“Let’s race,” I say, sounding as sure of myself as I can, and I place my cage with Atevi on the starting line.
All Check-My-Biceps can do is imitate me, and there we stand, eager, staring at each other, eyes ablaze. But the bodybuilder’s almost adult hatred is nothing compared to the pure uncut rancor silently throbbing in the green pupils of his little brother at the other end of the tracks.
Oh, there’s no hate like childhood hate.
I wonder what happened to little Yotuel later on. For some reason, no one knows why, he will blame me when Yamil dies. Highway boy prostitute at the age of eight, no brawny big brother to protect him; his life must have gotten pretty hard. And then he disappeared from the neighborhood.
Never to return, I suspect. Maybe he died shortly thereafter, like so many other kids of my generation in Rubble City, orphans or not. I can’t picture him as an adult, obsessed as he was with cleanliness but having to live surrounded by shit.
But my dream keeps moving ahead, giving me no time for my pessimistic reflections.
“On your mark! Set! Release your bugs, idiots!” Diosdado shouts in his bass baritone.
And off go the racers, to the frenzied shouts of the crowd.
The regulation racing tracks are gutters made of smooth galvanized steel, fifteen centimeters deep, walls highly polished so the racers can’t climb out. They’re eight meters long, with two curves and three hills and valleys bent into them.
They are easy to scrounge from the garbage dumps in Rubble City. Years later, I’ll figure out that they’re made from the scrapped exhaust pipes of old Chinese-manufactured rocket engines, cut in half lengthwise.
My Atevi is better trained than Yamil’s Centella. While her rival, the reigning champion, wastes a couple of precious seconds exploring the starting gate and getting her bearings in time and space, my challenger has already smelled the sugar at the other end of the track and, waving her long antennae aloft, run almost half a meter, moving as fast as her six spiny, chitinous legs can carry her.
Abel winks at me. Yotuel and Yamil look like shit; I’m all smiles, listening to Evita laugh uproariously by my side, literally jumping up and down in excitement. Bravo, Atevi! I didn’t go wrong when I picked you from all the others in your brood. You’re a natural competitor.
Right. Though I clipped her wings like we always do before we start training racers, she even raises her milky-white elytra as if to release her flying apparatus. Oh, if only she could fly—then there’d be no doubt she’d get there first, long before Centella.
Maybe someday they’ll figure out how to do flying races, and then they won’t have to continue mutilating the finest mutant cockroaches in the neighborhood.
Years later, as a respected condomnaut in Nu Barsa, when I have the time and the means to learn about these and many other things, when I round out my feeble education by reading everything that falls into my hands, I’ll find out that her scientific name is Periplaneta americana mutantis. And that her species has lived among humans since time immemorial, being almost universally considered the most disgusting insect and one of the most repugnant creatures in the world, to the point that some psychologists believe our rejection of her kind is fixed in our genes at birth.
But they’re wrong. Or perhaps it’s that human beings can adapt to practically anything. Back then—right now, in my dream—Yotuel is the exception to the rule; for me, and for almost all the Valdés orphans, they’re not pests, they’re just cockroaches, giant bugs, racers. We don’t see them as repulsive monsters. Instead, we respect them as natural survivors that appeared along with lots of other mutant creatures after background radiation spiked with the Five Minute War.
Nor do they stink. If you raise them in a clean environment from the time they’re tiny, they just have a faint spicy smell. Like my Atevi.
At just under five inches long, my racer would be a perfect specimen of her highly resistant species, if not for the fact that something twisted her genes and she lost her pigmentation. If you hold her up against the light, you can see through her chitin and watch her rapid heartbeat, the gastric juices moving in her intestine when she eats, her muscles flexing and extending.
A lovely show. Or a disgusting display, depending on whether it’s Abel or me or finicky Yotuel observing her.
Of course, Atevi is far from the largest cockroach we’ve ever found in Rubble City. I myself have seen some that measure eight inches. Bugs that fight with dogs over bones in the street. Diosdado swears that once when he was young, he saw one half a meter long, meowing like a cat. But we all think that’s just a tall tale, like the ones about the titanic meter-long insects that were supposedly exterminated in Rot Town.
Later on I’ll find out we were right to be skeptical. Like all insects, cockroaches lack lungs. They breathe through their trachea, an efficient system—for small animals. An insect as big as Diosdado’s would simply asphyxiate. Not to mention that exoskeletons, a lightweight and efficient support system for tiny creatures, also become inefficient and cumbersome when bugs grow beyond a certain size, until at last they cannot even support their own weight.
As kids in Rubble City, maybe we intuitively guessed something of the sort. We all knew that when racers are six inches or longer, they get so heavy they can barely fly or run.
The best racers are long-legged ones, like Centella, who’s a little under five inches, but with her long shanks she looks like my Atevi’s little sister on stilts.
Oh, damn those long legs. By meter two of the steel race track, she’s making up for lost ground. The bitch is a natural runner. By meter four, she’s left Atevi behind. Afro Boy gets his sarcastic, arrogant smile back. God, I hate him. Evita falls silent and stops jumping up and down, watching me in dismay, as if she can’t believe what’s happening.
But for an insect, even one five inches long, eight meters of race track with three hills to climb up and down is almost like a marathon for a human. Speed isn’t the only decisive factor; in the end, it also takes endurance.
I’ve trained my Atevi by making her run up to fifteen meters without a rest, using gentle electric shocks. Though later, on the coldest nights, I also let her snuggle up to me for warmth when she sleeps, while I enjoy the smell of her. Velvet glove on an iron fist.
Apparently, whether or not he shares his steroids with her, Yamil hasn’t bothered to do anything of the kind with his racer. In the final meter, Centella flags again, her rhythm slows, and my translucent beauty closes the gap once more.
The roar of the crowd grows deafening. Pandemonium: everybody around me is jumping and screaming. Evita squeezes my hand, hard. All I can look at is my supercockroach, and less than half a meter from the finish line she catches up to the champion… passes her… No! Centella puts on a last spurt, her spindly legs squeal along the galvanized steel. Now it’s antenna and antenna.
But Yamil’s long-legged racer raises her elytra, lets out a pair of sloppily clipped wings (it seems that caring for animals, despite all the money he gets from them, isn’t Afro Boy’s strong suit), and though she can’t quite manage flight, the extra push from her clumsy flapping gets her to the sugar prize first. Just by a couple of millimeters, but she has definitely won the race.