Parasites Like Us

by Adam Johnson

  Passing the carousel at the other end of the park, I entered the open street and poured on everything I had. All the wooden carousel horses got peppered—thuck-thuck, the solid hits sounded like, with a thwack whenever splinters flew. The last stretch was without cover, down an empty street, but here the bullets stopped. I don’t know if the deputies were reloading or if they’d lost interest, but there was only the sound of my shoes as I clapped past the old Bijou Theater and the Red Dakotan, then burst through the brass doors of the Odd Fellows building.

  I had to rest, I needed to collapse, but there in the lobby was an old guy on one of those red couches, and he was sprawled out as if watching the television mounted above. The TV was dead, though, and the sound of his green oxygen bottle hissing on without him made me not look too close. I just went for the stairs.

  On the top floor, I found my father’s door locked for the first time. I pounded on the big metal door, and when it didn’t open, it took me three tries to wheel out the combo. I heaved the door wide, and there was my father, golf club lifted in self-defense, standing on the far side of the room, framed by those large coppery-tinted windows.

  “My God,” Dad said, “you’re alive.”

  I couldn’t breathe. I had to bend over. “Yeah,” I told him, “I’m alive.”

  I’d never felt so alive.

  Dad lowered the golf club. “You’ve got it, don’t you?”

  Hands on my knees, wheezing, I nodded. “I’ve got it.”

  “Well, what about your asthma?” he asked. “You probably just need your inhaler. You’ve always had problems breathing.”

  I looked up at him, shook my head no.

  Dad just stood there, as if he couldn’t move. I walked to him, and he started shaking his head. I put my arm around him, and all he could do was shake his head. Through the window was the Missouri River Valley and the main hog fire, still raging, though squat now and more intense.

  “I didn’t know if I’d see you again,” he said. His eyes were clear and wide. “I went to the prison. No one’s there. The rooms are empty. There was no one to tell me anything.”

  He really was upset. Deep down, I could tell, the man was really hurting. I wanted to tell him to relax, to calm down, that everything would be okay. But I couldn’t say anything like that, because on the outside my father was as calm and collected as could be.

  “There’s nothing on TV,” he said. “They just play reruns—old shows, soap operas, twenty-four hours of reruns. The radio stations are on, but they’re all broadcasting the same old swing dance music. Now the power’s out. And for some reason, they stopped the dam. I take it you’ve seen what’s happening down there in the streets. I’ve watched it all from up here.”

  “I’ve been through town,” I said. “I’ve seen it. But I don’t know what I was looking at.”

  Dad said, “Think what’s happening in big towns like Omaha and Des Moines. Just look at what’s left of our town. You know what’s next, don’t you? You know what they’re going to use those fires for.” He grabbed the back of my neck and pulled my head to his chest. “I didn’t know if I’d see you again,” he told me.

  I was too tired to feel anything right then. I just looked past his shoulder to that fire. Within its white core, there was much movement—objects deep inside the furnace would suddenly incandesce, then rise, hover, and turn in pulpits of heat. These were the ashen husks of hogs, burned free of weight, light as carbon, floating round and glowing like paper lanterns. My mind kept trying to imagine what human bodies would look like in that convection, but I wouldn’t let it.

  I said, “I have to find my students.”

  Dad turned to me. “Is that what you want to do?” he asked. “You don’t know how much time you have. You know I’ll help you, but you may not have much time. I was talking to this man on the street. Sure, he was coughing, but he looked normal, and then, all of the sudden—”

  “Dad,” I said, “tell me what’re you going to do.”

  “I have to find Lorraine,” he said. “I have to know.”

  I looked again to the river, where a mile-long ash shadow covered the banks. The open water was fouled by runners of oil that blacked the current and washed rainbows of animal waste upon the ice. Like pink buoys, bodies bobbed in the eddies. They’d bloated large enough to tear any clothes off, and they turned and rocked in a river that was slowly running away.

  “Whatever we do,” I told my father, “we do it together.”

