A PREFACE
About five years ago, before I began playing music, I was far from home and feeling a lot of anxious creative energy, so I wrote a series of short stories about the house I was living in, more specifically about the bugs that lived in the house I was living in. But when I started focusing those creative energies on making music, I set these stories aside, unfinished. I recently started reading them again and I figured I would share the first couple just for fun, and if anyone here actually finds them interesting I'll keep sharing. Feel free to comment with feedback :)
For quite some time I lived in a small orange rectangle room in the backyard of La Casa Sin Tiempo in Buenos Aires. The room, built by the owner Mosco, had two small windows that were much too close together and one dim light, and it was tucked into the far corner of the green and red and brown and blue and yellow backyard. Next to my hut was a small algae-filled fishpond that in the summer months housed an ever dwindling number of black and white and tangerine goldfish. The backyard was also home to three other little rooms neighboring mine and an astonishingly stupid dog named Hinota. The tenants in those other rooms never stayed for more than a few months, so I never really got to know any of them that well. I think maybe the Bugs scared them off. The Bugs could be insufferable at times.
For me the mosquitoes were the worst, but each room came with its own unique infestation. Since my little windows were set together like they were holding hands, my room didn’t get much by way of ventilation, and the combination of standing fishpond water and stagnant humid air meant my room was quite literally a breeding ground for mosquitoes for over half the year. But the mosquitoes certainly were not the only ones who visited. My room was popular with all of the Bugs. The adobe hut’s facade was painted watermelon with a lime colored door which had four panes of glass at the top that had also been painted over. It was surrounded by a dense patch of thorny bushes, shaded by short palm trees and a tall dark eucalyptus, and covered in long hanging ivy that draped off the rusty tin roof, such that direct sunlight almost never fell into the room and in my darkness I simply assumed that at any given moment there were an innumerable amount of insects in, on, and around my living quarters.
I’ll admit that I did attempt to combat them at first via various mediums, including but not limited to poison sprays, roach motels, toxic burning spirals, sticky fly-paper, tennis shoes and all other manner of swatting instruments. Eventually I even tried turning my room into an impenetrable fortress, spending eighteen fevered hours one weekend scouring every inch of the shack in a crazed attempt to seal each little crack, hole, and hinge in the house. But the Bugs were legion, and I quickly realized the futility of such aggression. Plus, dealing so much indiscriminate death was exhausting, so I resigned myself to the fact that it would never just be my bedroom, and made peace with the bugs as best I could. These are their stories. Theirs and mine.
MATTHEW
I woke up one morning to find that I had left my little desk lamp plugged in all night. It was the only light in the room, but I rarely left it plugged in while I slept because I knew how uptight the owner, Mosco, was about the electricity bill. It sat there on my desk glowing guiltily, the yellow paper lampshade standing crumpled and embarrassed around the bulb on its square wooden base. It only lit half the room, casting the long shadows of whiskey bottles and stacks of papers towards me as I struggled to get out of bed. I thought about crawling over and unplugging the damn thing, but since it was the only light in the room, and my room was dark all day, and I had to go to work, I left the lamp on as I showered and made my coffee. I came back to my room to drink my coffee and read some pages of a book I would never finish, and as I sat at my desk sipping and smoking and listening to Regina Spector’s ‘On the Radio’ wondering how the hell she could sound so happy singing about the Eternal Recurrence, I saw a shadow flutter across the brown-yellow parchment lampshade to my left and fall. By this point there had been many months of peaceful cohabitation with the crawlers and wingers, and I was well acquainted with the variety of bugs that frequented the room, but I didn’t want to be roommates with more insects than absolutely necessary, so I lifted the paper cylinder to let the little critter free.
As I removed the lampshade I expected any one of a thousand bugs I’d seen before to make a quick soaring exit through the open door in front of us. Instead, someone I had never seen hovered in the empty circle where the lampshade had been and slowly set itself on top of the blue-white bulb. His name was Matthew and he looked like a cross between a wasp and a grasshopper. Although his proud black armored head and torso shone spectacularly in the lamplight, his cracked wings betrayed his old age, and his yellowed legs were drawn in close to his body, struggling to support his feeble weight.
