"But at the same time, the operations bred a subtle organization in the colony. Citizens began to think of the plans, the future, the colony, first, before their own immediate welfare. They got used to being told what to do. Their faith in the future was based not on their own competence but on yours.
"The night of the dinner party—when you didn't return, you coward—they were lost. After months of dependence, they didn't know what to do. They had forgotten how to take care of themselves.
"Now they're prey for anyone who will promise them anything. Going to the land of milk and honey doesn't sound any more bizarre than a lot of your schemes. And look at you and me. How can we explain this?"
I was astounded. Except for my close friends, I had never felt the slightest support from the colony. I never got help without offering a bribe. If citizens had been corrupted by my vision, I didn't see it; I couldn't believe that doing a little labor for a Cheerio or a waterbug shell once or twice could have such a profound effect. For the most part the citizens had watched and waited in the baseboard, selfish and lazy, while I worked.
I never represented myself as a savior. When I offered a strategy, citizens followed me out of pure self-interest when they thought I was right, and reviled and rejected me when they thought I wasn't. How did that instill self-abnegation or organization?
Bismarck said, "If you're blaming yourself, you're an unbearable egotist. I'll have to ask you to step aside so I can die in humbler air."
"I don't feel the slightest guilt or responsibility. I was the only one who tried to change our fortunes. No offense."
Bismarck used his only free part, the one antenna, to strike the top of his head in applause. "Well done, lad. You have edited the truth so you can have a peaceful death."
"Bastard, I remember the truth."
His laugh was labored. The posture made all expression strenuous. He fell silent and soon he was asleep.
I lost track of time. Suddenly I was startled by the clomping and shuffling of shoes. Ira and Ruth. The shoes passed within a yard of us. So close yet so safe—like being in the middle of an artillery barrage, knowing you couldn't possibly be hit.
Aromas soon permeated the motel. Bismarck was wakened by the clamor. He sniffed. "I have to cut down on my cholesterol. Thank God I'm here so I don't have to eat any of those eggs."
As the dishes and pots were washed, I could smell the moist detergent and hear the abrasion. "Pinky!" I said. "I just remembered. That's you're real name. You were one of the Brillo boys!"
"Who told you that?"
"You did. A long time ago."
"You'd take the word of someone named Pinky?"
"I think it's adorable. Why did you change it?"
"Ask Soapy Barbarossa... And grant a roach his dying request, never call me that."
The shoes left, and the motel was quiet. The others were still. Were they dead? Asleep? I couldn't sleep; there would soon be ample opportunity for that. The compressor of the refrigerator, just beside us, kept switching on and off, our relentless timekeeper.
Ira and Ruth didn't return to the kitchen until the following morning. Bismarck looked much worse. The specks of gray that had appeared overnight in his carapace were a terminal sign. He was going to die long before I did. The thought of dying had become bearable to me because I had pictured it in his company, joking and jousting. Without him I would be prey to my howling fear.
"Bismarck!" I cried.
He woke. "What?" His weak, crackly morning voice was Caruso to me.
"Good morning."
"Good morning? You woke me up to say good morning? Leave me alone until check-out time. Can't a roach get some sleep around here?"
He dozed for several more hours and awoke in a serious mood. "You know you can get out of here."
"Great. Let's go."
"Not us. You. Look at your legs. Only the tips are caught. If you're very careful you can leave them behind."
I laughed. "Then what would I walk on?"
"Your new ones. When you molt. Are you a total ninny?"
"Molt at my age? Who's the ninny?" I struck my back with an antenna. I sounded hollow, like a gourd.
"Let the dead bury their dead. I'm going to save you. You'll always owe me for this one, and all I regret is that I won't be around to remind you...
"In a day, maybe two, I'm going to die. Eat me. Don't grimace; compared to most of your diet, I'm champagne and caviar. I will fill you out for a quick molt. And that, my friend, will set you free."
My mind would not accept the idea. But he was waiting for a response, so I said, "I'd rather you didn't die before I do."
