Archaeopteryx

by Dan Darling

  I was speechless.

  “Good evening,” Tanis said. “I made you a drink.” When she held the drink out to me, her coat sleeve edged up, revealing a flower bracelet. A lei made of the same pink flowers peeked through her collar.

  I stammered a little before I could find words. “You can’t drink in the zoo parking lot. It’s government property.”

  She tilted her head to the side. The starlight played a little game with her shining black hair. “Yet here I am, drinking in the zoo parking lot.”

  “Security will fine you,” I said.

  She smiled her too-white teeth at me. Her lips were full and painted a very tasteful shade of rose. “They were already here. I told them that I was arranging a surprise picnic for my boyfriend. They thought it was romantic. I cooked them each a hamburger.” She smiled wider, showing even more of her perfect teeth. “I brought plenty of extra meat.”

  “I’m a vegetarian,” I said.

  “Liar,” she said. “Take the drink.”

  The drink was delicious and strong, though a little cold for a winter night. “How do you know I’m lying?”

  “Because you just admitted it.” She set her drink on the table and opened the lid of the grill. A ball of smoke made a run for the cosmos. “Also because I went through your garbage, silly.”

  I almost spat out a mouthful of piña colada. “Why―” I had to stop so I could choke a little while. “Why would you go through my garbage?”

  “Please climb on up and have a seat,” she said. “I know that the chair may be a little small for you. I found the biggest one I could.”

  I snapped my fingers at her. “Garbage. Why?”

  “Any good detective who is getting the runaround by a person of interest goes through their garbage. It’s basic procedure. I also stole your mail.”

  I growled at her.

  She put two patties of ground beef on the grill and closed the lid. “Don’t worry. I steamed it open, sealed it, and returned it when I was done. You only had junk mail and bills, anyway. I learned very little about you.”

  “Have you been following me?” I demanded.

  “A little,” Tanis said. “Enough to know that someone else is also following you.”

  “Who?” I asked. “Why?”

  She gave me one of her dazzling smiles. “Did you know that I’m wearing a blue bikini under this down coat and ski pants? I’m also barefoot inside of my boots and wool socks. And I have a nice tan, thanks to my Zuni heritage. Isn’t a picnic at the beach pleasant?”

  Tanis was obviously insane. I told her so.

  “Wrong. I simply understand the world to such an extent that I realize all so-called truth is a social construction. The only reason that sitting under the sky, barbecuing hamburgers, and wearing skimpy clothes is considered a beach activity is because we’ve decided, as a society, that it is so. A polar bear would consider eating a seal burger in the moonlight by an ice floe to be about as wonderful as life could get.”

  “Show me your bikini,” I said.

  She shook her head. “Only once you’ve told me all your secrets.”

  “Who else is following me?” I asked.

  “I’ll tell you after you’ve eaten a hamburger with me and finished your drink. How do you like it?”

  “Pretty rare,” I said. “Not too rare, though.”

  She opened the grill and flipped the burgers. They were gorgeous, crisscrossed with grill marks, hissing with grease. “What have you discovered about the nature of the universe?”

  “That it’s nosey. Ever since I went to the Bosque―which I only did as a favor for a friend―I’ve been plagued by interruptions to my happy life. People following me. Scientists hassling me. Dead animals showing up without explanation, killed by mysterious beasts.” I gestured at her. “Weirdoes going through my trash.”

  “Come up and sit in the lawn chair I brought especially for you.” Tanis patted the chair. Her white sunglasses slipped a little down her nose, revealing big, dark, mischievous eyes.

  I sipped my drink. It was half gone. “I’ll stay down here.”

  “But I’ve arranged it just right,” she said. “You’ll notice that I have positioned the back of the chair up against the cab of your truck so you can stretch your legs all the way to the tailgate.”

  I leaned an elbow on the roof of the cab and took another slurp of my drink.

  “Fine,” she said. “Have it your way. What do you want on your hamburger?”

