Wild Thing: A Novel

by Josh Bazell

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  The human understanding is not composed of dry light, but is subject to influence from the will and the emotions, a fact that creates fanciful knowledge; man prefers to believe what he wants to be true.

  —Francis Bacon, Aphorisms Concerning the Interpretation of Nature, and the Kingdom of Man, Dryden translation

  But I wanna know for sure.

  —Chip Taylor, “Wild Thing”

  PROLOGUE

  EXHIBIT A

  White Lake, Minnesota

  Summer Before Last

  Autumn Semmel feels Benjy Schneke’s fingertip trace the top of her thigh, along the lower front hem of her boy shorts toward her pussy. It causes her skin to tighten all the way to her nipples and her pussy to unclench like a fist. She opens her eyes. Says “Stop that shit!”

  “Why?” Benjy says.

  She nods over her shoulder. “Because Megan and Ryan are right there.”

  Autumn and Benjy are lying on the White Lake side of the spit of land, mostly roots, that separates White Lake from Lake Garner. Megan Gotchnik and Ryan Crisel are out on Lake Garner, behind them.

  Benjy says “So? I’m not touching anything that’s covered.”

  “I know what you’re doing. You’re driving me crazy.”

  Autumn stands up, stretching down the edges of her bottoms. Looks behind her.

  Megan and Ryan are in their canoe, twenty or thirty yards from shore. Megan’s legs are over the sides. Ryan’s going down on her. Because of the way sound carries over the water, Autumn can hear Megan’s panting as if it’s right in front of her. It makes Autumn feel dizzy. She turns back to White Lake.

  It’s like going from one season to another. Lake Garner is a broad oval under the east–west sun. White Lake is at the bottom of a jagged canyon that runs north from Lake Garner’s eastern end. The water in White Lake is black, cold, and choppy.

  It’s magic. Autumn dives in.

  She’s alert to everything instantly. She can’t see, but she can feel her ribcage, her scalp, the tops of her feet. Her arms are slippery against the sides of her breasts, from sunblock or some property of the water. It’s like she’s ghosting through onyx.

  When she’s gone a dozen strokes she feels Benjy hit the water behind her. She swims faster, not wanting him to catch up to her and grab her feet. She hates that: it’s too scary. As soon as she surfaces for air she turns around.

  She can feel the chill breeze on her face. The chop has eaten up her wake. She can’t see Benjy at all.

  A thrill of dread runs up her right leg and into her stomach at the thought of him coming toward her under water, and she kicks out.

  It gives her an idea. She swims in the direction of the western shore. If she can’t see Benjy, he can’t see her either. So if she’s not where he thinks she is, he can’t grab her.

  It still feels like he’s going to, though. She keeps instinctively jerking her legs up, one at a time.

  But as the seconds go by, it becomes more and more obvious that Benjy’s not going to try to scare her. Then that he’s not even in the lake with her, whatever she thought she felt while she was swimming. He’s probably gone into the woods along Lake Garner, to watch Megan and Ryan fucking.

  It’s a bad feeling. Abandonment and dickishness, but also something else: although Autumn loves White Lake, she’s not that interested in being in it alone. It’s not that kind of place. There’s something adult about White Lake.

  “Benjy!” she yells. “Benjy!” Her wet hair is cold on her head and the back of her neck.

  He doesn’t appear.

  “Benjy, come on!”

  As Autumn starts to breaststroke back toward the south end of the lake, Benjy explodes out of the water in front of her, visible to mid-chest and vomiting a dark rope of blood that slaps her like something from a bucket.

  Then he gets yanked back under.

  He’s gone. The heat of his blood is gone too. It’s like Autumn imagined the whole thing.

  But Autumn knows she didn’t imagine it. That what she’s just seen is something terrible and permanent—and which might be about to happen to her.

  She turns and sprint-swims for the rocky beach at the base of the cliff. Full-out crawl, no breathing allowed. Swim or die.

  Something punches into her stomach, and snags there with tremendous weight and pain. As it tears free, she gets an instant head rush and can’t feel her hands.

