The Year's Best Science Fiction 11

THE ROACHES THOMAS M. DISCH

Miss Marcia Kenwell had a perfect horror of cockroaches. It was an altogether different horror than the one which she felt, for instance, toward the color puce. Marcia Kenwell loathed the little things. She couldn’t see one without wanting to scream. Her revulsion was so extreme that she could not bear to crush them under the soles of her shoes. No, that would be too awful. She would run, instead, for the spray-can of Black Flag and inundate the little beast with poison until it ceased to move or got out of reach into one of the cracks where they all seemed to live. It was horrible, unspeakably horrible, to think of them nestling in the walls, under the linoleum, only waiting for the lights to be turned off, and then. . . . No, it was best not to think about it.

Every week she looked through the Times hoping to find another apartment, but either the rents were prohibitive (this was Manhattan, and Marcia’s wage was a mere $62.50 a week, gross) or the building was obviously infested. She could always tell: there would be husks of dead roaches scattered about in the dust beneath the sink, stuck to the greasy backside of the stove, lining the out-of-reach cupboard shelves like the rice on the church steps after a wedding. She left such rooms in a passion of disgust, unable even to think till she reached her own apartment, where the air would be thick with the wholesome odors of Black Flag, Roach-It, and the toxic pastes that were spread on slices of potato and hidden in a hundred cracks which only she and the roaches knew about.

At least, she thought, I keep my apartment clean. And truly the linoleum under the sink, the backside and underside of the stove, and the white contact paper lining her cupboards were immaculate. She could not understand how other people could let these matters get so entirely out-of-hand. They must be Puerto Ricans, she decided—and shivered again with horror, remembering that litter of empty husks, the filth and the disease.

Such extreme antipathy toward insects—toward one particular insect—may seem excessive, but Marcia Kenwell was not really exceptional in this. There are many women, bachelor women like Marcia chiefly, who share this feeling, though one may hope, for sweet charity’s sake, that they escape Marcia’s peculiar fate.

Marcia’s phobia was, as in most such cases, hereditary in origin. That is to say, she inherited it from her mother, who had a morbid fear of anything that crawled or skittered or lived in tiny holes. Mice, frogs, snakes, worms, bugs—all could send Mrs. Kenwell into hysterics, and it would indeed have been a wonder if little Marcia had not taken after her. It was rather strange, though, that her fear had become so particular, and stranger still that it should particularly be cockroaches that captured her fancy, for Marcia had never seen a single cockroach, didn’t know what they were. (The Kenwells were a Minnesota family, and Minnesota families simply don’t have cockroaches.) In fact, the subject did not arise until Marcia was nineteen and setting out (armed with nothing but a high-school diploma and pluck, for she was not, you see, a very attractive girl) to conquer New York.

On the day of her departure, her favorite and only surviving aunt came with her to the Greyhound terminal (her parents being deceased) and gave her this parting advice: “Watch out for the roaches, Marcia darling. New York City is full of cockroaches.” At that time (at almost any time really) Marcia hardly paid attention to her aunt, who had opposed the trip from the start and given a hundred or more reasons why Marcia had better not go, not till she was older at least.

Her aunt had been proven right on all counts: Marcia, after five years and fifteen employment-agency fees, could find nothing in New York but dull jobs at mediocre wages; she had no more friends than when she lived on West 16th; and, except for its view (the Chock-Full-O’-Nuts warehouse and a patch of sky), her present apartment on lower Thompson Street was not a great improvement on its predecessor.

The city was full of promises, but they had all been pledged to other people. The city Marcia knew was sinful, indifferent, dirty, and dangerous. Every day she read accounts of women attacked in subway stations, raped in the streets, knifed in their own beds. A hundred people looked on curiously all the while and offered no assistance. And on top of everything else there were the roaches!

