by Adam Haiun
Coming home from yoga class I ran up the steps and unlocked the door, my mat under one arm and my bag in the crook of the other. The house key was a copy of a copy and I wriggled it in the lock and nearly dropped it, and I was afraid of the insects.
They were crowded in the stone archway above the front door, the insects, working at something, going up to one another and tensing their wings, and they were like black wasps, and they had produced or placed white specks all across the stone. If you walked under them they all tensed their wings at once. I was afraid of them.
“Those gross bugs are still, like, congregating around the door,” I said.
“Like I told you, you should’ve cleaned it in the spring,” Uncle said.
“Uh-huh.”
“Take a broom and sweep them. There are cobwebs in all the corners too.”
“They’ll attack me and lay eggs under my skin or something.”
“You’re letting this house go to shit.”
I put my things down in the front hall and went upstairs to the bathroom. The light through the blinds was orange, and looking out I could see the telephone wires. Sitting on the toilet I sent my girlfriend a text message which said: “Those gross bugs are still, like, congregating around the door.” She replied with: “You really have to get over this fear.”
I took off my clothes, and I looked at my body in the mirror, sucking in my belly and then letting it out. I thought to myself that it looked like I was two different people. Then I took a shower.
I had the next day off and Uncle told me to bring a water sample to the pool store to see what chemicals we needed to buy. I took an empty water bottle and dipped it in the pool. I left the house from the back gate so I wouldn’t have to walk under the insects. The magnolia bush at the side of the house was overgrown and blocked the stone path, and I walked on the grass. I was wearing a muscle shirt and basketball shorts and old sneakers.
It was hot in the car. To get to the pool store I had to drive down a kind of sad street which had some brown condos and strip malls and an ugly bank building, and for a block it smelled like eggs because there was some kind of treatment plant near there. While I drove I almost took a drink from the water bottle by accident. The pool store had a big parking lot and the sun was on it.
In the store it was actually cold from the air conditioning, and it smelled very strongly of chlorine. I walked past the deck chairs and backyard table sets to the little desk where they did the water tests. The kid behind the desk had a thin face. He poured some of the water from the bottle into a little plastic cylinder and put that in a centrifuge. Next to the centrifuge were laminated instructions on how to use it and I tried reading them upside down while waiting for the results.
He was looking at the computer and clicking the mouse in different places. The sound of the mouse clicking made my head feel soft. Then he printed a sheet and circled three quantities in pen and showed them to me. The printout showed that the water needed a pH booster and a calcium hardness increaser and a clarifier.
“Do I really need all this stuff?” I asked the kid.
“Uh, yeah.”
I put the containers in a cart and wiped the chemical dust off my hands. I also put a container of chlorine pucks because we were running out. At the register the total came out pretty high but I figured Uncle would want the stuff regardless, because he hated when the water got milky or if there was any algae on the walls.
At the house I carried the containers to the alley, and the pool filter was humming. I took eight chlorine pucks out of their individual packages and put them in the tube, and screwed the lid on tight. My fingers were stinging a bit from the chlorine and the chemicals from earlier so I dipped them in the pool and dried them on my shirt.
That night I dreamed there was a flying insect chasing me through an indeterminate place with people all around. It had the feeling of a house party, except there were many interconnected chambers and there was an insect furiously following me. I turned to face it and threw out my hand which the insect evaded before plunging itself into my eye and I screamed.
At the yoga studio in the summer they opened the windows even though it did very little. There was always one middle-aged person or another who would say something like: “I didn’t know this was a hot yoga class!” For the beginning of the class the teacher had us stand in Samasthiti with our eyes closed, and as my intention I picked to say to myself: “I am beautiful.” When I opened my eyes I chose a tree branch on the other side of the parking lot as my Drishti.
“You paid this much for fucking chemicals,” Uncle said. He was holding the receipt with both hands like a little scroll.
“The lab guy said the water needed it.”
“It’s not a lab it’s a kiosk. You can’t just do whatever they tell you.”
“Then why did you tell me to get the water tested?”
“I expected you to be able to use your judgement.”
“My pool chemical judgement.”
“You have to return the clarifier and the calcium hardness stuff.”
