Parasites Like Us

by Adam Johnson

  Eggers and Trudy walked out upon the trestle. They dangled their legs above the water. Gerry and Farley were off foraging, and I was pulling baby-sitter duty. I sat on a bucket, directing the kids on how to dig birds out of the snow in order to harvest their tail feathers, which I attached to the base of atlatl darts. There was an irony I didn’t like in removing the feathers of birds and asking them to fly again, in the service of killing other animals. But I didn’t mention this to the kids. When I looked up at Eggers and Trudy once more, they were swinging their legs, and that simple intimacy made me think of Yulia.

  I’d gone a long way in defeating my weaknesses on this trip. I’d conquered my desperate hope that Yulia was alive by simply deciding she was alive. And it was with knowledge that I defeated speculation: I knew what Yulia’s house looked like. I knew what foods were in her cupboard. So, when I imagined—over and over—entering her hothouse and lowering her to my bearskin coat and demonstrating the Celsius of my passion, the copper watering can by her side and the shiny tools on the wall weren’t products of my imagination, but real pieces of her life, pieces she’d given me. It was Vadim who haunted me. It was his yellow jacket I constantly saw in my peripheral vision.

  One of Gerry’s kids pointed a black feather at the river. “The water,” he said.

  Before our eyes, the river began moving visibly faster.

  We set down our quills to watch, and we didn’t chase after them as, one by one, they blew away. The water was really moving. You couldn’t take your eyes off it. Soon, it was sucking itself from its own banks, retreating into a deep channel of accelerating froth. Entire ice shelves cracked off and were thrown downstream like panes of glass.

  “What is it?” a kid asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  The water was literally sprinting, faster than a man could run. Trees, barrels, boats, docks and piers—anything that had been drawn into the channel simply shot past us. Humps and valleys formed along the river’s surface, like a dragon’s back, and you could hear a deep rumble as the current pushed large, unseen boulders along the bottom of the channel. The bridge pilings began to vibrate against the rush of water, and by the time white spray was blasting off them, the trestle’s black girders were shuddering.

  “Run,” I yelled to Trudy and Eggers.

  “Run,” the kids shouted. They didn’t understand why, but they knew something was terribly wrong. “Faster,” they called when Trudy and Eggers made for shore.

  “What is it?” the biggest kid asked. “What’s happening?”

  I looked at him. “The dam’s gone out in Parkton,” I said.

  The kids looked downstream, though we were hundreds of miles away.

  Another kid asked, “Is everything okay there?”

  “Parkton is gone,” I told him. “I’m sorry, but everything there is gone.”

  The oldest boy nodded his head, as if he understood what “everything” meant, but he didn’t. How could he imagine the prison being washed away, the university, and the casino? Could he picture ten thousand bodies surfing the wave’s crest, or conceptualize the river casting the ivory dice of a million hogs’ teeth? In that frothy wall of water turned poker chips, Odd Fellows bricks, chained-up hot rods, and the warden’s meteorite. Roiling along would be the glitter of bullet casings, the glimmer of spectacles torn from people’s faces, and the life’s work of Hitchcock, unreeling in ribbons of celluloid a hundred miles long. Deposited across the cornfields of Iowa and Kansas would be titanium turbine blades, white-roofed school buses, ana the statue of Harold McGeachie, “The Farmers’ Farmer,” perhaps dropped side by side with Janis’ plaque. Liberated was the man who was cemented alive while constructing the dam. Freed finally were the lake’s petroglyphs, appearing suddenly, as if carved in one night.

  The train trestle, after Trudy and Eggers left it, dropped to its knees.

  There was nothing to do but sled on, following the exposed plains of mud where the shoulders of the river had been. The retreating river exposed rocky outcrops, some of which looked excellent for fossil hunting. I marked on my GPS unit a rare outcropping of ochre-colored rock from the Devonian period, the age in which the first tetrapods crawled forth from primitive seas. That night, a mist rose from the mud that smelled of turtles. From camp, I heard an owl call, but I figured it was Farley having one over on me, so I didn’t tell anyone.