At some point during the previous evening, while I was drinking and smoking and pretending to try to learn how to play the harmonica, Matthew felt his geriatric body finally sputtering out, and knowing that Death was imminent, and that he was now easy prey, he crawled into a hole in the wall of my little room seeking shelter. He had planned on dying right there in the black sandy tunnel, but he sensed still air and faint Light on the far end so he kept crawling, and as I fell into bed and sleep, Matthew emerged through the other side of that dark jagged cave to find a beaming column of soft yellow-orange Light below, a short jump and flight away.
‘If here and now is when I die,’ he sort of thought, ‘then it will be as close to that Light as possible.’ Matthew could make out dark brown creases in the lampshade like bolts of lightning reaching around a burnt orange lighthouse, but his eyes were drawn to the bright, almost bluish blaze that was erupting from the open top of the tower. With all of his strength he leapt from the wall and spread his wings, calculating for a landing on the crumpled paper lampshade. He knew as soon as he jumped that he would fall short of his mark, but his frail frantically flapping wings were able to carry him to the edge of the desk, which he grabbed with his front two legs, his heavy abdomen hanging below. As he struggled onto the desk and moved towards the base of the lamp, he looked back over the edge and shook his head.
‘My God…’ he thought out loud, now sweating profusely. He shuddered at the possibility of having met his end there on that forsaken ground and looked back towards the lamp, feeling Destiny tugging at his shoulder.
Before we go any further, we should make one thing clear, for Matthew’s sake. This attraction to the Light was no mindless instinct. All of the best and worst moments of his life had occurred around electric Lights, and throughout his long life they had repeatedly shown themselves to be a force beyond his understanding. He had mated with all of his lovers on or around these Suns-of-the-Night, and had spent many sleepless nights skipping off white hot glass with his friends seeing who could endure the heat the longest. Matthew had also watched countless of his own, children and wives, brothers and cousins, drift to their doom on the black mesh of the Blue Death. He understood and revered these Lights as great beings, or different manifestations of the same Great Being… he wasn’t sure. What he did know was that they were powerful enough to merit worship, and this Light- such a beautiful, soft, silent golden Light- showing itself to him in his final moments, in Matthew’s mind anyways, meant God was giving him a final place to lay his heavy burden and rest.
There was no access to the lightbulb from the bottom of the lamp, so he spent the next two hours struggling slowly to the summit of the thirteen inch tall paper temple, zigzagging his way up so as not to have to battle gravity head-on, stopping to catch his breath before every turn. The starlight inside the lamp warmed his belly, which gave renewed strength to Matthew’s arthritic limbs. Once he got to the top, the blaze inside was so glorious and blinding that he let himself fall to the wooden base. There he lay for a few moments, letting the warmth radiate through him, wondering what glory in Death await him. He waited and waited, but instead of being delivered from his wretched body, he began to feel stronger, younger, like the electric waves were washing the hours and days of his age away. But Matthew, as he looked at his broken legs and his withered antennae and his long life, understood this to be one of Death’s cruel jokes, and he laughed and coughed and spit on the Light so that it hissed and sizzled in a sort of grim challenge. Then he realized what had to be done.
Matthew had thought about God & Death before. He was an old man, having roamed the earth for almost three weeks now, and old men’s minds tend to turn towards such themes. He knew God was Light, and he imagined that Death was a return to God, so he hoped Death meant becoming Light to be scattered all over the universe (though truth be told Matthew’s universe was little more than my neighborhood). With this in mind, he mustered his remaining strength and with an agonizing shuffle surrendered his body unto the brilliant monument above, delivering himself to the Light like ore to the magnet.
The glass was so hot that Matthew could feel, and hear, and smell the sticky pads of his feet melting with every step he took, but he would not be deterred. He could almost sense the photons grabbing bits of his soul and flying with them into the Great Beyond.
Then a lot of things happened at once. Whatever sticky green secretion he had at the end of his legs completely evaporated and he lost his hold on the slick, burning hot lightbulb. As he fell back he threw out his wings, hanging in the air for a split second before falling to the bottom of the lamp again. Then to Matthew’s complete bewilderment, I lifted the shade around his Gateway to the Eternal and almost completely shook him from his hallucination. Such a bolt of panic shot through Matthew that without any effort at all his wings lifted him up to the top of the still-broiling lightbulb where he gently set himself down, guarding his God.
