Parasites Like Us

by Adam Johnson

  “Vacation?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “At a dude ranch, a high-class one.”

  “A dude ranch,” I echoed. “Can’t say I’ve ever been to one of those.”

  “They call it the Lazy-R. They’ve got a fancy lodge with horses and fishing, you name it. Gerry says everything’s first-class. At night they wash their steaks down with peach brandy.”

  The boy listed a few more of the dude ranch’s amenities, including activities like making bullwhips and writing cowboy poetry, but there was no light in his eyes.

  “You sure this is that kind of ranch?” I asked. “Isn’t it more like a rehabilitation center or a convalescent home?”

  He looked at me like he didn’t know what the heck I was talking about.

  “Your mother is recuperating, isn’t she?” I asked. “I mean, wasn’t there some sort of accident?”

  The boy’s look turned from incomprehension to uncomfortable vacancy. I wanted to grill him a little more about this supposed ranch that was open in the middle of winter, but I understood the kid was going through some hard times.

  I tried to strike the right tone, a mix of casual and concerned.

  “When was the last time you talked to her?” I asked.

  He didn’t say anything.

  In the silence, you could hear Gerry snoring in one of the adjacent rooms.

  From nowhere, an inmate strolled into the kitchen in his underwear—skin sallow, flesh pasty. I could tell he was a millionaire by the way he grabbed a gallon of milk from the avocado-colored fridge and stood in the light of the open door drinking for himself what was meant for us all.

  The kid took the opportunity to pick up his wax.

  “I’ve got to finish my sled,” he said.

  I took a long look at him. “You don’t have any idea where your mother is, do you?” I asked him. “You don’t know when she’s coming back at all.”

  He seemed not to hear me. With his special wax, he began stroking the runner, methodically, the wax caking where he pressed too hard.

  * * *

  I went to the shower house. Under the urinal trough I found a stiff-bristled brush and a jug of industrial cleaner. I didn’t have my shower sandals, let alone a sponge caddy, and forget finding any yellow rubber gloves. I just started scrubbing. Somehow that kid had gotten to me. Under the spray of old copper nozzles, I couldn’t tell if I was crying or not. It felt like I was. Using the brush handle, I scraped at chalky green calcium deposits. Then I dug the bristles into the purple-black grout where microbial flagella clung as tightly as when they gripped the earth in the Precambrian era.

  Normally, cleaning soothed me. I found solace in its sense of purpose and accomplishment, in the single-minded attention serious housework required. But I couldn’t focus at all. Cold condensation dripped down from the ceiling. The lingering smell of kiwi shampoo and mango conditioner sickened me. Kids, I thought. They were born suckers. It made me shudder to think how lost and clueless they were. The way they looked at you, so blind, so trusting. They fell for any damn thing you told them. Then there was the neediness, the withdrawal, the tears. Who’d blame a mom if she did head off to the old dude ranch? Who wouldn’t turn to a diet of cowboy canapés and nightly charades?

  Under each shower nozzle was a depression in the cement where decades of human feet had worn the concrete, exposing an aggregate of sand and crushed river rock. I stood in these stations, polishing the tile, making the fixtures shine, dehairing the drains. I scrubbed until the first glints of morning light shone down through the vent shafts. I looked up, as if I could see pale sky through the lean ducts. High in a propeller plane, at that very moment perhaps, the most beautiful paleobotanist in the state of North Dakota was on her way to see me. Yet inside, where my stomach should be, there was only a hollow drop-off.

  It was the same pang I’d felt after buying the Corvette. I had just published a book, one I fancied would shake things up in the intellectual world, and to celebrate I duffed five years of savings on a stupid car. After I paid for it, the shop in Sioux Falls kept the car a week while they installed the custom stereo I wanted, and mounted the rear spoiler and the window louvers. When a guy from the dealership finally dropped it off, he left the motor running, as if I’d dive in and race through town. But all I felt was this: that no fool had ever so fooled himself, that self-suckery had now become an art. Babes, I suddenly understood, weren’t going to start speaking to me—and they didn’t. Colleagues wouldn’t begin to respect me, as I’d fantasized. But what was there to do? I climbed in and drove around town all afternoon, revving the engine for nobody.