There were roaches everywhere, but Marcia didn’t see them until she’d been in New York a month. They came to her—or she to them—at Silversmith’s on Nassau Street, a stationery shop where she had been working for three days. It was the first job she’d been able to find. Alone or helped by a pimply stockboy (in all fairness it must be noted that Marcia was not without an acne problem of her own), she wandered in rows of rasp-edged metal shelves in the musty basement, making an inventory of the sheaves and piles and boxes of bond paper, leatherette-bound diaries, pins and clips, and carbon paper. The basement was dirty and so dim that she needed a flashlight for the lowest shelves. In the obscurest corner, a faucet leaked perpetually into a gray sink; she had been resting near this sink, sipping a cup of tepid coffee (saturated, in the New York manner, with sugar and drowned in milk), thinking, probably, of how she could afford several things she simply couldn’t afford, when she noticed the dark spots moving on the side of the sink. At first she thought they might be no more than motes floating in the jelly of her eyes, or the giddy dots that one sees after over-exertion on a hot day. But they persisted too long to be illusory, and Marcia drew nearer, feeling compelled to bear witness. How do I know they are insects? she thought.

How are we to explain the fact that what repels us most can be at times—at the same time—inordinately attractive? Why is the cobra poised to strike so beautiful? The fascination of the abomination is something that. . . . Something which we would rather not account for. The subject borders on the obscene, and there is no need to deal with it here, except to note the breathless wonder with which Marcia observed these first roaches of hers. Her chair was drawn so close to the sink that she could see the mottling of their oval, unsegmented bodies, the quick scuttering of their thin legs, and the quicker flutter of their antennae. They moved randomly, proceeding nowhere, centered nowhere. They seemed greatly disturbed over nothing. Perhaps, Marcia thought, my presence has a morbid effect on them?

Only then did she become aware, aware fully, that these were the cockroaches of which she had been warned. Repulsion took hold; her flesh curdled on her bones. She screamed and fell back in her chair, almost upsetting a shelf of odd-lots. Simultaneously the roaches disappeared over the edge of the sink and into the drain.

Mr. Silversmith, coming downstairs to inquire the source of Marcia’s alarm, found her supine and unconscious. He sprinkled her face with tap water, and she awoke with a shudder of nausea. She refused to explain why she had screamed and insisted that she must leave Mr. Silversmith’s employ immediately. He, supposing that the pimply stock-boy (who was his son) had made a pass at Marcia, paid her for the three days she had worked and let her go without regrets. From that moment on, cockroaches were to be a regular feature of Marcia’s existence.

On Thompson Street Marcia was able to reach a sort of stalemate with the cockroaches. She settled into a comfortable routine of pastes and powders, scrubbing and waxing, prevention (she never had even a cup of coffee without washing and drying cup and coffeepot immediately afterward) and ruthless extermination. The only roaches who trespassed upon her two cozy rooms came up from the apartment below, and they did not stay long, you may be sure. Marcia would have complained to the landlady, except that it was the landlady’s apartment and her roaches. She had been inside, for a glass of wine on Christmas eve, and she had to admit that it wasn’t exceptionally dirty. It was, in fact, more than commonly clean—but that was not enough in New York. If everyone, Marcia thought, took as much care as I, there would soon be no cockroaches in New York City.

Then (it was March and Marcia was halfway through her sixth year in the city) the Shchapalovs moved in next door. There were three of them—two men and a woman— and they were old, though exactly how old it was hard to say: they had been aged by more than time. Perhaps they weren’t more than forty. The woman, for instance, though she still had brown hair, had a face wrinkly as a prune and was missing several teeth. She would stop Marcia in the hallway or on the street, grabbing hold of her coatsleeve, and talk to her—always a simple lament about the weather, which was too hot or too cold or too wet or too dry. Marcia never knew half of what the old woman was saying, she mumbled so. Then she’d totter off to the grocery with her bagful of empties.

The Shchapalovs, you see, drank. Marcia, who had a rather exaggerated idea of the cost of alcohol (the cheapest thing she could imagine was vodka), wondered where they got the money for all the drinking they did. She knew they didn’t work, for on days when Marcia was home with the flu she could hear the three Shchapalovs through the thin wall between their kitchen and hers screaming at each other to exercise their adrenal glands. They’re on welfare, Marcia decided. Or perhaps the man with only one eye was a veteran on pension.