  We moved through the Sioux Reservation, windy and quiet. If only they’d harbored an atavistic gene of immunity, passed down from Keno, there would have been some delicious justice. But no, the reservation was windy and quiet.

  Over the next week of sledding, I came to understand the power of Trudy’s theory. I’d always seen a simple elegance to her postulation that spear points were the Clovis people’s chosen art form. As we made our way into North Dakota, I saw firsthand how art and necessity are the same thing in primitive technologies. There was art to the way you’d shape a new sled strut. There was art in the way you stacked kindling for a perfect fire—airy enough for ignition, yet tight enough to produce a hot, compact burn. When I carved a ladle for our broth pot, I couldn’t help whittling the face of a Pomeranian into the stem, just to give the kids a kick. There was even art, Eggers taught me, to butchering an animal. You didn’t just disassemble the thing, the way I’d imagined—slicing all the muscles into steaks and fillets. Instead, you studied the animal’s anatomy, and after saying thanks, you traced the tendons to the joints, then snipped them there, so the sinew wasn’t wasted and the bones revealed their uses. You learned to remove the liver so perfectly that you could see your reflection in the hepatic membrane.

  We’d been gone nearly two weeks when Gerry called for a day of rest for the dogs. I wanted to push on, but when Gerry showed me how tender the pads of their paws had become, I understood. We stopped on the lee of a small hill. We all had our routines at this point. Gerry began pulling off harnesses and putting the dogs down for the night. The kids teamed up for firewood. Dad got to work on the sleeping quarters, while Farley began assembling the menu. At this time each evening, Eggers and Trudy would splash doe urine on their arms and legs, then set off to hunt. If they returned late with a certain symbol painted in blood on each other’s faces, I figured they’d had sex.

  I was the guy who got the fire going, drew a pot of water from the river, and, once it started simmering, went fishing with my father in the last light. Our culture had ended, the people who called themselves “Americans” were no more, but the fish of South Dakota cut us no special slack. The night we rested the dogs, my father and I returned with one measly perch, nothing more than seasoning for the water. Coming back from the ice, we could see the fire in the distance, playing on people’s faces. The moon wasn’t up yet, but its light was in the sky.

  “What do you think the afterlife is?” I asked my father.

  We were walking close. Our snowshoes kept clacking.

  “You mean, like heaven?” he asked.

  “Could be,” I said. “Could be anything you want it to be—heaven, paradise, something else.”

  He thought about that. “Well, if afterlife means to keep living on after life is over, don’t you think that’s us? Aren’t we doing that?”

  I neared the fire with that thought in mind. If this was the afterlife, it was a place where you performed hard work for a good cause, with those who populated the center of your life. I’d have had another person or two with us if I could, but you can’t just order up an afterlife like a tuna-melt special. You don’t get to bargain. If there’s no Corvette, so be it. If there are no martinis or shrimp bowls, so it goes. The voices of our friends were reflected large off the hill. They were big-spirited people with much to give. We were embarked on a grand endeavor, together. Nearing them, I wondered if there hadn’t been a way to make something like this happen before. Couldn’t we have made our lives matter more during our before-life?

  We rested and ate leftovers. When the dogs were finally harnessed up again, they wouldn’t
budge. They planted their feet against the traces, and even if we’d still had Peabody’s whip, I doubt it would have worked. I assumed the dogs had been spoiled by their rest, figuring we’d have to run the indolence out of them all over again. But when we finally shouted and prodded them forward, the crest of the hill showed us what the trouble was. Below was the city of Croix, and roving snowy plains between us and its small-town streets were gangs of feral dogs.

  At the sight of those wild, sidling beasts, our sled dogs whimpered and moaned. There was no end to their fretting—they stammered forward and back against the leather, swiveling their heads round to one another for support.

  “We’re here, aren’t we?” Gerry asked.

  “Yes,” I said, rather triumphantly. “We’ve made it.”

