by Various
I wasn’t about to stand on ceremony. “Looks like we get a freebie,” I said.
Then I saw the check-out girl hiding under the counter, her make-up all smeared. I made her stand up and reached into my pocket for my billfold. I wanted to make things as legal as possible under the circumstances, as long as it didn’t take too long, but wouldn’t you know it, my billfold was missing! I figured it must have fallen out of my pocket somewhere in the descent from the commercial airliner, earlier. That’s why parachutists wear special pants, with all those special pockets, I suppose.
“J-just g-go,” the check-out girl said. She was also afflicted with a stutter. I was running out of patience, so I made her give me all the money out of the cash register, and gave her two twenties back.
“Keep the change,” I said. It was a joke but she didn’t get it. Neither did the kid.
“You can’t pay her with her own money,” he said. “That doesn’t count.”
Now he was mister logic. He was all folded up in the cart, like a rubber midget, with his eyes wide open. “Navy Seals don’t steal,” he said.
“Sometimes they do,” I said. “I’m a Blue Angel anyway.” I did my hands like wings.
“No you’re not,” he said. “You’re a TVA baby.”
He said it with a certain admiration in his eyes, so I told him the truth, which was that indeed I was. I was tired of pretending anyway. “Now you know why that ‘dad’ of yours had to die,” I said. “He had it all wrong.”
He just stared at me, all owl-eyed. I peeled off another twenty, to make it up to him. His fingers weren’t broken but his arms were, so I stuck it in his wet shirt pocket. That took some doing. Meanwhile, I had forgotten the girl in the bikini. She was trying to hop away. I caught up with her, no big deal, and herded her back with the shotgun and said, “Now, let’s get the hell out of here, on the double!”
Easier said than done. We started out the door but the parking lot out front was filled with police cars, all with blue lights flashing. There were Darth Vader types in black helmets crouched behind them, looking ready for action.
“Change in plans,” I said.
“N-no shit, Sherlock,” said the girl. She was getting saucy. I liked that. I gave her a twenty and she stuck it down the front of her bikini. I liked that too. I gave her another, then steered her and the cart toward the back of the store. It was slow going with her hopping, but I couldn’t help push the cart since I had my carry-on in one hand and the shotgun in the other.
It wasn’t my job to push anyway.
“Y-you’re t-toast,” she said. She was still stuttering, or maybe it was the hopping. I decided to ignore her. Besides, I had other things on my mind. I knew that if I could get to the loading dock I could escape into the woods out back. There’s a woods behind every Wal-Mart.
Unfortunately, the loading dock was also filled with pissed-off-looking Darth Vader types.
“T-trapped!” she said. She seemed pleased. I was getting tired of her shit. “Don’t be so sure,” I snarled. I poked her in the butt with the shotgun and we headed for the TV section, which is, in my opinion, the nicest part of the store. All those TVs going at once, all tuned to the same station. It’s almost like home.
They were all showing the “Breaking News,” which was the scene out front, the parking lot crowded with cop cars with blue lights flashing. There was even a helicopter. It was Live.
“You’re toast,” she said again. I never liked that expression. Toast always seemed to me like something nice. I was explaining this to her and the kid while I was setting up the tent (they were no help) when she said, “I don’t know why you keep talking to him. He’s dead.”
I stopped, taken aback.
So that was it! The open eyes had fooled me. But what about all the things he had said? Had I only imagined he was talking to me? It was entirely possible, I knew. Perhaps he had been dead all along. There was no way to know for sure. He was cold but that could have been the water. His clothes were still wet.
“So what,” I said, to give the impression that I had known all along. I made her get in the tent and topped off the pistol with the hollow points. The shotgun still had four shells.
Meanwhile, on the TV, all the Darth Vader types were coming in the front door. I turned around to look and, sure enough, I could see them toward the front of the store, darting around the aisles, trying to stay out of my line of sight.
They were moving in from the loading dock, too. Luckily, I still had a trick or two up my sleeve. How many guys carry a universal remote in their carry-on? (Raise your hand!) I flipped around until I had Oprah on all the screens. I was waiting for her to stop talking when one screen exploded. They were shooting.
I stood up and emptied a clip and sent a bunch of shit flying, and that quieted them down again. They are kind of chicken shit, really. But there was a bunch of them and they were getting closer. I really needed to get out of there.
Oprah was still yakking away. I crouched down and flipped around till I got Ellen. That’s more my kind of show anyway. I watch it all the time. You can’t even tell she’s a lesbian, not that that matters to anybody anymore.
“You,” Ellen said. “What do you want?” She didn’t look pleased to see me, but I’m used to that. I’m a TVA baby.
“I want to be on your show,” I said.
“I told you, I don’t arrange that,” she said. “That’s all arranged through the producer.”
“It’s an emergency,” I said. “Can’t we make an exception just this once?”
I pointed toward the front of the store, where the Darth Vader types were still filtering in, all crouched down. But of course, Ellen couldn’t see out of the TV.
