The Roaches Have No King

by Daniel Evan Weiss

  She walked to the desk, opened the box, and gently lifted out the scarf, smiling as she rubbed it against her cheek.

  Oliver looked up. "How much did you blow on that?"

  "Ruth and Ira gave it to me for my birthday. Don't you remember?"

  "Well, don't you forget their birthdays, or you'll be hearing about it."

  "Oh, please." Elizabeth folded the scarf lengthwise; I was afraid she had turned my art to the underside. But then she held the scarf up to the reading lamp and gently rubbed it with a finger. "Ollie, I can't get this off."

  "What, the price tag? Let me see." He scratched at the flipper marks with the nail of his chubby thumb, then tossed it back to her. "That, my dear, is filth. Filth is what Ruth and Ira have given you for your birthday."

  "Do you think it will come out?"

  "It's hard to know with that Korean polyester."

  "Stop it. It's wool challis. Do you think it would be terrible if I told them?"

  "Why not? At Bernstein's all they have to do is give their Christkiller number and they can make any exchange they want."

  Elizabeth wrapped the scarf around her neck. "Ollie, I really don't like you talking like that about people who went out of their way to buy me a birthday present—which is more than you did."

  "Mine will get here. Didn't I take you out to dinner? That was romantic."

  "At Burger Brigade? The Custer Trough for Two?"

  He dropped his paper. "What do you want from me? Is my love for you measured in dollars? Should I have blown for something ostentatious and empty? Or maybe you wish I'd grown up in a faith where the bottom line is God."

  Bless him, he pushed her much farther than I thought the scarf was good for. "They're the best friends we have. They're kind and generous. But everything you say about them is ugly. You seem to want me to feel dirty about our friendship. Well, it won't work, OK? It's your problem."

  Later that night Oliver climbed into bed aflame with alcohol. When he tugged on Elizabeth's shoulder, she slapped his hand and said, "Not tonight."

  The couples were in the perfect mood for Friday dinner. I had only to make final preparations.

  The Table Is Set

  I GOT HOME several hours before dawn, the safest time to forage. I had hoped that the Julia episode would prompt more searches of our floors; instead it seemed to have discouraged the colony altogether. I heard only one deviant, from around the corner: "Workers of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains." For once I wished someone had listened.

  But I was filled with purpose, and today's was to locate my vacuum cleaner nymphs. I spotted the first one late in the morning, after Ruth and Ira had left for work, loitering with his peers beside the baseboard. As I approached, his front legs shot out and struck the wood. "Got you, sucker!" he said. The others laughed.

  They were stomping bacteria. There was no sport in it; the slow, defenseless microorganisms had no chance. It was pure viciousness: the adolescents had learned from watching, or hearing about, humans doing it to us.

  I lifted the nymph by his forelegs. "What are you trying to prove?"

  "Fuck yourself," he snarled. What had happened to his self-preservatory instinct to make him risk his life with his foul little mouth? His chitin cracked in my grasp. He made little whining noises, but he would not beg, not with his friends watching. I wanted to squeeze until he broke. But I needed him.

  He was far too light for his age. When we fixed the Wainscotts' lock he was a second instar. He should have been an adult by now, but he was still a fourth instar, and even those two molts hadn't been completely successful; he was long and slender, with thin, weak limbs.

  I dropped him. He rubbed himself. When I asked for his help he mocked me.

  "There's a big meal in it for you," I said.

  He soon found all seven survivors; the eighth had been rolled up in a table cloth and perished in the spin cycle. They were all as sallow, anemic, and foul-tempered as he was, which upset me. A spoiled child of the Gypsy generation, I refused to accept that every new generation could be anything less than we were, princes of the ecosphere, master survivors.

  I told them their reward was American Woman; I knew the Vibrams would have blabbed by now. On the open floor the nymphs were determined, indifferent to sights and sounds that had terrified them a few months earlier. They climbed into the back of the vacuum cleaner without hesitation.

  "Six pieces of wire this time," I said, "each twice as long as the one we used in the lock. I need them by this afternoon."

