“Dial, Javex and Jenny”
I go through one bottle of Liquid Dial antibacterial soap every week, but even this fails to quiet the noises inside my head.
I am very careful to keep myself clean. Liquid Dial is my favourite soap. It is translucent orange, and you can see through the soap, through the bottle, and it acts like a bizarre filter and makes things on the other side look orange and twisted. I buy the large, almost two-litre bottles and use it to refill my little bottles sitting around the house, the little bottles that have the white spouts on them, like in restaurant washrooms, the ones where you push down on the spout and the orange gold pours out. The large bottle, which has a carrying handle on it, and a white lid, says ‘value pack’ on it. Indeed, it is quite a good value. I buy it from the Wal-Mart across town, usually in unopened cases of twelve. The bottle says, ‘refill/recharge’ on the bottom of the sticker on the side. ‘Recharge’, I assume, is French for refill, but I like to think it is there just for me, telling me it gives me the recharge I need. I always gently remove the stickers with warm water. I know what is in the bottle, and I feel insulted by the stickers.
I keep six of the little bottles around my house: two in the kitchen, two in the bathroom, one on the table just inside the front door, and one next to my couch where I watch television. Sometimes I feel dirty watching television. I need to keep myself clean, especially my hands and the area around my mouth. I try not to get any soap in my eyes.
Actually, no. I have another bottle, a seventh one. It is at the top of the stairs that lead to the basement, on a small oak table next to a vase of very real-looking plastic flowers. (I call the basement the (de)basement, not too funny, I admit, but I like it just the same) When I come up those stairs and into my living area, my hands always, always need to be cleaned. Sterilized. Rubbing soap over them as I walk to the bathroom gives me a head start, you see. There is also a bowl of water on the oak table, so I can wet my hands before I squirt soap on them. I replace the
water every day. There are bowls of water all over my house.
The shade of pink created when I scrub my skin is bright, shiny and mesmerizing. I do not like dead skin on me, and I work very hard to get rid of it. I keep my skin pink, almost red. I use a nail brush or the little scrub brushes you buy in packs of two, the ones you use for dishes. They come in plastic baggies, either a yellow and a blue one, or an orange and blue one. I used an SOS pad once, and I scrubbed so hard that it made the skin on my forearm bleed. SOS pads have some other soap in them, and the pads leave what looks like bits of wire on the skin. Now I only
use those pads for scrubbing the kitchen and bathroom floors. Cleanliness is next to godliness, that’s what I say. Can’t get too clean.
I tried to drink Liquid Dial, once. Only once. Its citrus smell made me do it. I probably drank a cup of it. Drank is the wrong word, as the soap is like a thick orange syrup, so perhaps I should say I poured a cup down my waiting throat. It didn’t taste too bad. It actually made me feel cleaner. I have been eating some strange things lately, and this was to cleanse my body. It was fine until my stomach complained. I ended up doubled over, clutching my belly, burping up huge orange-tinted bubbles, like some cartoon character. A cartoon character! Jesus! That was
the end of that. I won’t even tell you what it did to my intestines. Lots of bubbles, that is all I will tell you. I decided to keep with my less exciting but very effective method of drinking (chugging) one litre of water a day, just before bedtime, that contains about a pinkie finger’s width of liquid bleach. I have been doing that every night for, I think, about a year. It works. I should know. Those stomachaches no longer bother me. But burping up bubbles! Once was
enough of that.
Oh, the bleach I have been using, since the beginning, is Javex. I have gone through a few bottles in the past year, but certainly not all of it has gone down my throat! No, I use it around the house, for cleaning and disinfecting. It is very effective for stain removal. For some reason, there seems to be a proliferation of stains in my (de)basement. Javex to the rescue, I say. The jug has a picture, in an upside-down triangle, of a hand in a jar, and the hand is nothing but bone. So of course I do not touch the bleach with my bare hands. I don’t even carry the jug around without my trusty rubber gloves. You know, the ones your mother used to wear when she cleaned the toilet, the yellow, sweaty, ill-fitting gloves. I have also seen lime green ones, and orange ones. They make me feel like a mad scientist when I have them on. Do I need to tell you how many pairs of those gloves I have laying around the house? Lots. Tons. Again, all from the local Wal-Mart.
