I’m on the toilet again when I answer my mother’s call, urine dripping out of me like hot sauce from a long-neck bottle. She says it’s only a urinary tract infection, one I likely picked up from baking in the sun in my pantyhose at the graveyard yesterday. I tell her that while the sun was shining bright during my father’s funeral, the air was cold. Just like one of those tricky early summer days when I’d visit my father as a teen and we would spend our days stooped over a puzzle.
What I’m afraid to tell my mother is I feel this is no ordinary UTI. It is a widely held belief in my father’s family that ghosts enter a woman’s body from the feet up. It’s why women in his homeland never walk barefoot in a cemetery or dance barefoot, as I had last night, drunk and stumbling into the lap of my father’s teaching assistant just yards away from his casket. How ironic that my father, someone who wasn’t particularly receptive to superstition while alive, may have used this method to possess me in death.
My mother cuts off my inner monologue and tells me to go to the clinic. I huff, then hang up the phone. I don’t heed her advice; it would be a futile attempt to drive away a ghost with Western medicines. My father, who wasn’t haunted by anything but his own gluttony, died of malpractice at the hands of Western doctors when he landed himself in the hospital, jaundiced from a failing liver. Had I suspected the doctors might take his life, I wouldn’t have convinced him to opt for surgery over the slower, steadier course of treatment they’d offered. And so, my father has all the cause to possess me, I think to myself as I pour a mug of fresh coffee. When I reach for the sugar, the bottle of Tokaji beside it crashes to the floor, all the proof I need that my father is here, wreaking havoc as much in my body as in my home.
◆
In two days’ time, my father reaches my bladder, squeezing it between his fleshy palms and stabbing it with his nails, which he always neglected clipping, leaving them long and wood-splintered. I guzzle pure cranberry juice until tangy sores develop on my tongue. The stabs intensify as my father gains weight inside me. He strives for my attention even in death. And where once I ducked his calls, I now ignore his stabs, distracting myself with bottles of gin and bad TV.
Eventually, the pain grows so large I cave and go to the clinic. The RN writes me a prescription for an antibiotic the size of my thumb. My urine clears, but the pain persists, as though my father were releasing a steady wail in my abdomen.
◆
A week later, I still haven’t expelled my father from my bladder. In fact, he has now wormed his way up my intestines. He wraps his arms and legs around my insides, grows extra limbs with which to cause me more pain for ending his life too soon. I return to the clinic to learn what I already knew: my condition is incurable. Let’s hope I’m wrong, says the RN, uncertain in her abilities to diagnose possessions. Instead, she writes a three-week course of antibiotics.
My father, who now haunts the entirety of my abdominal cavity, comes to me in dreams. Although my mother divorced him decades before his death, in these dreams he always shows himself with her. They laugh like I never saw them do when he was alive, and I don’t have the heart to implore him to quit his haunting. I don’t have the heart to remind him he’s dead. Instead, I leave my dreams to him as a sacred place to relive the days before my birth, long before I had a body for him to haunt, and long before my mother finally launched herself across an ocean to be free of him.
◆
In the mornings, I wake with a stomach full of my father’s clenched fists, which have multiplied in the past weeks. Envious I am still alive, his ghost binds me to my apartment. The office is understanding; they let me work from home. But for the better part of each day, I can only writhe in bed. I move to the toilet at half-hour intervals for a change of scenery. Whenever I release my bladder, I can feel my father tighten all his muscles inside me like a dog or a child bracing for the spanking he’s afraid might come. My father misbehaves so that I will hear him, but I am deaf to childish antics.
And like a child myself, I stop returning my mother’s calls, not interested in another scolding. As a peace offering, she sends a box of lemongrass tea by mail. To soothe your bladder and your heart, she writes on the box. I drink one each morning with a grimace and a generous spoonful of honey.
To fool me, my father speaks to me in a voice that sounds like my own. He tells me what to eat, to nourish and keep him strong for his daily attacks, which would continue well into the night were I not so spent by dusk from his internal beatings that I inevitably fall into a fitful sleep. I always startle awake in the early hours, my stomach a bag full of fists again, my bladder an ulcerated balloon, my urethra a spicy, pinched nerve.
