Archaeopteryx

by Dan Darling

  “Well, I hope they know that I am not serious. About anything.”

  “Except your job,” she said. “You take that very seriously, don’t you?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “And your friend.” She grinned, as if at something particularly delightful. “Dr. Melodía Hernandez.”

  A rumble rose in the back of my throat.

  She leaned across the bar and grabbed my wrist. “I can tell that gets to you. You don’t even like me to say her name.”

  I pulled my wrist away and took a swig of red, viscous sweet with a hard, tart punch.

  “You are also serious about your friend Spartacus Rex.”

  “Enough about me,” I said.

  “He is a difficult one, that Spartacus Rex.” Tanis’ eyes were big and hungry. She looked as if she wanted to dig my friendships out of me so she could eat them. “He’s your oldest and most loyal friend, but also your most criminal and racist one. What a conundrum!”

  “Drink your wine.”

  “It’s rude to interrupt a course of conversation before it’s naturally exhausted itself,” Tanis said. “Especially with a guest.”

  “It’s rude to put your nose into my personal life.”

  “Not on a date. How else am I supposed to get to know such a stoic man, unless I force him to talk about himself?”

  “This isn’t a date.”

  “Then how do you explain the lingerie I’m wearing under this overcoat, dress, hat, boots, stockings, and thermal underwear?”

  I groaned at her.

  “Your father.”

  “What about the old man?”

  “Your father, your job, your two friends, and probably your spider. Those are the things you care for.”

  “Should I be writing this down?” I dosed myself with another mouthful of wine.

  “It’s such a short list, a child could memorize it. Obviously, your ideology of life revolves around minimalism.”

  “No conversation with you is ever light, is it? What about your life ideology? It obviously includes harassing good, hard-working Americans. What else?”

  She sipped the wine and her face split into a smile. “This is quite delicious!”

  “New Mexico doesn’t disappoint.” I stole a glance at Ralph while she took another sip. He had crawled his front four legs up the glass wall of his terrarium, exposing the stiff, khaki-colored hairs of his abdomen. He wanted out for his nightly romp. “Mind if I let my spider out?”

  She shrank back in her chair. “You mean to walk around the house?”

  “That’s what I mean.” I lifted him from his terrarium and set him on the floor. A couple millipedes still roamed around for him to hunt. He stood there for a few seconds, angling his body minutely back and forth so that he could take in Tanis’ image with his eyes. She stared back at him.

  “He’ll probably examine you for a half hour or so to make sure you’re not a threat. Don’t pay him any mind.”

  Tanis lifted both feet off the floor and tucked them onto the seat beneath her. I poured her more wine.

  “So. Why exactly is everybody following me?”

  Tanis smiled. “Because you’re the tallest, darkest, and handsomest man in the city?”

  “Wrong.”

  Tanis unzipped her coat and held it out to me. Beneath, she wore a red silk scarf over her bare brown shoulders. Her bust line scooped modestly, but enough to make me uncomfortable. It didn’t take much. I took the coat and hung it on my hat tree.

  “Seriously.” I returned to my position in the kitchen with the bar between us. “Why?”

  Her face settled from the smile she’d been affecting and she looked ten years older. Now that she wore the expression of a serious person, her eyelids and lips were heavy and expressive. Her voice dove deeper than the usual girlish giggle. “You are a lead. Every person with any stake in reality must discover why, in a single stroke, thousands of beings passed from life. It is a scientific, theological, sociological, ecological, and existential dilemma. It should be keeping every single person awake at night.”

  “It happens all the time. Things die. That’s the way the universe works.”

  “Yes, but not all at once. Things die and breed in a staggered pattern.” She sipped her wine and hummed with pleasure. “If everything died all at once with any frequency, life would cease to exist. Archeologically, when a big mass death occurs, it is a precursor to extinction. Theologically, it indicates an act of God―or Satan.”

  “You’re saying that God is sick of birds?” I said.

