Spraying For Bugs
Chapter Ten of The Troika
But she wouldn’t stop breathing, so I went to the kitchen for my spray gun. I’d make her sign the receipt, then finish her off. I understood my mission for the City. To kill pests. Including any excess citizens who got in my way. Discreetly. Without appearing to. I was a chemical weapon. Whereas Mrs. Everson was old and in the way. Should I have suffered her to live? Old and useless as she was?
Sitting on the sofa, loading the spray gun, my legs began to itch. Impossible, but they did itch. I had no legs, only trousers and metal stilts. Yet they itched. It was like something from a previous life.
Long ago in a previous life, I had been a man built of flesh. For a year or so, I lived in a rainy city in a clammy basement. The fleas there became a problem, because they liked me. As food. I scratched my flea bites until they bled. When the blood dried, I scratched my scabs. Finally I went to the pet section of a supermarket and bought some flea powder and a couple of the flea collars for cats. I sprinkled the powder on my bed and my sofa. The collars, I wore around my ankles under my socks. It seemed like a great idea at the time. Unfortunately the collars were designed for an animal with fur.
I slept in the collars and woke the next morning with big black fleas hopping on and off of me as usual, and angry red water blisters that ran all round my ankles. With trembling hands I unbuckled the plastic shackles from my insulted flesh.
For days I lay on the sofa with my feet up on the backrest, while my puffy yellow ankles wept salty tears down my legs. Suffering for my stupidity, I underwent epiphanies of self-disgust. That’s what happens when you don’t read labels.
It was a good thing for me that I wasn’t flesh anymore. Flesh could be stung by bugs or even eaten. Plus, if I were flesh, I’d have asphyxiated myself by now. I’d be dead or delirious. Whereas I was reasoning with perfect clarity.
My van wasn’t faring so well. The car strippers had removed all its tires and pried loose its engine cover. A tire iron had shattered its windows. Pebbles of auto glass littered the driver’s seat. The strippers applied hacksaws from the van’s own tool kit. The van exploded in slow motion, like a carburetor schematic, clusters of parts floating in midair. There went the alternator. There went the batteries.
What if they find the silica wafers of my brain, Alex? What then? Where are my car keys, Alex? For the love of mercy, help me!
An old woman was sleeping under a sofa. A robot sat on top of the sofa. Neither of us were breathing. It was dark outside. A siren wailed, across town somewhere.
I climbed down from the sofa and paced the living room. All the faucets in the house were running. Mrs. Everson’s dresses were stuffed down the drains and into the cracks under the doors. The water lay an inch deep on the floor. All escape routes were blocked. I paced the room, waiting for the water to rise, slipping on loose tiles and place mats—half indoors, half out, half crazy, half dead.
I told myself: Don’t panic. Whatever happened, I mustn’t panic. If I could continue to reason with perfect clarity, all would be well.
A deep dark well. With three sisters at the bottom, eating treacle and feeling ill. A deep dark ill.
I stood beside a blacked-out window in the dead of night. Everything seemed to be shrinking. The walls shrank from the floors. The alley gravel shrank from the patio bricks. Tire tread shrank from asphalt, billboards from the sky, and the stars from the earth. Women shrank from men, and men from one another. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t make sense of anything. Somewhere in the neighborhood a mariachi band was playing—accordion and trumpets. It sounded like a party.
The earth spun under my boots. The stars circled Mrs. Everson’s roof. I had burned all her magazines. Something was chewing on my leg.
Time passed. The water company shut off the water. The power company cut the power. Batteries emptied, I shared the ruined house with my friends, the bugs. The moon-scorched skeleton of my van stood in the alley, corroding in the winter downpours.
On the day they cut the power, the picture on the TV screen contracted to a white dot and blinked out. Sometimes children threw rocks through the windows, but I ignored them. The cicadas would take care of them. The cicadas had driven the red ants from Tucson, and were eating the last of the citizens.
