[
Wrote this business sometime during the second half of 2009. It is, unfortunately, almost entirely autobiographical (q.v.).]
oh dear god jesus no
As Charlie had heard it, Adam had been waking up with bug bites for a few weeks, and at first he didn't think anything of it, or didn't connect the itchy red dots, but then he started getting paranoid. For some time, now, the New York
Times had been on a kind of cycle and would do a big bedbug story once every few years—alarmist stuff about how before long every apartment in the City would be infested. It didn't have anything to do with hygiene or housekeeping or social class: anyone who visited a hotel, even the fanciest ones, risked bringing back bugs in his suitcase, and the new globalized "flat earth" was just an easier surface for insects to scurry silently along from Point A to Point B to your bedroom. Adam had two friends from college who had discovered the creatures in their apartment, and it had turned their lives upside-down—they had recently wed, and the first two or three months of their married life had been less conjugal bliss than waking nightmare.
So when Adam started to wonder about bedbugs, a terrible fear had pierced him and gone right for the heart...
Adam had read fifty articles on the Internet, and his apartment had felt increasingly hostile. He had looked under his mattress, shone a light under his bed and at the tiny cracks where the floor met the walls, gone over his sheets in search of black spots of insectile feces, and found nothing. It was his imagination. Bedbug bites were supposed to be bunched together in little clusters, these ones weren't. Mosquito bites, they were mosquito bites.
Still, he would wake up in the middle of the night with the feeling that something was crawling crawling up his hairy leg, or because his dim smoldering awareness of an itch on his back would suddenly flare up into full conscious worry, and he'd sit up suddenly and snap on the light and search his sheets. He never found a thing. The thought that bugs were hiding in his bed with him, waiting for him to go to sleep, was a hard one to put out of his mind, but he had been a human being for decades and knew that he sometimes got an itch, sometimes got a crawly feeling on his leg. It had to be ignored.
So when he felt an itch or got the feeling that he was not alone in bed, he made a point of
not sitting up or turning on the lights—but he couldn't resist running his hand along the sheets to feel for foreign objects. Inevitably he'd find something, and
then he'd turn on the light, panicked, carrying what felt like a struggling many-legged creature between thumb and forefinger to hold under the hot fluorescent light; inevitably it was lint, or a piece of skin, or a hard grain of something from one of his pores, sharp and shiny like a grain of sand, like a pearl.
What can you do other than check? And if you find no evidence, is it not perverse to go on worrying? What point is there in it? Not every itch or bite signals disaster. Adam moved on.
One morning a week later, he woke up with a constellation of bug bites across his shoulder blade, bunched together, in clusters. He stared at them in the bathroom mirror from various angles, looking over his shoulder, until the muscles in his neck bunched up and began to hurt.
That night he woke up in the middle of the night to piss, and he saw something on his arm, plucked it off and dropped it into a ziplock bag and sealed it and placed it on his desk in the living room of his small one-bedroom apartment. The thing was small, not quite like the pictures on the Internet. Its legs moved uselessly in the bag, slipping and sliding on its plastic surface.
The next morning, Adam called an exterminator, an expert, recommended by his married friends. The expert took one look at the bug in the bag and said, "Yep, that's a nymph. Looks about two weeks old." He flipped over the mattress. He flipped over the box spring. "Yeah, see, that's fecal," he said. Then he pulled back the plastic corner of the box spring. "Get me that plastic bag, will you?" he said to his assistant, and his assistant brought over the bag with the bedbug nymph in it; the expert took out his business card and removed something from the box spring, shaking it then into the bag. "There you go," he said.
The expert found several more bugs in Adam's box spring. Maybe five or six. They looked just like they did on the Internet. Adam watched them in their bag, saw them crawling over each other.
"This problem is about two months old," said the expert. "Where were you two months ago?"
At a wedding. At a country inn in Massachusetts.
"Oh, yeah, you got a big problem over there." The expert happened to be looking down at a corner of Adam's floor when he said this, and Adam nearly had a panic attack before he realized that
there meant Massachusetts.
The expert explained that bedbugs are in just about every hotel and will get in your bag. Bedbugs will get into your bag in the trunk of a taxicab, in the luggage hold of a commercial airliner. You don't take any chances: travel with your clothes tightly sealed in super-size ziplock bags, throw the duffel in the dryer when you get home: roast the fuckers.
Everyone needed to do this, said the expert, everyone in the world. The problem was nearly out of control.
Another thing everyone needed to do was to put his mattress and box springs in special encasements so the bugs had nowhere to hide, and anyone like Adam who already had a problem needed to put special interceptors under all the legs of the bed. But first what was going to happen was that Adam was going to move everything out of the bedroom, all of it in plastic bags; and all of his clothes and towels and sheets he was going to have to put in the dryer for 30 minutes on high, after which they'd have to go in new plastic bags; and all of these bags had to be filled not all the way up, so you could twist the tops real tight and then fold them over and then close them with rubber bands, loop 'em over a few times to make sure they're airtight; and every single book needed to be wiped with alcohol (70% or more, the weaker stuff just slows the bugs down—you could get special alcohol wipes from CVS, intended for use as preparation before injections) and put them in bags; and the only thing left in the bedroom on the day they came to treat the place (which Adam and the expert scheduled for three days from that afternoon) would be the bed and the dresser. That was the prep work that Adam needed to do. It took him the full three days.
"From this point on," said the expert, "this room is ground zero. They don't live more than a couple feet from where you sleep—you ever sleep on the couch?"
No, he didn't.
"Good. So the bedroom is ground zero. You keep a towel rolled up under the door so they can't get out, and"—he laughed in a way that might have been slightly sadistic, but probably not—"you gotta sleep here. You want to keep them in the bedroom, and that's why they're there: you. They get out into the living room, you've got a much bigger problem."
Three days later, the expert's men came, and they cut open the box spring and found several more bugs, which they put in ziplock bags, and they used special machines to blow hot steam into the open box spring, and all over the mattress, and in the dresser, and in the closet, and along the floor, and along the walls. The expert's men sprayed poison along the bottoms of all his walls to keep any bugs from escaping or climbing back in, or down to the floor from the walls. Then Adam had to leave for three hours as they treated the floors of "ground zero" with something particularly lethal. After that, and until the second treatment, which he'd schedule in two weeks, Adam's job was the sleep in his bedroom every night.
He was bait...
holy fucking lord god NO
