By Daisy Cashin
My partner Arty and I received an email last week from our rental company. It was the third in as many months. The first was to inform us that our rent would be raised by three hundred dollars. The second was to make sure nobody let any more strangers into the building. Our neighbors let in some bible salesmen a few weeks prior, and they stole some packages on the way out.
The lady who handles the correspondence is named Diana. I hate Diana. I have never met Diana, but I imagine she dresses her rescued pit bull in little pink doggy shoes and Carhartt vests and sends her children to yoga camp in the summer. She’s violently cheerful and only ever has bad news. If someone were to be axe murdered in our building, her subsequent email would read:
Good morning, friends! Just reaching out to let you know that there is an axe murderer in the building. Your next-door neighbors were brutally murdered on Tuesday, but rest assured, the super will be there around 3:00 to clean the guts off the floor.
Have a wonderful day!
Diana
In the third, most recent email, Diana told us that our next-door neighbors found bed bugs and that we might have bed bugs. She said an exterminator would be by in a few days to spray. In the meantime, we were told to wash our clothes and put them in bags. I wished the neighbors had been murdered instead. I wished the exterminator was coming for me.
When our clothes and sheets were clean, we put them into big black trash bags. Then Arty put her body in a trash bag, and we counted how many body parts we could fit in a trash bag—quite a few, especially if dismembered.
The bags quickly consumed me. The day before the exterminators came, I woke up like a pissy teenager, walked into the living room, and looked at the big pile of trash bags. Arty was tying up another bag for the pile. I huffed and asked, “Why do we have so much stuff?” Arty pulled the blue strings on the black bag real tight like she was trying to strangle a spy, then shot a look at me like, if you don’t get your unhelpful ass from ’round me, I’m going to chop you up into little pieces and STUFF you into one of these bags. She wasn’t playing, and I would have deserved it. So, I fled to Manhattan in a lazy fit of cowardice.
On the J train, I sat next to a shirtless man. He held a water bottle full of gin in one hand and a beaten-up Bible in the other. After a big swig of gin, he read a verse out loud. Then he looked up from the Bible, stared at the people across from him, and hollered, “Look! It says right here. The plague is coming! Can’t you see, you idiots!” Everyone looked at the ground and clutched their bags. Then he continued, “See! We are all witnesses. Genesis only repeats itself! Over and over! Look, here, you idiots, it’s just Genesis over and over again.”
“Mmhm,” I hummed, not out of biblical enthusiasm, but because I fully understood that there’s nothing quite like a water bottle full of gin to make one think they know something about God.
But then the angry monk turned his head and gave me a pat of acknowledgment on my bicep. “See, you get it,” he said, “It’s all right here,” and pointed to his Bible. Then he stood as the train stopped at Marcy Avenue, opened his arms, and hollered, “BABYLON!” When the doors opened, he disappeared.
One stop later, I got off the train at Delancey and Essex and walked to Tompkins Square Park. I found a bench in the sun and smoked a cigarette and stared at all the wonderful weirdos boozing and grooving and the intolerable phone-holding fuckwits talking about real estate and mindful dog rearing. The sun fell through the trees, and there was less stuff.
Halfway through my cigarette, I heard the unmistakable “Excuse me, sir,” of someone who wanted something from me. I waited until the noise became unavoidable then looked down the line of benches. Seven benches down, a person in a pink dress wiggled their bare feet over their socks drying in the sun and waved. “Excuse me, sir, what’s a girl got to do to get a cigarette around here?”
I’d already survived the bible-thumping, so I figured, what the hell? And held out a cigarette. With a smile, the bench person tiptoed towards me, and her pink floral dress floated behind her like she was flying. Her smile was wide, and her skin was loose and leathery like she’d been lost at sea for some time. “Oh, goody! Thank you so much. I’m Steve,” she said sincerely.
“Hi, Steve,” I said.
“Have you ever had a shit ton of bad luck?” Steve asked. I looked at Steve, unsure what this had to do with the cigarette. She grinned and continued, “You know, like everything for four or five years goes to absolute shit, then, all of a sudden, after all that shit, you get some amazing news, and that pile of shit that once seemed so massive now seems so small. Have you ever experienced that?”
