Parasites Like Us

by Adam Johnson

  The reporter signed off, and Eggers killed the television.

  “That black cloud,” I said, “what could it have been?”

  Eggers said, “If you ask me, that was meat—blood and meal weathered down to an oily dust. That was what remains of a raw mastodon flank. Take a look at the bottom of my game bag if you want a lesson on meat desiccation.”

  The Egyptians were the ones who came to my mind, the way they removed a human’s vital organs before burial. These organs were placed in individual clay jars marked with the appropriate insignia of the god intended to watch over them—liver, Isis; heart, Anubis; lung, Amen-Ra—so the body could retrieve them in the afterlife. But I didn’t tell Eggers that. I didn’t outwardly muse that it was Keno’s organ meat floating up the noses of meatpackers, that it was the blood of the best animal-killers on earth that had gritted their hair and gotten under their skin.

  What shocked me was that it was over. A door to the past had closed, right before our eyes, and the horror I felt was magnified by the fact that we witnessed it as a rerun. Of course, what we couldn’t know there, on that couch in the prison rec room, was that the opposite had really happened: that what we’d really witnessed was eternity’s icy door opening wide. “Is there any way to know?” I asked Eggers. “Will we ever figure out what that cloud was?”

  Eggers put his new shoes up on the ottoman. He rubbed his hair, then gave his wrist an almost imperceptible shake. This little tic was something I’d noticed during his days as a Clovis, but only now did I understand that the gesture was meant to wind the movement inside his perpetual watch. “Negative,” he said.

  My dear colleagues, were there any anomalies that would help you, so far in the future, to figure out the exact day on which these events took place? Was there an odd weather disturbance that might leave a long-term mark? Were the sun and moon engaged in some rare dance, or did the planets align in an unusual pattern that might allow you to trace this day from your distant vantage? Negative.

  * * *

  I had been feeling pretty spunky about my debut in the broadcast booth, but as evening came on and I walked toward the signal tower, I did so contemplatively, staring at my feet, the fur of my coat scampering in the wind. Of course, I couldn’t have known that things had forever changed. A scientific opportunity had been lost, certainly. Some insight into the past was irretrievably gone. It didn’t matter that it was in the name of greed, gambling, or quality meat. That was the way of the world. The loss I felt was more personal. It was as if I’d come close to meeting an aged relative from the Old World who then expired on the crossing. As long as Keno reclined in a grave, and someone wanted to know her story, she was alive. And now, after waiting thousands of years for me to come find her, she’d died. I’d spent my life shining a flashlight into the universe, trying to back its mystery up a few steps with the weak beam of my inquiry. Well, it was the universe’s turn to put me on my heels.

  The broadcasting booth looked not unlike a grad student’s cubicle—cement walls, carpeted partitions, and pipes above that rattled with every toilet flush. I’d expected a big microphone and fancy instrument panel, one whose displays would flicker with my every word. There wasn’t even a sound team. Instead, there was only an old white guy who sat me down in front of some obsolete language-lab equipment and clamped a pastel-blue headset on me, the kind with the loopy cord. He broke the news that my readings wouldn’t be archived, that no tapes would be made for posterity. My words would simply be beamed out into the world, and they’d never come back.

  When the red light flashed above me, I opened my book, folded back the front matter, and looked at the first sentence, which was a long and lofty metaphor comparing humanity to a wildfire that would consume the fuel of the earth until it burned itself out. The flashy, sophomoric bravado of hooking the reader with an opening shock made me cringe. I began with the second line instead: “So, when examining pre-Holocene Paleo-Indians, we must follow a twin-pronged strategy of examining the fire of Clovis lithic hunting technologies with the fuels of North American megafauna.”

  I can’t say I got past the first page or two on that opening night of reading. I had many asides and interjections planned, but whenever I dove into an anecdote, it felt forced and clumsy. And all the gossip I inserted about rival anthropologists ended up sounding catty. I would read and jabber, read and jabber, and soon I couldn’t tell what I had written and what I was ad-libbing.

