I climbed up the case and soon found myself on a spine reading Uprighting Inclined Mandibular Molar in Preparation for Restorative Treatment. To my left towered The Apically Positioned Flap. I looked out into the living room. There was crocheting on the arm of McGuire's sofa ("like making our own chains" was the Gypsy's feeling about needlework). A peerless housekeeper, a scientist or doctor, a handicrafter—how could this McGuire live with the Gypsy?
Maybe she wasn't immune to the Gypsy, just not as servile as Ira. I remembered when, one night a month before she left, the Gypsy belittled Ira's scant sexual experience by comparing it to her own. She yelled through the pillow Ira wrapped around his head. "I can't even count the cocks, Ira. I've had more pussy than you'll ever have, too." Was McGuire's one of them?
I sat on Guide to Occlusal Waxing the rest of the afternoon. The sun was setting when the door opened and McGuire came in. She was short, with neat closely cropped brown hair and a pleasant face. She wore an attractive blue pin-striped suit. She put a bunch of flowers into a vase, and placed it on the coffee table in the living room. She tuned the radio to an easy-listening station, and crocheted, humming the tunes she knew. I watched her closely. I couldn't see her with the Gypsy as friend or roommate, and certainly not as lover. They were too different.
Some time later the door opened again and a man entered. Now I was baffled. He was pasty and unfit with narrow shoulders and wide hips, maybe a few inches taller than her. I was quite sure he wasn't the type for a ménage a trois. Maybe he was a gay roomer. I wished I had checked the number of bedrooms.
When McGuire kissed him that theory died.
"Have a good day?"
"Fine. And yours?"
"Fine."
"Nice flowers," he said.
"Thanks."
They made the Wainscotts seem hot-blooded. How could the Gypsy stand it? I wished she'd get here already.
McGuire disappeared into the kitchen. The man sat in the living room. From his briefcase he pulled a copy of American Plaque. So he was the dentist! The group portrait was not developing for me.
Boiled smells reached the living room. McGuire called him, and we retired to the kitchen.
They ate pretty much without talking, mouths carefully sealed while they chewed. Knives and forks crossed hands for cutting. Napkins dabbed lips. Wine was sipped from crystal goblets. The gypsy used to stick a knife into a large chunk of meat and gnaw on it, and drink wine straight from the bottle. Were they eating early to avoid her? Was she coming home late to avoid them?
When dinner was over, the man helped McGuire carry the dishes to the sink. As she began to wash them, he kissed her lightly on the cheek and said, "Very good, Esme. Please brush your teeth before you do this."
Esme. Esme? Esmeralda? The Gypsy? Impossible. She hated the name Esme. She had hair to her waist. She would never wear a suit The deportment, the manners, the smell, the crocheting. No. However unlikely it was that there would be two Esmeraldas in one household, this was not the Gypsy.
They spent the rest of the evening watching sitcoms. Esme continued to crochet. The Gypsy did not show up. Still wild.
"I'm going to get ready for bed," said Esme a few hours later. I followed her to the bedroom. I wanted to be sure.
Esme wore a frilly little bra; the Gypsy called bras "tit- cuffs" and never wore one. Esme hung up her clothes; the Gypsy used to leave hers where they fell. When Esme removed her bra, I had to admit that she had the same little teen-tits. But beneath her skirt she wore panty hose, which the Gypsy reviled as a "muff muzzle." The clinching evidence snaked through Esme's thin, mousy bush; the string of a tampon. The Gypsy was a sworn enemy of the "vaginal gag."
As Esme showered, she shaved her legs and underarms. How could this be my Esmeralda?
Doubt still gnawed. I went under the toilet seat. First the tampon—out with the old and in with the new. She fumbled a bit with the applicator, unusual for a woman of over twenty years' experience. Lemon-lime vapors rose from the tampon in the bowl. The Gypsy would rather die than pollute herself like this. But the hormonal smell was too maddeningly faint to make a positive identification.
Esme urinated, which did not help. I couldn't stand it anymore. As she crumpled her toilet paper, I raced across her buttocks for a quick lick of her pussy. I had to know.
