My Leech Journey, part three

The conclusion to my leech saga. One leech disappears, possibly into my cat. The final leech is confiscated by a special agent. Video and audio of confiscation are provided.

Summary of parts one and two: I ordered leeches for medicinal purposes. They arrived on September 3. One leech “ran away.” Two leeches sucked my blood. One sucked much more than the other. I called this one the big leech. I called the other one the small leech. I put them in a bowl with a rock, inch plant cuttings, and a sea shell.

Lali—the suspected/probable eater of “small leech.”

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September 14

In the morning, I was surprised to see the small leech on the tile floor, squirming, covered in dust and hair and ants. I put it back in the water in the bowl on the counter. It sunk, leaving the ants and detritus floating on the water. It seemed okay, swimming around. I briefly wondered how it survived the ants. Bites from “little red fire ants”—the dominant species of ant here—are painful.

To prevent future escapes, I added a rock to the now three-part cover—plastic mesh, glass plate, oblong rock—for the bowl-home. I told myself to try feeding the small leech my blood again soon—maybe it left the bowl because it was hungry.

September 19

I donated blood in Hilo, which has one blood drive per year. I did it supine on a special bed. They gave me a rubber thing to squeeze every “three to five seconds” with my hand. I squeezed it every four seconds. I donated one pint (473 milliliters). 

September 20

I felt better than normal—stronger, more clear-headed.

September 22

I still had scabs from the dual leeching of my hand on September 3. I noticed that the bigger one was T-shaped, the smaller, tiny one L-shaped—my initials, TL.

September 27

At night, I saw the big leech on the tile floor. “Oh my God,” I said. I put it back in the bowl.

September 28

In the morning, both leeches were in the sea shell. I was impressed that they fit in there together. In the afternoon, while mopping, I saw a series of brown stains on the tile floor. The stains or smears left a kind of trail that seemed to start and end abruptly and mysteriously. I was slightly confused. I vaguely imagined it was caused by Nini dragging his butt on the ground, smearing his poop, even though he has never done such a thing. I got the idea from my childhood poodle Binky, who often got poop stuck to his butt and sometimes smeared it across the carpet. I mopped the stains and and didn’t dwell on them. Not everything has to be explained, I knew.

September 29

At 2:15 p.m, I noticed the small leech was gone. I couldn’t find it anywhere in the bowl. I couldn’t find it anywhere on the counter or floor. Later in the afternoon, I recalled the smears from the previous day. I began to think they had come from the small leech, who had bled or something, leaving a dark intermittent trail. I began to think one of my cats ate it, probably Lali.

October 28

For almost a full month, there was no leech news. The big leech, my last surviving leech, lived its life in the bowl. I checked on it almost every day. When the water became cloudy, I changed it. Everything was fine.

Then one day I saw that the leech had squirmed through one of the small openings in the plastic-mesh cover. It seemed to have pushed 10 percent of itself through the opening and gotten stuck. I was surprised it could get through the mesh, whose openings seemed much narrower than the leech’s body. I tried to cajole it into backing out of the opening, but it seemed firmly stuck. I used a metal dental pick to pry through the plastic, creating a larger opening, allowing the leech to fall back into the water. I stopped using the mesh cover. Now there was just the plate and the rock. This seemed maybe harder to escape, the rock-weighted glass plate on the glass bowl.

October 29

I saw the leech on the tile floor, covered in ants. I picked it up, put it in the water. All the ants floated off it, onto the top of the water, in bunches, maybe a hundred ants. They all seemed dead. If they bit the leech, the leech should have died, I thought. I wondered if the leech’s skin was poisonous to the ants. I put the leech’s bowl-home inside a styrofoam box with a styrofoam cover. 

November 1

I saw the leech outside the bowl, motionless at the bottom of the styrofoam box. Was it dead? I put it back in the water. It was not dead.

November 3

The leech was on the floor of the styrofoam box again. I let it stay there.

November 4

I saw dark smears inside the styrofoam box, showing that the leech had climbed out of the box, somehow slipping through the cover, which I hadn’t been closing completely, thinking it would be good to leave it a bit loose.

I saw the leech on the tile floor. It was shriveled and hard. It seemed dead. It was covered in ants and dust. I put it in the water. It sunk, as if dead. I felt what I later thought of as “a leech-sized sadness.”

Around ten minutes later, it still seemed dead. I moved it from under the water to on top of the rock, out of the water, vaguely thinking it would “drown” in the water.

That night, I saw that the leech was alive, suctioned onto the side of the glass bowl.

November 6

I woke late, at 10:25 a.m. Normally, I get up around 7 or 8 a.m., but I didn’t fall asleep the previous night until 2 or 3 a.m., maybe due to watching election coverage. I decided I would start my day with a sunbath instead of a run.

I removed my underwear. I went outside. I checked on a mosquito trap I’d created the previous night, using a fan and an aluminum screen. While kneeled down, examining the fan, I heard someone calling out to me. Someone was in my yard. 

“Wait,” I called out. “I’m not wearing clothes.”

I could see the top half of his body—a Native Hawaiian man in his sixties or seventies. In my kneeled position, he seemed able to see the top half of me. He was saying something like, “Tao Lin? Are you Tao Lin?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I’m not wearing clothes.”

He said he was with the district attorney’s office, and that he was here due to an “article” I’d written on “social media.”

Instantly I assumed it was about something I’d tweeted, and that this confrontation was politically motivated. Instead of fear, I felt kind of annoyed. 

I repeated that I wasn’t wearing clothes. I said something like, “Go back,” trying to get him to back up so that he wouldn’t see my naked body when I stood. My language was more direct than normal due to being ambushed and having just woken, I felt.

His car was parked behind my car. Three people had come to my house in the past—a Christian missionary, a man selling electricity service, a man selling internet service—but they’d all parked in the street. This guy had driven up to the back of my car.

“I’m going to go inside to put on clothes,” I said. 

“Okay,” he said, sounding friendly. “Go do that.”

I asked him again to move back. He finally realized what I meant and backed away, out of view. I stood and walked inside and put on shorts but no shirt (in Hawaii many people go shirtless). I got my phone and—thinking of all the videos I’d seen of people recording videos of cops—began to record a video. I decided to record covertly, holding the phone (audio from 1:40 to 2:09 has been removed due to [redacted]):

I stopped recording on my phone, somehow feeling that his question about my phone meant that I should stop recording. As it became apparent this wasn’t the case, I regretted stopping my recording.

Less than a minute later—after I asked if he’d confiscated leeches before, and he said only one other time in nine years—I started recording again, this time as a Voice Memo (based on my research, it’s legal for me to post video and audio of my interactions with the special agent, but if my research is wrong and it’s not legal, can someone tell me?—thank you):

When I posted what happened on X, some-to-many people seemed to assume I was upset—no, I was not upset at all. I was happy, even giddy. I felt heartened by the calm and friendly interaction, and I felt highly amused by the overall situation.

I’d been gifted an interesting and delightful ending to my leech saga. Before this, I’d considered and decided not to try to write an essay on my leeches for my in-progress essay collection, but now I think I could write a satisfying leech essay.

One leech “ran away.” One leech was likely eaten by Lali. One leech was confiscated by the government. Now I have no leeches. I feel pleased with my leech experience.

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