When I suffered a bedbug infestation in my apartment two years ago, I spent much of my time crying to friends and family through bloodshot, sleep-deprived eyes.
Sounding like departed BP CEO Tony Hayward, I repeated one simple prayer between sobs: “I just want my life back!”
Sometimes I fantasized about jumping the one storey off my balcony – not to die, but so I could go to a hospital and lie in a bedbug-free bed for a few nights.
My roommate and I endured about half a year of this, including nearly half a dozen unsuccessful fumigations, which meant six months of keeping all our belongings in sealed plastic. Kind of like living out of a suitcase – or rather several suitcases, garbage bags and Rubbermaid containers. I spent between $300 and $400 on the containers as well as cleaning supples and what turned out to be useless bedbug-proof sheets and pillow cases.
Everything that couldn’t be sealed in plastic needed to be vacuumed regularly to suck up the eggs the bugs might have left behind, including baseboards and kitchen drawers. Ironically, despite being infested, my apartment had never been cleaner.
After nearly dropping out of university because I could never find my fucking books and had barely slept, I began to look at homeless people with a certain perverse envy.
Still, I think it would all have been tolerable if I’d known it would end. “Will I always be living like this?” I would think, staring ruefully at the border of carpet tape around my bed, put there to capture bugs on their way to dinner, or grabbing the flashlight on my bedside table to shine a prison search light on intruders.
Of course, I thought of moving but had read enough about bedbugs by then to know that they’d likely come along. I thought about getting rid of everything I owned – but then the question would be how long to wait before replacing my bed and other furniture, since the replacements, too, could become infestation sites. Like most people, I couldn’t afford to buy a new bed every few weeks.
Eventually, my roommate and I threw out our beds and slept on air mattresses till we finally resolved the problem – and without doing so I am pretty sure we never would have. (Word of advice: throw your bed out at the first sign of the beasts.)
And what about clothes? I seriously considered doing the following: throwing everything out and sleeping naked on an air mattress while keeping a stash of outfits outside my apartment – that I would sprint to in the nude before sunrise and then wear to go about my day.
I also thought of simply burning everything I owned and walking out of my apartment stark naked to begin my life completely anew. In the middle of the night as I lay in vigilant half-sleep, I had an image of myself walking nude in slow motion, behind me my apartment engulfed in flames fuelled by the gasoline I had sprinkled and the match I had just tossed.
There would be a hundred, a thousand (how many bugs were there?) tiny screams, followed by a peaceful, paradisical silence. I am pretty sure I was losing my mind.
This gradual decline into semi-functioning madness was not helped by my obsession with learning everything I could about the bugs.
I spent hours online. Did you know that bedbugs don’t make nests? They do not form any kind of family unit, and while they congregate in groups, they do not form any kind of community, unlike ants and bees. Rather, it’s every bug for him-/herself.
But my favourite piece of bedbug trivia concerns their mating behaviour. Male bedbugs literally rape the females. There is no mating dance. A male simply attacks a female and, since females have no sex organs, tears a hole in her abdomen and fills it with his sperm. It’s called “traumatic insemination.”
Some nights I imagined these Clockwork Orange sex scenes occurring on my body while I slept.
In a moment of startling lucidity, or lunacy, I had a startling revelation: bedbugs are extreme conservatives. They do not seek or want help from one another they reject the idea of community. It’s everyone for him-/herself in the pursuit of blood.
The ultimate horror: I was being munched on by libertarian parasites. You could say it was a long six months.
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