Bedbugs (24 page)

So Susan wrapped herself in Kaufmann’s Greater Brooklyn Pest Control jacket while the exterminator heaped scorn upon Pullman Thibodaux’s masterpiece. “Badbugs, right? Please. Just for starters, the author of that book was insane. Literally. A mental patient. Supposedly, he and his wife had a severe bedbug infestation, and he was too cheap to have it treated professionally. So he’s trying to handle it, doing all this research, taping up the mattresses, all the bullshit things people do when they don’t know what they’re doing.”

Susan listened, holding her breath.

“Long story short, the wife can’t take it anymore, she walks. The guy goes cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs, decides that bedbugs aren’t bedbugs, they’re demons. OK?” Kaufmann, without smiling, rotated one finger beside her temple, playground sign language for crazy. “So he
wrote that book”—she placed exaggerated air quotes around the word—“in his spare time, while in the nuthouse.”

“Well … all right, but … ”

“Susan, I had a client a couple years ago who got his hands on that damn book and insisted to me that his house had been cursed. Except he didn’t say curse, he said … oh, what the hell did he say?”

“Blight,” mumbled Susan. A draft crept in beneath the frame of the kitchen window, and she shivered. She was starting to feel a little ridiculous, half-naked and wrapped in Kaufmann’s gigantic jacket.

“Yes. Blight. Well, I performed an aggressive three-pronged protocol, right out of the playbook, and guess what? Five years later, he’s contented and bedbug free.”

The words shone like a dawning ray of hope in Susan’s mind:
contented and bedbug free
. But still … she cleared her throat, shook her head. “But …” Susan gestured around the apartment. “There are so many of them.”

“I’ve seen worse.” Kaufmann looked around. “Well, not worse. But close.”

“But I couldn’t
kill
them. They can’t be
killed
.”

“Oh, yeah?”

In a swift, athletic motion, Dana Kaufmann squatted and snatched a bedbug between two thick fingers. A split second later, she held up the squashed corpse for Susan’s inspection: a crumbled brown shell, a tiny gush of bright red blood at its center.

“Dead.”

Susan reached forward with a trembling hand and wiped the bug’s bloody broken body off Kaufmann’s fingertip onto her own. “Jesus,” she whispered. She began to shake, overcome by a confusing wash of shame and fear. “Dana. Dana, I tried to murder my husband
last night. With a butcher’s knife.”

The exterminator raised her eyebrows slightly, let out a long low whistle, and shrugged. “Well, you know, infestations place extraordinary strain upon a relationship.”

Despite everything, Susan laughed.

“Now, come on,” said Kaufmann. “Let’s kill some fucking bedbugs.”

*

“The first thing we do is, we clean. Here, and your landlady’s apartment. Basement, too. This entire building needs to be scoured, disinfected, and decluttered, down to the canvas. No hiding places: no bugs.”

“But the book …”

“Right, right. The book. Your friend the mental patient wrote that the curse of the evil bedbugs will stay with you forever and always, no matter what you do or where you go. Well, guess what? The ancient Greeks said if you baked the bedbugs in a pie with meat and beans, they’d cure malaria. That, too, was total nonsense.”

Susan smiled weakly.

“Here’s what is
not
nonsense. We’re going to vacuum every room, we’re going to steam clean your mattresses and linens, we’re going to dry clean every piece of fabric in this apartment. We’re going to scour every exposed surface. Then we pack up your infestibles to be sealed and pumped with Vikane.”

“Vikane?”

“A fumigant. Industrial strength. Forty-eight hours in Vikane, no bug lives. No egg lives. Nothing. Then we proceed to the application of silica gel and pyrethroids.” Dana Kaufmann’s confidence, her sense
of power and purpose, was palpable. She was like a general, rallying for battle. “Do you have a vacuum cleaner with a hose attachment?”

“In the closet.”

“Good. You relax. Drink your coffee.”

Susan did as she was told, slowly sipping from her mug and taking deep, cleansing breaths, watching the sunbeams play across the handsome brown hardwood of the kitchen floor. Already it seemed like there were fewer bedbugs than there had been an hour ago, when Kaufmann first pulled her from the bonus room. She heard the vacuum cleaner roar to life and allowed herself to hope that maybe Kaufmann was right: she would clean, they would pack her infestibles in Vikane, apply the pyrethroids and the silica dust and whatever else … and, in time, everything would be OK. Everything would go back to—

“Oh, shit,” Susan said suddenly. “Alex. I have really got to call Alex.”

