It’s September 23rd. It says so, thin paper, mostly gray with black lines in a language I don’t know. All I can read is the date, that’s as much French as I remember. Septembre. Septembre 23, 2007. The Le Monde comes daily. I lay it on my dining table, along with the others, piled high, a collection of sentences I can’t translate. They are sprawled in different sets of rows. Some on the floor, some on the coffee table, all facing the same direction and making the living room look like an informative cemetery. I place the coffee mug and saucer next to the most recent. A plate of sliced strawberries, red and supple, seeds begging to be picked from the gums. As I sit, I take the newspaper, stare at the date, trying to remember the time change. She could be waking up, she could be sleeping, or she could be walking about the campus, wondering if anyone knew what day it was. 923 sticks in my brain, it comes in at least once, the number on a roaring bus or an address of a house. It could be someone’s total at the store, it could be the number of hair strands on my head or the number of coins in my piggy bank. This particular day, I finally open the paper, look at the words, and see a spider appear from between the pages, a daddy-long leg.
A poisonous spider. It stretches its needle legs and begins to turn itself around the paper, making circles, not knowing where the exit could be. I stare at it, not moving, perhaps it will not see me with its two magnifying eyes. Pholcus phalangioides, the cellar spider, the skull spider. Cellar because it hides its web in your attic, and skull because it has the cranium shaped much like that of a human’s. Watch them reflect humans. When their webs appear threatened, they will shake the thread, blinding the predator, buying time. They are one of the quickest spiders, mechanical and methodical. But this is not a true spider. Though it resembles one, it is scientifically an arachnid, a harvestman. If food is scarce, it will feed upon its own kind by climbing another’s web, mimicking a fly or mosquito by tapping the thread, and then capturing the other spider, wrapping it, biting it, and injecting poison. Not that the poison is really lethal. It’s just sort of paralyzing. Her fingers would touch my collar and she’d move her mouth near and whisper, My web is disorganized, made in no time, and if you want to see its details, you must be drawn in. Her words, vibrating through the cochlea, beating the drum, translating to images through my brain cells, and finally being felt though the nerves on my arm, hair rising. Then she would wrap me up in her words, moving to my neck and biting down with porcelain teeth. Her weakest venom, I would go into a temporary coma, fall onto the neck of the couch, and let her press her weight against me, choking my lungs. I could say nothing, for the thick threads of web, disguised as words, were wrapped around my mouth.
I lay my hand, palm up, next to the spider. It steadies, and I can feel its eyes staring at my palm, wondering if this new place is as dark and damp as its home should be. It moves its long leg onto one of my fingers lightly, touching softly the skin wet from nervousness. Then it moves another leg onto the center of my palm.
A daddy-long leg spider’s limbs can be 10 mm times its body’s length, which means that its limbs make up its body. It is the feature that shines through, the one thing that people will remember distinctly enough to say This is a daddy-long leg.
Then the spider climbs entirely onto my palm, I take my empty coffee cup and carefully place it over the spider. Using the saucer, I turn him over. A captured daddy-long leg. I’ve finally caught you.
“I’m Beau.”
“Nice to meet you, Beau. Is that short for something?”
“Beauregard.”
So Beauregard was caught within the cup, and I, unsure of what to do with him, keep him there for hours, dwelling on her webs in my mind, and searching for the web that Beauregard might be keeping in my apartment.
I am thinking of a girl that would spring into my room, jump onto my bed, and begin thudding me against the mattress, asking me what sort of fun I would like to be having. She would get on her knees, press her palms against my chest and say, You have caught me, you know, and even though the forest is vast, it is only this part of the wilderness that I explore. She would take her nose and press it into my cheek, dipping her nose into the pond, sipping and disturbing the quietness of the water. My lips would quiver and try to contain their steadiness, but she sensed the movement and hopped quickly from on top of me to the space between the doorway. Then she would say You know it is just a game. I am too fast, and you are not the one for me. You are not my kind. I would retrieve the gun from my waist, and try to shoot her down, but she was right, much too fast. I was too shaky to steady my crosshairs. And see, my nervousness then led to this disease.∗