Suddenly, the internet is freaking out about bedbugs. The New York Times is reported to have an infestation throughout the building. One of the infected sites is said, somewhat ironically, to be “a wellness room”. A couch is also infected, and a sound room.
Then, the situation spiralled. When a Twitter user said that the bedbugs were a metaphor for the conservative New York Times columnist Bret Stephens, he (Stephens) got super angry, contacted the guy’s boss and quit Twitter in a pique. It was something he had been threatening to do for years – but it was bedbugs that pushed him over the edge.
The ridicule directed towards Stephens was mostly on the grounds that it was a huge overreaction, that calling someone a bedbug is a mild insult, as much as bedbugs are a mild inconvenience. Right? WRONG!
Trump gets it. He understands. On Tuesday he reacted angrily to what he called “false and nasty” rumours that his Miami golf club had a bedbug problem, following a 2016 lawsuit from a customer who claimed to have been bitten at the $300 a night hotel.
“Not nice!” Trump tweeted of the allegation.
It is indeed, not nice. Bedbugs are tiny torturers that ruin lives.
In 2004, my living situation was becoming intolerable. My flat in Sydney had an infestation of bedbugs that, despite repeated sprayings by professionals, would not die.
Deeply fatigued after being woken by the bugs feeding off me every night, I would wake every morning with my pyjamas dotted in tiny flecks of blood, while my body was covered in welts, lumps and scratches. My wrists and ankles were particularly gnawed.
They were bugs. They were in my bed. It didn’t take Sherlock to deduce they were … bedbugs.
Initially I experienced some cognitive dissonance. I was in one of Australia’s wealthiest suburbs (OK, it was a flat and not a mansion): didn’t the bugs normally frequent Victorian-era orphanages, doss houses, drug dens and lower-end youth hostels?
My flatmate and I were puzzled as to how the bugs came to be in our house. One day it was a chicly decorated young professionals pad, abstract art on the wall and with a view of Bondi beach – but overnight it transformed into a charnel house.
“Come and stay!” I would tell friends or prospective boyfriends. “Actually no, don’t stay … !” It was a romance killer. But I couldn’t say why I was rescinding invitations. The bed bugs were a shameful thing – a marker of bad hygiene and a careless life. But the flat was spotless! And we were yuppies! Except for the blood. And the pestilence.
At first I couldn’t see the bugs. I’d just wake up in the middle of the night furiously scratching. In the morning there would be – distressingly – flecks of blood staining the wood of my bed frame, on the sheets (particularly around the neck area, and the ankle area) and pillowcases.
Later I became more practised at spotting the bedbugs. I don’t think I ever really deeply slept in that time. I was working at the Sydney Morning Herald and spent a summer wearing long-sleeve, dark-coloured turtlenecks to hide my sores and any random bleeding.
At night, I would lie there unable to relax, anticipating when they would start feeding off me. The minute I felt the first sharp, tiny nibble – I would switch the light on. “Gotcha!” I would say – before trying to crush them to death between my thumb and forefinger. They would make a little crunch sound when I killed them.
The bugs themselves were tiny – and, unlike mosquitoes, noiseless. They were a browny-black and looked like disc-shaped ear studs. They had small legs. When I caught and squashed them at night, they oozed blood. My blood, I suppose. They were disgusting. I took to washing my sheets in bleach.
In the mornings we would emerge hollow-eyed and itchy from our respective bedrooms, each comparing the fresh hell of the night before.
In a way our infestation was a lonely time. None of our friends had bedbugs. We couldn’t joke or laugh or share experiences about the blood on our furniture and our cluster of sores. Nor could we entertain or have dinner parties. What if we infected our friends?
It was never stated but I’m sure my flatmate and I both wondered: had the other brought this pestilence into the house?
But we worked in offices. We had spent the whole year barely leaving the city. The furthest I had been all year was to cover a murder in Minto.
After much back and forth, blaming various visitors (“Was it Barry – you know that guy who came here and had just been in South America?”) – we lighted on a suspect. It was our couch that a backpacker had slept on!
It had to be it.
A pest control guy confirmed the couch was probably Patient Zero. As for the backpacker – it went without saying that he was the obvious carrier.
The pest control guy sprayed everywhere but still the bugs would not die.
The next pest controller advised us to throw everything out in the flat that was made of wood – which turned out to be most of the furniture.
I can’t remember who left the flat first – us or the bedbugs.
I never had them since, but remain haunted by the memory.
