Tales of Natural and Unnatural Catastrophes (16 page)

“All these’ll die!” Ricky shouted. “Don’t worry, they can’t get into your suit! They’ve come up from the lower floors!”

Sidney Clark kicked at a large cockroach which seemed determined to attach itself to him. Christ! He peered up through the rectangular plastic before his eyes, and saw that the high white ceiling glistened with the shiny, light-brown backs of cockroaches, all trembling, some dropping as he watched.

Ricky patted his shoulder reassuringly. “Tomorrow the vacuum boys’ll be in for the corpses! Let’s go!”

They next visited a vacuum-stage apartment, where it was impossible to talk because of the din. To Sidney Clark’s disgust, he saw live cockroaches being sucked up from the floor, along with crusty, motionless hundreds. Had all the cockroaches in New York come here? “. . .
burnt
!” Ricky roared in Mr. Clark’s ear. “Below!” Ricky pointed downward, maybe to indicate basement furnaces.

When they were out in the corridor again, Ricky shouted, “Want to see the swimming pool?”

Mr. Clark shook his head, gave a polite smile that Ricky could not see and, gesturing downward, said that he had to get back to work. As he glanced at the nearby elevator doors, Mr. Clark noticed two fat cockroaches squeezing themselves with difficulty, but making it, into the crack between the floor and the elevator shaft doors. They were not committing suicide down the shaft, he knew, but would climb upward, away from the ascending fumes. Sidney Clark got out of his suit, and entered the elevator that Ricky had summoned and was holding.

“You give us a good report!” yelled Ricky. “Because we’re winding this up Wednesday, coupla days ahead of schedule!”

That night, Sidney Clark had no bad dreams, because he couldn’t sleep. When he closed his eyes, he saw twitching roaches, long antennae trembling, seeking a way to flee. Their backs glistened as if with oil, they covered every surface in Sidney Clark’s imagination—walls, ceilings, floors. Nonsense, he told himself. He gave a tremendous sigh, because he had been holding his breath. He’d seen the vacuums taking up hundreds in seconds, dead for ever. The cockroaches
were
going upward to inevitable destruction, and tenants of the Jade Towers were moving back. The second to sixtieth floors had nearly all their tenants back, except those who happened to be traveling, and nearly a hundred tenants were due back in the next two days. Floors up to the seventy-fifth had been declared “disinfected and fume-free,” but the Board was giving tenants an extra day in their hotels, if they so wished, as a gesture of goodwill and also to try to avoid complaints about headache among tenants who might be sensitive to Ex-Pest Unique’s fumes.

But against this Sidney Clark had to weigh, in all honesty, the fact that at least three tenants, even apart from the rich Mrs. Pringle, had moved their furniture and their belongings from their apartments today, rather yesterday, as it was now 4 a.m. And there had been Bernard Newman again just before noon, with another newspaper item to show him, something about
Supercockroach
in heavy type over a paragraph that said that Lexington Avenue’s Jade Towers, which had for half a year topped all in the Big Apple for luxurious apartment living, had now topped all in the size of its cockroaches, and that the current cleanup was driving the huge varmints upward to the penthouses.

Mr. Clark, bleary-eyed but spruce as ever in a dark business suit and white shirt with french cuffs, was at the reception desk by 9 a.m. He put on a smile of welcome for returning tenants. Ricky telephoned down, sounding tired but cheerful as he said: “We’re winding up the penthouses today, and that’s the end, except for the towers, and we might have a question about them.”

“The towers? But nobody lives in the towers!” The towers were simply hollow domes with some metal bars inside to support them. Mr. Clark had been up to see the towers once.

“Still, we want to do a thorough job, sir.—Want to come up and see the pool? No water in it now, but it’s clean as a whistle, all shiny jade tiles again.”

Mr. Clark said he was glad to hear that, but he was too busy at the desk to come up.

Around 3 that afternoon, Ricky telephoned again, and asked if Mr. Clark and Mr. Vinson could come up, because he had “an urgent question.” Ricky sounded so urgent that Mr. Clark agreed to come up. Mr. Clark interrupted Paul Vinson to tell him the situation, and asked Madeleine, one of the switchboard girls, to hold the desk for a few minutes.

