Grasshopper Jungle

by Andrew Smith

  Dr. Grady McKeon also had a very small L-shaped scar between his eyebrows. When he was twelve years old, Grady McKeon was struck in the head by an unoccupied wooden swing. The swing was unoccupied because he had just pushed his younger sister, whose name was Arlene, onto her face.

  Grady McKeon did not want his sister to be on the swing.

  Arlene was not very talented when it came to sitting on things like bench seats on swings. In 1974, she fell from a ski lift in Jackson Hole and died.

  Jackson Hole is in Wyoming.

  Arlene was a real dynamo on snow skis. Not so much on ski lifts.

  Dr. Grady McKeon was comfortable narrating the filmed history of his life’s accomplishments. Grady McKeon’s hair was perfect. He carried a strong resemblance to Shann’s stepfather, Johnny McKeon, who was Grady McKeon’s decades-younger and immensely less talented brother. Also, Grady McKeon had never physically abused Johnny the way he had inflicted harm on their sister, Arlene.

  Arlene McKeon was also Miss Iowa in 1969.

  Iowans love shapely young women with names that have lots of long rhyming vowels, even if their brothers are psychopaths.

  The film was in black and white, but I feel safe making the claim that Dr. Grady McKeon’s hair was the color of Smith Brothers licorice cough drops, and his skin was the same color as French vanilla non-dairy creamer.

  Dr. Grady McKeon wore a blue-and-white Eden jumpsuit, too.

  His jumpsuit was monogrammed, the same way a doctor’s smock at a hospital would be. The monogram said:

  DR. GRADY

  EDEN

  1

  Reel One opened with Dr. Grady McKeon’s personal message to the audience. It was a frighteningly sober introduction, despite the fact that Dr. Grady McKeon maintained a comforting butcher’s smile while he spoke.

  Dr. Grady McKeon looked like he was floating on a fistful of little blue kayaks. He could have easily been sitting across from us at a desk, selling us his top-of-the-line casket for our departed loved ones. Whoever that might be.

  After his introduction, the film went through a history of McKeon Industries from its founding in 1957 through 1971, which was the year the Eden Orientation Series films were produced.

  In 1971, a film called The French Connection won the Academy Award for Best Picture. Voting members of the Academy probably did not get a chance to see Eden Orientation Series.

  This is exactly what Dr. Grady McKeon said at the beginning of his film:

  Welcome to the Eden Project, my friends.

  Welcome, welcome.

  If there are any McKeon family members in the audience, would you please stand and make your presence known?

  This is where Dr. Grady McKeon smiled and nodded and panned his head from one side of the screen to the other, as though he could somehow look out at us from his black-and-white celluloid universe.

  “Stand up, Shann,” I said.

  “Stand up,” Robby urged.

  “This is so dumb,” Shann said.

  Shann stood up. Robby and I clapped for her.

  Shann said, “Shut up.”

  Then Dr. Grady McKeon nodded and continued:

  Thank you.

  Each of you is fortunate to be part of the Eden Project. You are fortunate to have survived, but you also bear a tremendous responsibility to mankind.

  You must breed, my friends. You must breed.

  “You heard the man,” I blurted out.

  Shann said, “Shhh—”

  Dr. Grady McKeon seemed to pause, anticipating the instructions he delivered might cause nervous comments among his audience.

  Robby said, “Uh.”

  And Grady McKeon continued:

  The event that brought you here today was one of two things.

  First, if there has been nuclear fallout detected in the atmosphere, you would have been directed into the showers upon arrival. The world above is no longer habitable. You will be alerted as to when it will be appropriate to return to the surface. Until that time, this is the New World, my friends, and you all are the New Men and Women. The men and women of the future.

  You have a responsibility to breed.

  Do not despair.

  I was not despairing.

  Here, Dr. Grady McKeon looked very serious and clinical. The camera zoomed in so Dr. Grady McKeon’s face occupied the entire screen. Grady McKeon’s twitching right eyeball was as big as an Ozark watermelon. Dr. Grady McKeon stared directly out from the screen with the same expression a doctor performing a physical gets just as he grabs your balls and tells you to cough.

  When a doctor grabs your balls, how can you think about coughing?

  Coughing when someone is grabbing your balls requires as much concentration as riding a unicycle while carrying an Ozark watermelon.

  History shows that when your balls are being grabbed, you can only think about your balls and nothing else.

  “See? I told you that’s why we’re here,” I said. “Eden Five needs us.”

  Shann pointed out that there was no nuclear war taking place at the moment.

  “Nobody’s dropped any bombs,” Shann said.

  It was something of a disappointment to me.

  “Oh,” I said.

  Robby said, “Um.”

  Then Dr. Grady McKeon went on:

  Second, in the event of a 412E alert, the world aboveground will unfortunately become an interspecies battlefield, tremendously dangerous for human beings. You must pay close attention to all the training films we have prepared. Your survival—and the future of humanity—depend on this.

  Pay attention and breed, my friends.

  Breed.

