Parasites Like Us

by Adam Johnson

  I couldn’t stop thinking of Vadim.

  The hardest thing in life is to see beyond the known. What I knew was that there was a little boy seven hundred miles away, and he was alone in a room I couldn’t picture. He liked science, feared dogs. And that was it. He would stay that way in my mind until I knew otherwise. His mother worked—in a lab, a classroom, an office?—on campus, and unless I knew where she picked up fried chicken on the way home, without knowing the rights and lefts of her drive, whether she entered through the front door, the side, through the garage, I’d never be able to put them together in my mind. That boy would always be alone.

  As it grew dark, I could see, through my one mesh-reinforced window, the red safety lights come to life atop the smokestacks of Hormel. The towers were hard at work, pluming steam vented from the rendering floors, where hogs danced their way into sausage casings, where pigs poured their hearts into patties and links. It was easy not to think about the grim work that went on twenty-four hours a day in the meat factory below. The simplest thing in the world was not to visualize the hydraulic slaughter line or picture the busy air knives and cauterizing belts.

  As the moon rose, a soft light illuminated the smokestacks, setting to glow the lime in their mortar, giving the giant towers a mosaic look—like the pattern of fish scales, or the blue-and-white weave of old maize. The bricks glinted with bits of silica that had baked to glass in a Kansas City kiln a hundred years ago, and the blinking crowns of the towers were glazed maroon with a buildup of carbon. The towers made me think of the minarets of Herat, pillars that stood tall during the sacking of the year 1222, hovering blue and floral above the executions of all Herat’s 160,000 inhabitants.

  I decided, lying on my metal bench, to drop this tidbit into my next pop-culture lecture, maybe let my students jaw on the jerky of perspective for a while. A hundred and sixty thousand, I’d tell them, is a fair guess as to the sum of people you meet in life, the number of humans you make eye contact with, the tally of beings who accidentally brush your shoulder in the hall or unintentionally knuckle the back of your hand in a tight elevator. I’d ask my students to imagine that many people disappearing. Picture them missing. See that birth-to-death chain of every person you would’ve met—broken. See yourself walking alone, moving through life without each of the thousands of human moments that confirm you’re alive.

  I thought of all the people I’d hoped would come visit me, and the list was ridiculous. They were the people that I’d never see again, that I probably wouldn’t recognize if I did. Peabody was dead. He had to be. Janis’ face, when I conjured it, was now the stranger on the bronze plaque. My mother had never been anything more than a crumbling plaster cast and a yellowy X-ray.

  Then it struck me that I probably wouldn’t be lecturing tomorrow.

  The room grew cold, and as I drifted toward sleep, I’d have lain down with the dogs if I could have. A bird landed on the perch outside my window. It was a pretty thing. I wish I could tell you which kind it was. Except for the noteworthy birds, all the rest have merged in my memory into a representative variety, a catch-all composite: medium-sized, pigeon-color, grainy beak.

  This bird flapped its wings and pecked twice at the glass.

  Did I mention that birds were supposed to be symbols of freedom and liberty?

  As quickly as it had arrived, the bird startled and was gone.

  Before bed, I, too, urinated on the floor.

  Chapter Seven

  Sheriff Dan woke me in the morning. He extended a paper cup, half full of coffee, through bars that were white with frost. “Reveille,” he said.

  His breath shone crystalline in the morning light.

  Like many people, I sleep in a fetal position, with one hand in my drawers. And I’m not used to doing anything before my morning ritual—I hadn’t stretched or flossed, let alone gargled, and who would greet visitors before enjoying that heavenly, cottony, first Q-tip of the day?

  Shirttails out, wet spot on my collar, I shielded my eyes, calling out, “What?”

  The light was painfully bright. As I stood wincing, I located its source: A loading-bay door stood open at the end of the room, a rolling steel shutter that I hadn’t noticed before. Through it, a parking lot glowed afterlife-white.

