Add This to the List of Things That You Are

by Chris Fink

  As you put the dictionary away, you spy Ricky’s fruit-colored journal, lying demurely in his backpack. You’ve looked through this before, of course, but not for some time. It’s full of his scribblings and etchings, what he calls field notes. You finger the heavy cotton pages, flipping to the last entries, from this week. The pencil etchings catch your eye. Well, Ricky’s drawing has certainly improved. The last is quite an interesting likeness. It’s a sketchy nuptial image of you and him, but you’re both crouched low on the curb, looking over Main Street, Mount Horeb. Your features are grotesque: he’s given you a hunchback and himself a bulging neck-full of goiters or hives, but your faces are quite angelic. He’s made your face softer somehow, prettier than you imagine it.

  You hear keys in the door and stuff the journal away, quickly. There is Ricky, contrite, as usual, too soon. You can’t take seriously a man who forgets his grievances so quickly. You’re not as apt to forget a grudge, and now it’s your turn to storm out. You pass Doña Ester dusting in the foyer and head out into the old city looking for a café with Wi-Fi. On every street you pass evidence of last night’s storm: broken windows and strewn debris. At Café Donostea you’re amazed that a simple search yields dozens of sites about the insects. It’s as if you’re discovering something for the first time that is commonplace to the rest of the world, that bedbugs are not just a bedtime story. They live in the creases of your mattress, under your headboard, any place safe and dark and near your body while you sleep. At night, awakened by your heat, they come to feast. They crawl onto your tender shoulders, forming a feeding line where they chisel their mandibles into your flesh. Blood-engorged adults may reach the size of a tooth. Like spiders and snakes, they grow by shedding their skins.

  The sites you explore are quasi-scientific, the squalid descriptions often laced with humor. No one, it seems, has ever died from bedbug bites. The people who collected this information had, like you, unknowingly gotten into something. You learn that bedbugs are remarkably efficient animals. While feeding, they secrete toxic saliva that helps them break your skin and digest your blood. The poison induces sleep. The longer the bedbugs eat, the longer their meal stays at table. Theoretically, the host could fall into a state of continuous unconsciousness.

  The other question, of course, is what about Ricky. Nothing in your search exonerates him, nothing suggests the bugs would choose one bedfellow and ignore the other. You explore some other sites of general interest about bedbugs. You find bedbug in a list right above cochineal bug, largely responsible for the rapid colonization of Mexico, a bug that clothed the entire British army in its blood.

  Enough. Armed with the knowledge of where bedbugs live, you return to the apartment to check the mattress. You turn back the dust ruffle and aim a flashlight at what you’ve been sleeping with. There, in the mattress creases, hundreds of tiny insects crawl in a moving hoard of their own bodies. You suppress a shudder and lower the beam lest you send the little bloodsuckers into a frenzy. You close the bedroom door and wait in the living room for your husband to return. Sitting on the couch, you can’t keep your fingers from exploring the seams on the underside of the couch cushion. But your fingertips read nothing but dense fabric. You feel an abiding sense of relief. All this will be over soon. You need only find someplace else to sleep.

  When the doorbell rings, you realize you’ve drifted off. Sleeping again. How long were you out? You’re expecting Ricky, probably holding a bouquet of flowers, but instead you find Doña Ester. It’s cleaning day, evidently. At her side is a man she introduces as Don Rodrigo, her husband. Strange, you hadn’t realized she was married, but of course she is. Don Rodrigo holds a big wrench. He looks like a plumber. You decide now is a good time to broach the delicate subject of infestation.

  You have, you say to Doña Ester, many bugs in the bed. You attempt to translate. Muchos bichos, you say, de la cama.

  Doña Ester looks at you blankly at first, then her eyes alight with recognition.

  Oy. Pulgas, she says, laughing. Pulgas no son un problema.

  No son pulgas, you say. They’re not fleas.

  You take Doña Ester into the bedroom, her husband in tow. You flip back the dust ruffle and point the flashlight into the mattress seam. The gasp uttered from Don and Doña is loud, synchronized. Don Rodrigo’s big wrench hits the floor.

