What pretends to be grain is, in truth, ravenous. It is an optimism that allows yeast’s miraculous minuscule eating to reach us. A sprinkle is knocked in with flour and water, a ball rolled, placed in a bowl under cling film and in half an hour holds its breath and swells into bread.
I read that line, which I wish I wrote, sitting to pee at 3am after it arrived in my inbox like a communion wafer. In bed, I search the author. Kenneth Rosen was a mathematician, author of Discrete Mathematics and its Applications.
Lowan Whole Foods is the brand of yeast my mother bought, and I buy too. Its tube reminds me of two cars. One, like its body, was maroon—a Fiat rear-ender with my brother and I in the backseat. The other, like its lid, was champagne—a borrowed Mercedes we drove without chains over mountains, you snapping at my whimpers each time the ice skidded us close to the edge. Our destination was a wide basin where your uncle’s cabin buttressed a copse of trees, a grassy plain ambling from front door to creek. The creek is significant, but more on this later.
The year the Fiat was written off was the year Eight Legged Freaks was released. People twist the middle word into a bowtie and I enjoy this. Leg-ged. At that time, I categorised things according to a scale of escalating severity: migraines were greater than headaches, wasps greater than bees, and hornets greater than both. Orcas were greater than whales, but only inasmuch as we recognised in them a propensity for violence and teeth. The world was a tremendous ladder of effects.
Evidently, there were two Kenneth Rosens. One, a man of maths. The other, a poet. You share a name with a recently deceased pop singer. And once a fire fighter approached us in a changing room to describe Shiraz, Iran, after mistaking your ‘ancestry’. A year later, we discovered his name on a mathematics book a school library condemned to landfill. Twenty-two years on, I categorise the world this way: malaprops, fellow feeling.
When I received your diagnosis, from which you made a full recovery, I bathed while watching a spider build a web from scratch. A decade later and I am accompanied by a spider in the bath again. This one not building, suspended all day by the toilet waiting for something to eat. Having pressed its long legs into pairs, it appears like a double helix. I send a photo and you ID it: a Rufous Web Casting Spider. Which are massive, with skinny bodies and two huge eyes that gawp out of the other six like headlights.
After being handed three cups with brown screw tops, having what I’d deposit in each referred to as my babies, I was informed of an $83 charge for each faecal test. When I got in the car, I kid you not, Fela Kuti’s Expensive Shit came on. Which was funny. And true. But also, would become less funny and increasingly true depending on my results.
Which I’ll get to. But first I want to talk about collecting shit. It is one thing to fill a cup with dense loaves spasmed into shape by a well-nourished gut, whose departure expands your rectum in a brief, erotic rise and fall that subsides as the sphincter tapers the shit into a smug log, evenly filling the corners of the room with the homely, fetid aroma of a proud parent. It is another to capture shit dispatched like an upturned coin purse, ragged shingle held together by thin skins of gelatinous orange that bleed into the water like coastlines seen from above. Their gift is an acidic haze which clambers under your eyelids, inflates them with sulphur and gas. Then too, the yellow streaks which grasp the rectum (which they’d do with fingernails if they had them) as if they do not wish to leave, exiting in a single forlorn drip that hangs like the limp sling of a misfired trebuchet before thinning into a split, a portion returning to the ass like a mollusc, the majority sliming jaune tracks down the bowl in a sticky fit. And there is shit foamed into catacombs, as though yeast were involved, too much gas or fibre or malabsorption of fat producing aerated tokens begging to be squashed with the same forgiving wheeze of dough on its second kneading. That smell burns membranes too. There are pressurized spurts that speckle luminous brown dots so far up the sides of the bowl you come to think of the anus less as a tight muscular band and more as powerful artillery.
