Parasites Like Us

by Adam Johnson

  We sat at the same counter, on the same stools, and dug in, eating quietly, sopping up everything with quarters of pancake. The cold juice stung the stumps of Dad’s front teeth, and the way food kept gumming up there bothered him greatly. Those teeth would soon blacken, I knew. I felt bad for him, knowing they’d have to be pulled.

  The potatoes were crisp, the muffins buttery. We’d garnished the plates with slices of orange, and those, too, we ate. You would think nothing could discombobulate a guy more than eating this meal, on these stools, in the house of the newly dead, where you kept having the urge to pass the salt to someone who was no longer there. Yet Dad was right. It felt as if we were all eating together.

  Dad lifted a fork to his mouth. He took a big bite, then chewed some.

  “Janis always put pecans in her pancakes,” he said.

  “That’s right,” I said. “She did.”

  I grabbed a handful of mints before we left. Dad partook of several toothpicks. Outside, the snow was untouched by man. The road wasn’t cleared. The steps hadn’t been salted. You couldn’t even see the outline of the parking lot, let alone where the road was, and only a plow would be able to move through snow that was fifteen inches deep and falling. We stepped off the porch as from the Apollo moon lander—my first footfall sank shin-deep.

  Walking away, I realized I had some unfinished business. That dog was still barking. We went down the motel looking for it, kicking door after door. When we found the thing, it turned out to be a little collie. I stuck my head inside the room. There was a big bundle on the bed. The sheets had been stripped from the other mattress, and this person was slumped under double comforters.

  “Hello,” I said, like an idiot. I stood there a moment, then closed the door.

  Outside, the dog assumed a crablike stance, then crapped a half-moon across the parking lot. After that, it was a ball of energy, tongue lolling. You’d never seen a dog jump like that. Dad and I turned toward town, calling the little guy, hoping he might make for good company on our grim walk ahead. When I whistled, he instead dashed toward a snow-covered blue pickup, where he hopped in back and sat waiting.

  The road we walked looked like this: There was a plain of white as far as the falling snow would let you see, and the blacktop was indicated only by two cattle fences whose bottom wires had been buried by the growing drifts. There were no trucks on the road, no cars in the ditch, and with that slow, steady snowfall, it looked as if we’d never see another person.

  We stopped at the first place we came across. It was one of those creepy old farmhouses, the kind whose rooms had pitched ceilings, whose tornado cellars made you think of abandoned children, and whose backyards promised forgotten, unmarked wells. In the driveway, a pair of tricycle handlebars stuck out of the snow, red tassels and all. The roof gutters were choked with dead birds.

  We knocked, then kicked the door in. Two Labradors raced out. They ran through the snow, digging out black wings.

  In the kitchen, a transistor radio played static.

  “Hello,” I called.

  “Anybody home?” Dad called.

  Dad examined several firearms on the table, but none of them had bullets. Then he went for the fireplace. There, displayed above the mantel, were two pair of snowshoes from a previous century. I didn’t think it was possible, but we sat on the leather sofa to buckle them. While I was adjusting the straps, I kept looking at the ceiling, as if at any moment the homeowners would come down. When we had the shoes on, Dad and I clacked them on the floor, then did a slow loop around the downstairs. The snowshoes didn’t feel too bad. As I passed the kitchen, I turned that awful radio off, and only then did Dad and I hear the sound coming from the bedroom. We stopped, looked at each other. The sound was rhythmic and creaking.

  I slowly walked to the bedroom in my birch-hoop snowshoes. When I opened the door, I saw a husband and wife curled under the blankets of an old sleigh bed. Cough-drop wrappers were everywhere. Beside the bed was a mechanical swing, a battery-powered thing that rocked back and forth on plastic arms. In it was an infant, its head flopping forward and back, forward and back.

  “What is it?” Dad whispered from the hall.

  “Nothing,” I told him, then closed the door. I didn’t have the guts to go near the thing and turn it off, and for that, a dead child would forever swing on in my mind.

  When we left, the dogs were playing tug-of-war with a frozen raven.

