Ben Winters - Bedbugs

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.