Cockroach (10 page)

ON TUESDAY MORNING
, the day of my interview at the
restaurant, I was awakened by the noise of my dripping faucet, a noise that persisted in
its monotonous, torturous tune until it forced me to drag my feet to the kitchen, put my
grip on the faucet's neck, and twist it into a permanent silence, that of a
morning lake. And in the same spirit of cruelty, I reached for my slippers and pounded
the walls above the sink, flattening a few early risers.

I decided to smoke a cigarette before going to meet the restaurant owner
as promised. I also decided to take a shower and walk all the way to my meeting. In the
shower, my big toe touched the drain, feeling the stream of water running through it. I
also felt a vibration, the sound of the drain gulping like a quenched throat on a hot
summer day. I got out of the shower and rubbed my skin with the towel. I walked naked
around my bathroom, looking in the mirror behind the door. I combed my hair. Under a
certain oblique angle of light I could see the scar on my face. Shohreh had asked me
about it
once, and touched it with her thumb as if trying to erase
it. I told her that I had fallen.

It is a cut, she said.

I fell on something sharp, I answered.

She dropped her hand from my face and said, So, you do not want to talk
about it.

Many people in my life had asked me about it, but no one had touched it
before, maybe because it looked fragile, as if it was about to burst wide open and spray
a fountain of blood.

I looked for my socks, and goddamn it! They were still moist. I usually
put them under the bedcovers and slept on top of them to dry them out, but last night I
forgot and just tossed them on the floor. Perhaps I was thinking a little fresh air
would do them good. I dug around in my laundry and found an older pair that were dry
— dirty but dry. I put them on, reminding myself that, no matter what, I should
not take off my shoes in the presence of a woman or the restaurant owner. That bastard
of an owner has a nose for poverty. He knows well what a threat to his business an
impoverished presence might be. The rich hate the poor, and they especially hate those
whose odour surfaces like a cloud to overshadow the smell of cigarettes and hot plates
or to overwhelm the travelling scent of an expensive perfume. Nothing corporeal, nothing
natural, should emanate from a servant. A servant should be visible but undetectable,
efficient but unnoticeable, nourishing but malnourished. A servant is to be seen,
always, in black and white.

I walked down St-Laurent and approached the Artista Café. Inside it
was foggy with smoke and warm breath, and the
glass of the window
dripped water. I stuck my face close to the glass (so as to see others and not my own
ghostly reflection for once), and I moved my eyes left and right, searching to see if
any lost immigrants had arrived. No one I knew was there yet, so I continued
walking.

A merchant was sprinkling salt on the sidewalk like a prairie farmer.
Taxis waited on the corners with their engines idling, precipitating fumes like
underground chimneys. A falafel store on the corner sported a sign with neon hands and a
swinging moustache, the hands slicing meat with the speed of light. A Portuguese
used-clothing store hung churchgoers' dresses in the window, dresses suspended
behind glass like condemned medieval witches. A little farther down, the street,
gentrified now with a strip of chic Italian restaurants, was getting ready for the
lunchtime specials.

I like to pass by fancy stores and restaurants and watch the people behind
thick glass, taking themselves seriously, driving forks into their mouths between short
conversations and head nods. I also like to watch the young waitresses in their short
black dresses and white aprons. Although I no longer stand and stare. The last time I
did that it was summer and I was leaning on a parked car, watching a couple eat slowly,
neither looking at the other. A man from inside, in a black suit, came out and asked me
to leave. When I told him that it is a free country, a public space, he told me to leave
now, and to get away from the sports car I was resting against. I moved away from the
car but refused to leave. Not even two minutes later, a police car came and two female
officers got out, walked towards me, and asked for my papers. When I
objected and asked them why, they said it was unlawful to stare at people inside
commercial places. I said, Well, I am staring at my own reflection in the glass. The
couple in the restaurant seemed entertained by all of this. While one of the officers
held my papers and went back to the car to check out my past, I watched the couple
watching me, as if finally something exciting was happening in their lives. They watched
as if from behind a screen, as if it were live news. Now I was part of their
TV
dinner, I was spinning in a microwave, stripped of my plastic
cover, eaten, and defecated the next morning just as the filtered coffee was brewing in
the kitchen and the radio was prophesying the weather, telling them what to wear, what
to buy, what to say, whom to watch, and whom to like and hate. The couple enjoyed
watching me, as if I were some reality show about police chasing people with food-envy
syndrome.

