TERMITES IN MY BRAIN

by Jane Ellen Stevens

It was about 1 a.m. Sitting at my desk on the second floor of an open-air house, in Bali, Indonesia, I'd been working late on a story. Six wide spaces-it's difficult to call them windows since only roll-down bamboo shades blocked the sun or rain-opened to a wide avenue of grass, palm trees and shrubs, and, beyond, layers of emerald green rice paddies.

TERMITE PHOTO COURTESY OF VA TECH WOOD SCIENCE/CARLILE PRICE

During the day, birds and butterflies used the second floor, which served as my bedroom and office, as a shortcut, soaring or fluttering through the northern side to the southern. At night, I often left on a single light bulb hanging from the center of the room to attract insects, so that bats would silently whisk in and circle for a late snack.

This night, though, I didn't turn on the light. In the air were thousands of tiny termites that had blossomed from the grass at dusk. I had amused myself by ripping off their wings and waving them at the tokay geckos-eight-inch-long spotted lizards that are smarter than you might think. The geckos rushed down the walls from the ceiling beams and waited for me to place their treats on the floor.

Several hours later, the geckos occupied in their midnight territorial battles, the termites were just plain aggravating. I'd turned on a small light atop my desk to distract them from my computer screen so that I could continue working.

And then, stuck on the phrasing of a sentence, I heaved a sigh. It was a mistake. A termite rode up my nose on the inhale. It clung to my nasal passage on the exhale, and on each subsequent and increasingly frantic snort and sneeze. In fact, fighting against these tides of air, the insect tenaciously crawled toward my sinus cavities.

Paralyzed by this quandary, I debated waking my friends, who lived next door. They were American; they might understand. Or I could wake the young Balinese man who helped manage the bungalows. Thinking it through, I realized that their reaction would be the same: hilarity. This would risk waking the rest of the compound, because no one had walls thicker than a layer of bamboo.

While waiting for the termite to choose some fork in the nose that would move me to a decision, I reflected on a writer's life in Bali. I had a love-hate relationship with the place, tipped toward the side of love. In many respects, doing science writing in another country is a challenge. I lived on the cheap, for an ex-pat-in a two-story bungalow on the outskirts of Ubud, a rural town of 3,000 people. It had no hot water, a toilet that had to be manually flushed with a scoop of water from a deep square tub, a tiny refrigerator in a tiny kitchen, and no lights stronger than a 40-watt bulb. Power ebbed and surged to such extremes that I bought a special transformer. The humidity was so overwhelming that green mold grew on the inside of my camera lens and on my floppy disks (I lived in Bali from 1991-94). My fingers sweated so much that the letters of my computer keyboard disappeared.

The bungalow's owner was kind enough to give me a key to the cupboard where they kept the phone in the open front office. He let me rig up a contraption so that I could plug my computer into a phone wire and send e-mail, which I always did at odd hours, factoring in the 17-hour time difference to the States and the two-dollar-a-minute phone rates during prime time. Of course, finding the hardware that would enable me to set it all up meant riding on the back of a motorcycle to the big city of Denpasar an hour away and searching in one electronics store after another.

I had no car, so to keep up with the world (pre-Internet cafe and World Wide Web), I bicycled a mile and a half into town every day and bought an International Herald Tribune. Indonesia's censors always drew black marks across any bare breasts appearing in paintings or statues advertised at auction by Sotheby's.

It was a place where everything had to be done by hand. There were no microwaves, no washing machines or dryers, no automatic coffeemakers. Because few people had refrigerators, and those available were very small without icemakers, shopping had to be done daily at the farmer's market. There were no fast-food restaurants and no supermarkets in Ubud. So, "my staff," as a visiting friend once termed them, freed me from this daily drudgery and gave me the hours I needed to find stories, traipse around to do the interviews (no phone interviews-they were considered crass), and write.

In other aspects, I lived very well. The young man who was assistant manager of where I lived insisted upon cleaning my bungalow (even giving me a lecture when I wanted to make my own bed) and cooked for me three or four days a week. I gave him a little extra money, always helpful in a land of low wages. A young woman who had married at sixteen and immediately had a child-fairly normal for Bali-washed and ironed my clothes, also for a little bit of money. (She later accepted my offer to pay for English classes and now manages her own jewelry export business.) Another young man who did labor around the place became my assistant-he found a store that had a copy machine, picked up supplies, searched out good electronics stores, and often served as my guide when I had to track down story sources. (He recently graduated from university, an education subsidized by myself and a friend, and is starting his own business.)

About once a month, I endured a bout of homesickness, usually when I tired of wading through a day in a different language, or couldn't find an interviewee because Bali's maps can't be accurate (for military reasons), or simply missed modern conveniences.

And, of course, when termites were tunneling through my brain. Or at least that's what it felt like. I rocked back and forth, trying not to scream. I paced, as it crawled and tickled and tortured. Finally, I could feel it heading toward my throat. I held on until I could no longer suppress my gag reflex and coughed out the termite.

Too jangled to go to sleep, I turned off my computer, and flipped on the 40-watt bulb overhead to attract the termites and, in a weak effort to exact revenge, the bats.

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Jane Stevens is a freelance multimedia journalist in Davis, Calif.

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