Bedbugs (19 page)

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.”

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.

“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.

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?

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.

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.