There are bugs in my apartment.
There was a time when that sentence alone would have been the most horrifying thing I could imagine saying about a new home. Due to my parents’ divorce when I was 2, I split my childhood between the dry, arid, and largely bug-free high desert of southwestern Colorado and the hot, muggy, and buggy swamps of rural Louisiana. It took me until my 20s to realize that my lifelong preference for living with my father wasn’t caused by any particular faults on the part of my mother, but simply to the dread I felt toward the cockroaches and palmetto bugs that often infested her house.
I hate bugs—even more than most people do, I think. I hate the silent, erratic way they move. I hate their many legs. I hate the buzzing sound they make when they fly. I hate the red, swollen marks they make when they bite—and the fact that I hardly ever notice a bug is crawling on me until after it has flown away with my blood. Intellectually, I know that insects are an important part of the ecosystem, but emotionally, I can’t imagine a world entirely without them being anything other than paradise. When I travel, I always carry bug spray and a can of natural bug killer to spray under the doors and windows of my hotel rooms.
So when I graduated from college and moved to Denver for a marketing job, “no bugs” was high on my list of priorities for my first apartment. Unfortunately, “affordable” was even higher on the list. Since my parents had always owned their own homes, and most of my friends lived in rural areas where rent rarely reached $1000 a month, I was completely unprepared for the rental market in a city like Denver.
I started by searching online for apartments near my new company’s downtown office, but quickly realized that they were all well out of my price range. Taking comfort in my employers’ promise that I would be working from home most of the time, I started looking farther afield at apartments in some of the suburbs. But while I did apply for a few of the cheaper apartments in Aurora and Centennial, they were all snapped up by higher bidders before my applications finished processing. Finally, I reluctantly toured some run-down apartments in the Colfax and Capitol Hill areas, trying to ignore the graffiti outside and the smell of urine and fentanyl in the halls, but I soon realized that at an entry-level salary, I would barely be able to afford even these. The salary had seemed so generous back in Durango…
But my luck seemed to change one day when one of the rental apps I’d subscribed to alerted me to an apartment right in the heart of an upscale neighborhood in North Denver. It seemed perfect—a reasonable distance from my office, wifi, and utilities included in the rent, and a spacious, one-bedroom floor plan. Best of all, the rent was barely more than a quarter of my monthly salary—cheaper by an order of magnitude than even the grimiest apartment I’d toured previously.
In hindsight, I should have asked more questions. I should have at least toured the place in person before applying for a lease. But the deal seemed too good to be true, and I was sure that someone else would snap it up if I didn’t take it immediately, sight unseen.
The first odd thing I noticed, as I rolled up to the apartment building with the suitcase that contained half my earthly belongings was the way the landlord looked at me. Or, rather, didn’t look at me. He was a clean-cut, middle-aged man in a slightly rumpled dark suit, and at first glance there was nothing unusual about him except a bald spot on the left side of his head—a spot where I’d never seen a man go naturally bald. But as he began to explain the terms of the lease and the location of the mailbox and other amenities, I started to feel a little unnerved by the fact that he never made eye contact with me. There didn’t seem to be anything wrong with his eyes—He didn’t even wear glasses or contacts as far as I could tell—but he spent our entire conversation looking down at his papers, staring at the wall or ceiling behind my head, and generally looking everywhere except my face. After a while, I noticed he was also missing the tips of the last two fingers on his left hand, which made me feel more uneasy for some reason.
My nerves calmed a bit when he showed me the apartment itself. It was on the first floor, at the very end of the hallway on the building’s south side. There was no apartment on the other side of the hall, only a door leading to the outside, and the landlord said the adjoining apartment was currently empty, so I would have no noise unless the people in the apartment directly above me decided to have a wild party. The apartment had a spotless open floor plan with faux wood floors, popcorn ceilings, and walls painted uniformly light grey. Windows on the south wall let in plenty of natural light, and the landlord told me I was free to decorate any way I wanted, as long as I didn’t cut deeply into the walls or ceiling.
That first night, I slept soundly on an air mattress I’d brought from my dad’s (I hadn’t bought my own bed yet). The landlord was right about one thing: the apartment was quiet. I could barely even hear the noise of the busy road nearby, and for all the sound my upstairs neighbors made, I might have been the only person in the building. In the morning, I felt more relaxed and at peace than I had since I arrived in Denver. Or I would have, that is, if I hadn’t noticed something worrying about the wall next to my mattress.
