Bedbugs

16

On Wednesday, November 3, at 3:21 a.m., Susan woke to find a bedbug latched onto her upper arm.

It was perched on the rise of her shoulder, just inches from her face, a brown-black oval, looking for all the world like an apple seed. But it was not an apple seed, or a fleck of paint, or anything else: it was a bedbug, and it was biting her, actively drinking her blood. She felt no pinch, no pain, but the bug was latched on, bent to its task: It was eating her — this thing was feasting on her flesh.

Feasting. The word caused bile to bubble up from Susan’s gut, and she tasted it at the back of her throat. A monster is feasting on my blood, she thought stupidly. A monster.

She reached up to kill the bedbug, to pluck it off and pulp it between her fingers — and then paused, letting her hand hang in the darkness.

“Alex?” she whispered.

She needed him to see, to know.

“Hey.” Louder. “Alex.”

He slept as soundly as ever. She twisted her head toward the bug, watching as it drank. She remembered baby Emma nursing, the splotchy yellow infant huffing at her breast, all desperate animal instinct, tugging at her, drawing the fluid free, fat little cheeks plumping and overflowing with milk.

Now it was feeding. The bug, this monster, was drinking of her, too.

Again Susan reached for the insect to pluck it free. She formed her fingers into pincers, advanced by millimeters in the dark. She hesitated, dreading the visceral sensation she was sure she’d experience when she grabbed it, the awful little tug and release as she pried the grasping mouth free.

“Alex. Please.”

She pushed his back and then shoved it, at last causing him to rustle, clear his throat, and roll over slowly. “Yeah?”

“It’s …” She looked at her arm. The bug was gone. Her skin was clear, clean, and pale in the darkness.

Alex rubbed his eyes and blinked. “What? Susan?”

“Nothing. Sorry, honey. It’s nothing. Go to sleep.”

Alex did so, slipping back into unconsciousness, and Susan lay on her side of the bed with her heart hammering, her body awash in adrenalin. The red lines of the bedside clock said 3:27. She went downstairs to wait for dawn.

17

Alex wasn’t convinced.

When he came downstairs in the morning, a few minutes after seven, and Susan tugged down the strap of her Old Navy camisole to show him the tiny pink blemish marring her shoulder, he cocked his head, squinted, and said, “Hmm.”

And then, after a moment, he asked if she was sure the mark hadn’t been there before.

“No, Alex. It wasn’t there before.”

“Are you sure? It’s not, like, a pimple, or … ”

“A pimple?”

“Well, whatever. I think I’ve seen it before.”

Susan looked at him. “Alex. I saw the bug. I woke up and saw it biting me. I felt it.”

He sighed, said, “Bleh,” and pulled open the fridge to rummage around for coffee beans, talking over his shoulder. “It’s just … I mean, the lady said we were clear, right? The exterminator.”

“Dana Kaufmann.”

“Right, Kaufmann. I knew a guy with the same name in my dorm, freshman year. Did I ever mention that? Dan Kaufmann. Isn’t that funny?”

“Alex?”

“Right. Well, she said we didn’t have bedbugs. She was pretty unequivocal about it, you said.”

There was no way Susan had said that. “Unequivocal” was a word from Alex’s lexicon, one of his all-business, look-how-clever-I-am vocabulary words. She rubbed her rutted, scabby wrist with the flat of her palm. “She was wrong, Alex. I’m getting bitten. I think we have to move.”

“Whoa, whoa.” He pushed shut the fridge door and turned to look at her. “Move? Slow down.”

Susan shut her eyes. She saw Jenna staring across the table at Les Halles, insistent: “I have heard so many horror stories …”

“Alex, I know this sucks.”

“No pun intended.” Susan didn’t laugh, and Alex sighed. “Couldn’t it still be something else? What was it the lady—”

“Kaufmann.” It was irritating to Susan that Alex couldn’t get the name straight. He wasn’t paying attention to the problem.

“Right, right. Didn’t she say it was spider beetles or something?”

“She said it could have been. But it’s not. It’s bedbugs.” She slapped her hand down on the table, loud, and he took a step back, startled, and ended up leaning against the sink. “Alex, I saw it.”

“I know you did, baby.” Alex raised his hands in gentle surrender. He wore baggy pajama bottoms and a ratty, ancient softball jersey. “But you don’t think it’s possible — just possible, is all I’m saying — that you imagined it? Dreamed it or something? They’ve really been on your mind lately, right?”

“Well, yeah. Of course they have.”

He nodded. Case closed.

“I didn’t dream it. It was — it was vivid. It was real.”

Alex settled down at the kitchen table across from her. “I know, but moving? Think about it, Susan. I feel like we haven’t even unpacked. And it took me a little while, but, you know, I feel like I’m settling in here, I’ve got the commute down. I like it. And I know you’re working hard to figure out a preschool in the area, here, for Emma for the spring.”

Crap. In fact, Susan had forgotten about it completely.

“Not to mention that if we have to sacrifice that monster security deposit, we’re … well, actually, no. I mean, we can’t. We can’t afford to do that.”

“But if we have bedbugs, she’ll have to give us the money back.”

“Yeah, sure,” said Alex. “If we can prove it. And anyway, even putting aside the issue of the security deposit, it would cost a few thousand bucks to move again, and we definitely don’t have a few thousand extra bucks. Just making rent right now is — I mean, it’s fine, we’ll be fine, but, you know. Moving is an expensive proposition, especially when you start doing it every couple months.”

He went on — calm, reasonable, reassuring — while Susan stared at the ceiling. When he had said his piece, she leaned forward and held his hands in her own.

“I totally know all of that, and I totally see what you’re saying.” She tried to keep her own voice even and calm, to match his reasonable, rational tone. “Don’t forget, this is not the first time. I’ve been bit before. That’s why we called Kaufmann in the first place.” She tugged up the sleeves of her pajamas, held up her wrists. “Remember?”

He winced, jerked backward in his chair. “Christ, Sue.”

Susan looked down at her wrists. They were red and raw, with angry tracks running in ragged parallel lines from the base of her hand to her elbow. The original cluster of bites was long gone, lost in a muddle of torn, mottled flesh. The whole lower part of her arm looked like a battlefield.

“What the hell have you been doing?”

“Scratching.” Susan looked at the floor.

“Scratching?” Gingerly, Alex drew her sleeve back down over her wrist. “Baby, you gotta stop.”

“Well, it itches.”

“Look, Susan—”

“Look, Alex—”

They had both started at the same time, and both stopped at the same time, and he smiled, and Susan found herself smiling, too. She allowed him to take her hands in his. “I know this is upsetting,” he began. “But can we give it a few days and just see what happens? As soon as you have a bite, or I have a bite, or God forbid Emma does, we’ll tell Andrea.”

God forbid Emma does. God forbid—

“Forget telling Andrea. If Emma has a bite, we’re leaving right away.”

“Well, Andrea may want to solve the problem for us.”

“Are you kidding, Alex? She hasn’t even fixed the floor, or the outlet cover, or … Andrea’s useless. You were right about her in the first place. She’s a useless landlord.”

“OK, so then we’ll move. We will. If we have to, we’ll figure it out. I promise.”

The Mr. Coffee beeped, and Alex stood abruptly to pour himself a cup. Susan was imagining Andrea, poor old Andrea, nodding, stoic but brokenhearted when presented with the news that they were leaving. She remembered the feel of the shaky old hand resting on her elbow, the two of them enjoying a mother-daughter kind of moment on the stoop that afternoon, partners in some unnameable melancholy.

“So that’s the plan,” Alex said, pouring his coffee and smiling gently. “We give it a few days. If we so much as hear a bug farting in the night, we are out of here.”

Susan sighed. She knew what he was doing; kicking the can down the road, giving her time to forget this flight of fancy when a few days had gone by. It had happened before. When she had wanted to get a dog; when she had made noises about leaving New York, moving upstate, somewhere with mountains. He would say, hmm, let’s think about it, hmm, we’ll talk about it next week, when I’m not so crazy at work, when Emma’s not sick, whatever … and eventually other things cropped up to distract her attention. She looked at her shoulder. The pink mark on her arm was tiny, barely visible. Maybe it was a pimple. And they had brought in a professional, paid good money for a thorough investigation not two weeks ago, and been given the all clear.

But the fresh knot of unease that had formed in her chest that morning at three o’clock, when she woke to see the monster on her shoulder—it was no dream, no dream at all—had not abated. It throbbed, sending out one message, over and over: they had to move, had to get out of there, and quick.

Or else or else or else.

Alex turned to look at the clock, and Susan gnawed furtively at her nails, wrenching off a hunk of thumbnail and spitting it on the floor. A pulse of pain shot up her thumb, and blood welled where the nail had been and drooled down over the knuckle. Alex turned back and planted a sweet kiss on her cheek. “So, we’ll handle it. We’re on top of it.”

“OK,” she said and smiled weakly, rubbing her eyes. “OK.”

Clutching his coffee cup, Alex padded upstairs to get ready for his day. As soon as he disappeared, Susan’s shoulder began to itch.

18

When Marni arrived for work, an hour and a half later, Alex had just left, and Susan heard him on the exterior stairs, greeting the nanny in passing. She had remained in the kitchen, slowly sipping her coffee and staring with dead eyes out the front windows.

“Hey,” Marni called brightly from the front door, and Susan leaned back in the chair to respond.

“Morning. Emma’s upstairs.”

Marni poked her head into the kitchen, and the girl’s big brown eyes and tousled auburn hair were framed by the morning sunlight like a shampoo commercial. “You all right, Susan?”

“Yeah. I’m fine.”

Susan smiled tightly. Marni was so effortlessly beautiful, and she could only imagine what she herself must look like: unshowered and exhausted, her hair a knotted mess, her eyes red rimmed, her face unmade-up and greasy.

“Marni!” Emma squealed from upstairs. “I’m making a pee-pee, Marni!”

“Awesome!” Marni yelled. “Here I come!” She bounded out of the kitchen toward the stairs, flashing an ain’t-she-cute? grin over her shoulder as she went.

Susan rose and trudged up behind her, wondering about the moment a few minutes earlier, when Marni had brushed past Alex outside the apartment on the stairway landing. It was a small space. How close had they passed? Had her small perky breasts pressed against his chest? Had Alex gotten a deep noseful of her flirty orange-blossom perfume? How often did they squeeze past each other that way, while Susan was upstairs picking out Emma’s clothes or downstairs pouring milk on cereal? Marni was immortal, impervious to tiredness or hurt. She was like Alex in that way, Susan reflected sourly: both of them wore the mantle of the world so lightly. Not the type to get sunburned, or stung by bees, or suffer the untimely death of their mothers.

