Archaeopteryx

by Dan Darling

  Once we’d finished our dinner and chased it with a couple of sopapillas, she put her feet back up on the counter and laced her fingers behind her head.

  “Buy you a drink?” she asked.

  “Hell yes,” I said.

  She opened a drawer in the desk behind her stool―the lab was full of desks, counters, tables, bookcases, and various sitting apparatuses―and pulled out a pint bottle printed with a picture of a barefoot woman wearing only bikini bottoms, a lei, and some voluptuous locks of hair. Sailor Jerry, it read. She poured generous shots into a couple of 500-milligram beakers. We clinked and drank. The rum was dark and sweet. I had a premonition of myself drinking too much of it.

  “This feels like a celebration,” I said.

  “Maybe it is,” Melodía said. “Whatever it is, I know it’s breaking up your routine.”

  I shrugged one shoulder. “My routine can suffer for one night.” Truth be told, I hadn’t thought about my routine for an hour or so. But once the word left her mouth, my eyes developed a deep desire to find the face of my watch to see how far off this evening’s fun had thrown my life. I forced myself to swallow some rum instead and push my beaker at Melodía for a refill.

  She obliged. We clinked again.

  “So,” she said. “Do you want to see it?”

  I nodded.

  She gestured toward a wide magnification microscope set up on a nearby counter. I doubted I’d even need it. I could see the monster from ten feet away. It was as long as a normal’s index finger. Melodía didn’t get up. She let me go over and inspect the thing. That was her way: even on social occasions, she didn’t want to taint my first impressions with her own bias.

  I didn’t get much new information by inspecting it in person than I had by looking at the photos. I zoomed in to inspect the joints of the forelegs. I spent some time on the eyes. I measured the proportions of the three body segments and looked at the wing stubs. The wings would’ve had a lot to say for themselves, if stomach acids hadn’t dissolved them. Finally, I checked out the stinger.

  “What is it?” Melodía asked when I straightened up from the microscope.

  “It’s a tarantula hawk wasp,” I said.

  She shook her head.

  “What else could it be?”

  “Explain the irregularities.”

  “Mutations.” I wasn’t sure at all about that.

  “Those are some serious mutations,” she said.

  “She lived too close to Los Alamos.”

  Melodía gave me a flat look. “Ha-ha.”

  “Seriously. People born after the Chernobyl accident. People born in Hiroshima.”

  “Native Americans who drank the ground water near the Trinity Site,” Melodía said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Deformities. Look at the documentation. Kids born with four arms. Elbows that turn the wrong way. All sorts of skeletal malformations. Organs displaced or missing. Even the kind of proportional distortions present in our little lady here.”

  “She’s a big lady,” Melodía said.

  “She’s a Delphyne.”

  Melodía’s face went blank.

  “You don’t know your Greek mythology.” I shook my head. “And you call yourself an educated woman.”

  “I know more Latin than you,” she said.

  “Fair enough. My point is that your specimen may be mutated or deformed, but it’s a tarantula hawk.”

  Melodía shook her head.

  “That’s the answer.”

  “Creatures that are deformed don’t function well,” Melodía said. “Their bodies perform awkwardly or break down altogether.”

  “How do you know this wasp functioned?” I asked.

  “She lived out her life cycle,” Melodía said. “She went through the larva stage, matured into an adult, mated, and implanted her egg. Given how tough life is for a flying insect, if she weren’t functioning well, she wouldn’t have lived that long.”

  “You’re assuming she’s the same one that implanted the egg in the whooping crane.”

  “She is. I can feel it. The birds, the bite on the crane, this wasp―they’re all connected. I just have to figure out how.”

  “Assuming she did implant the egg, maybe she was lucky. Maybe in her case, her abnormalities paid off. Evolution in action.”

  Melodía sipped the last rum from her beaker and rested it on one of her upraised knees. “I’ve done my homework on this one.”

