Ecstatic

by Victor La Valle

  – Well then, the bus driver’s husband said from the threshold of the living room. Guess I’m going out.

  I untangled the phone cord wrapped around a chair leg in the kitchen. Kept to busy work around him so he’d believe I knew my profession. If he even suspected I was an amateur he’d lecture me about how to sweep to his specifications. Everyone thinks they’ve invented the best way to wipe down a fridge. With this guy, just looking at him, I’d have had an embolism if he took a professorial tone while mispronouncing words like ‘ammonia’ and ‘broom.’

  – How long you’ll need? he asked when I didn’t answer.

  – Seven hours?

  – Seven hours?! He yelled it. How much you think we got to do here? Shit. She didn’t tell you to do the basement too, did she?

  – No.

  –Then what you talking all this seven hours mess? I’ll be back in four and that’s what I’m paying you.

  He made for the door then turned back. – And what the hell you wearing a suit for?

  To appear professional.

  When the man got gone I ran back to the kitchen to call Ledric. He didn’t pick up for twenty-three rings.

  – Who’s this? He breathed heavily through his mouth.

  – How’s your disease coming? I asked.

  –Tapeworm’s not a disease, it’s an infestation.

  – How’s your infestation coming?

  – I lost weight already.

  – It’s only been eleven days!

  – So? I bet I lost eight pounds by now.

  – You told your family about all this?

  – It’s only my mother and father out in Chicago. But my long-distance got shut off.

  – When’s the last time you spoke?

  – I sent them some bootleg videos for Christmas.

  – Last year?

  – Why are you bothering me about all that?

  – I’m not trying to down you, I told him. You’re not feeling sick?

  – Of course not, he said.

  I was committed to Ledric because, well, wouldn’t you be? Also, what if it worked?

  After seeing him so desperate to lose a few hundred inches that he’d actually ingest bugs, refraining from my usual three–Big Mac snack-attack seemed hardly a sacrifice at all. And what if it worked?

  – It’s not bugs, he said on the phone.

  – Bugs, worms, insects, whatever. I don’t think the fish had to be rotten to get tapeworms.

  His faith would not be shaken. – I didn’t want to take any chances about that.

  After hanging up I set the two dirtiest pots in soapy hot water to let them soak last night’s meat loose. I went to the car for my tools.

  In the living room I ran the vacuum. I lifted the couch on its side and left it there.

  People don’t want to return to a neat house. They want to enter fifteen minutes before the finish, when the rooms are still a little disarrayed. If they see no proof that work’s been done they quibble about hours, swear that the appliances were that shiny before I got there. They cut even cheaper with the tip and I’m not talking about generous clientele to begin with. It’s necessary to let people think they’re seeing backstage at the theater minutes before the show. They want to be the producers, not the audience.

  I mopped the kitchen floor quickly and let it dry while I wiped down the living room surfaces. The second time I mopped the kitchen I did it slower. We were supposed to use only one bucket of water per house, but I was alone so the policy faced revision. Water, water everywhere.

  Washed those two stubborn pots.

  Washed the utensils.

  Washed the washcloths too.

  Why didn’t anyone admit that work was fun?

  To touch things and move them and lift them and clean them.

  The constant activity pacified my mind; my body became a device.

  I worked for one hundred and thirty minutes. Laundry had been easy since it was already gathered in bags down by the basement. There were some pillowcases in the dryer when I went down there, still warm; I touched one to my chin. Lorraine’s strong hands on my face.

  Lorraine was sweet, and fat.

  What should have taken me three and a half hours was done in about two.

  It’s not that I was efficient, just I needed to slow down. I was working so quickly that I’d sweated big patches under my arms and between my thighs. I felt great, but a headache grew. I sat on the living room stairs before going back to the second floor.

  I took a while to catch my breath and wiped my sweaty forehead against a wall.

  My chest felt plugged with wires that ran from every socket in the room.

