The Perfect Predator

by Steffanie Strathdee

  Using his long legs now to his advantage, Tom took the stairs two at a time and, despite having added a bit more heft to “sturdy” in recent years, was first to reach the small platform at the pyramid door. He gloated over me when I arrived a few minutes later, huffing and puffing. A lone watchman, an aging militiaman in worn army fatigues, crouched by the low entrance door, observing our arrival with cool interest. His head wrapped in a turban, with one hand he absently stroked his long white beard. In the other he clutched a battered AK-47, which lay lazily across his lap. I peered past him. Khalid hadn’t exaggerated when he’d said you can crawl inside. More precisely, you had to crawl to get inside. I took a deep breath, lowered my head, and stepped down the first few rungs, but that was enough. I scrambled up, and Tom gave a smug smile as he started a backward crawl downward into the pyramid.

  “Do not breathe the air!” the watchman called down to Tom. Local lore had it that noxious gases lingered in the chambers. Tom scoffed. Poisonous gases? It sounded like a line fed to gullible tourists.

  “Famous last words,” Tom hollered back. He quickly disappeared from view into the bowels of the Red Pyramid, the top of his silver-haired head no longer visible. I swallowed hard, and tried to shake a growing feeling of dread. Despite the heat, I shivered. The guard’s leering presence made me uncomfortable. I turned to face the desert, scanning the dunes for Khalid. He was a black dot on the horizon. I bellowed down the chute at Tom. “Hurry up!”

  Tom finally emerged, panting, covered with sweat and red dust, his face a little ashen. I handed him a bottle of water from my pack.

  “Let’s get out of here,” I said, tugging his shirtsleeve. Another tomb awaited.

  A short drive from Dahshur was Saqqara, the main necropolis for the ancient Egyptian capital of Memphis and onward for over three thousand years, well into the Roman Empire. Tom was still looking a little bushed from our last hike when we arrived at the Step Pyramid. He wandered out among the alabaster benches that lined a catacomb of tombs, closed his eyes, and took a deep breath. I could see that his brow was now coated in sweat and he was breathing more heavily, as if we were climbing a mountain.

  “You okay?”

  He waved off my concern.

  “There’s just something about this place,” he murmured absently. “It’s strangely familiar.” We both knew he had never been to Egypt before, and Tom was skeptical about reincarnation.

  “Maybe just creepy,” I said.

  Khalid caught up with us and resumed his informative lecture as we walked through the ruins of the necropolis; below us were the catacombs, the subterranean crypts, with mummies and the king’s chambers. During the king’s rule, no effort was spared to keep his larder and spirit stoked, to protect his ka, or his energy, his inner power. If his ka weakened, Khalid explained, he could be deposed by enemies. Saqqara had also been an important destination for Egyptian pilgrims who belonged to several different sects. Recent excavation had uncovered almost eight million animal mummies, including dogs, cats, baboons, falcons, and ibis.

  A glimmer of interest broke the pall on Tom’s face.

  “Hey, Dr. Doolittle,” I quipped, using one of my favorite nicknames for him. “Maybe you wrapped animal mummies in another life.”

  From the time Tom was young, he’d shown a special affinity for animals. He considered this a natural inheritance from his great-grandfather, who was supposedly Cherokee. In Tom, it developed into a passionate vocation, and later a scholarly one, as he first pursued research and training as a primatologist, publishing studies on the psychology and memory of lowland gorillas. Later, he became an ornithologist, studying how the dialects of white-crowned sparrows had evolved differently from one part of San Francisco to another, publishing his dissertation paper in one of the world’s top journals, Science. He liked to tell people that he later worked his way down the evolutionary ladder to study humans. When we went on our usual walk at the local lagoon, Tom was more likely to say hello to other people’s dogs than their owners.

