her absence, “Come on, René, like I don’t know how to use the dishwasher. Like I don’t know where you keep the neti pot. Like I don’t know how to clean the goddamn oven.”

The truth was he didn’t know any of those things, and soon he started getting mad at her for not leaving notes: “Do you expect me to know how to iron the pleats in my pants? And where in the hell are the vacuum bags?” He had been so dependent on her, for everything, as if he were the proxy for the child they couldn’t have. He had never asked her if that’s what she wanted—to actually know where the vacuum bags were.

He had almost asked her point-blank one night years ago, asked her if this life was what she wanted. It was dark by the time he had gotten home from work, and he saw her through the backdoor window squirting an amber liquid zigzag across the linoleum floor of the kitchen, wildly enough to think she was about to do something crazy. He stood there in the dark watching his wife, wondering if it was gasoline and if she was going to torch the kitchen. He thought maybe he should let her, that she was enraged about her life, and shame on him for not knowing. But then she grabbed the mop and began to clean the floor and he convinced himself that she was content. Ancient history, he had said to himself. He should have asked her.

~

“You can barely see over the table there now can you?” he asks Nessie, instructing her to stand and he places three of René’s cookbooks on the chair and lifts her back onto it. René had been so light by the end, so easy to lift. Her long silk scarves—she preferred them over wigs—would sometimes skim his face as he picked her up and he’d breathe in her perfume.

Nessie sniffs the strudel and pokes at it cautiously with a fork.

“It won’t hurt you,” he says.

“I don’t like it.”

“You haven’t even tried it.”

“I’m not hungry.” She sounds sad.

“What’s the matter?”

“I miss Sam.”

Maybe Sam is her father.

“Where is Sam?”

“I killed him!”

She had named the moth. You should never know the names of the things you kill.

~

In bed that night, Frank tries to conjure images of René before she got sick, before she began to beg him to assist in her death. But he is haunted by her pleas, by the disappointment in her face when he said he would not be her executioner. After all, he had made a vow not to kill. “You always said that the creatures inside attics and garages, up chimneys and under floor boards were disrupting divine order, that they had somehow wandered from God’s path and, as unfortunate as that was, it was your job to establish order again. My body is all disorder right now. This isn’t right. You can establish order,” she argued. She was right. He had said that because he needed to hold onto a position that could justify all the killing of living things. Order. He took orders, sought order.

He thinks about Nessie, how her guilt about the moth keeps creeping back, how he is grateful they called him the bug man and not the exterminator. He flips onto his stomach and puts his pillow over his head, desperate to fall asleep, hoping the soft down will convince his brain to desist for just a little while. After an hour of waiting for sleep, he jumps out of bed and makes his way to the backyard with his headlamp on, searching for caterpillars on the bark of the old dogwood.

~

The workshop in Frank’s basement, where the dark and dank conditions will allow the caterpillars to grow, is fully functional the next day. The caterpillars need to eat the leaves from the host tree, so he drags his ladder from the garage and prunes the dogwood. Nessie is out back with her babysitter kicking around a soccer ball.

“Can I try?” she shouts as she looks up from the bottom of his ladder.

“Afraid not. It’s a long way down.” René would never have let him climb a ladder this high at his age.

“Can you see if my rocket landed on our roof?”

He looks over at her house and sees only that their gutters are in need of cleaning. She shrugs when he shakes his head and goes back to her soccer game. He won’t tell Nessie what he’s up to until he’s confident he can get moths out of these caterpillars.

~

He can’t keep them alive. He tries to poke them back to life, thinking they’ve entered thanatosis because they fear their kidnapper, but most of the caterpillars are dead. Maybe this is payback because he had kept René alive against her wishes. She had been so angry with him, said her pain was unbearable, life was unbearable. Still aware enough to see the hurt on his face, she told him she loved him more than she had loved anything on this earth and that this was an act of love. For both of them. He brought her out to the patio, spring was in the air. If she would see and hear and smell the world around her, Frank thought, maybe she’d stop asking to die. He knelt next to her wheelchair and took her bony hand in his. “Do you hear the Red-bellied Woodpecker? The Yellow Warbler? They’re singing to you.”

“Please, Frank. I’ll wait for you on the other side.”

He kissed her hand and cried. “I can’t do it,” he said.

She pulled her hand away and whispered, “But that’s what you do best. You kill things.”

Frank thinks that maybe the jars are too small for the caterpillars, so after supper he pulls the tub of rainbow sherbet from the freezer and finishes it while watching Jeopardy. He pats his paunch and tells himself the extra-large portion of dessert is for the caterpillars. After he washes the tub out with dish soap, he fixes it up with fresh leaves and twigs and transfers the surviving four caterpillars to their new home. “All right, girls and boys, now go ahead and grow, do your thing. I’ll see you in the morning.”

