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Swat's Wrong With This Picture

MESA, AZ-- Upriver from Phoenix, on a hot August day, the quiet suburban town of Mesa is unusually silent. The normal quiet buzzing of insects, a sound we are unaware of because of its normal omnipresence, is no more. Instead, the dead silence of the atmosphere weighs down, pushed down by the suffocatting heat, interupted only occassionally by a passing car.

Terri Weismuller tells these houseflies where they can go.

I was sent upriver by The Company to find out what had happened to Terri Weismuller. A salesperson in the field, she had gone silent. She had ceased all communications: phone calls, e-mails, faxes. Her orders had became sporadic shortly before stopping altogether: twelve cases of skin cream, three boxes of aloe vera. No one orders that much.

Management was concerned. They thought her methods were becoming "unsound."

"Find out what happened," they asked me, "and terminate her command."

They gave me a leaky steamboat to go up the river. Some sales representatives of The Company, pilgrims looking for easy money, accompanied me. I hated them. I hated their polyester suits, their carefully arranged hair. They were always trying to sell their wares to each other and to me. I don't need special skin moisturizers. I spent my days locked in the pilot house avoiding them all. After several adventures with angry neighbours we emerged from the desert into the ilent bedroom community of Mesa. Sweat poured off our bodies, soaked our clothes, and then quickly dried in the hot air.

We found her apartment building and were greeted by the mailman.

"I'm so glad you're here, man," he told us excitedly, "Terri is doing some really marvellous things. Big things. She's expanded my mind, she really has. This is Big, really really Big."

"What kind of things?" I asked.

The mailman seemed confused. "I can't tell you that," he said and then his face brightened. "She'll be glad to see you. Come on in. She's a great person, a wise woman. She's expanded my mind, man, she really has."

I pushed him aside and entered the apartment. It was a decorator's nightmare. The walls and windows were covered with fly-paper. A sickly-sweet smelling mist hung in the air. At first I thought it was a humidifier with some ghastly odour sold by The Company, but then I saw the cans. The floor was covered with bug-spray cans. They lined all the windows. They hung from air-fresheners tacked to the ceiling. The coffee table was covered with dead insects. Flies, wasps, silverfish: they were all there. Piles and piles of corpses.

The pilgrims were aghast. "That's not The Company's merchandise," they whispered to each other, pointing to the flypaper and cans of bug-spray.

More of the mist came from the bedroom. I pushed aside the flypaper hung like a bead curtain and entered the room. Terri was sitting in a lotus position on the bed. Her hands were in front of her, and each held a can of "Raid". Her face was covered in cream and a bandana was over her nose and mouth.

"It's the larvae," she said. "We have to get the larvae. Until then there will always be flies and other bugs."

We spent several days with Terri in her apartment. She would be in a trance most of the time, snapping out occasionally to utter a non-sensical phrase or spray a swath in front of her. After several interviews with the mailman I thought I got a better understanding of what had happened.

It was the potato salad, he said. Terri was always a very clean person, and this summer was a bad one for fruit flies. One afternoon there were just too many buzzing around the salad and she had an epiphany.

"It was really something," said the mailman, his face glowing, "she just said something like 'I'll get them. I'll get them all.' I tell you, she's expanded my mind."

We left the next day, leaving Terri in charge of her own little domain. The Company was not interested in people who tried to solve problems. It only wanted to assuage the symptoms, not strike at the root. The larvae should be left alone. Terri had gone too far, she had gotten in too deep. Could she ever come back to Suburbia?

"The horror," Terri said as we left. "The horror."

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