Parasites Like Us

by Adam Johnson

  I polished off most of my wine and made for the back door, averting my eyes from paintings that invariably included eagle feathers, trusty palominos, and cloudy-eyed braves with washboard stomachs. I was almost to the exit when a woman stepped right into my path. To keep from knocking her over, I put a hand out for balance, and it landed on her shoulder.

  “Careful,” she said as I juggled my glass, nearly sloshing wine on her.

  I felt the cool, silvery fur of her coat, which was made from a patchwork of rabbit pelts, and, realizing I’d let my hand linger a moment too long, I pulled back. She had pale, pale skin and dark hair, and her eyebrows lifted in a wry way, as if my touching her was a gesture so unexpectedly forward that she found it entertaining.

  “Sorry,” I told her. “You okay?”

  She smoothed the collar of her coat, then checked the state of her own wine. She regarded me over the rim of her glass, as if deciding what to do with me, and after finishing the last sip of white, she narrowed her eyes as if she’d made a decision, though something told me this look was for my benefit, that she’d made a decision before she crossed my path.

  “You must really love this painting,” she said. “But there is room enough for everyone to enjoy the artwork without running people over.”

  The way she unabashedly appraised me was commanding—there was some hunter in this woman—and though she was too skinny for my taste, though her posture was pitiful, something rose in me, and I decided to see where things might lead.

  “What painting?” I asked.

  “This painting,” she said. “This painting is not so bad.”

  She pointed toward a large canvas, on which was a simple depiction: in a hammock made from an American flag, a woman snoozed under a blue stand of summer sun, surrounded by an atoll of prairie grass.

  “The other paintings have too many people in them,” she said. “It is my experience that people come and go. I prefer landscapes.”

  There was a slight honk to her voice, and an accent I couldn’t quite place.

  She turned toward me, as if for my opinion, and the downy rabbit fur made her seem charged somehow, made me want to study the portrait more closely. Looking deeper, I saw how delicately the artist had captured the carefree recumbence of a woman in slumber: the way an ankle hangs in the air, how light cascades through hair, making it look as if the hammock swung with the wind.

  But I didn’t want to seem uncritical, either.

  I shook my head in minor disgust. “The artist seems completely unschooled in the depiction of mountainscapes,” I told her, pointing at the brown bumps on the painting’s horizon. “I suppose these are supposed to be the igneous formations common to local grasslands. The work is not without merit, however. I like the way the flag cradles the woman and rocks her to sleep. It lacks the irony that ruins the other pictures for me.”

  “Perhaps,” she said, smiling. “Observe, however, that the hammock is strung between two saplings. These are birch trees, very brittle. And there is wind. I predict the woman will soon be on the ground. Though the artist may not intend this. It is my opinion that people rarely know their flora.”

  Now I studied her more closely. Again, she was not my type, but I noticed how full her lips were, how her eyelids lowered when she spoke. “I don’t believe I’ve seen you before,” I said. “What brings you to USSD? Parents Weekend?”

  She said, “Tomorrow I deliver an academic paper. This I have been with fever to finish. Now is time for personal amusement.”

  “Really?” I put my hand out. “I’m Henry.”

  “People call me Julie,” she said, though she didn’t shake.

  I took a step closer. “So, Julie. What’s the topic of your paper?”

  “Corn.”

  “Corn?”

  “Well, corn mostly. There is some talk of beans, especially the lima.”

  There was a silence. I scratched the back of my neck.

  “How fascinating,” I said, nodding. “The lima is one of my favorite beans. What’s your thesis?”

  “There is no actual thesis. The paper is a summary of early migration and cultivation of Mesoamerican starches. I teach the history of agriculture at the University of Northwestern North Dakota.”

  I nearly spat up my drink. I’d gone to UNND once on the lecture circuit. Talk about the middle of nowhere.

  “I know this is not a glamorous university,” she said, pulling out a tube of nasal spray. “But where else may I do my research? North Dakota is also kind to my allergies, and the countryside reminds me of home.”

  “No, no, corn is fascinating,” I said.

