Sleep Tight (6 page)

 

Two men and a dog moved in a halting shuffle along the wide corridor. The beagle, Daisy, padded silently along and stopped at the sixth doorway. The two men froze and held their breath. The dog nosed the door open and pushed inside. They followed her inside. Daisy sniffed and pawed at the crumpled sheets that lay at the foot of the bed in the vast suite, gave one short bark, and promptly sat down.

“What does that mean?” Mr. Ullman, the general manager asked. He was a sweating, pallid man in his mid-fifties who demanded that the employees call him Mr. Ullman, never by his first name. He looked like he might be sick any minute.

Daisy’s handler, Roger Bickle, was a round little man dressed in a white uniform with a red bow tie. He knelt down and peeled up the fitted sheet from the mattress. Using a pen flashlight, he lifted the edge of the mattress and examined the seams. Daisy barked again.

“What does that mean?” Mr. Ullman asked again, impatience cracking his voice. “Why is he doing that?”

“It’s a ‘she,’ sir, and it means that we have a positive result.”

“Positive? So that is . . .” Mr. Ullman was clearly overwhelmed and confused. He refused to give up the hope that a positive result meant that his rooms were pest-free.

The exterminator shook his head. “It’s not a good thing, sir. I’m sorry.” He stood, grim and apologetic, hoping his professional appearance would reassure the general manager. Roger secretly liked wearing his company’s uniform. He went along with the usual bitching and moaning about the ridiculous outfit in the locker room, but every morning, he felt proud to clip on the bow tie. He believed the uniform carried authority, and had a calming effect on clients.

He circled the bed, pulling up the fitted sheet as he went. “I’m afraid to inform you that Daisy has given us a positive sign. And what that means, sir, is that you have an infestation of bedbugs.” He swept the pen light along the seams in the mattress and focused on a spot near the headboard. “Yes. Here we are. You can clearly see a physical presence right here.”

Mr. Ullman got closer, put on his glasses, and stooped over, peering at the circle of light. He saw brown spots dotting the fabric and what looked like tiny, finely crumbled scabs. “What is it?” he finally asked.

“Bedbug fecal matter,” Roger said with no small amount of satisfaction. For a moment, he thought the general manager might actually vomit. “See, what happens is—”

“Please, I don’t need to know.” Mr. Ullman sank back onto the leather couch. “All I want to know is how to get rid of them. Quickly and quietly.”

“They might be in the couch too,” Roger pointed out helpfully.

Mr. Ullman leapt to his feet and swatted at the tail of his suit coat. He looked like he was about to cry. Instead, he fingered his tie.

Roger grunted and pulled the mattress sideways about a foot. Lying on the floor, he shone the pen light on the underside of the mattress. “Yes, sir. There is most definitely an infestation of bedbugs here.” He pinched something tiny between his thumb and forefinger. It looked like the husk of some foreign fruit seed. “Here we have an exoskeleton.”

He swung his flashlight back to the wall. “And like any bug, when there’s one, there’s a ton.” He held the exoskeleton out.

Mr. Ullman waved it away. Now that the harsh reality had settled in, he only wanted to know one thing. “How do we get rid of them?”

Roger struggled to his feet. “That, sir, is not an easy question.”

“Surely you must have some kind of pesticide for these things.”

“Yes and no,” Roger said while checking the other side of the bed. “DDT nearly wiped them out fifty years ago, but of course, to the benefit of humanity”—he had a quiet laugh with himself—“that’s been banned. Most of the bugs they’ve tested show signs of immunity anyway. Bedbugs are awfully . . . resilient. The main problem with pesticides is that even if you find one that works, all you’re doing in a building like this is driving them from one room to another, or one floor to another. They can fit anywhere.”

“A building like this? Are you kidding? This floor was just completed two weeks ago! This entire building is brand new!” Mr. Ullman was starting to take the infestation personally.

The Serenity was Chicago’s latest luxury hotel, inhabiting an entire city block, stretching from Washington to the south to Randolph on the North Side, and Dearborn to State, west to east. Much of the space near the streets had been carefully landscaped, layered with reflection pools and birch trees. The building itself was triangle shaped, both in footprint and profile. It rose one hundred and thirty-four floors above the city, culminating in a great sweeping point at the top. The leading edge of the building faced the lake, flanked on both sides by curving slabs of gray windows. The locals had immediately dubbed it “The Fin,” as in a shark’s dorsal fin, to the dismay of the owners and Mr. Ullman.

Mr. Ullman kept trying to get the exterminator to understand the true significance of the hotel. “We have been in the news practically every day for weeks now. It has all been carefully orchestrated, I can assure you. Surely, you heard about the charity ball last night? Everyone in town was here.”

Roger considered this. He spread his hands apart in a helpless gesture. “If this building is so new, then why would it have so many bugs?”

