The Surf Guru (26 page)

That night I went to a bar a few towns over, where I didn't know anyone. The place was quiet. I was sitting by myself, tracing wet rings on the scarred oak, when a guy tapped me on the shoulder and started grunting at me. No words, just sounds, nasal and urgent. I told him to leave me alone. The last thing I wanted to do was try to figure someone else out. But the guy just got louder, more insistent, and he started jabbing his finger at me. I was about to knock him down when I realized he was pointing behind me, pointing at two women sitting at the end of the bar. Late thirties, both of them, and they looked like they'd seen some hard miles. One had straight brown hair crimped into little rows of waves. The other one wore a shade of bright pink lipstick I'd once seen on a dead old lady Black Swede showed me in the basement of the funeral home. These two women were staring at the TV, which was announcing the lottery numbers that nobody had matched. I turned back to the guy and he was smiling and making his noises, happier-sounding now. He pointed at me, then at himself, then at the women. I finally got it. He was deaf. “You want me to talk to them for you?” I said. “For us?”

His hands tightened into happy little fists, and his head bobbed up and down—yes yes yes. I pitied him. He thought he'd found words in me.

ST . TERESA OF AVILA ,
The Interior Castle

On an after-hours tour of the natural history museum, my friend the herpetologist shows me the laboratory in which, fifty years ago, the division's curator gathered with several colleagues to puzzle over an African tree snake that the city zoo had sent for identification. Thirty inches long, bright green and black-beaded, with folding rear fangs: it was almost certainly a boomslang, they agreed, but for the matter of the anal plate, which ought to have been divided but wasn't. The men were confounded; this snake was a taxonomical impossibility. The curator picked it up for a closer look, but he took his grip too far behind the head and the snake whipped around and struck, burying those rear fangs into the soft flesh at the base of his thumb.
That it was a boomslang was dramatically manifested by its behavior
, the curator would write. Still, they all agreed, the snake was young and had been in captivity for some time, so it wouldn't possess venom in enough quantity or potency for the bite to be fatal. The curator did the old cut-and-suck, then retreated to his office to chronicle his symptoms as the hemotoxin pulsed through his body.

By two-thirty, the area around the puncture had blackened. By four, he had developed chills that shook him as he donned his overcoat and headed for the suburban train. On the train, he noted waves of nausea. At home, in bed with heating pad, pencil, and notebook, he recorded continued nausea, a fever spike, bleeding from the mouth. Midnight: blood in urine. Later, just blood—no urine—plus abdominal pain and violent nausea. In the morning, heavy-lidded and sore, he paused in his writing and asked his wife to call the museum and say he'd be back at work the following day.
Mouth and nose continuing to bleed, though not excessively
, he wrote. This was his final entry. He fell into a coma. By three-fifteen p.m., he was dead. His colleagues, though saddened, told the newspapers that a good herpetologist never misses an opportunity to record a case study. His wife's thoughts on this subject were not reported.

The office that once belonged to the late curator is locked (and it has someone else's nameplate on it, besides), but I linger there, one hand on the dark-grained wood, and I imagine him in his office that afternoon, in his creaky chair behind his bulky desk, staring at his hand as he flexes his swollen thumb. Along one wall are maps of southern Africa, India, the Pantanal; along another are two tall and packed-tight bookshelves. At his back, a window open to the lake breeze. On his desk, a gila monster's skull serves as a paperweight. Perhaps he has a moment of doubt. Perhaps he finds himself with the telephone in his good hand, about to connect to the hospital, but he turns his gaze to the clock on his wall (brutishly plain, as institutional clocks are, with cold black numbers on a white face and a second hand that buzzes, insectlike, as it sweeps its arc) and decides he can catch the next train home if he hurries.

The air around me is chilly and spiced with formaldehyde. My friend calls from down the hallway, tells me to hurry up because we have much more to see in the museum tonight: the lab where a
T. rex
is being reassembled; a fearsome collection of shark jaws; the insane menagerie that is the birds-of-prey specimen room. I let my hand drop from the curator's door, suddenly sheepish. I am forty and graying; by now I ought to know what, if anything, I will give my life to, or for.

In the distance, down some other hallway of the vast museum, a floor polisher thrums and thrums, getting the place clean for tomorrow's visitors.

