Parasites Like Us

by Adam Johnson

  It was in this state of mind that I made my way to the agribusiness building, which was really just the old history building, gutted and renovated. I walked under that Santayana quote, shaking my head, and I couldn’t help noticing how watery and colorless the building had become since agri-business took over, since history had become an entertaining elective, not a subject that merited a major. Entering the alcove felt more like striding into a dentist’s office—pastel carpets now covered the old wooden floors, and the lath and plaster had given way to expandable, accordionlike walls that could accommodate any conference or team-building session. The old water fountains, copper with malachite basins, had been replaced by a lone blue cooler. It was as if they’d tried to remove the history of the building itself. But history isn’t so easily glossed over. I could feel the past fixed here by a century of storytelling in these rooms. The meditations of Sor Juana seemed woven into the banister’s scrollwork. The fate of Darius felt cut in the ceiling’s frieze.

  There were about twenty students in the auditorium, a normal crowd for one of these lectures. Waiting for events to begin, I couldn’t help coveting agri-business’s new ergonomic seats, not to mention the sound system and splashy modern-art panels on the walls. I sat in the rear of the hall and endured a long introduction from some lame department head before Dr. Yulia Terrasova Nivitski came to the lectern. She carried a sheaf of paper, a wad of tissue, and a bottle of water as she strode before us in a charcoal suit that was all business, except for a V of ultrawhite skin that plunged deep into her num-nums.

  But her hair! The endurance of a Russian perm seemed limitless.

  “Good morning,” she said when she’d adjusted the microphone. “I am many times asked how is it I became interested in paleobotany, and today I thought I will open with a humorous anecdote.”

  Julie spoke as if she were addressing a group of children, and you could hear people shift in their seats, settling in for the long haul. “As a little girl in Vlotovnya,” she continued, “I suffered terrible allergies. Always my nose was running. A new specialist came to town. This man was very dashing. Who was more excited, my mother or I, I could not tell. Always when we are walking to the specialist for our visit, Mother is telling me, ‘Smile, smile.’ Behind the specialist’s office was a greenhouse where he cultivated the botanicals, even when the snow was deepest. My mother admired this handsome doctor. She would praise his work as he held me firmly and abraded sores into my skin with a file he wore like a thimble. Then he would rub a different compound in each little wound.

  “After these tests, I would be sent to the hothouse while my mother and the specialist waited for the inevitable results: rows of welts that rose and spotted my body. My limbs would inflame. There was the inevitable wheezing. Week after week, the specialist could not believe it: I was allergic to everything. Soon I ran out of skin to make his abrasions. Then he ran out of compounds to rub in them. There was no point, anyway, he said: You are allergic to everything. Yet, after all the experiments were over, I kept coming to this hothouse. I finally knew the names of the things that had been hurting me. I began to recognize their forms. As I realized we were bound together, these plants and I, I became fond of them.”

  Julie went on, cataloguing those plants in botany-talk before moving on to the lecture’s topic of plant domestication. I didn’t need a bunch of Latin names to feel I was there, in Russia with Yulia, surrounded by aromatic botanicals destined to touch her skin. I could smell them—I was there! Before me were milkweed, columbine, horehound, and aster. I pictured feverroot, foxwort, myrtle, and brax. Then there was mandrake, nux vomica, cattail, and all the conifers. The students around me were taking notes on the fourth millennial diaspora of Mesoamerican starches, but my mind wouldn’t leave that Russian hothouse.

  Sitting in my ergonomic chair, I heard an occasional moan from the Missouri outside, straining under a new load of ice, and I pictured this hothouse on the banks of a great river, the Volga maybe, a place where the glare of a short-lived sun made glass and ice indistinguishable. Here a girl moved through rows of green, and I clearly saw the copper watering can she touched, heard the rustle of coat sleeves as she combed all the leaves. It felt like my secret, this atrium by the river where a girl was banished once a week by her mother and some doctor of debonair. I bet Ivan didn’t even know about this place. If he’d ever pictured it the way I had, he’d have understood Julie better, and maybe she wouldn’t have left him. Was this “specialist” a witch doctor or a man of science? Was Julie’s mother sleeping with him? Was either of them really interested in Julie’s well-being? For the moment, I didn’t care. I only saw panes of Siberian light illuminating a young woman as she learned to love the thing that caused her grief.

