Parasites Like Us

by Adam Johnson

  The kids all took a step forward. I tried not to show any fear.

  “Please,” I said, “I won’t even dignify that.”

  Gerry looked at the boys, as if to say, What are you waiting for?

  All four of them hit the deck and began banging out pushups at a feverish pace, their noses making greasy dabs on the dusty floor.

  Watching them exercise, Gerry suddenly seemed overtaken with pride. He leaned toward me as though we were confidants, as though he hadn’t just insulted me seven different ways. “You know, they’ve never had any discipline,” he said. “Last week, when I picked them up—Jesus, it was like that movie Lord of the Flies. I opened the trailer door, and it was like Indians had attacked. The furniture was stacked up in fortresses, and the twins had raided all the food. Nobody was getting past Kelly to the bathroom. Little Pat was sleeping with a sharp stick at night. Now look at them.”

  The boys pumped in unison. They all had that same rail-thin body, the same wiry biceps and pointy elbows. They all sported identical mullet haircuts, dustbin-blond, and they even wore matching silver studs in their right ears. Later, I was to learn that these kids could run for days on end through unpacked snow. And eventually I would discover they weren’t even all boys.

  “What is going on here?” I asked.

  “This,” Gerry said, indicating the pile of skis, “is my latest project. I’m going to increase my sales sixfold. It’ll take the Midwest by storm. You know they’re already filming a sequel to Impossible Journey?”

  “No,” I said. “I meant, what’s going on with these kids? Where’s their mother?”

  “Oh.” Gerry looked down to the kids doing push-ups. Every time they reached another increment of ten, they pushed off hard enough to clap their hands and sound off—“Thirty!”—so when Gerry spoke his voice was a mix of pride and sorrow. “The ex–old lady, she’s having some health issues. I’m kind of watching the kids till she rebounds a little, at least until she gets her short-term memory back. They’re good kids, though, you know? They grow on you. I mean, do not lay any free time on their hands. Do not let them out of your sight. But, you know, you get used to having them around.”

  “Even if you have to keep them in a jail cell?”

  Gerry was in another place. He didn’t even hear me. “My ex–old lady, she was making the kids breakfast, like every other day,” he said. “I warned her about that toaster trick a hundred times.”

  I watched his eyes closely. It was like he was there, watching it happen.

  “What?” I asked. “Did she put a knife in it or something?”

  Gerry shook his head. “You think that woman’d learn.”

  “She was shocked? And it had happened before?”

  Gerry looked off, as if all those fancy machines could help him craft the words. “I never thought I’d get her back,” he said. “She took off for all those years—I thought she was gone for good. All I did was work and work. You know, you get into this loop where you only let yourself look forward. I had two night jobs. I begged Sheriff Dan for extra shifts. I’ve arrested everyone in town—two, three times. She was the best thing that ever happened to me. And this is how I get her back. This is how she returns to me. Don’t get me wrong, though. I’ll take it. If this is how it has to be, I’ll take it.”

  I put my hand on Gerry’s shoulder. “I hear what you’re saying.”

  He slapped my hand away, as if I’d offended him, then took it out on the kids. After one of those piercing two-finger whistles I could never do, he yelled, “Double time.”

  The kids clutched the cement for all they were worth, elbows knocking as they drove it home, clapping twice between sets. When they chanted “Fifty!” Gerry sensed he’d made his point. He called “Cut!” and the kids popped up, faces glowing as they looked to Gerry for approval. By way of praise, Gerry brushed the dust off all their painter’s pants and lined them up again. Little Pat came up and hugged Gerry’s leg.

  Gerry turned to me. “Look,” he said, “this project is taking longer than I thought. We’ve got a quota to fill, and then I’ve got to get these kids to their first hockey practice. Can you find your cell on your own?”

  “Yeah,” I said, “I suppose.”

  He pulled a map from his pocket. “You’re in Building C-3.” He pointed to the old freshman dorm. “Your room’s on the second floor. Go straight there, and do not cross the perimeter wire. If you step off campus, the alarm sounds, and then they hunt you down. Then you get transferred to a real prison.”

