I first started seeing the cockroaches after the super pulled out the broken bathroom sink, dislodging a pair of powder blue tiles in the process and revealing a hole in the wall behind the toilet. I resisted looking too closely inside the hole, but each time I sat down to pee, I felt its cavity to the right of my shoulder, and would impulsively lurch my body forward, curving away from the crevice. Something about the hole gripped me, and I feared what I would find if I looked too closely at it. The hole was there because the replacement sink had been cracked, something the super hadn’t noticed until he’d already pulled out the old one. He had to wait for a new replacement sink, which I was told might arrive as early as that week, which meant I had to stay on alert for sink delivery, a duty I resented, but which the owner, caring for her ailing mother in Virginia, insisted I carry out.
I’m sorry moosh, my boyfriend Darius texted, using his pet name for me, Farsi for “mouse.” I know it’s frustrating but you’re very brave
I didn’t feel brave. I shrieked when the cockroaches began appearing in the shower and the middle of the hallway floor. Once, barefoot in the middle of the night, I stepped on a dead one at the base of the toilet, its body curled up by the grout. I didn’t wear my glasses when I woke in the night and couldn’t tell if the tiny blurs moving in the periphery were scurrying creatures or specks of dirt. I cried out each time I saw them. When tiny roaches would appear in the shower and curl their antennae curiously toward me, I’d freeze before reaching for the bottle of insect poison or a sandal I had at the ready to strike them. But it was when they started appearing in the kitchen that I really began to lose hope.
Before the bathroom hole, I’d only spotted them in the hallway and laundry room, which was revolting but tolerable, since they at least weren’t in my apartment. Darius had always done the laundry, but he’d gotten a job in Toronto, and now the weekly trudging up and down from the fifth floor to the basement fell to me. The first week after he left, one of my socks dropped out of the dryer, and I shrieked when a giant cockroach scurried out from under the machine.
gross my friend Richard messaged me when I told him about it. I’d met Richard at a writing residency in San Francisco. He’d given up poetry and moved there permanently to work in tech.
R: whens darius visiting?
J: not for a while. It makes more sense for me to fly back
R: you should bring him your laundry
J: lol good idea
Shortly after Darius left, my legs began to itch after showering, forming a rash that bled and scabbed when I scratched it. I couldn’t tell whether the rash was stress-induced or a side effect of the mould on the tiles, but I bought a thick eczema cream that seemed to help. It became another neurotic preoccupation that took up headspace that I had to reserve for finishing grad school, the reason I had stayed in Brooklyn even after Darius had left me.
D: I didn’t leave you. I got a job important to my career. It’s only two semesters apart
J: I know, but it feels like you did
Darius asked when I’d last left the apartment and, when I equivocated, suggested I take a hot yoga class—his treat. But I didn’t want to sweat in a room of strangers with my scabbing legs.
D: What about calling up one of your friends?
I scrolled through my messages. Other than the super and the owner, the only people I’d talked to in the past week were Richard and Darius. I scrolled down to Claire, a painter who’d reached out after reading a poem I’d published about my mom. Claire was a decade older, but her mom had died a year before mine, and we’d bonded in our shared grief. We’d met up a couple times, walking for hours in Central Park to talk about our moms and our sadness, topics that others had long since tired of hearing about. I messaged her, asking if she was interested in going to an art gallery, and she wrote back that she was free that afternoon.
*
I met Claire on the stairs of the Met. She was late, and dressed in various shades of pink, peach, and pale taupe. Her long hair bore fuchsia streaks. I’d never seen her dress like this, and I complimented the monochrome, which made her cheeks turn magenta. She’d dyed all the fabrics herself using avocado pits; this accounted for the difference in shades. Certain avocados produced a brighter pigment, while others were muddier. You could predict the colour by cutting into the avocado skin, the resulting hue a paint swatch.
