by Tyler Knox
Kockroach pushes ahead his other bishop.
Mite squirms in his seat as his rook retreats.
Kockroach kills a pawn.
Mite pulls his king farther back.
Kockroach sweeps his queen across the board. “Checkmate.”
Mite examines the board for a moment, topples over his king, then sits back and stares at Kockroach.
“You going to kill me now, Boss?”
“No, Mite, I’m going to hire you.”
“I need information,” says Kockroach.
In the conference room, the chessboard has been removed and replaced with a huge urn of ice and shrimp. The table is littered with shells, Mite’s shells. Kockroach still eats his shrimp whole. Kockroach and Mite are leaning back in their chairs, smoking cigars. Kockroach sucks the smoke into his lungs in deep drafts. Mite coughs. The smoke billows about them like the steam in the schvitz.
“Information’s good,” says Mite.
“It is better than money.”
“I don’t knows about that.”
“Information isn’t something you put into a bank, it is what allows you to buy the bank.”
“Do you own a bank, Boss?”
“Just a small one,” says Kockroach, holding his cigar out in front of him, staring at the glowing tip. “I once looked for opportunity there. A woman sent me home because I couldn’t fill out the form.”
“What happened to the woman when you bought the place?”
“I promoted her.”
“That’s funny, Boss. You know, I got myself a new line.”
“I heard.”
“I can get you information, whatever you need.”
“I know you can.”
“But I’m with Champ now. You got a job for Champ?”
“What’s he to you, Mite?”
“We’re a team.”
“Mates?”
“You could say that.”
“The two of you can live in the house.”
“What house?”
“My house. Istvan lives there. Cassandra. Now you and Champ.”
“For a time, I suppose.”
“So it is settled.”
“What about Celia?”
“No,” Kockroach says quickly. The same spurt of fear as before. “Not her.”
“She’s a good girl,” says Mite. “She wants to see you. And she’s got a kid now.”
“I know.”
“It wasn’t she what betrayed you, Boss. It was all my doing.”
“I know that, Mite.”
“She just wants to see you.”
“I don’t work like that.”
“Think about it, Boss. All this time she thought you was dead. When she heard you was still breathing she looked like she swallowed a goat.”
“No.”
“It’s your call. But it don’t seem fair to me.”
“When was I ever fair?”
Mite frowns at his cigar. “Why ain’t you wringing my neck right now for what I done?”
“I never expected anything different from you.”
“And still you want me on?”
“Brother Mite.”
“I’ll be square from here in, Boss. I promise.”
“Don’t bother,” says Kockroach. “We are what we are.”
Kockroach, alone in the conference room after sending Mite to the house, stares out the wall of windows and thinks. He can’t stop himself from thinking. It is the curse of this body.
He stands now high over the city, far higher than even the great smoking face in Times Square. From this vantage the city stretches like a chessboard before him. He can pick out the blocks he owns. That one, and that one, and that one with the tall building there. And the rest he wants to own. The world of business, he has learned, is a marvelous machine for feeding his greed. There are still those who feed his fear. The regulators who paw through his deals. The prosecutors who ask their questions. Fallon, a ruined drunk now but with continuing dreams of rising again to destroy him. It is not a place without fear, the world of business, but those who feed his fear are still without the power to bring him down. The world of business is as close to a perfect spot as a cockroach could ever hope to find.
And yet, it all does not feel the same to him as it once did. Working with Mite, cruising the Square in his brown Lincoln, feeling the power flow from his very being, the fear, the crush of human flesh in his hands, that had given him a purer satisfaction. And so had the world before that, the daring rushes to feed his greed in his old arthropod body, the stench of the colony, the grit and violence, the life-and-death victory over an adversary.
He misses his old lives.
It is why he took care of Mite all these years, waiting like a patient spider for Mite to come home. And now he has. It is good to have Mite back, like old times, but something is still missing. Mite is back and his colony is growing and the world outside falls building by building under his dominion, but still something is missing. And the something that is missing has a name.
Celia.
He was willing to support her, but he wants nothing else to do with her, ever. The very thought of her fills him with an uneasy dread. She has a child now, a boy, and everything in Kockroach’s being screams at him to stay away from a female and her nymph. It is why he reacted with such alarm when he learned Mite had brought Celia here, that she was outside this very room. And what about the boy? Was he here too?
The fear overwhelms him and he lets out a yelp.
The door opens, Istvan steps inside. “Is everything okay, Mr. Blatta?”
“Fine, Istvan,” he says without turning from the window. Istvan quietly closes the door again.
Celia.
