Spider and Fly
I came home one afternoon in late 1976 to my house on Chestnut Street in Santa Cruz. I'd been working in the building trades since leaving the boats, and was trading work for rent, building my first complete house behind the one I lived in. I had recently gotten my general contractor's license.
I walked across the living room, past the fireplace, and into the kitchen where sun was streaming in through the windows. I started putting groceries away in the fridge. The windows faced south, so that the afternoon sun warmed the red quarry tile floor and threw shadows of the windows' wooden bars and muntins into parallelogrammed patterns across the sink, stove, and countertop.
I lived alone; the kitchen was quiet. But I had just closed the refrigerator door when a loud buzz caught my attention from a lower corner of one of the windows. It was a big bluebottle fly, buzzing with such intensity that the sound filled the room. The fly was having trouble with a spider's web that was spun across the corner of the window. A small spider came scooting across the glass, waved its legs near the fly, backed away. I got a kitchen chair and moved it up to just beyond arm's length and sat down.
Obviously, it would be no contest. The web was no more than a few frail strands, not yet ready for a quarry several times larger than the spider, whose legs were nearly as delicate as the strands of its web. The fly still had both wings free, and was buzzing loudly, trying to get enough lift to pull its legs free of the web.
The spider darted out again, near the fly but just out of reach of its great thrashing wings. The spider waved its forward legs again, as if giving some arachnidic benediction, but from this close I could see the spider stretching a strand of web between its two forward legs, and offering that strand to the sacrificial buzz saw of the fly's wings.
The fly instantly snapped that strand, seeming not to notice it. It continued to struggle to free its legs, but could only free one leg by pushing at the web with another, which trapped the liberating leg. The spider pulled back, seeming to rest or to give up. But then it scooted forward again, and again offered its nettlesome benediction. As before, the fly snapped it immediately; as before, the spider backed just out of danger to rest, and to spin another strand.
The world's time ‑ that is, time outside of what was happening in one corner of one pane of that old twelve‑light double‑hung window ‑ began to dissolve for me. Minutes, or hours, might have passed. The battle became a ballet, a pas de deux between the raging fly and the tiny, impudent, darting spider, coming in with its frail monofilament offerings. The force‑field generated by their antagonistic movements drew me closer to the battle, seeming to magnify the two creatures. I began to see the motion of the spider's legs, as it attempted to lasso the fly with puny strands, as similar to the parenthetic arcs of a ballerina's arms in opposing crescents above her head during a pirouette. The fly became a furious neomechanical monster with blue and green and black metallic glints flashing off its segmented head and thorax, the translucent but formidable wings the instruments of its rage.
I leaned in closer. Now, among the flinty pulses of light being emitted by the writhing of the fly's body, a new source of color appeared. As the fly revved its wings, trying to get enough lift to pull itself free of the web that still held its legs, a quick tiny flash of rainbow would appear along the top edge of the fly's left wing, the one nearest the spider. The spider kept moving back, spinning, darting in with a new strand that the thrashing wing would instantly break. But the rainbow glints of light, refracted by the strands' residue on the fly's wing, came more often, lasted longer, and grew in size until a strand of web became visible between the wing and the body of the fly, darting violently with the wing's motion, snapping but then reconstituting itself as the spider added more material, until the strand became a cable, then a net, and that wing suddenly stilled, lashed now to the fly's body. The roar of the fly's wings was cut in half. The spider moved cautiously up on the disarmed side, threw a few more strands in place to make sure the wing was secure, then circled around to the fly's opposite side, patiently repeating the process until the great blue fly was trussed, immobile, silent.
"There it is," I said. "Vietnam."
