a thing with teeth

It’s predictable, really, that I should be standing over a pile of laundry, smoothing out the cracked vinyl teeth of a monstrous snake-dragon-dinosaur style beast with my fingers, folding Adam’s favorite t-shirt, flashy with the logo of the Loch Ness Monster roller coaster, when it comes to me that generally my view of things is much too small, small like I am, and so limited.

By comparison with God, who has no beginning or end, I’m like a spiritual two-year-old, my personality too big for my diminutive size, my will informed by my immature understanding of the way of things.  I practice saying no like rebellion is a rite of passage, and sometimes deep down I honestly believe I could do okay on my own.

Adam had marched, on that trip to Busch Gardens, into the park beneath the sweeping shade of big-armed trees, talking about the Griffon, a ride described by the park as “a floorless coaster with a 205-foot drop.”  We could hear it off somewhere to the right, hurtling through the sky above those trees, could hear the riders’ screams, could see it looping like sky-blue iron ribbon.

“You want to do that one first?” I had asked him, looking up into his lean, angular face, having already begged off the crazy coasters which my mind loves and these days my body cannot abide.  I would sit and watch, I’d said.  I would take pictures.

We weren’t sure what to expect with Adam on the roller coasters this time, because while Riley tends to daredevil about absolutely any kind of ride, Adam tends to love wild water rides and cringe over pretty much everything else.  In any case, this love for theme park rides is one of the ironies about our Autistic two that we can’t quite understand, a fist-in-the-air defiance, really, against the boundaries within which they typically feel compelled to live.

As it happened, we had entered Busch Gardens beside The Loch Ness Monster, with its sun-yellow interlocking loops, and stood not more than a few feet from the entrance.  Busch Gardens had given the tremendous lizardesque monster teeth, a snarling bite that lunged forth out of the sign on the way into the ride, and, as I watched Adam taking all this in, I remembered how even the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer lion, snarling briefly from our television screen, usually sent Adam into hiding in the alcove next to our downstairs bathroom, how he would press his body up against the wall and peer cautiously around.  Is that thing gone?

We had taken our young adults to see Jurassic World in the theater a few years ago, and Adam kept covering his eyes with his hands, kept yelping in hilarious falsetto every time a dinosaur opened its mouth on the big screen.  All those teeth.  I remember wondering if what I enjoyed as a fiction, a fun special-effects feast for my imagination, he experienced as a real possibility.

Interesting, that the book of Genesis describes our enemy—the tempter, the evil enticer, the father of lies who comes to steal and kill and destroy—as a snake.  On Sunday school felt boards and coloring sheets, at least back when Kevin and I were kids, artists often depicted him as a pesky little baby green tree snake with a crafty smile and a bright red forked tongue, but never any teeth.  Teachers would talk in quiet voices about that fork, how he speaks with forked tongue, how it betrayed his deceptive nature.  In an admirable effort not to widen our little eyes or enlarge him in our imaginations, content creators chose to convey the general impression of an annoying trickster, but also, he looked like a cartoon, like the troublemaking villain in the Saturday morning specials we watched in our pajamas.  He was a fiction, a feast for our imaginations even, but not, unfortunately, a very real possibility either in personality or the capacity for harm.  I did not want to hide in an alcove and press my body against a wall; I did not think it pertinent to know how to avoid him or conquer him.  And this is unfortunate, because while the ancient Biblical narrative seems not to set out to inspire a sense of fear in the reader, it does, in meditation, leave me aware of a very real enemy of the sort Paul would later describe as a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour.

All those teeth.  And if a thing has teeth, it can bite.  More than merely a pesky idea, a toothy beast can devour, can hunt, can kill.  Eve had been hunted in that garden; look close and that can’t be missed.

“Look, we’re right here,” Kevin had said that day at Busch Gardens.  Funny how they’d made a garden—of all things—out of this place of thrills and screams and toothy creatures.  There were trees, two sprawling ones, in fact, reaching, making a canopy over the place where we stood.  Kevin had gestured toward The Loch Ness Monster, had ventured, “We could just go on this first?”

We could see, could hear that The Loch Ness represented only a slightly milder threat than The Griffon.  Griffons, you may know, are mythological creatures with the body of a lion and the head and wings of an eagle.  It’s no accident that they’ve drawn the logo at Busch Gardens with the f’s in the word extended, long and sharp, like fangs.  Something anyway, maybe it was only the grit in the sound coming through the trees, made us think that Adam’s inaugural coaster ride might better not be that.  Riley, on the other hand, looked all yes, her eyes glinting with fierce joy as she scanned the horizon.

