Invasive Species

by Joseph Wallace

  “They fear what they don’t understand,” he said. “And you don’t go to museums to see things that terrify you. You make horror movies about them.”

  Jack would know. He could recite the dialogue from just about every grade-Z movie ever made.

  The people who were terrified of bugs would have fled screaming from Jack’s office. It had originally been a nondescript room like so many others in the building: four peeling walls, linoleum floor, grime-streaked windows overlooking Central Park West and the park across the way. Just another chamber in the hive, until Jack had decorated it with mementos of his own area of expertise: the order Hymenoptera. Bees, wasps, and ants.

  Specifically: wasps.

  On his big oak desk were trays of specimens borrowed from the collections room, each containing rows of little yellow-and-black hornets whose black-eyed gazes seemed filled with rage even in death. The bookcases were filled with everything from reference books to penny dreadfuls (“Attack of the Wasp Woman!”), and every other surface was covered with sculptures, postcards, beer cans, and other knickknacks, all variations on the theme.

  “What have arthropods ever done to deserve their evil reputation?” Jack asked.

  “I’m about to tell you,” Trey said.

  * * *

  THE TWO OF them had met more than a decade earlier. Trey, emerging from four weeks assessing a vast, empty stretch of foothill thorn scrub in northern Peru, had encountered a multidisciplinary museum expedition that included Jack. No one there ever forgot the contrast between Trey’s dirty, ragged, half-starved condition and the opulently equipped expedition.

  Unexpectedly, the chance meeting had also marked the beginning of a friendship. Just about the only lasting friendship Trey could claim, and one that most people didn’t understand. How could the explosively, unstoppably enthusiastic and talkative Jack have anything in common with Trey, who spent so much time observing and analyzing the world around him that sometimes you forgot he was there?

  Trey had wondered about that himself.

  Jack’s thick arms were crossed over his chest. “What are you talking about?”

  Trey didn’t answer.

  After a moment, Jack said, “People are whispering about you, you know.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. They’re saying you had your butt kicked out of Senegal and got fired by ICT.”

  Trey was quiet.

  “They basically disappeared you, except you ended up here instead of Guantánamo.”

  This was true enough. A short flight on a military airplane and Trey had been in Dakar, three hours after that he’d left Senghor Airport on a Senegal Airlines 747, and less than seven hours later he’d disembarked at JFK.

  Feeling disoriented. More disoriented than he’d ever felt before, and he’d been traveling his whole life.

  And also curious. When he’d gotten into trouble before, he’d always known why. But not this time.

  He brought himself back and looked at Jack. “ICT can’t fire me, since I don’t work for them.”

  “They can stop giving you assignments.”

  This was true as well.

  Jack blinked. “Jesus,” he said. “Jesus, Trey, you’re, like, famous. You’re the guy who always does whatever the hell you want, and always gets away with it.”

  Trey closed his eyes. He saw the wet gleam of the ivory white stinger. The agonized monkey. The wasp hovering just in front of his face, deciding whether he should live or die.

  He opened his eyes again to find Jack staring at him. “Shit, Gilliard,” he said, “what the hell happened out there?”

  Trey said, “Get your pencils.”

  * * *

  JACK WAS A brilliant draftsman. Two centuries earlier, he might have been an itinerant artist-scientist, traveling the world with paints and collecting jars. Producing works like those that now hung on the office walls. A John James Audubon of the insect world.

  But those times had passed. In the modern era, his artwork was known only to those who read his journal articles. And to his friends, who were often faced with the challenge of finding the perfect place in a small apartment to hang a portrait of, say, a tarantula-hawk wasp attacking its prey.

  Over the years, Trey had often seen—but not captured—insects that didn’t yet exist in the scientific literature. Jack’s crystal-clear reproductions based on his descriptions had existed long before actual specimens were collected, when they were at all.

