Tales of Natural and Unnatural Catastrophes

by Highsmith, Patricia

  At that moment, William C. Fordham, a Wall Street broker, was sitting in the sun in shorts on his penthouse terrace, working from home as usual with computer and telephone on either side of him. He and his girlfriend Phyllis, like most of the tenants in the jade Towers, hadn’t seen a cockroach in their apartment, and hadn’t heard a word about cockroaches in the building.

  Later that day, when Mr. Clark was about to quit his post because the evening desk manager, Paul Vinson, had arrived, a man and woman approached the desk, accompanied by one of the doormen.

  “These people are asking about rentals, sir,” said the doorman.

  “Good evening,” said Mr. Clark. “For the two of you? . . . One-or two-bedroom?”

  “One,” said the woman, “with a view east if possible.—Is it true that the Jade Towers has a roach problem just now?”

  Mr. Clark shook his head slowly. “No, madam. No.”

  “That’s what we read in the Post today. And we heard it from someone yesterday—a friend we told we were going to ask about an apartment here.”

  “A new building like this?” Mr. Clark smiled. “I think it’s a rumor put out—maybe to be funny.”

  “But you’ve heard about it too,” said the man.

  “No. No, I have not,” replied Mr. Clark, beginning to think this couple might be journalists snooping. “Would you like to see our one-bedroom apartments? There’re only two left, I believe.”

  There was not a cockroach to be seen in either of the one-bedroom apartments that Mr. Clark showed Mr. and Mrs. Ellis, and they took the first one.

  Nine days had gone by without a cockroach complaint, when Bertrand Cushings, head of the Board of Management of the Jade Towers, paid a surprise visit. Mr. Clark had seen him only twice before, and had received a firm handshake from him, when he had been taken on as one of the three desk managers. Now Mr. Cushings was accompanied by a somber-faced man whose name Mr. Clark didn’t get. The message Mr. Cushings delivered in Mr. Clark’s office behind the reception desk was that several tenants, more than twenty, in fact, had got together and engaged a lawyer and threatened to break their leases unless something was done about the cockroaches in the Jade Towers.

  “You seem to be unaware of all this,” said Mr. Cushings.

  “Not at all, sir. Ex-Pest was here twice. I sent the Board a report. I haven’t had any complaints since.” Mr. Clark felt that his face had gone white.

  “I don’t know what’s going on, but I can tell you it’s a disgrace,” said Mr. Cushings. “Jokes in the newspapers, letters from lawyers—one from our own lawyer, warning us. You’re the one supposed to have his ear to the ground here. You and what’s his name—Vinson. And Fred Miller.”

  “Yes, sir.” Mr. Clark saw in the set of Mr. Cushings’s jowl that he might have lost his job already, that Mr. Cushings had more important things on his mind now—namely millions of dollars—than the verbal sacking of Sidney Clark.

  Mr. Cushings then began to explain Ex-Pest’s plan of attack, but in an absent and murmuring way, as if since Sidney Clark might not be here for the duration of the work, why should he go into detail?

  “This’ll be a floor by floor attack. Evacuation floor by floor, all expenses paid by the Jade Towers, until this roach problem is licked. But you’ll have all this on paper. The desk managers will,” Mr. Cushings added, as if the desk managers might be other people soon.

  Mr. Cushings and his colleague departed.

  As if to underline Cushings’s words, a telephone call came then for Sidney Clark: a woman in 49 L had seen at least six cockroaches darting away two minutes ago, when she had come home and turned on the light in her kitchen.

  “Not the first time,” she said, “but six at once! I thought I really must report this . . .”

  Sidney Clark said reassuringly that the entire building was going to be fumigated, and that the problem was in good hands.

  When Paul Vinson came behind the desk, Mr. Clark told him about Cushings’s visit.

  “Floor by floor evacuation,” Vinson said. “That’s going to cost the Jade Towers a pretty penny.”

