“To Kill a Housefly”
All day it flew aimless patterns overhead. I needed Jimmy Stewart and the Strategic Air Command to bring it down. It had a green head, transparent wings, bzz bzz bzz. I started by ignoring it. I concentrated on the formula instead. I had been working for several weeks on the formula. The formula for happiness. I was getting so close. I needed to jigger things. So far I was up to hapiness, one p. I couldn’t get the second p to stay. The first p, as far as I can tell, stands for parity. The second p, I knew, could stand for almost anything. Purity. Paradise. Pathology. Penguin.
Mosquito in the bedroom at night,
Sailor’s delight.
Housefly in the office by day,
Sailor’s Mandalay.
I rolled up the want-ads section of my local paper and kept it at hand. Every time the fly came close, I lashed out at it. I knocked over an old milk bottle filled with fresh snaps from the garden. I knocked over the lamp. I went and got a fly swatter from the other room. I lay down on the fainting couch and waited, armed. It made a pass. I tried to take it out of the air. I missed, feeling the shooting pain of tennis elbow. All those years I’d worn the copper bracelet, to no avail.
Bzz bzz bzz. Did the noise come from its wings, or its choppers rubbing together diabolically. I’d seen the original The Fly and all its macabre remakes but I couldn’t remember if any of those flicks explained how the maddening sound of the housefly is produced.
If I was increasingly preoccupied with my housefly, the housefly was growing more interested in me. Once in a while it would alight on a distant windowpane, the perfect killing field, to catch its fly breath and stare in my direction, only to take off after I got up from my desk and came near, clutching the swatter. I swatted the glass pane anyway, warming up my stroke of death.
I tried to concentrate on the formula. Love + Luck – Love + Wealth – Health + Surgery – Deductible = Safe at Home.
I stood in the middle of the room, holding the swatter in a ready position. I wanted to give the housefly a deviated septem, something it would always remember me by. It widened its orbit in response, staying just out of reach. I turned in circles, refusing to let it get behind me. After a while I became quite dizzy and had to sit down.
I got a can of Spectracide, which advertises a 22-foot jet spray. From my desk I could hit any corner of the room with it. I waited. Bzz bzz bzz, but where???? I could not locate the housefly though I could hear it. It had taken cover behind something. It too had read the entire label before use. Finally I saw it sally forth from the table where I keep my orchids. I let it have it. Bzz bzz bzz. I missed. I had splatted my favorite phalaenopsis. Pink and white petals began to float to the floor.
I began to associate each sudden appearance of the housefly with certain failures and mishaps strewn along my path through what we laughingly call my life, my life. Missing the cut in Babe Ruth League baseball. The botched foreign service oral exam. Trouble adjusting to “uncomfortable civilian life” following a hitch in the army. Marrying Madame X. Falling backwards and breaking chair at important company function. Losing my Jack Benny autograph. Et cetera.
After lunch I brought my English setter, Buster, into the housefly’s haven. Bzz bzz bzz. When the dog’s ears perked up, I knew I had an ally. Buster sat alertly on the floor, head swiveling slowly from side to side, like the gun turret on an Abrams tank. Not really aware of the speed of its new adversary, the housefly did a loop-de-loop in front of Buster’s muzzle. Buster lunged and jaws snapped with a heartening click. Bzz bzz bzz. A narrow escape. The housefly retreated to the ceiling and appeared to be mulling over future tactics.
A shot of Spectracide missed it by six inches. The poison dripped into a tiny puddle on the floor, I cleaned it up before Buster could have a taste.
I went back to the couch, book in hand, and pretended to read. Soon came the drowsy numbness, the jaw snaps of Buster receding into the back of my consciousness. Bzz bzz bzz. The life in re-run. Losing $500 in casino winnings to a felonious cleaning lady in the Bahamas. Buying a Ford Pinto with the infamous exploding gas tank. Drinking a Bud in St. Patrick’s Cathedral on St. Patrick’s Day, 1978. Trading in the Pinto for a Yugo. Getting mixed up with a woman who lived above a funeral parlor. Ordering riz de veau in a restaurant in Paris, to impress my companion, thinking it would come to the table as veal with rice, not marinated cow brain. Et cetera.
I had the housefly woes. Refreshed from the nap, however, I resolved on a new tack. I flung doors and windows open. Buster went careering across the field; he would not return until dark. I prayed the accident-prone dog would not happen upon a porcupine or a skunk this time around. It was October, the end of gardening days, chilly but no frost in sight as yet. I stood outside, shivering, waiting for Harry the Housefly to leave the premises. No housefly worth its name hesitates when it sees an opening to the outside world. Or so I thought.
I did a little weeding, killing time. I observed that my Japanese morning glories were finally coming into bloom after a summer-long gestation period. I made a mental note not to re-sow same next year.
An hour passed. I returned to my work chamber, closed doors and windows, and went back to work on the formula. By now I’d forgotten all about the housefly. According to my calculations, happiness is one part DNA, one part hard work, two parts money, one-half part the belief in one or more deities, and one part a full tummy. Nowhere is it given that to drink, to smoke, or to love gives one a leg up on the happiness quotient. But what did the second p in happiness really stand for? That was driving me crazy, keeping me from my lofty objective.
Bzz bzz bzz.
The fly had alighted on the telephone there before me on my desk. I froze. I grimaced. The swatter was over on the couch, out of reach. I stared hard at the insect-like creature. It seemed to be grooming itself with one of its raspy tentacles. Slowly and deliberately my hand moved behind me, grasping at air, at air, at air, and then at last at something solid, a hardbound book behind me on the shelf. My hand began the return trip, slowly, slowly, slowly, until with its weighty purchase it hovered over my head.
Down came book crashing into phone. The handset went flying across the room. The front cover of my dogeared copy of Great Expectations stared me in the face. I turned it over. There on the back cover, to my amazement and gratification, was the splattered remains of Mr.Housefly.
How I howled! What a gay dance I did on my own wood floor, causing the orchid blossoms to tremble. Happiness indeed! I was in the very heart of happiness.
The moment I replaced the phone on the desk, it rang, startling me so.
“Yes, hello?” I said into the mouthpiece.
“Doctor’s office,” announced a female who sounded a bit off her feed. “We need to see you as soon as possible. Your medication needs adjustment.”
“But I’ve never felt better!” I declared.
“That may be the problem,” came the voice. Did I hear a titter?
“Well then of course I’ll come by.”
“We have a cancellation tomorrow morning at ten.”
“All right, I think I can be there tomorrow at ten.”
I hung up without saying goodbye. I hate goodbyes. I hate goodbyes almost as much as I hate my meds, the things the meds do to me when they need adjustment. I sat down, adjusting to my fate. Oh fiddle faddle, were my last words on the subject.
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