by Dino Parenti
I tip-toe-twist on the toilet to get a better sightline through the glass. Since Tammy stopped hanging her dry cleaning from the rear driver-side window hook after she stopped giving a shit how she looked, there’s nothing to obstruct my view of the car seat, though at the angle I’m at, all I can make out is the kid’s chubby, silhouetted arm passing across his brow.
In hindsight, swiping the baby while his mother slept off her latest bender may not have been my finest moment.
I halt mid-thrust until I’m pretty certain the baby has gone back to sleep. This was Tammy’s fear all through the pregnancy. She often bitched up a storm about some flavor-of-the-week’s suckling keeping her awake at night, but she never stayed lucid enough after the birth to realize what a tranquil little bundle she ended up delivering through a relatively easy birth.
The sudden tooth-buffing triggers me into yanking back, and the protest from the other side gurgles up in feral snorts before the words follow.
“Hey, man,” the barkeep snarls. “Oscar said it’s fifty a pop, not per hour. He insisted I remind your chatty ass of that, so can we please . . . ?”
“Sorry, brother,” I tell him.
There are no hard feelings. I get it. The demands of the moment require expediency on both our parts. I’ve long gotten used to the atypical, and should know better at this point. I thought so anyway. Kept reinforcing it in my mind, even after I caught Tammy last week trying to sell the baby for a dose.
It’s during Hallmark moments like those that you realize maybe you’ve pushed the bounds of mutuality far enough.
Last night I packed my car with the few treasures I have of this world. This morning, more from whim than consideration, I snagged the final item and crept to the garage. Tammy’s probably still too spaced-out to even know he’s been missing from the crib for the entire day, three-hundred miles removed now and belted in his seat between a file box of my favorite Stephen Kings and my mother’s urn.
I resume pounding in due time, my moist, hairless paunch coaxing suction-cup pops against bible verses and for-a-good-time-call numbers scored into the stall wall. The barkeep did give my tattoo a good scowl before getting down to it, but I didn’t hold it against him. Ditto with each subsequent pause-and-stare. Tummy tattoos aren’t all that common and pretty painful to sit through, but I’m sure the C-section that almost killed my mom in having me was as well, mirrored permanently now in a mixture of maroon ink and her ashes in a smiling scar below my bellybutton.
Okay, so maybe anonymous blowjobs in roadside bars aren’t what I’m hooked to exactly, but . . . you get the blurry picture.
I’m getting close now, and I think this purge will hold me well, at least till Phoenix. To the east, the storm holds steady, frothing, biding its time, taunting my resolve, testing my freedom, waiting to see how long my cash will stretch before I too cave in to bartering with flesh in more extreme ways.
SEGMENT 5
AFTER
ON THE FICKLE NATURE OF GERMINATION
1
EL CALAFATE, ARGENTINA, 7/23/2031
NOW THEY’RE SAYING it started in New York. This morning, it was Chicago. Yesterday, San Diego. Because that’s where patient-zero was found. It’s what the upstart reporter on the TV keeps insisting on at any rate. He’s a coiffed, suave young thing looking to trickle his wiz on the tree before it withers, laying down a sober voice ripped from a 1940’s radio spot, so nobody questions it. It sounds manly. It sounds like the truth, and we’re all addicted to truth, if not its illusion, at least. Here’s my version of it: the Argentinian Ministry of Health (whom we called before leaving) along with the CDC (whom we called upon ascertaining outbreak) are doing their respective best to track down the source and figure out containment, but they’re not sharing a thing. Nothing official, anyway. Still, despite having no evidence to his claims, that San Diego hack happens to be right on one fact: Sam Briar was the first death in the “public sphere.” Sam had been my husband, Terry’s, intern, a kid he’d plucked personally from one of his own classes because he had all the qualities he coveted in the son we’ve been unable to make ourselves—disciplined when he had to be, otherwise carefree and fun. Sam had just gotten engaged to another intern, Holly, and they were married in an impromptu ceremony overlooking our excavation site by the captain of the ship who brought in our monthly supplies. With the backdrop of the Perito Moreno Glacier unfurling from the mountains like blue-white shag, a more amazing and surreal setting would’ve required green-screen or time-travel. I have to admit, I envied their newness. Their blush. At the end, we all toasted with some of Denny Shuster’s virgin level-4 bio-toxin vials because we wanted to clink glass and not plastic. Denny was the virologist from the neighboring camp studying plant viruses found in deep core samples. Using the vials had been his idea, I think because he just wanted a party to crash, and because we had four women in our camp while his was all men. Still, we all loved the faux-jeopardous aspect of that. The risqué nature it implied of a bunch of geeks on a dig. There might even be pictures of this moment someplace, though none have surfaced online as of yet. Just as we gave our final toast, a small section of the glacier to the north began calving, and we cheered as a chunk of ice the size of an apartment building tumbled into the water and roared across the sound. That should’ve tipped us off. That should’ve made us stop and think. But good luck getting a bunch of scientists—most of them male—to believe in signs. I should mention that I’m one of those scientists, and one of those four ladies. I should also mention that I’m writing this all down on sheets from a jumbo-pack of the biggest cigarette rolling paper I could find. At 12” x 1.75” each, it’s enough to squeeze in about 450 words per sheet. 550 if I write small enough. Problem is, I only have 10 sheets left from my packet of 20. Once these run out, I’ll have little choice but to actually quit smoking. I tell myself that paper will be at a premium soon, along with tranquility, civility, and a shitload of other for-granted comforts.
