Kockroach (3 page)

“Why would we give him a sandwich?”

“A knuckle sandwich, dimwit. With mustard.”

“Spicy brown?”

“Sure, that’s it.”

“Can I get one too?”

“Shut up and hit him.”

The fatter one, he grabs the collar of my red jacket and cocks his fist and he is about to feed me my teeth when a figure appears out of the steam from some faulty pipe running through the ground, a silhouette what stands there, legs spread and arms on hips like a hero right out of them comic books. I catch just a glimpse of this heroic silhouette and my breath stops with hope, with hope that it is my daddy, returned from his run, home at last, ready to save my life as he should have from the start, my daddy.

And then the figure strides forward into the light.

Old Dudley, wouldn’t you know.

And the fat Thomasson turns around and gapes and the fatter Thomasson drops me to the ground and tries to run, but he can’t get away, and neither can the other.

Old Dudley, he grabs both them Thomassons each by their lank hair and smashes their faces one into the other so that their heads resound like two blocks of wood and their noses mash one against the other and the blood first spurts and then streams down their cheeks as they stagger away.

“Well hello there, Master Mickey,” says Old Dudley with a rheumy wink as he pulls me up off the concrete. “I doubt those young ruffians will bother you here on in. Children need to be instructed how to properly behave, even towheaded cretins like those two. But now, perchance, if ’tis not too much trouble, maybe you could do a small something for me.”

The world,
Kockroach discovers, is marvelously hospitable when your skin is pale and you walk on two legs.

Each morning now, just before dawn, his gut full to bursting, he scurries around corners, through marvelous dank alleyways strewn with aromatic scraps, to a pile of wooden cartons leaning against an old brick wall. He climbs over two cartons, tunnels under a third, arrives at a crate with one edge shattered. Through the shattered timbers lies a comfortably narrow space where he can sleep with pressure on three sides of his body. He carefully takes off his coverings, folds them neatly, grooms himself for an hour or more, and then slips into the narrow space.

At dusk he awakens, grooms himself again, cleans every inch of his coverings with his teeth, places them on his body in the precise order he learned from the picture, and slithers out of his carton, emerging into the night to feed.

Behind almost every building there are containers left out for the great monstrous collectors to devour in the morning, and from these containers Kockroach gorges himself nightly. Soggy breads, rotted fruit, the wilted leaves of great heads of
lettuce, peelings from all sorts of starchy vegetables, porridgy mixtures congealed into delicious balls of gluck.

In his old body it was the starches and sugars for which he hungered, but this body eats everything and savors, most of all, the knuckly joints of meat he finds in the containers. Sometimes, if he is lucky, the meat he scavenges is covered by a clutch of writhing maggots. He sucks off the maggots, shakes his head wildly as they slide down his throat, and then pulls off the red-blooded meat with his teeth.

From puddles, or from snaking green tubes, he washes down his nocturnal feasts with water.

There is far more in the containers than even he can eat, but this bounteous buffet is not without its risks. If he makes too much noise, rattling the containers as he searches, sometimes humans stick their heads out of windows and shout phrases at him which he dutifully shouts back. “Get the hell out of there.” “Ain’t you got no self-respect?” “Get a job, you bum.”

Other times he is forced to share his food with creatures that fill him with a long-ingrained terror, slippery rats, narrow-muzzled dogs, raccoons, and, worst of all, cats, with their flat ugly faces and their quick paws. He remembers these brutal felines having lazy sport with the young cockroaches that scurried carelessly within the ambit of their gaze. They would flick out a paw, knock a cockroach on its back, lethargically pierce its abdomen with a claw. Even though he now stands five times taller than the largest cat, fear overwhelms him whenever he sees such a creature. But still he eats. Since when did fear ever long stop a cockroach from eating.

Once, when he regurgitated his food out of long habit, a
rat rushed between his legs and began to slurp. He has since learned there is no need to regurgitate in this body. His teeth are ugly yet marvelous things, and once he pulps the food in his mouth he can swallow it straightaway.

He should be hugely content in his new life, he is living a cockroach’s dream, food and shelter, a nice brown suit and leather wingtips.

But something, something is missing.

Nightly now, after feasting, he makes tentative forays into the world of the humans. He has no longing for friendship, no pathetic need to blend within the jagged contours of human society, but still he feels an urge to insinuate himself among the specimens of this noisome species.

