On how I became a Brazilian Mosquito Researcher’s Assistant:

*I’m not going to say it was my first choice in an occupation when I made the move to Brasilia, the capital of Brazil, to become an assistant to a Mosquito Researcher. But you know, the lady that I was traveling with, she wanted to settle down for a while as it was getting to her---the traveling thing. There was of course the question of where we were going to get the money to survive. What with her being a student working on her Ph.d thesis concerning the rudimentary regeneration of Titin (or Connectin, as it is otherwise known, and whose own chemical name of 189,819 letters is still disputed as being the longest word in the English language), and me being one whose specialty at the time was making snowmen out of marshmallows (avec those little silver candies that cakemakers use when they are making cakes), between the two of us we had enough to by some cheddar fries at best.

*So after roaming round the capital for a couple of days looking for conventional work at a tourist trap or whatever, we decided to answer an ad in the local rag. The ad in question had been put out by a specific scientist’s team for his upcoming study to be done, as it was, two weeks before we had landed our own feet in beautiful Brazil. That meant that we might still have a chance to piggyback on what in all reality was an ad that should have been taken out of the rag a week ago. Still, I must admit it was her idea. I was just about ready to get the eff out of dodge and mosey on down further south. We got lucky though, and after calling and leaving a message, it wasn’t much more than a day of continued starvation and arguing before the good doctor did call. When he did, we were ecstatic!

*Dr. Wrett D. Heinneburg phoned us in the midday and she answered as it was her number (she had made the ad---all in Portuguese, as I don’t speak a word of Portuguese), and she thought he might speak the native language of Brazil. As this was not the case, Dr. Heinneburg spoke English with a bit of a German accent. He said that his then-assistant, a Mr. Helge Zieler who was currently working in Africa (mosquito research, more specifically that which dealt with malaria), would not be there to join him in Brazil. While he had formed a pretty solid team already, he had found that he needed a couple more people to complete the crew. When he mentioned the pay, both myself and my partner, our mouths seemed to drop in unison. We hadn’t seen any kind of real money…well, to tell you the truth we had never seen any real kind of money, and so this opportunity was one of great rarity and great payoff if we in fact completed it to his utmost desire. She didn’t even ask what it was that we would be doing for the doctor. She simply accepted. He told her that we would both be involved with a very physically demanding activity for the benefit of malaria research. He went on to bore her with the fact that our part in the research could eventually help millions of people and blah blah blah. We were starving…well, probably not as much as the millions of people that we could eventually help…but we were starving, and we wanted the moola. Enough said.

*When we arrived to meet the doctor and his crew at his office in the capital, his right hand lady informed us that we would all soon be making a flight via plane to the amazon rainforest, where the work was already being done. My partner had believed that we would meet the good doctor there in the capital, but things never work so smoothly, do they? We came to the conclusion that meeting him at the job site would be just as good as any time. We had, after all, no other place to go. We had already agreed to work for the man, and lastly, did I mention that we were hungry?

*We arrived at the main camp, and it was like something straight out of a National Geographic episode. There was khaki and olive clothing as far as the eye could see. The doctor was in the office tent and his right hand lady led us there, promising that it would only be a half hour before the luncheon that was planned in honor of our arrival. I shook his hand, she shook his hand, and we both listened to him blab on about the study and the institute and this and that, but neither one of us really cared. All we wanted was food, and that was promised to us by him, somewhere amidst the rest of his lecture that seemed to have no end.

*After he was done blabbing, we made a bolt for the feast that had been set up for the crew’s luncheon, and the both of us filled our bellies like we had been dreaming of since we had got the doctor’s call the day before. It was an amazing feeling to stuff these once empty stomachs full of whatever we could fit in them! And when we were both kicking back on the stretch out chairs that had been laid on the beach near the camp, one of the crewmates sat down next to us and filled us in on the particulars of our job.

*We were to be food for the mosquitoes! And yes, when I first heard this, after almost involuntarily spitting out an obscenity under my breath, I found the irony deafening---that we had both been so hungry and had just finished stuffing ourselves, and now were being told that it was all for the betterment of these rare insects that lived in the rainforest. My partner looked at me with great fear. It was something I had never really seen in her, as she was someone whom I felt had great strength. She mouthed to me some words that I can’t repeat, but I can assure you that they were not optimistic, and they weren’t the best things to be said about the great doctor and his crew at that time. Nevertheless, I understood our predicament with an odd sort of clarity, given the situation at hand and its obvious danger, if not just general pain and annoyance.

