This morning I made my way up the narrow steep stairs to my attic office and thought, as I cleared the top and saw no bat shit or mouse shit, How pleasant it is to live pest free. I thought those words and advanced towards my desk, where I sat down. But as I sat down I saw first one, then two flies, house flies, black and convivial. They landed near me, but would not allow themselves to be killed and one, having made several escapes, landed on top of my monitor where he sat and rubbed his arms together, taunting me.

Then I noticed, on the floor, a mass of tiny ants swarming, as ants do when they are devouring something tasty, and then I realized that there was another fly, who had fallen there, and was being eaten. Several hours later, having eating what they could off him where he lay, they departed, leaving his carcass behind.

I used to think that I had infestations, I had a mouse problem or bat problem or ant problem or a roach problem, but only recently, and only thanks to my house, which, over time, is losing its status as a thing apart from me, in the way that my body, as it fails me, becomes my whole self as it wasn’t when it worked and I could do what I wanted with it, without thinking about what it was I wanted to do, have I realized that I live surrounded by teeming and buzzing and crapping armies, they are all around me, they run through my walls and up my siding and they scamper on the roof. Some lie sleeping above where I lie sleeping, although not, actually, while I lie sleeping, but the point is that they are there, breathing in and out, fulfilling their purpose as living beings, as I fulfill mine.

The universe is an infestation.

The exterminator returns this week.

Yesterday I thought of my grandparents’ house in Great Neck, their second to last house, small, yellow, and oddly built, with steps up to the little sun room, and down to something else, and up again to the living room, with further steps to the bedrooms, where we almost never went. The backyard was a hill that ran down to the street.

The room I always think of, when I think of this house, is the dark dining room, filled with its table, on whose walls were hung several oil paintings. I almost remember one of these paintings, or I should say I remember its setting, a little piece of land in front of a wall, but not its subject. I know why I think particularly of this room: When my mother’s mother died, and her father remarried, his new wife, my grandmother, made an effort to instill table manners in her stepchildren, instructing them never to take food without offering it to someone else first. In a spirit of enmity, my mother and her brothers spent a meal offering each other the food my grandmother cooked, but never actually eating it. My mother told us this story.

Yesterday I realized that this wasn’t the dining room it happened in, that my grandparents had moved twice from that dining room, before they were in the one that I saw, and remember. Then I realized that none of the memories I had of my grandparents’ house, or almost none of them, were memories of things that had taken place there. They were stories my mother had told me, that I had grafted onto an alien place. It was useful to have in mind a house where these bad things had happened.