Conversations with a Cockroach

When I leave my studio apartment to meet Mr. Roach over drinks at the dive downtown, dusk is in the midst of casting everything in ultraviolet light. As the two-story buildings radiate that eye-dazzling neon-orange, I locate the entrance to the bar. It’s a discreet doorway tucked within the brickwork of an alley I never before wandered down. Through it, there is a single descending flight of stairs.

Gravity pulls me into a dark, underground room and it takes a moment for my eyes to adjust to the shadows. In that momentary disorientation, I latch onto the brightest things: the bluish-yellow stage lights at the distant end of the room. The lights scintillate across golden saxophones, trombones, and trumpets murmuring in drawn-out, metallic phrases. Basses and cellos pluck away in moody undertones as a husky alto drools out her harmony.

Soon, my vision settles enough for me to notice candles quivering on tableclothed roundtables, small flames swishing to and fro as silhouettes pass, six-legged. Flitting and fluttering, the dancers’ exoskeletons refract the stage-lights in glints and glimmers; a flurry of angular insect legs. I’m surrounded by a swarm of bodies sheathed in chitin, a cacophony of jagged edges and reticulated limbs. They are seated and standing, stritch-scratching on the tables, scurrying to the lavatory, serving drinks on silver saucers.

I make my way to the back of the room. I try to maintain some distance. I’m overwhelmingly aware that the patrons around me do not have the warm, exposed fleshiness of the human form. They’re armored. Their bare feet make pitter-pattering sounds on the hardwood. Some of them can fly. Some of them can bite. All those with barbed tibias and shield-like scutella have found a safe place to play. Me and all my goosebumps? We feel soft and vulnerable.

As I wait for Mr. Roach on a bench in the back of the room, I can’t help but feel I’m already failing miserably at my task. I try to shake off the tension. I order a whiskey from a mantid in a bowtie. He tilts his head in slow-motion, staring at me through unblinking compound eyes. As he ambles away, I chuckle to myself. I attempt to seem at ease. I focus on my breathing, leaning back in my seat with my leg bobbing to the music. A centipede glances in my direction. An army ant scuttles past, wielding a soldier’s curved pincers. When the mantid deposits my drink on the armrest beside me, I nod my thanks and focus on the coldness of condensation on my fingertips. The crack of ice between my teeth. Slowly, I let the music and the alcohol loosen my spine, melting my rigidity. As I soften, I notice the dancers in a new light. They are surprisingly graceful. Gliding. Twirling. Exoskeletons sashaying beneath the faux-moonlight.

Being here, I can’t help but become nostalgic for the music halls of my hometown. Back home, the dancers sweat beneath heavy layers of incensed cologne. I’m familiar with how the scent of human body odor begins to slowly choke the room, dense with pheromones. I’m familiar with that variety of musk, thick as attraction, heavy in the room as the act of seduction. It oozes its way through the music, into the dancer’s lungs and movements. Boundaries blur, encouraging strangers and lovers and old friends to lean into each other. As ashamed as we are of our own aromas, there is something comforting and familiar about them. Intoxicating, even. Here, the room is filled with a different odor. It’s an earthy, sebaceous smell with notes of decay. I try my best to ignore it, but it’s enveloping me, approaching me.

            “It’s better for your pores than the Dead Sea,” Mr. Roach says, appearing suddenly at my side. Not a drop of sweat on him. He just finished dancing with a scorpion who now sits in the opposite corner, her segmented tail coiled and sinister. She seems to be pointing her stinger in my direction, and even from a distance, I feel a gush of adrenaline. Classic fight-or-flight. But, I’m probably just reading into things. Being paranoid.

“She hates you, you know.”

“What?”

Mr. Roach cocks his head in the direction of his dance partner.

“She hates you.”

Great. It wasn’t paranoia. I feel a little queasy. Mr. Roach brushes an antenna over his shiny shoulder.

“It’s no reason to sweat. She won’t hurt you. Follow me.”

  He leads me to the bar, where I down the rest of my whiskey and order another. As he orders a martini from the barkeep, I almost ask him why she would hate me, she never even met me before. Instead, I find myself boozily considering my distorted reflection as it gleams on his carapace.