  * * *

  Outside, the sun shot purple halos through bilevel clouds, and a mist raced between the buildings, furling like parachute silk, smelling of the chinaberry hedges it passed through. The light, indeterminate and bright, made my eyes weep in the corners, where bits of sawdust had lodged.

  Before me, the prison campus was a series of mirror-bright fields punctuated by old-timey buildings whose bricks had leached whiter with each winter. The current freeze held broken branches fast in the trees. An aerial antenna slumped under a baggy suit of ice. Clutched by a trellis of brown ivy was a yellow T-shirt, still looking summery and surprised. I couldn’t quite make myself move toward any of these buildings. How could I sentence myself to some teeny dorm room? How could I resign myself to slacking off the remainder of my days on a freshman bunkbed? I had no way of knowing it, but as I stamped my feet with indecision, the annals of primitive technology were rewriting themselves. A new day had dawned in science, and though I didn’t understand it yet, I was the Adam of anthropology. There was so little time.

  Then it came to me: the Unknown Indian. I hadn’t been on this campus in years, since long before it’d become a minimum-security prison, but I suddenly realized there was a place I needed to go. I pulled up the hood of my prison-issue blizzard overalls and tucked my hands inside the jumpsuit’s sleeves. I gauged the wind, dropped a shoulder, and set off for what had once been Parkton College’s humanities building. Down in the basement there was an exhibit called the Tomb of the Unknown Indian, a collection that began with some ceremonial graves discovered during the school’s construction, and had over the years expanded into quite an archive of death ephemera.

  Despite the tithing wind, the prison’s population of white males was out in full force, clustering in groups of ten to fifteen, showing the cold their backs. The puffy eyes of billionaires tracked me as I passed their chummy cadres, smoking Canadian cigarettes under a work-detail awning, or gripping foam coffee cups in the lee of a laundry van. There was something ganglike in the way they huddled, and I decided I’d take Sheriff Dan’s advice: I wasn’t going to speak to any of them.

  Heading downhill past the gymnasium, I passed a group of older corporate types, all wearing their blue prison bibs, all sporting military crew cuts. And in front of the library stood a group of young lions, hair slicked down, glasses lean and wiry, which was probably the look on Wall Street when they were arrested for crimes like price fixing and securities fraud. Beyond them, through the library’s windows, I could see the shelves were still loaded with books, bolstering my faith that the Unknown Indian exhibit would still be there.

  I cruised by the old Memorial Union, whose little collegiate movie theater was hosting a monthlong Hitchcock, film festival for the viewing pleasure of the titans of white-collar crime. Perhaps at this very moment, the moviegoers included Michael Milken, Charles Keating, Fife Symington, and Ivan Boesky. The matinee was The Birds, a film whose paranoia and hubris were laughable. As if our feathered friends were the ones conspiring to eradicate us. Tonight’s screening was Psycho, the most frightening movie ever made. What sick freak could think up that story line, what kind of person would leave his decaying mother’s corpse in the basement?

  Finally, I came to the old humanities building. The main doors were inset with dark wood, and heavy shocks hissed them open and closed. I made for the basement doors at the end of the hall. Passing rows of classrooms, I noticed through the little windows that all the old rooms
had been converted into sound booths. Through the security glass, you could see blue-bibbed inmates using the old language-lab equipment to record books for the blind. In room after room, men wore pastel plastic headsets and read works like White Fang and Beloved into outdated, modular microphones. Lord, how would I make it through a day here, let alone a month?

  I headed downstairs, where a repository of regional grave paraphernalia was on display. Though I’d viewed the artifacts before, there might be something I’d see in a new light, something that would help me understand Keno. The collection was famous for a set of seventeenth-century Nakota coup sticks and a primitive polished-shell mirror used only by Ojibway men who’d completed a rite-of-passage ceremony called “The Life of the Long Body.” The exhibit also boasted a Mandan breastplate made from rose sea coral. Most famous of all was a set of twenty duck decoys, hand-woven from bulrush reeds, discovered during the dam’s earthmoving phase. The decoys carbon-dated back three thousand years.

  Of course, compared with the Hall of Man, the Tomb of the Unknown Indian was an inferior installation, hastily assembled, poor of theme, and though the exhibits were ethnographically accurate, they lacked the little flourishes—track lighting, dioramic painting, mood music—that truly ignite the imagination. Still, I took the steps two at a time.

