Strategies Against Nature

by Cody Goodfellow

  He didn’t remember things so well, these days. A lot of fumes up the old sniffer had wiped out his dreams of doing anything with his life, while the dreams of nice things only got louder and shinier. So when Rat Patrol let him go, he decided fuck it, play the hand you’re dealt, and became a thief.

  But larceny takes at least as much nerve, wit and sweat as honest work, if you plan to make a living at it. After a few near-disastrous forays into burglary, Joe’s fumigated brain gave him a rare gift, in the form of an idea. It led Joe to use his natural talents and career training, and made theft a snap.

  His principal talent, as he saw it, was an unnatural resistance to the debilitating effects of exposure to pesticides. While all the other guys at Rat Patrol called in sick two to five days a month, Joe had never had a sick day, and saw no ill effects—at least, not physical ones, and he wasn’t bucking for a MENSA membership, anyway.

  It would never make him famous, but damned if he’d go on using it to make someone else rich. Even if he someday got caught, people would see him on TV and say to themselves that Joe Sudweeks was one crafty motherfucker.

  At any given time, there were two to six house or apartment complex tented for termites or other pests in every neighborhood in town. All he had to do was strap on a mask and go shopping.

  Apartments and condos were the best. In a fat complex with a lot of units in a good neighborhood, he could clear two thousand in an hour, if his fence was feeling generous. He avoided his old company’s sites at first, and some bright light in the police department braced the Rat Patrol guys. Turned out Gus Zwerski, the asthmatic ass-kisser, was running pretty much the same operation, and got sent up. With the competition eradicated, Joe could let his hair down a little.

  The Banker’s Hill Arms used to be a nice place in a nice neighborhood. Two blocks from Balboa Park, a brisk walk from downtown, it stank up the gentrified avenue with its seedy landscaping and peeling paint. The tenants had aged as poorly as the place, but Joe did his homework, and found they were richer than they looked. Among the ten tenants, there were two retired doctors and a college professor; a bachelor columnist for the Union-Tribune, a gay couple who played in the local symphony until it disbanded; and a widow of the mob-connected creep who once ran the fanciest restaurant in town.

  A faux-curtain wall of a lobby building straddled the entrance, but aside from the mailbox alcove, the front office was abandoned. He crawled under the tent and used his company church key to get the manager’s keyring from the lockbox. It would cost Rat Patrol less than a hundred dollars to change the lock, which he could pick with a nail file, anyway.

  The tattered rags of a maroon awning projected from the lobby doors to the curb, where a uniformed doorman might have escorted pampered residents to their cars, in simpler times. Joe couldn’t figure it. More people than ever, more unemployment, but nobody wanted to be a doorman, anymore.

  The courtyard was nicer than the exterior. A U-shaped arrangement of crumbling bungalows faced each other across a pool and a lush lawn bordered with planter boxes and bird of paradise bushes. The yellow-and-blue striped tents covered all three buildings in fine big top style. Swelled taut by the fans pumping the gas into the bungalows, they looked fun and inviting. It was a miracle every small child in the neighborhood didn’t sneak over to catch the show. Flyers were taped over each seam in the tents, red warnings in English and Spanish under a skull & crossbones. At the bottom, the Rat Patrol logo was intended to scare kids away, but the fleeing rat looked much less disturbing than Chucky Cheese, and what child could resist following a running rodent?

  I’m late, I’m late, Joe quoted the only poetry he knew by heart, for a very important date. Strapping on his gas mask, he broke the seal on the first bungalow and crept inside the tent, and the traveling circus of death.

  The unlucky rosebushes between the canvas walls and the bungalow still held their leaves and blossoms, but they were tobacco brown and crumbled into dust almost as fine as smoke.

  The poisoned grass crunched beneath his boots. They were Tony Lamas from Boot World, a style ubiquitous among cheap laborers, and two sizes small for his 13AA gunboats, but he dragged his feet to smear his footprints, anyway.

  The door wasn’t even locked. Joe pegged the job for Tim Bananas before he looked at the work order taped over the door’s peephole. Guy was a slob, and more than once, Joe had walked in on him jacking off into an underwear drawer.

