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 Thousands of years ago, a continent named Atlantis flourished in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, midway between Africa and the American continents.  The people on Atlantis were happy and peaceful.  They had few needs, and so they had little work other than to hunt or grow and harvest enough food for their population.  Atlantan artists painted and sculpted the most beautiful works, and Atlantan musicians composed songs to which the people loved to listen and dance. 

The Atlantans knew that people lived on the rest of the world, but they sought to kept their own existence as secret as possible so that no outsiders could spoil their wonderful life.  One day, however, an underwater earthquake erupted of such force that it slowly sank the island.  Just enough time existed for the wisest Atlantans to design and construct a huge dome beneath which the people could survive on their submerged continent.  Believing that the earthquake was no accident but had been triggered by hostile people from other nations of the world, the citizens of one of the Atlantan countries, named Flussia, passed down to their children and their children’s children and their children’s children’s children, and so on for thousands of years, the tale that humans in the rest of the world were evil and had sought to destroy Atlantis.

Despite (or perhaps because of) isolation from the rest of the world, life in Atlantis went on happily for many thousands of years, and the rest of the world, which anyway had barely heard of Atlantis, forgot that it had ever existed, except in myths to which almost no one paid attention.  But thirty years before the time when this tale takes place, Atlantan scientists began to notice something strange was happening to their continent.  Although oxygen was sealed into the continent by the giant dome, the land was still affected by absorption of substances in the ocean surrounding it.  And whatever these substances were—in fact, they were the result of pollution from the rest of the world, especially in the Northern hemisphere—they were suddenly starting to make life deteriorate.  Plants began to become smaller and less common.  Animal life began to alter.

But the most startling and disturbing change of all came with almost no warning.  One day, a Flussian mother found her baby starting to look…strange.  She and the father hurried to the family doctor, but even in the time it took to get there, the baby had totally changed, from a human into a…sea monkey.

While trying to calm and reassure the parents, the doctor sent out emergency messages to the Flussian and Atlanta scientific community.  At first no one believed her, but before long, more and more reports of changes into sea monkeys were heard, and panic began to sweep the population of the continent.  Scientists worked feverishly to analyze what was happening, but they weren’t fast enough: before they knew it, the scientists themselves, along with everyone around them, had turned into sea monkeys.

But very special sea monkeys.  In all ways except outer appearance, they retained the characteristics of the human beings they had previously been.  They could talk, think, work, laugh, cry, dance.  Except that everyone looked different, life went on as before.  Businesses continued to function, child sea monkeys attended school, .Atlantans continued to prepare and enjoy the same food as before.  Atlantans even began to think that looking like sea monkeys was better than looking human.

But there was one glaring difference from when they were human: for some unknown reason, the transformation into sea monkeys had carried with it a powerful taste for cockroaches, which became more of a treat in Atlantis than sugar was in the rest of the world.  And while cockroaches flourished throughout the rest of Atlantis, they were unable to survive in the hyper-clean environment of Flussia.  Atlantans elsewhere took advantage of this fact and exported tiny packages of  grade-A cockroach parts to Flussia at prices that only the richest Flussians could afford, so that all Flussians (except the few pathetic souls born allergic to cockroaches) prized these insects as the rarest and most expensive of treats.  Flussian children would go to sleep dreaming of a paradise where cockroaches were so abundant that they occupied everyone’s home and happily jumped into salivating mouths.

Now while the rest of Atlantis seemed to resign itself—even to welcome—its fate of perpetually being sea monkeys, the people of Flussia, perhaps in reaction to the scarcity of cockroaches, were outraged.  “Remember the earthquake that the rest of the world created to sink our continent?” they said to each other.  “Human beings must have thought they had gotten rid of us, and then discovered we still existed! So their descendants injected into the ocean some kind of poison to destroy us for good.”

Desiring revenge, the Flussian government decided to make war on the rest of the world.  Flussian technicians devised equipment to eavesdrop on other countries’ radio and telephone communications so they could study what that world was like.  Deciding that the United States was the most dangerous country, Flussian leaders decided to send a spy there.  A volunteer named Chris, who had grown up with his mother after his father had left Atlantis before the sea-monkey change to earn a living elsewhere in the world, stepped forward.  During Chris’ training to be a spy, Flussian scientists devised brilliant disguises that would enable Chris to look totally human, and to change his appearance if anyone became suspicious.

