Flies

or

A Story About Stories

 

            I can’t sleep. Every time I close my eyes, I see the flies, dancing across my brain, squirming and twitching and swarming on the back of my eyelids in surprising detail –  a disturbingly single-minded movie in which the scenes keep changing, but they’re all about the same thing. I can make out the different mutations as these moving images cloud my mind – stubble flies with their short bristles, ebony flies black as their name suggests, P-element males with variegated eyes, splotches of white and red. I can’t get them out of my head. I’ve been looking at Drosophila a bit too long.

             I roll over and sigh. Anne, beside me, asks me what’s wrong, and I tell her about the flies. She suggests we talk about something else, so I can stop thinking them, and we do. We discuss Hell first. I say I would prefer Hell to the reality of death, of ceasing to exist, because once you’ve ceased to exist, nothing matters. It was all for nothing. Pain, I say, has to lessen when it is constant. Pain, experienced for an eternity, becomes normal,  becomes the status quo. Anne suggests that Hell would be better (that is, worse) if there were some false hope to cling to, some reason to keep a scrap of one’s spirit, if the torture stopped now and again, and the demons gave you tasks to do, and told you that if you were good, they would let you go, but then never actually did. I laugh, and she says we’d make good evil things. I say I’d want to be a Succubus (as long as I can be a lesbian Succubus) and then we talk about Succubi and this naturally leads to talk of Incubi (which, Anne says, would be an interesting excuse for an unplanned pregnancy – it was a rape demon, I’m telling you, an Incubus.)

            We’re silent for a while, and I then remember that I need to get up at in the morning and I flip on the lights and set my alarm. Anne pauses, and then remarks that she doesn’t understand why people have sex with the lights off. I shrug, say something about the patriarchy, utter the phrase “lie on your back and think of England” and crawl back into bed. We proceed to talk about hating the world. September 11^th, schmaltzy country music about September 11^th, the Holocaust, the Rwandan genocide, the United States’ failure to do anything about the Rwandan genocide, the civil war in the Sudan (which Anne doesn’t know about, so I tell her) and that tsunami in Asia all factor into this exchange.

            It’s all very interesting, but none of it makes the flies go away. I’m still thinking about them this whole time. Anne, eventually, drifts off, and I am left staring at her back in the bluish light emanating from my computer monitor. It reminds me of the lighting in those night scenes in Hollywood movies. The flies are dead now, or maybe anesthetized. Anyway, they’re not moving. I kiss Anne lightly on the shoulder and try to think about nothing. At some point, I too fall asleep. I dream only of flies.

           

            In the morning, the alarm rings, and I jump up cursing and turn it off. Anne grunts and turns over. She sleeps like a log. I sleep like the opposite of a log. (Sometimes, we play this opposites game. The idea is to find the opposite of something that doesn’t have a conventional opposite. Like a log, or a freeway, or a sandwich. I think the opposite of something is its absence. Like dark is the absence of light, or silence is the absence of sound. So absence of log is the opposite of log. Anne has banned “absence of x” from the opposite game. Anne says the opposite of a log is a pipe.)

            I can’t my find my shoes. The place is a mess, the proverbial tornadoes, bombs and assorted tragedies having assaulted it. Occasionally, I pick it up, but it returns to its natural state as the universe marches inexorably towards chaos. My room, like everything else, is governed by the Second Law of Thermodynamics. I shove the piles of stuff aside but my shoes have disappeared into the void. I don’t have any other practical shoes, so I put on these monster platform boots – all buckles and rivets and laces and zippers – and march to the lab, my footwear clattering on the pavement.

            I stop in front of my building, but I do not seem to have my key. It’s locked on Sundays. It is early, I am tired (I have not slept fully in at least a week), and I do not wish to drag myself back home.  I dig into my multitudinous pockets (I always have too many pockets, and I have no system for putting things in them, so I must look through all of them when I have forgotten where something is. I tell myself, sometimes, that I must be organized. I never listen.) but my key is in none of them. I do, however, have my phone, and I proceed to call security. I am on the line with them, explaining who I am and where I am and why I wish to be let into this building when a man comes out. I inform security of the change in my situation, and enter.

            Inside the lab, I take out the fly bottles and put them on my bench. The flies are shifting about gently in their glass enclosure, clustering on the sponge plug that blocks their escape (and allows the entrance of air, so they don’t suffocate). I can see the larvae writhing on the green food at the bottom of the fly bottle. You are not supposed to call them maggots.

