Bugging Out

Tova Cooper

Word Count 1395

Weekday mornings between 4 and 5 am are my uninterrupted coffee hour, each precious minute like ambergris dripping viscously down the hourglass called “me time.”

On a particular Thursday in an otherwise ordinary week, my early morning grope down the darkened hallway (destination espresso) was not going per usual. In fact, the hallway seemed to contain an apparition of my mother-in-law wearing a sleeveless, flowing nightgown, staring at me like a deer in headlights.

“Good morning, Tova,” she said, in a voice that was much too chipper for the hour and frosted with barely concealed anxiety. Noooo, I thought to myself, wondering if there was any chance I could pretend that “Grandma Amo” was not standing between me and my morning coffee. Amo’s presence in the hallway was an affront to my precisely choreographed morning routine, which could not tolerate the smallest variation from type. I stared unresponsively at her, the ambergris droplets melting and flowing ever more quickly down my imaginary hourglass.

“Uh, hi?” I intoned in a voice that might have hinted to my mother-in-law that this wasn’t a good time to talk. When Amo had shown up at our overpriced, too-small San Mateo apartment, explaining that she was now homeless and planned to stay indefinitely, I didn’t really have it in me to refuse. She had promised to help around the house, do some cooking, and spend time with our kids. That was okay. But this?

“Tova?” Amo repeated with an anxious chirp, shocking me out of my panicked distraction. “I’m afraid I have infested your house with bedbugs.”

“What?” I asked, torn between the need to focus on my stove-top Bialetti machine and Amo’s unthinkable utterance.

“What are you talking about?” I asked after registering what she had said.

“Look at my arm,” Amo responded, waving around a forearm covered in clusters of infected-looking sores. “I’ve scoured the Internet and have determined that these sores are definitely bed bug bites,” she continued, holding up a phone with photos of sore-covered arms that looked just like hers.

I continued to stare, dumbfounded. Obviously, coffee would have to wait.

Amo seemed to be insinuating that bed bugs had finally invaded my sanctum sanctorum, a fact I simply could not accept. I had read the infamous New Yorker article, so I knew that bed bugs had ruined the lives of countless New Yorkers. These were people exiled from rent-controlled apartments that had been passed down through generations: people who without a second thought were abandoning their irreplaceable apartments and thousands of dollars’ worth of furniture in an effort to escape the inescapable. As far as I understood it, only an expensive, high-heat treatment could stymie the dread invaders. This wasn’t good. Bed bugs were almost impossible to detect and had the uncanny ability to lodge themselves in nooks and crannies that humans didn’t even know existed.

“Amo, are you sure you’re not mistaken?” I asked. “Couldn’t those be infected mosquito bites?”

“I am sure,” Amo said, confident in the results of her Internet search. She went on to explain her emergency action plan: “We need to isolate Leo’s bedroom, which means I’ll have to move into the hallway while we quarantine and disinfect the room.” As Amo spoke, I suddenly came to terms with the fact that this darkened hallway—this birth canal between my bedroom and my morning coffee—had become the site of a living nightmare. My apartment was infected with bed bugs!

Stifling my instinct to panic, I got to work trying to contain the uncontainable. It was still early, I reasoned. If bed bugs had only been here a few days, I might be able to eradicate them before they started reproducing like, well...like bed bugs. I didn’t want to admit the truth, which was that this crisis threatened to unbalance my reality, which already felt like a heavy ballast at the edge of a cornice.

“No!” I cried out. “This cannot be happening. This is not happening.”

“I’m sure it is,” Amo responded, her voice disturbingly calm. Again, she held up the images from her Internet search. “I’ve ruled everything else out,” Amo continued in the faux-rational tone she reserved for her most outlandish claims. Had I considered it more thoroughly, I might have noticed that Amo’s careful home reorganization was too carefully considered to be an emergency response. However, my prefrontal cortex had temporarily shut down, leaving me in an aporia between freeze and fight. Flight, unfortunately, was out of the question.

“Diatomaceous Earth,” I shouted, remembering something I had once read about the abrasive powder’s ability to thwart bed bugs. After purchasing several bags of diatomaceous earth, I was ready to begin operation immediate containment.

First, I grabbed a pile of trash bags and stuffed every infestable item into them before double-tying each bag. I was moving with superhuman speed, motivated by visions of my future family, nomads on the run, always a step ahead of the most insidious home invader of all—the bed bug, invisible to the naked eye, yet rife with the potential to create harm.

Operation Immediate Containment resulted in a surreal scene. Our apartment was soon covered in piles of tightly knotted trash bags resting on a landscape of volcanic ash. I had scattered the DE over every infestable surface, including beds, couches, chairs, and carpets, while my anxious tween started perseverating about inhaling particulate matter. Obviously, he hadn’t read the New Yorker article and didn’t have his priorities straight.

Later that day, when I asked my husband to help me understand his mother’s behavior, his response was disturbingly nonplussed: “Shoot, haven’t I told you about my mom’s history of imaginary bug infestations? It’s a pretty regular thing with her, actually.”

“That might have been useful to know before she visited,” I said.

He just shrugged and went back to reading his comic book, which made me wonder if there was a link between my husband’s hobby and his mother’s off-the-wall behavior.

“This is different from the poison gas, right?” I asked, referring to Amo’s belief that wherever she went, the Feds would gas, laser-beam, or otherwise poison her. Fortunately, Amo had heroically survived many attempts on her life because of how careful she was. For example, Amo only ate out at buffet restaurants, since her enemies wouldn’t dare poison everyone in the restaurant. Too much collateral damage.

“It’s a bit similar to the poison gas,” Stan explained. “Did you notice how my mom identified the bed bugs as a threat so she could justify quarantining the space? The problem is, my mom might end up having to symbolically threaten and quarantine...more space.” He nodded significantly at our bedroom door.

“Are you saying that if Amo keeps living here, she might eventually colonize our entire apartment?”

“Without a doubt,” Stan said, satisfied that I understood.

After the bed bug scare, we had to ask Amo to leave. For my part, I had to choose between being a good daughter-in-law and staying sane. After Amo left, I reveled in the peacefulness of life without bed bugs, imagined or real.

It wasn’t until this last summer that I was able to appreciate Amo’s imaginary bed bug infestation. After a trip to Sweden, I discovered that some actual bed bugs had hitchhiked in my suitcase and had begun to infest my house. I didn’t know how many there were, just that I woke up one night to find two reddish brown, adult bedbugs (which, it turns out, are definitely visible to the naked eye) crawling on my body. With the combination of incontrovertible evidence and my experience with Amo, I reacted with preternatural calm. As soon as I had positively identified the invaders, I put all my family’s clothes and bedding in tightly knotted plastic bags, rubbed diatomaceous earth into all the nooks and crannies of our house, and arranged for an exterminator to heat the house to 150 degrees (the gold standard of bed bug treatments). When I think of bed bugs these days, I am reminded of the famous line, first coined by Joseph Heller in Catch-22: “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you.” For many people, the specter of imaginary danger is worse than actual danger. In this respect, bed bugs are the perfect paranoid threat—visible only through second-hand signs that might or might not evidence the unthinkable.

Tova lives in Los Angeles with her husband, two kids, and two fur-babies. After spending 20 years in academia, Tova now spends her time writing creative non-fiction, making ceramic art, and raising her two children. She is currently working on a novel entitled, Death in the Humanities.