Insects

Insects here are objects of dread, torture, and identification — small creatures trapped, tormented, or tormenting. The seed is the insect on Erdedy's audio-shelf girder that "would disappear into a hole in a girder inside him," read as an equation for Erdedy's own retreat "into his home and into himself" (pp. 17-27). Orin's roaches are the motif's engine: asphyxiated under drinking glasses, giving "the howling fantods," roaches "that wanted to get at your eyes, as an infant" (pp. 44-45) — an image that recurs whenever bugs appear, from the insect-torture simile of "clinical contempt… for an insect you've… know you're going to torture" to Gately stomping "as if he were killing cockroaches" to the wraith-era maimed flies circling. It pays off horribly in Orin's finale under the tumbler, swarmed by the very roaches he once suffocated: "Do it to her!" (pp. 971-972). The motif fuses phobia with cruelty — the tormentor and the trapped bug turn out to be the same figure.