Parasites Like Us

by Adam Johnson

  “What?” I asked. “Why?”

  “On you are all the danger signs,” she said. “Can you see what happens to me? Do you see how I suffer?”

  Julie tried to swallow through a constricted throat and swollen glands. She snuffed at me. In futility, she dropped the nasal spray, then turned to the window, to the barren whiteness streaking by. The edge of town had given way to open road, the slats of snow fences flapping as we passed them. Hormel grew in the distance.

  “There’s something special about you, Dr. Nivitski,” I told her. “Join me for a salad at the Sky Lounge, would you?”

  She didn’t say anything.

  I said, “Look, if this is about those little liquor bottles, I assure you I had nothing to do with them.”

  “I’ve heard that one before,” she said, and I could tell that was the end of it.

  Soon the blue-lit runway was pacing the road beside us, and I became melancholy. Airports had always disturbed me, especially now. It wasn’t the fact that, from time to time, planes fell flaming from the sky: that seemed pretty normal. What got me was the idea of crossing a whole continent and simply dropping in someone’s lap. The idea is, you just ambush this distant stranger, chum it up for a while, and then you’re gone, probably forever. Maybe that person doesn’t want you dropping in. Maybe that person doesn’t want anything to do with you—does anyone ever think of that? Maybe that person lives far away for a reason.

  And on an airplane, you don’t even have time to think about what you will say to this stranger you’re jumping, how you’ll act, whether you’ll pretend to know the “real them.” It’s just over: one minute you’re looking at the high-altitude rat maze of their city, and then you’re landing, and the next thing you know—How do you do!—you’re there. Does anyone want to look at his own hometown from that height? The whole of the Dakotas, seen from a window at thirty thousand feet, looks not unlike the pale, pointless patterns strewn through acoustic tile, or the smattering of brown flecks amid a catbox of white.

  I pulled into the white zone and left the motor running. Through the glass I saw ticket counters for all the major airlines, though only prop-driven planes landed here. Bill Hasper’s lone cab idled in the loading zone, waiting for the next fare or the rapture, whichever came first.

  When Julie climbed out of the car, she looked as if she was still vibrating. She jerked her bag from behind the seat, slammed the door, then leaned in the window. I was still hoping to come into the terminal with her, buy her a snack or something, and, I hoped, talk.

  Instead, she simply said “Thanks” and was gone.

  No See you later or Catch you soon. Julie didn’t say Until we meet again, or even Looking forward. I would have settled for Aloha, but what could I do? I turned on my emergency lights and bolted for the airport. The terminal never changed: a blast of air hit me when the doors rolled open, followed by the must of snow-sogged carpets, and that fried-metal smell of overworked space heaters. I trotted through the terminal, its pitted windows showing foamy pink puddles of de-icing fluid that blew into clouds when a turboprop kicked up. Alone out on the frozen flight deck was a large aluminum crate. Did I hear a faint barking?

  I caught her at Security. She’d just fed her carry-on into the X-ray machine, and she was about to step through the metal detector. She held a belt by its silver buckle.

  “Julie, wait,” I said. “You’ve got me all wrong. I’m better than you think. I’m not some guy who throws out empty pickup lines. I’m no college-mixer Casanova.”

  She stopped short of the security scanner. “In that house of yours,” she asked, “you don’t have a Draculunus vulgaris, do you?”

  “Of course,” I said. “Absolutely.”

  Julie put her hands up, flat-palmed, to keep me from going on.

  “Please stop,” she said. “No more talk of plants, and put sex out of your mind.”

  “I love vulgarises,” I said. “I have two of them.”

  This sent a visible shiver through her.

  “Enough,” she said, and spun on her heel, passing through the metal detector, toward the gates, and beyond.

  Chapter Five

  How invigorating! I felt like a new man.