And so Chris went to live in New York City, on the ground floor of a brownstone, in a small apartment on a street in Greenwich Village. 

A few blocks away lived a boy named Chuckie.  On his way to and from school, Chuckie would pass the street on which Chris lived, though Chuckie had never seen Chris.  One day, however, as he passed this street, Chuckie noticed a strange and unpleasant odor.  Curious, he turned into the street, sniffing the air, following the growing strength of the scent.  Halfway down the block, the smell became most powerful.  Climbing over a low railing in front of the building from which the smell seemed to be emanating, Chuckie peered in a street-level window.

At first he could make out nothing.  But as his eyes grew accustomed to the darkness behind the window, he saw someone moving at the far end of the room.  The person, who seemed very small—a child, Chuckie decided—appeared to be cupping something in its hand and nibbling at the contents as one would nibble at small M&M’s, or popcorn.  Chuckie squinted, and now he saw that the person was no person at all but some kind of…creature.  At that moment, the creature’s hand twitched as if trying to grasp something alive, and indeed an object seemed to jump from the creature’s hand, or claw, or paw (Chuckie could not tell which), and scrabble across the floor in Chuckie’s direction.

Now Chuckie could see what it was: a cockroach.  His mouth and face scrunched up in disgust, even as the creature scurried after the insect and, with a lightning motion swept of its…hand…flipped the cockroach into the air in a wide arc.  Expertly, the creature caught the cockroach in its teeth, bit down several times so that Chuckie imagined he could hear a crunching chorus, and finally, smiling, swallowed the snack.

Now the creature, head bent to the floor as if searching for something, took another step toward the window, so that Chuckie could at last see it clearly.  It looked exactly like a…sea monkey!  Frozen by what he had been watching, Chuckie gasped, and the creature’s head jerked up toward the window.  The head moved from side to side to make out what had made the noise.  Spotting a human peering in at him, the creature cried out, opened its jaws to expose long and pointed teeth, and leaped toward the window to destroy the only human being who had ever seen him as he really was.

Still frozen with fear, Chuckie’s watched helplessly as Chris the spy—for, of course, that is who the creature was—struggled with the window, which was stuck shut from never having been opened since the last time it was painted just before Chris had moved into the apartment.  Chris was also having trouble because of some bulky object at his feet that interfered with his leverage as he tugged at the window.  Chuckie’s eyes focused on the object—the decaying body of a man who appeared to be middle-aged, though it was impossible to be certain because so little of the man’s rotting flesh remained on his skull.

This, Chuckie realized with another gasp, must be the source of that awful smell.  And indeed, the body was that of Chris’s landlord.  Chris had chosen this particular apartment for its unusually large population of cockroaches.  For several months, he had gloried in the ability to feast on all the cockroaches he could swallow whenever he wanted.  Like a human in advanced stages of alcoholism, Chris paid attention to little else than satisfying his appetite for cockroaches, and he had completely neglected his spying mission.

A few weeks earlier, Chris the Spy had received the greatest shock of his life, when the landlord had notified all tenants that the building would be fumigated to destroy—murder, in Chris’ mind—the cockroaches about which other tenants had long complained.  Desperate to avoid losing his happiness, Chris had murdered the landlord and left the body to decay beneath the window.

At last, Chris realized he would never pry the window open.  Changing shape before Chuckie’s very eyes, Chris turned himself into a human so that he could run out into the street and drag Chuckie into his apartment to join the landlord’s body.  Somehow, this new shock of seeing not just a cockroach-munching sea monkey but a sea monkey who turned into a human (or was it a human who had earlier turned into a sea monkey? Chuckie found himself wondering), awoke Chuckie from his trance, and he found himself able to move again.

Terrified, he fled down the block in the direction he had come.  As he reached the corner, Chris emerged from his building and began running after Chuckie, rapidly gaining ground on him.  But just as it appeared that Chris would catch up, they arrived at a park where Chuckie’s friends were playing tag.  Chris pulled up short, for he could not afford witnesses to the abduction.

