Where Do the Mosquitoes Go?

On fingerprints, snapping turtles, and the grace of small mercies

Lex E. Santí · A Key Therapy LCSW, PLLC

I was late. It was raining. The drive to Odessa is a little windy going from Tburg, and I had somewhere to be — the kind of official somewhere that does not forgive tardiness: fingerprints and a background check, the formal machinery of a New Jersey license, another state in the slow accumulation of permissions that will let me do the work I’ve been doing for years. You know the kind of errand. The kind that makes you feel like your life is actually a series of forms and check boxes and always feeling like you're in the wrong.

That’s when the mosquito showed up.

It emerged from somewhere in the car — the dashboard, the seat crack, the ambient mystery of all the things that live in our vehicles without our knowledge or consent — and began its lazy, infuriating orbit around my head. I was already running late. The road was slick. I needed this particular morning to cooperate.

Om Kali, Ka Kali Namaha

It’s the mantra I say. Kali — the Hindu goddess who brings things into the world and takes them out. She who holds the skull and the lotus. She who dances on the chest of Shiva not in cruelty but in the ecstatic forgiveness of impermanence. I try to believe in the love and kindness of all things, even the things that want to bite me. Even mosquitoes need a prayer. So I said one, and I meant it, even as I was swatting at the air with one hand and trying to keep the car between the lines with the other.

Finally, in what I can only describe as an act of inspired frustration, I took a blue pen — a pen, the thing I have always trusted most — and threw it at the corner of the front windshield. Then I threw it again. Not once but twice, because the first time felt inconclusive. And there, in the angle where the glass meets the frame, the mosquito finally went still. Not dead, I think. Just still. I noted this with something between satisfaction and guilt, and drove on to my fingerprinting.

· · ·

When I got back in the car, it was there again. Waiting. Moving a little — injured, I think, not gone. It did a slow, confused loop and retreated to the windshield, edging toward the gap between the glass and the dashboard, that thin dark corridor where small things disappear. I watched it and thought: that’s not nothing, that little life. That’s a whole arc.

Om Kali, Ka Kali Namaha

Which is when I noticed the turtle.

There was a swampy area next to the courthouse and there it was: a gigantic snapping turtle, in the middle of the road.

I pulled over. I got out in the rain. I tried first to kick it toward the shoulder — this was not my best idea — and then retrieved from my car a piece of plastic left over from the wheel well and used it to push the turtle, end over end, off the asphalt and into the field beyond the ditch. It landed on its feet. It stared at me. Not with gratitude. With the absolute patience of something that has been on this earth for longer than most of what I know. I took its picture. Then I got back in the car.

· · ·

I’ve been listening to Heavyweight lately — the podcast where Jonathan Goldstein helps people return to the moments in their lives they can’t stop thinking about. A man trying to find a version of himself that maybe never quite existed. People doing the improbable work of going back. I was driving through the rain thinking about that, and thinking about my own book, The Song of the Midnight Rider, about a man on a road of his own — a road that’s partly about drug running, partly about whether you can run from or toward a self in the same motion — and I was thinking about what it means to be trying to get people to listen. To follow someone into a story they didn’t know they needed.

And in the corner of the windshield, the mosquito retreated to its final station. Still breathing, I think. Or maybe not. Maybe it had finally gone wherever mosquitoes go when they disappear into the gap between glass and dashboard. I drove. I picked up my phone at a stoplight and said this out loud. This moment. These two creatures — one enormous, ancient, armored, unbothered; one minuscule, nearly invisible, a hum and a needle and a prayer — and me in between them, freshly fingerprinted, late, trying to love all of it.

I’ve been thinking about what a license means. The word itself: licentia, Latin, freedom, permission to act. And here I am collecting them — state by state, a little more official each time — while a mosquito teaches me something about persistence and a turtle teaches me something about patience, and neither of them applied for anything.

Maybe that’s it. Maybe the mosquitoes in the corners of our windshields are just the things we can’t quite bring ourselves to finish off, the ones we’ve injured without meaning to, the ones that keep circling. Maybe they find the gap and go still. Maybe they wait. Maybe they go wherever small, winged, persistent things go — into the next morning, the next road, the next corner of some other person’s glass.

I hope they find it. I said another prayer. I kept driving.