The Transformation, part III

originally posted April 11, 2007

Upstairs the phone rang. It was my husband. In a slurred british accent he informed me that he was going to his brother's house after work and would not be home that night. As he spoke, I pulled the phone to the top of the basement stairs and shined a flashlight into the darkness. The naked doppelganger peered up at me quizzically. "Did you hear me?" he demanded from the phone, losing character for a moment. "Leave my pipe in the mailbox." "Right, sure thing, Ringo," I replied.

Hanging up the phone, I considered for a moment the situation at hand. I tried to recall any old family stories, raised eyebrows, or stern, silencing looks that might suggest my husband had another sibling who'd been abandoned, sent away, or locked in an attic. Nothing came to mind. This was puzzling indeed. Who was this naked couch-eater? I grabbed a banana and crept down the stairs.

Behind the furnace he sat, knees to his chest. On one knee sat a cockroach. The cockroach moved its antennae, and the naked man responded in kind, using his eyebrows in the same slow, expressive way. He whispered softly, an almost indiscernible hissing sound. I froze, silent, afraid to move, wielding my banana like a spear. I do not like cockroaches.

I remembered a time in high school when I was on the speech team, and lost a poetry interpretation competition to a girl who read a series of poems about a cockroach who liked to climb around on a typewriter, pressing keys with his little cockroach feet and writing little cockroach poems. It was a crushing defeat, made possible because she read the poems in a bashful, lisping cockroach voice, and by the fact the judges were idiots. I attempted this voice now. "Go away, you hideous bastard," I lisped bashfully, addressing the cockroach on his knee. "Oh, please, mister cockroach, go away." The voice did nothing, nor did my request. Shining the flashlight on them again did the trick however, and the insect scuttled away. The naked man of uncertain origins remained cornered with nowhere to scuttle. Proceeding cautiously, I peeled the banana and dropped a piece in front of him. He picked it up and put it in his mouth. Piece by piece, in a wily demonstration of huntsmanship that would have done Hemingway proud, I lured the naked, dusty man up the stairs.