Pest

The afternoon tranquility in Ullin’s home was disturbed by a knock at the door. He arose from his meditations, slipped into a pair of pants, and walked upstairs. He grabbed a shirt off the handrail on his way to the front door and put it on. He opened the door to a collared shirt wearing man with the word ‘Eradigators’ stitched above the heart, and below it a picture of an alligator chomping down on a mouthful of bugs and rodents. 

“Good afternoon sir,” said the man. “I’m Jehrun from Eradigators, and wanted to let you know about our special pesticide services. Next week we’ll be in the neighborhood providing our signature pest eradication services for a few of your neighbors. Since we’ll be in the area we can offer you a special discount if you schedule an inspection and pest removal service during that time.”

“What makes you think I have pests?” Ullin said. 

The man chuckled. “Summer is almost here! Your yard is a hot spot of parasites and pests and other dangerous bugs. Ticks, fleas, mosquitos, centipedes, mice, wasps, bees, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. In your home you’ll get spiders and cockroaches and rats and stink bugs. All your neighbors have the same problem. These creatures spread disease and devalue the home and prove a real nuisance when you’re trying to enjoy your life. The problem persists year after year, and we come in to take care of these things.”

“How do you plan to take care of these?”

“We apply a low concentration pesticide to every inch of your yard to eliminate the critters, then we do an inspection of the home. We apply similar treatments to danger zones within the home, and have a selection of traps and lethal, permanent solutions to rid the home of unwanted guests.”

“Unwanted guests,” Ullin repeated. “Interesting.”

Jehrun nodded and his smile never left his face. He could feel the sale, he could sense the power of his words on this customer, he could see the horrors behind the resident’s eyes as all the awful living things around him were made known to him. Jehrun had perfected his pitch and knew all the notes to hit to excite the biophobia in the client. Professionalism poured from him.

“I don’t have a problem with spiders or any of the other things you named,” Ullin said.

“Not yet,” said Jehrun. “Not yet. But you wait and see. You’ll be calling us about the spiders and the roaches and the ants and the mice once summer is here, and you’ll be wishing someone had taken care of these critters for you.”

“What do you do about mice?”

“We put traps around your home, with a piece of food on the tray. The mouse comes and sets off the trap, snaps its neck and dies.” Jehrun animated the sequence with his hands and grinned. “No more mouse.”

“Why would you do these things?”

Jehrun looked confused. “To rid your home of pests. This is what our company does. It seems like you’re not getting it. You’re going to be overwhelmed by pests, soon.”

“Summer is upon us, you said.”

“Those weren’t my exact words.”

“Do you think this will be my first summer on Earth, and that before now I had never met a spider or a centipede or a wasp?”

“Of course not,” said Jehrun. “But if you haven’t had a problem with spiders and other bugs yet, you must be new to the area. I’m warning you, it will get bad.”

“Warning me?” said Ullin. “It sounds like a threat.”

“I beg your pardon? No, not at all, sir. Simply a promise that the infestation will come, and you will wish you had our services once it is here.”

“Not a threat?” said Ullin. “Answer me this. If I came uninvited to your house one day while you were watching your sports or grilling your chunks and offered you my services to come onto your property and spray a slowly lethal neurotoxin all over your mother and your father and your sisters and your brothers and your children and your cousins, so that they would die in spasms of suffocation and hemorrhages and paralysis, and I did it with a smile after warning you about their diseased, wretched impact on this planet, would you take that as a threat? Or would you throw your money at me to get me there spraying my poisons as soon as possible?”

“I don’t know what to say to that, mister.” Jehrun’s smile finally faded. “You’ve misunderstood me.”

“Have I?”

“Isn’t it obvious I’m not trying to poison your family? We offer pest control, which means we take care of your lawn and your house. This is safe for humans to be around, we just recommend you don’t roll around in it.”

“You mean you spray poison and set poison traps and do whatever it takes to eliminate the life from my home.”

“You’ve turned this into something it’s not. I’m not eliminating life, I’m killing pests. I apologize for bothering you.”

“You must recognize that you are the pest, Jehrun. You admit that your presence and your service is the thing that harms. Those that were here long before you and me are not the pests.”

“Heroic of you to say so, mister.” Jehrun rolled his eyes. “We were warned about your type but I’d never encountered one until now. You know what? I’m not impressed.” He turned to leave, but Ullin grabbed him by the shirt sleeve.

