Pandemia
Taylor Wood, Stupid Anonymous Collaborator, and Cara Reed
There’s an ant drowning in my kitchen sink. There’s an ant freezing its exoskeleton off in my freezer. There’s an ant corkscrewing around the perimeter of my bathtub until it sees God, flailing its wiry limbs ‘til they’re numb.
I have ants. And I will let them live their feeble, fragile lives until they don’t. They will wander the fierce and stormy ridges in the wallpaper. They will traverse staggering lengths of plaster. They will chill, simply chill, in the most cavernous of IKEA shelves and revel in the devastatingly florescent light of these two rooms that I reign upstairs. They will hurry and hurry towards whatever light is needling into the eyeholes of their beady skulls the sharpest. Where they are fed, they will go. Where they are allowed, they will be. And I’m gonna let them.
Maybe I am God.
-
But that would imply the existence of both God, and myself, and that’s not a call I feel qualified to make, so I kill them. I kill them all, laughing. AHAHAHA WHO’S A FUCKING LOSER NOW? I arrange their crushed bodies in a line, goo and little hands smeared on my own, pour myself a shot in their honor and take it, leaving corpse juice stained on the glass. That’s it. No more ants. No more disappointments. No more reminders of my shortcomings. Only progress now. Only smiles and laughs and a head held fucking high. My phone vibrates in response to these thoughts, but before I can examine it, I hear, “You missed one, motherfucker,” come from the other room. “Come and get me. Bitch.”
-
The first year I was married, we had roaches. Call it an indicative omen, call it nothing short of expected. Neither of us could muster the courage to kill them. I created a device with two spatulas and a sandal. It worked once and then broke. Call it an indicative omen, call it nothing short of expected.
The first year I got divorced, I started smoking. I thought it would quell my anxiety, but it only muted my anger. I was back in school, supposedly newly liberated, supposedly empowered. But the loneliness was the same as it was when I was married; whelming like the tide. I kept trying to drown myself in the sea of smoke. It didn’t work.
The first month into this awful fucking quarantine, I have tried to quit smoking. It seemed as good of an excuse as any to stop. Except it snowed this week, and I’m now crankier than I normally would be.
I haven’t touched another person in three weeks. Not that it was terribly different from before, despite my foray into polyamory/consensual non-monogamy/trying-to-steal-as-much- love-from-everyone-I-can-before-my-heart-shrivels-into-a-tiny-raisin-because-I-have-daddy- issues, I have still felt wholly and unequivocally alone.
The bitter irony is, I’m terrified to die alone.
-
I put down the phone I didn’t know was at my ear on top of the fired squad I created after hearing myself tell me all of my own memories, wondering why I can’t stop interrupting myself, and investigate the other voices. On my bed, MY bed, lies a giant roach, which is really more of an annoyance than anything. I mean, what fucking nerd had the literary gall to try this bullshit again? No one is ever fucking transformed; you fuck who you fuck, you kill who you kill, then
you die, and you hope to disappoint as few of these people as possible in the meantime. The roach lights one of my cigarettes.
“You can’t do that in here,” I say. “It’s in the lease.”
“Suck my dick. There’s a full ashtray right here.”
“And?”
“You’re saying you can smoke in here, but I can’t?”
“Goddamn right. It’s in the lease.”
“You people. First us, now the ants. You’re a pest, ya know that? Living in the same city where you barely graduated with a couple liberal arts degrees. A loser pest.”
“I’m a human being. I’m essential.”
“You’re a dunce. A fast food failure. You know you can’t kill us all. We’ll always come back. We’ll always remind you. Always.”
I rub my watering eyes, or maybe they’re just covered in ant cum now, but my phone starts ringing again in the other room. The fun is always in the other room.
The other room is what I call the room I’m not in. The single, bisecting wall is really just there to break up space. Like there might be someone on the opposite side organizing spices or whatever. In this case, with the world being ivory towered up for now and surely later, there has not been anyone. So it’s me and a humanoid fucking asshole cockroach in this room, and the hollow metallic bellow of a fucking landline shrieking from the other room. And suddenly I’m bored.
