No Deal

It’s been fifteen years since we made the pact, the Tarantula and I.

From the hammock’s rope she looked down at me accusingly. It’s possible that at first she was afraid, but that didn’t seem likely. She was a giant motherfucking Tarantula, after all. I was in the hammock, prone and most likely stoned, and I was definitely afraid. But what could I do? There was no calling out for help—I was in an isolated cabin in the Colombian mountains and the closest person to me was a French base head in the main house, a good half-kilometer away. And if I moved at all from the hammock I risked pissing the spider off or shaking her loose or bringing her closer to me somehow. So I breathed in once and froze. And she froze. And we stayed like that eyeing each other up from a few feet away for a long time. A very long time.

She was an enormous hairy, scary mother of a spider, but she was extremely beautiful too. The more I looked at her, the more I was sure that she was pregnant, she was so gorda. Her legs, covered in long, black, velvety fur with orange markings around something like her knees, were almost as long and as thick as my fingers. There was no question that she was elegant, downright stunningly so, but I’d seen enough nature shows to know that, more importantly, she was nothing less than deadly—Look out, Peter Brady!—and I played my own horrific death scene out in my mind on eternal repeat. One wrong move and she’d be on top of me in a second and a half, sucking out my poor gringa blood with those inverted vampire teeth of hers. Even if I didn’t move (which I couldn’t do anyway as I was paralyzed, too scared shitless to even shit my pants), the Evil Queen could still have me for lunch.

Time thickened around us. The Tarantula’s shiny dead eyes remained fixed on me and my unblinking eyes never left her. A thousand years later, I eventually managed to start to breathe again. Shallow, but at least in and out, for the most part. Was she breathing? Did she even have lungs? What was going through her mind? Did she have a mind? Or just an instinct to kill me? In all the eternity we sat there staring at each other, she didn’t twitch once, not even move a muscle. (Did she have muscles?)

I went over the situation in my head: Colombian Monster Tarantula Spider in her natural element versus stoned little dinky Canadian tourist paralyzed in a hammock. I was fucked, que sí o sí. But my instinct for survival wasn’t that thin. I continued (what else could I do?) with my mind-racking, heart-wrenching calculations and after many, many more minutes, I came to the conclusion that there was still one thing I could try. If I wanted to get out of this situation alive, I had to get over it. My Fear. If I could do that one thing, if I could conquer my plain and basic terror of the Tarantula, I’d no longer be her prey. We’d become equals and she’d respect me and have no reason to eat me alive. Desperate stoner gringa logic, yes, weak and almost laughable, but I had no other.

So that was it then. The time was now to GET OVER MY FUCKING FEAR. I breathed in as deep as my lungs would allow and began. With the punkest eyes I could conjure up, and with all my intents and purposes, I stared at that goddamned spider for the next forever-many minutes, calling on my dead mother and on all the Saints to help me face that basic genetic fear, the most common of all human phobias, of being bitten by (and dying painfully) at the “hands” of this God-awful creature. After an immeasurably long chunk of time, I managed, drop by drop, to gather the courage to embrace my terror, and, in turn, to break it down, iota by iota. Then I started to push it out of me in increments, like it was a giant zit, or like I was squeezing a sausage out of its skin into a pan. But not for one instant did I stop staring at the Tarantula, and all the while she watched me—she knew exactly what I was doing.

Eventually, something nameless in the room clicked. My breathing went back to normal, my heart returned to its natural rate, and my collosal fear dissipated almost entirely. I was calm and so was she, by the looks of it. Her eyes no longer shone pure evil and her posture no longer read Pounce and Kill. We were just two of God’s creatures kicking back in a Colombian cabin in the woods. Everything was cool and we both knew it and at that point, in complete wordless confidence, we made a pact. The Tarantula promised that she wouldn’t fuck with me—I could sleep that night in complete safety—and in turn I wouldn’t fuck with her, or any of her kind, from then on. It was a good deal all round and in no time, I closed my eyes and slept peacefully through the night.

