Cockroach (9 page)

THE FOLLOWING THURSDAY
morning, the sun
shone again and I tossed off my quilt. I watched it suspended in the air for a moment
before it fell again and joined its own shadow. I searched for my slippers and hurriedly
washed my face, brushed my teeth, and covered myself in layers of underwear, cotton
shirt, socks, and jacket. There were no cockroaches to be seen today. The brutal
temperature must have driven them down south to the boiler room, looking for warmth and
comfort. I searched for my shoes, but could not find them. Only one place left for them
to hide: I slipped under the bed and crawled across the floor, but found only one shoe.
So I took a deep breath and squeezed myself under the dresser to find the other shoe. I
laid the pair out on the cold floor and cleaned off the dust I had collected on my body
everywhere — even on my chest and eyelashes.

As I walked towards the clinic for my appointment, I was still picking
dust off my clothing and my face. I stood outside the window of a clothing store and
looked at my reflection, now appearing like a ghost against layers of displayed and
suspended cloth. I turned and shifted against the store window and watched my reflection
clad in the latest fashionable cuts and colours. I captured the last dustball and held
it in my fingers with a mixture of amusement and cruelty. I let it fret against gusts of
wind and then released it, watching it leave confused, pain-struck, and disoriented in
the whistling air, which sounded like mournful trains and sirens of war howling at the
sight of fighter planes that descend and ascend and tumble in the air and land and
freeze on the ground like insects with metal wings, like a child's toys in the
bath
brought back to the surface by the small hands of an invisible
hero or tossed out and hidden under a wooden dresser until they are forgotten and
invaded by dustballs, deserted in favour of the call for food and the threats of giant
mothers.

When I told the shrink that I had arranged a job interview at a restaurant
on Tuesday, she was delighted. She clasped her hands against her chest, her eyes open
wide like a mother looking at her child onstage in a kindergarten play, a child dressed
as a bee and buzzing around a flower with another child's face, singing springtime
songs.

Tell me more, she said, smiling. That is such wonderful news. It will be
such a good step for you to reintegrate into society.

Well, nothing is definite yet, but I feel I would like to work in that
place. To start, I know that I would have food to eat, and the under-the-table tips
would be good, something to add to my welfare cheque.

You must tell me if you get it. This will be a good step, a very good step
in your assessment, she added. Now, where were we on our last session? Yes, here, I
wrote a few notes after you left. Your sister . . . you were telling me about your
sister and her husband, I believe.

Well, I can't really remember exactly where I left off. Could you
read the last few lines for me?

Yes, you felt helpless to defend your sister from her husband's
aggression. What was the man's name, by the way?

Tony.

Tony, she said. Okay, Tony.

Are you going to write it down, before you forget? I asked.

No, that's okay. Later. So, tell me more.

Well, doctor . . .

Genevieve. Call me Genevieve.

Yes, Genevieve. I feel as if I do not know you and here you are, asking
everything about me. But who are you? I mean, you are silent most of the time. You
remind me of priests in the confession booth. Nodding all the time, and then telling us
to go kneel and mumble a few prayers for a virgin, and one for a man with a beard. You
know?

Did the priests hit you?

Well, of course. Sometimes.

Did they do anything else?

Like what?

Like maybe asking you for something or touching you?

No, not that I remember.

Okay. So, your sister?

Well, my mother went to the hospital for the delivery of my sister's
baby. This was the first time my mother met Tony.

Yes, Tony. The shrink wrote the name down this time.

Tony, I said. He was in the room when my mother came in. He was smoking
next to the window. And my mother, the first thing she said to him was to go smoke
outside.

He hid his cigarette behind his back and extended his arm to my mother,
and when she ignored him, he smiled at me to show her what good terms he was on with me.
Then he walked outside the room and smoked in the hallway with the rest of the
fathers.

Was your father there?

No.

He did not come?

No.

Okay, go on.

Well, my sister had a girl. And Tony wanted a boy to shoot guns with. My
sister called her Mona.

What kind of work did Tony do?

I'm not sure, really. He joined the militia at one point and he
would disappear for a few days every now and then, and then he'd come back. At
first, when he made money, I suspected it was because he was in charge of some kind of
racketeering. People feared him because he was allied with the people in power. He
always had guns.

