Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls (7 page)

The Worm Eternal is wise and sneaky. He will leave you all alone on auto-pilot 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 cop incident.

Deep down, I suppose I hadn’t really been dealing with the fact that Sister wanted to break contact at all; 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 temple and cringing but when she sees the pills she cringes even more.

“Are these aspirin p.m. 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.

“OK,” I 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 to an alarming but expected bright orange 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 utter grief at her loss, but she’s staring up at the loudspeakers. “This is a really great song,” she yells, which is not what I was expecting Sister to say.

“It is,” I reply gingerly, “this drum solo will last for approximately 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.

“Lets 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 the still-inflated side of her bra 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 her breast cancer and the mastectomy, and when Grog says she is still totally doable they start flirting and take off her bra so Grog can draw a nipple over her scar tissue with a Sharpe marker. She thinks it’s hilarious. It’s so good to see Sister smile.

When the curtain on Grog’s bunk finally reopens and the two of them come out, she’s still in great spirits, which for Sister means that she is in a completely altered state.

“Sis,” she yells, putting her naked arms around me and bringing my face to her half-bosom. She rocks me back and forth like a mother for a little while.

“What were Mom’s last words?” she asks. I was only four at the time but I remember them easily.

“Mother looked at me and said, ‘I’m doing this because of you. You drove me to this.’”

Sis completely cracks up. CT and Grog start laughing too, and before I know it tears are pouring down my face because I can’t stop laughing either. “That’s ridiculous!” Sister says through her laughter. I nod.

“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 you to live with me. I felt like I had to take you in, because Mom was such a horrible person, and I didn’t want to seem like a horrible person too. But it ruined so many things for me. If I hadn’t been forced to grow up right then and be a parent, things would be way better for me now I think, much much better.”

I have been in the stomach of the Worm Eternal long enough to know 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 headdress of swan 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 bit. It’s easy not to sober up in the bus-light and bus-air; the bus is a sort of intoxicant 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 it. “I’m a blooming flower, say those words.”

And she does. The sun is coming up brighter than I’ve ever seen it, and it is all hitting Sister, her scarred parts and her whole parts, everything. And Grog’s face moves into her bloom like a hummingbird, 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 like a hummingbird 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. My ears eat every drop of 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 other type of currency). 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” was bolded and underlined.

The biggest surprise was that she’d left me a white leotard. I knew with one look that it had been Mother’s. I smelled it, hoping that it would somehow still smell like her, even though she’d been dead for over two decades and was mostly a horrible mother. But it smelled like the bus’s incense-laden air. I put it on beneath my leather suit, though, and pretty soon because of rubbing on the leather all day the leotard acquired a very comfortable smell, like a drowsy horse.

A few weeks later we were able to stay in the hospital with Sister for a week. It was weird-Worm Eternal-serendipity because we’d long ago been scheduled to go to the desert to film a new video for the upcoming album
La Muerte es Suerte
. Then, during filming, the python wrapped around Grog’s shoulders totally bit him on the johnson, just like Grog is always worried will happen to CT when we go sleep in fields. 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 want to bite a human in that physical region, and asked Grog what kind of cologne he used 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 was staying at.

So we cancelled some tour dates and I got to sit by Sister and hold her hand during and after treatment, sometimes holding her as she got sick and left drops on my leather suit that were a nice type of reminder stain. And beneath the suit I always wore Mother’s leotard. Late at night when the cable got boring and Sister was asleep and CT and the rest of the gang were 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 happily declared) I often thought about how family and Mother and Sister were 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, its beauty is dizzying in fast, airplane-stunt ways: the beauty of CT’s locks spiraled in a hurricane of rock, the beauty of my sister so strong while her body is weak, the beauty of Mother’s white 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.

When space on earth became very limited, it was declared all people had to host another organism on or inside of their bodies. Many people chose something noninvasive, such as barnacles or wig-voles. Some women had breast operations that allowed them to accommodate small aquatic life within implants. But because I was already perfectly-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 all your movies,” the doctor told me during our first consultation. “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 commercial 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 certain buttons were pushed, the doctor could see all the ants moving around in my body, using their mandibles to pick up 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 in my closet. 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 of course before the cancer—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 cancer 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 was somehow going to suck out 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 awhile 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 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. Where are you right now?”

At the moment, I was in the middle of shooting a commercial for a water company.

“Leave the minute you hang up the phone. What we have to discuss is far more important.”

I was very 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 these 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 at the doctor’s he was very upset—he’d cancelled everything and had been waiting in his office, which is covered with wall-to-wall pictures of me, for hours.