Kockroach had thought the world of business would give him less opportunity for sex than the world of prostitutes and violence, but he was wrong. Money, he has learned, draws women like flies to feces. There is a parade of women into his bed, Cassandra of course, and the wives of his business opponents, and the girls Istvan finds for him in the Square, and the writers and the realtors and the ambitious young things. He is gorging on sex as he once gorged on gloop from the Dumpsters in the back alleys. What more could a cockroach want? But something gnaws at him.
Male cockroaches know only sex, they care nothing of the result, have no interest in the act of breeding. Clever as they are, male cockroaches still wonder where all these annoying white nymphs have come from as they go about their business of screwing every female in sight. But Kockroach has begun to imagine Celia’s long pale body, and as he imagines it, in the ribbons of possibility that flow from the present to the future, he sees her eyes turn dark and her stomach swell.
And in those moments he can’t help but think of the boy.
This is all wrong, this is a corruption of his character. He thinks of all the corruptions he has tolerated so far. The taste for roasted meat, the use of impersonal mass violence, the use of words, the curse of thought and its bastard cousin, regret. He has allowed himself to change so much, is this another change he must abide?
No, this is too much, a connection like this would alter him too fundamentally. This would be worse than thinking, he thinks. He must never allow Celia and her nymph back into his life.
And yet, as he stands before the window to look out at the world, he can’t stop imagining her body, long and pale, supple, her dark hair, her tears and devotion, her stomach swelling to enormous dimensions with his progeny. The image of it touches some strange place in his belly even as it fills him with a familiar desire.
“Istvan,” he calls out.
The door opens.
“Mr. Blatta?”
“Send in Cassandra,” says Kockroach.
21
Celia moved through the days after her visit to the Empire State Building as if the dancing edifice had been the reality and it was her life that was the dream.
Yonkers felt as if it were deep underwater, slow, cold, colorless, distant. She stopped taking her afternoon
walks, she resisted her husband’s entreaties to perform the rudimentary duties of the faculty wife, no cocktails at the chairman’s house, no dinner parties for the young bucks of the department. Gregory sat her down and told her he was worried that she had become depressed, but she didn’t feel depressed, instead she felt detached. Nothing made an impression, the sidewalk beneath her feet, the laugh track on the television, the touch of her husband’s hand on her arm. Only the golden flecks in the brown of her son’s eyes seemed to burn with life. And it was her son, her lovely Norman, with the chubby limbs and mop of brown hair, that revealed to her the truth.
“Who are we hiding from, Mommy?” he said one afternoon.
“We’re not hiding,” she said.
“Then why don’t we go out anymore?”
“We don’t?”
“Not since those two men came. The short one and the big colored one.”
“We’re not hiding. Do you want to go out now?”
“No.”
“Are you sure? Come on, let’s go.”
“I don’t want to. I’m afraid.”
“Of what, sweetheart?”
“Who were they, Mommy?”
“Old friends. Just that.”
“I think it’s good to hide. Sometimes at night I slip under my bed. I like it there for some reason. I feel safe.”
“Norman?”
“But who are we hiding from, Mommy?”
Who indeed? Because Norman was right, she was hiding, and she realized now she had been hiding for the last eight years. And it wasn’t from that grubby policeman who had given her the business after it all went to hell, and it wasn’t from Mite or the other gangsters, and it wasn’t from Jerry. She reached out and patted her son’s hair and saw again the bright golden flecks in her son’s eyes. It was a familiar color, that gold. When she closed her eyes she saw it, a streak of that same golden color, like a flaw running through her soul. It was this that she was hiding from, this part of her, this flaw. It had seemed to shrink in her years in Yonkers, it had blended in. She could almost imagine that it had disappeared, but no more. Now that golden flaw vibrated with color, it glowed as if on fire.
And what was it really? The thrill she felt from her proximity to the raw exercise of power? A sensuality that left her weak and clenched at the same time? A taste for shrimp? A desire for more than that of which she was capable of dreaming? How ridiculously shallow it all was, and yet. Take away the flaw and what was she? A mother, a wife, a daughter, a member of the PTA. Wasn’t that just as shallow, to be nothing on her own, someone only defined by the others in her life. The one thing that was truly her own, the one thing that was truly her, was the flaw. And so maybe it wasn’t a flaw after all, maybe it was the truest expression of her deepest yearnings.
Maybe what she had been running from all this time was her one true self.
The phone call came four weeks later in the middle of dinner. She had made a meat loaf with ketchup on top, mashed potatoes. She could barely muster enough energy to open the can of green beans. Gregory was talking about the most recent faculty meeting when the phone rang and she knew, immediately, what it was.
