Archaeopteryx

by Dan Darling

  “A creek flows into it.”

  “Correct,” he said.

  “Why would anyone plan a building right in the path of a creek?”

  “No one knows.”

  “What does he do with the water?”

  Marchette lifted his shoulders and spread his hands.

  “What is the purpose of the building?” I asked.

  Marchette wagged his head back and forth and shrugged even bigger.

  I figured I’d better stop asking questions before he strained himself.

  “Apart from John White himself, no one knows what happens in that building―save for one man. His name is Dr. Charon. He’s the chief scientist of the entire facility and the only member of the staff allowed access.”

  Charon, the average man I’d met the day after the birds died and the man I’d seen in the picture with Marchette. “No one else goes in? No janitors, secretaries, lab assistants, electricians, delivery men, security guys―no one? C’mon, Doc. Somebody else must have access. Every building in the world needs peons.”

  “This one doesn’t.” Marchette leaned back in his chair and folded his arms. “I’ve tried. I’ve sounded out every member of staff and security. No one enters. No one leaves. Unless John White has a secret entrance―which he very well might―he lives in Mount Olympus.”

  “Except Charon. He comes and goes.”

  “Yes,” Marchette said. “He’s the only one. And he’s a trained dog, a bland man with no vision.”

  “You’re jealous of him.”

  Marchette’s ears turned red again. He got up and paced the room. “John White made me promises.” He slashed an arm through a phantasm only he could perceive. “I was an up and comer. I was to be part of the biggest discoveries. My brother was an astrophysicist. He was discovering planets. I wanted to find my own planets, as it were. Arachnologists were unearthing new species every year, mainly in the rain forests of South America, but also in farther flung locales such as Papua New Guinea, Thailand, and Sri Lanka. I specialized in venom. I believed―as many do―that study of new arachnids and their venoms might lead to medical innovations.”

  I didn’t like humans who studied animals only to benefit other humans. I didn’t buy the Bible line that the animal kingdom was our own personal farm.

  “Typhon Industries was interested in venom,” Marchette continued. “But their primary field is genetics. They wanted to genetically modify spiders to produce custom venoms―or so they claimed in their call for researchers. I was working at Cornell University at the time―I had a post-doctorate fellowship with strong possibilities for future tenure―but I abandoned my post for an opportunity to work with Typhon Industries.”

  “You got the job,” I said, trying to speed him along. I hadn’t come for his life story.

  “I did.” He stopped pacing and gazed into a far corner of the room where the orange floral wallpaper met the ochre baseboard.

  “And?” I said.

  He took a deep breath and fidgeted his fingers against the change in his pants pocket, which jingled in the closeness and quiet of the room. “This is the hard part to tell you.” He angled his eyes toward me.

  “Just spill it.”

  “John White lost interest in venom almost immediately,” he said. “He shut down that section of his lab and assigned me to the zoo.”

  “Typhon Industries has nothing to do with the zoo,” I said.

  “On the contrary, John White is the chairman of the board of trustees. He’s obsessed with the zoo. He’s an animal fanatic―for all the wrong reasons.”

  “How do you know all this if you’ve never met the guy? And what does any of this have to do with me?”

  “I know because he issues directives. I’ve never met him, but I’ve read thousands of pages of his writing. They read like manifestos as much as memoranda. He blends instructions and polemics into a mélange that can barely be described as sane.” He held up his hand to keep me from interrupting him. “And as far as you are concerned, over the past six months, one of my primary duties at the zoo was to spy on you.”

  Gravity swelled into my skull and red flowers bloomed in my peripheral vision. My fingertips went numb. A trapeze act did some flips in my stomach.

  “John White is obsessed with the zoo―and its most accomplished keeper.” Marchette dropped his eyes. “I’ve been writing regular reports on you.”

  I didn’t have any words, so I kept my mouth shut.

  “That’s not all―I’ve also been collecting samples.” His voice was raspy, as if he needed water. “Snapshots. Vocal recordings. Fingerprints. I pilfered a zoo polo that you neglected to take home one day.”

