They do not feel like bites. They feel like a swiftly spreading sensation which arrives all at once and then abates. The worst part is being roused in the wee hours; they only feed in the hours before dawn. They know when I am asleep and when I am awake: they listen to my breathing and my heart rate, and like clockwork during my REM phase they mobilize. The first time, I close my hand over the bite and drag. I leave a bright red smear along my inner arm, sourced from my eyebrow, my cheek, a spot just above my collar bone, the knuckle of my ring finger. The carcass is a dark gooey mash of limbs, but there is little ambiguity as to its genus, and I lie in bed for three hours staring tensely at the ceiling. I can’t sleep. I itch. When I wake up again it’s to the sound of Suite Mate making her Saturday morning coffee and brie on toast. I say, without opening my eyes, that I’ve killed a bug. Suite Mate is groggy and irritable and asks me to repeat myself.
The stages of infestation map fairly well onto the stages of grief. Denial lasts for a glorious ten minutes. As she finishes her toast and I contemplate the ceiling, we pretend that nothing has happened. Before I call Facilities, before I tell the RA, I call my mother, who has logged her time in New York apartments. “Oh. Ah.” The audible cringe. “Ahhh.” and then “Just stay calm. The most important thing is not to panic. You will get through this.”
I empty my drawers. I unstick my map of the Arctic Ocean from the wall, and my print of Krishna Flirting with the Gopis, to Rhada’s Sorrow. It feels as though more than my room is being dismantled. I take the entirety of my wardrobe to the basement to dry on hot. With some misgivings, I shove the vintage Flokati rug my mother gave me into the dryer and walk away. In shaking out the rug, I find proof: a body, flat and dried out like a little brown seed. It is translucent, and the black mass in its abdomen is my partly digested hemoglobin. I find many flax seeds which have somehow migrated from Suite Mate’s granola stash to my furniture, but they are faceless and false alarms. I seal the only body I find in a paper envelope left over from a gift: it says, in my sister’s hand, “Happy B-Day Queen.” I tack this proof to the refrigerator for the Bug Technician to find, an attractive man with a black widow embroidered onto his polo, so that he will be able to hire the exterminator.
The culprit, I am sure, is a shallow wooden shelving unit, its glossy black paint flaking at the edges. It is divided into seven parts like a bento box. I came upon it on the curb across the street from my dormitory, and the friend I was walking with helped me to carry it in. It fit perfectly in the space beside my bed, and I arranged it with my books and small trinkets. It pulled the room together. The morning after I kill the first bug, I empty the shelves and shine a flashlight through the gaps in the warping wood. I feel in its corners with a Metro card, as the Internet instructs. I do not find any bugs. I check the lint filter after each load of laundry, pulling apart the dust bunnies for bodies. Clean. The absence is disturbing. Bedbugs, as a rule, live collectively. Likely there is one cranny in my room that is lodging the whole brood. Is it the armchair? Is it, God forbid, my amplifier? If it is, they have crawled in too deep for me to follow.
Suite Mate, stuffing sheets into trash bags, wants someone to blame. It was Boy. He brought them from the frathouse. Who else has spent so much time on our soft furnishings? It would not be the first affliction Boy has carried into my bed. Chlamydia, chronic heartache, lesser illnesses. He thinks that I suffer mainly from Sadness, but it may be more accurate to say that what I suffer is Hope. Sometimes the cure is harder to eradicate than the disease. There is much ambiguity in our relationship, but I know that real love takes root slowly. In any case, codependency commonly precedes it, so we are on the right track. Boy takes offense at my insinuation. His sheets are clean. Sweat-stained and full of muffin crumbs, but he’s the only bug in them. He offers them up to me, but I decline. The Internet says that it is important to continue to sleep in the bed. If the bed is left empty, the bugs will travel elsewhere for their blood meal. They may infest other beds in the house. Despite this, in the hour after sunset on the third day, I beg Suite Mate to let me sleep on her futon. She refuses, and seals the crack under her door with a piece of masking tape. In the mirror the next morning, two vampiric bites glow on my neck. Cimex lectularius aims for the face and the thin skin on hands and wrists. Everyone reacts differently to the bites. Some people don’t wake up at all; the bugs inject small doses of anesthetic saliva into the wounds. I wake up to a burning itch along my forearms. The bugs feed for five to ten minutes at a time, but I’ve only ever caught two in the act. My bites blossomed quickly and were barely detectable by morning. I never felt their small feet, even on the crest of my cheekbone. They look like ticks or fleas, but they move like ants.
