My housemates and I pride ourselves on recycling, but this garbage day we’re hauling more than a dozen bags of trash to the street, along with most of my furniture, a painting of a wave breaking on a lighthouse, my laundry hamper, and a beautiful wooden chest that wouldn’t look odd stuffed with gold doubloons. We’re sweating like old men in steam rooms even though it’s winter — the trappings of our lives weigh a lot. We’ve run out of city-issued garbage tags, despite overstuffing the bags outrageously, so we leave the rest up to the mercy of the boys in orange.
There. Nearly done getting rid of most of our worldly possessions. It’s like Buddhism, only without all the enlightenment. There’s only one last detail to take care of: with a carving knife, I cut the pillows off my beloved couch, slash my mattress along the diagonal, and write BED BUGS on it with a fat black Sharpie.
Our exterminator warned us even these precautions might not dissuade the most desperate from ransacking our stuff.
I roll a yoga mat out on the kitchen floor, pull my thoroughly sterilized sleeping bag out of a sealed garbage bag, and arrange some clothes for a pillow. I want to feel less like a homeless yuppie and more like I’m camping, so I drink whisky from the bottle and listen to bad acoustic covers of rock staples. I wish I still had some of those glow-in-the-dark stars kids would stick to the ceiling, just to complete the alfresco illusion.
Morning. My fitful slumber is interrupted by a foot prodding me gently in the ribcage — my roommate is home with her boyfriend. “I hope you don’t mind if we make breakfast in your bedroom,” she says. Of course, go right ahead, I’ll take mine scrambled, please.
I can deal with this latest indignity, because our kitchen is the Green Zone. No bugs found.
Cimex lectularius, you sneaky bastards. How did you get in here, and how did you avoid detection for weeks? It was my roommate who sounded the klaxons. I got the call while sitting in my office, swamped with more work than I could possibly finish, when cruel Fortuna gave my wheel another spin downwards.
“Lucas. I found a bed bug. And she’s pregnant. Well, full of eggs. You know.”
I didn’t, actually, but she was the one who studied tree mites at U of T. “I was examining her on a piece of tape, but she got away,” she continued.
Now, I’m a raging insectophobe. Flying ones don’t bother me much, but crawling ones set off my sympathetic nervous system something fierce. Being surprised by a spider makes me shriek in a way that could charitably be described as “unmanly.” I once stopped seeing a girl mostly because her basement apartment had centipedes.
Needless to say, this little exchange would have sent me over the edge, had I not immediately started going through the five stages of grief. This wasn’t possible. Dirty people got bugs! Our place was immaculate; we’d splurged on a high-priced maid not two weeks prior. They say cleanliness is next to godliness, and we actually lived next door to a weird little church.
“Valerie. Can’t your science experiment wait? I’m already effing drowning in things I have to do here. I’ll be happy to deal with this latest crisis tomorrow.”
“Listen to me! It. Cannot. Wait. I’m calling a fumigator right now, and tomorrow our place will be choking with poison gas. You better come home.”
Returning to my abode, I buy the strongest flashlight available, on the Internet’s advice. Even though there’s nothing to find, I reassure myself. I make it to the threshold of my bedroom, but I’m suddenly afraid to enter. I head to the washroom instead, and take off my shirt. While it wouldn’t kill me to hit the gym, there isn’t a bite or blemish on me. Time to nip this madness in the bud.
In my room, I leave the lights off. Bed bugs are nocturnal, and avoid the light unless desperate for a blood meal. Electric torch in hand, vaguely wishing it were of the flaming variety, I play the beam over my duvet. Nothing. I gingerly pull it, then the sheets, then the mattress cover away with a broom handle. Nothing. I get down on the floor to examine the seam in my now-exposed mattress… and let out a shriek that could charitably be described as “unmanly.”
I awaken on my couch, after the first in what will be a long string of poor sleeps in bizarre locations. I have to move quickly; the exterminator will be here before noon.
As I stuff our dryer full of clothes—washing and drying things on the hottest setting is effective at killing all stages of the parasite, even their tenacious eggs—I can feel my denial giving way to rage. Having learned on Wikipedia that the “thermal death point for C. lectularius” is 45 °C, I imagine them squealing in chitinous anguish, hissing and popping, repenting their myriad sins to their unholy parasite god. Every dryer-fresh load goes straight into a black garbage bag I then demarcate with white tape. I promise my roommate this is only the beginning of the genocide. She wonders if I too would have to be a bed bug for this to legally constitute a “genocide.” No matter! This isn’t the UN, this is war. There’ll be plenty of time for semantics during the How the Hell Did We Get Bed Bugs tribunals to follow.