I thought too deeply for a moment and came to no real conclusion. “I’m not entirely sure. I’ve got bed bugs,” I said.
“Oh, honey, then you know what the hell I’m talking about.” Steve laughed and looked at the end of her still unlit cigarette. “Do you have a light? I’m sorry. I’m not always so needy.”
I held out my lighter. Steve lit the cigarette and took a deep drag. On her first exhale, she smiled and said, “Damn, American Spirits sure are the best. It’s fewer chemicals, and they burn slow.”
“That’s right,” I said, trying to kill the conversation.
“Do you think they’re telling the truth when they say there are no extra chemicals in these things?” Steve asked.
“No chance,” I responded.
“You’re probably right, damn tricksters. That’s all it is, you know, this life thing. It’s just one big trick. I would know. If there’s one thing I know, it’s tricks. I’ve been turning tricks since the eighties,” Steve giggled, tilting her head back and watching the smoke in the sun. Again, on an exhale, she said, “So, how long do you think we have left?”
“How do you mean?” I asked.
“Like on earth. Us humans. How long do you think we have left? Four years, five years?”
“Give or take,” I responded, “Ten years if we’re lucky. Ten minutes if that horny Russian lobs a couple of nukes into Europe.”
“Hey, don’t forget the aliens! It could be that the world ended years ago, and we don’t even know it’s over yet. Anyways, good luck with the bed bugs. I’ll leave you to it. I’ve just had some terrific news!” Steve said and bounced expectantly into the park.
I sat for a minute and wondered what news Steve had just received. What sort of news would nullify five years of shit news? A new job. A bag of heroin. A new apartment. A first date. Cured of cancer. Met an alien. Realized it was all over or just beginning.
Then I wondered how I got to be such a baby. I wondered why it was that a couple of damn bugs could make me want to give up on it all, make me move back to that comfortable bottom right corner of America and die slow like I had done all my life. I wondered why I wasn’t more like Steve. I wondered why I hadn’t found God in a water bottle full of gin in so long. I closed my eyes and went boo hoo, boo hoo inside my skull.
Since I was sad for no reason, I figured I’d give myself a reason, so I called my Nana with dementia down there at Brown Hearth Retirement Community in Christiansburg, Virginia. After the second unanswered ring, I hoped more and more she wouldn’t pick up. By the third ring, I thought, phew, she must be playing bingo. But on the fourth ring, someone answered, and I thought, wow, Nana sounds great. Then I realized it was her caretaker.
When my Nana finally came to the phone, she said, “Mmm, hello?” and I introduced myself over and over. Eventually, she asked, “So what’s going on? Where are you living these days? Catch me up on everything.”
“I’m in New York,” I responded, scratching a red bump on my arm.
“New York? Now, remind me, is that far away from here? Are you far away from home?”
“Pretty far,” I said.
Then Nana went silent, and I could hear the wheels turning in her mind, but the wheels weren’t connected to anything. They were just tires rolling down a dark forever hill past infinite beat-up Buicks sitting on cinderblocks. Eventually, she said, “So what are you doing there? Why are you so far from home?”
“I’m trying to be a writer,” I said.
“Well, how’s it going?”
“I’ve got bed bugs.”
Without pause, Nana gasped and said, “Oh, sweety, how exciting. That is just wonderful. I am so happy for you.”
My boohoo turned into a haha, and I said, “Pretty cool, right?”
“Cool indeed,” she replied, “It is just so great to hear your voice.”
“It’s nice to hear your voice, too,” I said.
There was another heavy pause, and I heard the wheels rolling down that damn hill again. My eyes started leaking like an old garden hose, and I clenched my teeth. Then, Nana cleared her throat and said, “So, where are you living these days? What’s new? Catch me up on everything.”
I scratched hard at the red bumps on my arms and caught her up again and again. And it was all itchy love and lovely pain, and it ended and began and lived and died and forgot and remembered because that’s all it ever is. It’s just one big trick—genesis over and over again.
Daisy Cashin is a writer surviving in New York City via Southwest Virginia and Charleston, South Carolina. His work has appeared in Pere Ube, Esoterica Magazine, and HAD. He is currently at work on his novel Dirt Pusher, a cheery tale about a grave digger named Joe. Fans of love and loathing can find his chaos missives at ihatethesepeople.substack.com.