Finally Janet found her voice – a whispery, kind of choked version of her voice – "Oh Paul, you won't believe this, but Angie just pushed a Q-tip in there and it disappeared!" Paula rolled her eyes and looked over at Angie, tapping her temple and glancing meaningfully in Janet's direction – until she saw Angie's face. Angie looked like she'd just had an electrical shock. And she was shaking her head, slowly, as if trying to free herself of something.
They went home and tried to find a comfortable way to sit on the couch. Angie had said she'd do some research and call them, and to contact her if there was any change. In the meantime they had difficulty finding a way for Paula to pee, although it was no problem for Janet as long as Paula stood close enough, helped her push down her jeans, and ripped off the toilet paper for her. In the evening after they'd eaten – awkwardly, with Paula on Janet's lap, although Janet, bless her, said it was "kind of romantic" – Janet said that she could no longer see her fingernail at all. Paula felt Janet go rigid; then Janet shuddered, her whole body rippling as if a giant snake were flailing inside her. Finally, exhausted, they lay down together, in much the same spooning position in which they'd woken up. They lay stiffly, clutching hands, unable to sleep and somehow unable to talk to each other. They had no awareness of having fallen asleep until they woke up some time toward sunrise. Janet started to cry almost immediately, and shook Paula. "Paul," she whimpered, "Paul-A, my fingers, my fucking FINGERS!" When Paula got her calmed down enough to talk, Janet said that in her sleep, the two longest fingers, which had lain next to the disappearing forefinger at the spot, had been pulled in. All three forefingers were now inside. Paula began to feel queasy, and only wanted to get away and have some time to think about things, alone. This, of course, was the one thing she couldn't have.
By late afternoon Janet's fingers had all disappeared, the veins on the back of her hand seemingly growing out of Paula's skin. Paula still didn't feel anything, except for Janet's terrible hot panting and tears against her neck. She smelled Janet's fearsweat; the whole house seemed filled with that smell now.
Angie had phoned in the morning, sounding grim. Then she came by in the evening and looked at them; her face curled in disgust and she said they'd better try an X-ray. She drove them back to the office and they tried to take X-rays but somehow they couldn't get a good picture. Around the spot where Janet's wrist bones penetrated Paula's back there was simply no image. Angie looked pale in the empty office and offered to amputate Janet's hand at the wrist. Janet vomited right there onto the lead apron. Paula shook her head.
That night, once again, they thought they wouldn't, but then they slept. This time though, the sleep came in small pockets, twenty or forty minutes at a time. Each time Janet woke up she cried and described for Paula the slim margin of hand that was missing that hadn't been missing before. She said she could feel the pull getting stronger now. By daylight it was up to her elbow and she couldn't stop sobbing; she was wracked by dry heaves and couldn't keep still. She had moments of panicked thrashing. She jerked Paula painfully as she flailed; her flesh, damp with fear-sweat, rubbing at the now-irritated skin of Paula's back. Paula desperately wanted her to be calm. She closed her eyes and imagined Janet in meditation, serene. It didn't help.
Around noon Janet broke one of the fingers on her right hand during a hysterical fit in the hallway on the way to the toilet. Paula called Angie who came over and taped it up, feeding Janet samples of a sedative so she could sleep. Paula still didn't feel anything at all except a little relief that Janet would be quiet for a while. She was beginning to realize that if they survived this Janet might lose a limb, or part of one – if they survived. She found herself imagining what it could be like to lose Janet; she forced herself to put it out of her mind. The tension was making her sick to her stomach. More and more she felt like a giant bird of prey, some kind of bizarre vulture, only instead of a huge pair of wings she had the bigger part of a woman attached to her back. Far from being able to fly, she felt ponderous, weighed down, grounded.
Janet slept through the night, but when she woke up she was jammed against Paula. Her speech still a little indistinct from the sedative, Janet told Paula that her shoulder was being sucked in, that the edges of the cotton jumper were starting to pull. She said that the more of her that was sucked in, the stronger the pull became. Over the course of the morning, as snow fell outside, Janet lost her shoulder and part of her left breast and she said her shoulder blades felt as if they had suction cups over them, or a wide flat vacuum cleaner. Paula's heart pounded against her ribs; she could hear the flat pain in Janet's voice, the dull agony. She suddenly felt panicky; she was trapped by Janet's body, Janet's sweaty skin pressed against her back and legs. Paula closed her eyes and pressed the panic down.
They were deeply regretting not having let Angie amputate, but it was definitely too late now. Paula felt alternately guilty, because she wasn't the one who was being sucked away (although who knew what would happen when Janet's whole body was gone), and disgusted, by the feeling of Janet's lump of a body attached to her. And then guilty again, for feeling disgusted. Did Siamese twins feel this way? Paula squeezed her eyes shut and felt every inch of Janet's twisted body pressed against her, wanting to preserve the feeling in her mind.
Late that night, with Janet's chin so hard up against Paula's back that her jawbone felt painfully like a vise against Paula's shoulder blade, Angie showed up with a van from the hospital; they were bundled into the back of it by two very large orderlies. It was weird, but it didn't occur to either Paula or Janet to ask what was happening. They were still thinking about how to survive through the next heartbeats, each in her own way.
