The Cockroaches of Stay More

by Donald Harington

How can he propose to her in such an unromantic place as a toilet? “You’d have to get me out of here,” she replies. “And you can’t.”

  “I’ll get you out of there,” he says, and for a moment he disappears from the wooden rim of the seat, but reappears beneath the seat, on the edge of the porcelain bowl, which he is scratching at with his gitalongs.

  “Don’t try to climb down!” she cautions him. “You’ll get stuck yourself, and we’ll both drown.”

  “Then I’ll drown with you, because I don’t want to live without you,” he says. “Listen. I’m going to try something. I don’t know if it will work, but we can try. I’m going to fly down there, see, and then you catch hold of my rear gitalongs, and I’ll fly you out of there!”

  “But you can’t fly that long!” she protests. “No roosterroach has ever flown for more than three full seconds.”

  “Time has stopped,” he says. “There are no seconds. But assuming there are: one second down, one second for you to grab hold, one second to get you out. Okay? Let’s try it. Here goes!”

  And before she can further protest, dear Sam springs off the edge of the bowl, his wings fluttering frantically in the clumsy way that roosterroaches have of using their useless wings on rare occasions, and he comes steadily through the air down to her, until he yells, “Grab hold!” and she bites into one of his rear gitalongs, firmly enough to hang on but not so tight as to bite off his gitalong, and then she can actually hear the beat of his wings! He thrashes his wings, and she can feel herself being lifted, slowly, out of the water! But so slowly! Surely three seconds have passed already. He rises upward, beating his wings until it would seem his heart would give out, and she herself senses that the three seconds have expired. Time is up, Time is out, Time is over, and if she continues clinging to him she will wester him. And just in the instant before his heart can fail, she releases her bite on his gitalong, and drops, falls, back down into the water, and he has strength only to give his wings one last solid beat that lands him back on the edge of the wooden seat.

  He collapses there. She collapses into the water, shaken and with only enough of her wits remaining to remember to keep herself afloat. She can hear Sam panting and wheezing, and it seems to take forever for him to regain his voice and ask her, “Why did you let go?”

  “If I hadn’t, you wouldn’t have made it,” she says. “You know that.”

  He seems to know that. “Well, let’s try it again,” he suggests.

  “No,” she says firmly. “You’ve already used up your strength. You couldn’t possibly succeed on the second try.”

  “Well,” he says, “I suppose I can just sit here and try to keep Sharon from flushing you away whenever She comes back.”

  It takes Tish a while to realize that Sam is attempting to make a kind of half-serious joke. She does not laugh. “When do you think She’ll be coming back?” she asks.

  “The question is not when but if,” Sam says. “There is some doubt that She will be coming back at all. But I for one know that She will, eventually.”

  “And when She does, She’ll flush me.”

  “Not if I can help it.”

  “Sam, Sam, listen, in case She flushes me, I want to tell you where my easteregg is hidden—our easteregg, because it’s yours too—I want you to find it, and make sure our babies get back home to Stay More, and then someday you can tell them about me.” The pathos of this declaration makes Tish begin to cry.

  “Hoimin’s already told me how to find it,” Sam says. “We’ll find it. You and I will find it, and when our babies hatch we’ll give a party.”

  The prospect of that almost comforts Tish; she snivels and tries to summon up the Fate-Thing to keep her company during the coming hours.

  Chapter thirty-seven

  Sam will always remember the toilet seat as the place where he got religion. It is of golden oak, with chrome hinges attaching it to the back of the bowl, and he has spent hours and hours on it, either perched at the edge, talking with Tish, or impatiently, anxiously, nervously walking around it, around and around and around it, as on a racetrack. He must keep talking to Tish, so she won’t fall asleep, because if she falls asleep she will drown.

