By the time my landlord emailed me to schedule an inspection with the exterminator to determine the severity of the cockroach infestation in my apartment, I had already been thinking about them for months. There were no signs yet, not really. Later there would be moments when I would pause whatever I was doing, breathing in through my nose like a gross gourmand in an attempt to determine if the scent I was smelling was just a symptom of living in close proximity to other people, with open windows, drafty doors, and thin walls, or the telltale sweet musk of an intrusion of cockroaches. 

During the exterminator’s first visit, he asked a few questions and looked around. No, I had not seen any cockroaches at night when I got up to go to the bathroom. The results of my sniffing were inconclusive. I had seen no cockroach droppings but also, I had no idea what those looked like. What I didn’t tell him was that during the summer, I had become obsessed with a novel by Clarice Lispector called The Passion According to GH, in which nothing much happens. A woman, having recently lost her maid, goes into the servants’ quarters to find a cockroach half-squished by a wardrobe, and spends a hundred-some pages contemplating it and the various expansions and contractions of the moment it represents. Ultimately, she licks it. 

Apophenia is the term for the human tendency to see patterns where none exist. You can think of it as a coping mechanism. We feel very small when we look up at the stars and so we make constellations to give the universe some order.

I read the novel feverishly once, letting Lispector’s frenzied prose wash over me. Then I read it slower. Then I realized it was 189 pages—the same length as another book I love. Then I read it again, picking out sentences about volcanoes, which both writers fixate on. Lispector conjures them as symbols of geological time, the aeons that cockroaches have inhabited the planet. In the other book, they represent the destructive nature of desire, which rips and burns and sets ice to those stricken with it. Then I wove the two books together, so that each page of one frottaged against its twin in the other book. I thought about cockroaches and dreamed about them and read about them.

Which is to say that when I received that initial email, my first thought was that I manifested them myself through the sheer strength of my obsession. Apophenia is the term for the human tendency to see patterns where none exist. You can think of it as a coping mechanism. We feel very small when we look up at the stars and so we make constellations to give the universe some order. We are overwhelmed by the amount of information whizzing around on the internet so we arrange it into tidy conspiracies. The exterminator came into my apartment, scryed into the household dirt under my sink and transformed it into cockroach droppings. I was disgusted by the violation of my private space, and so I romanticized it by projecting onto Lispector’s novel. 

“I knew that as long as I was disgusted,” GH muses, “the world would elude me and I would elude me. I knew the basic error in living was being disgusted by a roach.” The romantic image, though, is never the one that persists.

The idea of a cockroach is different from the cockroach itself and my cockroaches were different from GH’s. Hers, since she is living in Brazil, are larger and capable of flight. Crucially, her varieties do not infest, but wander in (solitary) and wander back out again, not linked inextricably to human habitation like mine were. 

My cockroaches were German. They are much smaller—the immature form is a diminutive 3mm long and black, with a small patch of brown on their backs like the skull on a biker’s jacket. They change their skins as they mature, becoming slightly larger and a warm deep brown like rooibos tea before you add milk to it. They have lots of babies quite quickly and they are self-sufficient: when one dies, its community will eat it, along with any molted skins. Both of these qualities make them excellent colonizers.

When I first moved to the city I lived in an affluent neighbourhood, in an apartment with crown moulding and French doors that I could only afford while splitting the rent with my then-partner. It was gloriously singular, delineated from its neighbours by thick walls covered in plaster. After we split up, I moved into an apartment on the third floor of a building that was attached to the ones on either side of it, which were in turn attached to the ones beside them. When two entities are pressed up against each other, their neat borders become porous and things seep. The reason it felt so exciting to intertwine the pages of my two loved-books together, letting unrelated things meet to form a third entity in their union, was the same phenomenon at its core that made the infestation plaguing my building impossible to stamp out. 

There was one day, soon after I moved in, when while feeling especially alone, I heard my neighbour telling his partner that she was the love of his life. The smoker who lived below me made his habit known nocturnally, when mysteriously, the smell of his cigarettes permeated only my closet, the wool of my sweaters swallowing it all up. A baby squirrel, rescued in the midst of a heatwave, lived in the building too, in an apartment that seemed to house at least a dozen people on a rotating basis. So: permeability. Cockroaches are masters of this, of moving through and between spaces, with their penchant for cracks making them notoriously difficult for an exterminator to target. One of the most effective methods for stemming their flow is also one of the simplest: a caulking gun and an eye for minute fissures. 

There are many things you must do to prepare for a fumigation. You must seal all food and ideally place it inside the fridge, even the five-kilogram bag of flour. You have to empty your cupboards, your closets, and drawers, any places where bugs could be hiding and laying eggs. You have to move all furniture to the centre of the rooms so that the exterminator can spray poison along the baseboards. If you have pets or children, they must be moved somewhere else until the poison is dry, and then they can come back and you can watch them worriedly as they sniff around, certainly getting residue on their paws and then licking it off later. 

An adult human is apparently less at risk and during the nights following the fumigations I lay in the centre of my bedroom, my bed and the rest of my furniture a floating island of flotsam, windows closed, hotboxing poison along with presumably hundreds of roaches. The number for the poison control centre is conspicuously in bold at the bottom of the page of instructions from the exterminator. The toxins are meant to target the reproductive systems of the bugs, making them infertile and stopping the stream of new nymphs. It also stops nymphs from being able to molt, rendering them ever-young, little Lolitas stuck in prepubescence. 

