Another Kind of Madness. Ed Pavlic

guest since he’d quit traveling full time with the construction crew. He’d had no overnight guests on the road, either, only music. If there was sex, that usually took place in the company-owned Ford F-250 he drove. He looked. There were no webs in the room. The boards in the floor were warped enough to allow easy transit to untold worlds of tiny, flexible beings like spiders. Not roaches. He’d caulked and puttied and steel-wooled and foamed those openings. He’d spent enough years on the road in efficiency motel rooms where he had to stomp his feet on the way to the bathroom at night and shake the cereal box before pouring it into the bowl in the morning. He wasn’t going back to that. He’d rather go back to planet college. Well, OK, maybe not that. If the spider wanted to come from out of the old elevator shaft through whatever crack she found and slip up next to him in the night, as long as she left nothing more than one of these small hickey-like bites or so per week, he could live with it. With her. Again, he knew this was strange, which, he told himself, was half the battle.

      So he made a quiet deal with his silent roommate. As long as she could slip in and out of bed with him and he didn’t wake up and she was gone by morning, she was more than welcome. It was a pact with silence and a truce with its consequences, a kind of embroidery of fear and, maybe, an experiment with trust.

      The bites traveled up his body. Another appeared on the inside of his upper arm. This one was the same as the others. A marble on days one and two that diffused into a poison reef and atoll by the end of the week. The barrier faded and went away by day seven. The spider’s visits made him notice spiders. He read that, in fact, westerners in temperate climates are never more than five feet from a spider. He made a small series of transactions with his roommate during the first six months he lived at 6329, apartment 3B. Spiders aren’t silent, they’re silence. During the years working on the road, he’d come to understand himself as a repository of silence in a mad-loud world. The hemorrhaged world bled noise. He didn’t participate. Less and less. On some jobs he ran a diamond-blade brick saw, cutting very dense, ceramic brick. A small hose sprayed water on the blade. This meant specialized cuts, expensive brick, no mistakes, and a diamond blade spinning at 4500 rpm an inch from his right thumb.

      The blare from the blade was beyond deafening. Earplugs did nothing. The sound waved its way past skin and flesh directly into the bones. It rode the marrow, bypassed the ears, and opened into the mass of the skull. Floating in an amplifier, his brain itself translated the vibrations into sound. In fact, he’d come to believe that, like water, bone marrow transmitted sound better than air and so he had given up on the earplugs altogether. But it wasn’t just the saw. It was the world gone agog on blather. The saw was, however, good training for this world. He’d imagine that he was a set of inverted waves that canceled out the noise of the saw. Same amid conversations and in front of all manner of media. TVs had proliferated in public spaces. When he’d stopped watching altogether, it became obvious to him that TVs watch people, not the other way around. And he could see clearly that TV had turned many people into things that didn’t need to be watched. In fact, TVs worked much like spider webs. Those caught ended up like the dried husks of bugs one finds in a web. It was only a matter of time before the screens had sucked all the juice from people’s homes and would then need to reduce their size and find a way to follow people out into the world and into every waking moment. At that point the only unwatched piece of life would be sleep; Shame doubted that wall would hold. Screens would be invented that could watch people in their dreams too.