Unexpected Enlightenment- A Cockroach Story

Unexpected Enlightenment- A Cockroach Story

 My first apartment in Kiev was in a complex called the Tsar’s Village.  It came with Soviet furniture and had oriental style rugs hanging on the walls in the living room and bedrooms.  I don’t know why rugs on the walls were so popular back then, but I soon learned that many apartments had them.  The building also had an immense colony of roaches inhabiting it.  Infestation is the only word that comes to mind regarding the enormity of the situation and infestation really doesn’t do it justice.  It was something out of a horror film or nightmare, or both.  The only good news is that the roaches in Kiev are not the kind you may be thinking of.  They are fairly small, maybe an inch or so long, and are a light brown-reddish color.  They don’t have wings and don’t get to be the size of their large cousins in the American south or in tropical climes. 

Even so, I’ve never been a big fan of bugs and I couldn’t take the first few days of living with them.  I was constantly filled with anxiety and fear.  I was so paranoid that they were on me, that I kept feeling little roach feet running on my legs, arms, back, neck.  Even if they weren’t there, I felt them.  I felt them all the time.  I could often find a roach if I looked for one, but even if I didn’t, I knew they were there, behind the curtain, under the hanging rugs, in the cabinets- everywhere.  

When I’d come home at night and turn on the lights, I’d usually see at least eight-to-ten roaches running for cover in all directions.  This was what I termed the “mad dash” and it happened every time I came home to a dark apartment.  It got worse.  When I’d lie in bed reading, it was common to see a roach running along the headboard toward me.  I got so used to this that I put a box of tissues on my nightstand and would just take one, kill the roach that was heading my way with a tissue and throw it on the floor.  Within an hour or two, there would be at least seven-to-ten tissues lying on the floor.  Once, while I was reading, I grabbed a mug of water I’d put on my nightstand and as I brought it to my lips I just managed to catch sight of a roach running around the rim of the mug at full speed as my mouth was only a few inches away.  He almost got me that time!   

In the middle of the night, I would get up to take a piss and when I grabbed the doorknob to the bathroom in the darkened hallway, I’d often feel a roach run over my hand and jump to the ground below.  It was truly horrible.  In the mornings, I would get up and open the drapes in my bedroom only to see four or five roaches falling from them, hitting the floor and then scattering for cover under the radiator, bed or into a crack in the wall. 

I got into the habit of putting little balls of Kleenex into my ears before going to sleep as I was quite freaked out by the idea of a roach going into my ear and not coming out- similar to something I had once seen in a Star Trek movie as a child.  This was a constant thing while living in the Tsar’s Village.

Later, when I started looking for a new apartment, I kept a keen eye open for roaches.  I was trying my best to get out of the insect mess I was mired in.  After looking at some 15 apartments, I picked one didn’t have any evidence of roaches of any kind.  However, once I moved in and came home the first night and turned on the light while entering the kitchen- Bam! – three roaches where on the counter scattering away at full speed.  It was an off Broadway reenactment of the mad dash I had grown so used to seeing at the Tsar’s Village.  I was crushed. 

I soon encountered the little buggers in the toilet and bathroom (which were separate rooms).  The good news was that my new apartment’s infestation was much more manageable than my previous living arrangements.  The roaches at my new place liked the “water” rooms, so the toilet and kitchen were their zones of comfort, but unlike the Tsar’s Village, they were quite content staying confined to these rooms and I rarely saw one venture into the living room or my bedroom.  This was definitely a trade up and I was actually on cloud nine once I realized that there were boundaries that they largely adhered to.  It’s the little things in life and having my living and sleeping space “roach free” after being in bug hell was akin to hitting the Powerball jackpot.  After a few weeks in my new digs, I even stopped putting balls of tissue in my ears before bed and a few weeks after that, the phantom roaches, i.e. the imagined feeling of roaches crawling on various parts of my body whenever I was home, disappeared.  Life was good. 

I had a maid back then.  One day when I came home to find she had bought a can of roach killer.  I sprayed it around hoping to inspire the little guys into migrating to my neighbor’s flat for a day or two.  It didn’t work and they were always in the kitchen and bathroom at night.  