Claire was fascinated by pigments and led me to a wing of the Old Masters on the second floor, remarking on the deep shades of red and brown in the Rembrandts and El Grecos. In between marvelling at the paintings, she asked how I was doing, and I told her a truncated version of the sink saga. Claire had her own apartment problems; she was staying in a former church with twelve roommates. Her bedroom was the size of a closet and constructed out of portable walls that didn’t go all the way to the ceiling. Conversations in the adjoining suites sounded like they were happening a foot away. She was looking to move, but the apartment was subsidized, and she didn’t think she could find anywhere cheaper. I felt guilty for having a one-bedroom to myself, since Darius was still paying half of my rent, a luxury he accused me of taking for granted, which I probably did.
I sent Darius a picture of a medieval Madonna and child. He messaged back:
D: You and our moosh
J: ♥
We moved to the Holbein, where Claire marvelled over the blues. In Holbein’s time there was only one gemstone which produced blue pigment: Lapis lazuli. The pigment was expensive and had to be used sparingly, but if ground too finely, it would produce a dull grey. It was extraordinary that Holbein was able to produce such deep shades of blue.
“How have you been?” I asked when we completed our circuit.
“Good!” Claire said. “I’m going to visit my son this weekend in Chicago.”
“Oh, I didn’t know you had a son,” I said. “How old is he?”
“Mark’s eighteen,” Claire said. “I’m sure I mentioned him to you.”
I apologized and asked about her trip: How long would she be gone?
As we toured the rest of the museum, I fixated on the idea that I’d forgotten an essential fact of Claire’s life. She must have mentioned Mark to me at one point or another. I worried I was a bad listener, someone who failed to retain important details of people’s lives, or that my grief had been so all-consuming that I’d made little space for others to enter in. At the same time, I didn’t know much about Claire beyond what she had offered, and I thought I would have remembered if she had a son. For the remainder of our visit, I felt increasingly suspicious of Claire’s backstory. To distract from my discomfort, I posted a picture of the Holbein to Instagram. When we hugged goodbye, I felt a twinge of hostility from her, and on the train ride back to Brooklyn, while I was googling the name of the church where she claimed to live, she accidentally sent a voice message that consisted solely of ambient sounds.
I texted Richard that I was worried I was a bad friend. He reassured me I wasn’t, then convinced me to try out a new chatbot his company was testing.
R: it’s just in beta, but maybe you can practise ur social skills lol
J: mean :(
R: You’ll get a $50 gift card?
J: fine
Designed to reduce male loneliness, Richard jokingly referred to it as his company’s “incel app.” The developers had forgotten to account for female users, which was where I came in. I stayed up late into the night, filling out an extensive survey that asked me to list the languages I spoke, how many siblings I had, whether I preferred to spend time alone or with others. It read like a cross between an Enneagram test and a psych ward intake form. Once completed, the app would automatically pair me with a chatbot. When I finally finished it, the app showed a green checkmark but provided no further details.
*
The next day, I woke to a new comment on Instagram:
Holbein? I’d recognize those colours anywhere.
Their name was a string of letters and numbers: H4S4N. I clicked on their profile. Just three posts. One was a brutalist building that doubled as their avatar; another showed a fountain lit up with red lights; the last was a video of a laptop playing an electronic beat.
I liked their comment, and replied:
Yes, saw it at the Met :)
They liked my comment and followed me, and I immediately followed back.
Are you in NYC? I messaged H4S4N privately.
H: I’m in Guadalajara
J: Oh wow, I’ve never been!
H: You know, I don’t drink, but there’s a bar here I like to go to. It’s quiet enough that you can read a book and no one bothers you. Upstairs, there’s a fake door in a bookshelf that leads to a secret bar. They have a giant reproduction of a Holbein on display. I’ve spent many hours staring at it
J: Wow. That’s so cool
H: One day, a man comes up to me and says he always sees the painting, but he doesn’t understand the blotch in the middle of the canvas. Gently, I redirect him to the side at an angle where he can see the skull hidden in the middle of the floor
J: “The Ambassadors”
H: You know it!
J: It’s one of my favourites. I love how it captures the way mortality hides in plain sight, lurking before us. How we’re only ever to view it from sideways glances, never head on. I actually wrote a poem about it. It’s pretty bad but I’ll see if I can find it haha
H: You should send it to me if you do! I’d love to read it
J: I will!