  I took that stupid pamphlet out of my wallet. Yes, I had it with me constantly. In the photo Ahmed Abdel’s narrow handsome face was fringed by enormous black dreadlocks. I could never grow mine into such a pretty mess as this Japanese guy had.

  In the pamphlet there was an interview with him conducted by a law student from BU. Ahmed Abdel went on about the anti-immigrant bias of the Boston courts then lambasted the U.S. entirely; condemned Leif Ericson and Eric the Red. But when asked about Japan’s own imperial way Mr. Abdel dismissed it. He became mawkish instead. He mentioned the tony gardens of his father’s home. (My grandfather would describe a boyhood of public tours through Kyoto Palace in 1928, one of Abdel’s answers read. He told the law student, I always drew terrible pictures of the Kitayama cedars. They looked more like a row of spears than trees!)

  I mildly hated this man. How was I going to contend? Kyoto played musically on an American girl’s eardrum while Southeastern Queens was a bum note. We have aluminum-sided homes, not fortresses.

  With an hour and a half until the husband returned I shut my eyes on the stairs and reclined. The carpeted steps were firm, but plush against my sore back end.

  Eventually the boredom would have made me a fridge pillager, but I remembered that there was a video store around the corner. I’d seen it when finding this address.

  A place with a Lotto machine by the register; a beeper sales booth near the front door. And, usually, a broad selection of the best action, comedy and horror films.

  I left the front door of the house propped slightly open by stuffing a rag in the jamb. At these low-end stores a video membership cost only five dollars. The tape was three bucks for three nights. I rented one then ran back feeling amped. An errand that would have been twenty minutes finished in five.

  Other guys would’ve picked a porno. Rub one out while getting paid. My preferences come with a different kind of warning label. Not frank depiction of sexual situations, but blatant use of gore.

  We Like Monsters, released in 1993. It was seventy-five minutes; I might see the whole story while the little master was out. Their TV and VCR were upstairs in the bedroom.

  Above their bed a set of knives were nailed to the wall, but only for decoration not defense. They had great black handles. Some spikes on the hilt. I sat on their bed to watch the movie, but couldn’t stop imagining a blade falling loose and right through my neck.

  The floor was comfortable, too. I felt so good that I had to take my shoes off.

  It was a terrible movie. About a guy named Ziff who so wishes to be famous that he disfigures himself in the background of a morning show newscast by pouring an unspecific acid on his face. He becomes famous, but the same stunt that propelled him to stardom is what’s killing him now. The acid is still burning under his skin. A ‘scientist doctor’ explains this seemingly impossible fact. Ziff is disintegrating.

  I don’t want to explain any more, because this is the moment when the film turns to standard fare. Ziff’s skin melts, his skeleton shrivels, until he’s just this sniffing meaty creature that goes killing everyone ‘for revenge.’ But what revenge? He kills a business-woman who’s said to have created the acid, but it’s more likely that the stuff was mustered in a lab. He kills another woman said to be his ex-wife, but at the start of the film Ziff laments that he’s never been married
.

  These films mattered more to me than I should say. I sat, half-depressed, as the tape neared its end. Only stubbornness propelled me through to the foolish conclusion.

  Okay, by the end Ziff has gone to the home of the reporter who first interviewed him. Ziff asks that his death be broadcast live. The reporter calls over a crew. The scene is arranged for vulgar effect as Ziff reclines on a white bed in a white bedroom; suddenly the reporter is wearing a white contamination suit; this is so that each time Ziff moves the surfaces are flecked with ruddy goop.

  Ziff is asked why he did this. The acid on his body. The murders. The actor pronounced some treacle about ‘wanting to matter in this world’ and I nearly put my foot through one of the bus driver’s bedroom walls. I stopped the tape, popped it out and would have stumped it underfoot, but I’d given my real name on the membership form. $80 fine for lost tapes.

