Spraying For Bugs
Chapter Ten of The Troika
Their legs were old burnt matches.
Their legs were old burnt matches.
Their legs were old burnt matches.
Their arms were just the same.—Vachel Lindsay
It was 1997, and I was working for the city of Tucson as an exterminator. My life was fairly simple. I’d given up on being a man, and was trying to function as a public works vehicle.
I was south of downtown, driving the side streets around Stone, looking for an address. I watched for the numbers stenciled in yellow paint on the lampposts and checked them against my internal street map. My optics scanned the decaying city, translating walls and alleys, and dumpsters into vehicular simulation space. My tires rumbled over the sun-scorched gutter trash. My fender optics tracked the curbs. Traffic was sparse. There weren’t any pedestrians out, nor any drivers either. The city had grown nearly uninhabitable. The storm drains were choked, so the next winter flood would swamp the place and cripple city services for good. Piped water and wired power would recede into the fabled past. The more stubborn among the citizens were refusing to evacuate to the settlement camps. All the worse for them.
I came to Russell Avenue and braked at a stop sign beside a boarded-up library. I was the only vehicle in Tucson that still stopped for signs, but I’m a creature of habit, what can I do? A tow truck limped past me along Russell, dragging a sedan with no wheels. The tow truck had a flat. I turned onto Russell and proceeded south.
A year earlier I’d been the guidance brain in a trash truck. That was pleasant work, if you didn’t have a nose. But they ripped me out of that truck and wired me into this van. Well, ours not to reason why.
My six tires rattled over cracked cement. The pressure vent on my methanol tank was jammed, and my shock absorbers were a joke, but I was on the job, and that was what mattered to the City. I had a good spare tire but no jack. I’d lost a wiper blade, and when it rained, I compulsively dragged bare metal across my windshield. Also I talked to myself too much.
I had my service manual etched on my visual cortex—four volumes of theoretical perfection and zero tolerance schematics—no rust, no wear, no fraying cables. I used to read it in the back of my mind, for a laugh.
My only friend at this time was a municipal garage door opener who opened the door for me when I went out or came back. She told me that my problem was that I’d been a man, and now I expected too much. I wonder how she could tell.
I was driving through a city of people who stayed at home. They stayed indoors and watched television and gradually melted. That was the new virus, the melting. After they melted, ambulances with loud sirens would take their goo to the University Hospital to make sure they were dead. After they got certified, pickup trucks would haul barrels of them out to the cemetery on Oracle Drive. Then bulldozers covered them over, and then there were forms to fill out.
The city had been built by earthmovers and cement mixers and cranes. Humans could never have built it. Human could hardly live there. Humans grew buboes, sarcomas, and cysts there. Humans broke out in plastic sores, plague cankers, and growths without names there. Their wheat was full of wheat rust, no matter how their chemists poisoned it. Their water was full of cleaning supplies. If the poisons didn’t get them, they still had household pests to contend with. New improved mutant pests! Paper wasps from Chile. Amazonian jumping scorpions. Norwegian wheel bugs and killer isopods from the Malay. The humans had it tough. The ones with no houses to hide in would lock themselves in cars and starve there, or seal themselves into dumpsters with duct tape and suffocate. At least they didn’t have to worry about rats. The bugs had eaten all the rats.
But humans weren’t my job. My job was killing pests. You weren’t going to catch me catching any diseases. You’d never see me melting. Me and the digital clocks and VCRs were immune. God grants small favors for his chosen. Sometimes so small you need a microscope.
I was told what to do, and I did what I was told. If I forgot where I was going, my Comptroller would remind me. If I ignored him, he repeated himself. People’s houses filled up with bugs, so they phoned my Comptroller. Then he would send me out to spray. People didn’t want to be bothered with bugs. People wanted to melt in peace. I could relate to that. I would have liked to be left in peace. But someone had to spray.
I knew a lot about bugs. My ROM included A Bestiary of the Urban Insects of North America, updated to 1996. The carapace of the Pea Scaler ranges from drab brown in winter to brilliant yellow—the sting of the Giant House Centipede—Sometimes I’d run it through my voice coder at high speed. Bug jabber.
I was in a disgraceful condition. I should not have been working. My transmission fluid was seeping, there were bubbles in my tires, and my solenoid was out of adjustment. I should have been up on a lift, with grease monkeys packing my wheel bearings.