She had recovered her iPhone in the morning, found it in a corner of the bonus room, shut off with a dozen bedbugs nesting in the UBS slot at the base. Now she turned it on, but before she could dial her husband, it rang. The incoming number was one she didn’t recognize, a 718 area code.

“Hello?”

“Hi, this is … ”

The mechanical roar of the vacuum was moving down the hallway now, coming closer.

“What?”

“I’m—”

“Hold on.”

Susan lowered the phone and shouted to the living room. “Dana, can you cut the vacuum for one second?” Susan turned back to the
phone. She had to call her husband. He must be worried sick.

Except—he was supposed to come back, come back to get her. Where was Alex?

“I’m sorry … who is this?”

“My name is Jack Barnum. I think I used to live in your apartment.”

A nervous, prickly energy erupted into Susan’s chest. Beneath thick smears of calamine lotion, her itches sang to life. Kaufmann poked her head into the kitchen, holding up the vacuum hose with an inquiring expression. “Can I …?” Susan shook her head “no,” and the exterminator set it down with a sour expression.

“Yes, Jack? Yes, you did.” She held the phone with her chin, reached around to scratch beneath her shoulder blades.

“I read the note you sent to Jessie, on Facebook. I finally figured out her password. It was my middle name. That was her password, my middle name … my …” Susan could hear raw, throaty grief in his voice, grief and bafflement.

Alarm bells were clanging in Susan’s mind. She scratched the sole of her right foot with the craggy big toenail of her left. “Jack? Are you there?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I am. Do you know where she is? Did you—Jesus, did you find her?”

“No, I’m sorry. I don’t know where she is. Jack, can you tell me what happened in this apartment?”

Jack Barnum said nothing, but she heard his agonized, fearful breathing, tearful and labored. Dana Kaufmann, not one to waste a spare moment, was now crouched on all fours beneath the kitchen sink, right at Susan’s feet, scouring the baseboards with a thick-bristled brush.

“What happened, Jack?”

“She … Jessie … poor Jessie, she got this idea, somehow. That we had bedbugs. And I didn’t believe her. Because I never saw them. Never. And she …” His voice trembled again, and petered out. “She …”

“She tried to kill you.”

“Yes. Jesus, how did you know that?”

Oh, God—oh, God—they were already here. The bugs were here before Jessie and Jack even moved in
. Shivers chased up and down Susan’s spine like electric pulses. Her whole body itched: searing, dry, tingling, horrible itches.
They were already here
.

“Anyway, so, I freaked out, and I mean, I just ran.” Jack sobbed again, a single guttural wail. “I left her here.”

Dana was watching Susan now, looking up at her with her head tilted and one eyebrow raised.

“And then they kept torturing her,” Susan said. “And she flipped out, and, and when she couldn’t take it anymore, she bolted. She left so fast she left the cat behind. And—”

“The cat?”

“What?”

A cheery knock sounded at the front door. “Yoo-hoo?” called the genial, throaty voice. “Suze?”

“No,” Jack said. “We never had a cat.”

Dana was on her feet and out of the kitchen, halfway down the hall, while Susan stared into dead air, thoughts tumbling into her brain:

Never had a cat
.

The knock came again, a happy little “shave-and-a-haircut” knock.

“Wait, Dana! Don’t—”

It was too late. The exterminator pulled the door open and Andrea Scharfstein smashed the side of her head with a hammer. Kaufmann stepped back, swayed on her feet and pivoted toward Susan, an expression of dumb surprise frozen on her face. Then she pivoted again, back toward Andrea, and Susan saw the inside of her head where her forehead had been cracked like a pumpkin, clumps of red and gray under the cap of her skull. Andrea twirled the hammer in her hand and struck again, this time with the claw side, tearing a huge, messy divot into Kaufman’s face. While her hand, still clutching the hammer, hovered in the space between them, a badbug flitted from the open cut on Andrea’s arm into the shattered wreck of Dana’s face, like a child cannonballing into a swimming pool.

Dana’s broken frame sunk to the floor, and Andrea Scharfstein looked up at Susan with a daffy grin. “Oh, dear,” she said, clucking. “What a shame, what a shame.”

