A TIDAL wave of air sweeps into the house from the bell above the front door.
It crashes against the bodies of the family inside, sending powerful blasts into
the winding tunnels of their ears.
And nobody responds.
The tiny metal clapper pulls back and鈥攁bout two milliseconds after the
first strike鈥攇ives a second resounding whack to the curved metal bell.
Another giant wave of air races along a collision course with the humans.
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And still nobody responds.
The metal clapper hits again and again. Only at the 125th repetition, a
quarter of a second into the barrage that constitutes a seemingly continuous
ring, does the first of the humans begin to react. For we operate on an entirely
different time scale from the mechanical objects around us. Our reflex networks
are condemned to work through wet nerves and a sopping brain, leaving us
continually bewildered, lagging behind the real world outside.
Slowly, with the gravest of deliberations, the father鈥檚 eyes start to rotate
towards the sound source, sliding in the lubricated eye sockets of his skull as
12 miniature muscle cables that are anchored to his socket bones start to pull.
About 25 more aerial shock waves batter into the kitchen, and then, with their
slightly slower reflexes, the wife and son begin the concerned eye rotation
too.
By now the father is gearing up to an actual body twist. Tests have shown
that adult men tend to be high-speed marvels compared with women and children.
Soon all the family鈥檚 tendons are cranking and creaking as they pull on their
skeletons to get their heads and then their whole upper bodies to follow their
eyes. In under half a second鈥�250 bell thumps after the very
first鈥攅veryone is looking towards the sound.
To the door now, where a pretence of civility has to be given to the other
couple, who鈥檝e been invited as Christmas Day guests. Misunderstandings are easy,
for men tend to sidle up from the side when they greet someone, as a way of
showing nonhostility. Women, however, prefer to be approached cleanly from the
front, so they can see the other person head on. If anyone makes a wrong move,
suspicions can arise.
The adults burble greeting sounds, and sinuous forearm extensions with a
powerful pumping action begin. We take such handshaking for granted, but in the
mid-1800s English aristocrats were appalled at the lower-class American habit.
One English officer observing the Confederate Army couldn鈥檛 contain his distaste
at the way General Lee allowed subordinate officers to violate the sanctity of
his body in this way.
The members of each couple standing so awkwardly at the door have a great
deal in common. Eye colour matches in a married couple more often than it does
in random strangers. So too does arm length, length of ear lobes, the political
opinions of their parents, and even the probability that they鈥檒l end up as
psychiatric cases.
Almost all behaviour patterns, such as the amount of time spent watching TV,
merge in the middle as a couple ages, but not so IQ. Although this matches only
roughly at first, five or more years into a marriage the score of the partner
who had the lower IQ starts to rise.
Toxic fumes float into the house from the recently revving car now parked
outside, but people who have lived in a polluted city at some time in their
lives are protected to some extent. Their bronchial cells work more efficiently,
ferrying pollutants towards the throat, as do backup enzyme systems in their
blood. Families that have been long-term residents of Los Angeles, for example,
carry lots of cleansing glutathione in their blood, even after they鈥檝e moved
away. Blood tests show that families from rural areas do not.
Reflex action
The baby of the host family crawls out to explore, and immediately gets
lifted high, to be goo-gooed at, and have its little hands admired, and
generally be messed about. When the women face the baby, tiny muscles
controlling the pupils of their eyes suddenly tug wider. This happens whether or
not they鈥檝e had children. But it鈥檚 different for men: the pupils of those who鈥檝e
had kids reflexively widen, but those of the men who haven鈥檛 usually do not.
Into the kitchen now, to help with last-minute preparations, and who can
resist a quick taste of the Danish pastry on the tray? Its steaming white icing
looks delicious, which is just what the manufacturers wanted. This is why
they鈥檝e added glistening titanium dioxide to it鈥攖he same chemical in the
pots of white paint in the garage. Inside the delicacy, to make the brown,
caramel-suggestive swirls, the baker has probably added indelible rosin of the
sort scraped on violin bows. And to enhance the flour鈥檚 chewy texture, a little
sticky red algae might be added or, in the cheapest commercial brands, some nice
processed chicken feathers, or sometimes just proteins from the scraped belly
stubble of scalded pig carcasses.