They are dead by morning. He walks up the basement stairs holding the tub with both hands, terrified he might trip, and remembers the first touch of René’s urn, its coldness, its surprising heaviness, his inability to find the right place for it, how he moved it from the mantle in the living room to his bedside table, back to the mantle after a sleepless night staring at the urn, waiting for René’s ashes to break free from the ceramic cocoon, swirl up into the darkness of his bedroom and sparkle into the shape of her.

He digs a shallow hole out by the dogwood and buries the dead caterpillars.

~

He decides to try a different breed. His neighbors across the street have maple trees and the Promethea like maples and it just so happens they like those particular trees on this particular day. Frank hollers under the canopy of the McNichols’ maple. Same thing over at the Costa’s yard and the Tannenbaum’s down the street—they have maples, and their neighbors have maples. Soon, he has more caterpillars than he knows what to do with. After he gets the fresh caterpillars settled in temporary housing, he races to the pet store and buys five large aquariums and spends hours making the habitat just right for the new tenants.

They are ravenous creatures. Soon, the caterpillars outgrow their skin, swapping one color out for another, eating and growing as they are supposed to. As they get older, they become more solitary, and move away from each other. Theirs is a voluntary solitude. By the last costume change—the fifth stage of larval growth—they are ready to pupate.

Once they start to spin their cocoons Frank decides to tell Nessie. She is drawing pictures on the driveway with chalk while her mom mows the front lawn.

“Whatcha drawing?” Frank asks as he waves to Maura.

“The whole universe,” she says, stops and takes a few steps back to inspect her work. “It’s going to take me all day.”

“Well, if it’s okay with your mom, I have a surprise for you in the house.” He was going to have her go ask her mom if she could come over, but realizes he’d look like a creep, so he walks over and asks if they’d both like to come look at some insects.

“Like the bad kind?” Maura says, after she turns off the mower and takes out her ear plugs.

“I guess it’s all about perspective. I don’t think there are any bad insects, just ones that lose their way,” he says. If he really believed that, then why hadn’t he just caught and released all those creatures he had exterminated? He could have been a liberator. Back then too. At least warned them about the herbicide, not to drink the water, eat the fish. He didn’t need to know the language, he could have just used his hands—pointed to the water, then pretend to strangle himself. Poison.

“Well, okay, then,” Maura says.

He warns them about the steep stairs to the basement and the bad lighting. René had tried to spruce it up by putting down an old area rug and painting the concrete walls yellow, but neither did much for the ambience.

“Moths are a fascinating species, you know. When the caterpillars turn into the cocoon, they undergo a complete transformation,” he says, and points to each one as if he were a tour guide.

Nessie and Maura look interested, so he keeps talking. “I mean, they turn into mush and then somehow that mush becomes wings and antennas and eyes and an abdomen in their little sacs. It’s a real miracle. To go from nothing to life.” He thinks about the children born without eyes, animals with extra limbs.

“You sound like a teacher,” Maura says.

“That was the plan. Professor of Entomology.”

“What’s that?” Nessie asks.

“Basically the study of bugs.”

“The curse of the plan,” Maura laughs. He was going to tell her about the danger of making plans, but apparently she already knew.

“I was in graduate school when Vietnam called.” He says it as if he had no choice back then, like he couldn’t have deferred. But he couldn’t afford school, hadn’t been talented enough to get a scholarship or a fellowship. He was ashamed of dropping out, so he had convinced himself that duty had changed the trajectory of his life, from professor to exterminator. That the heat and moisture and swarm of the paddies, the way he had so blindly navigated them without being blown up, had prepped him for this career of slithering his body through cobwebbed attics and dampened crawlspaces, dark places people feared. And later, he convinced himself that war, not some genetic defect, had turned him into an agent of death. For a while at least, he believed his lethal actions were responses to threat.

“What’re you going to do with them?” Nessie asks.

“What are you going to do with them?”

“They’re for me?” Nessie claps her hands.

“You can take one of these containers home as soon as I think they’re getting ready to hatch. That is, if it’s all right with your mom.”

Maura nods. “Sure, but you’ll have to let them go, Ness. They aren’t meant to be caged.”

~

When the cocoons harden, turning a maroonish brown color, Frank handles them gently. He holds one up between his thumb and his pointer finger, examines all of its ridges and shades, and brings it up to his ear. “Come on out little guy,” he says softly, as he puts the cocoon back inside the aquarium. Pupation time is unpredictable, maybe lasting a few weeks, maybe less. Nighttime for Frank has become less traumatic as he’s found purpose in checking on the cocoons, rolling out of bed and lumbering down two flights of stairs to the basement, making sure they aren’t emerging without him there to witness. He is exhausted, and yet he feels less drained.

