The Bedbug

It starts like this: a pinprick of blood on a white sheet. 

Caroline nearly misses it. She would’ve missed it if it weren’t for the snow-blind blankness of her new bed set. The spot is perfectly round and rust red, the planet Mars in miniature. “The god of war,” she thinks, a bad omen.

Her mother, from the old world, burdened her with all sorts of superstitions: don’t leave your purse on the floor or you’ll be poor, don’t whistle at night or mice will come into the house, spit three times when you mention something bad.

But Caroline’s an investment banker. She doesn’t believe in gods or omens, she doesn’t believe in anything without at least two decimal places of precision. 

So, she checks herself for cuts or scrapes, double checks the date of her upcoming period, and dismisses the pinprick as an ink stain or a factory error or something from the wash. She files the information away, finishes making the bed, and feeds Gideon. By the time she walks into her office, she’s forgotten about the anomaly completely.

That afternoon, in an interminable status update meeting, a phantom itch blooms in that hard-to-reach spot between her shoulder blades. She cut the tag out when she bought the top, but it’s new, maybe she’s allergic to the polyester. The more she considers it, the harder it is to ignore the urge. Rubbing against the hard plastic chair back only makes it worse. More insistent; almost a burning. 

In the office bathroom, bursting with the deep need to scratch, she lifts her blouse to reveal a red blotchy welt just above her bra line in the mirror. The skin is taut and raised with hives. She makes her manicured nails across it repeatedly.

It’s a mosquito bite. That’s all. 

After a few days of peace, it repeats. Two pinpricks of blood join the first, which has faded brown. She spots treats the sheets and throws them in the washer. As she’s bending low ,she feels something ignite on her Achilles tendon. 

There are three more mosquito bites, stacked in a neat vertical column. The need to itch is all consuming. She scratches until it bleeds. 

As she cleans and bandages each bite, she remembers something her mother had told her, while treating a ballet blister in the exact spot. 

“In my village, when I was very young,” she said, pressing a cotton ball soaked in vodka on the raw skin. “When someone died, they would cut this tendon on the back of the ankle.” She sliced her finger across the tendon, miming the action. “Men, women, children, even stillborn babies.”

“Why would they do that?” a nine-year-old Caroline asked, horrified. 

“So, the dead couldn’t come back and feed on the living,” she said matter-of-factly, pressing a Hello Kitty Band-Aid onto the wound. It never occurred to her mother that this was an inappropriate anecdote to relay to a child—there were no children in the old world, only adults in miniature. “Of course, no one does that anymore.”

Laptop perched on her chest, whilst she lays on the white microfiber couch; Caroline takes a self-directed course in comparative dermatology. It’s not gluten—not that she eats bread anyways—and it’s not eczema; and it’s not dermatitis; and it’s, definitely, not her expensive, organic, laundry detergent.

With a knot of dread forming in her stomach, she moves on to insect bites: spiders, fleas, kissing bugs, mites, ticks, mosquitos. And bed bugs. The pattern of three in a row is so typical that it even has a cute nickname: breakfast, lunch, and dinner. 

As she combs through photos of infected bites and infested mattresses and nymphs and eggs and molted skins her alarm grows until she tosses the computer aside and runs to her bed. 

Yanking off the sheets, she creeps her fingers along the seam of the mattress. 

The eggs are soft, white/yellow, about 1millimeter, BuggedOut89 wrote on a forum post from ten years ago. That’s about the size of a pinhead (smaller than a grain of rice). Good luck finding those. 

Next, she shines her phone light into the screw holes of her bed frame. At each stage in the lifecycle, the post continued, they must shed their skin to grow into the next stage. IMO, the shells look like the bottom crumbs in a bag of BBQ potato chips.

She heaves her mattress—not an easy feat, it’s a California king—and peers at the underside. Their shit is black and smudgy, kind of like clumped up mascara, BuggedOut89 wrote. Some people say it smells like rust, but to me it’s more of a sweet stink. 

Nothing. No bugs. No smears. No more bloodstains. No eggs. No molted skins. It was nothing more than a few mosquito bites. She lets the mattress drop back onto the frame, lays back flat on it, and gazes up at her reflection with relief... 

The previous owner of the condominium had installed a round mirror over the bed. It’s tacky, bordering on obscene—but she doesn’t take it down. If anyone asks, she claims laziness. In truth, there’s some narcissistic pleasure in seeing her own reflection first thing in the morning. She likes seeing her Pilates-toned limbs tangled up in her fair-trade cotton sheets. And when she isn’t alone, well, the mirror is fun then, too. 

The king-sized bed is the centerpiece of the apartment. The tacky mirror is its sole quirk. She’s lived here for five years now, picked out every piece of furniture, and every picture that hangs on the wall. Somehow, it still manages to feel like corporate housing. 