The paint job, which I now realized was new, had disguised it well last night, but in the morning light, I could see that the place where the baseboard met the painted drywall was pocked with tiny holes. My mind immediately flashed back to the termite infestation that had almost forced my mom from her home during the summer of my 10th birthday. The memory was so vivid that, when I stared long enough, I almost thought I could see something moving in the dark pinpricks behind the holes. I realized I’d been so tired last night that I’d forgotten to spray bug-killer like I usually did when entering a new place.
I immediately rectified this, opening the windows for ventilation and laying down a thick layer of insect death around the baseboards, door frames, windowsills, and plumbing throughout the apartment. I also checked myself thoroughly for bites, and, finding none, sprayed myself with bug spray just in case. When I was done, I was lightheaded from all the fumes, but satisfied that no bug could enter my apartment and live. It was a good mindset to take with me to my first day at the office.
Although most of my job could eventually be done remotely, I spent my first two weeks doing on-site training at the downtown office—and bonding with my new co-workers at the many nearby breweries and other nightlife spots. During the few hours I did spend at home, I saw no new signs of infestation in my apartment, and in fact the holes I had seen near the baseboard seemed to have all but disappeared. I figured the anxiety of being alone in a new place had enlarged them in my mind.
By the time I was ready to begin working from home, I had filled the apartment with the few pieces of furniture I already owned, as well as a new bed, TV, and couch. I’d also hung a few pieces of dollar store art on the walls, along with pictures of me with my parents and a vintage-looking Pink Floyd poster I’d had since college. The place was starting to feel like home.
When I started my first fully remote day of work—promptly at 8 a.m., with coffee in hand and a freshly cleaned desk—I had almost forgotten about the existence of bugs. Denver was, fortunately, just as bug-free as my dad’s place in Durango, and I hadn’t seen so much as a fly indoors for a few days. My morning of work went by quickly and smoothly.
I was so engrossed in work, in fact, that it wasn’t until I took a break for lunch at noon that I became conscious of a background noise that hadn’t been there when I woke up that morning. It was a kind of quiet rustling, or scratching, that seemed to be coming from the wall beside my desk. That was the apartment’s western wall, which faced toward the empty neighboring unit, and upon which I had hung the Pink Floyd poster. The rustling, or whatever it was, was so soft that if my upstairs neighbors had been making any noise at all, I wouldn’t have been able to hear it. But although I couldn’t make out what it was, once I concentrated on it, it was impossible to ignore. When I pressed my ear to the wall, it sounded almost, to my mind, like the kind of sound a lot of tiny legs would make if they were crawling through tiny holes in a wall.
After searching every inch of that side of the apartment for any sign of bugs, I assured myself that there were none and tried to go back to work. But the sound never went away. If anything, it seemed to be growing louder the longer I sat at my desk. I turned on some loud, cheerful pop music and was able to concentrate well enough to finish my tasks for the day.
But as soon as I turned off the music, the noise returned, louder than ever. There was no mistaking it now—It was definitely the dry, crackling sound of hundreds of crawling insects. Or at least, that’s what my mind told me it was. In hindsight, I should have realized even then that the crawling sounds didn’t match any kind of bug infestation I’d ever experienced—It was too uniform, too rhythmic. The sound wasn’t coming from the entire wall at once—It was moving, twisting from one corner to another like the undulations of a single, many-legged creature.
At the time, though, none of these thoughts made it into my conscious brain. I immediately rushed out to the leasing office and demanded to speak to the landlord. He stepped out of his office, wearing the same suit he’d been wearing when I first moved in. He still wouldn’t look me in the eye.
“There are bugs in my apartment,” I told him, hoping the panic I was feeling didn’t register in my voice.
“What kind of bugs?” he asked, his soft voice not betraying any of the offense or irritation I was afraid he would show. In fact, he didn’t even seem surprised.
“I—I’m not sure,” I said. “But they’re in the walls.”
“Which wall?”
“The western one, in the living room.”
“I’ll send maintenance to check on it in the morning,” he said, and reminded me of the number I was supposed to call for maintenance requests.
“Is there any way you could take a look tonight?” I asked, now sure that he could hear the nervous upward pitch in my voice.
The landlord sighed, looked around the empty leasing office, and grabbed a key ring and flashlight from where they hung on the wall.
“You’re new here, so I’m doing you a favor,” he said. “Next time, call maintenance.”