  “I’m saying that we, as humans, are pattern-seeking beings. We want to know that there’s a purpose, or at least a trend, to events. Big events like this one, we want to believe, indicate something. God is angry. The Devil is loose and causing bad things to happen. Our ecological system is breaking down. The government or an evil corporation is running tests with massive and terrible side-effects.”

  “The birds just died. Maybe it’s as simple as that.”

  She took a long, slow drink from her glass. Her dark eyes twinkled over the rim.

  “Things die. There doesn’t have to be a reason.”

  “You atheists are so cute,” she said.

  “I’m not an atheist.”

  She set the glass down. “To answer your question, people are following you, trying to hire you, and seducing you because you are making headway on solving the mystery.”

  “Untrue.”

  “Whenever competing parties simultaneously explore the same mystery, they don’t just hire people to look at the clues. They also try to steal the insights of the other parties involved.”

  “That’s what you’re here to do.”

  She grinned and the fake Tanis sprung back into her face. “No, I am here because I am romantically interested in you. It’s just a coincidence that the universe has delegated me to investigate the same mystery.”

  “I’m not investigating, and you’re a liar.”

  She fluttered her eyelashes and crinkled up her nose. It was cute. I wasn’t big on cuteness.

  “How do I get everybody to stop following me and leave me alone? I’ve stopped investigating. I never really started.”

  She shook her head. “It doesn’t matter what you do. From here on out, anyone who approaches you is probably working for one party or another. No one will ever leave you alone.”

  That much was proving to be true.

  “You are cosmically inherent to the mystery.”

  “That sounds stupid.”

  “Are you calling gravity stupid?” She swatted at my hand. “How dare you!”

  I wondered what the hell she was talking about. I told her so.

  “The cosmos is held together by gravity. When I say you are cosmically involved, I am using gravity as a metaphor. But it isn’t a metaphor, exactly. Ever since that moment when those thousands of beings suddenly ended, events have taken orbit around you. You are pulling everything toward you―in ways you don’t even comprehend. There must be a reason for this. That is what everyone is trying to understand.”

  “I have a friend. She asked me to drive down―”

  “I’ve heard all that before. However, many things have happened, very few of which you are aware, that center on you as a person. The few events you do know about, you have very little understanding of their consequence. You’re in the dark.”

  “Well, illuminate me.”

  “No. Instead, I will kiss you.” She knelt atop the stool, put her hands on the bar, and leaned across it. She lowered her eyelids and puckered up. I could have snapped a picture of her and sold it to a modeling agency.

  I considered picking up Ralph and substituting his lips for mine. Instead, I waited.

  She opened her eyes. She raised her eyebrows. Finally, she un-puckered her lips and spoke. “This is our second date. If you don’t kiss me, I’ll think I’m too ugly for you.”

  “It’s the other way around.”

  “I’ll develop a complex. I�
��ll think you only like pretty blondes. I’ll begin to loathe myself for not being white.”

  “I hate pretty blondes,” I said, which wasn’t far from the truth.

  “Then kiss me.”

  “Absolutely not.”

  “You’re shy.” She lunged, grabbed me by the collar, and pulled herself up. She was strong, but she had a long way to climb. Eventually, she got her feet beneath her. Standing on the bar, she was a foot taller than me. She tilted my head back, my collar still clutched in her fist.

  I had been kissed a handful of times, by only a handful of women, usually scavenged by Rex, most of whom I’d never seen again. That had been back in my late high school and early college days. I had also kissed a few women at bars, in Rex’s various slummy apartments, and in my car during my lost twenty-something years. Alcohol and desperation were always involved on both sides. Since then, I hadn’t kissed a woman.

  Tanis’ breath, sweet and dark with wine, nuzzled my face. A nimbus of cherry blossom hung from her hair. Her black eyes looked straight into mine, flicking back and forth minutely. I hadn’t experienced anything so intimate in a long time. It made me fall in love, just a little, and only because I was, beneath my gruffness, a vulnerable person.

  The dog in Tanis’ van chose that moment to let out a long, morose howl.