"Numbers, you're hopeless."
The motel was quiet all day. Our starvation was marked by the compressor.
Ira and Ruth, our other faithful markers, returned and ate dinner. That night several more citizens died. As for as I could tell the motel now had eight dead guests and two living. And the register was going to change again.
In the morning Bismarck looked still worse. He was grayer, his back shedding flakes of chitin.
"Bismarck," I said.
There was no answer.
"Bismarck!"
Still no answer. No movement.
"Damn you, Bismarck, answer me!" I screamed.
"More pressing business this morning?" His voice was low and weak.
"Don't ever do that to me again!"
I let him doze. The switching of the refrigerator was unbearably loud today. By midday I couldn't stand any more. "Hey, Bismarck, remember when I walked up the wall when Ira was fornicating. He got so mad I thought he was going to die in the saddle. Bismarck?"
"Sure."
"And remember when I set off that smoke detector when Ruth was in the bathroom? That was a good one, wasn't it? Bismarck?"
"Why are you asking me this?"
"I'm reminiscing."
"I'm tired."
I let him be. I was glad when Ira and Ruth reappeared and filled the motel with aromas of corned beef and cabbage. Their shoes and voices broke the maddening rhythm of the compressor. I said, "Good thing we don't have to clean up after that meal."
Bismarck did not answer. I was too scared to repeat myself. In the morning I didn't bother trying to wake him. It was no longer possible.
I rubbed his back with my antennae. "Pinky," I whispered, "you scoundrel. First you let me walk in here so you won't be alone, and now you leave me. Where are your manners? What am I going to do now, just watch you decay?" The compressor went on.
Later in the day I heard Blattella footsteps somewhere in the kitchen. My mind raced: what if the citizen approached? Would I warn him off, assuring myself a harrowing death in this rotting wax museum? Or would I let him distract me, as I had distracted Bismarck, during my last days? I debated with myself passionately.
He approached. My heart pounded. I knew I was about to speak—but to this day I don't know if it was going to be a warning or an invitation—when I heard a voice.
It was a silverfish. "Check this out. A Roach Motel."
Her friend said, "You know, not even a roach would fall for that thing. You'd think they'd give it up already."
It was a terrible night. Every time I started to nod off, I was certain I saw someone move. I would strain in the dark to see a sign of life. The effort of examining all nine bodies tired me, but each time I grew sleepy I would imagine something stirred and go through it all again.
When sleep came it was punishment. In my dream all of the bodies came alive. A set of stairs appeared in front of each of them, leading out the top of the motel. I did not get one. They easily stepped out of the adhesive and started to climb. I begged them to let me come. "Someone has to watch the motel," said Bismarck. Fuck the motel; I was going after them. But I was still stuck fast. I yelled, "Tell me how you got free." "Faith," said another voice. It was Exodus, who was standing at the main opening. "I'm going to lead you to the land of milk and honey. Do you believe me?"
"Yes, yes, lead me,"
I said. He raised his forelegs and incanted. The adhesive pad started to ripple and flow toward the sides of the box, parting down the center. My legs were freed. I was amazed. Exodus beckoned me from outside. But just before I reached him he cried, "Liar! Infidel!" He raised his forelegs and the adhesive was released, crashing down on me, coating me, securing me like a hundred manacles.
I woke trembling. I vowed never to sleep again.
Now I noticed the first specks of gray on my own back. So soon? I didn't feel as if I were dying. I wasn't even tired. But then, I had just seen that death is not announced with cannonades and crashing cymbals.
Bismarck's eyes were already beginning to decompose, to flatten, making him look gaunt, determined, as if death were not the last rest, but rather the next shift. I knew this was decay, not emotion, but it was hard to discount the expression on the face I had trusted for so long.
"Why do I want to live so badly, Pinky, when I really don't want to live at all? We used to say that we were the only animals freed from genetic prejudice, that we lived the true life. You may have, but I can't. You knew when to give up. I'm a prisoner of the survivor instinct."