Mr. Ullman licked his lips, then pressed them together so tightly they almost disappeared. He did not want to discuss the matter. “I think you will understand our need for discretion. We had a . . . situation, where we discovered that a group of homeless people had been hiding in the unfinished sections near the roof, and using these rooms to sleep in at night. We scrubbed and fumigated everything, of course.”

“Of course.”

“I can only assume . . .” Mr. Ullman gestured helplessly. They contemplated the room in silence, until finally Roger felt compelled to say something, anything. “Yes, well. The problem is that once they are established, it can be very difficult to eradicate them. The females lay an average of up to five eggs per day when they’ve had a good meal. That’s over two hundred eggs in their lifetime. And the babies are ravenous. That’s what I’m assuming we have here. Bedbugs molt five times before reaching adulthood. That’s why I’m finding so many exoskeletons.”

Roger slid the entire bed away from the wall and shined his light behind the headboard. “Aha! Here we go.” He produced a pair of tweezers and held it up for the manager. Up close, it wasn’t exactly menacing. The little bug was about the size of an apple seed. Six feeble legs waved about helplessly.

“Yes, yes,” Mr. Ullman said. “Fine. But now what do we do?”

Roger dropped the bug in a specimen vial and secured it in the chest pocket of his uniform. “To be absolutely sure, I would recommend clearing out every piece of furniture in these rooms and destroying them. Start over. At the very least, dispose of all the mattresses, the couches, the easy chairs. Anything with padding and fabric.”

Mr. Ullman was aghast. “Are you joking? Do you have any idea of what this couch cost? More than your annual salary, I’m guessing. That chair? Hand built in Italy. The mattress alone cost over fourteen thousand dollars for God’s sake. Are you seriously saying there is no chemical that we can use to kill these things?”

Roger shook his head. “The amount you’d have to use would destroy the furniture. Heat can kill these things, but again, you’d risk ruining the furniture.” He thought for a moment. “Bedbugs can live up to a year without eating. But they have very weak jaws. They’re just tubes, really, one for injecting you with their saliva, which contains both an anesthetic and an anticoagulant, and the second one sucks out your blood. Fascinating stuff, really when you—”

“I’m sure it is. You were saying.”

“Well, they can’t chew through much of anything. Not like your cockroach, let me tell you. It’s not hard to trap them. If you could get by without all this furniture for some time . . . some considerable time . . . you could seal everything in plastic sheeting. Then we could go through the rooms, sealing every crack and crevice with clear silicone.”

“Would that solve the problem?”

“You would have to store them for over a year.”

“So I could theoretically not dispose of these, and claim it on insurance?”

“If you have bedbug insurance.”

Mr. Ullman studied his spotless shoes. “It was overlooked.”

“I don’t know if your insurance will pay for it or not, but if you seal this furniture and this mattress and box springs, the rest of the bed too, just to be sure, then, yes, I think it would take care of the problem.”

“As soon as possible, get it done.”

 

 

The furniture was encased with industrial-strength plastic wrap and sealed with clear plastic sheets, to be on the safe side. All of it, the couches, the chairs, the mattresses, were triple sealed in duct tape. The workmen rolled it away to the freight elevators while more exterminators arrived to seal the cracks between the floors and the walls, all electrical outlets, light fixtures, and anywhere else a dime could fit sideways. The carpets were steam cleaned again and again, and inch-wide double-sided tape encircled the inside of every vent.

The furniture was taken to the basement, where it was wheeled past the massive clothes washers and dryers, then carried down the stairs through the narrow walkways between massive pipes and various industrial machines, down into the third level of the sub-basement. The concrete here had been slapped against the crumbling walls that linked tunnels under the Washington and Lake train stations. They pried open a steel door at the far end, and packed the furniture inside a room the size of small church. The door was padlocked, sealed with duct tape, and promptly forgotten by the staff.

It took only a few seconds for the noise from the workers to diminish and disappear completely. Thirty minutes later, the first rat squirmed into the room from a crack in the far wall and sniffed the furniture. In three days, the rats began to build a nest. They tore through the plastic like a toddler going after a sliver of cake wrapped in Saran Wrap, digging into the soft underbelly of the cushions and mattresses.

The bedbugs grew aware of the new blood and crawled out to feed on the sleeping rats. As the rat nest grew, so did the bug population. The bedbugs encountered the bat bugs inside of the second week.

Bedbugs and bat bugs are so similar that each species can only be distinguished by microscopic examination. Inevitably, some of the male bedbugs attempted to mate with the bat bugs. The males crawled over the bat bugs, stabbing the females in the abdomen with their hypodermic genitalia, filling the body cavity with sperm. All but one of the traumatic inseminations produced sterile offspring. This one female found a quiet spot inside one of the expensive mattresses and laid three sticky white eggs. Fourteen days later, the eggs hatched.

All three bugs carried the virus.

 

When the seasons change in Chicago, the transformation can be startling. Bare branches become lush and vibrant; trees seem to appear out of nowhere. Bushes flourish like a happy cancer, hiding garbage and cracked foundations. Grass turns green overnight. Even the air smells different, as if it were being piped in from somewhere down south.

