The Roaches Have No King

  Daniel Evan Weiss is the author of The Swine's Wedding, Hell on Wheels and Honk If You Love Aphrodite, all novels published by Serpent's Tail; and Your Life Is Not Your Own and An Unbelievable Thing, memoirs published by Pointed Prose Press. He lives in New York City.

  Praise for The Roaches Have No King

  'Woody Allen meets Kafka in this wildly original and funny account of a cockroach conspiracy... A novel to make you laugh and squirm' Observer

  'Fabulous, cockroach-eye-view of life in a liberal, middle-class American male's apartment... Weiss is a daring original, an underground Kafka who invites biblical allusions and street savvy on to his page and lets them fight it out' Time Out

  'The Roaches Have No King isn't just amazingly funny, it's the sickest, most imaginative and complex novel since Patrick Suskind's Perfume ... an implausible, hilarious and beautifully written tale' Vox

  'Something of a cult item among connoisseurs of the exquisitely disgusting... outrageously funny and impressively twisted ... with a keen intelligence and razor-sharp sense of satire' Venue

  'Shades of Kafka, Swift, and Don Marquis. Daniel Evan Weiss has written an appealing, often mordant satire about the urban condition as seen from the point of view of a roach... Make no mistake about it, these roaches are philosophers, sharp and insightful. Have I neglected to mention that Daniel Evan Weiss's unusual novel is dark and erotic in addition to being clever and charming? It is laced with sexual scenes so graphic I hesitate to share them with you' New York Times Book Review

  'It takes a writer with great skill and a lot of humor to make cockroaches appealing protagonists, and Weiss has both... His ground's-eye insights on the intricacies of human interaction are pricelessly accurate... If you've ever lived side-by-side with roaches ... The Roaches Have No King will fascinate you. God knows, it made me wonder what my old roaches thought of me' Los Angeles Reader

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2001087178

  The right of Daniel Evan Weiss to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Patents and Designs Act 1988

  Copyright © 1994 Daniel Evan Weiss

  First published under the title Unnatural Selection in 1990 by Black Swan

  First published in 1994 by Serpent's Tail

  Cover design by Denise Baldwin

  Roach illustration by Sapphia Cunningham-Tate

  For John Speicher

  Many-legged thanks to Pati Cockram

  The locusts have no king, yet they go forth all of

  them by bands.

  —Proverbs

  Prologue

  WHAT DOES IT MATTER when you lose a lover? At the top of the animal kingdom the answer is easy—not at all. Coitus is a great experience, right up there with excretion and gluttony. But all things end, especially good things, and the lover fades, looking again just like all the others.

  Never for long. Unlike humans, who rightly worry if they will commingle again, we never do. When pheromones are calm we are sexually indifferent. When pheromones storm, these miraculous chemicals always bring us an ideally suited lover, each the equal of the last. At floor level there is no unrequited love.

  As for offspring, we have a policy adopted only by certain cagey urban humans—no one knows the identity of his father. One sperm injection can fertilize a female's lifetime production of eggs—but it might not. After each go-round you can never know if the next brood is your doing or that of one of your predecessors. But after all, who would want to know a thing like that?

  This is not braggadocio. When I was released into the intimidating world of Homo sapiens, it was their reactions to separation from their lovers that offered me first comfort. I would soon realize that man is only an eerie visitor to our ecosphere, like a jack-o'-lantern on a windy night, frightening, but already flickering and certain to go out. The reason is simple: humans cannot adapt because they are not rewarded for diversifying their gene pool. Separation engenders not a sense of satisfaction at a job well done nor a heart-pounding anticipation of the next opportunity, but instead a black, debilitating insecurity. In fact, separation ignites human passions unmatched by those occasioned by consummation.

  During my first days, the Bible assaulted me with illustrations of this trait, but I refused to believe it. Later corroboration by the Iliad, however, made me concede its possibility. As told by Homer, the Iliad is the story of a man who led his countrymen to bloody death on foreign shores because his lady-friend found greener grass. I would soon learn the full account, passed down from an ancestor who was there—the word of a sober witness with compound eyes, not the drunken crowings of a blind man.