They didn't go to a city hospital, but rather to some kind of base or installation out on the north shore. Once inside, they were examined by a number of people in white lab coats who poked, probed, and asked lots of questions in strange monotone clipboard voices. By the time the examinations and tests were finished, Janet's lower jaw was immobilized. They were given a sedative and immediately began to feel powerfully sleepy. Janet said, "Aula, I ove ou," which squeezed Paula's heart and pushed a great sob up through her constricted throat. Janet cried a little before slipping into unconsciousness; Paula heard her lover's breath become calm, almost like a baby's, before slipping under herself. In the morning Angie told her Janet's whole head was gone and then immediately administered a strong sedative which took effect even before Paula could really react. She woke up after two more days of strange mindless dreams, after, they said, the last tip of Janet's right big toe had disappeared between Paula's shoulder blades like a stone into a pool of water.
They kept Paula at the lab for over a week afterward, giving her every test under the sun. X-rays, CAT scans, blood work. They sedated her at night, and she dreamed of Janet's toe slipping into water, Janet's toe like the tip of an iceberg, Janet like a big fish swimming through her heart in a wash of blood and disappearing in a distance. While she slept they did exploratory surgery with lasers, looking into various parts of her body, although with no advance in their understanding. Finally they let her go home. Paula continued to see Angie on a weekly basis for months; there was never a sign of what had happened. Angie would ask Paula, "How do you feel?" and Paula would say, "Usual." She'd shake her head and sigh. By midsummer she could even laugh a little. She'd give Angie a wry smile, and she'd say, "At least that itch is gone."
The Scuttling or, Down by the Sea with Marvin and Pamela
William Sanders
The Bradshaws got back from their vacation late Friday evening and discovered right away that they were not alone.
Marvin Bradshaw was coming up the front walk, having gone across the road to pick up their accumulated mail from the neighbors, when he heard his wife scream. He ran up the stairs and into the house, cursing and wishing he had tried a little harder to get that pistol permit; but there were no intruders to be seen, only his wife standing white-faced and trembling in the kitchen, pointing in the direction o
f the sink. "Look," she said.
He looked, wondering what he was supposed to see. Everything was as he remembered, but then he had never given much attention to the kitchen area, which after all wasn't his department. He said, "What?" and then he saw something small and dark moving rapidly along the sink's rim. Now he saw another one, slightly larger, going up the wall behind the faucets.
"Son of a bitch," Marvin Bradshaw said. "Cockroaches."
"I came in here to get a drink of water." Pamela Bradshaw's voice was almost a whisper, as if that one scream had used up all her volume reserves. "I turned on the light and Marvin, they were everywhere. They went running in all directions." She shuddered. "I think one ran over my foot."
Marvin Bradshaw stepped toward the sink, but the cockroaches were too fast for him. The one on the sink dived off into space, hit the floor, and slipped into a barely visible crack beneath the baseboard. The one on the wall evaded Marvin's slapping hand and disappeared into the cupboard space above the sink. Marvin swore in frustration, but he felt a little relieved too; he hadn't really been eager to crush a cockroach with his bare hand.
"Cockroaches," he said. "Wonderful. Bust your ass for years, finally get out of the city, away from the dirt and the coloreds, into a three-quarter-mil house on one of the best pieces of ocean-front property on Long Island. And then you go away for a couple weeks, and when you get home you got cockroaches. Jesus."
He glared at his wife. "You know who's responsible, don't you? You had to go hire that God-damned Mexican maid."
"Inez is Guatemalan," Pamela protested. "And we don't know – "
"Mexican, Guatemalan, who gives a fuck?" Marvin had never seen the point of these picky-ass distinctions between people who said sí when they meant yes. Maybe you needed to know the difference between Japs and Chinamen and other slopes, since nowadays you had to do business with the yellow assholes; but spics were spics, whatever hell-hole country they came from.
"The fact remains," he said, "we never had cockroaches here, and then two months ago you hired her, and now we do. I'm telling you, you let those people in, you got roaches. Didn't I run that block of buildings in Spanish Harlem for your father, back before we got married? Cockroaches and Puerto Ricans, I saw enough of both. Don't tell me."
"I'll speak to her when she comes in tomorrow."
"No you won't." He took a sheet of folded paper from the stack of mail in his left hand. "That was what I was coming to tell you. Look what your precious Inez left us."
She took the paper and unfolded it. The message was printed in pencil, in large clumsy block capitals:
NO MAS. YOU NO PAY ME 5 WIKS NOW. GO LIV SISTER IN ARIZONA. PLES SEN MY MONY MARGARITA FLORES 72281 DEL MONTE TUCSON AZ 85707. INEZ
Marvin took the note back and wadded it up and hurled it at the kitchen wastebasket, missing. "Comes in here, turns our home into a roach motel, runs out on us when our backs are turned, then she expects to get paid. Lots of luck, you fat wetback bitch."
