Bedbugs
Page 14
“I fired the babysitter, that’s all. Everything is fine.” Susan readjusted her fingers on the mouth of the bag, and the foil package crinkled in her grip.
“Glad to hear it,” said Louis, nodding slowly, trying to look past her, into the apartment. From the TV in the living room they could hear Elmo’s falsetto giggle. “And your little girl, she’s doing all right?”
“Yes, Louis.” Susan felt like her whole body was vibrating, could feel the bag of loose soil trembling in her hand. What the hell did he want?
“Listen.” Louis said suddenly, quietly, leaning forward toward her. “Is it bedbugs?”
“Bedbugs?” Susan dropped the bag, and her eyes shot open. “Why would you say that?”
“Whoa, whoa.” Louis reached forward to pat her reassuringly, and she flinched backward from the touch. “No reason, really. It’s just that you asked me about them. You were awfully worried, seems like. And I just know, bedbugs, boy … that’s the sort of thing people get themselves all worked up over. All twisted up in knots. Hate to see that happen to you.”
He was just being nosy. He didn’t know anything. Couldn’t help her.
Nobody could help her.
“Really,” said Susan, beginning to inch the door shut. “I’m fine.”
Susan glanced in to check on Emma—rapt, thumb-in-mouth, Mr. Boogle tucked under one arm—and returned to the kitchen. Louis’s and Andrea’s voices echoed from the front stoop, a low murmur of old-person argument drifting up through the slightly cracked kitchen window.
“… it’s a free country,” Louis was saying, “and if there’s something I can do … a person having trouble or … ”
Susan watched through the window. Andrea was shaking her head, waving a nagging finger up at Louis, who had six inches on her. The wind carried away her words, and Susan just caught scraps, drifting up through the window: “… your own beeswax … bothering me is one thing … nobody wants some old … ”
Susan scowled, shut the kitchen window, and moved on to the closet in the front hall.
21.
“Sorry, will you tell me again what it’s called?”
“Diatomaceous earth.”
Alex was at the kitchen table, eating dinner. He had made chicken parmesan, and Susan had eaten three bites before thanking him and returning to her project—she had forgotten about the pantry, of course there could be bedbugs in the pantry, why not?
“And it’s … what is it? Like, fancy dirt?”
Susan, pulling out boxes of macaroni and cheese so she could get to the back of the cabinet, recited from memory what it said on BedbugDemolition.com. “Diatomaceous earth sticks to the waxed shells of bedbugs and draws out the moisture, and the bugs die shortly thereafter.”
Alex sipped his beer and spoke hesitantly. “So, what’s the story here, baby? Have you actually seen any bedbugs since yesterday? Yes? No?”
Reaching into the darkness of the cabinet to crumble out a fistful of the powder, Susan grinned sardonically. Not that I can show you, Alex. Not that will meet your standard of proof. “No,” she said flatly, withdrawing her hand from the pantry. “I have not.”
“Oh.” Alex exhaled. “Good, good. That’s good. Hey, so Susan … do you have plans for tomorrow morning?”
“Plans?” What was this? “No.”
“Well, I was thinking I’d take the morning off. We have that Tiffany shoot at 3:30, but Vic can handle the prep. I thought maybe I’d take you over to a doctor. So someone can take a look at those bites of yours—or, or, whatever they are.”
“A doctor?” Susan shifted on her haunches and pulled open another cabinet. “I guess. What about Emma?”
“Well, won’t she be with Marni?”
“Marni doesn’t work for us anymore.”
Susan knew from BedbugDemolition.com that bedbugs are attracted not only to carbon dioxide but to body heat and will strike, night after night, at any stretch of exposed skin.
And so, after Alex went to sleep that night, Susan found a pair of his long underwear and pulled it up over her own. She dug out a long flannel nightgown from the bottom of a drawer and pulled it over her head, tugging the sleeves down as far as they could go, and then rolled on a pair of woolen socks up over the cuffs of the long underwear. Finally she tucked her hair under a shower cap and, after a moment’s hesitation, slipped on a pair of thick winter gloves.
