Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls (5 page)

Sister likes to pull back the curtains of her windows then stare out of them and look up at the sky suspiciously.

“What did you want to talk about? Do you need some money?” Of late, Sister has been plagued with a variety of fiscal obligations, something about back taxes. “Listen, Sis, I do understand what you’re saying.” I peek behind my shoulder and watch CT—naked, gentle CT, pink grapefruit juices dripping down his body like cartoon sweat—pretend to plug the blowhole of the dolphin on television with a slice of his grapefruit. His giggles are like heartbeats: steady and seconds apart. “But you just have to realize that we’re on different planes of existence. I’m not saying I’m better than you, just that my path is way more open with lots of colors.”

Sister’s weeping intensifies. “What the hell are you talking about?” she asks. “You’re speaking the drug-talk. I want Claudia back and I want her in English.”

If the spasm that afflicts my back and spine at the mention of my old name “Claudia” could make a sound, a single note, it would be unharmonious beyond this dimension. No one would even be able to hear what a wonky note it would be, because the human ear is not advanced enough. It’s one of those things; the sound is made but does anyone hear it?
Was
it made? I speak but Sister does not hear me.
Do
I speak?

“Uuuuuuuhhhhhhhhmmnnnngg.” CT lets out a guttural moan to begin his a.m. bowel gyrations. His torso bounces up and down while his hips move like he’s using an invisible hula-hoop.

His is a hula-hoop made of enchantment. It’s built of understanding, spiritual experience, and opium ether, paired with a variety of other things the human eye cannot see and the human ear cannot hear. Most of our senses are completely inadequate and not to be trusted; our true feelings come from our wormholes, often described as “the heart in our stomach between our legs.”

“Think about it,” CT likes to say, “The organ that the wormless refer to as ‘heart’ is like, entirely muscle. Like a body-builder or a worker bee. If bees have muscles.”

Sister does not affect my wormhole, but her disapproval makes my pulse quite irregular.

“Sister,” I say firmly, “Claudia is dead.”

Sis wails. I feel like I am some sort of hostage negotiator, except Sister is both the hostage and the captor. “We’ve been over this. My name is now Sorcerella Van Crystal. It’s official; I have stationary. Our bathrooms are filled with SVC embroidered towels. You used them to wipe the perspiration from your forehead the last and only time you visited our tree house. Please don’t backpedal. You’ve chosen to remain in my journey, thus my life.”

When Sister is really upset she begins to salivate. Her harsh words shoot out at me through the phone: sleds of anger luging down a hateful mountain. And the thing with mountains is, the higher their altitude, the lower their boiling point.

“Don’t give me this Sorcerella crap, Claudia. Jesus. The court fines I paid when you lived with me during high school. That guy who set your car on fire in our driveway. After everything we’ve been through, some ooga-booga rock weirdo can come along and brainwash you just like that?”

Sister is not receptive to meditative breathing exercises so I decide to suggest something a little more hands-on for her anxiety. “Sister, if I send you some special brownies, will you eat them?”

CT passes by with the walking stick and gives me the thumbs-up, meaning he’s embarking on a defecation-stroll. I wave goodbye. Perhaps sensing my tension, he jiggles his dingy slightly.

“Sweet earth for my loveworm,” he shouts, “I shall return.” Several flies are enjoying the streaks of grapefruit juice that ran down his chest and pooled in his groin and thighs. As he walks past me there is a loud unified buzzing; it is so cosmic, all those individual flies but just one buzz. It strikes me that it’s like my feelings for Sister—all the different harsh emotions could come out in one unified primal scream. I emit this into the receiver once I feel CT has ventured far enough on his defecation stroll that he will not hear me and fear danger has struck my physical person. CT and I do not like to use toilets-we only do this when we have to, like in super-posh hotels and backstage on television programs and concert tours. Sometimes the super posh hotels have double toilets and then he and I sit on them together, stare at each other, and try to predetermine when the other will flush, thereby flushing at the same time without ever looking away from one another’s eyes or communicating a will to do so. We have gotten very, drastically close to simultaneously flushing on more than one occasion. I’m pretty sure complete synchronicity is nigh the next time we are at the Plaza.

“You blew my ear out. I’m hanging up.”