  Knowing the drill, Jack sat down behind his desk, rummaged, pulled out his case of artists’ pencils and a sketch pad. Then looked up and said, “Okay. A bee?”

  “Wasp.”

  A gleam in Jack’s eye. He loved wasps. “How big was it?”

  Trey held his thumb and forefinger three inches apart.

  Jack’s mouth turned down at the corners. “Come on, Trey.”

  Trey’s fingers didn’t move.

  “You sound like a civilian, the kind who mistakes a housecat for a mountain lion.”

  Trey said, “But I’m not, am I?”

  “Not what?”

  “A civilian.”

  Jack stared at him, and now there was a kind of desperation in his expression. “Trey, the largest known wasp on earth, Scolia procer, isn’t that big!”

  He made a gesture over his shoulder at one of the old prints hanging on the wall. It showed a fat black-and-yellow wasp whose wings extended from its back like an airplane’s.

  “That’s not what I saw,” Trey said.

  “I know! But—”

  “The ones I saw were bigger,” Trey said. “Can we get started?”

  Jack drew in a breath. His face was a little red. After a moment, though, he lifted a hand and held it over the pencils. “Okay,” he said. “Color and shape of the body?”

  “Black,” Trey said. “Skinny like a mud dauber. Arched abdomen.”

  Sitting in an old armchair across from the desk, he spoke. For twenty minutes, the only sounds other than his voice were the distant hum of traffic down on the street, the scratch of the pencils, and Jack’s questions making sure he was getting the details right. The color of the wings. The angle of the head. The size of the mandibles.

  When he was done he held up the picture, a nearly perfect representation of the wasps Trey had seen. All that it was lacking was the sense of menace, of calculation, of intelligence that came to Trey whenever he closed his eyes.

  The soul.

  “You saw one of these,” Jack said, as if he still couldn’t quite believe it.

  “I saw a colony of them.” Trey sat back a little in the chair. “In a forest that was dying.”

  Jack stared down at the drawing, and when he raised his head his eyes had a different look. Trey had seen it many times before. It meant his friend’s mind was engaged. It meant he was ready for the hunt.

  “The whole story, please,” Jack said.

  * * *

  AGAIN TREY TALKED. It was a requirement of his occupation, talking—if someone was paying you to go look, they expected you to tell them what you’d seen—but one he hated. Usually when he was done being debriefed, done talking to fund-raisers and scientists and whatever press was interested in his explorations, he’d disappear into the wilderness again. Making up for a few days of noise with weeks of silence.

  Jack was quiet, looking down at his desk, at the drawing. For someone who loved the sound of his own voice, he knew how to listen, too.

  Only when Trey was done did he look up. “That smell,” he said. “Was it formic acid?”

  The characteristic odor of ant colonies, the acid found in their stings . . . and wasps’, too.

  Trey frowned. “No. Not quite. It was . . . stronger.”

  He was much better describing what he’d seen than what he’d smelled.

  “And the dead man you saw had
the same odor.”

  “The room did, at least.”

  “And you think the wasps were going to kill you.”

  “I think they were considering it.”

  Jack frowned. Opened his mouth as if there was something he wanted to say, then shook his head as if he’d changed his mind. What he finally said was, “But the sting didn’t kill the monkey. You said being stung made it . . . more alert. Aggressive.”

  Trey said nothing, just turned his palms up.

  “Do you think they attacked that woman after she rescued you?”

  Trey shook his head. “I tried calling the village to ask about her,” he said, “and no one there will speak to me. But—”

  “But she didn’t seem afraid?” Jack widened his eyes. “Suicidal?”

  “No. Determined.” He struggled to find the right word. “Powerful.”

  Jack grimaced. “I hate this shit.”

  “What?”

  “Having a few pieces of the puzzle, but not enough. And not having access to the rest of the pieces.”

  “I know.” Trey felt weary. “But I’m not getting back into Senegal anytime soon, and I don’t know how else to get the other pieces.”

