LA CUCARACHA
 

T  A fable by Christian Gottwalt
A Beau White

When Karl awoke from unsettling dreams after accidentally eating a eucalyptus candy, he found himself transformed into a monstrous creature. He only had four appendages instead of the usual six and his whole body was squishy, soft, and pale. He felt as if his innermost being had been laid bare. Where had it gone, his blackish-brown protective carapace?

Karl had never once in his entire life been unprotected. He had hatched as a full-fledged cockroach from the egg case in which he had grown along with his fifteen closest brothers and sisters. Even then, a leathery shell had protected the juvenile cockroaches.

He was an egg again. No, he wasn’t, because he now realized that the fleshy extremities he had just observed as belonging to him were in fact not his at all. They belonged to another living creature – for they were certainly alive, given how warm they were, how they moved and pulsated. There was no doubt of that.

Karl couldn’t decide whether he was dreaming or not, whether what his sensory organs were telling him was imagined or real. He was in a semi-conscious state that was not fixed but characterized by a clarity that ebbed and flowed. He oscillated gently between being and not-being until he realized that the naked appendages he had just thought were his own were moving in a coordinated fashion. They certainly didn’t have a life of their own in the way a bunch of nymphs did, just before hatching from an egg case, or his own six legs after drinking too much eucalyptus oil. Rather, they were pursuing a goal: to grab him and hold him in place.

Something is grabbing at me! This message manifested in his extended nervous system and traveled like an echo along his neurons: grabbing at me, at me, me. Krzz! And now, finally, a realization flashed through his mind that was even more monstrous than the idea of lying there without his carapace, naked and squishy and defenseless: he was inside another being, in another being’s grasp. A human being. He was in the hand of a human being. Krzz!
 

Now he was awake.

He sensed he was lying on his back in the worst position a cockroach could possibly end up in. His nervous system immediately went into flight mode. How many times had it saved his life? Just run, krzz, run, krzz, run, krzz, because if there’s one thing cockroaches can do really well and fast, then it’s that. One and a half meters in one second. But without the resistance of the ground, and without even an ounce of his body weight, it wouldn’t work. Karl felt his appendages trembling in the air. Krrrrrrzz. Krrrrrrzz.

Then a vibration, which Karl felt clearly with the help of his subgenual organ, filled the room. At the same time, there was an intensely sour, putrid, and cheesy smell; he couldn’t identify the smell or where the vibrations had come from. He had never been close enough to a human being to observe one groaning out of a combination of anger and boredom, thereby expelling air. The next thing Karl perceived was a high-pitched hiss, followed by a blast of wind with an odor he had never smelled before. Then Karl became cold – unbelievably, icy cold. Karl slipped back into a coma.

He didn’t notice the human’s fingers grabbing him again and trying to clamp him between the two jaws of a small, but rather solid-looking vice. The human’s fingers proceeded with caution, their movements suggesting a certain degree of experience in dealing with the live specimen. In any case, the first attempt succeeded in clamping Karl in such a way that the vice pressed on both sides of his chitinous shell, not so lightly that Karl would slip through, but also not so tightly that his shell would break.

Karl awoke from his cold coma, for the effect of the ethyl chloride in the coolant spray didn’t last very long. His sensory organs transmitted the familiar ebbing and flowing stimuli, which coalesced in his neural network to form an image of the outside world. Added to this was a sensation he had never before experienced: a feeling of confinement that permeated him to his very core. This awareness was so intense and new that it overrode his flight reflex. He sensed danger and he forgot to run.
 

Clamped on his back and incapacitated in two different ways, his sensory system, which continued to oscillate between clarity and fogginess, reported that something was tampering with the underside of his abdomen.

The diameter of the unipolar needle electrode was only 0.2 millimeters, but the pain stimulus triggered by the prick in his body was so severe that what he could see with his compound eyes began to flicker like a stroboscope. He registered surprisingly little of the needle’s further path through his guts; the presence of the foreign body manifested itself as a digestive stimulus, albeit one that occurred in an oddly large number of places simultaneously.

It only became bad again – really bad, unbearably bad – when the needle touched one of the centers of his filamentous brain. He suddenly became aware of his entire nervous system: all seventeen ganglia and all the strands with which they were connected to a decentralized brain. For a brief moment, he was completely electrified, before he once again lost consciousness.

Karl was therefore unaware of the second, third, and fourth electrodes. He only woke up when the fifth electrode was pushed through his core in search of a suitable nerve fiber. The fine tip kept moving about until it stopped in what seemed to be a largely random location. Krzz, krzz.