There is the issue of how to ensure all that power and stink is directed through the small aperture of the sample cup. To complicate things further, the shit can’t touch the water because the water will contaminate it. You suggested I lay paper along the bowl and readjust my body for aim. But my toilet is very steep and when the shit hit the paper it all began to slide. I rammed the lid’s in-built scoop into my falling baby and severed a chunk. It was reddish and acrid, like masticated beans. The rest sunk away, to be contaminated forever.
I kept the cups in my fridge. Filling one each day until the third day when I drove them in their plastic slip to an unattended cooler box in a clinic’s waiting room. Removing them, feeling each cup’s coolness, felt intimate and painful, as though I were freezing a name in an ice cube to cure myself of secret love.
My shit was couriered to a lab where scientists smeared it on glass and peered at it through a microscope. Combing for examples of blood and intrusion, they concluded: parasite.
I need to say here that you misnamed the spider. It’s net-caster, not web-caster. But we contaminate the two often. And since you don’t catch fish with a web, nor do spiders perch on nets, I think I would’ve made the same transposition. And since words are just forms we blow wind through in patterns we learned to whistle from those around us, it’s important to switch the tune up now and then.
It’s not lost on me that toilet water could’ve contaminated a sample that was itself already contaminated with something else: my guest, which I’ve dutifully fed for nigh on twelve years now. Some say the guest is an envoy from god. Others, that hospitality means knowing one’s place in the class system.
It’s not lost on me that my waste is my guest’s waste too. Their presence betrayed by rancid sludge we engineered together. For this, they must die. My dear guest, you worked so hard, but I recognised you not by your greatest labours. You ate to progress through cycles, this was your parish. All these years, the spent casings of your flock peppering my faeces; my constant calculations of time and distance in anticipation of a sudden urge’s force and density; my strange, painful and mindless accustomisation to a body’s poor health—I know this is residue you’d sooner forget. You never learned, like me, to hide your shit.
So, thank you for your honesty. You are my guest, though I am someone’s too and all our shit is more telling than any perfect execution. Shit is a type of dream, effluviant produced from the compression of the day’s consumptive efforts. Leave it long enough and it’ll further compress into humus. And seeds go in humus. Though the stupendous work of muscles and bile is not captured in the harvest. This absence spans everything we eat, and no, I do not mean just that which we put in our mouths. I mean the world interpreted as value divinely disassociated from the waste it makes and that makes it. Shit, even shit produced in illness, even shit announced by alarming desperate need, even shit floating so full of fat the body couldn’t take in, shit made in partnership with a tiny living being that came from another living being’s shit, contaminated shit, what it asks of the body, the relief or discomfort it requires in its passing, is a type of pre-lingual hymn. Everything else— concealment, value, abjection—comes after the squeeze.
The uncivilized are those whose waste is visible. The civilized are those who concentrate their waste in uncivil zones. Sometimes our waste washes back to us like a charm or hex—shit and hair and fat congealed in tar black idols.
I imagined my parasite as a steadily growing single being lodged in my gut. Though, really, it splits and dies and reproduces. It is a congregation in union. I should be glad of what we made together, but I am tired and thought this may be their fault. Gastroenterologists are split. Some people host Blastocystis hominis and never suffer gut function in disarray. Others do, then kill the parasite, and their troubles persist. My race is yet to be run. Day six of antibiotics and the promised nausea arrives. I am told to eat yoghurt and I dream a minute seagull’s wing grows from my knee. A friend plucks it but it comes back. We collect and arrange the wings like shells.
People on a parasite cleanse—a restrictive diet designed to siege their guest into surrender—avoid, among other things, sugar. Some foods are encouraged, extra garlic for example and papaya seeds. Which brings us back to the cabin. On our second day we dissolved cardboard soaked in acid under our tongues and set out into pasture fringed by bush. By which point any language beyond the sensual relay of the mind folding into revelations was lost to us. We came upon a tree. And this tree was full of fruit. Huge fruit. Four-foot-long papayas weighing the tree down into the semblance of a prostrate sow succumbing to piglets rioting for milk. Greedy fruit, swaying on long stems. We knew it to be impossible but approached gleeful anyway suspecting a disappointing but rational foil to our fantasy: farm equipment, sacks of fertilizer. We encountered, instead, wild dogs. Strung by their hind legs.
