My mother is old. Or rather she’s like an actress in a movie playing a role across forty years and they have taken the young pretty actress and worried her face with care and daubs of splotchy makeup.

We’re in the university hospital. Perhaps it’s a Sunday night because it is nearly empty. The admission room, where we are, is swathed in a dim sickly green, yellow, the color of spoiled lime.

She’s looking for a new job and has solicited my help. Only nobody will pay us any attention and I’m not altogether sure which person to go to. It shouldn’t matter which; nobody is paying any attention and this is all a mistake. But I want to humor my aging mother.

She has told me the name of the course she wants to take. It’s a series of nonsense words. And it spells something like AVRSU or something. But I fret that if I get even one of the letters wrong, I might enroll my puppet of a mother in the wrong program. At the most, I mean here that my dream mother is a puppet. And I am speaking for her. It’s clear I have to speak for her. It isn’t clear at all why. I do it out of habit as much as anything. A habit of obligation that is not obligation.

None of the workers want to help me. A wrinkled woman with the personality of a school headmistress suggests to me that I am in the wrong place. I suppose I might have managed to win some forms. I’m not sure they are the right forms.

Backward glances at my mother where I spy her flirting with a distinguished and dangerous looking lothario.

There’s a display. It’s massive and tall like a giant shower stall. There’s a tortured man inside with a spider. The aquarium, for it is filled with water, also contains some antique animal. A cross between an elephant and a mastodon. The squished specimen of a beast, whatever it is, lives. In the squat space above the creature, the naked tortured man hovers with his spider. Submerged, the man somehow has the ability to speak. And like a competent but bored zookeeper, he explains thusly: The spider has to be handfed to the beast. This is the most venomous spider in the world; it would kill me inside of five seconds. The spider is the only thing the beast eats. It will satiate his hunger for a week. The beast has to remove the venomous sting before he eats it. We cannot remove the sting first.

Now here the beast unfurled its insect head. It had pincers and tiny little arms around its ghastly mouth. And, meticulously, expertly, its mouth went to work on the spider. First, as a practiced seamstress might thread a needle with care but no caution, the beast, or the beast’s mouth removed the fatal sting. And then tongues rolled up and out and wrapped the spider and brought it down and in. So it was done. So it had fed. The tortured tangled man by then had died. Not from the venom of the spider. Not from the feeding either, which was as quiet as a fish’s dream. He had drowned. And it became clear that the beast-tender always sacrificed himself. Always died. No one got out alive. It was either the quick sting of the reckless spider. Or the slow quiet drowning that got him.

I was not horrified or saddened. I only quietly despaired for the next beast-tender who had to face the same choice.

Meanwhile, in the iridescent lime shine of the admissions office, no other but me had paid a whit of attention to the feeding, to the death. As dependable as cogs, the orderlies shuffled random things around, the women behind the desks still hiked up their stockings under their skirts with secret little pinches, and my mother and the dangerous lothario maintained their private discourse.

SS