  Sidney Clark, at around 10 the next morning, received by messenger the Ex-Pest Disinfectant Plan, and signed for it. The envelope was addressed to him and Mr. Vinson and Mr. Miller. It contained a detailed schedule of the floor by floor disinfecting with Ex-Pest Unique, which would begin with basement and ground floors, necessitating closure of the Jade Cup and the Jade Corner piano bar, and of course everything else on the ground floor, the florist’s and soon, for “not more than forty-eight hours.” At the same time, the tenants of the second floor (the one above ground floor) would quit their apartments for forty-eight hours, and the procedure would be repeated in subsequent days. The desk services such as reception, presence of managers and doormen, would continue as usual. Tenants would be notified individually of their dates for evacuation. An acceleration in disinfecting was anticipated after ten days, so that three floors at a time would be evacuated during a forty-eight-hour period, resulting in the operation being completed in about one month.

  The news of this directive was leaked somehow and reported in a couple of newspapers the next day.

  “Some of our residents are justifiably annoyed by the presence of any kind of vermin in our building,” said Cushings to the press, and this appeared in the Times. “A small fault becomes a big one here, and that’s the way the Jade Towers prefers its residents to react. That’s why we’re going to solve the current problem as quickly and efficiently as is humanly possible.”

  “Roach parties” started in the Jade Towers, as the extermination program gathered momentum. In apartments and at the swimming pool, people were supposed to look out for cockroaches and count how many they had seen. A high-score man or woman was presumed to have won. A wag had floated some large jade-colored roaches made of painted balloons in the swimming pool. This somehow got photographed, and appeared in New York magazine.

  The better hotels were said to be enjoying extra patronage, with Jade Towers tenants being put up for at least two days and in fine style. Then there were tall stories about super-cockroaches which, having fed on caviar and buttery croissants, had grown to great size and boldness, fending off workmen who wanted to enter apartments to fumigate. Another story told of cockroaches which had captured an elevator and were using it to go up and down as they pleased, taking themselves to safer floors, and frightening off, by their number, workmen who tried to smoke them out.

  This last story might have been closest to the truth. Some cockroaches may have used the elevators, if only by accident, but all the insects still alive were going upward. Ex-Pest had anticipated this, which was why the enemy was being attacked from the ground floor upward. Cockroaches became more in evidence on the upper floors by the time Ex-Pest reached the fortieth floor. The courteous letters to the Jade Towers tenants from the Board of Management now asked for a four-floor evacuation per day “. . . to hasten the work and minimize inconvenience . . .”

  Many tenants on the upper floors smiled cynically at this. They were already inconvenienced good and plenty by darting cockroaches, but two things influenced them in the direction of hanging on: the substitute housing in good hotels offered by the Jade Towers, and the fact that the majority of residents wanted to keep their apartments because of safety and comfort (apart from the current cockroach situation) and its accruing prestige, even. Years from now, some said, people would ask, “Were you really in the Jade Towers during the great cockroach cleanup?”

  Ex-Pest sweepers and vacuum cleaner pushers had meanwhile tidied up the lower floors, while Jade Towers guards watched, as they had during fumigation, to be sure there was no pilfering and that clothing or whatever was not damaged. The apartments were then aired.

  Tenants of the higher storys told Mr. Clark and Mr. Vinson of seeing “a few amazingly large cockroaches” in their kitchens and bathrooms, and of using their own sprays in the interim before their date for evacuation came round. Sidney Clark and
Paul Vinson were still on duty, as was Fred Miller, putting on brave faces, and beginning to think they might not lose their jobs after all, if they weathered, like captains in a storm, this roach season, which surely had a limit, just seven days from now on a Wednesday. Meanwhile, the three had their hands full with telephoning for hotel rooms ahead of schedule, because many upper-floor tenants suddenly wanted to get out all at once. Big cockroaches had been seen on the slopes in the center of the swimming pool, for instance, and no one wanted to use the pool any longer.

  An elegant old lady who lived on the eighty-sixth floor under the swimming pool, and was the matriarch of one of the wealthiest families in America, laid a thick envelope on the reception desk one afternoon when Sidney Clark was on duty. “It isn’t funny any more, despite all the jokes,” the old lady said sourly. “This is a carbon copy. The original will be sent registered post to the Board of Management.” With a rap of her cane, she turned toward the door and toddled off, accompanied by her female secretary and her man servant, both of whom lived in the apartment with her.

  Mr. Clark opened the envelope with slightly trembling fingers. Mrs. Mildred Pringle of 86 H stated that after ridding her kitchen of cockroaches at some trouble and inconvenience to herself and household, she had discovered that “huge roaches” had attacked the clothing in her closets, including three fur coats, for which a bill would be sent after she had consulted with her insurance company. She gave notice that she intended to break her lease and quit her apartment within two days, or as soon as removal service could be arranged.