Susan climbed the steps until she stood on the landing between the bedrooms, watching Marni get Emma dressed. Her eyes lingered on her daughter’s naked body: her clear vanilla skin, the bulge of her tummy, the fragile lines of her legs, the small pink creases of her nipples.

“Hey, Em? Do you feel itchy?”

Emma looked up and giggled, like it was a joke. “No, I do not.”

Marni laughed and Emma waggled her head playfully, but Susan didn’t say, “Good puppy,” like she was supposed to. She nodded silently, slowly, and went back down the stairs to the kitchen.

Susan turned on her MacBook and drummed her fingers on the kitchen table until the screen lit up, telling herself all the while that she was being an idiot. Go take a shower, she told herself. Put on something pretty, get the hell outside. It was really a great area — the Promenade, the cute coffee shops on Smith Street, that row of antique-furniture stores along Atlantic Avenue. Outside the kitchen windows of 56 Cranberry Street the day had blossomed bright and blue, the kind of crystal blue you only get on crisp autumn days, when smoky clouds drift through pockets of sunlight.

Go paint something, for God’s sake. Capture the autumn light. Eat a bagel.

Instead, Susan stayed rooted to her kitchen chair, drinking coffee and surfing the Internet, her face bathed in the pale light of the screen. She Googled “bedbugs” and “bedbug infestation” and “signs of bedbug infestation,” scanned the resulting paragraphs, and jumped from link to link. She downloaded an article from the Journal of Applied Entomology, scrolled through chat-room threads, and watched YouTube clips of bedbugs swarming in laboratory jars.

“Yick,” said Susan.

When the coffeepot was empty she brewed more.

Susan learned that bedbugs can be killed by extremes of heat and cold; she learned that they hide in the hair of their victims, in discarded clothes, under beds, and in couch cushions. Back on BedbugDemolition.com, Susan discovered numerous schools of thought relating to bedbug control. Some exterminators adhered to the aggressive methods of Dana Kaufmann: contact kill, residual kill, growth control. Some advocated the exclusive use of pyrethroids; others suggested more traditional insecticides or a compound made of diatomaceous earth, which could be purchased at pet-supply stores and which, when sprinkled around the home, kills the bugs by drying out their waxy membranes.

“DDT!!!!!!” suggested one contributor, who signed himself EndsJustifyMeans. It was noted in a flurry of responses that DDT was banned in the United States in 1972, one contributor sneeringly adding, “SILENT SPRING MUCH, DUMBASS?” To which the stubborn EndsJustifyMeans simply wrote “DDT!!!!!!” again, this time all in bold and underlined.

The guy who signed himself 0-684-84328-5@gmail.com had contributed to this thread, too, writing “makesureit’sreallybedbugs.” Susan wrinkled her brow and grunted, “Huh,” when she had teased out this jammed-together phrasing. What does he mean, “make sure it’s really bedbugs”? She clicked on the signature link and dashed off a quick e-mail to 0-684-84328-5@gmail.com: “So how you do you know it’s really bedbugs?”

As she plowed through website after website, Susan occasionally scratched at her wrists and shoulder. At some point, the shoulder-bite itch intensified, and she dug a ballpoint pen out of the junk drawer and used its capped end to zero in on the itch. At 11:52, her phone rang, startling her with its crazy rattling vibration on the counter. The screen showed that it was Karen Grossbard, a college friend, who was in town for the weekend with her two kids; they had made loose plans, a couple weeks earlier, to hang out today. Susan was absorbed in a detailed explanation of the dual proboscis morphology of bedbugs and other hemipterans: one channel to suck the victim’s blood, the other to inject saliva and anticoagulant, which maximized the flow of blood while keeping the host from feeling the sting.

Keeping her eyes locked on the article, Susan fumbled for the phone and silenced the call.

Another sign of a bedbug infestation, according to a contributor to BedbugDemolition.com named MrMcEschars, was their deposited feces. “Gross but true!” MrMcEschars wrote and attached a picture of one such deposit in his bathroom: a small pile of black and brown dust. Five minutes later, Susan was yawning elaborately, stretching back in her chair and twisting her torso, when she spotted a pile of the feces on the kitchen counter, just below the broken outlet cover. She blinked, gasped, and froze, staring at it in shock.

Finally, she rose slowly, walked over to the counter, and poked gingerly at the pile with the tip of her ring finger.

Coffee grounds.

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Susan said to no one. She exhaled heavily as her heart resumed beating. She was brushing the coffee grounds off the counter and into her palm when she heard keys jingling in the door, followed by Emma’s hopeful call of “Mama?”

She called, “In here, love!” as she rinsed the coffee grounds off her hand into the sink.

Her legs were wobbly beneath her, dancing with pinpricks. She had been in the kitchen, seated at her computer, since the girls left, five and a half hours earlier.

“Hey, you want to know what I read on the Internet?” Susan said.

“That the Internet is a giant waste of time?”

“Har-dee-har.”

The TV was on in the background, with Alex keeping one eye on the Top Chef season finale. When they spoke on the phone at 5:30, Alex had announced his intention to make a big chef’s salad for dinner, but Susan told him the lettuce had a lot of rotten pieces, so could he grab a pizza on his way home, instead? She was lying about the lettuce. In fact, she had seen small dark specks on the bottom of the vegetable drawer, and, even after confirming that they were apple seeds, and after rinsing the drawer thoroughly, she couldn’t shake the idea that the spots had been dead bedbugs.

“All right, sorry. What did you read on the Internet?”

“I learned that a lot of people with bedbugs think they’ve killed them — they think the infestation is over, in other words, and then the bugs come back.” Alex chewed his pizza, half listening, while Susan yawned into her fist. That afternoon she’d taken Emma to the big playground down in Dumbo and watched her make circuits from the rope ladder to the slide and back, too exhausted and preoccupied to give chase.

“They’re not like ants, where you just use Raid or whatever and they’re gone. Even in abandoned apartments, with no one to eat from, bedbugs can live for months and months. Some people say up to a year. Oh, and they can hide in your hair. Disgusting, right?”

“Yes,” said Alex, and made a face. “Actually … wait …” He put down his slice, dug his fingers into his corkscrew curls, his features convulsed with exaggerated terror. “I … I … feel them right now! Aaaaah!”

He shook his head wildly, clutching at his temples.

Susan looked at him evenly. “I need you to take this seriously, OK?”

“I am. Seriously, honey. I totally am. In fact, I called Dana Kaufmann today.”

Susan’s heart leapt in her chest. “You did?”

“I did. Could you pass me another slice of the mushroom?”

She obeyed, her hands trembling slightly. Yes! Let Kaufmann come back. This time she would see — surely, this time …

“I just figured we might as well have her come back and take another look,” Alex said. “She wasn’t too happy about it. She told me she was ‘past the point of reasonable doubt as to that particular residence.’ Quote, unquote.”

Susan smiled. It was easy to imagine the deadpan Dana Kaufmann using exactly those words, and in exactly the icy tone Alex had conjured. Alex smiled back, took a big bite of his fresh slice, and tugged a strand of cheese from the corner of his mouth. “Anyway, I talked her into it. I told her my wife is pretty sure we’ve got bedbugs now, even if we didn’t before, and my wife’s a pretty smart lady.”

“Thank you.” Susan reached over and stroked Alex’s cheek gently. “I really appreciate it.”

“I’m on your side, babe.” There was a pause, and then he delivered the punchline. “Hey, can I borrow two hundred bucks? Tax free if we pay in cash.”

Susan laughed and helped herself to a piece of pizza while Alex started in about his day. Slowly but surely, he said, things were turning around for GemFlex. “Bottom line, we might remain midlist for a little while, but to tell you the truth, that’s fine. Midlist is fine.”

“Of course it is,” Susan said.

“I mean, so we’re snapping a few Rolexes instead of Cartier, who cares?”

“Exactly.”

“Although, actually, on Friday afternoon we booked a gig with Tiffany—”

“Oo-la-la.”

“I know. So, who the hell knows?”

When Alex asked Susan what she’d done with her morning, she took a breath and said, “Oh, you know. I took a walk, did some sketching on the Promenade. I’m going to get back in there and do some painting soon.”

“That’s great, honey.”

They cleared the table, and Susan sat sipping wine while Alex put in a tray of fish sticks so Marni would have something to give Emma for lunch the next day. When a decent amount of time had passed, Susan changed the subject back to the bedbugs.

“So, I’m sorry. When did Kaufmann say she was coming back?”

“Uh, I wrote it down. Friday at 4:30, I think.”

Susan nodded, tried to smile. It was now Wednesday night, and Friday at 4:30 seemed like an awfully long way away.

“And look,” Alex went on. “If she finds anything, then we’ll decide what to do.”

If she finds anything … Susan felt a cold rush of fear in her spine. What if she doesn’t?

Four hours later, Susan was standing at the linen closet, gathering up a couple of sheets, a pillowcase, and their spare blanket, when Alex stuck his head out of the bedroom.

“Hey. What are you doing? You’re sleeping on the sofa?”

“Yeah. I know, I know.” She laughed, trying to sound light and self-teasing. She had thought Alex was already asleep. “I think, for now, I’ll just be more comfortable.”

Alex made a pouty face and looked like he was about to argue. But then he shrugged. “OK, babe.”

She walked down the steps to the front hall, clutching her ungainly camp-out bundle tightly to her chest, and then looked back up at Alex at the top of the steps. They stood that way for a long moment, her looking up and him looking down, and from Susan’s perspective he was silhouetted by the wash of light from the bathroom behind him. Her husband looked a distant stranger, dimly perceived from a mile away.

Susan inspected the sofa thoroughly before lying down, of course. A contributor on BedbugDemolition.com named EcdysisMan had written a chilling vignette about (finally) clearing his gorgeous double bed of bedbugs, only to have an overnight guest discover a thriving colony between the cushions of the sofa. Susan lifted the cushions one by one, shook them out, banged them together, slipped her fingers into the cases and wriggled them around. Nothing.

She dry swallowed an Ambien, lay down, and descended immediately into a vortex of anxiety.

