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"FacebookPinterest\n\n I'm halfway through my shower when my daughter comes into the bathroom, looks in, and asks me what f%*ing means. \"What what means?\"\n\n \"Fucking.\" She says it very matter-of-factly.\n\n She's 6.\n\n \"Fucking?\" I ask.\n\n My wife, Julie, in all probability, put our daughter up to the intrusion. A surge of hot water had scalded me only moments before, and in response to the patchy, cursed nature of our pipes, I'd bellowed a perversity.\n\n I promised Julie that night I would try to do something to clean up my language. We'd been going over this for six years. Fortunately my daughter hadn't picked it up, and I used this mild victory to rationalize how my unremitting abuse of the language had actually defanged the bad words, rendering them harmless out of senseless overkill. Besides, it wasn't like I was one of those brilliant swearing virtuosos. My application was merely frequent and vigorous. My curses were the uncolorful equivalent of putting lots of extra modifiers in all caps. For example, just a week ago, at Whole Foods, when I had blurted fuck me in the ass when I saw they were out of Japanese eggplant. A demand met only by the disappointed glare of a silver-haired woman in a fair-trade-cashmere cape.\n\n Julie said that these outbursts gave the impression that I was much more unhinged than I realized, but worse, made her feel like a little black cloud was pooping on her heart whenever I swore around Ruby. Especially when I swore at our daughter. I tried to picture my wife's heart and how I didn't want anything or anybody, including myself, pooping on it.\n\n We carried our conversation down to the kitchen for a midnight snack. That's when Julie disappeared to the basement\u2014looking for more potato chips, I assumed. I heard her rummaging below.\n\n \"Here,\" she said, when she came back up the stairs and set down a giant pickle jar. \"Every time you swear, you put in a dollar. Then, with the money you save, you take us to Paris.\"\n\n I drew a happy face in the dust on the jar with my pinkie. \"Yeah,\" I said. \"Okay.\"\n\n A month later, with only $3 having made its way into the jar, my wife gave our daughter permission to pinch me, as hard as she wanted, on any part of my body, anytime I swore. Within two days, the bruises made me look like I'd just hauled across a leech-infested swamp. A series of even more trying anti-incentives were implemented: clich\u00E9 sitcom-style bedroom deprivations, but deprivations all the same. Still, every inch of my body was so sore I didn't want anybody touching me, anyway.\n\n One night I began reading articles online about swearing and its purported underlying causes. People swore, the Internet said, because they were angry at life, and because they were impotent to effect change, and because, in general, they could not accept the basic nature of reality.\n\n That about summed it up.\n\n \"What you need is like a level-five deterrent,\" my wife told me one night in bed.\n\n \"What's level five?\"\n\n \"Like something really sick.\" She thought for a minute. \"Something unacceptable.\"\n\n \"How about, like, I have to watch the Lifetime channel?\"\n\n \"That's pretty harsh,\" she said.\n\n \"I could eat something really disgusting.\"\n\n She frowned. \"Oh, wait.\" A sadistic look crossed her face. \"What if you put something really twisted inside the swear jar?\"\n\n \"Like what?\" She was making me nervous.\n\n \"Like instead of putting money in, you put something awful in it, something really scary, and then you'd have to put your hand in the jar.\"\n\n \"Like a dog's heart.\"\n\n \"What?\" She looked at me like I was insane. \"Jesus, no, not a dog's heart.\"\n\n \"What, then?\"\n\n \"I don't know,\" she said, playing with my hand. \"Something really fucked-up.\"\n\n That's when I rolled over to turn off the light and saw something slither across our ceiling. It was a millipede, maybe a silverfish. I let out a soft whimper.\n\n \"Exactly,\" she said. \"Like that. But bigger.\"\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\n Over the following week, I tried to capture one of these things down in our unfinished nightmare of a basement\u2014without luck or, really, to be sincere, much genuine effort. In a streak of masochistic curiosity, however, I had also begun looking on the Internet at images of more outlandish versions of the wriggly things that lived off our bags of old clothes ten years withheld from the Salvation Army. That's when I got the idea that if I was going to scare myself, I ought to do it properly.