  Helen was not abducted. Menelaus' garlic breath left her frigid, and she was chronically diarrheic from olive oil in her diet (and raw from wiping with grape leaves). One day Aphrotella—my ancestor, and the real heroine of this tale— heard Helen conspiring with her handmaiden to leave. Aphrotella was torn. Greece had its advantages—a family of forty could easily live off the food matted in the beard of one man, who made access easy by drinking himself to sleep after dinner every night. But even Aphrotella was disgusted by the sanitary conditions. And she had always wanted to see Troy.

  While Helen toppled the furniture in her chamber, simulating her abduction by Paris, Aphrotella's pheromones drew the avid attentions of a passing stud. That evening she and Helen left for Troy. The gates opened for Helen's chariot, but it was a moment later, when Aphrotella followed, that Troy was properly conquered. Her first brood was soon born, and our new colony flourished.

  Then the Greek fleet came. The foolish young men of the Greek and Trojan nations turned each other into crab chum on the gray sands of Troy. No Homo sapiens protested this absurd tragedy. No, it was thought the height of manliness to fight and die because a woman you'd never even met was copulating with another man.

  It took the Greeks ten years, thousands of cadavers, and a huge horse to pass through the gates of Troy. Our conquest was made by one demure female in a trail of horse piss. Menelaus again had his fair Helen but, in fact, Aphrotella reported that her mistress spent most of her time alone with a plaster of Paris. And then the Greeks torched the city, killing not only most of the Trojans, but also most of Aphrotella's descendants, who by then outnumbered the Trojans by a factor of twelve thousand. Some of the survivors went back with the fleet for moussaka; others went on to do what the Greeks could not—conquer Asia and the New World.

  The two versions of this tale agree: when humans are separated, or even threatened with separation, from their lovers, their behavior knows no bounds, no matter how dry or futile the romance has become. I do not gloat over this ugly knowledge. But when humans thrust the fight upon me, three thousand years after the fell of Troy, I chose to stand and face them, as anyone would, on the treacherous field of romantic distress.

  Genesis

  MY MOTHER NEVER trusted the kitchen cabinets. Since the founding of the colony it had been a tradition to unload oothecae—egg sacs—in the cabinets so the younglings would be near the principal food stocks. But, bloated with her brood of thirty-eight, my wonderful mother dragged all the way to the hallway so we would debut at the base of the bookcase.

  She never wanted us to read. Had she ever suspected what the books would do to her babies, she would have killed us all first. She intended only that we suckle; the sweet, creamy library paste that bound the books was our mother's milk.

  The moment she dropped the ootheca there was a stampede to get out. Churning legs pounded my head and blurred my eyes. I emerged and stumbled across the shelf to a volume with a calm earthy smell, which suggested that the book had seen a lot of use, but not for a long time. I could not make out the gol
d-plate stamping on the blue cover. But with the unflinching certainty of youth I climbed to the top of the spine and began to eat my way through.

  I flinched many times during those months. Every page was filled with betrayal, murder, lust, vengeance, delusion, genocide, treachery, incest, or some other unspeakable vice. Why had someone chosen to disseminate these chronicles, when they should have been dumped into a pit and covered with rocks? I desperately crawled over the top of the impervious divider and into the little second section of the book. It was even worse. Now, no matter how grim the crime and hardened the criminal, everything was forgiven! As if it had never happened! I knew then that I wanted nothing to do with humans. If man did have dominion over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth, I would hide here and suffer only the written record of his perversions.

  Alas, my mother was right; this book was a growing experience. I molted twice. The space became suffocatingly tight. It was daytime when my head squeezed from between the pages. I looked over the top of the spine. The gold letters were now sharp: I was a Bible baby.

