Parasites Like Us

by Adam Johnson

  Eggers turned. “Look at me,” he said, lips shiny with spice. “Look at how I live.”

  His eyes were a little wild. I put my hand on his bony shoulder.

  “You’ve done enough science for one day,” I said. “You better get out of here before they catch you.”

  He laughed, like I was an idiot, like I didn’t understand anything.

  “I said I came here to see you. I brought you this.”

  He opened the flap of his game bag, and from it removed one of Keno’s balls. This he handed over, then began scooping chips by the armful into the bag. The ball was warm and weighty in my hands. It was like being handed a baby.

  Eggers said, “Trudy and I got this out of the Hall of Man this morning. We figured you put the first ball in there.”

  “So Keno’s gone?”

  “You know what happened to Keno,” Eggers said. “Some guys from the casino came out in the middle of the night, and they started shoveling him up. Right now, Keno’s probably in some cardboard box in the casino basement, never to be seen again. Ancestor? What ancestor?”

  “How’d you get in?”

  “To the Hall of Man?” Eggers asked. “We picked the lock. Though afterward, of course, the combo was obvious—your birthday. You know some freak put biohazard signs all over the place?”

  I shrugged in a way that said, What can I say—I’m a Virgo.

  Eggers took a long look at that ball in my hands.

  He said, “You’re in jail, right?”

  This I had to concede.

  “And the cops trashed your office?”

  “I suppose,” I said.

  “Your career’s basically shot.”

  “What’s your point, Eggers?”

  “My dissertation is shit,” he continued. “All my work is gone. I’m talking a year of my life. And my parents? Forget it.”

  “Eggers,” I said, “you’re worked up about the loss of Keno. That’s understandable, and I’m willing to pretend I didn’t hear the sauce on a few of your earlier remarks. But never forget this: out of sight is not out of mind. No one is ever truly gone, as long as someone out there still cares. It means nothing that Keno was shoveled into the trunk of a police cruiser or stuffed in some box in the basement of a casino. We specialize in bringing people back, across far greater distances, through geologic time, so the patience of an anthropologist must be limitless.”

  “You really interrupted me that time, Dr. Hannah.”

  “Sorry.”

  “I was about to make a point.”

  “Of course,” I said. “My apologies.”

  “I was going to say: Give me one good reason why we shouldn’t open that ball, right here, right now.”

  I looked at the ball, at the petrified handprints preserved in the surface. My hand, when I placed it atop a print, fit. “Come on,” I said. “Follow me.”

  Without speaking, we made our way back across campus to the industrial-arts building. We were men of purpose, moving with a silent mandate, and when we reached our destination, we opened the door without hesitation. Inside, the place was empty, the machinery still. The floor had been swept, the tools returned to their places, and I have to say I admired Gerry for teaching his kids the proper respect for public property. Eggers and I walked among the machines, silent as totems in the dark hall.

  “Which one should we use?” I asked him.

  “Beats me. Why not just drop it on the floor?”

  I grabbed a pair of shop goggles off a peg. When I put them on, the world grew cloudy. I adjusted the elastic straps as snugly as possible, for safety’s sake, and the dangling tails kept tickling my cheeks. Then I approached the bandsaw. I wished that Trudy were here. She’d know how to work these things. When I hit the power switch, the saw raged to life, the cement floor vibrating from its torque. I set the ball on the cutting table and turned to Eggers.

  “What, should I just cut it in half?”

  “Dude,” he said, “there is no Clovis orb-cutting manual. You’re writing it.”

  Dude?

  I studied him as he leaned against the table saw. He pulled a dry river reed from behind his ear, then opened the flap of his game bag and withdrew a little buckskin pouch, from which he extracted an herblike substance. After packing the reed full, he stuck it between his lips, and, James Dean—like, looked at me.

  “What does it matter?” he asked. “Open the thing already.”

  “What does what matter?”

