Bedbugs

by Ben H. Winters

  “I definitely get that.…”

  As she tugged her shirt down over her head, Susan saw the doctor shake Alex’s hand reassuringly.

  “She’s fine. Once she starts on the Olanzapine, the situation should begin to improve.”

  Emma, as instructed, had sat in the waiting room with Mr. Boogle, flipping through picture books. “Bye, sweetheart,” sang the nurse’s aide Alex had paid five bucks to keep an eye on her, and Emma grinned at her.

  “Her name is Shirley,” Emma announced. “She lives in Queens! Have I ever been to Queens?”

  “Not yet,” said Alex. “Maybe one day.” The three of them proceeded slowly down Clinton Street, Alex talking the whole time, low and gentle. “We’re going to get you home, we’re going to get you in bed. Slip on those fuzzy slippers of yours—whatever happened to those? The ones with the mice heads?”

  “I don’t know.” Susan smiled, thinking I did see them, though. I saw them. I felt them. Snaking her fingers up inside her coat sleeve, scratching furtively at her wrist. Didn’t I?

  “You know what I’m going to do? I’m going to make you soup. Chicken soup!”

  “Oh! Can I put in the noodles?” asked Emma, tilting her head back in the stroller excitedly.

  “Of course.”

  “Alex, no.”

  “What do you mean, no? You don’t like soup all of a sudden?”

  “First of all, I don’t have the flu, remember? I have the crazies.”

  “Susan.”

  “What about the Tiffany job, Alex?”

  “Vic will be perfectly fine.” But he looked at his watch, exhaled through his teeth.

  “Vic will not be fine.”

  They were at the entrance to the N/R train. Alex looked her up and down, assessing. She drew herself up straight and looked into his eyes, brushed him on the cheek with her fingertips. “You go do your thing. Me and the Emster are gonna swing by the drugstore to get this—what did he call it—marzipan.”

  “Olanzapine.”

  “That’s what I said.”

  Alex threw an arm around her, drew her in for a hug. “If you need anything.… ”

  She hugged him back. “Go make some money, darling.”

  *

  After Alex had descended into the subway, Emma wriggled around in the stroller again and peered excitedly up at Susan. “Are we going to the drugstore that has the sunglasses? Can I get a pair of Barbie sunglasses?”

  “Sure, baby. But first we have to stop by the library.”

  23.

  At first glance, Cimex Lectularius: The Shadow Species did not look like the answer to Susan’s prayers. The book, when she finally found it in the third-floor stacks of the Brooklyn Public Library’s main branch, on Grand Army Plaza, was nestled between a fat volume on spider crabs and the charmingly titled Encyclopedia of Intestinal Parasites. The Shadow Species was a slim and unimpressive hardcover, with no dust jacket and a blank, unprinted gray cover. It reminded Susan of books she’d hated in college, theoretical works with titles like An Interpretational Aesthetics of Representational Art, written in dense, indecipherable text. Holding The Shadow Species up to the flickering fluorescent library light, Susan felt a surge of disappointment.

  Come on, Sue, she chastised herself, settling down across from Emma at the big table where the girl was diligently working her way through a Wonder Pets activity book. What were you expecting? Golden pages? Magic sparks flying from the corners?

  Susan flipped halfheartedly through the three blank pages at the beginning of the book, feeling the dog-eared corners crumble under her fingertips. On the title page, besides the author’s name (the name Pullman Thibodaux conjured for Susan a bearded British eccentric, puffing on his pipe at a meeting of the Royal Society of Explorers), she found the year of publication, 2002, and the name of the publisher, Kastl & DuBose.

  Susan asked herself again what exactly she’d been expecting, and again she had no answer. Emma giggled and held up a piece of construction paper. “Mama, look! I drew you!”

  Susan glanced at the exuberant scribble-scrabble. “Nice work, kiddo,” she said, and looked at her watch.

  I’ll read for ten minutes. Then we’ll go get the stupid prescription.

  The first chapter of Cimex Lectularius: The Shadow Species bore the bland, uninspiring title “Anatomy, Physiology, Habitat,” and the text that followed was every bit as lifeless: dry and academic all the way, seemingly intended for a purely scientific audience.

