Wrapped up like that, it looked innocuous enough. I remember my mom giving my dad a look, a “did you get this for her” look. If he’d picked up on it, they might have realized something was off – even if they never could have guessed what that something was – and they could’ve put a stop to it. Called the cops, hidden the present away, packed up and moved. Anything to keep me from getting my grubby little hands on it, knees covered in pajamas and pine needles, and tearing it open to reveal the toy inside.
It was a plush bug. Not the kind a child would normally receive, designed with soft round eyes and a sweet smile and droopy string antennae. A scientifically accurate bedbug. In the years since, during my desperate research, I’ve discovered that plenty of people make things like this, but they’re usually simplified. This toy was immaculately stitched and detailed. It almost looked like it shouldn’t have been soft at all, it resembled a bug so much.
I guess Mom assumed Dad bought it and Dad assumed Mom bought it. And I loved it, being a weird child, so neither of them questioned it a moment further.
Buggy became my instant best friend for the rest of the day. I showed him all the other presents I opened. I annoyed my aunts and uncles with him at the dinner table. One of my aunts shrieked when I dropped him in her lap. She was petrified of bugs. I was dismissed to the kids’ table, but I didn’t care. Why did I need anyone else when Buggy was with me? He was probably the highest quality stuffed toy I’d ever had. I always saw the other kids at school with the bears they’d built at those mall stores, the ones my parents turned me away from. Too expensive. Sorry honey, maybe next year. But now I had Buggy. I had my own weird expensive toy, and so what if he was a bedbug? He was mine.
“Who gave her that thing?” My aunt asked. I wish my parents had figured it out then.
That first night, sleeping with my arms wrapped around my Buggy, I didn’t make the connection. I’d always had nightmares. I didn’t have any reason to think this one was different.
I dreamed I was in a maze, layers of crypts and tunnels and damp caves that stacked on top of each other. I could feel them around me, but especially above and below me. I felt the presence of the others more than the one I was stuck in. I groped around in the dim, slipping, trying to find something dry to hold onto. In retrospect I know I was trying to walk on the tracks of a subway. I had never heard of a subway at the time. I was six years old and I’d never been to a city.
My eyes blurred, trying to focus on the things around me – or maybe trying to put off focusing on them for as long as possible. My foot came down on something and it crunched like a snail. I let myself look down at it. An eyeball. It was attached to something, like a big slimy plant pushing itself through the tracks and holding itself in place with long veiny fronds. My only frame of reference was a nosebleed I’d had a couple years before, and the horrible things that had come out of my face when I’d blown my nose. It quivered underneath me and recoiled, dragging the burst eyeball into the darkness with it. My scream should have echoed in a proper subway tunnel but fell muted against the layers of things packed against the walls. I bolted awake the morning after Christmas to a bed soaked with pee and sweat, screaming and crying, blubbering nonsense about nosebleeds at my parents.
It was by far the scariest thing I’d ever experienced. Worst of all, Buggy had fallen victim to the bed-wetting. Mom told me she would have to wash it, but because it was a stuffed animal, the process was “more gentle” than washing clothes, and she’d have to do it manually that night. Buggy would be drying all night, and I wouldn’t be able to take him to bed with me. The idea of having another one of those dreams filled me with anxiety, but the idea of not having Buggy during them made me want to die. It is difficult to want to die as a six-year-old child, except in cases of horrific trauma, but I felt it plainly after only one night in that place.
It took me a while to fall asleep. I missed Buggy, and the temporary sheets felt alien to me. Most of all I feared going back and seeing that thing again. As much as my parents had assured me it was just a dream, some part of me knew even then it wasn’t that simple. Something had been off. I’ve thought about it a lot now. It was the scream. In most dreams, when you try to scream, your body stops you. It’s a horrible feeling and a characteristic of nightmares for a lot of people. But I’d had no trouble screaming.
I didn’t go to the subway that night. I went to another place. It was dry and bright and endless, just a flat plane of nothing stretching out before me. But I wasn’t alone. Someone was above me. I knew it. Someone was watching me. Someone was watching me and they hated me. They were so angry with me and I couldn’t figure out why. It wasn’t something I’d done. It wasn’t something my parents had done. It was older than that, like when you hear about a war as a kid that happened way before you were born. Only this war made the dirt look young. I don’t know how I knew that. It was wrapped up in the hate somehow, and I could feel the hate so strong that it must have filled all the deepest cracks of my brain with all its other baggage. I have trouble explaining this sometimes, the few times I’ve tried to explain it, so I’m sorry if it doesn’t make any sense. I invite you to consider how much less sense it made to me when I was six years old if it’s something I’m still trying to properly articulate.
I woke up that morning with no tears and a dry bed, but in a state I can only describe as depressed. Advanced depression. I felt nothing and I didn’t want to do anything. All I remembered was the dull ache of the hate radiating from above me and the emptiness of the world I’d found myself in. This world felt empty, too, like it was just a picture pasted over the one from my dream, and I felt like that hate would find its way in at any moment. My mood only improved when my mom handed me Buggy, dry and clean, smelling of lavender. I clutched it for the rest of the day, never saying a word. My parents were too worried about some bill to notice the state I was in. They cared, but life gets in the way sometimes.
