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THE BED BUGS YOU NEVER
KNEW YOU HAD
A Special Report on a
Monster that could already be lurking underneith your bed, but don't
bother looking. These Monsters aren't the kind that you can see, and
that isn't the most dangerous thing about them.
by Maxwell Douglas
"I
keep telling myself that somewhere in the back of my
mind there was some part of me screaming for me to stop, but I
don’t think there
was really. I don’t think that any part of me was sane."
With Nancy
Goodall’s
stern-as-silver composure one could scarcely believe her to be capable
of
horrible acts she inflicted upon herself on the night of April 14th
of this year. She calls it “The day I lost my mind”
as she sits in the loft of
her eloquently decorated two-story suburban manner. Nancy
sits cross-legged over-looking the dense and endless tree tops of Rochester,
North Carolina.
She is wearing a beige pantsuit with a tea
cup in one hand and its matching saucer pinched between the thumb and
forefinger of her left hand, the only two remaining fingers after the
surgery
that saved her from bleeding to death.
At
around 4 am, on the day of the incident Brent Goodall walked into the
kitchen
to find his wife sawing through her own knuckles with a serrated
kitchen blade.
She claims to have woken up scratching the back of her hand before
getting out
of bed. “I don’t think that I ever blacked
out,” she recounts the incident looking
out at the horizon over her veranda. There is a wet haze coated around
her blue
eyes that could be mistaken for tears, but given her demeanor
I’m more apt to
believe that the wetness is due to a lack of sleep. She never looks
directly at
me when discussing details and her voice drops to just above a whisper.
Nancy
Goodall, a prestigious and powerful seven year bio-engineer working at
the
botanical observatory at Haussmann Park,
transforms into a
child frightened and embarrassed by a distant nightmare. “The
itching was so
bad, and it had been bad for some time. I remember running to the
bathroom,
past the bathroom. The ointment never really worked anyway so I knew I
had to
use something else. The ointment just made the itching cold and wet,
but no
less severe,” her pauses feel like small chasms, “I
think that my idea was to
just use the steak knife until the itching went away, or maybe until
the pain
brought me to my senses. I keep telling myself that somewhere in the
back of my
mind there was some part of me screaming for me to stop, but I
don’t think there
was really. I don’t think that any part of me was
sane.”
“It’s
really amazing, what these creatures can do, but it also makes
no practical sense from a natural selection point of view,”
A
number of
dermatologists who have listed the worst case scenarios for over a
thousand
different causes of itching ever claimed one to be as bad as
self-mutilation.
Dr. Nathan Tippet holds a private dermatology practice in Rochester
and examined Nancy
nearly a weak before the incident. He sticks by his claim that there
was
nothing physically wrong with her at the time, “the first
thing that we
eliminated was the possibility that oils, pesticides, or any of the
genetic
growth hormone that Mrs. Goodall uses in her work could be causing the
itching.
After that we tested chemicals from any bath soaps, perfumes, hand
lotions,
make up, pretty much anything that she uses on a daily basis. When that
didn’t work
I even had her bring in a written copy of her daily diet to assess the
possibility that the itching could have come from some kind of allergic
reaction. Trial after trial there simply wasn’t anything
there. She told me
that Collidal Oatmeal Lotion was helping a little so I advised that she
stick
with that… there was never any indication that she had
contemplated some kind
of self destruction at anytime.”
Then
how could
this happen? The causes of Nancy’s
itching are
perhaps the most disturbing aspect of this case, since it simply defies
conventional thinking and may be as much a danger to us as it was to Nancy.
After the
incident, the severed fingers were inspected by scientists at Central
State
University
to see if the
problem might have been under rather than on top of the skin. They
found
something that Dr. Tippet claims to be impossible, a nest of
microscopic mites
called Demodex Brevis, more
commonly
known as harmless eyebrow mites, embedded underneath the skin.
“Demodex mites
are not uncommon at all. They are one of any number of million
different
microscopic creatures that exist on the human body,” says Dr.
Tippet, “but
they’re only found in hair follicles more commonly around the
face. There is no
way that they could possibly exist anywhere else. It’s
absurd.”