  Sheriff Dan shook his head. “You can snooze through anything, Professor.” He glanced at his watch for effect and handed me the cup of coffee.

  I spit the first sip all over the floor. “It’s ice cold.”

  “Get used to it,” he said.

  I was getting a little tired of Sheriff Dan’s tone. As far as I could tell, he possessed no special attributes that qualified him to boss around his fellow man. But I hesitated to say anything. I imagined, behind him in the stationhouse, a desk on which sat Keno’s second ball. I pictured a spare handgun or maybe a nightstick as the only thing that blocked it from rolling off the desktop and smashing open on the floor. How could I get my hands on that ball? I sweetened my approach:

  “I’m willing to meet you halfway on the coffee,” I said, very politely. “A little warmer-upper would do.”

  “The teat of Christian tolerance has about run dry, my friend,” Sheriff Dan said. “And I’m not about to let you scald the face of peace and justice.”

  His voice was more than a little snarky.

  “What are you talking about?” I asked. “I’d never throw coffee on anyone.”

  “This from a man who defiles scripture?” he asked. He pointed to the dogs’ cell next door. “The deputy who took care of these dogs this morning was a Christian, and he didn’t take kindly to hosing Bible pages down the sewer, not on his first day of dog duty.”

  I followed his gesture to the cell in question, to where the dogs had shredded that ten-cent Bible, and I saw that it was empty, hosed clean except for a few soggy, uneaten biscuits. Those sad, stupid dogs, I thought. All that remained of them was a series of wet streaks on the floor, leading from the cell to the back door, places where their fur had mopped comet tails of filth as their limp bodies were dragged out back to some pickup, waiting to haul them to the dump.

  “What’d I tell you?” Sheriff Dan asked. “Peace and quiet.”

  “What happened to them?”

  With his thumb and fingers, Sheriff Dan mimed a hypodermic injection. “We do things the civilized way around here,” he said. “We don’t set traps for little dogs. We don’t skin them warm and eat them. Law-abiding folk don’t fingerpaint with animal blood.”

  Sheriff Dan passed a sealed plastic bag through the bars. It contained tampons, toothpaste, and a few other travel-sized toiletries from manufacturers I had never heard of.

  “They’ll probably hold you in one of the state facilities after this,” he said. “We’ll be parting company. I doubt you’ve been to the lockdown in Sioux Falls, but I’ll give you this advice, and if Janis were here, she’d give the same: speak to none of the prisoners, and no matter what, never join one of those gangs.” He looked at his watch. “If you want to brush your teeth, you’ll be thankful for that coffee. Your lawyer’s here. It’s time to pull yourself together.”

  After Sheriff Dan left, I brushed my teeth alone, spitting the green-brown foam on the floor. A tiny bottle labeled “Bucolave Fresca” turned out to be an awful lemon-flavored mouthwash, and the jail-issue floss was like deep-sea fishing line. My gums bled as I used it, staring at that empty cell next door.

  Farley entered in a blue suit—almondy tie, French cuffs, level in the shoulders—his haircut flat as a New Mexico mesa. In one hand, he balanced a slim manila folder and a cup of coffee—his was steaming—while the other held an all-purpose suit, wrapped in plastic. This he hooked in the bars by the hanger, then handed me the coffee.

  “Look at you,” he said. “Taking fashion tips from that student of yours?”

  I wanted to ask Farley if he’d viewed any evidence from the excavation site, if those yahoo deputies were playing bocce ball with Keno’s grave offerings. At this very moment, were they
bowling down the DQ drive-through with the head of an ancient one? But did it really matter if they did? I kept seeing Sheriff Dan’s invisible needle, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that it would come for all of us, that tonight, while I slept, some deputy would back his van up to the side door, creep into my cell, and—and my story would conclude alone, without witness, without comment, the cell simply sprayed clean again, my few possessions thrown into an evidence bin like Keno’s.

  “Are Trudy and Eggers okay?” I demanded.

  He pulled a tie from his pocket, unfurled it. “You’re a mess, my friend.”