  “Okay, then,” Gerry said, and began letting the dogs go. He said, “We appreciate your services,” to each dog as he unbuckled its lead, and that marked the last time I ever saw humans and canines working together. That was the last time dogs ever lent a paw to help us with anything. The surprising thing, what really blew me away, was how each dog, instead of running away, bolted downhill to join the packs of loose dogs. Good riddance, I thought, though I didn’t say it. Nobody wanted any more of my predictions that dogs would become the bane of humanity. Time would bear me out.

  The University of Northwestern North Dakota clock tower was visible, and that’s where we were headed, even though we’d have to cross a shallow pan of fields where the dogs were engaged in mischief. Gerry led the way. The hill was a big one, so he pointed his sled in the right direction, told the kids to hold on tight, and trusted gravity to get them most of the way to the university. Once they were off, Dad and Farley lined their sled up with Gerry’s tracks, and Trudy brought up the rear, with Eggers and me crouched low in her litter.

  Things started out okay—we floated nicely for a few yards—but I had no idea how fast a sled could go. We were tobogganing! All I could think of were those roller-coaster cars plunging through Parkton’s downtown during Glacier Days. We stayed gripped to the tracks of the sleds ahead, and never had I felt such velocity.

  You could hear Gerry’s kids wooing and wowing their way down the hill as we advanced upon what looked like the town junkyard below. At a certain point, however, their shouts of joy became screams of panic. “Look out,” my father yelled from the litter ahead. The wind had my eyes all teary, so it was only too late that I understood where we were really heading.

  The city of Croix had developed no system for the burning of animal carcasses, and we were barreling at breakneck speeds toward acres of frozen hogs, poured who knows how many deep in the marshlands below the university.

  Gerry’s sled burst upon the hogs, clacking along stiff bellies and backs until the sled dumped and all were thrown. Dad and Farley bailed at the last moment, tumbling through sprays of white, but it was too late for us. We were riding it in.

  Eggers and I braced ourselves as we pounded down upon the brown mass and rattled out upon the plain of them, yellow hooves beating the struts off, exposed ribs tearing loose our crossbars. The sled finally tipped, and we were battered out upon the icy blue meat. Eggers had a blackened eye, and ribs I thought were healed reasserted themselves. There was no regrouping. We all began making our way to the other side, to the lawns of UNND. We had to get out of the field of pigs. Mostly, they had been shot. Mustard-colored ice dripped from holes in their bodies, and ice—liver-red and tobacco-brown—froze them together into one mass. The lug soles of our boots left prints in their skin.

  Just when I’d gotten used to hogs, I discovered that, near the end, Croix had taken down all its beasts. Horses, sheep, goats, and cows lay upon the terminus of the heap. I’d endured almost the whole stretch without breaking down, but right at the end, four little petting-zoo donkeys nearly broke my heart.

  On the other side, I didn’t wait for the others. I called to them and, receiving their thumbs-up, forged on ahead. Though Croix had been a smaller town, the mayhem here was worse. Cutting across campus, I could see down the side streets. Signs of final horrors were everywhere—barricades, bodies under cars, bullet holes all over. The campus was vaguely familiar, and I made for the agriculture department’s hothouses, the only buildings on campus lacking layers of snow.

  At the main nursery, I burst through the doors. For two weeks, my central occupation had been to bar from my imagination all the horrible possibilities that could have befallen this place. I’d kept at bay images of the glass broken, the plants wilted, the structure burned or washed away. As long as it survived intact in my imagination, Yulia was alive, Vadim was alive.

  And here I was. Inside, a propane space-heater kept the place warm. The bulk of the building was filled with rows of experimental crops; the wings contained exotic plants from the world over. The aisles, however, were packed with houseplants, regular-looking things, in all different pots. You had to duck under the canopies of overgrown ficus plants and squeeze past the fat arms of rubber trees. There were junipers in terra-cotta pots, and poking from an urn were the nosy trumpets of a creeper. I even had to fight several spider plants hanging from overhead racks. As I waded through all that damn greenery, it suddenly dawned on me that Yulia had gone door to door, as my father and I had, except she’d rescued the houseplants of Croix.

  “Ahoy,” I announced.

  Through some baskets of bamboo, I made out movement. I began running down the row, and when I emerged at the other side, I saw Yulia and Vadim seated on stools at a pruning table, eating a lunch off of white paper.

