Let It Not Come Near Me

 At around 10 pm Friday night, as I was washing up for bed, I heard the most bone-chilling scream coming from my sister a floor below me. With a newborn in the house, it was hard to hear it and not immediately assume the worst—any number of horrors shot through my mind—but the scream had more in it of surprise and disgust than of agony. Before I could even finish spitting the toothpaste from my mouth, my brother-in-law had called on the phone and I had my answer. A bat had been circling round the bedroom. 

There are people who will let out at this point a snort of anticlimax. Bats aren't so uncommon in New England—many people have stories of encountering one indoors. It is even politically correct in some circles to express a kind of affection for animals that creep and crawl and squeak and fly on leathery wings. Surely the progressive thing to do—a triumph of reason over instinct—is to appreciate the necessary role that verminous reptiles, rodents, insects, etc. play in our urban ecosystem. Still better to retort, when told a shudder-inducing story about meeting such a being, "But bats are cute!"

Whatever their merit, these are not the thoughts that assert themselves in the moment of confrontation. A more accurate account of the human instinct in the face of bat-life is to be found in the scene in Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, when a character sleeping in the desert awakens to find the "wrinkled pug face" of a vampire bat sitting on his chest, surprised in the act of inserting his fangs into the man's neck. What McCarthy's always-ghastly evocation manages to capture best is not just the terror of the moment, but the sense of injustice. Something this gross should simply not be happening to me! 

At least for our family, at least in this moment, these were the primal considerations that obtruded, drowning out humanitarian impulses. Bats are not cute, we decided. They are horrifying. And we do not want them anywhere near us; least of all with an infant in the house. "Let not the bloodsucking bat or the rat or the stoat or the club-footed ghoul come near me," the poet Louis MacNeice once wrote, and that about sums it up. 

And here we were thinking we would be spared any such encounter. It is true that my brother-in-law had glimpsed a flying shape the other week but, with the immense human power of suppressing unpleasant data at our backs, we had supposed he imagined it. 

We proposed to go through the house room by room, narrowing down by process of elimination where the winged creature could have fled to. Holding the flashlight of my phone in front of me, I wound my way down one flight of stairs, through the living room, and up again toward where my sister and her husband were staying. Remembering what Clarice Starling is taught in FBI training, I made sure to check the corners before clearing a room. But, it would seem, bats hide better than serial killers, as we later discovered, because I must have missed it. 

Having reached the second floor again, my brother-in-law boarded up the active construction site where we think it must have flown in. Creating a fake wall that semi-blended in with the rest of the surface, and erecting piles of wooden planks to try to eliminate the possibility of a particularly determined creature writhing its way under the door, it occurred to me that this is how a household of people come to accept as normal what might seem intolerable eccentricities to the outside world. 

I was reminded of the attic in Grey Gardens that was taken over by raccoons. This classic documentary had come up in conversation a few weeks earlier, and my brother-in-law expressed an interest in seeing it. On the night of the bat-counter, however, I decided this was a bad idea. It might hit a bit too close to home. 

As it happened, our sealing off of the bat-chamber was unsuccessful. I don't know how it managed to evade my scan of the house's lower floor, but it could have hid behind a bookcase or another piece of furniture. In any event, the bat was loose and flapping around again the next night, after I had already turned around and started a drive to Boston, thinking our ordeal was behind us. 

While we are almost positive the bat left through the front door, it is impossible not to check behind every curtain and under the bed before going to sleep at night. I do not want to be the Cormac McCarthy character, awakening to find such a demonic visage staring into my own at night. 

But surely such a thing would never happen, right? For one thing, we are obviously not talking about vampire bats here. The creature would have no incentive to bite us, right? My sister went searching online for answers. They are known to bite and scratch people, the internet told us—and of course they can be carriers of rabies. But surely we would know if we'd been bitten right? Well, says the internet, bat bites can be very small and scarcely detectable. But if one had been around us while we were asleep, we would have woken up, right? Well, but they are so quiet you might not. 

Indeed, my sister can attest the same. There was barely a flap or rustle audible while the creature was flying and looping around the room. Who knows how many times any of us may have been in the bat's presence previously without knowing it? Our next step became increasingly clear: we needed to get a rabies vaccine. 

