The Roach

We defend our modest apartment against an invader

I lie in bed quietly, pondering the vast open spaces of my inner sky.  A sense of peace and effortless calm.  

Then she brought the news. 

She sized it for me with thumb and first finger held way too far apart.  She couldn’t possibly have been describing it accurately. Like the hooked fish that came up alongside the boat, memory stretching the dark shape below the surface. Too bizarre to take seriously on first recounting.  A Faustian nightmarish scene in our very own kitchen.  

Still I wisely refused to openly doubt her, promising instead to sort it in the morning. As nighttime advanced I held my position, plotting my strategy while staring into the dark, noticing my eyes shifting as the plan fell into place. 

I woke early.  Fresh and focused.  And prepared for violence.

Times like these you’d like some backup.  But far from home, out on the southern edge, you have to man up and wade in.  Recycling and boxes cleared away, vacuum cleaner parts connected, hiking shoes on.  Ready to rock. 

I’ll admit I was grossed out and unsettled.  He’d made himself known to me early, demonstrating a remarkably fast serpentine run.  Had there been many, I would have been unable to focus on a single one.  How many legs?  They were all a blur.  Too many to count.  What is happening to this country?  Nothing, I convinced myself.  He flew in on an Amazon box from Spain.  He was black/brown and the size estimate was, if anything, too small.  We’re going to need a bigger boat.

The canister, already full on the Dirt Devil, afforded me an effectively worthless level of negative pressure. Initially, I had him isolated on the pantry floor.  The head of my equipment turned into a blunt instrument, I battled with it; each thrust a reflexive jerk of disgust and fear.  Instead of the suck, I went for the crush, but was thwarted by his speed, my own ‘blech’ factor, and a stray binder clip.   He toyed with me; using a combination of speed, guile, and a survival instinct honed over a billion years.  I crouched low to try to meet him on his turf.  Saw him paused vertically on the wall below the bottom shelf.  There was a feeling that HE had turned to take MY measure.

Able to scale walls on the vertical?  Is that a superpower or isn’t it?  I continued to thrash with the business end of the Dirt Devil, unable to trap him and apply what little suction I had.  I withdrew for a breather and to take some coaching from my deepest inner self.  

“What kind of a pussy are you?”my inner self asked me, taking control of my limbs, disconnecting the vacuum hose from the useless floor assembly, and setting it to one side.  Was that my father’s voice? Hearing my own rebuke, an inner audience of one, I forced myself to accept in a flash that the situation called for hard, cold ruthlessness. Soft warm wetness was not going to get it done.  I visually measured the hose opening and came away certain that our target was going to enter straight on or in pieces.  I went in again, this time ready to avoid the binder clip, and hip to his vertical strategy. 

I thought he had paused for breath too. But really he was holding his long antennae just so.  That’s right folks. He went psyops.

“This will COST you,” he said, directly into my mind.  “I’ll haunt your dreams!  I may have already completed the need to pupate!  Soon we will be millions!  I will eat you someday!”  He almost had me frozen like the proverbial deer on a dark country road, the instant before impact.  “My legions will turn your lifeless corpse back into the elements!”, he shouted soundlessly.

I shook my head once to clear it.  “Not today,” I heard myself answer mentally, and thrust the hose as his not-insubstantial carapace.  I heard something go up the hose.  It could have been the binder clip.  I saw him no more.  I anointed myself victorious.  I held up the vacuum hose, not to celebrate, but to ensure that he wasn’t clinging to the inside and simply waiting for his chance to crawl back out.

But now the But Dirt Devil canister seemed a poor enclosure for this monster.  I descended to street level to empty it into the communal garbage bin.  Holding it over the bin, a 6-foot drop through the cylinder and into the layers of bagged garbage, I released the end of the canister and out flew a substantial cloud of dust. Tapping the canister once, then twice.  On thrice, his prescient words came ominously true.  The canister tube separated from the handle in my hand, I heard it land with a faint ‘poof’ out of reach on a small mountain of bagged trash.  In my hand, a useless part to a suddenly worthless vacuum cleaner.  I was less than an hour from learning that they don’t make parts for this model and haven’t for many years.

I closed the lid quickly.   Feeling closely watched through every window, trapped between 5-storey towers of eyes, I carried myself as if this was precisely what I had intended, the canister handle dangling loosely in my hand–minus the essential tube for actually collecting dust.  Anyone who had been watching, my shoulders consciously un-hunching, my eyes staring glazed into the distant morning sky, could have easily been smirking, and muttering something in Portuguese, adding insult to ego injury.

I told Mrs. Bloom that I had good news and bad news.  She forgave me with relief.  What a gentle, compassionate soul she is.  How proud I was to do my part to keep our home safe.

2 Days Later.

I was in the second bedroom, sketching the design for a new city.  It was a modest metropolis, fully powered by solar and wind, home to 50,000 souls, all engaged in fulfilling work and a deep love for each other–when I heard what I have come to know as Cornelia’s distress call.  “Honey Help me HELP ME!!!” 

I emerged to see her chasing what appeared to be the same very large, now clearly wounded, but still elusive insect directly at me.  I didn’t have time to say, “Oh My God!”, or even think about arming the now useless vacuum as there was only time to lift one foot and watch as he ran right past me beyond the safe, sensible conditions of the kitchen, into the dark unconscious realm of the bedroom.  

He ran under the bed.

Cornelia already had a Swiffer stick and was waving it ineffectively back and forth under the frame.  Still, what she lacked in technique she made up for in raw determination.  With no visual we had no chance against him.  I went to get my own swiffer stick weapon.  When I returned, she had seen it and lost it once more.  Faustian nightmare indeed.  In an instant I considered needing to wear earplugs every night forever, and my imagination failed me at this delicate time trying to formulate a plan to keep my remaining orifices secure.  

“Lift up the mattress”, she commanded.  Suddenly relegated to being the muscle of the operation I did as I was told, only to see him slip away yet again into the bed frame.  “Pull back the bed!”  I hooked one mighty paw under the frame at the foot in a modest but firm display of exceptional strength, and pulled it back and away from the wall exposing our interlocutor directly to Mrs. Bloom.

And in this open field between the wall and the bed, for a precious few seconds, it was just her and the beast.  He was probably going psyops on her as if (HA!) he hadn’t already done so.  

SLAP!  Came down the head of the swiffer duster thing.  Was that a crunching sound?  BAM! Down it came again, this time I’m sure alerting the neighbors below us to an ongoing battle of epic proportions.  I thought to urge a  modicum of restraint to allow for proper post mortem taxonomy, when BAM, down came the swiffer a third time.  I was sure without looking that the remains would be…unrecognizable to even the most experienced entomologist.  

Husbanding what little was left of my courage, quietly assembling the remains of my self-esteem, and repressing my disgust, I peeked beyond the edge of the bed and saw him crushed beyond identification.  My tone was sober; my face blank, serious.

“I think you got him”, I said.

Fucker was big.  For real.  Like I’m saying the roach traps we ordered showed images of little baby roaches.  Not big enough.  At all.

She got a paper towel.  We pretended it was a team effort.  A new vacuum cleaner is on order.  No further mind bending creatures have been seen out in the physical.  But every fly that lands on me is met with a reflexive hand swipe and a “fmeh!” sound.  Disgusting daydreams are gradually fading into the far distance.

I’ve returned to my design work.  This time it’s a self-contained operation that grows hemp, recycles every drop of water, and produces industrial diamonds.  It’s a direct copy of something I saw once on YouTube.

But what was he really?  Periplaneta americana? Was he carrying a terrifying message from Spain?

We hope we’ll never find out.  But we stand ready to defend ourselves as needed.