The Worm Eternal is wise and sneaky. He will leave you all alone on autopilot and then suddenly come back to help you when you’re least expecting it. “Yes, one second,” the Worm Eternal tells me to say to Sis, and then I go over to Zapruder (one of the road crew) and ask him does he have anything. I’m in luck because he just scored five minutes ago, a great score since our entire stash had to be replaced due to the cops.
Deep down, I suppose I hadn’t really been dealing with Sister’s request to break contact; in fact I was in denial right until the second the Worm Eternal slid into my brain. “This is your last chance,” it told me. “You might never see her again if you don’t do something drastic.”
I return a few minutes later with a glass of cold water. “Here, Sister,” I say, trying to seem nonchalant. I’m worried my voice sounds robotic since I’m being so careful with my words. I drop two pills into her hand. She’s still holding her temples and cringing but when she sees the pills she cringes even more.
“Do these contain a sleep aid or something? I just want regular aspirin; I don’t want to feel drowsy.”
“It’s regular,” I tell her, “it’s just from Europe. Most generic pills in Europe are neon green with a pagan star in the center.”
She swallows them and opens the folder and clicks the pen above the line where I need to sign.
“Okay,” I say with a nod. “I just want to read it first.”
She scowls. “That’s an oddly responsible thing for you to do.”
I pretend to look at the words for several minutes until she leaps up off the couch, a very high leap. “Is it warm in here?” she asks. Her face and body have flushed in alarming but expected red patches and her pupils look like giant Kalamata olives. “It is,” I reply, and she removes her shirt.
That’s when I see that she is only wearing one breast.
I open my mouth to say something, something loving that also expresses my grief at her loss, but she’s staring up at the loudspeakers.
“This is a great song,” she yells, which is not what I was expecting from Sister.
“It is,” I reply gingerly. “This drum solo will last forty minutes.” Sister suddenly seems so changed; I’m not sure whether to talk to her in the careful way I’m used to or to just open up.
“Let’s go watch them,” she says. It is almost a squeal, and is total confirmation that she’s most certainly in a Wormhole and I need to jump in with her. So we go to the curtain and I yell to Zapruder that she is my sister, and he checks out her boob and gives me a thumbs-up.
A few hours later we are back on the bus driving to California, and Sister is more talkative than ever. She has told us all about the cancer and her mastectomy, and when Grog says she is very doable they start flirting and take off her bra and she has Grog start drawing cartoonish flowers on her scar tissue with a Sharpie marker. She’s in good spirits. It’s nice to see Sister smile.
* * *
Hours later, when the curtain on Grog’s bunk finally opens and the two of them come out, she’s still happy, which for Sister means that she is still in a completely altered state.
“Sis,” she yells, putting her naked arms around me and bringing my face to her naked chest. She rocks me back and forth like a mother for a little while.
“Tell everyone what Mom’s last words were,” she says. I was only four at the time but they’re memorable.
“I never wanted kids.” Sis completely cracks up, then I do, too. Then CT and Grog start laughing, too, and before we know it tears are pouring down our faces.
“What’s this?” Sister asks Grog as he hands her the tube to a hookah, but then before he can answer she sticks it into the side of her mouth like it’s that spit-sucky thing at the dentist and lets it hang out there while she continues to talk.
“You know, no offense, but I didn’t want kids either. I felt like I had to take you in when she died, because Mom was such a horrible person, and I didn’t want to be horrible, too. But it ruined a lot of things for me. If I hadn’t been forced to grow up right then and be a parent, my life would’ve been much, much better.”
I’ve known the truth of the Worm Eternal long enough to realize that Sister doesn’t mean this in a personal way, that in fact the Worm Eternal has itself entered her ear and is speaking to me through her so that I will have Greater Understanding. CT gently squeezes my hand and whispers “W-I-E” into my ear, which means Wriggle-In-Effect, as in, the Worm is actively present and working.
Suddenly, the bus stops and Fractyl Clymber runs back wearing a vest of faux ostrich feathers. “Dudes, the sun is coming up and there are all these flat rocks and I think it’s really cleansing. Like, I sort of took an accidental detour; I mean it’s totally cool, I totally know where we are, in relative terms. But I think it was like, meant to be, because it is so fucking pure out there right now, and I think if we all just go out there and sit it’ll be great, like I might even be able to forget that that ever happened, I mean.”
When we file out of the bus, the light of dawn seems to sober Sister up a little. It’s easy not to sober up in the bus-light and bus-air; the bus is sort of an intoxicant in itself. As we walk out onto the rocks Sister looks down at the light shining on her scar tissue and begins to cry.
But Grog is not about to let this happen. “Lie down, beautiful woman,” he says. “Bloom like a flower.” He walks to her and parts her legs with his hands and tells her to say that she’s a blooming flower.
And she does. The sun is coming up brighter than I’ve ever seen, and it is all hitting Sister, her scarred parts and her unscarred parts, everything. And Grog’s face moves into her bloom and CT walks over with his erection peeking tall and shadowy from his still-untied leather suit and he moves his face into her bloom, too, and I stretch out on a nearby rock like I do backstage at the concerts. Sister’s noises are a lot like the music of Wolf Rainbow, except this time I do jump into the noise, I get lost in the sounds and become them totally. I let myself get lost inside her pleasure.
