Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls (11 page)

Mother could maybe not come with me.

The next morning I pop the question to Brady.

I quickly peer over my shoulder to make sure Mother is still finishing her home tattoo. She’s deep in concentration over an electric toothbrush motor and a Bic pen.

We discuss logistics. Although I want to leave this afternoon, Brady has a biohazard run to finish and only one radioactive suit. We decide on Friday.

The truth is, good things do happen to good people; sometimes it just takes awhile. And bad people do get punished. Mother already got hers, sort of. She should’ve gotten it for longer but I wanted to give her a second chance.

The rest of the week proved to be quite a struggle. I managed to get through it only because I knew it would all be over soon, I in Brady’s protective embrace.

On Tuesday, incredulous that I wasn’t holding any hard drugs, Mother burnt my vinyl curtains to create a tar-like mixture she could huff. Once high, she insisted we have a series of home-Olympic strength competitions that included arm wrestling, leg locking, and kickboxing. These were followed by a medal ceremony in which Mother awarded herself the two remaining tin cans of food on board. I went to bed hungry. This was probably for the best because my stomach was already so full of swallowed blood.

Bored on Wednesday, Mother dislodged a ceiling panel and went up into the cabin’s airshaft. She emerged adorned with several pieces of apocalyptic jewelry she had fashioned from living rats.

Thursday was a delight of secret packing. Although most of my sparse possessions had been transformed into some type of weapon, I had been able to hold onto one pair of decent underwear, elastic still relatively sturdy, for my first meeting with Brady. That night I decided to set things as right with Mother as I could.

“Mother, I want you to know that despite all that’s happened, you’ll always be my mother, and I love you.”

She seemed to possibly absorb this. Her fingers fidgeted with her rattail necklace. “I can’t believe they did away with television ten years ago,” she said. “I really didn’t see that coming at all.”

I get up in the early hours of morning, dress, and start towards the exit pod. Suddenly the shadow of the doorway takes form and I feel a grave disruption in my breathing that gives way to unmistakable pain. Mother, wearing an eye patch donned for purely aesthetic reasons, is holding a homemade knife. As she pulls the blade from my chest, I see that it has been whittled from a tin pork-n-beans can. Its label is still partially on.

Knowing I have just minutes, perhaps seconds to live, I don’t dabble in the muck of blame or anger. Circle of life, I decide. Mother giveth, Mother taketh away. But I can’t live with Brady thinking that perhaps I’d gotten cold feet, or worse, never loved him at all. I use my last remaining strength to scrape towards the WordCall console.

To my surprise, it is already lit up. There is a message between us, except the words are not my own.

“Sorry to burst your bubble.” Mother hoists me over her shoulder and begins walking. “He’s a steady I met back in the pen, pre-freeze. Been in wait ever since for an opportunity to spring me. As a former felon, he wasn’t be allowed to buy my permacapusle, so when he found out I’d be going up for auction he decided to get to me through you.”

The room is starting to turn a dark shade of magenta, waving at the edges like a flag of silk. Mother hoists me down and then latches something around my wrists and neck. I realize I’m in the prison capsule.

Before closing the lid, she unzips the purse on my waist and removes all my shower ration cards. From the inside of the capsule, her voice sounds echoey and god-like.

“Don’t worry, I’m freezing you, not leaving you to die. It’s just a flesh wound. Albeit a deep one. I’m going to have to dump you somewhere that no one will find you for fifty years or so, long enough for me and Skinner, or Brady, or whatever you called him, to have a nice life together without you showing up to blow the whistle.”

With that, the cold smoke starts. It burns in a surprising way. The fact that this should not be happening to me, that Mother and my pretend boyfriend formerly known as Brady are bad people and I am not, doesn’t provide quite as much insulation from the pain as I might like. In fact, I am very cold, so cold that no one thing can be any different from another. My thoughts and my left arm are equal-sized chunks of ice. The small window of the capsule begins to frost over and I know this is my chance: this where I get to make the face that I will have until I wake. I decide to stick out my tongue. As if this painful freeze is just a snowflake I can catch and eat, as if my mother is just a bad medicine I can swallow.

My friend Gizmo who works at the funeral home occasionally smokes the hair of the embalmed dead. The smell does not bother him; he is used to horrible smells. He claims that after a few minutes of inhaling, moments from the corpses’ lives flood his head like a movie. He won’t smoke the locks of children. “I did that once,” he tells me, “and I watched a dog die over and over for two days.”

“What happens if you smoke the hair of the living?” I’m a little intoxicated. I like Gizmo romantically, and I wonder if rather than having to tell him he could just smoke my bangs and figure it out.

“I don’t know,” he shrugs. “Maybe then I’m just breathing burnt hair. Or maybe then I’d steal their memories and they’d never get them back.”

Memory theft is a pleasant concept to me. I’ve just been through a horrible breakup with my ex-boyfriend. As it dragged itself out, I often called Gizmo late at night while he was at work. In between tokes of hair he gave me really great advice.

The next day I decide to go to the salon and get the past fourteen months of hair chopped off. “I want the hair back,” I say, holding up a Ziploc bag. Since I knew I would feel strange requesting this, I decided to go to the Save-N-Snip where there is a large hand-drawn sign near the register that says IF WE FIND LICE WE CANNOT CUT YOU; the wording is sinister and when I leave with my hair bagged I don’t feel like the oddest animal they’ve ever seen.

At home I worry that strands of other peoples’ hair got swept in with mine. Who knows what memories of other people he could accidentally smoke and attribute to me? To be safe, I go through the baggie and take out anything even remotely straight. I am miles of curls.

The next night when I show up at the morgue with a bag of hair and a lighter, Gizmo is a bit skeptical.

