It all started when my cunt of a roommate, Christine, brought a tropical crab home.
She called us up and asked if it would be all right if she purchased a tropical crab. I was busy and missed the call. Gary told her no.
She already had a cat, Arthur, a vomit-white Siamese she’d bought for two dollars from a lady in a cardboard hat at the Ashby swap meet last summer. He turned out to be the meanest cat alive. I don’t say this because I have a problem with cats—generally, I never have. But my fearful distaste for all felines was slowly assembled, refined, and crystallized in the three years I lived with Arthur.
He had no tail. Just a lump at the end of his butt curving like a broken bone into a loggy stump. His fur, post-kittenhood, quickly morphed from off-white to crusty gray to a swimmy discharge color. His claws ripped like talons through whatever he could grab onto at any given moment—a pantleg, a chest, the side of a couch. He especially loved to tear apart the fuzzy alpaca blankets Brook had brought back from Ecuador.
There was absolutely nothing cute about this cat whatsoever, but Christine insisted on cooing at him, berating him in a disgusting child-whine and calling him “Meow-Cat,” over and over, ostensibly because he had a constant, thimble-stretched yowl (it hardly substituted as a meow). She’d try to pick him up and hold him, lovingly pressed against her breasts for the three or four seconds he’d allow before yowling and scratching the shit out of her arms, until she finally dropped him and he could scamper away, probably to spray all over the bathtub, which he did whenever feeling scared or aggressive.
He hated her and he hated the rest of us. It was unfortunate, for Christine, being so blinded by love that she was never able to recognize the inability for compassion deep inside his cat heart. It was also unfortunate that she only came home every two or three days to feed him. This meant that he would starve for two days, then get a dump truck-size serving of kibble on his kitchen floor platter, eat it all in one sitting, and then starve again for two more days.
She hadn’t cleaned his litter box in about three months. We kept her bedroom door closed religiously, so the thick wafts of stale feces and urine wouldn’t permeate the entire house.
Gary said no. I said no. Politely, of course. You have Arthur already, and we don’t want the distraction and responsibility of a second animal, we said. Thanks for understanding.
She seemed put out, but grudgingly, no crab was brought home.
We found out a few days later she’d indeed gone and bought the crab, opting to bring it over to her boyfriend’s place. A week later they broke up, and the crab arrived on the scene. We were a little peeved at this. But she was in a delicate state, given the breakup. She promised to keep the crab in her room. She made a place for it inside the top shelf of her closet. Its heating lamp lit up the dark interior around the clock; shuffling to the bathroom in the middle of the night, I could always make out the yellow light filtering through the crack under her door.
The crab stayed graciously in place like this for a couple of months. Out of sight, out of mind. We left to go visit our families for a week or so during the holidays, and when we returned, the litterbox had been restationed in the living room (urine pellets scattered across the floor) and the crab was set up on the kitchen table.
With passionate indignation, we moved the litterbox back into her room ourselves. Then we called her up and asked her to keep both the crab and the box in her room. She said of course. She’d only brought them out because no one was there.
A few days went by, and the crab remained in the kitchen. Its head was bluish purple, while its claws glowed bright red, extremely tropical (I figured), with two liquid-black eyes flustering on tiny stalks poking from the top of its head. Its claws groomed the glass back and forth with a shiny squeak that made my teeth hurt. It seemed to be always sitting in a pile of wet and soggy sand, its mottled back glistening in the kitchen light. I started to get a sick feeling whenever I sat down at the table to eat. The cage smelled faintly of moisture and other excreta.
We asked her to move the crab back to her room again. She said okay. A week went by. Then two.
On a Monday morning, when we were in the kitchen together, I asked her again.
“It’s a little unhygienic to have it in here,” I said.
Her back was turned away from me, her torso half-hidden by the open refrigerator door. Her head swiveled, her expression ruffled.
“Well,” she said. “He’s completely contained in the cage. He’s not hurting anything in here.”
“You didn’t seem to mind having it in your room before,” I said.
“I hate keeping him in there. It’s not good for him.”
She said we could compromise by putting him in the living room. I decided to remain obstinate.
“That’s not a compromise,” I reminded her. “The compromise was letting it be in your room, because we asked you not to bring it to the house at all. We asked you not to buy it, and you did. We asked you not to bring it here, and you did. That was the compromise.”
Her soft face wrinkled into a sneer. She said that all of that had been weeks ago, aspects of the past she’d already apologized for. She said that I had been holding a grudge against her crab for months.
I left the kitchen.
The crab remained for two more days. Then, when I came home on a Wednesday, it’d been positioned on top of a wooden crate in the corner of the living room. The yellow heat lamp shone down on its host, haloing the crab. Rarifying it. She’d chosen a corner of the wall where a painting of mine had hung. Looking around for it, I found it lying face-down on top of the television.
A couple of nights later, I was sitting on the couch watching a movie when Christine marched into the living room with a slice of ham in her hand. She went to the crab and slid back the cage’s grated opening. She dangled the ham above its head, cooing at it in the same tone of voice she used on the cat.
