Parasites Like Us

by Adam Johnson

  “Get this,” Eggers said. “We reintroduce tigers, elephants, sloths, and so on, maybe in some kind of park, or maybe just wild. Tourists go crazy for this stuff—lions chasing camels, here in South Dakota. Can you believe it? We’d get a tram, maybe.”

  “How about a gondola?” Trudy said.

  “There’d be giant bears everywhere, and maybe, in ten thousand years, things will have taken their course, things will be back the way they were before.”

  “Before what?” I asked, pulling an animal skin over me.

  “You know, before,” he said. “What do you think, Dr. Hannah?”

  “Sounds like you’re talking about a zoo.”

  “A zoo is where you store animals that are going extinct. Sticking an animal in a zoo means you’ve given up on it. My idea is the opposite of depletion. I’m talking about repletion.” His face shifted gears. “No, no, wait. How about Pleistocene Times? That has a ring, no?”

  Eggers went on and on, describing Pleistocene Whatever in great detail, with Trudy plugging in her two cents, both of them slumber-party punchy. I pulled the skin close around my face—it smelled of both the human and animal worlds. From this window of fur, the casino was reduced to a hypnotic plane of light, high-strung and out of focus. In the Cretaceous period, a meteor traveling twenty-one kilometers per second eradicated 93 percent of life on earth. Mammals at that time were nocturnal, burrowing rodents, so when the sky turned blue-white with fire they were safely underground, happy to snooze through the resulting nuclear winter.

  When I was at the edge of sleep, cocooned in dark fur, my eyes opened and closed, focusing on a bleary mobile of flame, stars, and casino lights. How alluring the night sky must have been to our tunneling ancestors, to whom the only glimmer on earth was a snatch of starscape, glimpsed on a nightly foray. Their fossilized nests exist today still packed with ancient shiny things—teeth, micalike flakes of petrified scales, and hardened, amberized corneas, all scavenged from billions of newly dead dinosaurs—proof we have always been attracted to flashy things, that we were born to dig graves and line them with souvenirs of the dead.

  Chapter Four

  In the dream, I am walking through valleys replete with white, save for a few lichen-covered boulders and an occasional island of frozen grass whose brown tufts poke from the snow. Iced-over saplings lean one way, then another, in the meter of the wind, and I watch as a shaggy ground sloth, big as a backhoe, lumbers up to an extinct Uinta tree. Using its stumpy tail, it rears up to strip the top branches, and when its black claws get behind the bark and tear, it sounds like husking corn.

  I traverse ice hummocks and pressure ridges. Though I am in an unknown land, I move under the illusion that below the fresh powder are unseen sets of old footprints, showing me the way. The sun is strong, though diffused through clouds, and I don’t feel the cold. Ahead, on a leveling plain, I spot a team of humans, a black huddle against the horizon. It takes forever to near them. Are they grouped around a kill? Lighting a fire?

  Nearing, I see they’ve cut a hole in the ice, and they are cradling, like a baby, a fish whose yellow scales are graying with each moment it is out of the water. Recumbent on their mittens, the fish knits its brow and speaks—it sweeps a fin past their fur-shrouded faces and tells a story in a tongue I do not know. What I feel in the dream is an amazing sense of continuity. I suddenly know that the story Farley’s mother told him is true, that it was faithfully handed down through six hundred generations, and I feel connected, almost electrically, to twelve thousand years of oral history, to every elder who repeated it on a winter night.

  The fish, as if tired, pauses to fan its gills for air.

  Then it points its fin at me. “Now you,” it says.

  I jolted awake. Opening my eyes, I found myself in the warm belly of a mastodon. Great ribs met above me in a line, and a yellowed membrane stretched between them, which must have been its stomach lining. I sat up, shaking off an animal skin. A crack of light met my eyes, and I pulled a flap and stepped outside. Only in the blinding light did it come clear that those ribs were really tusks, that Eggers had erected his lodge around me during the night.

  The day was both occluded and bright, a sign of snow to come, and not a stone’s throw from the lodge were the mounds of discolored snow that marked Eggers’ latrine. Along the ditch where Keno rested, I noticed a grid system had been erected: at intervals, sticks protruded from the sooty mud; these were laced together with strips of knotted leather. Amid this tangle, Eggers and Trudy lay on their sides, meticulously excavating something from the mud.