  Jack stared at him for a few seconds. Then he gave a sudden grin. “You’re so clueless, you make me seem like Stephen Hawking. I admire that in you. You really don’t know what to do next?”

  Trey shook his head.

  Jack’s eyes flicked over to the laptop computer that sat open on his desk. The screen saver showed not wasps but, unexpectedly, a litter of golden retriever puppies.

  “Well, I do,” he said.

  EIGHT

  Nouadhibou, Mauritania

  THERE WAS NO space on the dhow for Mariama.

  She’d spent days with the Ndoye family, hiding from officials amid the donkey carts surrounding the marketplace and among the villagers mending fishing nets down near the beach. Waiting, just waiting, for someone to sell them transport out of the country.

  The Ndoye family: an old father and mother, both of them thin, tired, and gray before they’d even left the shore. Their grown children and younger ones, too, along with some cousins, or maybe they were friends, or simply people they’d met along the way as they’d met Mariama. A dozen in their group at least, maybe more, including one girl, perhaps fourteen, who stood out for her quick smile, friendly manner, and unquenchable optimism.

  The girl reminding Mariama of children she’d known in Mpack, children she doubted she’d ever see again.

  None of them here expected ever to see again the places where they’d been born. All that mattered now was that they’d scraped together the thousands of francs needed to commission an old fishing boat and its captain. A boat like the dhow the Ndoyes got, so rusty in the fittings and wormholed around the hull you marveled that anyone would trust it beyond the ocean’s blue edge.

  Mariama wanted to warn them, to tell them to wait for a sturdier craft. But it would have been useless. You took what you could get, and if hunger and thirst and storms and those European Union patrols—ships from Portugal and planes from Italy and who knew what else—if they weren’t going to stop you from trying, then a leaky old boat wouldn’t, either.

  If the Ndoyes hadn’t taken the dhow, then the next group would have. The next group being Mariama and other men and women she’d met here in Nouadhibou. The next batch of the uncounted refugees who came here every year from Senegal and Morocco and Mauritania itself, all with a single goal in mind.

  To reach the Canary Islands.

  Islands that for some reason were part of Spain, even though they were located right off the western coast of Africa. Once you made it to the Canary Islands, the refugees had been told, it was easy to reach the real Europe, where there were jobs, food, a new life.

  For most of them, this was their first trip from home. Not for Mariama, who had visited Paris, Johannesburg, and New York with her father. A few years earlier, when she still had a passport, she wouldn’t have had to travel this way. She would be stepping aboard a comfortable jet at Senghor Airport.

  Instead she’d come to this little port town, just another body hoping for passage out. Carrying with her nothing but a few pieces of clothing in a cloth satchel, extra money in a leather belt under her shirt, and just one memento from home: a locket containing a photo of her father, hanging on a tarnished silver chain around her neck.

  * * *

  MARIAMA ENDED UP on the Sophe, a twenty-foot wooden boat that she thought seemed sturdy and strong enough. There were twenty-two of them on board, packed tightly against the rails and across the slippery wooden deck. Twenty-two plus the captain, who had a sharp face and quick eyes that didn’t miss anything.

  They departed from an unlighted dock on a pitch-black night speckled with cold rain. Staking a place by the rail near the back, Mariama helped an old man and a mother with a little daughter settle beside her.

  Prayers rose and tears fell as they left shore, but Mariama stayed silent and dry-eyed.

  * * *

  DURING THE FIRST two days, they saw three EU patrol boats and one spotter plane. None were close, and none noticed their little boat amid the waves.

  On the third morning they came upon the old dhow carrying the Ndoye family. It had set off two days before them, but there it was, foundering in a patch of choppy ocean under a slate gray sky. They could hear the engine grinding, but it wasn’t making any progress.

  “It’s taking on water,” someone said.

  They could all tell that.

  “What do we do?” someone else asked.