This, to me, was the least traumatic part of the whole event. Ever since childhood, my mother's explanation of what to do if you are ever bitten by a wild animal has remained in the readily-accessible chambers of my mind. Information about rabies is very prominent in the RAM part of my memory hierarchy, you might say, and I never need to look far to retrieve it. What I knew was that if you can receive the vaccine quickly after exposure to the virus, you are most likely safe; but if you do not, the result is inevitable death. 

Also somewhere in my brain was the notion that receiving the vaccine involves some sort of horrific multiple puncture with syringes in the abdomen, but that getting it—while horrible—is nonetheless infinitely preferable to the alternative. 

The result of this knowledge has been that, throughout my whole life, I've been ready at a moment's notice to drop what I'm doing and go get a rabies vaccine. I was even open to leaving the house the first night we saw the bat, piling into the car with the baby and spending the next sleepless hours in the emergency room. Though cooler heads prevailed. 

I've been assuming for so long that a rabies vaccine was somehow inevitable in my future that it was with something more like relief, therefore, rather than astonishment, that I bowed before the yoke of necessity in this regard. Like A.E. Housman, my thoughts "were of trouble [...] So I was ready/When trouble came."

I can even point you to a fragment of an unfinished novel I wrote in 2015, in which the protagonist Alethia—an old-stock New England aristocrat, or such as I imagined one might be, at age 25—awakens in the decaying house where she has been staying with her great-uncle, and manages to convince herself she was bitten by a bat in the night. She therefore rushes to the hospital to receive a vaccine, reflecting on what might befall her if it turns out she was somehow already too late. 

I will include this passage as a coda, because I find it an eery foretaste of my own destined meeting with the bat, while also indicating just how much bats and rabies have always been on my mind. The main thing I got wrong in the story, it turns out, is the medical profession's attitude to the vaccine. As my family and I discovered when my sister called the health department, we were not in fact overreacting. Rhode Island recommends that everyone receive this series of shots after the smallest exposure to a bat, regardless of whether or not we are aware of any direct contact with the animal.

I was also pleased to discover—as my sister assured me in advance—that the abdominal puncturing procedure is a thing of the past. It is true that the rabies vaccine involves a shot both of the inoculation itself as well as multiple doses of immunoglobulin to provide instant immunity, and that these components are delivered to the bloodstream simultaneously via multiple injections. The way they did it was to have four health professionals stand on both sides of you and dose you in one go in all four limbs. 

After this had been accomplished Saturday afternoon, we returned home to the final bat encounter described above, feeling a new sort of invincibility in the face of animal life. 

At any rate, here is the chapter from the book I never finished writing. I offer no particular defense or denigration of it; just a note that I wrote this when I was 25, and that it reflects in various ways—for better or worse—some of the things that were going on in my brain at the time. 

Also, author's note: Edgar Allan Poe is the "dark prince of letters" she is trying to think of, whom we now believe may have died of rabies. 

  Et voila: 

IX.

 

I swear I don’t set out to be such a magnet for the macabre, or perhaps I do, but either way the fact of the matter is that I awoke this morning (it’s always the mornings with me, as we know), with blood on the sheets. 

It wasn’t this that had woken me, however, but a belching and roaring sound from the corner of the room.Something comes in the morning all right. This is another of those moments that take time to disentangle from the remnants of dreamland that always trail after you in waking like cobwebs. What is that sound? I remembered in another second or two that it was the radiator, which appeared to be having a difficult morning. Next question: Am I actually bleeding?

            

My first thought on turning on the lamp is I am mostly embarrassed by the resulting stains on the sheets. Not many women have lived in this house apart from me, and I would hate to give Zanzibar the impression that being a woman means trailing fluids everywhere and never quite keeping them inside. These stains were unmistakably not menstrual, however, lacking the aroma that always made me queasy in college when I could smell it off my roommates, but I wasn’t sure if I could expect Zanzibar to know that. Perhaps I could hand these off to the maid with a “you know how it is” shrug and my great uncle need never see them, or just bundle them into the laundry room and dare Zanzibar to mention them of his own accord, which he would never do.

            But where then did the blood come from? From my Armen, it appears. The same arm that was made out of rubber yesterday morning, but now with a small and bloodied hole in it. It occurred to me that it would be a fine Gothic twist to everything if Zanzibar turned out to be the vampire rather than myself, and I suppose there was something batlike in his living all alone in this great Victorian house and harvesting his first editions – though I think a vampire would collect Harvey on the circulation of the blood, or perhaps the novels of Ronald Firbank, and would have little use for William Ellery Channing. And wouldn’t a vampire who knew what he was about go for the neck rather than the arm?—Not that we can assume a vampire version of Zanzibar who shared his living qualities would fall into that category.