Alex would see, wouldn’t he? He’d have to see. It was ridiculous to stay in an apartment that had bedbugs—if there were bugs, if it’s real, what if it’s—over a matter of a couple thousand bucks. It was insane. She could call her dad, ask him to borrow the money, to help them out with the move.

No way … come on, Susan …

Her dad didn’t have money and wouldn’t be inclined to loan it if he did. Alex’s parents were the ones with the money, and they had given Alex a ton to go to art school — money that he was supposedly paying back, although Susan couldn’t remember the last time they had made a payment. The room felt hot, too hot, but when she kicked her leg out from under the blanket she felt a draft, so she tucked it away again. Beads of sweat formed on her temples and dripped down into her eyes, convincing her for one alarming instant that bugs were crawling across her eyelids. She wiped away the sweat and stared at the ceiling.

At least it’s a different ceiling for a change.

Small sounds drifted up the air shaft from Andrea’s apartment: shuffling, slippered footsteps, the clink of a spoon on a teacup. She was reminded of the weird ping they had heard — whatever had happened with that? I guess Andrea took care of it.…

Of all the flaws with the apartment, all the things Susan had complained of, it was the only one Andrea had done something about.

When at last she slept, Susan had horrible torturing nightmares of bedbugs. They were marching across her stomach, leaving behind them a trail of that disgusting brown-black dust—feces. A trail of bug shit on her body like the uneven black line of an Etch-a-Sketch. They scuttled up her stomach and bit her chest, her shoulders, her neck and face. In the dream she couldn’t lift her arms to wipe them away, could only lie helpless as they sank their horrid needle-noses into her undefended flesh — stinging — pinching—biting—and then, disappearing, skittering back to the air shaft, crawling into the cracks between the glass and the wall—

She opened her eyes, gasped for breath, rose unsteadily from the sofa and staggered across the room. She slapped at her body, ran her fingers across her chest — no bugs. No marks. Nothing. It had be a dream, this time—right?

It had to be.

In the darkness, she pressed her face against one of the little windows on the air shaft, trying to see down.

19

When she woke it was still dark, and Susan was on the floor, wrapped in a starchy linen tablecloth they’d gotten as a wedding present from Alex’s great-aunt and never used. Susan had no memory of taking the tablecloth out of the sideboard, nor of deciding to sleep on the ground. Her back was sore and knotted, her eyes ached in their sockets, and her mouth tasted like ash. Rubbing at her temples with her thumb and forefinger, Susan stumbled from the living room down the hall to the kitchen, where she glanced at the clock on the stove. It was 6:22 in the morning.

She trudged up the stairs, scratching absently at her wrist. Halfway up the stairs, she heard Alex’s alarm go off and felt a pang of longing — now he would snooze for ten minutes, and it would be so pleasant to slip into the bed, to nuzzle her face into his neck and snooze alongside him. Instead, she went into the bathroom, peed, and flushed.

She stood, shuffled over to the sink and was squeezing toothpaste out of the tube when she saw a tiny translucent blob nestled among the bristles. Susan blinked. Her mouth dropped open. Slowly, she raised the toothbrush and brought it closer to her face, squinting.

It was an egg. She recognized it from a dozen different images she had stared at on BedbugDemolition.com. A milky white larval orb, smaller than a pinhead, nestled between two bristles of her toothbrush. But she could see it. In the bright vanity lights of the bathroom mirror there was no ambiguity; it wasn’t the middle of the night, it wasn’t dark, and she wasn’t half asleep. Susan was wide awake, and she was staring at a birth sac, in which, she knew, a baby bedbug waited to emerge.

“Motherfucker,” she whispered.

Susan reached carefully with her forefinger and thumb, feeling for the impossibly small white dot. She grasped it, raised her fingers slowly, opened her hand — and saw nothing.

“Shit. Shit shit shit.”

She must have accidentally brushed the egg away, into the sink. “Shit!” Quickly, Susan pulled the stopper of the sink closed, so the tiny sac couldn’t slip down the drain. She craned her neck over the basin, squinting for the white dot against the off-white ceramic. Nothing.

“Damn it!” Susan said. “Damn it.”

“Baby? You all right?”

“What?”

Alex had cracked open the bathroom door and leaned in to the room, groggy and unshaven. Susan looked over, holding the toothbrush limply in her hand.

“I just asked if you were all right?”

“Yeah. I …” She turned back to the sink, playing out the conversation in her mind:

“There was an egg sac on my toothbrush.”

“Oh, wow. Let me see it.”

“It’s gone. I lost it.”

“Well, if you see another one, let me know.”

“It’s nothing,” Susan said, and Alex shrugged.

“Okey-doke.”

“You need to pee?”

On the way out of the bathroom, Susan flung her toothbrush into the trash.

By the time Alex emerged from the bathroom, Susan had dressed and returned downstairs; when he came down to make his coffee, she asked if he could hang out with Emma that morning till Marni arrived. A cloud of annoyance passed over Alex’s face, and Susan could see him weighing the value of his lost work hours against the cost of pissing her off. Finally, he smiled, shot her a thumbs-up, and said, “Of course, baby.”

“Great.”

Susan pulled on her coat, suddenly desperate to get out of the house and taste the air.

“You doing all right?” Alex paused on the stairs, examining her as he took his first slow sip of coffee. “How was sleeping on the sofa?”

“Fine.”

“Oh, good. So I’ll survive if and when you kick me out of bed.”

Susan gave him a tight smile in lieu of a laugh and slipped out of the apartment, buttoning her coat as she walked down the exterior stairs to Cranberry Street. Immediately, she realized that the weather was too cold for her shortish skirt, loose cotton top, and light jacket; the wind bit at her legs, chased up her skirt and her sleeves.

This was autumn weather, and Susan felt a melancholy shiver, like the seasons had changed without asking her permission. She glanced back at 56 Cranberry Street but kept on walking.

She stopped into a characterless deli on Henry Street, ordered an everything bagel with scallion cream cheese, and ate it as she walked the streets. For an hour, then two hours, she walked around Brooklyn in wide circles, watching the sun come up and the commuters emerge from their apartments and move in their intersecting tides toward the various subways. She meandered as far south as 2nd Place, west to the Atlantic Center, east as far as the shipyards. At 9:30 she was on Van Brunt Street, on the outskirts of Red Hook, and she stopped into a consignment shop that was just opening for the day; there was a poster taped in the window of a cartoon bedbug, upside down with its legs in the air. “Every item treated for infestation!” it said. Susan had a sudden, insane fear that this guarantee was backed up by infrared cameras, scanning each patron for bugs, and that some sort of alarm bell would sound as bedbug-sniffing dogs chased her from the store.

“Don’t be an idiot,” she muttered and forced herself to remain in the store for fifteen minutes, rifling through the racks of vintage dresses and antique costume jewelry.

Then Susan just kept walking, trudging in no particular direction, yawning, shivering, her bone-deep exhaustion making her feel like she was walking on the bottom of the ocean. Pressure throbbed behind her eyes. She weaved down Smith Street in a haze, trying to puzzle out what was happening to the house … to her. The dreams, the bites, the egg on her toothbrush that morning that had disappeared before she could snatch it, before Alex could see it … she felt like the bugs were teasing her—tormenting her—like they had somehow singled her out for punishment …

… and don’t forget about Jessie — good old Jessie Spender …

“Hey! Watch it, lady!”

Susan had collided with a knot of people clustered at the corner of Schermerhorn and Court, in front of the state courthouse. They were gawking at a woman in a bright orange jumpsuit and handcuffs, being led from a prison van into the courthouse by a trio of brutish-looking female police officers. Susan brought a trembling hand up to her chest. The prisoner was Anna Mara Phelps, who had shoved her poor babies to their death from the rooftop on Livingston Street.

At the door of the courthouse, the prisoner stopped in her shuffling progress and turned to stare back at the crowd, her eyes wide and innocent and terrified.

Susan found herself staring directly at Anna Mara. “It’s OK,” she mouthed to the terrified woman, who looked so small and fragile surrounded by the escorting officers and the restless crowd, like a trapped bird. “It’s OK.” Anna Mara looked back at her desperately before being led away. Susan turned and stumbled down the street.

Strange words appeared again in Susan’s head, flashed before her eyes like neon on a dark street: not only on blood — on body and soul.

Susan didn’t know what it was, but something very wrong was going on, and she had to act.

“Oh, my God, Susan! I was just talking about you!”

“Really?”

Susan reached the intersection of Schermerhorn and Court Street and waited at the light, running her tongue over her dry and chapped lips, while Jenna prattled in her ear. “I was just saying to Rami — do you remember Rami? He’s the choreographer on Dignity, and his boyfriend went to college with you, actually — anyway, I was just telling Rami all about you, and how I seriously owed you a call.”

“That’s sweet. How’re you doing, Jenna?” Susan cleared her throat, trying to let some light and air into her voice. “Did that show open?”

“What? Yeah. We got — there was a pretty good review in the Times, actually.” In the background, someone, she guessed Rami, screeched “Pretty good?” with exaggerated incredulity.

“Oh, I’m sorry. I totally missed it.”

“That’s OK. You’re so busy.”

“Jenna …” Susan took a deep breath and steadied herself in the doorway of the Barnes & Noble. She winced at the reflection, haunted and haggard, staring back at her from the bookstore’s glass doorway. “I need to ask you a favor.”

It was no use. She could hear and feel the tears in her voice; surely Jenna could hear them as well.

“Susan? What’s up?”

The wind had intensified along the broad stretch of Court Street. It whistled and whipped at her ears. Susan held the phone closer and drew her coat closed around her chest. “Me and Emma need a place to crash.”

She ended with a hopeful rise in her voice and waited for eager, generous Jenna to say, “Oh, of course!” Or “No problem!” Or “I’ll leave the keys with the doorman.… ”

Instead there was only silence, and the light crackle of an imperfect connection.

“Jenna?” she said at last.

“What’s going on?” Jenna’s voice on the other end dropped to a whisper. “Is it the bedbugs?”

“Oh, no, no.” Susan spoke quickly, rattling out the words, her voice rising desperately. “Actually, no, remember? Kaufmann said we don’t have them, I thought I told you, I could have sworn I told you, and by the way thanks so much for the recommendation. She was — that was super helpful.”

Another silence. The tinny echo of the cell-phone connection. The wind whipped up into Susan’s sleeves. “No, it’s not that. It’s, um, it’s Alex. We’re having a really hard time.”

