Cockroach Read Online Free PDF Page B

money, and those who owe, they usually hide.
    You just want to come here so you can make your usual sexual advances.
Il n’est pas sous le lit
. Matild hung up the phone on me.
    I felt my teeth grinding. That mysterious, mutant urge was coming over me
     again. So I called her back immediately and confessed. Matild, I said, I dream of you
     every day. Do you know that soon the ozone will burst open and we will all fry, and only
     a few chosen people will be saved by the Lord? We shall all fry and only the cockroaches
     and their earthly kingdom shall survive that last deluge of fire. We will all melt like
     fondue, and all I want on that day is to melt next to you.
    You are not seeeerious, she said.
    Believe me, I said, I am seeeerious. I have a magazine to prove it.
    Quel magazine? C’est un article, ça?
    Well, yes indeed! The article is approved by the Grand
     Minister of the Ascending Temple himself. He has even pasted his photo onto the first
     page. Let me come over and show you his meticulously combed hair, his thick glasses that
     are a testament to his diligent reading of the scriptures, his sincere smile that is
     proof of his inner happiness, his guaranteed salvation, his family devotion, his
     anticipation of the long celestial journey on the back of Jesus the saviour.
    N’importe quoi, bof, en tout cas les religions me font chier,
     moi.
    I do not care about religion either, I wanted to say to her, but she had
     hung up the phone in my ear.
    The last time I thought about religion was when I chose the tree to hang
     myself on. I was pissed with the gods, or whoever is responsible for sprouting the trees
     around here and making them either thin and short or massive and high. I didn’t
     think about religion too hard, but I did not take my decision lightly either. It was not
     deceit, depression, or a large tragedy that pushed me to go shopping for a rope that
     suited my neck. And it wasn’t voices. I’ve never heard any voices in my head
     — unless you consider the occasional jam sessions of Mary, the neighbour above me.
     No, the thing that pushed me over the edge was the bright light that came in my window
     and landed on my bed and my face. Nothing made any sense to me anymore. It was not that
     I was looking for a purpose and had been deceived, it was more that I had never
started
looking for one. I saw the ray of light entering my window and
     realized how insignificant I was in its presence, how oblivious it was to my existence.
     My problem was not that I was negligent towards life, but that somehow I always felt
     neglected by it. Even whenI rushed over to the window and drew the
     curtains, I could feel the ray of light there waiting for me. Waiting to play tag and
     touch me again. Flashing and exposing all there was, shedding itself and bouncing images
     in my eyes, a reminder that this whole comedy of my life was still at play.
    I opened and closed the curtains compulsively, many times, that day. Just
     like death, I thought to myself, just like death it is always there, and it will
     eventually reach me. I became obsessed with escaping the sun. I thought: What if I live
     only at night? I can sleep all morning and have a nocturnal existence. But even the next
     morning, in bed, even when I was asleep with the curtains drawn, I knew that the sun was
     still there. Then a brilliant, luminous idea came to me. I thought: It is precisely
     because I exist that the light is still there. What if I cease to exist?
    I pulled open the curtains and ran downstairs. I found a store and looked
     for a rope thick enough to hold my weight and fit around my neck. I consulted with the
     store employee about matters of weight and height. I convinced him that I was moving and
     the rope was for dangling a fridge through a window that would be held by a pulley, and
     to make the story more real I went to the pulley section and chose a suitable one. Then
     I put the pulley back when the