Yet, this is how she likes things. Her mother’s house had been cluttered. A mess of yogurt tubs and pickle jars that had been filled with buttons and rubber bands; scraps of clothing cut into rags; and stacks of old National Geographics tucked away, “just in case,” she’d said to her.

Nothing went to waste. Now, Caroline has a cleaner come twice a week and her glass coffee table is a clean slate, not a single fingerprint remaining after. The presence of a human being is nearly undetectable; she lives here almost as a ghost. When you walk in for the first time there’s a faint antiseptic scent, otherwise it smells like nothing. Only the shrewdest of noses can detect the cat, who blends in with the gray furniture. And the gray walls. And the gray laminate hardwood flooring.

The doorbell rings and she sits straight up. It’s Thursday night. Shit! She forgot! 

There is no time to fix her makeup. She skates across the floor in her socks. Self-conscious of the bare mattress behind her, she opens the door only a few inches and peers out. 

“Hi,” Roman says, smirking. 

Her heart pounds in double time. Historically, she’s always gone for baby faces.  after Roman moved into the building, she found herself drawn to the hard angles of him: his pointed nose, his sharp cheekbones, a jawline that could cut glass. To say nothing of the rest of him: the V flanking his abdomen and his jutting hip bones that bruised the insides of her thighs. Even his teeth have a carnivorous quality, and he liked to use them in such interesting ways.

He clears his throat, interrupting her daydream, and holds up a bottle of wine. “Aren’t you going to invite me in?” he asks.

Oh God, she was supposed to cook him dinner tonight. She runs a hand through her bleached hair, racking her brain for the contents of her fridge and pantry—but there’s no way he can stay over tonight. She can’t even let him inside for a drink. Especially, not if she has an infestation. 

“Do you mind if we reschedule? I’ve got something going on with work tonight, you know Singapore and the time difference...”

He rolls his eyes. “You’re always working.”

She opens her mouth to say something, but he stops her.

“Don’t you dare apologize.” His voice lowers. “I like powerful women.”

Her mouth goes dry. He hands her the bottle, and she listens regretfully to his footsteps marching up the stairs to his apartment. She sets the bottle on the glistening marble countertop and pours herself a glass. A bright, bloody red merlot. Metallic and fruity.

Some people say it smells like rust, but to me it’s more of a sweet stink.

Her stomach sours and she leaves the glass unfinished.

She listens to Roman cook dinner for himself upstairs. He’s got the TV on—local news maybe—and his footsteps dance around the kitchen in that familiar triangular waltz, sink-to-fridge-to-stove, stove-to-sink-to-fridge, the fridge door opening and closing, water running, something sizzling in the pan. 

Below, she eats a dinner of romaine lettuce with a teaspoon of vinaigrette. A holdover meal from her ballerina days. She gave up dance when she started college, left behind the music and the creative expression but kept the discipline and body fascism. 

She stares at the bed. BuggedOut89 warned readers at the start of every post: just because you can’t see them, doesn’t mean they’re not there.  The bites might be her only proof, but the hum of their itch is a constant reminder. Even looking at the mattress makes her skin crawl. 

At three in the morning, after Roman’s apartment has long gone silent and she’s sure most of the building is asleep, she heaves the mattress off its frame. It’s heavier than she expects, and when she props it against the wall, it nearly topples over on her. She slides it along the engineered hardwood towards the front door.

“I’ll order a new mattress tonight,” she thinks, as she pushes the thing down the first flight of stairs. “It’ll be over before he even realizes anything is going on.”

The bed is jammed in a tight corner of the stairwell, it takes a combination of pushing, pulling and cursing to get it unstuck. On the second flight, it seems to get caught on every step. 

She props open the alley door with her foot. Sweating, panting, the summer smell of warm garbage assaulting her nostrils, she slides the mattress onto the asphalt. Struggling to balance it against the dumpster—there’s no hope of lifting it into the thing—she lets the door fall closed with a heavy thud, just as a voice behind her rasps, “Excuse me miss, do you have a dollar?”

A homeless woman shuffles towards her, a dirt-smudged beanie pulled down to her eyebrows and deep hollows under the cheekbones. 

Caroline pats her pockets frantically—keys, where are the keys—and darts back to the door, mumbling her automatic response, she’s sorry, she doesn’t have anything.

But the woman stops, looking from the bare mattress against the dumpster to Caroline and back again. Her eyes grow wide. She steps back, repulsed. 

“You got bed bugs.” 

Caroline opens her mouth to protest, but the homeless woman is turning. 

“Never mind lady, stay the hell away.” 

