Kristen Li: My Nights with the Worm
/My Nights with the Worm
by Kristen Li ’21
I: Nausea
I first read about the tapeworm diet online. Just like every other diet plan, it featured transformative before-and-after pictures. I skimmed through the menu, learned that the diet was illegal, not FDA approved, and could have devastating side effects. I glossed over the statistics and the numbers, and my eyes landed on the guarantee: you will put off pounds, you will lose weight. That was all I wanted, all it took.
“Go to sleep.”
“Okay, I’m trying.”
“Wear socks—”
“Mom, that’s not gonna help.”
“Try counting Bichon Frise dogs then. They’re just like lambs, and I’ve read something––”
“Mom!”
“Goodnight, sweetie.” She tucked a strand of hair behind my ear.
It had been hours, and I still couldn’t sleep. Night crept up the walls of my house and dressed it in darkness. I lay on my stomach, on my stuffed animals, on my gingerbread man shaped pillow Marlie gifted me on my sixth birthday. Ten years ago already? I simply couldn’t believe it.
I pulled out my journal and stared at the empty, lined pages. It smelled like air-freshener in the school bathrooms. Maybe this would do the trick.
While my pencil moved across the page, my mind drifted elsewhere. I started having nightmares in the past weeks. I wasn’t the kind of person who remembered her dreams, but I knew they were nightmares. I woke up drenched in sweat, and I felt as if I were wearing someone else’s skin. Needles I couldn’t see pierced my neck, and my veins throbbed, pulsing with blood rushing to my head. It was hard to describe, and the closest I’ve come to capturing that sensation is when I replayed a horror film. I knew it’s coming, a clown hidden in a cabinet or a terrifying creature lurking behind the bedposts.
Marlie called today. I told her I was sick and couldn’t go out. That was only half-true because I could muster enough strength to gossip and nimble on cake-crumbs. My legs refused to stir and buckled when I stood, so I laid down and read magazines and caught up with people’s stories on Snapchat. I pampered myself with a jasmine-scented bubble-bath, but the bath just made me nauseous. The scent was too sweet, too thick, too heavy. I wrapped myself in plush towels and popped a Tylenol.
The next morning, Mom told me over her mug of black coffee, “You were whimpering like a cat in your sleep last night.”
I didn’t think she slept well either, afraid that I caught the flu or something of that sort. I, on the other hand, was afraid that she might take me to the doctor’s, so I told her I was fine.
Fine enough to go out with Marlie and Laila. We shopped and ate at The Cheesecake Factory next to Macy’s, but the Chicken Mango Avocado Salad there shot me into a state of frenzy. My stomach was searing in pain, and the salad dressing made its reappearance onto the tablecloth.
My face burned. “Please don’t tell anyone.” Marlie covered her mouth with her hands, while Laila, wide-eyed, froze in motion. When the waitress arrived with her nose scrunched, I wanted to crawl under the table.
The sleepless nights were unbearably long. They stretched into days, into weeks. The hands of the clock just didn’t budge.
After midnight, I took my textbooks out of my book bag to finish the next day’s homework. I fiddled with some algebra before the numbers peeled off the pages under the faint lights. Then I cracked open my No Fear Shakespeare edition of Hamlet.
One passage caught my attention. When King Claudius confronts Hamlet as to the whereabouts of his Lord Chamberlain Polonius, Hamlet makes an odd remark: “Your worm is your only emperor for diet. We fat all creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for maggots.”
My stomach jerked. What the hell did that mean? I yellowed the lines with a highlighter. I then digested the words for their meaning. First the worm eats the body of the emperor, then a fish eats the worm, and finally, a beggar eats the fish. So that’s how the emperor progresses “through the guts of a beggar.” After all, we are all worm food.
That was enough to chew on for the night. I climbed onto my bed and sank into the soft mattress. Through the window a full moon hung in the dark sky, and I watched it without blinking.
II: Insomnia
It wasn’t that I thought I was fat. I just wanted to be thinner (But you’re already like a stick, my friends would say). Losing weight was my obsession, though I didn’t realize how far it had gone. The tapeworm diet was my drug. But in my defense, I’d tried so many diets. I was tired and desperate and wanted a way that would work.
After going over a scene, Mrs. S paused and said: “Form pairs and discuss the meaning of these lines.”
I sat next to Laila in English. She racked her brain and cupped her chin. “Well, you go first,” she ventured. “This is absurd.”
“Which part?”
“‘There is nothing either good or bad…’”
“‘But thinking makes it so.’”
