The wife and I are under attack. Not from any droopy-trousered cretins in the street or unsympathetic debt collectors or obnoxious upstairs neighbors or neo-Yuppie gentrifiers or iconic neighborhood crackheads, but from an assemblage of assailants that are a thousand times more sly and efficient in their efforts than any of those other threats. Peggy and I, for the last several nights, have been plagued by a menace so tenacious and resilient in its campaign to harm us, that we are both dangerously close to parting with our sanity. We are sleepless, irritable, weakened, sore and after several attempts to combat the problem, almost entirely bereft of hope. Our enemy? The common mosquito.
We've fought this battle before. At out old apartment on East 12th, we were continually sucked dry by swarms of the tiny vampires, but that was invariably due to the fact that our windows had no screens on them. When we moved apartments in 2002, we were both convinced that we'd escaped that problem. Not so, as it turns out. The bigger question here, however, is how they're getting in. All our windows are screened, and none of those screens have any immediately visible holes. Moreover, is the mosquito itself that wily? How do they know how to get in? And where are they coming from? To our knowledge, there is no large body of tepid, standing water nearby. You'd think we were living in a lean-to in the middle of the Amazonian rainforest. Our limbs are covered with countless, tiny red bites. Our brains are rattled from whipping our heads around when we hear that tell-tale buzz near our ear. Our eyes are swollen from squinting around our white walls in the middle of the night, trying to locate our teensy tormentors. Some nights, we luck out and are rewarded with small splotches of our own blood on the ceiling. It's cold comfort.
But each night, they're back and in greater numbers. We are losing this fight.
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