“Well,” she asked the mirror in the bathroom off the kitchen. “How do I look?”
Pretty much like a lunatic, she answered herself silently. But there was nothing to be done about it. Susan took two and a half Ambien with a cup of water, lay down on her back on the floor of the living room, and closed her eyes.
Approximately three and a half hours later, at 3:40 a.m. on Friday, November 5, Susan awoke to the sensation of being choked.
She sat up, coughing, grabbing at her throat.
There was something crawling in her mouth, way at the back, on the slippery edge where the tongue takes root. She coughed, cleared her throat, hacking like a cat. She felt the tiny feet skittering around in the back of her mouth.
Oh my God oh my God Oh my—
She stuck two fingers into her throat and scrabbled madly for the thing, trying to pluck at it, get it out, get it out—her fingers slipped across the wet surface of her tongue. But the bug was too fast, it evaded her searching fingers, danced around in maddening circles. Or, God, was it just one, was there more than one? How many—
Susan jammed her fingers farther in, bruising the back of her throat. Stomach acids rose up, burned her esophagus. Tears of pain and shock welled in her eyes.
After thirty terrible seconds, Susan hacked, gagged violently, and swallowed the bedbug. Then she heaved herself to her feet and raced to the kitchen sink to vomit. As the yellow and orange sick pooled in the sink, she drew up the stopper; pinching her nose closed with one hand, she sifted through the vomit with the other, trying to find the tiny bug in the vile puddle.
No luck. Of course.
Susan rinsed out her mouth three times with water and then gingerly reached with a fingertip to touch the welt she already felt rising on the back of her tongue. She almost gagged again and had to stop, but when she swallowed she could feel it, could picture it, rising red and round way at the back of her mouth—out of sight.
She could tell Alex. She could go upstairs, and—if she could get him to wake up, if she could get him to pay attention—there was zero chance that he would believe her. And why should he believe her? He wouldn’t be able to see this new mark. It was hidden, just like the bugs wanted it to be.
Susan poured herself a glass of wine, sat down at the kitchen table, and turned on her computer.
*
When Safari opened, some vestigial reflex led Susan to check her Facebook page, and her eyes dimly scrolled through the mundane and mock-profound information displayed by old friends. Leslie Clover was remarrying her ex-husband. Sean Hurley was about to publish a book of poems with a small press in Nebraska. Someone was having a baby; someone had eaten at the Applebee’s in Times Square; someone had been hired to teach economics at NYU. These all felt like dispatches from some distant land where Susan had once lived, a long time ago.
She typed in the address for BedbugDemolition.com, and when the website opened with its now-familiar junky landscape, she scanned the forum titles. Nothing new; she returned to the Pictures page and stared morbidly at the photos of egg sacs, then at a series depicting the “classic bedbug bite formation”—three bites in a neat horizontal row, described as “breakfast, lunch, and dinner.” There was nothing new posted from Susan’s old friend 0-684-84328-5@gmail.com.
“Oh,” Susan said suddenly. “Oh, shit. Right.”
She hurriedly went to Gmail, holding her breath hopefully, and ran her eyes impatiently down dozens of unread subject lines, one-day sales and horoscopes and “haven’t-heard-from-you” messages, until—yes!—there it was. In her Spam box, a reply from 0-684-84328-5@gmail.com.
allbedbugsarenotcreatedequaldonotcontactmeagain
“What?”
Susan squinted, yawned, and ran her finger along the screen as she puzzled out the words: All bedbugs are not created equal do not contact me again.
“Not created equal?” Susan whispered the words. She felt a sudden and powerful urge to stand up, slam shut the computer, and run from the house, just go sprinting off into the night in her long flannel nightgown and shower cap. Fuck Jenna. She would go to a homeless shelter.
“A homeless shelter?” she said aloud. “I don’t know, those places are pretty gross. Might have, like, bedbugs or something.”
Susan cackled, throwing her head back and bouncing peals of wicked laughter off the walls of the dark kitchen. Her lips were dry, so dry that when she grinned her bottom lip split open painfully; she flicked out her tongue, tasting the coppery tang of her blood.