She didn’t so much mind the noise of their arguments (she was seldom home in the afternoon), but she couldn’t stand their singing. Early in the evening they’d start in, singing along with the radio stations. Everything they listened to sounded like Guy Lombardo. Later, about eight o’clock, they sang a cappella. Strange, soulless noises rose and fell like Civil Defense sirens; there were bellowings, bayings, and cries. Marcia had heard something like it once on a Folkways record of Czechoslovakian wedding chants. She was quite beside herself whenever the awful noise started up and had to leave the house till they were done. A complaint would do no good: the Shchapalovs had a right to sing at that hour.

Besides, one of the men was said to be related by marriage to the landlady. That’s how they got the apartment, which had been used as a storage space until they’d moved in. Marcia couldn’t understand how the three of them could fit into such a little space—just a room-and-a-half with a narrow window opening onto the air shaft. (Marcia had discovered that she could see their entire living space through a hole that had been broken through the wall when the plumbers had installed a sink for the Shchapalovs.)

But if their singing distressed her, what was she to do about the roaches? The Shchapalov woman, who was the sister of one man and married to the other—or else the men were brothers and she was the wife of one of them (sometimes, it seemed to Marcia, from the words that came through the walls, that she was married to neither of them— or to both), was a bad housekeeper, and the Shchapalov apartment was soon swarming with roaches. Since Marcia’s sink and the Shchapalovs’ were fed by the same pipes and emptied into a common drain, a steady overflow of roaches was disgorged into Marcia’s immaculate kitchen. She could spray and lay out more poisoned potatoes; she could scrub and dust and stuff Kleenex tissues into holes where the pipes passed through the wall: it was all to no avail. The Shchapalov roaches could always lay another million eggs in the garbage bags rotting beneath the Shchapalov sink. In a few days they would be swarming through the pipes and cracks and into Marcia’s cupboards. She would lie in bed and watch them (this was possible because Marcia kept a night-light burning in each room) advancing across the floor and up the walls, trailing the Shchapalovs’ filth and disease everywhere they went.

One such evening the roaches were especially bad, and Marcia was trying to muster the resolution to get out of her warm bed and attack them with Roach-It. She had left the windows open from the conviction that cockroaches do not like the cold, but she found that she liked it much less. When she swallowed, it hurt, and she knew she was coming down with a cold. And all because of them!

“Oh go away!” she begged. “Go away! Go away! Get out of my apartment.”

She addressed the roaches with the same desperate intensity with which she sometimes (though not often in recent years) addressed prayers to the Almighty. Once she had prayed all night long to get rid of her acne, but in the morning it was worse than ever. People in intolerable circumstances will pray to anything. Truly, there are no atheists in foxholes: the men there pray to the bombs that they may land somewhere else.

The only strange thing in Marcia’s case is that her prayers were answered. The cockroaches fled from her apartment as quickly as their little legs could carry them— and in straight lines, too. Had they heard her? Had they understood?

Marcia could still see one cockroach coming down from the cupboard. “Stop!” she commanded. And it stopped.

At Marcia’s spoken command, the cockroach would march up and down, to the left and to the right. Suspecting that her phobia had matured into madness, Marcia left her warm bed, turned on the light, and cautiously approached the roach, which remained motionless, as she had bade it. “Wiggle your antennas,” she commanded. The cockroach wiggled its antennae.

She wondered if they would all obey her and found, within the next few days, that they all would. They would do anything she told them to. They would eat poison out of her hand. Well, not exactly out of her hand, but it amounted to the same thing. They were devoted to her. Slavishly.

It is the end, she thought, of my roach problem. But of course it was only the beginning.

Marcia did not question too closely the reason the roaches obeyed her. She had never much troubled herself with abstract problems. After expending so much time and attention on them, it seemed only natural that she should exercise a certain power over them. However she was wise enough never to speak of this power to anyone else—even to Miss Bismuth at the insurance office. Miss Bismuth read the horoscope magazines and claimed to be able to communicate with her mother, aged sixty-eight, telepathically. Her mother lived in Ohio. But what would Marcia have said: that she could communicate telepathically with cockroaches? Impossible.

Nor did Marcia use her power for any other purpose than keeping the cockroaches out of her own apartment. Whenever she saw one, she simply commanded it to go to the Shchapalov apartment and stay there. It was surprising then that there were always more roaches coming back through the pipes. Marcia assumed that they were younger generations. Cockroaches are known to breed fast. But it was easy enough to send them back to the Shchapalovs.