  “Those cost a lot of money. The zoo has to get my uniform custom made.”

  His huge mouth bent up in the center and down at the ends, like a cartoon version of sadness. “That’s not the worst of it.”

  I waited. Far off, a dog bayed.

  “I collected strands of your hair.” His face twisted around the words as if he were eating a wedge of lemon. “Flakes of skin. I invested hours in your office at night with a headlamp and magnifying glass. He’s even given you a code name: Archaeopteryx.”

  I tried to take it in. I felt numb. The distant dog barked. A couple others joined it. I pushed a word out my throat. “Why?”

  “He’s a geneticist.”

  “That makes no sense.” My voice was louder than I meant it to be. “My―condition. It isn’t genetic. It’s glandular.”

  “But your mother had the same affliction, did she not?”

  If he mentioned my mother again, I thought it might be reasonable to ram his head through the cheap plaster ceiling. I stood up. A carousel wheeled around in my head, and the room staggered in dizzy turns. Marchette gushed words all over the place. He got his tiny body between me and the door. I tossed him out of the way. I stepped out into the sun, the wind, and the howling choir of dogs. Marchette poked his bald head through the crack in the door and whispered at me.

  I turned. “I came here for one thing.” My voice rumbled the windows of Marchette’s crummy room. “What happened to the birds?”

  “Come back in and I’ll tell you.” He clung to the door, the fingers of both hands wrapped around the edge.

  “Tell me now or I’ll stuff you in a duffel bag and deliver you to the steps of Mount Olympus.”

  “I don’t know.” His voice was tinny with shame and desperation. “What I do know is that on the same day every year, the roof of Mount Olympus opens. On that day, during that hour, something bad happens.”

  I snapped my fingers in his face. “Specifics.”

  “The first year, a new strain of hanta virus broke out. No one linked it to White’s work, of course. Some people died on pueblos, there was a little panic, people bought mousetraps, and they never asked where it came from. The next year, on the same day, a string of tornadoes did a dance down the Rio Grande valley.”

  “We get one every now and then.”

  “Not like that year.”

  I remembered those tornadoes. Every resident in the city had hidden in their pantries and garages. No one dug basements in Albuquerque―the soil was too dense. My home below the earth was a rarity. It’d been untouched, but dozens of other houses had been chewed up by the funnels of furious air.

  “Next year it was a drought. Then a mass beaching of silvery minnows. Then a pox that wiped out half the state’s roadrunner population. Can you guess the date upon which all these disasters transpired?”

  “The same date my life went down the toilet.”

  “The birds were the worst yet,” Marchette said. “I can only imagine what sort of catastrophes will occur when Mount Olympus opens again next year.”

  “I’m leaving. I’m going to go listen to some pop songs about true love on my truck stereo. They make a hell of a lot more sense than you do right now.”

  “You must listen!” he yelled after me. “Every time John White opens the roof of that room, calamity strikes! He’s
channeling an evil power through it!”

  I stalked back to my truck, trying to stay mad enough at Marchette so as not to take his blather seriously. Around me, every dog in the town howled at the moon that hung in the afternoon sky. It was white and fragile, like the skull of an ancient god watching over a world lost to him. The dogs weren’t actually barking at the moon―of course. I’d heard that racket before. Tanis’ white van sat behind my truck. A dark car with government plates edged it in from the front. She leaned against the white van. Inside, the maniacal beast she rode around with bayed, scratched, and whined.

  “We placed a tracking device on your car,” Tanis said by way of greeting. She wore jeans, a tan trench coat, a blue blazer, a white blouse, and cowboy boots. A toothpick hung from the corner of her mouth. She examined her fingernails. This time her decal read White’s Express Delivery Service. “I’m surprised you didn’t look for one.”

  “You forget that I’m a simple zookeeper. I’m not trained, nor do I have intent to evade you or anyone else.”

  Two big men flanked me. They’d been lurking on either side of the entrance to the motel. Their suits, sunglasses, and practical shoes gave them away as low-level feds, and they hung their arms like gorillas do when they’re trying to prove something.

