In the Dead of Night
Photo: Joshua Ganderson via Flickr. It must have been late February when the ants first arrived, though I can’t be sure. They slipped into our house the way ants always do: silently, easily, without notice. Even after I caught sight of a few—a pair perched on the lip of the sink one morning, another swept into the dustpan along with bits of construction paper and spilled raisins at the end of a day—I paid them scant attention.
Now, when I think back to those weeks in an attempt to pinpoint the ants’ arrival, I can recall surprisingly little, only that the days were ordinary, made up of everyday moments that seemed, at the time, entirely unremarkable: Lingering at preschool drop-off to watch my daughter join hands with her teacher. Sharing a park bench with strangers. Squeezing eight chairs around a table meant for six to eat dinner shoulder to shoulder with friends.
It’s not until a few weeks later that my memory sharpens.
On this mid-March morning I wake before sunrise, switch on a lamp, and find, crossing the fir planks of the living-room floor, a thick trail of ants. They’re not the usual tiny ants that arrive every year when the weather warms, but some kind of carpenter ants I’ve never seen in my house before, with big sturdy bodies more than half an inch long. Head, abdomen, thorax: a row of three black beads strung together.
I watch them for a moment—each one moving with that particular ant industriousness, that nose-to-the-grindstone fervor, as if they’ve no idea how small they really are—and then follow their path up a wall and onto the kitchen counter, where I find an apple pocked with holes. Inside the tunnels ants hunch in pairs, working their jaws over the flesh. I lift the apple by the stem and rinse it under a stream of water, but the ants cling to the fruit, refusing to be washed away. Only after I give up, turn the water off and set the apple down, do they release their grip, and, all at once, as if part a single body, crawl swiftly out of their crevices, back across the counter, and down the wall.
By the time the sun rises, the line of ants has vanished and schools have been officially shut down. My daughter’s preschool teacher sends an email suggesting thoughtful ways to discuss the changes with our children without causing too much alarm. We might consider describing the closures as town-wide “rest days,” she offers. And so, though soon enough my daughter will learn the words “quarantine” and “lockdown” and “shelter-in-place,” it is this term—the rest days—that I use when I explain why school is canceled, why we can’t go to the library, why she won’t have a birthday party with her friends this year.
The ants seem to be nocturnal; all but a few lingering insects disappear in the daytime. These wandering creatures unfailingly end up in the He shrieks when he spots an ant making its way across the living-room floor. He lays on his belly and squirms after it, working his chubby fingers around its body until he manages to pick it up. Then, with the ant cupped in his palm, he rocks it back and forth, making shushing sounds as if lulling it to sleep. When the ant drops through his fingers or scurries up his arm, he searches frantically, calling out,
