The Infestation

The crickets made themselves known on the first night. Camel crickets, named for their Notre-Dame hunch. They were the nightmare crickets from her parents’ garage and she hadn’t seen them in years. She used to park the car outside and go all the way around to the front door rather than run across them. That first night, she lay awake with a full bladder because two were sitting on their haunches by the bathroom door, waiting to spring forward on hinged legs. She stayed up, her bladder pushing, stretched like pigskin. She looked at her blue phone light in the dark with one eye closed. She googled them in acidic panic. They ate couch cush ions and curtains and linen on clotheslines. If hungry enough they ate each other and, rarely, they ate themselves.

They lived outside and inside, lined up like sentries by all the entryways. It was her fault for renting an apartment marketed under the heading “efficiency housing.” It was her fault for renting the place sight unseen. A restraining order means a broken lease, and a broken lease means house-hunting in the middle of February. If anything, she was the intruder. The crickets occupied the space with a territorial confidence she didn’t have. They squatted on huge jointed legs, hump backed, obscene, beady-eyed, silent. They lurched, hurled into her, blindly spring ing, antennae flailing, their curled brown torsos divided into sections like the hard exoskeleton of a crustacean. Who are you—they seemed to say—to run us out of our home, when you know what it is to be banished?

She ordered a four-quart bottle of Fine Granular Bait, two six-packs of traps, rubber stoppers to seal the cracks under doorways, and plaster for the wall voids. She bought a dehumidifier off of Craigslist. The Fine Granular Bait looked like sand, and puffed out of its red-tipped dispenser in little bursts. She put it everywhere and she put more than the recommended amount. She walked sideways like a crab around the outside of the entire building, puffing it in an invisible perimeter. She checked the traps every morning, sometimes counting six crickets from one night to the next. The traps were flat white rectangles covered on one side with a slick of glue. They were printed with a pattern of crickets, for whose benefit she did not know. Crickets piled on top of each other. Sometimes they were stuck on only by their back legs. They didn’t die, they just sat in their perpetual squat, antennae probing. The adults couldn’t be killed with hard-cover books or trapped under cups because she couldn’t get that close for fear she would see them move, make them jump. When they jumped, she jumped, too. They were also so big that smashing one meant skeletal crunching, actual gore and latex gloves. The babies, little gray replicas that swarmed around the shower drain, she smooshed with balled toilet paper and stamped with manic feet.

The bait did nothing, the sealants did nothing, and the traps only caught what passed their way. She started keeping her shoes on at all times, and when she did take them off, to sleep and to shower, she placed them on chairs and tables, or on top of the toilet seat. She compulsively shook out her clothes, left nothing at ground level, did not sit on the couch because they liked to sit underneath it, and kept every light on at every hour. She was on the lookout. Fresh out of the shower, naked and sockless in her white tennis shoes, she was scanning the ground. She felt stalked and she stalked. She dragged overcrowded traps of crooked curled legs, brown tangles and lazy, paper-thin antennae into the trash by the tips of her fingers, gagging and victorious. There was no obvious source. They kept coming, out of nowhere.

The infestation propelled her to philosophical heights. She lost sleep debat ing whether it was better to patrol for their presence or stare straight ahead with blinders on. Surely it was better to know what you were up against? But, she coun tered herself, ignorance was definitely bliss. Curled in bed, she reread Metamorphosis and found that her sympathies lay with the rest of the Samsas, Gregor be damned. Lying this way on the bed, her body made the shape of the letter C, the skin of her hunched back stretching so that the knots of segmented vertebrae were made visible, as were the ridges of her ribcage.