don’t see anything,” he said.
I was pleased with that answer, so I turned over and went to sleep.
The next day we had a cooking class and then switched from our hotel to a ryokan in town. We wanted to get a little more of that traditional Japanese feeling. Despite being ill, we went for the multicourse kaiseki dinner. Between the pickled vegetable course and the fish stew course, a small brown bug fell onto Dave’s arm. He immediately flicked it off.
“Where did that come from?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he said.
It almost looked like it had dropped from his head. There were a lot of quirky things in Japan. A raccoon dog, called a tanuki and known for its colossal scrotum, is supposed to bring good fortune. Replicas of the big-balled animal greet you at the front door of many restaurants. In a country that adores a rodent with gigantic testicles, why wouldn’t a bug appear out of nowhere?
After our final day in Kyoto, we headed back to Tokyo. We had dinner at a sushi joint in the Ginza district. I itched so badly that I couldn’t keep my hands out of my hair for more than one slice of fish. That night, I couldn’t sleep, so I went to the swimming pool as soon as it opened. For the first few moments, the water put out the bonfire of pain on my back and head. When I got back to the room, I had to ask Dave to check for lice again.
He still didn’t see anything, which was actually a huge relief, because if I had lice, it would be somewhat of a cataclysmic event for Japan. I had been up and down the country using the bullet train. I used blankets, pillows, towels, taxies, ferries, and small Jacuzzis. I laid on tatami mats and rubbed up against restaurant booths. I had leaned against walls, tried on yukatas (thin cotton kimonos), and wrapped cute scarves from expensive shops around my head.
“It’s probably an allergy,” Dave said, which sounded entirely plausible even though I’d never once experienced an allergy.
“Yeah, we’ll figure it out when we get back,” I said.
By this point, we were ready to get home. The same man who’d picked us up at the airport eleven days earlier drove us back. I noticed how he’d decorated his car headrests with intricately woven lace doilies. So many people in Japan went the extra mile to make everyday objects more comfortable and aesthetically pleasing. I was impressed. I laid my head back onto those beautiful covers as I watched the city go past.
At the airport, we had a little extra time, so I went into a corner shop. I browsed books and then I began trying on neck pillows. My mom always told me not to try on stuff like that in stores because you never know the hygiene of other people who have tried them on before you, but I’ve never been concerned. The pillows were so soft and came in so many colors.
As I tried them on, I became a little obsessive—it happens periodically—and suddenly felt like as long as I tried on every different color, then somehow that would mean that the plane wouldn’t crash.
Dave was getting antsy, but I managed to finish my mission before he dragged me off to our gate.
When we got home twenty hours later, we went straight to bed. I woke up on a glorious Sunday morning, and the first thing I did was jump into my aqua-colored velvet sofa chair. I could once again enjoy that plush swiveling piece of gluteal glory, because it was finally out of quarantine.
After fully indulging, I started to unpack our bags, piling our dirty clothes onto the other sofa. While I was doing that, Dave woke up and suggested that we go to the farmers’ market. We’d been eating gluttonous meals for the past eleven days and he thought we should get some fresh veggies.
I left our clothes strewn in the middle of the room as we went out into a chilly but sunny New York morning. We walked together in the East Village along Avenue A, up toward St. Mark’s Place. We were talking about what we would make—some kind of soup? No. A roasted chicken? Maybe. Something with black beans? That sounded good.
I remember happy dogs walking by with their owners. The clank of boots on the sidewalk cellar grates. Pulling my sunglasses down over my eyes. The burn at the back of my head. The stinging sensation that occurred each time I touched my scalp.
I stopped in the middle of the sidewalk. The vendors—their piles of gourds and apples—were in sight.
“You have to check my head one more time,” I said.
“Right now?” Dave said.
I didn’t answer him. I didn’t even care about standard pedestrian practices. I stayed put in the middle of the sidewalk, like an obstinate boulder dividing a rushing river, as people walked around me. I dropped my chin to my chest and waited until Dave appeased me.
When I was in Japan, I could easily dismiss the sensations as if they were some kind of awkward travel bug—the customary stomach upset we expect when traveling to a new place—but now that I was back home, I could finally recognize that the shit I was feeling was not even close to normal.
Something had to be wrong.
By this point, playing lice check had lost all its former cachet. Dave was exasperated—he’d probably checked my head at least thirty times—but he did his duty and took his designated position behind me. My hair was in a bun, so I expected him to start rummaging around in there. Instead there was silence and the heat of direct sun.
“Do you see anything?” I said.
“Um,” he said.
“What?” I said.
There was another long pause.
“What?” I said.
He came back around to face me. The corners of his mouth were drawn down. “It must be because there’s better light here,” he said.
Crabs Pubic lice, or Pthirus pubis, are the couch potatoes of the lice kingdom. They are characterized by their sluggish and sedentary lifestyle. I can’t blame them; I’d be that way, too, if my house was a porn set. Each louse is a millimeter, which means it would take twenty-five of them, back to front, to add up to an inch. They have a roundish gray body with six legs. The two in back are capped off with crustacean-looking claws, which is how they got their nickname: crabs.
They are not found in the crotch because they are fools for genitals, but because pubic hair is their method of transportation. Like a train needs tracks to move, crabs need pubes. That’s why they can also be found in other coarse hair like eyelashes, eyebrows, armpit hair, and beards. We originally caught pubic lice from gorillas three or four million years ago. That’s why pubic lice like pubes. Pubes are the closest thing we have to thick and tough gorilla hair. The fine hair found on our scalps does not give them enough purchase to move around.
Crabs don’t do much besides suck our blood and lay eggs—about three a day—for the two to three weeks of their short lives. Like head lice, they can’t jump or fly but can only scuttle from hair to hair. That is why sex—pube to pube—is their best opportunity to colonize a new home. They can also, though extremely rarely, be caught through infested bedding. A myth looms large that crabs can be transmitted via a toilet seat, but if that’s how your boyfriend is telling you he got his, then it might be time to find a new boyfriend or to finally have that talk about opening up the relationship.
One textbook, Medical Entomology for Students, explains quite insightfully that having