Christopher, the best man, is on his fifth rum-and-Coke when the music stops and the stage is cleared and his thoughts turn to Jamaica. To the inn in Montego Bay where he proposed to the woman who is now his wife. To the garden where they had their breakfast the following morning. To the creature they saw darting across one of the flower beds. The strangest thing: a lizard head on a thick, stubby-snake body with cartoonishly tiny legs and feet. It paused on a flat rock, and they admired it until the gardener, a dark-skinned man in flawless white linen, crept up to the creature and smoothly decapitated it with one strike of his shovel. “Galliwasp,” the man explained to them. “Most dangerous ting on de island. Got venom in dey teeth.” He scooped up the two pieces of the reptile with the shovel and carried it away, whistling, leaving them to their plates of ackee fruit and saltfish and their stunned silence. What they found out later, back at home, surprised them even more: galliwasps aren't venomous. Aren't dangerous at all. The lore is a lie, and the damned things are nearly extinct because of it.

There's another piece of island wisdom about the galliwasp: If one bites you, you're supposed to run for the nearest water. If you get to water before it does, then you'll live and it will die. If it gets to water first, you'll be dead before the next sunrise.

Christopher wants to share this with the guys at the table—it feels important, somehow, in his rum-fogged mind—but they're all busy scoping out the lap-dance talent and conferring with each other on same, and the groom-to-be is already blind on tequila shooters, and now there's a new girl on stage and the music starts pumping again. He couldn't make himself heard if he wanted to.

He looks around the table. Eight men. They've been friends since they were teenagers; they've screwed some of the same girls; they've boasted-slash-confided about sloppy-drunk hookups, about each of their Top Five Blowjobs lists, about conquests in bathroom stalls and faculty offices and graveyards and parking lots and airport hotels and delivery vans and dank basements while parties thump away overhead, about the demure girls who fuck like wildcats, about walks of shame and cold sores and amoxicillin, about the I-swear-I'll-call-you-agains and the Ones That Got Away. And now he understands why his thoughts are on Jamaican galliwasps instead of the C-cup cowgirl pole-dancing ten feet away: all of them spent the first two decades of their adult lives treating sex like a galliwasp bite. There is the bite, and then there's the running. You might be the reptile or the human, you might be the biter or the bitten—you might not even be sure which one you are—but the barest fact of it remains: Jaws sink into flesh, and then you're both running for the water. All those bites, all those sprints, all those deaths by sunrise. But it's different, he thinks, now that they've gotten older, now that they're settling down. It's different. Isn't it?

This feels like a question that should not be contemplated with an empty glass. He raises his hand and tries to catch the eye of the bone-skinny cocktail waitress, who for some reason is dressed like a matador.

The Argus monitor, a.k.a.
Varanus panoptes
, is a diurnal metaphor and an important predator in today's global biomeme.

In Greek mythology, Argus Panoptes was a giant with a hundred eyes who was assigned by Hera to guard a white heifer from Zeus, that crazed rutter.

 

 

The Argus monitor has sharp claws for digging, climbing, and ripping apart aesthetic distance.

 

 

The Argus monitor is a major employer in most American cities and towns, but it is nervous and quick to startle.

 

 

When scanning its environs, the Argus monitor will often “tripod”—i.e., raise itself high on its hind legs and tail. It sees all. Keep your shoes shined, your underthings clean, and your paperwork up to date.

 

 

A powerfully built, rapacious eating machine, the Argus monitor is the “bottomless pit” of the animal kingdom, feeding on snakes, insects, corn syrup solids, rodents, birds, consent,
The Fountainhead
, frogs, rage, synecdoche, arbitrage, apathy, wounded dingoes, Tibet, that new car smell, situation comedy, marketing majors, Bowery river crab, restraint, theocratic impulses, the Rule Against Perpetuities, wonder, exhaustion, degenerate art, collateralized prey obligations, the missionary position, phenomenology, cake, the proposed Trans-Afghanistan pipeline, and, in times of scarcity, other monitors.

 

 

Off camera, Marlin Perkins would refer to the Argus monitor as “a bad mamma-jamma.”

 

 

The Argus monitor's droppings are superconcentrated pellets of hope and bones, prized as trophies by some and as protein sources by others. More precise demographic breakdowns remain unavailable, however, due to budget cuts at the research facility.

 

 

The Argus monitor pays well. Sweet rutting Zeus, does it ever.

 

 

On March 14, 1983, an Argus monitor urinated on Johnny Carson's shoulder during a live broadcast of NBC's
Tonight Show
. When they cut to commercial, it tore off and devoured both of the TV host's legs.

 

 

The Argus monitor offers many opportunities for intern-ships as well.

 

 

Venom? Damn skippy!

It prefers to bask in the morning, with a two-gallon MonolithiGulp™ of coffee, a raw goat, a bowl of white phosphorus, and the
Wall Street Journal
it has swiped from its neighbor's driveway.