NIGHT VISITORS.(The Talk of the Town)(bedbugs)

Life is, like, so unfair sometimes. Case in point: Alexis Swerdloff and her friends Laura Perciasepe, Avni Bhatia, and Anna Arkin-Gallagher, a quartet of eye-on-the-main-chance nouvelles Yale graduates who late last summer set up housekeeping in the East Village, in a four-bedroom apartment that they really, really liked, but then realized that they liked a lot less when, not long after they moved in, all were viciously assaulted by bedbugs. According to Andy Linares, the proprietor of the Bug Off Pest Control Center, in Washington Heights, which he describes as the largest supplier of pest-control products in the city, New York is witnessing "without a doubt, a dramatic increase in bedbug activity. We hadn't seen bedbugs in New York in sixty years. Then, all of a sudden, bingo. Who'da thunk it?" Whatever satisfaction Alexis and her roommates might have derived from having caught the wave of an interesting new trend was offset by the heart-of-darkness horror of it. That's how they felt, anyway, after the fourth or fifth visit from the exterminator, a redundancy necessitated by the fact that, as Alexis explained the other day, "the bedbugs kept not going away."

When the first symptoms appeared, last September--small, itchy pink welts, mostly on the arms and legs--the four women thought they had a mosquito problem. A bit of online research established that the welts matched bedbug bites. The good news--other than the illusory good news that the landlord was dispatching an exterminator--was that bedbugs are not a disease vector and therefore not a public-health risk. The bad news, which quickly revealed itself, was that if you're twenty-two years old and you're paying (O.K., so maybe you're getting some help from Mom and Dad) Manhattan rent, bedbugs can easily drive you insane. Cockroach-colored, and when full grown about the size of an apple seed, a bedbug sucks blood through a mosquito-like proboscis after injecting an anesthetic that keeps the sleeping victim from reacting before the meal gets under way. Bedbugs are not, strictly speaking, parasites, because unlike, God forbid, lice or crabs, they can survive away from their host. Basically, they eat and then crawl into a tuft in the mattress or upholstery, or under the rug or the molding, or maybe into your clothes or your furniture, and sleep it off until the next time they're hungry. When they're not feeding or dozing, adult bedbugs evidently enjoy having sex.

The argument can be made that bedbugs are an economic boon--certainly for exterminators, janitorial services, dry cleaners, mattress sellers, and mental-health professionals. Hotel operators tend not to be fond of them.

As it happened, all four roommates had parents who lived in the city. "So, on days when the exterminator had visited and we couldn't sleep in the apartment, we could all go home to our parents," Alexis said. "But then our parents didn't want to let us in the door. My mother was afraid I would bring them into her apartment and she'd have problems with her co-op board. I'd have to come in the back door and take off all my clothing and put it in a plastic bag in the kitchen. She'd leave a change of clothes for me there, but first she'd make me take a shower."

Around Halloween, Laura Perciasepe, who proved to be particularly sensitive to the bites, raised the possibility of moving. By then, interpersonal friction had begun to fester. "The bedbugs started affecting our relationships," Alexis said. "One of us had a serious boyfriend, and he didn't want to stay over and he didn't want her staying over at his place. No one wanted to be with us. Sort of like leprosy. We were on the verge of killing each other." They reestablished solidarity after a fact-finding visit from the previous tenants, who announced that they were suing the landlord over their bedbug problem. The roommates considered starting a bedbug Web log, then discovered that one already existed, the handiwork of a young woman, a recovering bedbug victim, who seemed to have been even more aggrieved than they ...