Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls (8 page)

“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 pale 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. It was 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, face flushed. 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.

Since the ants, I have started gloving my arms. I buy the longest gloves I can find. It feels like putting the ants to bed, the way one might place a blanket over the cage of a bird.

“We are all certain this can be resolved.” Around the table sat 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 vomiting—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 insanity. “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 peoples’ organisms—they are ultimately 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 their food inside.”

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 more enticing? A different bone-substitute? 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.

“No,” my doctor said, and then he stood. His hands lifted slightly above his head. “This is not about consumption. It is an act of interspecies war!”

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 when I’d first met him. 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 swish 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 requested that my room’s television 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.”

I heard him pull up a chair and sit down next to me. “It is wonderful, isn’t it? My swan, my pet?”

He hadn’t called me those things before, but I was in no condition to disagree. My arms and legs could no longer move—I could only move through the ants. It was like having hundreds of different hands. I could make them go anywhere and do anything inside my body; I’d even started eating with them. Though I didn’t necessarily want to devour my own bone, I had an insatiable hunger, and there was a commanding voice,
Eat, Walk, Lift, Chomp
. It was my own voice but much deeper, not exactly masculine but echoing and confident, like my home was a large cave and I firmly believed in everything I said. I seemed able to express only one word at a time, but this felt more liberating than restrictive—suddenly every word could be a full representation of myself.

I lost all track of time. Eventually I was certain of only two things: the appetite was getting out of control, and my old eyes were completely gone.

“The rest of the world thinks that you’ve died,” the doctor told me. As he swished into the room, there was the sound of yards and yards of material being unwrapped and lifted. His words seemed round with satisfaction. “You cannot see it, but I have just unveiled the portal.”

I would’ve answered him, but I was no longer sure if my voice still made a sound or if words even came out when I felt like I was talking.

“It’s right here on my waist; I’ve been making paths inside of me just as there are paths inside of you. After you first came to see me, I reported to the government that I, too, hold ants inside my body, but I don’t. Not yet. It is your ants I’m after. You have become the ants who ate you; your consciousness is united with theirs. And when you all crawl inside of me, we will all be one forever.” As his voice continued I could feel the ants rallying, see their legs beginning kick with heightened motion. “I never actually fed the ants you’ve become; I simply allowed them to eat you whole. But you will not eat me. I will feed you properly so that you don’t. We will share my stomach—I’ve inserted a tube whereby everything I swallow will also be accessible to your minions, your thousands of minions that are now you entirely and do your bidding. I have always loved you, and when you came to my office, I knew this was my chance to make you mine.”

And then I smelled something irresistible and began to crawl towards it, into the new pink-grey cave that must be the doctor. If what he said was true, I was somewhat grateful to get inside of him—if I was now just thousands of swarming ants I certainly did not wish to be seen.

Once we had transferred, I was pleased to realize that I could see through the doctor’s eyes as well as those of my ants. It is calming to look through the eyes of another person. It stills your own thoughts almost to a halt.

“Do you love me?”

The doctor likes to ask this; he does so almost every hour. Although I cannot speak, he always smiles afterwards and says that he loves me too.

Throughout the day I have all types of sensations. Some are good, others worry me, but my fears can’t grow so big that they reach outside of his body. Nothing can move beyond this body, so in a way I feel like I am the world, and he is the world, the same way that lovers feel. “How strange,” I often think, though I try not to let him hear me thinking it, “to have so much in common with an unattractive man.”

And then there is the evening, when sunlight pours into the window like nectar. He sits down to the dinner table in front of a large mirror—I think so that I can see him, though maybe he has figured out a way to see me. Then he carefully opens the bag of sugar with a knife. When I hear this sound, each of my ants jump and he smiles, his legs and arms contract whether he likes it or not. And though they are his own, I feel as if I guide his fingertips, that the tiniest of my workers go down into the marrow of his thumb and help to grip the teaspoon.

I love watching him eat. Teaspoon after teaspoon disappears into his mouth; his saliva coats the spoon’s surface with stuck granules that change its color from silver to a crusty white. I cannot decide if he did me a favor or if I’m a victim. When I try to think, all I can feel is the sugary fluid, and a rage that comes when after our feedings I find myself hungry.

“The ghost is friendly,” says Grandmother. She pushes me inside, throws in a loaf of bread, and locks the vent.

There is a strange ghost in the air-conditioning duct and it’s my job to find and tame it. I did not volunteer. It is more of an assigned position.

“Hello?” I call softly. Hopefully, the ghost is Mother. Grandmother killed her a few years ago and has feared her haunting return ever since.

Both Mother and Grandmother were knife-throwers by trade. Grandmother trained Mother from an early age, as Mother trained me, as Grandmother continues to train me now that Mother is gone.