  Eggers withdrew his little firebox, which contained a single coal wrapped in corn husks, a fireproof material with great insulating power. He peeled back layer after layer, till he found the ember. This he blew on. “We dedicate our lives to anthropology,” he said. “And for what? To get crapped on? To have your shit rummaged through and stolen? I bet the Clovis had their version of the Fourth Amendment. In the late Pleistocene, there was no illegal search and seizure, I can tell you that. If someone’s sinew turned up missing, you can bet there’d be hell to pay. In the Ice Age, if you stole someone’s rodent stick, you could count on some serious Clovis justice descending on your ass.”

  With a little effort, the reed took, and Eggers began puffing away.

  As soon as I smelled the smoke, I lifted my safety goggles.

  “Tell me that’s not marijuana,” I said, glancing around for security cameras.

  He held the reefer out to me. Suppressing a cough, he said, “Homegrown.”

  “Don’t insult me,” I said. “Do you realize where you are? Have you no respect for the penal system?” I had the ball poised before the blur of the bandsaw blade, but I needed to get a couple things straight with the boy.

  “Eggers,” I said, “do you really have a Porsche?”

  “Where’d that come from?”

  “I’m asking the questions here,” I said. “Do you speak Japanese?”

  “Domo arigato.” he said. “You want some French? Merci beaucoup.”

  I eyeballed him good. “Are you a billionaire?”

  Eggers took a toke of weed.

  “You insult me, Dr. Hannah. You know I’ve taken a vow of poverty. I possess nothing but my friends, my loyalty, and twelve thousand years of history.” Here his eyes got hot. “And I’ll have you know, from direct observation, that a billionaire is the most loathsome thing on earth. It’s a person who uses for himself the resources of a thousand others. Worst of all, this wealth makes him think he doesn’t need other people, no matter who they are.”

  “So you’re telling me you don’t have a fat book contract?”

  “Of course I do,” he said. “I want to change people. My book will make them reconsider everything that’s important in life, the way your book did.”

  What was there to say to that?

  Satisfied, I lowered my goggles in a way that said, Let’s open this puppy.

  A rooster tail of red clay shot from the saw when the ball touched its blade, instantly dulling the ribbon of teeth. Still I cut on, scoring a circle around the equator of the ball, which I cut deeper with each revolution. After I’d worked through about an inch of clay all the way around, the pitch of the blade changed, and it seemed clear I’d hit some softer material.

  I shut down the saw and moved the ball to a workbench.

  Eggers pulled an antler from his game bag. He worked it into the seam I’d cut, and with a little prying, the clay shell broke loose, revealing an inner core, wrapped in a velum of ancient, hardened tissue that was certainly animal intestine. These yellowed layers of watertight membrane were stiff and crackly to the touch. Picture a head of iceberg lettuce, but with leaves made of hardened rawhide, nearly translucent, tough as bark.

  At that point in my life, I had yet to become intimate with the husking sound an animal sternum makes when it’s cracked wide—that yawning, almost creaky noise that comes after you stick your foot into a gaping chest cavity, hatchet through the breastplate, then bend the ribs back to the snapping point. But that’s the kind of sound we heard as Eggers and I
began peeling back layers of velum until we reached the center, which contained a cache of tiny white beads.

  Eggers and I both grabbed a handful. They rolled smoothly in your fingers, and you’d think they were little pearls except they weren’t quite round. They tended toward a teardrop shape. Too light to be pearls, too.

  Eggers sniffed one, then held it up to the light.

  “What the hell is it?” he asked.

  It struck me suddenly that this was some kind of wampum, that what we’d discovered was the equivalent of Clovis cash, and a wave of dejection ran through me. Certainly there was some anthropologist out there somewhere nerdy enough to study ancient monetary systems, and to him this would be the discovery of a lifetime. Personally, it made me sick—those beads meant that Keno had been a fat cat, bent on taking it with him, that his vision of the afterlife was based on maintaining wealth rather than discovering the infinite, transitioning to the eternal.

  The news was going to crush Eggers. I watched him put a bead on the table, but when he went to smash it with an antler, it skittered away. He grabbed another one and inspected it closely.

