OF LOVE AND WORMS

Ophelia D’Unzi loved him. She loved him, even though she was a professional journalist and he was a parasitic worm living inside of the Politician’s brain. She knew it was “wrong” in the conventional sense of the word but she didn’t care.

She loved him from the first moment she saw him, wriggling his way out of the Politician’s ear in the middle of an interview at Jax Steakhouse on restaurant row, the only place where the Politician was able to get off-menu bear steaks.

At first, Ophelia thought she was seeing things. She was on her third espresso martini already - maybe it was a trick of the eyes?

But as her interview subject bowed his head so that he could sneeze into his napkin, she saw the worm there, peeking seductively out of the Politician’s distressingly hairy external auditory canal: grey, moist and sexy.

For the rest of dinner, Ophelia tried to focus on her prepared questions. She knew she had to get it together - she was a journalist for chrissake. She did not want to miss this opportunity to grill the Politician on his controversial, perhaps even dangerously unhinged vaccine beliefs. But every time she looked at his wrinkly face the worm would be there, sticking out of his ear canal, seductively undulating at her.

She found her heart melting.

“I know it sounds crazy,” she confides to me later, well after her career had fully collapsed in on itself like a blackhole. “If I’m thinking objectively about the whole affair, I understand it was the quote-unquote wrong thing to do. But trust me - in that moment? It was hot.

~

When the news broke on (where else?) social media of her year-long torrid texting affair with a brain-eating roundworm, her employers had a fit. Some said it was a conflict of interest. Some said it was supremely unethical. Others found it weird and gross and had basic questions about how the anatomical logistics of lovemaking between a human being and a parasite would even work.

Either way, Ophelia’s career was over - or at least it seemed to be for the moment - so she did what any normal, self respecting person who had been outed for an incredibly eccentric extramarital fling would do: she went back to basics. By moving to the Italian Riviera.

~

I meet up with her at her favorite coffee bar, just up from a small, picturesque harbor. She asks me not to give away the name of the village, in case the paparazzi come calling for her, and not to share the name of the Politician, even though it’s painfully obvious who this guy is to anyone who has been alive even for a moment within the past year and a half. The last thing she wants, she says, is unwelcomed attention.

Welcomed attention is a different matter, she assures me.

She’s wearing massive sunglasses, her head covered in a trendy patterned scarf. Copies of The Divine Comedy, War and Peace, and Eat Pray Love sit stacked atop her tiny cafe table. She looks a bit like if Audrey Hepburn robbed a used bookstore.

“I’m working on a memoir,” she explains, “hence the important books. They serve as my inspiration. Just a little project to help me process my journey, and also if it makes a bit of money for me then that wouldn't be the end of the world.”

I tell her I imagine there’s a pretty big audience out there for this sort of sordid tale.

“Oh yeah,” she says. “You’d be surprised how many people are into worm-on-woman action. Or maybe you wouldn’t be surprised. X is full of these people.”

~

The first text came out of nowhere. 

At first, Ophelia assumed that the politician was upset with her - her piece had not been particularly complimentary of his heterodox health policy proposals or his complete lack of medical experience.

But her eyes grew wide as she read the text. “Hey it’s me - the worm living inside of <redacted>’s head. I’ve finally figured out how to control his thumbs so I can text you whenever I want to lol."

For weeks now, Ophelia had been haunted by forbidden thoughts of lust for the worm. She had done everything she could to drive him from her mind. And now here he was, back in her life, undulating at her again through the Politician's waggling thumbs.

"Anyhoo," texted the worm, "I wanna ask if you'd like to get a drink sometime?”

Thus began what she described as a “torrid emotional love affair.”

“There as so many juicy bits to share, I assure you,” she tells me as we hop aboard her moped. “I’m not going to give them all to you. You’re gonna need to buy the book, just like everyone else. But honestly, very juicy. You’ll have to wipe your chin afterwards just from reading all this juice. 

“So hey, there’s a tree that I like that I want to show you. It's the kind of tree us sensitive writer types like to look at. Nature. Are you up for that?”

Having come all the way here, to a small nameless Italian town, to get this interview, I knew I could not turn her down. I shrugged and agreed to press on.

~

The moped skittered precariously up the cliffside road - more like a goat path than an actual proper street. “I say ‘emotional love affair’ because we never consummated it!” she shouts over her shoulder at me.