“I don’t know if they let you return chemicals.”
“You’d better find out.”
At the store I tried to return the things and the cashier gave me a bit of a hard time, because it was pretty obvious that the containers had been sitting outside.
“But, uh, the seals are all intact.”
“They still aren’t in the same condition as when you got them, sir.”
I sent Uncle a text message saying I was giving up on returning the chemicals, and then he called me and told me to hand the phone to the cashier. I got very uncomfortable and I paced around a bit, and looked at some skimmer nets that were on clearance, and tried very hard not to hear anything the cashier was saying. Then she held out the phone to me wordlessly and I took it. She scanned the containers and held out her hand for my card and I passed it to her. She printed out a receipt and I said sorry to her.
“It’s okay,” she said.
Uncle wasn’t home when I got back so I told my girlfriend she could come over. When she saw the backyard she said: “Jesus, you really need to do some weeding back here.” She lay tanning on the stone with her top off. There were crickets talking in the grass and in the flowerbeds.
“I just hate how much I get caught up in his shittyness,” I said.
“It’s a choice that you’re making every day, living in his house.”
“It’s going to shit anyways.”
It started to become dark, and when she got up to leave she insisted on going through the front of the house. I wanted to close the door quickly but I saw her hold out a finger, and one of the insects dropped down and perched on it. She smiled at me. Then she lifted her arm like a falconer and the insect flew off, and she got in her car.
In the kitchen Uncle was explaining a dream from the night before, about borrowing a car and it being full of cigarette packs, and then driving it downtown, and forgetting where he had parked it, and walking in the streets looking for it, and a man asking him for a smoke, and him regretting that he had left all those packs in the car. I felt happy that we were talking.
In the computer room I had a little cactus and on a Saturday I took a swig from a glass of water and gave the last bit to him. He had begun as a round thing and become more oblong, and he was leaning toward the sun so I turned him. Then I saw that there was one of the insects fighting to come through the screen on the open window. It was working its black head against it, tilting it back and forth. I tried blowing on the screen but the thing did not budge.
I went and found a can of compressed air that Uncle kept for cleaning keyboards and pressed the trigger hard and the insect blew away with its legs outstretched like a loser. I closed the window.
“I forget what I was going to say,” my girlfriend said, curled over me on the chair as we watched a commercial for insurance.
“Probably that you love me,” I said back.
“No, it was something about The Boss Baby,” she said.
At yoga we held Vasisthasana for a long time and I slipped in my own sweat.
At work I was writing about the rich benefits my company could provide with their tailored corporate solutions when Uncle called to tell me that he was at the hospital and that he would need a lift home. He sounded groggy.
“Bugs came down. Descended on me. Like, uh, angels. I’m alright now,” he said, and he hung up.
I told my manager what had happened and she let me leave right away. Driving to the hospital I couldn’t decide how I felt. I figured to myself that I should either be wholly happy to be proven right about the insects, or be wholly worried about Uncle, and instead I felt only the smallest bit of each. The air through the windows was loud, and I wanted to pretend that it came from the sea, but it had none of the smell.
I waited in the car at the doors of the hospital. A woman in a gown leaned on her IV and pretended to smoke from between her empty fingers. Then Uncle came out, and before sitting in the car he brushed the seat with his hand, and looked around at the receipts and wrappers in the cupholders. On his face and neck there were red welts, and something white and medicinal applied over them.
“I’m glad you’re alright,” I said, as I brought us out of the hospital parking.
“What a day.”
“So what happened?”
“The bugs! I was going out the door — go into the other lane here — and they just came down. Stung me all over. And look at this,” he said, and he pulled at his polo collar to show the top of his shoulder. There were three ugly cuts closed with stitches.
“What the hell.”
“They laid eggs under the skin.”
“What the hell.”
“They had to cut them out.”
He told me about how they were an invasive species of tropical fly, and that I was hitting too many potholes and had to learn to be more observant.
Adam Haiun is a writer and poet living in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal. In 2021 he was a finalist for the Malahat Review‘s Open Season Award for fiction, and for the Far Horizons Contest for poetry in 2020. His work can be found in Filling Station, Bad Nudes, and The Void.
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