Insectopedia (32 page)

There is the nightmare of swarming and the nightmare of crawling. There is the nightmare of burrowing and the nightmare of being seen in the dark. There is the nightmare of turning the overhead light on just as the carpet scatters. There is the nightmare of beings without reason and the nightmare of being unable to communicate. There is the nightmare of their being out to get us.

There is the nightmare of knowing and the nightmare of nonrecognition. There is the nightmare of not seeing the face. There is the nightmare of not having a face. There is the nightmare of too many limbs. There is the nightmare of all this plus invisibility.

There is the nightmare of being submerged and the nightmare of being overrun. There is the nightmare of being invaded and the nightmare of being alone. There is the nightmare of numbers, big and small. There is the nightmare of metamorphosis and the nightmare of persistence. There is the nightmare of wetness and the nightmare of dryness. There is the nightmare of poison and the nightmare of paralysis. There is the nightmare of putting the shoe on and of taking the shoe off. There is the slithering nightmare and the one that walks backward. There is the squirming nightmare and the squishing nightmare. There is the nightmare of the unwelcome surprise.

There is the nightmare of the gigantic and the nightmare of becoming. There is the nightmare of being trapped in the body of another with no way out and no way back. There is the nightmare of abandonment and the nightmare of social death. There is the nightmare of rejection. There is the nightmare of the grotesque.

There is the nightmare of awkward flight and the nightmare of clattering wings. There is the nightmare of entangled hair and the nightmare of the open mouth. There is the nightmare of long, probing antennae emerging from the overflow hole in the bathroom sink or,
worse, the rim of the toilet. There is the nightmare of huge blank eyes. There is the nightmare of randomness and the unguarded moment. There is the nightmare of sitting down, the nightmare of rolling over, the nightmare of standing up.

There is the nightmare of the military that funds nearly all basic research in insect science, the nightmare of probes into brains and razors into eyes, the nightmare that should any of this reveal the secrets of locusts swarming, of bees navigating, or of ants foraging, the secrets will beget other secrets, the nightmares other nightmares, the pupae other pupae, insects born of microimplants; part-machine, part-insect insects; remote-controlled weaponized surveillance insects; moths on a mission; beetles undercover; not to mention robotic insects, mass-produced, mass-deployed, mass-suicide nightmare insects.

These are the nightmares that dream of coming wars, of insect wars without vulnerable central commands, forming and dispersing, congealing and dissolving, decentered, networked; of netwar, of network-centric warfare, of no-casualty wars (at least on our team), dreams of Osama bin Laden somewhere in a cave. These are the nightmares of invisible terrorists, swarming without number, invading intimate places and unguarded moments. The nightmares of our age, nightmares of emergence, of a hive of evil, a brood of bad people, a superorganism beyond
individuals, “swarming on their own initiative—homing in from scattered locations on various targets and then dispersing, only to form new swarms.”
¹
The nightmare of language. The language of bees. Nightmare begets nightmare. Swarm begets swarm. Dreams beget dreams. Terror begets terror.

Where are the bees now? Collapsing in their colonies, gliding through their plastic mazes, sniffing out explosives, sucking up that sugar water, getting fat and weak on corn syrup, locked in little boxes at airports, sticking out their tongues on cue. Who knew the tiny critters were so smart, said the journalist. Fuzzy little sniffers. Buzz, buzz, buzz. Keeping us safe. Helping us sleep easy at night.

And then, on waking one morning, as if in a dream, I left London with my friend Greg, headed for north India and Nepal. We planned to travel together for several months, but Greg returned after just a few weeks and I went on to Nepal with another friend, Dan, who, like me, had earned his ticket money as a porter in the local hospital. In all, I was away for six months but am surprised to realize now that I have no photographs from that trip and not many memories. Perhaps this is what happens when you travel without purpose, or at least when the only purpose is a hazy sense of adventure derived from a hazy sense of privilege. I do remember that Dan liked his drugs and that once he arrived, the two of us smoked more or less continually from the time we woke up until bedtime. We lived in a state of sensuous, if not analytic, clarity.

In those days, the town of Pokhara was little more than a main street, at one end of which the breathtaking mass of Annapurna rose vertiginously above all else. When the clouds cleared, it felt as if the mountain would topple over and bury everything. We stayed there in a sort of workers’ dormitory for one or two nights and then decided to go to the hills. Somehow, I’m not sure how, we made a Nepalese friend of about our age who agreed to accompany us, and we set off walking. I have no photographs, letters, or journals of any of this, but if I fix on an object and move from there to another and then to the next, I create memories. A plunging waterfall in the side of a cliff and our bodies afterward covered in black leeches that we burned off with cigarettes. A woman killing a chicken for our dinner and our embarrassment because it was too big a thing and she wouldn’t take payment. A wooden house on a hillside where, after dinner, a young boy tried to sell me his sister for the night.
Fried bread and salted buttered tea. Broad stony valleys. Strings of flapping Tibetan prayer flags. When I first saw the breathtaking opening scene of Werner Herzog’s
Aguirre, Wrath of God
, I remembered the mule trains we passed picking their way along the sides of the mountains. When I heard on the BBC that the Maoists had finally entered Kathmandu and national government, I remembered the women who pleaded with us for money for their sick babies, who explained that the health post was closed, who showed us their children, listless, pot-bellied, and covered in sores, who made us feel helpless, stupid, ignorant, and out of place, as we were, who made me swear to myself I would never do this again.