  What shit me about the finale was that these creatures always have an explanation. The Devil. An alien. A terrible childhood. Why did the virus in Small Evil cross the European continent only to ravage a small town outside of Budapest (on the Pest side of the placid Danube)? Because a Roma musician placed a curse on the land where his young daughter was beaten to death by Magyar police.

  There’s always a reason for monsters. Human beings need rationales.

  The machines in the basement had finished thumping so I took the mass of fabric out of the dryer then folded it into separate pieces. I worked quickly because, bad movie or not, the far end of the crowded basement began to seem creepy. There were thirty big cardboard boxes laying around, some open and some taped shut.

  Their dining room was smaller than it had been one hour ago. Now the glass dishware cabinet rose seven stories high. The plates inside it rattled when I walked by, which was because of my weight, yes. But what made them shake again as I stood in the kitchen?

  In the living room I’d been surprised to find a bookshelf, if only because most of the homes I’d worked could fit all their books in a sandwich bag. I didn’t like the man, so I credited his wife, the bus driver, with the library. It’s elitist, but I always check the spines on people’s bookshelves to find which ones are for status and which ones are a pleasure.

  I was impressed because they had The Seven League Boots by Albert Murray, but when I opened it the covers cracked audibly; there was the rubber gum smell that wafts off unread pages.

  I’d cleaned for black people and Jewish, an Italian family, Latinos, too. Stupid people had a few authors in common: Sidney Sheldon, Judith Krantz, Danielle Steel. What nonsense. Such dreck. How about H.P. Lovecraft, just once. Disposable income was wasted on the dumb.

  I closed my eyes. I took one of their trade paperbacks off the shelf. Opened it randomly and spat on the paper. I mean a real goober. Shut the first then went to another.

  I did that in their romances, the generational dramas. Thrillers, war stories and immigrant boo-hoos. When my mouth went dry I drank water.

  A mirror hung over their living room couch. As I was about to hock into Alex Haley’s Queenie I noticed the mirror reflecting me.

  My pants had ridden up between my thighs and bunched over the hump of my great big ass.

  My shirt had risen over the belt line so that my stretch marks showed.

  My shoulders were massive, but soft.

  My God just look at that thing.

  2 MISS INNOCENCE,

  6

  Ishkabibble was on a cigarette but still managed to say, – You walk slower than my old Aunt.

  I nodded because he was right, but why tell me.

  – I’m not trying to down you or nothing, he added.

  We were on 147th Avenue, only two lanes but respectably wide. Nabisase’s church was on the corner, one block away. By the third time I’d disappointed my sister she stopped asking me along. Grandma and Mom, too. Nabisase left at 9 on Sunday mornings and stayed longer every week. That first time, on the 8th, it was only for an hour. One month later service lasted three. In half a year she’d be living there in a state of constant worship.

  Ishkabibble gave the last of that cigarette such a pull I thought he’d eat the filter.

  When I’d gone out that Thursday afternoon, November 9th, for a constitutional, Ishkabibble hadn’t been what I was looking for, but he’s who I met. I was walking by Brookville Park’s half-hearted playground. A place for kids to swing in the afternoon and teenagers to drink at night. The grounds had seemed deserted, but then Ishkabibble stepped out from behind a water fountain. I’d been alone and then I wasn’t. He found me.

  At the corner of 230th Street Ishkabibble led me into the Get Right launderette. I was talking, had been for twenty minutes; he didn’t tell me to keep quiet, just to follow him as we spoke. He, for one, didn’t treat me like a dolt.

  Behind the counter of the launderette was the matriarch of a Jamaican family who owned the store. She kept watch against people trying to dry their sneakers in the machines. She wasn’t happy to see us, but I blame Ishkabibble. A man whose own mother was probably repaying one of his high-interest home loans.

  – Miss Rose.

  – Yes, she said, but it wasn’t a question, like Yes may I help you?, or even, Yes that’s who I am.

  I really think I smelled the small black microwave oven behind her before I saw it. Or it might have been the tasty snack she sold. Alongside washers and dryers, this laundromat had food. So many of the smallest businesses around here had to diversify for profit. The owners of the low-budget cab service next door, Fast Fast Car, sold sneakers at the back of the store.