I looked on my little world with new eyes. In front of me sat a hunk of flesh in early decay. That's all. Fillet of human, rat steak? I didn't know and it didn't matter. I looked it over, my salivary glands colluding in the deception, trying to choose the site for the first bite. I let my eyes wander to the face. Suddenly it was Bismarck again—the meal was gone.
I steeled myself and concentrated on his rear legs, for from the knowing eyes. Quickly I tipped forward and opened my mouth. My heart was pounding so violently that my antennae wrote figure eights in front of me. I lunged and bit into the thigh.
The chitin crackled between my mandibles. I spat it out. I couldn't do it.
Come on, Numbers. Listen to the refrigerator, time moves on. We are all flesh, but his is carrion and yours lives.
I concentrated on that as I closed in again. I took another bite. I suppressed the gag reflex and swallowed. Before I could think I took another bite, then another. I finished the thigh, then worked down the leg, stopping safely above the adhesive. With the last bite, the leg cracked in two, and the body lurched toward me. I couldn't stop, couldn't allow my mouth to begin to empty. I leaned over him and ate the other thigh. The cercus was one bite. It was flesh now, good flesh, cool and fragrant, tender from its brief aging.
I was eating on instinct. My motions became automatic, efficient. It was not a matter of hunger; I ate because there was food. I consumed the thorax and abdomen back to front, top to bottom, ever faster, loving the motions, being a cockroach again after so long. Soon I could feel my gut swell against my carapace.
When I reached the tegmen, I stopped. I didn't want to look into those eyes. I was sure I had had more than enough meat.
Leaning back, I looked at what I had done. The head was intact, but the rest was a husk ravaged by locusts, a bombed-out plane. I was a glutton, a cannibal! It made me sick. But at the same time the first nutrients from his body were clearing my mind. Though I was nauseated, I refused to vomit, which I knew would cost me my only chance to survive. Soon the horror passed.
For the first time since I'd checked in I slept well. The next day I felt sick, as my withered digestive system was unequal to the richness and volume of what I had eaten. My guts churned, but the food crept along. And oh, for a cross-wind to clear the motel of my foul, foul flatus.
On the second day I could feel new tissue reconstructing my body. Unlike the other nine guests, I was getting fatter. I was a survivor.
The call to molt is a general pressure which feels as if you want to shit in every direction at once. When I was young, molting was as easy as shitting: one contraction and the cuticle would split between my wing muscles. Flexing would work the slit open, and in a few minutes I would step out of the old carapace, a newer, bigger model.
I could already tell it wasn't going to be like that this time. I was beyond normal molting age, and my thick, tough shell was not meant to split. Though I was filling it nicely, I wasn't sure I had the strength or the endurance to get out of it.
During the third day I felt I was at peak plumpness. It was time. I opened my spiracles all the way to increase the volume of air inside my shell. Then I shut them and flexed my wing muscles, slightly engorged ever since the flight from Ruth's mound. Soon I was trembling. I contracted my abdominal and thoracic muscles. The pressure was so great that the damned carapace should have cracked in six places and flown apart. But it didn't. My eyes bulged, magnifying the cadaver set-piece that surrounded me. I would not end up like them.
But I ached with effort. I couldn't push any harder. What more could I do?
Then I heard scratching just outside. I was sure these were Blattella legs.
"Don't come in! This is a trap!" I yelled.
But in walked G-string. "Did you say something?"
In a moment she discovered she had checked in. "Hey, I'm stuck! Help me, will you? Don't just stand there." When her eyes adjusted she said, "So it's you. I should have known. You want to get us all."
G-string was a pill. She had none of the charm suggested by the stripper's garb of her name, which she had in fact taken from a piece of gut on Howie's guitar. Now I was sure I'd escape; I couldn't imagine living out my life in her company.
"Get me out!" she shrieked, contorting as the others had, locking herself in a position of perpetual discomfort. She began to curse me.
Her execrations were music to me. Strength redoubled, I flexed. Come on, split, you bastard!