  “Dr. Nivitski,” I yelled, “it’s me.”

  Yulia wore a white smock. Her hair had gone wild. She held a can of soda in her hand. When she turned and saw me, she stood. She wore no eye shadow, no lipstick, and her face looked aged and puffy.

  I pulled back my hood and lifted my goggles. I suppose I was no Soviet Romeo, either. I walked a little funny because of my ribs. I hadn’t bathed in a month. The winter sun had shown me no mercy.

  “Finally,” I said, “Yulia, I finally found you.”

  I began walking toward her, arms out. I sought to lock her gaze, but her eyes were desperately flashing from my clothes to my arms to my beard to my hands, and they would land no place on me. “It’s Hank,” I said. “Hank Hannah.”

  That’s when she ran. She exclaimed something drastic in Russian, and ran.

  I guess I didn’t understand what was going on. I went to Vadim. From where he sat, I could see the last glimpse of Yulia as she ran down a row of seedlings, smock flowing behind her. She stopped at some sort of root cellar, bent down to open the doors, and shut herself inside.

  Vadim was eating a slice of frozen pizza.

  “She won’t be out for a long time,” he said.

  “Doesn’t she know it’s me?” I asked him. “Didn’t she recognize me?”

  “You came through the dogs, didn’t you?” Vadim asked me. “How did you get through them?”

  “What?”

  “I don’t ever go out there alone,” he said. “Professor Winslow went out there alone, and he never came back.”

  “Who’s Professor Winslow?” I asked.

  “This was his hothouse,” Vadim said. “This is his pizza.”

  I brought the boy with me to the cellar, where, indeed, the insulated doors were locked. It looked like they stored plant bulbs and seeds down there.

  “Yulia,” I shouted through the doors. “It’s Hank Hannah from South Dakota. We’ve come to rescue you.”

  There was no response.

  Vadim was drinking a soda. “She doesn’t speak English anymore,” he said.

  “Yulia?” I called. “Yulia?” I turned to Vadim. “Talk to her,” I said.

  “It won’t do any good,” he told me.

  “Then tell me,” I said. “What’s Russian for ‘We’re here to help’?”

  “She gets like this,” he said. “The longer you yell, the longer it takes for her to come out.”

  “Doe
sn’t anything work? Won’t anything bring her out?”

  He shrugged, sipped his soda. “You don’t happen to have a Draculunus vulgaris on you, do you?”

  The rest of the gang came panting in, calling my name. When I apprised them of what had happened, Farley looked at the door hinges and the frame and said, “We can have this thing open in no time.”

  Eggers said, “I bet Trudy can pick the lock.”

  “Hey, hey,” Gerry said. “You can’t just drag her out of there. The woman’s alone in there, afraid. She’s got to come out on her own terms.”

  Vadim sat on his stool, eating pizza.

  Trudy said, “Let me try to talk to Yulia,” she said.

  “Yeah,” I said, “that’s a good idea. That’s worth a try.”

  I pictured poor Yulia down there in the dark. I remembered the way she described herself in that speech: as a girl, suffering first from terrible allergies, then caused further pain by the doctor who was supposed to help. I had to get Yulia out of that cellar. I had to show her that I was here to help, that I would never hurt her.

  I went to Vadim. He was wiping his mouth with a napkin. Some kind of eerie, casual disconnection had taken hold of the boy.

  I asked, “Where can we find one of these vulgaris plants?”

  “This was a kind of joke,” he said. “The D. vulgaris is one of the rarest flowers in the world. They bloom only at night, along the South China Sea.”

  “There’s got to be some other plant we could bring her?” I asked.

  “We saved all the plants.”

  “Well, then, we’ll dig one up,” I said.

  “Out there?”

  “Yeah,” I said, “out there.”

  I grabbed a bucket, and we walked to the hothouse door, where we closed our coats. Vadim grabbed a gardening spade off the wall. It had a long, lean blade, and I could tell this was what he carried to ward off dogs. He waited for me to choose a tool. I grabbed a pickax and leaned it over my shoulder. “Where to?” he asked.