Parasites Like Us

by Adam Johnson

  Gerry went on and on about his Pomeranian mill, but I was in a daze. I know you can’t unthrow a spear, but in my mind, I was running the lawns and streets of Parkton, racing across intersections and tennis courts, in the open door of the library, running through stacks of books before leaping out an open window, running until I ran up the steps of the courthouse, into the rotunda, where I hoped to catch my own spear.

  “Hey, are you listening?” Gerry asked.

  I had to sit down.

  Gerry came up and patted me on the cheek. “Lighten up, Hanky,” he said, smiling. “I didn’t mean to pull your chain about the old days. Me and Sheriff Dan just want you to explain this.”

  Gerry took out a napkin and handed it to me. On it was drawn a horizon line. Below the line was a circle, the sun of the underworld. Above it was a set of antlers, pointing down.

  I slumped in my high-back chair, a row of The Depletionists staring at me.

  “Sheriff Dan just wants to know if this thingy on the napkin is Indian.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said.

  “It’s an Indian symbol, right?”

  I shook my head. “You mean, is its origin Native American?”

  “A simple yes will do,” Gerry said, then leaned forward, smiling. “I can’t discuss a case in progress, but . . .” He mouthed, Gangs.

  Gangs? I mouthed back.

  “An Indian gang. There’ve been other signs. Beer runs. Vandalism. Some serious joy-rides. All the trouble you’d expect with this new Indian casino.”

  I sat there, shaking my head I don’t believe it, Gerry nodding Believe it.

  “Well, I’ve got all I need here,” Gerry said.

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “Just hold on here.”

  “Gotta go,” he answered, sharpening an imaginary knife again. “Lunchtime.”

  Gerry turned to leave. He began climbing through the boxes that blocked the exit. But then a thought seemed to strike him. He looked back at me. “Hey, before, when I said ‘autopsy’—you didn’t think I was going to do an autopsy on a person, did you?”

  “No, no,” I assured him.

  He was standing on a box of pluvial-silt studies from local late-Pleistocene lakes. It gave him the stature of a full-sized man. He asked, “Then what did you think I was talking about?”

  I had to think fast. “I thought it was a metaphor,” I said.

  Gerry cocked his head. “Right,” he said, “a metaphor.”

  * * *

  Because of an interdisciplinary program in place at the university, my department forced me to teach an occasional class in a related field. I was currently instructing Pop Culture, a course I interpreted as “popular culture through the ages.” We were doing a unit on mid-glaciation lithic figures of the proto-Inuit, and things weren’t going so well. Gerry had rattled me a little, so my lecture was off, and before dissension set in, I decided to show some slides.

  The projector’s rotary tray dropped fertility figure after fertility figure into the light, and I did not narrate the stories behind images I hoped would speak for themselves. On the screen flashed a palm-sized female idol, all breasts and buttocks and belly, the ivory worn dark from rubbing. Next flashed a blackened birthing totem that had, at some point in the last twelve thousand years, been burned. Then came the image of a kneeling woman, etched in obsidian, her almond eyes lowered in contemplation of her swollen abdomen.

  At this same time, three days a week, Trudy taught her Arc-Intro across the hall from me. We both conducted class with our doors open, and though the wooden floors in this building had been replaced with carpet, and the plaster ceiling was now acoustic tile, I occasionally made out bits of her lecture, noted the tone of her voice when her teaching grew passionate, heard when her students chuckled at her jokes.

  As the frames silently clicked forward, I began pacing, keeping an ear tuned for Trudy while timeless female forms lit my room in their advance and retreat. The projector was on auto-repeat.

  “Notice how sexuality and maternity are captured in the same image,” I said to my students when they’d seen enough images to note patterns. “Also observe,” I continued, “how small they are. This is personal, portable, perhaps even mass-produced art. This is the art of a people on the move, a people who, in only a few centuries, traversed three thousand miles of Siberian and Aleutian coastline before populating North America by shooting the gauntlet through the two largest glaciers of the late Pleistocene. Now, that’s an impossible journey,” I added, trying to sound hip.