Looking back over his shoulder, Chuckie dashed among his friends.  He pointed at Chris and tried to explain, but the friends laughed, certain that Chuckie was joking with them—for would you, dear reader, believe someone who pointed to a normal-looking human being and insisted that the person was really a murdering, cockroach-eating sea monkey?  I don’t think so.

Chris smiled at the group and pretended to walk on.  But he actually hid himself down the block, and when Chuckie walked off with a few friends, Chris secretly followed them.  He knew it was too great a risk to try to grab Chuckie now, but at least he was able in this way to find where Chuckie lived.

At home, Chuckie explained to his parents, who drove a Duffy truck and collected garbage in the neighborhood, what had happened.  They weren’t sure whether to believe him, but they agreed at least to stop picking up the garbage at Chuckie’s building.  Terrified that Chris would, in fact, find him, Chuckie began never going out by himself but always with his parents or friends.  Chris indeed followed Chuckie, hoping to find a moment when his prey would be alone.  So that Chuckie would not forget his life would soon be over, Chris would hide behind displays and stacked goods in supermarkets and leap out at Chuckie when no one else was looking.  But always fearful that others might turn around and see what he was doing, Chris never felt confident enough to grab Chuckie and run off with him.

But the pursuit was destroying Chris’s life.  He was constantly worried that someone would believe Chuckie, which would mean the end of Chris’ spying mission—and even more importantly, of his supply of cockroaches.  As garbage piled up in front of his building, threatening to draw special attention, Chris stole a Duffy truck and began to follow Chuckie’s parents.  And one day, when he found them completely alone, Chris ran over them with his Duffy truck.

Poor Chuckie was now an orphan, still pursued by Chris.  But fortunately, Chuckie was adopted by his Aunt Pauline and Uncle Phyllis, who had once lived in the midwest and had since moved to France, where they lived as illegal immigrants in a large two-story house on the main street of a small town.  Phyllis got his name because he was born with hair down to his waist so that his parents, prisoners of traditional views of boys and girls, at first thought he was a girl.  Phyllis had a brother named Iris, whom he loved dearly, and who lived with Phyllis and his wife.

Phyllis and Pauline had a son, Chuckie’s cousin, Melvin, a year younger than Chuckie.  The cousins got along very well, so that while Chuckie never forgot his parents or his sadness and anger at their deaths, he was able to enjoy his new life.

The house in which the family lived—Pauline, Phyllis, Melvin, Iris and now Chuckie—had cost just one franc.  Unknown to the family, which had merely considered itself lucky to pay such a ridiculously low price, the house had two secrets kept from them by the realtor, Zane, who had sold them the house. 

First, the plumbing in this town had been designed and built by a con-artist who pretended to be an engineer but who knew nothing about plumbing, and he had somehow managed to hook up all pipes so that they ended up in the house where Chuckie and his new family lived.  On some days, this fact made the house very disgusting indeed.

Secondly, a reclusive scientist, Dr. Olivia, lived in a fall-out shelter concealed in the basement of the house.  This troubled woman had been raised by cruel parents who would not even let her own dolls.  While still very young, she had found a leather strap which she smuggled to her room and treated as a doll.  She loved this strap-doll, and played with it all the time.  But one day her parents discovered what she was doing, beat her with the strap, and buried it in a field outside the town so she would never find it.  From that day forward, Olivia (now Doctor Olivia, or “Doctor O” as she liked to think of herself), resolved to get revenge on all who committed strap abuse. 

Moreover, Doctor O became especially annoyed with the new family in what she thought of as “her” house.  The family had brought baseball equipment with them from America, and the two cousins would throw and bat the ball to each other.  One day soon after Chuckie arrived, the boys broke an upstairs window while batting a baseball to each other; the crash was so loud that it woke Doctor O from a nap.  (Not wanting to have Phyllis and Pauline angry at them, the boys took some styrofoam left over from unpacking Chuckie’s belongings that had been shipped from America, and they shaped the styrofoam to fill the hole in the broken window.)  Even worse, in a corner of the attic Melvin had found a chair on wheels, which he brought downstairs to play in.  His favorite game became having a member of the family roll him around in the chair.  The noise from the rolling wheels echoed into the basement and reverberated inside Doctor O’s hidden fallout shelter, giving her headaches and keeping her awake.  Since she felt unable to leave her shelter, out of fear that a nuclear war might break out while she was exposed, Doctor O had to suffer in silence.