  “Funny,” she has remarked to him, once, trying to sound light, “all that time my house was floating down the creek, and so many of my brothers and sisters were drowning, it never occurred to me that I might ever wester by water. And now…”

  He is desperate with worry, and it is precisely such states which drive some folks into religion, although this is not to say that there aren’t many deeply and truly religious persons who have never been worried, or frantic, or feeling so utterly helpless. Not once does it ever dawn on Sam to pray—not to Man, certainly, or to Woman, or even to God, although he is well aware of the presumed fact of God’s existence, a fact which all generations of Ingledews have steadfastly denied. And Sam is not about to become religious in the sense of accepting that fact, let alone praying to God. No, Sam is about to become religious in the sense of believing that there is not one Man, or one Woman, but many of Them, and They have not perished from this earth, and never will, and if we continue to worship Them, and honor Them, and love Them, They have the power to keep all of us staying more, forever and ever, amen. Call this religion polytheism or myriotheism; call it secular humanism, even; Sam is about to become a passionate convert to it, and eventually a preacher of it, and he will always remember (and relate to his audiences) that his conversion took place on the seat of a toilet wherein his true love floated in peril of drowning or being flushed away.

  To pass the time while they wait for an outcome unknown, a fate unimagined, Sam even tells Tish of his conversion, his new belief, and his plan to preach it. Tish laughs, perhaps at the thought of him preaching. It is good, at least, to hear her laughing.

  But now his tailprongs pick up a sound he has not heard since he first began to lose his hearing: the engine of an automobile. He runs to the front porch and sees a car driving into the yard. From the passenger seat, Sharon emerges, and, before closing Her door, speaks at length with the Driver, Her voice too distant for Sam to hear. Nor can he see the Driver. Sharon closes the door. The automobile leaves. Sharon turns and approaches Her house. She begins to climb the steps. Squire Sam rushes back into Her bedroom, telling himself to keep calm, at all costs. Do not panic, he says to himself, more than once. But think, he says to himself. Think. Think! There must be some way to keep the Woman out of Her bathroom, or keep Her from flushing the toilet.

  The Woman enters Her bedroom. She flings Herself across Her bed, and simply lies there, face down. Sam from this low perspective cannot see Her face. Are Her eyes closed? He waves his sniffwhips for a long time, trying to detect Her slumberscent. There is none. Is the Woman silently crying? Has Man westered, after all? Is Sharon alone in this world? For the longest time, or, since Time has stopped and the Clock sits west and silent on its mantelshelf, there is no movement or sound from the Woman.

  Sam begins climbing the coverlet. He will not let Her see him, but he wants to get as close as possible to Her. He wants to see Her beautiful face, to tell if he can if She is grieving, if She is mourning the west of Man. Yes, Her eyes are open, but She looks not at him or at anything but off toward the general direction of the mantel, not looking at it but just toward it. If there is grief or even sadness in Her face, Sam cannot tell. She looks simply tired, very tired. “Sleep,” he says to Her. “Why don’t you sleep?”

  If only She would fall asleep, he could have a grace period in which to make one last effort to save Tish. Sam has decided that if he cannot prevent Tish from being flushed away, he will go with her. Even if it is to westwardness and oblivion in a subterranean septic tank, he will join her on that last journey. If there is any chance in this world that the pipe leads not to an enclosed septic tank but to a drain field or even to the creek, there is always the chance that Tish could survive, if he is with her, to help her and guide her. But his many walks and hikes in the vici
nity of Parthenon have never shown him any hole which could be the outlet of the drain, so probably its outlet is within the tank. Probably he and Tish both would drown before they reached the tank. But whatever her destiny, it shall be his too.

  The Woman lies prone, staring vacantly into space for a very long time. If She remains much longer, inevitably She will have to get up and go use Her bathroom. As he is thinking this thought, Sharon moves. She turns over, raises Her upper body, and sits up. But She does not stand. Sitting on the edge of the bed, She reaches for the telephone, holds it to Her ear and listens for a long moment, then pokes Her finger into the dial and turns the dial, then again, several times.

