Parasites Like Us

by Adam Johnson

  “Remains?” Trudy asked.

  “In situ,” I said.

  “Where?”

  “I’ll show you. Out by the casino.”

  Trudy picked up her briefcase. She grabbed her coat.

  “Hey, hey,” my father said, “what’s going on here? What about the Red Dakotan?”

  “You don’t mind if we take a rain check, do you?” Trudy asked, and I realized she’d seen through his little ruse all along. “Or, better yet, why don’t you come along?”

  “I don’t dig,” Dad said.

  Trudy said, “My car’s downstairs, Dr. Hannah. We’ll stop by my dorm so I can change and grab my digging gear.”

  “Eggers wants to excavate with primitive technology,” I told her.

  “Like hell,” she said.

  In a courtly manner, Dad said to Trudy, “A rain check it is.” Thank God he didn’t try to kiss her hand.

  The two of us took the old elevator down, cinching our coats as cold air rushed us through the open, scrolled metal-work of its walls. Old checkered floors whisked by, and you could have kissed the counterweight as it swooshed past. In the underground garage was Trudy’s GTO. The quarter panels had all been patched with Bondo, much of which had fallen off, and the whole undercarriage was crummy with rust. She was planning on fixing it up and giving it a cherry paint job, but till then, the gray coat of primer was hand-painted with details of cave art. Grand on the hood was the same symbol she’d drawn in blood: a red horizon, the low-slung sun, and those antlers, pointing down.

  It took a while for Trudy to fire the engine up. I knew the sound of a souped-up GTO; I kept waiting for that joyous GTO rumble, but all I heard was the grind of the starter.

  “Sorry,” Trudy said. “The flywheel’s missing a few teeth.”

  When the motor caught, I felt more sorry for it than anything. Blue smoke started filling the garage, yet we had to wait there, choking, till the thing warmed up. Finally, we groaned out of the smoke and, lacking any real suspension, were pitched sideways as we pulled out of the garage. You could hear the wild jangle of Trudy’s tools being thrown in the trunk.

  I waited in the car while Trudy grabbed her gear and changed. Then we hit the road, heading out of town on the same road Eggers and I had walked. In the dark, we passed empty fields where the ridges of buried corn rows were echoed in the snow, making the pastures seem raked with black and indigo. Near the casino, we scanned the fields for Eggers. One fire burned out there, small as a tiger moth against the night. It had to be Eggers. I shuddered to think of him alone and angry as he took counsel with a litter of poached animal skins and an open grave.

  Trudy parked the GTO on the side of the road, under the “Phase II” casino sign. We could make out a figure by the feeble fire, stirring it with a twig.

  “That must be him,” I said to Trudy.

  “Let’s do it,” she responded.

  We got out and walked a few steps down the embankment. But I stopped. I’d almost convinced myself that I wanted to come out here, but Eggers’ sullen silhouette reminded me this was just a ruse to thwart my father.

  “Why don’t we get a drink up at the casino first?” I offered.

  “Didn’t you say this was a Clovis site, in situ?”

  I nodded.

  “What’s wrong with you, Dr. Hannah?” Trudy asked. “This is the Holy Grail. This is what anthropologists dream about. If I wanted a drink, I’d be at the Red Dakotan right now, being leered at.”

  I looked at Eggers out there, feeling abandoned and needy. I’d dealt with one father tonight. I thought, Let Eggers deal with his.

  “I’m going to take a rain check, too,” I said. With that I showed her my back, then crunched off into the snow, walking through slush and grit toward the neon glow of the casino.

  The Thunderbird parking lot, when I entered it, was beyond full: vehicles stretched horizonward in orderly rows, industrial lights muting their paint jobs to variations on blue, the frost making windshields appear yellowy and sandblasted.

  Inside, the bartender was a lean young man from the Tribe. He wore heavy glasses that were partly obscured by bangs, and as if in acknowledgment of the poison he was handling, he poured my drink carefully, holding it directly in front of his face.

  He set my bourbon on the bar, gave change in gaming chips. “Party on, Dr. Hannah,” he said and returned to folding some napkins. The kid’s name tag said “Tommy.” I figured he must be a former student. In khakis and a polo shirt, with that haircut all the boys wear, he could have drifted through any of my classes.