\n\n It turns out there are tons of options out there if you want a messed-up bug for a pet. For instance you can get a Goliath beetle, which is basically a scarab the size of a kitten. But Goliath beetles like to eat dog food, and I couldn't see myself feeding a giant insect dog food. Camel spiders will bite off your finger and look like something you might hallucinate if you were trying to quit heroin cold turkey.\n\n One day, I rang up an outfit called Jungle Emporium and spoke to a man who seemed to understand what I needed, as if my self-improvement scheme were a common reason people purchased exotic insects. He said, no question, what I wanted to introduce into my situation was Archispirostreptus gigas.\n\n \"Archispirostreptus gigas?\" \n\n \"Giant African millipede.\" They were slow and stupid and didn't bite, required almost no care whatsoever, but were, of course, he said, sufficiently terrifying in mien to make a man think twice before reaching for the strong wording.\n\n \"I've got a foot-long puppy. I could FedEx him for seventy-five bucks.\"\n\n We went ahead and made arrangements, and he said he'd e-mail some additional factoids about my new pet.\n\n He sent out this list of fun facts late that night, so I didn't get to read, until the following morning, how my new millipede was from the Devonian geologic period and had survived for so long in part due to a neat defense mechanism whereby it secreted cyanide from its carapace.\n\n This secreting could happen when it got agitated.\n\n I tried to cancel the order, but didn't hear back from the guy right away. Then I put in an emergency call to a zoologist at a university in Illinois. The next day, I got a call back from an expert who was quick to assure me I had little to fear. Yes, the species did excrete cyanide, he said. And, yes, some millipede cyanide was toxic to certain sensitive individuals and did cause hallucinations in some primates. But, the bug expert said, he was curious: In the willy-nilly to-and-fro of my everyday life, did I not face other risks? Was a kitchen knife not a potential threat to life and limb? A bath? A staircase in one's home? What about the carbonic exhaust that excreted from my automobile, assuming I did not own an electric car? I did not. Well, was this not also potentially lethal? And yet, he said, you don't park your baby stroller next to a running car and let the child suck the fumes into her pristine lungs straight off the pipe, do you? Likewise, he said, jumping in before I could answer in the negative, likewise, you would not confine a young child inside a sealed tank with Archispirostreptus gigas. I said I had no intention of doing that. Well, he said, good; then the worst thing I had to worry about was my hands turning red if I handled it\u2014a stain that might take a few days to wash off, though he strongly advised washing as soon as possible if I did in fact choose to touch it.\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\n __\n\n So I asked, what was the red stuff?\n\n \"Cyanide!\"\n\n I said I probably wouldn't be handling it, but asked how else I would know if it were pumping cyanide into my home. He said if the millipede got sufficiently agitated, and if I held my face close enough, then I would detect the subtle odor of toasted almonds. He then told me how in his line of work they sometimes actually put several millipedes inside a tight jar and got them good and pissed off before dropping in the insects they wanted to euthanize for study. The last thing the poor cricket ever knew was the faint scent of madeleines.\n\n I reluctantly filled Julie in on all the unsettling details, and was surprised that she wasn't really all that concerned.\n\n \"He said it's basically safe, right?\"\n\n \"I guess.\"\n\n So long as it was confined and didn't get out of its cage, she didn't really care. Feeling somewhat conflicted, I went ahead and called the dealer back to reorder my bug.\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\n At first I thought I might keep the bug in the pickle jar. But the guy from Jungle Emporium told me I'd need a more accommodating habitat. So I drove to PetSmart and bought a twenty-gallon terrarium with a lockable front latching system.