  “I’m sure your teachers are very proud,” I said.

  “To the untrained eye, she’s a deformed tarantula hawk. Fine. But as somebody who knows something about insects, you should be picking up on a pattern.”

  I’d already picked up that pattern. I could tell that Melodía knew I’d picked up on the pattern. It’d been apparent from my first glimpse of the creature in the photo―even from the first glimpse of the bites on the whooping crane.

  “You already know what I’m going to say. Admit it.”

  I didn’t want to admit it. I took a slug of rum instead. It was delicious.

  “The irregularities all correspond to a common horsefly,” she said. “This is a wasp-horsefly hybrid. Deny it.”

  “I do deny it. I’ll deny it all night long if you want, because it’s impossible. Wasps and horseflies can’t breed. Just like you can’t get impregnated by a chimpanzee.”

  She slapped me. She was probably aiming for my arm, but ended up hitting my thigh instead. It made us awkward for a few seconds. “That’s disgusting.”

  “So is the idea of a wasp and horsefly mating,” I said.

  “You’re wrong.”

  “No. you are.”

  She smiled and stuck her beaker out at me. “Give me some more booze.”

  I poured her about fifty milliliters.

  “Now pour yourself a little more,” she said.

  “I’ve had plenty.” But I splashed myself some to make her happy.

  “You know how we settle this,” she said.

  “I sure do. You admit that I’m right, then we drink to it.” I held up my glass.

  She clinked. “Wrong.”

  “How, then?” I asked.

  She pointed toward what looked like a small microwave in the corner of the lab.

  “We put the thing in the microwave and blow it up like a baked potato?”

  She slapped me on the arm. “That’s an incubator, stupid.”

  We looked at it together. So that was where she was incubating the egg she’d found buried in the flesh of the whooping crane. “What are you suspending it in?”

  “Nutrient solution. I plan on putting some raw meat in there when it hatches so it has something to eat.”

  That would probably work. The egg would hatch a creature that looked a lot like a maggot. It would have a ravenous mouth and a wormy body. Horsefly larvae loved to be born in any sort of organic filth. Tarantula hawk larvae enjoyed eating the organs of a living spider. If Melodía was right and the thing was a hybrid, it would probably be fine with raw meat for a cradle.

  Melodía’s eyes searched my face. “You don’t like it.”

  I did not.

  “What’s the alternative? How would an expert zookeeper like you do it?”

  I raised my eyebrows at her and let her put it together herself.

  “You’re not serious,” she said.

  I was serious.

  The next morning, I proved it. I brought her a healthy adult tarantula. His name was Jones. I’d named him that because he looked like a businessman in a brown suit―not literally, of course. He was an eight-legged hairy spider the size of an English muffin. But I looked at him and my impression was the same every time: businessman, brown suit, mustache, working stiff’s hunch.

  I hauled him over to Melodía’s lab in a roomy glass terrarium with a cedar chip floor, a water bowl, a hodgepodge of sticks and leaves for him to nest in, and a banzai tree in one corner for him to lurk beneath. It was a nice little home. I also brought a separate, much smaller terrarium full of
crickets. I wanted him to stay well fed. He was about to go through a nightmarish ordeal, for which he would need every ounce of strength.

  Melodía’s eyes got pretty big when I’d set the terrarium on a table and removed the sheet. Jones stood in the exact center on high alert. He rotated ninety degrees clockwise, then ninety degrees counter-clockwise. The crooks of his knees ticked up and down like the type bars of an old-fashioned typewriter.

  “So,” Melodía started to say.

  Jones spun a full 180 degrees to face her.

  “Whoa,” she said. “Can he jump out of there?”

  I tapped the lid, which was closed tight.

  “This is Jones. He’s a friend of mine, so be nice to him.”

  “Hello Jones,” she said slowly.

