Jar of Spiders
By Matt Freeman
The place where they brought him back to life was worse than the place where he almost died.
At first, the hospital seemed clean and safe. Everything in it was made of rounded pastel plastic, like a kindergarten scaled up to adult size. But being lost for so long had sharpened David’s perceptions; he could smell decay hidden all around him. Bodies. Rubbery wafts of food. His sheets were changed every day. They even had a decent thread count. But when he pressed his face against them, he could smell the sharp tang of piss under the fabric softener, as if a former patient had marked the bed as their own territory.
He remembered mosquitoes screaming in the night. Ant-bites like tiny fires. All the agonies that meant you still existed. He eyed the lukewarm apple juice on his tray and remembered sucking water from cupped leaves at dawn.
The doctors and nurses told him he was lucky to be safe and back in Australia.
He was worried if he said too much, he’d start spewing everything he’d learned, so he answered their questions as briefly as he could. ‘David Merchant. Forty-four. Married. Marketing consultant. No, not yet today.’
The doctor scrutinized him and pinched the skin on his forearm. ‘The nurses say you’re having trouble eating.’
‘It’s difficult.’ A pit of hunger yawned inside him, but he felt sick at the thought of filling it with any of their food. ‘I don’t have much appetite.’
‘You’ve had an ordeal. Your body doesn’t know the difference between safety and danger anymore. Rest. Eat what you can.’
After a few days—days and nights smudged together in the hospital—he heard an argument outside his room and knew that it was Chelsea, her influencer treble rising above the stern undertone of the nurse.
‘It’s alright. She’s my wife,’ David called out, his voice cracking. ‘Let her through.’
He’d wondered what it would be like to see her again—so many things had been a disappointment—but she still had a tan from the resort and looked perfect as always. Around her throat, she wore a silver chain he’d forgotten giving her. Above it, devotion and anger battled for possession of her face. ‘Why did you go off like that?’ she demanded.
David looked at his hands, filigreed with bright scratches. One finger was still capped with a blood blister earned from mashing a spider with a rock. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.
#
It had just been a bad day. David had paid for Palm Villa’s penthouse suite, and at five o’clock the sun stabbed into the room like a searchlight while they winced and struggled in the bed. Still hungover, he tried to work the blinds, and Chelsea moaned into the pillow wrapped around her face. ‘You could help instead of complaining,’ he muttered, and their moods clashed for the rest of the day.
At breakfast, she chattered about their plans while David watched withered tourists drift past and wished he had a decent cup of coffee. Chelsea piled fruit on her plate and recited their names like a nursery rhyme. ‘Lychees,’ she said. ‘Rambutans.’ She spooned something called custard-apple into his mouth and the sickly mass of it almost made him choke. It didn’t help when the unctuous waiter stopped at their table to make sure he and his daughter were enjoying their stay.
Their travel planner had said the resort was bordered by endless rainforest on one side and ocean on the other. The rainforest part was true. On the ocean side, a band of desperate humanity jostled between Palm Villa and the waves: bars, stalls, people rinsing down the street with bright blue buckets.
Chelsea wanted to explore. She wanted to see the real country, and David pretended he’d prefer that to lying comatose by the pool. A hundred metres from the gates of the resort, a wiry local with one red eye harangued them while they stood waiting for the lights to change. David smiled and patted all his pockets to show he couldn’t help, and the man shook his greasy curls and started barking in their faces. They escaped to the nearby market, but Chelsea couldn’t get it out of her head.
‘It just feels wrong,’ she said, spooning pork mince into a lettuce cup. ‘We’re on holiday, sleeping under the air-conditioner, paying by credit card. People like that are just surviving. Not even surviving.’
We aren’t paying for anything, David thought. ‘I wanted to give him something.’
‘I know. I’m just saying. How are we supposed to enjoy ourselves?’
He said they had to try, surprising himself with the emotion in his voice. The couple studied each other, remembering the months before the holiday.
Chelsea pressed her mouth into a line as thin and flat as a scar. ‘Ok,’ she said. ‘We’ll try.’
#
For the rest of the day, they tried. They tried holding hands in the heat. They paid ten dollars each to go in a gloomy tent and tried not to notice the poking ribs and desperate eyes of the floating crocodile inside. Over dinner, they tried laughing at their scalding soup and dubious shellfish. David had a beer everywhere they stopped, and Chelsea tried not to say anything about it. She took a picture of everything they ate and posted it. He looked over at her phone and saw a steady stream of love-hearts floating across the screen.
By sunset, they were tired and irritable. They’d been talking, but David couldn’t remember the last time they’d looked at each other. The bars opened. A headache from the sun and beer lodged over his left eye. People Chelsea’s age were laughing in the street and she watched them, looking defeated. David decided what they needed was a quiet place to sit and have a drink. To be alone.
