There will be blood

Bedbugs are-no exaggeration-everywhere in Toronto: our libraries, offices, schools, hospitals, hotels, transit and homes. Inside the always expensive, often traumatic, probably futile battle to eradicate the bloodsucking parasites that are ruining our lives

- By Lauren McKeon. Illustration by Alex Antonescu

IN the spring of 2017, I moved into a grubby basement apartment in the Beaches. When I went to view it, I could already tell that it would be perpetually damp-it smelled faintly of turned earth and musty sock. It was depressingly dark. There was no place for my desk, and I would have to store my cat's litter box in the shower. Yet I was desperate to move out of the apartment I shared with my soon-to-be ex-boyfriend, and I couldn't afford much else on my freelancer income. Besides, the space did have a few things going for it. I liked the industrial-boho aesthetic of its exposed-brick wall and concrete floors, and there was a washer and dryer squeezed into the bathroom. Plus, the location: I could leave my cave for the sandy, sunny shores of the lake any time I wanted. In a moment of willful delusion, I told myself I could make it work.

I couldn't. Despite the $300 dehumidifier I splurged on, my apartment remained stubbornly soggy. Then, in my first winter there, a couple of days before New Year's Eve, the pipes froze. When the plumber finally arrived, his strategy was to hack into the drywall-raining debris on my floors and furniture-until he found the offending pipe; it took days for my landlord to (badly) patch the gaping holes. After that, ants streamed in, forming undulating lines across my bookshelves, my kitchen counters, my bed. I stocked up on traps and diatomaceous earth, orchestrating the colony's demise with the glee of a serial killer. My relief was fleeting. One day that summer, I arrived home to find an anonymous note in the mailbox. It helpfully informed me that a few houses on the block were battling rats-rats!-and that the rodents could squeeze through the smallest of cracks.