  “Gran,” Sharon says, “I’m home. Yes. Vernon drove to the airport and got me. Are you all right? How long have I been gone? I would have called you from Little Rock, but Vernon said he talked to you. That’s right. Yes. Um-hmm. Yes. Unt-uh. No, he didn’t. That was before. Probably Friday afternoon, they said. I hope. What day is this? It is? Gosh, Gran, are you sure? It seems like time has stopped. Just completely stopped. I’ll look. Yes, it says eight o’clock, isn’t that ridiculous? I’ll wind it. I thought something was funny, because it hasn’t bonged once since I got home. I don’t know. Are you sure you don’t want me to…. Well, thanks, yes, I guess. Of course I paid all his expenses, the doctors’ bills too, and all. The least I could do. Well, I’ll let you know. Thanks again. Goodnight, Gran. Sleep tight.”

  Sharon puts the phone back where it was. Now She stands. Sam jumps off the bed and heads for the bathroom, intending to place his own person between Her and the bathroom door. But She does not move to the bathroom. She moves to the mantel. She opens the Clock face, lifts the key, inserts it into the Clock, and begins to wind. Sam can hear the old familiar scritches and grindings of the Clock’s internal vitals. Sharon continues to wind. Soon the Clock will be east again. Soon the Clock will run. Soon Time will…

  Chapter thirty-eight

  …Shift entirely into the future tense, because Sharon winds the Clock too tightly, too far, too easterly, too much: the mainspring will go haywire, the secondary gear will slip off the tertiary gear, something will snap, and the Clock will begin to keep exceptional Time, Time too fast and all future: it will be Time which will not have happened yet but will always stand in possibility of happening.

  Sharon will exclaim, most unladylike, “Oh, shit.” Then she will sigh and say, “Oh well, I’ll just get a new one, an electric one that doesn’t have to be wound. Maybe I’ll just get a clock-radio for the bedside.”

  Then, at last, she will head for the bathroom. She will see a cockroach standing in her path to the bathroom. She will gasp, and then she will stamp her foot, but the cockroach will just stand there, as if he is not afraid of her, as if he’s trying to block her way to the bathroom.

  “Out of my way, Alfonse,” she will say, “or whatever your name is.”

  Will it be just her weariness that will make her think the cockroach will be speaking in reply to her? Will she just fancy the bug will be trying to talk to her?

  Since he will not budge, she will step over him, resisting an impulse to step onto him, and in her bathroom she will discover another cockroach floating in the toilet bowl, alive and kicking. “You little buggers really think you can take over my house while I’m gone?” she will say. “What are you trying to do?” She will stare down at the bug in the water, who will be staring back at her. She will impulsively reach for the handle which flushes the toilet. The first cockroach, the one she will have called Alfonse, will fly into the air, and hover above her hand without quite touching it, and she will draw back her hand, exclaiming, “Jesus! I didn’t know cockroaches could fly!” She will watch Alfonse fly down and land in the water of the bowl where the other roach will be. Now there will be two roaches in her toilet bowl.

  “Are y’all trying to commit suicide, or some-thing?” she will ask them. “Or is this just your idea of a skinny-dip, huh, Gaston?” She will have decided to address the other one as Gaston, the lesser of the two; it has no wings like Alfonse. But then she will say, “Oh, I get it. You are a female, huh, Gaston? Then I’ll call you…I’ll call you Letitia, which means happiness.” Sharon will smile to herself, and look at herself in the vanity mirror, the dark circles under her eyes from lack of sleep, the unkempt hair. She will speak to her image, “I am being so silly.”

  For the briefest instant, she will reach once again for the handle that makes the water swirl and lower and disappear in the bottom of the bowl of the toilet. But she will not. Instead, she will wad up a handful of toilet paper, and she will hold the wad down close to the water, close enough to touch the bugs or be touched by them, and she will suggest to them, “All right, Alfonse and Letitia, climb aboard.” The two cockroaches will not; they will seem to be conferring with each other about the meaning of her gesture; they will seem to be trying to back away from the offered wad of tissue.

  But finally the one she will be calling Alfonse will actually nudge Letitia, pushing her toward the wad, and the one Sharon will be calling Letitia will climb onto the wad of tissue, and Sharon will lift the wad out and hold it close to the floor and give it a shake, and Letitia will be on the floor. Then Sharon will return the wad to the bowl and hold it close to the other one and she will say, “And now, Alfonse, you climb on too.” And he will. And then she will set him down on the floor beside Letitia.

