Emily’s Laugh
A cockroach military-marched up the computer desk and the job application asked why he wanted to answer those phones, in particular. His fitful night of sleep pulled at his eyelids. It was cut up into pieces by nightmares of his fingernails wriggling out of the sockets, extra belly buttons sprouting in the crooks of his arms, and mildew seeping from his nostrils to rot his whole skull. The form asked his True Name. His first and last were on page one.
The stench of the roaches was the worst part of their residency. It was a smell halfway between spoiled oil and mold. The next-worst part was the vow of allegiance to the Roach King, which they proclaimed from their chitinous mouths at all hours of the day and night. To drown this out, he pulled up his favorite movie in a new tab, Zombie Pizza Delivery 2. He knew every word by heart and spoke along with the actors while he identified himself, again, to the application. It spat a red X.
He clicked the question mark next to the X. Beneath his mouse, a window popped up: PLEASE ENTER THE TRUE NAME SET OUT FOR YOU BEFORE ALL TIME BY THE HEART OF THE UNIVERSE AND NOT THE NAME CHOSEN BY YOUR PARENTS, YOURSELF, OR ANY OTHER PARTY.
Emile saw something else on the screen and started, pushed his chair out with a tightness in his chest. From under his desk, he pulled out the experimental treatment prescribed to him by an experimental therapist he could no longer afford: a rubber chicken he was meant to look at when his thoughts raced, to remind him that these thoughts were absurd and did not define him. He counted the red bumps on its head, and he looked up. It was still there. His reflection in the computer screen had a white hair, tucked among the black ones like a viper in the grass.
It wasn’t vanity that sat in a lump at his throat. Change always had the same texture as his nightmares. He shook his head, plucked out the offending hair and dropped it to the floor. A roach scuttled from the baseboard. It took hold of the find, only to push it away.
“Insufficient,” it called up to Emile in hoarse clicks. “Mighty Roach king—long may he reign—demands morsels.”
Emile did not dignify this with a response. It was time, he thought, to speak with his property manager—again—about the infestation.
Mr. Richard’s face was not visible in the glass box which served as his office. There was a wooden panel six feet up which obscured it. Mr. Richard was not taller than six feet, and he did stand on a stepping stool during office visits.
By way of greeting, Mr. Richard raised one palm to level it with the ducky on his tie and waved it firmly, right and left and left and right. Emile laughed nervously, as was his natural reaction to authority. His neighbor, Emily, emerged from the door to the street and got in line behind him. The chuckle died in his mouth. Goosebumps rose on his skin through the stuffy hallway air. Mr. Richard’s hand stopped where it was, then fell slowly to his hip. A third person got in line, a business student in a Khaki blazer. Emile locked eyes with him pleadingly, but from the student’s relaxed gait and youth, Emile gathered there weren’t yet enough years in the building between those Khaki lapels to know what he and Mr. Richard were afraid of. Emile began.
“Hello, Mr. Richard,” The Mister came out like a beggar on helium. Emily pressed the back of her palm against her mouth to stop herself, but it was evident that a giggle lay just beyond it. Panicking, Emile threw his voice a few octaves below its normal register to clear his throat and stop being funny. This, apparently, was even funnier. Laughter took hold of Emily and shook her arm clean away from her face. At the far end of the hallway, a light bulb’s standard depressing dimness burned up to blinding, then another, and another, and another, until the four of them stood in perfect, ugly brightness.
Cloudy plumes of mist filled the hallway. In between the pillars of white there were the faces of others, jaws gaping, sleepless eyes more red than white. A gentle beating sound swelled up, and a shadow of indiscernible shape fell on the ground, and its drum-thick noise became the baseline to a chorus of screams from the faces of those strangers in The Mist. Emile closed his eyes. Something hit him in the face and bounced off the fleshy part of his cheek. Peeking between his eyelids, he deciphered the outline of an umbrella, its color obscured by The Mist.
All at once The Mist rolled away, and the line was one person shorter. Emile stood up. Emily looked at the empty space behind her. Her eyes grew wet. She stuck out her jaw and wiped a tear quickly with the side of her fist.
Ignoring both Emily and the disappearance of the business student, Mr. Richard called Emile “son” and asked what brought him in. Emile fixed his eyes on the ducky tie.