  “Water,” was all I could say.

  “I bought coffee up at the casino,” Trudy said. “But yours is probably cold by now.”

  My eyes hurt. My mouth tasted like oily hair, and I was itchy all over. I had to have fluids and aspirin, and the need to urinate was approaching desperate.

  But as I stood, I glanced over at Keno, and for a moment I forgot the madness of Eggers’ project, Trudy’s foolishness in joining it, and I could only think that I was in proximity to the oldest skull in North America. I took a couple quick steps through the wet remnants of last night’s fires, then leapt across the stream, where I dropped in the mud beside Eggers and Trudy, the three of us face to face.

  “Morning, Dr. Hannah,” Eggers said.

  When Eggers spoke, the poo of his breath nearly finished me—his puffy gums and furry teeth fumigated me with a writhing, larval cloud of vinegary yeast. Hadn’t he just brushed his teeth?

  It instantly ignited my hangover.

  Still wincing, I turned to Trudy. “What have you found?”

  “Tell me about it,” she said. “Wait till he farts.”

  She whispered, “I think he’s been eating trash.”

  This I pretended not to hear. “Find any hematite?” I asked. Hematite is the source of red ochre, which is commonly found sprinkled over gravesites.

  “Not yet,” Trudy said. “There’s no sign of whether Keno was buried or if she died alone.”

  For some reason, I winced at the pronoun.

  With what looked like a sharpened antler, Trudy pointed to a section of exposed earth. There, embedded in a plane of thawing mud, was a saucer of bone that, even half sunk, glowed with the vellum of prehistory. I couldn’t look directly at it. I’d hoped all my life to find the remains of a Clovis, the most elusive Paleo-Indian on earth, and now, when I was so near, I froze up. My mind got distracted, and all I could think about was the slipshod nature of the excavation. I suddenly hated Trudy’s antler. Anger welled over Eggers’ stupid dissertation stunt and all his ridiculous theme-park plans. I should have recognized fear when I felt it, known that I was somehow afraid of Keno, but all I could muster was disdain for my students.

  I reached out and plucked one of the flimsy leather straps that served as a gridline. The stake it was tied to flopped in the mud.

  “What kind of sorry grid system is this?” I asked.

  Before they could answer, I said, “It’s worthless. I can’t even tell what scale you’re using.” I yanked another strap of leather. “The squares are smaller than a meter yet bigger than a foot. The whole point of the grid is to map the site. Haven’t you two learned anything?”

  Eggers looked stunned. “You know I can’t use the metric system,” he said.

  “Hey,” Trudy said. “He made his own. You have to give him credit for that.”

  I looked at Eggers. “You made your own what?”

  From the muddy snow, Eggers produced a stick.

  “This is one eno,” he said, handing me a fresh switch of mulberry whose edges had more or less been rough-planed square. There were eight hash marks on it.

  “What is this?” I asked him.

  “It’s an eno. You know, as in ‘Keno.’ That’s where I got the name.”

  I could tell Trudy’s heart wasn’t completely into defending Eggers. Still, she said, “We’re using our own measurement system. An eno is the length of a Clovis femur.”

&
nbsp; My jaw dropped. “You found a femur?”

  “Not exactly,” Eggers said. “I measured mine.”

  “An eno’s about sixty-three centimeters,” Trudy said.

  “Let me get this straight,” I said. “You’re going to document a ground-breaking discovery by dividing your leg into nine sixty-thirds?”

  “It’s not how you’re making it sound, Dr. Hannah,” Eggers said. “The beauty of the eno is that you can divide it any way you want—tenths, sixteenths, whatever. The eno leaves all the old systems behind.”

  “Give him a break, Dr. Hannah,” Trudy said. “Don’t you see what we’ve found?”

  “Yeah,” Eggers said. “Check this out.”

  With a twig, he indicated the piece of bone. “We defined the edges but decided to stop, choosing to get more data from the surrounding strata. Over here we found some soil calcification, and closer to the water, more finger bones. Trudy thinks the torso is oriented this way.”

  With his hand, Eggers made a sawing motion that ran parallel to the ditch.