  I moved to the commodes, which were filled with all manner of material, amber and otherwise. After I flushed them, though, you could see the porcelain bowls were passably clean. The toilet tanks, however, had never been touched, and when I lifted the lids, I found that beards of algae had grown deep into the water—they waggled, as if with wisdom, after each flush. I closed a stall door, took a seat on a toilet lid, and leaned back against the tank. Who did I think I was fooling?

  In the bare light of a jailhouse crapper, I counted a thousand reasons Yulia would reject me. There were my bony wrists, so thin and flimsy that my hand could just about squirrel through the hairpin curve of a toilet trap. There was the fungal smell my scalp had picked up. These were obvious flaws, and then there were the ones that I couldn’t see but she undoubtedly would. I was an expert at knowing when people secretly didn’t want to be around a guy. I’d been trained to detect in my fellow humans those quiet inclinations to be somewhere else, with someone else.

  After your mother leaves, you look back on things with sharper vision. You understand that those days she scanned the horizon, she wasn’t thinking about the weather. You realize your walks to the post office weren’t about your fascination with stamps, but some secret correspondence she was keeping, with someone far away. In retrospect, you remember which sections of the paper she read first, what distant radio station she spent forever trying to tune in. Flying a kite, she was the kite. Ice-skating, her tight turns were loops around the world. When I close my eyes and try to feel her now, it is not my mother’s embrace that comes to me, not her hug, or the lap I sat on, but those interminable swing sets. After school we always went to the playground by the river. Even as a child, you know when the hands on your back are absent hands. To swing, you must face away from your mother, and she pushes you away, she pushes you away, but you keep swinging back. Her heart loses ground the longer this game goes on, until she is barely touching your back and you are barely moving, until her hands feel so faint, it’s like she’s pushing you from Paris. Listless in a swing, you toe the sand and watch the water as she finishes her cigarette. You never step in the same river twice, your science books say, and your mother is only a puff of smoke, passing over your shoulder.

  So, after she leaves for good, your radar is on as your dad begins rotating through the parade of girlfriends that will eventually lead to Janis. After dinner, your father and a woman drink sherry in silence as you finish your ice cream, and you know when your company isn’t preferred, you know they can’t wait for you to go to bed. At the cinema, your father slings a jacket over his shoulder and leads a different woman to the lobby, where they will chat and gesture, where they will lean casually against the theater’s big windows, touching fingers, waiting for you to watch the end of the movie reel. In a restaurant, you come out of the bathroom, and there are three half-eaten dinners around a table, some cash under a plate, and this means your father and some woman are already in the car, radio on, smoking. When you crunch across the lot, your dad’s engine fires up, and as you climb into the back seat, he passes you a mint and gives you that look. The look isn’t mean. It doesn’t wish you weren’t born. It doesn’t hope you’ll be gone tomorrow. It only wonders if you have to be right here, right now.

  In this period, your father gives you books, literally, by the box. Once, he orders every book in the Junior Geologist’s summer cata
logue. Sure, you read. But, for reasons you don’t understand, you begin rifling through his possessions. While he’s at work, you feel your way through the bottom of his sock drawer. You stand on a chair to inspect the closet’s top shelf. Inside the breast pocket of his sportcoats, you find plastic swizzle sticks from bars you’ve never heard of. Your mother’s nurse medallion, you discover, is something your father keeps in his medicine cabinet, beside his stomach pills. In a book, Profiles in Courage, you find one of your baby photos, except in this one there is a little puppy on a blanket with you. The puppy has a bow around its neck, but this dog you have never heard of. No one ever mentioned his name. You find a cache of condoms, taped individually to the bottom of the bedside table, and though you don’t exactly know their purpose, it’s clear to you, lying on the floor, looking up at them, that these have to do with the women your father dates. These are integral to the look your dad gives you as you take forever to finish that melting ice cream.

  Cramped in the stall, my legs had gone to sleep. I had to lean on the toilet-paper dispenser to stand. I flushed the toilet under me, lest anyone think I was up to some monkey business in here, then walked stiff-legged to the common room, where I called Trudy.

