When ‘Bugmaggedon’ Strikes

In The Washington Post Magazine, Jessica Goldstein details her experience of discovering bed bugs in her apartment:

“It looks like we’re going to murder someone,” I say as my sister-in-law and I line the seats of her car with garbage bags to protect them from contamination. We don’t know if we are overreacting, underreacting or just-the-right-amount-of-reacting. It is 2 a.m.

We’ve spent seven hours putting every washable item in my apartment into garbage bags, shuttling them down the elevator and into her car. We drive to a 24-hour laundromat in Alexandria.

Perhaps you have never had the pleasure of pulling an all-nighter at a laundromat.

Imagine that fluorescent glare of the Metro car — the kind that makes you look at whomever you were kissing at the bar and think: Oh, no, you? — and the speckle-tiled floor of a high school hallway. The washing machines make loud, gurgling sounds. As night turns into morning the dryers seem to get louder, dry-heaving all around us.

It’s a very familiar story, not because I have personally dealt with bed bugs (knock on wood!), but because as a person who lives in a city where having bed bugs is not a rare occurrence, I can’t help but read every piece that comes across my screen about how individuals handled their nightmares so I have a sense of what I’d need to do if I ever needed to handle one of my own.

Photo: Kenji Ross

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