When I let him into my apartment, I immediately noticed that the noise had stopped. The unit was as silent as it had been on the day I moved in. The landlord spent a few minutes tapping on the wall where I had showed him, and examining corners of the floor and ceiling with his flashlight before concluding that there was no sign of an infestation. Before leaving, he reminded me to call maintenance if I had any further issues.
That night I slept with a light on and music playing. My dreams were full of legs and mandibles.
For the next few weeks, I had music, a podcast, or an audiobook playing in my apartment almost constantly. If I thought I heard a noise underneath it all, I told myself I’d imagined it. That there were no bugs in my apartment. On evenings and weekends, I spent as much time away from home as possible. When I started my job, I had thought that the occasional in-person work day would be a hassle, but I found myself cherishing them, and even volunteering for a few optional work meetups that gave me an excuse to go downtown.
Still, as time went on, I began to relax a bit when at home. I had to admit to myself that I had never actually seen any bugs in my apartment, and the noise I’d heard could have been caused by a number of things. Maybe I was just allowing my phobia to take over my reason. It wouldn’t be the first time.
One evening, during a Zoom call with my dad, I casually brought up the noises in my walls. It had been long enough since I’d heard them that talking about them no longer brought up the feelings of horror I’d experienced at first. But as soon as I mentioned the noise, my dad looked concerned.
“It sounded like… bugs crawling?” he asked, his forehead wrinkling in concern.
This was odd. My dad had never shared my fear. In fact, he used to tease me about it when I was a kid (especially when I’d woken him up at midnight to kill a spider).
“Yeah, that’s what I thought anyway,” I said. “But I haven’t seen anything. Might have just been the building settling, or whatever.”
My dad was silent for a moment, a troubled look on his face.
“Did it sound like this?” he finally asked, and made a sound with his tongue and teeth.
A blanket of chills descended on my skin. It wasn’t perfect, but I could tell that my dad was imitating the exact crawling, clicking sound I had heard in the wall.
“Yeah,” I breathed. “How did—”
“I’ve been hearing that sound in the background every time you call me,” he said. “I thought it was static or something. But you say you heard it too?”
We both went silent for a long moment. In the emptiness, I thought I could hear, very faintly, the rustle of insect legs behind me.
“It’s been getting louder,” my dad said at last. “Every time you call.”
Neither of us had much to say after that, so I ended the call shortly. I spent the next hour searching my apartment once again for any sign of something that could be causing the noise. There was nothing. I had kept the space much cleaner than any other place I had ever lived, and the open floor plan meant there weren’t many nooks and crannies for vermin to hide in. The only thing I saw that could possibly point to an infestation was the collection of holes near the baseboards on the western wall. Were there more of them now than when I had first seen them? Were some of them bigger? I couldn’t be sure. But after staring at them for several minutes, and even (to my great revulsion) running my hands across them, I was sure that no bugs were crawling out of them. I sprayed my insect killer directly into the holes and turned on the loudest playlist I had.
That night, I woke up at 3 a.m. from what I was certain was the worst nightmare I’d ever experienced. I couldn’t remember the specific details, but I knew that at the end of it, something was reaching for me—something dark and huge, with claws on the end of its many segmented legs. It had been digging its way out of a hole in the western wall.
Immediately wide awake, I sat up and turned on my bedside light. The wall was intact. But I could see the cluster of holes at its base even from across the room, and now I was certain there were more of them. They took up a section of wall as big as my torso.
The playlist I’d fallen asleep to had ended, and the apartment was completely silent. Beneath the sound of blood pounding in my ears, the noise in the wall returned. But now it was more than just a soft rustling. There was more weight to it, somehow. It sounded almost as if whole sections of the wall were being moved and shifted to make a path for some… thing. As I watched, I thought I could see the tiny holes moving and swelling to the rhythm of the crawling sound behind them.
At that moment, any sense of logic or rationality left my mind.
“STOP IT!!” I shouted, jumping up and stomping on the floor. “LEAVE! ME! ALONE!”
I don’t know what I expected to happen, but the sounds and the movement did seem to fade away with the echoes of my voice. When I turned on all the remaining lights in the apartment, the holes in the wall seemed to have shrunk back down to their previous size. Nevertheless, I did not sleep again that night.
As soon as daylight started filtering through the windows, I started putting a plan into action. I called the building maintenance line and left a message about termites in the western wall. I emailed my supervisor to ask if I could work at the office for the foreseeable future. And I started searching online for other apartments in the Denver area.
That line of inquiry proved to be very discouraging. Rental prices had only gone up in the months since I signed the lease on my apartment—which I now, depressingly, remembered would cost me three months’ rent if I backed out of it early. And my company had made it very clear that there was no possibility of a raise until after my first year of employment there.
