Parasites in Paradise
by Kirin Khan
Sara Rahbar, the victor, confessions series, 2014, mixed media, (legs) 49 x 16 x 9 inches, (head) 13 x 13 x 6 inches
PARASITES IN PARADISE
Kirin Khan / Sept 2020 / Issue 1
Her mouth opens at sunrise. A giant centipede crawls out and writhes down the path to the street, along the curb; its legs brush against the shoe of a boyfriend waiting in line. This one. Erik #5. The line runs around the block and then some, all the boyfriends the same, the Aarons, the Mikes, a preponderance of Eriks, all hoping to get in. Her eyes are open and cold watery sunlight beams through.
These boyfriends-in-waiting have heard the view from inside her head is phenomenal; suspended in vitreous humor, you can see the whole city projected across her retina. The line rustles, prospective boyfriends shift their weight. The boyfriends will be served in order of appearance, for as long as she lasts. The line moves in glacial time.
Ice underfoot crunches like tweak under the flat side of a credit card. Ice in large shards, glass crushed to fine powder, powder glittered to sand. Sand straight to the brain, melts and slides down the throat. Without crystal, the line seems longer, everything moves slower when you’re sober. But he should get used to that, if he wants to get better.
Once inside her, Erik #5 heads toward the spine, and up—from the sacral division to lumbar, lumbar to thoracic. Starting from the top means more time for her to get used to him inside as he works his way down, which means a better chance she won’t reject him, evict him. At the top of the cervical spine, he catches his breath. A wasp circles his head and he stays very still. The wasp lands on his face. Another joins. Something wet cleaves from the spine and falls, releasing a septic scent. The wasps rise and circle away in search of meat.
Erik #5 follows the spiral of her vertebrae into a room in the parietal lobe. Her head is still in good shape. If he does this right, he can stay as long as he needs, take whatever he needs. He will be chosen and he will be saved.
He traces his hand alongside her blood-brain barrier. He slips off his clothes and feels along the brain for a crease in the myelin. He runs his hands over wet wrinkles and folds, slick and flushing. She moans and her vibration hums across his skin. He slides his hand along the membrane and hardens himself with cerebrospinal fluid. The crease is tight and it crunches as his hands spread it wider, the crackle of a snapped wing bone. His hands feel her blazing inside, humid tropical jelly. He uses two fingers to splice the wet sensory strip. He is lightheaded when he enters her. He knows this is the way to make her love him, to make a warm and welcome nest inside her. Her neurons spark and dazzle. He presses deeper inside her, he can feel all of her, he wants her to feel him, he needs her to feel him. His rhythm speeds up. The friction hurts and he keeps going. Cauterizing smoke fills him with the scent of cooked tripe and he keeps going. Her tissues turn white, then necrotic. He leaves burnt ridges in her brain and passes out, empty.
He slides out of her in a nod, every part of him an oozing, melting thing, viscous fluid and clammy skin. Evening kicks in and he knows he’ll get the shakes soon. He hears buzzing in his dreams and begins to cramp.
He stirs, shakes his legs out, and his head swims with wanting. He taps clear crystal from a plastic bag out onto the fatty white matter of her brain. Before he can cut lines, it soaks in. So, this is how she detoxes him. She absorbs all of it, any poison her latest boyfriend brings with him. He watches her get high, feels the vasoconstriction, sees how her irises spiral to pinpricks. He looks through her eyes and sees the line of boyfriends waiting outside in the morning cold, waiting to be immersed in her sticky heat.
Four years of drinks and calls and text messages and crying, so much crying, to get here. How long has he been here now? Some would-be boyfriends have waited for years. He might make it last. He might even love it here. For as long as it lasts, anyway.
Her necrosis spreads, he can smell the gray tissue decaying. A wasp circles the broken crease, drawn to the dead scent, the semen and nerve slime, a pungent seeping meat. Saving them comes at a cost, he supposes, she’s a finite resource. She absorbs the meth, or the booze, or the heroin, or every violent, desperate impulse in the darkest heart of a man and he sees and smells and feels how it kills her, slowly. He has to take as much of her as he can, to get his life back on track, and then he can leave, become an ex-boyfriend, and start a new life. What happens to her then is someone else’s problem, mostly hers.