Adam, not easily dissuaded, murmured griffon, griffon, right now, under his breath, as Kevin scanned Adam’s body for anything that might fly off during the ride and began handing me whatever might easily hinder their progress.  It was a disarming that in its way also was an arming, Kevin’s hands gently gliding over Adam’s shoulders, preparing, father’s watchful eyes assessing.  I said griffon, Adam implored, but faintly, his eyes cast down and away, griffon, griffon, griffon.

“Next,” Kevin finally said, turning Adam by the shoulders toward The Loch Ness Monster.  “We’ll do that one next, if you want.”

He did not, as it turned out, want.

I am still mulling all this far into the evening, after The Loch Ness Monster t-shirt has already made it back out of the neat pile I left in Adam’s bedroom, after Adam has showered and thrown the clean, sun-bright thing on his still wet back and wandered downstairs for dinner; after Kevin and I have retired to the soft corners of the sofa and are watching a television show.

The investigators on NCIS Sydney happen to be—wouldn’t you know it—puzzling over the theft of an inland taipan, the most lethal venomous snake in the world.  I can’t help it, I’m Googling, wanting to know if it’s true what they say in the show, that a drop of its venom could kill hundreds.  True, yes, but it’s one bite, not one drop, and the image that loads on my phone shows a massive snake, that lives, of all places, in the Australian desert.  This is no nonvenomous baby green snake with scales the color of lush grass.  In the picture, this creature rises up off the desert dust looking as wide as my forearm, with fangs each one as big and long as a couple of my fingers pressed together.  I glance at my hand and back down at the phone.  In the show, they catch one and plop it in a pillowcase with one gloved hand, but I look back at that picture and imagine it would take more than one person to lift, and full suits of armor to completely avoid those fangs.  There’s no bright flicker of forked tongue, either.  This thing has teeth, that’s what I’m thinking, my mind back on that Loch Ness Monster t-shirt, feeling the scaly-rough vinyl with my fingers, all those cracks softened from all the wear and washing and folding.

Kevin says their screams were different, Riley’s and Adam’s, on that roller coaster, Riley sounding all adventurous, triumphant glee turning at once into bold, grace-rolling laughter, and Adam screaming like all those monster teeth had him by the leg, captive, devouring.  This was of course why, when they got on the ride with the rows of two, Kevin had planted himself behind Riley but next to Adam, so Adam could easily find his father beside him.

I tell Kevin about the picture I found of the inland taipan.

“You know, I don’t think we need to be afraid of the enemy,” I say, thinking all the way back to Genesis, “because he’s already been defeated, but I do think I’d do well to think of him in more accurate terms.  How will I think about arming myself for battle, say, about the crucial nature of union with Christ, if I know that real evil—not a fiction nor a pesky little annoying thing, but a massive ugly thing with teeth, lies and lurks, rises from the desert dust, looks to steal and kill and destroy?”

Makes it harder to disregard spiritual warfare, to think of it like an entertaining side hustle or a niggling itch, as though it would be just be a good idea to get dressed for a fight.  Makes all those Word-urgent reminders—Be alert! Stand firm! —make a whole lot more sense.

Paul wrote that our battles in this war are not against flesh and blood, but against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.  So, when I think I’m fighting my neighbor or some political party or even a threatening idea, I’m thinking too small.  I’m thinking me-sized; I’m thinking felt boards and coloring sheets.  I’m not thinking about spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms, or of prowling lions, or of a snake with venom enough to kill hundreds in a single bite.  And I’m definitely not thinking that maybe the bite is actually mine, right into something God forbids for love; not recognizing that’s just the same as evil sinking its teeth right into me.

On the other side of The Loch Ness Monster, Adam changed his tune.  Stood looking pale at the edges and a little shaken, glanced around like he was looking for a lion lurking behind one of the trees.

“Now,” Kevin had said, clapping a hand firmly on Adam’s shoulder.  “You ready to ride The Griffon?

“No,” Adam had responded immediately, turning to look at a nearby map of the park, scanning, his finger in the air.  “Sesame Street Forest of Fun.  Elmo’s Castle. Yes.”

But in the gift shop at the end of the day, Adam had chosen that gaudy yellow t-shirt with its toothy monster like a trophy of war, and he’s been wearing it out ever since, while yet the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer lion roars and he hides all over again, peering cautious from the alcove in our living room.  It’s like he wants to remember what it felt like to wrestle the beast and win, like he wants to keep declaring himself solidly on the side of the victor.