  I RETURNED to the baseboard to a barrage of accusations. It seemed that I was now a hoarder as well as a murderer. If the citizens knew American Woman was in the apartment, why hadn't they gone out and found her? I would have. Hunger was paralyzing them, making them cowards.

  "Hold on," I said. "I was the one who went out to defeat the waterbugs. I will share her with you, but only if you do as I ask."

  They wanted the meat without making the motions.

  A voice in the back piped up: "Every present state of a simple substance is a natural consequence of its preceding state, in such a way that its present is big with its future." It was Hegel, orating with impunity.

  I took him on: "Which is just what I was saying. How better to make your present big with your future than to make your gut big with waterbug meat?"

  "In the world everything is as it is, and everything happens as it does happen: in it no value exists, and if it did exist, it would have no value."

  My spirits began to fade. Who was I to direct these loud, demanding citizens, when Blattella has resisted direction for 350 million years? Each of us was designed to do it our way, and our individualism has everything over the alternative, communalism. Its lowly avatar, the bee, like the human, thrives only in its assigned caste, unable to sustain itself alone. The good little fascist worker performs its "dance" (would entomologists say galley slaves "dance"?) to endlessly collect food of which it barely partakes, to tend a hive it rarely inhabits, to indulge a female so obese, so grotesque, that she is never let out for fear the species would be laughed out of the animal kingdom. And at what cost the honor of worker beehood? Half of all chromosomes, all gonads, and all independence. Everything.

  It had to be Blattella ways, first and always. The problem lay not with my fellow citizens, but with my own defective individualism. I wanted to open the cabinets, to reclaim the kitchen for the entire colony. It was too grand, too collective. Why wasn't I looking for grape nuts or hot Blattella babes for myself? I wasn't being selfish enough.

  I left the baseboard. Under a kitchen toe-kick I saw a backside of distinctive stiffness. Bismarck. "What have you got?" I said.

  His leg flew apart to defend his food. He had it right—every roach for himself. But when he saw me he said, "A bran flake. I stayed here all through breakfast, and I got lucky. Ira's plugged up again."

  We shared the flake, and a moment later shat uncontrollably on Ruth's clean floor. "Good stuff," he said. "I don't know how he holds it in."

  Bismarck's generosity turned me around again. This time I felt sure. I could not give up my plan after months of work. I was as selfish as the rest, only mine was an enlightened selfishness; if I received no immediate reward, the future prosperity of my colony was certainly my selfish interest.

  I said to Bismarck, "I'm going to play it out tonight during dinner, and there's an awful lot to do. The others won't help."

  "We don't need them." Within minutes he assembled Barbarossa, Sufur, T. E. Lawrence, Clausewitz, and last of all Snot, who could not meet my look after his cowardly retreat from Julia. If these citizens didn't quite share my vision, they did share my disgust with the torpor of baseboard life.

  THE THEORY of boric acid holds that a human lays the fine white powder where we, the quarry, are likely to pass. Too primitive to notice, we stroll through it, if necessary plunging into drifts shoulder high. Then, ignoring the chemical's astringent taste and all our knowledge of its effects, we preen—
a primitive instinct of primitive animals—to transfer the powder, now stuck all over our bodies, into our mouths. This is how it kills us. Humans don't think much of the intelligence of insects; but if I filled Ira's living room with barrels of toxic waste, I would not expect him to jump in.

  We picked our way through the line of boric acid just inside the pantry. The floor was clear from there to the back wall, where Ira had put more poison. I never understood why.

  But it had worked. Half-buried in the white powder were three Blattella cadavers. It was a terrible sight. Bottomless white sockets stared at us from where heavens of eyes had sparkled. Powerful wings and thoraces had weakened to a translucent brown; extremities had turned a rotting guppy green. Most unsettling was their posture, contorted like prospectors caught in an avalanche. These were careless deaths, which had to date from the bounteous generations before Ruth. It angered me to see lives casually squandered, and it hurt to be reminded of the prosperity that had passed us by.

  I handed out fragments of a toothpick that Rufus had spat onto the living room carpet. I kept one for myself.