During these first few weeks of true warmth, the city’s denizens peel off layers of clothing, like snakes shedding their skin, and emerge from the darkness of winter hibernation with pale skin and an insatiable lust for the sun. A collective sigh of relief can be heard, and just like the plants and trees, the abandoned sidewalks erupt with life.

Louis W. Holtzfelder liked to take a midmorning break from his tax law office in the upper floors of 845 North Michigan and stroll across the bridge to the Starbucks on the other side of the Chicago River in the Trib building. In the winter, he parked in the heated underground garage, and rode the elevator up to his office. Same thing in the deep summer. There was no point in suffering the extremes of Chicago’s weather like some common laborer when his status afforded him twenty-four-hour climate control.

When the weather was mild, a Goldilocks blend of spring warmth and refreshing breezes without summer’s oppressive heat, he gladly left the sedate hum of fluorescent lights tastefully hidden behind soothing smoked glass, and ventured onto Michigan Avenue on foot. No doubt the attire of the office girls that suddenly appeared on streets had something to do with this decision, but he would never admit this, not even to himself. Still, he couldn’t help but notice the annual baring of shocking amounts of female flesh and he tried not to stare as he made his way through corporate workers and throngs of tourists to get his soy chai latte espresso.

Sometimes he would even take the time to sit on one of the benches along the river if the stench from the polluted water wasn’t too bad. Today, though, he needed to get back to the office as soon as possible. He shouldn’t have even left, because the temp’s lack of intelligence was staggering, but by eleven in the morning, Holtzfelder hadn’t been able to resist the sunlight and smells of tree blossoms and snatches of intoxicating, exotic perfume he occasionally could catch as he passed the girls on the street.

He was on his way back when he saw the homeless woman, approaching the bridge on the far side. At least, he thought it was a woman. She was black, of course.

He’d seen her before, shambling along the sidewalks like some great sluggish buffalo, pushing a shopping cart. He had had the misfortune of having to wait for her as she took hours to cross in front of his Jaguar. Holtzfelder believed there should be some kind of ordinance that banned the homeless from the city. Or at least kept them in the South Loop, well away from where the decent people worked. This was the price he paid for venturing onto public streets on such a beautiful day he reasoned, and tried not to let her presence interfere with his pleasant stroll.

She stopped at the edge of the bridge, nearly completely blocking the sidewalk with her overloaded cart. Tourists kept a wide berth, pushing their children out in traffic on the Michigan Avenue Bridge to shield their delicate sensibilities from an honest-to-God street vagrant.

No matter the weather, she wore layers upon layers of tattered, rotten scavenged clothing. A pair of oversized black Chuck Taylor shoes could be seen under the frayed plaid bell-bottoms. Holtzfelder knew the brand because his son had begged for a pair for his thirteenth birthday many years ago. Holtzfelder had refused. No son of his was ever going to look “punk.”

Most curious of all though, the homeless woman wore some kind of plastic Halloween novelty Viking helmet. The cartoonish horns pushed their way through holes in the brown hood attached to a brown cloak that draped her bulky frame. A circle of graying, waxy hair encircled a dark face with the texture of an old walnut. She could have been anywhere from a beaten forty-year-old to a still spry eighty-year-old.

Holtzfelder just knew she was going to accost him as he drew closer. He curled his free hand into a fist and focused his gaze firmly on the blinking DON’T WALK sign on the far corner. The lights were not going to help him. He would be stuck on the corner while the traffic sped along Upper Wacker and he feared that he would be exposed and vulnerable. Well, that was ridiculous. He was Louis W. Holtzfelder; some of his clients were among the most important people in the city. He set his jaw.

He was all ready to give her a piece of his mind when he got within five feet, but she wasn’t even looking at him. Instead, she was intently watching the promenade down by the water. Unable to stop himself, as if he was passing a gruesome traffic accident, he followed her gaze.

Down on the walkway that ran along the river, between the wrought-iron benches and cement flowerbeds, was a rat. Holtzfelder’s lips pursed. Rats had no more a right to be in the city than the homeless did. Still, it wasn’t natural to see a rat out in the direct sunlight, moving so slowly.

In fact, the rat wasn’t acting right at all. It stumbled from the shadows, staggering slightly as if drunk. He needed his glasses, because there seemed to be something wrong with the rat’s hair. It looked almost as if it was crumbling away, leaving a trail of dirt behind it. It hobbled to the edge of the river, and simply fell in. There was no jump, no grace, nothing natural. It looked like it was dying.

The homeless woman spoke, so suddenly and so close that Holtzfelder jumped. “Rats be sicker than a motherfucker. All over the place. This town, it be in all kindsa trouble. You watch.”

Holtzfelder edged around her and the cart, with no idea of what to say. The lights changed, and he hurried across the street, leaving the woman still staring at the empty space where the rat had fallen.