  Eventually his career evolved to focus on long-form history—the evolutionary origins of behavior. He took the very, very long view of the natural world and how we—and all creatures great and small—evolve to adapt to a changing environment. Or perish. It’s our ability to adapt in response to the stressors around us that helps us cope and survive. With that long view as his preferred one, Tom considered the world not in terms of days, months, or even years, but in millennia. He’d point to the topknot of some obscure bird species in Africa relative to a comparable one in Asia, musing aloud how they reflected “convergent evolution,” the way different species develop analogous traits as they adapt to similar environments. Rather than feel sorry for himself if he got the flu or even when he was infected with a voracious parasite he picked up in the Colombian rainforest, he’d marvel at the biological brilliance that enables an organism to outwit challenges to its survival, and the adaptive value of surviving it. He was annoyingly quick to remind me of the evolutionary bright side: “What doesn’t kill you, actually does make you stronger.”

  That afternoon at Saqqara, Tom was evolving right before my eyes. Within seconds, he seemed a thousand years older, his face pale and drawn. His ka was definitely weak. Even so, he remained intent on exploring the underworld of the ancient necropolis. Khalid and I had to tear him away.

  “Just the heat,” he said. By morning he seemed rested and ready to go again. We forged ahead by car, camel, and air and on foot, with Khalid in the lead, to see the temples of Ramesses II and Nefertari, and the Aswan Dam. Finally, we boarded the MS Mayfair, a cruise ship that would take us to Luxor for the grand finale: the Valley of the Kings. The ship accommodated 155 people and ordinarily would have been fully booked this time of year. But the recent terrorist scares and drop in tourism had left it eerily vacant. We didn’t mind. We’d looked forward to some special downtime together, and an empty cruise ship certainly promised that.

  As we’d learned from Khalid, Egyptian mythology held that at the end of each day, Ra, the sun god, descended into the underworld on his solar boat, where he encountered demons and gods who opposed him, such as Apep, often called Apophys, the god of chaos. Apophys would partially swallow Ra, leading to the setting of the sun each night, and would spit him back out at dawn. We’d had it easier, returning to our cozy accommodations each evening and updating our friends and family on Facebook before calling it quits.

  When our ship anchored in Luxor the next day, there were several other ships but not enough docks. Our crew tied the Mayfair to a ship that had already moored, which in turn had tied itself to another, and so on. Hand in hand, Tom and I traversed three ships to get to shore so that Khalid could take us to visit the Luxor and Karnak temples. We returned to the ship at dusk for a romantic dinner on the top deck under the stars—a towering platter of seafood paella and a bottle of wine that I had saved for the occasion. In the days and weeks ahead, I would come to refer to our feast under the night sky as the Last Supper.

  2

  THE LAST SUPPER

  November 28, 2015

  We hadn’t planned on having the ship to ourselves, nor could we have known the evening would be so spectacularly beautiful on that upper deck, under the blanket of stars and the warm, velvet breeze. But we had planned on a special dinner, and I’d packed the special bottle of Chardonnay from home and asked the ship’s chef if they could chill it to go with our meal. We were celebrating the last night of this dream vacation, after all. Plus, it was the anniversary of our first date fourteen years before, and, as is my habit, I rarely left anything to chance. Organization, focus, and follow-through are the Day-Glo genes in my DNA. Tom was an amused but graceful beneficiary. If his “never retreat” ethos was a signature trait, then mine was “never give up.” It had steeled me through a childhood as a brainy, bullied kid, and earned me the nickname Pit Bull in my early academic career.

  Tom sometimes chafed at my dogged persistence and attention to detail over things that he might
have preferred to put off for another day. But he also mused, affectionately at times like this, how the forces of nature and nurture that were so different for each of us could have forged the likes of us as a couple. Tom had grown up something of an Oliver Twist in 1950s Southern California. I’d grown up in the seventies white-bread middle-class Toronto suburb of Scarborough, with two sisters and a mother and father who provided for us in all the ordinary ways a kid can take for granted. Our job was to study hard and get good grades.

