had read that after death and before decomposition, the epidermis of a deceased human develops
a leathery hardness, chitinlike it could be called,
which begins to resemble the beetles who gorge
on the decaying corpse and defecate at the same
time, turning flesh into compost. The uses of shit
were many. The most delightful was manna. Emily liked the story of Moses leading the starving
Israelites into the desert. Insects came to their
rescue. Of course the manna, which Exodus describes as a fine frost on the ground with a taste
like honey, was thought to be a miracle from God,
but it was really Coccidae excrement. Coccidae
feed on the sap of plants. The sugary liquid rushes
through the gut and out the anus. A single insect
can process and expel many times its own weight
every hour. They flick the stu= away with their
hind legs, and it floats to the ground. Nomads still
eat it — relish it. It is called honeydew.
Ah, Coccidae. She could draw them—she
loved to draw her relatives—but unfortunately
the mature insect is basically a scaly ball: a gut
in a shell. It was more fun to draw the ant—its
proboscis, pharynx, two antennae. Sometimes she
tried to render its compound eye, but the result
looked too much like one of her mother’s jet-beaded evening pouches. She could produce a respectable diagram of the body, though: the thorax,
the chest area, and the rear segment, segmented
itself, which contained the abdomen and, right beside it, the heart.
town. The Knapps lived in a cul-de-sac o= that
road. Leaving his house, walking across the road,
sideslipping down his side of the ravine and climbing sure-footed up hers — in this athletic manner
Richard had been visiting Alice twice and sometimes three times a week, in the late afternoon, for
the past few years. Sometimes he picked a little
nosegay of wildflowers on his way. Alice popped
them into any old glass — today the one on her bureau. She was undressed before his sweater had
cleared his head. And so, reclining, naked thighs
crossed against her own desire, she watched the
rest of the disrobing, the careful folding of clothes.
Sometimes crossing her thighs didn’t work, and
she’d surrender to a first bliss while he busied
himself hanging his jacket on the chair. Not today, though. Today she managed to keep herself
to herself like the disciplined educator she was,
waited until her body was covered by his equally
disciplined body; opened her legs; and then spinster teacher and scholarly physician discarded
their outer-world selves, joined, rolled, rolled back
again, each straining to become incorporated into
the other, to be made one, to form a new organism
wanting nothing but to make love to itself all day
long. Perhaps some afternoon they — it — would
molt, grow wings, fly away, and, its time on earth
over, die entwined in its own limbs and crumble
to dust before midnight.
RICHARD WAS PULLING his sweater over his
head. The deliberate gesture revealed, one feature at a time, chin, mouth, nose, eyelids closed
against the woolen scrape, eyebrows slightly unsettled, broad high brow, and, finally, gray hair
raised briefly into a cone.
Alice and two Caldicott teachers lived on the
school grounds. Their three little houses fronted
on the grassy field where important convocations
were held. The backs of the houses overlooked the
ravine. In the wet season the ravine held a few
inches of water — enough for that determined suicide a century ago. These days it provided a convenient receptacle for an empty beer can and the
occasional condom. On the far side of the ravine
was a road separating Godolphin from the next
EMILY DIDN’T DO DRUGS often. Her substance
of choice—her only substance, in fact— was
bi-cho de taquara, a moth grub found in the stems
of Brazilian bamboo plants, but only when they
are flowering. Mr. da Sola tended bamboo in
one corner of the Caldicott glass-covered winter
garden. He harvested the grubs, removed their
heads, dried them, ground them up, and stored
the resulting powder in a jar labeled “Rat Poison.”
Each year he produced about six teaspoons of the
stu=; three times a year he and Emily swallowed a
spoonful each . . .
The Malalis, in the province of Mines, Brazil, report an ecstatic sleep similar to but shorter
than the unconscious state produced by opium,
and full of visual adventures. Emily could attest
to that, but she did not share her visions with
Mr. da Sola, who enjoyed his own private coma
