THE COMPANY YOU KEEP

Bedbugs, not something I pictured in my mind until recently. The hotel stay that promised no cooking, no washing up, and no dirty linen to process, is gone. If I pluck up the courage to spend a night in a city hotel, I think I’ll stand with a flashlight and a bar of wet soap, waiting for the critters to show up for their nightly meal.

I shouldn’t be so surprised and horrified at the vitality of the insect world. In parts of Boston, where I used to work, people have learned to live side by side with the wildlife. A fireman thought a wall was heaving with the heat of the fire but it was the inches deep layer of cockroaches protesting at the sudden rise in temperature in their happy home.

A TV series showed cities ten, twenty, forty, etc. years after people no longer existed. Vegetation destroyed cement and mortar. Bridges succumbed to rust. I didn’t see it in the series but I imagine cockroaches expanding their real estate holdings and clinging to buildings like the most lush ivy vines, beetles carpeting floors, and ant mounds reaching gigantic proportions.

The bedbug epidemic draws my attention to the trillions of bacteria reproducing at a rate that makes rabbits look like amateurs. When I was a student nurse, one of my instructors suggested I not despair over the millions of bacteria in my eyelashes. After all, their presence meant I was never alone.

How easy it would be to introduce a fatal disease into an orifice or wound of an enemy. Of course, that’s been done before in fiction. I never forget Oscar Cook’s short story set in a jungle in Borneo. An earwig marches across the brain of a would-be killer and lays eggs. The agony of the victim is enough to make anyone think twice about killing for love. A writer could come up with a variety of ways to introduce a mindless creature into the human host it will destroy.

Is it only in the West where cold winters kill or make dormant many insects, where antibiotics are as common as aspirin, and new types of bug spray are developed daily that bugs and bacteria are abhorred? People who travel to Africa are surprised by the apparent indifference of the inhabitants to killer bugs and bacteria. The inhabitants don’t expect to win against their small enemies. Not even people from the West can destroy them all. In fact, when people from the West visit Africa, they sometimes succumb to diseases they’ve never met in their hygienic world.

I can’t help feeling our bubble of security in the West is more vulnerable than we think. Microscopic creatures surround us in the air, the water, and underground where they join up with rodents. I wonder what the miners trapped in a mine in Chile have to face from creatures who prefer the dark.

At one of the Crimebake conferences I attended, Tess Gerritsen said, when she thought about writing a thriller, she imagined what she most feared.

I’d be horrified to discover a once tiny creature was growing and multiplying inside me, and one of its offspring resided in the vitreous humor of my eye. What would it see or is it blind?

What makes the hairs on your arms stand up, even when you can’t see it?