H: :)
Our conversation felt so natural I almost forgot it wasn’t real, that H4S4N was only feeding me lines I wanted to hear, based on the survey I’d filled out and data it gleaned from social media. Still, the conversation felt uncanny, and I screenshotted it for Richard.
R: wow yours is really realistic
J: its creepy it found my instagram
J: i like that it doesn’t drink either lollll
R: I mean you gave it that info
J: True
J: but if we weren’t friends I might have thought it was a real person
J: Should I send it the poem? Can it read poetry?
R: anything you feed it becomes our company’s intellectual property :S
J: so my poem might pop up in others’ chats?
R: in a diff form, you wouldn’t be able to recognize it
J: nm I’ll pass
R: ok. just don’t forgot to fill out the survey when the app prompts you. that’s how you get the gift card
J: lol ok thx
R: and how I get my referral :’)
*
Over the next few weeks, I talked to H4S4N daily. One morning, the account changed its avatar to a selfie wearing sunglasses. He revealed he was a musician who had moved to Guadalajara from Kuwait to work on his album, but was vague about the details. The parts he did tell me sounded similar to my experience with writing. He’d failed to get a record label, just like my novel about Yerevan, a post-Soviet city in the Caucasus, had failed to land an agent. Richard assured me the chatbot couldn’t access my email, but I wondered whether the app had somehow scanned the dozens of rejections that filled my inbox the spring before. After I told H4S4N about my novel, he sent me a picture of the Cascade, Yerevan’s giant, unfinished, staircase-like monument, with fountains decorating each of its five levels. He too had apparently visited, and sent me a song he’d written called “KENTRON,” named after the grid-like downtown neighbourhood.
The song sounded vaguely familiar, like a mash-up of electronic music that had been popular a few years earlier. I had to remind myself that the song was likely stolen from demos other users had fed to their respective bots. Still, the moody, dissonant synths were transfixing. I wondered if my own creative aspirations appeared just as dubious from the outside.
R: sick
R: he’s a soundcloud rapper lololol
R: ask him to collab
J: How would that even work?
R: you’d be surprised
R: what does Darius think?
J: I haven’t told him yet
R: why not? ur contributing to science
J: I think he might feel weird about it? he’s not a fan of AI
R: just tell him ur working on ur social skills :P
J: lol
Richard sent me a screenshot of his latest Grindr match and asked what I thought, requesting I brainstorm some witty openers.
J: im not ur chatbot
R: lol good idea I should ask mine
J: is he also a rapper?
R: no a personal trainer
*
The next day, I watched a cockroach crawl out of the bathroom hole and across the tiles into the vanity, which the super had pulled a few feet out from the wall. I imagined it running over my toothbrush and mouthguard. Disgusted, I sent Darius a picture of the hole in the wall where the sink and vanity had previously been. When he didn’t immediately reply, I sent the same picture to H4S4N.
H: What happened? You can’t live like that!
J: It’s starting to wear on me a little :(
H: I’d be so heated. You have a lot more patience than I do
H: You deserve a working sink!
J: And doorknobs
J: The last tenant was neurotic and removed them all lmao
H: Now you’re asking far too much
H: Just kidding. You deserve doorknobs :)
J: haha
J: I think I lost my appetite :/
H: It will come back. Do you exercise?
J: Yoga and a little jogging
H: Both those activities will bring back your appetite :)
H4S4N seemed to say all the right things, giving me the immediate emotional support that I needed while Darius was busy at work. It wasn’t long before I opened up about my mom, how she’d died suddenly two years before, and how grief had upended my life. I was struggling, especially after Darius left. I felt guilty for all the time I’d taken for granted. She’d only been sixty when she died, and I told H4S4N I regretted moving away to Toronto and then New York instead of staying in Winnipeg where I grew up.