  She tries to arch her back to get some air, but she must be turned around or something, because she sucks in water instead.

  Then the thing rams into her from behind, clapping shut her rib cage like a book and squirting the life out of her like water from a sponge.

  Or at least that’s how it was explained to me.

  FIRST THEORY:

  HOAX

  1

  Caribbean Sea, 100 Miles East of Belize

  Thursday, 19 July

  “ISHMAEL—CALL ME” is all the Tel-E-Gram says, but I’m busy pulling some poor fucker’s teeth out with pliers when it gets slipped under the door, so I don’t read it till later.

  The guy’s a full-on Nhambiquara Indian from the Brazilian Amazon. Beatlemania haircut and everything, though he’s in the white uniform of the laundry department.

  Of course, every department’s uniform is white.

  I tap his next molar. Say “¿Seguro?”

  “No.”

  “¿Verdad?” Like they speak Spanish in Brazil.

  “It’s fine,” he says.

  Maybe it is. From what I know about dentistry—which, granted, comes from watching about an hour and a half of procedure videos on YouTube—lidocaine to the posterior superior alveolar nerve will knock out sensation from the third molar in about two-thirds of people. The rest will need another shot, to the middle superior alveolar, or they’ll feel everything.

  I assume any actual dentist would just go ahead and give both. But that’s the kind of thinking that caused me to use up all the lidocaine in the crew clinic in the first place, and almost all the lidocaine I’ve been able to steal from the passenger clinic. So now I have to tap and ask. And a lot of my patients are too butch, or just too polite, to admit they’re not numb.

  Well, fuck it. Save the lido for someone too scared to lie.

  I twist the molar out as quickly and smoothly as I can. It crumbles into black muck in the pliers anyway. I catch the pieces in my gloved hand just before they hit the guy’s uniform.

  It occurs to me that I should give another oral hygiene lecture in the warehouse. The last one doesn’t seem to have changed anything, but at least there were fewer knife fights down there while I was talking.

  I peel my gloves off over the sink. When I look back, there are tears running down the man’s face.

  Fire Deck 40 is a metal platform between two smokestacks, as far as I know the highest part of the ship you can actually stand on. Fuck knows what it has to do with fire.

  The sun’s setting, wind like a hairdryer. On the horizon there’s a ten-mile-tall wall of clouds running parallel to the ship. Iridescent reds and grays that bulge over each other like intestines.

  I hate the fucking ocean. Hate it physiologically, it turns out. Being at sea fucks my sleep and makes me jumpy and subject to flashbacks. It’s part of what makes the job of junior physician on a cruise ship exactly what I deserve.

  Not that I had a choice. If there’s another industry that hires this many doctors without giving a shit whether their medical degrees—in my case from the University of Zihuatanejo, under the name “Lionel Azimuth”—are real or just kited off commercially available supporting documents, I’ve never heard of it. Let alone one that
’s this poorly infiltrated by the Mafia.*

  The hatch in the wall beside one of the smokestacks barks open, and a very black man in a long-sleeved version of the (white) uniform of updeck junior submanagement steps out.

  “Dr. Azimuth,” he says.

  “Mr. Ngunde.”*

  Mr. Ngunde is staring at me. “Doctor, your shirt is open.”

  This is true. I have a white undershirt on beneath it, but my white short-sleeved uniform shirt is unbuttoned. It has gold epaulets, so wearing it like this makes me feel like a drunk airline pilot.

  “I don’t think anyone will mind,” I say, looking down over the edge.

  From here the ship, which is twice as wide and three times as long as the Titanic, is mostly all-white rooftops and telecom equipment, though there are a few pairs of sorry fucks visible whose job it is to watch for pirates. The passenger areas I can see into, like the Nintendo Dome and the rearmost indoor-outdoor pool, are guaranteed to be empty, since all five of the ship’s main restaurants started dinner service an hour ago.

