disappearances

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The first scent detection canine I had hired had so much trouble picking up on the problem that she and her handler were literally at the front door -- as I was writing a check for a negative find, well done -- before the man hesitated (in apparent reaction to my offhanded comment, expressing surprise that they hadn't detected anything inside the many-layered, insulated, wooden wall) and asked if I would like them to take one more look. I'd just mentioned how that area of the basement beneath my bed had been utterly spattered with spots of my blood just a few months before, prior to a few half-hearted treatments.  And that's when he seemed to become uneasy that  perhaps the dog had missed something.

 

And sure enough, it was all too good to be true. The results of just the moment before were what has become known as a "false negative."

Or were they? After all, this company did not perform exterminations (and therefore had nothing to gain by positive results) -- the very reason I had hired them.  Nonetheless, why hadn't the dog found anything the first two times she'd circled around the area? Sheer incompetence? Was the handler worried that I'd sue if the diagnosis soon proved to be inaccurate? Was there a signal he gave the dog so that she would scratch the wall on command? If he took her to the same spot a certain number of times would she scratch no matter what? In the absence of seeing, what was I to believe? Perhaps, by contrast, this had been, in fact, a false positive.

If I wouldn't see the bugs or feel them (or see the bites) – and if they wouldn't necessarily get caught in the various traps designed to catch them -- and if that 2% chance always exists that a scent detection dog won't find them – then what is one to do?

After a while we start to resemble our pets. Or our spouses.  What, then, if the bugs are your new pets? What if they are as intimate with us as to be in our beds? I confess I couldn't help but begin to feel simpatico with them. I thought of how  twenty- or thirty-something-year-old tattooed guy that the exterminator sent had said, no worries; the caulking and wall void dusting that they were doing for me would ensure that by now the worst that could happen would just be that a single insect might very well find me – but then have nothing to mate with. 

And of all things, I empathized, feeling that I too would be incapable of properly mating again until or unless my life ever got back to normal – or at least my bed.

There were other things that my enemy and I had in common. My body weight was in inverse proportion to the level of stress I was feeling, such that I -- already previously a hundred and twenty-five pounds and slim and small-breasted -- might develop the capability, like my little insect friend, of all but disappearing when turning sideways, able now to fit inside the smallest crevice in the wall...