By the fifteenth day, he’s losing patience, and despair returns. He follows the recommendation of one online moth expert and gently shakes a cocoon and hears it squirming, can feel the vibrations. He yells out with joy, the happiest he has felt since René died. They are close, he can feel it.

The next night, he does the same. Wiggles a cocoon. He waits for a response. Nothing. He tests the rest of them from one aquarium. Nothing. He places five cocoons on his workbench, grabs a utility knife, and prepares to cut into them to see what the plan is for these creatures. His hand shakes, so he puts down the knife and walks a slow lap around the room. If he’s careful enough, precise, he could open the cocoon without injuring the life inside—see if there’s life inside. The knife doesn’t have to be a weapon, it doesn’t have to kill. But it could kill, and wasn’t that potential what drove him all these years? He had needed that power because it made him feel strong. By asking him to kill her, René had weakened him. That’s what you do best. You kill things. He picks up the knife and, as he carefully slits the first cocoon, liquid seeps out. He drops the knife and the cocoon and gags. He cuts another one like a cantaloupe. It has some recognizable parts—an antennae, maybe a leg. He gags again. When he sees a wing just inside the third one, he stops cutting and throws up his dessert.

He had been so angry with René after she said that. She was just goading him, he thought. The next day, he was sure she would apologize for what she said, but instead she told him she had taken care of everything, had what she needed, but could only take it so far. “When I’m close, Frankie, I need you to take over. Don’t let me fail.”

“You’re all I got,” he cried. He was on his knees, his head in her lap. He wanted her to comfort him, to put her hand on his head and tell him it was okay. When she said nothing, did nothing, he looked up. She was staring out, unblinking. He said her name. Nothing. He snapped, clapped, waved his hand in front of her eyes. Nothing. He put his hand on her chest to make sure she was still breathing. The haze. She had entered thanatosis, apparent death. Was this how she would look? Vacant. See-through. Drained. Visions of her end came to him, the moment this dead-playing would be real and he’d be alone in this house. There would be no human sounds but his own, no grown children coming into town to check on him, no grandchildren climbing over his creaky knees to perch on his lap, not even great-grandchildren to look at photographs and wonder who he was.

Only predatorial memories would be left. René had always blamed herself for their inability to have children and the truth was he blamed her too until an army buddy called to tell him he was joining a lawsuit because he was sure he got Parkinson’s from Agent Orange. Frank told him he was perfectly healthy, but after that conversation he wondered if he had been the problem all along, maybe the dioxin had made him sterile. But he never brought it up to René. Ancient history, he had told himself. He had let her carry the burden alone.

“Come on, snap out of it,” he said loudly, hoping this wasn’t really the beginning of the end. She wasn’t afraid of death; in fact, she was so unafraid of death that she had been stockpiling morphine, conspiring with an ally, maybe the hospice nurse or even their doctor, someone who understood that what she was really afraid of was life. He picked her up out of the wheelchair, brought her to the couch, and wrapped her in the blanket she knit all those years ago for the child that never was. “Whatever you want, my love. I’ll do whatever you want,” he said, and she blinked. Her shoulders relaxed and she smiled for the first time in weeks.

~

Frank can’t bear to check the other cocoons and goes upstairs to the couch where he wraps himself up in René’s blanket and falls asleep. In the morning, he makes coffee and changes his t-shirt, which smells like vomit. He braces himself to begin cleaning out the aquariums. He thinks he could find a couple of frogs for Nessie and make her a terrarium instead. A small window offers a square of light over one of the aquariums and he peers inside, expecting the messy remains of a lost battle, the faulty design of an inept architect. But it is clean and the cocoons seem to be vibrating.

He puts his hands on the workbench wondering if the shaking is coming from the spinning washing machine above him, but when he looks more closely a wing peeks out of one and then another and another. Same thing with the other aquariums. Good lord. He grabs one and runs out the door into the garage and presses the garage door button. He ducks under and gently puts the glass case down and runs back for the others, as if he’s saving babies from a burning house. He yells for Nessie to come quickly.

Nessie and Maura run down their deck stairs. “They’re here, they’re here!” he yells.

It seems like hundreds of wings are fluttering: blacks and browns and tans and pinks, circles and ovals and rectangles, flickering like old movie frames, moving so fast Frank’s eyes can’t adjust. The last thing he hears is Nessie’s joyous cheers.

Frank opens his arms wide ready to receive them and the moths fly out of the cases. He exhales deeply and inhales hard. René had died with her mouth open and he had counted to seventy-two, the number of years she had lived, in case that was the way the soul left, swimming the dark caverns of the body, departing through the mouth.

He knew she was gone, but he took the dropper filled with liquid morphine and gently pushed one last time, let the clear liquid fall down her throat like a waterfall because he had promised her. Then he closed her mouth as if it were a change purse. Nothing left but the shell.