All it took out there was the irrevocable snap of one brittle fan belt, and you’d be dead on the shoulder of some desolate industrial drag, and the car strippers would come down like flies. But the City didn’t consider that. The City needed every vehicle it could muster in those desperate days. If it moved, put it to work! That was their philosophy. Who was I to complain? I couldn’t feel pain. Neither can bugs, but bugs at least can die. Bugs do have that advantage over machines.
A dummy sat in my driver’s seat. He didn’t drive me. He was just part of my equipment. There wasn’t any steering wheel, so he kept his gloves in his lap. He had black leather gloves, black leather boots, and no hands or feet in them. The gloves and the boots were his hands and feet.
He was called a Mobile Unit because he could get out of me and walk around. His coat was black vinyl, and his pants, and his cap, and his face. Dual cameras were mounted in his head. Their lens covers were gridded red glass, like a stoplight. I could see through his eyes or talk from the speaker in his neck. I could swivel his head or tap his feet. I could send him into houses and use him to spray for bugs.
When I was a garage truck, I’d had a similar Mobile Unit to empty the trash cans. Sometimes he’d even scrape up Melters. Certain Melters didn’t rate the ambulance treatment—dumpster people, people who melted in public toilets, people like that.
Garbage collection had ended a year earlier, but the City still sent teams around to spray the fresh garbage with a foam that hardened around it. Phenomenal, the things they were doing with plastics. People were dropping like flies, but the new plastics were breeding like rabbits. It gave one hope for the future.
I turned north from East Sixteenth into a graveled alley between Stone and Russell. To the west was a junk-strewn vacant lot. North of the lot stood a row of two-yard-wide mini-apartments, with aerials and swamp coolers on their roofs and bulbous mounds of petrified foamed-over garbage leaning against them in the alley. To the east, the back yards of houses, behind storm fence. I parked beside a house reputed to be the residence of a Mrs. Everson. My turbines wound down. I filed a status report by tightbeam. It was a punishing day in August, 1:27 p.m.
I raised the dummy’s hand and unbuckled his harness. I unlatched the driver’s door and pushed it open. Swiveled the dummy’s legs out of my cab. Somehow got both of his boots planted on the gravel. Slammed the door behind him and turned him toward the back end of me. All very complicated, if you thought about it too much.
I opened the rear doors and dragged out my canvas pouch and my tool belt. I hung the pouch on my shoulder and stuffed it with spray guns and a cross-section of aerosol toxins. I had pesticides for ants, spiders, roaches, fleas, silverfish, or armored slugs.
A mangy dog trotted up the alley with a scrap of greasy butcher paper in its mouth. It didn’t even look at me. I had no scent. I walked up to the storm fence and followed it south until I came to a gate, chained and padlocked. I hung my gloves on the wire and thought for a while. Luckily I had a bolt cutter on my tool belt.
The side yard was paved with red bricks. A barrel cactus stood in a little well. A swing set with no swings stood rusting. I turned east at the corner of the house, found the front step, and knocked at the door. Just then I was attacked by a vicious carnivore. Well, it was only a small poodle, but it bit my leg.
Slowly I bent at the waist and leaned down toward the dog. “Good dog,” I said soothingly, while it growled and worried my ankle. “Nice doggy.” I drew a cylinder of pressurized methyl cyanase from my pouch and lifted it over my head. Then I clubbed the fucker until it let go of me. I kicked it against the door, and it landed in a broken heap.
“I’m coming! I’m coming!” said a voice from the house. “Don’t kick the door down!” Security chains rattled. I kicked the poodle into a space between the aluminum siding and a potted yucca.
“It’s the exterminator,” I called out. “The exterminator is here.”
“Keep your shirt on,” said Mrs. Everson.
The door swung open. An old woman squinted at me, shielding her eyes from the sun with one hand. Her arms were like plucked chicken wings, and her neck was like a powdered eclair. She wore orthopedic shoes, nylons rolled to the ankles, bifocals on a cord, and a hearing aid. Hanging by a thread.
“Are you the exterminator?” she asked me. “Well, come in out of the sun. I’ll talk to you in the den. I’m watching one of my programs.” Then she vanished and left me in the entryway. I would have to locate the den by the sound from the television. Not as simple as it sounds.