  The two bugs will seem reluctant to decamp. They will almost seem to be having a discussion on whether or not to decamp.

  But then they will walk together, side by side, out through the door, and Sharon will be alone.

  Before going to bed, she will set out a saucer with some milk in it, and a cookie on the edge of it. She will study the saucer for a while, as if she will be waiting to see if her cockroaches will come to it. They will not.

  In the morning, she will look to see if any of the milk will be gone. It will not be. Nor will the cookie appear to have been sampled. She will throw the milk into the sink, and untie the garbage bag to put the cookie into the garbage. When she will untie the garbage bag, a cockroach will leap out of it, startling her. “Alfonse?!” she will cry. But there will have been no way the cockroach she will have called Alfonse will have been able to get inside that tied garbage bag.

  The cockroach liberated from the garbage bag will make a beeline for the front door, and the porch, and she will follow, watching the cockroach scamper down from the porch and off in the direction of Larry’s house. The same direction that the whole horde of cockroaches had seemed to point, that evening, oh so many evenings ago.

  She will be tempted to follow, for she will intend to be going that way, anyway, soon. But first she will have her breakfast, and an extra cup of coffee, to dispel the remnant of the possibility that she will be imagining things.

  Still, she will be edgy and nervous when she will at length walk to Larry’s house, and the sight of his car parked behind the house will cause her to stumble and grab a tree for support, until she will remember that the car will never have been moved. Or will it have?

  It will be a beautiful morning in Stay More, a gorgeous morning, one of those sunny springtime (or early summer) days, more rare than June is rare, and she will be almost reluctant to go indoors. She will want to stay out here in the sunshine, breathing the nice air. It will be unpleasant inside the house.

  It will be unpleasant inside the house: it will be unpleasant on the porch, as she will climb it. As she will climb the steps, she will see a strange little thing: right in the way, at the top of the steps, stuck into the wooden porch floor, there will be a cockroach impaled upon a straight pin. It will be a fat cockroach, much fatter than her Alfonse. The way the pin is stuck through the roach’s body and into the floor will remind her of the bug collection her brother Vernon kept inside a cigar box. But Vernon will not have done this. Larry could not have done it…unless…

  The cockroach, fat and stupid-looking, will somehow arouse a fleeting pity in Sharon, p
ity that she will not have felt if it will not have been for the pity she will have taken on Alfonse and Letitia, sparing them. This dead, impaled cockroach, over which she will step as she will have stepped over Alfonse the day before, will cause her to recite aloud some old snatch of an elegy she has read in school: “And now I live, and now my life is done.”

  Sharon will not know why she will be saying that aloud, but, thinking of poetry, she will be not totally unprepared for what she will find inside the house, in Larry’s study, in his typewriter: a poem. She will have known, of course, that he sometimes attempted poetry when he wasn’t analyzing it, and she will assume, even before reading it, that this will be his own creation. His black IBM Selectric will still be running, still be on. She will reach down to feel how warm it will be, and in doing so she will cause to fly up an enormous cockroach. This will not be, cannot be, Alfonse, nor the one she liberated from the garbage bag, nor any other cockroach she will ever have seen; it will be too large, and although she will have discovered, just yesterday, that cockroaches can fly, this one will be flying all over the place, like a bird, like a bat, and she will be much more afraid of it than of any insect she has ever seen. But it will at length fly through the door and away, and she will never see it again.

  She will have one more fright before she can read the poem. She will see a mouse. If it will have been a black mouse, or a gray mouse, it will have made her cry out and jump, but it will be a white mouse, and it will not be totally a stranger, because it will be the same mouse who led the horde of cockroaches in their directive arrow and message.

  The white mouse will be on the floor near Larry’s desk, and it will be looking at her, twitching its whiskers and bobbing its nose. And then it too, like the oversize roach, will decamp.

  Sharon will return her glance to the poem, and read its title and begin reading it.