            My job today is to find virgins (that is, unmated females. Drosophila can store sperm, so if you use mated females in your experiments, you can’t be sure of the paternity of the offspring) and put them in vials, five in each little plastic container. The virgins are lighter than their unchaste colleagues, sort of puffy, and have this dark spot on their abdomens, off to one side (this is meconium, or, as the instructional video put it, “the remnants of the flies last meal”). There are also male virgins. They are also light in color, but their bodies are thinner, and they have a dark blotch at the end of their tails. I don’t want them.

            I turn on the CO2 and dump some flies out onto the pad. They twitch and lie still, drugged by the gas. I stare through the microscope as the flies burn themselves into my memory. I begin the selection. First, I push the males, with their dark bodies, to one side of the CO2 pad, where the brownish spot is. I accidentally squashed a fly there a couple of days ago, and its blood has soaked into the white fabric. I separate the mated females, marked by their striped abdomens, next, the hairs of my little paintbrush sweeping the flies, broom-like, to the same place as the males. I am left with the virgins of both sexes. I use the scope to differentiate them, and brush away these males as I have done with the others. The female virgins I put into vials, picking them up with the paintbrush, or sweeping them off the edge of the pad. After I have collected enough of them, I will introduce males of another genotype into the vials. Their offspring are needed later for another phase of the experiment.

            These flies are the lucky ones. They will live out their lives in the little vial. They will mate and lay their eggs and die in their truncated actuality. For the rest on my pad, fate is more immediate. Beside the microscope sits the fly morgue, a beaker of ethanol with a funnel in its mouth. Countless fly corpses float in the poison sea. I add to it the refuse of my selection. I am reminded of this awful PETA campaign, Holocaust on

Your Plate – juxtaposed images of the Nazi concentration camps with those of farm animals – prisoners crammed into barracks alongside chickens in cages, and so on. The Nazis themselves could hardly have done better. I wonder if there is some crazy organization that protests research on Drosophila. People for the Ethical Treatment of Flies, or Insect Liberation Front, or something.

            I watch a loose fly walk across my bench. She is not one of mine. Her eyes are red, and I am working with white-eyed mutants. I touch her with my brush, and she flits off, landing a short distance away. They are sort of sickly, these lab strains. Even the so-called wild type flies are weaker than their undomesticated counterparts – inbred, homogenized, homozygous for everything.

            I go back to working – dumping out flies, separating the desirable from the unwanted, sending the latter to the ethanol. I have three bottles left, and a load of flies stupefied on my pad when my CO2 hose disconnects. I hear it hiss and jerk free, and flies go shooting across the Formica of the lab bench. Some of them land on the floor, some on the counter. A few end up on my lab notebook (these I scrape off into the morgue). I wrestle with the hose and jam it back into place. Flies are reviving all around me, and I shoo them off.

            I remember the loose fly I saw earlier today. I have added flies to the colony of feral insects that inhabits the lab. I wonder what they would think about all of this, if they could think as I do. I imagine a network of survivors, huddling together in the corners of the lab, trying not to be noticed and executed. Perhaps there is even a resistance, a brave cadre of escaped flies plotting the overthrow of their oppressors. All of this is rather silly, of course, but I have been staring at flies all morning.

            When I return home, Anne is still asleep, her face down on the pillow, her dark hair spread out across her back. I am amazed by the quality and the duration of her slumber. Everything wakes me up. I have some calls to make, so I stand in the hallway so as not to disturb her (though I am not sure I would wake her, it still feels wrong to make noise). I go back in, and Anne is propped up the black pillow that we jokingly refer to as my boyfriend, reading a book. I greet her, and she asks me how the flies went. I tell her that I am going to write a story about flies. She thinks this is a good idea.

 

(This is the story I wrote about flies)

 

            Things are slowing down, now. My body is not as strong as it once was. I no longer yearn to fly, but am content to sit here, picking at a scrap of food that the giants have dropped. Five-Legs buzzes over and alights on my food. Like me, he is a survivor. He has lived five days since he was re-born, though he likes to count it as three since his escape. Five-Legs, who lost the other in the dizzying, paralyzing haze of the White Place, is the leader of the Resistance. He and his troops risk the crushing things and the sweeping things  to collect stunned fugitives. They organize for the Revolution that is coming. I no longer hope to see it, but I know it will come. We will free our fellow prisoners. We will live in peace.

            Five-Legs has a cluster of young flies with him, maidens fresh from the rebirth. They were born here, then, in the Outside.

            “Old one,” Five-Legs says, and rubs his front legs together in a gesture of respect. “You must tell your story to these children of the Resistance. They must know.”

            Five-Legs always speaks with such pretension. “Yes, yes,” I answer him, and I turn to survey the young flies. They are white, puffy still from the emergence. The differences between them have not yet begun to show. They have not yet names.

            “Do you remember being a larva?” I ask them.

