Cockroach (2 page)

I am doomed!

When I entered the café, I peeled myself out from under layers of
hats, gloves, and scarves, liberated myself from zippers and buttons, and endured the
painful tearing Velcro that
hissed like a prehistoric reptile, that
split and separated like people's lives, like exiles falling into cracks that give
birth and lead to death under digging shovels that sound just like the friction of car
wheels wedging snow around my mortal parts.

I spotted Professor Youssef sitting alone at his usual table. That lazy,
pretentious, Algerian pseudo-French intellectual always dresses up in gabardine suits
with the same thin tie that had its glory in the seventies. He hides behind his
sixties-era eyeglasses and emulates French thinkers by smoking his pipe in dimly lit
spots. He sits all day in that café and talks about
révolution et
littérature
.

I asked the professor if he had seen Reza, the Iranian musician, but he
did not respond. He just gave me his arrogant smile.

I knew it, I knew it! The professor wants to shower me with his
existentialist questions. The bastard plays Socrates every chance he gets. He has always
treated the rest of us like Athenian pupils lounging on the steps of the agora, and he
never answers a question. He imagines he is a pseudo-socialist Berber journalist, but he
is nothing but a latent clergyman, always answering a question with another
question.

Is it a yes or a no?
C'est urgent
, I shrilled at him,
intending to interrupt his epistemological plot.

Non! J'ai pas vu ton ami
. The professor pasted on his
sardonic smile again, puffed his pipe, and changed the position of his legs. He leaned
his body into the back of the chair and looked at me with an intellectual's air of
dismissal, as if I were a peasant, unworthy of the myopic thickness of his glasses. He
does not trust me. He smells me through his pipe's brume. I know
he suspects me of stealing his last tobacco bag, which I did. But he cannot prove
it. Now whenever I approach him, he acts as if he is repositioning himself in his chair
in order to say something valuable and profound, but I can see him through his
pipe's smog, gathering his belongings closer to his body, hugging his bag like a
refugee on a crowded boat.

I turned away from the professor, thinking that I would like to choke
Reza, the Middle Eastern hunchback, with the strings of his own musical instrument. He
owed me, and I was in need. He always managed to extract money from me, one way or
another. He either gave me long monologues about Persia and the greatness of its
history, or he re-enacted the tears of his mother, whom he will never see again before
she dies because, as he claims, he is an unfortunate exile. But I know that all Reza
cares about is numbing his lips and face. He is always sniffing, and if it's not
because of a cold, it is because of an allergy, and if it is not because of allergy, it
is because of a natural impulse to powder his nose with “the white
Colombian,” as he puts it. But there was nothing I could do now except dress again
in my armour against the cold and go back to my room and wait for Reza to call.

At home I lay in bed, reached for my smokes, and then for no reason became
alarmed, or maybe melancholic. This feeling was not paranoia, as the therapist wrote in
her stupid notes (notes that I had managed to steal); it was just my need again to hide
from the sun and not see anyone. It was the necessity I felt to strip the world from
everything around me and exist underneath it all, without objects, people, light, or
sound. It was my need to unfold an eternal blanket that would
cover
everything, seal the sky and my window, and turn the world into an insect's
play.

A FEW HOURS LATER
, in the early evening, I decided to pay
Reza a visit at his home. I walked through the cold to his house, rang the bell, and
waited. Matild, a French beauty of a waitress and Reza's roommate, opened the
door. As soon as she saw me, she tried to slam the door in my face.

I put my foot in the corner of the door frame and whispered tenderly: I am
worried about Reza.

Alors, appelle la police, quoi, bof. Ah moi, alors, je ne veux pas me
mêler de cette affaire.
He did not pay his share of the rent last mooonth.
J'en ai marre là de vous deux.

Can I come in? I said.

I told you, he eeezzz not herrrreh.

I just want to take a look at his room, I said.

Mais non là, tu exagères.

Please, I begged. And I showed Matild what my droopy, bashful eyes were
capable of.