“Just you wait,” Grandmother warned the day we lugged Mother’s burlap-wrapped body out to the woods. I kept hitting up against rocks in the dark and collecting large bruises. “She’ll come back and give me my what-for. I won’t know a moment of peace until I die.”

I dug and dug until the sun began to appear, when Grandmother’s head finally peered over the hole’s rim. Her normally tight bun was loose and wild; wisps of hair floated around her face like thin smoke. “Come up,” she said, lowering down a rope for me to grab so I wouldn’t get her hands dirty. Once I filled the hole back in, Grandma’s composure returned.

It was not how I had pictured my mother’s funeral.

Afterwards Grandma handed me a large, glowing cigar and patted my thigh. She has a scar on her thigh from when Mother dared her to put a lit cigar there for a whole minute. I worried it was my time to receive a matching scar, but she said nothing more, so I sat by her and tried to puff until I got sick and vomited.

“Hello?” The ghost does not answer my hellos, so I try something personal. “Madre?” I take out a piece of bread and try to shape it like a ghost, then lay it in my lap like a type of sign. Ghosts Welcome. Ghost Spoken Here.

There is banging as Grandma hits the vent with a broom-handle. “I don’t hear anything,” she says. “You must wrestle the ghost and win.” There is more banging and then she goes to boil tea.

The ghost has been making rattle-noises that sound like music for people who have never heard music, or people who are very lonely for sound. Grandma suspected vermin—she has caught hundreds of raccoons in her lifetime—but then one night she saw a blue glow coming from the vent.

From the sounds of the television drifting into the vent from the living room below, I can tell that it is evening. When ghosts come.

There is a saying Grandma has, “Fit in or else you’ll be sorry.” All I really know about ghosts is “Boo.” I whisper it at first; I want to fit in but I’m also not sure what this word means to ghosts. Then I say it a little louder.

Suddenly a wind takes up all my different hairs. The hair on my head starts orbiting in whips that seem very much like snakes, so much like them that I grow afraid of my own hair. My eyebrows and the soft hairs on my cheeks begin to tickle. On my arms and legs, the hairs stand straight up and prick out into my clothing. The hairs bruise and balloon. One hair in the back of my head swells out too much and pops. Injured hair is a strange sensation.

As the wind grows stronger, I start to worry: what if saying “Boo” is like swimmers cutting themselves in a sea of sharks? Maybe ghosts smell sounds, and “Boo” is the strongest scent they know. Large dust bunnies fly past me, now and again a small roach, then just one very fearful old mouse that probably came up into the vent to die and did not count on this at all. He whirls past so quickly that I barely get to see his expression, his lint-covered whiskers, but he looks tired and terrified.

I close my eyes when tiny particles of dust in the fast wind begin to sting. I can no longer hear the television, just the wrapper-top on the loaf of bread buckled between my knees whipping back and forth. I try to think about my bed, which is soft and has a canopy that Grandmother makes fun of. Lying beneath it I feel like a doll who someone loves.

The wind stops suddenly. Afterwards, I squint for several minutes in case it starts up again. Whenever something bad happens in my life, it’s best if I don’t feel relieved when I think it’s over. Like how we buried my mother, and now the house is haunted.

Then I feel her breath on my eyelids.

Mother. She’s not as beautiful as I remember; her skin is gray and a tooth is missing. Mother’s stab wounds trickle blood continuously. They are the only part of her that appears to be alive.

I forget everything I’ve said to her in the quiet beneath my bed’s canopy since she’s been gone. Our hands try to come together but they are like the ends of magnets. I cry a little and Mother starts crying too, but this makes her blood fountain much swifter so we stop.

“Grandma did this to you.”

“We had a disagreement. Don’t hold it against her. When I think about it, she was right.”

I remember that night. They were fighting over tequila.

“It’s been you then? Haunting the house?”

“Of course. Did I scare you, my lamb? When you’re a ghost, not haunting is like trying not to laugh. It tickles and pushes until it hurts. Of course there are a lot of boring ghosts who find it easy not to haunt. In the afterlife, so much is boring.” She tilts her head and looks at my neck, my chin. “You’re getting beautiful. Hector would be proud.”

Hector is my father. I remember him running away from our home when I was very little, and Mother running after him, throwing knives. I wonder if knives exist where Mother lives now.

We stare at one another. It’s nice to have her in front of my eyes. It doesn’t make me hurt inside the way photographs of her do.

“Dear, how about we scare Grandmother together? That way you’ll be in on it, and you won’t get frightened.”

I shrug. Grandmother is already grumpy. “You’re not the one who has to live with her,” I say.