  “What is this made of?” he asked. “Is it ivory? Horn? No one could carve beads so small, so uniform. Who would? And why?”

  I put my beads back in the ball. I didn’t want anything to do with them.

  “Let’s get out of here,” I said. “We’ll worry about it later.”

  Eggers looked at me like I was insane.

  “Seriously, now, Dr. Hannah, what do you think?” he asked. “Are they man-made? Or naturally occurring? Hey, what about freshwater pearls? Or kidney stones removed from game? Weren’t the Mactaw known to save the kidney stones of the buffalo they butchered?”

  It was so like a grad student to be concerned with the small picture, to get caught up in form rather than function. This time, I was happy to keep it that way.

  “Not to worry,” I said. “We’ll do some tests later this month and get to the bottom of things.”

  “Month?” he asked. “I don’t have a month. My dissertation’s almost over.”

  I leaned against the table, crossed my arms. “Just when are you done?”

  “Exactly?” Eggers asked. “I don’t know, exactly. It’s not like I use a calendar or anything. I’ll have to check where the sun sets on the horizon.”

  “You said you started last year, after Parents Weekend, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well,” I said, “Parents Weekend is over.”

  “Let’s just get back to work,” Eggers said, and moved to put a bead in his mouth, as if taste might solve this problem.

  I grabbed his wrist. “Don’t be a fool,” I said. “You don’t know what we’re dealing with. Remember the National Geographic team who discovered that galleon in the North Sea? They celebrated by drinking a jug of wine from its hold, and everything was one big party until they became the first people in five hundred years to contract the Thames strain of the black plague.”

  Eggers adopted a look of bemused indulgence. Or maybe it was the reefer.

  “Dr. Hannah, my worms have worms,” he said. “My amoebas have dysentery. Over the past year, I’ve devoured frogs, ducklings, and minnows, still wriggling, and I’ve actually taken a liking to a dish I call ‘culvert surprise.’ I’ve eaten eggs straight from bird nests, little blue speckled things that you crunch down whole. I’ve gnawed on acorns till I shit lentil soup, and I ate a perch straight from the gullet of a dead river eel. I had squirrel fever for three weeks. I’ve eaten larvae, fungus, crabapples, and sap. I’ve siphoned blood from livestock, then frozen it into little cubes I could chew on for breakfast. In October, I practically lived on pumpkin meat, and I was the one who stole the candy canes off the USSD Christmas tree. I’ve eaten old fishing bait, Dr. Hannah. I’m a man who’s sucked the sunflower seeds from bird feeders.”

  That doobie gave him a serious case of the munchies, I thought as Eggers droned on and on about his diet. But then, out of the blue, I said, “Seeds.”

  “Seeds?” Eggers asked.

  Like a thunderbolt, it had struck me. “What if they’re seeds?”

  “Seeds,” Eggers echoed, starting to nod his head.

  I grabbed one of the beads, studied it. In the light, it did appear organic. Indeed, you could see a tiny dot at the end of the seed—the growth bud.

  “It looks like corn,” I said. “Don’t they look like miniature kernels of maize?”

  Eggers looked dubious. “Sure, it looks like corn, but maize comes from South America. It’s only migrated north in the last few thousand years.”

  “Bear with me,” I said, gesturing largely. “Let’s imagine, hypothetically, that maize was indigenous to all the Americas, but then the Clovis came along, and through overconsumption they eradicated it, the way they eradicated everything else they touched.”

  “But what about the Law of Seeds?” Eggers asked. “Doesn’t the Law of Seeds state that the fruit of plants beneficial to humans will be made profligate—not extinct—by them?”

  “But not when the food is cooked,” I countered.

  Eggers looked at me suspiciously. “The Clovis left no grinding stones,” he said. “There are no cooking pots, no hearths, nothing. Clovis teeth show none of the wear associated with milled cereals. Yet you’re saying the Clovis cooked corn fritters?”

  “Look, Eggers,” I said, “you let me worry about that. You just meet me here tomorrow with that corn. Right now, I have to make a phone call.”