As I watched him sitting, perched atop the 120 watt, it seemed to me his breathing was labored, and in an instant I knew what had conspired while I slept, and why Matthew sought the Light. It was time for me to go to work, so I slugged my coffee, threw the book forever left unfinished into my backpack, reached down and unplugged my desk lamp. As I was shutting the bedroom door on the way out, a truly evil thought occurred to me. I stopped, poked my head into the now almost completely dark room and said with a wicked grin, “Your God is dead.”
I regretted my decision all day long and hoped Matthew could keep the Faith until I returned home and plugged the lamp back in. And I’m sure he did keep faith for some hours, which were his last days, there on the cold white glass in the dark of that room, but when I got home from work he was dead on his back, on the floor at the foot of the desk. What force got him that far I will never know, though I imagine it was tremendous despair.
Gregor Samsa, or one of the Samsa boys
The Matthew tragedy happened almost a year into my stay in that cabana in the backyard of La Casa Sin Tiempo. When I met Gregor, however, I was still new to the room, and still very much in the process of learning how to be-with the other inhabitants there. One night, a couple of months after moving into the room, I brought a girl home. I should say up front that during my entire time in La Casa Sin Tiempo, I brought girls home so infrequently that I’m pretty sure, by the end of it all, Mosco had begun to suspect I was asexual. Anyways, a pretty girl named Julia in a tight black miniskirt with wavy strawberry-blond hair to her waist (that coincidentally also smelled like strawberries) and eyes the color of bermuda grass after rain, this one time, thought it a fine idea to come home with me.
We had spent the whole night at a bar in San Telmo talking about our favorite musicians and taking turns going to the bathroom to do key bumps between drinks and cigarettes. As the bar was finally closing, I actually convinced her to let me spend my last 100 pesos on a cab to get us across town. She was going that way anyways, so she could always change her mind and go home instead. But, for better or worse, she did not, and after exchanging a few passionate kisses in the back of the taxi, we arrived in front of my house and got out singing our favorite Beatles songs. Argentines are suckers for the Beatles, so I had tried to keep the conversation around their genius because I wanted to unveil to Julia the massive Beatles tapestry I had folded up in my closet, waiting to be tacked to the orange concrete wall in my room. For some reason, I imagined the scene unfolding accordingly: I would say I had a surprise, and pull out the banner, and she would squeal with delight at the sheer size of the thing, and in our Beatles ecstasy I would jump on the bed where she was seated and wrap her in the flag as we began to mess around.
Anyways, we stumbled into my pitch black bedroom in the backyard as quietly as we could. I struggled briefly, or not so briefly, to plug in my desk lamp as she blindly felt her way to the bed, almost knocking over the coat rack in the process. With the lone light now turned on I quickly put on the love-making playlist and turned to my closet.
“Mira que traje pa colgar ahi en la pared,” I said in my best Castellano as I moved to draw open the sliding door for the big reveal. Out of the corner of my eye (I don’t remember which one) I saw Julia sitting on my bed, legs crossed, drinking in her dimly lit surroundings. Those legs, folks. Those legs were by far the second most memorable part of the night. Julia was by all accounts a very short girl, but in that moment I thought that those were some of the longest, slenderest, smoothest legs I had ever seen. Her gaze was roaming from the desk and closet in front of her to the bookshelves on the wall behind and above her.
Then, in one fell swoop, I slung open the closet door and whipped out the black vintage Beatles flag, spreading it wide and lifting it above my head so as to impose the full effect of the enormous tapestry. As I was tugging the cloth off of the shelf, I thought I felt an abnormal bulk, a weight, resisting my matador maneuver; but when I unfurled the flag before me, I became undeniably aware of what seemed at the time to be a shoe-sized & shaped piece of dark leather that had tumbled out of my panty-dropper and hit the floor with an audible thud. I paid little attention to it, thinking it to be sufferable, maybe even charming, evidence of my unorganized nature, but as I lowered the tapestry to see Julia’s reaction I saw her soft green eyes glowing bright in the warmth of the lamplight, opened just a little too wide, fixated on the anomaly that had fallen at my feet. I looked down, chuckling nervously, ready to explain why I had a deflated American football wrapped up in my Beatles flag, when I saw clearly a row of skinny legs that I momentarily tried to convince myself were the laces of the ball.