  My dad was a high school science teacher who later took on mentoring gifted kids, and I guess he’d practiced on me from the start. I was the nerdy girl who took even that a step beyond the norm. Today I’d be described as a little “on the spectrum”—a euphemism for Asperger’s syndrome, though I’ve never had a formal diagnosis. With a high-octane brain for academics but low-res skills for connecting with kids my own age, I was forever on the fringes socially, but had a couple of girlfriends who shared similar interests. Meanwhile, my dad tutored me painstakingly in physics and math, showing me techniques for testing a hypothesis to determine the “knowns” from the “unknowns”—the analytical heart of scientific enquiry. I was required to study two hours after dinner, and my sisters and I were only allowed one hour of TV per week. When I told my dad that I’d decided I wanted to be a scientist, he thought it was because I was trying to follow in his footsteps, but the truth was I wanted to prove to myself that I could do something really challenging. Once I discovered a passion for problem-solving science puzzles, I’d found my path.

  Tom had the same drive to tackle knotty research problems, although we’d each traveled markedly different paths in our pursuit. My trajectory was very linear. I’d gone right into college and then grad school, became a postdoc, and then faculty. Tom’s path was a little more circuitous in that he’d embarked on his postdoc work and then worked as a high school teacher for three years before returning to academia full time after he obtained research grants. Our paths would eventually intersect, but even before then our research on the frontier of the HIV/AIDS epidemic slowly brought us into the same orbit of academic publishing and international conferences.

  By then, Tom had already turned his attention to humans rather than animals and fish; his focus was on stress research. He’d started off studying elderly people and what made them vulnerable to illness, which led him to the study of psychoneuroimmunology—the effects of the mind and brain on health and the immune system. When the HIV epidemic hit, he was riveted by the potential to study the far-reaching implications of stress on the immune system, and a person’s vulnerability and resilience in the context of this disease. He became fascinated that some people progressed to AIDS and others didn’t, and he wondered why—this was one research question we had both studied. He was awarded a grant to study the impact of stress on HIV disease progression, which led him to study risk behaviors that made people vulnerable to infection. He was one of the first people in the field to develop a risk-reduction program for people who were already HIV-positive—recognizing that people needed skills to help prevent them from passing the infection on to others.

  Each on our own path for the previous twenty years, we had been following the same north star in our research, mapping the constellation of behavioral risk factors driving HIV infection. When we finally met face-to-face in 2001, it was at a boring grant review panel. Tom was developing risk-reduction programs for methamphetamine users and had just started working in Mexico with sex workers. I had just returned from Pakistan, where I was studying the impact of the post-9/11 war in Afghanistan on the risk of acquiring HIV among people who inject drugs. We often joked that of all the most dry, unromantic, and unlikely places to discover the love of your life—personal chemistry ablaze—this scientific committee meeting would have topped the list.

  It would be years later, long after we were married, that we realized we’d actually first “met”—eyes only—across a crowded room at a conference in 1997 in Flagstaff, Arizona, where I’d presented my most recent research findings. It was a riot because, chatting one day about a new study that had just come out, I referred to something about that conference talk, and Tom said, “Wait I minute, I was there, too! Were you wearing a yellow suit?!”

  I had to stop and think. I’d worn a crisp, tailored yellow suit and stiletto heels, remarkably more attentive to looking polished and “grown up” at that young age than I would become in later years. And now I remembered the lumberjack in the back row.

  “Yes! Were you in the back row wearing a red plaid shirt?”

  “Yup, but you walked right past me,” Tom said, feigning insult.

  “Yeah, I wasn’t ready for you back then,” I said, laughing.

  “Neither was I,” he quipped. And we were right.