*It was the Anopheles Darlingi, which unlike other mosquitoes that the doctor had caught before in Africa and whatnot, was not easily amused by parlor tricks like shiny lights and the wind traps that were usually used by the crew in capturing them. Instead, these intelligent products of natural selection had to be lured in by actual human bait. As it was the biting habits of these creatures that were to be studied, yes, that meant that my partner and I, as well as another couple of unfortunate souls were to be encapsulated in a sort of mosquito buffet tent, where the winged bloodsuckers could come and feast. That feast took place in the early evening, when the Darlingi was most likely to show up for dinner, as it was the prime time for mosquito dinners apparently.

*Needless to say, after hearing that we were about to be chewed up into a fine fleshy pulp, the two of us, both myself and my partner, were a bit reluctant to live up to our end of the bargain that we had formerly agreed to. The problem was that now that we had both eaten a great amount of expensive food which had been provided for us, if we were held to pay for the bountiful meal, we simply wouldn’t be able to and we would end up looking at a financial penalty which would be followed by something worse. The fact remained that if we did not go through with this and allow ourselves to be eaten up by the rare mosquito society, then we ourselves would not be able to continue eating, as we had no money to use to eat as we continued to travel (and none to provide shelter for that matter) and no money to use to pay of that food which we had already consumed. We were effed as the kiddies say---caught between a rock and a hard place.

*We were first told to change into something that would make our bodies more available for the bugs to chow down on. I was given a pair of Speedos which cupped my junk rather tightly and was subsequently given a stick of butter which had been sitting under a hot lamp for a short bit of time. I had to rub that melting butter all over my body, from head to toe. I was instructed to cover the back of my neck, behind my ears, and especially under my arms and all over my chest and legs. I was told that the bugs would go for the broader pieces of me and therefore they had to be generously shellacked so that they would be drawn to them. My partner was told to put on this very light and skimpy two-piece, which left little to be desired as far as copping a peek, if you were a sexually frustrated scientist who had been in the rainforest a little too long without any time in the love shack. Still, she was a good sport and lathered herself up in the melted butter just like I did. After that, as the clock was turning past four in the afternoon, we were both led to our prospective tents.

*I was shown to my tent. It was made of a strong sort of mosquito netting which had a large hole around the bottom. This hole, I was told, was meant for the droves of mosquitoes which I was soon to find out would choose to make their early evening smorgasbord my legs. It retrospect, it was worse than just my legs, but for the sake of saving time, let’s leave it there. I was given a large sort of straw after I made my way into the tent, and after the bug attracting lights on the ground had been flicked on, I was told to lie down in the specially made tray which had been made to fit my body almost exactly. What I hadn’t been told was that there was a very thin layer of honey which had been poured within the whole of the thing and when I laid back in it, I was automatically disgusted! I was then instructed, as I moved slowly in my sticky buttery mess, that I was to suck quickly with my large straw, any mosquito that settled down to suck the blood out of my body. When I was given this little bit of information, I started to laugh. I couldn’t see how this would be possible. After all, there would only a be few that would zoom around me, and how could I possibly catch them in the short amount of time that they would stay in the tent? The crewmember assured me that I would have plenty of opportunities to catch them. And then I was told that sucking the bug through the straw would drop it in the bulb device that was near my mouth and release them in a bag that hung directly beneath.

*I liken the fear that I had when the crewmember left the general vicinity of my tent to something like torture victims in the Middle Ages must of had right before they had begun to be tortured. I was alone with the mosquitoes, and it did not take long for word to get out amongst their kind. I myself had always hated that infernal buzzing that unlike a bee’s was something more persistent but not as loud, which came and left around my ears when only a couple of the choice bugs were near. Now, the collective buzzing of groups of these rare little beasts seemed to me surreal and like something out of a cheap B-horror film.