“Oh. No kidding?”

Susan bobbed her head up and down as she lied. Except, it was true, wasn’t it? They were having a hard time.

“Yeah, so, we’re working it out, you know, but it’s pretty bad right now. So, I mean, can I — can we — can Emma and I please come crash with you for a few days? Just till I figure out our next step.”

Finally Susan shut up, tilted her head back up to the sky, and squeezed her eyes shut. Come on, Jenna. Come on.

“I … oh, Sue.” The final silence was the longest. Susan felt a tear spill down her cheek, before Jenna spoke at last. “I can’t get bedbugs. I just can’t.”

Susan ended the call and shoved her phone in her pocket, cursing loudly and stomping her foot.

“Ma’am?”

At some point she had entered the Barnes & Noble and was standing at the table of new releases. A small crowd of perplexed shoppers were looking her up and down, and a rent-a-cop security guard placed a gentle but firm hand on her shoulder.

“Sorry,” Susan muttered, and pushed her way out of the store.

On the way home she stopped at a pet store and asked if they sold diatomaceous earth, the crumbly soil compound that was one of several supposed bedbug killers she had read about on BedbugDemolition.com. The saleswoman, a puffy, overly made-up woman in her fifties, chuckled ruefully. “Sure, honey. You’re lucky we still have some in stock.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“You think you’re the only one with bedbugs?”

Susan felt a hot rush of shame and looked furtively around the shop. “No, I … I …” She had no idea what other uses one might have for diatomaceous earth. The pet-shop lady shook her head and grinned.

“Don’t worry, dear. Everybody’s got the darn things, or it sure seems like it.”

“Not like I do,” Susan muttered. The saleswoman cocked her head and said, “Sorry, dear?” But Susan just shook her head and forked over the $27.50 for her three-pound bag.

“Well, I wish you luck, sweetheart, I do,” said the saleswoman. After giving Susan her change, she squirted hand sanitizer into her palm from a dispenser beside the cash register. “Do you know where you got ’em?”

“No, I …” Susan trailed off, and her mouth dropped open.

“Ma’am?”

It was funny — for all her research, all her terror, it had never occurred to Susan to wonder where the bedbugs had come from. But as soon as the woman asked, Susan knew the answer. She took her bag and left the store, passing under the tinkling shop bell, clutching the heavy bag of soil to her chest. Susan marched up Court Street and turned left onto Montague toward home.

20

Quietly, Susan let herself into the apartment and set down her lumpy package of diatomaceous earth just inside the door. She poked her head into the kitchen, then slipped off her shoes and padded in her socks to the living room, where she found Marni dozing on the sofa, her phone dangling in one hand, breathing lightly.

“I can’t believe it,” Susan whispered to herself. “I can’t believe it took so long to figure this out.”

Marni’s chest rose and fell gently; her thick copper hair lay in a tumble across the pillow.

Every day she’s been coming here. Every day, in my home. With my daughter.

Staring at the sleeping girl, Susan dragged the nails of her right hand along her left wrist, harder and harder, perforating the barely healed skin for the hundredth time, drawing out bright red beads of blood.

Every single day.

“Marni,” she said sharply. “Get up.”

Susan waited a moment and then knelt at the girl’s side and shook her, roughly, by the shoulders. Marni proved to be a lighter sleeper than Alex — she jerked awake, blinked twice, smiling through her confusion. “Oh, hey, Sue. Emma’s napping.” She fumbled for the baby monitor, which sat on the coffee table, and lifted it up reassuringly. “Poor thing was totally zonked. We went over to the carousel, and then … um, Susan?”

Susan was still crouching beside the sofa, staring at Marni, not moving. She could almost see them, the bedbugs, stage-one and stage-two nymphs most likely, invisible to the naked eye, crawling out from Marni’s shirtsleeves, up from her cleavage, marching in uneven lines. Bugs appearing from the folds and creases of the girl’s clothing, tumbling onto the sofa, disappearing into the cracks, sliding between the floorboards. It was disgusting.

“Marni, you have to leave.”

“Oh.” She hefted herself up to a sitting position. “Wait. What?”

“I’m sorry,” said Susan. “But it’s not working out.”

“What? What do you mean?”

“You’re fired. Get out. Right now.”

Marni’s eyes were wide with pretended innocence. Susan felt waves of hatred and disgust wash over her. The girl shifted on the sofa, ran a hand through her hair, and Susan saw the invisible rain of them, bedbugs floating like dandruff off her scalp. She grasped Marni by the wrists. “Get up. Please. Please, just go.”

“But why? What is this about?

Susan’s mounting distaste crested, transforming into pure hot fury. “Why?” Susan laughed once, a high thin bark. “What is this about?” Like she didn’t know! Like she didn’t go home every night and laugh at them — laugh at her, laugh at Susan, laugh at what she’d done to her. “Because you’re dirty.”

Marni’s back stiffened, and she stared at Susan with cold, hard eyes. “Excuse me?”

“Because you’re disgusting!” Susan heard the hateful words pouring out of her mouth, a hot torrent of bitter words, but she couldn’t stop them. Didn’t want to stop. “Because you got bedbugs in some 10th Avenue motel room, or at your Friday night gang bang—”

“Oh, my God! Susan!”

“—and you brought them here. Into my house! You contaminated my home!”

Susan was shrieking now. She felt her blood pumping in her veins; her hands were clutched into fists, her ragged fingernails biting like teeth into the tender flesh of her palms. The pain felt good and powerful, clean and right. Marni was furiously collecting her things, sweeping her computer and hair-ties and a textbook into her backpack.

“This is unbelievable,” she said. “Unbelievable.”

“Out! I want you out!” Susan chased Marni as she stomped down the hallway. “Get out!”

She reached past Marni, threw open the door, and it cracked against the wall of the landing.

“Fine!” shouted Marni. “Jesus! Fine!”

Susan slammed the door behind her and locked it. Through the wall she heard the muffled tromp of Marni’s footsteps as they rapidly descended the interior stairs. As Susan stood there heaving hard raspy breaths, she felt something at the back of her knees: A bite. She whirled around, slapped at her legs, trying to catch the dirty little creature in the act. Another one, this time right at the corner of her eye. She brought her hand up, pinched at where she had felt the insect, clawed at her face.

When she looked up, Emma was standing halfway down the steps, clutching Mr. Boogle, scratching her little bottom and looking around the room.

“Mama? Did Marni go home?”

“Oh, baby.”

“Is everything OK, Mama?”

“Yes, honey. We’re fine. Everything is fine.”

She smiled at Emma, who smiled sleepily back, Mr. Boogle dangling against her pink thigh. “All right, Mama.”

“Everything is fine and dandy like sugar candy.”

Susan spent the next two hours spreading her diatomaceous earth around the apartment. She crawled into the closets and sprinkled loose handfuls of the stuff along the baseboards; she worked her way down the steps, layering a line of chalky soil along the joints and cracks as she went. Emma passed these hours in front of the television, enjoying the unimaginable treat of a Sesame Street marathon, lazing like a pasha in a nest of pillows — Susan having decided that the sofa was off-limits for the time being.

At a little past 4:30 Susan was squatting in front of the kitchen sink. The bag, now half empty, dangled from one hand while she seized handfuls of earth with the other, patting them behind and around the small bucket she’d set up for compostable material. At the sudden, heavy sound of a knock at the door, she twisted around, like a dog startled by the sudden noise, and rose unsteadily to answer it.

“Heya,” asked Louis. “Whatcha got there?” He angled his head to the bag Susan clutched to her chest.

“Nothing,” said Susan, and she took an unsteady step backward into the apartment. “What’s up?”

Susan needed to get back to her task. There were many corners of the house she had not yet reached with her bag of diatomaceous earth. She wanted it scattered everywhere the bugs could be. She wanted to decimate their population, poison their habitats, run them down.

“Well, this is going to sound …” Louis grinned shyly, like he was going to ask her to the prom. He looked down, tracing a nervous pattern on the rug of the landing with the toe of his boot. “The thing is, Susan, I’m a little worried about you.”

“Worried?”

“Well, listen, this afternoon, I was sweeping some leaves from the front stoop, and I saw that girl go sprinting out of here …”

Susan let him trail off.

“Anyway, so. I hemmed and hawed about it, but I figured I’d just come and make sure everything was copacetic in apartment number two.”

“I fired the babysitter, that’s all. Everything is fine.” Susan readjusted her fingers on the mouth of the bag, and the foil package crinkled in her grip.

“Glad to hear it,” said Louis, nodding slowly, trying to look past her, into the apartment. From the TV in the living room they could hear Elmo’s falsetto giggle. “And your little girl, she’s doing all right?”

“Yes, Louis.” Susan felt like her whole body was vibrating, could feel the bag of loose soil trembling in her hand. What the hell did he want?

“Listen.” Louis said suddenly, quietly, leaning forward toward her. “Is it bedbugs?”

“Bedbugs?” Susan dropped the bag, and her eyes shot open. “Why would you say that?”

“Whoa, whoa.” Louis reached forward to pat her reassuringly, and she flinched backward from the touch. “No reason, really. It’s just that you asked me about them. You were awfully worried, seems like. And I just know, bedbugs, boy … that’s the sort of thing people get themselves all worked up over. All twisted up in knots. Hate to see that happen to you.”

He was just being nosy. He didn’t know anything. Couldn’t help her.

Nobody could help her.

“Really,” said Susan, beginning to inch the door shut. “I’m fine.”

Susan glanced in to check on Emma — rapt, thumb-in-mouth, Mr. Boogle tucked under one arm — and returned to the kitchen. Louis’s and Andrea’s voices echoed from the front stoop, a low murmur of old-person argument drifting up through the slightly cracked kitchen window.

“… it’s a free country,” Louis was saying, “and if there’s something I can do … a person having trouble or … ”

Susan watched through the window. Andrea was shaking her head, waving a nagging finger up at Louis, who had six inches on her. The wind carried away her words, and Susan just caught scraps, drifting up through the window: “… your own beeswax … bothering me is one thing … nobody wants some old … ”

Susan scowled, shut the kitchen window, and moved on to the closet in the front hall.

21

“Sorry, will you tell me again what it’s called?”

“Diatomaceous earth.”

Alex was at the kitchen table, eating dinner. He had made chicken parmesan, and Susan had eaten three bites before thanking him and returning to her project — she had forgotten about the pantry, of course there could be bedbugs in the pantry, why not?

