Invasive Species

by Joseph Wallace

  He’d probably been standing like that, waiting in that exact position to make sure they saw and felt guilty, for an hour.

  “You ready?” he said. “Or maybe you want to go to a movie first.”

  Sheila didn’t seem to be listening. She was looking around the office, taking in the ramshackle furniture, piles of old books, and Jack’s collection of wasp-themed junk.

  “Cool,” she said. Then, “I got stung sixteen times before I was twelve years old.”

  Jack blinked, then looked at her with something approaching respect. “Thirty-seven times by the age of ten,” he said. “But thirteen of them came at one time.”

  Sheila walked to the streaked windows and looked out at the park. “I used to love this museum,” she said, as quietly as if she were speaking to herself. “Especially the Hall of African Mammals.”

  “You from New York?” Jack asked.

  When he met someone new, Jack usually had one polite question in him before he got impatient. Trey thought this was probably it.

  Still looking out the window, Sheila shook her head. “When I was little, we lived in Boston. After that, Tanzania.”

  She paused. “Shit,” she said. “Where do I live now?”

  “I heard Trey’s place.” Jack’s eyes gleamed. “Knowing him like I do, I’m sure he’ll welcome you there for as long as you need. Stay a year!”

  Both Trey and Sheila looked at him, and he laughed. “Now that we’ve settled that,” he went on, “can we get to work?” He looked down at his pad and pencils. “I fucking hate a blank piece of paper.”

  As Sheila sat down across the desk from him, he looked at her out of the corner of his eye. “Heard about your mom,” he said. “Sorry.”

  Sheila said, “Thank you, Jack.”

  * * *

  SHE DESCRIBED THE larva she’d extracted and Jack scratched away with his pencils and erased and asked questions. Trey did not look. He wanted to see it fresh, complete, not as a work in progress.

  While they worked, he sat in an armchair across the room. Taking an old book from the pile he’d gathered, he paged through another tale of adventure, discovery, and high tea among the itinerant aristocracy of nineteenth-century Europe.

  He found descriptions of everything from white ants to elephants, but nothing that even resembled the wasps he’d seen.

  As he put the book down, a thought struck him immobile for a moment. Something he’d forgotten to mention to either of them.

  “A woman I talked to called the wasps majizi,” he said. “Thieves.”

  “What woman?” Jack asked.

  “A vendor at Ujiji Market.”

  “And she sounded like she knew what she was talking about?”

  Trey nodded. “Yeah. She’d seen them.”

  “Huh.” Jack pulled at his beard. “Thieves. Interesting. So what do they steal?”

  The question Trey had asked the old woman, who hadn’t answered.

  “Maybe . . .” Sheila sounded unsure. “I think maybe . . . your awareness.”

  They looked at her. Color rose to her pale cheeks, but she didn’t waver. “My mother couldn’t recognize that she’d been”—a breath—“parasitized. Even when she was looking right at the spot where the larva was, she didn’t seem to see it.”

  There was silence as they all thought this through. Then Jack gave a shake of his head as strong as a wet dog’s. “Wait. You’re saying that these wasp larvae can . . . disguise themselves? Cloud men’s minds?”

  Sheila didn’t answer.

  “Like stealth babies?”

  Sheila’s expression hardened. “I’m just telling you what I saw.”

  “Could it be,” Trey said, speaking carefully, “that you’re putting two different things together? Maybe your mother had something else, a second condition, that prevented her from seeing clearly.”

  “You mean like a stroke?” Sheila was shaking her head. “I wondered about that, but I’d seen no other signs. We were together for hours. No symptoms of stroke. Just . . .” Her certainty seemed to vanish. “Just that she didn’t seem to understand she’d been infected.”

  Even Jack looked uncomfortable with the direction the conversation was taking. “A stroke might also help explain why she—passed away so suddenly.”

  Again Sheila shook her head. A muscle in her jaw jumped.

  “All we know for sure,” Trey said, “is that we don’t know enough.”

  “You’re right, Yoda.” Jack picked up the half-finished drawing and shook it. “So let’s get this done with.”

  * * *

  FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER Trey heard Sheila say, “Yeah. That’s it.”

  He looked up just as Jack lifted the drawing so he could see it.

  Trey looked at the elongated white body, eyes like pearls, black mandibles. “There’s no reason to believe that’s not the larva of what I saw,” he said.

  “Yeah.” Jack scowled. “You know what fucking sucks? I’m the only one sitting here who actually gives a damn about wasps. And I’m also the only one who’s never seen one of these guys in the flesh—larva or adult.”

  Sheila sighed.

  “I wish it had been you,” she said, “instead of me.”

  * * *

  THEY SHOWED SHEILA the poster Jack had e-mailed around the world. “Any response yet?” Trey asked.

  Jack said, “No. Just mostly people asking if I missed April Fool’s Day.”

  For a moment he looked disconsolate, but then his face brightened. “But it’s early yet. Most of the people likely to see these beasts aren’t spending all their time on the Internet. They’ll get to it.”

  He walked over to a cluttered table in the corner of the room beside the windows. “Meanwhile: Look!”