Sister does not understand that her ears are already worthless. Their multiple defects predated my scream by decades.

“Sis, if I want to ingest the most powerful hallucinogen the Worm Eternal has provided to earthlings and copulate with my soul mate beneath the desert stars, that is my
business and my right.”

“The balcony of your Vegas hotel suite is not the desert! Do you know how many photos there are of you plastered everywhere, how many videos? How is continuous sex for that long even possible? Did police really have to break into your room?”

The vital fluid allows for radical love-energy. Management was charged for the cost of the door. “Sister, no harm, no foul.”

“No HARM? You look like sex freaks to the entire world! You should see the faces you’re making! They’re not even attractive. I’m saying this objectively. You look carsick and blinded by headlights.”

“It’s not about how we look to
other humans
, Sis. Third eye. There’s more to see than you think.”

“Ugh, it’s on the TV right now.” There’s a long silence; I can almost hear her eyes squinting. “What the hell is that, a tattoo?”

I decline to answer, as Sister wouldn’t understand. I recently had a bottle of wine tattooed on my mons.

“CT and I got married,” I offer.

Sister hangs up then calls back and hangs up again, then finally calls back and is sort of able to speak through the wheezing. I stare at the healing crystals I glue-gunned to my phone in the mirror, a sort of second-line of defense against Sister’s negative energies.
Work
, I beg them.
Glow
.

“To that creep,” she sputters, “to that pervert hustler? Did you know he hit on me at Thanksgiving? I was putting the cranberry sauce into Tupperware when I felt a stiffness on my leg and turned around. He was down on the floor like a crab rubbing his...his...extension near my ankles. His pants were that new kind of denim, the stretchy stuff. I could feel everything.”

“He is a wonderful lover, Sis.”

“I can’t do this right now,” she says, and then hangs up.

I stay on the phone and let the open dial tone be a sort of beacon-call, a homing signal for CT to return, bowels empty, groin hungry.

I should mention that Sister is also my mother, somewhat. When Mother died, Sister was nineteen and I was four. As a teenager I used to love calling Sister “Smother” whenever she was overbearing—a perfect combination of sister and mother.

“Sustainable,” replies CT, “so bitching.” We’re at the home of a fashion designer whose mansion is built into the side of a cave. One room of his house is actually filled with bats; when I grabbed a flashlight sitting by the door and shined it up to the ceiling, there were tons of bats instead of popcorn paint. The room has no furniture due to “Ze guano, yeesh, ze guano,” but there is a mounted television on the wall that plays looped footage of a young girl feeding a loaf of French bread to a Dalmatian dog over and over again.

We came to the designer in order to get fitted full-body leather suits. “Ju can wear zees forever,” he said, “Drink en zem, sex en zem, die en zem.” They have zippers and ties all over the place so they can stay on during a variety of activities, like going to the bathroom or getting an immunization shot in the upper arm.

CT raises his glass of wine up to the ceiling, a kind salute. The wine is red and has 10-15 drops of bat blood in each bottle; it’s from the designer’s own vineyard with blood from his own bats.

CT, who is very pale and pretty always, lifts the glass to his mouth and sucks it in with his cheeks so the wine glass stays magically attached to his face as a sort of bulb-nose. He looks at the ground and puts his arms out in a crucifixion pose, then begins moving his arms. He looks like a hummingbird that has been transported to a different planet, one where the environment is harsh and there are no flowers so it has to fly around all the time with its own personal glass vase of nectar attached to its face.

It strikes me that the cave home we are in is one such environment; a hummingbird could not live here without a nectar appendage-bottle.

The designer disappears for a minute and comes back holding three pairs of night vision goggles. “Let us go back inside ze bat cave,” he suggests. He is no longer wearing a shirt.

The goggles make everything green and give us all emerald eyes, the bats and CT and the designer. Several battery-operated floor cleaners roam around the cave’s paved cement and eat the guano. They remind me of sting rays or giant moving sand dollars, very flat and white.

“It’s like we’re underwater,” I say, “an underwater cave.” But in the cave, as in water, my voice does not seem able to travel.