I thought, I will show this happy couple what I am capable of. One of the
officers came back from her car, gave me back my papers, and said, You'd better go
now if you do not want trouble. So I started to walk. And when I passed the man outside
his restaurant, I spat at the ground beneath him and cursed his Italian suit. Then I
crossed the street, entered a magazine store, flipped through a few pages, and came out
again. I watched that same couple from behind the glass of the entrance to an office
building. Now, all of the sudden, they had something to say to each other, so they had
started to converse. And I watched the owner come to their table and talk to them as
well. Excitement had been injected into their mundane lives. I bet they even got an
apologetic complimentary
drink on the house at my expense. Bourgeois
filth! I thought. I want my share!

Finally the man stepped outside. He buttoned his blazer, put his hand in
his pocket, pulled out his keys, and pointed a small electronic device at a blue
BMW
. The car responded, opened its locks, blinked its lights, and
said, I am all yours, master, and all the doors are open for you. The man smoked a
cigarette outside while he waited for his woman to exit the restaurant with a
fresh-powdered nose. I crawled to the edge of the pavement, rushing with my many feet,
my belly just above the ground; I climbed the car wheels, slipped through the back door,
and waited on the floor. The man opened the door for his partner and slipped her fur
coat in. From below I could see her fixing her hair in the mirror. They both buckled up.
The car purred, and neither of them said a word for a while. When we reached the
highway, the woman said something about the place, then something about the food. She
asked the man if he remembered the owner's name. Alfonso, the man said. I believe
I have his card here. He passed it to her. She glanced at it and threw it on the
dashboard, and neither of them retrieved it. Then there was silence again. At last the
woman said something about the other Italian place, the one they had gone to last time,
with Helen and Joe. It is quieter there, she said. St-Laurent Street is becoming too
noisy and crowded with all kinds of people.

I knew what the bitch meant by noisy and all kinds of people.

The man must have nodded or not responded.

He was the driver.

She was the driven.

I was the insect beneath them.

At last the car stopped, and the man reached for an electronic device. He
pressed it and opened the garage door. I waited until they got out, until the car
beeped, blinked, and burped again. Then I dragged myself along the garage floor,
avoiding patches of oil from the car, manoeuvred around golf clubs, and slipped under
the door and onto the house carpet. When the couple passed me by, I froze in a corner,
watching their well-mannered feet.

The woman balanced on one foot and pulled down a stocking, giving her leg
a lustier white, silky colour. The man was rotating ice in a whisky glass. He sat on the
sofa, untied his tie, and flipped through the
TV
channels. She went up
and then came down the stairs. Now she had on a nightgown, made of a kind of see-through
material. And she had plump thighs, ones I had only glimpsed just above the knee at the
restaurant. At the time I had been more distracted by the sight of the large plates of
food. The woman asked the man if he was coming to bed, and the news anchor was silenced
before he had the chance to finish the word “famine.” And then both the man
and the woman went upstairs and made noises, opening brass faucets and scrabbling
toothbrushes against their gums. Their gargles and their spit rushed through the pipes
to join the toilet flushes. I sat downstairs on the sofa and finished what was left of
the man's drink. Then I went up the stairs, crawled up the bedroom wall, and from
above I saw them sleeping, both on their sides. The bed was large and high above the
floor, balanced by two small dressers filled with medicine bottles,
hardcover books, earrings, and tissues. The woman's thighs were exposed now,
and this gave me an uncontrollable urge to fly down and land on the bedsheets and extend
my arms like two antennae and extract sweet nectar from between her open legs. She
tossed around, exposing different shades of her long thighs. The man, his back to her,
snored quietly.