I have a fear that the bugs will crawl between my legs. This is somewhat irrational, not just because they have a clear preference for the arms and face, but because bedbugs eschew vaginas as a rule. The scientific term for the way they fuck is “traumatic insemination.” (Both Suite Mate and Boy ask, “So what’s the difference?”—they share a lurid sense of humor.) Male bugs have long since abandoned the vaginal tract of the females, which has atrophied with disuse, in favor of stabbing their hypodermic penises through the armored abdomen. The hole must have been too hard to find. Though the species has adapted to practice this style of mating exclusively, the evolutionary benefits are dubious: while recovering from their open wounds, females are susceptible to bacterial infection, and some succumb to their injuries. If she recovers, a female bedbug will lay three or four eggs each day for the rest of her life. As days pass and the exterminator does not come I do the multiplication.
On day five, Suite Mate’s face folds in on itself like she is about to cry. “I hate this,” she says. I cannot summon sympathy for her. There are no bugs in her futon. Certain pangs of indignation leave me uneasy. The bugs are bringing out Suite Mate’s inability to cope with stress, something which has strained our relationship in the past. She feels the ickiness of infestation in the abstract, and considers it profoundly unfair, but because her room is ostensibly bug-free she is untouched by the subtle madness that begins to creep in as the restless nights accumulate. I tote the entirety of my library, in two trips, to a friend’s kitchen two blocks away. The books come out of her microwave floppy and steaming gently like warm tortillas. The only casualties are Tai Pei, whose sparkly cover ignites, and Shakespeare’s sonnets, which were sitting on top.
…Which but today by feeding is allayed,
Tomorrow sharpened in his former might.
During this month of Infestation I also, against my better judgement, let in Pestilence. Boy carries the Carman Plague. He knows, if he is sick, that I will care for him, because the real disease I’ve contracted from him is one of the heart. All else is merely symptomatic of this. I empathize too easily with Boy and am undeterred by signs of contagion, all of which manifest more explosively in his body which is much bigger than mine. Larger lungs, deeper throat. I take his slimy face in my hands and resign myself to catching what he has. The Carman Plague, named for the freshman party dorm, is a seasonal malady: during the first three weeks of school, first years from all over the country and the world descend on a new city for the first time and attend parties in frats and upperclassman dormitories in droves. They drink, hook up, and vomit on each other. Navigating this grand fluid exchange is an occupational hazard for Boy, who lives in a popular frathouse. The Plague lasts for a week, beginning with a sore throat and fatigue, followed by mucus and a hacking cough, followed by a brief lull after which the nose begins to run. I know exactly how he got it and what her name is. Go through two rolls of cheap toilet paper. Boy never learned how to blow his nose properly. I remember learning from my mother when I was six: don’t mash the tissue into your nostrils. Leave yourself room to breathe.
Suite Mate and I avoid the suite, spending long hours in the library. The suite does not only contain Cimex lectularius but a variety of fauna: ladybugs march across the ceiling and die in the sills; fat black wasps, from the park across the street, hazard into our open windows on nice days and beat around the venetian blinds; mosquitos whine in our ears at night. Our third suite mate is the roach, as long as my thumb. We meet infrequently, but memorably. As I wash dishes there is a plasticky plop onto the counter by my elbow: the roach, wriggling, regains its balance as I aim for it with a wet bowl. I miss. It flees alarmingly fast.
The mouse (one mouse?) who lives under our radiator is no longer cute to me. Neither are the squirrels in the park. After searching in vain for vermin smaller than my pinky nail I am horrified by their grotesque size, and it strikes me that the way their bodies race fluidly around tree trunks is not mammalian but serpentine. So, too, with the pigeons and the rats, whom I used to feel a companionship with, all of us surviving in the hard city. Now, Nature and I are at war. We receive an email alert from Public Safety, reporting a raccoon sighting on our street. After a girl I know is bitten on the leg, I stop going to the park.
