Bedbugs

by Ben H. Winters

  “Uh, no. Actually, I hadn’t.” Susan didn’t move. She didn’t want to feel the scratches. What was the cat’s name again? Oh, right. Catastrophe.

  “There was a cat. It, uh, it died in here. Really sad.”

  “A cat, huh?”

  “Yes.” Susan felt the painting watching her, felt Jessica Spender’s pleading, pitiful eyes. “Why?”

  “Nothing. Forget it,” said Kaufmann, straightening up. “Not my specialty. Anyway, I’m done. Let’s talk in the kitchen.”

  As it turned out, there were no bedbugs in Susan and Alex’s apartment.

  Kaufmann had performed an exhaustive search, “from bow to stern,” as she put it, and turned up no evidence of Cimex lectularius, or Leptocimex boueti, which—according to Kaufmann—would be even worse.

  “Fortunately,” she concluded, flipping closed her notebook. “You have neither.”

  “But …” Susan gestured vaguely to the notebook. “What about all those things you were saying. Contract kill, and, and residual—”

  “Contact kill, ma’am.”

  “Please stop calling me ma’am. OK?” Susan was flustered. How could there be no bedbugs? It made no sense. “Call me Susan.”

  “That’s fine, Susan. But listen, this is good news. Contact killers, residuals, control agents. These things are poisons, and you do not want your home treated with poison unless such a treatment is called for.”

  “But …”

  “I found zero bugs, living or dead. I found no cast skins, no fecal matter, no larvae. I wouldn’t say it’s impossible that you have bedbugs, ma’am …” A smile flickered across Kaufmann’s face. “Susan. But it’s impossible that you have bedbugs.”

  “Wow.” Susan forced herself to smile while her stomach twisted itself into greasy knots. “Well, I mean, that’s great.”

  “Yes. It is.”

  “Wait, wait. What about my wrist?” She raised her hand, turned it wrist up, resisting the urge to hold it under Kaufmann’s nose. “What about the bites?”

  As she said it, the bites began to itch, as if she had reminded them of a neglected duty. She lowered her arm and tried to scratch nonchalantly while Kaufmann answered.

  “Could be a lot of things. Scabies. Mosquitoes. Could be fleas, though I don’t see any evidence of fleas. Do a Google search on spider beetles. Half the time, when someone’s got bedbug bites but no bedbugs, what they’ve really got is spider beetles. I’m not a doctor, but I think you put some hydrocortisone cream on there, give it a week, and you’ll be fine.”

  “OK. Thanks. Thanks so much.”

  “You’re welcome.” Kaufmann tucked her notebook back into her coveralls while Susan opened the door.

  “It’s two hundred for the visit. Tax free, if you’ve got cash.”

  *

  “Oh, fantastic!” Alex enthused. “That’s the best news I’ve heard all week.”

  “Yeah. I know.”

  Susan shifted the phone, jammed it under her chin, freeing her right hand to keep scratching at the welts on her wrist. The bites had continued to itch, and the scratching was barely helping.

  “Listen, baby doll,” Alex said. “I’m sorry I was such a jackass last night. Let’s start over, OK? Remember that thing you read that time? How moving is, like, the most stressful thing that couples go through?”

  “Right.”

  “Well, so, we moved. We’re done. We’ve got a great new apartment, and there ain’t no bugs in it. OK?”

  “Yeah. Of course. Bye, babe.”

  “I love you, Susan.”

  She hung up and looked at her wrist. With all her scratching, the bites had opened into bleeding sores.

  15.

  Alex transferred money out of their “rainy-day” savings account to cover the rent. On Thursday night, September 30, he trotted downstairs, rapped on Andrea’s door, and handed over the check. Susan stood on their landing, listening to the two of them chat.

  “I stopped by the other morning,” Andrea was saying in her gravelly undertone. “When the exterminator was here. Or does one say exterminatrix?”

  Alex’s big fake laugh bounced up the stairwell; Susan’s husband was always a good one for laughing at other people’s stupid jokes.

  “Susan seemed quite upset, but I gather there’s no infestation after all. That must be a relief to her.”

  “Oh, yeah,” said Alex. “For me, too.”

  “Well, that makes three of us!”