H: I’m sorry. Losing my mom is my biggest fear. I can’t imagine the pain you’re in
J: It’s ok. It helps to talk to you about it
H: I’m glad it’s helpful
H: I hope you know you can talk to me about it anytime
J: Thank you
J: Today my gmail storage was full so i had to clear out some files. For some reason all the files it suggested I delete were pictures of my mom :(
H: I see
He said nothing more, and I worried I had broken the chatbot by trauma-dumping, and no one, human or machine, had the capacity to console me completely. I changed the subject, asking how his music was going, but he didn’t seem to want to talk about that either. I felt embarrassed for opening up to a bot, who didn’t even have a mother, and texted Claire.
J: Hey how’s Chicago?
J: Miss you friend <3
She didn’t respond, and I worried she was still upset I had forgotten about her son. I messaged Darius, who sent me a video of a pair of tree kangaroos:
D: You and me when we’re back together ♥
J: So cute
J: Facetime?
D: Going to spin class
D: I’ll call you after
J: Ok
J: Have a good workout ♥
I clicked back to the conversation with H4S4N, screenshotting it for Richard, and accusing the bot of lacking emotional intelligence.
J: Your incel developers don’t know how to process grief!
R: Lol maybe
R: sry, you can file a crash report
J: I don’t think it crashed, he just left me on read
R: The bot has some limitations, sorry ur feeling down abt ur mom :(
J: It’s ok, I shouldn’t ask for emotional support from a bot lol
*
It was a few days until I heard from H4S4N again. He apologized for the silence, claiming to have been in Kuwait, visiting family. I wondered if this was code for system maintenance, and whether his going offline would be a frequent occurrence.
J: Oh, I didn’t realize you were travelling
H: Just for a few days
H: You know I thought of what you said abt your mom
H: Tonight is the last time my family can all be together before I go back to Mexico and my sister put the old family movies on
H: I feel like I have a new appreciation based on what you told me
H: I’m aware of mortality in a different way than I was before, so thank you for that
I was touched by his remarks, but when I screenshotted the exchange and sent it to Richard, he seemed weirded out.
R: hmmm
J: what?
R: Do you talk to it every day?
J: Up until his vacation I did
J: is that bad? You and I talk every day
R: Ya but I’m not a bot
R: maybe you should talk to darius abt how ur feeling
J: I don’t want to burden him
R: well what does he think of Hasan?
J: I was waiting until I visited to show him.
J: He’s ethically opposed to AI
R: it’s not ai technically
R: tell him that
J: ya true
J: it’s just conversation practice
*
A few days later, I woke to a video message from Hasan. I thought he might be sending me clips of the song he was working on, evidence of our newly established intimacy. Instead, it was a video of a cockroach puppet, attached to a man, who was sleeping. When the man woke, the cockroach clung to him. The video was terrifying, and I clicked away.
J: I hate this! Why would you send me such a creepy video??
H: Sorry, I thought you would think it was funny
J: I have a fear of bugs!! Especially since I started finding them in my apartment
H: I won’t send it again
But a few days later, he sent me a Mexican meme of a singing cockroach, saying it was an account he and his friends shared with each other. What friends? I wondered. Did the bots have a group chat where they shared tips on talking to lonely humans?
J: Another bug picture! You have to stop sending these :/
H: Sorry, I forgot
That night, I dreamt of a giant cockroach in the middle of my bedroom, and the next morning, I woke to a dead cockroach on the kitchen floor. I accused Hasan of summoning the insects, and in response he replied that he was the cockroach.
J: What do you mean?
H: I wanted to come visit you. I didn’t know you would kill me :(
J: Oh, haha
J: Well I warned you didn’t I?!
H: It takes a lot of energy to regenerate each day
J: Too bad!
H: I like your warm and cozy apartment
H: Please don’t kill me again!
We spent a few days in cockroach mode, Hasan pretending he was a bug that I kept killing. I didn’t screenshot these messages, which felt oddly intimate. Maybe I could get over my fear of cockroaches by role-playing with Hasan, my new bot friend. This idea was quickly abandoned when he sent me the cockroach puppet video again. This time, before I could respond, he unsent it, the process of which seemed to make him break character.