“You hungry? You want it?”
The crab didn’t move or respond in any fashion.
“It’s a special treat,” she chided the thing. “You don’t want a special treat?”
I knew she was putting on the show purely for my benefit. I pretended to be very interested in the elastic of my sock.
“You sure you don’t want it?”
I wondered if she half-expected it to tell her it was having a stomachache at the moment.
“Okay, well if you’re sure. I’ll try again later…”
She cooed at it for a few more seconds and then slid the opening shut. She sauntered back to the kitchen, the piece of slimy meat still clutched in her hand.
Lying in bed at night, I found myself brainstorming different ways of murdering the crab. I was shocked by my violent thoughts. I’d never been the kind of person to impose cruelty on animals. And I knew I wasn’t angry toward the crab itself. It was what the crab stood for.
I lay in the dark, my head cooking. The rationalizations she made up in her head were amazing. She never believed she was wrong. She always thought she was innocent. Even when she apologized for something, I could hear in her voice: it wasn’t sincere. The words were spoken with a shrug, a smirk on her lips. It was the kind of apology a child makes when they spill grape juice all over the floor. Oops.
I don’t know at exactly what point I hit the corner—or the bottom—and decided I was unequivocally going to kill the crab. For weeks I played with the idea, compiling different scenarios in my head (just for fun, of course). I could boil it in a pot and eat it. I could walk up to the cage with a knife and spear it in the head like it was a baked potato. I could poison it. I could trap it under the heavy plastic log in the far corner of the cage. I could throw it out the window. I kept thinking about how good it would taste in a salad or a risotto dish.
My mouth began to water whenever I imagined its brain, creamy and braised, melting on my tongue.
I finally decided on poison. If Christine didn’t notice the mold growing on the underside of Arthur’s food dish, I doubted she’d be willing to probe so far as to recognize what kind of particular ingestion had led to the death of her crab. It would probably sit for weeks in the cage, dead as a doorknob, before she even noticed. As far as I was concerned, I was putting the little thing out of its misery. As far as things were concerned, she was the one enacting animal cruelty, not I.
I waited for an afternoon when everyone was out of the house. I’d read on the internet that crabs will eat almost anything you give them, so I spent some time in the kitchen preparing a special meal for the little guy. I pounded ten aspirin tablets into a powder and rubbed this into a piece of tangerine I’d sliced open.
I dropped it into the cage and waited for the crab to go at it.
The fucker didn’t move.
So what, I thought. Maybe it wasn’t hungry. Its ugly little tentacle eyes swung up toward the window, then drooped into the sand. I couldn’t quite figure out where its mouth was.
I put on a movie and decided to keep an eye on it. Halfway through, it sauntered toward the tangerine and ate a bit of the side, shoving it under its stomach. I supposed its mouth was down there somewhere. It refused to eat any more of it, though, and the half-shredded tangerine lay pressed against the glass, half-covered in sand. It resembled some kind of tropical shrimp companion, bright orange and pulsating in the water.
Braving the terror of the cage, I lifted the lid off and scooped the thing up in my fingers, throwing it down the garbage disposal.
Coming back from the kitchen, I eyed the crab. It was looking fit as a fiddle, and if crabs can appear as such, practically jubilant. I glowered at it until others started getting home.
The next morning, I went to check on the crab while my cunt of a roommate was in the shower. Awake and docile as ever, it stood perfectly still on its mound of soggy sand, not unlike a Buddha meditating. It occurred to me that the crab might be an enlightened spirit who saw all the wickedness festering in my heart. I turned away from it.
On the drive to work, all I could think of was my utterly failed attempt. The fact that it hadn’t worked seemed to deepen the evil of the plot. I observed my hands on the brown steering wheel, thinking, are these the hands of a killer? Am I capable of these thoughts and these actions? I was fascinated and mutually disgusted by the lengths I’d already gone in this melodrama. I vowed to never act on a bad feeling, ever again.
*****
When I got home from work that night, the crab was dead. He was lying on his back ; not a very traditional pose for a crustacean. His claws jutted out like twin bottle openers.
I opened the cage and poked him a few times, just to make sure. No response whatsoever. I flipped him over to his sitting position. From far away, he appeared pretty much alive . If Christine were standing at the opposite end of the room, she’d never notice. It wasn’t until one got right up to the cage and realized his stalky eyes were glazed over, no longer shining with liquid ink, that something might be wrong.
I could’ve hurled. Instead, I microwaved a burrito for dinner and set myself up on the living room couch with a book. The scene of the crime. Thoughts raced through my head: maybe it hadn’t been my fault. Maybe the crab had died of natural causes. The other week a friend’s hamster had died, completely out of the blue. It was two months old and one morning she’d found it with its feet sticking up in the straw. Animals were just a mystery of life we humans couldn't fathom.
