Parasites Like Us

by Adam Johnson

  Outside, I tried to head away from the ugly portraits of town. A couple knolls overlooked the Missouri at the edge of campus, and I figured there had to be some shrubs or something up there.

  Vadim was petrified of dogs. His cool, collected posture quickly disappeared. Watching him constantly scan for marauding dogs made me realize this wasn’t a single morning’s work. My entrance into the lives of these two people wouldn’t be as simple as the rescue scene I’d imagined. There wasn’t going to be a dinner where I regaled Yulia with stories of hardship, kept filling her champagne glass, and later claimed my passionate reward. I didn’t even know Yulia that well, and it would prove true that she’d gone a little mad from the events depicted, as testified by some of her behavior later in life. But I held her in my heart, and would stay with her all my days, even if a great many of them were trying ones. If love dictated only in Russian, I would learn that thorny tongue.

  Since the boy owned no snowshoes, he stumbled often, and each time he fell, his first thought was to defend against advancing dogs. Before, he’d been a smart, brooding boy, prone to silence and introspection. Now, after what he’d experienced, I wondered if I’d ever get through to him.

  We were making for the highest spot on the hill. There were some little chinaberry bushes poking out of the snow.

  “I know you’re going through a hard time,” I told the kid.

  He didn’t answer.

  “I’ve brought you something,” I said. I produced Keno’s point. “Dogs are afraid of this,” I said. “I’ve scared many dogs away with it. Keep it in your pocket. They’ll smell it on you. They’ll keep their distance.”

  I placed the point in his hand. The thing would save his life come spring, after we’d all set out for Okinawa. Now Vadim seemed impressed mostly with its beauty, with the pink light coming from its edge, but he looked indifferent to my claims of its potency. I’d expected a few of his science-minded questions, like How can dogs smell It? or How does It work? But such questions were dangerous. From them, it was only a short hop to other questions, like Where is my father? and What will happen to me now?

  I knew where he was at—it seemed impossible that mere inquiry could protect you from the unknowns swirling about like cast-nets. It seemed unthinkable that simple questions could prevent you from being forever drawn into the seine purse of doubt. But one day, that would change. One day, he would separate himself from what he felt, so “this hurt” would become “that hurt,” and once that happened, once he learned to step outside the cloud of his loneliness and examine loss with scientific eyes, then words and names would begin to work for him. Then he’d be able to tell his story as if it had happened to someone else, which is the only way you can speak the story of your life and still survive when it ends.

  The ridge, when we reached its rounded peak, was stunning. A gray wedge of cold front cut against the horizon, and in the sun off the water, the light was intense. I tried to find the smallest chinaberry out there, one that would fit in our bucket. That chinaberry smell always made me think of Parkton. I pulled out my GPS unit and marked the spot. Its batteries were failing.

  With the pick, I scraped snow away from the little plant until I found frozen soil. I began chipping at the earth, breaking a little dirt loose with each stroke.

  “You gonna help or what?” I asked Vadim.

  “This isn’t going to work,” he said. He stood there, watching me dig. “She will not be impressed by this weed.”

  It was pretty hard not to hurt the roots in the frozen dirt, but I did my best. The plant smelled good on my hands, and I’ve always liked the shape of those little blue berries.

  Vadim wouldn’t let up. “What makes you think she will like that plant? There are a million plants just like it. What makes you think that one is special?”

  I just kept digging. When my face started to shine, Vadim joined me, and soon we had a passable hole. Soon we had a plant in a bucket. I looked at that hole. It was a good spot we were at. I didn’t quite understand Vadim’s resistance, but we’d turned our first corner here. I pulled out my GPS unit. I wrapped it in the buckskin I’d used for Keno’s point, and together Vadim and I buried the thing. If this story has reached you, fellow humans of the future, then you have no doubt found this and all the other artifacts I have left for you. Perhaps some sort of historical marker now stands where Vadim and I stood that morning. Perhaps such monuments to our deeds litter the landscape from here to Asia.

