...who, for all I knew, could be a descendant of the great Spider Spirit...

...it stayed hidden all morning after I'd destroyed its web.

So, all that afternoon, and all that evening, the toilet remained uninhabited, as toilets are supposed to be. Who knows where the spider went. He was probably hiding behind the toilet, waiting for the insurance adjusters. I imagined he would be despondent, maybe having a crisis of faith, wondering why such bad things happened to good spiders. Certainly the insurance adjusters would be even less generous with reimbursements this time, now that the spiderweb had been wrecked twice. I wondered if they'd cop out altogether, attributing the devastation to an Act of God. (I confess that I felt strangely flattered by this "Act of God" scenario.)

And yet, the next morning, there was the spider in the toilet again! Back again, like the swallows to Capistrano. Back again, like the morning itself.

I knelt down in front of the toilet for a better look at the web—a position which also, unfortunately, gave me a better view of the toilet.

It was hard to understand why the little spider was so fond of not just any toilet, but mine in particular. The toilet's charms were as elusive to me as those of New Mexico. Why a toilet? Why mine? It was green, except for all around the edge of the seat, where the green had kind of chipped off. That part was white. The toilet seat looked like a big moldy bagel. As toilet seats went, it was definitely nothing special. Then again, my trailer was ugly and beaten up too, but it was home. Maybe that's how the spider felt about the toilet, if spiders are prone to such sentiments.

In contrast to my toilet, the spiderweb was a work of art. It was a masterpiece, a shimmering fiber-optic spirograph. It was modern, in a neo-primitivist kind of way. If the spider had thought to spin its web in a corner of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, someone in a black turtleneck would have put a little plaque on the wall that read, "Installation: Spiderweb, circa 5 A.M., artist unknown."

I wondered if the web was difficult to make. Did it just come naturally to the spider, the way I grew hair from my head without thinking about it? Or did the spider have to envision, plan, and count knits and purls? Did the spider need to learn from another spider, like the old Indian woman must have learned her craft from another Indian woman? And did the Little Black Spiders come up with that particular web design? Or did they assimilate the culture of another type of spider, like the Medium-Sized Brownish Spiders, or the Gigantic Spiders with Yellow Stripes?

Well. No matter my respect for this mini Christo and his skill at draping webs across toilet chasms, the web would have to go. Again.

I felt a bit sorry for the spider, who would surely be denied web insurance for the rest of his life. But the fact remained that he did not have a permit to live in my toilet. My toilet was not zoned spider-residential. There was important business that had to take place there, and he was interfering with it.

I got a broom and scooped the spider out of his web. He seemed nervous at the thought of being relocated, of having to begin anew in an unfamiliar place.

"This is really for your own good, you know," I assured him. "You're crazy to build webs in my toilet. There are no Prospects at all in my toilet. You'll never catch anything, and you'll just starve to death. I'm going to put you outside, where it's sunny and there's plenty of bugs to eat and you'll be much better off." I headed toward the promised outdoors. The spider rode on the broomstick like a teeny witch. It squatted aerodynamically and held on with all eight legs. I'm sure if I looked closely, I'd see forty little white knuckles.

But as I walked down the hallway, the spider got impatient (let's not say "antsy," since it's a stereotype that's disrespectful to ants). The spider started running all along the broom handle. I hurried forward and so did he, redundantly. He became like one of those type A folks who'll run on an escalator that's already moving them as fast as it can. In fact, the poor little spider was so anxious about getting to his ersatz California, that he ran right off the end of the broom.

This time cartoon logic did not help him; he fell. Maybe he made the critical error of looking down. If this were a cartoon, I guess he'd pause in midair, just long enough to hold up a little "OOPS!" sign and wave goodbye. These are the standard last rites afforded cartoon characters, to whom death happens so often that the ritual has become kind of cursory, like Las Vegas weddings and divorces.

As for spiders, I don't know if they have any last rites. They don't appear to have an organized religion. They seem to go through life alone, with no company except for the victims that fall into their webs. Do spiders care for their captives, offering words of peace and consolation before the final, lethal injection? Do they thank the spirits of their prey, the way some Indians would honor a speared buffalo? Are there differing degrees of faith among spiders regarding the existence of the Great Spider Spirit? Are spiders really no different than most humans: not quite sure they believe in God, so much as they fear God's absence?

Odds are the spider believes in something, even if he doesn't know what it is.

I wonder, did the spider glimpse a brilliant web, a mandala woven out of light, that flashed before his eyes as he plummeted to my floor?