You can only go in hiz rrrroom, she said. No kitchen, and no toilet-paper
stealing,
d'accord
? When you worked with me at the restaurant zerre,
everyone was saying that it was you who was stealing the toilet paperzzzz, and they all
look at me bad because I was the one who recommended you forrr zee job.

I watched Matild's firm ass bounce towards the kitchen. I shrunk
into myself and hunched my neck into my shoulders, and my teeth felt as if they were
growing points as I stared at
her magnificent, majestic, royal
French derrière — studied it, surveyed it, assessed it, and savoured it to
the last swing. She was still in her nightgown, which ended right above her thighs. And
she was barefoot!

I sighed. Still hunched, I scratched my legs against each other. Then,
with the desperation of the displaced, the stateless, the miserable and stranded in
corridors of bureaucracy and immigration, I turned and fled to Reza's room.

His room smelled of old socks and a troupe of enslaved chain-smokers. It
had barely any light, but still I recognized the old black and white
TV
that he had inherited from his friend Hisham, a Persian computer programmer who had
moved to the United States because, as he said, there is more money there and no future
in Canada — too many taxes. At least, that is how the empty-headed technocrat of
an
arriviste
put it to me the night I was introduced to him at an Iranian
party. The party was full of Iranian exiles — runaway artists, displaced poets,
leftist hash-rollers, and ex-revolutionaries turned taxi drivers. That was also the
night I met Shohreh. Oh, beautiful Shohreh! She drove me crazy, gave me an instant hit
of metamorphosis that made me start gnawing on paper dishes, licking plastic utensils,
getting lost inside potato-chip bags (bags that crunched with the sound of breaking ice
and snapping branches). She was dancing with a skinny, black-clad Iranian gay man named
Farhoud. He danced and rubbed himself against her firm body. Like him, Shohreh was
dressed in a tight black outfit, and her chest was bouncing in time to the peculiar,
menacing cries of a cheap immigrant's stereo. When the music stopped for a moment,
I trailed behind her in the
crowded hallway and followed her to the
kitchen. I made my way through plates, forks, and finger food until finally, as she
dipped a slice of cucumber in white sauce thick as a quagmire, I made my move. I want to
steal you from your boyfriend the dancer, I said.

Shohreh laughed and exclaimed, Boyfriend? Boyfriend! And she laughed even
louder. Farhoud! she called to the man in black. This guy thinks you are my
boyfriend.

Farhoud smirked and walked towards us. He put his arm around my shoulder.
Actually, I am looking for a boyfriend myself, he gently whispered, and swung his hips.
The drink in his hand took on the shape and the glow of a lollipop. Shohreh laughed and
tossed her hair and walked away.

All night I followed Shohreh; I stalked her like a wolf. When she entered
the bathroom, I glued my ear to its door, hoping to hear her eleven-percent-alcohol
urine plunging free-fall from between her secretive, tender thighs. Oh, how I sighed at
the cascading sound of liquid against the porcelain-clear pool of the city waters. Oh,
how I marvelled, and imagined all the precious flows that would swirl through warm and
vaporous tunnels under this glaciered city. It is the fluid generosity of creatures like
Shohreh that keep the ground beneath us warm. I imagined the beauty of the line making
its way through the shades of the underground, golden and distinct, straight and
flexible, discharged and embraced, revealing all that a body had once invited, kept,
transformed, and released, like a child's kite with a string, like a baby's
umbilical cord. Ah! That day I saw salvation, rebirth, and golden threads of celebration
everywhere.

I asked Shohreh for her number. I won't give it
to you, she said, but I don't mind if you put in an effort and get it on your own.
It is more romantic that way, don't you think? As she danced she looked at me, and
sometimes she smiled at me and other times she ignored me. I could tell how flattered
she was by my look of despair. She knew perfectly well that I was willing to crawl under
her feet like an insect, dance like a chained bear in a street market, applaud like a
seal on a stool, nod like a miniature plastic dog on the dashboard of an immigrant cab
driver. I wanted so much to be the one to swing her around the dance floor. I wanted to
be the one who dipped her and took in the scent of her breasts flooding over her black
lace bra.

