A Tale of Ants

Topic   8 [berkeley]:  Berkeley Tales
#1 of 94: carter scholz (csz)      Thu May 21 '87 (22:17)    94 lines

 THE FORMICATION
 ---------------
 
 TIME:  Thanksgiving Day, 1979
 
 PLACE:  A two-bedroom basement apartment near the corner of Ashby and
         Shattuck.
 
 DRAMATIS PERSONAE:  The author.  His roommate.  A 7-11 clerk.
 
 Nine a.m.  Wintering sun pokes its pallid beams briefly through the
 narrow slot between two tall houses to the east, past the dumpsters
 visible at the end of the driveway, through the ratty bamboo shades in
 the kitchen window.  A few photons glance indifferently from the
 leaves of a dying coleus.  A minute later the sun vanishes from the
 interior of the apartment for the day.
 
 Fifteen minutes pass.
 
 The author emerges, shuffling, from his den. His dreams have been
 banal.  He scowls at the brown linoleum underfoot in the "hallway". He
 scowls at the bargain-basement gooseshit-colored carpeting in the
 "living room".  Being an author he still, after two years in this
 "apartment", uses mental quote-marks, seeing the place (especially
 when out of sorts) as a hastily- and badly-converted cellar.  Probably
 he wonders where his cigarettes are.
 
 At the end of the carpet he blunders left into the "kitchen".  His pace
 quickens at the thought of coffee.  He reaches for the kettle.
 
 Ants.  A trail of them across the makeshift counter.  Nothing new.  He
 pops the gas on under the kettle.  He eschews Raid, he has tried
 dilute ammonia, but boiling water is his current ant-killer of choice.
 While it heats, he tracks the trail backwards across the unhelpfully-
 hued linoleum.  Back to the east side, of course.  Ah shit, they're in
 the cupboard too.  Two kettles' worth.  No problem.  We've seen worse.
 
 The kettle pipes, he lifts it off the flame.  First the counter.  He
 slops it on carelessly; maybe a hundred ants there.  He turns to
 annihihlate the supply route; maybe five hundred there.  He turns
 again to address the cupboard, when he sees, at the edge of his sight,
 a blur.  He turns.
 
 From behind the refrigerator, which sits next to the counter, a stream
 of ants has emerged.  Stunned by the slopover of the first strike on
 the counter, all the dead ants' distant relatives have emerged from
 hiding.  Maybe a thousand, with more coming.  Impossible to count. The
 kettle is empty.
 
 He fills it quickly, drops it back on the flame.  As it heats the ants
 stream thicker, breaking into several tributaries.  The author watches
 with that growing sense of horror mixed with compulsion that gives
 meaning to the "fascist" cognate-root of "fascination". Among the
 hordes he sees a few larger insects.  He leans closer.  They carry
 minute white specks in their mandibles.  He has seen queens with their
 eggs.  The kettle pipes.  He feels the edge of panic.  He grabs the
 kettle and tosses its contents haphazard behind the refrigerator.
 
 And now they come, not in streams, but in rivers.  Dozens of rivers.
 Hundreds of thousands of ants. They have nested in the warm coils of
 the refrigerator.  They are everywhere: on all the walls, under his
 bare feet on the dark linoleum, streaming in all directions from their
 discovered lair.  The author becomes an automaton, bereft of thought
 or sense: fill the kettle, put it on, hurl it when it boils at the
 densest stream, and repeat ...
 
 Fifteen minutes later.  The author's roommate, emerging from his own
 den, pauses in the hallway, baffled at the sight of steam roiling out
 into the living room from the kitchen.  He adjusts his glasses.  He
 plods forward, turning to see his roommate, the author, a man of (at
 best) unsteady habits, standing half-dressed, poised like a maniac
 with a a kettle in his hand, babbling numbers and phrases like
 "Eichmann of the Ants!", turning, and suddenly drenching him with
 scalding water.
 
 EPILOGUE:  Our two stalwarts retreat to the living room.  Cigarettes
 are found and smoked.  Agreement is reached as to the efficacy and
 political correctness, in the circumstances, of insecticides. However,
 it is Thanksgiving morning.  Safeway is closed.  Pay & Save is closed.
 Telegraph Co-Op is closed.  Telegraph 7-11 is closed.
 
 College Ave 7-11 is OPEN, and it has Raid, and our heroes rejoice, and
 a clerk is bemused, and our heroes return and do the dastard
 Formicidae to death, mopping up for the rest of the afternoon.  Five,
 six, eight dustpans full of dead ants.  And when you thought you were
 done, and that dark linoleum cleared, and you went out to smoke a
 cigarette, you'd hear behind you the faint patter of minute bodies
 dropping from the beams, like distant rain, and you could go back and
 sweep again and reap another dustpan full.
 
 And for the next week they fell from the beams and the sheetrock,
 twenty or thirty daily on the counter, the stove, and the top of the
 fridge.  And many more, I'm sure, underfoot on that dark linoleum, but
 we both of us starting wearing slippers that week.