I wake up once again feeling the bug’s retreat from me, and hide in the crevices away from my vision. I try to distract myself from the invasive paranoia that has come from my pestilent life. I stand up and walk to the window looking out from the abandoned building that was once part home part factory and now is neither. Someone else seems to have taken up residence with me. I should tell them about the bugs, but if they’re here already there is no hope for them, and the pestilence will pursue them from the eyes of the Aegean to the mounts of the Himalayas. I see a single bug crawling toward my foot and I step on it. I felt not an ounce of guilt, as I know that I have successfully improved his brethren by removing him from their number. His stupidity does not become them. He does a disservice to their immutable and timeless strength.
I walk downstairs, and I see that my nightly guests have already left me. I think of the pictures in the room and I wonder back to my own family left so far behind on the distant shores of my own country. Where the dirge like waves run against the shore like the howling’s of an endless wake for a nameless soul leaving behind the ineffable bereft. It almost makes me weep to remember it. I was so happy before the blight of euphoria, and before the guilt. Before I made the mistake.
When I was a child:
We lived in a small house where there lived an old sulfurous odor that permeated through the air, and sought to stifle me. My father was a German, and I spent many mornings gazing into the faraway depths of his pale eyes that concealed a distant flame. My mother was a woman with fiery red hair and a vitality that seemed to hold the house itself together, even when the cracks dug themselves into the wall. Our house was always under perpetual assault from cockroaches. No matter how hard we tried to drive them away they always persisted, and I remember that the only time I ever saw my father cry was when he took a single bite of a fish he had caught in the Irish sea only a few ours before and the fish crumbled revealing a myriad of cockroaches united in their insatiable hunger. And my mother spent ours running her hands through the distant corners of our closets looking for cockroach eggs cloistered in the warm darkness. As a child I was all greeted with all manner of pestilence.
I remember that one day my father took me to Dublin so that I could city, little did he know that he was to give me my first grand exhibition of death. Near the center of Dublin with their backs against the wall three men were shot and slid down the wall leaving three red stains against the wall their eyes frozen in their final perilous moments. I looked into my fathers eyes and saw the reflection of memory, for he too had seen such terror in the eyes of men, he had the scars and the pension for drink to prove it.
“Daddy why did they shoot those men?” I asked.
“Because they wanted freedom.” He answered in an impersonal manner that made him yet a stranger in this land. But I was to learn their struggle was mine, and I learned to love our misfortune as if it were a brother even as I fought against it.
I open my eyes as the light shines in from the window illuminating the old abandoned building next to Castle Apartments, and I think about the person who has also taken up residence in this spacious building. I hope they get out before they get the bugs. But I knew they wouldn’t escape, they were already on their way here before I ever saw them pulled by an invisible and nameless current that tugged at us all. Outside I can see a blind man who sits next the clinic speaking of what is to come as if he has some prophetic understanding of the future.