He pulled her into the nearest bar—dark and stuffed with junk like someone’s attic. The bartender looked just old enough for a paper round. On the blackboard above him, one cocktail was listed separately, outlined in multi-coloured chalk and straggly Christmas lights. ‘A Xanadu?’ David asked. ‘What’s that?’
The bartender giggled. ‘Try it. Hella tasty. Gets you lit.’ He pronounced the last phrase with sing-song intonation, and David wondered if he was being mocked, or it was just a cross-cultural mix-up. What the hell. He was on holiday. Even Chelsea was drinking. ‘Alright,’ he said. ‘And a Mojito. Not too strong.’
The bartender grinned, dumped a blender on the bench and started pulling bottles from the shelf.
Chelsea smiled warily when he returned with the drinks. The Xanadu was a mound of shaved ice served in a toppling goblet. It was the colour of spite and pierced with a paper umbrella that looked like a biohazard warning. Chelsea’s Mojito sat toylike beside it.
‘Wanted to try something new,’ said David. ‘We have a lot to celebrate, the two of us.’
Chelsea took a prim sip from her straw.
He slid into his chair and wondered what to talk about. Nothing about their failed day, nothing serious. They could plan tomorrow, but sometimes making plans turned nasty. He licked his lips and took a beer-sized pull from his goblet of booze.
It wasn’t beer. It was a psychoactive gut-punch in a syrupy glove. His head rocked on his shoulders like the dolls that bobbed maniacally on taxi dashboards. He carefully lowered the glass to the table. Even the fumes were intoxicating. ‘Not bad,’ he managed. ‘It’s a little sweet.’
Chelsea started planning the next day of their holiday. A museum. Traditional handicrafts. Her voice sounded like it was being piped through a faraway speaker. They could take a cruise along the beach and up the river into the jungle.
The alcohol went into him like an injection. He took another sip. What was there to worry about? He was on holiday—a bloody hard-earned holiday with his beautiful young wife. They’d just needed a change of location.
‘Well?’ Chelsea asked, eyebrows raised, lips parted. It was what TikTokers did to convey annoyance, and for a moment she looked about fifteen.
He leaned forward and gently covered her hand with his—she was always telling him not to be so rough. ‘Whatever you want. It’s your holiday too.’
Chelsea turned her head toward the beach.
The music was louder now. A couple in the bar had started dancing, and their tanned limbs writhed like a mass of worms. Ground control, he thought, I may have had too much to drink. Time for fresh air and a walk. He stood, mumbling something about stretching his legs, and took another swig from the goblet before they left the table. The bloody thing had cost forty dollars.
She followed him along the beach. He stopped to look at the moon rise over the town, and Chelsea bumped against his back.
The pus-coloured streetlights made the promised paradise look sticky and cheap. A scrum of young men passed, and David was terrified they’d spot him and Chelsea and yell out something cruel. Laughing couples took pictures of each other—they’re only doing it for likes, he thought. He swayed and Chelsea’s warm body crushed against his arm. The band of jungle at the end of the moonlit beach looked like mould on an old slice of bread. Not so bad, he thought, and turned towards her for a kiss.
She pulled away. ‘What are you doing? Really? After today?’ She coughed an angry laugh.
‘Well, it’s never the time with you, is it?’ He heard that he was slurring and spat out the next words as precisely as he could. ‘Not all bloody year.’
Chelsea blanched, as angry as he’d ever seen her. ‘There are two of us in this, you know. You sit around and act like everything is so disappointing.’ She stabbed a finger in his chest. ‘But you don’t do anything to change things. You just … rot.’
David sneered. ‘And all I get from you is fucking complaining and …’ He tried to remember every inane thing she’d ever said, the times he’d wondered if there was a person at all behind her face. ‘Rambutans.’
Chelsea turned to face the ocean. ‘You think you’re so much better than me. I really hate you sometimes.’
David stared at her stony profile, considering the worst things he could say to her. She’d already said, ‘I hate you’. He wanted to demand a divorce, but images of lawyers and mounds of paper flooded his head. The worst words he knew for women felt like feeble playground taunts. His fists tightened until he felt the bones would rip his skin. ‘Fine,’ he croaked, turned and stomped away from her.
He lurched for the black rim of the jungle, the night rushing around him like he was driving in a tunnel. At the edge of the jungle, thick creeper crunched like glass under his shoes. He looked back and could just make out the pale smear of Chelsea’s limbs and face in the dark. That bitch, he thought. She hasn’t even turned around. Fucking fine with me.
The jungle swaddled him in the trapped heat of the day, rank and sweet. He swayed inside and the sounds of traffic faded until they were muffled by the surf. The image of his wife on the beach dwindled to nothing, like a still from an unmemorable film. In a blind rhythm, he hacked into the jungle's heart, bashing vines out of his face, kicking roots away and tunelessly chanting—‘I’m alone with you tonight. I’m alone with you tonight’—until, nauseous and exhausted, he collapsed against the bole of a tree, closed his eyes and dropped his head.
He woke to stagnant water pooling under his cheek, the rattle and whine of a thousand stirring animals, and wondered where the hell he was.