* * *
When we get back on the bus we’re all pretty tired. CT and I retire to the clam bed. Sister hugs me and I hug her, too, and it’s cosmic. When we hug, my boob fits into her boob-hole.
Several state lines later when CT and I wake up, Fractyl Clymber tells me that Sis asked him to let her out at the Reno airport. She left me a note saying she was going to a hospital in Arizona, and that Grog gave her a lot of money in the form of gold coins (Grog refuses to be paid in any currency but gold). She also wrote that she would call me sometime soon, or that I could call her when I was ABLE to talk. The word “ABLE” is underlined.
The biggest surprise is that she left me a white leotard. I know with one look that it was Mom’s. I smell it, hoping that it will somehow still smell like her, even though she’s been dead for over two decades and was mostly a horrible mom. But it smells like the bus’s incense-laden air. I put it on beneath my leather suit, though. I know that soon, because of rubbing against leather all day, the leotard will acquire a very comfortable smell, like a drowsy horse.
A few weeks later we are able to stay in the hospital with Sister for a week. It’s weird Worm Eternal serendipity because we were already scheduled to go to a national forest for a video shoot that was very nearby where Sister is staying. Then, during filming, the large snake wrapped around Grog’s shoulders totally bit him on the johnson, just like Grog is always worried will happen to CT when we sleep outdoors. The snake’s handler didn’t understand it at all; she said there was no reason in the whole world why a well-fed python would suddenly bite a human, particularly in that physical region, and asked Grog what kind of cologne he uses and questions of that nature as he and the snake were being taken away to the hospital on a stretcher, which ended up being the very same hospital Sister is in.
So we canceled some tour dates so we can be here with her. I get to sit by Sister and hold her hand during and after treatment, sometimes holding her as she gets sick and leaves drops on my leat
her suit that are a nice type of reminder stain. And beneath the suit I always wear Mom’s leotard. Late at night when the cable gets boring and Sister is asleep and CT and the rest of the gang are doing opium in the bus parked in the hospital lot (“We can do as much of anything as we want, you know? We’re in the parking lot of a fucking hospital” Fractyl Clymber likes to happily declare), I often think about how family and Mother and Sister are like my suit and my leotard, skin under skin under skin, this onion whose layers can be peeled back for the Worm Eternal to help me understand. And understanding is beautiful. In fact, like Wolf Rainbow, its beauty is dizzying in fast, airplane-stunt ways: the beauty of CT’s locks spiraled in a hurricane of rock music, the beauty of my sister so strong while her body is weak, the beauty of Mom’s leotard becoming the color of camels and tea and milk beneath my leather suit. “The beauty beneath”; it is something I know. I say it to CT all the time now, and of course he understands. CT has always understood.
Ant Colony
When space on Earth became limited, it was declared all people had to host a complex organism on or inside their bodies. Many people chose something noninvasive, such as barnacles or a vole in a wig. Some women had breast operations that allowed them to accommodate small aquatic life within implants. But because I was already perfect-breasted (and, admittedly, vain) I sought out a doctor who, for several thousands of dollars, drilled holes into my bones to make room for an ant colony.
After being turned down by every surgeon in the book, I finally found my doctor. Actually he’s a dentist. I had to lead him on in order to get what I wanted—he only agreed to do the procedure because he is in love with me.
“I have recordings of all your television appearances,” the doctor told me during our first consultation, “and I own every film you’ve been in. I think you’re the most perfect woman in the world.”
Since bone ants had never been attempted, I was a study trial. My participation in the experiment had a lot of parallels to modeling, which I used to do before acting. Once a month I went into a laboratory and removed all my clothing. This latter step probably wasn’t necessary, but I did it because I was grateful, and also because it was interesting to feel someone looking at my outsides and my insides at the same time. When I lay down onto an imaging machine and the doctor pushed certain buttons, he could see all the ants moving around in my body, could even zoom in on individual ants and watch them carrying around in their mandibles what he said were synthetic calcium deposits. The ants were first implanted within my spine, where their food supply was injected monthly, but they quickly moved throughout the other various pathways that had been drilled into my limbs and even my skull.
The ants’ mandibles were the only part of the insects that disgusted me; they reminded me of the headgear I’d had to wear with my braces in grades six through eight. I’d refused to wear it to school or even walk around the house when I had it on. Instead I wore it for two hours each night before bed, and I spent this time reading fashion magazines with my bedroom door locked. I wouldn’t allow anyone, even my mother, to see me. She used to stand at the door and beg for a kiss goodnight. This was before she got sick—she had already been dead for several years by the time the organism hosting movement started. When she began dying I didn’t want to watch; I usually grew angry when she’d ask me to come see her in the hospital. The disease overtook her body until she looked parasitic herself. Near the end, if I felt her lips on my cheek while I was hugging her I’d pull away—I knew it was ridiculous, but I was afraid she might somehow suck out some of my beauty.
