a boat

Yes, at the risk of sounding melodramatic, I want to say that for me this is the story of a loss of innocence. Not of the obvious kind.  The hardest thing about this particular loss of innocence was feeling that I was completely alone in it, unable to speak. That, and the feeling that there was nothing to be learned from all of this.

No, in this – where was the lesson? Was the lesson that anything I could ever do could be construed as careless, as dangerous? That an action as simple as laying my coat across a chair in the house of a friend could unknowingly change my life? What was there to learn in finding that something as ordinary as owning furniture or going to sleep at night could land me in bankruptcy? How could the knowledge that living a normal life – free of behavior one could only describe as obsessive-compulsive, work to somehow make me a better person, a stronger one, somehow wiser?

I see the innocence, of course, now, in the everyday habits that people take for granted. An action, in the dark, as simple as sinking down for several hours into the plush seats of a movie theater.

But I find particularly painful the recollection of two particular images – two memories of an innocence I wished to get back.

Number one: it is a chilly day of either spring or fall. My memory is limited, such that really it could be either; however, I am convinced by the hope contained in that memory, by the feeling of endless possibility – or no, perhaps not even that, for perhaps there is an innocent lack of even the need for possibility or a future – that it is spring, that everything is somehow waxing, not waning. I am probably four years old. Perhaps my siblings are around, perhaps not; I am immersed in my own green and rainy outdoor universe. 

I have made a boat. Out of what, I no longer remember. Perhaps a leaf. Perhaps some portion of an egg carton; I don't recall. I do not particularly remember how well my boat stayed afloat or how well it moved. It does not seem to have mattered. It seems only that that boat did something that, for the four-year-old girl that I was, a boat was supposed to do – and that this made me deeply happy. I believe, looking back, that I was probably only a block from home – but wherever it was, I felt very far away. Far, but not scared. Not the least bit scared.
 

And then there was the day I brought all of my stuffed animals out onto the front lawn. At least, it felt like a lawn – the small, bumpy patch of sparse grass and dirt in front of that run-down house we'd rented. I was four years old, and the world felt like a big place – but not in that way that made me feel like the universe was utterly indifferent. Not like now, when it seemed I could live the rest of my life this way and die alone like this – when I felt I was just part of the large, ordered, impersonal web of nature.

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...

What was Lost

The day after the follow-up pest treatment, I remember that I went up the stairs, pulling my weight up by the carved and curving Victorian banister, to see, resting on the top floor skylight, a classic, Brooklyn-style 2 1/2”-long water bug. Quite dead, its legs were sprawled out in silhouette against the piece of Plexiglass that Steven had lain across the opening, to replace the original decrepit windowpane that had previously been there.  No doubt it was lying on its back, as they always seem to be . It was only a water bug, I was thinking; that I was now able to use that descriptor, “only” with something as gruesome as a two-and-a-half-inch water bug was an irony not lost on me. And true, it was dead, and there was only one of them. But it lay there, in unmistakable silhouette, at the very top of the house, at the uppermost visible portion, all in distinct silhouette, such that it seemed unmistakably like an entomological victory flag.

At this point the assumption was that it was I who had won – but even to this day I can't really be sure. And anyway, even if I can put it all in the past, when will I be able to put the past behind me? My whole life had changed. All of this was, in part, a story of loss of innocence. 

 

But loss of other things, too. I lost weight. I lost money. Trust. Sleep. Belongings. I lost hope – hope that the problem would ever end, hope that I'd live a life normal enough again to ever be able to invite anyone in. I spent money on things that to the untrained mind might seem utterly unrelated to the problem. Suddenly I had to have a purse large enough that I could put my sweater in it before setting either item down in anyone's house – and never on or near the bed; rather, always a little too suspiciously close to the closet, where perhaps, however, luggage was being stored – or, worse, bed linens. That bag needed to be not only large but made up, as well, of a sleek and seemingly impenetrable fabric. And it needed to zip completely and utterly closed, in case I needed to keep my very life inside.