I let it wail like my mom is already darting across the kitchen to retrieve the relentless thing from the wall. I could be watching TV, popping mini Oreos without a thought, except I'm
pretty fixated on the way my new nemesis’s creepy ass antennae are wandering through the smoky haze erupting from what I assume is a very small mouth hole, though I’m shaky in my knowledge of roach anatomy. The haze eats up the whole room. It smells like it should make me feel better. Ok, I have to end this hack fucking hellscape mind prison. It is time.
“This isn’t over,” I say.
On the twelfth skull shattering ring I shove the door open in one beat. The sound slaps the air like a wave.
-
Things weren’t quite bad between us yet when the mice came. We worked together in
getting rid of them, though our preferred methods differed. I preferred the finite one. Sometimes we’d hear their screeches at night from our bed, their limbs dislocating with the pull of the glue. It was oddly satisfying as we didn’t screech from our bed much ourselves anymore. Things weren’t yet bad, but one or maybe both of us already wanted a new person, a new kind of genitalia, a new city, state. Instead, we trapped ourselves, thinking, praying love might heal our obvious mental wounds and make us feel the same as we once did. We made ourselves slaves to that love, the bad kind, then we exterminated our unborn child, flushed it down the toilet with the other ghosts in the sewers. Sometimes we’d hear their screeches at night.
-
“Are you serious?”
I don’t know if I am or if I’ve ever been, but both phones are on the floor, and there’s so much black everywhere; black, maybe sludge, but certainly not blood. Blood isn’t black. Well, not usually. I try to pick up the phone with the cord, but it’s just so stuck to something even
more than the wall, and my phone is still up there on top of the ant-omicide, which is weird because they were both somewhere else a moment before.
“What did the ants make you think about?”
“What?” I say.
I get no answer.
“Fucking what?” I say again.
In the bathroom mirror, my fingers and now my eyes have black sheen all over them. I can’t take Spiderman 3 again. I just can’t. I turn the faucet of my tub to full on fuckforce. I wait. No phone. No roach. No smoke. My hands are unstoppable. Mom laughs in my head. She’s right. Landlines. Laughs and not screams. I sit in the bath, and there’s more smokes next to me. There’s no water, though. And I never took my clothes off. Why is the phone still fucking ringing?
A voice reminds me again that I should really try to, for once, get some sleep tonight, but I’ve definitely been something other than awake for a while now, brought back into control of my eyeballs with a deep chill, my clothes soaked. It doesn’t smell like piss, and piss isn’t usually this black, this tarry, sticky. I rip my body from the inside of the tub, the adhesive not wanting me to leave, which is honestly kinda sexy.
Outside the bathroom, there are cigarette butts covering the floor, trails of ash drawn across the walls like a tic-tac-toe game played between two very caffeinated and very blind toddlers. There’s definitely something scratching behind these walls, but I’m more worried about the fact that some of the cigarette butts are marching up the corner between the hallway and the quasi-kitchen, up, up, and up into a hole in the very high ceiling. I light one of them.
My mouth is filled with crawls, and I spit out about 20 ants. They’re washed away into the tide of cigarette butts. I follow them to the counter, reaching out for the bottle, but it’s empty for some reason, and there’s way more there than there were before, and this isn’t necessarily a new occurrence in my life, but the guilt I now feel hasn’t been there in sometime, and I’ll be goddamn if more ringing doesn’t start, but this time it’s coming from the laptop, open on my desk.
I ignore it, try to open the windows to let some of this smoke out, but I can’t find them, and I force myself to ignore all the open yearbooks on my couch. They’re all there: the lawyers, the doctors, the athletes. At some point I must’ve covered my walls in photographs, because my wall is covered in photographs, and I remember thinking maybe a little more color, a little less emptiness might make this place feel more like home, less like a grave, and there’s her and her and him and her again and mom and me and her, and I now regret each moment that passes between each photo, each moment that passed. The smiles are too much - inauthentic - and the frowns are too familiar, and each memory has bite marks in it, blood drawn, sleepless, drunk, and fake.
