The Last Word On Nothing

My first impressions of the spider: It was big and it was smart.

The brownish spider was nearly two inches long. It had constructed a thick, complicated web in the corner of my kitchen window’s frame, outside of the house. On the wall inside, right next to the web, is a light fixture that almost always gets switched on at night.

“Look at this amazing spider!” I told my four-year-old son. He dutifully peered out at the spider huddled against the glass. Then he went back to work on his own web-like creation, a “machine” made of strings that stretched across the room. He had tied the ends to the fridge and the oven and the sink. He was using more string to attach a broom and various pots and pans. His machines often make it difficult for the rest of the family to walk through the house.

For weeks, every now and then, I checked on the spider. At first, because of its size, I thought it might be a wolf spider. Then, on the website “Spiderzrule,” I read that wolf spiders don’t have webs and that they’re often confused with funnel weaver spiders.

I now saw that part of the spider’s web indeed formed a funnel. It looked like a tiny frozen tornado. The spider spent its days at the bottom, which was right in the corner of the window. At night, the spider crawled up the funnel to the edge of a flat sheet of web. I learned that this sheet was not sticky. Instead, when an insect flew into its entangling filaments, the spider would rush out, bite its prey to inject venom, and drag the subdued victim back to the safety of the funnel.

I never saw that. Still, I admired the spider. I liked its black stripes, the little hairs on its legs, and its prominent spinnerets.  On the far side of its web it had shed two translucent exoskeletons that looked like ghost spiders. I was pleased to read that that funnel spiders could live for a year or more, always in the same web.

The spider’s arrival coincided with a period of intense introspection. In the dark autumn mornings, the spider kept me company as I drank my coffee at the kitchen table, while everyone else slept on under warm covers upstairs. I would write a daily stream of consciousness on a legal pad and occasionally get up to pour more coffee and observe the spider. Sometimes it was curled up at the bottom of its funnel. Other times, it was at the top, poised to strike.

These mornings reminded me of what it had felt like to be pregnant and working at the office. I would feel the fetus lurching around inside the warm, pulsating universe that was my body, pursuing its own mysterious agenda and thinking its alien thoughts, while out in the bright world I typed away at a keyboard, writing about exploding galaxies and prehistoric fish and hidden mountains discovered under distant glaciers.

One night in November I gave a public lecture on science reporting. Outside the auditorium, someone had set up a hands-on science exhibit about spiders. The lady behind the table wore spider earrings and was showing off a tarantula. She briskly confirmed the identity of my spider—“if there’s a funnel, it’s a funnel weaver”—and told me that if it had a large abdomen then that meant the spider was female. My spider was a she!

Abruptly the spider lady said, not unkindly, “That spider’s going to die tonight, you know.”

The weather report predicted a freeze, she noted. “But I thought these spiders could live for a long time!” I protested. Cheer up, she told me: “She’ll have made an egg sac and you’ll have babies to replace her. Didn’t you ever read Charlotte’s Web?”

I was insulted by the idea that my spider could be replaced. And of course I had read Charlotte’s Web. Who can forget Charlotte’s wry, unsentimental acceptance of her fate: “After all, what’s a life, anyway? We’re born, we live a little while, we die.” Recall how she died alone, after summoning her last strength to wave at Wilbur and whisper, “Good-bye.”

I respected how E. B. White had kept her spidery; she relished killing and drinking blood. When the illustrator initially drew her with a woman’s face, White rejected that idea and personally sketched in some dots and lines to make her look like a spider. But Charlotte wasn’t just a spider. As the book put it: “It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer. Charlotte was both.”  My spider was neither. My spider, as far as I can tell, didn’t know I existed.

As I went about my ephemeral chores—washing the dishes, hunting for plastic toy animals, wiping snotty noses, filing late night copy—the spider existed nearby, motionless in her strange silken world.

If she paid attention at all as I put my face against the glass to gaze at her, less than an inch away, I am certain her weak visual system merely registered me as some random moving blobs that came and went and meant nothing.

She did not know me and I did not know her, even though I watched her and I loved her. I tried to imagine her perceptual world, with its thrumming language of vibrations and the taste of fly. I wondered about her inner experience, what she thought as she crouched in her funnel, whether she had dreams, whether she felt the increasing cold and understood.

My spider did not die that first freezing night. For several days she stayed in her funnel. I detected slight changes in position that meant she was alive. I dared to hope she was entering some kind of suspended animation. Perhaps she would survive the winter. Some spiders make their own antifreeze, I read.

I imagined that if she did die, I would go out and carefully remove her body from the funnel with a pair of tweezers. I would cup her dry, hardened body in the palm of my hand. I would use a magnifying glass to examine her and peer into her eight eyes. I wanted to get as close to her as possible.

Then one morning I went downstairs and checked the web and she was gone. This was unprecedented. I went outside and immediately spotted her on the other side of the window frame, a few inches down from another, miniscule spider. Neither of them moved.

That night she was back in her web, deep in her funnel, scrunched down smaller than I’d ever seen her. It was the coldest night since February. I was relieved she had returned. But the coming winter, plus her inexplicable foray across the window, left me feeling uneasy. I told my therapist and he said, “Somehow I suspect that this spider story isn’t going to have a happy ending.” Nature generally doesn’t, I replied. Every week we sit in opposite corners of a quiet room and look at each other. We never touch and I secretly wonder what he thinks of me.

The next day the spider’s web was again empty. Night came and she did not return.

In the morning, I checked the funnel knowing that she wouldn’t be there. I didn’t think I could find her but I went outside into the cold anyway, shutting the door firmly behind me.  Standing on the back porch, I studied the architecture of her web from this different perspective. I saw a bit of blue iridescence, some left-over piece of an insect’s thorax. Deeper in the threads I saw a velvety dead bee, apparently intact and untouched.

I searched all around the window frame, inspecting every crevice. Way down at the bottom, far from her web, I saw a crack filled with about a dozen balls made of silk. Each was about the size of a pea. I didn’t believe that these belonged to my spider, but I crouched down to study them.

Suddenly I sensed a dark blur behind the glass and I looked up through the window to see my husband’s kind, familiar face looming just beyond the spider’s web. He smiled down at me and raised his eyebrows as if to ask, “Well?” I shook my head. He made a face of mock dismay that softened into fond concern. He gazed at me for a moment, then turned away from the glass and disappeared.

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Nell Greenfieldboyce reports on science for NPR and loves radio but sometimes misses print. She rarely tweets at @nell_sci_NPR

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Photos by Nell Greenfieldboyce