Since my father moved into my stomach, I no longer eat, I only feed. Try as I might to limit myself to grazing or to cease the gluttonous intake for a few hours, the persistent hunger consumes me. The hunger is no kin to ordinary stomach pangs. It is deep-seated, reaching miles beyond appetite. My father forces me to feed far past the tipping point of fullness. The tension in my stomach is so extreme, I wish only to carve a knife into my abdomen to release the insurmountable pressure.
After moving into my stomach, it takes my father mere days to clean out my fridge, my freezer, my pantry. Any uncertainty I once felt about my father’s presence is confirmed by these feedings. He forces me to combine foods in ways I’d never think to. I find myself unable to lower my arm, lifting into my mouth spoonfuls of Nutella topped with bacon, caramel sauce drizzled over baby brie, salted pretzels drenched in apricot jam, like I watched my father do over so many nights before the blue light of the TV. Never was I much for cooking, but now I find myself above my stove top and at my oven for the better part of my days, strengthening the gastronomic muscles my father always wished to possess. My apartment is a soup of aromas, the heavy smells of chocolate fondue mixed with the slightly sour scent of dairy and earthiness of root vegetables.
On my daily trips to the market, I buy cooking utensils I’ve never seen in person until now: pressure cookers, blenders, whisks and strainers of all makes and models. If my father had his way, I’d use an IV to mainline the beef briskets and fettuccini alfredos, the chicken paprikás and pogácsa, the rice crispies and Somlói galuska. At least that way I wouldn’t be left breathless after inhaling another course.
For weeks now, I haven’t spoken with anyone but grocery store clerks. I don’t answer when friends call, I don’t return texts. My mother has resorted to emailing me. I respond with blank messages, so she knows I’m alive. I’m afraid, among other things, that she’ll question me, my health, how much longer I intend to let my father govern my days like this.
I haven’t seen the inside of a bar or concert hall since my father took up residence inside me, and yet I splurge as though I were on vacation. My father and I tour Thailand, Italy, Argentina, and our homeland of Hungary without ever leaving my kitchen.
I haven’t managed to work for longer than an hour at a time since I quit going to the office. As I approach the last of my money, it becomes more and more imperative I find a way to work. My minimum hourly wage cannot satiate my father as much as the commission I’d pocket were I to string together a full shift. But this proves difficult when I spend half my day eating and the other cooking. Several days pass experimenting with strategies until I find one as close to foolproof as I’ll get.
At the bottom of my junk drawer, I find the keys to my kitchen and hallway doors. Once I lock them, I’m left only with access to my bedroom and bathroom. I pop two pieces of spearmint gum into my mouth and leave several packs at arm’s reach, tricking my father into believing he’s eating. This allows me a few hours of work without interruption until my father catches on, grumbling and growling so loud the sounds eventually filter through the telephone receiver. I hang up before the client can ask any questions. The sales I make in the time I manage to steal away should last the next five feasts.
◆
That night after eating, I lay on my back in bed, swollen with my father, and I can hear him screeching inside my belly for more. But if I listen close enough, somewhere underneath his wails, I can detect sobs. Uncomfortable as I was the few times I witnessed my father cry when he was alive, I pretend not to hear him.
In my dream, he wears the warm smile of a proud father as he takes the ten-year-old me to ballet, something he could never do from an ocean away. He pulls the pointe shoes gently over my feet. I see him there on the bench in the studio, captivated by my hundredth plié, and I see myself, spotting him over my shoulder with each turn. Turn after turn, I leave him to watch me, leave me to watch him, for despite the clawing pain I feel in my stomach even in sleep, I don’t have the heart to take this girl’s father away so soon.
The next morning, I wake to the usual fires my father stokes in my belly at night. The difference this time is when I sit on the toilet to release at least a portion of what he gathered the night before, he refuses to let go. He grips the dense block inside me. The more I strain, the harder his grip.
That’s it, I think. You’ve outstayed your welcome.