I was standing, according to my floor plan, in the entryway. But entryway is a deceptively innocuous term for that sense-numbing welter of porcelain mementos, stacked magazines, ceramic lamps, Christmas cards, et cetera. The ceiling was low, and there was hardly room to move.
I took my bearings from the walls and door frames and set forth. I knocked over an end table. I let it lie. I could understand a table wanting to lie down. I wished that someone would let me lie down.
I found Mrs. Everson sitting in an armchair. She was watching her TV set and eating crackers and cheese. Square orange cheese slices on round orange crackers filled a plate that rested on a tray with legs. Two boxes stood beside the plate, a box of cheese and a box of crackers. Every minute or two, Mrs. Everson would eat a cracker, and there’d be one less cracker on the plate.
Wet laundry was dripping on the rug. Yes, there were clotheslines strung across the den, with dripping clothes on them. It made sense. It saved her going outdoors.
CLIENT: They’re troublesome. Hundreds of them. They come from the window frames and spit on the glass. I can’t tell if they’re on the inside or the outside. Would you like a cracker?
MOBILE UNIT: No thank you.
CLIENT: Have you seen this show? It’s my favorite.
MOBILE UNIT: What is it?
CLIENT: It’s my favorite. I try to kill them with a broom, but they get in under the screens.
MOBILE UNIT: The bugs?
CLIENT: Awful! Do you live around here?
MOBILE UNIT: I don’t live anywhere.
CLIENT: Would you like a cracker? Are you married?
MOBILE UNIT: No, I’m an exterminator.
CLIENT: I beg your pardon?
MOBILE UNIT: I like to be indoors. Walls, floors. Nothing outdoors has any edges. And there’s all that weather. If everything just stayed in the box it came in, none of the boxes would get lost.
CLIENT: When are you going to spray? Because I have to move my pets. I can’t let my pets be exposed to chemicals.
MOBILE UNIT: Your dog is already taken care of.
CLIENT: Would you like some juice?
MOBILE UNIT: I will require that you vacate the premises for a minimum period of twenty-four hours. Your compulsory compliance with this procedure will allow the safe deployment of lethal fumigants necessary for the complete eradication of your pest problem.
CLIENT: Say what?
MOBILE UNIT: I will require that you vacate the premises for a minimum period of twenty-four hours.
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.
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.
The sprays might be driving the bugs into the foundation. Perhaps I could lure them out with some bait.
Peanut butter? Chicken liver? Dead dog? The dead dog would be perfect. I walked out into the moonlight and fetched it indoors. I put it on the bedspread and hid in the bedroom closet with the bathrobes and tennis rackets.
Still the bugs wouldn’t show themselves. I needed more bait.
I went to the alley and broke through the plastic crust of one of the hillocks of old garbage. Dragged two black plastic bags back to the house and used a garden rake to distribute the trash evenly. I kept going for more until I had it to a depth of six inches on all the floors. Then I hid in the closet again.
All night I lay in wait, watching with my eyes, listening with my gloves, smelling with my boots. The air conditioner turned itself on, turned itself off, a well adjusted appliance. Cars drove past. I turned off my eyes and just listened. My head felt as if it had retracted into my chest.
But I could make out a new rhythm behind the tranquil murmur of the air conditioner. A chirping. A shrilling. Dozens of shrillings. From the walls, the floor, from every side. A strident mantric din like a horde of locusts. I left the closet and turned on a lamp. The bugs went right on singing, safe in their crannies.
The air conditioner was distracting me, so I ripped out its cord. That’s when I saw my first cicada.
It dropped out of the air conditioner and landed on the floor. A huge fucker, six inches long. With a humped brown shell like a cricket’s. Angular sawtooth legs. Crooked feelers tapping at the floorboards like blind men’s canes. A radically mutated giant cicada. It belonged in a monster movie, knocking down Hoover Dam.
It scuttled nervously toward the wall, then stopped. I froze where I stood and processed optical data. Sampled out a dorsal view and a profile and ran them through my morphological comparitor. This cicada was not the traditional seventeen-year root sucker. This thing was a carnivore.
I wasn’t normally given to emotional reactions to vermin. But the giant cicada filled me with a physical dismay. It made the vinyl creep on my aluminum bones. It made my clothes itch.
