And once I admit to myself that the mites probably aren’t conscious, I can no longer conceive of their being ‘aware’ of the gecko in any sensate way. Certainly not via foveal eyes. But not via any other modality of perception either: not through little pinholes that could register its caliginous shadow overhead; nor even through little tympanic membranes that could hear its footsteps on the windowpane, or else detect the vibrations that each of those footsteps sends through the glass (in which scenario the mites’ bodies would be engulfed by the thrum of the gecko’s footfall, a seism similar to the iambic ‘foreboding rumble’ sound effect [‘da-DOOM da-DOOM’] that movies reserve for the laborious approach of off-screen giants [throughout Godzilla, I remember, I could feel this Dolby Surround Sound borborygmus, as if the darkened theater were itself digesting us]). Because if the mites were aware of the gecko, I reflect, they certainly would have fled from it long before it started darting its head and snapping at them. No, it’s obvious that their sensorium is too rudimentary to perceive the gecko, and that they didn’t even realize it was on the windowpane with them until some of the other mites began disappearing. It was likely just these traces of their brethren’s deaths that—in a kind of Stygian stigmergy—spurred each mite to flee. And even then, they were probably aware only that ‘something’ was causing the others to die, not the gecko specifically. What horror: what the mites experience themselves as fleeing from—namely, this face that is digging their graves—must have no face. The gecko must be an invisible or liminally perceptible threat, a blank cause whose effects they flee. (In which case it really would incarnate my childhood conception of Death, which of course I then personified as a giant, invisible lizard, which is exactly [horrifically enough ((it occurs to me now))] how the mites on the windowpane must be experiencing this gecko tonight. Lacking the sense organs necessary to detect it, they could not look it in the face if they wanted to. It is hidden inside Death’s spectrum, to the other side of the threshold of perception. And because the mites do not know to flee this giant, invisible lizard until it is basically already too late, they are like the men whom Allworthy disdains in the seventh chapter of the fifth book of Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, those men, he says, who do not think of death till they are in its jaws, and so who are incapable of seeing it at any distance. It is no different with mites than with men, I find myself thinking: when you bracket all thought of death within your mind, a blind spot must form, bracketing the sight of Death before your eyes.) Sitting up straight at my desk, I watch as the mites flee this lizard that they cannot see. The little gray dots of them on my windowpane drift steadily toward the reflection of my face, like iron filings swarming a magnet.