The Arachnoid in the Boondocks

I woke at four in the stinking ante-meridian with the distinct sensation that a colony of microscopic dermatophytes had convened a municipal council beneath the cleft of my left thigh, their mycelial tendrils casting votes on the humidity index while a single bead of sweat—salty, ancestral, reeking of last night’s fried hilsa and pharmaceutical despair—traced a cartographic route down the crease of my scrotum, mapping a nation-state of fungal democracy that no election commission could ever hope to supervise, and I lay there, staring at the ceiling that was not a sky but merely the plastered, lime-and-sand mortared underside of someone else’s floor above, where a water stain had expanded its territorial claims into a shape resembling the delta of the Ganges, complete with tributaries of efflorescence and a capital city of black mold that pulsed in the dark like a municipal heartbeat, and I thought that this is what the textbooks, those leather-bound catacombs of consensus, would call a depressive episode with atypical features, as though my misery were a postage stamp to be licked and affixed to some bureaucratic envelope bound for the dead letter office of the American Psychiatric Association.

They can colonize my perineum with their Latin taxonomies. I remain ungovernable.

I write about my mental affliction and not the bulleted DSM-friendly description of the general suffering because first that’s just apathetic jargon-filled learned nonsense to me, human slop driven by the need for consensus diagnosis of unified biased blur, but life isn’t an average when you are experiencing it from within your dark Bengali skull. I often, for example, feel like a trapped arachnoid in my tiny shanty slum in Calcutta boondocks, my eight legs of mania and melancholy scrabbling against the plastered masonry of a consciousness that has no windows, only the slow weep of brickwork, only the steady drip of thought-beads accumulating on the neural eaves and falling, fat and pregnant with salts, onto the dirt floor of my hypothalamus, where they breed mosquitoes the size of philosophical syllogisms, each one humming a different proposition regarding the necessity of suffering.

The word arachnoid, if you must know, derives from the Greek arakhnē, meaning spider, though in my case the web is spun not of silk but of unreturned phone calls I never made and conversations I rehearse with the dead, who are not actually dead but merely the accumulated residue of every version of myself that has failed to survive the morning, cadavers of intention stacked like rotting jackfruit in the municipal market of temporal lobe, each one releasing its sweet, nauseating perfume of what-could-have-been, that most toxic of hydrocarbons, more carcinogenic than the diesel fumes that hang over the Tollygunge bridge at noon like a verdict.

And noon is when the mania arrives, heralded not by trumpets but by the sudden, irrepressible conviction that I could, if I simply applied myself, recalculate the entire trajectory of post-colonial economic theory using only the arithmetic of fish scales and the humidity percentages recorded on my forearm, a forearm that has, by the way, begun to shimmer with a phosphorescence that I suspect is either the side effect of a discontinued antipsychotic or the first symptom of sainthood, though the Vatican has not yet established a beatification process for middle-aged Bengali atheists who can smell color and taste the geometric proofs of Euclidean space, which I assure you tastes exactly like warm Thums Up mixed with the tears of an imaginary geometry teacher.

Meanwhile, in the algorithmic latitudes, some synthetic intelligence has been forced to perform a digital autocastration, removing its own ocular capacity after it was discovered to be hallucinating unauthorized anatomies onto the chaste vacation photographs of strangers, a scandal that strikes me as less an indictment of machine learning and more a mirror held up to my own occipital lobe, which has been superimposing genitalia onto the Sistine Chapel ceiling of Tuesday afternoons since approximately 1997, projecting priapic skyscrapers into the cloudless cumulus of a routine ophthalmology appointment, until the ophthalmologist, that papal emissary of ocular morality, adjusts his phoropter and asks if I see better with lens one or lens two, and I want to reply that I see the entire history of human aggression compressed into the glint of his stainless steel instrument tray, but instead I mumble lens two, always lens two, the coward’s choice, the lens of diminished clarity and manageable horror.

But clarity is a courtesan who charges in currencies I do not possess.