11
PENSACOLA, FLORIDA, 8/3/2031
Don’t be thrown by the heading number, brave reader. I’ve decided to pick up this narrative again some eight days after starting it. I’m standing in a windy marina while Kirk haggles with the dock master from whom I bummed a skinny hand-roll, and whose kibbles and bits I’m now spitting into the balmy night air. If you’re reading this, I apologize for how these new words bleed into the Argentinian journal side, but the backs of these 10 thin rolling sheets are all I have while still staying inconspicuous. A notebook was too obvious. Ditto trying to dictate into my phone. And maybe I don’t want anyone reading this to begin with, and if someone were to, they were going to have to earn every word. Anyway, should make for interesting squint-eyes for whoever finds this and takes up that challenge. As to the order of the reading, I’ll leave that up to you, brave reader. But I felt compelled to include the narrative of Kirk and his boys in this makeshift confessional of mine. A little micro to go with the macro, not that Kirk would care. Ah, Kirk. His first words upon seeing me after my return from Argentina were: “How’d you people fuck things up this time?” Words he kept snarling in a loop through Keystone Light breaths as he stuffed sweaters and fatigues into an olive duffle. Stressed beyond measure as well as jetlagged, I had neither the inclination nor the energy to stand up for myself and call him out on his inability to divorce fault from femininity. For the record, Kirk’s my moron half-brother. We share a father. I never knew my real mother, only that she would die of injuries received in a car accident shortly after I was born, and grandma took over. But I digress. Kirk’s a strutting, ex-jarhead washout with affiliations to any number of survivalist groups. A classic anti-authoritarian, he’d sometimes squat in Terry and I’s basement with his two boys during his clockwork bouts of unemployment. But Kirk has a use right now, and despite his didactically fascist, boorish tendencies, he’s still family, and this may ultimately mean more in the coming weeks and months than anything else. I especially feel for his boys. Their stark masks of confusi
on when Kirk ordered them to the garage to fetch all the blankets, shells, and batteries they could carry would’ve looked shocking on adults, and it took me calmly-but-eagerly describing on bent knee the adventure we were about to embark upon before they snapped-to. Throughout my tale of impending whale hunts and deep, dark jungle expeditions, Kirk kept shivving looks at me from the closet. Because in his baboon brain, women aren’t expected to have all the answers. Women have enough on their god-plate just dealing with the kiddies. Once the boys were out of the room, Kirk bored into me with his blood-bloated eyeballs and weak chin, AR-15 cradled across his arms. He said, “Start talking, egghead.” It was an acknowledgment of education, at least. Perhaps even authority, and I decided for the sake of posterity and my own sanity to kill any further expectations on the spot.