  When she answered, I said, “Trudy, I’m sorry. But this has been a mistake. You can’t pick up Yulia. You can’t bring her here.”

  On the other end, Trudy gave a long, exasperated sigh.

  I was silent. I replayed Yulia’s image over and over in my mind, looking for signs that she really didn’t want to be with me. I couldn’t detect any, but that didn’t mean anything. It was my experience that it sometimes took a while to stumble upon someone’s hidden reservations. If you spent enough time with someone, though, if you looked hard enough, you’d find them. It was always a matter of time. If I found them in Yulia . . . when I found them in Yulia . . . how would I stand it?

  “Dr. Hannah,” Trudy said, “you may not remember this, because it was late, but you called me about twelve hours ago.”

  “Things have changed,” I said. “We’ll have to go with another paleobotanist.”

  “What about Dr. Nivitski? She lands in a couple hours. What am I supposed to do? Take her sightseeing?”

  “Can’t you just not pick her up?” I asked. “I mean, she’s an adult. She can take care of herself.”

  “I’m going to pretend this conversation never happened,” she said. “You’ve been under a lot of stress. Anyone can see that. I’m going to meet Dr. Nivitski’s flight at five, and I’m going to tell her how thrilled you are to have her consult on this project. Then I’m going to drop her off at the visitors’ entrance.”

  This time, Trudy hung up.

  Wrapping my trusty blanket around my shoulders, I headed for that icebox of a room, resigning myself to cold sheets and a cold mattress. This is how my father found me. I felt as if I’d only been asleep a minute, as if my eyes had just closed. Then he was shaking me awake. I squinted up at him, my teeth clenched with cold. He stood there, brown suit draped over an arm, looking at me—my bald head, my dishpan hands, the wet sock on my right foot. Though he was trying not to show it, I could tell he was dismayed. He went to pull off my wet sock, and when he found another wet sock underneath it, he shot me a look of moderate distress. From his pocket, he drew a pair of black wool socks, and after sliding these on my feet, he hauled me up to a sitting position.

  “Arms up,” he said, and pulled a white dress shirt over me.

  When my head poked through, I got a good look at him as he worked my hands through the cuffs. His hair was thinning. There were a few liver spots on his scalp. His two new teeth looked wooden. He seemed, for reasons I couldn’t put my finger on, very alone. But I was always wrong when I thought that of him. “Did you water the plants?” I asked.

  He was working the buttons on the cuff vent. “Yes, I watered your plants.”

  “Did you play them some Latin jazz?”

  “Sure,” he said. “I danced them a marimba, too.”

  When he played me like that, I never knew what to believe. He was full of these little power moves designed to keep me off balance. They always worked.

  He tugged my shirt this way and that, to center it.

  “Relax,” he said. “I watered your plants.”

  “Now you’re really lying, aren’t you? It would be like you to play the music and leave them dry.”

  “Look,” he said, gathering the fabric of my slacks so they’d slip on easier, “I’m trying to help here. I’m on your side. Now, come on, lift those legs.”

  I complied, though I moved pretty slow, just to let Dad know I had a mind of my own. “You’re wasting your time,” I told him. “Plans have changed, if you haven’t heard. She’s not coming.”

  Dad didn’t say anything. He just worked a pant leg over my ankle, then jammed on a dress shoe to keep the slacks from sliding off. This he repeated on my other leg, then began lacing.

  “Did you hear what I said?” I asked. “Are you listening to me?”

  When both my shoes were snug, he stood.

  “All set,” he said. “Just pull your pants up.”

  “I know how to pull my pants up,” I said.

  “Then pull your pants up.”

  A woman knocked on the door. “Is everybody decent in there?” she asked.

  I pulled my pants up.

  In walked the waitress from the Lollygag, though now her hair was down, and it was beyond black, full of sheen and depth. It was movie-star hair, rich enough to allow her to favor dark lipstick, wear a top that shimmered green, and carry a little extra weight.

  Dad stuffed a wadded-up tie in my coat pocket. “I draw the line at other men’s ties,” he said, and tossed a thumb toward the woman. “You remember Lorraine.”

  A coffee cup hung from her finger. She swung it to show that it was empty.