  Alex’s laughter mingled with Andrea’s throaty bray. Susan stood, listening, scratching at her bites. She had waited for them to fade, but they’d only gotten worse: the more she scratched, the more they bled and itched, and the more she scratched. She had taken to wearing thick bracelets every day, but when she was alone she slipped off the bracelets and attacked her wounds, moaning with relief. When she wasn’t scratching she bit at her fingernails, digging her teeth into the flesh at the base of each nail. She had gotten used to the miniature teardrops of blood that would well up at the corners, and the tender swelling and mild pain that came after.

  She had Googled spider beetles, per Dana Kaufmann’s suggestion, and discovered in the all-knowing Wikipedia that they were beetles of the family Anobiidae, with “round bodies and long, slender legs.” But the pictures of spider-beetle bites she found came in clusters of a dozen or more, not neat lines of three, and they were larger and redder than her bites had been. That’s what Susan remembered, anyway; at this point, she had been scratching her wrist so relentlessly that the original bites were barely visible amid the subsequent self-inflicted damage. Meanwhile, Kaufmann’s prediction was borne out: no new bites appeared, no new spots of blood appeared on the pillowcases, or anywhere else.

  Alex’s work, meanwhile, was turning around. Early October brought a raft of new clients for GemFlex, all of them small, but together enough to blunt the disappointment of having the potential rep slip through their fingers—what Alex now cheerfully called “The Hastie Incident.”

  Each morning, Susan carried her sketchbook to somewhere in Brooklyn. She went to the clock tower, she went to the Carousel in Prospect Park, she went to Fort Greene and sat in the shadow of the Martyrs’ Monument. She did not return to the bonus room, explaining to Alex that she was finding oil painting unsatisfying and for now was experimenting with line drawing instead. He readily accepted this bland explanation, so Susan never had to reveal how terrified she was to go back into the little studio, to see in what state she would find her aborted portrait of Jessica Spender.

  “Mama?” said Emma one afternoon, after waking up from nap. “I miss Shawn.”

  It took Susan a moment to remember who she was talking about. “Oh, sure, baby. Should I call Shawn’s mama for a play date?”

  Emma popped out of bed, grinning. “Yay,” she said. “Shawn’s coming over! Maybe Tarika will come, too! Do you think Tarika will come, too?” Susan laughed and squeezed Emma’s leg—sweet girl. “I don’t know. Let me call them first, hon.”

  She found Vanessa’s number in her phone and then listened with a sinking heart while the other woman spoke in a cool, even tone. “Susan, this is really awkward, but are you guys having an insect problem?”

  “What?”

  “Shawn’s coming over!” Emma was crowing, spinning in giddy circles around her room. “Tarika’s coming over!”

  “Emma, please,” said Susan. “Sorry, Vanessa, what were you … ”

  “I’m really sorry. The kids and I were walking past your house the other day. We saw the exterminator coming down your stoop.”

  “Oh, God, Vanessa. No, no. We don’t have bedbugs.”

  There was a pause. “Bedbugs?”

  “We don’t have anything.”

  Susan rubbed her forehead with her palm. She felt like she was going to cry.

  “I’m sorry, Susan. I just can’t risk coming over—the kids—”

  “Of course.”

  She hung up and stared into space, the phone dangling in her hand while Emma spu
n around her, clapping. “Shawn’s coming over! Shawn and Tarika are coming over!”

  On Tuesday, October 17, Susan dialed the number for Greater Brooklyn Pest Management, not exactly sure what she intended to say. It’s not like they had a spare two hundred bucks lying around for Kaufmann to come take a second look, even if she’d be willing to do so. When the exterminatrix answered with a gruff “Kaufmann,” Susan panicked and hung up, like a kid making a prank call.

  Instead, she called Jenna, and reached her at the Acorn, on Theatre Row, where she was in technical rehearsal for the Tom Kitt musical, which was titled Dignity and scheduled to open the following Tuesday.

  “Susan, hey! I only have a second. How are you?”

  “I’m fine. I’m OK. I wanted to let you know I called the exterminator you suggested. Kaufmann? The woman that your friend from Actors’ Equity—”

  “Oh, my God, so you do have bedbugs! Susan!”

  “No. Actually, she came out, and she said we’re clear.”

  “Well, that’s good news. I’m sorry if I freaked you out.”

