Enemy Of My Enemy

Thanks in no small part to my subconscious’ decision to end each and every dream I have in a cliffhanger – a tendency that, judging by last week’s inconclusive dream-time romp about rescuing my brother from an insidious cult, isn’t getting any better – I’ve started waking up about five or six times a night. While some have pinned sleep apnea as the culprit, I prefer to think it’s Syd Fields astral projecting his way into my mind, hoping I’ll cave and take his story seminar in an effort to find sweet release. Regardless, neither Syd nor apnea was the problem last night. It was the massive Boeing 747 circling slowly but deliberately overhead.

At least, that’s what the mosquito sounded like.

I have a history with mosquitoes. During the muggy Vancouver summers of my youth, I waged a nightly war against them using only a physics textbook that was curiously still in its original wrapping. And by the end of every August, my room’s walls told the story of this Sisyphian battle, with hundreds of bugs flattened against them like so many downed Nazi fighters stenciled on the side of an Allied bomber. It wasn’t the idea of getting bitten that drove me to nightly bloodlust – it was that terrible buzzing; nature’s own psychological warfare. An untapped gold mine for sleep deprivation researchers worldwide.

And there it was last night, near-deafening as the mosquito went in for the kill. After a noble thirty-seven seconds of doing my best to ignore it, I finally vaulted out of bed and slammed on the light. The nearest weapon was a fitness book with, somehow fittingly, a broken spine. Wielding it like a madman, I went for the first dark spot I could see against my white walls and smashed –

A spider.

This, I have to admit, gave me a moment’s pause. Yes, the spider could have inflicted a bite just like the mosquito. But at the same time, it was a silent hunter and the enemy of my enemy. I must have stared at that black smudge on the wall for a good thirty seconds, eyelids at half mast as my mind raced to decide whether it was a wise strategy to have killed my best – albeit reluctant – ally. The only answer I received was the faint buzzing of the mosquito’s wings, growing stronger as it went in for the attack.

I’m convinced that there’s some important lesson about the futility of war here but I’ll be damned if I can figure out what it might be.

Oh, and just so you don’t think my storytelling style has been corrupted by the narrative incoherence of my dreams, I never did kill the mosquito. I wound up positioning an industrial fan at my feet and turning it on full blast, creating a makeshift wind tunnel that I was pretty sure no mosquito could handle. Sure, the breeze nearly made me freeze to death. But like they say, war is hell.