  She proceeded to block a nostril before administering a whopping blast of saline spray. She then craned her head back to let it penetrate.

  She stood there a moment, eyes watering, and I grabbed her empty wineglass.

  “Here, let me freshen this for you,” I said, and beat it across the gallery, into the hall, and out the back door to the parking lot. The old “refill” move was one of my smarmy maneuvers from those dark Depletionists days, and it shamed me how easily it came back.

  I ditched the plastic wineglasses in the snow and made for the van. Before I’d even found the right key, I looked over my shoulder to that helicopter, silently looming in the dark snow. Through the smoked bubble glass of its windows, I thought I saw the glow of a cigarette burning, like the tiny red brain behind the eyes of a giant insect. It was probably just a blinking instrument light, but the thought that Eggers’ parents could be sitting comfortably inside such a craft while their son walked alone made me want to go up and pound their windows. Yet what would I say to Eggers’ parents? What had I ever said to my own?

  I climbed in the van and drove to the old Odd Fellows building, where my father now lived. Downtown, the commotion of Glacier Days seemed to roost in the trees—lights shot grotesque shadows high on brick buildings, and the mixing sounds of humans and carnival machinery keened through the streets. The midway throbbed near the gates—that huge 4-H building outlined beyond—and the plunge of a coaster sent a shiver through me. I would forever hear in any scream that skittish, porcine whine.

  The Parkton chapter of the Independent Order of Odd Fellows had gone the way of the Masons and the Moose and the Elks. The customs and rituals of their aging members were dying with them, and their brick buildings were now being parceled into apartments. I parked in the street and entered through the great hall, its wide expanse still filled with the same red couches, elbow-worn and smoke-darkened. I made for the elevators across a marble floor inset with a ring of the order’s symbols: the lamb and rod, pyramid and sun, eye and rook. In the center was an owl, body facing away, head swiveled back to eye you.

  Instead of numbers, the elevator had buttons that read “Mezzanine” (which housed all the social halls), “Lodging,” “Executive Council,” and then a final, unmarked black button that brought me to the top floor, where all the order’s secret business had once been conducted. This was where my father lived, in a loft converted from their former initiation room.

  His apartment had a massive, reinforced door, hung on industrial hinges. Instead of a key lock, it opened with a large combination wheel, the kind you see on safes. He never locked it, though. He’d repeat some insurance-industry baloney about more people dying from fires than from burglaries, but this door bothered him, and even though I knew the secret combo, it was always open. Did he hear his own heartbeat when it was locked? Did it speak of the crypt? I placed my palms on the door, felt the faint rumor of music vibrating within, and then swung it open to a sight I have never forgotten:

  The apartment was a large studio with a high, vaulted ceiling that arced from wall to wall, firmamentlike, and my father was in the middle of the room steadying the base of a ladder, head craned back, looking straight up a woman’s skirt as if contemplating the mystery of the heavens. Dad wore a loose double-breasted suit and sipped a gimlet almost phosphorescent with lime. His head bobbed with the beat of a rumba, and
as I followed his look of conjectural joy up the rungs of the ladder, I realized the woman was Trudy, stocking-footed in a black, skintight cocktail dress, straining atop the steps to inspect the ceiling. Her rhinestone earrings were shimmering, and in her hand, a cosmopolitan glowed as opaque-pink as Chinese jade. Beads of water condensed on the glass—when a drop ran down the stem and fell on my father’s forehead, he closed his eyes and smiled.

  Then Dad noticed me. He turned away from Trudy’s powerful legs, and in his eyes was not so much surprise, or even shame, as the sparkle of a challenge.

  “There you are, my boy,” he said. “We’ve been waiting for you.”

  Trudy smiled down, surprised to see me. “Hey, your father said you were going to meet us later, at dinner,” she said. “God, have you seen this ceiling?”

