The Blog and the Shower

I’ve been staying with a friend in her new apartment until mine clears out. On our first night there, I we hoped desperately that the first cockroach we saw was the kind of stray that sometimes passed by the Barnard dorms. During the next few hours, it became clear that this was not the case; the place was suffering from a low-level infestation, mostly of those bugs on the smaller end of the range that their kind spans. We bought jars of boric acid and some sort of cockroach-killing spray, treated the place with what we thought was a thorough layer, and cleared out for the night. I was shocked by my own eagerness to kill the things, and I hoped feverishly that when we returned to the apartment we would find legions of cockroach corpses lying prone on the floor. I wondered if this was the sort of mentality that soldiers slipped into before going into battle. I wondered if I could ever learn to think this way about legions of humans.

I hope I never have the chance to find out. After a few days, the problem seems to have lightened considerably–but I’m not sure if the cockroaches that still seem to make it through the lines of white dust that now encircle most of the rooms and cupboards have found a secret entrance into the apartment or are mutants, immune to the poisonous traps we’ve laid. The rather senile landlord refuses to do anything about the issue (sometimes he seems to be on the verge of death, and asked my friend to massage his shoulders when he tired from walking in the street), so I’m not sure how to get rid of the last few varmints.  I think I’m still quite a wimp at heart, though, since I know that I don’t have the temerity to follow the approach my friend Leah takes toward her own infestation in New York: she smashes them with her bare hands.