Bites like the Kuiper Belt

Variations on a true story

My mother has always been clean. Not obsessively clean by any measure, but someone who cleans with devotion.

What kind of devotion?

If we suppose the existence of a scientist who wanted to show that humans would and could and will believe in anything, no matter how absurd, and built a machine that selected any two things out of all the things in the world at random, she would believe that there was, indeed, a connection. And if the scientist built a second machine specifically to prove people like her wrong, a new machine that mixed it all up in a new way, and people began to believe in this new religion and the scientist would laugh or cry or both and say “But can’t you see that apart from the occasional lucky strike, there is no connection at all between any of this?”, she would pat the scientist very very gently on the shoulder, maintain that everything in this world is connected, that there is a higher plan for every “random” choice the machine had made and that if 1000 tests were run with 1000 different results, they would all still be true.
Then, she would offer him chamomile tea.

That’s why it came as no surprise when she reminded me to wash my hands when I got to Paul’s for the third time, to use the soap she’d packed when I wasn’t looking and to scrub each finger individually, because God knows what people touch on public transportation and where they’ve been before. But surely, I said, voice thick with some emotion or another, if I got sick, there must have been a higher plan for it? She didn’t think that was funny. She told me to air out my shoes.

Paul was an oblong man in a rectangular house. His door was rectangular; that much was normal. But rectangular, too, were his glasses, his cups, his sentences and the dents my rummy old suitcase made in the last-century walls because Paul was old but still insisted on carrying it all the way up the stairs to my floor. There was, he insisted, a certain way to do it. A certain way, I thought, that he must have still been figuring out himself, judging by the bumps, the groans and the grandstanding. My room for the week was rectangular, too. Rectangular black stripes on rectangular grey sheets, rectangular blue shapes on rectangular blue curtains and the most ridiculously rectangular mirror I’d ever seen – as tall as an elephant and as wide as my hand.

I shook Paul’s oblong version of mine at a 90° angle, plopped down on the bed and considered my life.
I aired out my shoes.

*

My brother and I have always disagreed on change. He thinks it is gradual; I, abrupt. When my brother looks up at the night-sky, I imagine he sees something like the large blobs of butter he needs for his pancakes – planets gliding through the cosmos as the butter would along the walls of his sizzling pan. But he knows as well as I do that continuity is a trick of the mind. We think of the world as static and of us as agents of fluidity, yet we blink, don’t notice, and are only ever in one place at one time. The truth is that our brain fills in the blanks of our disco-light lives. An object in motion will only stay in motion until it does not. There will be a moment when my brother and I blink, and our brains will try their hardest to build a bridge to the next bit of time, only to find an abyss staring back instead of a shoreline. That moment will be no more abrupt than any other moment before, but it will be the one that breaks the illusion.
I shook images of my brother’s corpse off my shoulders and went down to join Paul for black tea. He asked about my home. Nodded. Told me a man named Tony lived here as well. Took a sip. Told me I would never see Tony.
The images returned. First, because of a teabag that dangled down from my fingers, thick with juice and heavy with waste. Then, because of an empty toilet paper roll I’d tried to fold in half (why?) like all the others. We are changed, I mused and scratched my leg, and we change. Before me, the teabag was useful and dry, the toilet roll wrapped up and filled with potential. Scratch that. We don’t cause change. We lay waste. How many shirts have I worn down to sheerness, how many toys used and used till they broke? How many minerals were broken down, how many trees cut to pieces, how many metals melted in factory fires to sus- and entertain me? We are filters of the world: where we go, things are halved, thirded, decimated, pulverized. Don’t you worry about how things are connected, mum. The connections are only one blink of your eye. Inside us, the mesh of our human teethed filters makes sure to chop it all the way down, leave bumps in the wall and pass out decay - and too often we forget that life is chewing on us while we nibble the world: grinding us down, abruptly, flash light to flash light, until nothing is left.
I flush my brother down the toilet. Out of sight, out of mind.
We are insects.
Dots in a stuttering Kuiper belt without butter, no more.

