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Authors: John Sladek

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BOOK: Bugs
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‘Fred, come here. Quick.
There’s a huge cockroach in the bath.’

‘Oh, that’s just Kafka.’

‘Come in here and kill it.’
Her voice was not laughing. He went in and stepped on the large insect. When he had wiped it away with toilet paper and washed out the remains, when he had flushed the toilet and scouted around for other creatures, he kissed her.

‘All right?’

‘I hate those bloody things.’

She was pink and lovely, and he hated to leave her. ‘Scrub your back?’

‘Beat it, buster. Scram, mac. Take it on the lam, pal.’

‘I’ll take a powder, sister.’

He gave up and returned to the living-room. There was the sound of a shower door closing. Then a scream.

He raced in. Susan was out of the shower, sitting on the toilet with the lid down. She sat huddled, protecting her breasts, quaking.

‘They … were waiting for me … on the top rail … Waiting to drop on me …’

‘Poor darling.’ He saw half a dozen cockroaches trapped in the tub. ‘They must have been cooling off on the top rail, and when you shut the door they just showered down –’

‘I hate this fucking city.’

‘Look, you go lie down for a while. I’ll clean up in here, and I’ll make sure they’re all out before you come back.’

He led her to the bed, then returned to the bathroom to wreak vengeance. By the time he had removed all traces of insect life, she was asleep. He took a shower himself, and finally woke her after an hour and led her back to the bathroom.

‘I’ll give you your shower,’ he said soothingly. ‘I’ll be right here to protect you.’

‘Don’t be stupid. I was just startled, that’s all. Caught off balance.’

‘But I really –’

‘Piss off
. I’m perfectly able to look after myself.’

While he waited for her, he turned on the television. A cockroach scuttled away from under it.

On the screen, pairs of people were carrying black plastic body-bags from a fast-food restaurant.

‘… shooting may have been a robbery that went wrong. A police spokesperson said the assailant may be the same man who shot seventeen people in another Little Dorrit restaurant in Cleveland last week. This is Juniper Pugh, XBC News, Canton, Ohio.’

The scene switched to three personable newsreaders, grinning at one another across their huge communal desk.

‘Jan, what do we have from Capitol Hill?’

‘Well, Bob, the presidential sanity hearings reopened today. Following on the sensational testimony last week of Colonel Harry Stack Bratwurst – you may recall that it was Bratwurst who covertly delivered the waterbed full of chicken blood – comes the even more sensational testimony of Ms Pasadena Lipgloss.’

‘She was the personal assistant of Omar Hancock-Hour, wasn’t she?’

‘That’s right, Bob. And Hancock-Hour was the Anglo-Syrian arms-dealer who allegedly helped the President with his plan to ransom an inflatable doll named Doody.’

‘Let’s see, Jan, wasn’t Doody kidnapped from the luggage of an American businessman who was changing planes in Beirut?’

‘That’s right, Bob. The Ismail Alternative Reformed Liberation Army claimed responsibility. And the President was prepared to offer them West Virginia and possibly Kentucky, in return for Doody’s release.’

He switched to another channel.

On the screen, a reporter stood before shelves of red and white boxes. The reporter’s expression defined this as a solemn experience.

‘… company will be recalling all bottles of Kokophrin now on the shelves. So far, no one knows exactly how the cyanide got into the capsules, but a company spokesperson
said Koko and Bingo Laboratories are certain that it did not happen at their Baton Rouge factory. For now, they ask everyone who has a bottle of Kokophrin to throw it away. This is Heliotrope Snarsch, YBC News, South Bend, Indiana.’

‘Dave, what do we have from Capitol Hill?’

‘Well, Donna, the presidential sanity hearings reopened today …’

They launched themselves into the Village night: belligerent blacks, wild-eyed lunatics, menacing motorbike homosexuals, pathetic drooling junkies, wilted prostitutes, homicidal hispanics, disgusting beggars, staggering drunks, hostile faces, suspicious shopkeepers. Everyone was slick with sweat, numb from noise, weary of human contact, half-dead from breathing the warm, damp, acidic air. All that kept the night alive were the little knots of slack-brained university kids threading their way through the crowds, untouched by it all. They were giggling with coke, or perhaps only innocence, as they scoured the night streets relentlessly in search of fun.