Everything happened very fast. She must have had a most sensitive bottom, because she immediately reached back and brushed me off. I fell into the bowl, right onto the disintegrating tampon, and my questions were finally answered. The tampon kept me afloat long enough to watch her wipe; for the first time I noticed a gold band around her fourth finger. This woman was married to the dentist. This was Mrs. McGuire. And the chemicals in the spreading fibers told me the rest. Beneath the lemon-lime, it was her. Mrs. McGuire was the Gypsy. The wild one, the free-loving anarchist—now shaved, douched, disinfected, tamponed, and married to a dentist.
Another plan shattered. Even if I could get her back to Ira's, after this metamorphosis she was useless. Ruth's secretions would waste her. As if in retribution, the instant I concluded this the Gypsy reached back and flushed. At least she still had a touch of the old venom.
She stood up. Her receding silhouette spun slowly as it pulled up its briefs. Pushed up against the side by torrents of cold water, I started to circumnavigate the bowl, faster and faster until my guts pressed against my back. Eddies rippled over me, dimming my dizzied senses; but the weak taste of Esme's hormones stayed with me. Poor me. Poor Esmeralda. Can civilization ever compensate you for your loss?
With that lament, I whooshed through the bottom of the bowl, and careened through the trap.
Bless the Rat and the Roach
BLOODY TAMPON fibers and clods of toilet paper wrapped around my legs as the torrent of cold water washed me downward. Falling from the refrigerator had been scary, but at least I could see the end of it; this pipe was a black eternity.
How long could I continue at this tremendous speed? I prepared for impact. Suddenly my free fall was stopped—but I hadn't reached the bottom. I was pinned by a sideways blast from another waste line. If not for the cushion of shit it provided, I might have been cracked open on the galvanized pipe.
After a few seconds of intense pressure, the flush was spent. But it had stripped me of the cellulose fibers and the resistance they provided, and I fell at an even greater velocity.
A moment later I skidded against a pipe, then shot through a short flume. The fall was over. I was unharmed, floating in a pool of calm colloid. I was in the sewer. I never would have believed I'd be so happy to be here.
To me the sewer had always been an unimaginable Hades at the bottom of the sink drain. Now I saw that my imagination had failed me. How awfully decent of humans to have constructed a vast network of impregnable tunnels so we could get safely around the city. This was the perfect way to check out new apartments, to visit friends and relatives, or, for the singular individual, to limp home after the stillbirth of a lame-brained plan.
My mind was swarming with new tactics that I wanted to discuss with Bismarck and the others. All I had to do was swim home. I extended my legs and pulled them back. My body didn't move but the sewage did, washing over me, little clods of feces settling into my spiracles, like jimmies on an ice cream cone. I tried to wipe myself clean, moving gingerly so I wouldn't tip over. I'd always supposed everyone just knew how to swim; I never imagined it was something you had to learn.
The current of the sewer carried me slowly. I was sure I was headed straight for the ocean. I thought I could already hear the surf beating on the shore. The ocean. The thought of it made me cold. Animals that looked like sea weed, or glowed in the dark, or generated electricity. All that weird protolife stuff, neither animal nor vegetable. Slime everywhere. My ancestors rose from the oceans hundreds of millions of years ago, and I was certain they'd had damned good reasons.
My legs were quivering, poised to churn. But why bother? I was doomed. There was nothing I could do.
In my despair it occurred to me that Ira's apartment could be on the way to the ocean. Where was I now? There was some light in these larger conduits, and I could see letters and numbers on the ceiling; but they had nothing to do with any coordinates I know of the city. I prayed I would be able to crack the code before I hit the breakers.
All my hours under the toilet seat served me well; I could read the neighborhood by the excrement. Just now I detected the lardy taste of refried beans shot through with flatulence, yellow rice and oil, and the inert seeds of tomatoes. The urine was sharp, acidic, also from tomatoes. A small slick of coconut shavings trailed the meat. I was passing under a neighborhood from south of the border.