I fling the kitchen door open harder than I mean to, and the handle thumps against the wall. I take out the roll of trash bags and sweep the food off the counter. The remains of last night’s biscotti, zsíros kenyér, even the contents of the sugar bowl beside the coffee machine make it into the bag. Then I empty the fridge, the pounds of red meat, pork, sausage, the sheets of cake, the cheeses and creams, the tropical fruits and garden vegetables. Boxes of frozen pizzas and plastic tubs of ice cream puncture the sides of the second bag. I clean out my pantry too, all the canned beans and kovászos uborka, the boxes of macaroni and bags of flour.
I take the food out in two trips, and then lug back up the stairs the bottled water and bag of lemons I buy at the corner store. I’m so spent from the effort, the most exercise I’ve had in weeks, that I crack open and drain my first bottle of water. My belly swells with the fluid. My father swims in it, subdued, a child in utero who is yet to realize I’m going to starve him. Then I pick up my phone, ignoring the work emails and texts from friends, and call my mother.
◆
If my father knew how to eat, my mother knows how to starve. All my childhood, my mother was either fasting or juicing or dieting while my father gorged and smoked and sang and boozed. While my father’s kitchen was full of take-out bags and plastic utensils, my mother’s was a spotless sanctuary for dieting books, water purifiers, essential oils, and the occasional citrus fruit. In all the time I’ve known her, my mother has been a rail-thin woman while my father grew from a heavy-set man in early adulthood to an even heavier set man later in life.
My mother answers after the second ring. I can hear the pause in her throat as she turns her urge to scold me for disappearing into gratitude for my having called. She tells me to keep Grade B maple syrup on hand for when the detox symptoms become too much to bear. But she doesn’t know what a voracious parasite my father has grown into since we last spoke, doesn’t know I cannot trust him to limit us to just one tablespoon of syrup in the lemon water elixir that will become our consistent meal from today on.
I drink the two liters of water my mother recommends as the daily minimum within the first six hours of my day, but my father does not budge. He and his mass neither move nor crumble nor melt at the edges, despite my having cut off his supply. The citrusy water cascades around him. He yelps and screeches for sustenance, but I do not yield. At each wail, I drink another sip. He grows louder through the day, but the more I drink the more distant the pain of his screeching feels, as though the water were building a dam between us.
That evening, I administer the first daily enema my mother recommended to help eliminate the toxins my body has accumulated, as she put it. My hands shake as I place the hook around the pipe of the showerhead. I pour the liter and a half of lukewarm saltwater mixture into the plastic container above my head one cup at a time while pinching the oily end of the rubber tube in my other hand.
I insert the end with one fluid motion and slowly release my thumb and forefinger from the tube, letting in the water imperceptibly. As much as my father was subdued by the cold lemon water, he is as angered now by the warm salt water. He turns and twists and claws my intestines immediately. I pinch the hose, wait for him to cool down before releasing another dose. In this way, it takes about fifteen minutes to clear the container.
Water splatters on my calf when I pull out the tube. I trudge to bed with a full stomach and lower myself gently in the fetal position. My father contorts violently inside me as I turn from left to right to left again. We can’t hold the water past the eight-minute mark.
Seconds after sitting down, a fetid stench escapes the toilet bowl. The color is a dark, almost green hue of mud, as if it were pulled out of a well. The rigid walls of my abdomen collapse and cave. I am shocked by the sudden looseness of the skin there. I take my first un-labored breath in weeks.
I leave the bathroom weaker and slower than I entered it, and yet I’m beaming, my stomach as light as though it were cradled by pillows. I expelled my father so quickly, I nearly regret not saying goodbye. As I think this, I feel a knot of muscles in the back of my leg tighten. In bed again, I feel another knot on my thigh spasming a quick beat, the tapping of a lively almost giddy drum, and I know without having to think about it that this is my father showing his glee for having found a place to hide.