  They looked. He was holding a multicolored map of the world mounted on corkboard. Poster sized, at least three feet by two. Big enough to illustrate all the world’s countries and plenty of cities and geographic landmarks.

  He pointed at a red pushpin stuck into the Casamance area of Senegal. As they watched, he moved a poster of the movie The Wasp Woman off the wall and hung the map there instead. Then he stuck a second red pin into western Tanzania, right at the edge of Lake Tanganyika.

  “The story thus far,” he said.

  Sheila said, “Two pins.”

  Trey thought again about the old woman, the gesture she’d made that had encompassed the whole world.

  “Just wait,” he said.

  FIFTEEN

  Canal Zone, Panama

  IT WAS A dance.

  That was what Mariama decided. A long, involved dance, with everyone following the steps that had been assigned to them. Even Mariama herself.

  Maybe Mariama especially. She was learning that you could be aware of the dance and still be trapped by your role in it.

  By now, every stage of her journey here, from the surreal trip on the fishing boat all the way through her nights with Arjen aboard the freighter, seemed as if it had been preordained. Choreographed. All her forward movement, all her plans, all her cleverness and good fortune, seeming to exist at the whim of some master puppeteer she could not even visualize, much less see.

  Standing in the fat man’s office, Mariama wondered: Is this how the dreaming ones feel?

  She didn’t know. No one had figured out how to ask them.

  * * *

  THE FAT MAN’S name was Bannerjee. He looked at her across the desk and said, “And why should I help you?”

  Mariama suppressed a sigh. Arjen had sent her here, telling her that this Bannerjee was the best in the Canal Zone if you needed a passport. He’d also told her to watch out for him, this man. She hadn’t needed to be warned.

  “Because I can pay,” she said.

  He appeared to think about it. Yet she knew that Arjen had gotten word to him as wel
l. He had been expecting her.

  He would do what she wanted, when they’d completed their portion of the dance.

  “Your friend,” he said now, “he has told you that I am the best.”

  “How much?” She kept her eyes on his. “For the best?”

  “Two thousand.”

  “And I will get . . . ?”

  “A Panamanian passport and a valid visa to the United States. They will get you into New York. After that—” He shrugged and pooched out his lips, as if to say, You will no longer be my problem.

  “Fifteen hundred,” Mariama said.

  They settled on seventeen, five hundred now and the rest when she got the passport. She retrieved the cash from her money belt, counted it out, and handed it across the desk. Bannerjee counted it for himself, then bent over and put it in a safe or lockbox somewhere near his feet.

  In a back room furnished only with a wooden chair and a big camera, he posed her against a white wall and took her picture. “Don’t smile,” he said before pressing the button. “Since September eleventh, it makes them suspicious when they see people smiling in their passport pictures.”

  Mariama wondered if this was so, and why, but didn’t question it. She didn’t feel like smiling anyway.

  “When do I come back?” she asked.

  “You don’t,” he said at once.

  “Then where?”

  “I will send someone to deliver it in three days. Just tell me where you are staying.”

  She told him.

  He blinked but didn’t comment, saying only, “Have the rest of the money ready.”

  She was staying in a place Arjen had told her about, a stone building that had once been a one-room schoolhouse built and used by the Americans. It was part of a subdivision of structures that had boasted houses, shops, and restaurants, but now contained only ruins.

  Although it was only about fifteen miles from downtown, when you were there you felt a thousand miles from anywhere. The hum of distant traffic was often obscured by the calls of crickets or the wind rattling through the empty buildings.

  In the schoolhouse itself, there were still blackboards and the smells of chalk dust and the sweat of children. Spiders in the corners and mice squeaking at night. But a cot, too, and a functioning well outside, not far from the door.

  More than Mariama had expected.

  Best of all, the windows had long since been bricked up. The only way in and out was through a reinforced steel door. The outside walls were crumbling, leaving chunks of stone scattered across the ground. But the long, slow ruin still had a ways to go: The interior walls still stood. There was no way in through the cracks, not even for something small and clever and determined.

  With care, she could be safe there.

  Safe as you could be anywhere. Each night, she checked every inch of her windowless chamber, her schoolhouse tomb. And then lay sleepless for hours on the sagging cot. Thinking. Planning.

  When she was outside, she watched the skies. But saw, heard, smelled no sign of them at all.

  She knew this meant nothing. Less than nothing. But she did it anyway.

  * * *

  TREY GILLIARD WAS so near. It was infuriating. She could almost reach up from the Canal Zone and touch him in New York City. Almost shout loud enough for him to hear her.

  But not close enough. And she couldn’t risk contacting him from here.

  No one knew she was in Panama, she was almost sure of it. It was possible that the government of Senegal did not even know that she’d left the country.

  But they hadn’t forgotten who she was and what she knew. And since they’d expelled Trey, too, they must be aware of what he knew as well.

  Someone would be watching him, she was certain of that. Listening in on his calls, reading his e-mails. It was legal for the government to do that in the United States these days, or so she’d heard.

  No, it wasn’t worth the risk. The message she’d sent him from the Canary Islands had been her one shot.

  Had he understood?

