by Jack Douglas
“I wish. This isn’t going to be as tasty as that. Let’s go back to the kitchen.”
#
This wouldn’t be easy; she knew that much. She could do it, she thought, but she wasn’t sure about him. He wouldn’t even eat the ice, wouldn’t even suck on a few specks of dirt if it meant saving his own life. She had to handle this right, had to take all she had learned from him and persuade him as he would her. She had to make this work. Because he was falling into too deep a despair, and if he wasn’t already thinking about killing himself, he would be soon. And she didn’t think she would make it out of the flat without him.
“You’ve got to trust me,” she said as they stepped into the kitchen. “Remember that I’m a professional nutritionist.”
He grunted, an awkward attempt a smirk.
“We don’t have any conventional food,” she continued, “so we’re going to have to make do.”
“Make do?”
Her knees made an audible popping sound as she lowered herself onto the kitchen floor. She set her hands on the cool linoleum. Felt the grime stick to the sweat on her palms. She put it out of her head and tried to concentrate. How to do this?
How to lure them out?
#
He could do it right now, snatch the icepick off the counter and stick it into the base of her neck. Bleed her like a fucking pig. Or he could close his hands around her throat, he could tell her how sorry he was as he strangled her, profess how much he loved her as he squeezed out the last of the life left in her. That he could do, and it would be a sweet ending for his
For my what?
“Can you look in the drawer,” she said, “and find me something long and thin?”
“Long and thin?”
She nodded. “Something that’ll fit under the fridge.”
He slid open one of the drawers, the one in which he had found the icepick. There were some rusted utensils inside, some bent forks and spoons, a couple knives. He considered sticking one in her eye.
On the bottom of the drawer he spotted a twelve-inch wooden ruler. He dug his hand in and pulled it out. The pulse in his ear began beating.
“Here.”
He handed it to her and she slipped it beneath the fridge, seemed to fish for something, then pulled out a litter of dust bunnies. She shook some off and tore the rest free with her hand. She slipped the ruler back under the fridge.
After some fiddling, a small brown roach scurried out from underneath. She trapped it beneath her hand, going dizzy with the effort.
Craig gaped. He took a step backward, feeling faint.
Amy looked up at him, her face a blank slate. “Would you prefer yours dead or alive?”
He turned up the left corner of his mouth. “Are you shitting me?” “Craig,” she said. Her tone was matter-of-fact. “We have to eat.
And these little guys are all we’ve got.” She scooped the insect up in her hand, pinched its skeleton so that it couldn’t skirt away. “It won’t hurt you. Just close your eyes and hold your nose, chew a bit and swallow it down.”
He felt sick with revulsion and gagged. “I can’t eat that,” he said. “I can’t even look at it let alone put it in my mouth.”
“It’s a source of protein.” “Protein?”
“Just because cockroaches aren’t eaten in our culture doesn’t mean they’re not food. Native cultures all over the world eat bugs as a source of sustenance. Grubs, beetles, roaches, too. I even read that with the world population booming, it won’t be long before all of us are eating insects, anyway.”
His hands started shaking and he couldn’t tune out the pulse in his ear. He should have fucking killed her in the bathroom. “Who the fuck eats roaches,” he said.
It wasn’t a question but Amy answered anyway. “You do. I do. Everybody does. I read somewhere that the average adult consumes around one-to-two pounds of insect parts per year, incidentally as part of their food. The FDA allows that much. So you’re already used to it!”
The roach was squirming in her hand. Craig knew that if there were anything in his stomach he would already have thrown it up. As it was, he just stood there and stared, waiting for her to say this was all a joke, she was only trying to lighten the mood.
“You can hold your nose,” she said. “Pretend that it’s a Frito or something.”
He gagged again, backed away, imagining the insect squirming in his mouth, over his tongue, lodging itself in his throat. Squeezing
its way down his esophagus, building a nest in the pit of his stomach. Laying eggs…
“Oh, shit. I’m gonna be sick.” He turned an dry-heaved into the sink.
“You need to get over this fear. You need to eat this in order to live.”
Live? he thought.
(“I fucking hate you. You should’ve never been born.”)
“Please,” she begged. “If you won’t do it for yourself, then do it for me.
I won’t make it in here on my own.”
(What does it matter? You have a tumor.) (Or an aneurism.)
His eyes welled up until she and the roach disappeared into a watery blur.
(With an aneurism you go like that!)
He squeezed his eyes shut, felt a warm trickle down the left side of his face. Crying away what little hydration he had left. Fucking crybaby.
They could do it. They could do it if they only had the strength. They could, they would escape. But not unless they ate. She was right. Right now simply standing here made him short of breath. But something solid in his stomach—even an insect—that could provide enough calories to do the trick. He didn’t need much energy, just a little. Just enough to carry out his plan. Just enough to get them out of the fucking flat.
(Or you could skip the roach and kill her and that would be that.)
That was an idea. But then he wouldn’t be able to finish his book. Wouldn’t even get to see Libations published. What the hell kind of ending was that?