  Cimex lectularius, as distinct from Cimex hemipterus or Cimex pilosellus, is the most numerous of the several species of the order Hemiptera, family Cimicidae. C. lectularius is a hematophagous nocturnal insect notable for nonfunctioning wing pads and a beaklike dual mouth proboscis. Not unusually among its fellow invertebrates, C. lectularius reproduces by means of traumatic insemination: as the female lacks a vaginal opening, the male pierces the female’s abdomen and injects seminal fluid directly in the body cavity.

  “Ugh,” Susan grunted.

  “What, Mama?”

  “Nothing, bear. You’re doing great.”

  “I know!” Emma waggled her eyebrows like a pint-sized Groucho Marx and bent back over her coloring. Susan’s watch told her that it was 11:17, and the ten minutes she’d allotted herself had passed five minutes ago. She flipped forward and discovered that the first chapter of Cimex Lectularius: The Shadow Species concluded with an annotated line drawing of a bedbug: six thin legs and two antennae arranged symmetrically around the squat serrated husk of a body. The drawing made Susan’s entire body hot with itches, and she hunched forward at her seat and scratched wildly, like a dog.

  Five more minutes, she thought, steadying herself. Five more minutes.

  Susan stared at the title of the next chapter for a few seconds before fully registering the sly, oddly unsettling play on words.

  Chapter Two: Badbugs.

  This bit of mild cleverness introduced a distinct shift in the prose style of The Shadow Species. Pullman Thibodaux, apparently finished with the detailed biological survey of his subject, now proceeded to what he called “a brief cultural history of C. lectularius.” In a more sprightly and conversational tone, he related how bedbugs are mentioned in two plays by Aristophanes, and then—in a series of offset text blocks—detailed their appearances in the works of Anton Chekhov and George Orwell. On the next page, the bedbug illustration from the end of Chapter One appeared again, slightly bigger this time, and again Susan was overcome by it, convulsed in a feverish spasm of scratching.

  “And now we come to the crux of the matter,” she read, when she had recovered. “Where we turn from the realm of fiction to that of nonfiction; from story to history.”

  She leaned forward, licking her dry chapped lips, and turned the page.

  In the histories of Livy we find one Arobolus, a cousin by marriage to the emperor Tiberius, whose wife was cursed by a blight of bedbugs. Arobolus, far from being sympathetic, claimed he had caused the gods to curse his wife in this way, as punishment for allowing herself to be seduced by an official in the Praetorian Guard. The story ends poorly not only for the wife—who was eaten alive in her bed—but also for the prideful Arobolus, whose home is plagued thereafter by the insects, and who is ultimately driven mad by their unceasing torments.

  Susan licked her lips again, peeled a crust of dried skin from the corner of her mouth. Thibodaux related more stories in a similar vein: one from the Han dynasty of ancient China, one set among the Ibo people of precolonial Nigeria. One story, from Puritan Massachusetts, involved a minister named Samuel Hopegood, who threw himself into the Charles River, believing himself “bedeviled” after a particularly nasty bedbug infestation. As these stories unspooled, Susan scratched unceasingly at her neck with the cap of a ballpoint pen, until she felt the skin split open, and the pen cap sink beneath the skin.

  The final section of Chapter Two was subheaded with a single question, bolded and underlined: AND WHY?

  Why this epic fascination
with such a minor irritant?

  Why should the presence of C. lectularius in our homes and in our beds inspire such revulsion, even to the point of insanity?

  Why do we shake out the sheets, why crawl the floors of our bedrooms, hunting like dogs?

  Why such hatred for fundamentally harmless pests—these tiny, non-disease-carrying, functionally invisible insects?

  Susan nodded, murmuring, “Yes, yes, yes,” until—when she read the next paragraph—she froze, grew still and silent. The forefinger that had been tracing the words trembled above the page.

  Because it is not bedbugs that we are frightened of at all.

  There is another species, a shadow species, a bedbug worse than bedbugs.

  C. lectularius, for all its scuttling in bed sheets and hiding in darkness, is the species we know of, that we can understand, that we can name and track and capture and kill. But our irrational hatred and fear of C. lectularius is but an unconscious manifestation of our instinctive, and absolutely rational, hatred and fear of its sinister cousin.