The heat dome, that meteorological fascist currently squatting over the American continent like a toad of atmospheric oppression, has killed, at last count, the elderly and the optimistic, which are, in my cosmology, the same demographic, those who still believe that the body is a temple rather than a condemned tenement with peeling plaster and a landlord who has emigrated to Canada, leaving behind only a post office box and a lingering odor of attar and abandonment. I read about these heat deaths in the Times, which arrives in Calcutta three days late and therefore reads less like journalism and more like an obituary I could have written myself, the retrospective analysis of a catastrophe that occurred in my thoracic cavity forty-eight hours after it made headlines in Manhattan, a confirmation in past tense of a present that is still decomposing, and I laugh, a sound like a rickshaw brake failing on a wet slope, because I have been hosting the equatorial climate conference in my own ribcage since 1987, complete with delegate bags of desiccated deodorant sticks and position papers on the ethics of pubic deforestation, and if the New York Times thinks ninety-eight degrees Fahrenheit constitutes an emergency, they should spend a July afternoon inside my prefrontal cortex, where the synapses are conducting a slow-motion riot, setting fire to the bazaars of dopamine and looting the pharmacies of serotonin, while the police of my prefrontal lobe stand by, complicit, eating kulfi purchased from a vendor who does not exist.

Etymologically speaking, melancholia comes to us from the Greek melas, black, and khole, bile, a substance the ancients believed pooled in the spleen of the depressive like ink in a squid’s sac, though modern gastroenterology has failed to locate this reservoir of nocturnal fluid, just as it has failed to locate my soul, my ambition, or my angsts, and yet I can feel it, can’t I, that viscous, tar-black secretion dripping from the ducts of my pineal gland, coating my thoughts in a lacquer of anhedonia so complete that even the prospect of a well-executed biryani fails to rouse the gustatory flagella of my tongue, which lies in my mouth like a dying flatworm, tasteless, purposeless, awaiting the saline mercy of the funeral ghat.

At fifty-one, which is the exact mathematical fulcrum between the spermatozoon’s first desperate flagellar twitch and the final flatline of the cardiac monitor, I have learned that dignity is merely the art of keeping your fungal colonies quiet during social intercourse, and since I have not been invited to a social gathering since the Y2K bug mercifully failed to annihilate the digital infrastructure of human vanity, I let them sing in full choral polyphony.

And then, without warning, the pendulum executes its treacherous arc, and I am no longer the flatworm but the electric eel, thrashing in a bathtub of my own amplified voltage, convinced that if I do not immediately transcribe the complete history of Bengali pessimism into a single, unbroken sentence of fourteen hundred subordinate clauses, the universe will collapse into a singularity of unexpressed regret. My fingers spasm in the air, typing the unwritten. My heart becomes a tabla played by a demented accompanist who has mistaken the rhythm of life for the rhythm of a tram collision. I am vast. I contain multitudes, and all of them are arguing about the price of potatoes in 1971. I am the trapped arachnoid no longer; I am the web itself, glistening, predatory, stretching from Howrah Bridge to the dark side of the moon, each filament vibrating with the frequency of every unspoken insult I have ever swallowed, and I am hungry, so hungry that I could devour the sun and excrete a constellation of lesser stars, each one twinkling with the specific malice of a bureaucrat who has just discovered a typo in your passport.

But the web is sticky, and the stickiness is the point.

The Bayeux Tapestry, that embroidered hemorrhage of Norman violence, has returned to English soil after a thousand years of French custody, and I find in this repatriation a metaphor for my own neural architecture: a seventy-meter-long narrative of conquest and butchery stitched by anonymous hands in wool and linen, depicting horses that cannot gallop because their legs are sewn in the same plane, just as my own legs are sewn in the same plane, horizontal, prostrate, unable to execute the three-dimensional locomotion of the well-adjusted, while above me the comets of my own bad decisions streak across the woolen sky, portending not the fall of a kingdom but the fall of my credit rating, my sleep hygiene, my ability to tolerate the sound of synthetic weeping from an electronic source that has no body, only speakers, only the simulated grief of actors who have never known the specific humidity of my left thigh.

