SKIRMISHER

My room was slowly becoming like the set of a low-budget horror flick. The reason: I just couldn’t find the heart to kill the spiders.

At first, there was only a single occupant. One spider was weaving a web across my room’s fluorescent tube that I thought, maybe it wouldn’t hurt if I’d allow this guy to live. If you knew me, you’d be surprised with my sudden turn to being merciful. I have always squashed bugs at first sight. I stomp on them, spit on them, piss on them.

I especially have a specific hatred for roaches, and I suspect the hatred is coming from what I call “species envy”—after all, these little fuckers have been here far longer than my own species, and they doubtless will outlive my kind long after the last human civilization has fallen. The puzzling fact of the tandem of their uselessness and indestructibility as a life form would usually make me chuckle in my dark moments of lucidity. That’s why I hate them.

But there was something about spiders that made me relent to an “armistice”: their persistence, perhaps, and the way they reminded me of Sisyphus? Their dogged, singular desire to accomplish their little goal?

So I shrugged and turned my back and focused on my work. The next thing I’d see, ten amazing days later, was not a simple web but a bustling gauzy galaxy of Spiderville: a growing empire of almost invisible strands you’d see only when light brushes on them.

One night I counted something like more than a dozen spiders. My ceiling was getting thicker and thicker with them, and I imagined they approved what crappy thing I happened to be writing (I usually work in my room). There was one instance when one of them rappelled from the ceiling to my shoulder and made a soft landing on my laptop. Rappelled! Like those guys from SWAT! But instead of squashing the interloper with my fist (see Destroying the Beautiful), I gently poked its belly. It panicked and pulled up frantically. It made me laugh; there was something irresistibly comical about a frightened spider, something that made you imagine that it might be thinking: “Oh, crap! Nobody mentioned this human in the travel brochure!”

I couldn’t destroy them for some reason. Maybe because they reminded me too much of a regular extended family: there was the pair of large spiders that I assumed were Ozzy Osbourne and his wife. There was the skinny gray one that looked like Paris Hilton. There was a squat one that reminded me of Mike Enriquez. There was Etta Rosales and Love Anover, and all the famous stuck-up Filipino bishops from the CBCP. They were all having a party on my ceiling.

I knew this was bad; you begin anthropomorphizing bugs, and humanizing the toilet seat might be next. I was beginning to feel like I was that guy in Wong Kar Wai’s Chungking Express: talking to the soap, to the wet towel, to the empty house. But in probably the same way I didn’t care much about social approval, it wasn’t also bothering me that my room was beginning to look like the structural carcass of some failed ancient civilization.

One late afternoon when I came back from [insert vapid existential exercise here], I met my mother coming out of my room with a broom in her hand and a smile on her face. Then I saw why: she had cleaned up. Everything in my room was squeaky clean.

And when I looked up, there was nothing, nothing, nothing. Everybody was gone. Somehow, I felt a pang of loneliness.

After that, I got very busy; those were frenzied periods of my life when days consisted mainly of dunking my head into one blur of futile human activity to the next. But one night, as I hammered away on my PC, a spider rappelled down from the ceiling. I looked up and followed with my eyes the source of its long thread, and what I saw stretched my mouth into a grin. The little guys were at it again, rebuilding their empire.

I felt a strange calm, that sort that puzzled you because you’re unsure what it means, because you couldn’t instantly find the source of that confusing delight. But then, I realized what was making me happy. So I did the only nice thing I could think of.

I destroyed them all—in one easy sweep. The fuckers didn’t even have time to blink.

Stumble it!