“You think you can leave the same way you came?” said Ullin. “Is that an option you give your victims?” He put Jehrun in a headlock and forced him into the house, then slammed the door shut.

“Mousetrap! Mousetrap! Mousetrap!” Ullin shouted into Jehrun’s purpling face as he tightened his grip around the exterminator’s neck. “This is what you do to mice. Does it feel nice?”

Before Jehrun knew what was going on and could put up much of a fight, Ullin shoved him down the stairs. His rag doll body tumbled and crunched and banged all the way down. By the time he hit the basement floor he had broken many of the bones that make getting up and walking or fighting possible. He lied there in excruciating pain, moaning.

Ullin came down the stairs, removing his shirt and setting it back on the handrail. 

“A pest is something that doesn’t belong,” he said. “A pest is not something uninvited or unwelcome, because that would make all of mankind a pest, wouldn’t it? Wouldn’t that make you the pest? No one invited us to where we are, and yet, there we are. None of this planet welcomed us with its abundance of self-sustaining and glorious nature to plant our flag of conquest in the ground and to eliminate all life that we deemed inconvenient or nuisance. Do you think that makes us pests, Jehrun?”

The moaning exterminator didn’t answer, he only writhed in agony and shock.

Ullin opened a door to a dark room. 

“Imagine your family has been here for thousands of years, for so many generations back you can’t count. And then something big and fierce marches in and levels your environment with its loud machinery and decides it’s going to live here, too. You live alongside it in peace, until it decides it doesn’t like you because you’re ugly or you go where it doesn’t want you to, or you make a sound it doesn’t like or it’s afraid of you and its fragile worthless offspring scream in horror at you. All you’ve done is live as you always have, but this big loud thing finds that unpleasant. So you’re a pest, now. Your life is forfeit because this new big thing decides you don’t belong. Is that your philosophy, Jehrun?”

Jehrun didn’t answer besides his cries.

“I asked you if that’s your philosophy, Jehrun. Answer me.”

“No,” came out in a whimper beneath the pained cries.

“Then what are you doing with your life?”

The writhing man held back his wheezing for a moment. “I have a family to feed.”

“A mouse who scampers through a house in the middle of the night also has a family to feed. Do you look upon that mouse with the same understanding and compassion that you expect your excuse to squeeze out of me? You see that he is doing things that make you uncomfortable but that are necessary for his well-being and survival, and that of his children. Or has that thought never crossed your mind? Do you see that mouse’s presence as unwelcome? Do you look upon everything outside of your tiny moral circle as repugnant, unworthy of understanding? How many mice trying to feed their families have you killed? That is what you are doing with your life. Don’t try irony with me, midget. Your lack of understanding, your lack of even attempting understanding, is not the badge of honor you think it is.”

Jehrun said nothing. The sounds he made were not words, yet they communicated unambiguous pain and fear. Then, in a burst of defensiveness, he said, “Humans aren’t pests. Pests are simple and stupid.”

“It’s the difference in intelligence, is it?” said Ullin. “This excuse is not new. If that’s what you believe, I have good news. Good for me, not for you. Because I’m smarter than you I can look at you as a pest, the same way you look at a mouse or a roach as a pest. Isn’t that neat? I have moral supremacy because of my glorious brain that has explored the deepest reaches of cosmic concepts you can’t even fathom, Jehrun. That’s the key to my supremacy! You’ve given it to me. You’ve unlocked my greater moral worth and have given me the right to do to you what I like.”

Jehrun groaned. “You sound like a villain in a movie.” He rolled over to cover his bruised ribs.

“You make a living killing thousands of innocent living things in excruciating ways, wiping out life after life because that life dares live in proximity to human filth while it minds its own business, and I am the one who sounds like the villain? Your moral compass is broken, salesman. Like your bones. The person who removes the villain is properly recognized as the hero. You are interpreting this scenario from the human perspective. That puts a low ceiling on your capacity for compassion or realizing the error of your ways.”

Jehrun only moaned. 

“That’s not an answer. Come here,” said Ullin. He grabbed Jehrun by the pant leg and dragged him into the dark room. He slammed the door behind him.

The lights came on and Ullin dragged Jehrun to the far corner where a giant house spider had made a web. An egg sack was close to it in the web.

“Do you see this spider?” Ullin pointed it out to Jehrun. “This noble being has given birth to dozens of offspring and here they rest in its web. This mother spider is trying to feed them. Isn’t that much like you, Jehrun? You do what you do to feed your offspring. How are you different? Here’s how you are different, Jehrun. You see another doing what you do, and because it is smaller than you and different and you think it a lesser being you think it is your job to destroy it. How many spiders have you destroyed, Jehrun?”