            In some by-gone era, this place probably had a speakeasy air of secrecy and sleaze, complete with a password of knuckle-raps on the wooden doorframe. It probably puffed out smoke every time the airtight seal between out and in was broken, spilling cigar fumes thick as exhaust and speckled with sparkles and sequins. Now, it’s full of insects. Sentient ones, at that. But, I would probably get grilled for saying something like that. Deservingly, too. Apparently, they’ve been sentient this whole time.

Mr. Roach turns to me, squishing a green olive to bits with his many mandibles. He gestures to a table with one of his six arms, its digits clutching at an empty toothpick. As we sit down, he flicks his cerci like they are coattails and shouts, “More olives, please!” Almost immediately, an earwig waitress deposits a crystal bowl full of olives on the table. Their red pupils lean cockeyed in every direction as Mr. Roach continues to shred them to bits before me. Is it rude to stare? But, it’s almost impossible not to, with all those moving parts…

Then, he dabs the edges of his face with a napkin. I feel light-headed and reach for my whiskey. I focus on its burn. The cellist has moved front and center. They’re a beetle of some kind, plucking the beginnings of a gloriously melancholy tune while rimmed in the haze of the stage lights. I feel their rhythm snake around the tables like syrup. The cymbals circulate the room with a shudder. When the drummer’s foot pedal begins to beat, the centipede behind me falls off his stool.

“Atta boy, Francis!” Mr. Roach shouts, and extends a foreleg to help the guy back up. The sight of them making contact makes my skin prickle.

As Mr. Roach sits back down with his usual flourish, he looks at me.

“You know, it’s rude to look at someone with such open disgust,” he says.

My cheeks begin to burn.

Mr. Roach shakes his head at me, knowingly.

“Now, this is what I was worried about. Talking to a human journalist. How am I supposed to trust that you aren’t going to portray us as pests? Freaks? Objects?”

Mr. Roach crosses his top two sets of legs.

Human subjects ask me similar questions all the time, yet hearing such precaution from a cockroach is a whole other experience. It's the sort of question that demands recognition of his personhood. Yet, for the first time, I’m not sure if I’m ready for that. Not while an array of images roulettes in my mind’s eye: all those moments where I hunted, whacked, and flushed creatures just like him, all while gagging at the goo.

“I want to write only what you’re comfortable with me writing,” I find myself saying, out of habit. “When I write a sentence, I want your approval before it’s published.”

“Okay. Good,” he says, seeming to relax.

We both lean back and watch the performance for a while, listening as the band coalesces their various sounds into a cohesive whole. The thuds, lilts, and twangs intermingle like chemical compounds to form something undeniably alive. Music is a sort of ecology, too, come to think of it. It isn’t a pyramid with humans resting at the top like some out-of-tune vocalist forcing out a solo. With music, more cooperation is always better. One more voice, and it’s a harmony. Two more voices and it’s a choir. Diversify that by a hundred different voices and a million microscopic harmonies and you have an entire ecosystem.

“This is your first time in one of our gathering places, isn’t it?” Mr. Roach asks.

“It is.”

“You were unprepared.”

“I was. I realized that once I stepped through the door.”

“Mm.” Mr. Roach says, and takes a swish of his martini. When he does that, I’m distracted once more from the music as the dainty stem of the martini glass magnifies a portion of his foreleg. Crystal and cockroach. Those things don’t really pair up, do they? Buffed glass and Blattodea. The only times I’ve seen those two together, it involved heightened senses and calculated movements: an attack, the smell of cleaning fluid, and the screech of remains being wiped off a window pane.

I seem to have countless memories of infestations I’ve sprayed with poison. Endless images of grinding bodies like his into the dirt. There was that scorpion I flattened with the butt of a frying pan. That cockroach I popped with the heel of my boot.

I’m sweating profusely, now. Almost immediately, Mr. Roach’s antennae raise and he grows incredibly still. In my periphery, I notice as some of the dancers slow their waggling. The trombonist hits a note off-tune. I try to blink the images away, like sunspots. Yet as I do, I notice the scorpion align her posture to meet my gaze. Even with all that space separating her from me, her form seems sharp and urgent. Her pedipalps open like crab claws. The end of her tail twitches before I tear my eyes away.