The third night I went back to the vaults. That’s what I call that place because even the parts of it that aren’t underground are still covered with this cavernous sheen that makes them feel subterranean, like they’ve been engulfed by something larger than the Earth and the sky has been robbed from them. This time I was in someone’s backyard, rotting and collapsing in the dark, everything in shambles. A metal trapezoid tilted over the rusted swings it had shed, some of which sat only inches away from the nearby inground pool, as though they had crawled the short distance to join the dark liquid churning there. The road, cracked and crusted over with scabs, made it clear no one would come for the trash by the curb. I woke up sobbing and screaming and covered in pee. Buggy had managed to avoid this one.
It went on like this for weeks, and then months, and my parents began looking for professional help. First doctors, then hypnotherapists, even a psychic. I won’t bore you with the ups and downs of my journey. Nothing stopped the nightmares, or that empty hateful existence whenever I was separated from Buggy. No one made the connection. I just eventually learned to live with it. I stopped peeing the bed, I stopped waking up crying. I came to expect every night would be horrible and I dealt with it.
I figured it out when I was twelve. Determined to stop sleeping with stuffed animals like the rest of my friends, I put Buggy in a drawer and tried to forget about him. Night after night I went back to the empty place, felt the hatred digging into my skin from every inch of the dry air. I felt myself slipping into suicidality. My days were cold and empty and everything felt fake. Nothing would bring me happiness anymore.
I went on like this for about a month before I finally couldn’t take it anymore. You don’t need to know the details of my attempt. What I will tell you is that during my recovery, my dad spent most of his time looking for anything to cheer me up. He found Buggy in the drawer and brought him to me in my bed. It did cheer me up, and that night when I ended up back in the vaults it felt like some kind of sick sweet relief. Instead of the hatred of that empty place there was a kind of exuberance in the fear, an adrenaline rush. Most of all there was a future, even if that future made me seethe and retch and sob. In the vaults, there was always something new to find. A basement with a dead mummified child stretched like a ragdoll across the floor, one limb in each corner, wet moss growing where each of his putty limbs cracked and broke open. A field under an open but claustrophobic sky where something huge and sluggish hauled itself forward, grunting with each labored movement, desperate to get away from something – or maybe to catch up to it. An empty lake with fish who must be dead but refused to rot, still and strewn about the seaweed, their eyes following me as I moved among them. I felt like I spent more time in the vaults than the waking world, and this hell became my new normal.
I’ve done my research, of course. As an adult who slept with a plush bedbug every night for years, I have always tried to figure out why. There is some obscure occult symbolism, but I can’t figure out what it has to do with Buggy, if anything. I don’t know where he came from or why I was chosen. Maybe I wasn’t chosen – maybe I just stumbled into this. Maybe I drew the short straw in some cosmic game I didn’t know I was playing. I experimented, but it didn’t tell me anything I hadn’t already guessed. When I slept with Buggy, I went to the vaults. When I didn’t, I ended up in the big empty space that hated me.
I wish I had some grand revelation or vision to end this on, something that clarified the nature of those dreams, but the truth is that almost ten years ago now I finally worked up the courage to get rid of Buggy. I burned him, and I haven’t been to either of those places since. They seem like distant, awful memories to me. I met my wife soon after, something I’d been putting off despite wanting a family because I knew I’d have to find a way to explain all this nonsense or risk coming off as an unhinged. We have a wonderful daughter who keeps finding all kinds of ways to get into trouble.
But I’m writing this down for a reason. Christmas is coming up, and we’re amassing a sizeable hidden present pile to put under the tree. My daughter is six years old. If it’s going to happen, this will be the year. Burning it worked for me, but what if I’d already outgrown it? What if that pitiless gaze had moved past me and accepted my rejection, even anticipated it? What if it tries again? There is a present, wrapped, no label, with the same wrapping paper my wife used for all her gifts. It’s the right size. I’m sure it’s just something she bought for one of us. But my imagination is going wild. I don’t know if I’ll be able to take it away from her if that’s what it is. What if I rip the paper open before Christmas morning and I’m right? Do I burn that thing and possibly condemn my daughter to that empty and hateful place, unable to find solid ground even in the horror? How do I know it won’t make its way back to her in a worse way, a way I don’t understand or expect?
The last few days I have thought hard about that Christmas morning, about the look on my father’s face, the way he seemed to ignore my mother’s implications that she hadn’t bought the bedbug for me and the silent question in her glances toward him. I remember the way he always seemed to anticipate that whatever therapy of the month we were trying wasn’t going to make a difference. I remember how, after my attempt, he spent all his time trying to find “something to make you feel better.” I wonder if he was looking for it that whole time. I wonder how much he knew.
God help me, I think I have to let my daughter open that present on Christmas morning. I think I have to play along.