  When I pushed through the fire doors at the base of the stairs, I encountered not a portal into humanity, but a room full of vending machines. Strips of fluorescent tubing hung from a low ceiling, illuminating a room ringed with all manner of snack and soda machines. Glowing panels advertised sodas I’d never even heard of, like Splash and Quirst. One soda was named Jolt, and took as its logo the universal icon for accidental electrocution. LED panels flashed, and metallic dispensing screws gleamed. I had to turn in place to take it all in. I approached a tall, ominous machine that sold snacks called Bugles, Bangles, and I swear, Curdles. I peered into the machine. Hanging there on a rod, admittedly alluring, was a bag of those Doritos Eggers and Trudy were always talking about. Alas, I had no change.

  In the center of the room was a pair of twin vinyl benches that had been pushed together, the way they do in an art museum. I took a seat and studied the machines, each a climate-controlled, perfectly lit gallery of goods. On an ottoman of vinyl, I reclined. Above me, pipes lined the basement ceiling, some color-coded, some crusty with fireproofing, all of them wound through with fiber-optic cable and coaxial cord. This room had been a repository of the meekest of cultures, a few tattered remnants of now extinguished peoples, saved as tokens by the people who had vanquished them. Now they were gone. I wondered if, in a thousand years, a perfectly preserved soda bottle—tinted green, curvy, slightly opalescent—wouldn’t speak as much about us as an Algonquian baby rattle, made from the amber-clear shells of baby turtles, or the translucent horn ladles the ancient Manitobans drank with. Wouldn’t a Mars Bar candy wrapper, cut from silky, shiny Mylar and printed with the planets of our system, speak as much of us as a Spokane baby swaddle, handwoven and dyed the Five Colors of the Universe?

  But who had use for ancient things? What had happened in this room was all too common. What had been done here was repeated the world over whenever one group came into possession of something that was burdensomely sacred to another. The Midwest was full of stories of construction crews unearthing mammoths, or city contractors trenching up burial mounds, only to till the artifacts under so that building wasn’t halted for the troubling process of investigation and “repatriation.” Here’s what the prison had surely done: one night, a backhoe opened a hole somewhere on campus, a truck backed up, and a few unlucky inmates were forced to shovel out Aleut spirit totems, Lakota “tomorrow” suits of heavenly buckskin, Crow death masks made from beetle wings, and a hundred other accouterments to the afterlife of native peoples. This was what would probably happen to Keno if the casino had its way.

  Two inmates came into the room to stock up on candy bars, but I didn’t look up. Blackfoot fireboxes were sparking in my mind. Narragansett death flutes sang in my ears. After death, the former lit your way to the other side, and the latter whistled you back if you weren’t ready. Reclining, I heard my fellow inmates drop quarter after quarter, followed by the whir of the dollar-bill changer, and finally the mechanical twisting of the selection screw that sent a run of Milky Way bars into the pan below. Perhaps they were headed to see The Birds.

  Dear anthropologists of the coming millennium, when you come across the grave of the Unknown Indian, dumped to the brim with unwanted artifacts, what will you make of this grave of graves, filled with the soup of a hundred cultures? Perhaps you have already encountered this oddity and developed a complex theory, the source of much debate among the common people. Don’t let it become another footnote in the literature of yesterday. If the site is yet undiscovered, the resting place of the Unknown Indian shouldn’t be hard to find. The prison was on a hill above the river, right near the forty-third parallel. I charge you to locate this grave, liberate these objects, and place them in a hall you shall name the Hall of Humanity, which will also house all the artifacts you can find from the eradicated peoples of the earth. This Hall of Humanity should be climate-controlled, tasteful in its lighting, “hands-on” in its general approach, and perpetual in its charter.

  Someone entered the room and began messing with a vending machine.

  I was still trying to picture this new Hall of Humanity, up on a mountain, with lots of pillars perhaps, or maybe in the center of a great plaza. But someone’s interminable banging on a vending machine was ruining my concentration. I sat up. There, squatting in front of the potato-chip machine, was a man in a filthy fur coat, feeding a stick up the receiving door of the drop bin.

