Victory? Defeat?

I am sure that someday I will look back on this bedbug experience and laugh a mighty guffaw. I am sure of it.

Although I've been quiet on the bedbug postings of late, they have not been far from my mind. Even after we had our third extermination six weeks ago, I was still seeing bedbugs everywhere. Well, as it turns out I was never seeing bedbugs, but every small dark speck anywhere in the apartment posed the immediate concern that a bedbug was apparent. Then there was the Hoy (Spanish newspaper) cover story: "Chinches!" with a ten-inch photo of a bedbug. I was tempted to cut out the picture and accompanying declaration, frame it and hang it in the hallway, but then that struck me as a little bit off -- kind of like if you had an intestinal polyp removed and then taped it to your computer monitor.

I've also been suffering through an annoying body hyper-awareness: is that a bug I feel crawling on me? Is this itch from a bite? Is this a new welt or, oh wait, it's my thumb.

And, of course, living out of ziploc bags is taking its toll. I miss my polar bear boxer shorts (how did they not make the cut?), my fraying khakis, and the roughly 75 tee-shirts that are sealed in a large contractor bag in the top of our closet.

But the light at the end of the tunnel seemed like it was dimly coming into view after five bite-free weeks. We were reluctant to declare victory, especially after Cathleen's friend told her that she had heard that six weeks was the big hump to get over. Sure enough, at around six weeks, Cathleen asked me to look at her face -- three barely perceptible bite-markish bumps in a row, on her left cheek. It didn't make sense -- me, Mr. Canary in a Coal Mine, had not the slightest hint of a bite, and Cathleen, who had barely evidenced a bite reaction over the course of more than three months, suddenly has one? But they were undeniably bite marks.

I had had enough and I reckoned we needed to bring in a bedbug dog. These dogs are trained to sniff out bedbugs (their pheromones, it seems), and my guru on www.thebedbugresource.com was quite high on them. So I hooked us up with the folks at Advanced K9 Detectives, and last Thursday we were visited by Jada. Sadly, I was at work and missed it. For $250, Jada sniffed all around the apartment and alerted (whining and barking) at our wrapped up bedframe and headboard.

On the one hand, it was a relief -- the bugs were nowhere else in our room (anymore) and had not spread through the apartment. On the other hand, we still had bugs, and despite our best efforts to encase our bedframe and headboard in plastic wrapping, they (or at least one) were still getting out. Cathleen spent Friday on the phone and located a container fumigation place where they take infested furniture and gas the hell out of it. With pickup and fumigation, this was going to cost us $500, and then we'd not be able to use the bed for another month or two until we were sure that our bedroom was 110% bug-free. The other option was to toss the bed and eventually get a new one.

Now let me tell you something about this bed. Cathleen and I have a long history of crappy sleeping arrangements. From cramming our bodies onto my twin bed when I was in law school, to the leaky waterbed when visiting Mike and Theresa (yes, I woke up befuddled, wondering if I had peed myself and, if so, how come it seemed to be that I was peeing out of my hip), to the compromised air mattress at Lorri and John's (brrrrr, I'm cold and, ouch, this floor is hard), to the basement at my mom's when we were the only childless couple in the family. When we moved in together in 1995 at 4 Lexington Avenue (the Sage House), we bought a cheap, wooden frame at Ikea to hold the full-size mattress that Michael bought for us on the car ride home. I remember putting that frame together with Michael, neither of us able to bend one of our knees, and so we were screwing it together from some rather odd angles, with a lot of strange grunting going on. Cathleen and I slept on that full-sized bed with two dogs, and then intermittently with a child, for a decade. When we moved to Brooklyn, and that cheap wooden bedframe splintered in the move, we decided that enough was enough, we're getting a real bed, a queen-sized bed. We spent a morning at West Elm down in DUMBO and ordered what we thought was a comfortable and handsome bed for a pretty self-indulgent $700. We lunched at Garibaldis and, afterwards, as we waited to pay for the bed and arrange for the pieces to come out for us to load in the car, I told Max the story of "Goldilocks and the Three Bears" for the first time, and wound up having to tell it to him three or four more times over the course of the afternoon because he loved it so much (nowadays he only wants me to tell the "scary" version, where the bears are viciously violent, and throw furniture and dishes against the wall in order to emphasize their disgust). Cathleen and I put the bed together that night, and I remember feeling like it was this humongous sea of furniture. As much as one can, we loved that bed.

And on Saturday night we hauled that mother out to the sidewalk. Yeah, bedbugs, you wanted that bed from the beginning. You got it.

We beckoned the exterminators back yesterday for a fourth spraying of all things good and poisonous, and spent last night sleeping in the basement again (the allure of which, for Max, has faded quickly). But for the first time in four months, I feel like we have finally conquered the bugs. They won the battle, but we won the war. They won the bed, but we won the right to make really bad metaphors.

Our clothes will remain bagged up for at least another six weeks, but I'm optimistic. Again.