  We both turned our heads toward the street.

  The howl transformed into a series of desperate yelps. The beast scrabbled its claws against the inside of the van.

  “Should you check on your animal?” I asked.

  The look on her face suggested that this incident was curious, but not entirely unexpected. She always wore that same half-smile, except when she was faking something else. “Hmmm. I suppose so. Will you step out with me?”

  “Yes.” I said but didn’t move.

  We stood nose to nose for a few seconds more before she broke away. She straightened her clothing and smoothed her hair, as if such actions were perfectly normal while standing in high-heeled boots atop a bar. I helped her with her coat. While I donned mine, she leapt from the bar and landed like a gymnast.

  When we walked out into the night, my patio felt strange. The hound’s wild barking was louder outside. I felt eyes on my skin. A scent I couldn’t identify hung in the air. Hair. Heavy musk, like a badger or wolverine. A metallic tinge, the same scent I’d smelled at the Bosque as I passed the gutted van with Meat Shoulders and his loose-skinned friend.

  I scanned the bushes that surrounded us on three sides. They seemed empty. The roofline two stories above showed nothing but the soft touch of the moon. The boughs of the trees trembled in the slight breeze.

  Tanis had frozen too.

  Something creaked and rustled to my right. I turned. The sound had come from the deep foliage of my garden, and it might have been a rogue wind.

  It rustled again. The noise marked the unmistakable movement of an autonomous being. The full moon hung low and to the west, shining behind the wall of bushes and branches. I examined the outlines of shadow against the pale ivory light. Tanis stood stiff beside me, peering in the same direction.

  I found it: A silhouette about the size and shape of a bulldog squatting on the limb of a pine tree. I stared at that blot against the moonlight. It stared back at me.

  Nearby, Tanis’ dog continued to freak out. Somebody was bound to call the cops. My landlady’s light flashed in the upstairs window, flooding the patio with brightness. I blinked involuntarily. When I opened my eyes, I caught a glimpse of a dark shape leaping from the tree toward the street. A flapping sound beat against the tirade of dog noise. Even after it had gone, the heavy metallic scent still hung in the air.

  Tanis stepped away from me, tapping her finger on the face of her cell phone. When she finished, she slipped the device in her coat pocket and gave me a business-like smile. “Lynxes. They really rile up my dog.”

  “I thought you said it wasn’t your dog.”

  “I meant the dog that is temporarily in my custody.”

  “That was no lynx. There are no lynxes within the city limits.”

  “Coyotes, bears, rattlesnakes. They’re always wandering into Albuquerque. Why not a lynx?”

  “That wasn’t a lynx.” I didn’t tell her I had heard the flapping of what sounded like leathery wings. I didn’t know if I believed it myself.

  Tanis smiled up at me. “You’re sweet.” She grabbed my coat lapels in her fists and bent me over. Hopping into the air, she managed to smear her mouth on the underside of my jaw. Her lips felt like a cashmere sweater. “I have to go.”

  I nodded. Somehow, I had the feeling this was all part of some bigger game she was playing. What that was, I couldn’t fathom.

  Halfway up the stairs, she turned. “Call me in three days or I’ll think you don’t like me. That’s dating protocol.”

  I shook my head at her, the only thing I could think to do.

  She gave me a little wave, and a moment later, the door of her van slammed. The roar of the engine and the mad howling of the beast faded into the night.

  In the morning, I climbed atop a stepladder and examined the stout branch where I’d seen the silhouette. Claw marks from two broad and stubby feet cut into the bark. I stood on the ladder and pondered them. I knew them from somewhere, but I couldn’t say where. I didn’t know my mammals well enough.

  Back inside, I sat at my bar and ate breakfast. When I’d finished, I put my face on my fist and leaned. It didn’t get me anywhere. At work, my body droned around on autopilot. My fingers doled out crickets and cleaned up little dots of waste. My hands fished one sad, dead tadpole from the African dwarf frog tank. My body sat at my desk while my eyes gazed at my microscope without looking through the lens. After work, a coupe followed me home. Being followed was part of my routine now. I made dinner and ate at my bar, where I leaned my face on my fist some more. At ten minutes to nine, I was on the verge of a breakthrough when the phone rang.