  “I appreciate the help, but I don’t need it. Just tell me, did they find the Polaroids? What about the Hall of Man—have they been sniffing around there?”

  Farley reached through the bars. He tapped my chin to make me look up, then pulled the tie behind my collar. “I tell you, I thought you were coping pretty well,” he said. “But you’re not. We got you fishing again. We played some serious gin rummy. There was that night we talked late. But it’s worse than I thought. You’re still trying to punish yourself.”

  I stared at the ceiling. Preserved in the cement were patterns of rings and knots, a life history of the timber that had been used to form it. “I don’t need a lawyer, and I don’t need a psychologist,” I told him. “I need to know if they’ve disturbed the dig.”

  Farley just kept talking, his eyes on his fingers as he looped the ends of the tie.

  “Someone you care about is gone,” he said. “And the hurt is real. It must be somebody’s fault, right? I mean, someone must’ve messed up royal. But you’re the only person around to take the blame. Suddenly it’s like you’re the one who failed. And to move on, to do something good for yourself, well, that’s giving up, that’s quitting a memory, and now you’re the one who’s walking away. You become the one pretending someone didn’t exist.”

  Farley cinched the knot and snapped my collar down.

  “Look,” I said, “aren’t you listening? I’m guilty. I don’t need a lawyer.”

  Farley pulled his hands back. “And so you start driving people away.” He peeled the plastic off the suit and passed the coat and slacks through the bars. When I took it, he opened the folder and read from a piece of paper: “Quote: ‘Before abandoning his weapon and fleeing, the perp declared, My students had nothing to do with this.’” Farley closed the folder. “You get queasy scaling fish, Hank; you’re afraid to uproot houseplants; yet you think a judge will believe you killed an eleven-hundred-pound hog with your bare hands?”

  How could I explain that Eggers and Trudy were the best things that had ever happened to me? My tenure at USSD would soon be forgotten. My book was chaff. But Trudy and Eggers would go out into the world and train the next generation of anthropologists.

  Farley tried a different angle. “You know he’s a billionaire, right? Certainly you’ve taken a moment to type his name into the Internet. So you know Brent Eggers can speak Japanese. You’ve heard about his fat book contract.”

  “I believe in my students,” I said, with an undertone of Do you believe in me?

  Farley looked unimpressed. Still, he reached through the bars and patted me once on the shoulder. “Sure, sure, of course you do,” he said. Then his face became grave. “But make no mistake, my friend. There’s no nobility in accepting the title ‘convicted animal abuser.’ Need we even speak of ‘grave-robbing’? Don’t punish yourself by weaving the words ‘cruelty’ and ‘desecration’ into the story the future will forever tell of you. You just put on that suit, do something about your breath, and pull yourself together. They’ll have you in the courtroom in twenty minutes, and I’ll do the talking.”

  By the time he left, the coffee was cold. I put on Farley’s jacket, baggy in the shoulders and chest, then slicked down my hair with a product called Señor Pompo.

  On the drive to the county courthouse, Sheriff Dan cracked all the windows, whistled “Western Wind,” and seemed oblivious to a snow rabbit that darted from a culvert and got lost in his tires. Before I knew it, I was in the building where Janis had spent her life.

  The same fat man worked the metal detector in the lobby. The same little security badge dangled from everyone’s blue shirt. The lustrous marble floors were buffed to the sheen of burnt sugar, and the mahogany panels smelled of linseed wax. Sheriff Dan led me into the main hearing room, plopped me behind the defendant’s table, and, after cuffing me to a ring in the banister, headed off in search of coffee.

  I looked around the room, and nothing I’d hoped to see was there. Missing were Keno’s artifacts, which I’d imagined would be spread across the discovery table. Where was the evidence against me—the dog pelts, cat skulls, and squirrel tails? No parade of Dorito bags, barbecued ribs, and dental-floss fibers? Where were Trudy, Eggers, and my father, not to mention my friends and neighbors?

  Didn’t I have any friends and neighbors?