  When Ricky comes home, holding a glaring bouquet of calla lilies, you’re still packing. He has his friends in tow, the anarchist, the linguist, and the snob. They’re lonely children of the Foreign Service, sleeping in empty beds. Polite to the last, or perhaps afraid of Ricky’s monstrous wife, they wait in the doorway.

  What’s going on? Ricky says, gesturing at the luggage and the pile of clothes.

  Sweetheart, we’ve been evicted, you say.

  What do you mean evicted? We’re on our honeymoon.

  It’s Doña Ester, you say. She didn’t react well to the infestation. She seemed upset about the exotic disease we brought from Wisconsin.

  Evicted? Ricky says again dumbly.

  You take the flowers from your husband and bury your nose in their enormous white bugles. They’re pretty but don’t smell like much. Ricky will have trouble imagining a life on Main Street, Mount Horeb, a street where everything you could ever need is contained between its two ends. For your own part the return seems inevitable. Your roots are deep in the Mount Horeb soil, and your mother, the Troll Queen Troll herself, has bequeathed a place for you on the curb.

  Writer’s Elbow

  Today, Graves will get a haircut. In the meantime, he will take out the garbage. The last thing Graves needs to hear is how he needs a larger cock and balls. But that’s exactly what Shizzam Jizzam in his emails keeps telling Graves that he needs. It’s his brain—that bifurcated lobe dangling between his ears—that could use enlarging. His wife, Camila, complains that he eats too much and exercises too little. She says he’s a pig, but in that saucy Argentine way of hers that makes it seem as if she likes it. She gives him a bulleted list every morning before she goes to work. Today, it reads:

  • Remember to take out the Garbage! Today is Garbage Day!

  • Get a haircut! You look shaggy!

  • Write something Brilliant to make your wife proud!

  • Do some push-ups, hey Mr. Philosopher! They help you think!

  Camila detests complacency. She gives orders with gusto. She does not, however, complain that anything is too small. He manages to give her pleasure, say, 50 percent of the time, which, according to an article he scanned in Men’s Room, is statistically better than average. Graves himself is able to achieve noticeable pleasure nearly 90 percent of the time he penetrates his wife. Yes, everything in the cock and balls department seems A-OK. Knock on wood.

  His problem is that he needs to be smarter and more ambitious. Graves is on summer break from Evergreen Community College, where he teaches two sections of Intro to Creative Writing and three sections of College Writing per semester. He has the summer free. What’s more, Camila is teaching double her normal load of tango lessons at Fitness Inc. because her colleague Audra is on maternity leave. The resulting arrangement leaves Graves with seven hours of virtually interruption-free writing time from 7 a.m. to 2 p.m. each day. He has squandered those hours for exactly seventeen days to date, checking his email, rearranging his files, losing at computer solitaire, thinking about cigarettes, chewing nicotine squares, thinking how he’s a raving nicotine addict, thinking how he needs a dog—a large dog, maybe with a bit of wolf in him—breakfasting, lunching, napping, making a haircut appointment.

  Never, until today, has he wasted his writing time thinking that the answer to his creative sterility is a larger cock and balls. As a teenager, sure, Graves believed that an extra inch or three would have made all the difference, would have made him an object of desire rather than one who desires, therefore altering the course of his life, or at the very least getting him some action, which would have been life-altering enough. Now, because he is a more mature
thinker, Graves knows that larger genitalia, at this stage of the game, would be wasted on him. A book, now, or a brain. If he could buy a larger book and brain online, that would be a different kettle of fish altogether.

  Graves sits at the breakfast nook in his rented, two-bedroom bungalow and fingers his skinny laptop. He will sit here for the morning. If he can do nothing else, he will at the very least keep his ass planted in this chair. He feels compelled to utilize his writing time, not because he particularly wants to but because he must make good, sooner or later, on his reputation as a writer. Also, he must have some good reason to avoid taking tango lessons from Camila. She keeps nagging that he needs a little more blood to the brain, but beneath the nagging, Graves suspects, is Camila’s doubt that her husband finds any particular value in what she does.