On her screen, the words stared balefully out at her: All bedbugs are not created equal do not contact me again.
“Hmm.”
Susan highlighted the strange numerical e-mail address, 0-684-84328-5@gmail.com, clicked Copy, pasted it into a Google search box, and hit Return. There were three matches—all referring back to the mystery person’s postings on BedbugDemolition.com. Dead end. Susan felt a new itch at the small of her back and raked her nails at the spot.
This time she copied not the whole address, but just the numbers—0-684-84328-5.
She pasted them into the search box. Maybe it was a tracking code, for a FedEx package. Maybe it was a serial number for something. Some pest-control product, probably. Viral marketing. Some crapola. Maybe it was the VIN number for a car.
She pressed Enter and stared at the screen, agape.
It wasn’t a tracking number. It was an ISBN code—a numerical code, assigned by a publisher to a book. As it turned out, 0-684-84328-5 was the ISBN for a book, published in 2002 by an author named Pullman Thibodaux, titled Cimex Lectularius: The Shadow Species.
Susan’s hands began to tremble and she looked around the room; suddenly, she felt as though she could see them everywhere, the bugs, could feel them crawling under her chair, hear them hissing and clicking in the cabinets.
The Shadow Species.
The swollen bite sat at the back of her tongue, throbbing like a torturer’s mark.
22.
According to the degrees covering one wall of his examination room, Dr. Lucas H. Gerstein had obtained his undergraduate degree at Brown University, proceeded to medical school at Cornell, and then done his residency in New York, at Bellevue. Dr. Gerstein was a licensed allergist and a member of the American Medical Association’s Steering Committee on Pollutants and Allergens. He had a receding hairline, a large forehead lined with deep grooves, and mild grey eyes, which he now ran carefully over Susan’s body.
They had chatted for a while first, and he had jotted down her answers in a thin notebook: The bugs had first appeared three weeks ago, she’d reported; yes, she’d seen the bugs—well, only one, actually, and only briefly.
“Hmm.” Dr. Gerstein smiled blandly as his hands passed industriously over her body. “If you could lift your hands for me. Thanks.”
Susan shivered in her paper gown. Her skin was rough and dried out as an old piece of canvas, worn and abraded. There was her wrist, of course, where the original scar, dug up and healed a million times over, was now a crosshatch of suppurated tissue. There was the spot on her left shoulder, similarly dug up, currently red rimmed and lightly oozing with pus.
Dr. Gerstein ran his gloved fingers over these marks and found more: a cluster of bites below her breasts, three or four along her right thigh, scattered bites dotting her arms. Some of the bites were small, barely visible, while others were opened and bleeding like stigmata. Some were sharp, thin, and angled, like paper cuts, others were gaping, obscene, like gashes or bullet wounds.
“Does that hurt?” the doctor asked, probing at a bite on the small of her back. His voice was thin and nasal, fussy.
“Yeah,” she said, wincing. “It does.” Susan’s lips were dry and desiccated, and the skin of her knuckles was rough as sandpaper. When she flexed her fingers, small cracks opened up and bled fresh.
Alex sat in a hard plastic chair in the examination room, leaning forward with a worried expression. When she was pregnant, he had come to the ultrasounds, strained to hear the heartbeat, sitting awkwardly in the small examination rooms with his coat in his lap. Susan tilted her head back and exhaled. On the opposite wall was a picture of Dr. Gerstein and his homely, horse-toothed wife. As his fingertips danced over her abraded skin, they exacerbated the itch at every spot they touched.
“All right.” He was pulling off the gloves. “Are there any marks I have not seen?”
“On my scalp.” She pushed aside her hair, and the doctor stood up on his toes to peer at the top of her skull.
“All right.”
“And—ah—there’s one biting me right now.”
It stung, pinched, at the sole of her foot.
“Really?” said the doctor, raising his eyebrows. “You can feel it? Right now? Bedbug bites do not typically—”
“I feel it! Look.”
She turned her bare foot upward, and Alex shifted forward in the chair and furrowed his brow. Dr. Gerstein bent over the foot, took it in one delicate hand, and then looked up at Susan questioningly. There was no bug, only the faint remnant of an old bite, a pink flap of scab nearly at the point of flaking off.