*

There are some images I will never forget. Like white linen sheets, they sway in the roof truss of my mind and form my private museum of sense. Some are temporary exhibits, to be taken down with the next season of reading and life, but some have been on display since the moment I first carried them up here in a bundle and fixed them with one plastic clamp on each side.
That night, I find myself wandering through the rows, running my fingers along the white fabric and remembering how and where I found this one or that one. One shows a recent dream in which I am sitting at a train station with my beating heart in my hands. Whenever people come near me, it grows to the weight of the world.
I think there’s a reason why kids change tenses in the middle of texts.

*

My father always warned me: it comes when you expect it least; period.
I was back on Paul’s toilet, trying my best not to stare at my legs, where a replica of the Kuiper belt had formed overnight. Another empty toilet paper roll spun around my index fingers, flash light by flash light, round by round. I didn’t dare to touch the bites with my fingers, but I ran my toes over the skin of each opposite leg – over the bumps, the pinpricks, the valleys between them – and shuddered. I tried to fill my mind with the rectangular tiles of the room; failed.
My thighs are getting cold as I feel something building up between my stomach and spine. It is a swirling feeling, a smoke that rises and brushes against the tender parts of myself. Like a feather, or a slippery housecat, it rubs up against the back of my rib cage, the front of my spinal nerves, back, forth, chafing the bone and the flesh raw, the wet pink writhing under its grip. I picture the first bug breaking through, mandibles dripping, a small black head of excitement, and looking around. I am a new world. A solid just waiting to be chopped into pieces. The second bug follows, as eager. The third. A dozen. A million.
I am burrowed through from the inside, a network of tunnels spreading into smaller and smaller scissions as bugs press their way forward without ever coming to rest. A dizzying pattern of panic shoots through me. My mother’s voice is afraid. My own voice is drowned out by hers. I look down. The Kuiper belt stares back up at my face, fiery red dots on white skin in constellations that should be making sense but reject me. I feel sick, sick, dizzy and spat out, flush the toilet, feel my trousers grating on cold thighs and calves that aren’t mine anymore; were never mine to begin with. With violent anger that might just be fear, I buffalo back to my room, my breath heavy and hot in a bubble around me, and tear the sheets from my bed. There is nothing there except a pristinely white mattress, mockingly calm. The sheets crumple inside my clawed-up fists, tempting me to rip them apart or press them through the small rectangular window, away from myself, to be caught by a blast of wind and blown away, but when I feel the itch under my trousers, I remember that they aren’t the problem. I disgust me.
On my way out, Paul shouted after me from the kitchen and asked if I’d met Tony. I just wrapped my jacket tighter around the body I had and wriggled my cold feet into my shoes. I didn’t know where I was – certainly not in my head - so I welcomed the weather that waited for me outside: a fog so close to the ground, it seemed like I could run my fingers through it tippy-toed, and an air so clear, it made me realise that my lungs were still working. Deep breaths, as feet were taking me somewhere I had not been before. “This is just the broken illusion”, no more, no less, no help, it turned out, so I went back to breathing. There were sheep in the distance, compact clouds beneath the silky sheets flowing over our heads, and it was vaguely towards them that I seemed to be heading. The air assumed a heavier, saltier taste and that was when I realised that I was walking right towards the cliff. I had heard of Beachy Head, of course I had, how could I not, but I had not been prepared to walk this same route with this same urgency as the people heading for the abyss. I pictured them walking beside me, some faster, some with more hesitation or guilt, driven on by a goal that they could not see.

Was that not the appeal? That sense of relief at not seeing something? At hiding it under your trousers or eyelids forever? At dropping down into the pause? At being a rain drop: first mounting, then disappearing into the surface of water - a silence? But still, their faces were blurred; and much as I tried, I could not see beyond the broad strokes of their last moments.
I stared down at the mocking beauty of the white cliff underneath my cold feet and tried not to think of bugs breaking out through its surface. It was beautiful. The turquoise water, the violet heather, and the floating white haze formed a triangle of colour that seemed to soothe even the buzzing tunnels that run through myself. I still could not see their faces, but I felt that they had long given up on carrying their hearts in their hands. I did not picture them jumping. I held them with me as I held my one heart, in the eternal disco-light moment before, and I realised that I was not going to join them.
Instead, I roamed along the shoreline, walked through the fog as slowly as I had to, decided to come back home and talk to my mother. I bought a buttery light blueberry muffin and smiled as I saw the Kuiper belt stretch out in the soft of the dough.