  Before me in the sound booth was a Bible, a book with way more ancient tribes than mine, not to mention convoluted family trees and unpronounceable names. Still, the book had some poetry going for it, and more than one cliffhanger. Talk about reversals of fortune. As I read The Depletionists into the microphone, I lifted this Bible, flipped through its illustrated pages. Another prisoner must have read this during his hour, and the thought of sending scripture out into the dark prairies was somehow soothing to me.

  As I droned on about Clovis hunting technologies, I flipped through the Bible, looking at all the color plates, paintings in watery pastels of blond angels cavorting with bearded prophets. One picture near the end was nothing but ringing trumpets and flaming chariots, shining cymbals and thrones of gold. The Bible, it seemed, occupied most of its time describing the manifold kingdom of the afterlife, with all its rings, rooms, levels, and layers. The Good Book told you what songs the angels sang and how many steps led to the seat of the Holy Ghost. Over and over, the dead had it made—all was glory and light. Halos, harps, lapis, and linen were standard issue. But there was little real news of our loved ones—where did they sleep, and how did they occupy themselves? Isn’t that what we, the people left behind, wanted to know? Isn’t that why we point our telescopes skyward—to catch some glimpse among the firmament of the glitter-dust of the soul? Why else did people watch sunsets, if not to observe the contrails of the heavens cross the horizon line of the earth?

  And what of the rest of us stuck here below? Why did the prophets make no provision for the living? And why is heaven an either/or situation? Should we just pretend that souls are swept cleanly to some golden afterlife—that, of a mother or lover, not even a crumb remains? I know that people leave shadows behind. I feel the traces of the departed—in the stillness of my room, just before sleep; in the moans of ice on the water; in the shine, dusty and spectral, flashing off a digging trowel. So—why won’t the Bible give us the coordinates of where to look in the sky? Why doesn’t it tell me the frequency I need to hear the voices of the departed? What are we supposed to do? Use our dang imaginations?

  And why does no one ask of a lover or friend, Tell me, if a piano falls, or your car rolls over, how will I find you? Why doesn’t anyone simply ask, Where will you leave some of yourself when you’re gone? How come no one grabs a parent, before Dad’s heart attack, before Mom’s stroke, and asks, Where will I feel your presence? Where should I stand, what object should I touch, what language should I speak when I say I still need you?

  And why did I not ask this of Yulia? Why did I waste my breath querying her over what bulbs she had planted? How could I fritter important time away, wondering what flowers would rise from her garden come spring? I needed to implore of her, If you leave me, what will evoke you? I should have demanded, Tell me what movie I should watch, what tune I should sing, what book should be open on my chest when I wish to fall asleep and dream of you. Tell me, dear colleagues of tomorrow, tell me that in the future these are questions no one’s afraid to ask.

  In the broadcasting booth, a red light flashed, which meant my time was up. On the table before me were a Bible and my book, both open, and I realized I hadn’t been reading either of them, that, lost in thought, I’d been broadcasting silence to the blind of the Dakotas, and because only silence came back, I had no way of knowing how long it had been going on.

  * * *

  Over the next couple days, they began killing the pigs. I can’t say any of us thought too much of it. There was some new kind of swine influenza going around
the Midwest, they said, and it was true: people were starting to come down with a nasty bug. Some of the guards had called in sick, and Gerry was working round the clock, which was fine by him. Plus, in the last couple years alone, we’d seen news images of Europeans slaughtering cattle in the tens of millions, and Hong Kong had killed every chicken in its principality, by lots of a million a day.

  When they first lit the swine fire, I was sitting on the dorm steps, attempting to shape a piece of chert into a spear point. The evening was clear and still, with the setting sun teetering on the horizon, its light limp, urine-tinted, and coming right at us. Through this, the smoke rose vertically, with dark billows breaking free.

  Several prisoners drifted out. Hands buried in their blue jumpsuits, they studied the blaze. Someone said the National Guard had left the armory in Rapid City for parts unknown. Other people who had watched the news said the sickness started in meatpacking plants. Fifteen million hogs, someone said, were being slaughtered in Iowa alone. Bacon was being pulled from the shelves. Hospitals had opened quarantine wards. As they were talking, an old prisoner coughed, and everyone took an instinctive step away.

