Bedbugs

“Olanzapine.”

“That’s what I said.”

Alex threw an arm around her, drew her in for a hug. “If you need anything.… ”

She hugged him back. “Go make some money, darling.”

* * *

After Alex had descended into the subway, Emma wriggled around in the stroller again and peered excitedly up at Susan. “Are we going to the drugstore that has the sunglasses? Can I get a pair of Barbie sunglasses?”

“Sure, baby. But first we have to stop by the library.”

23

At first glance, Cimex Lectularius: The Shadow Species did not look like the answer to Susan’s prayers. The book, when she finally found it in the third-floor stacks of the Brooklyn Public Library’s main branch, on Grand Army Plaza, was nestled between a fat volume on spider crabs and the charmingly titled Encyclopedia of Intestinal Parasites. The Shadow Species was a slim and unimpressive hardcover, with no dust jacket and a blank, unprinted gray cover. It reminded Susan of books she’d hated in college, theoretical works with titles like An Interpretational Aesthetics of Representational Art, written in dense, indecipherable text. Holding The Shadow Species up to the flickering fluorescent library light, Susan felt a surge of disappointment.

Come on, Sue, she chastised herself, settling down across from Emma at the big table where the girl was diligently working her way through a Wonder Pets activity book. What were you expecting? Golden pages? Magic sparks flying from the corners?

Susan flipped halfheartedly through the three blank pages at the beginning of the book, feeling the dog-eared corners crumble under her fingertips. On the title page, besides the author’s name (the name Pullman Thibodaux conjured for Susan a bearded British eccentric, puffing on his pipe at a meeting of the Royal Society of Explorers), she found the year of publication, 2002, and the name of the publisher, Kastl & DuBose.

Susan asked herself again what exactly she’d been expecting, and again she had no answer. Emma giggled and held up a piece of construction paper. “Mama, look! I drew you!”

Susan glanced at the exuberant scribble-scrabble. “Nice work, kiddo,” she said, and looked at her watch.

I’ll read for ten minutes. Then we’ll go get the stupid prescription.

The first chapter of Cimex Lectularius: The Shadow Species bore the bland, uninspiring title “Anatomy, Physiology, Habitat,” and the text that followed was every bit as lifeless: dry and academic all the way, seemingly intended for a purely scientific audience.

Cimex lectularius

, as distinct from

Cimex hemipterus

or

Cimex pilosellus, is the

most numerous of the several species of the order Hemiptera, family Cimicidae.

C. lectularius is a

hematophagous nocturnal insect notable for nonfunctioning wing pads and a beaklike dual mouth proboscis. Not unusually among its fellow invertebrates,

C. lectularius

reproduces by means of traumatic insemination: as the female lacks a vaginal opening, the male pierces the female’s abdomen and injects seminal fluid directly in the body cavity.

“Ugh,” Susan grunted.

“What, Mama?”

“Nothing, bear. You’re doing great.”

“I know!” Emma waggled her eyebrows like a pint-sized Groucho Marx and bent back over her coloring. Susan’s watch told her that it was 11:17, and the ten minutes she’d allotted herself had passed five minutes ago. She flipped forward and discovered that the first chapter of Cimex Lectularius: The Shadow Species concluded with an annotated line drawing of a bedbug: six thin legs and two antennae arranged symmetrically around the squat serrated husk of a body. The drawing made Susan’s entire body hot with itches, and she hunched forward at her seat and scratched wildly, like a dog.

Five more minutes, she thought, steadying herself. Five more minutes.

Susan stared at the title of the next chapter for a few seconds before fully registering the sly, oddly unsettling play on words.

Chapter Two: Badbugs.

This bit of mild cleverness introduced a distinct shift in the prose style of The Shadow Species. Pullman Thibodaux, apparently finished with the detailed biological survey of his subject, now proceeded to what he called “a brief cultural history of C. lectularius.” In a more sprightly and conversational tone, he related how bedbugs are mentioned in two plays by Aristophanes, and then — in a series of offset text blocks — detailed their appearances in the works of Anton Chekhov and George Orwell. On the next page, the bedbug illustration from the end of Chapter One appeared again, slightly bigger this time, and again Susan was overcome by it, convulsed in a feverish spasm of scratching.

“And now we come to the crux of the matter,” she read, when she had recovered. “Where we turn from the realm of fiction to that of nonfiction; from story to history.”

She leaned forward, licking her dry chapped lips, and turned the page.

In the histories of Livy we find one Arobolus, a cousin by marriage to the emperor Tiberius, whose wife was cursed by a blight of bedbugs. Arobolus, far from being sympathetic, claimed he had caused the gods to curse his wife in this way, as punishment for allowing herself to be seduced by an official in the Praetorian Guard. The story ends poorly not only for the wife — who was eaten alive in her bed — but also for the prideful Arobolus, whose home is plagued thereafter by the insects, and who is ultimately driven mad by their unceasing torments.

Susan licked her lips again, peeled a crust of dried skin from the corner of her mouth. Thibodaux related more stories in a similar vein: one from the Han dynasty of ancient China, one set among the Ibo people of precolonial Nigeria. One story, from Puritan Massachusetts, involved a minister named Samuel Hopegood, who threw himself into the Charles River, believing himself “bedeviled” after a particularly nasty bedbug infestation. As these stories unspooled, Susan scratched unceasingly at her neck with the cap of a ballpoint pen, until she felt the skin split open, and the pen cap sink beneath the skin.

The final section of Chapter Two was subheaded with a single question, bolded and underlined: AND WHY?

Why this epic fascination with such a minor irritant?

Why should the presence of

C. lectularius

in our homes and in our beds inspire such revulsion, even to the point of insanity?

Why do we shake out the sheets, why crawl the floors of our bedrooms, hunting like dogs?

Why such hatred for fundamentally harmless pests — these tiny, non-disease-carrying, functionally invisible insects?

Susan nodded, murmuring, “Yes, yes, yes,” until — when she read the next paragraph — she froze, grew still and silent. The forefinger that had been tracing the words trembled above the page.

Because it is not bedbugs that we are frightened of at all.

There is another species, a shadow species, a bedbug worse than bedbugs.

C. lectularius

, for all its scuttling in bed sheets and hiding in darkness, is the species we know of, that we can understand,