Such things were to be expected. This was the decade when all the genetic codes went through a cheap photocopier. This was the generation when none of the babies were quite what they seemed. These were the years when puppies lay squirming on puppy blankets, all sticky and feeble and new and not quite puppies.
Cautiously I sank to my hands and knees and extended one palm over the specimen. The hideous insect tentatively twitched and squeaked. Then it rushed at me, a sickening scrambling concentration of vitality. I crushed it under my glove. The crunch was deafening.
Luckily for purposes of documentation, the cicada’s head escaped mangling. Its beady eyes glared at me while it died. I lifted my hand, and it hung from the underside, glued there by its own ichor, weakly waving its legs. Then it fell to the floor. I stuffed the corpse into a sandwich bag. The cicadas under the floor went on singing.
I had to simplify the floor plan. I went to my van for a crowbar. The sun was up, and the gravel was wet. A street scrubber drove slowly north along Stone, past the Presbyterian Church and Madelaine’s Beauty College.
Mrs. Everson might come home today. But she couldn’t stay here. I intended to make life very unpleasant for those cicadas.
The best thing would’ve been to burn the fucking house down.
I went back indoors and punched the fucking water heater right through the fucking bedroom wall. Then I tore out the bathroom sink and rammed that into the fucking attic. Just to show the fucking cicadas I meant business.
Then I walked around the house screaming insults at them. Just the normal kind of things you scream at a time like that. “Come out of there, you yellow little pukes!” “I know you’re in there, you slimy faggots!” That sort of thing.
Then I looked for them. I looked in the oven and pried the back off the television and pulled the stuffing out of the cushions. I wished that I could see through walls. That way I could’ve seen the bugs, snug in their cozy dens, warbling their miserable songs. I could’ve mapped their demographics and charted their social organization. Then I could’ve wiped them out—crushed their eggs, burned their larvae, tortured their drones for strategic information.
But since I couldn’t do any of that, I contented myself with pounding a crowbar through Mrs. Everson’s flocked pastel wallpaper, again and again and again.
I took a break. I felt I was entitled. I sat down in Mrs. Everson’s bathtub with the television set on my lap. I watched Saturday morning cartoons for a couple of hours.
One of the cartoons concerned a magpie that wanted to eat a worm. Another involved a wolf who wanted to eat some sheep. I enjoyed the jokes, but it bothered me that the worm and the sheep never got eaten. I think that a story should be realistic.
Just then my van made a noise on the tightbeam. It wanted to alert me regarding a Threat To Vehicular Security that was developing in the alley. Apparently a couple of suspicious looking Mexican kids were hanging around, sitting with their backs against the storm fence. One youth had a shaved head and was picking her teeth with a screwdriver. The other had purple tattoos on her face and wore a necklace of spark plugs. The van thought that they were talking about him. He suspected the youths of being car strippers. I thought he was being an alarmist.
“_Alex_,” I told him, “you’re overreacting. Alex? Do you copy?”
But I received no response.
However, as I stood up in the bathtub, I knocked my head against the rod of the shower curtain. Flying into a rage, I tore the ugly fucking thing right out of the fucking wall—curtains, brackets, and all. Half the bathroom wall fell into the tub with me. And there I stood in the trembling dust, curtain rod in hand, gazing into the wall.
Gazing into the wall. My wish had come true. Here was the plumbing. There were the studs. And over in the shadows, a pale pod hung in a hammock of filaments. Within the pod, myriad milky larvae wriggled or slept. It was a nest of baby cicadas. Adults stuck their heads from crannies, squeaking in alarm.
The adults rushed to the pod and tore it open. Each stuffed a few of the infants under its belly and scrambled away. But they were bailing out a lifeboat with a thimble. I had them where I wanted them. By merely reaching out my glove and clenching my fist, I could turn their nursery into a slaughterhouse. I could fry their grubs in peanut oil and dip them in hot sauce and sell them door to door. How could they prevent me?
My van went completely paranoid. One of the Mexican kids stood up, and it rammed the kid into the storm fence. It was convinced that they were car strippers. I couldn’t talk to it.
“_This_ will break some bones,” it kept saying. “Come on out here, Alex. Don’t you want to see me break some bones?”
Anyway I was reaching into the wall for a handful of larvae when Mrs. Everson tapped me on my shoulder.