  The lobby at that moment was a-bustle, as it had been ever since the Ex-Pest assault, with tenants and livened errand boys carrying suitcases in and out, and doormen going back and forth to inform people that their taxi was waiting outside. The switchboard girls, three, were occupied mainly with tenants wanting to know if their hotel rooms had been confirmed so that they could leave.

  Sidney Clark had had a couple of bad dreams about cockroaches, about turning on the light in his own small and immaculate kitchen, and seeing the walls all a-quiver with alarmed cockroaches clambering over one another as they fled. And Paul Vinson had told him—as if reality followed Sidney’s dream—a story of his having been summoned at 3 a.m. by an angry man in an apartment in the fifties floors (which were presumably now free of roaches), the man had turned the light on in his kitchen, and Vinson had seen at least a hundred flitting behind the breadbox, up under the cupboards, into corners anywhere. Now as Sidney Clark looked at the activity in the big lobby, the scowls of some people, the what-the-hell grins of others, his dreams seemed more and more like reality. Was Ex-Pest winning?

  Sidney Clark was now working several hours per day overtime, and so was Vinson, neither intending to ask for overtime pay, but preferring to hold on to their jobs, if they could. Both thought (and so did Fred Miller) that the Board of Management was using them, letting them take the flak during the roach crisis, and that Cushings intended to sack them once the extermination program was finished. The Ex-Pest men, though there were three shifts, also worked overtime, came and went through the service entrance of the Jade Towers at all hours of the day and night, and something like thirty of them in dark green uniforms must have been working at any time round the clock.

  And still complaints came in at the desk. One man had returned to his apartment on the fifty-seventh floor to find “irreparable damage” to many of his books and papers, despite his having covered them with plastic sheets which he had taped to the floor. He intended “to seek recompense” from the Jade Towers’ Board of Management. A woman tenant had found that cockroaches had got into three of her oriental rugs, which had been rolled up and sealed in heavy brown paper, and had damaged them “beyond repair, at least in this country,” and she was going to take legal action.

  The reddish-haired Ex-Pest man turned up that same day at the reception desk. Now Mr. Clark did not consider his appearance in the lobby so inappropriate, and some people standing about with luggage greeted him as if they knew him. The Ex-Pest man was pink in the face and sweaty from his exertions.

  “Fresh air smells good down here,” he remarked to Sidney Clark. “Have you got a glass of water back there? I’m still thirsty.” He indicated the open door of the office behind the desk, came round the desk and accepted the glass of water that Mr. Clark handed him. “Wow! Upstairs!—Those cockroaches are laying eggs faster than normal, I swear!” He wiped his lips with his bare forearm.

  “Wh-what floor are you on today?”

  “Eighty-fifth and -sixth. We’re on schedule and gettin’ there, but man! No tenants up on top now, y’know, just us and the roaches. Ha-ha!”

  Mr. Clark knew that the penthouses had been evacuated for nearly a week, the swimming pool kept half full, but the water poisoned, because many roaches came there to drink. As if on cue with Sidney Clark’s thoughts, the Ex-Pest man said:

  “We keep an eye on the pool, maybe a couple thousand dead floating in it every day and we suck ’em off, but we’ve seen these extra large cockroaches walking down the side and drinking and going away again. Y’been up there?”

  “No,” said Mr. Clark. Was this a dream? But he could see the Ex-Pest man’s sturdy thigh on the edge of a desk, where Mr. Clark wished he hadn’t parked himself. “But you’re bound to be achieving something. You say you’re removing a lot of dead roaches too.” Mr. Clark moved toward the office door, to indicate that he had to get back to the desk.

  “Sure, but the ones way up there are mostly bigger, and they’re not dying so fast, that’s what’s interesting. And they’re multiplying faster. Rats do that too, y’know, after an extermination program, to fill in the gaps in their population. Did you know that?—Well, I’ll split. Thanks for the water.”

  A couple of people were waiting at the reception desk, and one of the switchboard girls was trying to cope. Mr. Clark squared his shoulders and advanced.

  “Hey!” called the Ex-Pest man. “If you come up, ask for Ricky!” He jabbed his chest with his thumb. “You won’t recognize me in my gear up there.”