“Watch the road!” I politely suggest.

“He hadn’t figured out how to work the genitals or the hips yet!” she explained as she caromed around a tight curve. “There are certain body parts that need to function if it’s going to work, you know?! That’s not even taking into account any medical assistance needed to get it up, if you know what I mean!”

“Argh!” I  replied, as we hurtled over a pothole on our way around another bend. A flat bed mini truck barreled down the single lane at us, its horn frantically honking its distress.

“I don’t know if he’s figured it out yet, the technical aspects of love, but it doesn’t matter! The connection we had was more of a sexual-spiritual hybrid! Making things physical would have been profane, right?! I mean, I’m not trying to get with <redacted> - he’s just a tanned meat bag as far as I’m concerned!

“I wanted the worm!” she shouts over the din, then she slams on the brakes.

“Aaaayeeeee!” I say.

~

She imagined them lying in bed next to one another, the texts delivered like the words of whispering lovers, floating across the pillows in between heaving sighs of passionate longing.

“I love you,” he’d texted - but she imagined the worm cooing it to her.

“I love you too,” she confessed. She visualized shifting in bed to turn towards him, her eyes meeting the grey expanse just above his frontal mouth orifice.

“I want to be inside of you,” he says. “Literally inside of your brain. I’m running out of stuff to eat in here.”

“I imagine you must be growing pretty long right now, just thinking about me,” she texted, but in her mind she heard herself flirting.

“Yes, I have grown much in size inside of this man,” wrote the worm, the innuendo evidently failing to translate over the phone.

“Where do you end and <redacted> begin? Is the genius his or yours?” she asked, her journalist mind even then trying to probe the worm’s psyche.

“Everything good is me,” texted back the worm. She imagined him brushing the hair out of her face. “Everything stupid, dumb or nepotistic is <redacted>.”

Part of her knew not to ask, but she couldn’t help but pry, “even the insane health and vaccine and general medicine stuff?”

“MEDICINE IS BAD - ONLY ALL NATURAL HOMEOPATHY AND NO IVERMECTIN,” texted back the worm. "ONLY THE STRONG SURVIVE AND SURVIVE IS WORM"

~

Ophelia believes that exchange might have been the beginning of the end.

She tells me so as we take in her favorite tree, which looks to me like your standard gnarly oak tree. It's a fine tree but certainly not worth seeing my life flash before my eyes repeatedly while clinging desperately to the back seat of a doomed moped.

“It was never the same after that,” she reiterates. It wasn't long before the Politician’s wife (the Actress) found the text threads while opening her husband's phone and flew into a rage.

Ophelia’s own husband was also very perplexed.

“Did I expect to fall in love like this?” Ophelia asks herself rhetorically as she leans against the tree. “Had anything in my life prepared me for being sexually attracted to a worm buried deep inside the leathery, raisin-esque head of an elderly nepobaby?

“No,” she admits.

I ask her if there’s anything she regrets, or that she would do differently.

She turns to me, lowers her large sunglasses, and says, “I guess it depends how well my book sells.”

A book that she is not gross for writing about an "affair" that was not gross. And an article that I’m not gross for writing, for a print journalism industry that is neither gross nor dying. At a time when the wealthy friends of people like the Politician are not strangling the last pieces of plunder out of the people they are meant to serve before the whole world burns to the ground.

None of this is sad or gross.

~

And this is how we console ourselves, standing beneath a generic oak tree above a cliff, halfway across the world from either of our homes.

“I really did love him. His sense of humor. His passion for helping people. The way he would tear up whenever he saw a flower - though, to be clear, it was <redacted>’s eyes and the tears were probably an unconscious nervous system reaction to being eaten alive from the brain out. Still, it was a special time in my life, even if it cost me everything.

“Hopefully the memoir sells. I blew through my advance - who knew it was so expensive out here on the Riviera? Of course, I do have an offer on the table to join CBS News, but I’d like to hold out for something better.

“Anyway. How do you want to get back?” Ophelia asks. Because she had accidentally driven the moped off the edge of the cliff on our way up. We’d barely just jumped to safety, and the bloody scrapes on my forearms and legs were really starting to hurt. “I’d say we should walk it but it’s a long way down.”

I open my phone and search for a number to call a cab as the sun starts to set.

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