  “Party on, Tommy,” I said.

  I set off across the casino floor, where scores of people, transfixed as if by fire, crowded around gaming tables, three and four deep. Green and illustrated, the tables resembled small sports fields, above which hung round lights that illuminated glowing cones of cigarette smoke. I moved like a ghost—all eyes were focused on the turning cards—while smoky clouds rose toward the lights as if being sucked.

  Here were all the missing people from Parents Weekend—students and out-of-towners, teachers and administrators, as well as local folk, from farmers and aldermen to barbers and prison guards. They sat with their backs to me, yet I was greeted by colognes and perfumes, by a matrix of smells who’d left their original owners: the creamy stink of hog tallow, the tanky musk of a grain silo, and the pink ammonia of aircraft de-icing fluid.

  I came upon a table at which only one man sat. He wore a warm-up suit cut from fabric so fleecy and sheened it obviously cost hundreds of dollars, while his wife stood behind in a T-shirt spangled with gold. His jowls were ruddy, his manner was expansive and chatty, and on his finger was a grand square-cut diamond. A passionless dealer attended him, and their parlay was conducted in black chips—a huge denomination, I assumed.

  Immediately, I imagined them as Eggers’ parents, people who swooped into town to yuck it up with billionaire friends in prison, but couldn’t resist kissing off a couple pillowcases of cash at the casino before choppering on to paint the next town red. All while ignoring their son.

  Childs and Lizzie Eggers, I named them, though they could easily have been Reece and Sabrina or Lattie and Pearl. I looked at their bloated excess, and the irony struck me that these were the real Clovis: people who used for themselves the resources of many, who exploited their environment to depletion, and, once everything they wanted was gone, would skip town. I felt sorry for Eggers at this moment. The boy was a romantic, his dissertation an exercise in nostalgia. Eggers was no Clovis. The Clovis took and took and took, leaving six hundred generations of descendants to fend for themselves in an impoverished world, a place without horses to ride, elephants to tame, or camels to burden.

  “Childs” laughed deep at the turn of a card, and “Lizzie” raked the chips for him. I wanted to throw my drink on these fat cats, but there wasn’t much left, and they surely weren’t Eggers’ parents. Like I had the guts anyway.

  I examined my glass of icy bourbon. I hadn’t drunk this much in years, yet I didn’t feel a thing. Why didn’t the damn stuff work?

  Then something on the other side of the casino caught my eye. Through an acre of lights, I noticed a flicker, beckoning me. I cruised through rows of slot machines, squatting like silver monkeys before the old people who tormented them, and I followed runners of red carpet until I reached another bar, a horseshoe of padded booths below a cul-de-sac of windows. Through them, I could see a ring of fire in a distant, frozen field. I neared until my face entered that layer of biting air that always hugs glass in winter.

  Eggers had five fires gong out there, the flames making the snow incandesce a sooty orange that penetrated the powder, traveling under the surface till it dulled pale yellow. Or were there six fires? The flames seemed to sway, separate themselves, rejoin as one. Could be a trick of the wind, I thought. Or maybe the bourbon had kicked in.

  I held up my glass, ice winking. “I’m sorry I doubted you,” I said.

  I became aware of someone
staring at me; in the window, I could make out the reflection of a woman at the bar. When I turned, she turned, but not before I recognized her—it was Julie, from the art show. She feigned interest in her drink, a fuzzy colada or something.

  She sat, hip ajut, on a red bar stool, looking very available in a foofy blouse, black leather skirt, and dark hose. Peeping from her handbag was an issue of Horticulture Today.

  Hers was the sole face I recognized in the entire casino, and despite her flinty knees and frizzed-out hair, I needed to be near someone, so I went to her.

  “Julie,” I said, taking the next stool.

  “Get lost,” she told me.

  Her eyes narrowed to dismiss me. Her accent was strong—“Gyet loss.”

  “Julie, please,” I said. “We’re academics here. Let’s be civil. Let’s talk.”

