The Foreign Embassy

The ants came a couple weeks ago, brought on, as far as we can tell, by the heat. Like most invading forces, they began with sentries: I picked one off the bathroom rug as I composed my thoughts during my morning toilet, then pulled another off the shower curtain. Raised eyebrows, but no more, and when the missus said, "I think we have an ant problem," I just shrugged.

Later sitting at my desk, trying to write, I found one crawling up my leg. Then another. And I stuck my head underneath my opaque glass desktop to find, to my horror, a swarm of dozens near a crack between the floorboards and the wall, a foot from where my foot had been.

The bathroom was one thing, but this, this was my OFFICE. And they were on my FEET. Needless to say, I freaked. Needless to say, we had an ant problem. The missus, gracious in her superior intellect as always, rolled her eyes at my personal affront to the invasion of my study and neglected to say I told you so; she taped up the gap around the side door in the bedroom while I drove to the hardware store for the closest thing to ant napalm I could find.

Browsing the aisles, I was offended by the generic offerings on hand. Raid. Bait traps. Some kind of pebbles ("ONLY TO BE USED OUTDOORS"). All with packaging that stated, in perfectly noncommittal tones, that, yeah, this should kill ants, if you're into that kind of thing. It wasn't enough.

I searched in vain for what I wanted, and what I wanted was this: I wanted something that said, with true mission commitment, "This will kill your ants. All your ants. This will knock the fuckers to hell and back. Use this product you hold in your hands, this devastator of antkind, and I swear to Christ, years from now, the few surviving ants who managed to somehow stagger away from the ensuing apocalypse will gather their grandchildren at their knee and speak, in tones of quiet, horrified awe, about the plague that was unleashed upon them, that dark day."

I couldn't find it. So I bought everything else, including some thing called an Ant Bomb, which, even in my fit of rage, I was too terrified to actually use, as it required placing the thing in the center of the room to be disinfected, diving out of the room, and sealing up every orifice of said room for several hours, after which you were to enter the room with some kind of breathing apparatus and take the spent canister, seal it in concrete and bury at a depth of several feet, or something similarly ridiculous. It was the ant equivalent of the bomb they drop on the village in OUTBREAK, and I would have happily pulled the pin and tossed it in my study and gone to the movies, but I had visions of returning to find my block roped off by FEMA workers in hazmat suits because I forgot to close one of the windows. I still have the thing, because I'm afraid to throw it out and possibly kill my garbagemen.

Instead, I put out baited traps, which seemed like a good idea, because they have goodies in them that ants like that turn out to be not so good for them at all, with lots of dead ants being the end product. Unfortunately, the goodies in these traps were so good that the ants came in by the truckloads to get to them, and I found myself facing a conundrum: how far did I want to go with this thing? Fifteen minutes after I'd put down the traps, I'd managed to draw into my house a hundred times more ants than I'd ever seen in it before. And while they were dying in scores, I was starting to feel like I'd taken this vendetta beyond the realm of justifiable revenge and into the realm of wanton savagery, like if Rambo hadn't just contented himself with killing all of the NVA guards at the prison where he and his fellow soldiers had been kept, but had continued on into Vietnam proper killing every non-Caucasian he laid eyes on. How much death was enough? What would it take to sate my bloodlust? How many ants did I have to kill?

Thankfully, the ants decided to answer the question for me. Someone spread word that the all-you-can-eat buffet on Talmadge Street probably something best avoided, and soon there was nothing left but corpses. I gathered up the spent traps, leaving one here and there as a memorial and a warning for the short of memory; and really, that's what memorials are for.

The infestation has since slackened; while the ants still surround the house and garden, and sometimes make forays into the interior here and there, they tend to keep their distance. And the mental infestation they brought me, the scattered fragments of thought, the inability to concentrate, the whirling mass of confusion and doubt and questions that rose in my brain shortly after their arrival, has since subsided as well, and my thoughts have settled into their usual odd-but-manageable courses.

Now if only I could do something about all the spiders.