“Into their beds,” she added as an afterthought. “Go into their beds.” Disgusting as it was, the idea gave her a queer thrill of pleasure.

The next morning, the Shchapalov woman, smelling a little worse than usual (Whatever was it, Marcia wondered, that they drank?), was waiting at the open door of her apartment. She wanted to speak to Marcia before she left for work. Her housedress was mired from an attempt at scrubbing the floor, and while she sat there talking, she tried to wring out the scrubwater.

“No idea!” she exclaimed. “You ain’t got no idea how bad! ‘S terrible!”

“What?” Marcia asked, knowing perfectly well what.

“The boogs! Oh, the boogs are just everywhere. Don’t you have em, sweetheart? I don’t know what to do. I try to keep a decent house, God knows—” She lifted her rheumy eyes to heaven, testifying. “—but I don’t know what to do.” She leaned forward, confidingly. “You won’t believe this, sweetheart, but last night ...” A cockroach began to climb out of the limp strands of hair straggling down into the woman’s eyes. “... they got into bed with us! Would you believe it? There must have been a hundred of em. I said to Osip, I said—What’s wrong, sweetheart?”

Marcia, speechless with horror, pointed at the roach, which had almost reached the bridge of the woman’s nose.

“Yech!” the woman agreed, smashing it and wiping her dirtied thumb on her dirtied dress. “Goddam boogs! I hate em, I swear to God. But what’s a person gonna do? Now, what I wanted to ask, sweetheart, is do you have a problem with the boogs? Being as how you’re right next door, I thought—” She smiled a confidential smile, as though to say this is just between us ladies. Marcia almost expected a roach to skitter out between her gapped teeth.

“No,” she said. “No, I use Black Flag.” She backed away from the doorway toward the safety of the stairwell. “Black Flag,” she said again, louder. “Black Flag,” she shouted from the foot of the stairs. Her knees trembled so, that she had to hold onto the metal banister for support.

At the insurance office that day, Marcia couldn’t keep her mind on her work five minutes at a time. (Her work in the Actuarial Dividends department consisted of adding up long rows of two-digit numbers on a Burroughs adding machine and checking the similar additions of her coworkers for errors.) She kept thinking of the cockroaches in the tangled hair of the Shchapalov woman, of her bed teeming with roaches, and of other, less concrete horrors on the periphery of consciousness. The numbers swam and swarmed before her eyes, and twice she had to go to the Ladies’ Room, but each time it was a false alarm. Nevertheless, lunchtime found her with no appetite. Instead of going down to the employee cafeteria she went out into the fresh April air and strolled along 23rd Street. Despite the spring, it all seemed to bespeak a sordidness, a festering corruption. The stones of the Flatiron Building oozed damp blackness; the gutters were heaped with soft decay; the smell of burning grease hung in the air outside the cheap restaurants like cigarette smoke in a close room.

The afternoon was worse. Her fingers would not touch the correct numbers on the machine unless she looked at them. One silly phrase kept running through her head: “Something must be done. Something must be done.” She had quite forgotten that she had sent the roaches into the Shchapalovs’ bed in the first place.

That night, instead of going home immediately, she went to a double feature on 42nd Street. She couldn’t afford the better movies. Susan Hayward’s little boy almost drowned in quicksand. That was the only thing she remembered afterwards.

She did something then that she had never done before. She had a drink in a bar. She had two drinks. Nobody bothered her; nobody even looked in her direction. She took a taxi to Thompson Street (the subways weren’t safe at that hour) and arrived at her door by eleven o’clock. She didn’t have anything left for a tip. The taxi driver said he understood.

There was a light on under the Shchapalovs’ door, and they were singing. It was eleven o’clock! “Something must be done,” Marcia whispered to herself earnestly. “Something must be done.”

Without turning on her own light, without even taking off her new spring jacket from Ohrbach’s, Marcia got down on her knees and crawled under the sink. She tore out the Kleenexes she had stuffed into the cracks around the pipes.

There they were, the three of them, the Shchapalovs, drinking, the woman plumped on the lap of the one-eyed man, and the other man, in a dirty undershirt, stamping his foot on the floor to accompany the loud discords of their song. Horrible. They were drinking, of course; she might have known it, and now the woman pressed her roachy mouth against the mouth of the one-eyed man— kiss, kiss. Horrible, horrible. Marcia’s hands knotted into her mouse-colored hair, and she thought: The filth, the disease! Why, they hadn’t learned a thing from last night!