But amongst the past, I feel more present than I have in months, years, and I start to wonder if I’ve always been this way; alone in a small room even when others are around, a virgin even when I’m submerged, impurely pure, a broken whole, all of nothing. Am I learning to cope or to forget? Is there a difference? Do the mongrels discriminate between just and unjust or have I just been inside too long? The windows can open now, but air only flows one way, and I’m stuck beneath something so loud I can’t even hear the thoughts I don’t want to have. Alone is where the heart is, and I have nowhere else to go.
I finally answer the call.
- -
There’s a figure on the screen, but they are merely a silhouette, black, probably human, shining with a gelatinous shell, possibly a part of time. They look familiar almost, but I haven’t
seen another person in so long I can’t be sure. Maybe I never was.
“Are you me?”
“I used to be. Sort of.”
“Where did you go?”
“Away. You know that.”
“Why?”
“I didn’t want to be with you anymore. To be a part of you.”
“I wanted you to. I wanted you to stay.”
“Yes. You did. But only after I removed myself from you. Only after I became myself.” “I’m sorry.”
“I know. Don’t cry. You’ll find yourself again.”
“But the world. It’s closed. It’s on fire. I’m alone. My tail is stuck in the trap. I’m my
own pest.”
“The world will be open again. You’ll see. And you’ll be everywhere. You’ll be
everything. You’ll be eternity’s pest.”
“And I’ll still be alone.”
“Yes, you will.”
-
They said they’d left something at my place, though I found that strange. They hadn’t been here in at least a month or a year, but I believed them, so I try to tidy up for their arrival. The excitement I feel is monolithic. It shakes the walls, which, sure, is annoying, ant corpses raining on me from their goddamn holes above, but, hey, they knew about mice and roaches, so they could probably handle a few thousand ants. I try to think of what I might tell them about myself now. But then I realize I am the exact same person in the exact same town doing the exact same things, just older and stupider and even more alone. There’s only so much a person can change when trapped inside a place they don’t want to be. Then I figure that’s probably why they left, why everyone left, why I am still here; at least sort of alive, whatever that means.
The photos are all gone now, the yearbooks, the cigarette butts, the blackness. Everything is clean, perfect. No more reminders, no more memories, no more 10 year reunions or aborted love stories. I am clean. I am calm now. I am as calm as I can be. I sit. I wait. I wait and wait. I wonder if they will look the same, if I look the same, if they’re the same person, the person I’m even expecting. I think of the time we watched The Lighthouse and laugh. I laugh at how stupid this all is. I laugh at how, basically, any time spent with another person only means as much as you allow it, and, once it’s gone, it’s like it never happened. We have only photographs and beer-logged memories and social media to remember, to remind us of what it may have meant at one point. Like an earring found under your pillow, an underlined passage in a book, dried period blood left under your fingernails from the night before, there are relics, and they can either be drowned or put into a museum. The walls can be covered or torn down. The doors can be opened or locked. I choose to open it after I hear knocks.
Behind the door is only an endless white and blocking that white is the roach, his arms crossed, a cigarette hanging from his face.
“I’ve come to collect,” he says.
“Thank you,” I say, bawling. “Thank you so much.”
Mice deluge through the door, covering me, knocking me onto the current of cigarette
butts, and as they begin poking small holes in my flesh with their little teeth, ants begin to emerge from the butts, carrying me upwards. As we ascend, some of the mice drop, others cling, squeaking encouragement as the fallen climb back up my pedestal for more meat. I feel something inside me begin to quake, to slosh, to grow, and each orifice, opening, and pore is stretched as roaches emerge from within, claiming the present, erasing everything that came before. I start to maybe understand the role of pests. And as I’m pushed into my new hole, purpose comes out of my eyes while the roaches find a new skyline, and I wade on vermin’s maul.