  I walked closer. With each step, my view began to resemble my father’s, until I, too, stood under Trudy, an arm’s reach from the mid-thigh cut of her dress, beholding the way her tidy breasts rose with each breath. I could feel my lungs constrict. I hadn’t seen a woman’s body in some time. In winter, women wore everything from parkas and pantaloons to sweaters and socks. After entering a building, they’d remove a powder jacket, blizzard bibs, a long coat, and a scarf, only to reveal they were dressed in fabrics like flannel and denim, with the bitter promise of long johns below. So, as Trudy stepped down from the ladder, I could see perfectly outlined in Lycra the powerful breadth of her back, her padded torso, and then those hips—articulated, capable, thick with possibility.

  My father smiled. “Bourbon, right?” he asked as he folded the ladder.

  “Sure,” I said, only half hearing him. “Trudy, what are you doing here?”

  Dad carried the ladder off across a room furnished only with a stereo on a stool, a set of chairs—black leather, chrome tubing—and a Japanese screen that cordoned off a makeshift bedroom. He leaned the ladder in a corner and made steam for his “bar”—a line of bottles along the windowsill.

  “Well,” Trudy said, scooching her dress back into place. “Your father said our reservations got pushed back at the Red Dakotan, so we decided to have a drink in the meantime.”

  “Reservations, at the Red Dakotan?” I asked.

  “Look,” she said, “I know I kind of blew off our lunch yesterday, and I guess I owe you an apology for that. I wasn’t sure about this fellowship thing, but I checked with the USSD Foundation, and it’s for real. I feel pretty stupid. I mean, once I talked to your father, it was obvious how interested he was in my dissertation. I brought some of my research abstracts, and he was really into them.” She nodded to her briefcase on the floor. “Then I saw this ceiling. Have you seen this thing? I could write a whole paper on it. It’s a complete history of an all-male secret society, half of it in code. I bet I’m the first woman who’s ever set foot in this room.”

  I didn’t say anything to that.

  Trudy went on to describe how the entire ceiling was covered with finely printed initiation rosters, membership rolls, and codes of male behavior, but I refused to look up. It was to her briefcase that my eyes were drawn. I’d never seen it before. It was simple and businesslike, with a faux gold handle and spring-loaded hasps, the kind your aunts and uncles chip in for when you go off to college. It spoke of the dreams of many, riding on the success of one, and knowing that it was filled with all of Trudy’s ideas made the bourbon in my stomach flare.

  “Trudy,” I said in a stern whisper, “can’t you see the way my father’s leering at you? He doesn’t care about your ideas. Looks like I came over just in time.”

  “Oh, please, Dr. Hannah,” she said. “Remember my master’s thesis topic?” She put a hand on her hip.

  “Sure, sure,” I said. “You compared symbolism in tribal tattoos to gang tattoos.”

  “I’ve walked the entire length of Sec-Ward in Angola Prison. I took five hundred Polaroids in Marion Penitentiary.” She cocked her head and looked at me. “Don’t think I don’t know when a man is leering at me, Dr. Hannah,” she said.

  “Ice?” Dad called to us, clicking a set of tongs over a silver bucket. It was a rhetorical question. Beyond him, in the window, spread the blanketing flicker of town, bordered by the ropy dark of the river valley. Past that was Hormel’s flashing smokestack and the sodium glow of Parkton Prison. In my mind, I began following Trudy down cellblocks made from epoxy-sealed cement and bars painted maritime-green. I imagined her walking past inmate after inmate without fear, even as they pointed their wrought hands and small mirrors at her.

  “All I’m saying,” I told her, “is thank God I came over when I did.”

  “This fellowship is for real, isn’t it?”

  “Of course.”

  “So I’m ready for my dinner at the Red Dakotan.”

  Dad cruised back with a bourbon and a business envelope. I took the drink as he showed the envelope to Trudy. On it, in script, was written “Gertrude Labelle.”

  “It’s empty, of course,” he told her. “The real fellowship check will come in the mail from the University Foundation, but this is what the dean will present you in front of the photographer at dinner tonight.”

  “Dean?” I asked.

  There would be no photographer. The dean was not coming. It was even an accident that I showed up—Dad had ditched me, asking me to wait all night at a place he wouldn’t show, so he could scheme an intimate dinner with Trudy.