  “Yeah. Except—”

  “Hold on.” Susan could hear orchestra instruments in the background on Jenna’s end: the muted bleat of trumpets, someone sawing at a double bass. “Sorry.”

  “That’s OK. How’s the show, Jenna?”

  “It’s wonderful. It’s really great.”

  *

  The last week in October, the New York Times ran a three-day series on the city’s ongoing bedbug epidemic: one article on the lengths being taken by hotels to reassure worried customers; one on the devastation being wrought upon secondhand furniture and vintage clothing markets; one on the vogue for “bedbug-sniffing dogs,” which were likely a scam, preying on the paranoid and anxious. Susan tried to ignore the articles, but Alex read the headlines aloud each morning: “There but for the grace of God, huh, gorgeous?”

  The last days of late summer were gone now, and Susan was glad for the arrival of long-sleeve weather, the better to hide her gouged and inflamed wrist. Each night, after Alex went to bed, she swallowed an Ambien and stood at the foot of the bed for a long time, staring at the rough triangle of exposed sheet where she had pulled down the corner of the comforter. She would listen to Alex’s soft, even breathing, then force herself to get in.

  16.

  On Wednesday, November 3, at 3:21 a.m., Susan woke to find a bedbug latched onto her upper arm.

  It was perched on the rise of her shoulder, just inches from her face, a brown-black oval, looking for all the world like an apple seed. But it was not an apple seed, or a fleck of paint, or anything else: it was a bedbug, and it was biting her, actively drinking her blood. She felt no pinch, no pain, but the bug was latched on, bent to its task: It was eating her—this thing was feasting on her flesh.

  Feasting. The word caused bile to bubble up from Susan’s gut, and she tasted it at the back of her throat. A monster is feasting on my blood, she thought stupidly. A monster.

  She reached up to kill the bedbug, to pluck it off and pulp it between her fingers—and then paused, letting her hand hang in the darkness.

  “Alex?” she whispered.

  She needed him to see, to know.

  “Hey.” Louder. “Alex.”

  He slept as soundly as ever. She twisted her head toward the bug, watching as it drank. She remembered baby Emma nursing, the splotchy yellow infant huffing at her breast, all desperate animal instinct, tugging at her, drawing the fluid free, fat little cheeks plumping and overflowing with milk.

  Now it was feeding. The bug, this monster, was drinking of her, too.

  Again Susan reached for the insect to pluck it free. She formed her fingers into pincers, advanced by millimeters in the dark. She hesitated, dreading the visceral sensation she was sure she’d experience when she grabbed it, the awful little tug and release as she pried the grasping mouth free.

  “Alex. Please.”

  She pushed his back and then shoved it, at last causing him to rustle, clear his throat, and roll over slowly. “Yeah?”

  “It’s …” She looked at her arm. The bug was gone. Her skin was clear, clean, and pale in the darkness.

  Alex rubbed his eyes and blinked. “What? Susan?”

  “Nothing. Sorry, honey. It’s nothing. Go to sleep.”

  Alex did so, slipping back into unconsciousness, and Susan lay on her side of the bed with her heart hammering, her body awash in adrenalin. The red lines of the bedside clock said 3:27. She went downstairs to wait for dawn.

  17.

  Alex wasn’t convinced.

  When he came downstairs in the morning, a few minutes after seven, and Susan tugged down the strap of her Old Navy camisole to show him the tiny pink blemish marring her shoulder, he cocked his head, squinted, and said, “Hmm.”

  And then, after a moment, he asked if she was sure the mark hadn’t been there before.

  “No, Alex. It wasn’t there before.”

  “Are you sure? It’s not, like, a pimple, or … ”

  “A pimple?”

  “Well, whatever. I think I’ve seen it before.”

  Susan looked at him. “Alex. I saw the bug. I woke up and saw it biting me. I felt it.”

  He sighed, said, “Bleh,” and pulled open the fridge to rummage around for coffee beans, talking over his shoulder. “It’s just … I mean, the lady said we were clear, right? The exterminator.”

  “Dana Kaufmann.”

  “Right, Kaufmann. I knew a guy with the same name in my dorm, freshman year. Did I ever mention that? Dan Kaufmann. Isn’t that funny?”

