Chapter 38: A bedbug dinner.

So there we were, at that dinner party. Somewhere in the Hollywood Hills. The house wasn't big, yet it incited vertigo. A boathouse designed by a famed architect, it was partially suspended by cables over the small canyon. Probably Phil had overpaid for it. It felt as if I were constantly falling in the deep. Most guests were in awe, able to function. I understood the beauty that inspired them, but felt too dizzy to enjoy it.

I had thought that it was going to be a potluck, but it was definitely an occasion to bring wine, not food. Fortunately my only contribution to the nonexistent potluck were store-bought pastries.

We were at least twelve. I knew six of my eleven commensals. Still, it wasn't granted that I'd enjoy the comfort of absolute familiarity, as we were weirdly arranged. I had a guy called Alfred to my left, Marissa to my right, Eve in front. Phil, Marissa's husband, was the organizer of the dinner party. Chuck, Carl and Dan were all seated in the table as well.

One might think that I had grown some attachment to people. I would throw the term ‘friends’ to describe them, even though we all knew that that was probably a misnomer. Depends on how demanding one wants to be with the term.

It had been sixteen hundred and sixty-six days since my thirtieth birthday and adults were already prone to having more detached friendships. Cutting the friendship pie in the pieces they wanted to digest, and trashing the rest.

Who was I kidding? Sixteen hundred and sixty-six days before, I had kept the celebration to the minimum, excusing myself in having too much work. Leaks had happened, and colleagues, undergrads and students had wanted to prepare some sort of birthday party. I knew that their motivation was more mechanical than genuine —think corporate birthdays. I knew that they did it because they were meant to do it. And so, I avoided the whole thing.

So, after all, it wasn’t anything new that I couldn't find many characteristics to describe what connected me to the people surrounding me as true friendships. Although up in that boathouse, the feeling was more apparent than years before.

With counted exceptions, we didn't really care about each other, nor shared more than a few interests. We weren't really willing to cooperate beyond what's socially expected, nor provide any kind of costly help —unless explictly requested and therefore accounted for, in a subtle way. The city's lack of a sense of community and transactionality had permeated that group.

Phil was beyond being assertive as a host. He was the kind of host that smothers guests with an overly attentive attitude. He wouldn't allow a guest to do anything that resembles any activity a host could do. He would jump into it and do it for you. In such a setting, I wouldn't even try to do anything. Even going to the bathroom was going to be a hard task. Like, he'd do it for me, emptying his bladder, when it was my bladder the one which was overflowing.

The party was a fancy event.

“I should have dressed properly.” —I thought. Oh well, it was too late. Not a big deal.

The host then went on to serve what he described as “Red quinoa, cooked like rice, in chicken broth and a bit of ‘soya’ sauce in a pressure cooker. Then, fried with onions and pork sausage meat, with a bit of homemade tomato sauce and sour cream. Plus some spices. These are secret.”

The dish, on paper, sounded excellent. He served it in refined walnut bowls and those bowls were distributed throughout the table.

However compliments they gave, the look was awful. Their mere sight induced flashbacks to a bedbug nightmare, where bedbugs fought to climb a mountain of other bedbugs, mixed with their stool, corpses and decay.

Those bowls didn't only look like clumps of bedbugs: the quinoa seeds started to move like them. As in the nightmare, fighting against each other to get to the surface, to escape from the confinement of the bowl and become part of the invisible nightmare. They moved, at least in my imagination. It was all too vivid. I knew it. They were coming for me. To suck my blood. I knew it was only me. Nobody else saw what I saw. I straightened my sight, but it was becoming increasingly difficult not to fall in the visual illusion of them crawling —at the slightest move of the eye. Marissa put one of those infested bowls just in front of me.

I tried to be calm: I wasn't falling. They weren't coming to suck aonyone's blood. I wasn't crazy. Why every part of my body was itching? The bites were talking the truest talk. Those conversations full of laughter coming from both sides of the table dampened. They were fake and worthless. Bedbugs were speaking in their little screeching voices, about the dark reality they all shared, while conspiring to enter my mouth, my ears. Bedbugs, bedbugs, bedbugs. Dirty lentils befouling everything they crept on, trying to pass as enjoyable food.

I wanted to scream but felt mute. I wanted to quickly flee away but I was stopped by the ridiculous shyness that that social situation had imposed on me. My stomach suddenly turned. The minute I decided to stand up and excuse myself, a biological reaction —one that I hadn't foreseen— ensued. I puked. My bowels had spoken, projectile vomit dispersed like a shot from a sawed-off shotgun. My vomit splurging all over the table, as alive as the bedbugs in their bowls. Some commensals had been hit.

Upon realization of the scene in front of me, a sense of humiliation pervaded me. That humiliating moment had had no alcohol to blur its collection of memories. Then, only then, I agreed with people defending whom I'd previously called “that asshole at the party” —the one who would get drunk and vomit on the sofa, the one I couldn't have exonerated from having the choice of not doing so. Lack of prediction, it may be, but it was definitely true that —sometimes— one doesn't —can't— control where one vomits.

All the same, I wasn’t going to stay there to defend that position. I tried to apologize my way out. I didn't want to see anybody, anymore. I couldn't look. My brain had been blocked by humiliation. In tension, every face, every reaction around me was darkened. Tunnel vision. I needed to leave —flight or flight. Eve quickly came to try and help me, but I ran away. “Sorry, sorry. I need to go.” Got into the Accord and drove home.

As I was driving home, I recovered the ability to think. I started to think about how they reacted to my scene. They would have assumed that I was feeling sick. Itching aside, I had felt perfectly fine before I got there. Until vertigo hit. Until bedbugs started coming from every place.

Not only bedbugs had destroyed my sleep, they had dramatically perturbed my lame social life.

Even then, I was able to see some humor in the whole ordeal. Those tidbits of humor didn't last long, rapidly retreating to a deep feeling of shame.

I detested them. They were my nightmare. As much as I liked Eve, I needed to move away from that apartment. From that life. Or else, burn everything to the ground.