  We walked along the tree break to the next farmhouse. A dog was inside, trying to scratch its way through the door, but I didn’t want anything to do with it. There was no way I was going in. I mean, through the front window you could see a woman was right there, on the couch, dead. She had a box of tissues and a remote control, and she was frozen solid. The blood on her face had blackened, and the frozen blood seemed to have glued her hand to her mouth at an unnatural angle.

  I waited while Dad went inside. He didn’t call hello. I didn’t hear him opening and closing any doors. There was only the clacking of his snowshoes, the tikka-tikka of dog claws following him, and finally the emptying of a bag of dog food on the hardwood floors. Still, it took Dad a while to return.

  When he came out, he was holding his ribs, so I knew something had made him breathe heavy. “What?” I asked him. “What’d you see in there?”

  He left the door open for the dog, then started walking sideways down the porch steps. I followed him. “You must have seen something,” I said. “What was it?”

  “Nothing,” Dad said. “Forget it.”

  * * *

  That’s how it went on our way through town. We were compelled to check the houses, and every time we did, the hope of survivors was tempered by the reality of what we found. More than once, we heard a shutter swing shut or saw a piece of siding flap in the wind and rushed to someone’s aid, only to find the person frozen stiff. The only public service we seemed to provide was freeing the trapped dogs of Parkton. That no one had made provisions for the dogs confirmed my suspicion that no one understood the severity of what was happening.

  In Samuel Pepys’ journal entries of England’s great plague, there are innumerable accounts of the horrific variety of human death. The London plague took months to spread, and in the extended panic, Pepys witnessed victims hallucinating, begging for exorcisms, and throwing their children from rooftops. One man ran through Crambly Market with a hot poker, stabbing passersby in the neck. Pepys described persons performing primitive surgeries on themselves, and documented in detail the fanatics of Roland Hall as, one by one, they took turns burning themselves alive. The doomed souls of South Dakota, however, simply curled up in bed, drank lots of fluids, and drifted off.

  As we moved from house to house, there were ghastly sights, but the ones I remember were not the bloody or the visceral. In one house, I saw a fish tank that was frozen solid. The expanding ice had busted the glass to the floor, so there was only a rectangle of water, sitting on a table. The goldfish had died right away—they were all locked in the top inch of ice, belly up. But deep inside you could see the blue-red of neon tetras that had circled and circled in the shrinking pocket of water until they were all bunched in the center, where they’d frozen solid. Also in this cloudy, distorted ice were various tubes and some colored gravel, a string of plastic plants, and a tiny sea diver. The beautiful impossibility of it stunned me. The life-and-death of it spoke to me. The way existence was reduced and compacted, the way the tetras still schooled at the end, frozen mid-turn, bright as a Christmas ornament, seemed a model of the universe.

  We saw people who’d died holding telephones, eating diet foods, looking at pornography. There was an old woman who cradled a red bong. But the bodies that spooked me most, that reside still in my memory, were the ones you couldn’t see. The closer we got to town, the more people seemed to have died outdoors. In driveways and on sidewalks, we came across contours in the snow that suggested humans were below. These white mounds may or may not have been the shadows of buried people. Scariest
was the way your denial was allowed full discretion. I’d see a small snow-drifted form, and I’d tell myself, That’s not a child down there, the snow’s just buried a bicycle or perhaps a guitar case. Another such hump might simply be a pool raft, I’d think, or possibly a kayak. My mind could make up anything in its efforts to stop the inevitable: picturing all the people I knew who might be below—Jill Green, who ran the library reference desk; or Mike Magnason, proprietor of Video Utopia, where I was a preferred member.

  To tell the truth, we didn’t need to go house to house to convince ourselves that everyone had been taken. Walking deserted streets, moving through empty neighborhoods, you quickly get used to seeing corpses. They’re so clearly soulless, so utterly void of humanity, that they’re just empty vessels. Soon, of bodies, all that mattered was the scale—a family here, a dozen there, a bushel, a mountain, a million. What you can’t get over, amid all the human bodies, is the total absence of humanity, the sheer lack of its force and energy.