Sometime later (Marcia had lost track of time) the overhead light in the Shchapalovs’ apartment was turned off. Marcia waited till they made no more noise. “Now,” Marcia said, “all of you....

“All of you in this building, all of you that can hear me, gather round the bed, but wait a little while yet. Patience. All of you. . . .” The words of her command fell apart into little fragments, which she told like the beads of a rosary—little brown ovoid wooden beads. “. . . gather round . . . wait a little while yet . . . all of you . . . patience . . . gather round. . . .” Her hand stroked the cold-water pipes rhythmically, and it seemed that she could hear them—gathering, scuttering up through the walls, coming out of the cupboards, the garbage bags—a host, an army, and she was their absolute queen.

“Now!” she said. “Mount them! Cover them! Devour them!”

There was no doubt that she could hear them now. She heard them quite palpably. Their sound was like grass in the wind, like the first stirrings of gravel dumped from a truck. Then there was the Shchapalov woman’s scream, and curses from the men, such terrible curses that Marcia could hardly bear to listen.

A light went on, and Marcia could see them, the roaches, everywhere. Every surface, the walls, the floors, the shabby sticks of furniture, was mottly thick with Blattelae germanicae. There was more than a single thickness.

The Shchapalov woman, standing up in her bed, screamed monotonously. Her pink rayon nightgown was speckled with brown-black dots. Her knobby fingers tried to brush bugs out of her hair, off her face. The man in the undershirt who a few minutes before had been stomping his feet to the music stomped now more urgently, one hand still holding onto the lightcord. Soon the floor was slimy with crushed roaches, and he slipped. The light went out. The woman’s scream took on a rather choked quality, as though . . .

But Marcia wouldn’t think of that. “Enough,” she whispered. “No more. Stop.”

She crawled away from the sink, across the room, on to her bed, which tried with a few tawdry cushions to dissemble itself as a couch for the daytime. Her breathing came hard, and there was a curious constriction in her throat. She was sweating incontinently.

From the Shchapalovs’ room came scuffling sounds, a door banged, running feet, and then a louder, muffled noise, perhaps a body falling down stairs. The landlady’s voice: “What the hell do you think you’re—” Other voices overriding hers. Incoherencies, and footsteps returning up the stairs. Once more, the landlady: “There ain’t no boogs here, for heaven’s sake. The boogs is in your heads. You’ve got the d.t.’s, that’s what. And it wouldn’t be any wonder, if there were boogs. The place is filthy. Look at that crap on the floor. Filth! I’ve stood just about enough from you. Tomorrow you move out, hear? This used to be a decent building.”

The Shchapalovs did not protest their eviction. Indeed, they did not wait for the morrow to leave. They quitted their apartment with only a suitcase, a laundry bag, and an electric toaster. Marcia watched them go down the steps through her half-opened door. It’s done, she thought. It’s all over.

With a sigh of almost sensual pleasure, she turned on the lamp beside the bed, then the other lamps. The room gleamed immaculately. Deciding to celebrate her victory, she went to the cupboard, where she kept a bottle of crème de menthe.

The cupboard was full of roaches.

She had not told them where to go, where not to go, when they left the Shchapalov apartment. It was her own fault.

The great silent mass of roaches regarded Marcia calmly, and it seemed to the distracted girl that she could read their thoughts, their thought rather, for they had but a single thought. She could read it as clearly as she could read the illuminated billboard for Chock-Full-O’-Nuts outside her window. It was delicate as music issuing from a thousand tiny pipes. It was an ancient musicbox opened after centuries of silence: “We love you we love you we love you.”

Something strange happened inside Marcia then, something unprecedented: she responded.

“I love you too,” she replied. “Oh, I love you. Come to me, all of you. Come to me. I love you. Come to me. I love you. Come to me.”

From every corner of Manhattan, from the crumbling walls of Harlem, from restaurants on 56th Street, from warehouses along the river, from sewers and from orange peels moldering in garbage cans, the loving roaches came forth and began to crawl toward their mistress.