Javex bleach is derived from salt. It breaks down quickly and turns into salt, water and oxygen. I find that amazing. It gives me awful gas, too. That’s why I drink it just before bedtime, so I don’t find myself out shopping or something, during the day, with the unstoppable urge to pass gas. Not a pleasant thought, I am sure you will agree. I make sure I wash my nightly water and bleach down with two glasses of warm milk, just to keep things happy. That means I need to get up twice every night to go to the bathroom, but it is a nice break between dreams. Usually I down a bunch of Pepto-Bismol, the gross pink stuff. Sometimes when I get up I mix some honey in warm milk and drink it. Sometimes I just put the honey into the milk and watch it until I am tired again. Even if I don’t drink it, it is never there in the morning. I find that
strange. The empty glass is just sitting there when I get up, on the (of course) spotlessly clean kitchen counter.
The dreams I have each and every night are quite vivid and disturbing, and I believe they are only partly caused by my bleach intake. I am pretty sure that I was only dreaming in black and white before I started with the bleach, and now I dream in incredible colour. Oh, I also down about a half-dozen Advil every night too, with the milk. But I doubt that causes any dreams.
My cat, Israel, won’t touch bleach or Liquid Dial. He doesn’t need to. He is so perfect and sinless. I wish I could be like him, but I need to be cleansed constantly. The other day Israel brought up an inordinate amount of half-digested food and hair. I had never even considered that he would be capable of fault until then. I put out a bowl of water for him, with a tiny bit of Javex in it, but he refused to drink it, instead preferring to drink from the dripping tap in the bathtub. I have forgiven him for his little outburst, but I think that he was just showing me my own sins. He is such a good cat. He loves to drink from the water bowls that sit everywhere in my house. He is also very quiet. It relaxes me.
I am not actually trying to avoid talking about the noises in my head, but I do not find that talking about it helps. I have talked to two psychiatrists about it, but neither of them gave any workable advice. It was all, oh, use this drug, or use that drug, or pills. Nonsense. I also have tried talking to Israel about it, but he is a cat, and I cannot tell you what he says. Sometimes he says things in English, and I catch the odd word, and sometimes I hear something that sounds to my untrained ear like Spanish, but for the most part he is not very helpful. What is the main language that cats use? Catese? I don’t know. Regardless, he loves me and I love him, and we get along fine even when we cannot understand one another.
I know for sure that Israel told me one time that I should no longer wear paper surgical masks around the house. He would not tell me why, but I think he likes to see my pink face instead of a paper mask. I am glad he told me. I wasn’t aware that I wore those masks so often.
The only thing that I have found so far, that works, is talking to my freezer. Oh, don’t knock it until you try it. I actually also found one other thing that works, that is, talking to graves in the cemetery that is three blocks from my house, but I have been escorted out of the cemetery four times now, (four times!), always in the dead of night, always by security guards who grip my forearm like I am some dangerous monster and they are here to tame me. They tell me to never come back, that I need help, that maybe I should ‘take my medication’, whatever that means. They never, ever look into my eyes. Security guards have very poor people skills. I think I would go crazy if I was a security guard, because I would be alone so much. Regardless, I didn’t think I ever talked loud enough for anyone to hear. I need to make my own cemetery, so I can talk to whomever I wish. In the meantime, I am talking to my freezer.
I have a huge freezer in my basement (debasement). It is rectangular, white, and about seven feet long. Heavy lid. Long enough for a body to sleep in. I don’t get inside it, of course. I have heard too many stories about kids getting inside refrigerators and freezers and closing the door and then being locked inside until they run out of air. Not me. I am too smart to get inside. There is no room in there anyway.
What I do is, I bring a blanket and a pillow down to the freezer, and I lean against it and wrap my body with the blanket, and I cross my legs and prop up my head with the pillow, and I talk. The freezer, because it is but a freezer, does not talk back. It hums. The humming rises and falls, according to what it wants me to know. I tell it about the voices in my head, the awful noise, the arguing, the constant buzzing between my ears. I used to open the freezer, and talk to the bodies inside, but I decided that that was a waste of electricity, a waste of energy. Besides, it is not the bodies in the freezer that communicate with me, but the freezer itself. It houses the bodies for me. It is also more comfortable for me, especially for the longer talks, for me to sit
against the freezer than it is to stand over it and keep the lid open.
I have decided that it is almost time for another freezer. This one is practically full. I believe that this freezer (who I call jenny, no capital J, just jenny) will be jealous when I have another freezer delivered, but that cannot be avoided. The bodies cannot be stored upstairs, in my living area. They must be downstairs in the (de)basement, and that is where the second freezer will go. I will probably put a small table down here soon, too, for a bottle of Liquid Dial and a bucket of water and a hand towel. You can never be too sure.
I think I will call the new freezer jimmy. No capital J, just jimmy. jimmy and jenny, in my (de)basement, home of the bodies. It has a certain ring to it. That and all the Liquid Dial, little orange bottles of it everywhere. And maybe some Javex. I think I can find a piece of happiness in that.
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