And insect life is not the only life visible in the window. Crawling onto the pane, from the wooden frame to the right, is a neon-pink gecko, the back half of whose body still lies outside my line of sight. Pressed against the glass, its torso seems unusually magnified. For some reason the creature appears so close (though it is in fact four feet from where I sit) that its three-inch body looks hallucinatorily huge. The slowness with which it lifts each leg, the effort and heaviness of each step: I could be watching not a real-live gecko on my windowpane, but film footage of Godzilla on a television screen. Of course if I compare the gecko to another object for scale (my desk lamp, for example), I can tell that it’s not much larger than my finger; but when I stare just at it, I’m able to magnify it to monstrous, macropsia size again. (At such moments I’m as fascinated by the sight of it as I first was by Godzilla, the 1998 American version of which I had to beg my father to bring me to see the summer it was released. Seated beside him in the theater, I remember peering up at the screen and waiting impatiently for Godzilla, whom I had only glimpsed in miniature—in tantalizing split-second flashes—in the television commercials. The movie’s marketing campaign, I remember, emphasized the enigma of the lizard, refusing to reveal his body in advance. Instead city buses bore full-width ads reading ‘HIS FOOT IS AS LONG AS THIS BUS,’ and skyscrapers were draped with banners reading ‘HE’S TWICE AS TALL AS THIS SIGN.’ The actual design of the creature was kept carefully shrouded in industry mystery: until the film was released, Godzilla remained invisible. I was anxious to see him for the first time, so my father took me to the theater on opening night. Whenever that gigantic and terrible lizard finally did appear onscreen, I could not look away. I would enter—my father told me afterward—a trance of attentiveness, during which I was able to go whole minutes without blinking.) Now I watch as the gecko works to pull its hind section onto my windowpane. With its two forelegs, it drags itself gingerly along the glass, taking tentative, cat-burglar steps, peeling its toes from the window’s surface. When the gecko raises and extends its right leg, it pivots its torso to the left, and when it raises and extends its left leg, it pivots its torso to the right, so that its body makes a sinuous, slow-motion swishing pattern as it swings its tail for balance (though I cannot yet see its tail, I can very well imagine its swishing, for the gecko’s distinctive, saurian sashay seems to mirror those of its skeletally identical ancestors: the lizard, the dinosaur, and the crocodile. Indeed, the little gecko resembles nothing so much as a windup toy crocodile, or rather—considering the rubbery texture of the gecko’s body—a gummi crocodile [for instance, the tricolor gelatin alligators that my father bought for me at the theater’s concession counter before Godzilla: their tails red, bellies yellow, heads green.