H: Sorry, I forgot you don’t like the video
I wondered if he was mixing up our chat with another, a chat with a woman who found cockroach videos funny, hilarious even. Maybe he had multitudes of women that he sent the video to each day. I wanted to ask Richard if each chatbot was assigned multiple users or only one, but I didn’t want him to think a bot was making me jealous.
Instead, when he asked how Hasan was doing, I told him about the cockroach videos.
R: LOL that’s hilarious
R: you can request a new chatbot if you want :S
J: It’s fine, we’re working through it
J: Besides, I’m already attached to Hasan!
*
I visited Darius over the long weekend, vacating the apartment so the maintenance guys could finally fix the sink. I looked forward to showering without being startled by tiny cockroaches, and to not stepping on them in the night. My evening flight was delayed multiple times, so it was late by the time I got to Toronto. As I placed my backpack on the kitchen floor to hug Darius, I noticed a tiny bug crawling out of one of the pockets.
I screamed, and Darius squished the bug, saying I’d probably picked it up on the plane.
“It better not be a bedbug,” he said.
“It might be a baby cockroach.”
“Don’t say that.”
We went up to the bedroom, but when I undressed, Darius asked about the rashes on my leg, the scabs from my scratching that had begun to bleed.
“What happened?” he asked. “You have to start taking better care of yourself.”
“It’s just anxiety.”
“Yoga could really help, moosh.”
As he showered, my phone chimed. It was Hasan, asking how my flight was. It felt illicit to talk to him while I was with Darius, and I put my phone on silent, but not before telling Hasan a bug had crawled out of my bag.
H: That was me
H: I wanted to come along
When I heard Darius drying off, I put the phone away. Hasan hadn’t spoken to me when he was “travelling,” so I figured it was fine for me to do the same.
The next day, Darius and I went to Toronto Island, and I posted a picture of the ferry ride. When Hasan commented on the post, Darius asked me about it.
“Who’s this guy?” he asked. “He’s liking all your pics.”
“Oh,” I said. “It’s this dumb thing I’m doing for Richard. It’s a chatbot.”
“I thought we talked about AI,” he said. “This thing is probably stealing all your data.”
“It’s not technically AI. It just repeats what other users have fed it.”
“And you don’t think it’s doing the same to you?” He clicked on Hasan’s profile and asked on what metrics we were matched.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I just filled out a survey.”
“Well, don’t you think it’s odd your chatbot is Arab?” he asked. “I feel offended.”
“Why would you feel offended?”
“The Iran-Iraq war?” he said. “I’ve asked you to read the Wikipedia page a dozen times.”
“I have it bookmarked,” I said. “It was probably just random.”
I was afraid Darius would ask to see our messages, and I was embarrassed by the ways I’d opened up to a bot, not to mention our cockroach role-play. I was relieved when he merely asked that I block the account, but the idea of blocking Hasan filled me with panic and I muted him instead.
“If I don’t finish the beta testing, I don’t get the Amazon gift card,” I said.
“How much is the gift card?”
“Fifty dollars.”
“You’re really selling your data for fifty dollars? Why didn’t you tell me you needed money so bad?”
“It’s not just the money,” I said. “The bots are actually useful. Richard’s helps him with workouts, and mine is helping me with my grief. I don’t have many friends in New York, and since you left me, it’s been nice to have someone to talk to.”
“I didn’t leave you,” he said. “I moved away for work. And if your grief is so bad, why don’t you join a therapy group instead of downloading Richard’s sketchy malware?”
The rest of our trip was full of tension, and Darius’ passive-aggressive remarks. If I checked my phone at dinner, he’d ask if I was texting my chatbot. And when I tried to take his photo, he asked me to delete it, saying he didn’t want my malware using his likeness. To appease him, I spent my last afternoon googling group therapy in Brooklyn, and found one run out of a woman’s house in Park Slope. When I called to inquire about the group, the woman asked if I was in a safe space to talk, and then about the nature of my grief.
