But—oh, God, oh, God, thank God—someone was moving the sofa.
“Alex!” she called, or tried to call, but her voice came out as a gritty dry rattle. “Alex?”
“No, ma’am.”
As soon as Dana Kaufmann opened the door her mouth dropped open. The exterminator’s voice emerged as a cold dead whisper: “Holy crap.”
28
“You see them?” whispered Susan desperately from where she lay in a heap in the far corner of the room. The bug currently sucking blood from her face unlatched, descended onto her stomach, and skittered away. Bugs meandered across her arms and legs; bugs threaded in and out of her eyebrows; bugs swarmed in clumps and swirls across the floorboards, in patches all over the room. “You really see them?
Dana Kaufmann stepped slowly into the bonus room, her big brown work boots crunching on patches of bugs. The badbugs, made wild by her presence, dashed in frenzied patterns around and past her footsteps as she made her way to Susan, bent over, and extended her hand.
“I see them,” said Dana Kaufmann. Now that her initial shock had worn off, Kaufmann sounded like Susan remembered: gruff, stoic, and reassuring. “I do, Ms. Wendt. I see them all.”
“What I need you to understand, first and foremost, Ms. Wendt, is that there are no pests I cannot kill. None. Do you understand?”
Susan was sitting cross-legged on the kitchen table in her bra and underwear while Dana Kaufmann picked tiny insects off her body. She was like a mother gorilla grooming her offspring, hands moving swiftly and expertly over every patch of Susan’s skin. Cast skins covered Susan’s body, crusted on like patches of eczema. Her torso was smeared with brown feces. Dana found three bugs still biting, latched in a neat row on Susan’s lower stomach, just above her waistline. The exterminator pulled them free one by one — muttering, “Sorry,” each time Susan winced at the tug of the bug’s unlatching.
“Hold still.”
Kaufmann reached between Susan’s legs and plucked an insect from just below the crotch, where it was about to bite. “Excuse my reach,” she grunted.
Susan nodded blankly. “What time is it?”
She felt completely disoriented: her back ached terribly, and her head was pounding like she’d been hit with a shovel. And, Jesus Christ, the itching — her whole body itched, one massive undifferentiated fiery itch.
“Quarter to ten. Here.” Kaufmann produced a tube of calamine lotion from a pocket of her coveralls and handed it to Susan as she continued. “I was supposed to be here yesterday, and I apologize. I had an emergency call at a house in Ditmas, and frankly you were not a priority, since I had already cleared the premises.”
Kaufmann paused, shaking her head in disgust and self-recrimination. “I cannot imagine how I failed to detect a problem of this magnitude. I honestly do not know how it happened. I just didn’t see them.”
Susan closed her eyes against the sun, which was shining in brutally through the kitchen windows. “They didn’t want you to see them.”
Kaufmann cocked her head. “Who didn’t want me to see them?”
“They were hiding from you. Only I was supposed to see them. Only me.” Tears were rolling from her eyes, down her red and abraded cheeks.
“Stop. Susan, hold on.”
“They’re not …” Susan’s voice dropped to a whisper, and she looked around fearfully. The bugs, emboldened by their assault on her the night before, roamed at will across the floor of the kitchen, in fat roving packs. This is their house now. “They’re not normal. They’re … they’re supernatural. I read this book, see … ”
“Don’t tell me.” Kaufmann scowled with irritation. “The Shadow Species.”
“You’ve heard of it?”
“I wish I could say I hadn’t. All right. You’re clean.” Kaufmann cracked her knuckles, jerked a thumb at the pile of clothes in the corner of the room. “But I would not advise putting those back on.”
So Susan wrapped herself in Kaufmann’s Greater Brooklyn Pest Control jacket while the exterminator heaped scorn upon Pullman Thibodaux’s masterpiece. “Badbugs, right? Please. Just for starters, the author of that book was insane. Literally. A mental patient. Supposedly, he and his wife had a severe bedbug infestation, and he was too cheap to have it treated professionally. So he’s trying to handle it, doing all this research, taping up the mattresses, all the bullshit things people do when they don’t know what they’re doing.”
Susan listened, holding her breath.
“Long story short, the wife can’t take it anymore, she walks. The guy goes cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs, decides that bedbugs aren’t bedbugs, they’re demons. OK?” Kaufmann, without smiling, rotated one finger beside her temple, playground sign language for crazy. “So he wrote that book”—she placed exaggerated air quotes around the word—“in his spare time, while in the nuthouse.”
“Well … all right, but … ”
“Susan, I had a client a couple years ago who got his hands on that damn book and insisted to me that his house had been cursed. Except he didn’t say curse, he said … oh, what the hell did he say?”
“Blight,” mumbled Susan. A draft crept in beneath the frame of the kitchen window, and she shivered. She was starting to feel a little ridiculous, half-naked and wrapped in Kaufmann’s gigantic jacket.
“Yes. Blight. Well, I performed an aggressive three-pronged protocol, right out of the playbook, and guess what? Five years later, he’s contented and bedbug free.”
The words shone like a dawning ray of hope in Susan’s mind: contented and bedbug free. But still … she cleared her throat, shook her head. “But …” Susan gestured around the apartment. “There are so many of them.”
“I’ve seen worse.” Kaufmann looked around. “Well, not worse. But close.”
“But I couldn’t kill them. They can’t be killed.”
“Oh, yeah?”
In a swift, athletic motion, Dana Kaufmann squatted and snatched a bedbug between two thick fingers. A split second later, she held up the squashed corpse for Susan’s inspection: a crumbled brown shell, a tiny gush of bright red blood at its center.
“Dead.”
Susan reached forward with a trembling hand and wiped the bug’s bloody broken body off Kaufmann’s fingertip onto her own. “Jesus,” she whispered. She began to shake, overcome by a confusing wash of shame and fear. “Dana. Dana, I tried to murder my husband last night. With a butcher’s knife.”
The exterminator raised her eyebrows slightly, let out a long low whistle, and shrugged. “Well, you know, infestations place extraordinary strain upon a relationship.”
Despite everything, Susan laughed.
“Now, come on,” said Kaufmann. “Let’s kill some fucking bedbugs.”
“The first thing we do is, we clean. Here, and your landlady’s apartment. Basement, too. This entire building needs to be scoured, disinfected, and decluttered, down to the canvas. No hiding places: no bugs.”
“But the book …”
“Right, right. The book. Your friend the mental patient wrote that the curse of the evil bedbugs will stay with you forever and always, no matter what you do or where you go. Well, guess what? The ancient Greeks said if you baked the bedbugs in a pie with meat and beans, they’d cure malaria. That, too, was total nonsense.”
Susan smiled weakly.
“Here’s what is not nonsense. We’re going to vacuum every room, we’re going to steam clean your mattresses and linens, we’re going to dry clean every piece of fabric in this apartment. We’re going to scour every exposed surface. Then we pack up your infestibles to be sealed and pumped with Vikane.”