Pamela sighed. "I'll miss her, all the same. You know, I was working with her, trying to help her remember her past lives. I believe she was a Mayan princess – "
Marvin groaned. "Christ sake," he said, "not now, all right?"
He hadn't had much fun over the last two weeks. He hadn't liked Miami, which had been swarming with small brown people, and where there had been nothing to do but swim – which in his book was something you did only to keep from drowning – or lie around getting a tan, if you were asshole enough to want to look colored. The flight home had been delayed again and again. All in all, this was no time to have to listen to Pamela and her New Age crap.
"Okay," he told her, "we'll go out, get something to eat. Monday I'll call an exterminator. Antonio's okay? I could go for seafood."
Driving away from the house, he considered that at least there was one good side to the situation: eating out would give him a chance to have some real food, rather than that organic slop that Pamela tended to put on the table. He suspected this was merely a cover for her basic incompetence in the kitchen; chopping up a lot of raw vegetables was as close to real cooking as she could manage.
"Marvin," Pamela said suddenly, "you said an exterminator. You mean someone who'll kill the cockroaches?"
He glanced at her, wondering what the hell now. "What, you're worried about chemicals, poisons, like that?"
"Well, that too." Pamela paused, frowning. Marvin realized he'd just handed her something else to be a pain in the ass about. "But what I was going to say," she went on, "isn't there some other way? Besides killing them?"
"Christ." Marvin ground his teeth. "You want to get rid of the roaches but you don't want the poor little things hurt? What's that, more Oriental mumbo-jumbo? The roaches might be somebody's reincarnated souls?"
"I wish you wouldn't be so negative about reincarnation," she said stiffly. "I suppose it's not part of the religion you were brought up in."
Actually Marvin Bradshaw's parents had never shown any interest in any religion at all, and he had followed their lead; churches were places you went for funerals and weddings, and then only if you couldn't get out of it. All he had against reincarnation was that it was believed in by people from India – such as the one who collected fat payments for sitting around in a sheet spouting this shit to Pamela and a bunch of other goofy middleaged women – and Hindus, after all, were just another variety of little brown bastards who ought to go back where they came from. (Which, in the case of the said Baba Lal Mahavishnu, Marvin suspected would be somewhere in New Jersey; but that was another matter.)
"In any case," Pamela added, "it's not true that human beings can be reborn as insects. That's a Western misconception."
"Then – "
"Still and all, Marvin." Pamela bashed right on over him, an avalanche-grade unstoppable force. "Babaji says it's always best to avoid harming any living creature. The karma accumulates. All those roaches, there must be hundreds, even thousands – disgusting to our eyes, of course, but so many lives. I can't imagine the karmic consequences of killing them all."
"Then what do you want me to do about the fucking things? Ask them nicely to leave? Get them their own place? How about you go talk to them," he said, enraged beyond control. "That would make any self-respecting insect hit the road."
She didn't answer. From the tone of her silence Marvin figured one of them would be sleeping in the guest bedroom tonight. Well, that was another bonus.
Pamela kept up the silent treatment almost all the way through dinner. Marvin knew it was too good to last. Sure enough, as he was finishing up his lobster, she started in again. "My God," he said, "couldn't you wait till we're out of here? Talking about roaches, what are you, trying to make me sick?"
He leaned back and looked at the remains of his meal. He didn't really like lobster all that well; he'd just ordered this one to jerk Pamela's chain. Antonio's was one of those places with live lobsters in a big glass tank, so you could pick yours out and have them boil his ass alive. Marvin had enjoyed saying "boil his ass alive" and watching Pamela cringe. She hadn't been too horrified, he noticed, to clean her own plate. Probably thought all those clams and scallops had died naturally. Ocean roadkill, maybe, run over by a submarine.
He got up, tossing his napkin on the table, and headed for the men's room. As he was coming back the proprietor stepped not quite into his path. "Mr. Bradshaw," Antonio said. "I hope your dinner was satisfactory."
Marvin nodded and tried to smile. Antonio was small and dark and his black hair was a little too glossy; but he came from a Portuguese family that had been in the area for a couple of centuries at least, and he ran a hell of a good restaurant. Marvin thought that Antonio was okay for, well, an Antonio.
"No offense," Antonio said, glancing around and lowering his voice, "but I couldn't help overhearing your conversation just now."
"You and everybody else in the place," Marvin said. "Sorry if she upset your customers, talking about cockroaches. She's been kind of weird, last
year or so. Think she's getting change of life."
"Oh, that's all right." Antonio made a quick no-problem gesture. "No, what I was going to say, you're not the only one with roaches. I've heard a lot of people complaining, the last couple of weeks. It's like they just moved into the area." He made a face. "In my business it's something you worry about."
Marvin thought it over. So it wasn't just his house. Must be the new people moving in, bringing the pests with them. The standards had really gone to hell around here since that housingdiscrimination lawsuit.
"Point is," Antonio went on, "it won't be easy getting an exterminator any time soon. You'll do well to get one by the end of next week."
"Shit!" Marvin said, louder than he meant to. "Hey, Antonio, I can't live with those things in the house for a week. You must know some people, guy in your line. You know anybody might be willing to make a special call? I'll make it worth their while."
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