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The Unexpected Guest

Have you ever spent the night in a motel bed with a spider? It’s been years since I’ve spent the night in bed with anything, so you can see why I might be surprised. And no, I don’t know if it was a spider or spideress or whatever, so forget about any closet stuff.

I mean I’ve stayed at lots of motels before without any hint of nocturnal action, and I didn’t notice any hoodied youth lounging around the door vaping or anything. I didn’t pay for any extras either, although for some reason, the management did upgrade me to a kitchen suite as soon as I arrived -but in my joy at the unexpected gift, I neglected to ask about spiders.

The room was small -really small- but it was as tidy as might be expected for budget lodgings that clung tenuously to the edge of town: there were no suspicious smells, and I didn’t notice any webs between the bars in the windows, so I suppose I dropped my guard along with my suitcase. Sometimes you just have to go on trust. Well, to a point…

The first thing I do in a bargain motel, is to check the towels in the bathroom, and decide whether or not they’ve supplied sufficient toiletries for the stay. I also check for stray hairs before I can completely relax. And, of course, I do a cursory check for bedbugs, but even though I’ve never actually found any -and don’t really know what to look for- I never let my suitcase touch the linen. Only me.

You can tell a lot about linen by smelling it. Same with the pillows -although with them, I go more by whether or not they already have indentations. Stains say a lot as well.

Anyway, the tiny room passed my inspection as well as could be expected with the burned out ceiling bulb and having to grope my way around with the bathroom door wide open and its tawdry mirror lights at full wattage. I have to admit that it could have done with a change of carpet, however -I tripped a couple of times in same hole in one of the ever-repeating dot-patterns that I could never interpret. It wasn’t Persian, I’m pretty sure.

At any rate, after briefly dabbling in some atrocious laugh-track sit-coms on the TV (I couldn’t find CBC for some reason), I decided to read in bed. I have a Kindle Reader, so I wasn’t particularly bothered by the flickering lamp beside the bed, although I have to say it made me grateful that I am not subject to seizures or episodes of random panic attacks. Okay… I get some panic attacks, but those only happen in the dark in the middle of the night after too much pizza.

Anyway, I couldn’t read for long -I’d had a full day in the car, and wanted to leave early in the morning again- so I tucked myself in, pulled the covers up to my chin -I feel safer like that- and drifted off.

I’m not sure if it was the dream of falling through a cloud of feathers that woke me up, but at any rate, I noticed that I had an itch on my chest. I scratched it, of course and then let myself sink back into the creaking bed. Another itch, this time on my ipsilateral abdominal wall. These kinds of sensations are not that unusual for me, and once one starts, I begin to notice others. The best thing -once I convince myself that I’m not in danger- is to ignore them. I’ve always figured that the little body hairs that my waning testosterone bequeathed me, were to blame, so the trick is not to scratch each area -that just starts a chain reaction.

I usually try to revel in my ability to resist each stimulus; I used to pride myself on outlasting my brother in our tickling contests- so I am not a pushover. I let my mind go limp -no easy feat with ongoing dermal torment- and do Mindfulness stuff: concentrating on breathing in and out or imagining I’m on a beach in New Zealand.

It usually works with random stimuli -I’d like to think I’d last quite a while at Abu Ghraib, if they tickle there- but what immediately pulls me into full conscious awareness is non-haphazard, progressively advancing motility. An itch that moves can’t be up to any good. Random means just that: there are no legs, or biting parts involved.
I waited for a moment. I mean you can’t just reach down and scratch willy nilly at something determined enough to journey across derma incognita.

But the longer I waited, the more convinced I became that whatever it was had a purpose. I could only hope that it hadn’t spotted a tasty mole, or a mouth-watering vein to sample. Suddenly, overcome with curiosity as to whether or not I’d been misled -mistaken in my arthropodal attributions- I reached down to scratch, only to discover something, rather than nothing, there.

Quick as a cat, I flicked on the bed light, threw back the covers, and in the quivering shadows, spotted at least 8 legs walking along like they knew the way. It did indeed belong to the arthropod phylum, but it had only two body segments, and a whole bunch of eyes -although in the flickering light, I couldn’t really count them. That, plus four pairs of legs rather than three, put it tentatively in the arachnid class (spiders are not insects, strictly speaking) but at 2 AM the difference was largely academic.

I managed to flick it off and onto the bed sheet -neither of us harmed in any way, but both of us surprised at the sudden light, I suspect. And yet, you know, when I saw it just standing there gob-smacked and still, unaware of its trespass, I couldn’t bring myself to kill it. After all, it was only doing what spiders are trained to do: walk over stuff. Who knows, maybe it was on its way home to the kids, and I happened to be in the way -after all, it lived there, and I was just a passing curiosity.

I’d like to think that if our roles were reversed, it would do the same thing. So I flicked it off the bed on the side I wasn’t going to use, and turned off the light again.

I slept well after that, pleased at my mercy, and certain that, if we ever meet again in the great beyond, my deed will not have gone unnoticed and we will both a round unvarnished tale deliver -assuming it had read the first act of Othello, of course…

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