After thirty terrible seconds, Susan hacked, gagged violently, and swallowed the bedbug. Then she heaved herself to her feet and raced to the kitchen sink to vomit. As the yellow and orange sick pooled in the sink, she drew up the stopper; pinching her nose closed with one hand, she sifted through the vomit with the other, trying to find the tiny bug in the vile puddle.
No luck. Of course.
Susan rinsed out her mouth three times with water and then gingerly reached with a fingertip to touch the welt she already felt rising on the back of her tongue. She almost gagged again and had to stop, but when she swallowed she could feel it, could picture it, rising red and round way at the back of her mouth — out of sight.
She could tell Alex. She could go upstairs, and—if she could get him to wake up, if she could get him to pay attention — there was zero chance that he would believe her. And why should he believe her? He wouldn’t be able to see this new mark. It was hidden, just like the bugs wanted it to be.
Susan poured herself a glass of wine, sat down at the kitchen table, and turned on her computer.
When Safari opened, some vestigial reflex led Susan to check her Facebook page, and her eyes dimly scrolled through the mundane and mock-profound information displayed by old friends. Leslie Clover was remarrying her ex-husband. Sean Hurley was about to publish a book of poems with a small press in Nebraska. Someone was having a baby; someone had eaten at the Applebee’s in Times Square; someone had been hired to teach economics at NYU. These all felt like dispatches from some distant land where Susan had once lived, a long time ago.
She typed in the address for BedbugDemolition.com, and when the website opened with its now-familiar junky landscape, she scanned the forum titles. Nothing new; she returned to the Pictures page and stared morbidly at the photos of egg sacs, then at a series depicting the “classic bedbug bite formation”—three bites in a neat horizontal row, described as “breakfast, lunch, and dinner.” There was nothing new posted from Susan’s old friend 0-684-84328-5@gmail.com.
“Oh,” Susan said suddenly. “Oh, shit. Right.”
She hurriedly went to Gmail, holding her breath hopefully, and ran her eyes impatiently down dozens of unread subject lines, one-day sales and horoscopes and “haven’t-heard-from-you” messages, until—yes! — there it was. In her Spam box, a reply from 0-684-84328-5@gmail.com.
She clicked the message eagerly, took a deep breath, and read:
allbedbugsarenotcreatedequaldonotcontactmeagain
“What?”
Susan squinted, yawned, and ran her finger along the screen as she puzzled out the words: All bedbugs are not created equal do not contact me again.
“Not created equal?” Susan whispered the words. She felt a sudden and powerful urge to stand up, slam shut the computer, and run from the house, just go sprinting off into the night in her long flannel nightgown and shower cap. Fuck Jenna. She would go to a homeless shelter.
“A homeless shelter?” she said aloud. “I don’t know, those places are pretty gross. Might have, like, bedbugs or something.”
Susan cackled, throwing her head back and bouncing peals of wicked laughter off the walls of the dark kitchen. Her lips were dry, so dry that when she grinned her bottom lip split open painfully; she flicked out her tongue, tasting the coppery tang of her blood.
On her screen, the words stared balefully out at her: All bedbugs are not created equal do not contact me again.
“Hmm.”
Susan highlighted the strange numerical e-mail address, 0-684-84328-5@gmail.com, clicked Copy, pasted it into a Google search box, and hit Return. There were three matches — all referring back to the mystery person’s postings on BedbugDemolition.com. Dead end. Susan felt a new itch at the small of her back and raked her nails at the spot.
This time she copied not the whole address, but just the numbers—0-684-84328-5.
She pasted them into the search box. Maybe it was a tracking code, for a FedEx package. Maybe it was a serial number for something. Some pest-control product, probably. Viral marketing. Some crapola. Maybe it was the VIN number for a car.
She pressed Enter and stared at the screen, agape.
It wasn’t a tracking number. It was an ISBN code — a numerical code, assigned by a publisher to a book. As it turned out, 0-684-84328-5 was the ISBN for a book, published in 2002 by an author named Pullman Thibodaux, titled Cimex Lectularius: The Shadow Species.
Susan’s hands began to tremble and she looked around the room; suddenly, she felt as though she could see them everywhere, the bugs, could feel them crawling under her chair, hear them hissing and clicking in the cabinets.
The Shadow Species.
The swollen bite sat at the back of her tongue, throbbing like a torturer’s mark.
22
According to the degrees covering one wall of his examination room, Dr. Lucas H. Gerstein had obtained his undergraduate degree at Brown University, proceeded to medical school at Cornell, and then done his residency in New York, at Bellevue. Dr. Gerstein was a licensed allergist and a member of the American Medical Association’s Steering Committee on Pollutants and Allergens. He had a receding hairline, a large forehead lined with deep grooves, and mild grey eyes, which he now ran carefully over Susan’s body.
They had chatted for a while first, and he had jotted down her answers in a thin notebook: The bugs had first appeared three weeks ago, she’d reported; yes, she’d seen the bugs — well, only one, actually, and only briefly.
“Hmm.” Dr. Gerstein smiled blandly as his hands passed industriously over her body. “If you could lift your hands for me. Thanks.”
Susan shivered in her paper gown. Her skin was rough and dried out as an old piece of canvas, worn and abraded. There was her wrist, of course, where the original scar, dug up and healed a million times over, was now a crosshatch of suppurated tissue. There was the spot on her left shoulder, similarly dug up, currently red rimmed and lightly oozing with pus.
Dr. Gerstein ran his gloved fingers over these marks and found more: a cluster of bites below her breasts, three or four along her right thigh, scattered bites dotting her arms. Some of the bites were small, barely visible, while others were opened and bleeding like stigmata. Some were sharp, thin, and angled, like paper cuts, others were gaping, obscene, like gashes or bullet wounds.
“Does that hurt?” the doctor asked, probing at a bite on the small of her back. His voice was thin and nasal, fussy.
“Yeah,” she said, wincing. “It does.” Susan’s lips were dry and desiccated, and the skin of her knuckles was rough as sandpaper. When she flexed her fingers, small cracks opened up and bled fresh.
Alex sat in a hard plastic chair in the examination room, leaning forward with a worried expression. When she was pregnant, he had come to the ultrasounds, strained to hear the heartbeat, sitting awkwardly in the small examination rooms with his coat in his lap. Susan tilted her head back and exhaled. On the opposite wall was a picture of Dr. Gerstein and his homely, horse-toothed wife. As his fingertips danced over her abraded skin, they exacerbated the itch at every spot they touched.
“All right.” He was pulling off the gloves. “Are there any marks I have not seen?”
“On my scalp.” She pushed aside her hair, and the doctor stood up on his toes to peer at the top of her skull.