When everything is poetry, I know I am trying to create sense. Out of the corner of my eye, I still see cockroaches on my way to the bathroom at night and sometimes I smell them too.

As the infestation grew despite repeated fumigations, my days take on the rhythm of a horror movie. At night, huddled under a blanket, I try not to hear the animals I live with react to the bugs. They chase them across the floor, bat at the baseboards and stare upwards at things I do not immediately see and then see. Daylight is a reprieve until it isn’t and the infestation is so large, powerful, and indifferent to the power of the sun that I see them then too. The routine of entering the apartment is now: scan the room before taking off my shoes, watching for them. The parts of the movie where your hands are allowed to unclench, stop sweating, are no longer safe. My furniture is perpetually in the island state, huddled together in the centre of the room as though it too is scared. 

Eventually I cannot stand it and move to a different neighbourhood, terrified again that it is too late and I am harbouring egg sacks in my boxes (cardboard is a favourite hiding spot of the bugs, they fit cozily into its corrugated structure). This is a part of the horror movie too, where the family that has lingered too long, not knowing the kind of story they’re in, finally flees. Shirley Jackson has her protagonist in The Haunting of Hill House endure a week in the haunted manor, hearing objects crashing, a horrible voice, and a growing feeling of dread, before she finally tries to drive off. When she does so, she crashes her car into a tree, possessed by the ghost who has loosened its grasp on the house in order to latch onto her. My apartment, like Hill House, was made increasingly less sane by my delirious lack of sleep. It stood pressed against others where the haunting echoed. Whatever walked there, walked among hundreds of others.                                           

As the consumer of horror, who knows from the onset when a story is a ghost story, it is infuriating to watch characters rationalize strange phenomena and convince themselves that they should stay in a situation where omens are rapidly multiplying. But as a tenant, it’s harder to tell what kind of story you’re living, and leaving is never easy. Ghosts (or roaches) have the gravity of leases behind them. In Quebec, it is legal to break a lease if an apartment is unfit for human habitation, but exceedingly difficult to prove this in practice. A friend tells me that we might have to meet for coffee later than we initially had planned because an exterminator is coming to spray her apartment. They’ve rescheduled once already and she has been living in disarray for weeks but she has only seen one bug late at night and the infestation is mostly concentrated in the basement unit, comfortably two stories away. I want to tell her to run, that it won’t get better, it will only get worse. 

The same friend went to hike the Camino and brought back bedbugs so she knows how closely a spiritual journey can coincide with a buggy one. “I might have already known that, beyond the gates, there would be no difference between me and the roach. Not in my own eyes or the eyes of God,” writes Lispector.  There is a video on the internet with more than a million likes of a child mistaking the swaddled figure of Jesus in a nativity scene for a cockroach, the folds of his blanket becoming the seams in a roach’s carapace. 

Ultimately, these insects and their spread are moments where interconnectedness snaps into focus. Their presence and persistence a sign that our existence as discrete entities is pure fiction, that we are all seeping into each other, bedbugs hopping from hostel to hostel and causing pilgrims to itch like hair shirts, cockroaches setting up shop in low-income housing where landlords are not overly concerned with the wellbeing of their tenants and poison is just as likely to harm human residents as the insects whose resistance to chemicals is quickly growing.

While writing this I happen to listen to Ben Lerner’s story The Ferry, in which the narrator’s fixation with coincidences both beautiful and paranoiac gets in the way of him picking up his child. Everything is poetic: a fare machine asks him if he would like to add more time or more value. I similarly read into the fumigation instructions’ clause for pet fish that cannot be evacuated: “put first, a wet cloth on top + another one dry over very important.” Dry pushes up against wet to create a seal that stops poison from entering the tank and the technique sounds less like science and more like a spell. Throughout Lerner’s story are mentions of another insect, the spotted lanternfly, which is invading New York and New Jersey. The patterns and coincidences he witnesses are punctuated by the occurrence of a creature who should not be there but has nevertheless hitched a ride, creeped over an ocean, stowed away in crates of fruit to become not only a pest but a testimony to the porosity of global markets and the ways they make us vulnerable to interlopers. 

But how to handle the coincidence of listening to a story about an oversensitivity to patterns and insects while writing about my own oversensitivity to patterns and insects? It’s one of those things that makes the world not seem real, like reading Lispector, like Jackson’s haunting, like how can the right fiction be reaching us all the time, ready to serve as a simplified arena for working out our wicked problems? 

I see bugs everywhere. A moth is a material witness to early computing technology, the cause of the first debugging. Lerner’s flies decimate, particularly, the tree of heaven. Beautiful! Freud saw a woman opening and closing her legs in the image of a butterfly slowly flapping its wings. A dream interpretation website tells me that “to dream of a cockroach in your bed indicates that someone is going to challenge your comfort zone” but I have woken up with a cockroach on my pillow and oh God. 

Like Lerner says, “when everything is poetry, I know I am unwell.” I mix my metaphors when I think about the roaches I lived with for a year and a half, desperate to have them be poetically significant, to distill a disgusting situation into a meaningful one. Poetry is another kind of conspiracy, the workings of a mind to make meaning and analogy out of a chaotic situation it is powerless to escape. We recognize and misrecognize and over-recognize patterns to deal with overwhelm, the same way neural networks see eyes in images where there are none, the same way we see eyes in images where there are none. When everything is poetry, I know I am trying to create sense. Out of the corner of my eye, I still see cockroaches on my way to the bathroom at night and sometimes I smell them too.