  True, Graves finds the prospects of a life of the mind more stimulating than a life of the body. He’s borrowed from some continental philosopher the idea of the instinct/intellect paradox; the way Graves understands it, intellect and instinct are turned in opposite directions, the former toward the mind, the latter toward the body. Generally speaking, the instinctual person is the happier one, and therefore, to Graves’s view, the shallower. Lately, though, he has had precious little mind or body exercise. He feels no particular intellectual or instinctual urges. And for all her body enhancing, Camila remains intellectually nimble. She beats him in Scrabble nearly every time, though Scrabble, Graves reminds her—like the crossword, like spelling—measures rote more than intellect.

  Three years ago, Graves married Camila to keep her from leaving him. That same year he completed a novella and a stimulating low-residency MFA degree in creative writing. It was a dizzyingly productive time. Graves wrote his novella about a Sunday watercolorist and sometimes-adjunct art professor who marries an aerobicist. Upon finishing the book, Graves procured an agent at Otis and Otis, New York, who called the book, titled Housework, “a perfectly gorgeous meditation.” Nothing much happens in the book plot-wise, but according to his agent’s cover letter—the good parts of which Graves has memorized—he, the author, “portrays the aesthetics of domestic intercourse with such relentless sincerity that the mundane actions of each spouse—his taking out the trash, say, her boiling of the okra—becomes the architecture that bears the weight of their entire relationship, and of the work itself.”

  Most of the book takes place in the breakfast nook, the very breakfast nook, in the very bungalow, where Graves now sits dallying with his email, staring at Camila’s list of chores with no items checked off. Graves himself prefers to think of his book as “not unintelligent.” It was his first book, after all, and it would be crippling to heap too much praise upon it. The agent is trying to sell his novella as a shorter novel, though it barely stretches past seventy pages in the biggest font—Courier Old School—Graves could find. It would be nice, the agent had said, if his book were larger. Every artist must question the size of his gift. Still, with the font-fattened manuscript in one hand and the agent contract in the other, Graves felt like a writer.

  Lately, especially since the end of classes seventeen days ago, Graves feels like a fraud. He believes this feeling has something to do with his (he calls it his) instinct/intellect paradox. The intellect seeks things it can never find. The instinct could find the things the intellect seeks but would never look for them. This, Graves suspects, is why writers are so enamored with folks who work for a living, romanticizing and fetishizing every turn of their grubby lives. This, too, is why he loves Camila. Here Camila teaches tango and she’s a tango fanatic. She does it because she likes to, because it feels good, not because it has any particular philosophical worth. She has learned the names of all the muscles in her body that will improve her tango agility, and she stimulates these muscles while she’s doing other things. She does glute-tightening exercises when she’s washing the dishes or vacuuming the house. When she watches TV and even when she first gets into bed, she does ab crunches, numbering aloud well into the hundreds. The effect on Graves is like counting sheep, and he falls into a liquory sleep beside her well-toned body.

  Graves, on the other hand, prefers to do one thing at a time. He teaches writing, but aside from email and copious marginalia on student papers, he hasn’t written a thing in three years. He doesn’t even read very much anymore. During his three-year stint at Evergreen Community College, however, he has somehow fanned the flames of a rumor among his students and colleagues that he is indeed hard at work on a book, his second book, a novel. Sometimes Graves even catches the thread of a rumor that a few of his students and colleagues suspect that he, Graves, is a genius.

  His students—and his colleagues, come to think of it—are so starved for a creative outlet that all Graves has to do is utter an aphorism like Writing is a philosophical mode—it’s a way of thinking, with a certain sagacity he learned in graduate school, and his class practically weeps. They think he’s Socrates. It helps that in Creative Writing all the work is about the students themselves. This is a subject his students find endlessly interesting. They want to study more of themselves, and they give Graves the credit for coming up with the pedagogical justification to let them. In College Writing, only the first assignment can be a personal essay. After that they get down to serious work. In Creative Writing, the students spend the whole semester writing personal essays, confessional poems, and self-referential fictions. They love it, and they love Graves for it. Since his tenure decision at Evergreen Community College is based mostly on whether or not the students love him, Graves has decided to make it his first priority.