That night, I fall asleep with the goal of talking to my father. In my dreams, I follow him to the village where he would have worked after college had he not met my mother, which I recognize from his stories by the dusty roads and broken telephone wires. Finally, I catch up with him at the inn, feasting on a cutting board of felvágotak paired with a glass of red as the house band surrounds him with their string instruments. The singer has the black curls of my grandfather who I’ve only known through pictures, and the angular brow ridge of the weekend clerk at my local market. They play my father’s favorite song, the one that goes: my wrongs, I don’t know how to defend. With Gypsy music, my heart I mend. He pops a piece of bread with sausage, cheese, and green onion in his mouth, rests the bite on the inside of his right cheek, and sings along, don’t let me wither in this warm weather.
I cross the empty restaurant and walk up to him.
His eyes are still closed and he sings on as I approach, If you no longer love me, I may as well die. ‘Cause you were my sweetest dream.
The whine of the violin reverberates in my ear. I’ll love you to the grave. The violinist winks at me over his bow. The singer waltzes toward me from the other side of the table, one hand on his breast and the other open, beckoning me, the most beautiful flower on my casket blooms just for you.
I pull my hand away before he can grab it and sit down across from my father, who pays me no heed and sings, there’s only one who looks for me, shrouded head to toe in black.
“Dad,” I say.
He looks at me but his eyes don’t sharpen into focus. Only she mourns for me, and I leave her to account for my past.
“Dad,” I say again over the music. The scene is a recount of every visit to his home. The empty space across the table with a Gypsy band playing by his side remain the same in my dreams.
“Dad, you have to go.”
Only she mourns for me. He holds the note longer than the song allows, but the band follows his cue, they hold it along with him.
“Cut it, cut the music.” I retrieve the bill from my father’s hand and slip it under the strings of the prímás’ instrument, like my father taught me to as a child.
“Woah, hey, ho!” my father says, suddenly aware of me in the silence.
“What are you doing here?” I ask.
“Singing,” he says.
“What are you still doing here?”
“Where’s your black?”
I look down at my white blouse. My stomach hasn’t looked this flat since well before his funeral.
“Is that what this is about? Am I not grieving enough for you?”
“Are you grieving enough for you?” He swivels in his chair, looking for his compatriots. “Prímás! Play that again.”
The band turns around and traipses back.
“Hold on, hold on,” I put my hands up. “You haven’t given me a second to miss you.”
My father shakes his head. The candlelight catches his grays. His second chin grazes his shirt collar. “My little daughter, have the songs taught you nothing? If a man can grieve his own life while he’s still alive, what does that tell you?”
“The songs are nothing but a sad alcoholic’s cry.”
He laughs, full-throated. The air in the ballroom bubbles with it. “Her mother’s daughter, too cold to be romanced by the muses.”
“I’m not talking about the muses again! You have to go. I need you to go. I can’t take this anymore. The punishment is worse than your death.” And once it leaves my lips, I can’t weigh it in my mouth anymore. I only sense the bitter aftertaste on my tongue.
“Hmm,” he lowers his eyes to his greasy hands.
The band circles him. They pick up their instruments, but he tells them to rest.
I lean my back against the chair, my face hot.
“Y’know,” he says, “when your mother left me, I was distraught.”
“I remember, I was there. I helped you out of bed some mornings.”
He chuckles as though it were a fond memory, our inside joke.
“What you didn’t see were the many years before that. You were too young to recall, but I crawled through those days like a dog. It wasn’t a good look for her either. She was more skeletal than you’ve ever seen her, with her hair falling out. We mourned who we once were together before we parted ways. Now, I’m not saying we went the healthiest way about it, but we did it together. We buried who were together. Your mother did kill me. Our love did end my life, like the song says. But the man you buried two months ago and the man I was when your mother left me are two different men.”
He stabs his knife into a baked potato on the silver tray. Steam rises from it milky white. I reach to touch my father’s round face but can only feel the heat emanating from the tray, growing steadily hotter, as if a fire were lit underneath it.
◆
The bright light of my bedroom stuns me. Sunlight streams in, shining onto my hand through the slight gap between the two white, translucent curtains. I recoil from the heat.
The edges of my stomach and bladder ache. The surface area they cover is small, but the pain is deep. I release my abdominal muscles to ease the tension there, but the ache remains. I turn over, reach for my phone, and pull up my mother’s contact to tell her I want to come home. I want her to help me bury this pain.