The Plague

The man sitting to my right at the bar has a problem with his nose. It won’t stop whistling. Every seat is taken and I can’t move away. Happy hour specials only apply if you sit at the bar. I take a sip of my wine.

At least the house Pinot is good.

I’m not a huge fan of classic rock, but I wished that they’d turn up the Van Morrison playing so I won’t be able to hear him. It is more of a wheeze than a whistle: an intake of dried boogers or a collapsed septum that produces a dry, high-pitched “whooish.” The events of the last few weeks have made me anxious and sensitive. The sound is grating on my nerves and making my skin crawl.

“Whooisz… WhooISZ.”

It is a wheestle.

I took another sip and stared into my glass. My left leg and right hand are both throbbing. I’m relieved that it’s Friday.

Two weeks before, I had been awakened by the sound of my cat, Shadow, scratching and hissing at something near the window next to the foot of the mattress up in the loft of my bedroom. I turned on the small lamp I kept there and noticed a large brown cockroach scrambling from the cat’s strike. I tumbled out of the loft down its short ladder and crashed into the door of the room. I rammed against it and turned the doorknob, forgetting about the bolt on the inside of the door. A metal screw sticking out of the lock sliced open my knuckle in my haste to turn it.

One of my roommates, Patrick, who could be up at any time of the night, was in the kitchen and had to jump back from the refrigerator at the force of my door swinging open. He then leaned toward me as I bounded forward, grabbing my arms to steady my fall. At this gesture, my terror intensified. I broke his grasp with a rough shrug, pushing him away and into the cabinets.

“Don’t touch me!”

I backed away from him and tripped on a folding chair, knocking it over with a metallic clamor.

“Calm the fuck down!” he said. “I’m just trying to help you.”

I had realized that I was standing before him in a short, thin nightshirt and

underwear. Since I had moved in, I never left my room for any reason without being fully dressed, as my roommates were straight men. I crossed my arms over my chest and tried to keep from trembling. “There’s a big bug near my bed.” My voice sounded small and far away.

“You’ve got to be kidding me.” He pulled a bottle of vodka and some orange Gatorade from our rusty fridge. “All that for a damn bug?”

He took a glass from the cabinet, made himself a drink and emptied half of it in one sip. Hearing the commotion outside of his room, our other roommate, Dave, stepped out in a groggy state. I told him what was going on. He grabbed a rubber mallet from a box in the kitchen. He climbed up into the loft. Some rustling and a few muffled thuds came from inside the room. Shadow shot across the kitchen in a streak of black fur.

The perpetrator had been dispatched. Patrick took another glass from the cabinet, made a second drink, and went to pass it to me.

“Cocktail?”

I stepped forward to reach for the glass. My hand was caked in blood. Patrick withdrew the glass and stared at the gash across my knuckle. The cut burned under the running water and the tissue around it was becoming stiff and swollen. He handed me a paper towel and nudged the drink over. I thanked him, noting the slight orange swirl of Gatorade in the clear liquid. He nodded back.

We finished our “cocktails” in silence, Shadow was wrangled, and I went back to bed. I put on a pair of sweatpants, some socks and a long-sleeved shirt. After checking around the mattress, I laid on top of the comforter, staring at the grooves in the ceiling, plagued by little itches here and there.

I’m not scared of most insects. But I’m terrified of cockroaches. While there are other, larger threats in life that could, and have, caused me harm, nothing can torment me like these bugs. As early as I can remember, my worst nights were spent lying awake in bed, scratching at phantom sensations from these imagined terrors crawling all over me. Since then, it’s become a symptom of my anxiety issues, plaguing me whether I’m stressed or not.

The moist landscape where I grew up in south Louisiana is infested with them.

The biggest ones camouflage themselves in the moss that hangs from giant cypress trees and hide in dark, damp corners. They fly out from the darkness at the slightest disturbance and scuttle from behind furniture, water pipes and cracked windows. I never got used to their constant presence.

My hysteria was ingrained early in life. Once, a large one from the carport had flown straight into my grandmother’s wig as she got out of the car after coming home from Mass. She ran into the house screaming. When inside, Maw Maw yanked the wig from her head and proceeded to stomp on it with a force that could rid evil spirits.

Another time, my mother ran out, naked and wet, from the shower into the living room, where my brother and I stood petrified from the shrieking that came from behind the bathroom door. She clutched her private parts and screamed at us.

“Kill IT! It’s on the sink!”

