Bedbugs (21 page)

“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.”

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.

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.…