  “There’s a snowmobile in the basement. I can get the key.”

  “Everyone out there has a gun.”

  “We’ll go tonight,” he said.

  Before our eyes, we witnessed that little helicopter swing too near the hog fire. When its mist of poison floated down to the flames, that whole section of the sky exploded, and the chopper disappeared inside a cylinder of blue flame.

  * * *

  While we slept, the snow clouds rolled in, a slow-moving, snow-burdened front that worked through steady accumulation, so that nine or ten inches could fall in a day without your really noticing. Dad and I shared the bed, fully dressed under a mound of blankets. My sleep had grown accustomed to the syncopation of distant gunfire, but the snow slowly hushed this. Eventually, all you could hear was the moaning of ice loosened by the falling river, and the quiet progress of snow.

  The room was black when we roused ourselves. In the dark, I couldn’t see my breath, but it was there. Without speaking, we gathered our gear. Through the windows, you could only see the muted glow of some fires burning unabated.

  In the basement was a trailer that held the snowmobile. Once the tarp was removed, the thing looked pretty mean, with large, forward-facing air scoops and an anodized suspension. I held the flashlight as Dad connected the battery and primed the carburetors.

  “Do you really know how to drive this thing?” I asked.

  Dad answered, “Do you?”

  “That wasn’t the question,” I said. “So—whose rig is this?”

  Dad hit a red button and the engine fired up. “It’s ours,” he said.

  This engine didn’t purr. The exhaust was high-pitched, full of raps and pings, and oily smoke hung in the air. You could tell it was high-performance. We waited for it to warm up. The basement was pretty much a cinder-block parking garage, enough for twenty cars maybe, with a cement ramp up to Main, which meant, once we backed it off the trailer and got it out on the street, we’d somehow have to make it through one of Sheriff Dan’s blockades.

  I don’t know if it was the sound of the engine or what, but a woman suddenly stood up. Suddenly, there she was. It made me drop the flashlight. She must have been sleeping in one of the cars. “There you are,” she said to me. “I’ve been looking for you.” When I grabbed the light and shone it on her, she was walking toward me, wearing a sweatsuit with one of those quilted robes over it. I started to back up.

  “Tony,” she said, “I’ve been waiting all this time. Where have you been?”

  The woman was older, and she looked drunk or drugged or something. She wouldn’t stop walking toward me. I was circling away, but she kept coming closer, her arms out to me. When she coughed, red spittle came out.

  “Get that thing going,” I told Dad.

  I was shining the light right in her eyes, but she didn’t even see. She put a palsied hand on me, and I pushed her away. I mean I shoved her good.

  “Come to me, Tony,” she said. “I’ve been right here, all this time.” She came at me with her arms open and those zombie eyes. “Don’t you love me?” she asked.

  “Get away from me,” I told her and knocked her down. Dad had the snowmobile pretty much backed off of the trailer, but I yelled at him, “Get that damn thing going.”

  He revved the engine and whipped the tail around, the steering skids scraping along the cement. I jumped on, and I wasn’t going to look at her again. She was Tony’s nightmare, not mine. I killed the flashlight, and we raced up the dark ramp by memory.

 
Headlight off, we rolled across the sidewalk, felt the track drop into the street. Dad turned left, but it was so dark there was no way of knowing for sure where we were headed. The square was completely black. The snow was thick and steady enough that light wouldn’t travel too far anyway. I dragged my foot—there were maybe four or five fresh inches on the ground. We were idling along about the speed of a trot, and we could’ve run into anything, anything at all. Though you couldn’t see them, people were out there. We heard a slam—a trunk or a tailgate, you couldn’t tell—and there was some kind of distant chatter. Certainly they could hear the brap-brap of our engine.