  When the time came for Q&A, I raised my hand.

  Julie tentatively pointed my way, though I doubted she recognized me in the back row. I wanted to ask, Did Ivan both thrill you and hurt you, too? Is that why you were drawn to him?

  But that’s not what I asked. “Dr. Nivitski,” I said as I stood, “most grains and starches from the Pleistocene era survive today, do they not?”

  “Yes,” she acknowledged, though I could tell she smelled a setup.

  It didn’t deter me, though. I needed to wow her with a couple of my ideas.

  “And yet,” I concluded, “the animals which fed on those plants do not survive. Wouldn’t you see this as evidence for the hypothesis, articulated in my book, The Depletionists, that the extinction of North American mammals was caused by Clovis hunting, rather than starvation due to climate change?”

  I leaned forward, waiting for an answer.

  “I must say this is not my field,” she said. “But I was just reading a new article by Hatitia Wells in which she speculates that if Clovis had brought just one diseased animal with them from the Old World a virus could have decimated North American mammal populations.”

  Everyone turned to look at me. For effect, I removed my glasses and twirled them once. “Well,” I said, “I’d just point out to Stanford’s Hatitia Wells that South Dakota is pocked with the skeletons of young, healthy animals that bear the marks of some big ol’ spear points.”

  “Hatitia Wells is at Harvard now,” Julie said. Instead of waiting for a response, she scanned the room, as if to say, Next question?

  Some idiot agri-biz major asked the difference between corn and maize.

  I sat back down, gripping the leather armrests for support. Had I ever been cut off like that before? I watched Julie take question after question, treating all comers with equal gravity. Why did my blood boil for her? And why did my mind keep wandering to Ivan? I saw him clear as a bell, sitting on a stool in a room fashioned from Siberian slump block, above him a buzzing electric wall clock. Where has everything gone? he asked himself. Outside his window was another brown building, just like his. Beyond that was another town, just like the one he was in.

  Those ergonomic seats weren’t so great, I decided. The fabric was terribly itchy.

  When the Q&A was over, I waited for the usual circle of sycophants to clear. The smart students wandered off first; the sticky new teachers hung on a little longer, trying to glad-hand their way toward tenure. Last to leave were a couple downtrodden administrators I recognized only from their filibusters in the faculty senate.

  I approached Julie, strolling down an aisle. I tried to act cool, like I was chummy with all the famous anthropology professors. Julie was reaching for a carry-on suitcase stashed behind the curtain. When she saw me, she extended its handle with a snap.

  “Dr. Nivitski,” I said, climbing the steps, then strolling onstage.

  “You,” she said.

  I leaned an elbow on the podium, casually, as if my guts weren’t made of soup. I didn’t know exactly what I was going to say, but I needed to straighten her out about me. I needed to make her understand some things.

  “Now, hear me out,” I told her.

  But Julie cut me off. “First you are rude to me?” she a
sked. “Then you accost me at a casino? Then you follow me here and use my discussion time to plug your book? Now you make demands.”

  I couldn’t stop looking at that V of skin. I was not normally a breast man.

  She tossed up an arm. “Unbelievable,” she said.

  “I’ll have you know,” I said, “that I happen to personally know Hatitia Wells. We were on a panel together at Harvard.”

  Julie just glared at me. I started to cave.

  I said, “I do apologize if I dampened your discussion, however. That, perhaps, was less than professorial of me.”

  My apology was so fiberless that even I winced. Where was the new Hank Hannah, the guy who was trying to redress old wrongs and be a better person?

  “Have you been drinking again?” she asked. “Because I know about drinking and apologies. First he gets drunk, then there is a thousand ‘sorry’s, and after is sex. Then he gets drunk again.”