  They went on and on—what was rumor and what was true? I didn’t need any news, let alone speculation. The night was clear enough that the truth was before our eyes: at all points on the horizon, bright sparks of light were igniting in towns like Doltin and Willis, like Hollister, Glanton, and Langley. There was to be a Holocaust of hogs, and, unfortunately for the pigs of America, their Auschwitz, Dachau, Bergen-Belsen, and Birkenau already existed. The dark aria of pigdom, I knew, would soon be finished, and I figured that, within the week, they’d be importing fresh little piglets from places like Portugal and New Zealand. What I didn’t know was that when the oven bricks glowed white-hot at Hormel they’d glow for good, and I’d soon be stoking the flames.

  Eventually, Gerry joined us in the cold night air. He looked at the assembled prisoners as if searching for some petty infraction he could berate them for, and, finding none, he turned his attention to me. He toed through the various samples of stone I had spread on the steps.

  “Don’t these look just like the pretty rocks in the warden’s garden?” he asked.

  I didn’t respond. Whatever I said would earn me push-ups, and then there was the fact that I was flint-knapping chert, a difficult stone to work, and I was shaping the initial blade line, the most critical part. Holding the chert in a flap of buckskin, I chipped my way from the tip to the base, using an antler to strike short, deep cuts.

  Gerry sat beside me and picked up a piece of obsidian. “You think you know everything, don’t you, Hanky?” he asked. “You think everyone else is a stupid little doofus.” Copying my motions, he began fashioning the stone—cleaving off larger, convex chips with strikes to the edge, and then lining the cutting surface with teeth in a twisting, pressure-flake maneuver.

  We watched the fires, which had been ignited only an hour or two before, and still smelled mostly of fuel. Though we couldn’t yet feel the heat on our faces, the columns cast deep shadows, the turning air inside corniced with the black carbon of fat and blood. Gerry picked up stone-blade technology faster than anyone I’d seen. He really had the knack, especially when it came to obsidian, which even Clovis probably wouldn’t work in a low-light situation. Gerry was basically playing with black glass in the dark. I offered him a piece of chert, which was white. He shrugged this off and kept working, occasionally watching my technique, occasionally casting an eye to the growing fires. Though Gerry had no idea how to make a spear point, he somehow knew that strikes to the base would broaden the biface and that sharpening the tip should be saved for last. He didn’t understand the need to flute the point or to segment the tail so it could attach to a spear. Yet the cutting edge he had going looked ready to butcher a mastodon.

  And, instinctively, he employed a brilliant and dangerous technique: instead of laying the blade flat in his hand as he sharpened it, he stood it on end, so one side of the spear point rested against his palm as he chipped the other side straight on. This move was so dangerous, I’d never seen anyone try it. It was like picking up a double-edged razor by the blades, rather than the plane, yet it allowed Gerry to sharpen with more control and accuracy than I’d ever imagined.

  “You know obsidian makes the sharpest blade on earth,” I told him. “Sharper than any metal. Its edges regularly flake down to a width of five microns. That’s the thickness of an anthrax spore.”

  The stars were coming out, and in the fading light, we could see that the growing plumes, now dark brown and maroon, were glowing inside from superheated mists of grease that burned as they rose. These plumes swelled like anvil clouds whose heads, when they reached the stratosphere, raced off with the jet stream toward blackness. Sometimes, low booms came from within the flames, which made the inmates ooh and aah.

  As the dark wore on, I could only see the prison lights glinting off the obsidian’s faceted surfaces. At last, Gerry finished the blade, the final sharpening of which he must have done with his imagination. It wasn’t a spear point, really; it was a chunk of rock with two dastardly sharp edges, dangerous and invisible. I was afraid he’d try to place it in my hand.

