Bedbugs (20 page)

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 “B
REUKELEN:
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.”

“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.

*

“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 …”

Invited. Of course
. As she read, Susan mumbled to herself, a despairing chant of self-accusation: “I knew I knew I knew …”

Susan struggled for air, heaving a series of thick breaths as she turned the page.

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.

“Hey, Mama?”

“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.

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.