  – Beef patty? Ishkabibble asked me.

  Of course there was meat in a beef patty and beef is healthy, right? Forget that herbivore routine. How bad would it be to have just one because beef patties are so good when the meat inside is seasoned spicy and the yellow-brown shell is crisp. Maybe she also had coco bread.

  Nineteen days since I’d been to Halfway House and seen Ledric’s extreme dieting technique. I’d been trying to keep myself to a reasonable five thousand calories a day, but faced with a good beef patty I faltered.

  The woman rose, shuffled to the microwave. – You’re not eating? I asked Ishkabibble.

  – I’m one of those people without much of an appetite.

  – Lucky man, I said.

  While the microwave carousel rotated for three minutes the Jamaican woman got her checkbook. She set it down; she hadn’t spoken; she didn’t ask Ishkabibble how much was owed. She knew exactly.

  After that she went to the tiny black oven where there was, my delight, coco bread. She heated it separately then put bread and patty together. I was going to ask her for my favorite other ingredient, mayonnaise slathered on the patty’s skin, but I didn’t. I count this as marvelous restraint.

  – How much? I asked.

  She hadn’t looked at me not once and didn’t do it now. She asked Ishkabibble. – How much?

  – He’s a friend of mine.

  Then she waved her hand. –Take. Take, she said to me.

  Outside again I talked to him after I’d finished the food. I ate fast though the meat was hot because Mom might drive down 147th Avenue and see me. Maybe Hillman had a satellite in synchronous orbit over Queens smoking photos of its members when we cheated. At times I felt a power must be keeping track of me.

  Ishkabibble was an ideal salesman because he had the knack for listening. Anyone else would’ve rushed me while I explained the shortcomings of We Like Monsters and movies like it. Evening of the Hatchet , Crematorious. I went on for fifteen minutes about how stories of the eerie, August Derleth let’s say, usually let me down. The creatures turned out to be paper dolls and the characters were thin.

  – Maybe most people like it when the movie gets all gross, Ishkabibble suggested.

  –They can be bloody, but they don’t have to be dumb, I said.

  When I talked passionately about this with Mom and Nabisase they politely answered, Oh yes? and Ah-hmm, but nothing more. To be fair I unde
rstand that a twenty-three-year-old man getting agitated over B-movies casts a certain dummy-colored glow.

  On two occasions we crossed the street when loose dogs threatened us.

  As we walked Ishkabibble looked back down the block. He did it every ten feet, but I didn’t think it was only the wild canines he feared.

  – You not too popular or something? I asked. Kennedy Airport wasn’t far behind us now. A person could walk to his departure terminal from here if he had a little chipperness in the bones.

  I was out of breath. – Can we stop a second?

  He laughed, but not as viciously as it seemed to me then. – We only walked five blocks, he said.

  – I know what it was!

  – Okay. I’m not trying to down you.

  I only needed half a minute to get some wind. I tell you it’s exhausting being so big.

  – You not too popular? I asked again when he wouldn’t stop glancing around.

  – I’m popular when I bring people the money, just not as much when I ask for it back.

  – My mother told me you charge nine percent above the prime rate!

  – A man comes to me making twenty-nine thousand dollars a year and wants to drive a forty-thousand dollar car, whose fault is that?

  – But you’re black and doing this to black people!

  – I work with Hispanics, too.

  – What’s that on your neck? I asked, to change the subject. There was a large red patch of welts on the nap at the back of his head.

  – I fell asleep in a tanning machine.

  – You tan?

  I wasn’t surprised that a black man would go under bulbs, but that even with the help Ishkabibble was still so yellow. I mean the man made me look like a cloudless night.

  – I trusted one of my customers. He promised me a free ten-minute trial. I helped him buy that business! Some Italian over across the park. He turned the alarm off, so I fell asleep in there for half an hour.