The Jersey City Independent "

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Editor’s Note: We’re co-publishing a graphic-novel style series the Jersey City Stringer is producing about dealing with bedbugs when she was eight months pregnant with her first child. This is the second installment — the first can be found here, and the second here. Enjoy.

From the exterminators I talked to I picked one that was cheap but not too cheap, promised to come at least twice, and sounded soothing on the phone. A little online research on the pesticides they planned to use, which had reassuring brand names like “Bedlam,” turned up nothing too harrowing, but I made us reservations at a nearby hotel anyway. We emptied our closets and dressers, stripped the bed, and took ten contractor-sized garbage bags of clothes and blankets and pillows to the laundromat and dried everything on high heat. When the exterminator, a grave, bespectacled man named Angel, came the next day with his can of Bedlam, I went to the mall, and when my husband got off the bus from work I picked him up on the street.

The hotel I had gotten us was in Secaucus, a tiny burg five minutes away whose charming downtown has been overtaken, like a mouse squeezed by a python, by a sprawling, vascular network of highways and strip malls and hotels. We spent most of the first hour whizzing around on overpasses and underpasses in an attempt to reach our hotel, which we could see at a distance like a mirage, and which shrank and expanded and shifted sides of the highway as we sped by. It was like driving in a Greek labyrinth, and had its own soundtrack even, a radio station we had never heard before, playing a frenetic kind of old-world dance music.

My baby was due in ten days, and let me just say this about that, dear readers: Aside from the other logistical challenges of carrying an eight-pound human inside you, it plays hell with your center of gravity. At home I had been sleeping wedged into the sofa, my cantilevered belly propped on an intricate construction of pillows. Unable to replicate this adequately in the hotel bed, I ended up sleeping upright in the armchair, packed in on all sides with shams and comforters, like those astronauts who were shot into space on the first Mercury capsule, with a cockpit that was just a mold of their bodies.