"A few years ago, after I returned home to Seattle from a trip to Los Angeles, I unpacked my bag and found a dead cockroach, shrouded by a dirty sock, in a corner. Shit, I thought. We’re being invaded. So I threw the clothes, books, shoes, and toiletries back into the suitcase, carried it out to the driveway, and dumped the contents onto the pavement, ready to stomp on any other cockroach stowaways. But there was only the one cockroach, dead and stiff. As he lay on the pavement, I leaned closer to him. His legs were curled under his body. His head was tilted at a sad angle. Sad? Yes, sad. For who is lonelier than the cockroach without his tribe? I laughed at myself. I was feeling empathy for a dead cockroach. I wondered about its story. How had it got into my bag? And where? At the hotel in Los Angeles? In the airport baggage system? It hadn’t originated in our house. We’ve kept those tiny bastards from our place for fifteen years. So where had this little vermin come from? Had he smelled something delicious in my bag—my musky deodorant or some crumb from a chocolate Power Bar—and climbed inside, only to be crushed by the shifts of fate and garment bags? As he died, did he feel fear? Isolation? Existential dread?

Last summer, in reaction to various allergies I was suffering from, defensive mucus flooded my inner right ear and confused, frightened, and unmoored me. My allergies had never been this severe. I could barely hear a fucking thing with that side, so I had to turn my head in order to understand what my two sons, ages eight and ten, were saying.

“We’re hungry,” they said. “We keep telling you.”

I was embarrassed.

“Mom would have fed us by now,” they said.

Their mother had left for Italy with her mother two days before. My sons and I were going to enjoy a boys’ week, filled with unwashed socks, REI rock-wall climbing, and ridiculous heaps of pasta.

“What are you going to cook?” my sons asked. “Why haven’t you cooked yet?”

I’d been lying on the couch reading a book while they played and I hadn’t realized that I’d gone partially deaf. So, for just a moment, I could only weakly blame my allergies.

Then I recalled the man who went to the emergency room because he’d woken having lost most, if not all, of his hearing. The doctor peered into one ear, saw an obstruction, reached in with small tweezers, and pulled out a cockroach, then reached into the other ear and extracted a much larger cockroach. Did you know that ear wax is a delicacy for roaches?"

Get the Story:
War Dances (The New Yorker August 2009)