“This place looks so much better,” she told me. “I’m very grateful to you. And do you know what? At my sister’s house, I spoke with a nice young social worker. And she’s had me relocated. I’m very happy where I live now. They fix our lunches for us and give us free drugs. I have my own waterbed and my own VCR, and I watch pornography all day. It’s wonderful. You go ahead with your work, young man. And thank you so much for straggling that parakeet. I never liked it. It was a gift.”
She made a move for the door, but I was too fast for her. I wasn’t going to let her get away that easy. She still had to sign for the spraying. I put a sofa on top of her and sat down on it.
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.
I lay on my back with my head in a broom closet. A mop handle and some gallon bottles of ginger ale kept me company. I kept forgetting things. I forgot what I was doing. (Flooding the house.) I forgot what I’d done. (Lost my car keys.) I forgot what I’d planned. (Someday the roof of the house would cave in, and the sun would bleach my optical sockets.) All my vital parts had been pried loose and carried off.
I told jokes to the cicadas. I said, Stop me if you’ve heard this. The cicadas brought me food and taught me things. I couldn’t eat the food, but I learned quite a lot. Things about families and about deserts and about soul murder.
I can’t eat this, I kept telling them. They thought I was joking.
During mating season, the male cicadas turned blue and began to glow. They crept around the ceiling like winking constellations. I wondered whether insects were machines, and whether machines were insects. Certain insects can fly, but not every insect, and the same is true of machines. Flying machines can kill people, but so can insects. Everything had converged to a single dot, but it wouldn’t blink out.
In spring, the male cicadas grew wings and buzzed around me. They dove at my face and whizzed away again. They dug tunnels into my chest and sharpened their mandibles on my servos. When I told them to stop, they said, Make us stop! Corpses can’t give orders!
Then I told them that I would make them stop. They squealed with glee and rolled around inside me, kicking their legs.
I stood up and found a bucket and a length of hose. I kicked down the kitchen door and tramped out to the alley. The moon was full. It was bright as day. Pellets of glass crunched beneath my boots. I siphoned some methanol from the tank of the van and poured it over my head. I went indoors again for a match.
Soon I was blazing away like a pudding in brandy. The drapes caught fire as well. Roasted cicadas clambered from my armpits and my crotch and fell, smoking, to the floor. Shrieking elated bug shrieks they fell, dying happy bug deaths, like mad airmen abandoning a burning bomber.
From all directions, from below and above, a delighted stridulation sprang up. The cicadas pranced in circles around my feet, cheering me on. My black vinyl face was dripping. The drops trailed blue flame and made funny noises. The bugs turned cartwheels, laughing wildly.
Sparks flew from my optics. Brown smoke filled the house. I turned into a tottering scarecrow of silver sticks and black rags. But I was glad, because the bugs were entertained.
I fell to the floor. The flames guttered. The cicadas climbed up onto my wreckage in droves, to celebrate. Papa cicadas in blue overalls and mama cicadas in hoopskirts and petticoats waltzed on my chest. Cicada kids rushed to the final fires of my face, with tiny marshmallows on toothpicks. Nursemaid cicadas in starched white bonnets pushed larvae in strollers up and down my legs. Eventually they raised a tent on my torso and performed circus acts on tiny unicycles and tiny trapezes.
Personally I don’t attach a lot of importance to nightmares. Anyone can have a bad dream. Even machines get them. They’re a form of torture testing. You go on to the next thing. And the next. And the next.
The object of this game is to shoot down the Enemy Memory Ships before they can sink your Dream Boat. Are you ready? Are you set? Are you trapped in a toy truck in a toy chest in a hole at the bottom of the sea? Do you think you escape before you suffocate? What do you think, Alex? Can you get out of there? Can you get out?
I was sitting in the cab of the van, one afternoon in spring. We were parked behind a Chinese restaurant that was having some trouble with roaches. I opened the glove compartment and reached inside for a tire gauge.
My glove closed around a plastic bag that squished. I pulled it out, and what do you think was in it? A cream cheese and jelly sandwich on white bread. Which was crawling with maggots. I tossed it out the window.
But I could never figure out how it got there. I mean, who would put a sandwich of all things in my glove compartment? And leave it there to rot? Who would do that?
I could never account for it.
Copyright © 2000 by Stepan Chapman.
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