I tried to tell myself, again, that I was overreacting. After all, why did I really want to move out? Because I’d had a bad dream? Because of the sound quality on my Zoom calls? I tried to picture myself explaining to the landlord why I wanted to move out, and it made me cringe almost as hard as the memory of the crawling sound. Maybe this was all just a result of being home too much. After all, hadn’t I seen plenty of headlines about the negative psychological effects of remote work? Maybe if I’d actually read the articles, they would have mentioned something like this.
I decided to take a walk and clear my head. As I stepped out into the hallway, though, the door to the neighboring apartment caught the corner of my eye. On an impulse, I went over to the door and pressed my ear against it, listening for any kind of sound on the other side.
Nothing. The landlord had said that apartment was empty when I moved in next door, and I had never seen any sign of an occupant. The silence behind the door seemed to confirm this, but I still wasn’t satisfied. I pressed my face against the small peephole at the top of the door. All I could see was darkness beyond it, as I expected, but as I was about to move away, I thought a part of the darkness formed a…shape. It was only there for an instant, and I could not have described it if I’d tried, but I had the distinct impression that it was aware of me. Within a split second, I knew that nothing good existed beyond that door.
I jumped back into the hallway, heart pounding. At that moment, I decided money was no object. I needed to move.
To my surprise, my supervisor granted my request to return to the office. For the next week, I split my time between working, apartment searching, and hanging out with the few friends I’d managed to make in Denver so far. I was determined to spend as little time as possible in my apartment, especially since I had never heard back from building maintenance. Nightmares and the resulting sleep deprivation were taking a toll on my work. If I’d been putting in my best effort, maybe I would have dared to ask my supervisor about the possibility of a raise, but this felt impossible.
One evening, after perhaps one too many drinks with a co-worker, I asked if she knew of anyone who needed a roommate.
“Who doesn’t need one?” she said, laughing. “I have two and we’re barely making it.”
She stopped laughing when she saw the expression on my face.
“Are you wanting to move? I thought you loved your new place.”
“I did, but there are—” I stammered, trying to find a way to explain. Finally, I settled for something simple. “There are bugs in my apartment.”
“Ugh, nasty. I had a bedbug infestation once. It got so bad I had to burn my mattress.”
She suggested I call pest control. “Or, if all else fails, check with Brian. I hear he’s looking for a roommate.”
I hoped that was a joke. My primary form of interaction with Brian, a sales representative, had been hiding in the bathroom to avoid his never-ending monologues about how women were gold-diggers who expected men to pay for everything, nobody ever swiped on his Tinder profile because he was only 6’1”, and was I doing anything after work on Friday.
Still, spending more of my time away from the apartment than in it was helping me, I thought. There were times when I could lose myself completely in work or conversation or a movie or—increasingly—in alcohol, and not even think about what was happening in the walls of my apartment.
But something was happening. It wasn’t confined to the western wall anymore. In the few hours I spent at home, with music blasting through my headphones and all the lights turned as bright as they could go, I often felt like I was being enclosed, as if the walls around me were a fist that was slowly squeezing shut. I couldn’t stop thinking about my co-worker and her bedbugs. Sometimes I thought I could feel my mattress moving. I had called pest control, like she suggested, but I could never seem to get ahold of an actual person on their end. My apartment search was turning up dead end after dead end.
The only comfort I had, besides the numbing effects of alcohol, was that I could still tell myself I hadn’t seen anything. There had never been so much as a spiderweb or a dead fly inside my apartment since the day I moved in. Sounds could be drowned out or explained away, and dreams were just dreams. There was no concrete evidence, no undeniable proof, of bugs in my apartment.
Then, one morning, I woke up with red spots on my left arm. They didn’t hurt or itch, and I was sure I hadn’t seen or felt them before falling asleep the night before. If I’d taken the time to examine them, I might have been able to tell if they were bug bites or a rash, and if they really did form a spiral pattern or if that was just my imagination. Instead, I scrubbed my arm with soap and water and covered the area with a thick layer of foundation.
When I opened the door to leave for work that morning, I was startled to see the landlord standing in the hall. I ripped the headphones out of my ears and asked what he wanted—probably in a harsher tone than I’d intended.
“I tried knocking, but you didn’t answer,” he said.
Before I could open my mouth to respond, I noticed two things. First, the landlord was making eye contact with me for the first time. Second, his eyes were such a bright blue that they almost seemed to glow. Had they been that color when I first met him?
