The Bat in the Bedroom

"There's a bat in the bedroom," he said. Oh, sure there was. Turned out he was right, though - there absolutely was a small but very energetic bat up there, obsessively circling the plaster pendant at the peak of the dome, sonar working overtime to guide his angular flight away from the dome's eight planes. It was dramatically gloomy and Gothic way up there above the twelve-foot mark; he looked very Edward Gorey-ish.Waitaminute, you're thinking. Dome? Decent people don't have domed bedrooms with bats flying around. It just isn't done.

Well, hey, I didn't put the thing there, and nobody seems to know who did, or why; all we know is roughly when (about 1890). As a matter of fact, I'd owned the house for four years of pretty intense restoration before we ever laid eyes on it; before the big 'Yikes!" there'd been a dropped Masonite ceiling hanging there letting on that everything was just fine, nice and normal, not to worry, nobody up here but us ceiling panels. Then, in the course of some roof work, we discovered that there was actually plaster and lath up high under the pointy roof of the bedroom wing, way above the dropped ceiling. Down came a ceiling panel, and there, in the cold blue light of a fluorescent lantern, we got our first glimpse of IT, lurking there, huge and alien, like something from inside a mummified dinosaur's chest cavity, eerily organic.

The biggest thing about it is that it's so - well - BIG. Sixteen feet across at the deep cornice girdling the room ten feet from floor level, the dome slopes in eight tall trapezoids to an inverted octagonal bowl shape that tops out at nearly twenty feet off the floor. All this geometry, by the way, is noticeably out of kilter; visually more symmetrical than, say, Stonehenge, but much less centered in concept. The eight plaster panels are framed in heavy plaster ribbing. The centerpiece of the construction is a five-foot-long octagonal stalactite of distinctly phallic contours descending from the heights, neatly finished with a quartet of plaster roses bunched at the tip.

Back to the bat. I mean, he was still there, stuck in a holding pattern that had to be either his dream come true or his worst nightmare - who can tell? He looked great up there - the perfect Gothic garnish. Having a taste for the Gothic, I wouldn't have minded all that much having him stay for a while.

I have a fondness for bats - I guess not shared by very many - that's left over from the summer dusks of my Virginia childhood. We were all equal members of the hunt club in that dim silky twilight. The chimney-swifts and barn swallows would be wrapping up their last shift and heading back to roost as the next shift of bats and small children were coming on. It was lightning bug time, little scribbles of pale greenish-yellow neon rising from the grass, and we kids chased them with gimlet-eyed determination, clutching our icepick-ventilated mayonnaise jars. Overhead, the bats darted and twittered after those fat, arrogant Southern mosquitoes. I confess I never saw a bat take a lightning bug, though - I reckon it wasn't in their food chain. I know, because I watched those fireflies jealously, and I would have known if the bats were poaching. All in all, it was a pretty good working relationship - bats filling their bellies and kids filling their jars.

In the long run, it turned out not to matter that I was sympathetic to the bat in the dome, even though I knew it was only a minor miscalculation in his sonar and an unscreened dark open window that deceived him in the first place. The other household members were muttering darkly, dropping words like "lice" and "rabies" and "guano." Besides, it was bat dinnertime, and I was fresh out of bat chow.

The problem, however, was that shooing a flying beastie out of a room that inconveniently lacked a standard eight-foot ceiling presented a tactical dilemma. I fetched the butterfly net. Take my word for it, every household should have one for such occasions. Mine has three feet of bamboo handle, and if you add that to my maximum upward reach when standing tippy-toe - about seven feet - then tack on another foot for the diameter of the net's hoop, you'll get eleven feet, give or take a couple of inches.

It only took a couple of flailing swipes at the passing bat for me to understand that Plan A wasn't gonna work. The bat read the whishing net with his little squeaks and headed for the safety of the upper air.

A mystery of the brain's workings: "Zen archery" scrolled before my mind's eye. My mind obediently emptied (not a big job at that moment). All by itself, my net-holding arm went up, and the bat was in the net, just like that. I went to the window, held the net out, and off he went. Later, as I sat down to dinner, I said grace for the bat too, assuming that he was grateful for his belated meal.