\n\n The next morning, I was on the couch trying to meditate when FedEx knocked on my door. I reluctantly signed and then stood in my living room for a long while, staring at the box. It was pretty light. Scrawled in blue Magic Marker were the words PERISHABLE. HANDLE WITH CARE. FRAGILE. KEEP AT ROOM TEMP.\n\n I'd already set up the Critter Cage on an old coffee table in the basement, shoved in the far corner between a steep escarpment of junk, tottering bos of mildewed paperbacks, and a gurgling water heater.\n\n Assuming the millipede must have been pretty agitated by the trip and full-to-bursting with cyanide, I donned a sanding mask and goggles before getting to work.\n\n The box was extraordinarily well taped. But after lifting away the packing paper with a pair of OXO kitchen tongs, I discovered, tucked inside a Styrofoam cube, a round deli container. The sort with which you might make a purchase of ten or twelve ounces of chicken salad. Coiled inside, nestled on a bed of dry moss, was Archispirostreptus gigas, sleeping blackly.\n\n Using the tongs and a pair of pliers, I managed to convey, awkwardly, the deli container into the roomy interior of the Critter Cage. Pinning the deli container to one corner with a paint stick, I used the tongs to pull off the lid, and then, feeling like I might faint, tilted the container, and out rolled the millipede with a hard click on the glass. For a second I thought it was dead. But then it began to uncoil. I took a few steps back as it slowly lengthened, lengthened out some more, and then erected itself against the glass, antennae probing, its hundreds of blood-red legs rippling, moving in peristaltic waves, scritching at the glass like a thousand tiny ink black bird talons.\n\n Holy motherfucking shit, I choked, before slowly backing away and turning up the stairs as calmly as possible without running.\n\n For the rest of the afternoon, I was extremely careful not to swear. At lunch I stood in the kitchen trying not to slurp my soup, watching the latched basement door, doing my best to think pure thoughts.\n\n I tried to focus my energy on work. Then, midafternoon, when my energy flagged, I decided to take a break and walk to the mailbox. But as I was putting on my coat, button and buttonhole briefly failed to connect. Despite how far this may fall short, by any sane measure, of an ordeal worth taking umbrage, I reacted to the misalignment as if I'd simultaneously stepped in dogshit and stubbed my toe on a fire hydrant. (Something-something Christ's fecal matter on a cracker.) I didn't actually hear myself until I was locking the door. But once my foulness registered, I stood on the porch for a few moments, wondering if I could give myself just one more pass, before I finally let myself back in the house and descended to the basement.\n\n For a while I just sat on a camp chair dug out of one of the piles of junk and studied the bug. It was curled in the corner, legs fidgeting, as if busily tapping coordinates into an invisible Turing machine. I couldn't help but admire, however mid that feeling was with dread, the scarily perfect way this thing was put together. Each calibrated, symmetrical segment of its onyx serpent's body looked laser-sculpted. Its carapace was antimatter black.\n\n Finally I unlatched the top and let the tips of my fingers dangle. Though exposed, my hand was as far as possible from the coiled nautilus in the opposite corner. As I counted off the seconds on my egg timer, I felt volts of primal fear leaping in my bowels.\n\n Terrified as I was, it also felt kind of foolish being down here, penned in by all the seedy layers and strata of domestic neglect\u2014the broken lamps, unwanted Christmas presents, dead electronics, old Bundt pans\u2014all somehow seeming to embody the accumulative backlog of regrets and shame that go with growing older. I almost felt as if I'd been put on trial by the clutter itself: the failure to maintain an orderly, tidy life. I worried what it must say about me. Strangely, it's 85 percent stuff inherited from deceased grandparents and sundry aunts and great-aunts. There's a lot of bod-up glassware, Fostoria candy dishes, water goblets, and other Victorian bric-a-brac, the pi\u00E8ce de r\u00E9sistance no doubt being the gigantic ornate framed portrait of my great-grandmother's grandmother's sister, Aunt Rachel, propped against Ruby's old crib. Peeling and cracked, Aunt Rachel floats in a drab sepia oval, with her regal triple chins, five o'clock shadow, and white ruff collar fastened with a brooch. The paint is so fissured in places that the thatchy canvas is nakedly exposed. Here is a woman, I imagine, who did not spend her days cursing the sun and moon, but nonetheless, down here in my basement, with her severe blue eyes and mincing little mouth, it's hard not to feel the ghoulish old cunt is judging me.