The smaller ones, while not as scary, imprinted themselves onto my psyche as well. They clustered in the corners of the ceilings of an inner-city apartment that one of our neighbors lived in. My mother would always send me over there to play with their daughter. They also lived in and overran my aunts’ and uncles’ crumbling trailers in the damp bayou country. If I saw a little brown speck on the wall beside my bed, regardless if it was an insect or not, I would stay up until daylight.

The sound coming from the man’s nose continues. This week has been a doozy as well with my nemeses tormenting me again. It began on Monday, when I turned in my office chair to file away some documents. I caught sight of a massive roach caught in a sticky trap on the floor next to the filing cabinet. Stifling a yelp, I scraped the side of my leg along the corner of my desk in my scramble to get away. An angry bruise throbbed and bloomed through a gnarled snag in my tights across my thigh.

After I had gained some composure, I inched closer to the trap. Its long, dark body was stuck firmly to the glue. The two antennae at the top of its head twitched with fury. I rubbed at the sharp pain on my thigh and tried to rearrange my tights so that the rip wouldn’t show. In doing so, I cracked open the deep, infected cut I’d gotten the week before on the knuckle of my hand. The skin around it was puffed up, red and angry. My whole first finger and the muscle between it and my thumb were tender.

I can’t keep reacting like this.

They were everywhere, in every city and every state. I could go nowhere without finding them crawling along harbors, scurrying out of sewer grates, strolling along sidewalks near restaurants. They infested impoverished places and even nested in the within the walls of the most exclusive buildings here in NYC.

I had hoped that by keeping the trapped cockroach in my office, I might start to get over this fear. Little by little, I might be able to get used to it, to them, being everywhere.

“WHOOISZ…”

Instead, I’m sitting at a bar, a failure after another “incident”. I have a limp from the contusion on the side of my leg to go with the hindered range of motion in my right hand from the gash over my knuckle.

Each day, I’d take a ruler and, with a few spastic jerks, move the trap a little closer to my desk. I made sure to keep it out of eyesight, should a colleague come by. It moved from one side of the desk to the other and back again. Every time I reentered my office from grabbing a coffee, going to the restroom, or taking lunch, I forced myself to stand over the trap and look at it for a minute or so.

I’m not scared of you. Why are you so creepy? How long will you last? Why am I being so creepy? How long will I last?

If I had to wait for the insect to disintegrate, I would.

For the first three days, its antennae had continued to twitch with ferocity. By day four, the movement slowed and was less frequent. I was confounded by how long these things could stay alive without sustenance. When I came into work this morning, the fifth day of the experiment, there was no movement within the trap when I nudged it. Didn’t see any upon my return from lunch either. Assuming the insect had died, I moved it directly behind myself and spent the remainder of the afternoon clenched and anxious in my chair.

I returned from a bathroom break at the end of the day and commenced my ritual stare down into the trap before moving it back to its corner behind the filing cabinet.

Feeling a little braver, I squatted down and got nearer while meditating on what was inside. With my back turned, I couldn’t see that my supervisor had walked over to deliver some files. I had the ruler in my hand to push the trap forward. She couldn’t see me hidden behind my desk and called out my name. At the same time, the insect’s antennae rose in a quick jerk.

With a scream I bolted upright. I turned to see her clutching the files to her chest, eyes wide with terror—her own mouth open and shrieking. She had just gotten over a cold and the disturbance to her vocal cords caused a coughing fit. I was stunned and stuttering apologies. She finally stopped coughing.

“What in the world were you doing?” she asked in a scratchy voice.

Beet red and shaky, I stood next to the trap and mumbled something about the bug and that I was trying to throw it away. She looked at the ruler in my hand and gave a nervous laugh. She left without giving me the files.

I went into the first bar I came upon on my way home.

Out of the corner of my eye I see the wheestler try to discreetly wipe at the offending nostril. It doesn’t help. Makes my own nose itch and feel gummy. He takes out a newspaper and unfolds it over the bar. A Bob Dylan song finishes playing over his whistle-wheezing and the static of conversation.

I empty my glass, ready to leave, but I remember it’s “two for one.” I signal for another, take a swill of the fresh pour, and try to scoot a few inches over. A young, portly man in a full suit about a size or so too small sits to the left of me. The flesh of his neck is puffed up from the back of his collar like ready-bake biscuit dough bursting through a cracked can. Little beads of sweat speckled his temples. He swipes his forehead with the palm of his thick, fleshy hand before taking his scotch in one gulp. He loosens his tie.

“Whooisz…”

I take another large sip of wine, then lean over to ask the bartender if he could make the music louder. Even though I hate Springsteen.