“And it’s … what is it? Like, fancy dirt?”

Susan, pulling out boxes of macaroni and cheese so she could get to the back of the cabinet, recited from memory what it said on BedbugDemolition.com. “Diatomaceous earth sticks to the waxed shells of bedbugs and draws out the moisture, and the bugs die shortly thereafter.”

Alex sipped his beer and spoke hesitantly. “So, what’s the story here, baby? Have you actually seen any bedbugs since yesterday? Yes? No?”

Reaching into the darkness of the cabinet to crumble out a fistful of the powder, Susan grinned sardonically. Not that I can show you, Alex. Not that will meet your standard of proof. “No,” she said flatly, withdrawing her hand from the pantry. “I have not.”

“Oh.” Alex exhaled. “Good, good. That’s good. Hey, so Susan … do you have plans for tomorrow morning?”

“Plans?” What was this? “No.”

“Well, I was thinking I’d take the morning off. We have that Tiffany shoot at 3:30, but Vic can handle the prep. I thought maybe I’d take you over to a doctor. So someone can take a look at those bites of yours — or, or, whatever they are.”

“A doctor?” Susan shifted on her haunches and pulled open another cabinet. “I guess. What about Emma?”

“Well, won’t she be with Marni?”

“Marni doesn’t work for us anymore.”

Susan knew from BedbugDemolition.com that bedbugs are attracted not only to carbon dioxide but to body heat and will strike, night after night, at any stretch of exposed skin.

And so, after Alex went to sleep that night, Susan found a pair of his long underwear and pulled it up over her own. She dug out a long flannel nightgown from the bottom of a drawer and pulled it over her head, tugging the sleeves down as far as they could go, and then rolled on a pair of woolen socks up over the cuffs of the long underwear. Finally she tucked her hair under a shower cap and, after a moment’s hesitation, slipped on a pair of thick winter gloves.

“Well,” she asked the mirror in the bathroom off the kitchen. “How do I look?”

Pretty much like a lunatic, she answered herself silently. But there was nothing to be done about it. Susan took two and a half Ambien with a cup of water, lay down on her back on the floor of the living room, and closed her eyes.

Approximately three and a half hours later, at 3:40 a.m. on Friday, November 5, Susan awoke to the sensation of being choked.

She sat up, coughing, grabbing at her throat.

There was something crawling in her mouth, way at the back, on the slippery edge where the tongue takes root. She coughed, cleared her throat, hacking like a cat. She felt the tiny feet skittering around in the back of her mouth.

Oh my God oh my God Oh my—

She stuck two fingers into her throat and scrabbled madly for the thing, trying to pluck at it, get it out, get it out — her fingers slipped across the wet surface of her tongue. But the bug was too fast, it evaded her searching fingers, danced around in maddening circles. Or, God, was it just one, was there more than one? How many—

Susan jammed her fingers farther in, bruising the back of her throat. Stomach acids rose up, burned her esophagus. Tears of pain and shock welled in her eyes.

After thirty terrible seconds, Susan hacked, gagged violently, and swallowed the bedbug. Then she heaved herself to her feet and raced to the kitchen sink to vomit. As the yellow and orange sick pooled in the sink, she drew up the stopper; pinching her nose closed with one hand, she sifted through the vomit with the other, trying to find the tiny bug in the vile puddle.

No luck. Of course.

Susan rinsed out her mouth three times with water and then gingerly reached with a fingertip to touch the welt she already felt rising on the back of her tongue. She almost gagged again and had to stop, but when she swallowed she could feel it, could picture it, rising red and round way at the back of her mouth — out of sight.

She could tell Alex. She could go upstairs, and—if she could get him to wake up, if she could get him to pay attention — there was zero chance that he would believe her. And why should he believe her? He wouldn’t be able to see this new mark. It was hidden, just like the bugs wanted it to be.

Susan poured herself a glass of wine, sat down at the kitchen table, and turned on her computer.

When Safari opened, some vestigial reflex led Susan to check her Facebook page, and her eyes dimly scrolled through the mundane and mock-profound information displayed by old friends. Leslie Clover was remarrying her ex-husband. Sean Hurley was about to publish a book of poems with a small press in Nebraska. Someone was having a baby; someone had eaten at the Applebee’s in Times Square; someone had been hired to teach economics at NYU. These all felt like dispatches from some distant land where Susan had once lived, a long time ago.

She typed in the address for BedbugDemolition.com, and when the website opened with its now-familiar junky landscape, she scanned the forum titles. Nothing new; she returned to the Pictures page and stared morbidly at the photos of egg sacs, then at a series depicting the “classic bedbug bite formation”—three bites in a neat horizontal row, described as “breakfast, lunch, and dinner.” There was nothing new posted from Susan’s old friend 0-684-84328-5@gmail.com.

“Oh,” Susan said suddenly. “Oh, shit. Right.”

She hurriedly went to Gmail, holding her breath hopefully, and ran her eyes impatiently down dozens of unread subject lines, one-day sales and horoscopes and “haven’t-heard-from-you” messages, until—yes! — there it was. In her Spam box, a reply from 0-684-84328-5@gmail.com.

She clicked the message eagerly, took a deep breath, and read:

allbedbugsarenotcreatedequaldonotcontactmeagain

“What?”

Susan squinted, yawned, and ran her finger along the screen as she puzzled out the words: All bedbugs are not created equal do not contact me again.

“Not created equal?” Susan whispered the words. She felt a sudden and powerful urge to stand up, slam shut the computer, and run from the house, just go sprinting off into the night in her long flannel nightgown and shower cap. Fuck Jenna. She would go to a homeless shelter.

“A homeless shelter?” she said aloud. “I don’t know, those places are pretty gross. Might have, like, bedbugs or something.”

Susan cackled, throwing her head back and bouncing peals of wicked laughter off the walls of the dark kitchen. Her lips were dry, so dry that when she grinned her bottom lip split open painfully; she flicked out her tongue, tasting the coppery tang of her blood.

On her screen, the words stared balefully out at her: All bedbugs are not created equal do not contact me again.

“Hmm.”

Susan highlighted the strange numerical e-mail address, 0-684-84328-5@gmail.com, clicked Copy, pasted it into a Google search box, and hit Return. There were three matches — all referring back to the mystery person’s postings on BedbugDemolition.com. Dead end. Susan felt a new itch at the small of her back and raked her nails at the spot.

This time she copied not the whole address, but just the numbers—0-684-84328-5.

She pasted them into the search box. Maybe it was a tracking code, for a FedEx package. Maybe it was a serial number for something. Some pest-control product, probably. Viral marketing. Some crapola. Maybe it was the VIN number for a car.

She pressed Enter and stared at the screen, agape.

It wasn’t a tracking number. It was an ISBN code — a numerical code, assigned by a publisher to a book. As it turned out, 0-684-84328-5 was the ISBN for a book, published in 2002 by an author named Pullman Thibodaux, titled Cimex Lectularius: The Shadow Species.

Susan’s hands began to tremble and she looked around the room; suddenly, she felt as though she could see them everywhere, the bugs, could feel them crawling under her chair, hear them hissing and clicking in the cabinets.

The Shadow Species.

The swollen bite sat at the back of her tongue, throbbing like a torturer’s mark.

22

According to the degrees covering one wall of his examination room, Dr. Lucas H. Gerstein had obtained his undergraduate degree at Brown University, proceeded to medical school at Cornell, and then done his residency in New York, at Bellevue. Dr. Gerstein was a licensed allergist and a member of the American Medical Association’s Steering Committee on Pollutants and Allergens. He had a receding hairline, a large forehead lined with deep grooves, and mild grey eyes, which he now ran carefully over Susan’s body.

They had chatted for a while first, and he had jotted down her answers in a thin notebook: The bugs had first appeared three weeks ago, she’d reported; yes, she’d seen the bugs — well, only one, actually, and only briefly.

“Hmm.” Dr. Gerstein smiled blandly as his hands passed industriously over her body. “If you could lift your hands for me. Thanks.”

Susan shivered in her paper gown. Her skin was rough and dried out as an old piece of canvas, worn and abraded. There was her wrist, of course, where the original scar, dug up and healed a million times over, was now a crosshatch of suppurated tissue. There was the spot on her left shoulder, similarly dug up, currently red rimmed and lightly oozing with pus.

Dr. Gerstein ran his gloved fingers over these marks and found more: a cluster of bites below her breasts, three or four along her right thigh, scattered bites dotting her arms. Some of the bites were small, barely visible, while others were opened and bleeding like stigmata. Some were sharp, thin, and angled, like paper cuts, others were gaping, obscene, like gashes or bullet wounds.

“Does that hurt?” the doctor asked, probing at a bite on the small of her back. His voice was thin and nasal, fussy.

“Yeah,” she said, wincing. “It does.” Susan’s lips were dry and desiccated, and the skin of her knuckles was rough as sandpaper. When she flexed her fingers, small cracks opened up and bled fresh.

Alex sat in a hard plastic chair in the examination room, leaning forward with a worried expression. When she was pregnant, he had come to the ultrasounds, strained to hear the heartbeat, sitting awkwardly in the small examination rooms with his coat in his lap. Susan tilted her head back and exhaled. On the opposite wall was a picture of Dr. Gerstein and his homely, horse-toothed wife. As his fingertips danced over her abraded skin, they exacerbated the itch at every spot they touched.

“All right.” He was pulling off the gloves. “Are there any marks I have not seen?”

“On my scalp.” She pushed aside her hair, and the doctor stood up on his toes to peer at the top of her skull.

“All right.”

“And — ah — there’s one biting me right now.”

It stung, pinched, at the sole of her foot.

“Really?” said the doctor, raising his eyebrows. “You can feel it? Right now? Bedbug bites do not typically—”

“I feel it! Look.”

She turned her bare foot upward, and Alex shifted forward in the chair and furrowed his brow. Dr. Gerstein bent over the foot, took it in one delicate hand, and then looked up at Susan questioningly. There was no bug, only the faint remnant of an old bite, a pink flap of scab nearly at the point of flaking off.

“Must have …” Susan trailed off, cleared her throat. “Must have escaped. They’re very small, you know.

“I know.” He turned away. “OK, Susan, thank you.”

While she dressed, Dr. Gerstein took a small pad from a pocket of his white coat and made a series of quick notes. Susan was reminded of Dana Kaufmann: the same quiet confidence and efficient motions.