The bed’s duplicity as a site of both shelter and exposure is brought to the fore. It is still the bed my body loves. The sheets are wearing thin on their third year of use, their black and white patterning obscuring stains from my blood and sweat and dirt. I refuse to stop wrapping myself in my fringed woolen blanket. During the week in which we wait for the exterminator and all our belongings are in bags, I sleep on the blue plastic bug-impermeable material of my school-issue mattress, wrapped like a mummy in my pajamas and blanket. After the first night like this I make sure to leave an arm exposed: an offering, that they might spare my face. The bugs, like vampires, hate the light and they hate fresh air, so I start taking more frequent naps during the day to make up for lost sleep. Suite Mate is concerned that I spend all my time sleeping. I remind her that I am recovering from the Plague.
To break experience down into stages assumes an inevitable development, that things will not remain as they are but will get gradually better or worse over time. The clothes will not remain forever in plastic. A process has been set in motion. Conclusions will be reached. Something will give. The exterminator will come. I call Facilities again.
Boy still comes over to do homework. He steps over the garbage bags and throws his coat and backpack recklessly onto my bare mattress. Boy is an idiot. I tell him that if the frat catches bugs he has only himself to blame. My mother warned me that if I told people about the infestation I would risk becoming a pariah, but Boy is worryingly nonchalant about the dangers of exposure. As nonchalant as I was when the condom broke, as nonchalant as I was when we sat in the same chair to watch the presidential debate and he wiped his nose in my hair. Our friendship, unburdened by more complicated labels, is characterized by reckless behavior and the failure to learn from mistakes. During sex, instead of sweet nothings, he whispers: “What are we doing?” and “This is a bad idea.” The only climax we are able to achieve is of catharsis. There is no intimacy like contagion. There is no solidarity like the solidarity of suffering. I pillow-talk insect facts to Boy, telling him my favorites, Calpe eustrigata, the moth that drinks blood, and Lobocraspis griseifusa, the moth that drinks tears.
I am afflicted by winged sins. Desire is a mosquito. Anger is a hornet. Fear is a roach. The invisible colonization, infiltrating seams and crevices and living under the very skin of our home, is a passive aggression, the source of which eludes me. The source of which does not really matter anymore, just as the contentions over salted and unsalted butter and using the dishes sponge on the table do not matter but accumulate nonetheless into something you resolve to live through for a time.
I don’t know why I was expecting a man in a hazmat suit. When the exterminator finally arrives, he is wearing a dirty trench coat and an Obey hat. He pulls a very low-tech nozzled can from his large backpack. He sprays pesticide on the bed frame and the culprit shelves, which dries for four hours. “That’s it?” I ask. I’m skeptical. “Yup,” he says, and leaves. The Flokati comes out of its plastic, only a little felted around the edges. Pillows go back into pillow cases. I am extremely doubtful. I want to see bodies, but the suite looks as spotless as it has ever been.
Boy sleeps in the bed, in despair. Instead of drinking after his disciplinary hearing, he is drowning his sorrows in my freshly laundered sheets. His sneezes shake the frame. If he is suspended from school, a host of maladies I have learned to live with will be alleviated. Ambiguities will be abruptly resolved. Is this what I want? I listen for his breathing. In the next room, Suite Mate and her friend place bets as to whether or not we are having sex. I am not thinking of sex, I am thinking of breathing in and out through my nose. Being ill has always been a fundamentally lonely experience. I have never shared a sick bed before. Boy lies prostrate like a hot radiator, hogging most of the twin extra-long mattress. When he doesn’t snore, I worry that he can’t fall asleep. When his snoring begins, I am driven to distraction by the sound of his breath catching deep within his chest, like something is broken. In my delirium I lose my bearings. It seems to me as though the world is muffled by falling snow, though it is a September night and warm. Specifically it feels like the night before Christmas, when I was little and would wake up in the hours before dawn, which stretched endlessly into the near future, on the other side of which waited the patient morning, bright and full of treasure. I keep opening my mouth to describe this feeling, but, hindered by embarrassment or mucus, I close it.
I used to think that Hope, in the Pandora myth, escaped into the world with the rest of the swarm. But that’s not true by all accounts. Some write that Hope remains contained, broken-winged at the bottom of the barrel. Scholars even contend that in Hesiod’s Works and Days, Hope may have been an optimistic mistranslation of elpis, a Greek word that more accurately means “anticipation of misfortune.” If that’s what Hesiod meant, Pandora spared us dread when she shut the lid.
This piece was awarded the Karen Osney Brownstein Writing Prize and was originally published in Quarto, Columbia’s undergraduate literary magazine, Spring 2017 issue.