  Trudy raised her eyebrows. “Don’t you see,” she said. “This is the birth of a whole new field. This is paleo-paleoanthropology. We’re not dragging bones into the cold light of the modern age. We’re going back to Keno’s time. We’re entering the context. We are in situ with the bones.”

  I shook my head in disapproval, but still I leaned close to examine the bone.

  Lightly, with the pads of my fingers, I gave it its first human touch in twelve thousand years, and that shiver of fright ran through me again. Cold and mud-slick, it was like making contact with your greatest fear: that humans could live, love, and die without a trace, vanishing as if they had just slipped the earth’s mind. But of course the opposite is true: the ground never forgets. Only humans punish each other with amnesia. Unremembering another’s name and story is strictly a human pastime, and only we have learned that, to truly get the last word, you must give silence.

  So you had to get the ground to talk. I’d come to believe, after a career of study, that justice leaves no mark on history, let alone the soil, and the longer a story lies buried, the more unsavory you’ll find its moral. Go back far enough, and you’ll no longer know the heroes from the villains. All we had of Keno’s story was a dark conclusion, and only science could tell us its middle and beginning. Trudy and Eggers needed science. They needed to tease out the terrain of Keno’s final day with striation-and-sediment analysis. With chemical spectography, they could get the soil to whisper the menu of Keno’s final meal. They needed to run his remains under ultraviolet light, the best rumor mill for old injuries, illnesses, growth spurts, and malnutrition. Radiocarbon is solid scuttlebutt on clan and friends. Dental morphology would tattle on Keno’s age, diet, health, and kin. To get a story as old as Keno’s, my students needed to gossip with fluorine isotopes, pillow-talk with electron microscopy, then, finally, name names with DNA.

  Invariably, however, you will be left with some degree of mystery. Beyond science is an area of not knowing, and to get past that, you must enter the story yourself, filling the blanks with your own past, splicing the helix of your own narrative into the gaps of another. You must enter the play before you, becoming a minor character, the ambassador or court jester who appears in the final scene to satisfy the audience’s need to know how everything worked out.

  My students had always shown good digging instincts—at a Mandan site last year, Trudy had worked with patience and method, while Eggers had shown an uncanny instinct for nosing his way through the soil. But this slapstick before me evidenced neither science nor intuition: They had none of the equipment from our lab, so there was no way to measure anything, not even alkalinity or leaching. There was no way to acid-bath the remains or coat them in hardener—they couldn’t even tag the bones, let alone make casts of them. And for all Eggers and Trudy may have learned about reading rock matrix and soil strata, they had no clue how to coax bones into sharing their secrets, let alone telling your own in return.

  I closed my eyes and turned away. “You two don’t know enough to do this yet.”

  Trudy looked at me. “You’re the one who taught us.”

  “Yeah,” Eggers said, “you’ve taught us everything you know.”

  “No,” I told him. “No, I haven’t.”

  “But—” Eggers said, then stopped. Something had caught his eye in the distance beyond us. I followed his gaze to the road, where a sheriff’s cruiser was coasting to a stop on the side of the highway. It was far enough away that you couldn’t hear its tires in the slush, and the ghostly part was that the squad car seemed driven by no one.

  I rose, as did Trudy and Eggers.

  In the distance, the cruiser’s door swung open, and a tiny man emerged, flanked by a posse of small, jumping dogs. He tripped over one of them, falling into the snow. A moment later, he stood, yelled something we couldn’t make out, then headed our way, dusting the powder from the seat of his pants. This was clearly Gerry marching toward us across the field, his team of Pomeranians leading the charge.

  “Shit,” Trudy said.

  Gerry trudged, head down, through snow deep as his knees, and something inside me said to get the hell out of there. “I got to use the bathroom,” I told everyone, and wincing at the place where Eggers had been doing his business, I turned, to make my way through the mud toward the casino.

  “You’re not running away, are you?” Trudy asked.

  “I have business to attend to.”

  “Dr. Hannah, you can leave a place—I’ve had to move away from more cities and army bases than I can count—but you don’t quit people who need you.”

  Gerry was almost in our camp. A legion of lapdogs was now upon us. You couldn’t even count them—a ball of tumbling fur would suddenly split into two dogs that leapt, tail-spun, then blurred into other yipping tangles. One dog began tugging at the fur of Eggers’ lodge, while another attacked something in the latrine.