  I shrugged out of my backpack, which held the box of crickets, a vial of halothane, a couple of cotton balls, a magnifying glass, two cotton swabs, a few slim tongue depressors, and a bottle of Elmer’s glue―the kind that Flowers used to eat in elementary school.

  “I don’t know if I want to watch this,” she said.

  “Go get the egg.”

  She brought the egg from the incubator. It floated in a clear solution in a Petri dish. It looked the same as it had a week ago. I was surprised it hadn’t hatched yet. If it hatched at all, it wouldn’t take more than a couple more days―if it indeed housed a tarantula hawk larva. I put a dot of halothane on a cotton ball and dropped it into Jones’ home. He pounced on it. A few seconds later, he fell to his belly and lay very still.

  “Did you kill him?” Melodía asked. “Maybe you used too much.”

  I put spiders to sleep all the time. I knew what I was doing. I edged one of the tongue depressors under the egg and lifted it from the solution. It gleamed in the light. It was plump and healthy. I removed the lid to Jones’ terrarium with my free hand and placed a dot of glue on the middle of the face-up side of Jones’ abdomen. With great care, I lowered the egg into the terrarium and tilted the tongue depressor until the egg plopped into the glue, then pressed it in place.

  I pulled my hands out of the terrarium, taking the cotton ball with me, and put the lid back on. “Done.”

  “That’s it?” Melodía asked.

  I nodded.

  “So what do I need to do?” she asked.

  “Wait. Throw Jones a cricket at dusk. Shouldn’t take more than a few days.”

  “What will happen when it hatches?”

  “If it’s a tarantula hawk, the larva will burrow into Jones’ abdomen. It’ll eat around the major organs, saving them for last. It’ll grow. It’ll mature. It’ll pupate, which only lasts a day or so, and then it’ll become an adult.”

  “And then?”

  “It’ll rip through Jones’ abdomen wall and emerge, wet and beautiful, into the world,” I said. “Then we’ll know what we’ve got.”

  “That sounds awful,” she said.

  “It is quite awful.” Most of nature was awful.

  Melodía stood with her head cocked, watching the sleeping spider. “Isn’t there a kinder way to do this? Jones doesn’t seem like he deserves to die in such a gross way.”

  “Death comes with being a spider,” I said. “It won’t be pleasant for him, but he’s a predator. He’s poisoned dozens of innocent little insects and sucked their liquefied guts out of them. This experience is part of his life cycle.”

  Melodía fell down on one of her swivel stools. “You work with some terrible things, Stick. I think they’re beginning to affect your worldview.”

  I gathered up my tools and pushed the box of crickets toward Melodía. “That’s his food. Be sure to fill his water. We want that larva to have a big strong body to eat from the inside out.”

  “Ugh.” Melodía rumpled her hair with the palm of her hand. The messier her hair got, the better it looked.

  “You look beat.”

  “Sleep is for the weak,” she said.

  “You should go home.”

  “I will when I figure out what killed those birds.”

  “You know, this egg has absolutely nothing to do with it.”

  Melodía frowned. “You’ve said that.”

  “You found bites on only one dead bird. There were thousands.”

  “You’ve said all that. You repeat yourself all the time.”

  “That’s because you don’t listen,” I said. “Do you have any other leads on what happened?”

  “Just the basics. Mass trauma. Heart failure. No sign of electrocution, no sign of impact, no disease. I’m pretty much stumped.”

  “Any other people involved in the study?” I asked.

  She nodded. “I sent samples to Phoenix, Boulder, Calgary, Chicago. No dearth of corpses to spread around. Everybody’s come up with the same thing: goose egg.”

  Neither of us laughed.

  I thought about Tanis, the Captain, and the Newspaper Man. They’d all been after me since I’d become involved in the incident. Tanis worked for a mysterious employer interested in animals. The Captain had the same bite on his arm that I’d seen on the whooping crane. The Newspaper Man was interested in the dead birds―that had to be why he was following me. For a brief second, I felt like there was something behind the obvious facts, that there was a pattern I could almost perceive, but the feeling disappeared. But not before I opened my mouth. “What about a manmade incident?”