*The first bite I probably didn’t even feel. I can’t say where the annoyance began, but within a half hour, I believe that the initial pain that was to prolong for what seemed like forever, started to rise throughout me. It was then that I saw all the little gray dots on my legs, pausing ever so lightly and drawing blood. I would instinctively smack some of them, often watching their bodies explode on my skin and leave the red blotches of blood, but I did give my best effort to catch them using the sucking device. I won’t lie, I was ambitious in the beginning. I felt that I was part of something bigger and that this “real job” that I was performing was something that I could be credited to. It was something of a door opener into a new career, one that would allow me to travel to other interesting places, all in the name of science. I kept telling myself that as my legs began to turn a different shade, something between the buttery flesh yellow that they had been, to the pink that you might find in a ripe grapefruit. It wasn’t the whole of my legs and thighs to begin with. The flush groups of bites and evidence of mass bloodsucking came initially in blotches like something of plaque psoriasis. While I was trying to suck and catch the few that I could, I wasn’t paying attention to the bites as they continued to occur on the back of my neck as well as the rest of my back. I only sort of feared the rapid acceleration of those bites that I could see, and wondered how long it would take for my legs to heal and clear up, after this proverbial hell was over with.

*As I was being bitten, I wondered about the health risks that I didn’t think of before signing the papers. I remembered the panic about the West Nile Virus which had taken place a few years back, when I was living in the states, primarily New York State. I thought that certainly that wasn’t the only thing besides Malaria which these things could bring. They did, after all, fly everywhere on the planet it seemed, and the more I thought about this fact, the more my heart beat faster.

*It was then that I became a bit woozy. My eyes began to flutter a bit and it was harder to keep myself propped up the way that I had been sitting, in order to observe my legs in the attempt to catch the bugs. My vision began to fog and the whole while that was happening, my mind wandered. I started to envision a very large female mosquito landing her self down upon the outer regiment of my skin and as she bit me she shot down her saliva. It contained the enzymes and proteins that it atypically does, killing off the feeling round the tiny wound, while at the same moment creating an anti-coagulant state which made the blood that she was looking for flow more quickly and into her little itty-bitty bloodsucking belly. And I thought of the sound it must make, magnified a million times, like it was being amplified from the largest speakers that I could imagine. That sound panged across my mental landscape filling my whole lucid nightmare with holistic flushed of “WHOOSH….WHOOSH…WHOOSH!” It repeated cyclically and within the rhythm I finally counted myself out the beats, unconscious.

*The next thing I remember was waking up in a hospital bed, somewhere back in the capital. The room looked like any other hospital room. I looked to my right and I was hooked up to an IV. Upon my awakening, a crewmember by the name of Stanley who had been sent to monitor my recovery, and who was sitting at my side, got up and immediately made a call on his cell to the doctor, or I assume whoever was representing the doctor at the moment. I presume it was to tell him that I had just awoke. Until I had had some food, I was falling back in and out of sleep, so I didn’t really have enough energy to eavesdrop on what had been said during the call.

*Within the time frame that I had been laying, honey-soaked and covered in melted butter within that death-trap of a mosquito tent, waiting for the rare Anopheles Darlingi to make its holy entrance, I underwent nearly 4,000 bites. The good doctor estimated that I had been bitten on something of an average of 20 bites or so per minute that I was sitting and then finally laying, half-nude and covered in disgustingness in that tent. The amount of mosquitoes that I actually caught in the special bagged-straw contraption is embarrassing to re-utter, however, I must state that I ended up getting more than my partner did.

*My partner and I had gained enough of the Darlingi between us where the doctor came through with the money that he promised us. However, as we both winded up in the hospital, and both of us not having any kind of insurance, we ended up using much of it to pay our hospital bills. After the ordeal, my partner decided that she had had enough of traveling, at least for a while, and she went back to her university town to work on her thesis. Our relationship ended, pretty much before it had even got started. And so I stayed on with the good doctor and his crew for the next 4 ½ years until my bloodstream was so tainted with various forms of Dengue, Viral encephalitis, SLE, EEE, and Yellow Fever, that I was forced to have a full Homologous blood transfusion. After that, I quit the study. Having left the crew on good terms, I earned a footnote in the good doctor’s book.