  “Eggers?” I asked.

  Eggers turned to look at me.

  I asked, “What are you doing here?”

  “I’m here to see you, Dr. Hannah,” he said. “What happened to your hair?”

  “Don’t change the subject. Just what are you up to?”

  He looked at the rodent stick in his hands, half swallowed by the gleaming machine. “Gathering,” he said.

  I pulled myself together and, nearing Eggers, crouched beside him.

  What the heck was he doing? Soda spearing? Chip fishing?

  “Hold this,” he said.

  I grabbed the switch, freshly cut from green willow, as Eggers pulled off his heavy parka in preparation for some serious concentration. “They took my other rodent stick,” he volunteered. “I spent all day making this one.”

  He took the stick from me, then continued worming it up the dispenser flue, working the thing by instinct and feel, the way you floss a hard-to-reach crown. He nestled his cheek against the glass, wrapped his free hand around the machine. Through finesse, Eggers sent the barbed head of the stick rising, cobralike, up through the rows of gum and mints, past the candy bars, toward the top row, where the real calories hung—in bags and bags of potato chips.

  Eggers grunted and muttered to himself as he coaxed the stick, and I must admit, there was something sexual about the process. How long had it been since the poor boy’d known a woman? I’d never questioned his reputation as the campus paramour, but there was certainly something desperate here.

  “What happened to Keno?” I asked.

  Eggers scrunched his face at me, as if I was breaking his concentration.

  I said, “I’m in jail here, in case you haven’t noticed. Nobody’s exactly taking the time to keep me posted.”

  Eggers returned to his delicate work. He began twisting the stick, to help it clear the rungs of Twinkies and HoHos. Through the glass, the stick was right before our eyes, threatening to snag on the plastic rim of a Ding-Dong package.

  Easy, I kept thinking. Easy.

  Eggers gave the stick a little jiggle, and, simple as that, the triple-barbed head slid up to the next level. Then he spoke again. “I crept back to the casino last night,” he said. “Everything was gone. They confiscated all my tools. They impounded my lod
ge. They took my rodent stick. Can you believe it? Everything. There was only an evidence receipt, staked in the snow.”

  Eggers shifted, and his buckskin shirt raised enough that I could see his exposed ribs and the hollow of his stomach. Under all those thick pelts, the boy was skin and bones. His midriff was also covered with circles of scaly red skin—an advanced case of ringworm. Eggers had the stick poised below all those potato chips, and he kept trying a little push-twist-jerk motion to make the bags drop. They’d shimmy a bit, swagger with a good strike, but none would fall.

  “So—what about Keno?” I asked. “What about his ball? Don’t tell me they’re gone.”

  “Show a little concern, would you? I lost everything.”

  “You’re a nomad,” I said. “You take nothing and use nothing, right?”

  My tone was a little snotty, enough that Eggers looked at me like, What’s eating your ass? “I lost all my stockpiles,” he said. “Have you ever woven your own rope? Made bags out of sheep bladders? I had an entire pouch of sinew. Do you know how many roadkills you have to raid to get that much tendon? It takes a whole deer carcass to harvest enough sinew to make a single snare. You have to cut out the hamstrings, scrape the whole vertebral column, then strip the neck. You have to take the tendon, beat it into fiber, dry it in the sun, and weave it into cord by using glue made from hooves.”

  Eggers was sounding pretty sore.

  “Sorry,” I said. “Take it easy, would you?”

  “Take it easy? Have you ever made glue from hooves, Dr. Hannah?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Have you ever been to the dog-food plant south of town, where Hormel dumps its hooves in those huge mounds? Have you seen the size of some of those raccoons? They travel in packs, you know.”

  Now Eggers was totally worked up. He took his rodent stick and began slashing it around in the vending machine. The barbs tore holes in the bags, sending down a rain of Ruffles, Doritos, Fritos, and Funyuns, so that the dispensing bin filled with chips, and empty, torn bags hung from the racks. Eggers reached in and began devouring chips. I’d never seen someone eat like that, shoving them wholesale into his mouth, masticating them into an orange ball that he shifted as he chewed.