  Mr. Ngunde doesn’t come over to look. It reminds me that he’s afraid of heights, and makes me feel guilty for forcing him to come all the way up here to find me. And for taking lightly an infraction that, were he to commit it, would get him fired and dumped at the next port. Apparently I can bowl over a security guard while coming out of a passenger’s stateroom, drunk and dying to get fired, and get an apology from the security guard. Mr. Ngunde, unless he’s driving the Zamboni machine or doing some other task that requires it, isn’t allowed to be anywhere a passenger could see him. Regardless of what his shirt looks like.

  Speaking of the Zamboni machine, I say “How’s the arm?”

  “Very fine, Doctor.”

  That seems unlikely. Mr. Ngunde has a large sleeve-hidden burn on his left forearm from trying to add steering fluid to the Zamboni while the engine was hot. I haven’t been able to find a tetanus booster on the ship. Nor have I seen enough tetanus in my life to know how concerned this should make me.

  “And the diarrhea log?” Mr. Ngunde says.

  “Down, actually. Just don’t eat the stew.”

  “Thank you, Doctor. Large number of visits this afternoon?”

  “Fair.”

  “Anything of interest?”

  “No.”

  Mr. Ngunde is asking me whether any of my patients voiced a level of dissatisfaction significant enough for him to report it up toward one of the department chiefs. I don’t hold it against him. At some point in the next twenty-four hours, someone higher in submanagement than Mr. Ngunde will casually ask me if Mr. Ngunde has talked to me recently, and if so whether he said anything of interest.

  Still, it’s a bummer, because it reminds me that I am, in fact, an employee of a cruise line. My job here is showered in privilege: I get my own stateroom, I eat free in most of the restaurants, and—like the senior physician—I have a seat on Lifeboat One, the captain’s lifeboat.* But most of my patients wish they’d never left their shithole slums and villages. They make around seven thousand dollars a year, out of which they have to pay interest on the loans they took to get here, bribes for the supplies they use in their jobs, and wire fees for the remittances they send home so their children, please God, won’t have to work on a cruise ship. Whether what I do actually improves their lives or just assists in their exploitation is one for the ages.*

  “Please if you will excuse me, Doctor.”

  “Of course, Mr. Ngunde. Sorry.” He’s sweating.

  When he pulls the hatch shut behind him, I remember the Tel-E-Gram I picked up off the floor of the clinic. Take it out and read it.

  “ISHMAEL—CALL ME.”

  Interesting.

  “Ishmael” was my name in the Federal Witness Protection Program, but the only person who ever actually called me that was Professor Marmoset. Who got me into WITSEC in the first place, and then into med school. And later, when I was in trouble, got me out of New York City.

  Marmoset’s not a talker. He’s not even a responder. You hear from Marmoset, it’s serious. It could mean there’s a job out there for you. Maybe even one practicing medicine.

  Maybe even on dry land.

  But without more information, it doesn’t bear thinking about. The job I have now is crappy enough without imagining you could be doing something else.

  So focus on the sway of the ship. Get nauseated.

  You’ll find out soon enough.

  2

  Portland, Oregon

  Monday, 13 August

  The woman with the Bettie Page bangs and the “DR. LIONEL AZIMUTH” sign at the Portland airport is exactly the one I would hire if I were the fourteenth-richest man in America. She looks like a pin-up. A pin-up who can box.

  “Not interested,” she says as I walk up to her.

  “I’m Lionel Azimuth.”

  “Fuck off.”

  I don’t take it personally. I look like a dick with a fist on the end of it. “I’ve got a meeting with Rec Bill,” I say.*

  She considers this. “Do you have luggage?”

  “Just this.”

  A second later: “You don’t use the wheels?”

  “The handle’s not long enough.”

  She looks around, but there’s no one else willing to claim to be Azimuth.

  “Sorry,” she says. “I’m Violet Hurst. Rec Bill’s paleontologist.”*

  “Why does Rec Bill have his own paleontologist?” I say when we’re out of the rain and under the airport garage. It’s eight at night.

  “I can’t tell you. It’s confidential.”