  Like power lines without voltage running through them, the world looked the same but was missing its crackle and buzz. Gone were voices. Missing were music, cooking, and the shouts of children. The ice-skating pond, usually white with the calligraphy of skate blades, was instead a mirror that mirrored only empty trees. From the Karate House came no shouts of Hai, hai, as teenagers snapped their white gis with each punch. The parking lot was full when we passed the Lutheran church, yet it felt hollow, in total want of prayer, and the bay windows of the senior center, normally filled with old people, were void of the crochet club and bingo hour. Never again would I see shrunken, ancient couples executing a brisk foxtrot, samba, or Virginia reel. The energy of humanity was simply gone, and that lack was everywhere: in the silence of a phone lifted from its cradle, in the stunned blankness of an interstate, in the stillness of television antennas, and the way you could somehow feel that the hydroelectric dam had gone off-line, three miles away.

  We walked down Poplar Street, past River Drive and Meriwether. Where were we going? What excursion didn’t have a human interaction as its destination? Nearing the USSD campus, we passed the Everland Cemetery. How ridiculous the headstones looked, with their ordered spacing and uniform rows, as if the dying had stumbled toward their appointed slots and dropped into Grave L-19 or RR-124. What a laugh—as if the tablets of death could be sorted as simply as abacus beads. We saw an elk walking through the rows. It was a grand thing, with a tawny winter coat that tended toward coffee at the throat, and a muzzle that was nearly black. These were reclusive, wary beasts, so it surprised me to see one walking calmly through town. Only once in a great while did I lay eyes on an elk—occasionally, a herd would try to swim the Missouri, and one of them would invariably stop to rest on one of the sandy islands. From my office window, I could see when one got stranded. I’d watch it pace and fret out on the shoals, wading chest-deep until it felt the current and halted. When it lifted its head to call the others, the ones who’d swum on, I felt I could hear that mournful bray. This elk paused at a mausoleum, where it sniffed some plastic flowers. It rutted its antlers in the slats of a gazebo, then moved on.

  My father and I behaved less nobly. We were more like the dogs being set free: stunned, curious, wandering stupidly from house to house, inspecting everything, recoiling at every false alarm. On campus, the backup generators were going, which meant that the emergency lights would shine another day or two. It also meant the central heat exchangers were functioning, and as we walked past the administration building, you could already smell the decay of warm bodies in the dorm rooms. All those students gone, every one of them gone, and I hadn’t even learned their names.

  I made for the river, the square of the Missouri I thought of as mine. The snowfall was steady. When we crossed the white of Central Green, there was only a dome of visibility that centered on us—objects entered, stayed a while, then vanished. Snowy park benches came into view, inscribed in memoriam with the names of dead donors; it seemed unthinkably creepy to sit in them. Already I felt the cold of Janis’ monument out there in the white. Suddenly the idea of placing a monument to the loss of a single life sickened me. How could such an elaborate marker commemorate the passing of just one person, whereas the population of South Dakota had only this glut of snow as testament that they’d ever lived?

  Dogs raced past us, feathers glued to their faces.

  I steered Dad wide of where I thought Janis’ plaque must be.

  Always, I’d striven to lift the veil of the dead, but that spirit now left me. Now I was happy to see only a surface of white, to snowshoe onward in ignorance of the assembled citizens and songbirds of Parkton below my feet. Teams of dogs rummaged through the snow. When we didn’t see them, we heard them, and when we didn’t hear them, we came across the hollows they’d dug to ferret out some manner of dead thing.

  When we reached the riverbank, the Missouri was gone.

  “My God,” Dad said.

  “I never,” I said, shaking my head.

  The river had simply run away, leaving a deep, empty channel at the center of which was a brook no bigger than Keno’s. For some reason, the snow in the riverbed didn’t stick, and here, between pools of trapped water, was Sheriff Dan’s infirmary. Here were hundreds of corpses, thousands of corpses. The bodies that had begun to decay before they’d been cast into the river marked the old waterline. Bloated and pink, they’d swelled large enough that their limbs didn’t touch the ground. They looked like pieces of inflatable pool furniture, beached along a rocky shoal. And the bodies that had been dumped frozen and wholesale into the water had sunk to the river’s icy floor and now lay exposed in the stiffening mud. Ropy and drawn, these poor souls appeared almost natal, as if constructed from discarded twists of umbilical cord. Darkened clothes and uniforms clung to dislocated limbs—arms stood tall and wild behind people’s backs, boots appeared to be laced on backward, and necks, it seemed, could do anything.

