This Book is Full of Spiders

us really belonged there, she was there because she had a bad reaction to pain medication and bit a teacher, I was there due to a misunderstanding (a bully kept fucking with me until I snapped and gouged out his eyes—you know how kids are). Our fairy-tale romance began by us completely ignoring each other for five years, during which I only knew her by a crude nickname some asshole had given her. Then one day, John and I were asked as a favor to look into her disappearance. It wasn’t a big deal, and only took us a couple of days to get to the bottom of it (she had been kidnapped by monsters).

Setting aside her tea she said, “So what’s he like? The psychiatrist?”

“It’s just like you’ve seen in the movies, Amy. They get you talking and wait for you to announce you’ve had an epiphany.” I thought for a moment, then said, “And the therapist was a she, not a he. She’s about twenty-two. Busty. She kept turning everything into some kind of sexual innuendo. Like she said she believed therapy should be ‘hands on’ and grabbed my crotch. Then we porked on the desk for a while and the time was up.” I shrugged. “Like I said, it’s just like in that movie. Anal Therapist VI.”

She sighed and sipped her tea. “So I guess you don’t miss me after all.”

“Wait… were we not supposed to be having sex with other people, Amy? I guess that was never made clear to me, sorry.”

She didn’t answer, or laugh, and I said, “Come on, you know if one of us wanted to sleep around you’d have a way easier time than I would. I’m the crazy guy who sees monsters and shoots delivery people. You’re the adorable redhead. You could go down to the guys’ floor of the dorm and say, ‘I’m a woman. I want to have sex’ and you’d have twenty guys lined up with roses and shit. I’d have to work at it.”

“Why do guys always say that? It’s just as hard for a girl.”

“That’s ridiculous. Every bar is full of guys desperate to get laid and girls desperate to fend off all the horny guys. It’s just the way it is, it’s biology. It’s easier for girls.”

“That’s actually impossible. Heterosexual sex takes one man and one woman. That means guys and girls have the exact same amount of sex. That means there are an equal number of sluts and desperate people on both sides.”

“That… can’t be right.”

She shrugged. “Do the math.”

“And yes, just to settle the issue, I do miss you.”

“I know.”

“There’s nobody here to ruin movies for me.”

Amy had a superhuman ability to pick out the one flaw in a movie that would make it impossible to ever fully enjoy it again. During a single weekend’s George Lucas marathon, she pointed out to me that if Indiana Jones had just stayed home, Raiders of the Lost Ark would have turned out exactly the same way— the Nazis would have opened the ark and gotten vaporized. Then, during The Empire Strikes Back, she paused the movie when a character referred to Luke’s ship as an “X-Wing,” which is impossible, she said, because there’s no way that ship should be called an “X-Wing” based on it being physically shaped like the English letter “X” since an ancient race of people in a distant galaxy would never have seen that letter before. Jesus, I’m making her sound like a bitch.

To the webcam window I said, “How are the classes going? Have you gotten to the part where they teach you to make computer viruses? Because I have people I want to send them to.”

“If by ‘virus’ you mean a program that accidentally freezes up your whole operating system when you try to execute it, then I think everything I’ve coded so far counts as one. Oh, did you know you could hack the phone system with a Cap’n Crunch whistle?”

“Uh, is that like hacker slang or…”

“No, the phones back in the seventies did everything by tones, the different frequencies and stuff told the system how to route the calls and all that. So there was a hacker named John Draper who figured out that the little plastic toy whistles they were putting in boxes of Cap’n Crunch had the exact same frequency and tone that the phone system was using to end charges on a call. He got free long distance for like two years just by blowing his toy whistle into the phone every time.”

“Holy shit, I’m going to try that. See, this is the type of stuff colleges should be teaching.”

“Well they’ve updated the phone system since then.”

“Oh.”

We sat in silence for a moment then she said, “Give me a second, I’m trying to think of a way to work the conversation back around to your therapy again.”

I said, “I love you.”

She said, “I know.”

“Actually, tomorrow’s a group session. I’ll probably have to wax beforehand.”

“Gross.”

“Sorry.”

“Though maybe I shouldn’t talk, since I’m sitting here on a webcam without any pants on.”

I said, “Oh, really?”

“Wanna see?”

“Yes. Yes I do.”

30 Hours Prior to Outbreak

There exists in this world a spider the size of a dinner plate, a foot wide if you include the legs. It’s called the Goliath Bird-Eating Spider, or the “Goliath Fucking Bird-Eating Spider” by those who have actually seen one.

It doesn’t eat only birds—it mostly eats rats and insects—but they still call it the “Bird-Eating Spider” because the fact that it can eat a bird is the most important thing you need to know about it. If you run across one of these things, like in your closet or crawling out of your bowl of soup, the first thing somebody will say is, “Watch it, man, that thing can eat a goddamned bird.”

I don’t know how they catch the birds. I know the Goliath Fucking Bird-Eating Spider can’t fly because if it could, it would have a different name entirely. We would call it “sir” because it would be the dominant species on the planet. None of us would leave the house unless a Goliath Fucking Flying Bird-Eating Spider said it was okay.

I’ve seen one of those things in person, at a zoo when I was in high school. I was fifteen, my face breaking out in acne and getting fatter by the day, staring open-mouthed at this monster pawing at the glass wall of its cage. Big as both of my hands. The guys around me were giggling and punching each other in the arm and some girl was squealing behind me. But I didn’t make a sound. I couldn’t. There was nothing but a pane of glass between me and that thing. For months after, I’d watch the dark corners of my bedroom at night, for hairy legs as thick as a finger poking out from behind a stack of comic books and video game magazines. I imagined—no, expected—to find strands of spiderweb as thick as fishing line in my closet, bulging with clumps of half-eaten sparrows. Or spider droppings in my shoes, the little turds laced with bits of feather. Or piles of pink eggs, yolked with baby spiders already the size of golf balls. And even now, ten years later and at the age of twenty-five, I still glance between the sheets at night before pushing my legs in, some part of my subconscious still looking for the huge spider crouching in the shadows.

I bring this up because the Goliath was the first thing that popped into my mind when I woke up with something in my bed, biting my leg.

* * *

I felt a pinch on my ankle, like digging needles. The Goliath Fucking Bird-Eating Spider leapt out of the fog of my sleepy imagination as I flung the blankets aside.

It was dark.

Lights were off. Clock off. Everything off.

I sat up and squinted down at my leg. Movement, down by the sheets. I swung my leg off the bed and I could feel the weight of something clinging to the ankle, heavy as a can of beer.