He kept his eyes closed and dropped onto his knees, shuddered as they smacked on the hard linoleum. He savored the pain. It took his mind from what Amy held in her hand, from the small brown roach squirming for its own survival, writhing, trying to make its way to safety back under the fridge.
He flashed on the six days and nights he had been forced to spend in the basement as a child—what his mother called “solitary confinement” for pilfering a Mets hat from their store—when he would wake to find mulch worms crawling up and down his arms and legs, across his face and neck. He never could stand the fucking sight of insects after that.
“Now,” he said. “Now what?”
“Now!” He opened wide his mouth and stuck out his tongue. She placed the roach between his lips.
He felt it crawl toward the right side of his cheek.
Then he bit down. Heard the crunch. Felt the ooze. Swallowed it down.
And tried like fuck not to hurl it back up.
Chapter 30
Her hands bled onto the carpet where the bed had been. Onto a rust-colored stain in the shape of a foot, blending in drip by drip by drip, and she wondered whose blood hers was mixing with.
She dropped the metal fork onto the floor. “This isn’t working,” she cried. And Craig threw down the knife.
He had eaten the roach, that and three more. He’d gagged and vomited the first one back up, but by the fourth, he’d chewed it as though it were cotton candy-flavored bubble gum. His head had tilted severely to the side and his eyes had gone dark again, as when he’d flung the broken lockbox at her feet. But then he’d seemed all right. He’d helped her through her own meal, aided her in capturing three more, in stunning them and cracking their carapaces while putting them in her mouth. Then they continued taking turns trying to fish the roaches out from under the fridge for later. He even made jokes.
But after that he was all business. He became that take-charge Craig she had met in the city and fallen in love with. The man who need only grab her by the hand to make her feel safe. He had laid
out his plan and she listened, hung on his every word, impressed not so much by his thoughts but by his enthusiasm, his optimism, his sudden will to survive.
“We’re going next door,” he’d outlined. “We’re going to move the bed and break through that fucking wall, and then we’re going to walk out their goddamn door.”
“Why that wall?” she wanted to know.
“That’s where it all started--the music, then the pounding. What if there’s somebody or some thing in there?” He put his hands on her shoulders, the way he had when her grandmother died. “You said yourself, the wall in the bedroom must be paper thin. It’s the only wall in this flat that leads into another apartment. The walls that lead out into the hall are going to be thicker, stronger, probably reinforced with cinder blocks. The bedroom wall is the easiest to break. It’s our only hope.”
“Okay,” she said finally. “How do we break through it?”
It was then they started searching for tools, for something they could use to scrape through the stucco, to smash through the wooden laths. The chairs seemed too brittle, as though they would break apart in their hands. Craig passed on the table and went back into the kitchen and retrieved two utensils, a fork for her, a knife for himself.
Now he tied a tee shirt around her hand. There was a lot of blood but the cut wasn’t deep. They had barely breached the surface of the wall.
“What now?” she said.
Once they had reached the bedroom with the fork and knife, they tossed the utensils down onto the bed and stared. It was a four poster that seemed too heavy to move, especially in their weakened state.
They heaved and they hoed and inch by inch the four poster moved across the carpet, revealing deep indentations and stains. Once they had the space they needed they stared at the wall.
“Get the phrase book,” Amy suggested. “Let’s see what it says.”
Craig stood idle, staring down at the spot on the wall. Etched deep in the stucco were the words:
A maneira de viver é viajar
“I don’t need to,” he said, snatching the utensils from the bed. He handed the fork back to Amy. “It says ‘To travel is to live.’”
He didn’t explain. And she didn’t ask. They went right to work on the wall, stabbing at it like masked psychopaths in a slasher film.
And now she was bleeding, a deep dark red seeping through Craig’s tee shirt. She had stabbed herself in the hand.
“The bed,” he said. “If I can break off one of the posts I can use it as a hammer.” He lightly squeezed her hand. “Can you keep going, baby?” What choice did she have? She wanted to get married, to have children. To watch them grow up. To attend their graduations and their own weddings. To someday retire and to trav...Well, maybe not travel anymore.
“Of course.”
“Okay. See if you can find something to use in the kitchen.”
What had she done? Why hadn’t she just stayed with him in Hawaii?
Why had she been so stubborn about filing for bankruptcy? Craig was a lawyer; he knew what bankruptcy was all about. He had explained that it wouldn’t affect her life in the least, that the only change would be in her paying for everything with cash instead of credit. That in less than a decade she’d be fully restored and it would be as though it never happened.
Why was she so dumb?
Because she had listened to her mother. Her selfish petty fucking mother. An ugly old bag with a bull-dyke haircut who hasn’t been happy with herself a single day in her miserable life. This was who she was taking love advice from. Someone who wanted her nearby no matter what the price. Someone who didn’t hesitate to suggest that Amy leave her lover, yet who, in thirty-five years, couldn’t seem to leave her own husband. Why was she still with Amy’s father if she was so unhappy? Why all the talking and plotting behind his back without a single overt act? All the whispers and bad-mouthing. Amy had despised her father for so long and now she couldn’t quite understand why.
Because her mother had poisoned her against him. As sure as she had poisoned her against Craig. But were they really the bad guys? Two men who shrugged off convention but truly tried their best?