Jehrun trembled and pleaded in muddled words that Ullin couldn’t understand.

“Imagine if someone came into your house and eradicated your family because they were seen as pests. Would you like that? Before you get offended, imagine it is a being with much greater brainpower than your family, so there is a clear distinction in moral worth. What he does is acceptable by the terms you have set out. He’s a man of the world, buddy. If he counts the whole world as his home, then he should be removing pests wherever he detects them.”

Jehrun continued pleading incoherently.

“Interesting strategy,” Ullin said. “Do you think your behavior toward these creatures would be any different if they could beg for mercy? Would you even notice if they pleaded?” 

Ullin knelt down beside the thing he called pest. “Are you perceptive enough to notice the diverse forms of communication animals have?” He looked Jehrun over. “I don’t think you are. I don’t think you are very smart, because I can tell by the look on your face you’ve never had these thoughts before. You’ve lived your whole life with the assumption that you and your kind are the chosen species, the elevated life forms to which all others must bow. You are a product of inherited wisdom, not thoughtful reflection on one’s place in this world. That is the mark of an underdeveloped human intellect, Jehrun. If anything can be the mark of a pest it is a being creating havoc and suffering in the world through its selfishness. How ironic that you fancy yourself smarter than all the things you destroy. It’s your feeling of superiority and higher intellect that gives you this moral right to dominance, you think? If that’s so then I must have moral dominance over you. Do you agree?”

Jehrun shook his head.

“Normally I would not agree, either,” said Ullin. “In principle it is a bad way to think. But it is the way you think. It is the way everyone around us thinks. So let’s follow this line of reasoning to its logical conclusion. I am smarter than you so I am above you. I get to decide what happens to you because you are just a pest in my world. Do you know how many baby spiders a body like yours could feed?”

Jehrun broke out in sobs and squealed like a spoiled toddler facing punishment for the first time.

“I know you will understand my decision, Jehrun. Pests must be destroyed, right?”

Ullin opened another door, this one to a small closet. He walked inside. Jehrun heard the man tinkering with something and making a racket, before coming back out but leaving the door open. Ullin knelt beside Jehrun and took his wallet out of his back pocket. 

“You look upset,” said Ullin. “Am I being unfair?”

Jehrun nodded. “You have to let me go.”

“Why?”

“I’m a man. Please. I’m a human being like you.”

“That’s an unmoving classification. Why should I care that you are human any more than I care that you are a part of this planet? Is there something special about being human? Do you mean to convince me that with your great capacity for delivering suffering to all other forms of life and being completely oblivious to it, you deserve some special compassion?”

Jehrun moaned. “You know what I mean.”

“Let’s follow your kind of reasoning. You’re human, so you’re made of meat. So you must become food. You know what your kind like to say: if it wasn’t supposed to be eaten why would it be made of meat? Or is that logic only funny when it applies to something else?”

Ullin went to the door, turned off the light and told Jehrun he’d be right back. Jehrun trembled in the silent dark, lying on the cold floor in throbbing pain. He heard things moving toward him.

Hours later the door opened again and the light came on. Ullin entered with a trash bag in his hands. He approzached Jehrun, whose limbs had been gnawed to the bone by hungry rats and other moving creatures in the dark. He lied in a pool of his own blood, still alive, in shock, unable to move. Ullin emptied the contents of the garbage bag in front of Jehrun. Bloody heads tumbled out onto the floor. Their blood mixed with the pool of Jehrun’s own. He looked at the heads and saw his wife and his daughters gazing lifelessly at him.

“I’ve played the role of exterminator, Jehrun,” said Ullin. “I can see why you do it. I poisoned them and watched them suffer. I only cut their heads off once they were deceased. Have you ever wanted to understand your job from the other side?”

Jehrun only cried.

“The things that have fed on you do not understand the cosmic justice they are playing a part in. They do not know you are an enemy of their kind and by devouring you they are saving members of their species. But that is not important. I appreciate the poetry of your body sustaining them. It can be hard for them to find food down here. You should provide days of food for hundreds of living things. While that isn’t as many as you have destroyed it is still something. May you know the suffering you have caused and may you repay it with all the others. Be thankful you’ve got your family to keep you company. Goodnight.”

Ullin turned off the lights and left the room. Jehrun once more heard things scurrying about in the dark, coming closer.