  “There you go, Hanky,” he said, holding the blade up. “I know you think you know everything, but you don’t. You don’t know about me or my old lady or her kids. I’ve had to do some fast talking all week to erase what you did. I invented a dude-ranch rodeo, and those kids wanted to know every damn thing about it, like what kind of bulls did they have and what color were the clowns. I had to make up a thousand stupid things to keep them from worrying about their mother. And guess what? I just talked to the docs, and they say they’re going to take her tube out tomorrow. I’m the first person she’s gonna see. That’s going to spark her memory, I know it will. That will make her start talking again.”

  “Look, Gerry,” I said, “I’m sorry, I wasn’t trying to butt in. It’s just—”

  “You did butt in,” he said. “And you don’t sound sorry.”

  “Kids, they’re funny. They want to hear good news, but deep down they always know the truth. In the long run—”

  Gerry gestured with the blade. “They taught us crap like this in the Boy Scouts,” he said. “They taught us how to make a compass from a needle. In the long run, did I ever end up needing one? Did I ever have to make a teepee in life? No, but stuff like that got me out of the house, got my mind off things. For a while, I could be a kid. That’s what I needed, some time away from all my old man’s troubles. Kids need people to protect them, to let ’em be kids. That’s what I’m doing, Hanky. I’m protecting them.”

  Gerry flicked the blade out into the snow. “So stay out of it,” he said, then cast one more glance at the fires before trudging up the icy steps to his dorm.

  In the distance, there was a large flash. It swelled, a low boom following, enough to make the windows hum, and then a warm glow came. They’d ignited another pig fire, the initial mushroom of which created its own wind. It looked as if someone had crossed a cyclone with an oil-well fire, as if an inferno were being sucked to the sky. The sight was raw and beautiful enough to lure people from their homes, to make prisoners and administrators float down from their cramped rooms. Those first few days were like that, filled with awe and electricity. Disbelief hadn’t even begun.

  On that night, all the citizens of Parkton were drawn to the red glow. Families in the street marveled at the way lava flows of burning grease raced for the Missouri. Old people wanted to witness the sulfur-yellow smoke of incinerating hooves, to speculate, hands over mouths, upon each crackle and boom that sounded from within the flames. Whenever the dark curtains of smoke parted, the fire inside stunned us. Leaping, the flames were streaked blue-green from kerosene and fat, and that same light, corporal and marine, counted coup upon all our faces, prisoner and pilgrim alike.

  * * *

  Breakfast was otherwise normal. The eggs, I’d say, were undercooked, though I und
erstood some people liked a little yolk sac to run through their food. The bacon I usually devoured with relish was gone; instead, there were two soggy strips of imitation bacon, pressed into shape from soy by-products. I ate quickly, thinking of all that I had to do that day—there was correspondence to be conducted, a couple dry runs were in order for my evening broadcast, and my fingernails had been shamefully neglected. After I bussed my table and stacked the tray, I headed for the cafeteria exit, where an old-timer handed me two sandwiches. He was handing everyone sandwiches.

  Outside, Sheriff Dan had a small fleet of pickups waiting.

  We were driven in groups of six down the hill, and no alarm sounded when we crossed the buried wire at the edge of campus. We drove toward the fire, the trees becoming more ashen, the roofs less snow-laden, yet things appeared normal enough that when we neared the river I felt a chance the driver would turn upstream, toward USSD and my home. Instead, we veered toward Hormel, whose expansive parking lots, when we entered them, were dark under black clouds, and smoking embers fell like comets from the sky, plinking off hoods and windshields. Red cars were gray. Yellow cars were gray. And there we were, cruising toward the angry roar of the pyres.

  Only when our caravan stopped and we were ushered forth did we understand the true volume of the flames. Cloaked inside the general drum and rumble, there were other percussions. From the tall yellow flames came the higher-pitched clap-clap of air, pulsing with the flare-ups. There was also something vascular to the fire, not the beating of a heart exactly, but more of a gassy murmur, like the swooshy flow of blood. And of melodies there was no shortage: deep inside the core were gas releases whose wheezy hasp sounded almost like the colorfully sketchy reception you’d get from Japan, say, or Senegal, on a marine-band radio.