  Bismarck and I walked into the pile. Planting myself securely in the deadly powder, I swung the sharp edge of my wooden pick at the body. It bounced off; the chitin was tougher than it looked. I planted the pick on the membrane in between two of the body's segments. With a cellophane pop it was pierced. Bismarck speared the body the same way near the head.

  We hoisted the cadaver up out of the pile. Boric acid poured out of the eyeholes and limb joints, and the spiracles trickled like a salt shaker. Snot and Sufur moved into the drifts and extricated the second carcass. But Barbarossa adamantly refused to work with T. E. Lawrence on grounds of homosexuality, even though Lawrence was most adept in the boric sands. Clausewitz took his place, and the third body was removed.

  Laid out on the oak floor, the dusted bodies looked like wraiths. With my toothpick I started to carve out a hold so I could pick up my cadaver without touching acid. Chips of chitin flew; dust to dust. We all cut holds, then carried our charges slowly, like pallbearers, through the perimeter of acid and out of the pantry.

  In the kitchen the pots and pans hung from a pegboard beside the stove. When I first saw the board, as a newborn, I figured that with its body-sized holes it would make a good advanced position. But Ira caught a patrol there and decimated them even as they clung to the back, like ladies in a knife-throwing act. Raid shot through the holes and killed them on the ricochet.

  Ira wasn't home, and we quickly got the bodies up the board. Now I had to make a crucial tactical decision.

  There was a seven-pound chicken defrosting in the sink, which was certain to be roasted. This did us no good, because the roasting pan had no holes, and therefore did not hang.

  Ruth was a firm believer in the four mythological food groups purported by scientists to be essential for good health (although quintillions of us have thrived on fewer for 350 million years). For starch, I guessed potatoes or rice. Baked potatoes were also out of our control, but she might boil or mash them; rice, too was workable.

  The vegetables would arrive fresh with Ruth. But what would she do with them? They could be boiled in a small pot, steamed, sautéed in the small frying pan, or even turned into a casserole. There were too many variables.

  I had to guess. A roasted chicken the size of a booby is bland. So are potatoes. I intuited that there would be at least one spicy dish tonight, which probably meant frying or sautéing; or else rice would be the medium.

  This was it then; the rice pot and the two frying pans would each get a cadaver.

  With the toothpick fragment Barbarossa scored his stiff lengthwise and snapped it in half; the sound made me shiver. The shell slid through the hole in the pegboard and dropped into the smaller frying pan. Since Barbarossa relished the exercise, we let him break and deposit the other two cadavers as well. The mines were in place.

  I needed large-scale help now, but I was still reluctant to use up American Woman. I asked Barbarossa if he could scout up about forty more bodies for a little while.

  "As you wish," he said, clicking his back legs together smartly. He headed back toward the baseboard. I wished I too had the power to bully instead of bribe.

  In a niche between the refrigerator and the neighboring base cabinet was a small pile of debris left over from the Terror. Though it was only plaster dust, the similarity to boric acid made us very tentative. It took twenty minutes to pull out two pieces of an old plastic spoon, which could be fitted together like the arm and fulcrum of a primitive catapult. We also extracted a dry, crusted watermelon pit.

  Once, as a nymph, I tried the raisin bran escape, the maneuver that later doomed Rosa Luxemburg. Caught on top of the refrigerator by oncoming shoes, I raced across the top of the bran box and made a dive at the tab. I was thwarted; the box was unopened. Not yet familiar with real pain, I decided to jump to the floor. I was lucky that the young quickly heal and lost parts grow back. But I didn't learn that until after my excruciating crash, whose exact spot was where we now set up our plastic launcher. I believe in physics.

  We hoisted the watermelon pit into the hollow of the spoon. By this time Barbarossa was returning with hordes of citizens. "Where do you want your volunteers?" he asked.

  "The top of the refrigerator," I said.

  No one moved. I was about to explain the plan, then realized, from watching Barbarossa, that reason was pointless; this mass had to be led. "White is right!" I cried, and started up the alabaster rise. The others swarmed up after me, picking up the call.

  "Why you go use some asshole line like that for?" said Sufur.