  “How come the carvings didn’t get more realistic?” a student asked, a young man in back.

  It was hard for me to keep their names straight.

  “They’re more difficult to make than you think,” I said. “But what’s important here is the conservation of culture. These people had a belief system that worked, and their art expressed those beliefs. Experimentation in art happens when old systems of meaning fail and new forms are needed.”

  I paused in the light, the pink marble of a sleep goddess projected on my chest.

  This young man cleared his throat and spoke again.

  “I understand what you’re saying, Dr. Hannah, about their beliefs staying the same. I just think they’d get better at carving. You’re always saying those people are no different than us. Well, I’m a music major, and after the fiddle became popular, we had the Stradivarius within a hundred years.”

  Another voice came from the back of the class, an older man’s. “What Brad’s talking about is simple progress,” he said.

  “Who are you?” I asked.

  “I’m Brad’s father,” he said.

  I went over and turned on the lights. “How long have you been here?”

  “Since the beginning,” he said.

  “Of the semester?” I asked.

  Everyone laughed.

  Brad’s father continued: “I think what Brad’s trying to say is that these fertility people don’t show any signs of progress, which is what sets us apart from the more primitive cultures. There’s a tribe in Borneo that hasn’t even discovered fire, and, you know, we’ve been to the moon.”

  I stopped the slide projector and wound the cord while I took a good look at Brad’s father. He wore a polo shirt and a gold necklace, and you could tell that, despite his hard features, he’d led a soft life. I headed for the lectern, and the students groaned as I placed a foot casually on the podium’s rung. They knew what was coming.

  “That is a thoughtful contribution, sir, but I would modestly propose in response that the concept of progress is a lie. Certainly, technology improves, but the state of being human is constant. When it does change, well, we’ll be something other than human. It is because we don’t change that the Grecian urn speaks to us.”

  My blood was up. I flexed my hand open and closed, then glanced into the hall to see if, in the sliver of her class that I could view from my lectern, Trudy was visible. She wasn’t.

  “Of the twin fallacies of humanity,” I continued, “the first is that people invariably believe they live in times of great change and significance. Eighteenth-century England believed it. The pharaohs believed it. Turn-of-the-millennium America believes it. How about living through a great plague—say, 1348 Europe or 1521 Mayan Mexico. Is that significant? Perhaps a few centuries of bondage for a people? A hundred-year war?”

  Brad’s father sat with his arms crossed.

  “Verdun,” I announced. There was no response. “Birkenau, Bhopal, Black ’47.”

  I eased forward to one of the front desks, which always seemed to be empty, and rested a foot on its seat. “Pompeii,” I said. “Apartheid. If these are times of great significance, why isn’t the hair standing on your arms? And if the Trail of Tears is not such a time, then what is? I ask you—can anything that happens to one part of humanity change the sum of the whole?”

  I whipped off my glasses for effect, a trick they were used to. A lone student produced an exaggerated yawn, and in the blur of the ro
om, I couldn’t make out the culprit. True, I was getting off the topic with my world tour of tragedy, but the students looked ignorant and scared, the desired effect, so I rolled on past plagues and wars and lectured on torturous despots and senseless disasters.

  Yet, after a while, the real truth became evident—the fates of strangers had little impact on us, and I was angry not because I felt connected to anyone in Dresden or Hiroshima, but because I’d witnessed a single disappearance and a single death, and I’d been changed by them. My pity pony wanted to trot the ridge where my pain was visible to those who inhabited both the valley of friends and the mountain of strangers. But you can’t just quit a rant. I’d started something and, like it or not, I had to play it out. I described the backstroke we cut before the waterfall of time, paid some lip service to the bellows of injustice, and finally sketched out the raven of Regret.

  I shook the podium one last time, and, before dismissing class early, admonished them: “All life offers us is the moment. There is only the ravishing spontaneity of being, then nothing more. Moments, people—enhearten them, for they are fleeting.”

