by Tyler Knox
No comparisons here, missy, nothing to compare it to, had never seen nothing like it before and nothing has been the same since. You want the bright line in my life marking the before and the after, like a Charles Atlas ad at the back of them superhero comic books what I would lift from the drugstore? Well there it is, the bright line, when the big empty entered my life. It slipped inside my mother and latched on and never let go, and neither did I, even as the brown smell of singed corn filled the kitchen, even as the shuddering ebbed and she calmed into a sleep.
She didn’t remember what had happened when she awoke on the floor, told me she must have slipped and banged her head, that explained the headache, she said, and I let her tell me just that. But we both knew it was something worse, something simply too huge to talk about. She even later gave it a cute name, Hubert, telling me after I found her passed out on the floor that Hubert had come again to visit, like it was a gentleman caller paying his respects. And bit by bit, as Hubert returned once and then again, she hid herself from the world, left her job at Klein’s lest the shame of it hit her there, and started her vigil in the apartment, alone with her sewing, waiting for Hubert to take over again, which he did and did and did and did, growing ever larger, growing ever more ravenous, until he swallowed her whole.
I knows what it is to lose the meaning of things. I knows what it is to watch the world spin around in a tight helpless circle and get eaten by a nothing bigger than everything there ever was.
Pass the sauce, hey, missy?
Them shrimp are tasty little critters. Tiny clots of muscle what slide around the ocean floor and feed on whatever garbage they can scavenge. Sounds familiar, don’t it. For alls I know I could be eating a cousin.
What’s the matter, you maybe got better things to do than listening to my sad boyhood song? You’d rather we talk about the president? Why not, everyone else is. Should he stay or should he go? Is he a crook or what?
You wants to know what I think about the president? You wants to know what I think about the special prosecutor, the Senate Select Committee, Ehrlichman and Haldeman and that stoolie Dean? I think this: Who gives a crap? He stays, he goes, it ain’t going to change my life a stinking whit.
But this I knows: the Boss, he’s been a big supporter from way back, from when the president he was still just an ex–vice president, a two-time loser eyeing the big chair from afar. The Boss has been a big supporter, and not just with a pat on the back. That money theys all talking about now, the hush money, well the Boss, he’s been shoveling cash to the big guy from afore the first election. It was the Boss what convinced the president to hang in there all this time, and it was the president what convinced the Boss he ought to run hisself for that vacant Senate seat.
“The party needs people like you,” he told the Boss in his deep skulking voice. How you like that apple?
In fact, you know that thing he does, the president I mean, his two arms raised, two fingers of each hand in the air, that thing? He got that thing from the Boss, from the queer way the Boss walks. “I like that,” he says when he spied the Boss in the back of some hotel ballroom. “That’s good.” Next thing we knows the president, he’s up on the stage, shoulders hunched, arms raised, doing his imitation of the Boss.
That’s what you want, isn’t it, the details, the dirt? Oh, I know it ain’t nothing personal, you digging the dirt, it’s a trait of the profession. Lawyers sue, dentists drill, politicians drill aides named Sue. And reporters want the mud, the slime, want every last drop of excrement, raw and unfiltered. Well hold on tight, that’s exactly what I’m giving here. But it’s not just the envelope on Harrington you’ll be getting, and not just my morsels about the Boss, neither. This ain’t your story, this is my story, and I’ll tell it like I choose or you won’t get word one. You want the meat only, but you’re getting the bone and gristle too.
So sit back, missy, and keep the reel-to-reel rolling ’cause it may take us a while.
We was talking about my life in Philly, afore ever I saw New York. Philadelphia, a city of lawyers and whores, of crooners and con men. Like Old Dudley, what found me in the Philadelphia Free Library, Logan Branch, and who was maybe a bit of each.
There I am, in my red jacket and corduroy pants, my thick-soled discount shoes, twelve but looking eight, reading through the fiction section, book after book, because it was safer hiding in the apple barrel with Jim Hawkins, or floating on that raft with Huck and Jim, than it was staying outside in the fresh air where them Thomasson twins could have their way with me. And there was Old Dudley, in his ragged black suit, gray hair pouring out both sides of his head like a torrent of the thoughts that kept his mind a-buzzing. He appeared as nothing so much as a lunatic, leaning over his battered old chessboard, muttering to hisself in strange dead languages as he harvested dandruff from his silver tufts. And every once in a spell he would lift his brow and give me the eye.
I suppose it was inevitable that the two of us would find each other, there in the library. He come over one Saturday afternoon and sat beside me, with the sweet smell of liquor on his breath, and said with that fake bluster of his, “Do you perchance, my boy, want to learn the game of chess?”
It wasn’t no mystery what Old Dudley wanted from me, what with how he sat close beside me and squeezed my biceps beneath that red jacket as he taught me how them bishops moved on a slant. What wasn’t so clear was what I wanted from him. Maybe I was seeking a substitute for the father who had sprinted off into the horizon, thin black track shoes pounding on the asphalt as he fled. Or maybe I imagined that this man could somehow teach me the mysterious ways of the world. Or maybe I was, even then, searching for a protector of my own, for by that early date I had already intuited the sad truth of my existence. I suppose at some level deep in my skull it was a combination of all of them maybes, and if so, then my instincts was spot on, because almost everything I could have hoped to get from Old Dudley came true. It all came true, with a price to be sure, steep as the crack in the Liberty Bell, but isn’t that always the way of it?
And all them maybes, they burst into bloom a few evenings after that first squeeze of my biceps when I left out from the library and, on my way home, stepped into an alley to pee. I thought I was safe in the alley, behind a pair a garbage cans, facing the brick back of a row house, in the dim glow of a bare yellow bulb, I thought I was safe. But in this world, when you’re the size I am and you’re alone, you are never safe. My knees are still bent slightly, my yard is still out, the stream is still hissing against the brick, when I hears a voice from behind me.
“Well look who it is, the Mighty Mite.”
I jam my yard back in my pants, zip up, turn around. Them damn Thomassons.
“Hey, Mite, you hungry?” says the fat one.
“Who cares if he’s hungry, let’s just hit him,” says the fatter one.
“Well if Mite’s hungry, he might want a sandwich. Do you, Mite? Do you want a sandwich?”
“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.”
3
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 inside 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 e
yes. 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.”