色 戒

The orb spider waits under the eaves for the sun to go down. Crouched into a brown crouch, with one leg left out, hooked over the nearest silk support in case some insect blunders into the now ragged web. She will rebuild come twilight, and I will watch her spin and wait. The other day there was a praying mantis on the sill. It too had one leg hooked into a web but it was a different web and a different plan. I watched it raise and lower, raise and lower that trapped back leg. A delicate manoeuvre that seemed to require thought. Or, concentration. The black spider squatting inside the window sash didn't move, it must have known the mantis was too big to catch. Or was the mantis trying to lure the spider out? After a while I couldn't stand watching without being seen so I moved a finger to touch the mantis. It was almost comical, the brief scuttle then outraged turn of the head and stare. Then someone came to see me and I missed the rest of the story. They've painted out the alien that was on the wall of the medical centre, along with the bone fide shadows of bone fide patients; they may come back but not the alien. Unless the graffitist is local. That wall now so brilliant white I have to shade my eyes from the sun's reflection when I walk past it. Before the movie an ad for the medical centre ran, it featured those patient shadows, animated; then on the way back I saw the outline of the shadow of a body on the pavement, it was an advertisement for a TV show about criminal gangs in Melbourne. The show is as bad as the ad is tasteless but I hardly cared. I noted it and moved on, I was absorbed, the movie had got to me in a way that films rarely do anymore. Go now, she said. He didn't understand. She said again: Go now. He had just given her a ring that she had put on her finger and then tried to take off. So as not to be seen wearing it in the street. Or for another reason. Or both. The Arab jeweller had no idea what was going on. No-one did, except her, and she had just told him. It isn't just that whole lives can hinge on what is said in a moment, I already knew that. It was deeper, stranger, my complicity in plot and counter plot, surface and depth, so complete I knew she was wrong. And yet she said it. Then the denouement ... swift and fatal and again not understood by anyone except he who ordered it, who was told to go, who did go ... and lived. Or was she the one who really understood? Who stayed. And died. Now suddenly it looks as if in this world it is better to die than to live. I check the spider, she hasn't moved. She is innocent of everything. Or, nothing. I don't know. Where did the mantis go to make her/his lethal prayers? Don't know that either. The painted-over alien went back to Alpha Centauri and told its superiors we aren't ready, we don't yet know how to treat the heartache that comes from living on this earth - so how could we sooth an alien malady? It was just hunger. On its planet they eat spiders. Or, they are spiders, and eat each other. Or something else entirely. Whereas we remain, heartbroken, and we die. Or, live.

色 戒