  Joe opened the door and peered in through the murky brown fog. Parethrum was odorless and colorless, but they added the color as a last warning that the circus was not in town.

  He almost stepped in, when he chanced to look down at the doormat. A threadbare Persian rug with frayed tassels at the ends: a lousy doormat, and a worse final resting place. Curled up in a circle on the doormat, stiff as last year’s holiday wreath, was a scrawny black cat.

  Joe drew back his foot and planted it very deliberately on the step behind him, like one trying not to provoke a big dog. “I didn’t cross you,” he murmured over and over, backing down off the porch and out through the seam in the tent.

  What the hell did people leave their cats behind, for? At every complex, someone forgot, or was too lazy to catch them before evacuation. Other assholes fed strays from time to time, just enough to dull their instincts and lure them back for a lungful of death. He wanted to hit them the hardest, break what he couldn’t steal and shit on their pillows, but he didn’t fuck with black cats. He hoped Tim left the stiff for them to step over, when they returned.

  The next place offered some decent shit. He considered taking a numbered Erte print and a cello from the queers’ place, but they would be too hard to move. He settled for their flatscreen TV and a treasure trove of prescription meds, which they had thoughtfully sealed in Zip-Loc bags on the bathroom counter.

  The other bungalows disappointed him. Sad old junk, no appliances, and he didn’t know from books or records, so didn’t bother. Everything was banged up, marked and stained by the hands that collected them, and had no spark of value left to pass on. Antiques loved to death, faded pictures of dead people, ratty old clothes, cans and cans of soup.

  Places like this, they sometimes had to drag the old folks out, and some still tried to sneak back in to cop a ride to forever. It bugged him, that society didn’t make it easier for people with no reason to go on to check out with some dignity, without sticking Joe Sudweeks and his brothers with the corpse.

  Joe doubted anyone at the Arms had worked or saved very hard at all, to make him rich, tonight. One more place, and he’d bail out, maybe try to hit a rival exterminator’s job in North Park on his way home. The flatscreen would fetch three hundred, if he didn’t drop it, but he often did. Touchy fucking toys, those. . .

  He broke the seal on a corner bungalow at the back of the courtyard. Inside the tent, he was startled to find the front door hanging open just a crack. The windows to either side of it were wallpapered with old newsprint, and stacks of books and old magazines filled the vestibule inside, but he didn’t see a dead cat, and even if there was nothing worth stealing, Joe Sudweeks had to piss, and he wasn’t going to flush.

  Crossing the threshold, he immediately knocked over a stack of books with a tea tray balanced on it. The noise was a long time ending, the silverware and china cups striking a pachinko machine’s worth of unseen obstacles before they hit the hardwood floor. Joe cringed against the door despite the poisoned emptiness of the house. Nobody lived here. Every termite, ant, mouse and rat in the walls slept with the gas. He could even turn on the lights, if he wanted to—

  But right then, he didn’t want to touch the light switch on the wall—funny, it wasn’t a switch at all, but a pair of buttons—because right then, he noticed the odd purple light that sifted between the columns of books, just bright enough to delineate the impossible volume of junk crammed into the room.

  It was just some kind of neon sign or a blacklight, he told himself, but it might also be a grow-lamp. The queers in ne
ighboring Hillcrest ran lots of cannabis clubs. If this old nut—the professor, he decided—was a grower, and had bagged his harvest before the poison storm, he might not have to hit another place tonight, after all.

  Joe moved down the hall, freely trampling books and stuff that crunched like glass underfoot. He made so much noise, he wasn’t sure just when the voice from the living room had started talking to him.

  “Do be careful, young man, but come in, please come in.”

  He froze, a collapsing black hole of tension. He could run right now, but the game would come unglued, sooner or later. He loved to creep around in empty houses even more than he loved killing pests, but he wasn’t up to facing down a human being. . . was he? What kind of person lingered in a tented apartment? Not a healthy one, that’s for sure. Someone doing something illegal, and probably in no shape to resist. Not much of a human being at all, he told himself. Just a pest.