“You know, there’s a backroom I think you’ll like a lot more,” Mr. Roach says at last. Around us, the dancers resume their quick-footed pacing, but I can feel their eyes on me.

            “It’s, how do you say? More professional.”

            I agree and he leads me from our table. As we move, the scorpion leaves her corner and follows us at a distance. I can feel her scrutiny on the back of my neck as the three of us weave into the horde of invertebrates partying on a Friday night. The crowd seems to part as we pass.

Beetles, bugs. Aphids and slugs. A moth’s fuzzy wing almost brushes my arm. I jump. He apologizes. Then, I step a smidge too close to an angry-looking stink bug and I’m the one who hurries to apologize. Finally, we reach a booth in the back corner where a daddy-long-legs hat-check girl hands Mr. Roach a top hat and cane. There’s a red, velvet curtain draped across the adjacent door frame. Mr. Roach dons his hat before he uses his cane to part the way forward.

-

If I thought the previous room stank, I’m unprepared for the wafting smell of trash and decomposition that greets me, here. Rotten fruit. Spoiled eggs. The air is dank and humid. And there is the sound, not of brass instruments, but of buzzing en masse. Dozens of flies swarm about. As the curtain flaps closed behind us, one lands on the wall next to me, rubbing his forelegs together as one does before an appetizing meal.

“Now, this is where the action happens!” Mr. Roach exclaims, expanding his legs like a showman. We are in an expansive space with an earthen floor upon which towers an immense pile of debris. Within and around it, a frenzy of detritivores tear and claw, laboring away at the act of decomposition. Millipedes, pill bugs, and earthworms abound, their bodies wriggling and clambering about in the heaping mass. None of them are wearing bowties. Above, a troupe of fireflies perform synchronized choreography, glowing and dimming in the faint dark. Below, termites undertake feats of silent carpentry, creating clouds of sawdust as they whittle away at logs and branches. In the ceiling corners, silkworms spin impressive webbed cocoons.

“You know, insects were the original alchemists. Well, after the microbes and plants, of course.” Mr. Roach says and he beckons me onward. “Millions of years before human existence, we perfected the art of transforming rubbish into fertilizer. We turn darkness into light. We rearrange our very body parts into flying spectacles!” At this, he flutters his own wings and laughs.

Mr. Roach leads us past the pile and I carefully place my footsteps between clumps of plant debris, food waste, and human garbage.

“That’s right. Now you know who does your dirty work,” the scorpion says, still behind me. Her voice is a serrated whisper and I shiver.

When we arrive at the opposite wall, Mr. Roach takes a seat in an armchair upholstered in vegan red leather. I sit opposite him and the scorpion once again assumes an eerily motionless stance, this time within an arm’s reach. I place my recording device on the table.

Is she really going to be here the whole interview?

“Why, yes. I haven’t introduced you two, have I? This is Aka, my dance partner. She’ll be listening in.”

I smile vaguely in Aka’s direction as I take my notebook out, flipping to a fresh page. Mr. Roach lights a cigarillo.

“Are you ready?” I ask Mr. Roach.

He nods within his cloud of tobacco smoke. I press the “record” button.

-

“Mr. Roach, welcome.”

“Happy to be here.”

“You’re the owner of this venue, the name of which you requested I keep confidential. It’s a space for insects like yourself to gather and express themselves, am I right?”

“Precisely. Dancing. Music. Booze’n’class. We’ve got it all. But if the city legislators aren’t impressed by our doodads and baubles, they won’t even blink at our riffs and shoulder shimmies. As we speak, they’re scheming to demolish the place.”

“They’re citing certain codes and ordinances, correct?”

“You heard that, too? Word really is getting out. Listen, it’s all just bureaucratic baloney. I have the building permits. I have the licenses. I’ve got every scrap of paper and scribbly signature you need to keep a place kicking. Yet, they keep insisting we’re skirting corners and deteriorating the economics of this-and-that. Blah, blah, blah. It won’t end. If they think we’re flawed, they think we’re flawed. But we’re not going anywhere.”

“Investigations are still underway, aren’t they?”

