crabs—blood-sucking wingless genital goblins—sound apocalyptical, we actually have them on the defensive. They are becoming endangered because of habitat destruction. In one study, “Did the ‘Brazilian’ Kill the Pubic Louse?” researchers found that the dwindling number of crab infections coincided with the wax-it-all-off trend, which began around 2000. It’s hard to get good data—people often don’t report embarrassing parasites that have staked out their perianal region—but a 2009 study from East Carolina University reported that less than 2 percent of the population harbors papillon d’amour (which is the sexy French name for crabs). “Their forests are disappearing,” Danish lice expert Kim Søholt Larsen told me. “They are endangered because they don’t have anywhere to live.”
“What do you mean?”
He told me that there were so many black sesame seeds moving around that he couldn’t even count. He said it looked like a horror film where bagel toppings came to life.
My first reaction was to laugh. Gosh, isn’t that funny. I have a lice infestation. I went through an entire country spreading a parasite during my honeymoon. LOL!
Uneasily, Dave joined in on the laughter, too.
Then we pretended that whole episode didn’t just happen. We continued walking toward the farmers’ market as if we were different humans—ones who didn’t currently have minuscule animals eating away at their flesh. It was the most acute case of denial I’d experienced since I was twenty and still suspected that I might grow another ten inches.
“So we’re going to get broccoli and what else?” I said.
“I don’t know,” he said. “We’ll have to see what else looks good.”
We were half a block away from the vegetable stalls when we both paused and looked at each other.
“Wait, we can’t go to the farmers’ market right now,” Dave said.
I furrowed my brows as the realization finally dawned on me, too. “Holy shit,” I said, “I have lice!”
An hour later, I was sitting on a chair in our apartment hallway. Dave stood behind me, brushing through each segment of hair with a fine-tooth comb. We had bought just about every lice-murdering product at Duane Reade, and upon getting home, I had doused my hair with the toxic shampoo. There were nontoxic methods, but I wanted poison! I wanted complete decimation! The fumes—strong and searing—were making my eyes sting, and I relished the implications of this particular burn.
Dave sounded bilious as he explained the scene he was confronted with: “It looks like a city was napalmed and the civilians are trying to escape.” Many lice ran down my back. I couldn’t count them all, but I’d guess there were at least a metric shit-ton. On a piece of paper towel, Dave showed me an abnormally large one. “Look familiar?” he said.
It looked exactly like the bug that had fallen on his arm in the Kyoto ryokan.
(To this day, that bug is still inexplicable. I looked it up and there is no such thing as a queen louse. I try not to wonder about that too much. Mostly, the lice were as billed: dark brown and the size of sesame seeds.)
While I sat there, I thought back to all the neck pillows I’d tried on at the Narita airport. I wondered if lice inject you with psychotropic substances that make you think it would be a great idea to rub your head all over everything. (I’m sorry, people of Japan!)
Dave, oddly enough, had only four lice in his hair. When we did some research, we found out that they were repelled by the acidic shampoo he uses for his psoriasis. It was nice for him to realize that there was at least one positive to having a skin disorder.
Even though I didn’t tell him at the time—it was my duty to make him feel guilty for being a subpar lice-checker—committing genocide on my lice population was one of the most romantic things that he’d ever done for me.
I didn’t speak about my parasite to many people, because having lice is stigmatizing and they scare people, as they damn well should: Those suckers hurt and they are immensely contagious from head-to-head contact. Those evil little bastards exploit our love of hugs. That’s how they’ve survived for like a billion years. Nits have been found on Egyptian mummies. Vikings even carried delicately crafted lice combs in their belts alongside their most essential item: their sword. They—muscular masculine marauders from Scandinavia—were so freaked out by the little bugs that they got buried with their combs in case they needed to battle lice in the afterlife.
One of the few people I told was my dad. “Oh, yeah,” he said. “You know the story about how me and your mom got lice, right?”
He was referring to the time they both got crabs when they were twenty. Even though I’ve heard the story several times, I still don’t know it, because I’ve worked hard after each telling to block it out.
“Dad, I didn’t get genital lice!” I said.
He told me that was too bad because it meant that my lice story was a helluvalot less interesting than his.
When I got off the phone, I spent the next day wondering how lice knew which patches of hair they belonged to—did I have to worry that my head lice could suddenly, due to positioning, become pube lice? Luckily, I found the answer to that was no. Head lice can move around only on thinner head hair, while pubic lice evolved to navigate coarser hair.
Except for one particularly bad day when I contemplated lighting my head on fire, I brightened up over the next few weeks. I also stayed incredibly vigilant. If you leave one louse or nit behind, you can easily reinfect yourself. I knew it was overkill—many entomologists say you cannot catch lice from anywhere except head-to-head contact—but because I’d spread all my infested baggage all over our apartment as soon as I’d gotten home from Japan, most of our place was under quarantine. That, of course, included the increasingly superfluous aqua-colored velvet sofa chair. I did find humor in the fact that something widely considered a childhood affliction was preventing me from using the piece of furniture that symbolized my burgeoning adulthood. It felt like someone, somewhere, was trying to sabotage my maturity.
After two weeks without any evidence of lice or nits, one is considered in the clear. Until that time, I kept up a daily routine. Every morning, I’d wash my sheets, shampoo my hair, comb it out with a tiny-tined comb, and then investigate any detritus with a magnifying glass.
During this process, I came to realize that if it weren’t for me, then all those tiny beings wouldn’t have had life. I gave them life. They gestated near my follicles, hatched from my strands, and “breast fed” from my scalp. They could not survive without the heat from my head. You give and you give. They take and they take. Throughout it all, you worry nonstop. Is this what it feels like to be a mom?
A friend once told me that I look exactly like Matza Ball Breaker, a girl on the Chicago roller derby team. She called our resemblance “uncanny.” So I searched for Matza Ball Breaker on the internet. When I saw her, I was mystified. We both have hair on our heads and a chin below our mouths. We could also both claim a set of eyes. Most likely, she, like me, had a vagina as well. Other than that, I was left deeply confounded. My supposed doppelgänger looked nothing like me—or at least
