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The ‘little leg’ syndrome

I was travelling in country far far away, so bedbugs had hitherto never been a part of my life. And anyway, I didn’t know it was a bedbug; it was just really small, had little legs, and froze as soon as I pulled the covers back to get into bed. Obviously, I flicked it away before I could examine it any further; it was only much later that retrospect suggested I Google it, but by then, the finer anatomical features were hazy, if not by and large absent. Only the memory of legs convinced me that I had not swept a piece of lint from my sock off the blanket. The fact that I had already removed the socks before I snuggled in for the night, occurred to me much later.

I am not given to particularly profound thoughts as I drift off to sleep; I am usually more preoccupied by the mundanities of the day I am attempting to leave behind. Only if, after a decent interval, I haven’t yet drunk from Lethe’s water do I attempt to parse the more troubling aspects that persistently resist the pull of my blackout curtains. The little legs seemed the more fervent of the group; their unexpected presence begged for resolution.

I mean, why would lint have legs? Why should it? I change my socks after a run, and if someone keeps surveying the room with wide-open nostrils, I feel I am entitled to shrug and join them in the hunt for the malefactor. I have to admit that I never actually associated the little legs with an unpleasant scent, however, and this rerouted my thoughts into divers detours that ultimately led me to sitting up and throwing off the covers.

I am often subject to nocturnal dermal scratching in strange beds, though, and given my age and solitary existence, the memory did not jump readily to mind, I must admit. I’m a guy, eh? I still have an abundance of body hair, so I’ve always assumed that the presence of strange blankets in strange rooms were likely to blame for the itching -sort of like ‘muscle memory’ only kitted out for nerves, or something. I think that if I were ever sure I shared the bed with the Cimex family of bedbug micropredators who teach their children to have their dinners late at night instead of sleeping, I would develop PTSD. So I try not to think about it.

Still, trying not to think about something begs the question: if you already know what not to think about, then how can you be sure you’re not thinking about the right thing? It’s a circulus in probando, eh? I think I learned about that in Sunday School in Winnipeg when the teacher tried to ask us to imagine bad Samaritans without defining her terms. Anyway, perhaps I missed something when I was apologizing to the little girl in the seat in front of me who was always upset when I tugged on her braids.

But I digress. It was dingey in the motel room even when I turned on the flickering ceiling light, and after a while, every shadow on the bed seemed like a surprised bedbug about to engage in flagrante delicto.

I had been driving for most of the day, and think I’d taken a wrong road earlier; the only motel I managed to find in the middle of nowhere bore an uncanny resemblance to the Bates motel in Psycho; I wasn’t going to risk disturbing the desk clerk, even here in New Zealand, eh?

It occurred to me that I had only two choices: get back in the rented car and keep driving through the night in the Southern Alpine Mountains, or risk inviting the needy Cimexians and their hungry children to a surprise smorgasbord; I didn’t imagine the room I’d rented had many visitors. I was basically a candy store with protein…

With apologies to Robert Frost, it occurred to me that I would be telling this with a sigh, somewhere ages and ages hence: I took a road less travelled and that made all the difference… Well, to the Cimex family anyway.

It’s probably better to be a generous tourist that cares about giving, as well as using, local resources, don’t you think?

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