G-string's struggles only succeeded in coiling her body even tighter. This may have been tragic for her, but it was grand comedy for me; now each threat or insult squeezed excrement from her body. "I'll get you!" she screamed, and two pebbles dribbled from her anus. "Are you laughing?" A puff of piss atomized from her rear.
When the cloud drifted over to me I stopped laughing. The urine was mixed with pheromones.
Imprisoned in a Roach Motel, a cannibal, bombarded by G-string's verbal venom, about to die, and all I knew, all I cared about, were the pheromones.
Immediately my phallus sprang to life. But my abdominal muscles were locked so tight that it could not pass through its normal channel. Penis pressure built. Chemistry could not be denied. Chitin cracked, and then my masculinity tore through the carapace.
I flexed again, and the seam in my shell raced around me, top and bottom, like tearing cellophane. Whizz! Zip! The sounds were wonderful. My guts felt the invigorating air. Soon I pushed the old shell in half. G-string had done it! I was free!
You emerge from a molt larger and stronger, but at first as soft as a clam's guts, and as pasty as Ira. Half an hour later melanin browns the hardening new shell. I wanted to let the new armor set before facing the world again, but I couldn't risk being trapped inside the shell of my old legs.
As I pulled out my front legs I felt them expand like dough. I carefully climbed onto the back of the corpse at my side.
The view was disquieting. I was up here, but I could see myself still down there. Up here I was mushy, off-white, unsteady. Down there I was brown and hard, posed, as I would be for all time, beside Bismarck, my irreplaceable friend. But down there I was dead among the dead. Up here I was just steps from a new life.
Only G-string stood between me and the exit from the motel. Still wrestling with the adhesive, she had lost interest in me. As soon as she stopped to rest, I hopped with my mushy legs onto a clear spot on her back. One short leap and I was free!
Then the rising pheromones struck again. My phallus slid easily from my pulpy flesh, crooning: G-string, beauty, lover! The mat below screamed: Agony, starvation, death! I had never had to weigh the pros and cons of sex before, and the debate was over in a second. The only issue was mechanics: how could I stuff it into her from up here, when the normal position would place me back in the adhesive?
"What the hell?" shrieked G-string. She grabbed one of my
legs with a free antenna—I had thought her parts were all pinned—and planted it in the glue.
Lust shut off; self-preservation switched on. I leaped for the opening, twisting awkwardly in the air because of the trapped leg. But the other five hit vinyl.
I was exhilarated and enraged, but most of all curious. In all my time in the colony I had never witnessed, or even heard of, a single instance of sadism. "Why did you do that, G-string? Can you tell me?"
"A life for a life, Numbers. You're the one who said it."
Not this life. The hostage leg was pasty and slick, like a maggot I was taking for a walk. I pulled on it, but the maggot would not heel. I had no choice but to cut it loose. I did not worry about cannibalism because the flesh was mine. I bit into the joint. The sharp pain quickly faded. I was free!
"I hope you die," she said. "I hope you get stepped on and crushed and sprayed. Don't leave me here."
"My leg is a memento. Look at it and think of me."
I went out into the kitchen and sat quietly under the toe-kick, allowing my body to firm. I had a feeling the walk back to the living room would require thicker skin.
The Breach
"ALBANY...Pierre...I know this one, Baton Rouge... Portland... What? Salem? Are you kidding me? Salem?"
It might have been just an absurd dream, until an explosion woke me. The sight of a pair of vicious alligators made me leap. I was clubbed on the head and fell to the floor. The scene slowly cleared. The toekick of the cabinet was above me; I had struck my head on it. These alligators were Ira's wing-tips. The master had slammed the cereal box with the offending quiz on the counter above me. The molt and escape had so exhausted me that I had slept here the whole night—not the wisest choice.
As I massaged my bruise, I realized that the new shell had hardened and browned. My life could begin again. The refrigerator fan blew straight across the floor at me. I no longer minded it; it had helped my chitin set.
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