Gil could never be alone. No matter how hard he tried, people—or the evidence of them—followed 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 skin—casually sloughed off by everyday friction or scraped off by nervous fingernails—covering 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 he’d succeeded in Saran-wrapping his life. In the three years since he’d 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: “We got bedbugs in the building. That hippie college boy that just moved in musta brought ’em home from Thailand or the frickin’ ashah-ram or some shit,” he said. “I don’t know what the hell he’s on about half the time. Or why he thinks I give a goddamn ding-a-ling.” 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 horses—these vermin with bellies full of the blood of others—his 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.
—Adele Azabache