We know that yeast eats sugar, converting it into gas to inflate dough or ethanol to ferry us out of mind. I had a job in a distillery on a six-person factory line that filled, labelled and packaged bottles. There, each morning, barley overpowered our noses. By mid-morning you couldn’t smell it all. The body presses newness down into the indistinguishable gunk of background operations to avoid overwhelm. Perhaps why my guest went so long unnoticed.
Of course, the dog tree freaked us the fuck out and we vowed to stay away from it. I replayed a lifetime of driving past foxes and snakes festooned along fences, deterring would-be incursions with pungence. Did their relatives get used to the smell? Is that what fills a tree with fruit? We thought about Billie Holliday and Abel Meeropol and the clamouring world came for us hard.
After toxic waste spilled into a reservoir it infected crickets which a spider researcher collected to feed specimens. It is this transfer of toxins that produced the eight legged freaks. The waste spilt after a truck swerved to avoid a rabbit. I didn’t think about this while skidding on icy roads enroute to the cabin but I do now. Our cargo would not have enlarged spiders but, one can only presume, would’ve precipitated a different kind of mass death. From our wreck, leaking onto the shrubs and snow: glycol, polyalphaolefin, methylcyclopentadienyl manganese tricarbonyl.
So the creek. We headed for it to remedy the dog tree horror. Kneeling on the bank in prayer position, I stuck my head fully under even though it was winter. It was so clear and so cold in there. I opened my eyes and the water looked like thin strings of gel braiding and unbraiding. The farmers responsible for the strung dogs kept horses up there and trained them to be in movies. They would chew grass and drink from the creek, plod through it to explore whichever side they weren’t on. On their hooves: shit, diffusing in the water like coolant from an upturned Mercedes.
When I tell you about the parasite you say I was thinking about how insane it was that you drunk from that cow poo puddle water. I insist it was a pristine mountain stream. Ha! It was a piddling creek running through a cow paddock. I am telling you this ten years after I drank from the piddling creek. We are in a tropical lake which is colder than I recall. Love is moving in places I can’t parse, as though life is a ribbon wound round a stick resolving so long into stripes you forget, until flicked into shapes above you, that form is mostly a matter of keeping still. Someone’s eight- year-old draws a wiggle in the sand and asks his mum what it is. It was etched above the tide line and the next day I decode it: a face in profile with a cap on. Yesterday it was wind driven shapes, the next, a person. Once you determine form it’s hard to go back.
People ask if my parasite is a worm. It isn’t but I understand it that way, wending diagrams through my intestine. My parasite understands there is no story, just directions that lead to sugar. My stomach is creaking on the first night of antibiotics and I imagine a massacre. How astonishing it must be to have your cell walls suddenly collapsed, protein production halted abruptly.
I await a transformation. Until then, I wonder if my parasite can tell when I’m in water. This cold water. This water colder than I remember. This water I remember you in. Extraordinary water. This water you’re in, I’m in, again. This colder than last time water. This water. Us in it. Like an idiotic pistol. An idiotic pistol in a bad play. An idiotic pistol in a bad play about things we know already about. About things we know already about and so want told differently. And so want told differently until remembrance feels like renewal, like a ribbon stapled to a stick.
A crowd you summoned is in the lake and the lake is next to the sea where waves break and almost swept me out earlier. The crowd enters and departs the different water at different times. In small groups or alone. We all watch droplets slide over each other. Where once we would pack up to cook at your house, I leave in a different car. To have your walls suddenly collapsed, what nourishes you withdrawn. It is, it is, it is.
