Гвен Купер - THEM! - A Story In Five Parts

It was perhaps a half hour later, and I’d just drifted back into sleep, when I was roused once again by the sound of Fanny ascending the stairs with her hunting cry. I felt her land beside me on the bed, and she once again placed something on my belly. I blearily half-opened my eyes and raised my head as far as I could without engaging any more of my beleaguered spine than the very top portion of my neck. It was hard to make out what it was at first, although . . . was I imagining it? Was whatever it was moving? The room was still dark in the pre-dawn hours, so I switched on the bedside lamp.

It took me a second to realize what it was—primarily because my brain, for a moment, flat-out refused to confirm the report my eyes were sending. What Fanny had so lovingly deposited on my stomach was an enormous palmetto bug—otherwise known in the Northeast as a “water bug,” or simply a “huge ugly cockroach”—on its back AND STILL ALIVE as all six of its legs waved feebly in the air.

Now, I was born and raised in South Florida. I’ve seen plenty of giant cockroaches in my day. I’ve seen—and dispatched without flinching—cockroaches so big you could’ve saddled and ridden them in the Kentucky Derby. I had even, once or twice, awakened with a kind of prickly sensation on my arm and realized it was just such a cockroach crawling across me.

And, as would normally be the case in finding an enormous cockroach on my person, my instinctive first response—which, without thinking, I immediately undertook—was to attempt to bolt upright into a sitting position so as to dislodge the thing and get it off me.

Except that I couldn’t bolt upright. I couldn’t sit upright at all. The instant and painful wrench I felt in my lower back as I tried to rise quickly—an effort that would end up costing me another two days in bed—was a forceful reminder of just how futile this attempt was. “ Son of a—! ” I swore loudly, as I fell back into a supine position.

So there I was, flailing about helplessly on my back, while the giant cockroach on my belly was also flailing about helplessly on its back, the two of us acting out a scene from some cat-and-cockroach remake of Misery, in which Fanny was playing the Kathy Bates role and either the cockroach or I—or both of us—were James Caan.

Ultimately, the palmetto bug was more successful than I was. It soon righted itself and began a rapid scurry up my body in the general direction of my neck. I tried to brush it off with the back of my hand but, with a brief flutter of wings, it scuttled right over the top of my hand, down my palm, and—clearly as startled and disoriented as I was—continued its trajectory up my torso with an increased dash of frenzied speed.

I had a friend in Miami who’d once awakened in the middle of the night to find that a palmetto bug had crawled into his ear, and both his own and the cockroach’s combined efforts had been unable to get it back out. He’d wound up in the emergency room where the doctors irrigated his ear canal—effectively drowning the palmetto bug while my friend was forced to listen to its excruciating death throes inside his own head —before they were finally able to extract its corpse from his ear, chunk by chunk, with a small pair of forceps.

This palmetto bug—the one that I was dealing with in the here and now—was closing the distance between itself and my chin at an alarmingly swift pace.

“ Laurence! ” I shrieked. “ LAAAAUUUUUUREEEEEENNNCE!!! ”

Fanny and Clayton—who’d been sitting next to me with an eager air this whole time—darted off and under the bed so quickly, they practically left spinning dust clouds behind them. From the guest room, I heard the sound of feet hitting the hardwood floor and then a rapid thud of footsteps. In a flash Laurence was standing in the bedroom doorway, clad only in his boxer briefs and brandishing the baseball bat he always kept next to him while he slept (a holdover from having first moved to New York in the ’80s, at the height of the crack epidemic).

So poised and ready did Laurence look to club somebody bloody with that baseball bat that I had a wild, momentary fear he might use it on the cockroach while it was still on top of me.

“Get it off me,” I whimpered, gesturing to the bug on my chest. “ Get it off me! ”

Dropping the bat with a clatter and grabbing a handful of tissues from the box on our night table, Laurence snatched up the hapless cockroach. He clenched his fist with a satisfying crunch and swept it from the room, the sound of the toilet flushing a moment later confirming that it had been given a burial at sea.

“How did it get all the way up here, anyway?” he asked, as he returned to the bedroom. During the warmer months, we were usually good for one or two palmetto bugs a week squeezing into the basement-level kitchen through the French doors that led out to our tiny backyard. But the only time we ever saw one up on the third floor was in pieces, after Fanny had thoroughly mauled it and left its remains for us as an offering.

“Fanny brought it up,” I confirmed. “I think she thought she was ‘helping.’ She didn’t even eat any of it before she gave it to me.” The thudding of my heart had finally slowed to its normal rhythms, and I smiled at Laurence. “That was damn manly, by the way—how you raced in here ready to beat an intruder to death to protect me.”

Laurence smiled back. “I probably would’ve tried to talk my way out of it first.”

Clayton and Fanny, having determined that the coast was clear, peeked out from beneath the bed’s dust ruffle, then tentatively crept over to sit in front of Laurence. They craned their necks to gaze up into his face, their yellow eyes wide and hopeful. “You know,” I suggested, “as long as you’re awake . . .”

Laurence looked down at the cats. “Come on, guys,” he said, his tone resigned. “Let’s go get breakfast.”

Fanny gave Clayton a look that could only be described as triumphant. See? I knew I could get at least one of them out of bed!

As the three of them headed downstairs, one lone moth fluttered out of a dresser drawer to perch on the ceiling above my head—a solitary soldier in the enemy army taunting me, a fallen warrior, as I lay helplessly on my back remembering the day, one pleasant but otherwise ordinary day, just over a year ago when the whole thing had started.

5. In the Beginning . . .

It was a dreamily perfect spring afternoon. The sky outside the window of my writing nook was as pure and crystalline a blue as God had ever intended. The tiny pink roses on the climbing bush, wending its way up the wooden fence enclosing our small backyard, were in full, festive bloom. After a particularly cold and difficult winter, the entire backyard had exploded into a riot of glorious green leaf and multihued flower. I’ll admit that there are still days when I think to myself that nothing will ever be better than living in Manhattan. But, on days like that one, I can’t imagine any place on Earth I’d rather be than in my lovely little brownstone, here in Jersey City, with Fanny napping on the sunlit windowsill of my writing nook and Clayton dozing peacefully on the desk beside me.

A sudden commotion of sparrows split the silence outside, and I swiveled in my desk chair to see what had them so agitated. A wispy, fast-moving cloud of some kind was rising from the other side of the fence that adjoined our neighbor’s yard. I couldn’t tell what it was at first, but I soon detected the fluttering of small, almost imperceptible wings. It looked as if an egg sac of infant moths had burst open into the stillness of the springtime air—and the sparrows, grateful for the bounty, had stationed themselves in a cluster around the newly hatched insects, gobbling up as many as they could in their small beaks as the moths tried to beat their way skyward.