The Shape of Days

I saw a cockroach in my apartment the other day. It was just scuttling across the floor, not doing me any particular harm, but I smashed the little bastard to pieces anyway. No remorse.

Because I’m not an idiot, I know that where there’s one cockroach, there are others. Somewhere inside my apartment, hiding in the interstices of my walls and fixtures, dwells a whole colony of cockroaches, teeming and writhing in dark places where I can’t see.

I can’t tolerate this. Those sons of bitches are going to die.

So on Thursday I bought a bug bomb. I sealed up my apartment, set the bomb off and went to work. I came home twelve hours later and aired out the place, sweeping the desiccated corpses of about a dozen roaches into a plastic trash bag.

But I also had to dispose of about a thousand dead midges, gnats, spiders and other insects, creatures that I had no particular intention of killing and with which I had no particular beef. I hadn’t set out to kill them, but in the end I had no choice. They got in the way. The roaches decided to live in the same places that these harmless and inoffensive critters lived, and so I killed them all.

Then, yesterday after work, I saw another roach. They’re still in there. I didn’t get them all. They’re coming out at night, scuttling all over the place.

Today I called an exterminator.

About fifteen minutes after I’d confirmed my appointment, I saw a story on the front page of the Post’s Web site: “Pressure increases for cease-fire in Jeffraeli-Roachbollah conflict.” I skimmed the lede. A loose coalition of nineteen countries, mostly African and Asian, have signed a letter calling on me to stop all hostilities against the roaches. They’re calling my actions disproportionate, and running grisly pictures of slaughtered gnats on the front pages of their national newspapers.

Then the hate mail started. “Why have you abandoned diplomacy?” one letter demanded. “Ceasefire now!” another exhorted tersely.

This morning, a protest congealed outside my apartment building. About two hundred patchouli-scented twentysomethings waved signs declaring their “solidarity with the innocent insect people” and participated in a call-and-response chant led by a mustachioed kid with a bullhorn. “What do we want? An immediate end to Jeffraeli terrorism and the cessation of genocide against Insectbanon! When do we want it? Now!”

Cease-fire? Cease-fire? Are these people nuts? A cease-fire would accomplish nothing. I’d still have roaches scuttling in my walls, dragging their filth-ridden bodies over my furniture and clothes, stealing my food and just generally making my life a disgusting nightmare. Sure, some innocent midges might be saved, but sooner or later the roaches would regroup and I’d have to attack them all over again. We’d just be right back here in six weeks.

I can still hear them chanting. “What do we want? Justice for the oppressed Insectinian peoples and an end to inter-species racism! When do we want it? Now!”

Screw this. I didn’t ask for this war. The roaches started it. If the roaches came out of the walls where I could see them, I could kill them one by one with surgical strikes without inflicting any collateral damage on the midges and the gnats and the spiders. But they won’t do that, because they know it’d be a death sentence. So they hide, launching their attacks against me at night, surrounded by human shields — er, bug shields — and hoping that my own innate humanity will prevent me from retaliating.

This will not stand. There will be no cease-fire. I’ll kill every last roach in this apartment, and I don’t give a damn how many innocent insects get caught in the crossfire.

There will be no cease-fire until every last roach is crushed or has fled forever.

A little note to my landlord and other parties with a vested interest in the relative level of squalor in my rented apartment: I didn’t really see a roach. There are no roaches. This is all just a parable, okay? No roaches.

• A pleasant surprise
• Till we have built Jerusalem
• As much as some folks would like to link oil prices and Iraq, I’m pretty sure they’re two separate things