The bedbugs were on my mind. New Yorkers had begun to speak more often about these tiny creatures in the past two years. The conversations, as befitted a troublesome occurrence in the private arena, had remained private, and the bedbugs were having an unlikely success. They were the unseen enemy that carried on their work, even as false alarms were raised about the West Nile virus, avian flu, and SARS. In the age of the dramatic epidemic, it was the old-fashioned bedbug, a minuscule red-coated soldier, that was least deterred. Of course, other illnesses were much more serious, and more of a drain on public resources. AIDS remained a devastating problem, especially for the poor, and for people who lived in the poorer countries. Cancer, heart disease, and emphysema were not pandemic, but were nevertheless of great importance among the causes of mortality. Even as the terms of transnational conflicts had changed, a similar shift was happening in public health, where, too, the enemies were now vague, and the threat they posed constantly shifting.
But bedbugs were not fatal, and were happy to stay out of the headlines. They were hard to fumigate into oblivion, and their eggs were almost impossible to kill. They did not discriminate on the basis of social class and, for that reason, were embarrassing. An infection in a wealthy home was just as likely, and just as difficult to get rid of, as one among the poor. Hotels at all levels of luxury suffered. If you had them, you had them, and ridding yourself of them permanently was difficult. And in that moment, as I contemplated these ideas, I suddenly felt sorrowful for Professor Saito. His recent encounter with the bedbugs troubled me more than what he had suffered in other ways: racism, homophobia, the incessant bereavement that was one of the hidden costs of a long life. The bedbugs trumped them all. The feeling was subconscious, contemptible. Had it been put to me so baldly at the time, I would have denied it. But it was there, an example of how an inconvenience can, because of one’s proximity to it, take on a grotesque aspect.
These tiny, flat creatures, which had sought out human blood since before Pliny’s time, were involved in a kind of low-grade warfare, a conflict at the margins of modern life, visible only in speech. At the end of the afternoon, when I left Professor Saito’s apartment, I decided to walk north through Central Park. The snow from three days previously had not melted. In the frigid air, it had hardened to create smooth, low hills across the fields. I kept to a snow-covered road that ran along a sturdy old wall. Footprints were visible, but there was no one else in sight. The light was so diffuse that almost no shadows were cast on the snow, and this gave one the feeling of levitation: white light above and white below. A flock of tiny birds — they might have been starlings — swirled around a tree in the distance. I had the distinct impression that the tangled branches, and the birds that wove expertly in and out of them, were made of the same dun brown substance, the latter different only because they were in an active state. At any moment, I thought, the jagged little branches would unfold their hidden wings and the entire crown of the tree would become a living cloud. The surrounding trees, too, would lose their heads, leaving sentrylike stumps behind, and in the sky above the park there would be a massive canopy of starlings. I walked along this soothing white road for a long time, until the cold cut through my gloves and scarf and compelled me to leave the park and take the subway the rest of the way home.
Later that night, looking through my medical textbooks for more on the bedbugs, I found only dry descriptions of etiologies, life cycles, and therapies. Steam laundering and cyanogas fumigation were discussed at length, but none of this got at what disconcerted me about these creatures. But by a remarkable chance, I found among my books a volume of field reports on epidemiology from the early twentieth century, one in a stack of outdated books that had been discarded by Dr. Martindale at his lab. I had idly picked up a few of those books without really looking at them, but now I found the report written by Charles A. R. Campbell in 1903, and in his writing I got a sense of the disgust and awe in which Cimex lectularius was then held.
Dr. Campbell’s report superficially conformed to the period style for a medical bulletin, but it drew its real power from a gradual accumulation of assertions, which created an intense and oppressive image of the creature under study. One of the characteristics of the bedbug, Campbell wrote, is its cannibalistic nature. He presented evidence that engorged bugs were sometimes slit open and consumed by their young. He also described a half dozen experiments he had carried out, ostensibly in the interest of scientific research but which gave the impression of an obstacle course designed to prove the bedbug’s hardiness and intelligence. Campbell would have been disappointed, I felt sure, had the bedbug failed to pass any of the trials he put it through.
In the experiments, bedbugs survived four months of isolation on a table in a sea of kerosene without food, they came through a deep freeze lasting 244 hours without being harmed, and were able to remain alive underwater for an indefinite period of time. The cunning of these insects, an awed Campbell wrote, is remarkable, and it appears that they have, to a certain extent, the power of reasoning. He described an experiment by Mr. N. P. Wright of San Antonio—“a very reliable citizen and close observer”—in which, as Wright moved his bed farther and farther from the sides of the room, the bedbugs climbed up the wall to the precise height from which they could jump and land on him. When he moved his bed closer, the bugs climbed only as high as was necessary. Campbell’s report included a number of stories of this kind, in which bedbugs demonstrated a certain ingenuity in reaching a bed to which their access had been blocked.
I thought of the bugs in their countless millions in all the five boroughs of the city, of their invisible eggs, of their appetite, which was greatest at the hour before dawn. The problem began to seem less and less a scientific one, and I came to share Campbell’s unease. The concerns were primevaclass="underline" the magical power of blood, the hours given over to dreams, the sanctity of the home, cannibalism, the fear of being attacked by the unseen. My rational self was dismayed at these glib analogies, at this unexpected surrender to the kind of insecurity I mocked in others. Nevertheless, when I was done reading, I unmade my bed, switched off the lights, and, kneeling down, carefully examined the seams of the mattress with a flashlight. I found nothing, but of course this did not in itself guarantee a restful night.
FIFTEEN
There had been a bombing at the biggest pet market in Basra, and the scene was filled with the feathers of parakeets, the cries of dying animals, blood-streaked debris, a mangled engine, a destroyed chair, and cages twisted as though they were made of twine. On the radio, the secretary of state began to discuss an upcoming offensive in the Shiite-controlled area of Baghdad. I went to the pet market and saw the carcasses of dogs lying next to human corpses. Women in black gowns cried and beat their breasts. There was one father who, dead, continued to clutch the vial of insulin he had been trying to take home to his daughter. I became very tired; tired unto death was the phrase that scrolled across my mind. I was in my white coat, and my tie was loosened at the neck. My mother was in the pet market. She wore a burka, and Nadège was there with her, wearing the same. My mother asked, What is worse than the bombs? Nadège said, Bedbugs! The two spoke to each other in Yoruba. My mother said, Listen to your sister, Julius. I was about to correct her.