Well, a lot of help she was.

The fresh bite on the sole of her foot itched fiercely. It took all her self-control to keep from scratching it.

Dr. Gerstein’s diagnosis was simple and straightforward.

“I do not believe that the discomfort you are experiencing arises from bedbug bites at all,” he said blandly. “It appears that you are suffering from something called Ekbom’s syndrome.”

Susan stared at the doctor, feeling slightly nauseous.

“Ekbom’s syndrome,” Alex echoed, nodding slowly, gravely intoning each syllable. “And what is that, exactly?”

“It is a condition, sometimes called delusional parasitosis, in which the sufferer comes to believe that he or she is being tormented by small insects, too small to be seen by the human eye.”

At the word delusional, an alarm went off in Susan’s mind: oh no. oh no oh no.

“So there aren’t any bedbugs, then?” Alex said.

“Well, of course, I can’t say for sure. But, I believe you said your house was examined—”

“It was.”

“And—”

“Nothing.”

“No,” Susan interrupted. “No, no. There are bedbugs. I’ve seen them.”

“You’ve seen—” He checked his notepad. “One, you stated … ”

“Well, I’ve seen—” She clutched her temples, trying to remember. One on her shoulder, in the middle of the night. That disgusting little egg, on her toothbrush. In dreams, thousands of them: an army. “Two. I’ve seen. At least two.”

Dr. Gerstein’s mouth twitched up at the corners, a quick and dismissive smile. His white coat was immaculate. “I know, Susan, that you believe you have seen them.”

“I believe I’ve seen them because I’ve seen them.”

“Susan, honey, let’s just listen,” said Alex. “This actually makes a lot of sense.”

“No, Alex. It doesn’t.” Of course it made sense, for Alex! If there were no bugs, if she were simply crazy, he didn’t have to pay for extermination. Didn’t have to move. Didn’t have to be bothered at all.

“If I might interject,” said Dr. Gerstein, and Susan glared at him. “Your chart indicates that you’ve been taking Ambien on an as-needed basis—”

“Every night, doctor,” Alex interrupted. “She takes them every night.”

“OK. Well, a definite correlation is hard to pinpoint, of course, but antianxiety medications can create rather extreme delusional activity. We would have—”

“Alex!” Susan looked at him, raised her arms high like tree branches. “Look at me. Look! I’m covered in bites.”

“Actually …” Dr. Gerstein raised an index finger, and Susan fought the urge to bite it off. “One or two of these marks may be bites. Spider bites, perhaps, or — it’s best not to speculate. But most of what you perceive as bites, given the patterning and your observable behavior, we can assume to be self-inflicted.”

There was a long silence, during which every bone and sinew in Susan’s body demanded that she scratch at the inflamed spot on her thigh. She sat on her hands. My God — what if he’s right, Susan thought, the shock of it streaking across her mind fiery red, like a comet, followed by another: I fired Marni … I chased her out of the house.…

Susan managed, by enormous effort, to remain still, the stifled urge to scratch traveling up her arms as a series of shudders.

“Ms. Wendt, I promise you, your situation is not uncommon, and it is entirely treatable. Beginning with antihistamines and corticosteroids, just to get the swelling and itching under control. And, most important, a drug called Olanzapine, which will help your mind to understand what is really there, and what is not.”

Susan nodded mutely and slid off the examination table, her head buzzing. As she dressed, she heard Alex and the doctor discussing her in low tones, as though she were a child: the doctor murmuring hmm, Alex asking questions in his hushed, all-business voice.

“And what can we do next … is she in any immediate danger … ”

“No … not at all.”

“She’s a very strong person, just in general, that’s what’s so distressing … ”

“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.

Meanwhile the bugs were busy, busy, busy, flickering in the corner of Susan’s eyes, dancing across her knuckles, alighting on and off the back of her neck. Susan could feel them thick in the air around her, and she caught occasional whiffs of their tell-tale scent — a musty, too-sweet stink of raspberries and coriander. But when Susan looked up from Candy Land, or from the counter where she was making coffee and preparing lunch — when she turned her eyes directly upon the bedbugs—the badbugs, badbugs, bad bad bad—that she knew were there — she knew they were there — when she looked closer at the cluster writhing on the countertop, or at the line marching up the side of the trash can — they would transform under her gaze into specks of dirt, or twists of fabric, or nothing … just, nothing at all.

“Your turn, honey,” Susan murmured, setting her yellow plastic man on a blue rectangle, and rubbed her eyes with her knuckles until bright red spots danced across the back of the lids.

Alex came home a half hour earlier than his usual 6:30, acting as though not a thing were amiss in their charming little life. He was chatty and cheerful, brimming with positive news about GemFlex. The Tiffany shoot, in contrast to the Cartier debacle of last month, had gone off without a hitch. (“You were absolutely right, by the way,” Alex reported with a grin. “Vic would have been lost without me.”) What’s more, there had been a flurry of freshly signed clients, a big uptick in receipts going into the year’s end. But even as Alex prattled on, Susan could smell his nervousness, could feel his tentative movements; he was handling her with kid gloves, eyeing her anxiously, checking to see if Dr. Gerstein’s prescription had begun to take effect. To see if, in the doctor’s hideously condescending phrase, “the situation had begun to improve.”

Sorry, pally, Susan thought grimly as she walked slowly down the stairs from putting Emma to bed. The situation has not improved.

She had decided that, over dinner, she would make her husband understand that precisely the opposite was true: the situation was much, much worse. Worse than Susan had ever imagined.

“You’re not going to like what I have to say. But I need you to listen, and to try to understand.”

Alex looked up from his plate, a spot of salad dressing on his chin, and examined Susan through the flowers that sat in a vase in the center of the kitchen table. It was a gaudy autumnal bouquet he’d brought home from Trader Joe’s, flushed with russet and orange, but all Susan could see in it were hiding places. She knew that the bugs were slipping up and down the stems, paddling in the stale water at the bottom of the vase. Susan hadn’t touched her salad. She sipped from a cup of coffee, the last of the pot she’d brewed hours ago, bitter, thick and gritty with sediment.

It was Friday November 5, at 8:40 p.m. The Wendts had been living at 56 Cranberry Street for fifty-four days.

“Go ahead,” Alex said gently. “I’m listening.”

Susan took a breath and pushed her fingers with difficulty through her knotted, greasy hair. To have even a chance of getting Alex on her side, Susan knew, she needed to make all this insanity sound as nice and not-insane as she could. As normal as she could.

“OK, so, I found this book.”

“OK … ”

She told Alex about Cimex Lectularius: The Shadow Species, making it sound basically like an entomological textbook, very scientific, very dry and serious.

“The bottom line is, we somehow got these bedbugs,” she continued, while Alex sat stone faced on the other side of the table. “This particular strain of bedbugs, you might say. And, basically, they’re not going away.”

“So.” Alex took off his glasses and exhaled deeply. “This is about moving again.”

“No. It’s not above moving. God, I wish it were. Something very bad happened in this house. I think it has to do with the old tenants, with Jack and Jessica Spender.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Something happened. Something — something awful. And moving won’t help. They’ve got me now, Alex. They’ve got me.”

“Susan?”

She waved away his hand, gritted her teeth, ordered herself to keep it together. The tingling itch made itself known on her inner thigh, and she fought a need to scratch.

“There’s only one way to end the curse, you see.”

Alex’s eyes narrowed. “Did you say a curse?”

Well, Susan thought. So much for keeping it nice and not-insane.

“Yes, Alex. This house is cursed. The book uses the word “blighted,” but it’s the same difference. And the thing is, now I’ve … I’ve got it somehow. I’ve got the blight. I think I know how to end it, but it’s …” Her voice descended into a rasping whisper. “I don’t know if I can do it.”

Susan looked searchingly into her husband’s eyes, looking for some glint of understanding, of empathy. They had met eight years ago and had been married for five. They had honeymooned in Finland, after putting sixteen countries in a hat and both swearing to abide by whichever came out first. Finland had been amazing, a wonderland of saunas and smoked fish and dreamlike bogs.

Please, just let him — let him understand. Let him try to understand.

Alex’s mouth opened slightly, and then, after a moment, he said, “Did you pick up the Olanzapine prescription?’ ”

Susan squeezed her eyes shut and groaned, and in the silence that followed, she heard it, loud and vivid: a terrible deep hissing, a sibilant thrum in the back of her worn-out brain pan. The badbugs were laughing, a hideous insectine laughter, the devil’s own gleeful laughter. They were all around her now, in their colonies, in their swarms, massed and ready to strike … beneath the floorboards, under the sink, in the closets and the mattresses. Waiting. Susan gave in to the need to scratch, dove her hand into her lap and worked urgently at the fiery itches on her thighs.

“No, Alex, I didn’t pick up the prescription.”

“Why not?”

“Why—” Susan interrupted herself with a dry and rattling cough and shook her head. She raised her hands from her lap to drag her nails across her prickly scalp, and dry white pieces of skin tumbled onto the table. Alex looked down at the floor.

“Susan, please,” he murmured, and Susan thought, This is useless. Useless … “The medicine—”

“Alex, we are in serious danger. I am in danger. Can you understand that?”

Alex spoke slowly, choosing his words carefully. “I understand that you believe that you are in danger.” He reached across the table and took her rough, twitching hands in his own. “I am going to help you through this. You have an illness, baby. You’re sick.”

She jerked her hands away. “I’m not.”

“The landlord said we do not have bedbugs. The doctor said we do not have bedbugs. The bedbug exterminator, the amazing Kaufstein, the exterminator to the stars — I’m quoting now—”

“I know what you’re doing.”

“OK, well, she said we do not have bedbugs.” Alex’s voice was hardening, growing louder, and he shook his head as he spoke. “Look, I am not upset with you. I’m not. But you have a problem. And you have to deal with it.”

Alex rose from the table. His big hands were balled into fists, the fists pressed into his sides. Susan got up, too, and stared defiantly into his eyes. “I don’t care what anybody says. We have bad — we have bedbugs, and they are not going away. ”

Alex stepped backward, closed his eyes, and said nothing.

“I need you, Alex! I need your help.” She put her hands on his shoulders, peering up at him until he opened his eyes. “I need you to believe me.”