  We all waited to see if I was done, including me.

  Then someone asked, “Is that going to be on the final?”

  I was the first one out of the room. A queasiness tightened my ribs, and I stared at my feet as I passed Trudy’s door. But I couldn’t resist glancing in. The desks, as I’d imagined, were empty. Walking down the rows of faculty offices, I endured the looks of cartoon characters taped to teachers’ doors, felt the dour, accusing stares of jazz musicians glaring off tacked-up black-and-white postcards. Moments are fleeting? I sounded as dramatic and fake as the romantic poetry glued to English teachers’ in-boxes. Was “enhearten” even a word?

  At the end of the hall, my office stood open, as it always did, because of those stupid boxes of research. There were raw ice-core data from Greenland and summaries of nitrogen levels in the air pockets of late-Pleistocene volcanic flows. I’d accumulated diatomaceous readings from glacial loaming and summaries of paleo-pollen samples extracted from amber. Junior had started as an appendix, a small response to critics of The Depletionists, a junior answer to their junior minds. But as my critics grew over the years, so did Junior, and now I was looking at constructing a unified-field model, one that incorporated every variable in the disappearance of the Clovis, if I was ever to rescue my reputation.

  I stepped awkwardly over the boxes, adding another set of dirty footprints to these smudged reams. When Peabody was a young professor here, he became fascinated with the ancient petroglyphs lining the canyons around the river. He’d always planned to map those cliff carvings, tracing each one and its relation to the others. Such a comprehensive survey was a big job, but there was no other way to understand the hands that carved them. “I always thought I’d have time,” Peabody told me. “I thought there’d be time.” But he waited too long—they built the dam, and everything was lost underwater.

  What a fool I was. In my office, I grabbed my blizzard overalls and left.

  Winding down the old staircase, I made out Trudy’s voice, faintly at first. She had her whole class crammed into the Hall of Man, and when I crossed the foyer, she was leading a discussion. Her face was visible over most of the students. I glimpsed her shoulders and recalled our dark work last night. Her eyes were serious, and this display of passionate teaching made me suddenly ashamed of the desire that had animated my imagination before sleep last night.

  “That’s a good point,” she was saying to a student, “which brings us to the reason I call this place the Hall of Hoochie. Let’s look at Homo habilis, the earliest hominid represented here. Notice that the person who created this exhibit chose to depict her as lone female. She’s also made older, with droopy features and saggy, flattened breasts. An older ancestor is depicted as an older woman, past child-bearing, and therefore of lesser use.”

  Trudy left behind an artwork of smudges and fingerprints where she’d gestured against the glass, then moved on to the next diorama, in which two Homo erectus females sat next to a fire, suckling, while behind them on the wall Peabody had painted, with an amazing sense of perspective, two men in mid-hunt. This was an exhibit I’d always loved. Peabody had captured the meditative way people stare at flames, and I somehow recognized my own gaze in their eyes, which was the best that anthropology could hope to do—in some small way, connect people to the past.

  Trudy asked, “What message can be gained from this anthropological display?”

  A young woman spoke immediately. “The women are stuck at home with the babies while the men go to work.”

  “They’re kind of fat, too,” a young man added.

  “Big jugs, though,” Trudy amended, “and less hair. Which brings us to Homo sapiens.”

  The whole class shifted over a few steps.

  “Here two males carve spear points,” Trudy pointed out, “while the females lounge like supermodels, one of them sucking on a bone. Their breasts are perfect, bodies lean, and they’re unencumbered by offspring. My favorite is the touch of bouffant to their Pleistocene hairstyles. Anachronistic though their coiffures may be, the message to those who view this exhibit is clear. Males provide. Females consume, and the closer we get to modern times, the more women evolve into sexually desirable and available beings.”