“It’s not up to me,” she said. “It seems to people like it is, but actually it’s not.”
“So what am I supposed to do?”
“Try Wild Kingdom.”
That was an idea. I flipped around till I found it. Two lions were eating an antelope, one from the front and one from the back.
I flipped back to Ellen. “No way,” I said. I told her what I had seen and she gave a little shudder. “I can’t believe that’s what they call appropriate programming for children,” she said.
“Meanwhile, we have a problem here,” I said. “They’re closing in and there’s at least a hundred of them.” That was an exaggeration but not by much. Down every aisle I could see crouching shapes, darting here and there.
“I have a guest,” Ellen said. Sure enough, she was standing up to hug some guy in jeans and a sport coat. Some lucky dude.
“What about me?” I asked. “What am I supposed to do?”
She shrugged. “Shoot it out?”
That was no help. Oprah would have said the same. I was beginning to see that they were all cut out of the same piece of cloth. They want no surprises on their shows. I could even understand their point of view but meanwhile I had enough to worry about, with the Darth Vader types showing up down almost every aisle.
I fired off another clip, my last.
“You’re trapped,” said the girl in the bikini. She was peering out the window of the tent. I made her zip it shut from inside and told her to shut her pie hole while I went to the guns & ammo section. I had to crawl. I had to break the glass. I was reloading with hollow points when I heard a voice over the store’s PA system:
“Drop the gun and come out with your hands on your head!”
It’s usually used to announce sales and such. I guess they figured it made them sound more official, and to be perfectly honest, it did. It gave me a shiver.
I was getting worried.
I crawled back to the TV section. A guy tried to stop me on the way but he was too slow, and I wasted him with one shot. The hollow points expand. Somebody pulled him out of the way, sliding him back in his own helpful blood. The dudes were everywhere.
I had a sinking feeling when I saw the tent, and when I picked up one side to look underneath, sure enough, the girl was gone, bikin
i and all. She had somehow split the scene.
Now there was just me and the kid, who was still in the shopping cart, and dead besides. “Ned” was no help. Another TV exploded but there were still plenty left.
I tried Ellen again. “What about the studio audience?” I suggested.
She ignored me, as was often her wont. Meanwhile, bullets were flying all around. Not one to stand on ceremony, I squeezed on through, and just in time. Bullets were smacking into my flesh.
The chairs for the studio audience were arranged in rows, on low risers. None had arms. Everybody was watching Ellen, who was holding a puppy on her lap.
“Scoot,” I said, but all I got were blank looks. Scoot, it turns out, was the name of the puppy.
“Scoot over!” I said in a loud whisper, to which I added a snarl, and over they scooted, all of them at once.
And just in time for the commercial break. The lights went weird. I took my seat just in time as Ellen looked up from her puppy and asked, pretending to be interested (they are always pretending), “And how many TVA babies do we have in our studio audience today?”
Mine was, as always, as ever, the only hand raised.
Copyright © 2009 Terry Bisson
Books by Terry Bisson
Wyrldmaker
Talking Man
Fire on the Mountain
Voyage to the Red Planet
Pirates of the Universe
The Pickup Artist
The Gemini Jack Series
Be First in the Universe (with Stephanie Spinner)
Expiration Date: Never (with Stephanie Spinner)
Short Story Collections
Blood & Iron
Whiskey & Water
Ink & Steel
Hell & Earth
Nonfiction
Nat Turner
On a Move: The Story of Mumia Abu Jamal
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Sam Gregory woke up one morning and found, to his dismay, that he had turned into a big cockroach. “Oh, no,” he thought. He had some idea of what was happening because of the Kafka story. He hadn’t exactly read it, but he had heard all about it back when he was in college. Sam’s roommate, Cliffe with an E, had taken a course called Shape Shifters in Modern Lit, thinking it would be an easy A, like the video games he played in the Student Union, taking on all comers, or Eco-Alternatives. Instead, it required a paper, and Cliffe felt betrayed. Sam said I told you so (the wrong thing to say) and Cliffe suggested he shut the fuck up. That only made things worse and soon they weren’t speaking at all. Several times, they almost came to blows.
Instead, they became the best of friends.
Here’s how that happened: Cliffe’s girlfriend was a Conflict Resolution major, and she suggested they go bowling blindfolded (neither of them bowled) in an effort to change the subject through creative misdirection while she monitored the experiment for credit. They even rented the shoes. It might have worked, too, but she didn’t know how to keep score, plus they had forgotten the blindfolds, so they played the pinball machine instead; there was just one, between the Men’s and the Ladies’, a leftover from some previous universe of bells and flippers.
“What I don’t like about it,” said Cliffe, “is that is it’s just a metaphor instead of something real.”
“What if it was real?” I (Sam) asked. “What if it was me and I actually turned into a cockroach someday?”
“Then I would do everything I could to help you out,” said Cliffe.
I was to remember that promise later when I actually turned into a cockroach.