“What if I take the wrong memories?” he asks. “What if I smoke this and then you don’t even remember your name?”

“I don’t think so,” I say, “you’d need toddler hair for that. This hair is all memories I can stand to lose.”

For a moment I ponder tricking him and pretending not to know anything right after he inhales. I could ask
Where am I?
then grab his hand with confused doe eyes.

Suddenly he gets a suspicious look on his face and lowers the joint. “Have you ever owned a dog who died a slow and painful death,” Gizmo asks, “and if so, did you stand by its side the whole time in constant vigil?” His expression is filled with caution.

“No dogs,” I report, “goldfish.” I make the sound of a toilet flushing.

Assured, he nods and takes a deep inhale. My head begins to feel warm and maneuvered, like certain parts of it are getting massaged. He coughs a little. “Is it working?” I ask.

“Truffles,” he says, putting his hand to his forehead like a fake psychic. “You really like truffles.” I nod; they are my favorite tuber. The contents of my head begin to fill with motion, like water is bubbling up in my ears. Tiny popping noises start coming from a place in my skull and grow crunchier. Suddenly, Gizmo’s eyes change.

“Your ex is a
jerk
,” he says. This seems right too, but when I try to come up with a specific example I’m left with a vague and unscratchable tickle deep in my brain. “You’re too vulnerable,” he says. “That moron could never have given you what you really want.”

All of a sudden, one of the dead bodies shakes and its hand rises up on the table. I scream and hold my bubbling head. “Don’t worry,” Gizmo says, “it’s just a death-rattle.”

“Just
a death-rattle?” I laugh. “Do you even know how disturbing that sounds?”

Gizmo puffs more of my hair. I suppose he is used to the disturbing.

When we walk over to the rattling body, it looks vaguely familiar. “This isn’t him, is it?” I ask. “My ex?”

“No. But I can see the resemblance.” Gizmo turns his head a little and stares at the corpse. “Same chin.” As I admire Gizmo’s hands, they take a small clump of the body’s hair between two fingers. He gives me an inquisitive look. “Want to see what this guy’s life was like?”

I decline, for superstitious reasons. I figure I now have a memory hole in my head that might take a few days—weeks, even—to fill. I fear I might decide some other person’s memories are my own.

When I look over at Gizmo, he’s done with my hair joint and staring at me in a funny way.

“What,” I ask, “spill it.” We move towards a corner with a bench, and suddenly the sour smell in the air grows stronger.

“It’s wrong how we postpone bodies from rotting,” I say. “I can smell how wrong it is.”

“That’s what happened with you and the ex. It was going badly, but you kept holding on.” His gloved hands move under my shirt a little and around my bare waist. Knowing he has just handled dead flesh creeps me out at first, but then I move closer. Maybe, I decide, it is a nice contrast for him. After touching a dead person, my skin must seem quite special and alive. “You know,” he says, “I’ve smoked up many memories of bad relationships.” He takes off a glove so he can press his bare hand to my face. “I know what not to do.”

The body behind us gives another death-rattle. It startles me and I jump, but his hand stays on my face and I do not look away. “I’ve seen good memories too, though,” he continues. “I know how to be very romantic.”

I expect his breath to smell awful, like burnt hair, but instead it smells like Lilac Rain shampoo. I watch the fine layer of talc the rubber glove left on his hand glitter magically in the light, and the memory-hole in my brain turns hungry then hungrier.

Eat him with kisses
, the hole says; it needs to snack on a new memory right away. So we kiss, and the weird smells of the morgue suddenly turn into something tame and slippery, something our lungs can slide over like jelly, something that can hold our hearts steady through our own quiet death-rattle.

I invited Eddie over for dinner as a first date. I am bad at dating, which is to say, I am bad at waiting for people to fall in love with me. What is the hold up? Where is the kink in the hose?

Tonight, I’ve prepared mashed sweet potatoes. I’m nervous because they look like the diarrhea of a clown.

When Eddie knocks, Baxter begins to growl. Baxter is my obese cat. His thyroid condition and back paw deformity prevent exercise. Baxter’s growl is low when he initially spies danger, then it gets very high if the offender does not flee.
Your cat sounds like a Hank Williams song
, an old boyfriend once said, but he said it while quickly leaving so it wasn’t a compliment they way it could’ve been.

Tonight when I open the door, Baxter slowly crawls over to Eddie’s foot and bites.

During dinner, Eddie tells me all about his job as a claims adjuster. I could care less. I don’t even eat because I’m planning on sex, and I don’t want any sloshing in my stomach or for my mouth to taste like food instead of sex. The tricky part about having sex at my apartment is Baxter, who watches on and growls while slowly crawling towards the bed, then slowly climbing up the woolly cat ramp he uses to get onto and off of the bed when I’m not home. Once he gets to the top, he approaches me and my partner and begins with the fangs. I’m so used to the biting that it doesn’t bother me any more, not even in really sensitive areas, but past partners have freaked out at Baxter’s intimidating 27 lb. figure and his sideways tongue combined with the biting and growling. I should note that by the time Baxter has finally reached the top of the bed he’s exhausted and his mouth is foamy.
Maybe it has mad cow disease
, an old fling once said, a one-night stand from the bowling alley.
He’s not a cow
, I replied, but the man was adamant,
other things get it, goats and people and all kind of creatures
, and when Baxter bit him the man sent me a bill for several expensive precautionary vaccinations he requested at the ER after leaving my apartment. Baxter kind of looks like the cat that’s printed on my checks, only much larger. My checks say, “WHAT’S WITH MONDAYS?” and the thin Baxter printed on them is very confused-looking. I sent the man the check for his medical expenses on a Saturday, specifically so he’d get it on a Monday, and maybe like the joke enough to get back with me. He might call one day.