“Yeah. They always find some other reason to keep me on my toes. Fear does that to people,” Mr. Roach says, tapping ash off the end of his smoke. “When I originally opened this establishment, I was amazed by the numbers that flocked here. People like me want a place to relax and unwind, just like anybody. The music protects us in so many ways. Teaches us a certain language and way of being. At the end of the night, we take home style and sass. We’re more prepared to face the world. There’s simply no other place like it.”

“Certainly not! I was amazed to see so many talented insects in one space. It’s impressive. A cultural hotspot. A hidden gem.”

 “Ah,” Mr. Roach said, clearing his throat abruptly. “I was certainly inspired by my love of music. Then, by my love of creativity, in general.”

“What got you started with music?”

“Well, when I was young, my family didn’t have much money at all. In fact, we had absolutely nothing to our name. But I didn’t realize just how bent-outta-shape we were. We had a place where we were safe, and that’s all that seemed to matter...

            “Anyway, we were living beneath the floorboards of this house off the side of the interstate, and on the other side of it were these railroad tracks. Now, the sounds of all those poor creatures getting hit by all those cars, and the sounds of all those poor creatures getting blown to bits by trains...Well, that was enough of a horror soundtrack to fill a thousand nightmares. Ask any of my regulars, and you’ll hear something similar. Only difference was, my lot was lucky. The family on the upside of the floorboards had this huge record collection. And I mean huge. Wall-to-wall vinyl, everything from the heaviest of lights to the lightest of heavys. Voices rough and voices soft. Rhythms string-pickin and metal-gleamin and bang-bangin away.”

“You were hooked.”

“I sure was.”

-

The day the researchers shared the fact of our sentience with human society, it was like something out of a horror movie. I was stretching, cracking, growing. Rapidly molting carapace after thin, way-too-frail carapace, expanding like a mushroom cloud outta control. My body was being hijacked, you see. Before my eyes, some higher power had stolen my body, inflating it to whole new proportions. Molding me with little thought of how it felt to be the clay, ripping and tearing, rebirthing me one size larger at each shedding, till I emerged, cracking from beneath the floorboards completely exposed to the humans who I knew feared me, above.

It is an odd realization, to know you are feared. To know people have nightmares of you and to see it in their eyes. The scream that came out of the woman, that shriek. It will stay with me forever.

“I’m sorry!” was all I could think to say. I was embarrassed for bursting through her living room floorboards like that. For growing out-of-control, Alice in Wonderland style, my six legs flailing. I hated that I was being so destructive, so intrusive, so abhorrently protrusive. Yet, she only screamed louder when she heard me speak and began thwacking a broom at me, with the intent to kill.

There is nothing more humiliating than apologizing to your attacker. Yet, “I’m sorry” were the only words I could think to say, never having had the gift of gab, nor the voice to practice it with before that moment.

I’m sorry!

I said it the whole way out the door as I fled from her broom-swings.

-

Clicking off the recorder, I feel myself beaming in Mr. Roach’s direction.

“Wow, thanks for opening up to me,” I hear myself saying. Yet my mind is elsewhere, sniffing at the ground like a dog, baying with its tail pointed. The target is near.

Finally, things are going as planned. I’m electrified with new possible leads, new tracks opening up between my neurons like so many flying arrows. Gosh. What a relief. For a little while back there, I was forgetting why I was here, exactly. My skills were fuzzy, my aim all out-of-sorts. Revulsion was pulsing its way through my well-thought-out intentions, leaving me bare and wrecked. Now, a recorder-roll into the project, the fear feels fainter. The feature feels write-able. I can even hear applause on the horizon.

But before we could schedule our next meeting, the daddy-long-legs hat check girl scampers over with a message for Mr. Roach. Her left leg is coiled around a pair of spectacles, which she places on her narrowly-set eyes.

            “A Mister Mosquito wants to speak to you, sir.”

            “Okay, is it urgent?”

            “He’s hungry.”

            “Okay, I’ll be right there.”

            And just that scrap of conversation is enough to tear me from my goals and make me feel pale again. How are they going to feed a mosquito? Now, Mr. Roach is excusing himself. Now, he’s gone. Now, the scorpion and I are alone. I feel my posture slowly wither beneath the density of its looming presence.

            “My name is Aka. And I’m glad my very existence threatens you.”

            For once, I look at her dead-on, amazed at her bluntness.

