6.
Bitten
SNAKES WERE OBVIOUS. Real Temple of Doom snakes. Big bitey creatures. Spinal cords with fangs. But it’s not the fangs that kill. Most victims express disbelief, an instant trivialization of the fatal blow. Some absurdly laugh. Some yell at the creature like it’s a misbehaving dog. No, it’s the eventual, precipitous result, the swelling and necrotic flesh, the witness to parts of the body looking like someone else’s, looking like product, like prop body parts, fake and waxy. Many die thinking of appointments they promised to keep. Horacio Quiroga tells the story of a bitten man drifting between black basalt cliffs trying to make it to a doctor or anyone at all who could help. His anger subsides to thinking of his calendar. He can’t remember which day he’s supposed to meet a man, Tuesday or Wednesday?
The fear of a snake bite is not just the rude, spring action, but of having read or heard about what follows. It’s knowing what comes next. The fear of so many fatally injured or terminally ill, or simply having been abandoned, comes from having heard or read about it, or having seen the movies, and the chagrin and anger at your prior self for not having invested more pity in those characters then, for having become them now — and the sick feeling of knowing that you have become an exemplar character to everyone else, worthy of a cautionary tale or just a point of conversation or quick visceral thrill.
They thought of snakes and too-elaborate schemes. Trapped in a car full of the twining, narrow things in a mall parking lot was the most straightforward, but someone would have to procure the snakes in the first place, and Doc was terrified of them, hated them, thought that their inclusion in the universal scheme of things was an insult to their maker — and that’s why they became instruments to ancient religions and mythology: they were a rude mistake that needed some higher calling.
Stuart was asked to check out the range and availability of the creatures in local shops. He couldn’t take his eyes off one yellow python, its big head grinning with a smelling tongue and its dead permanent stare. He pictured the muscle of it wending its way across Veronica’s shoulders and down her arm into an open palm, a sumptuous Frank Frazetta painting.
But, no, snakes are too cagey.
Spiders are even less reliable. They’re small and fidgety and it requires a multitude to induce real panic. Doc had hatched a plan. He had read about a particularly vengeful species that, when brushed off a branch or shelf they shoot out a spindle of silk and return by the thread to attack the aggressor. Survival by revenge. Macaques have been seen festooned with them and mummified in a reverse-process silken cocoon, a soup of fur and body. They thought if they could set Veronica on top of a scaffold and swipe off enough of these avenging creatures, and give people broomsticks…
Most of Doc’s plans begin as absurdist jokes until he finds enough pins to give it shape, but this one remained a fantasy.
Besides, Stuart didn’t want to think of Veronica festooned with spiders, not at all. There may have been one vision of a black widow tiptoeing the circumference of her medallion tattoo high up the crease of her back, but this woke him up in a clawing panic. Its tiny lancets of legs on her back was too much.
They considered bats, naturally, and thought of anesthetizing some woolly one and entangling it in her hair as she lies in a public park, but even with a long pair of shears there’s little hope for rescue. People will follow instructions to deliver a baby or land a plane but they won’t go anywhere near a bat.
All of these they delighted in telling Veronica, among a whole dustbin of ideas — to tell how far they were willing to go — but when they began to flesh out the scheme of an entangled bat, she just shook her head. Besides, she told them, she had kept up her titers from her rabies series, a requisite from her stint in animal sciences.
Stuart listened and imagined her lying like Elvira under the moonlight, with one live bat barrette holding a towering nest of hair.
“We thought of birds,” said Doc.
“Birds!” she laughed. “Like Melanie Daniels? I’m going to be your Melanie Daniels?”
“You know your Hitchcock.”
“Hitch was required viewing in my family,” she said. “My dad owned whole anthologies. We watched the entire catalog, from Sabotage to Psycho to Frenzy.”
Next to Veronica was a grinning Rottweiler, ropes of saliva hanging from its pink jowls. She kneaded its fatty neck as it sat there like a porch ornament leering at Stuart. He watched and listened to the clap of its jaws and thought maybe there is no imagination in humankind. The source material for all horror is a dog named Judge.
“Strange,” Doc said. “How does a fearless girl watch horror films?”
“I like to see where they end up.”
“What do you know about Tippi Hedren in the making of The Birds?”
“Only that she was one of Hitchcock’s favorites to torture.”
“Do you know the trauma that Hedren experienced on that set?”
“I know there are stories. I had a film teacher who was a real fanboy and would tell us stories, but we just parked our attention while he carried on between scenes. He once stopped Rear Window as George Thorwold walked up the steps to Jimmy Stuart’s apartment.”
“L.B. Jefferies and his flash bulbs, yes! What a brilliant device to slow down the attack at the finale.”
“Now you sound like a fanboy.”
“Just required viewing.”
Judge was dozing under the patterned undulation of her fingertips.
“You remember the climactic bedroom scene, when Melanie Daniels made the grievous error of following a hunch into an upstairs bedroom? Birds dropped through the broken ceiling and massacred her. Throughout the shooting of the film mechanical birds were used. Sometimes they were painted frame by frame on the celluloid. For this scene, however, to really get the most out of the day, Hedren was told that the mechanical birds had stopped working, and that they’d have to use real ones. She was placed in the room, which itself was enclosed in a cage, and bird handlers wearing thick gauntlets hurled ravens, doves and pigeons at her. Some were tied to her clothing as she lay helpless on the floor. She suffered five days of relentless pecking, and only when she nearly lost an eye did she call it quits. She broke down into heaves of sobs, and no one approached her. She was left alone in that room, a bundle of a used-up actor, sobbing.”
Veronica shook her head. “I had no idea it was to that extent.”
“Now we thought to have the art students construct a bedroom cage, but immediately we abandoned the idea for failing to figure out how to make the experiment public. But the idea I want to impress upon you is why Tippi Hedren was traumatized. It’s because she wasn’t Melanie Daniels. That trauma was not Melanie Daniels’, but Tippi Hedren’s. Tippi Hedren knew it was a film set, that the birds do not possess the mysterious impulse to peck into soft skin and draw blood. She knew it was a set, and that a film crew surrounded her: colleagues, supporters, hair stylists. But they turned on her in the monomania of producing a show. Sacrificed on the altar of art and entertainment. The repeated tossing of the ravens, thrashing in hollow-bone, beak-and-talon remonstration for survival, was specifically contrived for a climactic scene. The camera operator must have watched with occupational satisfaction the raised flesh of her arms, tinctured with small cuts, her expression of legitimate horror consisting of confusion, betrayal, and the runaway velocity of true crisis. She had woken up that morning in the bliss of a new day, maybe opted for grape jelly on her toast — and suddenly there were men with gauntlets up their arms standing over her, men whose first names she knew. The birds were as much a device as the flash bulbs, the cameras rolled upon carefully laid tracks, all under the direction of a storyboard. What caught Tippi Hedren was the unblinkered monomania of The Show. Maybe there isn’t recourse, no high court of humanity, nothing sacred about being Tippi Hedren at all — instantaneously, in one gross, grotesque turn of the crank, she, too, had become just a morsel.”
“And they got their climactic scene.”
“They did.” Doc watched her shuffle her fingers up the Rottweiler’s neck. Its face muscles relaxed. It dozed. “That dog you’re holding by the scruff. It has a history of biting and is one nip away from destruction by the state. When we borrowed it from a fed-up colleague in Anthropology, we agreed to keep it in a muzzle. It lunged at us like it wanted to eat our throats out. But you give it no fear to agitate its instinct. You have subdued it. It is a dog again.
“So no zoophobia. No snakes or spiders or bats or birds.
“How are you, then, in tight spaces?”