  “Please,” I said, “I’m not like that.”

  She planted a hand on her hip and flipped her wild hair back to address me. That fist on her hip clearly meant business, but she hadn’t walked away this time, and I felt good about that. “I will thank you,” she said, “to direct me toward the nearest taxi stand or place of public transport.”

  How a zing went through me when she got bossy!

  “There’s no such thing,” I told her. “You’ll have to call for a ride, but why do that? Please, let me drive you. A courtesy from one professional to another.”

  She shook her head. “The telephone,” she said.

  I led her off the stage and down into the fancy new agri-business lobby, her rolling carry-on clanging down the steps. That suitcase looked so battered, so airline-tagged, that it might have spent a lifetime traveling the world with Julie as she abandoned men all over the globe.

  But where the old coin-operated pay phone had been, there was now a new one, with no slots for change. Instead, it required some fancy type of calling card, probably common in places like Boston or France. When I lifted the receiver to speak to an operator, there was only a computerized voice. Julie stared out the window while I diddled with the buttons. Then that fist went back on her hip.

  The look she was giving me was wicked. God, when she clenched her teeth . . .

  “The less you have to lose,” my father always said, “the more you stand to gain.”

  So I turned to her. “Just tell me this,” I said. “What the heck made you walk up to me in the first place?”

  Instead of answering me, Julie nodded out the window to the arched façade above us. “Do you know these words?” she asked, pointing to the Santayana quote—“Those Who Cannot Remember the Past Are Condemned to Repeat It.”

  “This is a popular saying where I am from,” she said. “In Russian, this word ‘past’ is feminine, so they translate it as ‘He who forgets the past must dance with her at the harvest.’”

  I thought about the past being feminine. Of course it was. Even without the idea of being condemned, the Russian quote was more foreboding, more sinister, for making destiny a feminine engine.

  I asked her, “Was that some sort of coded answer to my question?”

  “I was just thinking,” she lamented, “how always in Russia the sayings come down to sex.”

  Why did she keep bringing up sex?

  “My office is this way,” I said.

  Outside, the light off the snow was blinding; it made mirrors of the sharp, clear ice sheeting the marble entrance and penetrated the cloudy slush at our feet, making it look frozen from pulpy lemonade. Across the quad, new snow had erased in one night all traces that Eggers had ever lived there. Downhill, ice on the river was complaining under the sun. It chattered and creaked, and when a chunk snapped free, the newly exposed water steamed in the glare.

  I suddenly recalled that the University of Northwestern North Dakota was in the town of Croix, also located on the Missouri, near the borders of Montana and Canada. This river was something Julie might look at from her office on campus. Suddenly, the Missouri was a ribbon that connected the two of us. If she were to write a message, and cast it upon the water in a bottle, it would float seven hundred miles, all the way to me. Well, all the way to the dam, at least.

  “Isn’t the river wonderful?” I asked.

  Julie’s suitcase bobbed behind us as we made for the anthro building, her breath, then my breath, alternating white before us. She looked over her shoulder, regarding it. “The river is bitchy with ice,” she said. “It will soon crack free, and then—is anything more beautiful than open water in winter?”

  Inside the anthro building, Julie’s attention was immediately drawn to the flame-orange biohazard signs on the Hall of Man.

  “I’m doing some important work in there,” I said.

  Half aloud, she muttered the words “Hall of Man,” not without a little bitterness, as if she saw all of the Dakotas or Russia—all the world, even—as an outdated, hazardous Hall of Man.

  Upstairs, mine was the only office that stood open, Junior spilling into the hallway, and it looked to me like someone else’s mess, as if this heap were so many years of someone else’s life.

  “Don’t mind this crap,” I said, slogging through the papers, trying not to slip on the slick covers of iceberg surveys. Entering the shambles of my own office, I saw it as another professor would, had one ever come in here. Julie would be the first in years. Flint chips littered the floor, along with crates of anonymous bone casts, and the shelves were stacked with Tupperware containers of dirt, each masking-taped shut with excavation information. The hoary chair where Eggers always sat was sheened with grease, and either it was my glasses, or a small cloud of fruit flies had taken up residence. Then there were the plants.