  “Sauerkraut, avocado, and blue cheese.”

  “You may choose between ketchup, mustard, tomato, or lettuce,” she said.

  She opened the lid of the grill. The burgers were still sizzling and the outsides were brown. Tanis scooped one of them up with a steel spatula, put it in a bun and added fixings. She put it on a paper plate and handed it to me. I bit into it: perfection.

  We didn’t speak much as she doctored up her own and we ate. My burger was gone in five or six bites. It was the kind of meal that made you want to take a nap. Instead, I mixed both of us another drink.

  “Do you read much literature, Mr. Stick?” Tanis asked as she dotted the corners of her mouth with a napkin.

  “Just Stick,” I said. “No, I do not.”

  “I consider myself to be a Renaissance woman. I study many forms of knowledge and art, not just those that apply directly to my field.”

  “What is your field exactly?” I asked, just to hear her say it.

  “Animal theology.”

  “So you preach to monkeys? Stuff like that.”

  She gave me a smile that teetered on the brink between charm and mania. “I once tried to convert a school of dolphins to Roman Catholicism.”

  I couldn’t tell if she was kidding.

  “It almost worked. They liked taking the sacrament.”

  “You’re full of it.”

  She placed a hand over her heart. “I spent two months in a wetsuit. The water infected both my ears. I had to go on antibiotics.”

  I didn’t believe her. “Did they become good Catholics?”

  “Why should religion only apply to humans? If God created the whole universe, including animals, shouldn’t they get the opportunity to live in His grace, too? Why is it that, if God created us after so many billions of years of an Earth dominated by other beings, we are the only ones He cares about? I say that if religion can be brought to animals, then we’ll know for sure that God is real. And for every animal I fail to convert, that’s one more mark against Him.”

  “You don’t talk like a normal theologian,” I said.

  “I am a true theologian,” she said. “Theology should be about exhaustive critical inquiry. God gave me a free will and an extraordinary intellect. If I use them to disprove His existence, then that’s His own fault. And if animals, who’ve outlived us and who outnumber us, aren’t part of God’s plan, then what kind of a plan is that?”

  “What if God’s plan is different for each species? He gave us an intellect and free will, and he demands that we use them both. Fine. He gave spiders the ability to spin webs and catch insects. He gave vampire bats the ability to navigate using sonar and to suck blood from cows. The way to worship God is to live out your life cycle, using the facilities that God gave you. Maybe that’s it.”

  Tanis sat in her chair, with her piña colada in one hand and the fingers of the other pinching her chin. The night stars twinkled in the twin mirrors of her sunglasses. “Let’s say we accept your hypothesis. What happens if a creature is born that was not made by God? What happens if a creature is created unnaturally and has no inherent life cycle? Is that creature inherently evil? Can we say that such a creature, having no purpose given to it by a benevolent creator, is of the Devil?”

  “There is no such creature.”

  “Man creates animals all the time. The majority of our crops and livestock are either manipulated through husbandry techniques or directly genetically engineered. A chicken bred with no beak and no feet is no longer a chicken.
It cannot peck. It cannot walk. Some chickens are even bred without wings. This is no longer an animal with a life cycle.”

  “So,” I said, “you’re suggesting the devil is a chicken.”

  She didn’t laugh. “I’m suggesting that your measure of God includes, by proxy, an anti-God.”

  “You talk like a university professor. They think too much.”

  “That is a myth,” she said. “You can never think too much.”

  “You can never think too little. We are beings born into a world of action. The world doesn’t think. It acts.”

  “By the world, you mean the universe.”

  “Fine,” I said. “The universe acts. I don’t know much about it. I do know animals: they eat, sleep, breed, and socialize. They don’t sit around thinking. I live my life like an animal: I care for things. I grow things. I feed things. I don’t philosophize.”

  She cocked her head. “You’re an atheist.”

  “I am not.”

  Glee poured through her grinning face. “I just figured you out.”

  “No. You did not.”

