Vengeance

Of late, I could not control my giggles whenever I thought about your wild fear of cockroaches. Just yesterday, my team lead caught me off guard mid-stand-up call. It looks like I’ve been losing sight of a few basics : respect, focus, the stuff we’re supposed to uphold as a team.

Do you have a different opinion, Dip? My boss asked me.

Uh, sorry…I was just… Words failed me, so I muttered an apology, trying not to crack up all over again on mute.

Honestly, I couldn’t believe how one tiny cockroach could throw off our best conversations on the phone every time. Every single time. Right when you’d drop that practised big-city vibe, when I’d start to feel I could actually be myself with you, not the “assistant manager”, this ridiculous creature would appear. I’d hear your muffled, half-swallowed scream, and then… beep. My phone screen is back to its boring, blank normal. Just like that, you were gone.

A cockroach, ruining our love. Sounds crazy, doesn’t it?  Well yeah, it was hilarious to me. Whenever we’d talk about how it sneaked out from the corner of the bed, popped out from under the washing machine, or started crawling up the windowpane right when you were leaning on it, I couldn’t stop laughing. And I’m still giggling even as I write this. I’m sorry, really, I am… but I just can’t help it! And my solutions? You always said they were too “prosaic,” too “predictable” or “too simple to do”, basically just whack it with anything solid or grab a newspaper and go for it. Simple, right? Just one good thud, and poof, problem solved! Or, you know, use a repellent?

Living with cockroaches was the absolute last thing you wanted, I’m sure. But somehow, every single time, you just wouldn’t deal with them.

One little cockroach would show up, and bam!

No talking that night, then no follow-up the next morning, or the one after that.

Just this series of unfinished calls that could’ve been some of our best memories from the past six months.

And here I am, still giggling… even if I kind of wish those laughs had become something more.

 

That very day, I decided that if we ever shared a room as a couple, I would go to any extent to ensure that no cockroach could disrupt our conversations. But it is easier said than done. Dinosaurs may become extinct. Cockroaches may not. Not even if the world itself no longer exists. Is there not a saying like that somewhere?

 

And now, at fifty, a bachelor and alone, I often think that in my parental apartment the only creatures that still keep me company are these cockroaches. They are not merely insects. They belong to the dark parts of the room, the places I do not quite reach. They appear without warning and move with a quiet certainty, as if they have always been here and always will be. Their bodies carry a dull, bruised sheen, and their antennae keep testing the air, patient, searching, as though they are more at home here than I am.

They often appear from strange places, at strange times, when I am taking a loo and thinking of you, when I am shaving and the mirror shows me not my own genial face but a tired mouth with parched lips; when I am standing at the sink with my hands in cloudy, swirling water, feeling that under the gushing hot water, even in summer, the bacteria are dying. And most importantly, when I have my dinner at midnight.

Today, when I was returning home after a bad fight with the present boyfriend of one of my students, whom I had been stalking recently on Instagram, I could still feel the humiliation burning on my nose.

It had begun a few weeks back. Screenshots of random Insta posts on a phone screen. A girl in a pale top, one shoulder bare, the light in her hair making her look almost merciful. She had posted a story from a café, then another from a bookshop, then a short video in which she laughed at something off camera and tucked her hair behind her ear. She was one of mine, her teacher, her perpetual witness. I had taught her how to construct an argument, how to identify irony, how to pretend that language could save a person from loneliness. She was bright enough to be bored by me and polite enough to hide it. That was what made her dangerous. Not beauty alone. Beauty is common enough to be survived. What unsettles a man in his fifties is the combination of youth, intelligence, and the suggestion that she might not be entirely contemptuous of him.

I began by telling myself I was only curious. Then, that I was merely observant. Then, that I was protecting myself from foolishness. I watched the boy in her pictures too, though at first only in fragments. A shoulder in a mirror selfie. A jawline, a careless grin. He was the sort of young man who had never once had to wonder whether he was wanted.

The girl had once replied to one of my messages with a sleepy emoji and a harmless question about an assignment. That was enough to make a man like me invent a whole country of possibilities. I began to think of the places she might go. The café near the campus. The stationery shop. I dressed more carefully than I had in years. I trimmed my moustache, or what was left of it. I used cologne on days when I intended not to use cologne, as though invisibility were a sin and not a necessity. Sometimes she would look at me in the corridor and say hello with that faint, amused politeness people reserve for men they do not fear enough to avoid. Once, she was having lunch in the college café, sitting at the table beside mine with another student, and I caught the faint smell of her perfume as it drifted across. I remember thinking that some scents are more indecent than nakedness.

