The man from the exterminating service always comes on Wednesday mornings between eleven and twelve. I never asked him to come. He’s included in the rent. I do’nt have any vermin, either, but the exterminator man doesn’t care about that.
He has two large cylinders on his back, and when he starts exterminating, he puts on an oxygen mask. I spend the rest of the day in the vapor of the vermin. Without an oxygen mask, but he can’t help that either.
‘It’s not up to us,’ he says in answer to my complaint.
The first time he came, over six weeks ago, I wouldn’t let him into my apartment.
‘I don’t have any vermin,’ I said.
‘Never seen any mouse droppings?’ he asked.
‘No,’ I said. ‘Not one.’
He clearly didn’t trust the answer, because he was looking over my shoulder into the living room.
‘Cockroaches?’
‘Neither,’ I said.
He then showed me a piece of paper that said I was obligated by law to have my house purged of vermin.
‘Vermin can stay hidden for a long time,’ he said, ‘but then, all of a sudden, they come crawling out of the woodwork. And this stuff,’ he pointed to cylinders – ‘doesn’t just kill the vermin, it kills the egs, too.’
‘Then come on in,’ I said.
The exterminator took his job very seriously. He sprayed every ledge in my apartment with some kind of hose. He even did the window sill and the fireplace. Even though there was no one around to check up on him. He was in that category of increasingly hard-to-find people who see their work as a calling.
He went into my bedroom and came out a moment later, triumphant. He had taken of his oxygen mask.
‘I found one,’ he said.
He had a tiny black ball in his hand.
‘A dropping,’ he said cheerfully, holding the dropping under my nose.
‘No,’ I said. ‘That’s not a dropping. That’s chocolate. I was eating chocolate cookies in bed.’
I’d rather not make these kind of confessions, especially to exterminators. The embarrassing part, I believe, is the insignificance of the confession. When somebody asks you what you were doing this morning between eight and ten, you can’t very well say, ‘I was in bed eating chocolate cookies.’
When you say, ‘I was stuck in an elevator for two hours,’ that’s much less embarrassing.
Even though it’s just as useless, maybe even more useless.
The exterminator wasn’t impressed by my chocolate cookie theory. ‘This is a dropping,’ he said. ‘For fifteen years I’ve been coming into people’s apartments, I’ve cleaned rats out of entire factories; I know what I’m talking about.’
Further discussion seemed pointless, so I said, ‘If you think this is a dropping, I better believe you.’
My answer cheered him up visibly. He took a handful of blue grains out of his bag.
‘This is enough to kill five thousand rats,’ he said as he scattered the grains all over my bedroom. At that moment, I felt lucky for not having children. Sometimes I hear about people with children leaving New York City, and I realized this could have something to do with the mandatory exterminating program.
‘Better not put any in the bed,’ I said, because you just can’t tell with the exterminator.
Half an hour later he’d finished. The smell of disinfectant was so strong that the guest I had over that night said, ‘It’s like a hospital in here.’
I had to sign a paper saying the exterminator had been at my place. Then he shook my hand and said, ‘I’ll be back next week. If you find any corpses, put them out with the garbage in a plastic bag, but don’t touch them with your bare hands.’
On the Wednesday of the following week, at eleven o’ clock in the morning, he was at the door again.
‘How many corpses?’ were his first words.
‘None,’ I said.
He couldn’t believe it, and searched the entire apartment, but he didn’t find any either.
‘You see, they die in their holes,’ he said. ‘As soon as they feel that the end is near they retreat to their nests. Well, it’s the same for people, right?’
I agreed.
With a grim face, he put on his mask and started spraying disinfectant.
He’s been coming every week since.
Each time he asks, ‘Find any corpses?’ in the tone of a lover who asks, ‘Has he phoned?’
Every week I tell him no.
He prowls around in the apartment with the cylinders on his back. I prowl after him. Not because I think he’ll want to steal anything. No, I think he secretly carries around in his pocket a dead mouse that he wants to hide behind a bookcase at just the right moment, so that the next time he can declare triumphantly, ‘I found one!’
I’ve given up eating chocolate cookies in bed on Wednesday mornings, because I know the exterminator is coming.
The last time the exterminator said, ‘Your place is getting cleaner and cleaner.’
I could tell from his expression he considered this a personal triumph.