Chapter 4 #2
“This is all your fault,” I muttered to Rex, and imagined a squeaky snicker in return.
Painting Rex the fly took me nearly two days.
It shouldn’t have, but I was most of the way through when I stopped to compare my work to my predecessor’s burying beetle, and had to start over in despair.
In the end, I did not so much finish as realize that I had passed the point of diminishing returns and was now just making things worse.
This sort of thing happens a great deal in illustration, and I had been doing it long enough that I usually knew when to stop. Unfortunately, between the new position and the terrifyingly high bar set by the previous painter, I had listened too much to my own anxieties.
It’s as good as it’s going to be. I need to stop. If this is not the quality that he wanted, he may fire me if he wishes, but I cannot do better than this.
I was gloomily aware that I had failed to meet the standard set by my predecessor. Even if I hadn’t been, a quick glance at the pages on the worktable would have shown me. My fly was competent and workmanlike, but it did not look as if it might suddenly walk off the page.
I pinched the bridge of my nose. I could not force myself to be a genius. If artists could do that … well, we would be a very different breed.
The hallway leading to Halder’s office seemed twice as long, and yet I was still at the door far before I was ready. I knocked and stepped inside.
“I have a sample for you, Doctor,” I said. My voice didn’t shake. I was rather proud of that.
“Very well. Let’s see what you have.” He held out his hand and I offered him the page, my hand trembling in a way that my voice had not. Fortunately, he didn’t seem to notice.
He gave Rex a cursory glance, grunted, and pulled out his own magnifying glass. I clasped my hands behind my back to keep from wringing them, digging my nails under the opposite cuffs. My fingers felt like ice against my wrists.
“Bristles on the meron,” he murmured, “longitudinal stripes on the thorax … yes. Competently done, Miss Wilson. Maintain this standard, and we shall have no difficulties.” He held the page out to me. I blinked at him, then down at the fly.
Some part of me wanted to ask if he was certain, or if he was looking at the right image. Did he not see how shoddy it was compared to the work of my predecessor? Couldn’t he tell that this was merely competent?
If it had been anyone else, I would have thought that he was lying to spare my feelings. But this was Halder, who, so far as I could tell, possessed the personal warmth of a guinea worm.
“Make certain that you do not confuse the larvae with any other fly,” he added, not looking up. “The screwworm is distinctive and must be illustrated with great accuracy. The mechanism of its burrowing is one central to my thesis.”
I swallowed. So this was the adult form of a screwworm, the bane of livestock throughout the region. I had not realized. “This is the variety that attacks cattle?” I asked.
“Cattle, sheep, horses, us—anything that it can lay eggs in. Hominivorax is not picky about its diet.” He smiled crookedly.
It was not a pleasant smile. “It is one of the few insects that we know of that prefers to devour the living but will feast on the dead as well. It is a delightfully efficient little beast. The female lays eggs in nostrils, eyes, and open wounds, and once the larvae hatch, they burrow as deeply as they can, seeking live flesh. You have perhaps half a day to wash the eggs away before they hatch. I have heard of newborns suffering infestations in the stump of the umbilical cord when they were not bathed properly in the first days after birth.”
“Good god,” I said, appalled. Rex was apparently a bloodthirsty little monster.
“Cleanliness is next to godliness, Miss Wilson, or so they say. But foulness provides rather more opportunity for scientific inquiry.” His smile grew, showing teeth.
“You are most privileged, Miss Wilson. Your work may contribute, in some small way, to my life’s dream of the eradication of monsters that have preyed upon us for centuries.
Now, was there anything else you wanted? ”
“No, Doctor,” I murmured, and fled, feeling my skin crawling as if there were already eggs laid upon it.
Painting the C. hominivorax larva was, in some ways, much easier than the adult fly.
In other ways though, it was obnoxious. Alcohol from the preservation process tends to bleach everything out, so I could never be sure of getting the colors quite right.
Sure, it was white and fleshy, but was it the correct white and fleshy?
It’s possible to preserve many insect larvae by pinning them, but since you have to remove the internal organs to keep them from rotting, they tend to collapse.
Then you must reinflate them, using one of a number of patented caterpillar inflaters.
It’s worth it for things like caterpillars, where the color patterns are so important, but hardly anyone bothers with maggots.
(I learned this, incidentally, over the course of a ten-minute lecture from Halder when I went to ask about the colors.
I went back to my rooms and said, “Patented caterpillar inflater,” out loud several times and laughed so hard that Sally came to check on me.)
Nevertheless, after a great deal of lifting pigment and dabbing tiny smidges of gouache, I had something that bore more than a passing resemblance to the screwworm larva.
I presented it to Halder, my stomach knotting almost as badly as the first time.
This is it, this is the one, he’s going to look at it and think it’s just a blob and …
“Acceptable,” Halder said. “You need not bother with the eggs of this species.” He gazed at the image thoughtfully. “Do you know why it’s called a screwworm?”
“Uh…” I glanced at the page in his hand. “Because the spiral ridge resembles a screw?”
Halder grinned unpleasantly. “Indeed it does. As it burrows, those ridges anchor themselves in living flesh using tiny bristles. They become nearly impossible to extract. After a week, they burrow outward and fall to the ground, where they pupate into the next generation.” He reached out and tapped the jar on his desk.
I glanced toward it and realized that the grubs inside were now familiar. Dead screwworms. Hundreds of them.
“Ah,” I said.
“Most interestingly, killing the host does not kill the screwworm. It will simply continue to eat. Few other parasites survive the death of their host in such a way.”
“Fascinating,” I said faintly.
“It is my great hope that if I can fully understand the life cycle of these species, it will unlock new ways to deal with them. I have already determined the optimal way to extract them from living flesh with the least damage. My monograph on the subject is even now in circulation. But to learn more, one must study them exhaustively.”
He took my illustrations, rose, and locked them in the cupboard in his office. I felt a brief, nonsensical pang at seeing my work squirreled away like that. Don’t be absurd. What are you going to do, hang your art of screwworms on the wall? Show it off to Mrs. Kent?
I made a checkmark next to C. hominivorax and started on the next name on the list.
Esther, my old roommate, had asked me once if I liked painting. I must have looked at her oddly, because she colored up and said, “I don’t like teaching French. I know French, but I don’t like it.”
I told her that I loved painting, and then, out of both truth and sympathy, admitted that I didn’t like teaching it very much.
Esther fell back into her chair with exaggerated relief and embarked on a tirade about how people don’t understand that being good at something does not mean that you have any skill at teaching it to other people.
She was quite right, of course, but the question that stuck with me was the first one—did I like painting?
Despite what I told Esther years ago, I didn’t always know the answer.
Some things I loved painting. I could be on my deathbed and I would still leap up at the chance to paint a pitcher plant.
The veins, the little translucent windows, the lids with their flares and ruffles …
I found them endlessly delightful. Sometimes I even dreamed about doing a book of my own on the topic, though finding a publisher willing to risk money was the hard part.
Other things … well, I was good at painting, and I liked doing something I was good at. But with some subjects, it felt more like a bodily function than a grand passion. I didn’t love it. I didn’t hate it. It was just what I did.
The insects rapidly began to feel like that.
I got up in the morning, I ate, I hunched over a tray of pinned flies, I sketched them out, I applied color.
I could not have said that I was enjoying the work, but it was a great deal better than teaching had been.
Occasionally I would manage a particularly fine sheen on a wing, and I would feel a certain artistic smugness.
This would usually last until I glanced at my predecessor’s carrion beetle paintings, which took any of my pretensions and stomped them flat.
I would go down to lunch. I would present Halder with the painting. I would start the next one.