She stood, answered it, listened to the message. Then, pausing only long enough to depress the button and get a dial tone, she spun the dial of her phone, called the cab company, gave her address.
“I have to go,” she said to her husband.
“Who was it?”
“I have to go,” she said simply.
“Where are you going?” said Gregory. “Why? Who was it?” But by then he was talking to her back as she slowly climbed the stairs to the bedroom.
She wasn’t up there debating, weighing her options, she wasn’t trying to figure out what to do. Instead she pinned up her hair, applied the base to her cheeks, the blush, the eyelashes, the lipstick. And all the while Gregory was talking to her. He had followed her up the stairs, into the bedroom, had asked, commanded, pleaded, yet she barely heard the words. She put on the long black gown that pushed up her breasts and hugged her hips and hid her leg. She draped her pearls around her neck.
Gregory was demanding an answer, but he would never understand it if it came. It lay in that glimpse through the open doorway, in the huddle of the drones dancing and writhing around a source of great power. Dancing and writhing around him. That was where she belonged, there.
When the horn blared from outside, Gregory stood in the doorway, blocking her path. “I won’t let you go,” he said. “You’re my wife.”
“I’m going home,” she said.
“This is your home.”
“Why didn’t you tell me how we got this house?”
“I did tell you. It’s from the college.”
“He came to you, the lawyer. He made you an offer.”
“Celia.”
“Tell me the truth for once, Gregory.”
“The truth is I love you. And then the lawyer, he showed up at the college and gave us a beautiful house, rent-free. The only condition was that you shouldn’t know. What was I supposed to do?”
“You were supposed to tell me. What else did he give you?”
“Nothing, I swear.”
“Well, don’t fret, dear. I expect you’ll be getting something soon.”
“It’s happening again, isn’t it?” he said. “After all I’ve done, you’re doing it to me again.”
“I am what I am.”
“And what’s that, Celia? What kind of woman runs away from her husband and child?”
She looked into his eyes, saw the pain, the fear. The sight filled her with both pity and triumph and the combination gave her a familiar thrill.
“Norman has school tomorrow,” she said. “You’ll have to take him and pick him up in the afternoon.”
“Celia.”
“I don’t know when I’ll be back.”
On the way out, she leaned over to kiss her son goodbye. She thought she’d feel a tinge of guilt here, at this moment, but there was none. Was she imagining that the look in his eyes was full of understanding, as if he sensed what was happening, what was driving her, where she was heading, and what it would mean for both of them? Was she imagining that he wished he could go with her?
The address given her over the phone was on the Upper East Side. A large brownstone. It was Istvan, in his chauffeur’s uniform, who opened the door. He smiled when he saw her. And behind Istvan stood Champ, wearing a tailored black suit, shiny black shoes.
“Lovely to see you again, Miss Celia,” said Champ. “Welcome. I’m sorry that Mickey is out on business, he would love to have been here for you. Are you ready?”
“I think so.”
“Upstairs,” said Champ. “The door all the way to the right.”
“Thank you,” she said.
She made her way up the wide stairway, past the old paintings and the paneled walls. The space was bigger than it appeared from outside, three houses had been combined to create a single, glorious mansion, elegant and rich and shiny. The carpet beneath her feet was thick and red, the scent of the place was of polished wood and cigars. At the top of the steps, a long hallway led to the right, with a dark door at the end. She stepped slowly, almost reverently, toward the door, knocked lightly, closed her eyes.
It glowed white hot, her flaw. She could see it now in the darkness beneath her lids, watch it flow like a river of lava, widen, she could feel its heat. And slowly all the steady darkness around it burned away until it was no longer a flaw, until it was all there was in her soul. This, her.
She opened her eyes again and the door was now open and he was now before her. In a brown smoking jacket and ascot, in brown velvet pants and patent leather slippers. His dark glasses were on, his smile was bright. One hand held a cigar, the other was holding something large and pink and doused with thick red sauce. He raised it toward her.
“Shrimp?” he said.
She bowed her head, snapped a bite of crustacean in her teeth, passed him as she made her way into his bed
room.
22
Kockroach is ill at ease.
Possibly it is the outfit he is wearing, a cacophonous clash of stripes and diamonds, a riot of color that makes his skin crawl. Kockroach is only comfortable in brown, he has closets full of suits, racks and racks of them, all in brown. Brown wingtips, brown socks, brown hats, brown ties. Only the shirts are white. But today there is no brown on him, except for the shoes. He must admit he likes the shoes, the way they dig into the carpet, the way they crunch on cement. Yes, the shoes he very much likes, he should wear them all the time, but the rest of the outfit leaves him slightly nauseous.