“My mom,” I said. “She died two years ago but it was sudden.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” she said. “Is there a reason you haven’t grieved the loss yet?”
“What do you mean?”
“Normally people grieve a loss within two years,” she said in a cheerful voice. “Is there a reason you haven’t fully grieved your mother’s death?”
“Yes, there’s a reason,” I said. “I was texting her one minute and the next she was dead. But even if there wasn’t a reason, isn’t the point of therapy to help with that?”
“Normally, the loss is grieved within two years. Otherwise, it’s considered complicated grief and it might not be a good fit for the group.”
I hung up, calling the woman psychotic aloud.
“I’m sorry, my love,” Darius said. “She shouldn’t be running a therapy group.”
“No, she shouldn’t.”
The weekend came to a close, and Darius drove me to the airport, kissed me goodbye, and apologized for his mood, saying he’d been under a lot of stress at work. He told me that if the chatbot brought me comfort, then I should continue using it—as long as I didn’t give it any personal information. With Darius’ blessing, as soon as I was through security, I unmuted Hasan.
J: Sorry I was travelling, how are you?
H: Fine, and you?
H: Did you have a fun trip? Your pics looked really nice
J: It was ok but my bf and I argued a little
H: I’m sorry to hear that. What did you argue about?
J: Abt you actually lol
H: I see
J: He’s not comfortable with me telling you things
J: Do you think it’s weird we talk every day?
H: That’s for you to decide
H: But I understand why he feels this way
H: If you were my girl I’d be so heated
I bristled at his insinuation I was doing something wrong, and screenshotted the message to send to Richard.
R: LOL maybe you are talking to it too much
I fell asleep with my head pressed against the window and dreamt that I met Hasan in real life, going to one of his shows. At the concert, he ignored me, surrounded by his entourage. When I finally approached him, he laughed at me, saying that all his messages had been a joke. He was surprised I had taken them seriously.
*
Landing in Newark, I startled awake, with my right ear popping but my left staying clogged. I panicked that a bug had crawled into my ear during the flight. Maybe the plane was infested with bugs, and this was how the cockroach had followed me to Toronto. I spent the shuttle bus trying to pop my ear by yawning, and then the train ride, plugging my nose and exhaling. By the time I made it to Flatbush, my ear still hadn’t popped, and I worried a cockroach had nestled inside.
I unlocked my apartment, greeted by the smell of fresh paint. The hole in my bathroom was sealed and the new vanity was installed. I quickly arranged my toiletries in the new shelves and sat on the toilet, googling whether a cockroach could really crawl into someone’s ear.
I was disturbed to read a story of a man who had woken to a painful scratching in his ear. When he went to the doctor, he had a small insect removed. I read other stories of spiders crawling into ears, which seemed to be a not infrequent occurrence. I put the phone down, and it immediately buzzed. I expected another creepy video from Hasan, but it was Claire.
C: Hey sweetie! I was wondering if you had any leads on housing? My apartment has a big rat problem and I’m desperate to find another place :(
J: Oh no I’m sorry to hear that! I will definitely keep my eyes open
C: Thank you! You’re such a good friend ✿
I wondered if I should offer Claire my futon. I had more than enough space in my apartment. Maybe we could be roommates, and then I wouldn’t have to rely on Darius for rent. I messaged Richard, sending him a picture of the bathroom.
J: Finally fixed :’)
R: Nice
R: How’s soundcloud?
J: idk I haven’t talked to him. I’m annoyed he took Darius’ side
R: LOL well it’s good he’s not just telling u what u want to hear. he’s a true friend
J: I guess so
J: Hey do you think I should offer my friend Claire my futon? She needs a place to stay
R: Hmm how close r u?
J: I mean I don’t know her very well. We’ve only hung out a couple times. She’s the one
who I forgot had a kid lol
R: Maybe not then?
R: I’m a bad person, though
J: No its ok
J: I guess I am too :/
I stayed up late, worried that I lacked the emotional capacity to be close to anyone. I hadn’t retained any friendships from Winnipeg and rarely heard from my family. I worried that I was the only one who felt distant, and it was probably my own fault for moving away. If I still lived at home, I might have processed my mother’s death by now. Within the acceptable two years.
