so bite me

I've finally gotten rid of the little bloodsuckers.

Bedbugs.

Bed bugs.

Bed. Bugs.

Yes, you may have heard of heard of the recent upswing in bedbug infestations in New York City. First the transit strike and now this! It's like my own personal reenactment of New York in the 70s.

Let me begin by saying that I never expected to blog about this and that I don't want this to be one of those typical "why meee!?!?!?" horror stories about some urban misfortune that has befallen the author. (Last time I came close to that was regarding the delivery of my sofa...). I don't really feel any anger -- not to my landlord, or my neighbors who more than likely unleashed the bugs on me, and certainly not to the bugs (everybody's gotta eat, right?).

The quick summary is that a couple of months ago our landlorad warned us that the "schmucks" upstairs were having a problem with bedbugs and that we should be vigilant. Our landlord pasted the blame squarely on our upstairs neighbors because of their supposed uncleanliness. (The neighbors are two creative writing students who seem to have conceived their decorating scheme around their Sony PlayStation; my Ivy-League roommate and I seem a bit more cleancut by comparison.) Now, I've actually done some research on bedbugs for my job at the low-income housing residence, so I knew that cleanliness had little to do with the problem and that the little guys spread notoriously quickly.

Months pass. Didn't think about it. Did sort of wonder, though, when little black spots started to appear on my sheets. Had I inadvertantly spilled some ink? Was my tattoo washing off? No, it turns out -- that was bedbug excrement (grooooosssss!!!!). I didn't put two and two together fast enough, though; it was weeks after I noticed the spots when I woke up in the middle of the night itching and discovered my new houseguests.

I'm actually quite proud of most of my behavior from this point on. "Oh," I thought. "Now it all makes sense. Bedbugs. I'd better sleep on the couch." So I showered, changed my clothes and did exactly that. The next day I took off all the sheets, wrapped them in plastic bags, and called my landlord. The exterminator wasn't reachable over the weekend, which meant several more days of sleeping on the couch or uptown at S's dorm. "Ah, well," I figured, "I'll just have to deal with this."

I'm not saying this solely to pat myself on the back for my stoical acceptance of the vagaries of existence; in fact, I'm trying to figure out why my natural response was so level-headed. When I told people about the bugs many of them became incredibly alarmed, consoling me profusely or expressing how horrible and disgusting it must have felt. The uproar seemed misplaced to me: yeah, it would be horrible if I had to replace my mattress, but I would have to wait until the exterminator came in to examine the situation before I knew how bad it was. So why get upset now?

I guess I'd heard stories of people waking up to discover little bites on themselves; that hadn't ahppened to me. There art thou happy, as Friar Laurence once wisely said. My sofa (the one that took so long to get delivered!) is also reasonably spacious and comfortable. And I had enough personal time accrued to easily take off a Thursday morning from work to meet the exterminator. There and there also art thou happy.

The day of the extermination was rather incredible. My room is very, shall we say, compact. A bed, a desk, a dresser -- these things fit in the space just so, with very little room to spare. In order for the exterminator to get under the mattress and to spray along the baseboards, my entire room had to be dismantled. Furniture was brought out in the hall, things were pulled out and turned upside down, revealing an unseen universe of dust and grime. Cracks were discovered where the walls met the floor -- that's where the little buggers had broken in!! Poison was stuffed into the cracks and then they were sealed with preventative putty. Meanwhile, though, the entire environment was soaked in bug spray. He was hosing it inside the bed, soaking the mattress with it, dousing it on the floors, the walls, the surfaces of everything. By the time he was done, the room had been pulled apart and it was wet and stinking.

I felt like the characters in Maria Irene Fornes's Fefu and Her Friends, staring at the slime that was lurking under the stone. Here were the cracks, the mess, the uncleanliness that was normally papered over in the tidy order of my everyday life. Bedbugs weren't only something that plagued the formerly homeless tenants at my job. My room could use a good dusting.

And then it was time for the purification ritual. The laundering of every sheet and item of clothing. The dusting, the wiping, the drying. New sheets were bought. The room was reconstructed and it looked noticebly spruced up. I'd been meaning to do a spring cleaning, I told myself -- maybe this bedbug problem wasn't all that bad if it got me to get up off my ass and clean. Yes, my beautiful Turkish bedspread looked a little faded from the wash and had probably shrunk a bit, too, but every growth experience leaves its scars. Hadn't I emerged from this trial stronger than before?

It was not until that night that I finally snapped. Sleeping on my pristine new sheets I felt a bug and I woke up to find him crawling across my pillow. This was too much for me. I jumped out of bed, threw my new sheets into the wash, and paranoiacally began to bathe myself. It was then that I felt like a diseased human being, then that I finally felt like Job. The final tiny bug (just one!) arriving to destroy completely my sense of calm security. This is where all the irrational feeling of guilt and frustration broke loose. I spent one last fitful night in the other room, wondering when I would get a good night's rest.

Well, it turns out that that single bug was probably the last. The spray had been flushing them out of the walls, the exterminator said. It would be natural to see them for the next couple of days. Having now slept on the bed two nights without single itch or unwelcome visitor, I think I can safely say that the plague is gone. I lost some sheets but my landlord has promised to reimburse me (I like my new ones better anyway). Everything's back to normal.

I'm not sure what I'm trying to say about all this. The internalized guilt that finally burst out of me -- the worry that I would somehow infect S's bed or the rest of the apartment -- that feeling represented for me, in miniature, the guilt and shame that must be felt by all diseased persons. It's partly a feeling of self-pity and partly a feeling of isolation, stigmatization. The weariness that comes from feeling as if you alone have been saddled with a burden that no one else understands.

It was just some bugs and a week of lost sleep. When you think about it, it could have been a whole lot worse.