We Live Inside You (3 page)

He tells me their life is the best thing going. He says that I need to imagine what it would be like to crawl into the plushest limousine I can imagine, to flop down into a deep, soft leather chair filled with downy feathers from giant geese, to turn the internal weather controls to “Perfect” and have a constantly changing range of scenery and a non-stop supply of food and fluids.

Then he says, imagine that all you have to do is eat and make babies and watch your life roll by in luxuriant comfort. The American dream, but he’s a citizen of everywhere—he’s just naturally attained what we’re all shooting for. And it doesn’t matter how big you get, he says, because when you become too large, part of you just breaks off and becomes another you. No dating or mating required. No awkward social moments, never a viscous string of sticky spit running thick from tooth to tongue while you try to talk a woman of vague sexual persuasion into an allowance of simian grinding.

Never a credit card bill in sight.

And his kids, he says proudly, they all turn out just like him. The emergence of a misplaced chromosome is a non-option. Every little him is a perfect chip off the ancient block, and has been for eons.

He doesn’t speak to me as an individual; I can feel that in his voice as it creeps through my nervous system and vibrates my tympanic membrane from the inside. The idea of “self” is impossible to him. When he speaks to me as “You” I can tell he’s addressing our whole species, every last human representing a potential host.

“You are more fun than the elephants,” he says, “They didn’t drink enough water and always fed us the same things. You feed us the soft pieces, the animal bits. We spread faster now. We are everywhere. We are growing.”

I picture Susurrus as a “him” because I don’t get along well with women. Always felt more comfortable around men. Can’t truck with the idea of a lady crawling around in my intestines, judging me, saying, “Look at how you’ve treated yourself here. Too much red meat residue in your upper GI, and your colon could become impacted at a second’s notice. How about some bran? Some heavy green tea? Something needs to be done. This place is a mess.”

I named Susurrus after the analog “SSSSS” that accompanies his voice as it crawls around in my head. There’s always this hissing noise that precedes his speaking and hangs on afterwards, like an itch deep in my ear. Sometimes the echo stays with me for hours. Then I play jazz CD’s through my headphones and it sounds like I’ve got old records running under the needle.

Susurrus wasn’t always in my brain, but I’ve been cultivating him, making him more a part of me. When I meditate I imagine the fibers of my spinal cord stretching out towards him, like feelers. They sway and twitch and burrow into my belly and connect to him, linking us. His hiss slides up through my spine and connects with my slow-chanted mantra, my mumbled OMNAMA’s, until it’s all white noise and for a moment I’m inside him, inside myself, feeling his contentment as his mouths reach out and slurp away at acidy bits of the day’s meal, tiny snippets of sausage and soda pop sugars and oil-soaked ciobatta breads.

He is always at peace, a consumptive strand of nirvana.

According to the last x-ray my radiologist took, he’s over fifty feet long, and still growing. My doctors have extracted pieces of him from my stool, pulsing egg sacs waiting to find water or flesh and keep the cycle of expansion in motion.

They say he’s not a tapeworm, not a guinea worm, not anything they’re used to seeing. He doesn’t seem to effect my physiology in any negative way, although my grocery bill has ratcheted ever upwards. Still the doctors think I should have him removed. I tell them I’m a pacifist and it’s not in my nature to harm a creature, especially if it poses no threat. That gets me worried glances, furrowed brows. But they don’t protest much.

I think they’re waiting for this thing to kill me so they can take me apart and extract his coiled body. Get a new species, name it after themselves, get published in the right journals, pull grant money.

I’m a cash cow infestation case. On a ticking clock, they imagine. Especially since this thing is spreading. One end is snaking towards my genitals, they say, and the other is coiling its way around my spine, on the way to my brain. There are more mouths showing up, not just the ones that reside in my belly.

“How did it get out of my stomach?” I ask them, not mentioning my meditation, the way Susurrus and I have bonded now. The way I’ve encouraged him to become part of me.

“Well, we’re not exactly sure. It appears to exit through the duodenum as it heads toward your spine. There’s a sort of cystic calcification at the point of exit, where it pushed through the stomach tissue. That’s what keeps you from becoming toxic via your own acids. Again, this is all speculation. If you’d let us perform a more invasive…”

“Nope. No can do, Doc. You say this thing’s not hurting me. What’re the odds that this procedure would kill it?”

They don’t know. These guys really don’t know anything. Why should I open up my body,
our
bodies, to guesswork with scalpels?

I think I know where he came from, this new part of my life.