  Yet, in his own mind, Graves feels like a talented piano teacher who never touches his instrument. Every so often a doe-eyed sophomore with graceful prose and low-rise jeans will ask to read some of his work. I’ve heard you write like Kafka, she’ll say. Then she’ll smile a smile that manages to be innocent and hopeful and seductive all at once. Such smiling comparisons goad Graves, threaten to keep him awake through the bourbon-lit evenings and the ab-straining sheep counting that ensues. Sooner or later, Graves knows, he’ll have to put out.

  So, Graves has decided to use this summer to make good. Perhaps his students and his wife are correct. Perhaps he is brilliant, and perhaps the last three years have been a gestation period for Something Bigger. For seventeen days now, however, veritably chained to the breakfast nook, Graves has caught no glimpse of Something Bigger. Today, after looking at the screen for a couple of hours and checking his email—which he does with increasing frequency because he’s expecting an important message from Otis and Otis—he’s going for a haircut. He’ll have to shower beforehand, of course, and take out the garbage. Surely the good news from Otis and Otis will propel him toward Something Bigger.

  Each time he checks his account, however, Graves finds another notice from Shizzam Jizzam, Sin Amin, or Mei-Loine. Sometimes the taglines are cryptic: Inflate your ego, Expand your capability. Other times the messages are unambiguous and vulgar, vaguely ungrammatical: Get a Larger Cock and Balls.

  How long has this been going on? For several months at least, but surely more frequently since classes ended. The first few times the messages appeared last fall semester Graves was confused and a little paranoid. Wasn’t this something the internet people fixed years ago? He remembers getting messages like this back when he still had Hotmail, but not since then. He’s checked with Camila, and with a colleague from work. They’re not getting messages like this. Is Graves the only one?

  Why me? he asked Camila. Why now?

  Because you’re a pervert, she said, and pinched him.

  After trying unsuccessfully to unsubscribe himself from the mailing list, he simply deleted any messages with questionable subject matter. Lately, however, since he’s had more time on his hands, Graves has become more curious. He sometimes opens the personalized messages, reading how larger genitalia will give him more sex appeal, more sex drive, and how this will make him, Graves, a pleasure factory. Sometimes, after reading the ent
icements, he even clicks on the links to begin his order. He can use his credit card to pay all at once, or he can make four easy installments of $19.95 or $29.95, depending on how enormous he wants to be.

  Graves intuits now, late in the morning, his haircut encroaching, that he hasn’t really been getting more dirty messages; rather, he has been rereading the same dirty messages more often. The problem is that he’s checking his email too frequently. Once per day should be sufficient. Yet he finds himself on the goddamn email every ten to fifteen minutes, randy for an important notice. No wonder he can’t do any writing. This bad habit is not unrelated to the vulgar subject matter of the emails themselves. The medium is the message, as it were; therefore, email itself is cock and balls. The important word Graves awaits will never come by email, he understands, yet he cannot help himself looking for the message where it will never be.

  This is about more than the watched pot, surely. Yet the more Graves watches the pot, the more Shizzam Jizzam appears peddling his pornographic snake oil. Fine, so Shizzam Jizzam is the only one who cares enough about Graves to send him an email. Graves should reciprocate. Fine if the rest of the world turns its collective back to Graves. Graves will turn his back to the collective rest of the world. So, to show his appreciation this morning, after playing computer solitaire for three hours, checking his email a dozen times, chewing seven nicotine-replacement squares, and drinking four cups of coffee with cream while describing the florid wallpaper around the breakfast nook and Camila’s mysterious window-ledge herb garden in a limpid paragraph and a half, Graves instinctively follows the links and purchases a pump device that will surely enlarge his penis and testicles by 20 percent—the $29.95 package, what the hell—or his money back, guaranteed, personally, by Shizzam Jizzam himself.