Susan and Fred looked into a few restaurants, but all seemed crowded, or expensive, or unsuitable for one reason or another. They ended up taking themselves, like two fretful children, to a McIntosh restaurant, where they could eat controlled portions of hamburger, french fries, milk-style shake.

Their meal the following night was less controlled. Jonah Bramble came upstairs to fetch them.

‘Nice place,’ he said listlessly. ‘By the way, I asked a couple of other people to come along to Chinatown with us. They’re waiting downstairs, with the cabs.’

‘Cabs?’ said Susan.

‘Chinatown? I thought we were going to an Italian place,’ Fred said.

‘You wanted Italian? You should have said something. Too late to change our reservation now.’

‘But –’

Susan took Jonah’s part. ‘Oh, Fred, stop being awful about it. Chinatown is fine.’

The other people did not get introduced during the ride in two cabs. It was not until they were all sitting at a round table in the Chinese restaurant that Jonah spread his arms and said: ‘Let me introduce everybody.’

‘Everybody’ included a thin, bearded, apparently mute man named Luther Dorgue; a police sociologist from Arkansas named Boyd Something or Something Boyd; Boyd’s girlfriend Trashi, who claimed to earn her living modelling kitchenware (or perhaps kitchenwear); Trashi’s half-sister Poo; and an elderly man who looked like William Burroughs but was never introduced.

Jonah spread his arms and said, in a slightly more robust voice: ‘Luther is my former lover, ha, ha.’

Boyd said: ‘Shit, you can’t just say it like that, Jonah. Makes everybody thank the pore sucker’s some kinda gay blade.’ He turned to Susan, adding: ‘Nothin’ quare about Luther, honey. See, when they was lovers, Jonah Bramble was
Joan
Bramble. This was way, way back – long before he got a dick sewed on.’

Trashi said: ‘Boyd, watch your mouth.’

Pseudo-Burroughs coughed. ‘Jonah, I never knew you was ever a gal. Was you agenting then?’

Jonah, who had gone back to listlessness, nodded. ‘I worked for Mark Windsor then. Everybody want the special?’

Fred was unable to find the special on the menu; as he searched, he heard Jonah tell the waiter to bring eight specials.

‘Eight special, yes, Missa Bramble.’

When the waiter bowed and departed, Jonah sighed. ‘Missa Bramble. I never know if his English is really that bad or if he’s trying some kind of insult. Fred, it’s really
great
to see you. What brings you to New York? Stopping by on your way somewhere, or can you stay a while?’

Susan got her furious look, but said nothing. The waiter
brought bowls of very clear soup. Fred dipped his ceramic spoon into it and came up with what looked like a human ear.

‘Well, Jonah, I thought you asked me to come over.’

‘I did? What would I do that for?’

‘“British novels are hot,” you said. You promised some kind of “big breakthrough”.’

‘I was mistaken,’ Jonah said calmly. He smiled and shook his head, mightily amused at his own little error. ‘And you came all this way on my say-so.’

‘I thought you wanted me to talk to editors. Stir up interest in
Doodlebug.’

‘I once met Larry McMurtry,’ said Pseudo-Burroughs, to no one. ‘He was a real nice fella.’

Jonah sighed, scratched the site of a former breast, and started on his soup. After a moment, he said: ‘Well, we’ll have to see what we can do.’

A giant brown cockroach, the size and colour of a small cigar, was crawling up the wall. It took its time, knowing it was in safe territory. Fred hoped Susan would not see it.

She did see it, but she was not terrified. She was long past terror. A kind of numbness had taken over. By now, this hideous creature was about what she expected of the city.

When they got back to Allan’s flat, they had a fight about it. It began with Susan’s suggesting they go home.

‘Jonah lied to you or something. There’s nothing for us here. There isn’t even a public loo in the entire city. Or any place to sit down without paying money. Everyone wants to rob us or kill us.’