  Twenty or thirty of my kind were scavenging casually in the expansive hallway down below. I saw no murders, betrayals, or cruelty—nothing to forgive. But I already knew too much to want to live on the outside.

  I jumped onto the top of the neighboring volume—an oft-thumbed paperback—and burrowed in. The stories of the Iliad were as unaccountable as the ones in the Bible. But for me they were fateful. I was infected with curiosity. Like an anthropologist, I had to see for myself whether these common accounts of human savagery had any merit. Luring me from my Trojan sanctuary was humanity's first triumph over my good sense.

  When I reached the shelf I saw two of my siblings. Though we had quadrupled in size since we last met, I knew them immediately. "You remember Phil," said one, pointing to the other. "And I'm Columbo."

  We had had no use for names in the sac. "Numbers," I said. It was all I could think of.

  Phil continued with the conversation. "The more mature a language is, the more specific its sounds are. In ancient Egypt, the sound ab meant: to dance; heart; wall; proceed; demand; left hand; and figure. All of those. Can you imagine?"

  I said, "No wonder the Lord led the Chosen from the land of Pharaoh."

  "The same sound meant both 'weak' and 'strong,' another meant both 'toward' and 'away from,'" said Phil. "These early humans couldn't conceive an idea without its antithesis."

  Miller came up the shelf from behind me. "Poor fucking savage. Gets set up on a blind date, and what does he know? The chick's going to be foxy or a dog, tall or squat, sharp or stupid. After they eat, or they don't, the savage gets a virgin or a whore, so he might or might not poke a pussy that's rank or sweet."

  Columbo said, "No wonder they reproduced so slowly."

  "They were not fruitful," I said. Only then did I realize the air was filled with the smells of exotic foods.

  Columbo said, "What do you make of a sound that means all this: a small fish of the carp family; a seam of coal; a variety of Portland stone; a cut in a square sail; to clip a horse's mane; and the butt of a marijuana cigarette?"

  Phil shook his head. "Extremely primitive."

  "One more clue," said Columbo. "It also means one hell of a handsome insect." He waved his antennae in wide circles.

  Phil laughed. "'Roach' means all that? And such an ugly sound. I'd rather be called 'ab'."

  Columbo said, "Here's one from Latin: in 1758 a chap named Carolus Linnaeus decided to tidy the living world. From the word Blatta, which means 'shunning light,' he stamped out this classification: suborder Blattaria, superfamily Blaberoidea, family Blattellidae, subfamily Blattellinae, genus Blattella."

  "The primitive light-shunner," said Phil. "The ostrich? The vole? The worm?"

  "The rapist," said Miller.

  "Satan!" I said.

  Columbo said, "They are we."

  "Light-shunners?" said Miller. "I was just going to catch some rays."

  Columbo said, "And the species name is... No, you try to guess."

  Miller punched the Tropics. "Light-shunning blind daters?"

  "Blind daters don't shun light," said Phil.

  "They should."

  I said, "How about light-shunning King of Kings?"

  Columbo said, "Your scientific name is. . .Blattella germanica."

  "But we're American!" said Phil.

  Columbo said, "Yes, but if you want to talk roots, we're African. The west German humans call us the French roach, the eastern Germans call us the Russian roach, and the southern and northern Germans name us after each other. We have an image problem. But let's not forget who made up the name—the animal who calls itself 'Homo sapiens.’

  "Latin for 'thinking faggot,'" said Miller.

  Columbo said, "Humans trace homo to the Indo- European dhghom-on, meaning 'earthling.' But it's African, savannah dialect. When the hairy runt first fell out of the tree, we cried, 'Hoho!' The name stuck."

  I learned that Phil had taken his name from Classical Philology, his first home. It was a fine choice, an old volume slathered with vintage paste, a well-worn college text now likely to remain untouched in perpetuity. Columbo had come of age in the formidable Columbia Encyclopedia.