The deflated ball was in fact a gigantic ancient cockroach whose name, as I have already mentioned, was Gregor. He was about a foot long and in the dull glow of my lamp he seemed almost as black as the shadows he had emerged from, but if you looked closely at where the feeble light fell across his broad back, you could see clearly that he was a deep purple red, the color of a cheap malbec wine. He had wrinkled wings that may have worked at some point but had long since been useless, unable to lift his unnatural girth. No one in the neighborhood knew his origins, but since the moment he crawled out of a drain in the tiled patio of the backyard of La Casa Sin Tiempo, he had become a legend among the Bugs and vertebrates alike, both for his size and his age. He was of a race that hailed back to the Paleozoic Age, blessed, or cursed, with long life and enormous stature, and many speculated that he was the last of his kind.
Gregor’s affinity for solitude had kept him alive up to this point and being cast into the open before me and Julia meant the actualization of his greatest fear. For what seemed an eternity Gregor and I held eye contact as the weight of terrible realizations befell us both: his being that he was exposed, revealed, in what he later recalled to be “blinding light”; mine that I had been living, since day one, with a cockroach-dinosaur that could not have been a single day younger than my mother. Then, as if a spell had suddenly been broken, I dropped Gregor’s bed and went for the flip-flop on my left foot. In the exact same moment Gregor made a dash for the dark gaping space between the closet and the wall. He was surprisingly agile for his size.
As I brought my thin rubber sandal down on Gregor’s back with a leaping blow, a shrill, blood-curdling screech reverberated around the orange walls and echoed out into the street. Whether or not Julia screamed as well I cannot say, because I was deafened, as I’m sure she was, by the far too feminine wail that had erupted out of my throat in my horror at Gregor’s existence. I slammed my sandal down on Gregor’s thick plaited exterior with all of the force my terror-seized muscles could muster. And, I swear to God, as I lifted my white rubber footwear to assess the damage I had dealt, Gregor, having easily endured the flimsy flip-flop attack, looked back at me with a hissing laugh, and shaking his flat burgundy head, he proceeded casually into the opening to his dominion. I stood there in the yellow light on spaghetti-legs, looking at the hole he had just entered, shocked, paralyzed, and for some reason on the verge of tears. I turned slowly back towards Julia, searching for any sort of affirmation that what I had just seen/done had actually happened.
I don’t know if my screech had turned her off, or if she had simply realized I was not master of my abode and could not protect us from the monsters of the night, but either way, using her eyes and her shoulders instead of words, Julia asked me to call her a cab and let her out of my house as Manu Chao’s ‘La Despedida’ played softly in the background. I obliged, and after she left I did not speak to her or see her anymore.
For his part, Gregor never showed himself in the room again, though I’m sure he was in there somewhere. I think he was as ashamed as I was about the whole ordeal, and probably more-so afraid of having been in such close proximity to one of those who were responsible for incalculable deaths in his family and had caused him to retreat from the world, and so he committed himself for the rest of his days to finding an always-better hiding place.
Gregor awaited his death in hiding, but after our encounter I was occasionally startled by one of his more reasonably sized kin folk scuttling across my rug or down my wall; one of the many that had made the pilgrimage to visit the Ancient One. Even long after he had died, and I had returned home, roaches would come two-by-two to the shrine they had built around his perfectly preserved cadaver, inside his tomb in a wall of my cramped little room, hidden at the center of a maze that only the roaches could navigate. I can’t imagine why else they would be there. They certainly hadn’t come to see me, and if they had the misfortune of being caught in the open when the lamp came on, they were hunted and subsequently slain without mercy or ceremony. And every time I saw one, my heart would stop and I would think of that girl Julia. I also never did get around to hanging that Beatles flag.