  Soon, I started to hear a certain sound out there. It was transient, so I couldn’t put my finger on what it was. There was a hissing aspect to it. Also a mechanical whir. Though it was dulled in the thick air, its source was up ahead, and we didn’t dare turn on our headlight. I imagined a large robot ahead in the darkness, a thing with hydraulic arms and ram presses for feet. This sound would stop and start, hiss and whine, and when it sounded like it was right ahead, Dad stopped. The sound stopped, too.

  We idled a moment; then Dad clacked the snowmobile into reverse, backing up a few feet. The sound was unmistakable now. It neared some, and paused. I whispered to Dad, “Hit the light.”

  When he did, we saw, hovering in the air before us, two men with biofilter masks and rifles. They were suspended above the ground in the cherry picker, its long boom extended sideways across the square. I screamed and threw my flashlight, hitting one guy in the neck, which scared the crap out of them.

  Dad gunned it. We tore one wide loop around the square, chasing the bouncing white cone of our headlight. Through this light wheeled bullet-ridden cars, half-looted stores; in front of the pet shop was a pile of blackened birdcages, all of which must have been thrown on a fire with live parrots, macaws, and lovebirds inside. There was a stack of men in various uniforms, piled like cordwood to be burned in the morning, and the last thing we saw before we shot the two-foot gap between the wall and a fire truck was an empty Chardonnay bottle, standing upright on the pump truck’s chrome fender.

  Without goggles, the wind cut at our eyes as we booked across the USSD campus and followed the river past the hog fires to the edge of town. In the orange light, frozen cattails stood smudged with black, and regarding the river ice, I’m here to tell you that blackness can illuminate—the soot-stained ice sheets were strangely glowing as they sprawled into the oily, color-flashing river. Though bodies were beached along this shore, we raced on. Though the hog loader was parked beside dump trucks whose tires sagged under heavy loads, we didn’t pause to investigate what use they had now that hogs were extinct. We didn’t consider what business the remaining inmates had been up to when they called it a night and made for their cold cots.

  Soon, we were flying across cornfields in the general direction of the casino, and the Lollygag Motel. “Hold on,” Dad said, and I wrapped my arms around him for all I was worth. He put the engine in high gear, tearing so fast through the ice and corn stubble that the headlight was worthless. He turned it off. I couldn’t believe the balls he had to ride open-throttle into complete black. I imagined the casino where I thought it should be—without electricity, it was only a black cube against a charcoal sky.

  Can you feel condemned and liberated at the same time? Can you sense that death awaits even as you marvel at how you’re cheating it? I decided I had nothing to fear—my father was an expert at converting darkness into speed. I leaned forward and put my head sideways across my father’s back and closed my eyes.

  At some point, we hit something in the dark. We were bound to. If it was a rock or a post, I don’t know. The snowmobile lifted, and we were ejected. In the darkness, there was no stage direction. I flew, I tumbled, but I did not lose consciousness. I heard my father’s body hit the ground hard. Somewhere near me, I could hear him moaning. He’d cracked a couple ribs, and there was a hitch in his voice. With each breath I could tell he was wincing. He called out my name, and though I could tell it hurt his ribs to shout, I didn’t respond right away. It sounds weird, I know. My ankle was sore. I was jammed funny in the snow. Yet I didn’t answer. Over and over, my father called my name. He’d busted out the crowns on his two front teeth, so there was a whistle to his voice, but I didn’t care. I listened as he felt his way through the snow. I was silent as he cursed himself. He made a series of oaths to the heavens or the universe, and I didn’t want to spoil it. I didn’t want it to end.

  When he found me in the dark, he grabbed me and pulled me up to him.

  “I’ve still got you,” he said. “You’re still here.” He shook his head, then broke into fretful, nervous laughter. “Twice in one day,” he said. “I thought I’d lost you twice in one day.” He sat there laughing, a forced, painful laugh that lifted his shoulders, that made him grimace from his ribs. He put a hand on my chest and with his other mitten wiped his eyes. “Oh, God,” he said, clearing his nose and shaking his head. “Oh, God, twice in one day.”

  When I think back on this night, I remember it ending with those words.