  “It is Dr. Nivitski to you,” she said. “You have been drinking much.”

  She leaned away and waved her hand—what, from my breath?

  “Perhaps I looked like a bit of a cad earlier,” I said. “But I can explain.”

  She slurped the bottom of her drink. “When I saw you in the art gallery, I am thinking, He is sort of cute, he is my type. But I am wrong. You are like the rest.”

  She set aside her glass as if to leave, and I felt a pang run through me.

  “Please,” I said. “Stay. Let me get you another drink.”

  It was maybe not the best thing to say.

  Julie’s eyes widened in outrage—she had fire in her.

  “So pathetic, your tricks,” she said. “I am not the rube. You are the rube.”

  She scooted over to the next stool, showing some serious thigh as she did. I was left with her empty glass.

  “Julie,” I implored, “just listen to my side of the story.”

  “Julie? I am in disgust of you,” she said. “You do not listen. I am a doctor, and I will have you know that I have traveled around the world, all the way from Vlotovnya, to rid myself of a man such as yourself.”

  I moved to the stool beside her.

  She stood to leave.

  A current of panic went through me. I needed to explain that I did like corn, that lima beans were important, that it was wrong of me to walk out on her.

  “Don’t go,” I said.

  She reached for her bag. “I have a self-defense spray,” she said.

  I dared not speak as she pulled on her rabbit-fur coat.

  She took her sweet time shouldering the bag. “I am leaving now, and you will stay away from me. Tomorrow I lecture, then return to North Dakota, and I never see you again.”

  She casually left the bar, exaggerating the toss of her hips, and, without looking back, turned the corner into the casino.

  I wandered the gaming floor in a kind of daze—dealers pushed chips across bolts of green felt, waitresses lofted trays of small dirty glasses, and an old man accidentally activated his panic button. It seemed everyone in the world was here, bumping me, talking loudly, knuckling me with their breath, jabbing me with elbows of body odor. Everyone was here but the people who mattered.

  In a scene out of the Old Testament, I watched as old people lined up to spin a great wheel. Their heads slowly turned as they watched the word “Cadillac” circle past, and the thing I couldn’t stop thinking about was Julie’s husband, ditched on the other side of the world. I named him Ivan, and I figured he and Julie had been professors in the same Soviet agriculture department. The poor bastard, I thought, stuck in some Siberian icebox of a university, wondering where was his Julie. His office probably reeked of untold test tubes of pollen samples and crawled with a zillion spore cultures. I pictured him driving one of those sad, communist-made Ladas. What scared me, though, what made my knees go weak with speculation, was the way Julie was certain that Ivan deserved to be left, that he just wasn’t good enough to merit her presence. This is what sent me looking for fresh air, though I wasn’t fast enough. Before I even reached the casino doors, I was thinking about my mother.

  Outside, the cold hitched in my lungs, and it seemed the backhand of winter had struck while I was inside: a dry, fuzzy frost coated cars whose bellies dripped black icicles, while the panels of pickups appeared haloed, their iced-over fenders glowing gray in the stupor of industrial lights. I tromped past a tour bus dieseling in the dark, its driver reading a paperback by the running lights, and as I walked between rows of cars, the night became quieter and blacker, and all the more cold for it. It was on a night like this that my mother broke her leg, and I had always thought that it was those weeks of housebound convalescence that gave her an opportunity to rethink her life, that allowed longing and regret to take hold. Some great adventure called to her, I’d always assumed. Something out there completed her, and without it she could never be happy. This is what sent her down our driveway, swinging aluminum crutches.

  The truth is certainly less romantic: at some point, my mother realized she’d married a small-town rogue, and, sitting at home with an elevated leg, she must have also understood how needy and fearful her son truly was. She seemed happy during her convalescence. She had me dramatize scenes from my Marley’s Great Moments in History reader. She volunteered to play the instrument-handing assistant in my chemistry-set experiments. Yet I realize now that some part of her wasn’t really there. She knew she was about to leave, and as she orated Cleopatra’s lines, as she handed me the beaker of sulfur, her imagination had surely made the advance passage.