My apartment, to be honest, was never worthy of anyone’s expectations. The curtains hung as they pleased. Books were left in small piles where I had last put them down. The floor had gone unattended for a while. There were cups on the table, empty packets in the corners, an unsteady chair, and that faint, stale smell of a room kept shut too long. I told myself it did not matter. A man could be disorganised and still be capable of tenderness. This is what men tell themselves before they discover that cleanliness, too, can be an erotic backdrop. Some girls came because they were curious. Some because they were single and lonely. Some because the world had taught them to confuse attention with affection. A few agreed to sleep with me, though I do not mean that sentence to sound as loud and clear as it does in memory. They came in with lipstick intact and expectations carefully folded into their bags. They sat on the sofa, crossed and uncrossed their legs, laughed at my jokes, drank tea or cranberry breezer, and looked around with a mixture of caution and pity.

Then they saw the room.

One girl, whose perfume was too sweet for my apartment, stood beside the bookshelf and said she had forgotten that she had promised her cousin a call. Another touched the edge of the table and immediately remarked on the dust on her fingers. A third smiled with the strained kindness of someone withdrawing from a fire that had not yet started. The excuses arrived with miraculous speed. A parent might call. A paper needed finishing. A headache had come on suddenly. I would stand there apologising, talking too much about how I would sort the place out, even saying I had been meaning to get help, though I knew that was not really the kind I needed. Those who did not leave at once, who stayed a little longer for conversation, for food, for that slow easing of distance, ended up facing something far less manageable. And then, the cockroaches would appear.

Not all at once. That would have been merciful. One first. Then another. A brown glint near the skirting board. A sudden shape, slipping under the sofa. A thick, jointed movement across the tiled patch near the refrigerator. Once, one lifted itself into flight from under the bed and crossed the room in a panicked arc. The girls would shriek, spring upright, clutch their bags, and make for the door in an instant, their faces suddenly stripped of all social politeness. I would call after them that I had spray, that I would deal with it, that they need not make such a scene, but by then the room had already chosen its evening, its afternoon or sometimes, its night.

When I did spray repellent, the apartment became a chemical cathedral of nausea. The air turned thick and sharp. Even my own tongue recoiled. The room would smell like a hospital corridor after a fire. The body would reject the attempt before it reached its poor conclusion. The girl would breathe shallowly, look at me with a mixture of irritation and embarrassment, and say that it was not working. Then she would leave, often before I had finished opening a window.

 

So, the night my student’s boyfriend caught me near that secluded stretch by her building, I was already in a state of injured dignity. She had invited me there, or so I had believed. The message had been brief, almost playful. Come over. I will take you to my place. The words had seemed to contain more than they did. They always do.

I arrived under a streetlamp that flickered. The lane was narrow, half hidden by parked bikes and a wall overgrown with neglect. I was waiting, trying to appear casual, when the girl stepped forward from the dark.

But, it was not only the girl.

It was she with her boyfriend, the one I had seen in Instagram pictures, the one with the polished jaw and the rich-boy smile. He had on the same expression men wear when they know the rules of a game that others can only guess at. He did not shout at first. He said something low and contemptuous, something I no longer remember exactly because the blood in my ears had begun its own drumming. Then came the shove, quick and humiliating. Then the blow. Then the sudden, awful knowledge that my body had become a thing others could handle roughly, that it no longer knew how to strike back as it once did, but only to receive humiliation, hit, and hollow hurt.

He hit me once more. My nose gave way. My mouth filled with salt and iron. I remember my glasses twisting. I remember the sick crack of my face against his fist. I remember some part of me, absurdly, noticing that this was a very modern beating. No heroics. No nunchaku. No melodrama. Just a boy with a phone in one pocket and violence in the other, administering his moral verdict. It was all so on trend, so brutally casual, so absurdly small and complete. The kind of thing people would later film badly if it had happened to someone less ashamed than me.

When he finally stepped back, breathing hard, he looked almost bored. My face was wet. My nose was bleeding freely. I could hear a tiny wet click every time I swallowed. He said something I shall not repeat, because it was both fashionable and cruel, and then he left me there with the certainty that I had been measured and found ridiculous.