How did your sister feel about that, guns with a baby in the house?

With a baby in the house? The baby does not understand about guns. What
would the baby care?

Yes, but . . .

Maybe what my sister wanted was a fighter. Maybe she wanted to bring a
fighter into this world.

Nietzsche!

What?

Nothing. Go on, please.

Well yes, things are different there. Some people had guns over there at
the time.

Did you carry a gun?

Yes, later on I did. And I tell you, if I had a gun with me here, I
wouldn't have looked for a rope and a branch.

Why didn't you get one?

I did not know where to get one in this land. And I did not have any
money! I raised my voice.

The shrink was silent. I was silent. I looked her in
the eye. She looked back at me. Neither of us moved.

She finally blinked and said: You might get a job. Then you could afford
one.

I got up, opened the door, and left. The shrink did not follow me. She did
not call me back. That woman is living in la-la land, I thought.

I went downstairs and waited at the entrance to the clinic, and as I
waited I paced. I smoked and watched the newcomers to this land dragging their frozen
selves into the elevator of this poor neighbourhood's clinic, where they would
wait in line, open their mouths, stretch out their tongues, inflate their lungs under
the doctor's stethoscope, breathe the names of uncles with tubercular chests,
eject their legs like pompom girls, say “Ahh” with an accent, expose the
whites of their droopy, malarial eyes, chase their running noses, wives, and imaginary
chickens . . . I checked my watch. It was around four-thirty. At five, a few employees
started to leave the clinic. I imagined the white ghosts of their aprons hung by the
neck on the back of their office doors. I positioned myself in a corner close to the
elevator and waited for the therapist. For Genevieve.

When she passed, I did not recognize her at first. She had covered herself
with a dark coat. But then I recognized her ankles and shoes, and I followed her. She
walked from Côte-des-Neiges towards Outremont. I crawled behind her and six legs
appeared from my sides like external ribs, and a newly thick carcass made me oblivious
to the splashing water from passing cars. No element of nature could stop me now.

It was a long crawl. I noticed that Genevieve did not
seem cold. Some creatures are oblivious to the heat and the cold wind, I thought as I
crawled behind her toes. She did not stop to buy supper, or even bread and butter. She
lived in a rich neighbourhood with shop windows displaying expensive clothing and
restaurants that echoed with the sounds of expensive utensils, utensils that dug swiftly
into livers and ribs and swept sensually above the surface of yellow butter the colour
of a September moon, a cold field of hay, the tint of a temple's stained glass, of
brass lamps and altars, of beer jars, wet and full beneath wooden handles that gave me a
thirst for an executioner's hands, for basement doors and the downward swing of
falling boats, sailor's knots, and ropes stretched around gulping, gorging,
foaming throats, sounding calls for the last meal, the last count, the last sip before
the return of the sun.

I saw where Genevieve lived, and then I crawled home.

THE NEXT DAY, FRIDAY
, I woke up early. I returned to
Genevieve's place and watched her leave her house for work. Then I slipped past
the building's garage door, went down to the basement, and crawled along the
pipes. I sprang from her kitchen's drain, fixed my hair, my clothes, my self, and
walked straight to her bedroom. On the bedside table were a few prescription pills, some
books and magazines. A painting of a naked lady in an intimate, yet unrevealing,
position hung above the bed. She had a large bed, unmade. I crawled up onto it and
sniffed her pillow and bathed in the scent of
her sheets. I found a
spot that was still warm. I measured it, speculating that the weight of her torso gave
it that curved shape (I am fond of torsos, the arched ones that stretch like endless
valleys between soft green hills). I curled up and rolled like a kid down the hills. I
covered myself with a sheet, inhaled, and wept a little under clouds of cotton and the
blue sky. Then I made Genevieve's bed and lay on my back and looked around her
room. I wanted to see what she saw before taking off her glasses, before she closed her
eyes for the day. What if I were to stay here, in her bed? I thought. What if she comes
home and sees a considerate stranger who makes the bed and saves the other side for her
to slip her toes into as she asks me if I am asleep, if I had a good day, kissing my
forehead, hoping that I will wake up, take her in my arms, listen to her story about the
man who was caught with a rope on a tree looking for a solid branch, in the park, early
on a cold day, on a sunny day, and how he confided that he had had the best cup of
coffee that morning, and he insisted that he wanted to escape the sun, and why the sun,
what is wrong with the sun,
mon amour
? Can you tell me before you sleep? Can
you ignore the desire to stroke my inner thighs, can you please listen to me after my
long day in the office nodding to battered wives, impoverished immigrants, depressed
teenagers; I need you to listen to me . . .