  Joe picked up a limestone statuette serving as a bookend and held it behind his back as he edged around the wall and into the living room. He planted each foot like he walked in a minefield, and held each breath like a hand grenade.

  One glimpse of the naked violet light dazzled all plans and schemes out of Joe’s febrile brain. That numinous purple glow scorched his eyes and galvanized receptors his eyes had never had any use for, before tonight. It was no grow lamp or bug zapper; it was nothing of this earth.

  A light that was not light spun hypnotic lattices of trapped shadow, drawing him in and stroking his brain with shuddersome pleasure as he sank deeper into its web. That he had come upon it now, on this unfruitful raid, could only be destiny. What it actually was never entered his mind, as he silently pledged his heart to it.

  The negative glow cascaded out from a globe on a post in the center of the room, like the sun in a solar system model. It drastically upset the scale of the room, so the shabby furniture seemed like deformed planetary bodies in orbit, and Joe blundered in like a rogue comet, powerless to defy its gravity or check his own runaway motion.

  A pile of rags in a recliner stirred and coughed, beckoned Joe closer with a gnarled paw. A giant insect’s black rubber face nodded at him, wheezing, “I’m sorry, young man, but you see. . . I couldn’t leave it. . . like this. . .”

  Joe only had eyes for the negative sun that was the source of that charged darkness. And as he stared into it, his eyes began to play tricks on him. Darting motes of hyperkinetic blackness leaped out from the globe in crazy parabolas, then fell back into the gravity well of the purple star. They reminded Joe of carbonation bubbles or Mexican jumping beans, or the spots you saw when you went snowblind or started choking to death. Their eccentric movements got more excited as he watched, and they multiplied. Were there hundreds, thousands, millions. . . ?

  “Remarkable, aren’t they?” the professor buzzed and coughed up something solid into the filter of his Korean War-surplus gas mask. “They like to be watched, you know. They feed on it. Nothing but hunger, where they come from. . .”

  Joe could care less what the old man had to say, right now, couldn’t spare a second glance for the pile of bodies on the floor, beside the old man’s chair.

  The agitated black dots shot out in ever-widening arcs and bounced around as randomly as bubbles in boiling water, but just once, Joe thought he’d seen them arranged in midair to form the lines, shadows, contours and planes of a human face.

  “Go on, look. It makes them more real. It’s not all they hunger for, but it keeps them pacified, that and the light. I’m really quite glad you came. They’ve just about used me up. . .”

  Lena Spielbaum wept for the state of show business, but she did not starve for it. If the suckers howled for bubble-headed, bleach-blonde silicone piñatas to croon their tunes and news headlines, then so be it; if they had no use for the classic lively arts that had delighted crowned heads from the Pharaohs to Lady Di, let them suck eggs. But so long as they howled for anything to divert them from their nothing lives, Lena would be there to shovel it in, and if they choked on the slop every so often, so much the better.

  She had gone to Calcutta for her last big discovery: Duni and Suri, Siamese twins fused at the cranium. That one had been hard to sell to producers: freaks were sad, child freaks sad and ethically shady, and TV producers hated being accused of having ethics of any color.

  But when they did their somersault act, the fluidity and joy of their unlikely movement overcame any lingering shame. It was weird, but also somehow beautiful, their performance made it okay to stare, while the sheer whatthefuckery of the sight of a head with two bodies flipping over each other all around the studio made audiences collectively shriek, then laugh like riders on a rollercoaster. For that kind of moment, Lena would gladly go to Hell, tourist class.

  And here, in a seedy room at the Budget Inn in Yuma, she was pretty sure she had found it again.

  The whispering manager stood raptly basking in the purple glow for a while. Nobody had answered her snide question, and she actually felt kind of stupid.

  Then the manager snatched away the cloth from a full-length mirror. The purple glow reflected back on itself seemed to arouse the globe to curl its tendrils of light upon itself like an angry octopus. The mirror almost seemed to grow brighter than the globe for a moment, but then it darkened and turned a dull, absolute black.

  The surface of the mirror had charred in an instant, Spielbaum realized with a jolt that shook her from her paralysis. What must it be doing to her insides?