That fucking cunt, she thought.
And then she was in the kitchen, holding another knife. She glanced at it and started trembling. The reflection showed a set of dark deep set eyes, feminine but older. The knife fell with a clank onto the linoleum floor, just inches from her bare toes.
She squatted to pick it up and heard her knees pop again. Felt a sharp pain shoot through her legs.
She stood and stepped over to the oven, opened the oven door. Inside was as filthy as the rest of the flat. Burnt food residue and grime caked to the sides, giving off an awful smell. She closed it back up.
What could she use?
She opened the oven back up and pulled out the crud-covered rack. When she got back to the bedroom Craig was holding a bedpost.
His own hands and arms were scraped and red. “What—”
He smiled. “Don’t ask,” he said. “Are you okay?”
He put his left hand over his stomach. “I don’t think those cockroaches are agreeing with me, sweetie.” He winked at her. “But other than that I’m all right.”
She held the oven rack up for him to see.
“Excellent,” he said. “Now let’s tear this motherfucker down.”
Chapter Thirty-One
“Well,” he said, slamming the heavy wooden bedpost into the wall, “something tells me we’re not going to get our security deposit back.”
He turned and looked at her, could see the trace of a smile on her perfect face. Perfect even now, with a slightly swollen nose, dark rings beneath her eyes, cheeks as pale and hollow as a ghost’s. Still beautiful. Even as she stood with a grimy oven rack in her hands, sweating like a lumberjack in dirty, smelly nightclothes.
He lifted the post and drove it into the wall again. His hands and arms ached and he could feel splinters pierce deep into his flesh. He backed away and stared at their progress.
“Won’t be a first,” she said. “The wall we painted red in Battery Park? And we broke our lease in Waikiki, left our landlord high and dry?” She motioned with her chin toward the wall. “This seems about right.”
Sweat beaded on his bare chest and stomach. It poured like a warm acidic rain into his eyes. He drew a breath and struck the wall again.
Amy stabbed at the stucco with the oven rack. She used her faded red nightshirt to dab at her sweat. It was the one he had bought for her at Victoria’s Secret for their first Christmas together. It read the night is young.
“Ugh,” she groaned. “I smell like the Four train during rush hour.”
Craig winked at her. “You’ve smelled worse.” He swung the bed post again. A large chunk of stucco came loose and fell to the floor.
“I beg your pardon?”
He leaned in and examined the inside of the wall. He brushed some of the dust away and squinted. The dust stuck to his damp fingers and turned them white.
“Okay, maybe not worse. But not much better.”
He peered in at the wooden laths, the plaster squeezing through the gaps, locking the laths to the walls and ceiling.
He thought of his last summation before a civil jury of six in Kings County. “We the plaintiffs have presented our case,” he’d said, “built it brick by brick, lath by lath. All the defendant’s attorney has done is try to impede its construction, to knock it back down. When you head into the jury room to deliberate, I’d like you each to remember that it takes a master craftsman to put up a house. Any old fool can knock one down.”
“What do you mean, ‘not much better’?” she persisted. “When?”
He took a step back and raised the bedpost again. “Remember our third date? The one that lasted three days?”
“Yeah,” she said, as he drove the post into the wall. “But—”
“But nothing,” he said, his lips turned up in a semi-smile. “You didn’t shower the entire time yo
u were at my apartment. I was beginning to wonder whether you ever showered.”
“Well, I never planned on staying that long.” He shrugged. “But you did.”
“I was uncomfortable. And I didn’t have any clean clothes to put on.”
“And you were sweating. The whole weekend.”
“Well, you had the damn heat at eighty-two. And you insisted we cover ourselves with that thick stifling gold comforter.”
“It was freezing,” he said. “I hate the cold; I can’t bear it. Besides, it doesn’t matter how little clothes you wear or how few blankets you cover yourself with, you always sweat in your sleep.”
She lifted the rack and took a swipe at the crumbling stucco. “So, I smelled, is that it?”
“Let’s put it this way: When I told Danny about you, I referred to you as Stinky.”
He laid the bedpost down and sat on the floor. She dropped the oven rack on the rug and slowly set herself down across from him, wincing as she did.
“Don’t worry, Stinky, you smell like a rose compared to what’s coming out of the bathroom.”
She swiveled her head. “Should I close the door?”
“Nah. We need the light. Just think about something that smells wonderful.”
She rubbed her temples and squeezed shut her eyes. “My favorite smell,” she came up with, “is when we drove up the North Shore on Oahu with the top down on the Jeep and passed the pineapple fields. It smelled so delicious and sweet.”
“Really?” he said. “Definitely.”
He folded his legs underneath him and rested his chin on his chest. “What else did you love about Hawaii?”
She sighed. “Pretty much everything, Craig. The rainbows, the beach, the ocean. The mountains. The people.” She hesitated, then said solemnly, “The restaurants, the food.”
He cleared his throat, his voice still a strained and tired rasp. “Better than cockroaches?” he said, raising his left eyebrow as best he could. “Oahu had some big cockroaches, too.”