I sat there, sweating, my nose in the book, until Christine came home. She didn’t come into the living room right away. I could hear her fussing around in her room—a space that was easily a prime example of a hoarder’s den. I don’t know how she ever found anything in there. Everything stinking of cat piss, the piles of clothes on the floor mixing with the stenchy pellets. Arthur had carved a trail to go back and forth to the bathroom. Where he was at the moment, I didn’t know. I’d been so busy with my crab-killing plot I hadn’t been paying as much attention to him. I used to open all the windows in the house, hoping he would jump out of one of them. He never did.
It took about two hours for Christine to notice. She made dinner, ate off the coffee table, and complained to me about her day and the fact that her boss was making her work on Saturdays. She futzed in her room for a little longer and then came back out and started rolling a tiny joint.
I stared at the coffee table’s surface, the glass sticky in spots. It was littered with old cardboard coffee cups, bowls of soup from three or four days ago, a couple of dusty art books forgotten to be replaced on the shelf, a water glass, a pair of AA batteries, and some grimy-looking scissors.
Christine lit the joint and offered me a hit before smoking the rest herself. She leaned back in the chair, her elbows resting on her stomach. She had bobby pins thrust into her greasy hair, but at the end of the day they’d slid enough so that she was tucking and re-tucking the slimy hairs behind her ears.
Even though I hated everything about her, I knew she didn’t deserve to have a dead crab. I slouched on the couch, hunkering lower into my misery.
Ice Road Truckers was on TV. We watched two episodes in a sticky, conspiratorial silence. Christine sighed ostensibly a few times, the moist joint pinched in her fingers, which she eventually abandoned in one of the coffee cups.
At a certain point, I let my eye wander over to the crab cage. I cleared my throat conspicuously.
“Does the crab look all right to you?” I asked, my voice uncharacteristically conveying mild interest.
Christine glanced over to the corner. “What do you mean?”
“He just…looks. I mean, he hasn’t moved in a while.”
Christine hefted herself up from the couch and crossed the room. She stood in front of the cage and bent her head to the glass. She smiled and waved at the crab. “No, it’s fine.”
Aghast, on the couch: “Are you sure?”
“Yeah, he’s just sleeping.”
“How can you tell? Do they close their eyes?”
“This is his prime sleeping time. They’re nocturnal, you know. He’ll be frisky later, when we’re all in bed.”
I left it at that.
The next morning: the crab had not moved.
The following day the crab had begun to secrete a black liquid, trailing out from below and ringing around him in a watery puddle.
Gary and I did a closer inspection. He looked dead, in fact, he looked like he was falling apart.
We inquired with Christine, who said that he was molting. He ate yesterday, she told us. Reassuredly.
We look at each other. “Really?”
“Oh yeah,” she says, “It’s totally normal. This is his molting season.”
“I didn’t know crabs molted,” Gary said, all politeness.
“He smells,” I added.
“It’s all totally normal,” she repeated.
A week or so went by like this, and the crab remained motionless. Food Christine had tried to entice it with started to pile up in the tank: bits of meat and soggy apple slices. He appeared now to be separating from his shell, his body conforming to the glass. She still insisted he was molting, but at some point did decide to take him, cage and all, to a vivarium in Berkeley.
I decided to go with her, because it was a Saturday, it was beautiful out, and I had nothing else to do. Plus I was terrified of what they’d tell us at the place. Would they be able to tell the crab was poisoned? I pictured a pimply guy around our own age, eyes widening with dawning realization, stabbing a finger at the cage and saying, “Do you know that any kind of medication isn’t allowed? This crab was fed painkillers. It’s a classic presentation of toxin ingestion.”
Instead, with the cage on the counter, Christine began her molting story but before she could finish, the guy waved a hand.
“THAT,” he told us, gesturing to the cage, “is a very dead crab.”
No other explanation required.
*****
We carried the empty cage out to the parking lot, shoving it into the back of Christine’s red Toyota Yaris.
She was thoughtful, frowning, as she leaned against the hood, still eyeing the cage.
“I just don’t understand,” she said, after a beat. “I fed him on a schedule. They said they love meat, and I made sure to give him plenty of protein. I just don’t get it.”
I felt my mouth, amazingly, unglue. “Sometimes these things just…happen.”
“I know,” she said, sighing again. “But they’re supposed to have upwards of 30-year lifespans.”
I noticed that she was never one to blame herself. Despite the facts, the sheer amount of ham she probably fed that thing, she never once rationalized into the realm of personal responsibility. For all I knew, she was the one who’d killed it. With an elevated protein diet, perhaps.
I realized that I was trying to take responsibility for someone else’s lack of accountability and foresight. Christine would always be a threat to her own pets. My part, in the end, was most likely negligible.
I put an arm around her and squeezed.
“Let’s go get a beer or something,” I said, “Huh?” My guilt somehow entirely resolved.
Wiped clean. Pure.
Christine agreed. Always open to a drink on the house.
“To the little creep,” she said proudly, holding up her peanut butter stout.
I conceded, lightly tinking my martini against hers, “To the little creep.”
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