After a little while, I moved a can of roach killer into the toilet, which was in the hallway next to the kitchen and sometimes when I would come home drunk from the bars, I’d grab the can before entering the kitchen, turn on the light and try to spray the roaches before they disappeared behind the fridge or counter or wherever else they could squeeze through and out of sight.  It was a weird game of sorts.  Usually, when the light turned on, they would scatter away from the entrance of the room.  I don’t know if they were wise to the fact that I entered from there or if they were just going back the way they came, but my “sneak attacks” were not successful and most of the time they just involved me wildly spraying after their fleeing footsteps, covering my kitchen counter with roach poison and inhaling a lot of the fumes myself.  

One night however, all this, and, my world along with it, changed.  I’d just finished a long vodka session and stumbled home at around 3:30 in the morning.  I was hungry and wanted something to eat.  At this hour, I knew the roaches would be comfortably lounging about.  To be fair, it was their time to inhabit the room.  Despite this, I grabbed the roach killer from the toilet and prepared for an attack.  I hit the light and sprang into the kitchen to find four roaches on the countertop by the sink.  They were already high-tailing it out of there with all of them fleeing toward the wall on the far side of the kitchen, except one.  That poor bastard ran the wrong way and was coming right at me.  I took aim and fired a noxious blast.  The aerosol spray hit him right between the antennae and the widening cloud of fumes engulfed him.  Direct hit!  He immediately turned around and started heading the other way.  I remember feeling happy and I may have even yelled, “Got you!” or “Take that!” or something to that effect.  I’d finally gotten one with the spray head-on, but what happened next was as unexpected as living with cockroaches in the first place.

I got close and kept my eyes on the roach to see if I needed to give him another blast.  His comrades were all back in the woodwork by now, so this would be my only spoil of the battle.  However, he was cooked.  After running only a few inches, his speed slowed dramatically.  I watched as his little legs could barely muster another step and within seconds he stopped cold, his antennae searching frantically in vain for some answers.  Horror rose up within me like when a child realizes what death is for the first time.  The roach then flipped onto his back and extended his legs up and down twice in a synchronized motion as the poison overwhelmed his little heart.  He died at that very moment and this little leg extension was the last of his life leaving his little brownish-red body.  I just stared at him, roach killer can in hand, devastated. 

The weight of global injustice came crashing down on me.  This was a very moving death.  Worse, it was at my hands.  I was disgusted with myself.  Who was I to take this little creature’s life away?  What kind of monster would kill living things so indiscriminately for pleasure?  These roaches were just, through no fault of their own, doing what nature told them to do.  My eyes wet with tears with my mind filled with despair. 

I’d never witnessed such an intimate death before and since it was in slow motion, literally, as the toxins overwhelmed the poor guy’s system, it packed a clobbering punch.  The tissue killings were over immediately and had become a rote action that didn’t touch me.  This was different.  I knew I was responsible for his suffering before he left this earth.  On a broader scale, I now saw how we’re all roaches, it’s just that some of us have a can of Raid while others are scrounging in the dark.  At my office, I was the roach, my bosses had the can and they kept using it on me to slowly chip away at my inner soul.

I made up my mind right then that I would never willingly kill anything again (excluding food, which I don’t kill, but I eat).  I’ve stuck to that promise for many years now.  I also accepted that the roaches and I shared the flat and I’d be amicable to them.  I threw out the can of roach killer and told the maid not to buy another.  Soon after, this enlightenment broadened and encompassed all my actions.  If a fly made his way into my apartment, I would catch him in a glass and let him go free from the window so he could fly outside.  If it was winter, I’d free any bug I caught in the stairwell so that they wouldn’t die of cold.  Something switched and I felt closer to all living things.  We all shared the same cosmic energy that bound the universe together. 

I owe that roach a deep debt of gratitude, and even though I killed him, he saved me in some vague karmic riddle.  He opened me to a feeling of interconnectedness among living things and I found a greater humanity from his tragic demise.  I hope he’s been rewarded for his sacrifice and is having a blast up in that great roach motel in the sky.    

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