Before he checked in, his sundial marked each hour with beer, waking with winter sun in sour piss mouth mornings. Once started, it was easier to keep drinking, the act of it, swallow, swallow that bile reflux shame, wash it down. The best version of himself, the most fun version, drowned in a bathtub of cigarette water. When he tried to quit, his hands shook, his eyes quivered. Even now, every morning, his breath oozes strawberry jam.
The red strobe of her blinking eyelids scrapes his skin, kickstarts withdrawal headaches. He moves to the dark of her chest, where he can feel the racing throb of heartbeat in the walls. He thinks of how before he was admitted, he often made her come in his mouth, licking the doorway on his knees, hoping, hoping to be let in, beer breath and dried out from speed and desperate. He thinks of how the heartbeat pulsing through her thighs was the same. The same sound, the same rhythm and thunder.
Her chest crackles, alive and infested. Maggots ribbon in and out of striations along her ribs, eating the dead parts of her, cleaning her out. What remains is healthier, still usable.
Erik #5 kneels and bites her innermost intercostal muscle. Milk seeps through the wound, mixes with his saliva. He suckles. He chews on her yellow fat. The writhing grubs swarm the new gash. Staying inside her, keeping her inside him—the best way to get straight. The more he takes, the better he gets, the more whole. He can feel it, he can feel that she feels it. If he leaves scars, he really exists. Every scar a bit of crystal leaving his body, from his body to hers.
The further down he goes, the farther from her head, the worse it gets. Centipedes pile up in every well of her, climbing up her walls and dropping, falling over each other, scrambling and roiling at the base of her lungs. The histamine and serotonin in their venom must be one hell of a hit, especially when mixed with all the drugs. So many of them could easily slow down her heart, her crowded lungs. He doesn’t have much time, but as he works his way through her system, he sees wounds and scratches, not the chevron bites centipedes leave behind, more distinct markings from boyfriends past. He knows they are proof that she works—they got clean, got released, became exes, so he could too.
The longer he is inside, the better it is for him, the more fresh and alive pieces he can find, the brighter the inside of his mind. He will be so strong, when it's time. He will be new, ready to be loved by someone, to be worthy of someone great, maybe even out of his league. He falls asleep with rich flesh in his mouth. He kicks in his sleep. Brilliant wasps burst from her ovaries. They do not wake him.
+
This motherfucker sleeps in my bed, breathing is sweet-sour hot beer breath into my face while I watch. He’d better stay. Every boyfriend comes to me brooding at first, leaning against piss-stained walls in alleys between bars, and then later, my bad boy turns baby in bed. In the dark, he mewls about the pain he’s in, how I wouldn’t understand it, how he’s complicated, addicted, bad, and will never change. How I should leave, I’m too nice, I deserve better. I guess I have a type. Every time, in spite of myself, I say it: you’re not bad, you’re hurt, I understand, it’s okay. I’ll stay, to show him he IS lovable.
When we have sex, his creamy methsweat streams down his face and stings my eyes, oil and salt, as he pumps into me without looking. It’s the kind of sex that makes him feel affirmed, still a man after all. It makes me feel nothing. But that’s okay, that’s not really the point. It isn’t about me.
My ankles swollen with sewage, the baby leaches calcium from my bones to fill the holes in his methmouth. I lie in bed, pale as bones, bird wrists brittle, crescent moon face and brown eyes effulgent, violet as night, glinting like a knife in my sweat. The one in my bed right now starts making suckling noises in his sleep. He was inside me too, not too long ago. Inside me, they feel safe. One after another, boyfriends infest my body, since I was what,16?
Since I was 9, really.
Like a good girl, I’ve given the latest, another Erik or Sean or something, everything I’ve got. I waddle to the kitchen to make coffee. I’m not supposed to have caffeine, not in my condition, but look at his condition and tell me I’m the problem. Exactly. It’s fine. I feel the pressure in my lower back—it’s time to shower, who knows when I’ll do that again.