“I… didn’t hear you,” I said. “What is it?”
“I wanted to check on your bug problem,” he said. “Have you seen any in the apartment lately?”
“No,” I said, then quickly added, “But I never got maintenance to check the wall, either.”
The landlord nodded. It may have been my imagination, but I thought his gaze wandered to my left arm. I was sure I’d covered the red marks completely, but I instinctively grabbed that area with my right hand anyway.
“We’re working on sending someone,” he said in a slow, drawling voice. “We’re short-staffed at the moment. You understand.”
He gave me a look then that I certainly did not understand. It reminded me of the way a dentist might look at a spot of tooth decay in a patient’s mouth. Not waiting for a response to his excuse, he nodded slowly once again and turned to make his way down the hall. That was when I noticed that the bald spot on the side of his head had all but disappeared.
My nightmares worsened after that day. I soon found I couldn’t sleep at all without taking a heavy dose of medication, drinking until I passed out, or both. But while I continued to spend as much of my waking life outside the apartment as possible, sleeping in a motel or at a friend’s house never occurred to me. In fact, I realized a week later that I had stopped searching for a new apartment altogether. If pressed, I would have said it was because I had realized that nightmares, and bugs in my apartment, weren’t a good enough reason to leave an affordable place in this economy. But in my heart, I knew that wasn’t the reason.
I didn’t know the reason. I only knew that the cluster of bug bites on my arm was growing. It had the same shape as the cluster of tiny holes on the wall. And sometimes, when I woke up at night, I thought I saw it moving.
One day, my supervisor called me into her office. She looked more uncomfortable than I’d ever seen her.
“This is a difficult conversation to have with someone,” she said, looking me up and down as though I were a buggy spreadsheet she was editing. “I know you wanted to come to work in the office, but your personal hygiene is becoming an issue for some other employees.”
“My what?” I said, genuinely shocked.
“Look, I would never have brought it up if your co-workers hadn’t mentioned it, but there is an… odor that some people find distracting when they are working near you. And it’s not my business what you do on your own time, but it’s obvious that you haven’t been sleeping well. Is there a health issue that I should be aware of?”
I stammered through a half-baked explanation as best I could, but the question had caught me so off-guard that I was sure it wasn’t convincing. I couldn’t imagine what could be causing me to smell—sure, I was drinking more lately, but I was still brushing my teeth regularly, and I always wore fragrance to the office. For all the trouble I’d had with the apartment, I had never noticed any odd smells.
None of my explanations eased my supervisor’s uncomfortable grimace. She ended the meeting by asking me to try working from home for a few days and recommending that I see a doctor. I didn’t bring up the fact that the company’s health insurance didn’t cover preventative care.
It was during my first day back working from home that I saw it. I had gotten up to get a drink of water from the sink, and I saw something moving in the drain. The sound of crawling in the walls had become so loud that I could hear it over the music in my headphones. As I leaned over the sink to get a better look, the thing came out of the drain.
It was a bug. The thing that I saw in the sink was a bug. The thing I heard tearing itself from the wall was a bug. It had shiny bug eyes and a fuzzy bug body. The things that bit into the undulating pattern of spots on my arm and fastened there were bug mandibles and bug stingers. The things that I felt crawling up my back and into my skull were bug legs. The thing that exists where the western wall used to be is a bug nest. The thing that whispers in my skull in a language I don’t yet comprehend is a bug’s wings buzzing.
There are bugs in my apartment.
Bugs are unpleasant, but they can be lived with. They are an important part of the ecosystem, after all. I could call pest control, but my phone doesn’t seem to be working anymore. I could go to the leasing office and demand that the landlord fix the infestation, but I don’t want to bother him. He hasn’t come around to my apartment again. I don’t want to be rude.
I could look for a new apartment, but honestly, what are the chances of finding a cheaper place than this? With air conditioning and working drains, no less? Especially since my supervisor has stopped communicating with me, and I haven’t done any work in days. In this economy, renters can’t be choosy.
Instead, I sit and look down at my apartment and watch the bugs crawl. Sometimes it seems odd to me that I was ever afraid of them. After all, bugs are just a normal, natural part of this world. I think that might be what the voice is saying. I’m sure I’ll understand it all soon.
There are bugs in my apartment. And now, as I sway gently in the breeze from the open window, that doesn’t seem so horrifying after all. I hope the next person to lease this apartment understands this. No one should turn down a good deal because of a few bugs.