  The first thing I did was head straight for my office, where Junior was calling. Somehow that old Depletionists fire had stoked itself again, and I’d regained the drive that had sent me down into the library basement every night for six years while writing it. This was the energy I’d thrived on before I received any acclaim, before I made friends or had students, back when the world wanted nothing to do with me. Funny how quickly that scientific magic can return. I didn’t have time for agri-business lectures or fancy plants, let alone pussyfooting around with stuck-up women. I had work to do! Julie’s brush-off, far from setting me back, had been a real boon—now I could see what really mattered. Rejection always had a way of rejuvenating me, making me feel like my old self!

  I tore into those boxes and began sorting knee-high stacks of paper, creating a skeleton of the multivolume project ahead. By evening, my office was filled with high-rises of paper, and I decided that if I got cracking, there was no more than three years’ work here, tops. My “junior answer to the junior minds of critics” had amassed itself into a unified-field theory on the disappearance of a people. The task was daunting, but I had a vision. I believed 100 percent in my theory—that an entire people had been selfish, that they’d lived solely for themselves and they’d left their offspring nothing.

  When you’re a student, they teach you to be slow and skeptical, to gather data patiently, analyze them, and only then form a hypothesis. But that’s not how it really works, not at all. In real life, it’s just the opposite. You take a position you know in your heart to be true and then support it for all your worth, no matter what colleagues desert you, no matter which journals show you their backs. The dust from all those boxes was making my skin itchy, but did anyone care? Was Anthropology Today the least bit interested in my sneezing fit? Did Hatitia Wells give one titty about my scalp? Of course not. That’s what being a scientist was all about.

  I was leafing through deep-core glaciology results from Greenland’s mid-rift when the telephone rang. It droned on forever before it finally quit and I could concentrate again. The Greenland data confirmed all the other studies: the earth suffered ninety thousand years ice-age weather, then ten thousand years of warm, in a loop that repeated over and over, as far back as there was ice to record it. The Clovis appeared at the end of the last Ice Age, inaugurating an era of warmth that ushered in agriculture, the birth of civilization, and the ascendancy of Homo sapiens. But the Clovis simply plundered the first sunny days of humanity, just as we, a thousand years overdue for the next Ice Age, were plundering the last.

  Oh, the caprice of history was limitless, and it was my job to tame this bitch.

  The phone went off again—where was that blasted thing?

  When I answered, it was Trudy, breathless, on the other end.

  “What are you doing calling me here?” I asked.

  “We tried you ten times at home,” she said. “We need you out here, Dr. Hannah. We’ve found something.” Gaming machines trilled in the background.

  “What do you mean you’ve found something?”

  “Eggers is the one who actually came across it,” she said. “We don’t know what to make of it—it’s like nothing we’ve seen in any of the journals or textbooks.”

  I sat down at my desk, scratched the back of my neck. Certainly I was interested, but look at the towering stacks of Junior. I’d just recommitted myself, and you don’t go running off every time something sparks your fancy. You don’t just up and quit when someone new comes along; you don’t pack your bags when some distant mud city appears golden under scientific light.

  “Dr. Hannah?” Trudy asked. “Are you still there?”

  “Trudy,” I said, “I’m afraid I’m going to have to pass.”

  “Pass?” Trudy asked. “What do you mea
n, pass? You don’t even know what we’re talking about. We were out in the field, Eggers was digging away, and then—there it was, right there before our eyes. You’ve never seen anything like it.”

  I paused a moment, then said, “I have my own work, too, you know.”

  Now she paused a moment.

  “You are some kind of teacher,” she said. “You’re one piece of work. Do you know what I’m putting up with out here? It’s cold as hell, and all day I get to listen to Eggers’ theme-park ideas. You know he wants to start a Clovis Channel on cable TV? Twenty-four hours. I thank God every time he goes to the latrine, but then I have to race around sneaking off Polaroids for my professor, who, after a year of secretly lusting for me, takes my fellowship away and then won’t even help me. Do you hear me?” she asked. “You aren’t even listening,” she said, and hung up.

  I leaned back in the chair and exhaled deep. I’d momentarily lost my thirst for science, but that was to be expected. It was simply the ups and downs of the investigative process—the same force that drove a man into the library basement would, eventually, scare him right out again. I replaced my Greenland-glaciology surveys on the tallest stack and, stepping out, closed my office door for the first time in memory. But the key to lock it, I discovered when I thumbed through my key purse, was long since gone.