“I’m still having that problem with the roaches,” he said. “Can you please have someone around? An exterminator?”
“Have you tried the spray?” Mr. Richard asked from behind the wooden panel. It seemed to Emile that the voice emerged from the unmoving, grinning beak of the ducky. “Yes. I’m still having problems.”
“You can keep using the spray,” said Mr. Richard magnanimously, “Don’t worry. I’ll give you another canister if you run out.” Emile turned heel before he could say or do anything else that Emily might find funny.
The last question on the job application form was still blank. He tried guessing names at random, making his way through the alphabet, only to be red X’d and chastised time and time again about the HEART OF THE UNIVERSE. Giving up on names, he tried random words: Serendipity, Wallow, Trinity, and none of these worked, either. Without thinking, he typed Umbrella. This was not met by a red X, but a new pop up message:
HELPFUL HINT: THE TRUE NAME CHOSEN FOR YOU BY THE HEART OF THE UNIVERSE BEFORE ALL TIME LIKELY HAS TWO COMPONENTS.
Emile blinked, gathering that he’d guessed one of the two components correctly: Umbrella. A roach scuttled by his shoes. He sprayed it from Mr. Richard’s yellow canister. As he watched the droplets fall, and the bug with them, memory walked up on him. Umbrella wasn’t a guess.
With the rubber chicken under his shirt and one arm crossed over the lump, Emile knocked lightly on Emily’s door. She opened it just wide enough to sliver her eyes, hiding her mouth behind the slab of chipping paint, and asked what he wanted. He dug his nails into his palm to leverage out the lie that his aim was to check on her, after what happened at Mr. Richard’s office, and nothing more. She let him into an apartment taped all over with printed articles about injustices and tragedies. She offered him a cup of coffee. His eyes rested on a story about a collapsed slide at a water park which killed two children. Emily explained that she tried to think only of things which made her angry, or sad, given her predicament.
“So you’ve never done it on purpose, then?”
“Oh, God, no! It hurts people. Anyways, I don’t know for sure that it wouldn’t hurt me, take me away… woosh.” She waved her hands in front of her face. “Never, ever, ever in a million years would I ever laugh intentionally. Not under any circumstances.” Emile tried not to let the disappointment he felt creep into his features. Emily stared at him with her arms folded, drumming the fingers of one hand against her shoulder.
“No one’s ever visited me,” she said. “I’ll warn you, I don’t make friends. Friends make jokes.” In the far corner, beside a piece on the rising costs of diapers, was a single touch of color: a bright pink and green poster for Zombie Pizza Delivery 2. The star actor gazed out heroically from the advertisement of his first and only cinematic venture from under a bloodspattered chef’s hat.
“It hasn’t always been like this, you know. It picked me out ten years ago. The Mist only chooses people who—” The coffee machine dinged. Emily lost her train of thought pouring a mug for herself and her visitor, and cradled one against her chest, stiffly pushing the other at Emile. Emile changed tacts.
“I’m not here to make friends,” he said, “I’m here to put brains on pizza crusts.” Emily’s grip on the mug handles loosened with this, not enough to drop them, but just enough to stop cutting off her circulation.
“Freeze. Health inspector.” She spoke the following line from Zombie Pizza Delivery 2 with a straight face, and with none of the enthusiasm of its original actors. Emile took his truly disgusting cup of coffee and raised his eyebrows over a sip, repressing a gag. They continued this way, repeating the dialogue from their mutual favorite movie at rapid speed until they reached the devastating finale. Emile pretended to bite into her skull. Emily’s composure broke. A smile tugged at the corner of her lips. She flung her hands up. “Cut! Cut, cut, cut. Too close to funny.”
“The whole thing is pretty funny, isn’t it?” Emile asked, putting down his mug and moving his free hand to the hem of his shirt.
Emily downed the rest of her unsweetened coffee in one go.
“Yes, but I love it too much to give it up entirely, so every time I watch it, I tell myself that it’s all real, to take the humor out of it.” This was the saddest thing Emile had ever heard. His heart broke for her against the rubber chicken, and he let the shirt lay still over it.
Emily sent him away. Before she did, she gave him a packet of borax-sugar tablets, which she said might do more damage to the colony than Mr. Richard’s yellow canister. It was a friendly gesture, Emile thought.