  But there was no way to tell Trudy this—the excitement was unmistakable on her face; she beamed at the prospect of real recognition. I knew what a library basement was. I’d done time with carbon paper and computer punch cards. And I’d come to understand that the only real reward you got was the respect of your mentors and peers, that, years later, it could all come down to a colleague like Peabody saying something as simple as Well done. This was how you learned to respect your own work, after years of doubt, and it sickened me that my father would exploit this in the name of a stepladder peep show and the longshot of nooky.

  Oh, that cocky smile of his.

  A sip of bourbon gave my voice the timbre of false concern.

  “Gosh, Dad,” I said, “the dean might be pretty busy with Parents Weekend and all. We might want to give him a call to confirm.”

  Dad threw me a disapproving glance—it said, Hey, now. Work with me here.

  “Let me use your phone,” I told him. “I’ve got his private number.”

  “No need to call the dean,” Dad said. “If he says he’ll be there, he’ll be there.”

  “Never hurt to check,” I said. “It’s an important night.”

  Dad waved this off. “Why bother the man? We’ll see him soon enough.”

  Trudy looked with wonder from me to Dad and back. She assumed a nasal, documentarian’s voice. “The alpha males lock horns over the feeding ritual,” she narrated. “Has the presence of a female threatened their respective roles?” Dad and I didn’t say anything. He just nodded toward the screened-off bedroom, where the phone was. I had no intention of calling the dean, a man I’d personally seen fire a toothless poetry professor just to get his parking spot.

  My father’s room consisted of a small chest, a bed made with crisp black sheets, and a window with a view of the carnival. I grabbed the phone’s handset and lay on his bed, extending my legs down its black comforter, heavy and stiff as canvas. Beside me, on the pillow, lay a flower, presumably for Trudy’s sniffing pleasure. Above, an owl, body facing away, looked back at me from a metal plate set in the ceiling. Here and there on the walls, you could see vague symbols and writing ghosting from under the fresh white paint.

  I stared at the ceiling a moment, listening to the murmur of Dad and Trudy talking. Their exact words were lost in all that space, yet it seemed natural that people should feel close and far at the same time. Then I examined the phone’s amber-glowing keypad. I was about to call Information to get the number for the Red Dakotan, to see what kind of reservation my father had made, but I already knew the truth: he’d booked
a table for two. Instead, I pressed the redial button, which would call the last person my father had contacted. The line rang and rang until a woman answered. “Gi-Gi’s Go-Liquor,” she said. I hung up.

  There was a set of speed-dialing buttons. The first one was programmed for Shanghai Express. “Sweet and sour, half an hour,” was their greeting. Other buttons connected me with Speedy Taco, White Glove Laundry, and an establishment called Bam-Bam’s. My phone number wasn’t there.

  Then, for reasons I can’t explain, I dialed their old number, Dad and Janis’. A recorded voice told me the party I was attempting to reach was no longer available. The message repeated, without urgency, and nothing seemed reconcilable: I couldn’t imagine my father sleeping by himself, under these black sheets. Nor could I conjure him sleeping with Trudy, obviously the climax of his pathetic plan. And here I was, in my father’s bed alone, waiting for inspiration like so many Odd Fellow initiates who had come through this room, young men who knew nothing more than that the black button in the elevator had finally been pushed, the combination wheel spun, and here they were, on the cusp of secret knowledge, with the promise of unconditional acceptance ahead. Above them, the owl who sees tomorrow looked knowingly back.

  When I returned, I decided to trump my father’s little plan.

  I took a lick of bourbon, cedary and sweet. “Turns out the dean can’t make it,” I said.

  “Well, looks like it’s just the three of us, then,” Dad said, eyeing me.

  “Except that something else has come up,” I said. I turned to Trudy. “Remember Eggers’ little Clovis point from last night?”

  We were immediately locked in our own nuanced world, one that excluded my father as much as he wanted to exclude me from his “Awards Dinner.”

  “Of course,” Trudy said.

  “Well, Eggers showed me where he found it. And there’s more where that came from.”