“I’m scared you’re gonna sting me.”

“Sting you? It’s hardly in my interest to sting you. I’m about to become a mother.”

“A mother?” I feel my throat tighten as I notice contractions pulsating down the length of her body.

“Yes. Any moment, now.”

Indeed, I watch as a grub-white mini scorpion emerges from beneath her, complete with two beady eyes, his own set of pedipalps, and a stinger. He is followed by a parade of others. Two. Three. A dozen. They crawl up her sides and come to rest in formation on her back. The contractions slow, then stop.

“As a mother, I’m going to say what I want to say, when I want to say it.”

  I can feel a rage emanating off her, a rage as hot as embers, with as much capacity to roar into flame as any other. I feel the sudden urge to escape, but I can’t. I’m plastered to my seat.

“First of all, how dare you come here, to the one place so many of us feel safe, and infect the room with your fear.”

“I-I...”

“Second of all, how dare you aim to snag our stories for the benefit of your career.”

“I…”

“Also, a little one wriggles within you. I can smell the alcohol as it disturbs her equilibrium. You’re going to be a mother, too.”

I’m pregnant? The moment I hear it, something deep within me quivers. The flop of a suffocating fish.

At this, Mr. Roach returns and I find that his presence is actually a comfort to me. A sort of friendship seems to be hanging in the air between us.

“You’re probably not even pregnant,” he says. “She has a tendency to catastrophize, you know.”

I shake my head, but it does nothing to hold back a burst of anger from the scorpion, this time aimed at Mr. Roach.

“How dare you disrespect me like that.”

“Disrespect? Ha!” Mr. Roach thrusts a foreleg in her face. “Who are you to speak of disrespect? Their astrologers claim you’re a legend! A god! All while their ugliest too often sling my name as an insult.”

“Do not cross me, Mr. Roach. We’re on the same side.”

I look back and forth between them and hold my belly with one hand.

“Where’s the bathroom?”

-

I’ve never forced myself to puke before. And I never imagined it would be in a place such as this: a powder room in the recesses of an arthropod hang-out, complete with complimentary qtips and cotton-balls. Yet here I am, jamming fingers down my throat to bag-punch my own uvula. I try not to imagine the whiskey stinging all those dividing cells as they cling-for-life to my uterine wall. I pause after a while, upchuck unsuccessful. Breathing heavy, I stare at the hole at the bottom of the toilet bowl as it gapes open at me, accusingly.

I’m so immersed in the precariousness of squatting above the checkered tile, I’m not prepared when I feel a sudden scampering of pointy legs across my back. They’re moving quite quickly and all my spine-hairs rise like I’m a threatened feline. My hand flies of its own accord, slapping at my shoulder just as the creature rounds the top of it. It is as long as a skateboard. Way too huge to be touching me. It falls to the floor and I leap to my feet, my senses ablaze, my nostrils flared. I stomp, stomp, stomp it to the ground. Then, as it becomes apparent that I’m alright, my brain catches up to my actions and a fog seems to lift away. A soberness settles and my stomping slowly comes to a stop. There, twitching at my feet in that faint, spasmodic way of the dying, is one of Aka’s baby scorpions. The spasms still and my stomach twists, clenched. A sick, unavoidable fact is settled: the baby scorpion is dead.

That’s when I hear a rough banging on the bathroom door. It is Mr. Roach.

“Are you alright in there? All sorts of nasty-smelling pheromones are making their way under the door, you know. It has us all rather concerned.”

“Um, yeah!” My eyes dart about the room, which suddenly feels so grimy, so small. A prison cell I’ve simply walked in and locked myself into.

“You don’t sound very convincing at all.” Mr. Roach says. “What’s going on in there, exactly?”

            I can hear the suspicion rising in his voice.

There is a small, hip-height doorway in the back right corner of the room. I lunge at its brass doorknob, yanking at it, but it’s difficult to turn.

“I’ve got the master key, here. I’m going to have to come in, now. You hear me?”

I give the doorknob another rough yank, willing it to twist open.

“No! I’ll only be another moment!” I shout.

I twist the knob yet again and this time it obliges. I throw the door open and clamber through to the other side.