The bugs appeared from everywhere at once: they poured from the loose electrical outlet; they swarmed up out of the floorboards; vomited up from the sink. Susan raced for the knife block and slipped on the fallen ceiling tile, still lying at an odd angle in the center of the kitchen floor. Her foot danced out from under her and she landed with a painful, spine-rattling thud, sunny-side up on the kitchen floor. Spots flickered before her eyes while badbugs advanced from all directions.

Andrea was coming, too, padding toward Susan in her god-awful lime green house shoes, step by step. The bugs crawled up and down Susan’s arms in exultant figure eights. Susan felt them in her hair.

*

Though Susan’s body was weak and frail, it nevertheless took Andrea a full half hour to drag her down the long hallway into the living room, and then across the room to the air shaft. At last she made it and then, with a slippered heel, managed to kick open one of the windows lining the shaft. Cold air whistled into the room, and a moment later Susan heard the distant crash of glass hitting the basement floor.

“Now, listen, dear,” Andrea said, bending over Susan. “This is going to hurt. And there will definitely be some blood. Actually, if I’m being totally honest, there will be a lot of blood.” Andrea grimaced apologetically, her thin tight face a map of lines and spots. “But the thing is, dear, that’s how they want you.”

Andrea lifted her just far enough to get her up and over the sill and shoved her into the air shaft. As she tumbled down two floors to the basement, Susan imagined herself as a baby carriage, spinning end over end, filled with blood, about to burst on the floor below.

The pain was terrible. It radiated upward from the lower part of her body, from her legs and her pelvis.

Susan could not actually
see
the lower part of her body. Or anything, really. She was propped upright, somehow, and could move her head around a little, but not enough to look down. And anyway, it was dark. Terribly dark. But she could
feel
it, that was for certain. She could feel the pain, searing and intense, wave upon wave of agonizing pain radiating up from her legs. They were broken, she was sure of that. She tried, tentatively, to move them, and the waves of pain doubled, crested. Her right kneecap was facing the wrong way, is what it felt like. Her left leg she could not feel at all.

Next Susan became aware of the stench. Wherever she was—
the trunk of a car? stuffed upright in a hole somewhere
?—it smelled
awful
. The smell filled her nose and mouth, stung her eyes with tears. It was like the hot rancid odor that trails after trash trucks, that lifts from the muggy city streets on scorching August mornings: a reek of garbage and shit and death and decay. The smell was all around her. She was inside it.

She could move her shoulder and her arms. The joints were stiff and resistant, but they moved. She wiggled her fingers and they moved through something, something loose and slippery, crumbling.

Garbage—she was buried in garbage. She pushed her fingers around her, expanding the radius of discovery: soil and dirt. Hunks of slimy, roughly textured vegetable matter, slippery shreds and waxy peels, crumbling wet hunks of what felt like cardboard.

Oh
, Susan thought simply.
I’m in the compost bin
.

She extended her fingertips as far as they would go, swimming them through the clustered muck, and they brushed against walls of hard plastic. She reached up, wincing as the joints in her shoulders cracked, and touched the lid of the bin above her head. She was able to raise the lid the tiniest bit before it fell closed again.

Slowly, she lowered her hands again, and they brushed against flesh. Susan screamed. As she screamed, Susan stared forward, and her eyes had adjusted to the darkness enough to see that Jessica Spender was staring back at her, her eyes wide open, bugs crawling across the milky flesh of the eyeballs.

Susan screamed and screamed and screamed, the stench of rotting trash filling her mouth and rolling like fog down into her lungs.

*

In time, Susan stopped screaming, lapsed into a low animal moan, and then into terrified silence.

The minutes rolled past.

There was nothing to do, nothing to think. She couldn’t move. She kept her eyes closed, rather than stare into the dead eyes of Jessica Spender. But with her eyes closed, she imagined the body of Dana Kaufmann, slowly being covered over with gleeful triumphant bugs, her blood leaching onto the kitchen floor, a bloodsucker’s feast.

Susan flickered in and out of consciousness, her head lolling
forward on occasion, then jerking back up when her mouth sank below the line of the garbage. The pain, which had been so sharp when she woke, dampened to a low constant ache. In time, Susan began to feel a strange fondness for this pain, radiating up from the wreckage of her legs: it distracted her from the itching, rashy sensation that had been her constant preoccupation for so long. It was a different kind of pain, and for that she felt a perverse gratitude.