I went and stood at the door of the bedroom. I watched them dream of
SUV
s, cottages, and business deals, comparing dresses and cigars at
high-end cocktail parties. I put myself inside the dreams and helped myself to a few
shrimp cocktails and picked up a few hors d'oeuvres from the waitresses'
drifting trays. I ordered another glass of whisky and rotated the ice inside it
counter-clockwise to counter the stuffiness of the room. Then I followed the man with
the expensive car to the bathroom at the party. As he knelt to wash his face I passed
him, took a leak in a urinal in the wall, jiggled my organ, and made sure the last drop
was out before slipping my penis back inside my trousers. I went back towards the hall
and, without washing my hands, I pulled up my zipper and closed that dramatic scene.

At the couple's home I stole his gold ring, his cigarettes, a Roman
vase, his tie, and his shoes (I took the time to carefully pick clothes that suited my
dark complexion). Once I had finished checking myself in the mirror, I slipped under the
garage door. And I crawled, glued to the wall, my insect's wings vertical now and
parallel to the house's living-room window. Then I walked the dreadful suburbs.
Along the beautifully paved roads I made my way through a few dentists' houses,
computer programmers' lawns, executives' sailboats
covered in plastic and maple leaves, and all the while I feared that golf clubs
might escape the garages and swing in pairs and chase me for a raise. But what I feared
most of all was the bark of dogs who smelled my unwashed hands.

As I walked away from the suburb, the dogs' barks went up like the
finale at a high-school concert. Filthy dogs, I will show you! I said and ground my
teeth. I pulled down the zipper on my pants and crawled on my hands and feet like a
skunk, swaying from side to side and urinating on car wheels and spraying every fire
hydrant with abundance to confuse those privileged breeds and cause an epidemic of
canine constipation. Down with monotony and the routines of life! I laughed, knowing
full well that some dentist would soon be waiting for his little bewildered bundle of
love to get on with its business. I laughed and thought: Some dentist will be late for
trays of paralyzing syringes and far from the reach of blinding lights that hover above
mouths like extraterrestrial machines inspecting the effect of pain on humans trapped in
pneumatic chairs. And I rejoiced and howled (causing more confusion) at the thought of a
salesman stuck like a turtle in traffic, late for his work, flipping through catalogues,
rehearsing apologies, and mumbling about dogs' damnation.

WHEN I ARRIVED
at the Iranian restaurant for my interview, I
humbly knocked on the glass. A teenage girl walked to the door and said from behind the
glass, It is closed. We open only for dinner.

I told her that I had an appointment with the owner. She
opened the door and let me in, saying that the owner would be back in fifteen
minutes.

Can I wait for him at the bar? I asked.

The girl walked to the kitchen and informed the cook of my presence. The
man peeped at me from a square opening, nodded to her, then ignored me and returned to
his fire.

Are you the daughter of the owner? I asked.

Yes, how did you know? the girl said, and smiled at me.

I just know things.

What else do you know?

That you'd rather be somewhere else today.

Yeah, like where?

In bed, or hanging out.

She giggled.

No school? I asked her.

Not now, she said. In a few days it will start again.

School sucks, I said.

The girl nodded and laughed again.

I used to run away from school, I said.

And where did you go?

I hung out.

Yes, I like to hang out, too, she said.

Maybe we can hang out together, I said.

She smiled and did not answer.

I hang out with my skateboard in Old Montreal all the time, I said. You
know, I jump over those stair rails on the government buildings.

No, you don't, she laughed.

Sure I do, I said. I wear baggy pants and my cap in reverse.

No, you don't.

Sure I do. I am only dressed like this today because I am meeting your
father for a job.

My father will only hire you if you fear God. He says he only trusts those
who fear God.