  This shadow species is related to C. lectularius, closely related, in the way that men and chimpanzees are related—or, more aptly, in the way that men and angels are related. Or men and demons.

  I am not a scientist and cannot give the shadow species its name. Cimex nefarious, perhaps? Cimex daemonicus?

  I call them badbugs.

  Susan ran her fingers down the side of her face and felt the sharp sting of her ragged nails cutting like razors into her cheeks. This was all so ridiculous. So impossible. So awful.

  Bedbugs hide under mattresses and in the corners of doorframes; badbugs hide in the crevices of human history, in the instants between seconds, in the synapses between thoughts. When bedbugs latch on, they feast on blood for ten minutes and fall away; badbugs feast not only on blood, but on body and soul. And when they latch on, they feast forever.

  Susan read this last paragraph again, staring at the words “body and soul” until they seemed to lift off the page and spin around before her eyes. She tried to remember: When had she read, or heard, those words before? That same cryptic phrase—body and soul—not only on blood, but on body and soul?

  She snapped the book shut and looked straight ahead, her dead eyes locked on a framed antique map captioned “BREUKELEN: 1679.” Her pulse rang in her temples. A shrill and furious interior voice demanded of Susan that she close the book, stick it back on the shelf, consign it to the obscurity where it belonged.

  This is all bullshit, insisted this voice. There’s no way—

  Susan’s fingers gripped the edges of the table. The map of old Brooklyn swam before her eyes. Call it bullshit, but she had seen that horrifying portrait of Jessica Spender, her face mutilated, her eyes wide with terror. She had felt the bites of bugs that then disappeared, unseen, leaving no trace, determined to drive her mad. Susan’s body rattled. Her head throbbed. Something was buzzing. Her phone—her phone, in her pocketbook. Was vibrating. She dug it out, looked at the screen. It was Alex.

  badbugs feast not only on blood—

  “Hello?” Susan coughed, cleared her throat. Her mouth felt like it was coated in dust. The bite in the back of her throat throbbed. “Hey, Al.”

  not only on blood—

  “Hey, babe. Just checking in. How you doing?

  “Oh. Great. Yeah. Doing great.”

  on body and soul—

  “Did you pick up the prescription?”

  “What?” The prescription? Oh, right. “Yeah. Sure did.”

  “Good. So, I was thinking, for dinner—”

  body and soul—

  “Actually, Al, I can’t talk right now.” She fingered the pages, rubbing the rough paper between thumb and forefinger. She forced her voice to take on a flowery, lilting tone. “We’re visiting a preschool. I forgot I had made the appointment, so I figured why not?”

  “Wow. She’s still awake? Did you guys have lunch?”

  “What? Yeah. Of course.”

  Susan glanced at her watch: 2:10. Jesus.

  “Anyway, I think this place might be a great fit for Emma. I’ll tell you about it later.”

  She looked across the table. Emma was slumped forward, her head buried in her folded arms, asleep with a forest green Crayola clutched limply in her little fist.

  “Oh, well, that’s great,” said Alex. “And you got the medicine—”

  Susan turned off her iPhone and then used its flat surface to soothe a fiery patch on her back, rubbing it between her shoulder blades. Then she jammed the phone in her pocket, reached across the table to pat Emma’s hair, and kept reading.

  But where do they come from? This shadow species, this race of tormenters, this species within—beneath—beyond a species? Where do they come from, and why?

  Nobody knows. Even among those few of us who understand, who believe in this animal called badbugs, who have no choice but to believe—nobody knows.

  But it is beyond doubt that there are places—anguished places—the kind of places that give rise to sleeping nightmares and waking dreams—those places we all know of and pretend to laugh about—where certain dogs will not set foot—where people do things late at night they do not understand, things they wish in the morning could be undone.

  “Oh for fuck’s sake I knew,” Susan said, the words coming out in a dry rush of air, her whole body trembling. She remembered her night of wild, mesmerized painting, and even before that there were the dreams, from their first night in that house, the dreams …

  “I knew I knew I knew …”

  But even in these despairing places, the badbugs will come only when invited.