For days after the party, I begged that asshole Reza to give me
Shohreh's number. He refused. That selfish, shady exile would only say, in his
drooling accent, You are not serious about her. You only want to sleep with her. She is
not that kind of girl, she is Iranian. She is like a sister, and I have to protect her
from dirty Arabs like you.

But, Reza, maestro, I said, sisters also fuck, sisters have needs,
too.

This upset him and he cursed,
Wa Allah alaazim
. I will prevent
you from meeting her again!

But I did meet Shohreh again. I got her number from Farhoud, the dancer.
One day I saw him walking down the street, bouncing happily, trotting like Bambi. I had
a large scarf around my face that day, and I flew across the street and stood in front
of him, my hands on my hips like Batman. Farhoud recognized me right away, through my
mask and all. He pulled down my scarf and kissed me on the cheeks and
laughed like little Robin. Right away I told him that I was in love with Shohreh
and needed her number.

I will have to ask her first, he said, and his hands gestured in sync with
his fluttering eyelashes. But she is not the in-love type, my love, he added.

Give me her number and I will love you forever, I promised him. I put my
arm around his shoulder and gave him a kiss on the forehead.

He laughed. You are so bad! he exclaimed, and pulled a pen with a teddy
bear's head from his purse and wrote out both his and her numbers.

NOW I SEARCHED
Reza's room for money, food, hash, coke
— anything I could get from the bastard. I opened his drawers, sniffed under his
bed, reached under the dresser and scanned with my finger for the small plastic bags he
usually tapes there, upside down. I would have settled for a bus ticket — anything
to get back what he owed me. But there was nothing. That impoverished restaurant
musician blows everything up his nose.

I shouted to Matild, but she did not answer me. I went to her room. She
was lying in bed, half-naked, reading
un livre de poche
, smoke rising from
behind its pages. She felt my heavy breathing and my eyes sliding over her smooth shaved
thighs. From behind a scene in the book, she whispered, I thought we agrrrreed that you
would not enterrrr herrrre.

Will you call me if you hear from Reza?

Matild puffed and did not answer.

It is important.

D'accord.
I will call you. Leave now. Pleeeezzzz.

I walked to the apartment door, opened it and closed it loudly, then snuck
back inside to the kitchen and opened the fridge slowly. I grabbed whatever I could
— food and sweets — and then I left for good, shuffling home through the
high snow.

At home in my kitchen, the cockroaches smelled the loot in my hand and
began to salivate like little dogs. I moved to the bedroom, away from their envious
eyes, and sat on my bed and made myself a sandwich. Now, I thought, I have to get some
money before the end of the month, before I starve to death in this shithole of an
apartment, in this cold world, in this city with its case of chronic snow. The windows
whistled and freezing air drifted through cracks; it was a shithole of a rundown place I
lived in, if you ask me. But what was the difference? Nothing much had changed in my
life since the time I was born. At least now I lived alone, not crowded in one small
bedroom with a sister, a snoring father, and a neurotic mother who jumped up in the
night to ask if you were hungry, thirsty, needed to go to the bathroom (or if you were
asleep, for that matter). I was no longer in the same room as a teenage sister coming of
age, dreaming of Arabs with guns, ducking her left hand under the quilt, spookily eyeing
the void, biting her lip, and rotating her index finger as if it were the spinning reel
of a movie projector beaming sexual fantasies on the bedroom wall. And here comes the
cheering, like that of the men in the old Cinema Lucy, where clandestine dirty movies
quickly appeared and disappeared between clips of the Second World War, Italian soap
operas, cowboys and Indians bouncing on
wild horses. Cinema Lucy,
with its stained chairs glowing and fading with semen, and its agitated men dispersed
across the floor in the company of their handkerchiefs, which they held in their arms
like Friday-night dates. Like guerrillas at night, these men waited impatiently for the
porn clips to appear between the irrelevant worlds of the main features, circuses of
jumping mammals and falling buffoons, fantasies of high seas and sunsets that faded and
darkened into invading European armies stomping high boots over burned hills and cobbled
squares, frozen at the sight of a few saluting generals and their fat-ankled women.