  Gerry came to a stop in front of Eggers and Trudy. The fur-rimmed hood of his sheriff-brown coat gave his face the pinched, beady look of one of his own dogs.

  “Hey, Hanky,” Gerry said when he recognized me. “What’re you doing out here?”

  Eggers smiled, opened his hands. “Why, what can we do for you, officer?”

  “Yes, officer,” Trudy said, “how can we help you today?”

  “Well, I was looking at that GTO over there,” Gerry said, still looking at me quizzically. “Any of you folks see somebody messing with it?”

  The Pomeranian that had been rooting for feces in the latrine’s foul snow raced up to Gerry and began springing in place, looking for a treat. Whatever it had wolfed down was gone, though flecks of matter speckled the tips of its ears and whiskers.

  Old Man Peabody would have vomited at this sight. He couldn’t stand to see any contact between humans and dogs—he once nearly had a breathing attack when we passed a girl on the street whose face was being licked by a poodle. Peabody believed that all of humanity’s Old World diseases came from the domestication of animals, but in the New World, he was sure dogs were to blame for bringing humans into a thousand parasitic cycles: dogs’ coats were host to fleas, mites, ticks, chiggers, scabies, and lice, all of which made dog blood a medium for dozens of encephalitics and hemorrhagics, not to mention beauties like rabies, Borrelia, rickettsiae, and Chagas. Their eyes weep toxoplasmotic larvae by the million. Their mouths drip with cystozoans, and their anuses are home to flukes, proglottids, cysticerci, and of course the worms: tape, round, heart, pin, thread, seat, and hook.

  Eggers tried to shoo the filthy cur with a giant mitten.

  “That car?” I asked. “I hadn’t even noticed it. I didn’t even know it was there.”

  Gerry pulled back the hood of his jacket. “Looks like our little Indian gang struck again, Hanky. Sheriff Dan thinks they may be running a chop shop.” Here Gerry made a little tomahawk chop with his hand.

  “Maybe someone just had car trouble,” Trudy said. “And
what makes you think it has anything to do with Native Americans?”

  “The car’s been painted with well-known gang symbols,” Gerry said, shrugging.

  Eggers added, “The hunter-gatherer ‘gang’ is the oldest social structure on earth. We all came from gangs.”

  Trudy put her hands on her hips, making her shoulders broaden under the gray of her sweats. “Maybe a bunch of middle-aged white guys stole that car,” she said.

  “Oh, no,” Gerry said, more than half offended. “The perpetrators who did this are cowards, I can assure you. I’ve seen their work before, miss. Innocent motorists don’t remove their license plates when they’re stranded. Innocent people have a healthy respect for carnivals and farm animals. Regular folks don’t go around fingerpainting with the blood of their victims.”

  Trudy’s eyes went wide. Eggers froze, even though the Pomeranian called McQueen was leaving a trail of urine as he headed toward the lodge entrance.

  Gerry went on: “I gave that hot rod a good once-over. Looks like those punks went for a joy ride until the transmission gave out. There’s a sock in the glove box stuffed to the stitches with condoms, so who knows what else they’re up to. Sheriff Dan’s got a couple boys from the South Dakota Bureau of Investigation coming in from Sioux Falls tomorrow. They’ll get to the bottom of this.”

  Eggers cut McQueen off at the pass and was looking to give the lapdog a taste of buckskin. Gerry intervened. “Hey, careful with the Poms,” he said. “Those things have papers, you know. These here are purebreds.”

  “Gerry,” I said, “can you call off the hounds already?”

  Another darted into Eggers’ lodge and began rummaging around—it emerged crunching something that sounded suspiciously like a potato chip. That’s when Trudy noticed that a pair of Pomeranians were digging like mad in the matrix that held Keno. We heard her gasp and followed her eyes to a fury of paws that spit mud everywhere.

  “That’s it,” Eggers said, and grabbed from the lodge his rodent stick, a savage piece of technology if ever I’ve seen one. Its shaft was cut from willow, so it was flexible enough to follow the curves of any rodent burrow. Its three-pointed tip was armed with sharpened bird bones. This Eggers rooted down every hole he passed, fishing around till he jabbed something—once I’d seen him pull up a trio of baby rabbits, hanging from the barbed gigs by their baggy skin.