The two went up, and Ricky met them with green zip suits. “Just for safety!” yelled Ricky. They were at penthouse level, and again Sidney Clark looked on to a scene of tubes, cables and rolling vacuum tanks. He saw some roaches on the floor, too, but to his relief these seemed all dead.

“The problem’s
up
!” said Ricky, beckoning.

They entered a service section with a staircase up and down, one of the fire escape stairways, and here it seemed Ex-Pest had not yet started work. Mr. Clark saw hundreds of rather large roaches crawling nervously about on the metal staircase, as if changing their minds over and over again in a split-second about whether to go up or down, but most were definitely climbing the stairs.

“Only the biggest are still making it after all the fumes,” said Ricky. “Now here’s the problem—”

They were now on the level roof, under the sky. There were many roaches crawling around on the grey surface of the roof, walking in all directions, but somewhat aimlessly, and it occurred to Sidney Clark that they would have to jump to their deaths to escape, but on the other hand, how could fumes kill them in the open air? And couldn’t they simply walk down the sides of the building? And should all these cockroaches have been allowed to get up here in the first place? He was about to ask a question, when Ricky said: “They’re all up here, see?” Ricky indicated not the tower nearer them but the other tower some fifteen yards away, where five or six green-clad workers, some on ladders, pointed hose nozzles upward into the dome. “We can’t get ’em all this way and we want to
torch
’em!”

Sidney Clark was alarmed at the thought of fire. He certainly couldn’t give permission on his own. He turned to Paul Vinson, who was nervously tapping Sidney Clark’s arm, and saying something he couldn’t hear.

“Sprayers can’t finish ’em off!” Ricky yelled at both men. “Air’s not confined up there and the domes’re full of ’em! Look!” From a pocket in his suit, Ricky pulled a big flashlight and held it in his gloved hand, directing it up at the dome’s interior.

Sidney Clark took a step back in horror. He had seen a quivering circle, maybe twenty feet in diameter, of madly active cockroaches, clinging to one another, not able to go any higher, and not able to escape.

“Y’see my
point
!” yelled Ricky. “Torchin’ ’em’s the only way!”

Paul Vinson gave a muffled cry, and swayed as if about to faint.

Laughing, Ricky grabbed Vinson’s arm, and unzipped his head covering, so that Vinson could get some air. “Go down, go ahead down!” Ricky pointed to the open doorway which led to the stairs.

“I really must ask the Board about using
fire
!” said Mr. Clark, also drifting toward the open doorway, and promising to be in touch as soon as he knew what the Board decided.

Mr. Clark and Mr. Vinson shed their protective suits, and rode down in an express elevator.

“Look at that!” cried Paul Vinson, pointing to a cockroach which appeared to be six inches long in a front corner of the elevator floor.

It was laying an egg! Both men retreated to the opposite corner of the elevator, though the cockroach seemed to be paying them no mind, certainly wasn’t facing them. The egg emerged in a brown rectangular form, nearly as large as the little cakes of soap that the Jade Towers dispensed in cardboard boxes on the rims of bathroom basins, if tenants used the housekeeping staff for their apartment cleaning.
Step on the roach and the egg,
Sidney Clark told himself, but he couldn’t. He hadn’t the guts.

“Christ,” he said wearily to Paul Vinson. The elevator arrived at ground floor, they both stepped out, and Sidney Clark at once pushed the button for penthouse, and sent the parturient cockroach up.

Mr. Clark telephoned the Board, could not reach Cushings, but spoke to a man who sounded appalled at the idea of torching the interior of the towers, though Mr. Clark told him that there appeared to be nothing inflammable in them, just some metal supports. The man said he would be over right away, and hung up.

Paul Vinson had gone home, sick or claiming to be, so Sidney Clark was busy. Lots of tenants were coming back today, inquiring about mail and messages.

“I see you’re celebrating today,” said a young woman whom Mr. Clark recognized, Susan Dulcey, an actress who lived on one of the higher floors. “Fireworks on the roof. Very pretty. Have you seen them?”