  A few years later when we were dating, we were visiting Chicago, having dinner in the Signature Room on the ninety-fifth floor of the John Hancock Center. We had just ordered and were looking out the window at the view, when BAM! Out of nowhere, a peregrine falcon plunged down onto a pigeon, and feathers went flying. We both blurted out, “Did you see that?!” And then looked around. No one else had. Just us. We proceeded to compare birding notes. Tom, who had spent years crawling around Twin Peaks in San Francisco looking for the nests of the white-crowned sparrow for his dissertation, immediately speculated that the peregrine had a nest around there somewhere. I could tell he was itching to peer out the glass to see if he could find it. That’s when I knew I was in love. Now, at home, a pair of peregrines lived nearby and regularly rocketed through the canyon behind our backyard.

  Toasting the luck of cosmic timing and life’s mysterious ways, we turned to the chef’s stunning seafood feast, the wine, the Champagne, and the silken flan. Even I had to admit that it couldn’t have been a more perfect anniversary dinner if I’d planned it all myself. By the time we trundled back to our cabin, we were relaxed, romantic, and looking forward to the next day’s grand finale, the tour of the Valley of the Kings, and our flight home.

  I felt the bed shake and looked up to see Tom throw the covers back and dash for the bathroom. I squinted at my phone to see the time: midnight. Tom barely made it to the tiny toilet in our cabin, where he vomited every last morsel. Or so it seemed, but his misery continued. He had terrible stomach pains and made countless repeat trips to the loo that night. Neither of us slept. When Khalid appeared in the morning at our door, Tom was doubled over in the bathroom praying to the porcelain god. Khalid urged us to call a doctor, but Tom was dead set against it, and I didn’t push. Maybe he’d simply gotten a bad mussel and needed to ride out a bout of food poisoning. We were old hands at that.

  Tom made feeble attempts at humor. “Did I inhale too much of the poisonous gases in the Red Pyramid the other day?” If he could laugh, I took that as a good sign.

  “I just told everyone on Facebook that at this rate, you’re going to see the Valley of the Kings feet first in your own tomb,” I joked. Tom didn’t laugh this time. He moaned, through clenched teeth.

  “Just get us home now.”

  Home? That seemed a bit extreme. We’d run into things like this before in our travels. Delhi belly, we called it—our name for traveler’s diarrhea or stomach upsets from unfamiliar microbes in local food and water. We routinely packed Cipro, an antibiotic, like some people pack toothpaste. And where was my guy who typically pooh-poohed physical discomfort, braved the worst waves, and didn’t consider retreat a reasonable option? I was less sympathetic than I might have been. I contemplated calling a doctor or finding an emergency clinic in town where they’d check him out, give him a prescription, and in twenty-four hours he’d be good.

  “Don’t call a doctor,” Tom snapped, reading my mind. “And whatever you do, don’t take me to a hospital. I won’t go.”

  Tom had a history of avoiding doctors. His hardscrabble childhood had trained him for stoicism. His dad, a decorated World War II Navy veteran turned motorcycle cop, kept the life lessons simple: whatever happens,
you tough it out. Once, when Tom was a teenager, his surfboard boomeranged back and hit him square in the face, breaking teeth and bone. When he returned home and showed his dad the blood gushing from his mouth, his dad shrugged, pried the gash open, and poured in mercurochrome, that god-awful, glow-in-the-dark concoction that parents favored as a cure-all antiseptic back then. When Tom went to the dentist months later, the dentist rocked back on his heels, gave an amazed whistle, and asked Tom how long ago he had broken his jaw and why he didn’t have it properly set. I’d been raised to take care of myself, too, but with parents who had a more conventional relationship with modern medicine.

  Tom and I agreed on almost everything, but when we didn’t agree, we locked horns. Neither of us knew how to give in. I was determined that now would not be one of those times. But Tom was sick, and I was not. He wasn’t thinking clearly, so I had to. He tended to trust me on the medical side of things, since my degree in epidemiology was a branch of public health. But having a PhD without an MD meant that sometimes I knew just enough about medicine to get me into trouble.