  Sidney Clark thought that it might make a good impression on the Board if he could say that he had paid a visit upstairs to see how the work was progressing. So when Paul Vinson arrived in early afternoon, Mr. Clark left the desk. He rode up in an elevator with a silent man and woman who got off in the fifties, kept on going up with a definite feeling that he was about to enter a danger zone, something like a battlefield where bullets might be flying. Absurd, he told himself. Some thirty men were working where he was going, and no deaths or even injuries had been reported as yet.

  “Here, got a suit for you,” said a figure Mr. Clark could not recognize, but he knew the voice as Ricky’s.

  Ricky wore a head-to-toe dark green overall with a plastic rectangle where his eyes were, so he could see out. “Zip up the front. You don’t have to worry about the air—for a while.”

  The air smelt lemony, not like a healthy citrus scent, but rather synthetic. Apartment doors stood open, and green-swathed figures came and went in the corridor whose jade floor was covered with electric lines, tubes, spray tanks on wheels, vacuum machines whose tubes led to a central container three times the size of a metal garbage can. The shouts of the men to one another were muffled and unintelligible.

  “Show you what we’re up against!” yelled Ricky close to Sidney Clark’s ear. “This way!”

  Ricky opened an apartment door, which had been unlocked, and they entered a noisier atmosphere, where four or five men fired sprayers from Ex-Pest Unique tanks strapped to their backs. They aimed the stuff behind bookcases that were covered with plastic sheets, under sofas and couches. Mr. Clark was sweating already. He looked down at the floor and jumped a little. Cockroaches were twitching, rolling over one another—one turned on its back and remained so—others dashed directionlessly, and they were of all sizes, from what Mr. Clark considered normal size to nearly three inches long. He stamped a foot to shake off a few that had crawled on to h
is green-covered lower leg.

  “All these’ll die!” Ricky shouted. “Don’t worry, they can’t get into your suit! They’ve come up from the lower floors!”

  Sidney Clark kicked at a large cockroach which seemed determined to attach itself to him. Christ! He peered up through the rectangular plastic before his eyes, and saw that the high white ceiling glistened with the shiny, light-brown backs of cockroaches, all trembling, some dropping as he watched.

  Ricky patted his shoulder reassuringly. “Tomorrow the vacuum boys’ll be in for the corpses! Let’s go!”

  They next visited a vacuum-stage apartment, where it was impossible to talk because of the din. To Sidney Clark’s disgust, he saw live cockroaches being sucked up from the floor, along with crusty, motionless hundreds. Had all the cockroaches in New York come here? “. . . burnt!” Ricky roared in Mr. Clark’s ear. “Below!” Ricky pointed downward, maybe to indicate basement furnaces.

  When they were out in the corridor again, Ricky shouted, “Want to see the swimming pool?”

  Mr. Clark shook his head, gave a polite smile that Ricky could not see and, gesturing downward, said that he had to get back to work. As he glanced at the nearby elevator doors, Mr. Clark noticed two fat cockroaches squeezing themselves with difficulty, but making it, into the crack between the floor and the elevator shaft doors. They were not committing suicide down the shaft, he knew, but would climb upward, away from the ascending fumes. Sidney Clark got out of his suit, and entered the elevator that Ricky had summoned and was holding.

  “You give us a good report!” yelled Ricky. “Because we’re winding this up Wednesday, coupla days ahead of schedule!”

  That night, Sidney Clark had no bad dreams, because he couldn’t sleep. When he closed his eyes, he saw twitching roaches, long antennae trembling, seeking a way to flee. Their backs glistened as if with oil, they covered every surface in Sidney Clark’s imagination—walls, ceilings, floors. Nonsense, he told himself. He gave a tremendous sigh, because he had been holding his breath. He’d seen the vacuums taking up hundreds in seconds, dead for ever. The cockroaches were going upward to inevitable destruction, and tenants of the Jade Towers were moving back. The second to sixtieth floors had nearly all their tenants back, except those who happened to be traveling, and nearly a hundred tenants were due back in the next two days. Floors up to the seventy-fifth had been declared “disinfected and fume-free,” but the Board was giving tenants an extra day in their hotels, if they so wished, as a gesture of goodwill and also to try to avoid complaints about headache among tenants who might be sensitive to Ex-Pest Unique’s fumes.