  The utter stillness of this field of bodies was punctuated only by great reserves of gamefish clustered into small pools. The humps of large carp mooned from the water, the cartilage of their lips gobbling the surface for air. As other fish rolled and paddled, whiskers and spines would flash, and all the while small white perch leapt from the wells, only to land in the mud or, worse, in the cold crotches of humans. Desperately, the little fish would struggle to flop back in again.

  How can I accurately describe the amount of death? How can I grab you by the shoulders and shake this death into you? In his best-seller Journal of the Plague Year, Defoe included the daily death tallies of London’s great plague. He gave the locations of all the mass graves, and detailed how many thousands were dumped in each. Still, later generations grew to disbelieve his descriptions, preferring to think them fiction. Not until the Nazi bunker bombs fell in World War II was the veracity of Defoe’s accounts confirmed. The explosions opened graves the size of auditoriums, making it snow calcium and rain a porridge of rancid bonemeal. A single buzz bomb sent a cloud of remains up from Brixton Square that rained thirty thousand skulls down upon the good people of London.

  The sight of these people before me in the river was so disturbing that I didn’t have full control of my thoughts. Someone’s glasses were in the mud, and I thought, Those are my glasses. I thought this even though my glasses were right there on my face! Some corpse must have gone into the water clutching a cane, because the horn of a walking stick poked from the mud. I thought, I know that cane, that’s Peabody’s cane; then some of the bodies started to resemble Peabody. If you looked close enough, some of the bodies seemed to move slightly, maybe in the corner of your eye, like they were barely breathing and needed you to blow more life into them. When you looked straight on, they were dead, but sideways, maybe, just maybe, they were alive! But I didn’t care. I wasn’t wading into that mud! Then I heard them breathing—very light, then stronger, then it turned into a shh sound.

  Shh, it said. Shh.

  In my mind, this sound mutated into t
he hushing skids of Gerry’s Pomeranian team, the one I’d heard that night at the prison, mushed on by the hand of a ghost driver. That’s how strange I felt. That’s how your mind can play tricks on you when the Ultimate is unrolled before you like a rug.

  I clapped my hands on my head. How could the river have left us?

  Dad kept asking practical questions, just talking to the air. “Why would they close the spillways?” he asked. “If they wanted to take the dam off-line, why wouldn’t they just open the gates and let the turbines spin free?”

  Who cared? The river was gone. Soon, I knew, it would be gone in places like Kansas City and Baton Rouge. I pictured those places without their rivers. I pictured them strewn with bodies, and only then did it come to me that those cities were gone, too. Only then did I nod my head at the knowledge that Florida was perhaps gone, as was Paris. Only there, beside an empty river, did I realize that, wherever in the world my mother was, she was dead.

  That shushing, sledding sound came again, like a vibration in my ears.

  I put a hand on my father’s shoulder.

  “I know,” he said. “I know.”

  I bent over and lost my stomach in the snow. It made my face shudder. Saliva ran from my mouth. I ate a handful of snow. My nose was dripping, and my eyes were wet and out of focus. When I closed them, I saw nothing. Now, all these years later, I understand that what made my shoulders heave, what made my hands grip the fabric of my pants, was a welling sense of relief: I finally knew what had become of my mother. So the pain I felt wasn’t grief occupying me, but the beginning of its eviction. Ease—peace, even—had begun.

  Dad put a hand on me. “Breathe,” he said. “Remember—steady and even.”

  I exhaled as deeply as I could, then drew in sharp air.

  When I stood, Dad dusted me off. “That’s better,” he said. He kicked some snow over the vomit, then turned me from the river. The two of us stood there, staring at the white lawns of a university. “Big breath,” Dad said.