And then something very strange indeed happened.  Doctor O thought she had sealed her shelter against the outside world, but she had been planning only for people.  And one day, not a person but a snake appeared inside her private home.  Somehow, it had managed to slither through a crack in the doorway.

“What are you doing here?” demanded Doctor O upon catching sight of the snake.

“I’m sssssorry to dissssssturb you,” came the reply, “but I have an important requessssst to make.”

“Go back where you came from,” demanded Doctor O.  “I don’t talk to snakes.  Or to anyone, in fact.”

“But I badly need your ssssservices.  And I am willing to trade for them.”

“Sssss…I mean, “services”?  What kind of services?”

“I want you to create a sssssstrawberry.  A ssssspecial ssssstrawberry.”

“Special?  What are you talking about?  Who are you, anyway?”

“My name is Keebo.  And I run a bootleg videotape operation from a tree in front of the porch of thisssss housssssse.”

“Well, I certainly don’t see what good I can do you.  Or why you would need some kind of strawberry.  Now get out of here.”

“I am afraid that the family that moved in here will disssssscover my bootleg operation, and I want to get rid of them.”

“I don’t care what…  What did you say?”

“I am afraid…”

“No.  I heard you.  Maybe we do have a common interest.  Tell me more about this strawberry.”

“I want to be able to inject my poison into the ssssstrawberry so that sssssomeone will eat it and die.”

Now as it happened, Doctor O, in her hatred of strap abuse and of most human beings, had made herself a specialist in poison design.  In fact, Keebo knew all about this when he decided to go to her, and he was pretending ignorance.

“If you made thisssss sssssstrawberry for me, I would gladly do sssssomething nice for you, too.”

“You know what I would like,” said Doctor O after reflecting several moments, “is to stop that horrible racket that rolls around above me.  I don’t know what it’s from, but it would make me crazy if I weren’t so sane.”

“Why, I know all about that.  The ssssound comes from a chair that one of the boys, Melvin, getsssss pushed around on.  It disssssturbs me, too, when I’m trying to ssssssell my bootleg videotapesssss.  I’ll tell you what I’ll do: I’m too ssssssmall to ssssssteal the whole chair, but I can take the wheels and bring them to you.”

“Wonderful!” exclaimed Doctor O, and she shook Keebo’s tail to signify agreement.

That night, while the family was asleep, Keebo sneaked into the house and, with considerable trouble, finally managed to detach each wheel from the chair.  When he brought them to Doctor O, she had his strawberry ready.  When they had exchanged goods, Doctor O said, “Just one other thing.”  And she picked up a container of dental floss.  “I wonder if you would mind depositing this in the bathroom of the family who lives in this house.  It’s a special…mixture…that I’ve prepared and that will, I believe, serve both you and me.”

“Gladly,” said Keebo, taking the container in his mouth and slithering off to place it in the medicine cabinet of the upstairs bathroom.  To reward Doctor O for this extra effort, he brought her a fresh bootleg copy of Titanic, which one of his employees had secretly filmed at the local cinema the night before with a video camera.

That night, Doctor O watched the video Keebo had brought her.  Although the quality was very poor, she had become quite interested in the story when the actors on the screen were suddenly blocked out by a strange scene that must have occurred right in front of the bootlegger’s video camera.  A man with a moustache was standing over a woman sitting one row closer to the screen.  In the man’s hand was a strap—no, not just any strap, but the very strap Doctor O had played with so many many years ago.  And the bootleg tape had picked up the following conversation:

Man with strap:  “Give me a dollar or I’ll make you smell this strap.  It is an old, old and very sweaty strap, so you would be well advised to give me the dollar.”

Woman in seat: “Shhhh.  I’m trying to watch the movie.”

Man with strap: “The sooner you give me a dollar, the sooner you'll be able to watch the movie.”