  I made my way among the cars, turning sideways to squeeze between recreational vehicles that filled six spaces apiece. You could feel the slope of the blacktop here, and runnels of salt water cut through the tire-packed snow, making their way toward the storm drains ahead. I would never get my mother back. I knew that. Even if I found her—and I wasn’t looking—you don’t just make up thirty years. All I wanted to know were the details of her life. What color were her fingernails, and did she still bite them? Did she like anchovies? Did she still wear that amber ring?

  The stars shone clear and stark. Out in the far reaches of the lot, I began wondering what had become of all sorts of people. Where was Jim Toggleson, my lab partner from school? Where was Susan Preston, who tutored me in statistics and always stapled tracts on Mormonism to the homework she returned? If you don’t know what became of someone, if you don’t attend a person’s funeral or hear word from a friend of a friend, these persons who float from our lives attain a kind of immortality, always hovering around the next corner. By closing your eyes, you can attach to them any set of attributes: the various chairs he reclines in, the soda she might sip from, the dreams they have of you they can’t remember in the morning. This brings me to life’s great paradox: for someone to truly be a part of you—to live in your thoughts, roaming your memory and vision, occupying planes of hope, nostalgia, and speculation in your mind—he or she must be wholly inaccessible to you.

  Twin corrugated pipes jutted from the end of the asphalt, and I followed the sound of black water to their mouths. In the dark, I lowered myself down an embankment and began walking toward Eggers’ fires, my legs sinking in powder that refused to pack. I thought I heard the plush thumps of an owl’s wings as it ghosted the snow for white rabbits. Is there a spookier sound? There have been many nights in the years since that I have heard such wings and doubted they’re truly extinct. I began walking faster, kicking my feet free from deeper snow; suddenly I ran into a three-wire fence.

  It bounced me backward, landing me flat in the snow. I sunk into the powder, my breath rising, and then, clear and obvious as the stars above, I had a vision of the afterlife of Homo sapiens: I saw a galactic ice sheet so vast and barren that, stumbling through the cold, you might only encounter another soul once in a lifetime. But this is eternity, a billion lifetimes, and though you walk endlessly alone, eventually you’ll cross paths with everyone you lost touch with, every person who stood beside you in a grocery line, every distant uncle and forgotten friend, every human that’s ever been. You walk and walk
and fall and walk again, and when, at last, you near the warmth of another human heart, regardless of their race or language, age or appearance, you clutch them for all you’re worth.

  The stars looked away from me.

  Then I realized a face was staring down, oily and fire-blacked.

  “Dr. Hannah,” Eggers said. “I knew you’d change your mind.”

  When my eyes came into focus, I asked, “What are you doing here?”

  “You were yelling for me,” he said. “I came running.”

  Eggers helped me out of the snow. He threw an arm around me.

  “I’m warming Keno,” he said as we made for the fires. “Soon those tired bones will sit right up, and maybe he’ll tell us a scary story.”

  Trudy was sitting by the fires. “Did you get that drink, Dr. Hannah?” she asked.

  I sat where Eggers had a large, matted skin spread across the thawing mud.

  “Trudy’s finally taken me up on an invitation to spend the night,” Eggers said.

  “The GTO’s out of commission again,” Trudy said. “It might just be the throw-out bearing, but I won’t know till I drop the tyranny. I removed the license plates, which keeps the wreckers from towing you right away.”

  The ground was steaming. I reclined. My whole body relaxed in the old fur.

  Eggers squatted beside me, crossing his legs. His face was exuberant, glowing with firelight. “I’ve been doing some thinking,” he said.

  “If you ever held any esteem for my opinion,” I said, “you will quit this farce of science.”

  “This is serious,” he said. “Wait till you hear this.”

  I asked him, “You didn’t go see your parents, did you? You didn’t listen to me.”

  Eggers endured my entreaty, smiling. “Ready?” he asked.

  He gestured a large headline in the air above us. “Pleistocene World,” he said.

  Trudy said, “You’re going to love this one, Dr. Hannah. Talk about half baked.”

  I reclined across the fur, tuning the boy out. Part of me was still on that galactic ice sheet, and I let my eyes go heavy with it. With focus, I might return.