The
story gets
even more absurd once you hear the testimony of Research
Scientist Dr. Shan Bai Yin who
asserts that the demodex brevis found were actually a mutated form of
eyebrow
mite. “I wouldn’t even call them the same bug. They
share characteristics, but
obviously this new bug is much more antagonizing.” Dr. Yin
has even named the
new bug Demodex Pacis which means
“To
take away peace”. His team of doctorate students was able to
document some of
the characteristics of the bug before the fingers were confiscated due
to an
investigation of the corporation which originally hired Nancy
to work at Haussmann Park
nearly seven years
ago. Some of those characteristics include such gruesome far-fetched
qualities
like burrowing into the skin when exposed to light, literally hiding
from
detection. “It’s really amazing, what these
creatures can do, but it also makes
no practical sense from a natural selection point of view,”
says Dr. Yin. Since
the Demodex Pacis can only exist
with
its host alive it does them no good to cause such excruciating
irritation.
“They beg for their own extinction that way,” says
Dr. Yin. The
implications of his suggestion reach far
beyond the realms of science. He claims that the bug may have been
manufactured
by the company that Nancy
worked for, Threvius International, and in a sense Nancy and Brent are
taking
that same argument to federal court.
After
Nancy
was released from
the hospital she was hit with even more devastating news. The company
she had
served was not only firing her, but her insurance was refusing to pay
for the medical
treatment she had received under the grounds that it didn’t
fall under any
coverable terms of their agreement. Nancy
says that she was in the same kitchen when she heard the news, and
still wearing
the garbs she’d worn in the hospital, still tracing the red
stains between the
cracks of the kitchen tiles that Brent had never quite been able to get
out.
“We lost everything, absolutely everything. We have a
mortgage on the home and
two children. Brent does what he can, but it’s really hard to
keep up. I’m
virtually outcast because of what happened, which is the most painful
thing
because I loved my work, and the people I worked with.”
“It’s
simply not in our interest to go up
against companies like Lockheed Martin and Boeing, who would simply
crush us in
the arms market.”
Now
one woman’s
night of terror has become the torch head of an entire community up in
arms
about the Nancy’s
rights and the threat that demodex brevis might be lurking just outside
their
door. Stan Weiss is the head of the Rochester Citizen’s Union
and has announced at a number of city hall meetings that
“we’re taking the
fight strait to them,” he says, “(Threvius
International) has been looming over
this town like a dark hand for years. We’ve traced ownership
of several realty
companies in the area back to them, and I’m sure that they
have political
members in office. This bug, however, is the first real evidence
we’ve had that
they’re rule over Rochesture is something more sinister than
it’s been in the
past.”
The
locals have
taken to calling the corporate enterprise of the city
“Medusa” because of the
obvious malignant nature that the name implies, but more practically
because of
the number of avenues the company threads through other companies and
even
state sponsored affiliates like Haussmann Park.
Indeed, it is
difficult to define what Threvius International actually does judging
from the
company’s rather dull, still unfinished, website
(Threviusinternational.net)
which describes as a “unifying entity dedicated to corporate
outsourcing”. This
basically means that TI is a middleman from which rising companies can
attain
low wage workers from overseas. So what’s it doing with a
piece of Houssmann
Park
and realty companies in Rochester?
“We
specialize in
diversity,” says Darren Webber, the executive accountant for
TI’s district
office in Atlanta,
and the man whose signature
is on the forms that were sent to Nancy’s
house after she returned from the hospital. He agreed to speak with us
from his
high rise corner office where you would expect to find a man like
Darren
Webber, wearing what you’d expect an executive accountant to
wear. He laughs
abysmally to himself between short bursts of explanation, rather like a
self-important first date trying to sell himself to a prospective
mistress. “We
began by outsourcing production in 1998, but we’ve grown
since then into an important
firm for the development of new products which we then outsource
ourselves and
pull in the profits. Some of the things that our company has been
behind have
been as silly as dusters with really long handles that reach hard to
reach
places, stuff like that. But we’ve also sponsored companies
that make hard
drives for cameras too. Our company’s motto is
‘there is no beyond’, and that’s
exactly what we mean.”
When
asked about
bioengineering and closet weapons manufacturing, Darren Webber explains
that Threvius
International has no interest in it. “It’s simply
not in our interest to go up
against companies like Lockheed Martin and Boeing, who would simply
crush us in
the arms market.” Webber asserts that the claims of Stan
Weiss and Nancy
Goodall are nothing less than conspiracy theories which are being used
to
manipulate the system into “some kind of payout for a self
inflicted action
which took place outside of the workplace.”
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