The woman disappears into the night. Caroline stands, keys in her hands, eyes watering. 

“Too bad, because I was going to give you a dollar,” she calls out into the empty alley. “Dumb bitch!” 

Itchy humiliation follows her back up the stairs to her unit. She stands under the scalding shower for a long time, scratching the bites on her ankle and back. She tears at herself until the water at her feet is pink and blood cakes under her nails.

That night, she sleeps on the air mattress she keeps for guests. She tosses and turns, wakes at the slightest sensation. Gideon, usually so eager to curl up on her chest, is sullen, across the room in his own bed.

In her dream, Roman nuzzles at her neck. They’re wrapped up in red satin sheets, and the tickle of his stubble becomes a scrape as he drags his teeth across her skin. He bites down, hard, and—her eyes snap open. 

She touches the scoop of her neck and finds something small and hard nestled there. 

Screaming, she leaps out of bed and slaps herself. 

Gideon arches his back, hisses. The bug squishes into a smear of blood across her sternum, like the jewel of some awful necklace. Heart hammering, she wrenches the blanket off to reveal half-a-dozen rust-colored stains dotting the guest sheets. 

Four new bites: the one on her neck, and three on the inside of thigh. 

She calls out of work. The vacuum hums for hours as she runs the suction hose along the baseboards, the crown molding, under couch cushions and inside cupboards. It was idiotic to think they’d be limited to just the bed. BuggedOut89 had made it clear, they could live in or on anything: in gaps in corrugated cardboard, behind light switch plates, even inside of televisions. She sucks at the keyboard of her computer, the USB ports, and in between the pages of books. She vacuums the dark interiors of expensive leather purses and rarely worn high-heeled shoes. When she’s done, there’s not a molecule of dust left in the apartment. 

Sleep deprivation has her feeling burnt at the edges yet raw inside, like a chicken breast under a broiler on high. She washes sheets, couch covers, and clothes in hot water and then washes them again. And again, until she loses count. 

For the grand finale, she buys two bug bombs from the corner store and sets them off on either end of the apartment. 

This is ending tonight. 

Her hands, under the fluorescent lights of the diner, look like her mother’s hands. Or how she remembers her mother’s hands. The skin is dry from soap and hot water and slightly irritated pink. They’re her mothers, save the chipping manicure. Her mother kept her nails short and neat and bare. 

Her mother’s hands always were ten years older than her face because her mother cleaned houses for a living. In the summers, she’d take Caroline along and she’d help, pushing a towering broom around a house with a living room the size of their apartment, in awe of the one-hundred inch television sets and baby grand pianos. 

She has no memories of her father. He was an old man her mother met online. He bought her a ticket from Bulgaria and then promptly died after their Las Vegas wedding. What good luck, the other girls said. But no, it wasn’t good luck at all, her mother was pregnant and the man that was her father wasn’t nearly as rich as he claimed, in fact he was in debt up to his eyeballs, personal loans, a reverse mortgage, even the Mercedes was a lease. 

So her mother cleaned houses.

“Are you sure you don’t want to sleep over?” her friend Angeline asks for the third time on the phone. 

Caroline hunches over a mug of black coffee, phone wedged between her shoulder and her ear, stirring in a packet of stevia with a wooden stirrer. 

“I can’t,” she says. “I don’t want to give them to you.”

“Let me get you a hotel room at least? You can’t stay in a diner all night.”

She snaps the stirrer in half. “I can’t give them to anyone. Not to you. Not to the hot neighbor guy. Not even to a stranger at a hotel.”

“Hotels probably deal with it constantly, I’m sure they know how to manage it.” 

“Besides, what hotel is going to let me bring a cat—oh no,” Caroline says, standing so abruptly she nearly knocks over the mug. 

The cat. 

“What’s wrong?”

“I forgot Gideon.” Nausea rises up in her throat. 

She hangs up and dashes out of the diner, ignoring the shouts from the waitress.

When she reaches her building, her hands are shaking. Shit shit shit. It takes three attempts to enter the door code. The lock clicks and she bounds up the stairs two at a time. 

The sickly sweetness of pesticides leaches into the hallway. She holds her breath as she enters the haze, eyes burning, preparing to find the worst.

He’s curled up in one of his favorite spots—on the windowsill, where during the days he watches pigeons land on the awning below. He looks like he’s napping, peaceful almost, but when she pulls him into her arms, there’s no resistance. He’s limp.

She whimpers, gathers him in her arms, and sprints out the door. She doesn’t even bother to lock up behind her. 

“Everything okay?” Roman calls after her as she stumbles down the stairs, coughing, eyes blurry, cat clutched tight to her chest. 

“Fine,” she says, heart catching in her throat.