Standing in the white oversized T-shirt I used for sleeping and seeing that the blood had gotten onto it as well, I felt increasingly like a Gothic heroine – pale and virginal and shivering – the “porcelain beauty with raven hair.” And as I left the room I noticed the house did seem like a castle in the early morning hours, when the second floor hallway is never adequately heated and the old wood floor feeling uneven beneath my bare feet. 

I ran back into my room, chased by the cold, and put on some old jeans at the bottom of the dresser. Combined with the stained white T-shirt I looked like the sort of grungy teenager I would have been the last time I slept here. 

I noticed I had left the window open overnight, which explained the radiator’s labored breathing and the unexpected cold, and shut it. 

            When I came downstairs to join Zanzibar over cold cereal, it was almost with guilt that I showed him my arm. 

“Did you leave your window open last night?” he asked almost at once, barely looking at the ruptured flesh. 

When I said yes, he stood up and marched both of our cereal bowls to the kitchen sink and started washing, telling me we were going to the emergency room so I could get tested for rabies. 

            I was impressed. This was a peril I had not even guessed at, and I was good at spotting – and then magnifying – perils. Again I was teased by the suspicion that I had misread my great uncle all these years. What other fears did he have filed away in there from his navel-gazing days? It is not the ordinary non-anxious sort of person who assumes that an unknown cut is the work of a rabid animal clawing its way into one’s room at night, draining one’s blood, and then scurrying out again, all without waking the somnolent. Only one who had known his own fierce paranoias would leap to that conclusion.

 

Once we are on the road Zanzibar explains to me that rabid bats have been known to bite the necks or arms of sleeping people at night and pass on their disease. “Bats?” This seems not possible. I didn’t think they had bats in Rockport, but then, why not, I suppose. Zanzibar assures me that it’s better to err on the side of caution.

I am struck by my calm at this news about bats and rabies. This is one of the great unexpected strengths of the clinically anxious – we are distinctly collected and focused in a genuine emergency. It is the periods of ostensible safety that make us rattled – the soothing captains and stewardesses on the intercoms telling us that the turbulence is nothing to be alarmed about, we will be through it in a few minutes; the subway trains that are still barreling forward through the dark the way they are supposed to, but might at any second, let us face it, decide to stop doing so. If the plane really did take a nosedive, or the subway car break down, or the Baltimore tunnel start leaking water from above and then shake our car as we see the entire harbor break through the ceiling over our heads, we would not be the ones screaming. Our crises have already happened in the moments of safety, when we expect the true nether face of the situation to reveal itself, and when it does it seems only right and natural. It is the safety that is the lie, and the danger the reality we knew all along—better at least to have it out in the open. 

Rabies was one of the great fears of my childhood, but to actually have the possibility of catching it is making my heart race with a strange thrill. 

 

Coolly I try to rehearse to myself whatever I know about rabies. I don’t have much medical knowledge at my fingertips, so I turn to the literary. What dark prince of letters was it again that might have died of rabies? Nietzsche? No, that was syphilis. Same with Maupassant. Anybody remember what Baudelaire died of? I was trying to get a sense of what I had in store. Was rabies a long, 19^th century sort of death, the kind that allowed for a few spurts of creative energy even in its most degenerative phases – a last Ecce Homo or a Horla before the end? I think I could stand that as a way to go. This line of thinking made me wish for the comparative mercy of syphilis, as everything I knew about rabies pointed to a fate far more dire. Would I be a mad dog, shrieking and clawing and running screaming from water—there’s something about water and rabies right? 

Still just assessing matters, as if they were happening to someone else, I asked Zanzibar what would happen if the test came back positive. He reassured me as long as we got to a doctor soon after I was bitten I would be fine. This was what he had told me as a child too when I was petrified of going out into the woods and meeting a rabid possum. Appendicitis, head lice – there was a whole slew of horrors that my great uncle had told me as a child could be managed so long as one informed a grown-up what one was feeling. By the time you are a grown-up yourself you wonder how true any of that is. You realize you don’t have any of the answers. The doctors might, but they might not. How soon with rabies was soon enough? I had slept for an unknown number of hours after the bat got to me. Did the medication or vaccine or whatever it was actually work? Or was it more the kind of thing that improved your chances? 