“Oh, Susan.” He roped his arms around her, gathered her into his chest, and rested his chin on her head. “Oh, baby. The doctor said—”

“Please, Alex …” She spoke into his chest. Tears streamed down her cheeks. “Please …”

“—the doctor specifically said that a symptom of this, this Ekbom’s syndrome, can be a belief that the insects are persecuting you, and you alone. He said that rejecting the reality of the condition can itself be a symptom of the condition.”

Susan pulled away from him, scowling. “That makes no sense.”

“Well, it makes a lot more sense than supernatural monster bedbugs.”

Susan didn’t know what else to say. A miserable silence welled up in the room between them. Alex leaned against the doorframe, held his face in his hands, and let out a low grunt of frustration. Susan paced between the kitchen table and the stove, her mind pinwheeling: she thought of waiting until tomorrow morning, when Alex took Emma to ballet, and setting the building on fire. She contemplated following the example of the late, great Howard Scharfstein, wandering down to that creepy basement and blowing her brains out.

At some point, Alex turned, shook his head, and slipped out of the room. As Susan watched him go, one of the tiles of the pressed-tin ceiling fell abruptly from its place and clattered noisily onto the wooden floorboards just behind her. Susan wheeled around and gaped at the ceiling. The square of plaster now exposed was like the space under a rock that’s been turned over, writhing with dozens and dozens of tiny brown and black bugs. As Susan watched wide-eyed, the badbugs began to fall, dropping in uneven, weightless rows to the kitchen floor, where they landed like paratroopers, scurrying off to the corners, alone, in pairs or little groups.

Susan watched, frozen, as the bugs ran off in all directions, and then she heard it: a cheery knock from the front door.

“Susan? Yoo-hoo? So sorry to bother you, dear.”

25

Andrea Scharfstein, as it turned out, was having some trouble with her phone.

“I am so sorry to be a pain in the tush, Suze, but I am supposed to talk to my sister Nan at ten, which means seven o’ clock in Portland. If she doesn’t hear from me right on the dot, she gets nervous. You know how old ladies are.”

She gave Susan one of her broad, teasing winks, slouching with theatrical casualness against the doorframe.

“Oh,” said Susan.

“Anyhoo, you said if I was ever having trouble with this silly thing …” Andrea sighed, holding up the phone with a playfully apologetic smile. “So, but I’m barging in. How are you, kiddo?”

The absurdity of the question, considering Susan’s surreal and terrifying circumstances, rendered her speechless for a moment. She thought of the bugs on her kitchen floor, scattering in all directions from the fallen ceiling tile, like soldiers preparing for an ambush. She thought of bugs in the hall closet, just behind her, slipping in and out of coat pockets. Bugs wreathing the air shaft, clinging to the cracks.

“Oh, I’m just fine, thanks,” she said tonelessly. “Just fine.”

“So, can you take a look at the thing? I just hate to think of old Nan fretting away, thinking I’ve been crushed under an armoire or something.”

“Sure. You bet.”

Andrea was wearing lavender leggings, a long flowing nightgown, and an old-fashioned robe, tied loosely with a sash. Her hair was piled atop her head, in curlers. I am under assault from an army of demonic insects, Susan thought, the notion drifting untethered through the buzzing fog of her mind, and Mrs. Roper is here for tech support.

“Oh, you’re a lifesaver, dear. Absolutely a lifesaver.” She stepped past Susan, toward the kitchen, and the front door closed behind her. “Shall I put up the kettle for us?”

Susan sat at the kitchen table with her hands folded in front of her while Andrea busied herself in the kitchen, pulling open drawers, rummaging for teabags, sugar, spoons. The aggressive normalcy of the situation began, against all odds, to steady Susan’s nerves: it seemed impossible that these two worlds could exist simultaneously, that a cheerful old woman could be fixing a pot of tea in the same apartment — in the same universe—where Susan was being tormented by a shadow species sent from some circle of hell. Andrea did not seem to notice the ceiling fragment, still lying dead center on the kitchen floor, or else she just chose not to mention it, stepping around or over it as she bustled about in her absurd robe and sash.

“Handsome hubby’s asleep?”

“What? Oh — yes,” Susan said.

“I used to be the same way. Howard would tuck himself in at nine o’clock, or go up to read his mysteries, and I’d wander about the house for another hour or two. Liked the ‘alone time,’ I suppose. No shortage of that now.”

“Hmm,” said Susan, and then she squinted at Andrea’s phone, a cheap Samsung clamshell, five or six years old, lying on the kitchen table next to her own shiny pink-cased iPhone. “So, what exactly is the issue?”

“Well, it won’t do anything, that’s all! I’m sure I put it on some daffy setting or something, but I’ll be darned if I can undo it.”

Susan poked at the power button. “It’s got no battery, that’s all. No power. When did you last charge it?”

“It’s been charging all day.”

“And are you sure the outlet is working?”

“The …” Andrea tilted her head back, whacked herself dramatically on the forehead with the heel of her hand. “My goodness, now that you mention it, my hair dryer hasn’t been working either, and I keep that on the same plug.”

Susan slid the dead phone across the table and managed a tight smile.

“I was actually going to bring the dryer down also, but I thought, ‘Well, for heaven’s sake, Susan is a busy person, she’s not your own personal Maytag repairman.’ Even just the phone seemed enough of an intrusion … oops, there’s the kettle!”

Andrea had a free hand with the sugar, but Susan sipped the tea gratefully, enjoying the sensation of sweet burn on her throat. The older woman remained standing, leaning back against the counter with her stick arms crossed, peering at Susan over the rims of her reading glasses while they drank their tea.

“All right, young lady,” she said at last, playfully stern. “You want to tell me exactly what’s going on here?”

Susan looked up.

“Because I’m going to be honest with you, hon. You don’t look so hot.”

Andrea leveled Susan with a caring, motherly gaze. “You can tell me, sweetheart. What are landladies for? Is it—” She angled her chin upward, toward the bedroom, and brought her voice down to a low and raspy voice. “Is it Alex?”

“No. No, not exactly.”

Susan felt the rising tide of anxiety and desperation welling up from her stomach, filling her chest. She didn’t think she could bear telling the whole story to Andrea, to have one more person tell her how crazy she was being. But it was too late; she put her head down on the table and moaned long and loud.

“Oh, God, Andrea. Oh, God, oh, God.”

The older woman rushed over, her slippers shushing across the hardwood, and sat down beside her. “Susan, Susan, Susan.” Andrea patted her on the shoulder, laid her head across her back, like a mother bird. “My goodness, what’s happened?”

Susan raised her head from the table, wiping tears from her eyes with the rough, rutted backs of her hands. “It’s bedbugs, Andrea. This apartment has bedbugs, after all.”

“Oh, no!” Andrea said, her hand flying to her mouth. She looked around anxiously. “But I thought the exterminator, that young lady, said you were clear.”

“She did—” Susan stopped to blow her nose in a napkin. “She said so, but unfortunately she was wrong. Just … she was wrong.”

A tiny bedbug appeared on the arm of Andrea’s chair. As Susan watched in mute horror, the insect skittered onto Andrea’s shirt sleeve and down the withered line of her arm.

“Well, you know, Susan,” Andrea was saying, “If it’s necessary, I will of course pay for an exterminator.”

“Andrea … ”

“What, dear?”

The bedbug—badbug, Susan reminded herself with a shudder, bad bad bad—was advancing toward the wet pink sore that glistened on Andrea’s forearm. The bug would slip into it, swim around in that pool of exposed blood. Susan’s hand jerked forward, slapped at the bug. Andrea looked up, stunned at the sudden violence.

“Sorry — there was—”

Susan turned over her hand. Nothing. No broken husk, no smear of brown and red. It had escaped. Oh, God. Oh, dear God, don’t let me be crazy. She dug her ragged, clawlike fingernails into her palms and began a desperate internal incantation: I am not — I am not crazy. I am not crazy. Susan looked at the floor, and the fallen ceiling tile was still there; as she watched, a bug, small and brown like a lentil, slipped out from underneath it and darted to the pantry.

“Now, listen,” Andrea said. “Because this is very simple. We are going to call back that lady who came. No, that’s silly. We are going to call someone new. I am sure that in Howard’s Rolodex there are a zillion exterminators.”

Susan shook her head, still working at the insides of her palms, feeling blood well up where she had broken through the flesh. She knew what would happen if Dana Kaufmann came back, or anyone else: they would look everywhere, turn the apartment upside down, and find nothing.

The bugs were for Susan — for Susan alone. Body and soul.

She moaned again and trailed out into a kind of desperate hiss. Andrea made a soft sympathetic exhale, brought her chair closer to Susan’s, and draped one thin bony arm over her shoulders.

“What does Alex think?”

Susan shook her head and gulped tea, wishing it were coffee. Her eyes ached, her brain thumped inside her skull.

“Alex is not being that helpful.”

“Men,” Andrea barked. “Men and their secrets.”

Susan looked up, struck by the change in Andrea’s voice. The thin comedienne’s growl had transformed in that one sentence, dropped into a deep, angry rasp: “With their hiding. And their lying. And never there when you need them to be. Never, never.”

As she spoke Andrea looked off into the distance, out the windows above the stove at the streetlights punctuating the darkness beyond, and Susan examined her face. There was a coldness behind her eyes, a steely sadness that Susan had never seen before: the old lady was reliving some memory, something painful and raw. Susan studied her, rubbing together her bloodied palms.

“Andrea?”

“Yes, kiddo?”

It was as if a hypnotist had snapped his fingers: the light came back into Andrea’s eyes, and with a smile she turned her attention back to Susan. “Here’s what we’ll do. If you’re worried, we’ll just get you the heck out of here, that’s all. Right now. Tonight.”

“It won’t work.”

“What do you mean it won’t work?” Andrea was on her feet, all business, retying her robe with brisk movements. “Just for a couple nights, you and the whole gang, a nice hotel. On my dime, of course. Heck, maybe I’ll come with you. The Marriott, right here on Adams Street, isn’t a bad hotel, all things considered, though of course I haven’t stayed there in years. A nice hotel, doesn’t that sound just the thing, Susan?”

Hotel.

As soon as Andrea said it, the word clanged like a bell in Susan’s mind. Rang again each time she repeated it.

Hotel.

Hotel.

Hotel.

Susan stared at the kitchen table, boring into it with her eyes, picturing the badbugs working through the swirls in the wood, just below the surface. And her mind worked at that word—hotel—like a tongue works at a dead tooth.

Hotel

.

With their

hiding.

And their

lying.