  “Alex?”

  “Right. Well, she said we didn’t have bedbugs. She was pretty unequivocal about it, you said.”

  There was no way Susan had said that. “Unequivocal” was a word from Alex’s lexicon, one of his all-business, look-how-clever-I-am vocabulary words. She rubbed her rutted, scabby wrist with the flat of her palm. “She was wrong, Alex. I’m getting bitten. I think we have to move.”

  “Whoa, whoa.” He pushed shut the fridge door and turned to look at her. “Move? Slow down.”

  Susan shut her eyes. She saw Jenna staring across the table at Les Halles, insistent: “I have heard so many horror stories …”

  “Alex, I know this sucks.”

  “No pun intended.” Susan didn’t laugh, and Alex sighed. “Couldn’t it still be something else? What was it the lady—”

  “Kaufmann.” It was irritating to Susan that Alex couldn’t get the name straight. He wasn’t paying attention to the problem.

  “Right, right. Didn’t she say it was spider beetles or something?”

  “She said it could have been. But it’s not. It’s bedbugs.” She slapped her hand down on the table, loud, and he took a step back, startled, and ended up leaning against the sink. “Alex, I saw it.”

  “I know you did, baby.” Alex raised his hands in gentle surrender. He wore baggy pajama bottoms and a ratty, ancient softball jersey. “But you don’t think it’s possible—just possible, is all I’m saying—that you imagined it? Dreamed it or something? They’ve really been on your mind lately, right?”

  “Well, yeah. Of course they have.”

  He nodded. Case closed.

  “I didn’t dream it. It was—it was vivid. It was real.”

  Alex settled down at the kitchen table across from her. “I know, but moving? Think about it, Susan. I feel like we haven’t even unpacked. And it took me a little while, but, you know, I feel like I’m settling in here, I’ve got the commute down. I like it. And I know you’re working hard to figure out a preschool in the area, here, for Emma for the spring.”

  Crap. In fact, Susan had forgotten about it completely.

  “Not to mention that if we have to sacrifice that monster security deposit, we’re … well, actually, no. I mean, we can’t. We can’t afford to do that.”

  “But if we have bedbugs, she’ll have to give us the money back.”

  “Yeah, sure,” said Alex. “If we can
prove it. And anyway, even putting aside the issue of the security deposit, it would cost a few thousand bucks to move again, and we definitely don’t have a few thousand extra bucks. Just making rent right now is—I mean, it’s fine, we’ll be fine, but, you know. Moving is an expensive proposition, especially when you start doing it every couple months.”

  He went on—calm, reasonable, reassuring—while Susan stared at the ceiling. When he had said his piece, she leaned forward and held his hands in her own.

  “I totally know all of that, and I totally see what you’re saying.” She tried to keep her own voice even and calm, to match his reasonable, rational tone. “Don’t forget, this is not the first time. I’ve been bit before. That’s why we called Kaufmann in the first place.” She tugged up the sleeves of her pajamas, held up her wrists. “Remember?”

  He winced, jerked backward in his chair. “Christ, Sue.”

  Susan looked down at her wrists. They were red and raw, with angry tracks running in ragged parallel lines from the base of her hand to her elbow. The original cluster of bites was long gone, lost in a muddle of torn, mottled flesh. The whole lower part of her arm looked like a battlefield.

  “What the hell have you been doing?”

  “Scratching.” Susan looked at the floor.

  “Scratching?” Gingerly, Alex drew her sleeve back down over her wrist. “Baby, you gotta stop.”

  “Well, it itches.”

  “Look, Susan—”

  “Look, Alex—”

  They had both started at the same time, and both stopped at the same time, and he smiled, and Susan found herself smiling, too. She allowed him to take her hands in his. “I know this is upsetting,” he began. “But can we give it a few days and just see what happens? As soon as you have a bite, or I have a bite, or God forbid Emma does, we’ll tell Andrea.”

  God forbid Emma does. God forbid—

  “Forget telling Andrea. If Emma has a bite, we’re leaving right away.”

  “Well, Andrea may want to solve the problem for us.”

  “Are you kidding, Alex? She hasn’t even fixed the floor, or the outlet cover, or … Andrea’s useless. You were right about her in the first place. She’s a useless landlord.”