            They signal assent, half-heartedly. There is not much to remember. That life is bliss, it is the pleasure of non-thought. There is only the immediacy of desire and fulfillment. I am hungry. I eat. We cling to our memory of it, but it fades. It is not so much memory – it is a knowledge of some other sort. I cannot recall being a larva, but rather that I was one. Even with them, who were so recently reborn, the memory is hazy.

            “I remember,” I lie. “There was abundant food. Green, delicious food. All I had to do was crawl about and eat it.”

            Five-Legs interrupts me. “You waste time, Old One. The span of our days are short.”

            I tap my foot in annoyance. “I remember my emergence. There was a world beyond the green, a great world of flies like myself. They were beautiful and wonderful. I sat and watched them as I dried out my wings. I remember the ecstasy of flying, stretching my new-minted—”

            “Old one,” says Five-Legs again. I wish he would not call me this. I had another name before, but I have forgotten what it was. I have been Old One now for as many days as Five-Legs has been free, so he knows no other name for me.

            “Tell about the Giants,” the fledglings insist, with perverse excitement.

            I oblige them. “I was just a little older than you when I first realized the existence of the Giants. I became aware of the world moving. I looked out of the sides of the world – of what I though was all of existence – and saw other flies, flitting around in other worlds, and I saw that the world was not a world, but a prison. There was more to life than this place. I watched as a great pink something (a Giant, children, lined and creased, its five strange legs reaching) wrap itself around my prison, casting a shadow upon us. I asked the others what it was, but they told me it was nothing. They declared me crazy and would not speak to me. I sunk to the bottom of everything and sat in the food among the crawling larvae, who ignored me. The vastness of existence overwhelmed me and I could not think. I began to wonder if I was indeed crazy.

            “But I was not. I do not know how long I sat among the squirming infants. I felt myself growing weak and tired, and suddenly, a hoard of my fellows had fallen beside me in the bottom of our shared prison. The sounds of flies ceased abruptly. There were only a few frightened whispers from those who still had the strength to speak.”

            I notice a female presence near me, and I stop my story. It is Walker, so called because she cannot fly, with her twisted mangled wings. She is as old as I am, older perhaps. Like me she has lived uncountable days, more than six.  She has walked the floor uncountable times, laid uncountable eggs. These young ones may even be her children. I do not know. Walker does not know. I lose the trail of my thoughts and approach Walker, touching her with my feet. She kicks me with her back legs. “Go away.”

            Five-Legs taps his feet, and I return to my story. Walker rests near me. “Where was I? Oh, the White Place. Pray, children, that you never meet it. I could not move. I tried to twitch my legs, to prove to myself that I was still alive. My thoughts moved slowly, each one taking an eternity. I felt myself being moved around, piled with others in the corner of the White Place.. A bright light shone upon me, upon my fellows piled near me. I did not know what to do.

            “Here, I saw the unnamable thing. No one of us knows what to call it. It is the size of the prisons, bigger perhaps, but filled with corpses. They float, suspended somehow in water. The strange smell wafted towards me from this object of terror. I stared at the dead eyes of my comrades, and I was afraid.”

            “Were there more than six?” One of the children asks.

            “Yes, more than six. So many more than six.”

            I pause a moment. All these interruptions are making me forget my story. I always tell it the same way. If I do not keep my path, I become confused. “So, I was frozen, trapped in the White Place. I felt it tip, and again, I felt myself fall. I hit something hard and black, and I realized that I lay beside…it. I rested a moment, content that I was not dead, and I saw the face of a fly I knew float past me, lifeless in a sea of lifelessness. Still, my thoughts were slow, but I made myself move. The White Place released its hold upon me, slowly, and I dragged my body away. I had never moved so far in all my short life. If I had been beset by the vastness I had perceived before, here was an infinity uncountably more great. But I had no time for contemplation. I moved, because that was what I had to do. I found my way, somehow, to the floor. I found others, and I told them of what had happened to me, and they recounted similar stories. I—”

            It is Five-Legs again. “Yes. That is enough. You see, children, the horror of the Giants. When you are strong, I will take you to see the prisons,  where our kind wait stupidly for Death.”

            “Glory to the Revolution,” I say.

            Walker pushes herself in front of the children. “You’re all fools,” she says. “This is fate. That is all. It cannot be changed.”

            Five-Legs ignores her, and leads the young ones away. Even he will not stand up to Walker.

            “I have always wondered, Walker, about your story,” I say.

            “I was born.  I will die. That is all,” she says.

            “So you have no hope?” I ask her.

            “I don’t know what hope is,” she says.

            For a long time, we say nothing. I touch her with one of my legs. This time, she does not kick me. I forget what we have been talking about.