Marcia could still see one cockroach coming down from the cupboard. “Stop!” she commanded. And it stopped.
At Marcia’s spoken command, the cockroach would march up and down, to the left and to the right. Suspecting that her phobia had matured into madness, Marcia left her warm bed, turned on the light, and cautiously approached the roach, which remained motionless, as she had bade it. “Wiggle your antennas,” she commanded. The cockroach wiggled its antennae.
She wondered if they would all obey her and found, within the next few days, that they all would. They would do anything she told them to. They would eat poison out of her hand. Well, not exactly out of her hand, but it amounted to the same thing. They were devoted to her. Slavishly.
It is the end, she thought, of my roach problem. But of course it was only the beginning.
Marcia did not question too closely the reason the roaches obeyed her. She had never much troubled herself with abstract problems. After expending so much time and attention on them, it seemed only natural that she should exercise a certain power over them. However she was wise enough never to speak of this power to anyone else—even to Miss Bismuth at the insurance office. Miss Bismuth read the horoscope magazines and claimed to be able to communicate with her mother, aged sixty-eight, telepathically. Her mother lived in Ohio. But what would Marcia have said: that she could communicate telepathically with cockroaches? Impossible.
Nor did Marcia use her power for any other purpose than keeping the cockroaches out of her own apartment. Whenever she saw one, she simply commanded it to go to the Shchapalov apartment and stay there. It was surprising then that there were always more roaches coming back through the pipes. Marcia assumed that they were younger generations. Cockroaches are known to breed fast. But it was easy enough to send them back to the Shchapalovs.
“Into their beds,” she added as an afterthought. “Go into their beds.” Disgusting as it was, the idea gave her a queer thrill of pleasure.
The next morning, the Shchapalov woman, smelling a little worse than usual (Whatever was it, Marcia wondered, that they drank?), was waiting at the open door of her apartment. She wanted to speak to Marcia before she left for work. Her housedress was mired from an attempt at scrubbing the floor, and while she sat there talking, she tried to wring out the scrubwater.
“No idea!” she exclaimed. “You ain’t got no idea how bad! ‘S terrible!”
“What?” Marcia asked, knowing perfectly well what.
“The boogs! Oh, the boogs are just everywhere. Don’t you have em, sweetheart? I don’t know what to do. I try to keep a decent house, God knows—” She lifted her rheumy eyes to heaven, testifying. “—but I don’t know what to do.” She leaned forward, confidingly. “You won’t believe this, sweetheart, but last night ...” A cockroach began to climb out of the limp strands of hair straggling down into the woman’s eyes. “... they got into bed with us! Would you believe it? There must have been a hundred of em. I said to Osip, I said—What’s wrong, sweetheart?”
Marcia, speechless with horror, pointed at the roach, which had almost reached the bridge of the woman’s nose.
“Yech!” the woman agreed, smashing it and wiping her dirtied thumb on her dirtied dress. “Goddam boogs! I hate em, I swear to God. But what’s a person gonna do? Now, what I wanted to ask, sweetheart, is do you have a problem with the boogs? Being as how you’re right next door, I thought—” She smiled a confidential smile, as though to say this is just between us ladies. Marcia almost expected a roach to skitter out between her gapped teeth.
“No,” she said. “No, I use Black Flag.” She backed away from the doorway toward the safety of the stairwell. “Black Flag,” she said again, louder. “Black Flag,” she shouted from the foot of the stairs. Her knees trembled so, that she had to hold onto the metal banister for support.
At the insurance office that day, Marcia couldn’t keep her mind on her work five minutes at a time. (Her work in the Actuarial Dividends department consisted of adding up long rows of two-digit numbers on a Burroughs adding machine and checking the similar additions of her coworkers for errors.) She kept thinking of the cockroaches in the tangled hair of the Shchapalov woman, of her bed teeming with roaches, and of other, less concrete horrors on the periphery of consciousness. The numbers swam and swarmed before her eyes, and twice she had to go to the Ladies’ Room, but each time it was a false alarm. Nevertheless, lunchtime found her with no appetite. Instead of going down to the employee cafeteria she went out into the fresh April air and strolled along 23rd Street. Despite the spring, it all seemed to bespeak a sordidness, a festering corruption. The stones of the Flatiron Building oozed damp blackness; the gutters were heaped with soft decay; the smell of burning grease hung in the air outside the cheap restaurants like cigarette smoke in a close room.
The afternoon was worse. Her fingers would not touch the correct numbers on the machine unless she looked at them. One silly phrase kept running through her head: “Something must be done. Something must be done.” She had quite forgotten that she had sent the roaches into the Shchapalovs’ bed in the first place.
That night, instead of going home immediately, she went to a double feature on 42nd Street. She couldn’t afford the better movies. Susan Hayward’s little boy almost drowned in quicksand. That was the only thing she remembered afterwards.
She did something then that she had never done before. She had a drink in a bar. She had two drinks. Nobody bothered her; nobody even looked in her direction. She took a taxi to Thompson Street (the subways weren’t safe at that hour) and arrived at her door by eleven o’clock. She didn’t have anything left for a tip. The taxi driver said he understood.
There was a light on under the Shchapalovs’ door, and they were singing. It was eleven o’clock! “Something must be done,” Marcia whispered to herself earnestly. “Something must be done.”
Without turning on her own light, without even taking off her new spring jacket from Ohrbach’s, Marcia got down on her knees and crawled under the sink. She tore out the Kleenexes she had stuffed into the cracks around the pipes.
There they were, the three of them, the Shchapalovs, drinking, the woman plumped on the lap of the one-eyed man, and the other man, in a dirty undershirt, stamping his foot on the floor to accompany the loud discords of their song. Horrible. They were drinking, of course; she might have known it, and now the woman pressed her roachy mouth against the mouth of the one-eyed man— kiss, kiss. Horrible, horrible. Marcia’s hands knotted into her mouse-colored hair, and she thought: The filth, the disease! Why, they hadn’t learned a thing from last night!
Sometime later (Marcia had lost track of time) the overhead light in the Shchapalovs’ apartment was turned off. Marcia waited till they made no more noise. “Now,” Marcia said, “all of you....
“All of you in this building, all of you that can hear me, gather round the bed, but wait a little while yet. Patience. All of you. . . .” The words of her command fell apart into little fragments, which she told like the beads of a rosary—little brown ovoid wooden beads. “. . . gather round . . . wait a little while yet . . . all of you . . . patience . . . gather round. . . .” Her hand stroked the cold-water pipes rhythmically, and it seemed that she could hear them—gathering, scuttering up through the walls, coming out of the cupboards, the garbage bags—a host, an army, and she was their absolute queen.