I wanted very much just then to have the young Leethy’s implicit trust. The Atticus next to me however had not had time to shoot my mad dog, and we don’t know what would have happened to Scout in my situation.

 

Once we were inside the hospital I noticed again that I was still wearing the blood-stained white T-shirt and my high school jeans. Zanzibar by contrast was impeccably dressed, as he usually is before coming down to breakfast. I suppose we looked like a pair with an interesting story – a successful businessman and a hippie prostitute who just OD-ed, perhaps. Maybe for that reason we got in pretty quickly to see the doctor. 

 

Apparently I didn’t have rabies. 

 

The doctor said the gash on my arm didn’t even look like it came from an animal. Zanzibar and I pressed him to do a blood test, and he sighed at our lurid imaginations. Perhaps that was only fair of him, but I’d rather be a lunatic who was at least fairly certain she did not have rabies. 

We did the test and the doctor explained with much rolling of the eyes that I had no rabies, there was nothing at all wrong with me as far as he could tell, and he had other people he needed to see. I apologized sincerely for troubling him with my concern that I might have a fatal degenerative illness that would have forced Zanzibar to lock me in the bathroom while I clawed at the walls and he retrieved a shotgun. 

 

My great uncle and I shared a laugh over the whole business on the car ride back, and the sky and sun seemed like pleasant company as we bounded over the bridges on the road back to Cape Anne. It was only at night that the fear came barreling in. 

I had gone upstairs to my room as I usually do when my great uncle and I are finished with the dictation, and we had done no typing today so I figured I’d spend the whole evening there. With the safety and the relief of being told I did not have rabies, the terror came back. What if the doctor was wrong? What if the tests were wrong? I bet people trusted doctors in Nietzsche’s day too, and look what happened to him. Does anybody really understand the human body as well as they pretend to? For thirty minutes on the way to the hospital I had lived amidst reality, and now I was being put back into fantasy.[...]

I wondered vaguely what they did with rabid people of my social class. One presumes that for those whose blood courses blue as well as rabid there is prepared some special group home where the families try to keep the slow death hushed up and the victims relatively comfortable. I imagine you get there through some elevator, this one leading into a vast subterranean amphitheater whose artificial domed sky is colored deep indigo so as to give the impression of perpetual dusk—that’s to help keep the patients quiet. “They are always more calm when the lights are dimmed – at least our easier cases.” So clucks the robust nurse who shows the relatives around the place before they commit their rabid offspring. She is a kindly soul who can’t quite keep the tone of stern affection out of her voice when she speaks of her patients (perhaps she wasn’t even a nurse in her previous life, but a handler of large and difficult mammals – she is the type who knows how to tame the hazardous through well-timed uses of both sticks and carrots); nor can she help a certain degree of boasting from entering her voice as she speaks about the relative paradise she and her superiors have constructed. If you have to die of rabies, this is the place to do it, is the unspoken selling line of the place. The rich would make a luxury resort even of hell.

The nurse is addressing my great uncle, I assume—no one else in my family would be especially likely to visit. They’d have a central plaza amidst all the “residences” for their “guests” (the place would of course be swimming in euphemisms of this self-mocking stripe). For certain the patients could not be expected to share a room with one another, for the rich loathe each other as much as everyone else loathes them, and need considerable space to luxuriate even when they are in states of advanced mental deterioration. 

Each little unit would be built to look like a cottage, and maybe the fake sky overhead even has a full moon always lit in one corner so the really bad cases one sees pacing back and forth in doors and frothing and pawing can stare out the window and howl as the rabies moves them. 

Once my uncle has selected his seat in the plaza, he orders from a menu with conspicuously untranslated French entrées while he waits for “the guest” to present herself. His present environment, like all those in which he moves, has been so arranged as to screen from all awareness the fact that the world changes and that every one of us must die. I imagine my uncle would rather like this place, and content himself with staring up at the false stars, until the slobbering and matted thing that looks only passingly by this point like his grandniece is muscled into a straightjacket by orderlies and thence into the chair across from him. 

“Leethy! You’re looking lovely as always.” 

“Blahfumrufgumgarrgleblahr.” I try to eat the tablecloth at this point and they have to get out the muzzle again.