  Invited. Of course. As she read, Susan mumbled to herself, a despairing chant of self-accusation: “I knew I knew I knew …”

  Someone has to commit the act, think the thought that throws open the door to the darkness. Someone has to give off the unholy heat and light that draws forth the badbugs from the shadows. For as bedbugs are drawn to heat and carbon dioxide, badbugs are drawn to the hot stink of evil.

  Susan struggled for air, heaving a series of thick breaths as she turned the page.

  And now there is only one question left: How to get rid of them?

  Unfortunately, there is only one way to remove the blight.

  There is only one way.

  What Susan read next made her whole body shake violently. She scratched at her scalp, tugging painfully at the roots of her hair. She picked at the scabs and welts that dotted her body. She gnawed at her already ravaged nails, working down the tips of fingers, down to the knuckles, which she chewed at like an animal, sucking and biting until the skin stretched over the joint split, and she tasted blood on her tongue.

  She read it one more time, the short, brutal paragraph, and buried her face in her hands. “Oh, God,” whispered Susan Wendt. “Oh, no.”

  “Mama? Hey, Mama-jamma?”

  The sound was small and high pitched, an irritating buzz, a fly coming closer and closer. Susan kept her eyes on the pages, head bowed to the book, her hands pressed to her ears. There was only one page left, a brief and mournful postscript, and Susan read it with tears in her eyes.

  I am not a scientist, or an exterminator, or any kind of demonologist or spiritualist. All of my knowledge has been gained the hard way. If you have found this book bizarre and impossible to believe, then I pray you never have occasion to reconsider that opinion.

  “Hey, Mama?”

  But if you think it’s true, then for God’s sake pity me. And if you know it’s true, then it is I who pities you.

  “Mama?”

  Susan closed her eyes, slapped her palm down on the table. “What, Em?”

  Emma stared back, startled, her eyes wide and trembling with tears; over her shoulder, Susan saw the fat librarian behind the reference desk look up and scowl. Susan must have spoken louder than she intended.

  “I’m hungry, Mama.”

  Susan’s head was pounding; her eyes burned behind their lids.

/>   “Sorry, hon. I just …” Susan coughed into her fist. She closed the book. That was the end. “OK, boo-boo. OK, let’s go.”

  *

  Twenty minutes later, they were back on the subway, and Susan’s whole body was trembling, her mind reeling from all she had read. Her back itched; her cheeks itched; the back of her neck itched vividly, like it was swarmed with mosquitoes or biting flies. As the train made its rumbling way from Grand Army Plaza to Bergen Street toward home, Susan noticed that all the people in the seats around them—giggly, flirty high school students, a couple of elderly retirees, a hard-faced white man with his suitcase on the seat beside him—were staring at her. No doubt about it: they could tell. They were watching her, shifting away from her, whispering to one another, horrified by what was crawling over her flesh. Susan ducked her head and looked around furtively with hot, resentful eyes. Emma, slumped beside her in a hungry and exhausted daze, gazed up at her mom.

  “Mama? Are you worried about the buggies, Mama?”

  “A little bit, honey. Just a little bit.”

  Emma bit at her pretty red lips. “Are the buggies going to hurt me?”

  “No. No, no, no.” She squeezed the girl to her lap. “I promise.”

  The promise was like ash in her mouth. How could she promise that? She let go of Emma’s hand, thinking that with every touch, every loving gesture, she provided a bridge by which the monsters were jumping from her flesh onto her daughter’s. The things she had read in the book were a mad jumble in her mind. The bugs were not her imagination, not the symptom of some psychiatric illness or hallucination. Something terrible had happened to her—was still happening. The bedbugs were more than bedbugs, they weren’t going anywhere, and they could not be escaped.

  The 2 train rolled to a stop at Clark Street, the doors swooshed open, and Susan and her daughter got off.

  24.

  The rest of that day, the bugs would not let Susan be.

  She went through the motions of the afternoon like a robot, her body enacting the familiar movements: unclip Emma from the stroller, heave her up the stairs and through the door, prepare lunch, feed lunch, put her down for nap. When Emma woke up, Susan mustered the wherewithal to play a couple rounds of Candy Land.