Gil could never be alone. No matter how hard he tried, peopleāor the evidence of themāfollowed him everywhere.
In an empty room, he could smell body odor and perfume; spot the depression in the cushion where the most recent visitor had sat. In an empty street, he navigated around the fresh expectorations of passersby. On and around doorknobs, he could see oily fingerprints, smudged by movement. He imagined all of the microscopic flakes of skinācasually sloughed off by everyday friction or scraped off by nervous fingernailsācovering every inch of the landscape, every upholstered surface.
Gil knew that he was surrounded by pieces of other humans, so it seemed that there was very little space between him and them. The potential for contamination repulsed him.
He thought heād succeeded in Saran-wrapping his life. In the three years since heād moved into his one-bedroom flat, no one had entered it but him. And for good reason: it had taken long enough, and a great deal of rented equipment, to make it worthy of his things.
The ringing phone that morning was an ear-piercing alarm. A phone call was never good news, and as soon as Gil heard it, he knew he was about to get the air knocked out of him.
The landlord had gotten right to the point: āWe got bedbugs in the building. That hippie college boy that just moved in musta brought āem home from Thailand or the frickinā ashah-ram or some shit,ā he said. āI donāt know what the hell heās on about half the time. Or why he thinks I give a goddamn ding-a-ling.ā Ralph always spoke this way to Gil, even though the garrulous chatter was in no way reciprocated.
Now, to prevent an invasion from the tiniest of Trojan horsesāthese vermin with bellies full of the blood of othersāhis sanctuary would be violated. He imagined all the pairs of work boots that would track in the fragments of others. Soon his empty apartment would be overcrowded, and Gil already felt the suffocation setting in.
Ā āAdele Azabache