\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\n That first week, I make countless visits to my basement, each verbal infraction one more proof of just how nonacceptant I am of the multitude of niggling assaults on my being each day. The mistyped word, the fumbled dish towel, the wrong exit on the way to the garden-supply store to purchase some peat moss for the Critter Cage\u2014each a chance to blankety-blank against the foul accrual of petty obstacles that is my life.\n\n For instance, on my wife's birthday. Making roasted-vegetable strudel. Phyllo dough. Very risky/frustrating enterprise. I couldn't step away for each offense, but I'd been taking a mental tally, working on the honor system. So once the strudel was safely in the oven, I took my collected violations down to the basement, not excluding telling my daughter, for the eighth time, to turn down the gleeking frothy fen-sucked TV.\n\n I find the millipede coiled as usual, snoozing under the chunk of firewood I set inside for decor. It's got a little soy-sauce dish for a water bowl and a rock where I put out pieces of rotting fruit. I give him the company of my hand and watch the tiny mites that live off his carapace. They go round and round the incurved rink of his body like Roller Derby girls. When one brushes the fence of legs, he kicks like a sleeping dog. I think how all the curse words that cling to me are my own symbiotic pests. Little plovers flitting in and out of my jaws, each stealing away with a dark morsel from my crocodile teeth.\n\n The next day, to pass the time while paying penalty for an involuntary outburst over a computer crash, I go and get some garbage bags and start tossing stuff away. It's been bothering me anyway, spending all this time down here, annoyed at the disarray: in a sense, definitely more punishing than spending time with my hand in the jar.\n\n I toss out dried tubes of caulk, bos of clothes hangers, baby-food jars, empty paint cans. I drag out a dead vacuum cleaner, a rusty hibachi, and a condemned dollhouse. Two days and eight thirteen-gallon bags later, I manage to carve out a little nook of space. Energized by my sense of achievement, I decide to do a few small home-improvement jobs. I clean up my tools and organize some shelves. I replace the battery in the smoke detector and vacuum out under the dryer and tighten the drum belt.\n\n At one point, I take a break and just sit with the millipede, even though it's been a few days since I had to visit it for an actual curse. It occurs to me that the bug might be having some kind of overall positive effect on my life. If it hadn't been for the millipede, after all, my basement would still just be one big woebegone clusterfuck. Maybe the potty mouth was nothing more than a reflection of the inertia I'd been experiencing in general, but now that I'd dramatized, so to speak, a healthy purgation of my own inner detritus by dislodging some of the external junk, it was easier to see how I might stop hoarding all the negative potty-mind attitudes, starting with my lack of acceptance toward so-called reality, a.k.a. the day-to-day junk that everyone has to put up with.\n\n To express my gratitude to the bug, I go upstairs and make it a salad. When my daughter gets home from school, she joins me in the basement, and together we watch the creature munch its romaine. I share some of the fun facts I learned (minus cyanide). She isn't afraid of the thing but instead seems worried that it's too cold down here, and shouldn't we move the bug upstairs to her room?\n\n That night, in bed, I tell Julie I'm worried I'm not being a responsible exotic-pet owner. How I don't want its blood on my hands.\n\n \"Can they really bleed?\" She looks, for a moment, genuinely confused. \"Somehow I didn't picture it with a circulatory system.\"\n\n She ignores me when I get up and say I'm going to find an old blanket to drape over the cage. But down in the basement, which is pretty cold, especially in my socks, I can't find anything like a blanket. So instead I drag a seatless morris chair over by the furnace and then prop the Critter Cage across its wide arms. The radiant heat from the furnace thaws the millipede out, so in no time it's uncoiled and traipsing around and nibbling a rind of cucumber.