  “You mean something intentional?”

  “I don’t know what I mean,” I said.

  “Like an experiment or something?”

  I shook my head. “I’m just thinking out loud.” I was beginning to worry that if we talked about it anymore, she’d wheedle my recent difficulties out of me. I didn’t need her feeling guilty. “I’m tired, too.”

  “The Bosque is near White Sands.” White Sands was a desert of fine ivory sand. It was one of the strangest and most beautiful landscapes in the world. The American government had built a missile testing range there, humanity’s way of acknowledging nature’s wonders. “Maybe some new missile flew close to the Bosque. Animals can die of fright-induced trauma.” Melodía tapped her jaw with a finger. “Kirkland Air Force Base is close by. A fleet of fighter jets could induce that much trauma.”

  I nodded. I’d thought of those, and they sounded plausible. More importantly, they distracted her from any details about who was or was not harassing me. “Well, best wishes in your continued search for truth.”

  She caught my sleeve as I got up and headed for the door. The tips of her long slender fingers grazed my forearm through my shirt. They stayed there as she talked. “What’s the timeline on this spider thing?”

  “A couple days until the egg hatches.” Those fingers felt good. It was a betrayal of my routine, but I was tired and far from my routine as it was. So, I stood there and enjoyed the touch of a beautiful, flawed woman. I wondered if she would have touched me at all if it hadn’t been for the tumors bulging from the jaw to the hairline of her face. Probably not, but I was beyond complaining. “Then a week for the larva to mature, tops. You should be looking at an adult buzzing around Jones’ terrarium in less than ten days. Probably sooner.”

  She wrapped her hand around my forearm. “Thank you, Stick. I had fun last night.”

  “I did too. Fun… is rare.”

  Melodía nodded. Our eyes had become locked at some point. Hers were deep brown with gold motes, below high slender eyebrows and long lashes. The left eye was pulled taught at the corner.

  “I’m sorry again for being such a jerk the other night. I was stressed.”

  She squeezed my arm. “I’m sorry you were stressed. Want to talk about it?”

  I tried to smile at her to show her the stress was gone. I probably failed. I wasn’t good at smiling. “I’m good. It was just work.”

  She let her hand slip from my arm. “Okay. I realize you do a lot for me.”

  A more sincere smile emerged out from under my fake one. “No problem.”

  “I’m your friend,” Melodía said. �
�You can ask me for things, too.”

  I did not ask other people for things. I was an island. “Thank you.” I turned to Jones. “Good bye, friend. May you live out your destiny with dignity.”

  Melodía sat quietly and watched me walk out the door.

  I thought about Jones on my way home. I, his keeper, had consigned him to a miserable fate. It was the way of nature, but it wasn’t my way. I’d never thought about it much, but my role as a zookeeper was to hold the natural order at bay for my select group of animals. They didn’t have to fear predation. They wouldn’t die of exposure or due to an accident. They wouldn’t starve. They rarely died of diseases. They were lonely, caged creatures, but they were safe from the kind of horror that Jones was about to endure―the kind that the natural world guaranteed.

  he next morning I woke before dawn. I brewed coffee, boiled oatmeal, and butchered a grapefruit. I ate in front of my windows, watching the dawn edge over the mountains and trickle through the foliage into my patio. I finished my breakfast in a paradise of orange light. Birds tweeted. Spider webs turned platinum. You could feel each minute hang in the air before it quietly passed on into eternal nothingness. Being alone at dawn is one of the most important things you can do. It is the purest time, a time when you can peer into the face of the world and understand your absolute transience. You can realize it and welcome it because each moment is so peaceful and so long.

  Dawn passed and I went to work.

  At nine o’clock, when I was well into my paperwork and nearly ready to start feeding beings to other beings, I got a call.