The vomiting didn’t stop when they said it would. Even close to the end, I hunch over the toilet bowl. I clear the steam from the mirror in a clean circle. The woman on the other side looks gaunt, with large hungry, empty eyes. I feel him chubby and sated inside me, feeding off everything I’ve got. A giant tapeworm—no, no, I love him, I can’t let myself think that way, the doctors wouldn’t like it, it’s not motherly. Unnatural thoughts, so insistent they are sometimes, so, so, loud. My skeletal self waves from the other side of the mirror, and I see something many-legged crawl underneath the surface of the skin across my forehead. Maybe it’s a migraine coming on. That would be poor timing.
My belly is full to split with life. I can feel him inhale and exhale inside me, my little tadpole, suspended in fluid like an astronaut floating through space, which makes me, yes, the universe. I like that. The alpha and the omega. Everything, everything, for the one inside.
Rustling sheets. The boymanchild in my bed slinks out the door, a tomcat. He shuts it quietly as though I can’t feel him in the air, feel him gone. That motherfucker. He’ll be back. And in the meantime there’s the baby. I’m never alone.
I move in water time, the air fluid and fast and weighing me down. I recede with the tide, I follow the moon. I have taken the meds and I’ve watched the videos and I can do this on my own. Just me and my baby and the bathtub. Just me and my baby and the moonlight.
I can feel him pressing against my lower back, my pelvis. I fill the tub with hot water, all the way up to the edge. Let it spill over and flood the floor. I squat and I push and push and the pain is what I deserve. Riptides of pain sucks me under, fighting for air, I claw my way back to myself.
Ravenous baby born insatiable, rocketstreaming ooze from the parts of me stay split. Bloodshit bathwater.
Red as my wedding dress, with monstrous gray baby bird eyelids, a livid birthmark across its chest, his electric yearning guides him. He latches to my breast. Heat melt, my sweat glosses over my chest, into his suckling mouth. I hope the white salt of it stings.
I feed the baby, my sweet two-hundred-pound boyfriend. His arms wrapped around my neck, his legs long alongside me.
I did all the right things. I always do. I bite the umbilical cord with razor canines, eat the afterbirth, lick mucosa from his airway. Swallow his first shuddering scream into the real world, steal that scream like cats steal baby’s breath. In withdrawal, born with the shakes, weaned off the hard stuff while inside me but it takes work to make it stick, everyone knows that. The new babymanchildboyfriend, clean but jonesing hard. My body is infinite and it absorbs his withdrawal seizures. I exhale air that is not my own.
I run one hand over what used to be mine. Placenta belly. Origami stretch marks, creases in the page. Despite what they tell you, there’s always another boyfriend in the wings, if you work hard enough. A centipede’s feet tap tap in my brain like fingers against a mirror, like madness.
Clean and craving boyfriend plunges fangs into my nipple. I grind my teeth and pretend not to be aroused. It’s not good for the boyfriend to know what I like. If he thinks I like it, when I put him down, he’ll think I want something, and then he’ll leave. And I can’t have that. Not the sick, baby boyfriend, he needs me. He needs me so much. No one can feed him like I can.
Kirin Khan is a Pukhtun writer from Albuquerque, NM who lives in Oakland, CA. Her work centers on trauma, the body, sports, violence, grief, immigration, and queerness. An alumna of VONA/Voices, Las Dos Brujas, Kearny Street Workshop, and the Tin House Writers Workshop, she was a PEN Emerging Voices Fellow, SF Writers Grotto Fellow, a Steinbeck Fellow, and a recipient of residencies from the Vermont Studio Center and Tin House. Her essay “Tight” was nominated by Nat. Brut for a Pushcart Prize.
Sara Rahbar is a contemporary artist born in Tehran, Iran. She left her birthplace during the period of immense upheaval that followed the revolution in Iran and the start of the Iran-Iraq war. While her works had initially explored deeper concepts of nationalism and belonging, her overall artistic practice stems from her personal experience and is largely autobiographical—driven by central ideas of pain, violence, and the complexity of the human condition. Sara has exhibited widely in art institutions including Queensland Museum, Sharjah Art foundation, Venice Biennial, The Centre Pompidou, and Mannheimer Kunstverein. She lives and works in New York.