\n\n I light an old Halloween candle and set it on the floor, where it flickers against the portrait of Aunt Rachel. Then I drag over my camp chair and sit hunched with my forehead nearly touching the glass. I watch the millipede conduct its nocturnal explorations, going around the perimeter of the cage. Its 250 hydraulic legs moving tippy-toe over the dry sphagnum make the faintest of crepitations. It seems silly to put my hand in the cage now, when I have no need for atonement, but it also seems silly not to.\n\n So I lower my hand, and when it passes, my fingers are just inches above its body. It pauses. So I extend my hand a little closer, relieved when it doesn't quickly wind back up into its defensive coil.\n\n I find myself hoping it will lift itself against the glass so I might touch its head. I have never actually touched it, not yet. But if it raised itself now, if it let me, I would stroke its head and its perfect, symmetrical segments, but instead it keeps marching, away from my outstretched finger.\n\n That's when, forehead pressed to glass, I see the dilation at the hind end of its body. By candlelight: a meniscus of some blackish fluid quivering from this aperture. The sleek closed system is not so closed after all. In an instant I feel all my generous wonder turn to dread, yet the dripping orifice mesmerizes me, so I can't take my eyes away as the millipede crosses over its water dish, bug anus flared\u2014if anus is indeed what you call it\u2014and purges right in the dish. I'm not sure if it's taken a dump or given birth. Or, God forbid, just released a cloud of cyanide from its asshole. Holy shit, I think, this thing is trying to fucking kill me! And after all the effort I went to, to treat it like a real thing! None of that matters now. The experiment is a disaster. Even if it's not really trying to kill me but has only befouled our sacred moment, just as I was reaching out across the void, one phylum to a very other phylum.\n\n I go back upstairs. In the bathroom, Julie looks at me standing behind her in the mirror. I can see, as she must, how pale I am, but all she says, through her flossing, is, \"Everybody all tucked in and cozy for the night?\"\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\n For a few days the basement door stays latched. I've already called Jungle Emporium and told the guy that I need to make a return. The urge, even craving, to swear is intense. But I make every effort to repress it.\n\n That is, until I'm making pancakes for my daughter on Valentine's Day. Heart-shaped pancakes, which, one would think, should be incentive enough to persuade a 6-year-old to get herself dressed. But she hates her tights. Oh, does she hate her tights. Just after I drop batter in the pan, I hear her caterwauls from upstairs. She needs me, she shouts. There is a very aggro, ASAP tone in her voice. I shout back that she's old enough to get dressed on her own and that I'm busy making pancakes. Pancakes that have so far miraculously retained their heart shape. She screams that it's not fair. Oh, does she hate those tights.\n\n Five minutes later she is still upstairs, now screaming that not only is it unfair but it is the worst day ever, and that I am mean, and that she's not going to school. I go upstairs to find her splayed facedown on her carpet, sobbing, with nothing on but the feet of the tights all tangled around her ankles.\n\n Come on, I tell her, I'm making you pancakes. Do you want them to burn? Let's go; come downstairs, please.\n\n She screams into the rug that I don't understand.\n\n I know that if she got the tights on, this would all be forgotten in two minutes, and she'd be happily eating pancakes. It's some kind of mental block about getting them on that's the problem. Some mornings, many mornings, I do actually give in and help for the sake of getting on with the day, but today I just stand there and watch the situation completely disintegrate while she loses her shit because the tights are too tight, or too itchy, or not pink enough, or whatever it is, but her refusal to cope makes me furious. It also doesn't help that she won't stop shouting that I don't understand.\n\n Which, to be fair, I don't.