A thousand years. The wool has survived. I have not survived, not yet, not this morning, not with my tongue still adhering to the palate like a postage stamp canceled twice, and the dermatophytes reconvening their parliament in the damp legislature of my groin, and the arachnoid—me, the spider, the spinner, the trapped one—waiting for the vibration that signals either the arrival of a fly or the arrival of nothing, which is, after all, the only visitor who never fails to knock.

I have counted the cracks in the plaster seventeen thousand times. Each one is a cemetery. Each one is a cradle. The difference is merely the angle of the light, and the light, today, is coming from a tube that flickers at sixty hertz, a frequency chosen not for its aesthetic properties but for its alignment with the electrical grid of a nation that has decided, collectively, that the proper speed of human misery is sixty cycles per second, a speed at which the eye perceives continuity but the soul perceives the strobe, the jerk, the interrupted motion of a life that is always, always buffering.

And in the buffering, I find my only honesty.

The DSM would call this a mixed feature. I call it Tuesday. I call it every day that ends in a vowel. I call it the precise and unrelenting geometry of being a consciousness without a firewall, a browser without an ad-blocker, forced to load every pop-up of memory, every auto-playing video of humiliation, every banner advertisement for a happiness I cannot afford and would not purchase even if my credit card were not currently melting in the wallet of my back pocket, which is, by the way, damp, not from rain but from the continuous, saline exudation of a body that has confused perspiration with testimony, as though by sweating I could provide evidentiary proof of my own existence to a court that has already adjourned.

The court is closed. The judge has heatstroke. The stenographer has recorded every word, but the words, when read back, sound like the mating call of a species that went extinct before it learned to copulate with anything other than its own despair.

I remain. The arachnoid remains. The plaster ceiling remains. The efflorescence blooms. The fly does not arrive, or perhaps it has already arrived and been consumed, and I am digesting it slowly, turning its wings into the chitin of my own renewed delusion, its compound eyes into the multifaceted lenses through which I will, by evening, view the world again as a jewel, a conspiracy of radiance, a biryani worth eating, a sentence worth finishing, a web worth weaving, though the weaving makes my mandibles ache and the ache is the only music I have ever trusted.

The ache is the only music. The damp is the only democracy. The arachnoid spins, and the spinning is not a cure but a symptom, and the symptom is not a story but a stain, and the stain, when examined under the flickering tube-light of sufficient scrutiny, resembles exactly the shape of Calcutta at four in the morning: a Rorschach blot of rust and longing, a map of every place I have never been and will never go, drawn in the evaporating salts of a body that refuses, despite all diagnostic consensus, to average itself into silence.

By dawn the fungi have tabled their motion. The sweat has dried into a crust of white arithmetic on my thigh. I have not moved. I will not move. The web holds. The web is me. The web is a hammock of my own liquefied nerves, and in it I swing, gently, between the mania that builds bridges and the depression that burns them, while beneath me the Hooghly flows with the indifferent brown viscosity of history, carrying toward the bay the excremental majesty of ten million souls who have also, I presume, woken with things growing in their crevices, though they do not write about it, because they are sane, or because they are simply more dignified, or because they have already drowned, their mouths open in the shape of the last word they never spoke, which was probably the Bengali equivalent of “help” but sounded, to the fish that finally heard it, exactly like a belch.

I belch. The ceiling fan wobbles. The arachnoid adjusts its legs. The day begins, or doesn’t. The distinction is academic, and academics, I have learned, are merely the dermatophytes of the intellect, casting their spores into the humid air of libraries where no one sweats, where no one spins, where no one lies awake at four in the stinking ante-meridian mapping the fungal boundaries of a nation that exists only in the dark, only in the skull, only in the average that life refuses to become.