‘Tomorrow we’re going to this concert,’ he said. ‘Allan’s left us tickets. We’ll get in touch with the culture of this place, then you’ll see.’

The concert, at least, was a qualified ‘success. They took a taxi up some major street, lined with huge glowing buildings. This was the condition to which all American cities aspired, he knew – glowing pyramids of wealth and power. The glow
that somehow rubs off on anyone riding in a taxi. This time the ride was smooth; darkness hid all misery. The driver, who apparently spoke no English, was like a discreet chauffeur.

‘Do you know,’ Fred said, ‘when CBS fired an executive, they gave him four million dollars cash, plus four hundred thousand a year for life, and a suite of offices to use if he should ever feel like doing anything again? The offices could be in one of these buildings, I imagine.’

‘Obscene,’ she said.

‘But fascinating. That’s what New York is all about. No matter how miserable people are here, they’re near the high-stakes table in the big casino. They just might get a piece of the action.’

‘Pathetic.’ Her one-word replies somehow sized up everything he was saying and disposed of it.

‘I know, I know, but don’t you kind of feel it yourself? We might make it big in the Big Apple. Like the song says, if we can make it here …’

She yawned, not even bothering with the one word.

The concert was something called ‘Inner Spaces IV’. It combined Ruritanian flutes, synthesizers, dinner-gongs from the Raj days of India, an Andean nose-harp with wool strings, turkey bones, a bull-roarer, wind chimes, and recordings of wood-pigeons. Fred thought it sounded like the music in lifts. Susan liked it, because it helped her unwind.

‘They really need soothing music in their heads,’ she said. ‘They need something. This town –’

‘Just give it a few more days. We can try all the things the New Yorkers do: the Metropolitan Museum, Bloomingdale’s, the subway – hey, we could take the A train!’

‘Don’t be stupid. The song says it goes to Harlem, remember?’

‘Oh, right.’

The taxi-driver muttered something in an alien language.

‘Give it a chance,’ Fred said. ‘We’ll go to Bloomingdale’s.’

Chapter Six
 
 

Pratt had opened his office door again, and invited people in. It was there he said to Fred: ‘I’ve been thinking about feet.’

‘Feet.’

‘Feet or foot. Think of all the ways we use that word. The foot of the table, foot of the page, footnotes. Foothills. One foot in the grave. Put your best foot forward.’

‘Yes.’

‘I’ve got a quote here from something: “The longest journey begins with a single two-step.”’ Pratt paused. ‘Foot and mouth. The game’s afoot. Footsteps in the sands of time.’

‘Fear in a handful of dust,’ Fred contributed.

‘That’s not a foot. Try to concentrate.’ Pratt looked annoyed. ‘Think of foot soldiers. Think of marching, walking, running, jumping, skipping, dancing. Climbing mountains, wading in oceans. They have pierced my hands and feet, they have numbered all my bones.’

‘Pierced?’

‘Another quote from somewhere, maybe the Bible. One step at a time. People use their feet when they go stepping out. Or skip out on their bills. The Lord makes mine enemy the footstool of my feet. And Robinson Crusoe, finding that footprint in the sands of time. Maybe that’s it!’

‘What?’

But Pratt swivelled round to his terminal and began typing rapidly with his long gecko fingers. He ignored Fred and seemed to forget his existence.

After a few moments, Fred crept back to his own desk. He
opened a book, but did not focus on its pages. His thoughts sailed from Pratt’s word-games to word-play in general, to Freud and Joyce, to Bloomsday and beyond.

The visit to Bloomingdale’s was cut short by a bomb scare. Fred and Susan had hardly entered those dark halls with their expensive gleams when they were herded out of the door again. They stood outside for a moment, watching the rest of the herd emerge. There was a great deal of loud protest; these were not people who were used to being pushed about. These were men and women in silk suits and gold chains, dowagers in trousers and neck-scarves, rich young people with their hair carefully mussed and their sleeves pushed up, even a small clamouring group of Arabs (no doubt the bomb target) who swept into their limousine and sped away.

BOOK: Bugs
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