 

By the time I reached the apartment, I could still smell the blood in my nose. I washed my face, dabbed antiseptic on the cut, and put a bandage over it. Even then, the smell stayed. You think blood is simple until it refuses to leave. Then it becomes an idea, a private signature of humiliation. It becomes the perfume of the day’s failure. It followed me up the stairs, sat with me on the bus, clung to my shirt, because this smell is honest.

I sat down to dinner with my comfort noodle soup in fish in oyster sauce. I think I spilled one or two drops on the black glass dining table, which I wipe every day meticulously after dinner and then spray with a dash of citronella so the cockroaches stay away and I can at least savour in peace the thing I still enjoy, something that still remains in my taste buds, my tongue, my lips, the soft surrender of broth and noodle and fish yielding together in my mouth at the vulnerable moment of an indecent hunger especially when one has no one to witness it.

No sooner had I dripped the gravy of oyster sauce on the black glass than those creatures appeared from nowhere within a minute.

Little cockroaches. Or perhaps larvae, still learning to crawl.

I watched them and felt an inherited envy. They moved with a kind of certainty I have never known. In them, there was no hesitation about origin or future; both were already settled. The parent cockroaches and their offspring gathered in quiet, dark ranks, efficient and unquestioning. And I, fifty, with no such hierarchy of life, sat there with my bowl of noodles, aware of the peculiar emptiness that had, over time, come to resemble a life. The baby cockroaches were tiny enough to be pitied, but pity was not what I felt. I felt the ache of recognition. They belonged to something. Someone. Even their ugliness was communal. I thought of the girls who had once sat where the cockroaches now ran, girls whose laughter had brushed the edge of possibility and then withdrawn. I wanted proof that some creature had once trusted me enough to remain.

I was unsure whether it would be wiser to use my thumb and index finger as weapons or this book I had on the table. The thumb I had once used to caress your lips before we made love, the index finger that had glided gently from your clitoris to that inexplicable black hole which would still take me back in time, back to my twenties when I still smelled good and not stinky, back to when you used to come to me and there were no cockroaches and you would still say that I kept my lonely apartment clean, as girls would do. “Or do you have girls, other than me, who take care of that?” you would ask mischievously.

Now I could smell only the blood on my nose, even after I had washed up and sat down to dinner. I had sprayed some antiseptic and put on a bandaid, but I could still feel it there, ready to slip from my upper lip to my tongue, like some cannibal instinct I could not quite stop, then down to the lower lip, to the chin, and maybe even into the noodle soup. Would it make a better sauce than the oyster one? The thought was so foul, yet it was so elegant. The blood dripped. It ran like a thin red confession from my upper lip to the tip of my tongue, where it tasted of pennies and shame, then down to the lower lip, gathering there in a bead that trembled before falling to my chin.

And then I looked up.

As those nymphs surrounded my plate and crawled towards the dripped oyster sauce, I could suddenly smell them. The smell of blood was gone. The smell of oyster sauce was never there. I do not know how that girl, whose boyfriend had crashed my nose and the side of my lips that very day, smelled. She was gone before the cockroaches arrived. But I could remember distinctly how the cockroaches and nymphs smell whenever they stealthily appear in my apartment after each girl I wanted to fuck really hard and drain her out, crash her out on my sofa. That smell was unbearable. It was light, almost irrelevant, unless one crushed one or two of them and smelled the result on one’s weapon.

The nymphs had surrounded the black oyster sauce now. Soon, a few more would appear. Soon their mother or father or aunts or cousins or some other obscene relation would emerge from the walls, from beneath the refrigerator, from the seam beneath the sink, from the dark place of this apartment. Soon they would proudly declare that they would outnumber us in family, in sex, in troops, even if humankind were destroyed. I could see these little cockroaches encroaching upon my most coveted periphery, my dinner, my comfort food, the thing that soothes me, croons me to sleep afterwards. The smell grew stronger. Could I smell my blood anymore? I was not sure.

I looked at my weapons, which I could not use today: my fist and, most importantly, my thumb and index finger.

I thudded repeatedly on them, once with the thumb, then with the index, then with the entire fist. The sound of the thud grew louder, the smell stronger, and I could see haemolymph and haemocoel sticking on my thumb, index, and the back of my knuckles.

And now I can see the mother and the father cockroaches coming. Their feelers are talking to me with inaudible shrieks, maledictions and threats of vengeance.

They did not hurry. They never hurry. They know, perhaps, that victory to outnumber us requires only time.

I knew what I needed to do for this couple.

I stood up, went to the washbasin, cleaned my weapons, and stood there watching the parents as the water ran over my hands.