The father turns to the fridge to get a drink to go with this scrumptious
mix. He鈥檚 likely to have trouble finding what he wants though, for men on
average are exceptionally obtuse at processing information in three dimensions.
Women generally navigate paths by recognising particular landmarks. Men tend to
ignore these and rely more on pure guesses of relative distances and angles. In
the refrigerator that might mean the wife knows precisely where to look for the
juice, past the milk and behind the jam. But the husband will more likely
struggle to find it by vaguely remembering it as being up and on the left. Men
also often have problems with simple inversion.
Higher levels of the male hormone testosterone sloshing about also seem to
hinder success. Men almost always do better at 3 D orienting in the springtime,
when their testosterone levels are at an annual low.
At last it鈥檚 mealtime, and the older kids are called down from upstairs. They
bring computer games, colourful tracksuits and also鈥攓uite regularly, in
even the cleanest of well-off homes鈥攆amilies of tiny exploring creatures
that stroll peaceably across human foreheads. They are especially fond of
teenage girls鈥� skin terrain, where they poke about for leftover acne cream, or
even just leftover mascara, which might make an especially nourishing meal.
These are demodex mites, and virtually all families have their own
populations. They鈥檙e nothing like awful, visible lice, and are far too small to
see with the naked eye. Under an electron microscope they look like clomping
mechanical cars. Adult demodex each have eight pudgy legs on which they waddle
slowly between their cosy homes in the follicles of our eyelashes. The cuddliest
newborn ones are entirely content down there, but at the age of three days their
childhood idyll must end. They take a water-slide ride up the
eyelash鈥攕urfing on the lubricating oils that seep up from its
root鈥攖o get to the windswept outer world. Tottering slightly, they emerge
onto the vast terrain of our eyelids.
A sudden blink from one of the humans at the dining table, and the demodex
feel their entire world shudder and shake. But this is a theological mystery
beyond demodexly comprehension, and the demodex simply get to work. Like cattle
on the Texan plains, they lower their mighty heads and feed from the nutritious
bacterial fields we kindly supply on our skin.
The human families lean their own heads forward at this point perhaps, to say
grace before the meal begins. It鈥檚 a practice more common in the US than in
Britain. So much so that, as the statistically deft sociologist Father Andrew
Greeley of the University of Chicago has pointed out, with prayer averaging five
times a week, a typical adult American is more likely to have prayed on a given
day than had sex.
There鈥檚 more conversation, but everyone鈥檚 waiting until the sacrificial
beast鈥攖he Christmas turkey鈥攇ets sliced open. Since flight muscles in
sedentary modern turkeys don鈥檛 get used much, there鈥檚 no reason for them to
store lots of energy-ready blood. That鈥檚 why breast meat is white. It鈥檚 the same
reason halibut and flounder and other deeply unadventurous
hey-let鈥檚-stay-and-look-at-the-bottom-mud-some-more sea creatures also have
white flesh. Only fast-swimming tuna and fast-running turkey legs provide darker
meat, from all the oxygen-storing red blood cells that soak darkly through
them.
The whitish turkey breast is also low-calorie, for excellent thermodynamic
reasons. Turkeys and small animals in general are so thin that most of their
bodies are quite close to the open air. They need to put what fat they have
right up there, near the surface, to insulate against heat loss. Stripping off
the skin means lifting off that blanket of fat.
What the baby gets to eat is a little less delightful. Some cheaper brands of
baby foods are more exotic than you might think. One of the favoured mineral
supplements is good old-fashioned chalk, while the paste used for hanging
wallpaper and the glue that coats the back of postage stamps help to turn it
into a thick slurry. In some cases, the 鈥渕eat鈥� advertised on the label will not
be from the cuts you find on the butcher鈥檚 counter.
The rebellious teenage daughter of the house can鈥檛 bear to be at the table,
and ostentatiously flicks through her magazine, chlorine fumes from the bleached
wood fibres billowing unseen around her head. She nibbles from her own store of
low-cal yoghurt, which isn鈥檛 as wise for a dieter as it seems. The sweet taste
of artificial sweeteners makes her body think it鈥檚 taking in sugar with every
spoonful. In anticipation, her blood glucose will go down by about 6 per cent.