  “These things belong to you?” I asked Tanis.

  “They’re my pawns.” She flashed each of them a big grin. “Aren’t you boys?”

  The gorillas’ brows crunched up and their mouths collapsed toward the shelter beneath their massive nostrils. Their bodies could have been overfed twin brothers, but their faces exemplified opposite extremes of brutality: one was gaunt and steel eyed; the other had a jaw like a semi cab and huge, purple lips.

  “They’re cute. Like Nazis only in cheaper suits.”

  Tanis ran her laugh up and down a scale. She smiled merrily. “John Stick, you’re under arrest.”

  “You get funnier every single time you show up uninvited into my life. This one was a real hoot. Next time, you’ll tell me you’re my doctor and I have only one month to live.”

  Tanis lifted the right lower corner of her blazer. A gold badge hung from the waist of her jeans. It told me she was a Chief Patrol Agent of the Department of Homeland Security. She spat her toothpick into the gutter. “Cuff ‘im, boys.”

  Her boys edged up on me from either side. I wondered what sound their heads would make when I knocked them together.

  “Come over here and cuff me yourself,” I yelled. But she was already ambling around the front of her van toward the driver’s side door. Her goons pinned my arms behind me and pressed my wrists together. “Careful. I’ve got ten thousand year-old bones.”

  “Shut up,” Purple Lips said.

  The handcuffs pinched my skin and wrenched my wrist joints. “I’d like to see a warrant. Preferably with my name on it. You guys are probably mixing me up with another person. I wouldn’t blame you. People get confused about my identity all the time.”

  Purple Lips blew some flecks of spit between his teeth. “We got a comedian here. Zip it, funny man.”

  “Shouldn’t you be encouraging me to speak? I might reveal some key detail of my entirely legal and boring life of hard work and on-time tax payment.”

  “My partner brought a staple gun,” Purple Lips said. “You can seal your lips or he can do it for you. You’re under arrest.”

  “For what, I wonder?”

  “Harboring a fugitive from justice,” Steel Eyes snarled.

  “Who? My spider? He’s from El Paso.”

  Purple Lips turned me around and Steel Eyes tried to stick his face up in mine. He didn’t have an easy time doing it. His cheekbones were so sharp he was in danger of being mistaken for a man with three noses. He spread his lips savagely. His teeth were jagged at the edges and brutally white, as if he bleached them every morning before he did his pushups. His breath smelled like fresh meat.

  “Antonio Vicarollo Reyes DeRosa,” Steel Eyes said.

  “Never heard of him.”

  His grin stretched to crocodilian proportions. “You’ve never heard of your own father?”

  “My dad’s name is Tom. Tomás, if you want to get technical. You’ve got the wrong guy.”

  Purple Lips kicked me in the heel. “It don’t matter if we have the wrong guy. We can chain up the Pope for twenty-four hours if we want. It’s the law.”

  They marched me to their car, one man holding me by the shackles, the other leading the way. My face burned from some awful internal heat building inside my body. Stars danced in my peripheral vision, and I didn’t know whether they were a result of the sun blazing above, the rage burning below my skin, or some latent magic searing the earth at the farthest reaches of human perception. The gray-haired woman stood in the doorway of the motel, running prayer beads through her old dry fingers. Our eyes met. She laid her finger against her nose, just as she’d done earlier. I suppose she thought it’d give me comfort to know that I was part of something bigger. She was another rube, looking for meaning and connection where there was none.

  Tanis’ van pulled away from the curb and kicked dust into my eyes. I blinked and grinned, and my eyes produced some water. I wanted to laugh and laugh. And I did. I leaned my head back and let the moon see how big and crooked my teeth were. My captors had to go through some exercises to get me loaded into the back of their sedan. My legs were a couple feet too long and everything above my chest was a real pain in the neck. I didn’t make it any easier on them. In the end, they crammed me in, and it was hilarious and traumatizing and absurd―and then I saw another couple of gorillas in dark suits leading little Marchette in cuffs to another car. I’d led them right to him.