Five months ago I was jogging, a beautiful run at dusk through the sloping, rolling green park near my house. I was sucking down deep lung-loads of air when I ran through a floating mire of gnats. They stuck to me, twitching in my sweat, their tiny bodies suddenly swept up in the forward surge of my run. A few were sucked right into my chest, surely now melting to atoms against my alveoli.

But one of them… one of them stuck to the roof of my mouth. There was an itch, so close in sensation to the hiss of Susurrus, and I felt an immediate need to take a nap.

So I did. I collapsed to the ground, mindless of the lactic acidosis that would haunt my muscles, curled there among the duck shit and crawling ants and crushed grass, and I fell into a slumber.

When I awoke there was a tight bubble of tissue on the roof of my mouth, where the gnat had stuck. It hurt when I prodded it with my tongue, so I avoided it.

Later that night the bubble had become even tighter, this small mound of swollen pink tissue with a whitish tip. I stared at it in the mirror, unable to look away from its grotesque new presence.

I could feel my heartbeat inside the bump. There was no way I could sleep with this thing in my mouth. What if it kept expanding until I couldn’t breathe?

I rubbed down my tweezers with benzyl alcohol and proceeded to poke and squeeze the bump until it bled. A thin rivulet of blood trickled down from the fleshy stalactite, and the harder I squeezed the more the blood thickened, grew darker. Soon the blood made way for a dense yellow fluid that carried with it the odor of rotten dairy in high heat. I pushed one pointed end of the tweezers directly into the spreading hole at the side of the bump.

Then it ruptured.

The relief of pressure was immediate. My mirror caught the worst of the spray, instantly shellacked with dead-cell soup in a spray pattern near arterial in its arc.

Then the colors came. A thin drip from the open wound on the roof of my mouth, two drops like oil spilling out, swirling with shades I’d never quite seen before, just outside a spectrum my eyes could comprehend. The drops sat there in the curve of my tongue, merged together like quivering mercury.

I’d never felt so intense a need to swallow something in my entire life.

The sensation of the drops was not fluid. It felt as if they were crawling into me, too impatient for my peristaltic process.

And again, almost immediately, I collapsed into slumber, this time dreaming of a sea of human tissue, all of it shifting and turning and surging, soft and hot and wanting to pull me under.

I hadn’t had so explosive a wet dream since I was in junior high.

And when I woke up, curled on the floor of my bathroom with my underwear stuck to me like soaked toilet paper, I was hungry as a newborn.

Four month’s time passed like nothing, our perception expanded to a broader sense. The human clock thinks small—within seventy-five year death limitations.

We laugh at the idea of death. The upside of being We.

And We are larger now. Eighty pounds heavier, abdomen distended, watermelon tight. One poke with a toothpick just below the bellybutton and we’d tear open like crepe paper. Neck swollen with a circular rash pattern that seeps clear fluids now crusting in the bony pockets of our shoulder-blades. White of the eyes yellowing, thickening. Hair falling out in clumps from soft-scalp surface.

Our penis is heavier. Its skin shifts constantly; there are more veins, white beneath the surface. The head has bloomed from mushroom tip to flower; it is open, flayed, in rose-like petals, red, pulsing. We bandage it to keep it from seeping down our leg.

We have stopped seeing the doctors. They whispered letters last time.

CDC they said.

Our I-brain told us this means trouble. We cannot accept “trouble” so close to the next cycle. We force fed the doctors the bits of us they stole from our excretions. So many of us in each segment that even their testing couldn’t ruin all the eggs. Our body was shaking then, sweating hands clutching an oily metal tool, eyes crying. It has stopped struggling since. Its feelings are soft echoes now, little more. Things are quiet.

We are hiding. Hiding ends after the next sun-drop.

Our I-brain is remembering passwords, using fat purpled fingers to stroke language keys.

We are feeling better as we see the screen before us change.

Our tickets have been confirmed. The glowing box has thanked us for our purchase.

“You’re welcome,” we whisper. The rolling chair squeaks under our ever-shifting weight. We stand up with a grunt and feel that the bandages around our meat-sprout are wet again. Cleaning up is no longer important.

We crawl on four bony-stems towards our meditation mat. Light the incense and try to assume the lotus position. Too much of us; our legs can’t fold in to the space filled by our twitching belly.

We lay back and stare at the ceiling. Our mantra has been replaced by a new noise. We push our tongue to the front of our teeth and start leaking air, a steady SSSSSS until our I-brain goes soft and quiet and we lie there in the dark room, shaking slightly from our constant eating and squirming. Much of the old us is empty now. Our new muscles, thousands of them, ropy and squeezing against each other, roll us onto our right side.

At some point we insert our thumbs into our mouth and suck the meat clean from the bones.

Anything to feed the new cycle.