But since no glucose actually arrives, her blood level ends up stuck down there.
Before too long she鈥檒l be hungrier than when she started.
After eating, the children adjourn early and settle on the sofa in front of
an action video, where they begin to fall into a metabolic state unique to TV
watching. Temperature, pulse rate and muscle tension go down so much that a
truly focused TV watcher is soon in the extraordinary position of burning about
13 per cent fewer calories than if he or she were doing nothing at all.
The adults still talk animatedly at the table, but not necessarily with much
mutual comprehension. About three-quarters of couples, at least in the US,
disagree on whether they鈥檝e had a deep conversation about feelings in the past
week, and about as many disagree on whether they鈥檝e had an argument. Up to a
third, if asked, will even鈥攜ou鈥檇 think this was hard to
confuse鈥攄isagree on how frequently they鈥檝e had sex in the past week.
Suddenly an alarm clock beeps, and the video is stopped mid-act as the adults
gather in front of the TV. As they watch Queen Elizabeth II on the screen,
ghostly fragments of her long-dead namesake, Elizabeth I, float around the
house, banging on the windows. She arrives because a human body contains more
than 1025 nitrogen atoms and, long after a person鈥檚 life has ended, a
sufficient number find their way into the atmosphere and drift into almost every
parcel of air.
At the same time, some of the electromagnetic waves from the TV transmitter
carrying the image of the living monarch whip through the bodies of everyone
watching. Others reach the surface of the Moon, skimming low over its craters a
bare second and a half after being loosed from the transmitter.
For the teenage daughter, who is now killing time with her friends on the
doorstep, a more pleasant Christmas day activity is about to begin. She takes
off her glasses, accepting the resultant 14-point lower IQ estimates that women
without glasses are given, to gain the higher attractiveness ratings that ensue.
Then she steps carefully under the mistletoe, lifts her arms around her
boyfriend, puckering outward the mucosal folds designed to keep her food from
spilling out, and waits for a kiss.
Lips are a frontier zone between the skin鈥檚 microbial life forms and the
quite different ones inside the mouth, and warfare between species that do land
there keep populations low. So as the kiss begins, there鈥檚 only a very slight
transfer of bacteria between the pair.
A little more pressure though鈥攖o really contact the beloved鈥攁nd
the mucosal folds start squashing open. A low-pressure suction tunnel is
created, linking the teenagers, and the first saliva streams begin
cross-sloshing, whipped up by the sudden internal gale. Outer layers of bacteria
get ripped loose from the teeth they鈥檙e clutching to, since the cement-like
ligand molecules that normally attach them are incapable of withstanding this
wind-tunnel fury. The stored sebum from subterranean follicles at the
corners of the pressing lips gets ripped upward too, and with it come great
spurting jets of flying acne bacteria.
It鈥檚 enough to give anyone pause, but who can resist something that feels
this trusting, this close? The kiss raises the boy鈥檚 body temperature and potent
androstenone molecules begin to fairly boil off him, accentuating desire.
Although men can barely smell the chemical on themselves, and strongly dislike
the smell on other men, women like it very much. Men will avoid a chair in a
waiting room that has been coated with it. By contrast, women will head towards
the chair, especially if they鈥檙e at the halfway point through their monthly
cycle, which is when fertility is at its peak.
Human beings aren鈥檛 simple chemical machines, but at moments like this, drunk
on the mix of crackling brain circuitry and androstenone clouds, we come pretty
close. Foreheads get pressed lovingly together, which allows eyelash-wandering
demodex mites to lurch across. Sometimes these invaders will crossbreed with the
previous incumbents to create a new, unique group. Sometimes the newcomers
simply drive the natives away.
In the intensity of kissing, an extra quantity of saliva is being produced.
This is rich in bicarbonate ions and, as it neutralises the acid which the
couple鈥檚 mouth-transferred bacteria are producing, it generates bubbles of
carbon dioxide, which stream from their lips. The bubbles tumble out and
upwards, passing Elizabeth II鈥檚 unseen electromagnetic signals, and soon float
over the house and families, and distant unheard sounds of merry Christmas
carols.