I mopped the kitchen floor quickly and let it dry while I wiped down the living room surfaces. The second time I mopped the kitchen I did it slower. We were supposed to use only one bucket of water per house, but I was alone so the policy faced revision. Water, water everywhere.
Washed those two stubborn pots.
Washed the utensils.
Washed the washcloths too.
Why didn’t anyone admit that work was fun?
To touch things and move them and lift them and clean them.
The constant activity pacified my mind; my body became a device.
I worked for one hundred and thirty minutes. Laundry had been easy since it was already gathered in bags down by the basement. There were some pillowcases in the dryer when I went down there, still warm; I touched one to my chin. Lorraine’s strong hands on my face.
Lorraine was sweet, and fat.
What should have taken me three and a half hours was done in about two.
It’s not that I was efficient, just I needed to slow down. I was working so quickly that I’d sweated big patches under my arms and between my thighs. I felt great, but a headache grew. I sat on the living room stairs before going back to the second floor.
I took a while to catch my breath and wiped my sweaty forehead against a wall.
My chest felt plugged with wires that ran from every socket in the room.
I took that stupid pamphlet out of my wallet. Yes, I had it with me constantly. In the photo Ahmed Abdel’s narrow handsome face was fringed by enormous black dreadlocks. I could never grow mine into such a pretty mess as this Japanese guy had.
In the pamphlet there was an interview with him conducted by a law student from BU. Ahmed Abdel went on about the anti-immigrant bias of the Boston courts then lambasted the U.S. entirely; condemned Leif Ericson and Eric the Red. But when asked about Japan’s own imperial way Mr. Abdel dismissed it. He became mawkish instead. He mentioned the tony gardens of his father’s home. (My grandfather would describe a boyhood of public tours through Kyoto Palace in 1928, one of Abdel’s answers read. He told the law student, I always drew terrible pictures of the Kitayama cedars. They looked more like a row of spears than trees!)
I mildly hated this man. How was I going to contend? Kyoto played musically on an American girl’s eardrum while Southeastern Queens was a bum note. We have aluminum-sided homes, not fortresses.
With an hour and a half until the husband returned I shut my eyes on the stairs and reclined. The carpeted steps were firm, but plush against my sore back end.
Eventually the boredom would have made me a fridge pillager, but I remembered that there was a video store around the corner. I’d seen it when finding this address.
A place with a Lotto machine by the register; a beeper sales booth near the front door. And, usually, a broad selection of the best action, comedy and horror films.
I left the front door of the house propped slightly open by stuffing a rag in the jamb. At these low-end stores a video membership cost only five dollars. The tape was three bucks for three nights. I rented one then ran back feeling amped. An errand that would have been twenty minutes finished in five.
Other guys would’ve picked a porno. Rub one out while getting paid. My preferences come with a different kind of warning label. Not frank depiction of sexual situations, but blatant use of gore.
We Like Monsters, released in 1993. It was seventy-five minutes; I might see the whole story while the little master was out. Their TV and VCR were upstairs in the bedroom.
Above their bed a set of knives were nailed to the wall, but only for decoration not defense. They had great black handles. Some spikes on the hilt. I sat on their bed to watch the movie, but couldn’t stop imagining a blade falling loose and right through my neck.
The floor was comfortable, too. I felt so good that I had to take my shoes off.
It was a terrible movie. About a guy named Ziff who so wishes to be famous that he disfigures himself in the background of a morning show newscast by pouring an unspecific acid on his face. He becomes famous, but the same stunt that propelled him to stardom is what’s killing him now. The acid is still burning under his skin. A ‘scientist doctor’ explains this seemingly impossible fact. Ziff is disintegrating.
I don’t want to explain any more, because this is the moment when the film turns to standard fare. Ziff’s skin melts, his skeleton shrivels, until he’s just this sniffing meaty creature that goes killing everyone ‘for revenge.’ But what revenge? He kills a business-woman who’s said to have created the acid, but it’s more likely that the stuff was mustered in a lab. He kills another woman said to be his ex-wife, but at the start of the film Ziff laments that he’s never been married.
These films mattered more to me than I should say. I sat, half-depressed, as the tape neared its end. Only stubbornness propelled me through to the foolish conclusion.
Okay, by the end Ziff has gone to the home of the reporter who first interviewed him. Ziff asks that his death be broadcast live. The reporter calls over a crew. The scene is arranged for vulgar effect as Ziff reclines on a white bed in a white bedroom; suddenly the reporter is wearing a white contamination suit; this is so that each time Ziff moves the surfaces are flecked with ruddy goop.
Ziff is asked why he did this. The acid on his body. The murders. The actor pronounced some treacle about ‘wanting to matter in this world’ and I nearly put my foot through one of the bus driver’s bedroom walls. I stopped the tape, popped it out and would have stumped it underfoot, but I’d given my real name on the membership form. $80 fine for lost tapes.
What shit me about the finale was that these creatures always have an explanation. The Devil. An alien. A terrible childhood. Why did the virus in Small Evil cross the European continent only to ravage a small town outside of Budapest (on the Pest side of the placid Danube)? Because a Roma musician placed a curse on the land where his young daughter was beaten to death by Magyar police.
There’s always a reason for monsters. Human beings need rationales.
The machines in the basement had finished thumping so I took the mass of fabric out of the dryer then folded it into separate pieces. I worked quickly because, bad movie or not, the far end of the crowded basement began to seem creepy. There were thirty big cardboard boxes laying around, some open and some taped shut.
Their dining room was smaller than it had been one hour ago. Now the glass dishware cabinet rose seven stories high. The plates inside it rattled when I walked by, which was because of my weight, yes. But what made them shake again as I stood in the kitchen?
In the living room I’d been surprised to find a bookshelf, if only because most of the homes I’d worked could fit all their books in a sandwich bag. I didn’t like the man, so I credited his wife, the bus driver, with the library. It’s elitist, but I always check the spines on people’s bookshelves to find which ones are for status and which ones are a pleasure.
I was impressed because they had The Seven League Boots by Albert Murray, but when I opened it the covers cracked audibly; there was the rubber gum smell that wafts off unread pages.
I’d cleaned for black people and Jewish, an Italian family, Latinos, too. Stupid people had a few authors in common: Sidney Sheldon, Judith Krantz, Danielle Steel. What nonsense. Such dreck. How about H.P. Lovecraft, just once. Disposable income was wasted on the dumb.