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Page 6
Chapter Three: Jurassic Yard
 I opened my eyes and shrieked.
It's noon, so why the dusky twilight all around me?
The light remained dazed and dimmed and tea-colored.
I dropped my teacup, which spilled and shattered on the slate patio.
On a wall nearby sat a large grayish-white bird, a falcon maybe, eyeballing me with raptor eyes. He was looking at me as if gauging how best to attack me.
But why?
I knew pretty quickly that reality had set in, maybe with the help of that drug somehow. Or was that low, foul stench really a muzzy, humid air tainted with blood and humus?
This was the real world—a Jurassic Yard.
Overhead, a flight of blackbirds attacked a stately pair of broad-winged hawks sailing by on tan wings.
An armored lizard flicked out its tongue and killed a darting moth.
Spiders wove silently pulsating nets in whose sticky symmetry a bee was stuck and wriggling in its death dance.
There was no peace here, just an endless killing field.
Every living thing was in a constant, terrorized battle for survival and procreation.
Even the flowers competed with each other, so those getting more nutrients under the ground could overwhelm the weaker ones and steal their sunlight, leaving them to wither and die in the shadow (below stairs) of their flowering glory and success.
The birds had a strategy. Their nest, with helpless young, was hidden under a roof beam under the building's balcony behind me. The male of the nesting pair (mourning doves) stayed with the nest to protect it from predatory bird species. The dove's mate was out looking for food. When the female returned, she did not fly to the nest. Instead, she landed on a tree and looked carefully about to see if she had been followed. When she saw that the coast was clear, she quickly flew in the straight line to the nest. They don't read books or think about it. They have instinct, which is a hard-wired instruction set based on eons of hard experience.
A hawk landed on a tree limb elsewhere in the yard. It spread its wings to hide its catch from other birds overhead, including its own kind. It would look left, then right, and quickly dip its head take a beakful bite of the dead sparrow clutched in one set of claws, while clutching the branch with its other claws. Everything about it, from the sharply hooked beak to the razor talons, was a weapon.
And the way evolution had slowly run through the numbers and things had sorted themselves out, birds and other flying creatures were almost safe from the prowling ground traffic: cute, furry cats with saber teeth and ripping claws. Who had to run from dogs with power-jaws and teeth capable of breaking bones if they caught a cat or other small mammal.
The insects underground in their teeming hives were protected (up to a point) until gophers dug their way through and made a feast of thousands. Same with ants, and those pretty black May flies with red dots all over their wing shells.
The light grew dimmer and darker, maybe because I was looking through new eyes. My vision was that of some evolutionary ancestor eons ago, whose primary weapons were smell and taste rather than vision and interpretation. The smell of an approaching killer was more immediate than triangulating the flight of a raptor bird. But the choice of weapons varies from species to species.
Which is why the hunting hawk hovers slowly, and has eyes sharp enough to spot a mouse far below. The bird has one eyed vision (not binocular with two eyes) and plunges down fast as gravity will take it, barely rustling its frozen and tattered-looking wing feathers, to nail that little rodent with a beak the way a spear fishing human will shoot a turtle or a wriggling eel.
I rose, making a silent scream with my wide open mouth.
I held my palms to my tortured temples and felt instinct take over from reason.
My movement scared off the big grayish-white bird, who abruptly sailed away without any wasted motion, looking for an easier if less meaty kill.
I was safe for the moment. But for how long?
As I stood on the patio, I was flooded by thoughts and by emotions (instincts) from all sides.
I was an apex predator. We had killed or driven off or put in zoos all our potential rivals. We were (largely) safe in our towns and cities from animals that had terrified our ancestors until very recently (and still did in more remote parts of the world).
We forgot about those little micro thingies that inhabit our guts. I'm a nurse and I see it every day. We keep the micro bugs under control, and some of them living in our blood, in our tunnels, are friendly (for the moment) helping us fight off flu, Ebola, leprosy, whatever…
I was less inclined to worry about a tiger or a crocodile or a bear than…
…oh yes, another human. Truly our worst fear, the most frightful plague of all.
Like the predator who put those pills in my drink last night.
As a woman, I must live in fear every day of my life from every man I encounter, wondering at first moment if he was about to rape me, or use his superior strength and speed to steal my purse; or maybe just kill me (being a coward, only if nobody is looking) for the fun of seeing another living thing suffer and drain of its life force, like small boys blowing up frogs with straws up the rear end and other horrors.
In most cases, the men I encounter turn out to be either protectors or indifferent, and each moment of dread passes quickly.
The smart male knows his best chance of survival and procreation is to treat the female well, and to nurture his offspring. They are the majority. It's that tiny minority of snakes and spiders who create all the destruction and terror; whenever they gain the upper hand, it's Berlin 1945 all over again (rubble sinking of corpses, from horizon to horizon).
I don't go anywhere alone. As much as possible, I keep company with other women to avoid being alone with a man I don't know or whose motives aren't clear enough…
…until or unless (and it happens occasionally) I am in the clutches of a female sociopath who works differently but just as terrifyingly. She may attack, but more often she will be the manipulator on a school playground, agitating the dumbest of the children through fear and hate until they run in a herd and become violent predators; village idiots in the making, same pattern. Playground violence will start as taunting, until one or two real savage bullies (boys often older, bigger, held back a year or two) cannot overcome their raptor instincts and resort to naked, sweaty, glistening muscular kicking, beating, and punching, while the kid who is 'different' lies on his back and his broken glasses are nearby, or maybe it's his crutches, or whatever makes him different. In later life, these same manipulators become the demagogues who lead idiots and fools in false crusades that overthrow governments and lead armies in senseless, brainless wars against neighboring tribes or nations, only to typically end in oceans of rubble as far as the eye can see in less than a decade. Idiots, who have no knowledge and no critical thinking skills, cannot form an opinion. Rather, what they mistake for their 'opinion' is really an Emotion, formed for them by their manipulators. Most often, false (dark, violent, hateful) perversions of religion are the most powerful and useful tool to turn these simpletons into useful fools to make oligarchs and tyrants wealthier. The sad thing is that, with good leadership (not Hitler or Mussolini types) the result can be years of relative peace like in the optimistically named Wonderful Era (if you don't look too closely at the many industrial-imperial horrors all around the world).
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