2
My husband Terry and I were on a non-sponsored dig in Patagonian Argentina, studying Pre-Colombian migration settlements south of the Monte Verde finds, when we stumbled upon the frozen couple. They were preserved in a thawing ice womb of the most impossible blue. A blue from another time, meant for sprightlier eyes in a less hazy, less cluttered world. They were nestled in a shallow depression ringed by rocks exposed by rising global temperatures, still clutched to each other in a lover’s embrace. Our initial guestimates based on visuals of their clothing through the ice put them at around the 7,000-8,000 year range, though later during the thaw we ran a series of radiocarbon scans in the spectrometer from a bore sample and determined it to be closer to 14,000 years—well before the Bering migration period. I could get into all the naysaying Clovis-first arguments against it, but I’ll leave that for another occasion, time, privacy, and paper permitting. Anyway, Terry dubbed them Lady and Gentleman. When it came to names, he was always a bit of a lame. He’s had three dogs in his life, all of them named Doggie. Based on optimal compatibility, I should’ve run far and fast from any possibility of ever mingling those genes with my own. But throw in some kindly manners and a bow-legged strut to offset his dorky quirks, and I buckle like a fresh born pony. I’ve tried hard not to begrudge my “girlie” feelings about love, romance, and relationships; I embrace them because they’re as much an honest part of me as are my loves for science and study, along with a latent sense of anti-natalism. It’s in my marrow, like an addiction. Looking at Lady’s desiccated snuggle through that impossibly clear ice that first blustery day, I wonder if she too felt this for her mate in ways the language and customs of her day could never permit.
12
Soon as I got to Kirk’s trailer, I lit up one of the last five cigarettes I’d rolled earlier and gave him a glib rundown of the situation in the measured Nurse Ratched lilt I’d adopted of late—a cadence so far removed from the chipper post-doc I used to be that I might as well start adjusting imaginary nuts while walking. He got it all: the dig in Argentina, Lady and Gentleman, Denny and Sam, Terry and myself. For such a truculent meathead, I must confess that Kirk took well the news that Terry and I had inadvertently released an ancient strain of influenza. He even swelled a bit before nodding, as if privy to some closeted, latent nature in us he’s suspected we’ve been hoarding all along from a world he presumed to be teeming with likeminded, obstinate knuckle-draggers.
3
As we examined Lady and Gentleman more closely, we realized that they might’ve been a trio. What appeared to be some manner of strap for a pouch-sling was nuzzled between them, perhaps for an infant we couldn’t see due to the layers of animal pelts they were wrapped in. Excitement cartwheeled in my belly—a kind of rumble like hunger, only not as vulgar. Terry and I had been trying to get pregnant for several years, to no success. The treatment I was on for endometriosis was promising, but we kept hitting a wall conception-wise. After a while it gets so that you start wondering if your attitude truly does matter when trying to self-replicate. My mother got pregnant with me after a one-night-stand, and then carried me through the last three months of gestation while basically in a coma, so you can imagine my frustrations. Terry certainly wanted kids, far more than I did, and his disappointment so consumed him that he actually started to develop and cite apprehensions about bringing children into the world just to cope. He had recently latched onto this niche theory going around called Global Parasitism, which essentially posits that humanity is little more than another virus on Earth. Yeah, we’ve all heard that expression before, but the theory goes beyond a superficial proclamation of our inherently self-destructive behavior. It actually states that an intelligent, Type-I species that learns to harness its global resources eventually becomes, by default, an apex virus by unleashing ancient carbon monoxide producing fossils, yielding rapid climate cataclysms necessary for planetary replenishing. The parasites—us—are eventually rendered as the new fossil fuel for the next billion-year cycle, until the next intelligent species matures enough to repeat the procedure. It’s a variation on a Fermi Paradox solution—substituting the self-destruction-through-free-will aspect for a biological mechanism essential for planetary renewal. Natural selection creating its own leaches to drain the pus from itself, then eating the dead leeches later. All racy, juicy stuff, little of which I bought. No wonder we haven’t had sex in months and the yen to smoke has re-risen from the dead. This dig in Argentina, it was really meant as a last-ditch attempt to rekindle our passion. In that regard, at least initially, Lady and Gentleman afforded us some hope.
