Cleaning House
After the Executions
After the executions, I cleaned my house. It was the only thing I could do. I had just moved to a new address—it would be cheaper, it would be closer to the center of town—and cleaning was vital and necessary. After the executions, my landlord asked my roommates and me to send a list of everything that was wrong with the place. We wrote him a letter, which documented how spiders had established a thriving society, as had fruit flies, and mosquitos were hatching in a pool of water that collected under the fridge. (It leaked, for no good reason, from a pipe in the back.) There were fleas in the earthen basement, and a forest of poison ivy in the backyard. Mildew flourished on the bathroom ceiling. A squirrel had built its nest above the living room window. The walls were cracked, bungled in their construction. In the upstairs window, the ceiling was bowed and speckled with water damage from where the chimney—long since sealed—was crumbling. The bathroom leaked into the kitchen. Shelves were falling from the walls. And, more than that, there was gunk, human gunk, from years of unwashed living. When I walked barefoot, the soles of my feet turned a sickly grey.
After the executions, we painted. Former occupants had selected an off-white that looked, depending on the light, like snot or soured milk. Two walls in the kitchen we made pink. The porch we painted crimson. A can of periwinkle for the gate. One wall in my room, the one that faced the street, I painted blue: blue like the color bowerbirds gather, like the primeval ocean, blue like Leonard Cohen’s famous raincoat and Joni Mitchell’s voice (blue songs are like tattoos) and Van Gogh’s almond blossoms, blue like varicose veins and blue like soul and yes, even blue as in the mood.
After the executions, I opened the refrigerator door. In the door there were jars and canisters full of vinegar, floating matter with the expiration dates worn off. I found something wrapped in saran—maybe once a tomato—now disintegrated into something that felt like a bag of IV fluid. The crisper was full of leafy, rotted vegetable matter. I scrubbed it in the sink and later, tangled in the drain, found a fly that must have frozen to death in there, along with a bleached and perfect wishbone, sitting there like some seashell that had washed ashore.
My mother taught me how to clean as a way grieve. Other families make jokes; in mine, we scrub the baseboards. When my grandfather died, she had my father stack all the chairs on the kitchen table so that she could vacuum the spaces she normally couldn’t reach. She polished the furniture, the silverware. Bleached out the bathtub and the bathroom sink. Then tackled the garden: tearing fallen oak leaves from where they tangled in the azalea bushes, sweeping the patio. I remember the color of her face as she pushed the lawn mower across the yard, hacking at the grass, a small territory all she could control.
My grandfather died when I was 12, the same year I was in love with Daniel Pearl. He was missing, and he played the violin like me. He had written a story about a Stradivarius, lost on a freeway, then found again. This seemed like an uplifting sign. I thought he was too good to die, like he was somehow above executing. It was a stupid way to think—I had been 11 on September 11, like that hadn’t taught me that nobody is too good for a horrible death—but forgive me, he had gone to Stanford, and in the photographs he wore a pair of round, intelligent glasses, and like I said, I was only 12. It didn’t matter. When he died his neck became a swamp of blood.
After the executions, I vacuumed the floors, then scrubbed them, and then vacuumed them again. The scrubbing brought up a thick, black crust of goo. I thought of ectoplasm, Dr. Egon Spengler’s gun. Get me a Neutrino Wand. Get me a proton pack. I dumped the mop water in the bathtub, and after it drained it left behind a trace of silt.
After the executions, I pumped chemicals onto the bathroom ceiling to kill the mildew, which foamed and then dripped onto the floor. So I scrubbed the floor. I scrubbed the toilet. I scrubbed the sink and the mirror and my face, revealed in it, was as sweaty and flushed as my mother’s when she mowed the lawn.
After the executions, I set off a flea bomb in the basement. The label on the canister claimed to target only bedbugs and fleas: egg, larvae, and adult. I shook the can and pressed on the button until it shot a steady stream of pesticide into the air. When I returned, hours later, to ventilate the space, I looked above me and found a city of dead spiders, still clinging to their webs. I’m telling you, it was like Dresden up there. I mean it was like Aleppo or Baghdad.