  Of course, other things fade from your memory. Rest would not come until we had finished our business. And our night would not be over until we had pulled ourselves together and made the mile-or-so walk to the Lollygag, where we would discover Lorraine, much as we’d feared we’d find her. I had wanted my father to grieve for a year now—to empathize with Janis’ worsening illness and to feel her loss after she was gone. When we reached the motel and my father found Lorraine, I finally got my wish. He began weeping, uncontrollably, inconsolably. Helpless before his shuddering grief was how I spent the rest of the night. Right away, I knew I was wrong in wanting to see this grief. I knew no person should feel such pain. Yet what was started could not be stopped.

  No, in my memory, the night ends with a snowmobile on its back. It concludes with the two of us finding each other alive in the purple and tan of a cornfield, clutching each other’s coats for all we were worth, as if our hands and shoulders were finally admitting what our voices would not—that we were all we had.

  Chapter Eleven

  The next morning, my father and I collapsed from exhaustion. The sun was cresting the horizon when we made our way to the room we’d shared the night I sank my car. After kicking in the door, we even slept in the same beds. I’d never kicked open a door before. All it took was one boot, right above the knob. I’d always felt safe behind locked doors, but locks, I discovered, only locked you in.

  I can’t say if I slept. The room was literally frosted, and somewhere in the hotel, a dog was barking. Returning to this setting, with its musty drapes and scratchy sheets, made it feel as if I’d stepped into the past. I knew the television wouldn’t work, yet I couldn’t shake the feeling that if I lifted the remote control Jeremiah Johnson would be playing, that with the push of a button, I’d see Robert Redford dressed for the year 1870.

  The cars in the parking lot meant other rooms contained other Lorraines—humans slumped in chairs, curled on floors, or reclined in tubs of water grown cold. Looking at the ceiling, I could sense the chalk line of a person in the room above. In other rooms, I imagined the dead the way thermal cameras see the world—with everything reduced to green and black: the energy of the living glowing through walls and doors, vibrant against an eternal, inanimate night. The only life in the building was that dog, trapped in a room with its owner, now only the signature of the person, a formless dark disruption, a void where a person should shine.

  I rose to wash my face. I couldn’t remember the last shower I’d had. It had been a week since I’d even removed my Clovis coat. If the water was hot enough, I might even forget the things I knew we’d encounter in the day ahead. When I opened the faucets, nothing came out. I felt like an idiot. Of course there was no water. In the mirror, my face was black and oily. Nervously, I inspected the interior of my mouth. There was no red. I exhaled forcefully against the mirror a few times, but there was no misting of blood.
Relieved, I engaged the commode, and after I’d fully employed it, the thing, to my horror, would not flush.

  When Dad woke, he wanted breakfast. We laced our boots and walked through the tiny lobby to the lounge, which, fortunately, was empty. It was a relief that no humans had chosen to spend their last moments in a place adorned with plastic bottles of Popov and dirty bean-bag ashtrays lining a Formica bar.

  When we approached the short-order grill, Dad stopped.

  This grill had fried a million chicken wings, hashed out countless patty melts, and had started the days of too many men with the beer-and-eggs special.

  I asked him, “You sure you want to do this?”

  “Not really,” he said.

  On the counter were chips and jerky. Beyond that were doughnuts under glass.

  I said, “We can grab a bite and go.”

  “No,” he told me. “Lorraine would want us to eat. If she were here, she’d cook us the works.”

  At the grill, Dad ignited the propane burners. He rounded up some bacon and partly frozen eggs. I thawed orange juice and began grating potatoes. We’d eaten such breakfasts a thousand times. Janis insisted that Saturday mornings begin with big, lazy breakfasts. So we crisped our bacon and grilled toast with a practiced familiarity. Cracking the last eggs, I wasn’t thinking that such a breakfast would never again be eaten. Dad just whipped the whisk the way he always had, and I measured out the flapjack batter with my usual scientific sense of proportion.