  “Are you cloning dinosaurs, like in Jurassic Park?”

  “No one’s cloning dinosaurs like in Jurassic Park. DNA degrades in forty thousand years, even if it’s in a mosquito in some amber. The only way we’re going to get sixty-million-year-old dinosaur DNA is by reverse-engineering it from currently living descendants. And we’ll be eating human flesh in the streets before we have that kind of technology.”

  “We will? Why?”

  “That’s where the protein is. Anyway, I’m not a zoological paleontologist. This is me.”

  We’ve come to a car. It’s an old Saab with rust along the bottom like a waterline. Maybe it is a waterline.

  “What kind of paleontologist are you?” I ask her.

  “Catastrophic. You might want to just say it.”

  “What?”

  “If I work for the fourteenth-richest man in America, how come my car’s such a piece of shit?”

  I have kind of been wondering that. “I don’t even own a car,” I say.

  “Rec Bill doesn’t pay much, in case no one’s warned you,” she says, unlocking the passenger door. “He’s worried people will take advantage of him.”

  “So he does it to them first?”

  “He does whatever he thinks will keep him sane. Don’t mention the fourteenth-richest thing to him either, by the way. He hates that.”

  “Because it objectifies him, or because he’s only fourteenth?”

  “Probably both. Throw it in the back. The trunk doesn’t open.”

  “So how long until we’re eating human flesh in the streets?” I say.

  “You don’t want to know.”

  We’re on the highway. The rain keeps forming a trembling gel on the windshield.

  “I think I do.”

  I want to keep her talking, in any case. I’m not used to casual conversation, even with people who don’t look like they could steam up their own jungle planet. I’m worried I might say something that resembles my actual thoughts.

  “In the U.S.?” she says. “Less than a hundred years. Maybe less than thirty.”

  “Really? Why?”

  She gives me a look like people asking her questions just to watch her talk is something that happens all the time.

  Must get frustrating.

  “Bottom line,” she says, “there’s too many people and not enough food. A billion people are already starving, and climate chan
ge and oil scarcity will make it a lot worse.”

  “The issue with oil scarcity being that we won’t be able to use trucks and farm equipment?”

  “We won’t be able grow things in the first place. All modern fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides are made from hydrocarbons.”

  “And you really think we’re about to run out?”

  “It doesn’t have to be gone,” she says. “It just has to be where it costs more energy or money to produce a barrel of oil than you can get from a barrel of oil. We may have already reached that point—it’s hard to tell, because energy companies are so heavily subsidized that they can sell gas for less than it costs to make. When you can dump a hundred and seventy million barrels of crude into the Gulf of Mexico and take a write-off on the cleanup, cost-efficiency doesn’t really enter into it.”

  “But won’t there eventually be other energy sources?”

  “You mean like solar? Or wind, or geothermal? Not too likely. Petroleum is four billion years’ worth of organisms using radiation from the sun to turn airborne carbon dioxide into carbohydrates. Nothing we can make is going to come close to producing that kind of energy. And even if it did, we wouldn’t be able to design batteries efficient enough to store it. That’s another thing about oil: it’s its own storage and transport medium.”

  “Safer nuclear?”

  “Nuclear’s a hoax, even when it doesn’t leak or explode. No nuclear plant has ever produced as much energy as it costs to build and maintain. All nuclear does is keep France clean while it poisons South America. Which is enough crazy-scientist-lady info for one evening. You talk.”

  I laugh. “I feel like an idiot,” I say. “Here I thought it was all about the climate change.”

  “That’s not really what I meant by ‘talk.’ ” But when I don’t respond, she says “And anyway, a lot of it is all about the climate change. The oil crash will kill six billion people—at a minimum, because that would take us back to where we were before the Industrial Revolution, and the planet’s lost a lot of carrying capacity since then. But climate change will kill everybody else. Climate change will kill everyone on Earth even if we prevent the oil crash. We could stop using hydrocarbons right now, and just let the six billion die, and climate change would continue to speed up. We’ve already pulled the methane trigger.”