  The white noise on the line indicated that the call came from far away.

  “John Stick?” a voice asked.

  “Who is this?” I demanded.

  The voice kept quiet.

  “Hello?”

  “Verdad o consecuencias. Tengo su propriedad alla.” The voice belonged to a white man speaking Spanish.

  “Speak English,” I said to a dial tone.

  I returned to thinking, but had lost my place. I brushed my teeth and flossed. I lay down on my extra-long bed. My day joints creaked with delight. My night joints sighed at the hours ahead. A mobile of flapping wings, mysterious voices, and worry about my best friends spun in my head until I fell into a troubled sleep.

  arrived to work on time the next morning. That was becoming a rarity. I circulated around the back doors of the enclosures and terrariums, opening panels, inspecting animals. The western rattlesnake was molting and the sheath of mottled skin was stuck halfway down her body, like a ballerina in a tutu. I helped her shed it the rest of the way. I went into my room and checked the mail. I’d received a postcard with a lot of emoticons telling me that my python was thriving in Denver, as well as a few intra-zoo memoranda. I read them and threw them away.

  I worked my day. It was pretty uneventful, or in other words, very pleasant. At the end of it, I made a run to the Tropical America building, a simulated rainforest environment, to check on a couple of green vine snakes housed there. I returned to my office and started to wind things up when something caught the corner of my eye. The leathery leg of the box turtle protruded from her shell. The rest of her limbs were retracted. The visible leg looked grayer than usual. I got up. I opened the top of her terrarium and poked her leg.

  Esposita was dead.

  I slipped my fingers beneath her shell. As I lifted her from the terrarium, her limbs and neck slid from the shell and hung. Her face wore a twisted expression. Her black tongue swelled with bloat. A wound punctured her neck. My magnifying glass showed a swollen protrusion with a deep pit in the center, surrounded by several mandibu
lar gashes.

  A serial killer was on the loose. It was the size of a hummingbird, wielded the sting of a wasp, and bore the mandibles of a horsefly. It had a thirst for blood. I walked a trail littered with the corpses of murdered animals.

  I scrutinized every inch of Esposita’s home. I armed myself with an industrial strength fly swatter and combed my lab. I stalked my prey into the next room, where I found the red-headed batgirl Abbey. She stood on a stool, rummaging through the high cabinets.

  “Hi John,” she said.

  I held my finger up to my lips. “Have you seen a wasp?”

  “No,” she whispered. “Why are we whispering?”

  I couldn’t answer that. “We’re not,” I said at a normal volume. “A wasp killed my friend Esposita and I’m out for revenge.”

  Abbey looked me up and down. “Well, that wasp is a dead man. He doesn’t stand a chance.”

  I didn’t bother to tell her that the wasp was a woman. Instead, I scanned the walls, seeking out sticky spots and paying attention to the edges of window frames.

  “Want an assistant?” she asked.

  “Thank you. I’ve got this one covered. But if you see any animals with sting wounds, tell me.”

  The next thing I knew, Abbey had armed herself with a butterfly net and was poking around the room with me. I decided to let her. We found nothing. We searched the third room and even checked the back area of the bat cave and the adjoining nocturnal mammal rooms. All of the slow lorises, naked mole rats, brown kiwis, and huge-eyed bush babies seemed fine. When we’d finished, we ended up back in my lab drinking cans of Dr. Pepper from the vending machine.

  “So,” she said. “Explain.”

  “Esposita was my friend. No one kills my friends and gets to buzz around free to kill again.”

  “Can a wasp kill a turtle?” she asked.

  “It was a tarantula hawk wasp. Their sting isn’t fatal. It only stuns. But it’s one of the most painful insect stings in the world. Esposita was pretty old. The pain was too much for her.” I left out the details of the wasp potentially being a mutated monster.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.