  Certainly, of course, there will be those in the future who have found a way to hold me responsible for the very calamity that we here survived. I trust the thinking persons among you know foolishness when you hear it. Always there are lesser scientists who, for lack of a good dissertation topic, will spend several years researching such cockamamie ideas. Their goal is not truth but celebrity, and their means are incendiary sensationalism. I’ve said enough on the topic already; suffice it to say that, over the last million years, the fates of the cultures of the world have always been the same: dust. Anthropologists don’t erase cultures; we remember them.

  Other decisions, I’m sure, will fall under some scrutiny. In teaching Gerry’s kids, a duty that fell solely to me during their long march toward doctoral degrees, I instructed them in Latin at the expense of Greek. I perhaps overstressed the Enlightenment, and I confess that I pretended the entire twentieth century didn’t occur. As to my rendition of feminism, I tried my best. Vadim was to outclass all students before him, earning his Ph.D. in record time, and when his thirst turned from humanism to popular culture, I readily admit the inaccuracies I may have passed on in my depiction of the movies, songs, and literature of the day.

  That bank of clouds was still gnurling its way across the horizon. They looked like glaciers to me, slow, determined, unearthing everything buried before them.

  “So how long does she usually stay in the cellar?”

  Vadim shrugged. He’d been doing fine while occupied with digging, but now fear again gripped him, and he looked down upon the town with weary eyes.

  I said, “I’m going to say a couple things to you, all right?”

  Vadim looked at me. He nodded.

  “All those dead people in the streets,” I said, “they’re not people anymore, so don’t be afraid of them. Their spirits have gone someplace else. I haven’t figured out where yet, but I’ve been doing a lot of thinking on it. Your father is probably with the spirits. We won’t know for sure until we get to Vlotovnya.”

  Vadim looked past me, to the town and hog fields beyond. He was still listening, though.

  “These are only words to you now,” I told him. “It will take your whole life to understand what it means to lose your father. Someday, though, I’ll teach you how to tell his story. In the future, I believe everyone’s story will be told. Right now, it’s not possible. For now, all we can do is tell one story that has a part of everybody.”

  I indicated the cloud front on the horizon, pointing to the sooty wisp of its leading edge, as well as the ice-blue within. “I will never leave you,” I told Vadim, “though everyone’s time must come. When mine comes, you can look at a cloud like this, and you will feel me there. I’ll leave a part of myself there for you.”

  I stood. The cold air was sharp against my ribs, but the sun was really something off the snow. You could about see forever. It’s funny—I’d always pondered what had made the Clovis leave their homes and ancestors to make their crazy journey, but it had never occurred to me how they must have felt when they got there. They’d risked everything, and suddenly, emerging from the ice, they discovered a new world, a continent that was entirely unpeopled. What ran through their veins when they were confronted with such a possibility? What first words did they speak when they stared into a land that knew not their echo?

  That morning, with my hand on Vadim’s shoulder, I felt I knew.

  “Come on,” I told him. “Its time to get your mother out of the cellar.”

  We turned from the depopulated
plains of North America. We weren’t going to found an empire here. We had other plans, ones that included Canada, Alaska, the Bering Sea, and the Kamchatka Peninsula. We were headed to Okinawa next. My life’s work had yet to begin, and the journey ahead would shuttle us off this continent by the same route that had brought the Clovis, thus concluding humanity’s twelve-thousand-year camp-out in North America. The trip wouldn’t be so hard. We’d taught a thousand students how it went. It was a story we knew by heart.

  Acknowledgments

  The author wishes to thank the entire Harrell family, without whose generosity and tireless support this book could not have been finished. Specifically, I am indebted to Dr. James Harrell, the Honorable Gayle Harrell, Jennifer Sobanet, and Melinda Johnson; and nothing is possible without my wife, Stephanie Harrell—you are my perpetual orbit, my flight, my fuel, my gravity.

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