  Phone calls, e-mails, they were close to useless now anyway. She needed to see him. Needed to be in the same room with him, telling him what he didn’t know. Showing him. In person.

  The three days she had to wait for her passport felt like years.

  * * *

  ON THE SECOND day, she had a revelation. She couldn’t risk calling Trey, but she could learn more about him.

  She went into town, bought an international phone card, and paid for private access to a phone in a downtown real-estate office whose owner was on vacation. Alberto Castro would never know she’d been there, and no one else would think to be listening in on Castro’s line.

  She sat at his big steel desk. Alongside piles of paper sat a photograph of a cheerful-looking young man with a serious-faced wife and two smiling children, a girl of about ten and a boy of perhaps seven.

  Mariama felt an unexpected jolt of something like sorrow. She wasn’t sure what caused it. Maybe it was the fact that she would never have a life like the Castros’.

  Or maybe it was that the Castros’ dream of a life would too soon come to an end.

  Swiveling around in her chair, Mariama picked up the phone and dialed the international operator. When someone picked up, she said, “Rockefeller University in New York City, please.”

  Mariama had never visited Rockefeller University or even seen a picture of it. She imagined a gigantic apartment building filled with geniuses and their technology. Winners of the Nobel Prize. Inventors of new machines to replace failing organs, of new medicines, of new ways of looking at the world.

  The sort of people who would laugh at the health clinic Mariama’s father ran in the Casamance.

  To the receptionist she said, “Elena Stavros’s office, please.”

  Elena Stavros, the one person in the building full of geniuses Mariama knew wouldn’t scoff at her.

  * * *

  MARIAMA AND ELENA had met just once, two years earlier, at a conference in Cape Town, South Africa. Mariama had attended with her father, back when they were allowed to travel.

  Mariama remembered Elena Stavros vividly. How could she not? Elena, a microbiologist, was small, like Mariama, and just a few years older, but in all other ways so different that people had laughed when they saw the two together.

  Mariama was self-contained and slow to smile, with a quiet voice and a face whose expressions were hard to read. Elena, on the other hand, flaunted a great mass of black hair, expressive eyes, and a face that always seemed to be gripped by one rampant emotion or another.

  She was also loud. In fact, she was so loud that three times during symposia and panel discussions she’d been warned to keep her voice down.

  Somehow the two of them had decided they liked each other. They’d spent hours one night sharing experiences and memories, and among the topics of conversation they’d touched upon was Trey Gilliard.

  Mariama had mentioned that the International Conservation Trust was planning a months-long mission in the Casamance rain forest. Elena had blinked and said, “Hah! That means you’ll meet Trey. Lucky you!” She’d paused. “Unless they’ve gotten sick of him by now and fired his ass.”

  Elena’s face had reddened as she spoke, something Mariama had pretended not to notice. She’d just said, “How do you know him?”

  “Oh, our paths have crossed.” Then, as if acknowledging her discomposure: “He’s absolutely brilliant about nature. With people? Not so much.”

  Later, as the future’s path became inexorably clear, Mariama had thought of those words often. Brilliant with nature, that was important. She didn’t care how he was with people.

  “When you see him, tell him I said hi.” Then Elena’s gaze had sharpened. “And also tell him that the door to room 33 is shut.”

  Mariama had promised. But by
the time Trey had finally shown up in Senegal, ICT’s mission delayed again and again, Mariama had become persona non grata, warned to stay far away from all visitors.

  The times she’d managed to get close to Trey, they hadn’t had the chance to exchange pleasantries, jokes, or cryptic references to the past.

  Or anything important, either.

  * * *

  “STAVROS,” THE VOICE on the other end of the line said. “Who is this?”

  Her voice instantly familiar. Mariama found herself smiling. “My name is Mariama Honso,” she said. “From Senegal. We met in Cape Town. Do you remember me?”

  There was a brief pause. Then the voice came again, louder. “Mariama! For God’s sake. Of course I do! The lion kill!”

  Mariama remembered the lion kill. It had been on a field trip to Kruger National Park and the victim had been a zebra.

  “Where are you?” Elena went on. “Here? In the city? Let’s get dinner. There’s this great Ethiopian place—wait, do you like African food?”

  Mariama laughed. It was amazing she could still laugh.

  “I’m not in the city,” she said. “Not yet. Soon, though, and then—dinner.”

  “But I’m hungry for injera bread now.” Elena’s sigh came down the line. “Okay. Deal. Why are you calling?”

  “I have a question.”

  “Shoot.”

  “Are you still in touch with Trey Gilliard?”

  Elena was silent for a few moments. Then she said, “No. Not recently.” She made a sound that might have been a laugh. “People don’t stay in Trey’s life for very long, you know. But I do keep an eye on him from afar.”

  “You do?”

  “When I can. God knows why.”

  Mariama took a breath. “Do you know if he’s there? In New York?”

  “To the best of my knowledge.” A pause. “I heard he was in Tanzania recently, but I think he’s around again. Him and some woman he met there.”

  Mariama felt something loosen inside her chest. This was good. This was better than she could have prayed for.

  Elena was saying, “That’s not typical of Trey. He doesn’t often bring anyone home.”