  “To Hatitia Wells?” Eggers asked. “You’re going to bring in Hatitia Wells, aren’t you?”

  “That’s not your concern. You just safeguard that corn, and we’ll finish this tomorrow. In the meantime, no stunts, no improv, and none of that ‘Clovis creativity’ of yours.”

  “What?” he innocently asked.

  “I know you, Eggers. Do not plant, grind, or ingest any of that corn.”

  Eggers didn’t say anything.

  “I’m serious,” I said. “No baking, boiling, cooking, or chewing, okay? And do not get anyone else to do it. And no smoking it, either. You bring that corn back tomorrow, intact.”

  “You really think Clovis could have eaten corn?”

  “I’m going to bring in the best paleobotanist in all the Dakotas to find out.”

  * * *

  Outside, darkness had fallen. How was that possible?

  The only public phone I could find was in the movie house. The lobby smelled of salt and butter and the must of old velvet, and the prisoners working snack-bar duty were watching the movie through breaks in a curtain that had once been purple. I sat in one of those old-fashioned phone booths, and through the door I watched hot dogs slowly turn on the rotisserie as I waited for Dr. Yulia Terrasova Nivitski to accept the charges. A collective gasp rose from within the theater. When Yulia finally came on, I could tell she wasn’t too happy about the collect call.

  “Hank?” she asked. “From where are you calling?”

  “That doesn’t matter right now,” I said, trying to strike a note of authority. “I have an important question to ask you.”

  “There is something chaotic going on,” she said. “Is there an emergency?”

  She must have overheard the movie score in the background—there were a lot of insane, shrieking birds.

  I decided to get to the point. “You love plants. That’s your calling. You love plants because—”

  “I am hanging up now.”

  “Wait,” I said. “I’ve called for a reason.”

  “As I guessed. You did not call to talk to me. You only want something from me.”

  “No,” I said. “Yes.”

  “You do not even speak ‘hello.’ You cannot even engage in chitchat. Always it is the same kind of man who calls me—one who reverses the charges, then makes no small talk, no foreplay. The kind who wears coveralls and has a crate of motorcycle parts in his bedroom.”

  I tried to not picture Yulia in another man’s bedroom, strewn w
ith oily cranks and manifolds, maybe some weightlifting equipment. “Listen to me,” I told her. “We have made a discovery, a grand one. It will shake the foundations of paleobotany. We need your help. I need it.”

  Yulia harrumphed. “Maybe you need Hatitia Wells,” she said. “All of the men fall down for her. Hatitia, your thesis was brilliant. Hatitia, can I freshen your drink? I know, I have been to the conferences.”

  “I didn’t call Hatitia Wells,” I said. “I called you.”

  “Yet you do not even talk to me, let alone listen. I happen to be very conversant. But is there any Have you read any good novels lately, Yulia? What about Did you get the committee chair you were hoping for? Do you say, I like to karaoke, Yulia; do you? Do you remember speaking to my son yesterday? Do you ask, How is Vadim?”

  “Please, hear me out. It has to do with corn. . . .”

  I waited for the line to disconnect, but it didn’t. I knew that would pique her interest. “We have found some maize,” I said, “Some very, very old maize, and I need you to catch the next flight to South Dakota.”

  I waited for Yulia to say, I just left South Dakota, but she didn’t.

  That corn had her. I mean I owned her. It was time to set the hook:

  “We believe this corn dates from the late Pleistocene. We need you to verify it.”

  “The Pleistocene?” Here Yulia laughed. “That is impossible. That cannot be. I see you have been selling me a cartload of dung.”

  “I know it sounds crazy, but we’ve found maize, a kilo of it, in situ with Clovis remains.”

  “I am flattered that you would concoct such foolishness on my account, but let me tell you something, Dr. Hannah: desperate men are not sexy. Please, now, stop this. I will thank you to say goodbye. I must return to my evening, which just might be quite scheduled. In fact, I might be watching a rental video at this very moment with my masculine boyfriend.”