  EVEN IRA'S CHEAPEST BOOKS were printed in indelible ink: we never forgot our early lessons. Most of us knew and remembered them as curiosities. Only when we were under great stress could book dogma menace us by seeming real. Even then it could be suppressed. On this first day out, my mind swirled with characters from my Book. I knew they could never get the better of me.

  But some citizens were affected profoundly, tragically. Many books had been opened so few times that air never permeated the pages. Infants who chose these books were destroyed. We held an annual commemoration for the many lost in Gravity's Rainbow and Finnegan's Wake. Others, like the philosophers, labored through oxygen-poor atmospheres that stripped their natural immunities to book toxins. These poor souls were the true imprinted. Words deprived them of the 350 million years of Blattella wisdom in their genes.

  I soon found that one bit of written rot had had a persistent effect on the colony—the germanica in our classification. The idea held the colony like a long fad. Two generations before mine the apartment was overrun with Heidis and Siegfrieds, and my generation was not much better.

  I wouldn't have thought much about it except for this: we light-shunning Germans lived under the aegis of Ira Fishblatt, a candle-lighting Jew. From this day on I was wary not only of his Old Testament excesses, but also of his modern ethnic vengeance. I awoke many mornings expecting cataclysm. When it came, I felt like an unhappy prophet.

  But I only had these thoughts when I let the written word get the better of me. The war was not religious at all. It was biological, caused by a population crisis. Our finely balanced ecosphere would tip when Ira overloaded it with Homo yidus.

  THAT DIDN’T HAPPEN for some time. I was born during a time of great prosperity. In fact, I came out to a ceremony that would have done justice to a bumper harvest

  Ira was living in the intermittent company of a self-styled Gypsy woman, whom I soon came to adore. She described the timing of significant events like traffic accidents. The night Mercury crossed into Taurus, say. The night I first met her, dinner crossed into wall.

  After speaking with the citizens of the bookshelf my first day out, I was drawn toward the source of the thickening aromas. It was the Gypsy, preparing one of her Eastern European specialties, her root cuisine.

  Ira, whom I had been hearing about for several hours, came home at what I would soon recognize as his regular time. He was as unprepossessing a foe as a roach could hope for. He picked the lid off the pot Steam fogged his glasses. "Mmm. What's that, goulash?"

  "You're not sure?"

  He dipped in a wooden spoon. "Tastes good. A little heavy on the paprika."

  She pushed him to the side and took a taste. "It's perfect." She slapped the cover down. "What would you know about Hun
garian cooking, you and your pot roasts and chicken soup. You call that cooking?"

  Ira shrugged. "You're the expert."

  "I put in exactly a palmful, as usual."

  "These potatoes must be smaller. That's it." He started to leave the kitchen.

  She challenged him. "You make dinner next time."

  "I work during the day."

  And then came my first experience of human fury in the flesh. She turned pink, her brow furrowed, lips trembling and nostrils flaring. "You rub that in my face every day."

  "I'm not rubbing anything in your face."

  "Maybe the martinis at your three-hour working lunch numbed your taste buds."

  "I never drink at lunch."

  "Neither do I."

  Pause. "I have to go change."

  "Don't you dare walk out that door."

  "I'll be right back."

  "Don't you leave me here with all this terrible goulash."

  "Oh, it's fine. That's not what I said." He shook his head and walked into the dining room.

  She looked at the pot the way I knew Moses looked at the Golden Calf. "Try it one more time." She walked to the doorway and hurled the pot. It slammed against the wall beside him, spraying his suit with flaming red sauce, and sending great gobbets all over the room.

  Ira was immobilized, speechless.

  "I'm not taking any more of your superior shit," she said, and walked out the front door.

  Soon he was in pursuit. Legions I hadn't seen suddenly swept down from hiding places to plunder. Meat and potatoes and vegetables disappeared into their ravenous mouths, their faces and limbs dripping with mammalian blood. Only the paprika was spared. It was thrilling to eat my first meal beside virile Blattella twenty times my size, to march en masse through thickening sauce, to attack as the Book said men did thousands of years ago.