The matchbook in Alex’s pocket.

The matchbook from the Mandarin Oriental Hotel.

Someone has to commit the act

Susan had laughed at herself for being so silly. Ever to think that her husband would do such a thing, would go out to some hotel …

that throws open the door to the darkness.

But, oh, he had been out so late, hadn’t he? Two in the morning. That night, that Friday night, just after they moved to Brooklyn. She had finally started painting again, and she’d slipped into some bizarre unconscious state and added violence into her art, covered poor Jessica Spender with bedbug bites. Meanwhile, where was handsome hubby? Why, just over at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, and not alone … and then she had laughed at herself for being such a shrew, a jealous little wifey.…

Someone has to commit the act, think the thought that throws open the door to the darkness.

The Mandarin Oriental Hotel. And then — the next morning—the next morning—a spot of blood on her pillow.

For as bedbugs are drawn to heat and carbon dioxide, badbugs are drawn to the hot stink of evil.

“Susan?”

Andrea was waving her hands in front of Susan’s eyes, snapping her fingers. Susan stood abruptly, and the legs of her chair scraped loudly on the kitchen floor.

“Andrea, it’s time for you to go downstairs and call your sister, I think.”

“Yes. But—”

“Nan will be worried sick, Andrea. Just worried to death.”

She grabbed the two teacups by their handles and tossed them in the sink, moving quickly, feeling a kind of delirious lightness. She plucked the phones off the kitchen table, handed Andrea’s to her and stuck her own in her pocket. “Susan?”

She led Andrea by the elbow, down the hallway and to the door.

“Glad to help. Good night, Andrea.”

Susan stood with her hand on the doorknob, listening to the muffled patter as Andrea scurried down the steps. Cimex Lectularius: The Shadow Species had said in no certain terms how the curse could be undone, how the badbugs could be sent back to the other side.

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

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

Someone invited the bugs in. Someone opened the door to the darkness.

That person must be discovered, and destroyed.

Pullman Thibodaux was unequivocal on that last point. Susan marched back to the kitchen counter, where the knife block sat thick and squat, like a gargoyle. She ran her fingers along the protruding handles, hearing Alex’s voice in her head, condescending, chastising. I’ve told you, save the good knives for when you really need a good knife.

“Totally,” Susan said. “You’re totally right, honey.” She wrapped her fingers around the heaviest handle and slid the butcher’s knife free from the block.

26

The little TV on Alex’s dresser was on, as if he had intended to wait up for her and continue their conversation, but he had fallen fast asleep. He lay in a nest of pillows, his thick curly hair splayed out around his head, mouth half open, snoring gently. Susan turned off the TV and watched him sleep, the handle of the butcher knife sweating in her palm. The room was silent but for the baby monitor on the night table, emitting its steady sibilant crackle.

Susan crouched beside her husband and whispered in his ear:

“Bad news, Alex. We have bedbugs.”

He muttered something unintelligible, licked his lips, and turned over, presenting her with the back of his head. She whispered again, a little louder, in his other ear: “Lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of them.”

He slept on.

“Dammit, Alex, wake up.” She smacked him on the side of the head, as hard as she could, cracking the butt of the handle on the base of his skull.

“Get up.”

Alex shot up into a crawling position and then fell forward again, gripping the back of his head. He flipped over, blinking, confused, the covers bunching around his torso. “Susan? Did you — what—”

He saw the knife and froze with his mouth open. His hair sprung out in all directions, a crust of drool pooled at the corner of his mouth. His eyes were brown and wide. Susan had always loved his eyes. As she held up her knife, watching him tremble, she felt a sudden sharp sting at the back of her neck: new bite. New itch.

Susan winced but did not release her grip on the knife. He had done this to her. All of the pain and confusion and misery. All of the itching. He had done it.

“What are you doing, Susan?”

“Why did you do it?”

“Why did I do what?”

She swung the knife, inexpertly. He jerked back and the blade just barely caught him, tracing a bright line of blood along the tan flesh of his forearm. Alex shrieked, high and womanish, pulled back against the headboard. Both of them stared at the long line of the cut, and then up at each other.

“What were you doing at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel the Friday night after we moved to Brooklyn?”

“What? Susan—”

“Friday, September 17. The Mandarin Oriental Hotel.”

All the details were completely clear to Susan, totally available to her. Now she knew the story, of how her life had fallen to pieces, and why. Because of whom.

“I seriously don’t know what you’re—”

He cut himself off, midsentence, and lunged for the knife. She jumped backward, steadied herself on her back foot, and parried forward, nearly cutting him again. Alex retreated against the pillows, lifting the comforter over his chest as if it were a shield.

“Susan, I swear to God I have never been to the Mandarin Oriental Hotel.”

“Don’t lie,” Susan said flatly. The knife trembled in her hand. “Please, don’t lie.”

“You’re sick, Sue. You have—”

She cut him again and did a better job of it, swinging the blade like a scythe, right across his ribs. The knife bit deep, biting into the fat layer of flesh above his heart, and she could feel the resistance of meat beneath the blade. Alex brought his arm down and then up, staring at the sticky mess in his hand.

“Oh, God. Susan—”

“Tell me the truth,” she hissed.

“OK,” Alex said slowly, pressing his hands against the wound, keeping his eyes on the knife, now smeared and dripping with his blood. “All right. Um … I did. That night, the …”

“The seventeenth.”

“I ran into this girl. This old friend of mine.”

“What’s her name?”

He swallowed hard, staring at the knife.

“Uh, Theresa.”

Susan scowled. “Theresa?”

“From — from college. You don’t know her. She’s a photographer, too, from my program. Nobody special — just this girl. ”

As his confession unspooled, tears trickled down Susan’s cheeks. Not because he had cheated on her, had betrayed her, had fucked some stupid girl from NYU in a hotel room. Susan was crying because she was going to have to kill him in order to end this terrible torment. He had drawn the badbugs to the hot stink of his evil, and she would have to sacrifice him like a pig on an altar or they would consume her.

“Susan?” He looked at her in the darkness, his eyes wide and wet with fear, his chest drooling blood around his hands. Susan felt the prickly heat of a thousand itches all over her body, felt the weight of the knife in her hand, heard it demanding action. She stepped toward the bed and was distracted by a small shifting noise over the monitor, a barely audible pop and crackle: Emma shifting, adjusting herself in sleep. Out of sheer instinct, Susan turned her head to the sound, and Alex leaped at her.

The next six minutes passed in a wild panting frenzy.

Alex rolled from the bed, tossing the sheets and comforter to the ground, kicking his legs into Susan’s midsection. She went down hard on her ass, and Alex flung himself on top of her, wrestling her arm down, slapping at her hands, grabbing for the knife. She brought her knee up into his stomach and then cracked the knife handle into his jaw. He cried out and reared back, clutching his mouth, blood gushing between his fingers, more blood spilling from his chest. Susan slipped out from under him and hurled herself out of the bedroom.

He stumbled after her onto the landing, shouting, “Goddamn it, Susan, stop!” and then “Shit!” as his toe connected with the split in the floorboards. Susan halted, abruptly, stepping to one side just in time to let his big lumbering body chase itself past her, onto the top step. And then she was behind him, pushing him, hard, two hands in the middle of the back. Alex went tumbling down the steps, banging his head against the wall as he fell, and she chased after him, butcher’s knife clutched in two hands.

When he landed at the bottom, she was towering over him, straddling his body with her legs.

“Susan. Please. Think about what you’re doing. Please.”

She took a deep breath, bared her teeth.

“I’m sorry, Alex.”

She brought the knife down, fast, like a missile whistling toward its target, right at Alex’s neck, but he rolled away, kicking at her shins. She got up and followed, and they paraded slowly down the hallway: he walking backward, facing her with his hands raised, she following, one big step forward for each of his steps backward. She slashed at him, big wild uneven swings of the knife.

“Susan!”

He ducked as the knife sang just under his nose.

“Susan! Jesus, Susan, stop!”

They were in the living room now, passing under the archway and the ornately beautiful old sconces. In the corner of her eye Susan saw bugs crawling in and out of the teardrop-shaped lightbulbs that adorned the fixtures, bugs like sports fans crowding the bleachers.

Now Alex had his back to the wall of the living room, just to the right of the small door that led to the bonus room. Susan stepped toward him with the knife raised, and Alex grabbed her wrists and spun her around. She had a lunatic flash of memory, dancing at their wedding, one-two-three, one-two-three. And then it was Susan’s back against the wall and he had her pinned, his chest against hers, smashing her breasts, constricting her breath, his full weight pressed across her body.

Alex flung open the door of the bonus room, grabbed Susan by the waist, and shoved her inside. He slammed the door and she grabbed at the handle, rattled it, screaming, but Alex was holding it closed. She could picture him, leaning backward with the handle in his hands, sealing her in. She banged on the door.

“Alex!”

There was a loud scraping noise — what — oh, God. The sofa. Still holding the door tightly shut with one hand, he had reached with the other for the giant heavy leather sofa, was dragging it in place to block the door, pen her in. She pounded on the door. “Alex! Don’t leave me here!” The adrenalin-fueled anger in her veins was cooling rapidly, freezing into fear. She hammered the door with her fists. “Let me out, Alex.”

“Susan, I’m going to take Emma somewhere safe, and I’ll be back soon.”

Emma — no—Alex wouldn’t know what to pack for her, wouldn’t know how to take care of her. Her girl, her daughter.

“Alex. Wait.”

“I’m sorry, Susan.”

“Let me out, Alex. Don’t leave me here.” The magnitude of what was occurring swelled up in her, like a balloon expanding in her gut. She pressed her palms against the door. “Please.”

His footsteps moved out of the living room, pounded up the stairs toward the bedrooms. She tried the door again, and then leaned her forehead against it, tears cascading down her cheeks.

“Please.”

Five minutes later, the footsteps were back on the stairs. She heard Alex grunt, shifting Emma’s sleeping weight in his arms. Abstract, disconnected worries floated helter-skelter through her mind: Was he bringing her heavy coat? What would she have for breakfast? Where would they go?

The front door closed, and after a few terrible minutes of silence, Susan rose shakily to her feet and turned to survey the room in which she was now imprisoned. The painting remained where she had left it, pinned to her easel in the corner, just beside the window. It was still covered in the bites and welts that Susan did not remember painting.

But it was no longer a painting of Jessica Spender.

It was a self-portrait.

It was her.