This sample had been unusually pure. Readings soon became for more difficult because many areas of the sewer were outlets for small neighborhoods with fuzzy boundaries. To prevent myself from becoming saturated, insensitive to nuances in taste, I was careful to sample only occasionally, always from the mouths of the smaller pipes, before their flow blended with the main line.
I continued to watch for clues to my location. Large chunks had fallen from the ceiling of the ceramic pipe, which looked over a hundred years old. There was no glamour here; humans wouldn't bother with it until there was a major collapse. I could see it: a sweltering summer day. Heat would penetrate the asphalt, and one small shift in a teetering section of pipe would bring the whole thing down. Within hours shit would be backed up and running down the avenues, trapping old and infirm humans, small dogs like Fifi, and best of all, a good number of water bugs. Fancy footwear sucked off well-heeled pedestrians would bob in the sewage. Virulent disease would gestate in the moist heat, then erupt through the human population, defying attempts by health authorities to treat or contain it. Local news trucks and helicopters would race to the head of the flow to transmit important video footage. Some people would swear it was all caused by political corruption; others would detect a message from God.
From the looks of things down here, I wouldn't be surprised if the whole city substructure were about to go, water supply, power supply, and phone exchanges too. The foundations of the buildings would crumble. The great vertical city would turn horizontal. Then nothing could stop Blattella germanica from the conquest and domination of every apartment, every office, every kitchen and bathroom. It was a glorious thought.
I passed through a small ripple and into the next section of pipe. Suddenly it was very dark. The air was hot and filled with a carrion stench. I didn't think I was anywhere near the business district, yet the smell brought cannibals to mind.
It didn't last long. I soon passed under a neat row of yellowish stalactites, down another small fall, and back into the prison light and bracing aroma of fresh sewage.
I looked back. A dull orb floated in the sludge, but didn't drift with the current. There was another one much like it on the other side of the pipe. Then I understood. The ripples I thought were being caused by soiled paper and tampons were in fact the work of leathery hide. The stationary turd in the center of the pipe was the tip of a snout. I had just floated through the mouth of an immense alligator.
A gift from Florida, the alligator was probably flushed when it was about nine inches long. Now it must have been thirty-five feet long, its jaw five feet across. Its camouflage was superb. It was almost as if the animal had evolved right there.
But it didn't. The alligators had survived out in the world. How did they do it? Or maybe the real question is why did the rest of the dinosaurs die out and leave them here? The Jurassic roaches thought the dinosaurs would reign forever. Homo sapiens thinks of himself as lord and master, but he has had an unsteady hand on small swaths of the planet for a mere blink of the eye. The dinosaurs ruled. They were huge, fantastic animals. The swift ones would have made a slug of a cheetah, the powerful ones a flea of an elephant.
Above the rest stood the Tyrannosaurus rex. Roach nymphs did not play Bats then, they played Tyrannosaurus. And not only did they emulate the beast, many of them lived off it. The spindly forelegs of the Tyrannosaurus could barely hold kills up to its mouth, so plenty dropped; more slipped between its huge teeth. Because of this, every Tyrannosaurus had an entourage of thousands of roaches.
What happened to the noble dinosaurs? Ira, who took his nephew to the natural history museum once or twice a year, adduced several theories (which changed with the vogue in the current glossies). One year it was the Ice Age that wiped them out (but not us). Then it was the competition with smaller, supposedly smarter animals. (The shrew pitted against the Tyrannosaurus.) According to the following year's theory, a change in the earth's magnetic field had done something to release the ozone layer, letting in excessive ultraviolet radiation. (The Tyrannosaurus succumbed to freckles.) And last year he decided that an asteroid smacked into the earth 65 million years ago, causing a violent explosion whose cloud darkened the planet for years, killing off the plants, then the herbivores, and finally the carnivores. (But not the roaches.)
Every roach knows the truth: one day in South Dakota a Tyrannosaurus was finishing up a baby stegosaurus. Thousands of Blattella, Periplaneta, and Corporata roaches were harvesting the falling blood and scraps. When the carcass was tossed away, everyone ran to it. Usually the dinosaur burped and went off to nap under a giant fern. However, this time it stopped to watch the roaches and, for no obvious reason, stomped to death every one.