  “My job is done for tonight, John Stick.” Tanis rose from her lawn chair and dusted the crumbs from her thighs. Her tone became very business-like. “You are being followed by a member of a radical group of pro-immigration pan-Chicano militants. They call themselves the Good Friends. They’re interested in you because they believe you’re affiliated with the Minutemen.”

  “I’m not.”

  Her smile was a little bitter. “Don’t lie to me. I’ve been following you, remember?”

  “Rex is my best friend from when we were six,” I said. “He’s not a Minuteman. They’re just paying him. He doesn’t get much work. He’s not a racist.”

  She leapt down from the truck. “You sound like you’re trying to convince yourself as much as you’re trying to convince me.”

  “I’m his best friend.” I spread my arms. “Look at me. He’s not a prejudiced person.”

  “Every human is prejudiced. It’s in our genetic code.”

  “That’s a cynical attitude.”

  “It’s a truthful one,” she said. “You’re caught in a battle of prejudice. On one side are the Minutemen, and on the other are the Good Friends. Be careful. Both sides have guns.”

  “What side are you on?” I asked.

  She removed her sunglasses. Her eyes were steely points in the slanting moonlight. “I don’t have a side. I’m a free agent.”

  “So you’re the only human without prejudice?”

  She reached way up and patted me on the cheek. “Goodbye Stick.”

  “What about your bikini?” I asked.

  She walked away into the night.

  he phone rang as I left my house the next morning. Stress and lack of sleep throbbed behind my eyeballs, making the whole world pulse. My phone’s constant ringing didn’t help. Against my instincts, I answered.

  “I’ve been robbed.” It was Melodía. Her voice held that raw early morning tinge.

  “By who?” I asked. “Are you hurt?”

  “My lab,” she said. “Jones has been kidnapped. The whooping crane is gone, too.”

  “That’s crazy. Calm down. You’ll find them.”

  “I didn’t misplace a six-foot bird, you bastard. Get over here.”

  “Call the police.”

  The line went quiet. She didn’t want to call the police. They were the most masculine, most judgmental, and least tactful people you could ever want to meet―the opposite of sweet, nurturing Stick.

  “I really do have to go to work,” I said.

  “This is an emergency!”

  I didn’t tell her that the past week and a half had been nothing but emergencies. Instead, I put a gust of my wind in her ear.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  I hung up.

  Twenty minutes later, I stood outside the closed door of her lab. I knelt, hunched my body up at the doorknob, and inspected the lock. While I peered at it, Melodía pulled the door open.

  “What are you doing?” she demanded.

  I’d been checking for scratches, which I’d read in old detective novels were a sure sign that a lock had been picked. Melodía’s doorknob looked as if it’d been scratched at for years. “Tying my shoe.”

  We spent the next half hour combing over the lab. Jones’ terrarium was empty. A blank spot in Melodía’s fridge marked where the whooping crane had been. The frog’s corpse had vanished too. Otherwise, everything seemed intact.

  “Someone stole those three things, and those only.” Melodía’s right eye was inflamed and her left, nestled between two tumors, pulsed visibly. The line of her scalp was flushed red.

  “Why would they do that?”

  “They’re all connected to the egg,” she said.

  “What about the wasp you found in the frog’s stomach? If someone were after the egg, and the wasp was really related, they would have taken that, too.”

  “So, you admit they’re related?”

  I gave her a resigned shrug. “Strange egg laid in flesh the flesh of a bird in the fashion of a tarantula hawk. Wound made with the mandibles of a horse fly. We find a creature with a tarantula hawk’s stinger and a fly’s mouth. I guess I’ll concede the connection.”

  Melodía took a moment to look smug.

  “The question is not who’s right. The question is why didn’t your burglar steal the half-digested wasp corpse as well?”

  “No one knew about it. But no one knew about Jones either.”

  Something dawned on me. I felt slightly sick to my stomach. “I told someone.”

