The Man with Eight Pairs of Legs by Leslie Kirk Campbell

Author:Leslie Kirk Campbell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sarabande Books

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In Biebelnheim, rodents scuttled through the fields at night, black-bellied hamsters, the size of a young child’s shoes. Already, at nine, Reiner had not been like the other boys who loved to kill them. His father teased him for refusing to join in so he did, killing dozens of them with a trap that fit into their burrows and broke their necks. Twilight was the best time. The creatures thought themselves invisible. The little eyes gleamed. Reiner collected a dollar for each carcass from a tailor in the next town. It took the man three weeks to piece together a handsome cape with the miniature hides. The village priest promptly bought it for his kind, plump wife. She wore it on Christmas Eve.

And every day after that straight through Lent until the townspeople started sniping out of envy or boredom. Reiner assumed the entire village must have felt it, the bizarre beauty created from all those tiny deaths, this stunning metamorphosis of pests. But no one spoke of it. Young Reiner lay alone in his farmhouse attic mulling it over, but without the context or vocabulary such ruminations require. A few years later, that changed.

Returning home from soccer practice one afternoon at fifteen, he found his father—a head shorter than him by then—standing motionless in their garden in his yellow knee-high rubber boots, his upper body crawling with feral kittens. The setting sun lit the man’s stocky silhouette from behind, etching his head and arms in a lattice of gold. Oddly, he tolerated the mewing creatures, the scene as beautiful as it was frightening. Here was the man who barked orders at him, who humiliated him, who slaughtered pigs and drank his own homemade Eiswein until he snored at the table, yet who today was a conduit to a liminal world, a mystical place that defied, incomprehensibly, the demands of a normal day.

“Reiner! Komm zu mir!” his father had called when he saw him, but Reiner, catching his mother’s petulant eye in the kitchen window, walked past him and sprinted upstairs to his attic to reread the Heidegger chapter from Gymnasium that he hadn’t understood. The philosopher’s concept of Being in the World (In-der-Welt-sein)—a preintentional openness to true existence, one that would transcend the stink of sugar beets and his father’s insults—suddenly made perfect sense.

That same month Reiner began riding his bike ten kilometers to the home of his philosophy teacher for late-night discourse. The two could spend hours debating the merits of a single phrase, like Im Befremdlichen wandert, the concept of wandering in estrangement, until his exhausted teacher, folding his rimless glasses and tucking them into their case, finally showed him the door. Reiner, elated, would ride home under the immensity of night’s dome flushed by their surgical splicing of thought. At graduation, the elder man gifted him a signed edition of Sein und Zeit.

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