“Must have …” Susan trailed off, cleared her throat. “Must have escaped. They’re very small, you know.
“I know.” He turned away. “OK, Susan, thank you.”
While she dressed, Dr. Gerstein took a small pad from a pocket of his white coat and made a series of quick notes. Susan was reminded of Dana Kaufmann: the same quiet confidence and efficient motions.
Well, a lot of help she was.
The fresh bite on the sole of her foot itched fiercely. It took all her self-control to keep from scratching it.
Dr. Gerstein’s diagnosis was simple and straightforward.
“I do not believe that the discomfort you are experiencing arises from bedbug bites at all,” he said blandly. “It appears that you are suffering from something called Ekbom’s syndrome.”
Susan stared at the doctor, feeling slightly nauseous.
“Ekbom’s syndrome,” Alex echoed, nodding slowly, gravely intoning each syllable. “And what is that, exactly?”
“It is a condition, sometimes called delusional parasitosis, in which the sufferer comes to believe that he or she is being tormented by small insects, too small to be seen by the human eye.”
At the word delusional, an alarm went off in Susan’s mind: oh no. oh no oh no.
“So there aren’t any bedbugs, then?” Alex said.
“Well, of course, I can’t say for sure. But, I believe you said your house was examined—”
“It was.”
“And—”
“Nothing.”
“No,” Susan interrupted. “No, no. There are bedbugs. I’ve seen them.”
“You’ve seen—” He checked his notepad. “One, you stated … ”
“Well, I’ve seen—” She clutched her temples, trying to remember. One on her shoulder, in the middle of the night. That disgusting little egg, on her toothbrush. In dreams, thousands of them: an army. “Two. I’ve seen. At least two.”
Dr. Gerstein’s mouth twitched up at the corners, a quick and dismissive smile. His white coat was immaculate. “I know, Susan, that you believe you have seen them.”
“I believe I’ve seen them because I’ve seen them.”
“Susan, honey, let’s just listen,” said Alex. “This actually makes a lot of sense.”
“No, Alex. It doesn’t.” Of course it made sense, for Alex! If there were no bugs, if she were simply crazy, he didn’t have to pay for extermination. Didn’t hav
e to move. Didn’t have to be bothered at all.
“If I might interject,” said Dr. Gerstein, and Susan glared at him. “Your chart indicates that you’ve been taking Ambien on an as-needed basis—”
“Every night, doctor,” Alex interrupted. “She takes them every night.”
“OK. Well, a definite correlation is hard to pinpoint, of course, but antianxiety medications can create rather extreme delusional activity. We would have—”
“Alex!” Susan looked at him, raised her arms high like tree branches. “Look at me. Look! I’m covered in bites.”
“Actually …” Dr. Gerstein raised an index finger, and Susan fought the urge to bite it off. “One or two of these marks may be bites. Spider bites, perhaps, or—it’s best not to speculate. But most of what you perceive as bites, given the patterning and your observable behavior, we can assume to be self-inflicted.”
There was a long silence, during which every bone and sinew in Susan’s body demanded that she scratch at the inflamed spot on her thigh. She sat on her hands. My God—what if he’s right, Susan thought, the shock of it streaking across her mind fiery red, like a comet, followed by another: I fired Marni … I chased her out of the house.…
Susan managed, by enormous effort, to remain still, the stifled urge to scratch traveling up her arms as a series of shudders.
“Ms. Wendt, I promise you, your situation is not uncommon, and it is entirely treatable. Beginning with antihistamines and corticosteroids, just to get the swelling and itching under control. And, most important, a drug called Olanzapine, which will help your mind to understand what is really there, and what is not.”
Susan nodded mutely and slid off the examination table, her head buzzing. As she dressed, she heard Alex and the doctor discussing her in low tones, as though she were a child: the doctor murmuring hmm, Alex asking questions in his hushed, all-business voice.
“And what can we do next … is she in any immediate danger … ”
“No … not at all.”
“She’s a very strong person, just in general, that’s what’s so distressing … ”