  On top of the refrigerator, guarding the raisin bran, sat a big black box with Periplaneta-sized letters: ROACH MOTEL. One viewing of Psycho on TV had kept us away from it. And in case anyone missed the show, the box described its adhesive, even the recipe of its cloying bait, right on the side. Only an illiterate with a taste for Kandy Korn would ever walk into a Roach Motel.

  But Ira believed in them. I once heard him cluck, "Poor bastards!" as he put down a fresh one. Before the Terror we regularly booked the motels with debris from around the apartment, to multiply in Ira's mind the magnitude of his conquest. Delighted by their success, he continued to buy us new motels. We enjoyed watching the evolution of their graphic design.

  "Yo, check this out," said Sufur, pointing to the writing on the facade.

  Barbarossa walked over. "If you check in you can't check out. It says so right here."

  The crowd was getting uneasy on the revealing surface.

  "Citizens!" I cried. "Let's relocate this eyesore to the floor, where it's darker."

  Again those of us who were convinced quickly swayed those who were not. Within a minute we were packed side by side, like a burnished xylophone, heads butting against the box, united for a noble purpose. I tingled, thinking that if apartment 3B lasted for a thousand years roaches will still say: "This was their finest hour."

  Ira's ammonia had left the top of the refrigerator spotless and almost friction-free. "Now!" I commanded, and with surprising ease we got the motel moving. "Faster!" Feet screeched on the enamel and citizens groaned, their depleted bodies no longer fit for exertion.

  Still is was an inspiring sight, hundreds of hairy Blattella legs thrusting, a hundred antennae bent back by the weight of the motel. The front slid over the edge of the refrigerator door, and suddenly our side tipped up, the outer paper tearing in our grasp. In an instant our sworn enemy crashed to the floor, hitting the spoon. The plastic cracked sharply, and the pit flew. I miscalculated; it didn't make the counter. It just barely reached the edge of Ruth's seat.

  I noticed a white hole in our line across the top of the refrigerator door. Someone was missing. A scream echoed through the kitchen: "Mutha!" Sufur. He had forgotten to let go.

  We rushed down to him. He was lucky that the motel had fallen sunny-side up. He pulled me close by one of my mandibles and said in a hushed, concussed tone, "Free at last!"


  "Yes you are," I said, helping him up. He staggered off. The volunteers slid the motel across the flooring into the gap between the refrigerator and the cabinet; I didn't want to risk gaining Ira's attentions.

  Snot had climbed onto Ruth's chair and was sniffing the pit. "Smells like haddock."

  "Get closer," I called.

  Bismarck appeared, dragging another hair from Elizabeth's pillow; the one I had brought had long been lost to the vacuum cleaner. Bismarck and I climbed to the seat and knotted the hair securely around the watermelon pit. We all took hold of the hair and climbed up the chair back onto the counter. The pit bounced and spun, the twisting hair burning in our grasp.

  We crossed the counter and continued up the wall, above the line of canisters, a family of instars growing from dainty "Nutmeg" to burly "Flour." I figured Ruth would rest her shopping bag near the edge of the counter, then take out the box, and next to it put the platter, which would end up beneath the sugar canister. Splendid! Ruth rarely cooked with that evil food.

  We walked the hair up one side of the sugar canister and down the other, maneuvering the pit on the handle. Barbarossa chewed off the hair with his huge mandibles and I dropped it behind the stove.

  "Where'd you get the pumpkin seed?" said Junior.

  "Just you watch," I said. I whispered to Houdini, and he climbed onto the handle beside the pit. After all these months he still stank of horseradish.

  He said, "Ladies and gentlemen, for this trick I need a volunteer from the audience who can spit. You, sir, step up and show us what you can do. Right on that seed. Good. Now, that wasn't too bad but isn't there anyone out there with a little more juice... ?" Soon the white pit was running with spittle, Houdini turned his back and mumbled portentously, "Liver of blaspheming Jew, gall of goat, and slips of yew... cool it with a baboon's blood, then the charm is firm and good." He stepped aside. The pit was black and shiny as the day it dribbled off Ira's lip.