Meanwhile Cliffe’s girlfriend, who I will call Anna, tagging along to monitor the experiment, was pleased with the results so far. She was cute, not as cute as some but cuter than others, and I immediately fell in love with her. It made me angry how Cliffe always criticized her for everything and I told her so.
We were sort of a threesome.
She was dying of a disease and told me so. Cliff already knew. She only had a year to live. We both felt sorry for her, me sorrier, but it was Cliff who died. This happened unexpectedly one afternoon.
It was time to make a new start so Anna and I moved to Park Slope, in Brooklyn. We pretended we were married and even got a baby carriage. We rolled up a towel in a blanket and pretended it was a baby and rolled it around the streets and sidewalks.
Then we discovered it really was a baby. I say “we” but Anna had known it all along. It was crying like crazy. Luckily by then we had a house. Now this had to happen!
Here I was, a big cockroach!
I tried to think of what to do. The bedroom door was shut but I knew that sooner or later Anna would come in and see me, flat on my back with six legs in the air. I had to figure out a way to communicate with her and let her know what was what, before she freaked out.
I was still figuring when the door opened and she came in and immediately started screaming. I could see she wasn’t going to be much help, so I scurried under the bed as fast as lightning, cockroach style. Meanwhile she ran out of the room to get a broom, I figured, or something to kill me with.
I was on my own. That was when I remembered Cliffe’s promise and wished he was still alive. But if wishes were pennies we’d all be rich. I scurried down through the walls and out of the house, making quick work of the front steps.
Here on the streets of Brooklyn I was less noticeable. Fast-moving, too. It was raining, and after lots of adventures which involved things like making a boat out of a leaf and riding on a roller skate like it was a bus, I made my way to the Gowanus Canal. I had a plan. I knew that with all the renovations in Brooklyn all the writers had ended up in one building, an old warehouse that wasn’t hard to find. There were their names on the mailbox: Auster, Lethem, Whitehead, etc., and a bunch of unknowns.
“This is not how you spell metaphor,” they said, when I explained what had happened by walking through ink on scrap paper. I had spelled it with an F. I met with them all separately and together as well, but they were no help. Plus, the canal smelled good and I was beginning to face facts: the cockroach thing was for real.
I ate some paper. It was almost noon. I had to figure out a way to call in sick, at least. Then I might at least still have my job when things got straightened out.
I walked in a circle, thinking.
Then I met this old Jew. It was in the park. He almost stepped on me, then he picked me up and put me on the cuff of his shirt and started talking to me. It was in Hebrew but that was the least of my problems. His children had all died of this and that and he was fond of me. It turned out he was even older than he looked and knew lots of secrets, many of them Kabbalistic. He took out his pencil and outlined a Quest that would return me to normal.
I was off!
It took all day and involved more things like leaf boats and jumping onto the back of a pigeon and riding it like a dragon. I got to know the sewers too. I wished I had six little shoes.
But never mind, it worked, and by midafternoon I was normal, that is human, and full-sized. I was in the Bronx, but I made it home and knocked on the door at precisely five p.m.
To my surprise it was unlocked and swung open on its own. There was Anna with another lover, both of them nude.
“I thought you had turned into a cockroach,” she said.
“It must have been your imagination,” I said. I didn’t want to get into it. Especially in front of this other dude who was pulling on his pants.
&nb
sp; If you are thinking I was devastated, you’re right. But at least I was no longer a cockroach. I looked in the mirror to make sure.
I’d had nothing to eat all day but paper, so I fixed a bowl of Cheerios while Anna got rid of her lover, who it turned out she hardly knew.
“Maybe we can make a new start,” said Anna, pulling on her panties and replacing the barrettes in her hair. That was okay by me, I told her, and we were just about to watch TV when we heard the baby crying like crazy. We had forgotten all about it!
Well, it had turned into a cockroach too. There it was with six tiny legs, waving about, and I could see why Anna had screamed so on seeing me.
I looked at her. She looked at me. I knew what she was thinking. We had neither of us wanted this baby and now it was a cockroach.
She was just about to step on it when the phone rang. It was her father, the doctor.
“Your year is up,” he said.
Was our happiness about to come to an end? She had agreed as part of a medical experiment to come into his office after a year and be killed. It wasn’t a disease at all.
“My father pressured me into it,” she told me.
“I’ll go with you,” I said. I felt sorry for her. Plus I had a plan. I got a gun out of the box of them I had won in the lottery and stuck it into my belt. My plan was to kill him before he killed her.
“What’s with the gun?” she asked and I told her.
“You’ll need an alibi,” she said, mysteriously. Her father’s office was also near the Gowanus Canal, so I found myself retracing my steps, following her. It didn’t smell so sweet this time. It turned out Anna had a plan as well. On the way, she showed me the items in her purse: a huge pair of scissors and a weird thing.
“What’s this thing?” I asked.
“It’s a cockroach hat.” She showed me how it worked. When she put it on, she looked exactly like a cockroach, six legs and all. I tried it on myself. We were passing a health food store and I saw myself reflected in the plate glass window. It worked!
