Dark Banquet - Bill Schutt [61]
An air hole, I guessed. To my horror, I would later discover that I was only half right.
Inside the jar, there was a gray cardboard baffle, folded like an accordion. I tilted the container slightly and took a closer look—the cardboard was flecked with tiny black spots but there was no movement. Nobody home.
“I can’t see anything.” I said, even though, for a second there, I thought I might have seen something—a shift in the darkness between one of the cardboard folds.
“Cup the jar in your palms,” Lou instructed, holding his hands as if in prayer.
I complied, although now it was impossible for me to see the interior of the container. About fifteen seconds later the entomologist nodded in my direction. “That ought to do it.”
I shifted the canning jar to my left hand, bringing it closer to my face so that I could peer—
“Holy shit!” I screamed, and for a second, the jar shifted precariously in my hand. I secured my grip, then held the container at arm’s length.
The entire inner surface of the jar was seething with movement—tiny flat ovals—some the size of apple pits, others more like sesame seeds, and all of them frantically pressing themselves against the glass. More and more of the creatures appeared. Within seconds there seemed to be hundreds of them pouring out of that single piece of folded cardboard.
I sensed Lou coming up behind me.
“Look closer,” he said.
I squinted. There was something else. Amid the shifting pits and seeds were minuscule dots—barely visible and noticeable only because they were showing quite a bit more determination than your common household dust speck. In fact, if anything, their movements were even more frantic than the “giants” that clambered around them.
I found myself checking the silicon seal on the jar, having quickly come to the realization that a thin wall of glass and glue was the only thing keeping the bed bugs from the object of their frenzy—me.
“I’ll let you feed them later, if you like,” Lou said, almost as an aside.
“That would be great,” I said, having absolutely no idea what I’d just agreed to do.
Several days earlier, I’d contacted Lou because I was interested in learning what was behind the recent and dramatic resurgence in bed bugs, the epicenter of which appeared to be New York City.*86 It seemed that every week the local papers were featuring stories about people attacked in their sleep by the tiny blood feeders, but the weird thing was that these attacks weren’t taking place in rundown apartments or “no-tell motels.” The rich and famous were being bled as they exercised in posh fitness centers and as they slept in ritzy Riverside Drive co-ops. And not only were they getting bitten up and grossed out (sometimes enduring hundreds of bites) but these folks were also starting to squawk about it, as only New Yorkers can squawk. Guests at upscale hotels, both at home (the Helmsley Park Lane, overlooking Central Park) and abroad (the five-star Mandarin Oriental in Hyde Park, England) were filing huge lawsuits, not just because they’d suffered bed bug bites but also because of the cimicid souvenirs they’d brought home with them.*87 By January 2007 things seemed to have reached a fever pitch. There were splashy front-page stories in places like the Village Voice (“Bed Bugs & Beyond”) and major articles in the New Yorker (“Night Visitors”) and the New York Times (“Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Bed Bugs…”). Web sites (often offering conflicting information) and bed bug–related blogs sprang up on the Internet, some of them logging thousands of hits each month. Even politicians were getting into the act, scrambling to enact legislation to prevent the sale of secondhand mattresses. In typical fashion, the