There had never been a single conflict between a large reptile and an insect. But the next day there were fifty more similar incidents. The peace was over.
Battle plans were drawn up by the Corporata roaches and transmitted coast to coast. The following day Coroporata battalions shadowed and mounted every Tyrannosaurus on the continent. On top of each one's head they divided into two groups, about five hundred in each. Right at sunset they struck, running into the dinosaur's nostrils and locking their bodies tightly together. The last ones used the Tyrannosaurus' own mucus to seal the passages.
Two anatomical defects in the species proved its undoing: the short forelegs could not dig into the nostrils; and because of the depth of its skull, the Tyrannosaurus could not breath through its mouth. Within half an hour of sunset on the west coast, Tyrannosaurus rex was extinct in America and soon after around the world. Other carnivores vied for their spots, and the Corporatae did them in too.
The herbivore population quickly grew. They were slovenly animals which stood in swamps all day, chewing and drooling. The roaches killed them off without a twinge. Most got the Tyrannosaurus method. The dinosaurs with thick nasal armor got the stopper treatment: several score of Corporatae ran up their urethrae with dirt and twigs, which either burst their bladders or killed them by infection. Only the small lizards were too quick, which is why they still exist to this day. The alligators survived by staying offshore.
We could have killed them too. Now I could see why we didn't. Dumb, docile, and slow, but large and fierce-looking—the welfare class of the era—the alligators were the best, safest possible souvenirs of the Jurassic period. Ironically, the Corporata roach colonies soon collapsed under the weight of their organization, and the species died out.
I RODE ANOTHER small cataract into a huge pipe. Spikes of light pierced through manhole covers. Ladders led up to a walkway beside the conduit. But the current moved slowly, and a sewage sample revealed such diversity that it told me nothing.
Thousands of turds floated down the sewer. Now, for the first time since I was flushed, I saw something moving against the current. It looked like a tiny boat, a racing shell with almost no wake, powered by long, beautifully coordinated strokes. I was amazed to see that it was a Blattella germanica.
I tried to swim across the pipe to her, getting nowhere and earning myself an extra helping of jimmies. She stopped and said, "New down here?"
"Yes, and not by choice."
"A lucky break for you. The sewer is a wonderful home—endless food, complete safety, climate control year-round. Perfect for retirement" She was good ad
vertising—sleek, exotic, graceful. Very exciting.
"I have some business at home before I can consider retirement." I explained my excrement navigation system.
She said, "Tell me what you're looking for."
"It's a mix. The staple is chicken, in all forms. There are traces of hip ethnic foods. The "100% natural" component means high concentrations of sugar, mold, fungus, and bacteria. And there will be a good amount of antacids, laxatives, aspirin, and Valium.
"Easy. Everybody knows that neighborhood. We're going to have to turn you around. You're heading for the sewage treatment plant."
Visions of vats the size of apartment buildings came to mind, of huge drums stenciled with the skull and crossbones, acids dumped in by droning mechanical arms.
"Yeah, let's turn me around."
But she had disappeared.
What did I say? Why did she leave me? Oh my god, a sewage treatment plant! I'd disappear like a fudgesicle on a hot sidewalk.
Like her, now. Smooth. Pull. Pull. The turds flowed over me as I drifted closer to the plant. Come on. Pull. Pull. But I just couldn't get it. The debris on my back was making me gag. What an awful way to die. I so desperately wanted one last shot at Ira.
Suddenly I was lifted out of the water. I was standing on hard chitin; she had swum underneath me. Why did I think she had abandoned me? There must have been human toxins in the shit.
We started upstream. Her sweeping strokes were a pleasure to watch. I lowered my hindquarters onto her cuticle to feel the vibrations—a sexual thrill without pheromones. Very provocative; very unusual.
We passed through three long segments of pipe, each narrower and darker than the one before. She said, "We'll wait here."
Swarms of large pointy gray forms cut through the sewage. When one came close I could see fur tufted with turd, strands of shit hanging like brown tinsel from whiskers, little beady eyes with crusted yellow frames. Nervous, driven. The legendary sewer rats.
The Roaches Have No King Page 17