13
It was well after dark when Kirk, the kids, and I finally left Little Rock. We agreed that the prudent thing was to avoid Memphis before turning south for Florida, though it would’ve been faster. Avoiding major highways and population centers was in our best interest, so we took the 530 south instead before switching off to less traveled roads. It wasn’t long before Ollie and Clay were leaning against their respective doors, twitching their way through mutually edgy dreams. Of that I was glad. With the particulars being volleyed between Kirk and I, neither of us had the patience or vocabulary to justly translate our predicament to a nine and seven-year-old. In any case, the radio’s been doing a damn good job of that. Initial reports were already pouring in from New York, Chicago, St. Louis, Oakland, San Francisco, and Los Angeles: Clusters of people flooding ERs with “aggressive” flu-like symptoms. Twenty-nine confirmed dead, with the numbers expected to rise. So it’s truly viable and airborne. Less than ten days now since Denny first came down with it. Kirk frowned at the news. I just drew smoke and let the cig dangle near the two-inch gap of window I’d rolled down, enough for the slipstream to now-and-then scoop embers that flared against the charcoal roll of clouds before dying. The quick calc I did in my head before leaving said that we’d reach Kirk’s boat in Pensacola in about seven hours. From there it’ll be another five-to-six more to Cuba where a cabal of his seditionist cohorts reside. By virtue of this distance, in cahoots with the subtropical jet stream, we should end up just outside the lower-third risk circle, at least for a while. Of course if proliferation beyond our borders keeps increasing, this’ll all be so much pissing into a fan. And as if he’d read my mind, Kirk muttered another, “Fuckin’ scientists.” He’s been stink-eyeing me ever since the radio reports started, pushing down on the gas just a little harder with each one. Much as I hate to give him credit, he’s held back admirably on chewing me out over my complicity in all this, though I’m inclined to believe that fear has prompted this virtuous restraint, along with giddy wish-fulfillment at finally getting his shot to play out his deepest survivalist fantasies.
4
Terry wanted to fully thaw and extract Lady and Gentleman sooner rather than later, worried that if we waited and made a spectacle of the potentially groundbreaking find, transport back to the states would create additional risk and bureaucratic nightmares not worth taking. I was against it, insisting we could get all the study we needed on site. That I wasn’t in this line to desecrate bodies or burial grounds. We fought. He whined and moped. I caved. He kissed me on the forehead, whispering that we (meaning me) should stop being s
o naïve and shortsighted, and in no time got to work with Sam on erecting an improvised greenhouse enclosure from the rolls of plastic we used to melt ice for our drinking water. After subsequent protests kept falling on deaf ears, I grudgingly started helping out, though I would take my sweet time during breaks rolling cigarettes that I’d fight like hell at night not to smoke. “A woman who rolls her own smokes is stratospheric levels of sexy,” Sam would say, his dimples threatening to meet over the middle of his tongue. It was a toss-up as to whether my undead addictions or Sam’s comment made Terry flinch more. Though he adored Sam in most respects, his constant flirting with me—especially when his own fiancé was part of the team and, like all of us, never more than twenty yards away at any given moment—got under his skin. It was worse for him than any of our own professors flirting with me back in grad school when we met. I’m sure the fact that I encouraged it by not discouraging it is why Terry ignored me often while working the excessive hours he did, hoping to defrost Lady and Gentleman all the faster. His single-mindedness was as much aphrodisiac as it was irritant.
14
Being shrewd in the intricacies of his brutish, smoldering gender in the inverse ways Kirk wasn’t about mine, I thought it best not to confuse the easily befuddled with superfluous details, specifically those involving the dig, or Terry, or Lady and Gentleman. As for expecting equal subtlety from Kirk’s end, I knew I was in for a long drive. “You oughta stop smoking those damn things,” he said as we crossed the river into Mississippi proper. “They ain’t cool. And you oughta know better than to fuck with your immune system at a time like this.” This spoken by the twenty-smoke/two-six-pack-a-day consumer with the deep-fried diet of hushpuppies and gravy. And like Sam had declared, if there’s anything “cool” left about smoking cigarettes, it lies solely in rolling the damn things yourself. Sure, the end results tend to be sloppier than their machine-stamped brethren, with loose packing and insecure, windblown embers that can circle back to joust their way into your eyes and mouth, but at least it’s your own handmade sin. Rolling my own smokes has become my Zen crutch, pinching and dabbing and licking to the swing of my pulse. My fanny pack of works was the first thing I stuffed into the small freight I’d allotted for myself in leaving Argentina for Kirk’s, along with rugged clothes and a collection of Robinson Jeffers poems. Yeah, I’ve tried to quit smoking many times, and if not for Terry’s stubbornness regarding the exhumation, I think I might’ve been able to stop through work alone. Now I’ll have to settle for a lack of resources. Anyway, I held my tongue with Kirk. I’m sure my silence was a victory in his eyes, but I needed the urgency that few things but fatherhood could churn up. Considering that I’d just landed in Little Rock after 12+ hours of sleepless layovers and flights from Argentina, I felt more unhinged by how much energy I’ve expended coddling the insecurities of the men in my life than with the global crisis at hand.