Mr. Clark shook his head and smiled. “No, I haven’t. Not yet. Welcome back, Miss Dulcey!” Fireworks? Mr. Clark took the first opportunity to go outside and have a look. It was around 6 p.m., and dusk was falling.

People were standing on the sidewalk across the street, gawking up, pointing, laughing. From among them, even across busy Lexington Avenue, Sidney Clark thought he heard the word “. . .
roaches
. . .” Or was he becoming obsessed? He crossed the avenue on a red light. He could see reddish-orange sparks shooting and drifting from the lower edges of the twin domes—each spark a cockroach; he knew—and he could hear, or did he imagine hearing, the crackle of cockroaches sizzling into oblivion? The towers themselves glowed an orangey-pink, as if they might be about to melt from the torches’ heat, and more frightening was the rim of pink that marked the top edge of the building. Or could that be a reflection of the towers’ fires?

“Anyone for fried roaches?” a male voice in the crowd asked.

“Ha-ha! Nah, it’s some kind of fireworks!”

“No!” said another voice. “I can see workmen up there! They’ve got blow-torches!” The man speaking was holding binoculars to his eyes.

“Can I have a quick look through those?” asked a woman.

Sidney Clark trotted back to his desk. What next, a fire, he wondered? Would the next horrid sound be that of a fire engine making its screaming way through Lexington Avenue traffic?

“Hello, Mr. Clark,” said an incomng tenant. “Any letters for Simpson, fifty-nine H?—Thanks! The fireworks look nice on the roof. Today’s sort of special, eh?”

Mr. Clark returned Mr. Simpson’s smile. “It certainly is. We’ve got a clean house now.”

“Mr. Clark—telephone for you,” said a switchboard girl.

“Kellerman in seven J,” a man’s voice said. “I’ve seen
four
roaches in the last ten minutes since I got home from work and they’re all Bermuda-sized! If you don’t believe me, come up! I heard those exterminator guys’re still here, so send
them
up too, would you?”

“I
am
sorry, Mr. Kellerman. I’ll be up myself right away. Thank you for phoning.” Mr. Clark told a girl to buzz Ex-Pest on the penthouse floor and send someone to 7 J at once. Then he hurried to an elevator.

If there were any cockroaches in this elevator, Mr. Clark did not know, because he didn’t look, and it was a short ride to the seventh floor, where he found the corridor rather busy.

Kellerman’s door stood open, so did at least three other apartment doors, and a couple of women were talking excitedly together in the corridor.

“Oh, Mr. Clark!” one woman said. “Those roaches aren’t gone! There’re two in my kitchen and I can’t even scare them off the drainboard!”

“My bathroom,” said the other woman with a pained face. “Would you come in and look?”

Mr. Clark gestured toward Kellerman’s apartment. “As soon as I answer this call, Mrs—” He went quickly into 7 J.

“This way,” said Kellerman, a large man in shirtsleeves, motioning toward his bathroom.

A monstrous cockroach, truly five inches long, floated in Kellerman’s bathtub, which held several inches of water.

“Good heavens!” said Mr. Clark. The cockroach floated facing Mr. Clark, motionless but not dead, he saw, because the long flexible antennae moved lazily from left to right. Some of its three pairs of legs stirred, the cockroach turned a little, and Mr. Clark was reminded bizarrely of a fat person lolling on the surface of a swimming pool.

“How about
that
?” Mr. Kellerman asked. “I was getting ready to take a bath. So much for these Ex-Pest jerks!” He picked up a toilet brush and whammed the cockroach with the back of it.

Water splashed, and Mr. Clark stepped back.

The blow roused the brown insect to activity, it swam to the tub’s back end, and climbed with giant strides up the slanting enamel to the tub’s rim and stopped, facing them.

“Okay, you kill it,” said Mr. Kellerman. “I swear I’ve had it and I’m not staying another night here.”

“I have to say the same.” This was from one of the two women from the corridor, who had come into Kellerman’s apartment and was standing just outside the bathroom door. “Excuse me for intruding. My husband just came home, Mr. Clark, and we’re going to . . .”

Sidney Clark nodded nervously, and made his way to the apartment door. There were more voices and people in the corridor, and some tried to get his attention.