Those dogs wanted to eat livestock to stay alive. My guest is doing something similar. It’s an old tale, energy and deservedness. My guest collects tax, miniscule portions of sugars I consume. They give nothing in return, save symptoms I endure. I give nothing to those who grew the cucumber and garlic I crunch, save money which flows mostly to those organising people to arrange vegetables in trays. This too appears as a kind of ladder: a bromide coaching legibility from production’s mean curl.
This evening, an entirely orange building salutes jacaranda fanning purple below. And the sky is doing the same thing—purple, orange—like a friend asking where you got your shirt from then showing up to the party in it. I kick a tickle off my foot and realise I’ve annihilated two ants copulating, which makes it more like three ants or many. A colony, as in my gut, eliminated nonchalantly. It is ok, I too will end this way. We guzzle like mice in a pantry until a noise or tremor makes us flee. That is, pleasure blazes ‘til the world meshes otherwise. If we survive the scare, we firm it into subject matter, to make intelligible what is knowable otherwise only as fuzzy intensities.
As the acid wore off and we walked back to the cabin under colours, my stomach began to hurt. It lasted a little while, the pain increasing, before I vomited without stopping for 12 hours. The material evaporated quickly during the first brief satisfying torrents, leaving me to heave stubborn chunks on rafts of slime up from the deep, ultimately mewling for eternity as I backward orgasmed dribbles of bile out the tract. You rubbed my back and I hallucinated watermelons.
The night before the cold lake I am assured a brown ovoid settled on the water’s surface is a platypus, just as I was assured navy flecks twinkling way out were the tails of whales, just as I am advised three itches appearing in a row could be a bed bug bite. I scour my sheets for further evidence: rusty blotches from crushed body seepage, discarded skins, specks of teeny shit. Dirt, lint, small rocks, morsels of tobacco, the corner of a leaf, all fizz me into panic. I interrogate each on my fingertip under the burn of my phone torch then condemn my sheets to a hot, hot wash.
Many pick them up from hospital, a venue I haven’t visited lately but from whence they hitched home with you after your first child was born. Your daughter and partner were still in the ward, so we rallied. Some of us scrubbed, some put on and hung out load after load of laundry, and we hauled your mattress over the balcony railing, one friend stationed below, arms outstretched as if to catch a kitten and not this impossible infested shape.
Unlike you, preparing for your next transfusion, bed bugs must be iron rich. I find none of their shit but imagine my blood metabolised into liquorice-coloured pellets. I feel eaten at from inside and out—one guest in my gut, another in my room perusing my body at night. Or perhaps not even in my room, given I’ve found no trace, though certainly in my mind, since until I can rule whether I have or have not bed bugs, I host their dormant company and an amorphous spreading itch.
Dana Ward thought of the bed bugs he picked up from maternity as angels who incarnated the void. I don’t think—in the midst of sterilising your house—you were capable of romantic dispensation. Not for bed bugs anyway. I am sure, however, that the golden force condensing all of history into a stupid and sublime revelation, along the lines of tender-heartedness for what we can’t know but can love all the same, which moved him to declare bugs angels, moved in you too, even as you directed people where to find buckets or cloth, as though there was nothing doing, as though we couldn’t see the exact shape of your daughter filling your every depth.
Magic tricks, I read, depend upon a middle-ground between knowing too much and not knowing enough. You see the queen of hearts, its appearance somewhere it shouldn’t be and know, vaguely, of an imperceptible flourish that transported it. These partial knowledges triangulate into wonder. Platypus, parasite, daughter. I see horses travel through water and I drink it. I feel strange in my gut and I test it. I am diagnosed a host and I kill my guest.
I eat next to the world, accrue crumbs which might, themselves, host blueprints of these sleights of hand foaming forms from the mix. Forms we read our appetite through, our strategy, our basis. It is a kind of optimism. Luther stole a nut and was beaten until his blood flowed. As for me, I care for you, not because you bring me pleasure, but because you feel it.