Peter Liu - Bald New World

I went to the shower, wanting to clean myself. Several roaches scurried along the bath. The water was too cold and had a brown streak in it that smelled like rust. I was afraid to brush my broken teeth, though I rinsed with water to try to get the smell of peanuts and blood out. Dan was asleep when I emerged from the bathroom and I wondered how he dealt with the bed bugs. The scars on my back hurt and the migraine intensified. I was mixing up smells with sounds and sights with tastes. The ceiling was blurrily fractured and I tried to move a third pair of legs I didn’t have, fumbling awkwardly to the ground as a result. It was only one day and I was already a mental mess. The partition between cricket-hood and humanity would come with time. Just as I was about to go to sleep, I felt something crawling on my leg. I looked down and saw three roaches which I brushed off.

What the hell am I doing here? I should be tracking down your killers, Larry, not trying to win a cricket match against some dumb kids .

I looked over at Dan, then at the knives on the wall. Almost three decades later, I was reliving my childhood again. A violent desperation filled me. Despite our facade of civility, we always had too many roaches in our home, a physical manifestation of the rot my biological family suffered. Would I be able to endure this again? I took a deep breath, tried to think about something else. My eyes kept on creeping back to those knives. Would I murder a man while he slept so I could escape? Even though I couldn’t stand the smell of food, I was starving, having been unable to keep anything down. I reminded myself that I was no longer a cricket, driven by hormones. I was a human being with reasoning.

I’d have to reason with Dan in the morning. Ask him for a day off so I could recover. Maybe ask if I could stay in a room without roaches. That wasn’t too much to ask for, was it?

VI.

“I need you today,” Dan insisted. “I’ve scheduled two matches for you.”

My voice was raspy and my eyes felt swollen. He was sharpening his knives. “I need to get some food in me.”

“I brought you peanuts.”

“I need porridge and ice cream.”

“I’ll get it for you after the match. The first fight, I want you to lose in the third round. For the second one, fourth round.” He repeated it several times.

That was a total of 35 minutes linked. I didn’t know if I could even handle a minute.

“Look,” he said. “Toughen up. I spent good money getting you these crickets and buying what you needed. Don’t make me regret my decision.”

“I need more time to recover, man.”

“You don’t got time,” Dan replied. And from his menacing glower and the way he held his knife, I knew he meant business. So much for reason.

VII.

The first fight wasn’t too bad. While I hadn’t got enough sleep, the 12-hour break allowed me to recuperate enough to the point where I could dive without immediately feeling exhausted. It wasn’t a good fight by any means and I spent most of it either on defense or running away while pretending to be positioning myself. Fortunately, my rival, a mid-aged woman, wasn’t an aggressive type and fought askance, not sure why I was running when most men pounced. She was so focused on the match, she probably didn’t notice my sickly hue or the fact that my neck muscles were cramping. Getting to the third round was a tough stretch, but I managed. When her cricket flung me into the corner, I signaled my surrender.

It was the second fight that really screwed me up. Dan got me a decent fighter with a big head, in turn meaning bigger mouth. This one had sprightly thick legs which were essential for kicking. He might not have been top of the class, but he was still a damn good fighter. Both crickets were weighed in. My head started to spin. My toe fingers shook uncontrollably.

“I’m not feeling so good,” I said to Dan.

“You’ll be fine. Don’t worry.”

I had good reason to worry. My brain was fried. Within ten seconds of diving, I knew I couldn’t handle it anymore. I smelled the other cricket’s hormones, his face bulgingly big. Electrical currents rushed through my nerves. Every sound was a thousand times louder. Humans were storm fronts passing by. I took off the interface, stumped to the ground. It felt like my head was in a vise and someone was squeezing. Was my head on my neck? I tried to spring, tried to shake my wings, warn other crickets away. But they were missing. What happened to my wings? I was naked and exposed. Chomp, chomp, sing out your warning! They would come upon me at any minute. Even if I wasn’t much of a singer, I still had to shake them. I used my hands and rubbed them rapidly together. There wasn’t any sound. I shrieked, cried out loud.

“He’s still synced,” someone sang.

“How long has he been interfaced?”

“Only a few minutes.”

“What are you doing bringing amateurs here?”

Why couldn’t I fly? Why couldn’t I move? My thorax was cemented to the floor. I tried to sense out with my antennae but they’d been chopped off. The earlier fight had—

“Nick! Nick!”

VIII.

“You humiliated me out there,” I heard someone say. “It was perfect. Now they think you’re a joke. When you beat Tolstoy, we are going to rake in the cash. Aw, man, I can’t believe how well it played out. Yeah, I lost a couple bucks today, but we ended up ahead ’cause I bet more on that first match. I had a feeling you wouldn’t last that second fight.” A chiming sound.

I could smell a woman. She hovered near me. I had to prepare my song, beat my wings together to impress her. But I couldn’t feel my wings and had no idea if she was just going to move on without me.

“What’s he doing?”

“He thinks he’s a cricket.”

“Will he keep on shaking like this?”

“It’ll pass.”

“What should we do?”

“Ignore him and come over here.”

She made a song back. I didn’t recognize the music, but I knew I had to reply. Damn the wings. I’d have to use my legs to kick the ground. There was someone else after her. I’d have to get louder, make more sound to warn him off. This was my mate!

“That’s really annoying,” she sang.

“Just ignore it.”

“It’s hard to get in the mood when he’s making all this ruckus.”

“That’s what I’m paying you for.”

“Can’t you send him out of the room?”

“Will you just shut up and get back down here?”

Her song was getting louder. I would have to get even louder. I could smell her. She wasn’t ready for mating. There was something sickly in her. It made me pause. Maybe it was better to let this one go, better to focus on other mates. Needed to scavenge for food. Find some shrubs and fungus to eat.

“Why’s he digging under the bed?”

“He thinks he can find food down there.”

“This is really creepy.”

“You’ll get used to it.”

“You’ve seen this before?”

“His brainwaves are meshing with the cricket. It’ll pass. Now, can you shut up please and get to work?”

“I’m not the one making all the noise!”

Just needed some food, hungry, felt weak. She was singing louder and I could smell her hormones, but there was something terribly wrong.

“I’m not feeling it.”

“What do you mean you’re not feeling it?”

“He’s burrowing under our bed!”

“You’ve never seen a pilot get wired?”

“No. You have?”

“I lived through it. Mine was way worse than him.”

“You were a pilot?”

“Tried to be.”

“You never told me that,” she cooed.

“Yeah, I wanted to be a pilot so badly, it was sad. This guy used to be one of my heroes in the army.”