-

When I escape out into the open air, I do not chance at a heaving break, leaning against the brickwork, soaking up the open air. No. I keep moving. Walking, so as not to attract too much attention. When I finally cross into a more familiar part of town, I exhale. I feel like I’m far enough away, at this point. What’s it been, like two miles? Yet a shadow rushes past the corner of my eye and Mr. Roach is once again before me, leaning up against the wall in the most casual of stances, slowly dabbing at his face with a napkin. A bit of maggot-colored goo stubbornly clings to his mandibles.

“It wasn’t pleasant covering that up for you, but I did,” he says.

Finally, I successfully retch into the nearest alleyway. I imagine the clump of cells within me sighing with relief as I spit acid all over the sidewalk.

“There, there,” Mr. Roach says, patting my back. His prickles cling to the pores in my skin and my dry-heaving intensifies. Slowly, he removes his foreleg from my back. He straightens himself up, adjusting the top hat on his head so it rests at a stylish tilt.

“I trust we’ll be in contact. I need to approve those sentences of yours.”

I nod and watch him walk away, trying to process all that had happened in the last hour, the taste of acid on my tongue, my throat burning. I long for a glass of water to rinse with. Yet, that’s when I see the darkness on the wall near him begin to move downward, an Aka-shaped shadow. She descends upon Mr. Roach with a whip of her tail. He freezes beneath her and falls. Then, she crunches into his carcass. I sprint away.

Humans scatter and proliferate just like cockroaches, you know. Aka says, her voice loud in my brain even though she is a few blocks away from me, now. Except humans don’t know when to stop hunting.

As I run, I realize her dozens of children are catching up to me, trotting along effortlessly as my muscles burn. I push myself to run faster and they keep my pace. Some even run ahead in exploratory zigzags. More and more recruits join their ranks, a quickly amassing army. Spiders swing down from their webbed corners. Silverfish dart between legs. Moths and mosquito hawks begin to clog the air above me.

I wheeze as they begin to envelop me, a crowd closing in from all directions. The air seems full of their messages, a silent yet potent call for action that is stirring the immense citizenry of the insect underworld. The walls are teeming. Every brick and concrete slab is alive and jostling with the movement of multitudes. I crane my neck up to the sky. There, through the moths and over the skyscrapers, I see stars. Orion bows his head over his diamond-studded belt like an unheeded prophet. As I fall, his form turns upside-down, a patron saint desecrated as the legs of thousands trample me.

It’s a strange thing, being trampled. It requires a certain disregard and momentum. Today, I am the life that is thrown to the chaff. Today, I become dirt as others push forward. The crowd is so enormous now and flowing down the hill with such speed, their current pulls me taut until some vital suction snaps. Then, I am propelled far from my body, traveling like flotsam on a tide of exoskeletons reflecting moonlight.

I vault myself up and away until I am far above the streets. A different current, that of the wind, catches me and tosses me as it wills. I race across the sky like a shooting star. Fields and suburbs rush by beneath me. As I arrive at the epicenter of human activity, I’m thrown between the tallest buildings, whooshing through their wind tunnels. I spiral upward. When I skirt the skeleton of the highest edifice, Orion’s form has faded to almost nothing. Here, a lone Rigel bursts through the city’s smog. Yet hardly anyone looks up, if but for a pre-occupied moment.

The scorpions and their soldiers are still advancing from the outskirts of the neighboring town, having long left me behind. I wonder if the city-dwellers understand what they’ve become blind to, what they don’t see approaching. For it will only be a matter of time before Orion sets and Scorpius rises, all her stars invisible behind the metropolitan fog. When she arrives, we won’t be expecting her.

“Hey there, pal,” I hear a voice behind me say. I turn and it’s Mr. Roach, looking just as disembodied as me, that is to say, we now look exactly the same. “Listen. Can you hear their legs? They’re making music.”

My hearing is much better in this state. If I focus, it’s true! There’s the sound of a million footsteps on the horizon.

Rat-a-tat-tat. Rat-a-tat-tat. Rat-a-tat-tat.

***

Karina Dove Escobar is a speculative fiction writer currently based in San Antonio, Texas. Her interests range from crafting short stories to spinning her own yarns (no pun intended). She also loves singing to the squirrel that frequents her bird-feeder and watering the little plants that grow from the scattered seed.