Tonight, thirty years later, sitting near the back of the M5 bus on Seventy-second Street in Manhattan as the driver turned onto Riverside Drive and we sped along the darkened road with its grand doorman buildings on our right and the shadows of the park on our left, with the river and the highway below and out of view, I suddenly remembered, I can’t say why, the completely different feeling of rounding a curve on the brightest of mornings, high in the mountains, the three of us striding carelessly along the gravelly path, the valley stretched below us, the peaks rising around us, the snows of the Himalaya so crisply unreal above us, and a group of children tumbling, laughing, along the road toward us, on their way to collect wood, we guessed, and a girl, maybe ten years old, I remember, the biggest of the little group, stopping in front of us, her arm outstretched, holding out her closed fist, palm-side down, telling me to hold out my palm under hers and all the while giggling so hard that we were giggling too without really knowing why, until she opened her hand and dropped into mine a ball, a closed-up living ball, something multicolored and alive that sat there still as stone, hiding in that sharp, sharp light, its segmented shell like a rolled-up sea creature or a special jewel, something very rare, and after I’d looked at it a few moments without comprehending what it was or why it was there in my hand, she plucked it back, still curled tight, and giggling still, swung her arm in the widest arc, and before I could get the words out, she had flung it high and far, causing it to spiral off the side of the mountain into the thin air and down, dizzyingly down into the gray-brown valley below, and had run off laughing, twirling around but staying upright, little friends, carrying their bundles, laughing and not looking back.

On January 8, 2008, Abdou Mahamane, the managing director of Radio et Musique, Niger’s first independent radio station, was driving home through Niamey, the country’s capital. Around 10:30 p.m., as he entered Yantala, a suburb on the western outskirts of the city, his Toyota hit a land mine hidden in the unpaved road. The radio announcement was blunt: “Our colleague was torn to pieces.” A woman passenger survived, but with serious injuries.

Karim and I had just got off the bus in Maradi, 415 miles to the east, and were watching the news report along with three or four other guests in the dimly lit hotel bar. “That’s the road I take home every night,” Karim said, shaken. On the large flat-screen TV, a silent crowd stared down at a floodlit crater and the mangled carcass of the journalist’s car. In the studio, seated in front of what looked like someone’s cell-phone photo of the blazing vehicle, a government spokesman was denouncing the Mouvement des Nigériens pour la justice (MNJ) and calling on loyal citizens to root out the evil in their midst. For its part, the MNJ, the Tuareg movement that has been in armed rebellion in the north of Niger since February 2007, accused President Mamadou Tandja’s regime of setting the mines itself to feed the spiraling insecurity and violence and of further entrenching this latest phase of a decades-long conflict by refusing to negotiate.

In the hotel bar, it was doubt, counterdoubt, and pensive silence. This
was the first attack in the capital, but just the previous month two people had been killed by anti-tank mines here in Maradi, and four others had been wounded in the town of Tahoua. The month before that, a bus loaded with passengers had been hit outside Agadez, the major city of the north. There was no uncertainty about government hostility to independent journalists—two Nigerien and two French reporters were being held incommunicado for nosing around in the militarized rebellion zone. But who could say whether Abdou Mahamane had been targeted or was simply a chance victim? And in either case, who could be certain of the killers’ loyalties? People are “walking around on tip-toe,” reported the radio, everyone is “afraid of being blown apart.”

Still, as Nigeriens well know, there are many ways of being blown apart and many sources of insecurity and dread. These mines and this fear were just two of the routes by which the unrest was coming home. The first time we met, Karim had given me a concise introduction to Nigerien politics. Welcome to Niger, he said, a large country with a small population, a poor country rich in resources, a weak country with powerful neighbors.

A couple of days before the explosion, the two of us had taken a taxi over the U.S.-funded Kennedy Bridge, which spans the Niger River in Niamey, and walked through the lively campus of the Université Abdou Moumouni. Karim had studied law here until 2001, when the university was closed by student strikes. After that, he left to continue his schooling in Nigeria and Burkina Faso. He has many friends here still, and we stopped frequently to exchange greetings. Groups of young men were gathered in the sunshine outside their dormitories, listening to the radio, talking politics, getting haircuts. Young women strolled past arm in arm.

In a book-filled office on the ground floor of the two-story red-brick Faculty of Science building we met Mahamane Saadou, professor of plant biology. Karim had patiently explained to me how the political instability in the north generated random violence and psychic perturbation, how it held back the national economy by preventing the exploitation of subsurface wealth (uranium and oil), and how it increased the opportunities for geopolitical mischief by France, the colonial power, as well as by Libya and other neighbors. Professor Saadou listened as I
described my ideas for this book and Karim explained that we were spending two weeks together talking to people in Niamey, Maradi, and the surrounding countryside about locusts—what these insects do, what is done to them, what they mean, and what they have created here in Niger. When we finished, Professor Saadou told us that one thing created by both land mines and locusts was terror and that they did it not only separately but together.

Because of the political standoff and the proven danger of kidnapping, Professor Saadou said, the internationally funded anti-locust teams in Agadez, close to the mountainous Aïr region and the advancing sands of the Sahara, rarely leave their bases. When they do, he continued, it is only for short visits to the field. They can’t carry out their work, and—because a chain is only as strong as its weakest link—neither, therefore, can the elaborate trans-Sahelian locust-monitoring network, the early-warning system designed to give protection to those adjacent to what is not just a zone of conflict but also a zone of distribution, a point from which the
criquet pèlerin
, the most destructive of the Sahelian locusts, swarms west and south into the agricultural regions.