The Evolution of Mystery
an excerpt

Snakes have solved a potentially serious problem— how to nourish a heavy, limbless body with a small mouth. All snakes are carnivorous, but beyond that their diets run the gamut from meringue-like tropical frog eggs to birds in flight, to porcupines (no joke). Despite the lack of arms and legs, they manage to ascend trees and burrow underground. Some snakes have a near ability to fly, flinging their serepentine coils amidst the rain forest canopies using their tails as grasping anchors as they go.

Yet the onus this creature bears marks it an eternal enemy of mankind. Mention a snake in one’s house, and the whole room shudders. Endowed with a fascinating undulating locomotive pattern that conjures nothing but evil, and a pair of spooky eyes set above a rather harsh poker face, snakes have made few friends over the centuries. I know now, having witnessed dozens of friends and colleagues shrinking a centimeter into their skins when I bring out the boxes of specimens down from their shelves. The boxes, mere plastic shoeboxes really, which house my beloved snarls of whip-like jewels.

My chosen life is that of a herpotologist, which literarlly translates from the Greek to herp "creeping animal" and logos, "knowledge", and marks me as a lover of all things that go bump in the night, namely reptiles and amphibians. Where might this love for creatures most humans instinctively recoil from? The cold blooded scale, the pointed fang, the lidless eye, unblinking as it tracks its prey?

I was born and raised in the mountainous village of Gifu, on the island nation of Japan, where one’s existence with insects larger than dinner plates, strumming things that plonk into one’s hair at a moment’s notice, lagoons of frogs and lizards occupying the outer rims of the house- is de rigeur. Island children are molded from mud, their eyes poked stones, limbs broken sticks with which to climb and swim and run like the dickens on a rain thrummed afternoon. In our play, we gave everything a name: sleeping grass, octopus tree, stink egg plant, chirping gecko, hot legged ant.

I remember one day when our modest bungalow house experienced a frenzy of flying ants streaming from a previously undetected crack in the wall, a boil of shiny black thoraxes and iridescent wings preparing to move their nest with the queen at the hub of the vortex. As she bumbled forward, swollen four times the size of the average worker who tended her with quivering antennae and leg, the swarm pulsed with tension. My mother, caught totally off guard, yelled for us kids to head to our rooms, and to plug the cracks under our doors with towels. We would wait it out, with the front door and all the windows beyond the bedrooms wide open, hoping that the ants would find a way towards a proper exit route. Even behind locked doors, my sisters and brothers and I could hear the pop of thousands of insects dropping from the ceiling onto the living room floor. The miracle was how swiftly they did depart. Not more than twenty minutes later (someone inevitably had to pee) we dared to emerge from the bedrooms and found the livingroom entirely silent, not a trace of an insect to be seen. Only the panic of doors and windows, flung open helter skelter, gave an indication of calamity. They too, were silent, spilling shadows of the neighborhood against the indigo of twilight.

Every kid I knew caught geckos, detatched their tails and watched the wriggling appendage as it writhed miserable, in search of its ghost body. Those same geckos clung to the rust flecked screen doors of our lanai, shadows flitting nimblequick over night skies, trilling lullabies from sweet ochre throats. Listening from my bed, body immobile except for the creeping sweep of my gaze, my eyes grew instantly wet hearing the gecko’s sad song.

I wake. By the blinking green eye of my digital clock, I read that it is 5:15 a.m. on Tuesday, October 3 but I lie, rumpled and furred with sleep deprivation for another quarter hour before bolting upright and launching into the morning. Before anything else, foulbreathed and caffeine deprived, I switch on my personal computer and log onto the University’s laboratory site. The monitor screen bleeds to life, and type in my passwords, unbolting abstract locks into a room halfway across the city, the webcams come into view. In neat rows, five cameras trained onto a row of cages harboring Rhabdophis tigrinus, a rare specimen of native snake that is unique for its habit of borrowing venom from other animals to overcome its prey. The “Tiger Snake” consumes highly toxic toads in particular, absorbing their poisons and storing them in their own neck glands — nuchal glands — to be used for its own defense. How it manages not to kill itself in the process and how the toxins are actually sprayed (not injected) from the neck glands have been my latest project and well, obsession. The five snakes in captivity haven’t fed in nearly two weeks, and are by casual observation, mostly lazing about their cages, but today is feeding day. I argued quite passionately with my colleague, Professor R. Mori, for a need to keep the snakes separated and monitored very carefully and thus, it became my duty to do the monitoring via cameras, whether I am in or out of the lab. They are mine. Satisfied that nothing traumatic has occurred during the night, I rush to put the kettle onto the stove and prepare breakfast: fish, pickle, miso, tea.

Stepping into the dark entryway and into my shoes, I hear my neighbor’s wife wheedling through her door about money to her jaded businessman husband and pause before opening my door. There is a gruff final exchange before I hear his feet shuffling on concrete, the wheezing protest of the door hinges forced open, and the clang of the door as it slams shut. No love lost there. He is a fit of rustles and lurches by the time I quietly open my front door and slip away, painfully aware of the lonely housewife’s lingering eye rolling desperately in her peephole.

By the time I step off the crowded morning train, my plastic shoes have begun to nag at the heel. I am overheated and a little nauseous from the ride, and take great gulps of city air before heading out the gates towards the University, three blocks from the station.