  I didn’t exactly catch her name last time, but I said, “Of course. Charmed.”

  She handed me the empty cup. “Likewise, Professor,” she said, a little playfully. “I was going to make you a cup, but that coffee station—really, it’s a mess. Nothing personal. I mean, you do have quite a place here.”

  “The accommodations are temporary,” I assured her.

  She turned to my father. “Not much room for a party, I’m afraid.”

  I asked, “A party?”

  Just then, I saw Farley walk past the door frame, headed down the hall. He wore one of those sharp suits of his, and he was carrying something in large oven mitts imprinted with red flames.

  I followed in disbelief, catching up with him at the communal kitchen, where he was staring at the controls of one of the ovens. When Farley caught sight of me, he patted me on the shoulder and threw me a look that said, What’d I tell ya, eh? I could feel the heat of the mitt through my suit.

  He said, “A cut above the county holding cells, huh? You hear any dogs barking? Smell any urine? It doesn’t get any better than this. Here you’ve got your high-speed Internet access, your bowling league, and your”—he stopped, lifted his eyebrows—“conjugal visits.” As if reminded of something, he shook off an oven mitt and withdrew a cassette tape from his slacks. This he slipped into my breast pocket, then patted its impression through the fabric. “I know you’re an Eagles man,” he said, “but give the Santana a test drive.”

  I pulled the tape out, examined it. “Farley,” I said, “if this has anything to do with that call last night, let me apologize here and now. I was way out of line to—”

  He turned to his casserole dish, sealed with aluminum foil. “Speak nothing of it, my man. I present one mushroom surprise, as requested,” he said. With a note of conspiracy, he added, “I make the bacon bits myself. Trust me—the ladies notice.”

  I was always suspicious of sudden generosity. The rule of life tends toward the opposite. Still, I said, “This is too much, my friend. You didn’t have to do this.”

  Farley shook his head. “What would you do without me?” he asked, not altogether rhe
torically. I didn’t mind. Against the tableau of an old kitchen, it felt as if Farley and I were family, standing in a place where, had we been brothers, we’d have talked late by the fridge light or met before dawn to make sandwiches before slipping out to fish under the morning star. There was a certain kind of kitchen that could always make you feel this: twin cocoa-colored ovens, an avocado fridge, and Formica countertops that had once been lemon-yellow. Throw in a stovetop whose burner pans were lined with tin foil, and some pull-out cutting boards that had long ago been resurfaced with handwritten recipes. What spoke more of family than an always-wrong oven clock or that lone Crock-Pot made from clear root-beer-tinted glass?

  Farley leaned against the preheating oven.

  “Amigo,” he said, “you can do me one favor.”

  Then Farley mimed the zipping of a fly.

  I looked down. Sure enough. I gave the matter some quick attention as Dad and Lorraine straggled into the kitchen. Behind them, the sun was setting through the tall windows of the breakfast area. Outside, the prison was canopied by mid-level clouds, yet the horizon was clear. The dipping sun shot brilliant light at us, slanty and intense.

  Dad and Lorraine didn’t say anything. They just stood in that sideways light, smiling at me. “What?” I asked them.

  “Nothing,” my dad said, though that grin was on his face.

  I turned to Farley, and he had that stupid smirk, too.

  That’s when Eggers and Trudy came in, walking as la-di-da as Hansel and Gretel, as if they didn’t have a care in the world.

  “Hey, Dr. Hannah,” Trudy said. She had her big sweater on and was wearing shiny clips to hold back her bangs.

  “Howdy,” Eggers said. He was carrying a party bowl of assorted potato chips.

  Lorraine, out of politeness perhaps, grabbed one chip.

  Farley shook his head. “Oh, that’s vintage Clovis,” he said. “Now, that’s authentic. And here I’d been thinking that my ancestors had carried their Doritos in woven baskets on their heads.”

  This banter I ignored. I kept looking behind Trudy, through the door, to see if anybody else was coming. Perhaps Yulia was standing in the hall, waiting for the right moment to reveal herself to me. Maybe she was nervous about seeing me again, and was pausing to gather her thoughts. I took the time to adjust my shirt cuffs, to brush back my hair, though there was only stubble when I did.