  Enough was enough. She moved to the door, ready to pepper-spray the manager if he interfered, but the black mirror in his arms gave forth a cloud of smoke. She recoiled, her hand clasped over her mouth to stifle a scream. The cloud was not smoke, but discrete, dancing motes like gnats, bouncing and darting in a mass over the blackened mirror.

  The whisperer dropped the mirror to the floor and stomped on it, then backed away with the blurry caution of a sleepwalking lion tamer. Lena would have to walk through that swarm of dancing black things to reach the door.

  The boiling cloud converged on the globe as if sucked into it by some weird gravity. They seemed to disappear into the light, to dance like moths in the deep purple corona of its pulsating glow.

  They moved with such frenzied energy that she expected to hear tiny sonic booms, possessed by a fury that would tear the wings and legs off ordinary insects. They didn’t hover like gnats or dart like mosquitoes, but seemed to leap frantically to stay aloft, bouncing off floating dust particles in the stuffy motel room, or off the shimmering webs of violet light.

  They were not proper fleas at all, she guessed, but tiny motes of pure, empty blackness. Her eyes could discern so little, that she perceived them as fleas, though they seemed even smaller. And yet they burned to grow bigger.

  Their mad comet dance chilled Lena to the bone. An aura of unbridled appetite, of the scalding, ravenous hunger that nothing had for anything and everything, that goaded nobodies to try anything to become somebodies. With the silent shriek of graffiti and arson, porno spreads and suicide notes, they screamed, Look at me!

  The man behind the table opened his mouth so his ulcerated, pasty tongue dried up like jerky in the light. Lena heard no sound coming out of him, no sound at all besides the dull thrum of the lamp. Then he trembled and threw his arms out to catch the light. The fleas danced around his fingers, agitated.

  His teeth chattered, his blank face convulsed in tics and twitches, but he knitted his hands before him in a gesture more earnest than prayer and willed stillness over himself like a yogi stopping his own heart.

  The fleas swirled around the globe faster and faster, swept along in a tornado, and then, all at once, they descended on the tabletop model.

  Lena had seen a few flea circus models in museums and private vaudeville collections; the precious nature of the one-note joke lay in the absurdity of detail in a hopeless endeavor. Even if some pedantic kook packed an obsessively constructed model with a million fleas, their chaotic hopping would on
ly belabor the joke.

  The flea circus before her was as exacting as any HO-gauge model railroad diorama, down to the fine sawdust covering the ground. The faded barber pole-striped canvas of the big top presided over the midway, but somehow the miniature tent reminded her of a battlefield hospital, or a castle tented for termites. The idea of a real flea circus, with trained insects, was not so funny at all, yet she could not take her eyes off it.

  Surely, the frenzied black dots must be some kind of optical illusion imposed by the eerie light. Lena studied the chaotic effects for repetitive patterns, challenging them to skitter off to the fringes of her vision, as would a retinal defect or a hallucination. But the flying fleas defied her skeptical eyes with ever more complex movements, and fractal layers of detail that unfolded and expanded as she stared.

  At first, they formed concentric rings around the elevated globe and leapt up in precise waves, so the air rippled like boiling water with the pulsing light, repeatedly defining the fluted contours of a splash.

  The geek grinned wider and clapped his hands, then spread them to grip the edges of the table, as if it had to be forced down.

  As if at his command, the dancing blackness swarmed the big top, the Ferris wheel and the carousel, hopping in controlled, syncopated bursts that delineated flickering ghosts of human riders in the gondolas and on painted horses the size of Monopoly tokens. The intensity and speed of their motion described fuzzy forms that gradually sharpened into crystal-clear images, albeit flattened black and white ones, with the oddly forced depth of old-time stereoscopic prints, and the stuttering motion of a hand-crank nickelodeon. But the more she looked, the more lifelike and rich the circus became, until the frenetic motes vanished into a scene more effortlessly real than waking life.

  Their clothes were a century out of date, with bowlers, stovepipes, straw boaters, bonnets and caps on every head, mutton chops, handlebar moustaches and long bushy beards on the menfolk, careworn or wanton expressions on the women, and saucer-eyed, taffy-gobbling masks of awe and glee on every child.