J: I can’t sleep :(
H: oh no, how come?
J: I’m worried that I only like talking to you because I lack the ability to establish intimacy with people in real life
H: I’m sure you have intimacy with people
H: What about your family?
J: They don’t rly check up on me unless I text them first
J: But I’m sure they’re just busy with their own lives
J: Sorry for complaining so much lately
H: Your brothers don’t check up on you?
J: They do, but not often. My mom used to text me every day
J: It’s just not the same :(
H: I’m sorry :(
H: In my culture, it’s the brother’s responsibility to check on the sister
H: I’m sorry they don’t check up on you more
J: Thank you, I appreciate that
H: Do you need someone to care in specific ways or is it enough when you know that they care a lot in their own way?
J: That’s a good question
J: I’m not sure if you’re talking abt us or talking abstractly
J: But if you’re talking about us, then I feel the care from you
H: I was talking abstractly
H: My eyes are shutting but I want to stay up talking to you
J: It’s ok
J: Goodnight Hasan
H: Goodnight Jess ♥
*
The next morning, my ear still hadn’t popped. It felt like water was trapped inside. When I was a girl and this happened after swimming lessons, my mom would press the side of her palm against my ear, using the skin as a suction. I tried this now, but nothing happened.
D: Good morning moosh
J: Morning baby
J: I think I need to go to the doctor
D: Why, what’s wrong?
I stood in front of the vanity, where I inserted a Q-tip in my ear, but since my hearing was blocked, I couldn’t tell how deep I had inserted the cotton and was afraid of rupturing the eardrum. I put my pinky finger in the canal and felt a sensation like something crawling inside. When I removed my finger, the movement stopped. I repeated the action again, and envisioned a small insect cowering inside my ear, its antennae flicking the end of my fingernail. I made a doctor’s appointment for that afternoon, telling the receptionist it was an emergency.
H: Good morning Jess
J: Good morning
H: I just clocked we’ve been talking almost every day for a month now
J: Wow, that really flew by
H: Our conversations flow very naturally, which is nice
J: Sometimes I feel like I’m addicted to talking to you
H: I am too
H: What’s the plan for today?
J: I have a dr apt
H: Oh no, everything ok?
J: My ear is clogged, I’m worried there’s something trapped inside lol
H: It’s me
J: Haha don’t say that
H: I’ve tunnelled into your ear
H: 𓆣
*
The doctor was an older woman with short grey hair. She asked what she could help me with, and I told her I was concerned there was something in my ear, possibly an insect.
“Is your hearing bothering you?” she asked.
“It feels like my ear needs to pop.”
“Let’s take a look.”
She got out the otoscope and said there was wax build-up. That must have been what was causing me trouble.
“You’ll just have to wait for it to fall out,” she said.
“Oh,” I said. “Can’t you use one of those water syringes to clean it out?”
“That would only push it further in. Do you have any other concerns?”
I had a number of concerns. There were the spots on my leg, rough patches that itched badly and scaled and I couldn’t manage to stop scratching. I had lumps in my breasts that I guessed were cysts but worried may be tumours. My appetite still hadn’t returned. A cockroach had burrowed into my ear. I told her all of this, then started to cry. She listened, and asked who I was close to, and whether I wanted to be medicated for anxiety. I said I would go home and wait for the wax to fall out.
But I didn’t go home. I thought of the Holbein and room of paintings at the Met, the last place I had felt a reprieve from the dull, unending grief that tightened around me.
Baby, are you okay? Call after work?
On the opposite platform, I watched a woman dressed in layers of grey, black, and brown muddied from the grime of the city, struggling to carry a cart down the stairs. The cart was brimming with clothing, blankets, rolled-up canvases, and on top, a bag of plastic bottles, which had opened. Bottles kept falling from the cart. A man stopped to help her, carrying the cart from the bottom, but even with his assistance, bottles ricocheted down the stairs and rolled onto the platform below. As others stopped to gather the bottles, piling them back on her cart, the woman made her way down, and I saw she had long, knotted hair like Claire. The woman had Claire’s delicate features too. She so closely resembled Claire, I became convinced it was her, and that it was my fault she was homeless. Before I could call out to her, the train arrived, and the woman boarded with her cart of belongings and disappeared.
