Fantastic Metropolis

CLIENT: Well, if I have to, I suppose I can go stay the night with my sister. She lives on Speedway, but she’s married.

Mrs. Everson phoned her sister and packed an overnight bag. Then she called a cab. The cab came two hours later. Her parting instructions to me, as I bundled her out the door, were that I should help myself to whatever I found in the icebox, but that I should under no circumstances move her furniture, because she had it all where she wanted it.

She shuffled toward her cab in the pitiless afternoon sun. She turned and spoke to me again. “You should be careful not to breathe that stuff,” she told me. “You could grow a cancer like a grapefruit and never be properly compensated.”

I could relate to that. Everyone should be properly compensated.

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When I shut the door behind her, the house was mine. It was just me and the bugs now. But first I had to prep the floors.

I took my claw hammer into the den and got down on my knees in all the fucking magazines and crackers and tried to pull up the fucking carpet tacks. But there was all this fucking furniture in the way! The hell with the carpet tacks, I said to myself. I’ll rip up the fucking carpet with my fucking bare hands.

So I did. The television pitched off its stand and smashed. A bureau full of knickknacks fell on its side. But fuck all that shit! I had work to do! I tore the rug up, wrapped the armchair and the birdcage in it, and dragged the whole mess into the yard.

Then I unloaded my pouch onto the kitchen table. I arranged all my pumps and canisters, my thinners and spreaders, all my sticky syrups and virulent powders. I picked out a tank of ant-and-roach mix and screwed on a red rubber hose with a brass nozzle. (Tri-iso-necrolaine in a base of sodium chromate. If swallowed, induce vomiting.)

I hooked the tank onto a shoulder strap, carried it to the kitchen sink, and pointed the nozzle at the dishes piled there. I turned a valve. Half eaten toast on a flowery plate turned black. Cups and spoons and scrambled egg turned black. The sink and the sudsy water in it turned black. A gleaming black film crept up the wall tiles and blackened the doors of the cupboards.

Wallpaper blistered, peeled, and smoked. The inky stain covered the kitchen ceiling and spread into the living room. Shreds of curling paint fell from the plaster, leaving jagged white holes in the black.

I stood beside a window, spraying a baseboard and watching the guck soak in. The streetlights were on now. The stars were out. A breeze stirred the dead grass at the curb. I lifted my nozzle to the window panes. Oily goo slid down the glass and dripped from the sill. I moved into the bedroom.

Here, bugs! Come to Alex! Heeere, bug bug bug!

I closed off the valve on the tank. I surveyed the black drapes, the black bedspread and bolster, the closet full of black clothes, and the black perfume bottles on the smoking black lace doily. The toxic scum was a great improvement. It lent that cluttered wooden cave a sterile lunar beauty.

You started with the crude stuff to get the bugs’ attention and to flush a few into the open. Once you knew what you were dealing with, you could poison them more selectively. You could fuck up their spiracles with polymers, or mess up their sex lives with pheromones, or even feed them enzymes that killed their alimentary flora and made them starve. The possibilities were endless, a chemist’s holiday. But until you could stink a bug out of the woodwork and tag a specimen, you were just pissing in the wind. And I still hadn’t seen one bug.

All right then, I said to myself. Let’s experiment.

Back in the kitchen, I filled a bucket at the sink and screwed the lid off a jar of potassium tartrate. I poured three cups of the dangerous yellow granules into the water. They sputtered and fizzed. I found a mop and wet down all the floors. When a cabinet or a dresser got in my way, I’d rip the legs off it, drag it to the yard, and throw it on the burn pile. But the mop fell apart before I could finish. And still no bugs.

It never failed. Just when you got a good blood lust rolling, the little cunts crept deeper into the crawl spaces, where you couldn’t get at them, like an itch at the center of your back. Crawl spaces. The hallmark of shoddy construction. I walked around the house kicking holes in the fucking walls.

I had to carry stuff out of there in armfuls—samplers, houseplants, cans of tomato paste… And there was always more. What a rat’s nest! It made me want to strangle a parakeet. I got busy with my sledge hammer and knocked down some shelves and partitions. Then I turned off all the lights and sat down against a wall to think.