The Pest I Knowed

The other day I went into the bathroom/shower room--yes, I shower in the same room as I shit—no divider, no curtain. I turned on the shower to get the hot water primed and ready (it takes a while to heat up).While the water warmed I decided to poo, meeting my painful bi-weekly quota. I looked up to the right and in the corner near the 6’8” ceiling, yet still on the wall there stood a cockroach. A very standard, brown-banded cockroach-- he was about 20 days old, healthy and hungry. The shower water started to get hot and naturally enough it caused some steam and condensation to form on the cold, beige, bathroom tiles.

The cockroach was worried cuz his legs were losing grip on the smooth tile surface on account of the newly acquired moisture. I watched him as he slowly waved his front legs about up and down a few times, but it wasn’t helping much. I was still shitting when he fell. He never hit the floor. Somehow when he fell he hit the metal hand-rail deal about halfway down.

He ran back and forth on the horizontal bar, all the while being belted by remarkably hot shots of water from above. He seemed panicked. Eventually after some frantic wandering he found a somewhat safer spot directly under the horizontal hand-rail and the vertical portion of it that attaches it to the wall. He hung on there with his head facing the floor; the water looked a lot like huge, stressed, sweat-beads rolling from the tip of his face and splashing with terrible might onto the wine-red floor below. He thought how, God he wished he had more time and about how he was gonna die and about how the world seemed so radical. The Roach regretted never having a chance to have kids, or how he would never be able and warn them about the Universe’s infinite traps and futility.

I flushed the toilet and walked under the showerhead, I adjusted the heat a little bit so I could tolerate it. The water from the showerhead was powerful, it hit me and a thick cloud of steam poured up and outward from my considerably oblong head and back-leaning torso. The water streamed over my body and redirected itself to my limbs. The flood eventually ran out of limbs to flow down; portions of it shot down my arms and hit my elbow. From my elbow sporadic jets splashed while more united streams cascaded from my joints and onto the frightened cockroach. The roach was soaked--still staring at the floor and wrapped tightly to the metal rod. The pressure eventually took him. A surge of water from my elbow combined with some splash from my head you see, and lil Roachy, try as he might, he was unable to hold on. In a blink he instantly fell four feet to the solid ground below.

The Roach landed on his back-- hard. He thought, ‘Fuck Man!’ and ‘Oh Fuck!’ but he couldn’t breath so he couldn’t say it, even though he wanted to—he was frenzied and hurting, I mean, you know how it is to have the wind knocked out you, well combine that with the mass confusion of a flood and harmful fall. The Roach lay on his back for a while drowning from a huge dollop of water about the size of his head that covered his face. His legs and arms writhed and waved with mad energy. His underside was exposed, still he tried his best to crawl; he crawled and crawled and crawled, unfortunately he went nowhere because of the existent physics of friction. Eventually he got a break—I stood out, away from the shower-stream and lathered my body with a mucousy bar of Ivory soap, giving him just enough time to tuck his left shoulder from his first arm in and roll himself back to right. The Roach was exhausted. He shifted about the floor incoherently for 10 seconds and then finally, like a cast-away pulling himself onto dry land from the merciless Sea, he dragged himself towards the toilet.

The roach found the underside of a toilet scrub-brush holder. And he waited and panted and collapsed under his own weight, only, being a roach you couldn’t really tell so much that he had collapsed, you know, his tummy—it’s normal to be on the floor. But I knew, and so did he.

Two days later I saw the same Roach, I could tell, believe me, and he seemed spunky and filled with joy; justly revived even. The Roach as it turns out had actually done a lot of soul-searching in the 48 hours right after his near-death experience and was indeed filled with a love for life and a feeling of purpose that is very uncommon to the species. He even had a girlfriend and was considering kids.

Anyway, I was watching TV and I saw the Roach. I got to thinkin', ‘Hey, I bet all the food in our sink is helping these Roaches out; their procreation and feasting. Well, I don't really want too many Roaches so I think I'll throw this one outside and let him enjoy life out there like nature intended.’ I grabbed a partially unfolded map of the City of Taipei that was already near the Roach and coaxed the Roach onto it. Only the Roach looked up at me and screamed “YOU!?! --NO!” and he ran, he ran as fast as he could, right off of the map and onto the floor. I have to admit I was a little bit freaked out. I instantly dropped the map on top of the Roach and with a clenched right fist I began to pound; I pounded the area where I thought the Roach would be. I pounded 14 times. Fast. I lifted the map up and saw part of him stuck to the floor—it was like his back-wing/armor deal, I mean, I know he can’t fly but you know, that part that looks like half of his back, well, that was stuck to the floor with what looked like part of an inside-out raisin acting like the brown glue. I didn’t check the underside of the map to see if the other part of the Roach was there, I just couldn’t, you know?