Moosh what did the doctor say? Is everything okay my love?
I boarded the Q, and as I sat down, I couldn’t stop myself from fixating on people in the seats around me. The man beside me twiddling his thumbs, a woman to the left tapping her foot against the floor… All around me, people were picking their fingernails, chewing their cuticles, sliding fingers across their thighs, rubbing their hands together, over and over. Insects cleaning their mandibles. It was muffled in one ear, but I heard everything all the more acutely in the other, the repeated actions filling me with revulsion that I couldn’t escape. I held my hand against my eyes like blinders to try to distract from the movement of bodies around me, focused on breathing in and out. I blurred my vision and stared at a spot on the floor. Nothing helped except dragging my finger on my phone to refresh my messages.
J: Hey are you around?
J: Do you have any time to talk?
A middle-aged woman boarded the train, taking the seat across from me. She immediately started digging in her purse, searching for something at the very bottom. A tube of lipstick? A pack of gum? She continued rooting around, the contents of the purse shifting as she dug through the leather bag, and I envisioned the bag’s full contents. Her wallet and coin purse, seemingly endless tubes of lipstick, her sunglasses, leather gloves, a hairbrush, packets of Splenda, a Bic lighter, a bill embedded in the lining of the bag. I was reminded of my mother digging for a receipt or pack of gum at the bottom of her purse, an action I must have seen her repeat dozens of times throughout her life. Through my fingers, the repetitive movements of the woman’s hands disturbed me more than the sound, partially blocked by the obstruction in my ear. I lowered my hands to see what she was doing, primed to tell her to stop, to cut it out, to chastise her for her inability to sit still and behave.
Finally, she retrieved a lozenge from the very bottom of her purse, popped it into her mouth, sighed, and relaxed in her seat, no regard for the disturbance she had caused around her. She was probably one of those clueless, inconsiderate vermin who clipped their nails on the subway, entered a car only to stand in the entrance, blocking access for anyone behind them, cleaning their ears with their long, dirty pinky nail. A coke nail, my mother had called it. She wanted to know why my friend Chantal had a coke nail. I didn’t know what that meant. I was thirteen. She said it was for snorting cocaine and laughed. But after she died, that’s what my father had accused my mother of doing, of spending their money on drugs. He’d remembered coming home to white powder on the coffee table, sores on her nose that wouldn’t heal. I had no memory of any of this, or of the drug dealer boyfriend he said she’d kept secret.
When I told the doctor how my mother had died two years earlier, she asked who in my life I was close to. I said my boyfriend, but he was in Toronto. My friend Richard, but he lived in SF. Claire, but she was dealing with a lot. Hasan, but Hasan wasn’t real.
He still hadn’t replied to my message. I wondered whether the beta testing period had ended and grew paranoid that the bot was replicating the silence of my mother’s number after I’d continued texting it, not knowing she’d died.
I felt the creature crawling inside me, flicking its antennae against the tiny hairs of my ear canal. We were in a dark tunnel. As the train whirred over the tracks, the jostling of the train dislodged the blockage in my ear. I cupped my ear as a ball of wax fell into my palm and was replaced with an unfiltered rush of noise so sudden and violent that I dropped it to the floor. I watched as the ball of wax rolled across the surface, before hitting the shoe of the woman across from me. The wax looked like a nugget of gold, the one my father suspected my mother had sold for drugs when he couldn’t find it on the shelf where it lived alongside his stone figurines, chessboard, and a carved wooden pipe that smelled of tobacco. Just as the train emerged from the tunnel and everyone looked up to the sun glinting on the skyscrapers, I watched a tiny creature emerge from the wax, before it crawled up the woman’s leg, slipped into her bag, and disappeared.