Woman in seat: “I don’t have a dollar.  This is France.  Now go away.”

Man with strap: “All right, then.  You asked for it.”

And the man brought the strap under the seated person’s nose.  She started gagging and almost fainting, and the man with the strap then moved on down the row, out of sight.  Doctor O could again hear the dialogue from the film—but she could also hear the man’s distant voice threatening yet another filmgoer.

Between seeing her lost doll again and seeing it used for strap abuse again, you can imagine how shocked Doctor O was.  She didn’t know what to do, but she was determined to get her strap back and punish the strap abuser, even if it meant she would have to leave her secret hideout.

The man with the strap was, in fact, named was Scottie, and although Doctor O, of course, didn’t know it, he was a friend of the family who lived in the house.  He had once been principal of P.S. 41 nearby.  At that time, he had taken a class on an archaeological dig in a field outside the town, and during the dig had come upon this very strap, buried there years before by Doctor O’s parents.  Grasping the strap before realizing what it was, Scottie immediately felt something peculiar in his blood, for he had that rarest of genetic diseases, addiction to strap abuse if his skin ever touched a leather strap.  He had been warned of this at an early age, and up until now he had always managed to avoid touching leather straps. 

But now it was too late, and Scottie’s life went into decline.  He began demanding a dollar from students and teachers in his school, and from anyone else he came upon; and if they refused to pay, he subjected them to the odor of the sweaty strap.  Soon, he was fired from the school, but that didn’t stop him.  He collected many a dollar this way—and forced anyone who refused to give him the dollar to smell the increasingly smelly strap.

As it happened, the next day after Keebo received the poisoned strawberry and Doctor O viewed the videotape was Bastille Day, the French national holiday to celebrate the France revolution.  This year, Bastille Day was especially important, because the American family had been influencing the local people to change their national holiday.  Feeling strange about living in a new country, the family had taped an American flag above the porch of the house.  When neighbors asked about the flag, the Americans described the signing of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, and explained that this was the American national holiday.  As word of this holiday spread, more and more local French people became interested in it, and they began to celebrate it instead of Bastille Day, which occurred 10 days and 13 years after the signing of the American Declaration of Independence.  Of course, this shift of attention from the national holiday of France to the national holiday of the United States caused much resentment from French people who continued to celebrate Bastille Day, and that is why this year’s Bastille Day seemed especially important.

Melvin had bought himself a magnifying glass, and this morning in the bright sunlight he was on the lawn, trying to focus the sun’s rays to burn insects on the lawn.  Keebo, who felt that insects were his friends, was furious when he saw what was happening, and he sneaked up to bite Melvin and poison him.  Keebo’s mouth opened wider and wider, but just as he leaped forward to bite Melvin’s leg, Melvin happened to swing the magnifying glass into Keebo’s path, and the fangs smashed against the lens.  In agony, Keebo limped back to his tree without ever being seen by Melvin.

Furious, Keebo decided to put his strawberry plan into immediate action.  Carefully, to avoid pain from the swollen mouth around his bent fangs, Keebo bit into the strawberry and deposited all his poison there.  Then he hung the strawberry on the tree, where it looked especially delicious.  He could hardly wait for one of the humans to spot the fruit, eat it, and fall dead instantly.

He watched eagerly as all the family except Iris gathered on the lawn to watch the Bastille Day parade, just starting to pass the house.  The local school janitor, Dave, who was missing a hand because of a terrible accident when he was working at P.S. 41, was standing with them, as was Scottie, who suddenly felt the need to take a whiz and, rather than traipse upstairs to the bathroom, went to the bushes nearby.  Hiding in the bushes with a small pistol, Chris the Spy was hoping for an opportune moment to shoot Chuckie.

Iris, who had purchased firecrackers for the day, was late because he had gone to the upstairs bathroom to wash his hands.  Having rested the firecrackers on the window sill of the bathroom, in the midst of washing his eyes wandered toward the toilet.  What he saw nearly made him faint.