  Trudy turned toward the Clovis display, the place where Peabody had housed nearly every major Clovis artifact he’d discovered, and I decided to move on before Peabody’s life’s work took another blow. But before I could move, Trudy and I locked eyes. She kept speaking to her class, but her gaze was directed at me. “Beyond the sexism, I ask you to notice the Nordic features these Clovis are imbued with. I needn’t remind you that when we speak of the Clovis we’re talking about the original Asian Invasion. And, of course, all of humanity came from Africa. In the end, this exhibit is more about the Northern European male who created it than the culture he thought he was depicting.”

  I stomped down the stairs. Near the front entrance, I leaned against a vending machine and pulled on my blizzard overalls. My shoe wouldn’t go through the pant leg, and I hopped, frustrated, in place. Had I taught my graduate students no respect? Had they learned from me to mock their predecessors? I fell against the gaudy machine and nearly tore my pants.

  The process shook a Snickers down from one of the racks, and I pocketed the candy bar.

  Outside, the weather was changing again. Above, like a bank of fog, a snow front was baby-crawling toward us, like the drunk who would have to spend the night. I set off to find Eggers and his “bad news,” but my mind conjured the way Peabody had once described the sandstorms that swept across North Africa, weighty curtains of wind, laden with gypsum and bone dust and clay, these storms that hid Rommel.

  Before he retired to Florida, Peabody and I spent some time in the field, walking old riverbeds and alluvial terrain. On such excursions, he described the great sites of Alexandria, of Egypt and the sub-Nile. This, to a person who as a boy, when his house felt lifeless, went down by the park and used a stick to wheedle through old Lakota mounds. There was nothing left of value, of course, but with every shard of stone or flute of bone, my imagination took one more step into a past world where a family like mine got along fine without soap operas, insurance meetings, and sales junkets. In this world, when a father went off across the plains to trade, his goodbye meant something, because he might not return, and he’d have to use every skill in his power to ensure he didn’t let his family down. And in this other mother’s eyes were signs she considered the unthinkable every time he left; in that way, he could never really leave her.

  So I was a sucker for Peabody’s khaki pants and walking stick, his head of swaggering gray hair. He was a man of the field, restless in the classroom, perhaps restless in South Dakota, but he wasn’t leaving this place without a legacy. Like my own father, Peabody was probably a loner at heart, but he spoke my language and paid attention to me. In the semester between my arrival a
nd his departure, Peabody dropped in on my digs and looked over my shoulder, out of sheer curiosity and camaraderie. He asked my opinion. He approved of my book. So, after his Hawaiian-shirt retirement party, and his plane flight to Tampa, when we never heard from him again, not even a postcard, it was in the Hall of Man that I felt he resided. I’ve tried to picture him on a Floridian pier, fishing in that blue aloha shirt we gave him, cigar in mouth, but I can’t really conjure it. He must be over eighty now, most likely dead, and I suspect I’ll never know his fate. But as you pick through the bones of the past, you have to keep in mind that you’ll never really know another human’s story. The point of anthropology is not discovery, but learning to tolerate the unknown.

  By the time I reached Eggers’ lodge, the first flakes were dropping—so heavy and thick they seemed to stand in the air and let their shadows fall. Eggers didn’t exactly have a doorbell, and there was no place to knock. I cleared my throat a couple times. There was a rustling around inside, and then Eggers emerged.

  “I’ve been waiting for you, Dr. Hannah. You won’t believe what I’m going to show—” Eggers stopped and stared at me. “You okay, Dr. Hannah? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

  His long hair was completely frizzed from the bath that morning, and his skin whistled of Irish Spring. But in his eye I detected genuine concern.

  “Oh, I was just getting nostalgic,” I said. “The past is a trap, my young friend, and we should only go there armed with shovels and torches.”

  “Sure,” Eggers said, “sure.”

  He was nodding his head, but the look of concern hadn’t gone away.

  Suddenly the flap to his lodge opened, and a young woman appeared, face sooty. Her parka was wide open. She didn’t suppress her smile.

  “See ya, Brent,” she said, and dashed off through the snow.

  We didn’t say anything for a moment. Then I put a hand on Eggers’ bison poncho. “I understand that you’ve got this technology pact, but you are using condoms, aren’t you?”