The stranger stood up and walked to the kitchen, opened the fridge; it was
filled with food — French cheeses, ham, and eggs. He made himself some toast,
pasted on some ham and tomato slices, dropped a few thin sheets of cheese on top,
decorated it all with lettuce, and moved to the living room with a
large plate in his hand. As he ate, he examined souvenirs, figurines, pottery,
travel books, and coffee-table books. He opened the pages of a large, heavy photography
book. Then he picked up a book on Weegee, with its photographic work from the forties
and fifties. He ate his ham sandwich and examined Americans dancing the cha-cha, poor
people working, kids with hunched shoulders smiling under the fountains of fire
hydrants, and then images of murders, people stabbed, shot in the face, men stretched
out bleeding, a dead man lying under the shiny shoes of inspectors, and curious hats
gathered to watch the dead, many men with round hats, spectators, some even smiling at
the camera. He flipped the pages again and again, looking at well-dressed men lying
shot, with open arms, as if still calmly breathing through their blood-covered faces.
And the stranger laughed at one caption under a photograph that said: “Here he is
left in the gutter.” “Dead on arrival,” another caption said. But the
stranger was intrigued most of all by the one that said: “Their first
murder.” The image showed a crowd of kids and adults, a close-up of their faces.
The photographer must have been very close to the crowd, thought the stranger. Some of
the kids were even laughing and playing and stretching their heads towards the lens, and
in the background a woman, surrounded by the crowd of kids, was crying.

The stranger finished his sandwich, picked up every crumb and put it on
the plate, and closed the book. He thought about murders, about how all nations are
built in the image of a murder. Then he noticed a pair of slippers faithfully waiting in
the middle of the dining room for Genevieve's toes to come
back, wiggle inside the slippers' bellies, fuse into one another and slip
over the wooden floor in the sequences and stops and waltzes of virgins and princes, to
the accompaniment of string quartets (and trays carrying sandwiches of ham, tomatoes, a
few thin sheets of cheese, decorated with lettuce) and large fancy chandeliers, and
marvellous tables, marble and marvel, darling, and dancing white gowns turning towards
bowing men, future officers, who shall bear arms and dance and dance like me . . . After
the cockroach danced, so the tale goes, he lay down on the floor. He closed his eyes and
rested his cheek on the slippers and acted dead (without a hat), smiling, then inhaling
the faint smell of Genevieve's feet, aware of his own erection, satisfied with his
full belly, feeling the soft carpet. With his many feet he caressed the floor beneath
him and fell asleep.

When he woke up, he rose and picked up a portrait of Genevieve from when
she was younger. She was hugging a handsome man with blond hair and good teeth, both of
them smiling back at the intruder in the living room, not seeming to mind his presence,
heads leaning in towards each other. In the background there was a blue beach glittering
with pools of sunrays, which explained the need for the sunglasses that crowned the
lovers' foreheads. The intruder, feeling at home, turned on the
TV
,
put up his feet on the table, and watched the confessions of single ladies, sleazy men,
and a talk-show host discussing relationships, sex, and betrayals. A large lady in a
jogging suit was pointing her finger at an ex-boyfriend, saying, “He slept with my
girlfriend, my mother, and my sister.” And before the chairs started to fly on the
stage, before the crowd
cheered for blood, before there was
hair-pulling and disorder, the stranger in the house decided to wear the slippers, go to
the sink and clean the dishes, roll back the ham, cover the cheese, and put the lettuce
back in the fridge. He opened the fridge again, drank some juice, then turned off the
TV
, left his tube of stolen lipstick, open and red, on the dining
table, took the slippers, and left down the drain, hugging his loot, making sure that
his prize did not get wet and was not touched by the mildew on the dripping walls.