Day 13
Quarantine is a frustrating experience for anyone. And, obviously, much more so for people who have some awful disease that will probably kill off most of humanity. I don't have one of those diseases, so it's probably not fair to complain. Still, it would have been nice if -- when I returned home for the weekend -- my mother had greeted me with a phrase like 'hello' or 'good to see you' when I came to stay at her apartment, rather than the somewhat clinical: 'nothing you have is coming in the house. Stay there and take off your clothes and we'll wash them. You'll need to shower.'
In comparison to the greeting my roommates gave me when I came back to New York this morning, her reaction was actually friendly. The door to my room had been sealed off with blue painter's tape; anything that had been in my presence for the past four months was piled on top of my bed; and my roommates gave me stony glances for the first few hours I was home. We are not sure where the bedbugs came from, but it's clear that my room is a prime suspect.
Katherine and Jihad were fairly understanding after a time. They didn't really blame me for leaving town. They would have too, if they had the option. It is really miserable living in an apartment where you wake up several times a night with the distinct impression that something is crawling on you and the knowledge that the impression is probably right.
They just wanted me to endure the bugs with them. So we sat down and they asked me to stick around for the rest of the process. There were many legitimate reasons, I needed to stay in town, but the major subtext was "I am really miserable here... I would kind of like it if you were too."
Day 15
An exterminator finally came today. He arrived at 8 am, glanced around and said we didn't meet the minimum standards that would allow him to spray. I am a messy person. I admit it. Even so, it's disheartening for a stranger to tell you your living space isn't clean enough to warrant killing off the bugs.
The exterminator agreed to come back at noon, if we would better prepare for his return. So we started a whirlwind cleaning session that would have been the envy of any Warner Brothers cartoon character.
The process of preparing for bedbug treatment is a lot like moving out of your apartment. It involves taking out all of your clothes then carting them to the Laundromat for cleaning, then dry cleaning anything that can't be thrown in a dryer, and then cleaning off any shelf space, and then clearing space so that the bed can be moved or the desk can be moved or the armoire can be moved -- which, when you are in an apartment space that is roughly the size of your own chest cavity, can be tricky- and then going through any book that has been in your room and making sure bugs aren't hiding in the pages, and then checking your filing cabinet in a similar manner. At the end of the day, your bedroom is just a collection of bare surfaces.
All of this is arduous enough if you have in-building laundry. Sadly we don't. We actually use the Laundromat around the corner which is -- objectively speaking -- the most hostile place on earth.
Katherine began to wash and dry the fifteen bags of laundry that we had while I walked around the apartment with the exterminator. My phone rang as I was explaining where we had sighted bugs.
"How many circles does hell have?"
"Katherine?"
"This place is the tenth circle, I think... If there are ten. Where are you?"
"I'm dealing with the exterminator. There are only nine. This is Katherine, right?"
"Well, then this is the ninth circle. The woman here is an actual devil. It's hot. There are vicious people everywhere. Get down here."
"I'm with the exterminator... and the ninth circle is cold. Satan chews on people there. Judas and Brutus and someone else I think. Another Roman maybe. I'm with the exterminator."
"I don't care. Eighth circle then. Hurry."
She was right. Our Laundromat is the eighth circle of hell. Dante didn't mention it directly, but that was an oversight. Our neighborhood has relatively few Laundromats and almost no one has a washer and dryer in-building, resulting in an atmosphere of intense and sometimes uncomfortably physical competition for the few available dryers. The already charged atmosphere is made particularly dangerous at our local Laundromat by a series of heavyset neighborhood Grand dames who are willing to throw their weight around. When I walked into the Laundromat, Katherine was facing down one such woman who had taken her clothes out of a washer and thrown them on the floor.
"What, you want to use all the dryers here at once!" the woman said
"Actually, yes."
"Your clothes are dry."
"They have bugs," Katherine said.
Apparently she hadn't mentioned this earlier. The effect was satisfying. Most people took at least a small step back and the grand dame who had been facing us down retreated completely. One woman, who had been rummaging through our clothes in an attempt to clear a dryer for herself, jerked her hands back so rapidly and with so much revulsion that it looked like the beginnings of an epileptic fit.
Day 16
The spray has been laid down and, as we understand it, the next step is to simply lie and wait.
The idea behind spraying for bedbugs is for a professional to come in and spray your walls, shelves, and floor with a residual poison that will, theoretically, kill any bedbugs that walk across it. Of course, the bedbugs need some sort of incentive to walk across the poisoned surfaces, which means that you have to use yourself as bait.
The problem is that there is virtually no way to know if the bedbugs will take the bait. The awful little things have been observed to live for over a year without feeding and they are known to emit a scent that warns other bedbugs of danger. So even if they retreat for some time, there is still the possibility that they are just lying and waiting for you to let down your guard.
Meanwhile, our strategy must also be lying and waiting, though with the constant fear of bugs. It is actually a pretty horrible sensation, but to Katherine and Jihad's credit, I will say that it's a lot nicer knowing that there are other people dealing with the same thing.