An October memoir.
When a man's morning routine spirals into a surreal nightmare of infestations and existential dread, he must confront both his fears and the absurdity of life itself.
October 31. No star hotel, 7am. Auto-pilot routines. Cheap coffee percolating, ablutions in a dank bathroom. I reached into my travel kit, as I’d done countless times, but this morning, my fingers found the upturned razor instead of the toothbrush. The blades sliced into my fingertips. Wincing and recoiling from the sting, I saw four neat cut lines. It had to be the soft part, the most sensitive part of the finger. Jesus. Looking closely, there were ridges of skin opened by the blades, resembling a series of miniature crags, between which lay valleys whose walls precisely corresponded to the razor’s angle of entry. Within moments of the tender depths being exposed, blood swelled up from their trenches in rich ruby droplets before cascading down my fingers. Not a great way to start my morning. I scolded myself for being so absent minded as I searched for a bandage with my weaker hand. I didn’t know at that moment, but my day was about to get a lot worse.
I looked into the mirror and saw a dark spot under the skin of my cheek. You know that little bony ridge under your eye? It’s called the Zygomatic bone, the outer ridge of your eye socket. That area. Could that be a varicose vein? On my face? It wasn’t there yesterday. I took a mental note to look that up later. When I nudged the spot it shifted, almost deliberately. This instantly generated a profound WTF from deep within me, from that place some might classify as the soul. I barely felt capable of fathoming the situation. After a few seconds, I relaxed the muscles of my face and peered more closely. Rationalizing some composure, I realized I hadn’t had my coffee yet. Plus, my eyes aren’t what they used to be – then again, they aren’t that bad, either.
Was I imagining things? I’d recently read that neuroscientists discovered that signals from the brain to the eyes outnumber those from the eyes to the brain by four to one. Heavily influencing our perceptions, our minds are incredibly inventive, capable of conjuring almost anything we think we're seeing. Rarely, if ever, is the objective truth what we see. But can you invent bugs in your head?
More subcutaneous shadows appeared. A deep, gut churning panic welled up inside me, and my heart pounded like an earthquake. I forced myself to stay still, survival instinct overriding sheer terror. I leaned in close to the mirror, searching for any recognizable movement or pattern. Then, one shadow crawled, or swam, or shimmied or somehow propelled itself, but it moved from my cheek up into my eye – the white part, which is called the sclera, not that the official names of things were helping me in the moment. The critter was navigating with disturbing ease, unencumbered, like getting around in my face was the easiest thing going. It was so close to the surface that I saw its legs, six or eight, unmistakably insect-like.
My invaders, my parasites, my unwelcome guests, were well out of reach of flicks, swats or squishes, lest I gravely injure myself. I wondered if I could somehow push the outer edges of my face and corral the little fuckers to a certain area and squeeze them out, like a nightmarish pimple. But there was no such luck – they moved too quickly, and with the full expanse of my skull to roam, sank back into the depths of my head. Holy shitcakes, what was happening to me?
Strangely, there was no pain. Just a faint irritation or light tickle, but nothing substantial. Except of course, for the mental anguish – knowing there is a growing swarm inside me. The thought of their life cycle – eggs, larvae, pupae, some crawling stage, feeding off me from within – was nauseating, and I felt utterly helpless.
Grasping for answers, I wondered if this invasion started with last night’s spinach daal at the Indian restaurant. Had I ingested insect eggs nestled among the lentils, finding me the ideal host for a feast and free-for-all breeding ground?
The owner of the restaurant, an Indian woman, off the boat, looked so impossibly peaceful, like the Buddha of tikka masalas. Nah, the bugs can’t be from there. Her calm disposition and impeccable tidiness had impressed me, contrasting my own propensity to anxiety. I recalled reading some other stuff about how your emotions affect your immune system. It made sense, as the author explained it, that when you’re chronically stressed, too much cortisol can negatively affect your immune system, opening you up to all kinds of problems. I’d bet my last penny that the restaurant owner didn’t have chronic anxiety. This current infestation, however, was beyond anything I could have fathomed.
Almost in a trance, I drifted into thoughts about life itself. Not in any high-brow way, but in a pragmatic sense, like biological shrewdness. There's an inherent drive, like a tightly wound spring unleashed at conception, across all forms of life—from bacteria and fungi to fish and elephants. Onions and butterflies or grizzly bears and moss. Every living organism pursues existence from the earliest opportunity. Microscopes reveal no lounging amoebas; life is perpetually active. Birds don’t abandon their nests, and life is a chaotic rush to thrive before time runs out. Even video games echo this urgency: You pay good money not to sit idle while in player mode.
One of the constants over billions of years on this spinning planet and its countless extinctions – 99% or all species are gone, subsumed into other lifeforms – is that life just keeps going, reinventing itself. I may have to appreciate life in all its spectral wonder, but if this is also true for the bugs that have invaded my body, I just want them dead.
In spite of my parasitic inundation, I was able to move freely. My sight was unimpaired. But I was far from home, and as much as I knew I needed help, there was no nearby hospital. So I proceeded to do a trick I learned in Africa - when there’s no doctor, go see the pharmacist. In a pinch, it’s better than nothing, and there was one across the street. But how was I gonna explain my condition, my affliction, my plague, my menace?
There was no queue when I arrived, and I approached the counter. “Good morning,” I said, continuing as if talking about the weather, “By chance, can you see anything on my face?”
“Morning,” the pharmacist responded. I quickly wondered where she studied. She looked like a kid, but then again, more and more people were starting to look like kids since I turned 40. She looked at me with caring yet probingly analytical eyes.
“No,” she said flatly. “There’s nothing there.”
“But I saw something in my eye this morning,” I insisted. She looked at me with a sly reckoning that I had come to see her for an issue that likely landed outside her domain, and she was not about to step beyond her expertise.
“What’s with that nasty bandage on your hand?” she asked. I revealed my wounded fingers.
“Okay,” she said. “Let me get you some Neosporin.”
On my way out, she said with a wink “Happy Halloween, sir.”