The person whose maggoty fingers were guiding the needles had so far done everything wrong that they could do wrong. But the categories of right and wrong only emerged if you consulted the instruction manual, which a child of twelve could do, but by no means needed to do. 

A child was simply allowed to play with the neurologically inspired experimental kit created by a US start-up called Backyard Brains. The unashamedly ambitious parents, one of the few things they had in common, had acquired it after the YouTube algorithm had flushed a TED-Ed video into the father’s timeline, a video that was the same age to the day as his son. The video was entitled »Cockroach Beatbox« and featured the professional, grown-up version of what the boy was doing: a neurological cockroach dissection in which an excited, but not mad scientist plugged his iPhone into a cockroach leg and turned on some music. The severed leg danced to the beat.
Ba-boom. Ba-boom. Ba-boom.

The boy cried out. It was a cry of excitement and another stimulus that Karl was unable to interpret: the throbbing grew louder and louder and louder, as did the sharp cries of the boy, who had actually succeeded in inserting the electrode close to the tubular heart and tapping into the electrical signals of the cockroach's heartbeat.

Karl felt another new sensation: his heart beating inside and outside his body. Ba-boom, ba-boom, ba-boom came the sound from the boy’s expensive Bluetooth speakers. Ba-boom, ba-boom – a pretty darn cool beat that Karl’s heart was producing. It pulsated to a rhythm of ninety beats per minute, slightly too fast for a roach. 

A little too slow to dance to, the boy thought. And also a little too quiet. He turned up the volume on his speakers. Was it possible to get a crisper sound? This was what the young human thought as he touched the needle electrode. He moved it lightly, very lightly indeed, puncturing Karl’s heart and cutting the connection to the ganglia that set the beat.

One last ba-boom, then that was it: biotechnically, it stopped working, and electronically, it stopped being amplified. »FUCK!« shouted the boy, which Karl didn’t understand, of course, but he felt the vibration of the boy’s voice, that was for sure. Definitely not good.

Karl’s heart was no longer beating, but Karl wasn’t dead, of course, not by a long shot. As a cockroach, he was not only the fastest creature around, but also legendarily resilient. Every cockroach knew the saying that cockroaches would be able to survive a nuclear war. And humans wouldn’t.

But without a beating heart, the only question was: What would he die of? Suffocation would be relatively fast and for a creature like him it would only take forty minutes. That’s how long roaches could survive without oxygen. But there was sufficient oxygen here and his respiratory organ, a network of tracheal tubes, worked passively for the most part. 

So, he would not suffocate, because the function of his heart was not to transport oxygen in blood around his body, but to dispose of its waste products and supply it with nutrients. But in his current situation, nutrients were irrelevant, as he could go for fourteen days without food. So, he wouldn’t starve either. Nor would he die of thirst, because he could go without fluid for just as long. It would probably come down to sepsis – poisoning as a result of his perforated guts.

The fleshy fingers grabbed him again, released him from the vice grip, which removed the feeling of confinement from Karl’s body, and flicked him into a glass cylinder whose vertical walls prevented him from escaping. All around Karl, it teemed with life; he smelled his brood, his conspecifics and relatives, his family, and even a cockroach that had hatched from the same ootheca as him. 

Karl’s legs, which had become uncontrollable, twitched chaotically and went nowhere. He lay on his back and sensed that the others were avoiding him. No one came over to greet him. No wonder; after the intense contact he’d had with the human, he must smell like vermin, like pestilence itself. Olfactorily at least, he was no longer a roach.

And once again, the hand approached him, this time to correct the mistake it had made out of a mixture of carelessness and anger. What the hell was this one doing with the fresh critters? The fingers grabbed Karl one last time and threw him where he belonged: in the trash can.

Here it smelled like death, dozens of deaths. He noticed a brother who was missing all his legs and processed the fact that he still had all of his. Things could be worse.

Suddenly, something bumped down next to him and touched his carapace. A sticky, transparent something-or-other, its size and shape similar to that of a newly hatched nymph. He knew immediately what it was. For his entire 420-day life he had always avoided it, as any good cockroach should, only nibbling at it now and again, cautiously, not too much, because he knew that too much was fatal for a cockroach.

And now the deadly temptation lay next to him, sticky and moist and freshly spat out by the boy who had grown bored of his candy. And so Karl licked at his last meal. He licked and licked until the eucalyptus oil drove him completely crazy, until his remaining senses pulsated, deluding him into believing all sorts of things. Eucalyptus oil worked better than ethyl chloride, he could now say that with certainty. For a few hours, he lay there semi-conscious and quite at ease.

Then he was no more.