  * * *

  I sat in my car, engine idling. The thought of my own dark house gave me the willies—the leather of my father’s chair grown cold under drapes of blind, creeping plants—and I just couldn’t go there. When the motor warmed, and the defroster had cleared the windows, I saw that someone had spat all over the windshield. As the mucus thawed, it began to run. Some clown was obviously jealous that I’d snatched the prime handicapped-parking spot on campus.

  I dropped the Corvette into gear, the trademark headlights popping up. The power steering whined in the cold as I rolled toward the end of the lot. The plow had been through earlier, pushing up hard, crusted mounds of snow. In my headlights, the heaps glowed like glazed crap. When I got to the exit, for some strange reason I circled back for another loop, parking again in the same handicapped spot, one hand on the shifter, a thumb tapping the wheel.

  Of course, I could go hang out with Farley—I was always welcome there—but when I thought of his house, bright and warm on top of the bluffs, I wasn’t so sure. I pictured the steam of his laundry machines venting into the night, smelled the jerky he was always making in his basement dehydrator, saw his nieces’ drawings taped to the fridge—stiff construction paper, watercolors. Farley was on the couch, I was sure, talking long-distance to his grandmother in Mobridge, eating cookies in the blue of the TV. No, he probably had some lady over, was cooking up that soufflé of his, the one with the mushrooms that never failed to impress the babes. Santana was playing on the turntable.

  How could I barge in and interrupt him like that? Stars, if you’ll notice, burn dimly and alone. Once in a while, two ignite together. Never three.

  I couldn’t think of a place in the world I belonged that night. Then, prickly and chilling as a whiff of gin, my father came to mind, and it seemed the evening I deserved included him. I slipped out of the lot and cruised a couple of blocks, rolling past a bank marquee that still read “Glacier Days Awaits,” though the sign had lost a lot of bulbs.

  Past the victory grove of oak trees that lined Parkton Square, Glacier Days was simply gone, leaving precious little evidence it had ever been—a few latrine-blue puddles of ice where the Porta Pottis had stood, the flapping of junk-food wrappers exposed by melting snow, and the petroleumlike smell of butter where they’d dumped the nightly popcorn tubs. Glacier Days had only rained stuffed animals on the city of Parkton, given its citizens a safe taste of death, and fed the crows.

  I suspected my van might be sitting in the red zone outside the Odd Fellows, as it was some nights, but when I cruised up, it wasn’t to be seen. It was probably still parked in front of that cheap motel. In the lobby of the former lodge, I could see a gauntlet of old men, sitting on sad red couches, watching televisions suspended by chains from the ceiling. These gray-haired men were the Odd Fellows themselves, guys who’d lost their place of congregation, yet still gathered here in the after-supper hours to reminisce, smoke, and watch TV in a marble lobby whose symbols used to be theirs. Through the dirty windows, their faces were hazy enough that I could picture them all as my father, five years down the road.

  I couldn’t sit there a minute longer without getting all soupy. There was nothing to do but cinch my parka, crank the heat, and power down the windows as I drove out of town, heading for Keno through fields whose low spots were puddled with indigo. Above were clouds more meant for a summer afternoon. Big and singular, they sailed against a clear night sky. Backlit by a hefty moon, they glowed at the edges like chips of obsidian. If there were other cars on the road, as there must have been, I did not see them.

  I craned my neck to look into the howling wind. Pinpoint stars, fixed in a galactic vise, stood fast in a sky as slick and intense as midnight vinca, the flower whose small hemlock-blue petals Janis wanted spread with her ashes in the Missouri, a wish Farley and I honored one evening last summer. From the back of the boat, I broadcast bone dust that chalked the surface of the water before heavier chips—femur, pelvis, teeth—sank like tiny comets. Farley spread the midnight vinca, beyond blue as it landed and turned in the gas slick behind his outboard.

