Mercy Demo
on moving in, pest control, and the way lemons try and fail to warn us
We talk about crushing up Tylenol into the poison. If it’s extra strength, we reason that we may still count ourselves among the merciful. That if it’s extra strength they will feel very little, that their antennae will twitch against the dark wick of oblivion and then.
Google offers up other contenders, the horrible coven of B—bleach, baking soda, bait traps, boric acid, borax—don’t you pour that down drains? But hey—something for everyone!
One odd solution is diatomaceous earth, made of fossil dust of single-celled, photosynthetic algae. While diatoms live, they drift prismatic through the sea, like radial, microscopic kites in the deep. In death, their flakes adhere to insects and slice them alive, razors tearing apart the bug so completely that its exoskeleton can no longer hold in any water. Simply put, the creature dies because it becomes a drought to itself.
It’s roach season in New Orleans. We are moving into our brand new house and both of us have yet to be heartbroken inside of it. We arrange all of our objects so that they perfectly catch the light, so that they practically swell with radiance. We buy a cobalt couch, a cobalt vase, and cobalt dish towels for wiping up what messes may come. It smells distinctly of landlord’s special floor polish and unheartbrokenness.
And—a swarming gaiety, an unsanctioned housewarming; so far, we’ve found a generic hairy caterpillar under our counter, a bagworm larva mounting the doorframe, a small dune of termite shit in on the subway tile of the shower, heavy black flies careening in the asteroid way that they do, and in my “his & hers sinks,” a beetle went to heaven inside the “his” drain. I haven’t removed the body.
But mostly it is the cockroaches, four or five a night, emerging from beneath the oven in the predictable (nearly trite!) mythic tradition of darkness and trailing crumbs. They feast & skitter over the open floor plan (open floodplain?) of our tentative fantasy, a fantasy too young to defend itself from being trespassed by omen or metaphor or unbidden ache.
But I don’t kill them—ever. I can’t, at least by hand or heel. Instead I have learned the exact metric weight of my scream, how it is hurled in the small space of the kitchen, after the whole world has gone to bed and there is nothing and nobody awake except the fear that is always too close to the surface of myself, rising. Some sounds, I now know, can subsist as passengers inside the body for years without ever being made.
Instead, I marco-polo the roaches around the apartment, cursing profusely, waylaid by unopened moving boxes. I drop a trap on them from above—wicked witch of the east style!—with a mardi gras cup, under which I gingerly slide a piece of mail or copy paper, just like mama taught me. Then, while holding the trap, I’ll try and use an elbow to unlatch the chain and turn the knob to the front door, which is invariably when the bug starts to go the most crazy in the cup.
If you’ve ever done what I do, you’ll know the exact sound of it, the muffled knocking of chitin against plastic, the ricochet of mass as the roach hurls the sum of its power against the temporary fortress—a cup that we normally use to pour sugary juices into our bodies, turned into a tiny jail.
Over & over my roommate and I do this, take them out onto the street, or fling them out a window if there’s one already open. But against both of our best efforts, the new house is inundated.
Maybe we could use lemons, she says, reading from her phone, maybe lemons or the smell of them.
(My roommate and I, like many in our generation, are hot and gentle and just a little doomed.)
I want to be given that same grace—to smell lemons & be warned away from damage. I want to keep these countertops free of hurt. I am already looking back nostalgically on this house, to this moment, back before it was filled with whatever pain is going to happen here. When all of the roaches and termites and caterpillars were alive and we were in a negotiating phase of our lives and thinking that maybe it was possible to trick harm into leaving us all alone. By using lemons or the smell of them.
O—our tart little warnings, and how they never seem to work.
&
Why would I want to get death all over my twinkly little shoes?
As I carry each insect into the brothy night, singing out a staccato ribbon of unceremonious o shits and o fucks, I am thinking about mercy and inconvenience, about how some deeds must mean more this way, carried out in embarrassed futility, carried out alone and in terror, the same way we carry our hearts.
Because it is entirely possible that I keep banishing the same roach, over and over and over again. Some days I believe that the two of us are engaged in some circuitous, under-funded Beckett production—the abduction, the descending staircase, the weedy street—a loop-de-loop that is either tragic or marvelous depending on even the slightest variations in the choreography.
o shit. o fuck. o shit. o fuck. o shit. o fuck. o shit. o fuck. o shit. o fuck. o shit.
Which is another way of saying: please, let me be spared of pain. Let us all be spared of everything.
I haven’t prayed in a while & it shows. Things keep getting into the house.
I text the neighbors and ask if this is normal. If it is normal to be afraid that the building, the story you’re building, is being overrun, is spinning out, coming loose? But the neighbors next door are securely in love, and plus, they text back, we spray our kitchen.