\n\n But because my rage, and my own sense of what is fair and what is not, has begun to get the better of me, before I know it I am unleashing:\n\n \"Seriously, listen, if you CANNOT even HANDLE this particular level of irrelevant bullcrap, how the hell on God's green earth do you think you'll ever be able to COPE with any actual and serious conflicts in your life! WILL YOU PLEASE JUST FUCKING DEAL!!!\"\n\n I punctuate this by throwing one of her stuffed animals against the wall.\n\n Then I retreat to the kitchen and start a new batch of heart-shaped pancakes.\n\n A few minutes later she comes downstairs, dressed, tights and all, and stands there. Without looking, I can tell she's waiting for me to apologize, or maybe just soak in the withering look she's lately mastered, but I ignore her.\n\n When I weaken and look her way, she's pointing at the basement door.\n\n I ignore her another minute, and then, when she turns and stomps into the dining room, I bring in her pancakes and tell her that I'm really, really sorry. I really am.\n\n \"You need to go down to the basement,\" she says, brow creased, arms crossed. \"It's what you're supposed to.\"\n\n I start to apologize again, but she cuts me off. \"Go say you're sorry to the millipede.\"\n\n The only thing to do now, I realize, is obey her. Even though it kind of feels too late for us today. I've already pooped on her heart.\n\n Down in the basement, I sit at a distance from the millipede, cursing it under my breath. Then I scoot closer so I can put my face directly over the screen and really unload on it. Calling it every bad word I know. The harder I go off, hating on it, hating on myself, the harder I press my face to the screen until from below it must look as if I'm trying to push my eyeball through a colander.\n\n I kind of hope it bites off my face.\n\n I can hear cartoons upstairs and know my daughter has already forgotten. I could go up now and she would act like nothing had happened and we could just exchange our valentines before I took her to school. But this is when I smell the almonds. I know the odor, and I know what it means. The sound of the cartoons\u2014the high strident voice of the Cat in the Hat\u2014takes on a certain twisted, demonic undertone. But still I leave my face mashed against the screen, huffing deeply. When I look next, I don't see the millipede. I do see a chunk of rotting cucumber kind of shivering and emitting a light greenish-yellow glow.\n\n The smell of almonds is quite strong now. The cartoons are louder. The shiny tools in my toolbox look hilarious and menacing.\n\n When I sense something behind me, I turn to see Aunt Rachel.\n\n There's something funny about her brooch. Not the brooch that clasps the ruff around her neck, but the coiled onyx brooch I don't remember being there before. It's pinned to her chest. But then it slowly uncoils and slithers up over her shoulder. While it lingers for a moment, I take out my phone and try to think of whom to call. That's when it wriggles into one of the open tears across Aunt Rachel's forehead and vanishes inside the portrait.\n\n I jump up to grab its tail, but it slips away. I can still see its shape burrowing, and I can hear the dry rasp of brittle canvas as the millipede wriggles and moles just under the crackled surface. Without taking my eyes off the painting, I slowly move over to the table and pick up the knife. Then, tensed, I hover over the portrait, knife in wield position, as the millipede darts around like a snake under a blanket, warping the surface of the old woman's face.\n\n I stab and miss.\n\n When it wriggles away, I stab again where it's hiding behind the ruff around her throat. Now it twists and squirms, giving my blade the slip each time, camouflaging itself against the black background, then juking to scurry behind the old woman's head. It's playing cat and mouse, taunting me, and as I keep plunging the knife I can hear the Cat in the Hat laughing and egging on the kiddies. HIDE AND SEEK! OH, I'M SO GLAD I CAME! THE COUNTING! THE HIDING! IT'S MY FAVORITE GAME! It's not until the portrait hangs in shreds and I step away from the liberated frame, knife limp in hand, that I think to look at the cage. Where I see, of course, that the millipede is safely back inside, mouthing at me with its dilated anus: Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you.\n\n Jay Kirk wrote \"Burning Man,\" in the February 2012 issue of GQ."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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