#
Chelsea was examining the swollen saline bag beside his bed. The heart-monitor beeped, making her flinch. Her parents were still alive, David remembered, and she hadn’t been in many hospitals.
‘Were you trying to …?’ She gnawed her lower lip. ‘I mean, did you wanna get lost? Not come back.’
‘No. Christ, no. I just couldn’t get back.’
The first morning in the jungle, he’d found a gap in the trees and walked through it, sure it was the way he’d come in. He followed what felt like the right track, looking for something familiar from the night before, but the jungle was a different place by daylight. In his head, he scripted his apology to Chelsea. The sun climbed. The jungle steamed. His shirt clung to his back like a wrinkled second skin. It hadn’t been this far, had it? He’d been pissed, but surely he hadn’t walked for half an hour.
Resting against a fat tree, he remembered a special forces psycho on the television, drinking his own urine and talking wilderness survival. You were supposed to find higher ground, the psycho said. You were supposed to find water. David had a good memory. People like him didn’t get lost and die in the jungle.
He climbed an incline and found a pool of water topped with silvery scum. Turning in the direction of the beach, he slid into a gully and had to follow it out. He walked for hours before he remembered that if you were lost you were supposed to stay in one place and wait for rescue.
#
‘Nineteen days,’ Chelsea said. ‘It’s a long time.’
‘It felt longer.’
She sat down and pulled the chair close to his bed. His experience had impressed her, he realised, and she was looking at him like he could reveal some vital secret. How not to give up. How to protect yourself. She’d looked at him like that when they first met. ‘You must have been starving. What did you eat?’
Tiny pricks of hunger crawled along David’s gullet. He cupped his stomach with his hand and Chelsea quickly poured a cup of water from the carafe by his bed and lifted it to his mouth. He shook his head. ‘Did they say when I could get out of here?’ David asked.
#
They made a silent pact not to talk until after he’d recovered.
Coming home, David felt as dislocated as he had during his feverish last days in the jungle. His mind kept jumping back to different places. He was staggering along a dirt road. He was lying in the tray of a bouncing ute. He was strapped down in a plane. He was looking at their two-story neo-Georgian like it was the embassy for an alien civilisation.
‘Oop’, Chelsea said, when the wheelchair bumped over the threshold. He’d told them he could walk, but he’d been sympathetically ignored. Crouching, Chelsea squeezed his hand. ‘How does it feel to be home?’ she asked.
She made an elaborate welcome-home meal that David couldn’t eat. ‘It was on Masterchef,’ she said.
He ate warily, paring tiny slivers from his chicken breast. He remembered what he was supposed to say. ‘This is really good.’ The vegetables tasted like mud. Every piece of meat was an ordeal.
Chelsea discussed her next video. She was worried about showing people how they lived, without oversharing. To David, it seemed like she was speaking in a different language. They watched a movie after dinner—some bright idiocy about a bungled plot to kidnap the apathetic daughter of a CEO—and he was fascinated by the stern, beautiful faces of the actors as they performed stress and pain. Chelsea put her feet in his lap and the sudden contact startled him.
When Chelsea fell asleep beside him that night, her breathing recalled the distant waves against the beach, and David thought about the last days in the jungle.
#
Starvation had hit him hard some time in the second week, leaving him light-headed, halfway between heightened awareness and hallucination. An hour stretched to eternity as he stood fixated on whatever was in front of him, wondering if the petals of a flower could really be that colour. If he could really see faces in the leaves. A helicopter buzzed overhead and he chased it, arms windmilling, screaming himself hoarse before he realized it was just a cloud passing over the canopy, the coming storm clapping palm fronds to make the sound of chopper blades. His arms dropped to his sides. His whole head was on fire. He swayed and crumbled to the dirt, and the jungle intertwined and arced above him, like a cathedral’s high-vaulted ceiling, forming a tunnel for him to crawl along. He was sure there was something for him at the end. His fingers gouged the rich, black dirt, releasing the stench of rot, as pungent and sweet as rum.
Thunder rolled over the canopy, and when the lightning followed, it illuminated a patch of bare, dry ground just ahead of him, and a broad, pristine leaf that had been torn from the trees. In the stark flash of the lightning, it glowed as bright green as a traffic light. David dragged himself toward it, and when he turned it over, he saw the fat black spider squatting underneath, like it was waiting for him, its legs tucked primly underneath its body.
He inched closer. The spider stayed frozen. Beneath its coarse black hair, the sheen of its swollen abdomen was the exact colour of butter. His hunger coiled in his guts, as if it was a living thing. He lunged forward and crushed the spider in his mouth. The bitter, vital meat of it soaked into him. One leg twitched against his lip, tickling deliciously.
It was a revelation after weeks of chewing roots and nibbling at moss. He felt if he just ate one more, he could fly right out of the jungle. The storm broke, and rain lashed down. David rolled onto his back and let it fall into his gaping mouth….
~~~