  It would be easy to look back upon myself, at the wheel of my Corvette, and say that this was the night, that along this road the resolve formed in me to become the leader of the Keno excavation, that, after a silent, contemplative drive, I opened my car door a changed man, a captain. But the truth was that such a moment of clear decision never came. I simply couldn’t be alone a minute longer, and I sought only the company of other humans, the sound of their voices, a place beside the fire with my kin.

  I rolled to a stop by Trudy’s hot rod and fished a flashlight from under the seat. Then I headed across a field that grew lighter and darker as small, fat clouds crossed the moon. I scanned the bare branches of windbreak trees with my flashlight, checking for owls. All clear.

  A path had formed from our trips back and forth—a streak of tamped snow scribbled through with Pomeranian tracks. Nearing the lodge, I found Eggers and Trudy down in the mud, exposing artifacts amid the stagger and play of torchlight. Fire smoke had blackened the oil of their faces. The casino back-dropping them looked like a grand nineteenth-century painting of Byzantium.

  Rib bones littered the site.

  Trudy was sitting cross-legged, hunched over something I couldn’t make out by firelight. Eggers was on his knees, moving dirt with a crudely fashioned spade. He looked up, smiling smugly, as if he’d known all along I’d be out here tonight. “Dad always said I’d be a ditch digger,” Eggers announced. “If only he could see me now.”

  His beard in the torchlight looked thin and tangled as fishing line.

  I kicked a rib bone toward him.

  “What?” he asked defensively. “Can’t a guy even gather?”

  “Scavenge is more like it,” Trudy said.

  I picked up another bone. There was still some sauce on it.

  I asked him, “Won’t this contaminate the site?”

  Eggers shot back, “I think we can manage some things on our own—like telling a Pleistocene-era artifact from a barbecued baby-back rib.”

  I gave him a look that said, I have my doubts, but I wasn’t out here to give anyone a hard time. I’d been rough on them earlier. Now, standing under the stars with them, I found it hard to remember what the fuss was about. Here were my students, dedicated, ambitious, and in need of guidance. Here was an anthropological site begging for serious inquiry. I rubbed my hands together, watching everyone’s breath in the dark. If other people didn’t prefer my company, if some folks didn’t even have time for a simple salad at the airport, well, so be it.

  I tossed the bone into the fire. Sparks streamed from the flames lik
e the words of an ancient story. We watched them plume orange, cool, and vanish.

  I said, “Are you going to show me what you found, or what?”

  Eggers smiled. “You won’t believe it,” he said.

  He led me to the excavation pit. The earth was peeled like a cadaver, and amid the carefully exposed striations of soil, I could see a set of gypsumlike forearms—radius and ulna—their joint sockets sheened oystery where they’d worn smooth from use. And beyond that, as if the arm had been reaching for something, was a shape in the dark. I fixed my flashlight’s beam. There, nested in a bowl of exposed soil layers, was a sphere.

  “We found it below the finger bones,” Trudy said. “Like she died holding it.”

  Eggers and Trudy looked nervous, wild-eyed.

  “Is this for real?” I asked. “Are you two playing some kind of joke?”

  I knelt to examine it, my breath glowing amber in the flashlight’s path.

  The sphere was a little larger than a melon and seemed formed from unfired river clay that had, over the eons, mineralized as hard as cement, capturing in its surface the impressions of fingers and palms, the very prints of the hands that had formed it. God, were they Keno’s? Little divots and grooves pitted the surface, probably the result of river grass and seeds that were patted into the mud and had long since rotted away.

  “Trudy,” I said, “is it heavy? Is it hollow? Report.”

  “We haven’t touched it,” she said. “When we first encountered it, we thought it might be the skull, but, exposing its surface, we realized it wasn’t bone. We figured you’d know what it was.”

  I handed the flashlight to Trudy, who focused the beam as I lifted the ball. It was cold in my hands, absolutely hard, though it looked as slick and wet as the riverbank from which it was shaped. And it weighed a fair amount—heavier than a bag of sugar. When I rotated it to inspect the underside, I felt something shift, though it could have been my imagination.