  Our eyes met. “Who?” She already knew the answer. I could tell by the betrayed look on her face that she was thinking of the same man I was: Simon Marchette.

  “But why would Marchette steal anything?” I wondered aloud. “He’s not the type.”

  “This is a once in a decade find.” Melodía careened around her lab opening drawers and cabinets. “A new insect could get Marchette out of the zoo and back into the real scientific community. Hell, he could name it after himself.”

  It didn’t seem right. Marchette wasn’t a cutthroat biologist out to get famous. He was a sincere guy who tickled hissing cockroaches and handled centipedes as gently as newborn babies. Admittedly, he had been acting a little weird. “You should know something.”

  Melodía stopped roving around her lab and raised her eyebrows at me.

  “Marchette and I talked yesterday. He said some stuff that, in hindsight, sounded wacky.”

  “Like what?” she asked.

  “Well, you know how he is.”

  Her gaze wobbled away from mine and tentatively back.

  “You met him, right?” It was an experiment.

  Her gaze hit the floor and she turned half away.

  “You never met him.”

  “I was busy.” She still didn’t look at me. “I left him instructions and had him dictate notes into a recorder. What does it matter?”

  We both knew that she hadn’t been busy. She’d simply not wanted to meet another human being and have him look at her face the way the normals did. I didn’t blame her. Besides, it didn’t matter―none of this really mattered. It was all just keeping me away from my quiet hole in the depths of the zoo.

  “Well?” Melodía asked. “What did he say?”

  “He said you should incinerate the egg. He said on no account should you hatch it.”

  “That’s absurd. It’s just an insect egg. Did he say why?”

  “Nope. He seemed rattled though. He wasn’t kidding.”

  “What’d you tell him?” she asked.

  “I told him you were a big girl and perfectly able to handle an insect on your own. Then we talked about a snake, and I kicked him out of my office.”

  “A snake?” she asked.

  “Yeah. We have lots of them. They’re all sitting by their cage doors waiting to be fed right now. The one I was talking to him about was dead. Attacked and sucked dry of all
its blood.” I grinned at her. “Pretty gruesome.”

  “Looks like we both have problems with hematophages. A horsefly and―what kind was yours?”

  “Jury’s still out.” I grabbed my forehead with my fingers and massaged it.

  “What’s wrong?” Melodía asked, touching my elbow.

  “Marchette seemed pretty interested in that snake.”

  By the time I’d driven to the zoo, the snake was gone from my lab’s refrigerator, of course. I called Melodía from my zoo phone. “Well, we know who did it. Only Marchette knew about the snake, the crane, and the tarantula. The cops should have an easy time.”

  “So, you’re going to call them?”

  “Yes, Hernandez, I’m calling them.” My lab was an inviolate space. No one trespassed. “That pasty little scientist took some pretty important specimens.”

  “Are you going to tell them about my lab?” Her voice quavered. Her very slight slur deepened a shade.

  “This is no time for your fear of people.” As soon as I said the words, I knew they were going to cost both of us. Her fear, like her face, was taboo. She’d devoted her adult life to avoiding talking about them.

  Melodía’s breath came in bursts over the receiver, the rhythm of her rage, building. Like many recluses, she expelled her emotions at the wrong times, at the wrong targets. She packed them down into her psyche; they exploded out. I knew because I was just like her.

  “Listen―” I said.

  “People are bastards,” she hissed. “People are sons of bitches. People are pure evil. After people have tormented you your whole life, come and tell me not to hate them. A cataclysm could wipe every last person from the planet. I’d celebrate. I’d be free to go out in the sunshine. I’d be free to walk through a field and smell the flowers. Songbirds would land on my fingers. Don’t tell me not to hate people, you fucking bastard.”

  I probably should have exploded right back at her. I probably should have described my life to her in grave detail. I should have outlined my routine of solitude and then called her a heartless bitch or something. We could have screamed at each other and cried and apologized and realized that life was grand if you only had a friend. That was the way a couple of normals would have handled it.