  I stopped laughing. I didn’t think I’d ever start again.

  sat in a chair in an abandoned warehouse south of Central Avenue. The neighborhood had once been an industrial zone, but as the ever-expanding belt of Albuquerque widened and property taxes edged upward, the industry died or fled and the whole area fell to waste. Outside the warehouse windows, the stars cast their yellow eyes over streets lined with liquor stores, quick loan offices, dilapidated casitas, and apartment complexes like terrariums for human beings stacked one upon the other. Around here, murder and meth came easy, and fresh lettuce was as rare as gold.

  My hands were still shackled. The joints of my upper body felt as if they’d been slow cooked on a rotisserie. I had to urinate, but I felt too tired to get up and do it even if I’d been able to. I’d been sitting for hours alone in the long dark room, once the beer-hall of America’s industrial success, now twitching with rats. Finally, as the belt of Orion floated toward its zenith, Tanis Rivera walked in.

  She wore the same trench coat, jeans, white open-throated blouse, and cowboy boots. Her hair was up. The gold homeland security badge hung from her belt.

  “You never called,” she said.

  I didn’t reply. Her steps kicked up the desert grit that had built up over the years of the warehouse’s abandonment. I fought back a sneeze. I didn’t want to give her any sign that she was getting to me.

  “A girl throws herself at you, and you hang her out to dry.” She pulled a chair opposite me, lifted a boot atop it, put her elbow on the raised knee, and set her chin thoughtfully in her hand. Her trench coat opened just enough to flash the gun hanging under her armpit. “How heartless.”

  “There’s another woman,” I rasped. My throat was lined with sandpaper. I hadn’t had a sip of water since the drive to T or C.

  “Is she prettier than me?”

  “Let’s say she’s sane, honest, and good.”

  “I have other qualities.”

  I sat there and ached.

  She stamped her raised foot to the floor. The rafters sloughed a rain of dust down on us. “I am, in fact, sane, honest, and good, but you shouldn’t think so. My sanity, honesty, and goodness are much larger than our pitiful human struggles. I serve the universal truth.”

  “And the government,” I said.

&n
bsp; She flicked at the badge with a forefinger. “What, this? This is just one of the little costumes I wear.”

  “Did you steal it off another man you’ve been lying to?”

  “No, it’s mine. I’m a senior officer of the United States Border Patrol but only in the most superficial way.”

  Something happened in my brain, deep down. It felt like several gears that had been spinning madly in isolation―the chupacabras, the dead birds, the various agents chasing me―were all pressed together. They clicked and spun in synchronous motion for a split second and everything almost made sense. Then the works got jammed up and I enjoyed only a headache to show for a moment of clarity that happened too fast for me to follow. It did leave me with a question.

  “Where’s my father?” I harbored a sick dread that I already knew the answer.

  Tanis smiled girlishly and tapped her lip. “Hmmm. What’s his name again? Oh, that’s right, you don’t know your own father’s name.”

  “My father’s name is Tomás.”

  “Wrong. Tomás Ramón García died in 1970. We found the death certificate in a dusty filing cabinet in a tiny village near the Colorado border. His death hasn’t dulled his American work ethic, however. He’s been logging hours for forty years―paying taxes, contributing to Social Security, opening a couple bank accounts, earning himself a nice city employee pension.”

  “There are ten thousand Garcías in this state. You’ve been researching the wrong one.”

  “Let me ask you this question, John Stick,” Tanis said. “Why is your father’s name García, while yours is Stick?”

  My head was full of helium. “Stick was my mother’s last name.”

  “And why wouldn’t your father want to give you his name? After all, it’s the tradition. Children get their father’s last name. Now, you were conceived in the seventies, so I might believe it if your name was hyphenated. Stick-García. García-Stick. But for a man―a Chicano man, who are stereotypically pretty traditional, especially in areas where feminism has made inroads in the Anglo community―to name his son after his wife’s ancestry and not his own―it’s surprising. A person more skeptical than me might even say unbelievable.”