At first his fear and self-consciousness were debilitating. He shied away from anyone who came close, aware that he was being stared at, certain that every human was seeing him for what he truly was. Which of the humans, he wondered as his head swiveled back and forth in alarm, would lurch out and crush him. Which of the humans would dust him with their virulent powder. And no matter where he stood, no matter how far from the street, he threw himself against the nearest wall to avoid the vicious humped things that prowled like hungry yellow cats all hours of the night. But gradually his fears subsided, he felt more comfortable among this bizarre and repulsive species, and he began to explore.

Striding along the sidewalks, weight shifting, arms pumping, the V’s of his claws rising and falling in opposition to his
step, he follows a human here, a human there, following at a distance, studying their walks, their manners, their words. He halts when they halt, starts again when they start again. He models their behavior. One man stops to tie the strings of his shoes. Kockroach kneels down, as does the man, and quickly learns the order of movement to create two equal loops which keep his shoes from slipping. Another man lifts his hat as a female passes and Kockroach does the same. There is much he doesn’t know, but he intends to learn.

The humans he follows seem to be headed toward some great glowing place in the distance, like a day in the middle of the night. He always turns away well before he reaches the glow, his fear of light is deeply ingrained, but each night he moves closer, closer to what he now is certain is the great center of human activity. And each night, as the great center nears, he finds himself surrounded by ever more humans. He even finds the jostling from large crowds pleasant; it reminds him of those times of plenty when his fellow cockroaches climbed each one over the other as they raced for the crumbs of sweet cookies or the stray swollen crust of bread.

As he walks among them, Kockroach listens to the way humans talk among themselves.

“Got a light?” “Looking for a date?” “Who ain’t?” “It’ll cost you five.” “You got it, sweet pea.” “Boy, bush, jam-alam.” “And don’t come back, you fresh bastard.” “I’m from out of town.” “Move along, pal.” “Not so fast, big boy.” “Girls,
girls, girls.” “I like it dark.” “That’ll cost you more than five, you filthy boy.” “Enough with the blatta-blatta-blatta.” “Gotta run.” “Nothing personal, pal, just beeswax.” “I’m hungry, Jerry. Jerry, you hungry?” “Jam-a-lam-a-lam.” “Did you hear?” “No.” “Yes.” “Want to have some fun, honey? You look like you could use it.”

Back in his shelter, naked and groomed, pressed against the sides of the crate, he manipulates his hypopharynx to form the sequences of sound he has heard. To get the sounds right, he repeats the phrases to himself, one after another, all the time remembering who said what when and what happened afterward. “Looking for a date?” “Who ain’t?” “It’ll cost you five.”

Each night he learns something new and each day he becomes more ready to enter the great lighted place, the seeming center of all human activity.

Striding behind a human as they move together toward the light, the street growing dangerously bright, the human suddenly stops. Kockroach stops in turn.

There is a table set up on the sidewalk, a cloth over the table, and atop the cloth a myriad of strange objects. The human stands over the table to look and so does Kockroach. There are rows of shiny disks with straps on either side, the purpose of which remains a mystery to Kockroach. There are brown and black folders like the one Kockroach took from the room, though these don’t have the green pieces of paper with the faces on them. There are little bottles with a colored fluid in
side that smell of stinkbugs and overripe flowers. There are fake black eyes.

“Is this real?” says the human that Kockroach has been following, holding in his hand one of the shiny disks.

“Right off back of truck, and price, you can’t get price like this at Macy’s.”

Kockroach ignores the disks, ignores the bottles and the folders. He reaches down, instead, for the fake black eyes. He has seen humans wearing such things, some clear, some dark like this, and so he knows how they are supposed to fit. Kockroach slips the black rods over his ears and suddenly the world has turned lovely. He looks around at the bleaked landscape, grim and shadowy, and as he does the constant buzz of fear at the back of his prothorax subsides. It is as if he is seeing the world now like he used to see it as a cockroach.

“You like? Ray-Ban. Special shipment. Fell right off truck. I give you nice price.”

“I like it dark,” says Kockroach.

“Five dollar.”

“I’m from out of town,” says Kockroach.

“You don’t need tell me such ting, I’m not yet blind. Four dollar.”

“Move along, pal.”

“Hokay. Three-fifty, not penny less.”