Our exterminator shows up. He’s young, surprisingly handsome, and he runs an art gallery in his spare time. I’m worried — we need a grizzled bug-killing maniac, not some Strokes-loving hipster who probably finds my bloodlust for these hematophagic monsters ironic — but it turns out we’re his third bed bug massacre of the day, even though it’s only 11 a.m. After a quick inspection of our place, he’s confirmed the lawless menace, and he immediately moves into plotting the kill, because in these matters he’s judge, jury, and executioner.
He explains that he’s going to fill the house with two kinds of poison. The first is going to kill all the adult bugs, but since it won’t be effective on the eggs, he’s going to powder our baseboards with a residual poison which will take care of any that hatch after the first attack has dissipated. It’s going to be like the goddamn Second Battle of Ypres up in here, except we’ll be the good guys. Our worthless belongings are still scattered hither and yon, but our guy is eager to get started. We leave the rest of our junk wherever it fell, because he’s going to simply “poison around it.”
We arrive at the Java House on Queen Street with the few possessions of value we have left in tow. We’ve been sent out into the cold streets for only a few hours, but we’re considering never going home. But running away seems like a lot of work — should we just start drinking? Sure, it’s only 11:20 a.m., but we’re already pathetic. Against all odds we stick to lattes instead. Before long, my phone rings. The exterminator is done, and he’s booking it to his next call. He warns us that he’s left our front door unlocked, and for one ridiculous moment we’re panicked about being robbed. But as I step through the front door and get hit by a wave of toxic air, I realize the joke would be on whoever tried to nick our stuff.
Despite assurances the gas will clear soon, we should probably find other arrangements for a while.
Days later, we’re finally ready to go back to our Kafkaesque nightmare world of bugs and poison. But I’m less prepared for the truth and reconciliation commission.
The bugs came from my room. Just when they established their beachhead is unclear, but the molts showed that they’d been there for a few weeks, slowly growing in strength. I didn’t want to admit I was responsible, but the evidence was more damning than a bloody Isotoner.
It seems I belong to a smallish segment of the population that shows no allergic responses to bed bug bites. No welts, no itchiness, nothing. Without that canary in the coal mine, they were free to hang out and do their bed bug thing — at least until someone came looking. But where did the first bug come from?
After some reflection, we narrowed it down to one of a few most likely culprits. I’d been to New York City fairly recently, which has been hit hard by the scourge. You no longer need to worry about being mugged there, but you should probably fear getting bugged. Indeed, a Times Online article titled “A bedbug epidemic bites New York” states that “experts agree that the prime method of bed bug transmission is travel: you go somewhere — like […] to a hotel — sleep on an infested bed and pass the bugs on. Bedbugs also nestle in clothing and suitcases.”
There was also an incident in recent memory where a roommate had a house party, in which people filled every room in our apartment. I came home to find a dozen strangers chilling on my couch and bed, due to a lack of space elsewhere. Could one of these interlopers have been the culprit? I particularly like this theory, because it takes much of the blame off me.
While closure would be nice, I’ll never know the exact truth. We got them; we have to live with it. Weeks later, I’m still sleeping on an inflatable mattress a friend lent me, because I’m afraid to invest in new furniture before we’re absolutely sure there won’t be a sequel to this little horror movie. It seems safe: now I’m careful to leave the lights off when I leave, so when I come home I can flick them on rapidly and surprise any resurgent bugs before they have time to hide. So far, nothing.
When I finally do get a new bed, I’m going to wrap the legs in sticky white tape to trap any bugs hoping to march up them in search of a meal. I’m also getting a special mattress cover that is supposedly impossible for C. lectularius to penetrate. Between these precautions and my new paranoid habit of scanning the baseboards with a flashlight, I feel pretty confident about the future. Yeah, I’m ready to start living again. I can even talk about it now — when I tell people what happened, it’s amazing how often they whisper something like “It happened to me too. But be quiet about it!”
We’ve got to talk about it if we want to defeat this nocturnal menace though, right? Well, either that or bring back DDT. I’ll understand if you want to leave to check your own mattress right now, though. Go ahead; I’ll wait.