The designer kneels down onto the floor and begins untying CT’s new leather suit-fly. For a moment there is a sting of panic in my stomach; my mellowness is suddenly a balloon full of water being poked with a stick. I’m not sure if it’s going to burst open or maybe just spring a tiny leak or perhaps not puncture at all. The free love of the Worm Eternal instructs us to see one another as fellow worms, genderless, openings identical and indistinguishable.

But sometimes I fail the Worm and grow jealous.

CT hands me a bottle of bat blood wine. “My cherished one, please pour this on top of Gustav and me, pour it slowly so that he and I shall be like a primordial fountain flooded with the blood of cursed statues, unholy stones.”

And then the stick poking my balloon turns into a feather, and I am tickled. I feel my Inner Worm remind me that the Intensity comes when I forget that life is art, and Intensity is what clogs the path to enlightenment. As CT likes to say, “The boy at the top of the mountain of knowledge, the one standing like a flamingo with one leg straight and one leg bent. He is a mild child.”

As I ready the bottle at the top of CT’s golden locks, dead center in the middle of his part, Gustav’s head lifts up and he gives a half-hearted protest, “Don’t spill, ze suit, ze suit,” but CT gently moves Gustav’s head back downward, the way a parent might guide the cheek of a child who has just had a nightmare back down to the pillow.

“How can I wear a leather suit that does not carry the stains of wine and blood?” asks CT, and Gustav does not answer; of course it was rhetorical, and the bloody wine pouring over their green night-vision bodies looks completely black. I feel more powerful than ever, like a superhero who has shadow-juice as one of her many weapons. I streak their bodies with the unseen.

When my phone rings there’s about a fourth of the bottle left. I tap the opening at CT’s mouth and drizzle the rest of it inside until he makes a happy noise.

My phone’s screen is so green that beneath the goggles it seems interactive. I speak to it for some time before realizing that I need to open the phone in order to answer the call. Luckily it’s just Sister, who calls again and again and again until I answer. Once, when I had a few squares of acid beneath my eyelids, I finally distinguished the source of the music but then mistook the phone for a fetal orb—not an orb from the beginning of time but a baby orb, one that has only been alive for a few million years—so I sang children’s songs to it and told it bedtime stories hoping that its musical electronic crying would please, please stop. I later got distracted by CT leading me to a hammock that had been stretched over top a hot tub at his request by the really expensive hotel’s staff, but the next morning I saw that I had eighty-seven missed calls, all from Sister.

“Hello,” I say. I am unsure of the duration of time it takes me to complete the word. The bat blood wine—at least our particular serving, I am beginning to realize—has another complication to its chemical makeup besides alcohol and blood.

“Oh Lord. Are you on drugs right now? I can call you back later, when it wears off. This is important.” I can hear sliding window blinds in the background and I know that she is staring out at the sky with a deep frown on her face. Even though the sound is distorted (it sounds like the opening of the world’s largest tin can) another part of my brain knows those blinds well enough to recognize the sound they make even when it’s camouflaged by drugs.

“I’m fine,” I say. “Just sleepy. Just terribly awake.” I hear Sister’s nervous fingers tapping on the glass of the windowpane, or maybe someone knocking on a really thick foam door. “Sister?” I ask, because it is so quiet except for the rustling of the bats and the gentle sounds of Gustav’s mouth that I can’t remember whether the conversation has ended and she has already hung up or not.

“Listen,” she says. “I want the rest of your share of Mother’s estate money. All of the little that’s left. I want you to sign your half over to me. CT is rich and you don’t need it. The real reason I call you all the time and ask for money is because I’m not in good health and you’ve been paying my doctor’s bills. Sometimes I need medications badly and quickly but I feel like I have to ask you every damn time I use some of your money from the trust, and you’re usually impossible to get a hold of. How can I put this delicately? I want you to give me the money so I don’t have to talk to you ever again.”

The electronic vacuum cleaners, perhaps detecting CT’s new emission on the floor, all rush over to CT and Gustav, encircling them. It’s very cute, like the two of them are surrounded by a hungry brood of flat Maltese puppies. “Mine sweet bitter fruit,” Gustav is saying to CT, licking the stains of wine on CT’s suit of leather.

“Sister,” I say worriedly, “you are hurt? Your health is failing? We shall heal you together! We shall sail through the air like spores from a fern of renewal, a pollen containing life and promise, a seedling that blossoms into substance where before there was void!”