Kockroach, with the fake eyes still in place, turns and begins to walk toward the lights.

“Hey, you,” the man behind the table shouts. “Four dollar you owe me.”

Kockroach, still moving, shouts back, “Nothing personal, pal, just beeswax.”

“Hey, you. Hey, tief. Stop tief,” shouts the man behind the table, and Kockroach can hear the man yelling as he runs toward him.

Kockroach doesn’t know why he is being chased, but he knows he must do something. On instinct Kockroach turns around and stands on the very tips of his legs. At the same time he reaches his arms high in the air, V’s pointing right at the man. While fearsomely smiling, he jerks his body up and down and lets out a long loud hiss.

The human chasing him stops suddenly, his eyes widen.

Kockroach steps forward on his stilt-like legs.

The human backs away and raises his arms.

Kockroach has fought enough battles when still an arthropod to know that he has won. He turns around again and continues on his way, walking fast now, weaving through the humans.

“You pay later then, hokay,” shouts the human. “Five dollar.”

“You got it, sweet pea,” shouts back Kockroach.

Kockroach keeps walking, fake eyes in place, his world turned comfortably gloomy, ready now to face the brightness and to solve the mystery at the center of human activity.

He is surrounded by lights, great piles of lights, frantically pulsing and glowing lights, shouting lights, shrieking lights, a miasma of lights. Even with his new fake eyes, the noise of
the lights is overwhelming and suffuses him with fear. Over here piles of twisting blinking red lights, like the ones outside the room where he changed. Over there a ribbon of lights passing by with the strange mystical symbols he sees everywhere now. Lights, lights, a riotous chorus of lights.

He looks about for the white plate with its black switch which will allow him to silence the lights. It will have to be larger than the one in the room, he knows, it will have to be monstrous, but he finds nothing and the lights keep calling, burning, shouting.

But as he spins around and takes in the entire scene, it is not the shocking volume of the lights that shakes him most deeply. Scattered high in the sky are pictures, like the one in his pouch, only far larger, representing a giant species of which he is not aware. And one picture grabs at his attention like the warning screech of a cat. A huge grimacing face, rising within the deafening expanse of lights, aiming a fierce stare directly at Kockroach, as if the huge creature recognizes Kockroach for exactly what he is. Gripped in the creature’s giant claw is a large white fire stick, and pouring out of his fearsome grimace are great circular billows of smoke.

Kockroach has seen humans with the smoldering white sticks which they hold in their mouths or claws and use to spit out smoke, the sickening smell of burning floating about them. He had assumed the sticks were protection against some great predator, but now he knows they are also something else, a tribute to this totem of pure power with his brutal stare and grimace open in fierce warning. Kockroach suddenly has a great craving for a white fire stick of his own.

Cockroaches are not religious creatures. They take what they can as their due and live by a simple morality hardwired into their tiny brains. They never stop to contemplate their place in the great scheme of the universe for they have no doubts about their place in the great scheme of the universe. They are cockroaches. And whatever that sentence implies, they deal with it by surviving. Whenever a cockroach sits back and wonders what it’s all about, he gets stepped on.

Cockroaches are not religious creatures, but still Kockroach can’t help feeling a kind of awe while staring up at the wonderfully dreadful creature with the great smoking face. Awe is not an arthropod emotion, it is purely human, unfamiliar but not unpleasant, and so Kockroach doesn’t fight it as he did the ugly emotional nostalgia that had almost defeated him before. He lets the awe sweep through him and he finds himself, somehow, in the strange, for him, act of prayer, directed toward the fierce creature staring down upon him.

There are no pat words, no liturgical screens placed upon the raw emotions, it is prayer at its purest and most vital, flowing straight from the gut, simple and heartfelt, representing the deepest yearnings of this mortal being. If you could somehow hear this prayer, the sounds would be simple and repetitive. A message of desire that transcends all posits of philosophy to reach a true measure of universality. A sweet, rhythmic song, like plates of chitin scraping one against the other, over and over, into the night. A song whispered reverently by all manner of species, by all manner of men. A song that is heard in every farm field, every suburban lawn, every urban tavern.
A lovely plaintive song which, if translated into human language, would contain a single chorus of a single word repeated ad infinitim, emphasized only occasionally by a short yet urgent imperative.

Sex. Sex. Please. Sex.