And for the next fifteen years, I held up my end of the bargain. I never once, not deliberately anyway, killed or injured any spider of any kind under any circumstances. I habitually and gently rescued them from sinks with spoons, I apologized out loud before brushing away their webs, their homes, from the corners of my room and I always gave them the chance to run out from the broom when I swept. And for me, of all the basements and attics I’ve known since then, of all of the campsites and tropics and infested hotel rooms, never once has a spider fucked with me or given me cause for retaliation. But all this changed a few weeks back and now the Arachnid Pact is off.

At first I thought it was a particularly itchy mosquito bite just below my shoulder. But by nightfall it had swollen up and turned hard and burgundy. By the next morning it was a big round hot welt and for the next six days, it continued to grow and spread and harden. My entire upper right arm had been transformed into a fiery, mottled, painfully itchy piece of taut flesh, as if an alergen-giant’s burning hand had grabbed me and dragged me along forcibly all the way down histamine lane. My muscles felt bruised and achy and the arm itself felt heavy, almost too heavy to lift. Not the bee stings or the two scorpion bites, not even that nasty worm that nested itself in my belly button, none of the insect malevolence that I’d ever suffered could compare to this (besides the scabies, of course, but scabies aren’t insects, they’re mites, satanic microscopic mites).

I showed my alarming arm to everyone who would take the time to look. “What the fuck is this?” I demanded. Tourists were frightened and grossed out but the locals were sure. “Spider bite,” they all said. But...but we had a pact, I thought, and remembered for the first time in a long time the Colombian Tarantula and my night of terror. I was sure that I had never once shirked my promise to her and to the arachnid world. But when I thought about it, she hadn’t betrayed me at all either—her only promise to me was to not kill me that one night. Since then, I’d just sort of taken for granted that overcoming my fear and not fucking with spiders at all meant that they’d never fuck with me either. Fifteen bite-free years, by coincidence or cosmic deal, was without doubt a good run, but now my arm was rotting hotly from the inside out and I was pissed. So out loud and with the universe as my witness, I withdrew my participation and revoked any part I may have had in the original arachnid deal.

I began to look at all eight-legged creatures with a new and violent distrust and in the coming week I started washing all lost spiders down the drain, helping them reach their demise with the vengeful part of the spoon. I swept them and sprayed them and flicked them off tables with my nail and I even stepped on one on purpose and only felt a tiny bit sorry.

But after about a week, the bite’s swelling went down and the itchiness and the feverish pain all went away, leaving only an odd discolouration, like a rosacea patch or an old sunburn, along my whole upper right arm, which is bound to disappear eventually. I also got over the “betrayal” and managed to let go of my vengeful bronca against the eight-legged world in general.

But what about the pact? I wanted to renew its terms, I wanted to live in relative arachnid peace again. So the other day, when a goofy-looking Daddy Long Legs—the perfect eight-legged representative to negotiate with—came crawling down the curtain, I grabbed him by one of his squirming string-legs and said, “New deal, buddy. It’s time.” He flailed about and I continued. “You and your people, YOU DO NOT FUCK WITH ME,” I said, shaking my finger at him to show him how serious I was. “Capisce?” I wanted to look into his eyes to see if he was listening but he tore free and ran away with only seven legs now. I followed him along the floor. “Wait. Don’t worry!” I called out. “Really, I won’t fuck with you either. That’s the deal. The new deal!” He was at the wall now, climbing for his life. I blew on him and he stopped and I picked him up and he died in my hand. I’d killed him. That was not part of the deal.

I sighed and the imaginary Werner Herzog that I sometimes play host to in my mind piped up and grunted sharply. “The common denominator in the universe is not harmony,” he said high-germanly, “but chaos, hostility and murder.” I took the dead spider and his eighth leg which I still held between my fingers and dropped them into the compost bucket with a silent sorry. Just then the Daddy Long Legs twitched—he was alive!—and I reached in to rescue him. But he was covered in wet oatmeal now and for the second time that minute, died in my hands. Herzog grunted again and concluded, “You were the loser. Now you are the winner. You will be the loser again.”