“Can you feel them inside you?” As he watched the scan from an outside control room, the doctor would whisper into a microphone that I could hear through a headset earpiece. His voice sounded sweaty. “Does it seem like your blood is crawling? Does it tickle? Are you ticklish?” He’d ask me questions the entire time, but even if I were to answer, there was no way for him to hear my response.
In truth I didn’t feel a thing; it was hard to believe they were even there. On my first follow-up visit I made the doctor show me footage of myself in the large ant-imaging machine to prove they were actually inside me. But after a while I got used to the thought of their presence and even started speaking to them throughout the day. The doctor said this was healthy.
“It’s not uncommon to feel a shift of identity,” he assured me. “It’s okay to talk to your organism, and to feel like it understands you. It’s now a part of your self. We could talk about this more over dinner?” But I never crossed the line into dating.
Then one day I received a frantic call.
“Come in immediately,” he said. “Leave the minute you hang up the phone.”
At the moment, I was in the middle of shooting a commercial for a water company. He didn’t care.
“What we have to discuss is far more important,” he said.
I was used to people feeling like they were more important than me, but less beautiful. I often felt that every transaction in my life somehow revolved around this premise.
Defying his orders, I finished the water shoot. “Refreshing,” I said. It was my only line in the commercial, and I’d been practicing all day.
I can tell you this: I did love how invisible the ants were. They were creatures that seemed to consider themselves neither important nor beautiful. Earlier that month, the doctor had given me a videotape of several ants feasting on the corpse of an ant that had died in my femur. This cannibalism was an aberration, he’d pointed out: ants do not normally eat other ants from their own colony. The doctor said he’d worked with an entomologist to specifically breed a contained bone-ant species that would eat the dead, lay the eggs in the dead, and make the dead a part of the living.
When I finally arrived the doctor was very upset—he’d canceled everything and had been waiting in his office, which is covered with wall-to-wall pictures of me, for hours.
“Your left wrist.”
I slipped off my glove and held it out to him in a vulnerable way. My wrist was smooth and fragrant and had a nicotine patch on it; the doctor had suggested I quit smoking for the health of the ants. I squeezed my eyes to look beneath my skin for them. “It’s like they’re not even there,” I muttered.
“Grip my fingers,” he said, holding two of his own upon my pulse. I found this a little difficult to do.
“Oh,” he said. Even though his voice sounded worried, he seemed a little pleased. “Goodness.”
He ran from the room, flustered. And there I sat alone, or not alone truly.
“We seem to be in crisis,” I muttered to them, and put my glove back on. Sometimes, although I know the ants aren’t visible, I still get paranoid that people can see them through my arms. Wearing gloves helps.
* * *
“We are all certain this can be resolved.” Seated around the table were several new doctors I’d never met, or maybe they were dentists. I spotted a magazine that I was in—mascara ad, page seven—lying on an end table in the conference room. Somehow this made me feel safer, more of a majority. There were two of me in the room and only one of everybody else.
My doctor passed me a glossy picture: its subject was an engorged ant that was either eating or throwing up—I couldn’t tell which. The ant was surrounded by small piles of powder that, when magnified, looked like crumbs of bread. I gagged a bit. “Why are you showing me this?”
“This is their queen,” he said. The doctor’s pupils had dilated to a width universally associated with panic. “She wants you gone.” His fingertip moved from pile to pile on the glossy photo, leaving a print upon each one. “These are piles of your bone. You are being devoured by the ants that live inside you.”
“Eaten from within.” A dull woman at the very end of the table repeated this in a parrot-like manner. She wore a large dome cap, the obvious fashion of one hosting an organism on her head. Hers appeared tall and slightly conical; I was very interested in what type of creature it might be, but it is considered rude to ask about
other people’s organisms—they are ultimately too personal, too much of a bodily function.
“But we feed the ants so they don’t have to eat me. I come here once a month so you can put in their food.”
An authoritarian doctor whispered something to my doctor, who whispered to me. “They’re not eating it anymore.”
I whispered back to him. “Can we start feeding them something tastier? A different bone-substitute? Real ground bones from animals? Or maybe even dead people?” I knew it was a tasteless suggestion, but I did have money and my life was apparently in danger. The authoritarian doctor scooted back in his rolling chair and looked at his shoes.
In the following weeks, my strength and health deteriorated until I was finally admitted to a very special hospital ward. It was a room my doctor had built onto his existing home, just for me.
Around this time, the doctor also started wearing a large sack around his waist—to conceal his organism, I assumed, whatever it might be. It must’ve grown larger since we’d first met. I was grateful my organism wasn’t making me wear a sack around my waist, even if it was eating me alive. The sack made a swishing noise when he walked; in motion the doctor sounded like a giant broom.
This swishing became more and more of a comfort as I gradually lost my vision. The doctor reminded me that when one door closes another opens, and this was true; I did seem to be gaining a sort of ant-sight. My ears began to turn away from human sounds as well, but soon I could pick up more ant noises. Around the third week I asked for my room’s television to be taken away. When my eyes were closed I could see various dark caves and swarming ant-limbs, and these images gradually started to feel preferential to anything I might view of the outer world.
“I’m becoming them,” I said one night when I heard my doctor swish in. “I’m becoming the ants.”
Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls Page 6