“What on earth does that mean?”
“The English’s not that hard: everything can be good or bad depending on how you look at it.”
“Yes, I get that. But it doesn’t make sense. I’ve done a lot of stupid stuff, and I don’t see how they can be good no matter how I look at it.”
“Hm.” I thought carefully before answering her. “I guess you’ve got a point.”
“Shakespeare’s like that.” She said. “‘To be or not to be’ and everything...He contradicts himself a lot.”
I was still uncomfortable around Marlie and Laila, so when the bell rang, I slung my bookbag onto my shoulder and made my way home. Outside, it was over 100 degrees and my sweaty back dampened the bookbag. My stomach throbbed. I felt as if I were in the restaurant again.
When I got home, Mom was washing the dishes and arranging them onto the dish rack to dry. “You all right? You look like a tomato,” she commented. “Go take a shower and I’ll make you a strawberry smoothie.”
“It’s so hot, you could fry an egg on the ground. But I’m fine. Really.” I laughed convincingly.
Our neighbors' dog died later in the afternoon. They said he was in the backyard, and they had forgotten to fill his water bowl. I didn’t know one missing bowl of water could do that.
When night fell, I think I saw the dog through the windows above my bed. He pranced in the grass among many other spirits and scents, his contorted shadow lengthening and shortening as he made his way to the skyline. You see, things like that only happen after the sun sets. If you think about them during the day, you’d scoff. But they’re there, when the wind whistles and the darkness envelops the house. You either see them, or you don’t.
III: Weakness
I didn’t hesitate. I was in good company. The opera diva Maria Callas, mistress of Greek shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis, had expelled a tapeworm and lost 80 pounds. I made my decision, but the harder part was how to get one. I couldn’t order them off Amazon or eBay. I couldn’t drive to Mexico to buy them. I couldn’t go to a doctor and ask for a prescription for tapeworm eggs.
August’s my favorite month, because my birthday is on August 21st. I like how my birthday’s during the summer, since I’m not obliged to bring cake to school. Our neighbor’s eight-year-old daughter Bowie came in that afternoon and we shared a chocolate croissant drizzled in melted butter. She sang me the birthday song. I lit a thin candle and blew it out.
That same night I didn’t sleep at all. I kept the light on. When I pulled my blanket over my head I felt lightheaded. After that, I couldn’t remember a thing except for the coolness of the tiles on the bathroom floor. A moment later, the sink and the cabinet and the bathtub came into focus, and my towel, nowhere to be found a second ago, appeared on the floor. Heaving heavily, I pushed myself away from the toilet bowl. The bathroom was spinning, the bulbs were flickering, and the world seemed upside-down. I cleaned the floor of traces of vomit and snot.
In the morning, boiling water bubbled beneath my skin, threatening to overflow into the world around me. I refused to eat, refused to talk, and refused to leave the comfort of my bed.
Thankfully, my mom was out of town. She had left a sumptuous breakfast—fat Belgian waffles with chunks of Craisins, Lucky Charms in whole-fat milk, a mug of lukewarm chocolate—but I didn’t touch it.
Instead, I returned to my room and opened Hamlet in my lap. I had to read each line several times to process what was printed on the pages.
After Hamlet forces the goblet of poison down Claudius’ throat, Laertes pronounces in the final scene: “He is justly served; It is a poison temper’d by himself.”
When the meaning eventually sank in, the words taunted and sneered and looked me in the eyes. She is justly served. It is a poison tempered by herself.
IV: Abdominal Pain
On a Friday evening, I put on a large coat and got Mom to drive me to school. The night security guard checked my name on the list and let me through the gates. My biology teacher had given me the key to the lab so that I could complete our upcoming biology project. I had to check on the fish in the tank and measure the pH of the water. I remembered that one of the boys in Marlie’s class was doing an experiment on the growth rate of tapeworms on different diets (Ew! Tapeworms? Can you believe what he’s doing?). In the back storage area, I rummaged through agar plates and microscope lenses and textbooks until I found a sealed container labeled “Tapeworm Eggs—A.W. Science Fair Experiment.”
When school started, I spoke very little. Marlie and Laila laughed with girls whose names I didn’t care to know. I kept to myself and did what I was told. Every day I stood in front of a mirror, waiting for something miraculous to happen.
Bowie came over one night. She knocked on the front door. When I didn’t answer, she slipped in from the back. She was young enough to do this without being invited in. She went up to my room, and found me curled up in my bed.