It seems that some months back, when Scottie was still principal of P.S. 41, he had sent the custodian, Dave, to clear a clogged toilet in the boys’ bathroom.  Dave put on a yellow rubber glove, and as he was clearing the clog, Scottie, angry at Dave for never giving him a dollar, sneaked up and, unseen, flushed the toilet.  Poor Dave’s gloved hand was torn from his arm and sucked into the sewer system.  Now, months later, rotten and bloated, it had ended up in the toilet next to the sink where Iris was washing his hands.

The sight of the hand made Iris so disgusted that even his mouth felt filthy, and he opened the medicine cabinet to search for something that would help him feel clean.  His gaze falling upon a container of dental floss, he tore off a long strand and began to floss his teeth—only to keel over moments later as Doctor O’s poison quickly took effect.  Falling against the window sill, Iris dislodged the firecrackers he had balanced there.

Down they tumbled, bouncing on the porch roof below once, twice, three times, before falling into Keebo’s tree, where they began to explode.  Not knowing what was happening and terrified that his bootleg video store was about to explode, Keebo dashed out onto the lawn amdist the chaos there.  The humans were all jumping around, startled—except for Chuckie, who seemed to have collapsed to the ground in his terror. 

In her fallout shelter, Doctor O heard the explosions and thought nuclear war had begun.  Revving up an untested new super-weapon she had been working on to punish the strap abuser she had seen in the bootleg video, she pushed it from her shelter and then out of the basement on the wheels that Keebo had stolen.  Totally disoriented, she took aim at nowhere in particular and fired, but nothing happened, and when she examined the gunpowder, she realized that she had confused the powder with grains of wheat she had stolen from the field of a neighboring farmer—a man who, wearing a straw hat with a colored band, happened to be standing nearby in the growing crowd that was watching the Bastille Day parade.

As Doctor O wheeled out her useless weapon, Scottie saw someone with a pistol pop up from the bushes right alongside him and pull the trigger.  At the movement, Scottie had raised his arm by reflex, and so the bullet hit the strap, shattering it to tiny pieces and ricocheting directly at Chuckie’s heart.  It was the bullet, not terror at the noise from the firecrackers, that made Chuckie collapse, dead from the gunshot which Chris the Spy hoped would be muffled by the exploding firecrackers.  For a moment, Scottie was paralyzed by what had just happened.  But a moment later he exclaimed, “Chris!”

Chris the Spy had been concentrating so hard on shooting Chuckie that he had not even noticed Scottie.  But at the sound of his own name, Chris turned, and then gasped, “Father!”

For indeed, Scottie was the father who had left Flussia so long ago, before the sea monkey transformation, to seek his fortune in France.  Scottie and Chris hugged each other—only moments later to find themselves being handcuffed.  For at the head of the passing parade was the police honor guard.  Having witnessed what happened, they had left the parade and fanned out over the lawn.  They arrested Chris for shooting Chuckie (though they never found out he had also killed Chuckie’s parents).  They arrested Scottie for strap abuse (for in response to numerous complaints from people living in the area, they had been on his trail a long time).  They arrested Keebo for his bootleg video store (and the police made sure to watch all the movies before they turned them over to the prosecuting attorney).  They arrested Doctor O for illegal manufacture of poison and weapons (and while they suspected she was the cause of Iris’ death, they could never prove it).  And they arrested the Americans for illegal immigration (the family, deported back to the United States, was ever afterwards sad about Chuckie’s death; but Melvin grew up to become a great leader who worked for peace and to help curb further pollution affecting Atlantis—though it was too late to save the Atlantans from being sea monkeys).

As the only person who had done nothing illegal, and because he had suffered a permanent disability while working for the government, Dave received the house, and, after learning to use a mechanical hand, spent the rest of his days re-organizing the local sewer system.

Having never received the secrets of the American military, Flussia abandoned its plan to invade the rest of the world.  But during a private session with his Flussian lawyer, who was disguised as a human being, Chris the Spy relayed the fact of how abundant cockroaches were in Greenwich Village, and the Flussians established a smuggling scheme that provided all the freeze-dried cockroaches anyone could ever want.  Happily crunching cockroaches ever after, all Flussians, rich and poor alike, were now so happy that they accepted their lot as sea monkeys and flourished without further interference from the outside world.