  Looking back, it’s easy to see how little things lock into place. I’m not a man who believes in Destiny. Sure, I would soon be called upon to act in ways that bordered on heroic, and it’s true that superhuman tasks awaited. Yet not too much should be made of Fate. Would Determination really determine me to be its hand and sword? Would Destiny leave the inheritance of humanity in the hands of one so petty? No, life, such of it as there is, is spittled with moments that feel absolutely inevitable only because they are completely surprising, as when a student finds a spear point and instead of putting it in a museum decides to use it, or when an ordinary man invites a beautiful botanist into an office full of tropical exotics left to him by his stepmother.

  Julie followed me into the office, and I turned to her, ready to help drag that suitcase over Junior. I also needed to explain that there was only one cab driver in town, that his name was Bill Hasper, and that he was likely to speak the word of the Lord—starting with his alcohol troubles, tracing his entire third marriage, and ending with his minor successes at the lottery—all the way to the airport if she dared summon him. When I turned, however, I saw she’d let go of the suitcase. Already she was reaching for the mustardy fronds of a fanlike plant and the drooping stalks of a red-veined something-or-other.

  Already that V of skin was prickling red.

  She turned to me, trying to catch her breath.

  “My word,” she said, “I had no idea.”

  She approached the skinny plant on my desk, touching its spiky ends.

  “A Brophilia porsophoa,” she said. “Rare cousin to the Redendosa familia. These specimens are sensational. How do you keep them in this climate?”

  I couldn’t exactly tell Julie that every once in a while I whacked off all the hangy parts, including the brown, fuzzy chutes the bush by the window kept sending up, and the rotty white cones its neighbor was always opening.

  I told her what Janis was always saying:

  “The secret, Dr. Nivitski, is love.”

  Julie’s breathing was hoarse, labored. Her hand found my arm—completely without her knowledge, it seemed—and she looked into my eyes. “How is it you have gathered them here?”

  “There was no more room at home,” I said. “So I had
to bring the overflow here.”

  Of course, this wasn’t the answer to what she was asking, but it had the desired effect: her eyes widened, her throat grew flush, the rims of her nostrils flared—though that may have been her sinuses, I suppose. At some point, passion and allergies are indistinguishable.

  “I have to get out of here,” Julie said. “I have to get to the airport.”

  I took hold of her shoulder. “I’ll take you.”

  “Let’s go,” she replied. “Let’s go.”

  If those ferns set the hook, the Corvette drew blood.

  When we walked up, Julie did a double take as she realized which baby was mine. Sure, some of the yellow fiberglass was cracking through, and the racing spoiler drooped to the right, but Julie let out a little woo when the engine fired up. I had a loose motor mount, which caused the whole rig to rumble and vibrate, so revving the engine sent some serious quakes up our tailbones.

  I goosed it out of the lot, the tires sizzling some ice before they found traction. They caught with a lurch, causing a couple baby liquor bottles to roll from the dash down to Julie’s lap, and soon we owned the blacktop—glassed-over postboxes flew past, along with the cocooned rumps of family sedans and an occasional swing set, sinister with icicles. The Eagles were in the cassette deck, but unless things reached critical, I figured I’d hold off.

  I looked over at Julie—she had her nasal spray out, and she was trying, without success, to land a few blasts. Her cheeks were swollen, her lips puffy red.

  “Are you cold?” I asked, pointing a heat vent her way, though the warm air carried the faint waft of my father’s cologne, which smelled too much like Highlander for my comfort.

  She kept looking at me like I was real trouble, like drunken, swashbuckling botanists were her weakness. “A Pittisporum chrebus?” she asked me, shaking her head in disbelief. “It’s a good thing I’m leaving this state. It’s a good thing I’m getting away from the likes of you.”