“Are you feeling better?” she said as if she were my mother, with her hands resting on her hip. “You poor thing!”
“Uh-huh.” Lying was too easy.
Convinced, she took the lid off a Tupperware container stuffed with yellow cake and thrust it under my nose, plunging a plastic fork into the chocolate icing.
“Bowie, you’re such a gem. Sorry, though, my stomach hurts.”
"Still? You poor thing,” she repeated, as if not being able to eat cake was the worst thing on earth.
“Save it for yourself, Bowie.” I added, “Come back tomorrow when I’m feeling better, will you?”
“Alright, then.” She clambered off my bed but lingered at the door. “Shouldn’t you see a doctor or something?”
And for some odd reason, I began to cry.
Bowie watched me wide-eyed, though not surprised. Her velvet jumpsuit crinkled and the plastic diamonds sewn on the hems reflected the moonlight. I felt as if I’d known her my entire life.
“What’s the matter?” she asked, her head slightly tilted.
Tears poured down my face, and I couldn’t stop them. I frantically swiped them away with my hands. “I don’t know,” I said. “I wish you could help me, I really do.”
“Don’t be too hard on yourself,” she advised me like a pint-sized Dr. Phil. “Go outside for a bit. The wind will blow on your hair and the grass will tickle your feet. Trust me, the garden’s the magic potion.”
I wondered what chapter book she was reciting from. Maybe one with talking animals and watercolor illustrations. Certainly not Hamlet.
V: Fatigue
I unscrewed the lid of the container and fished out an eyebrow tweezer from my pocket. Carefully, I plucked the eggs out and placed them into a small beaker. I filled the beaker with tap water and gulped the mixture down. I then put everything back in its place and quickly made my way out.
The view was very pretty from the patio. Streaks of colors adorned the cloudless sky and the unkempt trees next to the house sprouted small, yellow flowers. I sat on the tire swing and dangled my feet, letting my toes graze the freshly mown grass as the sun set. Mom went to Auntie Janet’s that night to celebrate her 10 year anniversary with Uncle Pops (“No—you can’t come with me. You have school tomorrow!”). So it was just me and the house. Sometime before dusk I must have slipped off the tire and fallen asleep on the soft grass. I had the oddest, most frightening dream...
I was submerged in water. My body was light, and my limbs were numb as if I had not moved in decades. I was drowning in water, except I was not drowning: I breathed water. I felt the current pushing behind me, and I stopped paddling my feet. I let it carry me into the deep water and shut my eyes.
Then a light flashed, and I sprung up. I found myself in an arena, one like a boxing ring, except there are no audience, just pitch blackness. Out of the blackness, a serpent the size of a giant eel approached me. It squinted its blood-red eyes and hissed.
My legs were dead weights that I could not lift, and my heart thumped so hard that it was going to burst. When the serpent’s eyes leveled with mine, it thrashed its body and lunged towards my feet. I turned my head away, and waited, but the moment never came.
When I turned back, the serpent is gone. But in the spot where the serpent was, a small worm writhed, exposed and vulnerable.
“A worm?” Marlie said, flattening her wrinkled sheets on my carpet. “You asked me to sleep here because you dreamed about a worm?” She sounded exasperated.
“Forget it.”
“Hey! You owe me an explanation!”
I tucked myself in bed and let out a small sigh. “Maybe tomorrow, Marlie.” I turned off the lights with a flick of a switch.
VI: Weight Loss
Everything happened in a blur. It was snowing an awful lot. Snow clogged the drain and coated the pine trees. Mom slouched against the wall with a shovel in one hand and a pair of frayed mittens in another: “Sweetie, can you help out?”
“No, Mom, no!” I felt a tickle in my throat and spat on the dirty dishes in the kitchen sink. I wanted to say, “I have worm eggs in my guts and I think I’m going insane. Get out of my way before I throw up all over you,” but I couldn’t. It was as if I had swallowed a piece of gum.
I stomped up the stairs and slammed my bedroom door shut. I watched the dust from the ceiling rain down onto the clean, white sheets.
I eventually finished Hamlet on the last day of the semester, a snow day. I lingered on the last scene of the last act for a while. While four characters lie dead on the floor, Prince Fortinbras of Norway calmly says: “An hour of quiet shortly shall we see. Till then in patience our proceeding be.”
It was very cold that day. Small trees and bushes all froze into glistening statues. In the privacy of my bathroom, I swallowed worm poison. When the worm came out, it was exactly the same length as my height—5 feet and 6 inches.