Alissa Nutting - Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls

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.

“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?”