After they have finished mating, the female mantis will bite off her partner’s head and devour the rest of him as a post-nuptial dinner, Lord Attenborough suddenly crackled out of the radio.
Buddy was about halfway through his drive from Chemainus to Victoria when it short-circuited and switched on. He knew the road well enough to negotiate its twists and turns on autopilot and had been thinking about his upcoming appointment with Leanne. As for the scenery, he had willed himself not to be distracted by its modest grandeur.
“What the…” he jabbed the radio’s on/off button angrily. It was tuned sketchily to a country rock station south of the border, the mournful twang of a guitar and nasal lament of a jilted cowboy lover barely audible through the static. Buddy punched the on/off button again, cutting short the torture.
Thank you, Lord Attenborough said.
Sexual cannibalism, like many forms of animal behaviour, is rooted in the will to survive, he continued. Indeed, in this case, it is rooted in the will to propagate and continue existing by transmitting our own genetic profile through the DNA of our offspring. Having achieved his life’s climax by fertilizing his partner’s eggs, what better use for a male praying mantis than to make a meal of him, thereby nourishing the female and increasing the odds that his and his mate’s offspring will be born?
Praying mantis and some species of spider are best known for their cannibalistic, post-coital behaviour. But cannibalism, in a more general sense, is not uncommon. Many species, including humans, will devour their own kind, given half a chance…
“How do I turn you off?” Buddy asked. Politely, in deference to a man whose life’s work he admired.
Lord Attenborough paused.
“I have thoughts of my own, which I need to focus on right now, and your fascinating program is making that difficult.
No response.
“I’m meeting my wife in an hour and need to be prepared.”
There are many strategies employed by male members of a mating tryst to escape the less than romantic embrace of a hungry lover after the purpose of sexual intercourse has been achieved. But before considering avoidance, we should take a look at some of the factors that might trigger a cannibalistic episode. One such trigger is called ‘aggressive spillover’—an aggressive female simply mistakes her lover for prey…
“Please!” Buddy pleaded.
Lord Attenborough paused…
Another hypothesis (and when it comes to sexual cannibalism, many of our explanations are unproven) is called ‘mate choice’. If the desired female doesn’t consider the courting male up to snuff, she eats him rather than allowing him to mate. This prevents his undesired fertilization of her eggs and increases her chances of survival and meeting a more suitable paramour.
“For god’s sake!” Buddy wanted to pull over and bail out, escaping the prattling radio, but he was already late for his encounter with Leanne, and there aren’t many convenient shoulders on the upper reaches of the Malahat.
Lord Attenborough paused. Then continued.
The wary male will perfect his courtship display to avoid being devoured before, during, or after copulation. Nuptial gifts can increase the odds of survival significantly. The paramour presents his darling a meal to feast on, and while she’s distracted eating his offering, he inseminates her and gets away before she manifests signs of indigestion…
“Enough!” Buddy thumped the steering wheel, then corrected course before ending up in the ditch.
Lord Attenborough paused.
Legal turn-offs are few and far between heading south on the Malahat. Buddy drove on. But he felt dangerous—that he might have to resist a sudden urge to swerve into the oncoming traffic, a pending psychopathy that had always been there in his gut, just waiting for this fertile moment.
“Thank you, David,” he grumbled.
“Eyes on the road, Hope!” he course corrected again, his panic subsiding and normalcy returning as he drove down the familiar stretch through Goldstream Provincial Park then into Langford. But his interlude with Lord Attenborough left him shaken, haunted by a premonition that when he arrived at his destination, he might turn left off Craigflower onto Sunnyside and find himself in a place he’d never been.
A stupid thought, but…
The houses might look the same, but you’d somehow know that ‘ordinary people’ wouldn’t be found under those mismatched roofs anymore, but beings who fit a newly conceived notion of humanness… Humanness? What kind of word is that? Buddy frowned thinking about it, doubtful now about the very notion of humanity as an infusing essence.
He rolled on in a mindless reverie that wouldn’t coagulate into some identifiable thing you could point a finger at and say, There I am! That’s me. He seemed to be floating inside the Matrix, but not physically present—a ghost, imagining a world beyond the windscreen.
By the time the Trans-Canada had inevitably bifurcated into the arterial mass of Victoria proper, he felt lost, not knowing if the familiar routes went in the right directions. Instead of trees, granite, glimpses of ocean, he was confronted with the concrete and uncompromisingly three-dimensional architecture of mid-sized urbanity, which felt strangely foreign, as if he’d blundered into a habitat where he didn’t have a clue how to survive.
I’ve only been gone four days, for christ’s sake! Can I have lost my bearings that quickly?
There was no time for thinking, though. The metal herd jostled along its traditional corridors with threatening urgency and no patience for the faint of heart. No choices left, he realized too late. Exit onto Burnside, take a right onto Tillicum, left on Craigflower, then left again at Sunnyside. The Matrix knew the route by heart, and he had to trust its instincts.
“I’m doing the right thing,“ Buddy remembered, pulling up to what was now Leanne’s place and parking illegally because Gloria’s car was in the drive, leaving no room for him.
Next: Threshold