  There were some retired folk in the rear gallery, the same group who haunted the benches back when I was in high school, back when Dad would leave on his weeklong sales circuits. I’d come here after classes let out rather than do my homework alone, in an empty house. Spreading my schoolwork—book reports, history outlines, workbook quizzes—on the gallery benches, I ate sandwich halves and daydreamed as dramas unfolded below. You’d be surprised how much of court life is spent searching for papers, rereading testimony, and stalling for time. There were lots of recesses, points at which Janis would make for the restrooms or slip down the hall to brew more tea in the bailiff’s kitchenette. Sometimes, she’d hydraulically descend to Records in the basement—a place that everyone, out of laziness, accessed with the wheelchair lift—so she could tend to a night-blooming cereus plant she had growing down there.

  When a woman heads down the hall, do other people wonder if they’ll ever see her again? When a father “goes for a drive,” when a mother walks out the door and into the snow, do other people think: Is this it, are they ever coming back?

  To have been left is to know that anyone can leave, at any time. But that morning in the courthouse, I felt its opposite effect—the illusion that a person could return, that she might have a change of heart and emerge, at any moment, from one of these magisterial doors. It didn’t matter that Janis was dead, her ashes washed to the Gulf of Mexico. Hope doesn’t give a crap about facts like that.

  Crystal pitchers of water were placed at the witness box and jury stand. Someone turned on the judge’s microphone, which filled the room with a light buzz. Beyond the bar, the room was alive with clerks and bailiffs, gesturing with color-coded folders, typing, and talking as they geared up for the morning’s docket. These were Janis’ old co-workers, and though they ghosted through varying realms of familiarity in my memory, the routine of their motions only furthered the illusion that amber rings from Janis’ tea must still stain that stenographer’s table, that a lost Lean Cuisine lunch or two yet haunted the back of the kitchenette freezer. Did her little lotus tree still spruce the Mediation Room?

  I began to feel her presence—her pain-in-the-ass, can-do spirit, her maddening humming of songs too soft to make out, her stupid need to hug every human she encountered in the state of South Dakota—and I felt it physically, in my arms and knees, how much I’ve missed her since she died, six months before, in the guest room of my father’s house, even as he was packing her upstairs belongings for the dump.

  The room grew colder. I felt as if I were sitting at the center of a merry-go-round, the world in motion viewed from the calm. My eyes, when I rubbed them, burned from the Mexican hair pomade on my fingers, and I watched through bleary vision as civil servants went about their business. Could none of them feel Janis in the room, the person with whom they’d eaten Chinese buffet twice a week for twenty years? Did none of them feel the parts of her that remained?

  My father believed the dead lived on in their possessions. To him, Janis dwelled in the latent heat of an old curler set. She sighed in each exhale of a Tupperware lid, an
d spoke through the curled strips of trial transcripts she brought home and hung ribbony from refrigerator magnets. Trudy was partial to the notion that people preserved themselves through the images they left behind, and Eggers believed the dead were bound to the soil through which they’d trod their days.

  It was by watching Janis here in this courtroom, as I read my history books and peeled bananas, that I came to see that the dead reside inside narrative, that something immortal was happening as Janis documented everyday people swearing to the truth of their lives. Husbands and bosses, grifters and orphans testified to broken promises and failed bonds, to randomness and surprise, to the unexpected turns life took, and Janis was there to give evidence, not for or against them, but of them. She was the repository of our town’s stories. Is there a more noble trade?

  Farley swung into the courtroom, smelling suave in cologne and clicking a gold pen, a lozenge tucked in his cheek. He gave me a wink, then proceeded to glad-hand the prosecutor’s assistants before he worked the whole room in a counterclockwise circuit. My hands were trembling. An announcement was made, something I couldn’t make out. The judge made a joke, and everyone laughed. Through the doors came a clerk, balancing a stack of briefs. It was a clerk that Janis had mentioned before, the one with the stammer who grew angry whenever old people took the stand.