On Sentient Cockroaches and other Urban Anomalies, part 1

Years ago, in high school, we were taught that roaches elicit revulsion because, as a species, their adaptive gifts are so advanced that they will likely survive humanity.  I realize it is probably an indication of some deep-seated neurosis on my part, but I am still considering this conundrum at age 50.  The premise,  if you will excuse the expression, continues to bug me.  After all, couldn’t this my-lunch-is-rising feeling have anything to do with the knowledge that these feisty critters are perfectly content inhabiting fields of human excrement and then walking their infectious legs over as many of our essential foodstuffs as fortune will allow?  Isn’t that enough?

Furthermore, I have encountered, in my life, at least two roaches who were clearly and undeniably sentient.  What could be more disgusting and horrifying than a fully sentient cockroach?  Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” doesn’t even begin to describe the experience.

The first fellow introduced himself to me in Brooklyn.  We were living on the forth floor of a rent-controlled walk up in Williamsburg about five years before the renaissance and many years before the events of September 11th permanently altered the Wall Street skyline.  Although the daily journey from the last stop on the J-train to our front door was a bit like traversing a European city immediately following a Blitzkrieg, we picked our way through analogously anachronistic Hassidim to our front door with a feeling of joy and relief as the massive double bolt gave way to our cozy, high-ceiling one bedroom paradise.  And then he arrived.

It was early one morning as I was blow-drying my hair when he wandered out from behind the bathroom plumbing and slowly tilted his white-collared head upward in as thoughtful and reflective a manner as I have ever observed in any living creature.  The hairdryer paused in midair, warming nothing.  We contemplated our mutual existence deeply.  Time slowed.  He was fully three inches long and narrow, narrower than most of his peers, jaunty even, and he was undeniably conscious. The white collar he sported gave him an additional air of social superiority which could not be overridden by any amount of reason:  while I was but a humble administrative assistant on Avenue of the Americas, he was evidently from Wall Street.

I screamed.  He just looked at me, quizzical, puzzled, as if to say, “Really?  Really? You aren’t seriously going to expect me to exert myself running away from you when you are obviously no threat whatsoever.”

He was right.  (It was somehow inconceivable that this filthy, white collar bastard was anything but male.)  I was powerless.  I could no more act to end his life than I could have drowned a kitten.   I slowly redirected the hairdryer toward my head, completed my preparations and left for work.  As I slid the double-bolt shut across the door, I noticed my hands were shaking.

They were still shaking when I dropped my subway token into the slot at the station gate and they were still shaking when I pushed the elevator button to ascend to the 22nd floor of Kanematsu-Gosho (USA) Inc. where I worked in the coal division (for one-forth the pay of  a Japanese man in my position, I might add).

By lunch I was beginning to return to normal and polled the entire floor for suggestions.  Roach sprays, traps, poison pellets, exterminators and baseball bats were among the community favorites.  Still, at the end of the day, I had to face the discouraging reality that in order to effectively engage any of these methods, I would be required to apply deadly force to, or be responsible for directing deadly force at, a fellow sentient being.  I entered into a profound experience of helplessness and despair.  By the time I reached home that evening, I was contemplating the relative merits of ending my own life rather than ending the roach’s.  I phoned my therapist.

———end part I———–

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Image Reference:

Impactlab.net (September, 2010). cockroach.jpg. Retrieved on September 25, 2010 from http://www.impactlab.net/2010/09/05/cockroaches-could-be-used-to-develop-treatments-against-mrsa-and-e-coli/