  They were only a few hundred meters away. Some of the dhow’s passengers had noticed them as well and had begun waving cloths and shirts to get their attention. Mariama thought she saw the teenage girl she’d met onshore.

  “We must rescue them,” said the old man beside Mariama. “Otherwise they will all die.”

  Their captain shrugged. “That is not our concern.” His canny eyes were cold. “Look at us,” he said. “Look at our boat. Can we take on more passengers? Even one more? No. We would just sink as well.”

  Everybody looked. He was right: There was no space.

  “We will make room for some,” the old man insisted. “We cannot leave them all.”

  Already they could see that the captain was guiding their boat away from the dhow. “Which ones?” he said. “Which will we choose? No. They will all try to climb aboard, and we will all die.”

  Behind them they heard a splash, another. Two of the young men had abandoned the dhow and were swimming toward the Sophe. But they were too far away, much too far, and how much strength did they have? If they were like Mariama, they had been eating little but rice and plantains for days—weeks—on their journeys.

  The captain didn’t look back, though Mariama saw his mouth tighten at the sound of the splashing. The old man’s gaze caught Mariama’s, but he did not speak again, and nor did anyone else.

  Behind the swimmers, beyond their pumping arms and kicking legs, Mariama could see the ones that had stayed behind. Some were bailing, throwing water off the dhow’s deck with their cupped hands. But others, the old and the children, were still waving, and some were just sitting there, staring at the departing Sophe.

  It happened quickly. First the two swimmers gave up. One turned back, but the other, perhaps the victim of cramps or dizziness, began to splash around in circles. Soon he was thrashing in one place, and then, as they watched, he slipped below the surface, leaving behind only a tiny crease in the water, and then nothing at all.

  The boat itself followed just a few moments later. Echoing over the water came a dull cracking sound, followed by a puff of black smoke that rose a little way into the air before being blown away by the wind. The front of the boat rose from the water, as if it were being pushed upward by a hand. It stood still for a moment, looking like
the fin of some sea creature. Then it slid down and back, smoothly as a blade, and was gone.

  Mariama had twisted around to see small forms leaping into the water before the dhow disappeared. Now she turned away and looked up at the captain.

  But he stood straight, staring at the western horizon.

  * * *

  AS THE SUN sank, the swells grew larger, the clouds thicker, the winds sharper. The boat labored forward against the confused currents. Even the ocean itself was fighting to keep them in Africa.

  The old man beside Mariama had fallen into a kind of wordless trance after the sinking of the dhow. On her other side, the mother, a tough, wiry woman from Mauritania, tended to her daughter, who looked about six.

  The girl seemed unwell. She’d spent most of the journey with her eyes closed, and her dark skin seemed underlain with gray.

  “She does not like the motion of the boat,” the woman said. “She will be fine when we reach land.”

  Mariama did not speak. She knew the truth, but there was no point in sharing it.

  The woman said she was headed to London, where she had family. She shook her head as she said it: In this small boat, miles and miles from land, it was hard to imagine a place like London even existing.

  “And you?” she asked Mariama.

  “New York.”

  “So far away. Why?”

  Mariama hesitated for a moment before saying, “There is a man I need to find.”

  “In that whole big city?” The woman laughed at her. “Good luck!”

  It seemed impossible to Mariama as well.

  * * *

  ON THE AFTERNOON of the fourth day, as they shared the last of their water, Mariama spotted a brown stripe on the horizon to the north. “Fuerteventura,” the captain said.

  Their destination.

  No. Their way station.

  As the sun headed toward the horizon, the stripe grew larger, longer, became the coast of an island, a distant beach. Behind the beach they could see a jumble of houses painted in bright colors and, farther away, the gleaming white and pink towers of tourist hotels.

  The captain pulled back on the engine, left it rumbling just strongly enough to keep the boat in place, bumping in the gentle swells flowing out from the island. “We will make land after dark,” he said.