The roaches went to the borax-sugar tablets very quickly, and exploded leg-up at a rate Emile could hardly believe. He spotted and swept away the bodies of the babies on his floor first, and eventually even the larger, more wisened among them found their way to the poison. Three nights later, he slept soundly in his bed, unperturbed for the first time in a long time by the sound of tiny, hard bodies dragging their way through his walls, until he woke to something poking his arm.
He opened his eyes and saw a roach as tall and as wide as Emile himself, wearing a golden crown. Its mandibles swung around as its maw opened and shut, and from its mouth three words scraped out.
“No more tablets.”
He watched the hideous creature walk backwards out of sight and forced his eyes shut, telling himself the Roach King was a new kind of nightmare. At least this one had nothing to do with the flesh which bound him.
In the morning, the job hunt dredged him out of bed to his computer desk. Beside it was a message written in fresh roach carcasses on the floor: NO MORE TABLETS. He swept them up and scattered a new layer of tablets with zealous indulgence. He let the soundtrack of Zombie Pizza Delivery 2 galvanize him. With each crescendo underscoring a fight scene, he flung a tablet with special force, and loudly asked what exactly the Roach King could possibly do about it. At the end of the soundtrack, he collapsed on his borax-covered floor, exhausted and certain of victory.
In the morning, he undressed for a shower. He walked right by the rust caked mirror at first, but something in his peripheral view caught him. He doubled back. Facing his reflection, bile rose in his throat. His chest was covered in a constellation of swollen redness, spelling out: NO MORE TABLETS. The bites hurt and itched and worse, they changed him, made him different. His vision swam. He took therapy-deep breaths, ran out to hold the rubber chicken, but he couldn’t stop the ringing in his ears, the rabbit-quickness of his rushing blood, the sweat crawling down his skin, the weight of his fist shattering the glass.
He knocked fast and hard on Emily’s door in the rhythm of the credits sequence from Zombie Pizza Delivery 2. Drying blood scabbed away from his knuckles. She opened wide up right away.
“I’m not here to make friends,” he said, and he pushed the rubber chicken in her face. He let the remainder of the line droop from his lips pathetically. It was the same tone of voice she’d heard him speak to Mr. Richard with. “Iiiii’m here to put brains on pizza crusts.” The combination of the posturing dialogue, the stupid prop, and the self-effacing pitifulness Emile didn’t even need to try very hard to summon proved too great for Emily to bear. Before she even knew what hit her, she laughed. As the first note bubbled up to her lips, her eyes grew wide. The chicken fell, rubber slapping the floor.
“How could you?” She asked from the spaces between her fingers uselessly clutching her mouth.
“I’m sorry. I learned part of my True Name in The Mist.” Already, down the hall, a light glowed more feverishly than before. Emily took a breath to speak. Another light fired up. Emile beat her to it, wanted to get out all he had to say first, to make her understand. “I need the second part for a job application.” Even as he let them out the words felt wrong in his mouth, misshapen. Emily shook her head. The light directly on top of them sputtered to fullness.
“Emile, no. The Mist chooses people who know their True Names.”
The Mist arrived, pregnant with a steady beat, in whose direction Emile turned his head without flinching. From between two intangible pillars emerged a giant, beating heart, the Heart of the Universe, and this time he took in the color of the umbrella it levitated to beat him with.
The Mist cleared away, and when it did, Emily was gone without a trace. Woosh, Emile thought with a pang, and then he thought Maroon Umbrella.
The following week, he wore his finest shirt to a shiny-windowed building glutted with other fine shirts. His interview went well, largely because he took great care not to fall back on nervous laughter to soften his pseudo-confidence. The month after that, he moved into an apartment with no roaches, and no Roach King. When he brought the news that he wouldn’t renew to Mr. Richard, the property manager stepped down from his stool to say that Emile was a good tenant, one he was sorry to lose. In doing so, he revealed his face to Emile for the first time. Emile liked it less than the ducky.
When he finished unpacking his things, he set up with his laptop on the floor to watch Zombie Pizza Delivery 2. He told himself that every death and every injury he saw on the screen really happened, so as not to find a second of it funny.
Phoenix Roberts
Phoenix is praying for the eschaton. Her fiction has appeared in Luna Station Quarterly.