I buy more Tylenol in case we need to mortar pestle it. In case we need it for the mercy we are going to perform. After dusk I sit sentinel, staring at the oven, waiting for something to emerge. I sit with my phone face-up, waiting for the shape of a name to surface from the deep.
I have been seeing someone for eight months and not a stitch of chitin on me, no insurance plan against the consequences of trespassing back into the small stadium of light made by somebody else’s bedside lamp. Someone else’s bed, which could fold on me at any moment, crushing up into the wall like those vintage Murphy sleepers, to trick me, to trap me in the wall of the beloved.
Setting up the newly-sanded desk where I plan to write all my buckshot poems, where I plan to use my hands to make all the pretty things that will help other people realize they don’t want to break my heart, I see a roach’s antennae come out from INSIDE THE WALL, tasting the air, sampling the nascently hopeful vibe.
I turned the speaker towards it, a love song was playing and I wanted to see if the antennae would react, if I could watch the lana del wavelengths shake this bug to its core. I almost made myself believe that it worked, that I could tether our experiences, that we could be truce across some sort of sadness dimension.
I will never practice an intimacy that involves living inside the plaster of something else, although at times I have wanted to, although at times I have tried, although at times I have become very small inside the darkness of my own desire, eventually coaxed out again by some love song or another, beginning the cycle anew.
Once I texted a friend pls make my headstone say ‘here lies hannah corinne—all she wanted was a chitinous exoskeleton and to flap her little wings.’
I keep thinking about mercy and how I want a demonstration. I keep wanting. I keep spraying “Super Lemon Trader Joe’s Brand Room Spray” into the darkness beneath the oven.
Maybe it’s a problem of protection, that I refuse to ask for it correctly, at a decibel that God can hear: mercy as blessing forged from the syntax of somebody else’s blood on the door. Re: the sacrificial Passover lambs deployed as security system. Or: Jesus on crucifix. Or: Emily in The Devil Wears Prada, ousted from the big Paris trip.
And: the love affairs. Those charcuterie boards of my emotional labor, pickpocketed, plundered, licked all the way clean. The commonplace, and (often gendered) asymmetry of mercy. Like most of the women I know have at one or more points renovated the baroque estates of their bodies into rehab centers for the benefit of car-slammed wild things? And that the mistake being, obviously, is in thinking that the bandaged hawk has any interest—at all—in healing you back (unless you’re Helen Macdonald lol).
Cockroaches can recognize one another, can share pheromones like diary entries. According to the internet, “Cockroaches appear to use just two pieces of information to decide where to go, namely how dark it is and how many other cockroaches there are.” I, too, have been known to shirk the light. I, too, have absconded for years in the shade beneath the metaphorical pain stove, wandering along the pheromone trail of shame and togetherness.
(Digression: in what great boot shadows—of institution, of hegemony, of state-sanctioned violence—have we dwelled? In what staggering darknesses have we sought the company of others, the solidarity of vulnerable bodies gathering, gathering, gathering in numbers, sowing terror into the owner of the house?
This revolutionary cahoots, forged only by the light of a shadow, around communal soup pots and flickering outposts and trapdoors and floorboards. This is the healing, conspiratorial kinship that forces those in power to confront the fact that their house—“their” house—just isn’t theirs anymore. And: it never was.)
Really, the problem is that we are all renters here on earth, on this barely wrangled soil, this stolen land, this temporary ground—few here can seem to legitimize a claim to anything beyond what their tenuous, deeply circumstantial line of credit affords them. Where can any of us dwell safely, if not in each other’s hands? And sometimes not even there.
What I have now is a metaphor at the end of its leash. I really despise having a roach crawl over my sock during my evening glass of wine. I wanted a workaround, and I’ve come up empty handed, except for the same plastic cup I’ve been clutching for weeks.
So if my floor is bedecked in the ash of once-shimmering diatoms then let it be a failure that I acknowledge openly, that at least I have attempted to keep my heart from blackening even one more punitive inch.
(Somewhere, in the misty acres of the far future, the many descendents of the cockroaches I have not extinguished would have enough brute strength to carry me. To lift me in my nightgown and carry me to the mouth of the river of mercy and there they would dip me in it.)
For now, I am still locked in an attempt at…conscious uncoupling? But I am editing this piece from far away, in a roachless town with perfect weather and perfect roads and perfectly happy people, dreaming of home, of my new old building and its many foundational gaps, gaps that let in the animacy of the world, and the animacy of the world that is a relentless teacher, even to a failing student like me.
In the gullet of summer, I continue the ritual. I put my own beating heart in a plastic cup and deliver it into the night, alive, unharmed, and deposit it gently in the tall, wild grasses that temper the hard shoulder of the street, where strangers float vulnerably between the light and the dark, emerging, seeking one another, and all of us surviving.