October

52 | Jacob Eigen When he was a spider exuding thread between rocks, he considered his earlier life as a man and recalled with objective curiosity the belief that pleasure, true pleasure, constituted achievement. “Yes,” he told the fly as he bound it— “I remember lying in bed in Queens and watching snow accumulate on the windowsill, when I didn’t know what I was or what to kill to be happy. I’d bike down Northern Boulevard to the Thai place, thinking of the nights I’d spent on a woman’s couch. The way we’d talk about nothing—the foreign exchange student in her middle school, or the watch I’d look at in the department store while my mother tried things on.” “That was your problem,” said the fly, which looked fearless and elegant now, no longer even beating its wings. “You and your whole species. You tasted the stuff you called love, and then other draughts seemed thin and bitter. Better poetry October Jacob Eigen Jacob Eigen | 53 to do without.” And its eyes glinted as it extended its palpus to suck in the toxins that would dissolve it into bones and fluids overnight. ...