  If the flamingo at the entry chamber did not activate a warning signal upon your arrival, then you are all safe and free from 412E contamination.

  Make note: If the 412E event is more than twenty-four hours into its cycle, you must not return to the surface unless you have prepared the appropriate tools.

  You will be instructed, my friends.

  This is your new world, and you are the new race.

  You are Unstoppable.

  Please, do not despair my friends. I think you will enjoy living in this most remarkable world.

  Live in love. Live in love.

  Eden is love, my friends.

  In Eden, a new human race will begin. It is your duty to do this. You will find the Eden Project Compound to have sufficient resources for years, perhaps decades. You must prepare to recapture the world from the mantid armies above. If you have arrived within the window of infestation, then you may be able to halt what will invariably be the end of the world.

  But you must act.

  Pay careful attention, my friends.

  Pay careful attention and breed.

  Then Dr. Grady McKeon smiled a very creepy smile, like he was imagining pornos from Eden. I happened to be imagining pornos from Eden, too, and they involved the three of us: me, Shann, and Robby.

  The introduction shot lap-dissolved into old newsreel clips that took us through the history of Ealing, Iowa, and its most notorious scientist, Dr. Grady McKeon, founder of McKeon Industries.

  Robby said, “What a fucking psycho.”

  Robby and I never dropped f-bombs.

  Obviously, he was as impacted by Dr. Grady McKeon as I was, even if I did appreciate the frequent directive to have sex down there in our new world.

  Shann squirmed in her seat. She said, “Uh. Am I wrong about something, or do you two boys actually know something more than I do about what he’s talking about?”

  I said, “Uh.”

  Robby said, “Uh.”

  UNSTOPPABLE CORN! UNSTOPPABLE CORN!

  ALL ROADS INTERSECTED at our feet.

  We watched the first three reels of Eden Orientation Series.

  This is what we learned:

  Dr. Grady McKeon’s original business venture, which he founded in Ealing, Iowa, in 1957, which was the same year that his little baby brother, Johnny, came into the world, initia
lly developed fertilizers aimed at increasing corn yields. At that time, McKeon Industries had a workforce of three scientists, one secretary, and a man who drove packages in his pickup truck and swept the floors of the old service station Grady McKeon had taken out on lease. The fertilizer produced was a tremendous hit throughout the Corn Belt, and McKeon Industries expanded rapidly.

  In 1961, which was the year after my father, Eric Andrew Szerba, was born, McKeon Industries moved into its main plant, the one that recently shut down in Ealing. At the new facility, Dr. Grady McKeon unveiled the redesigned company symbol.

  The Great Seal of McKeon Industries looked like something you might find in an Ayn Rand novel.

  Ayn Rand was an author who had no books at all on the shelves of Dr. Grady McKeon’s library in Eden.

  The new symbol for McKeon Industries depicted a gigantic woman, sitting calmly with her legs folded beneath her, apparently gazing out from her two-hundred-foot-high face upon the beautiful and fruitful fields of Iowa. She had an expression like she had just swallowed some blue kayaks.

  They would have naturally been full-sized kayaks, since the woman was as tall as an oil derrick.

  Arranged before her bare knees (she was wearing a modestly styled dress that adequately covered her perfect thighs), like a child’s toys at Christmas, were hand-sized factories with smokestacks, a gleaming and modern steel locomotive, and, for whatever reason, a trio of bare-chested men in overalls working behind what looked like yoked teams of oxen.

  Ahead of the unnaturally enormous woman, perfect rows of sequoia-sized cornstalks grew, stretching off forever into the Iowa horizon. And inscribed around the curving edge at the bottom of the McKeon Seal were the words:

  INFINITA FRUMENTA! INFINITA FRUMENTA!

  Infinita frumenta! is Latin for Unstoppable Corn! or some shit like that.

  You could pretty much put anything you wanted to in Latin at the bottom of a picture and people in Iowa would either beat you up, or think you were a messenger from God.

  Dr. Grady McKeon believed he was God.

  He preached the gospel of infinita frumenta.

  History provides evidence that infinita frumenta made Dr. Grady McKeon one of the Cold War’s largest profiteers. His success entirely resulted from an accident of nature.

  In Reel Two of Eden Orientation Series, Dr. Grady McKeon narrated from off-camera as we saw clips of hardworking scientists in perfectly clean white lab coats, while they peered into microscopes and tilted their cigarettes with smirking intelligence and engaged in academic discussions with one another.

  Scientists loved a good smoke back in the 1960s.

  There were also ashtrays built in to the armrests of the Eden theater. When Robby and I saw those smart, hardworking scientists lighting up their fags, we couldn’t resist the urge to join them.

  It was our duty to smoke along with the Eden Orientation Series.

  “Ahhh . . . ,” I said, after I took a drag.

  “Ahhh . . . ,” Robby said.

  In the 1960s, infinita frumenta meant that McKeon Industries was working toward the development of corn plants that could not be eaten by insects.

  Unstoppable Corn.

  Like smoking cigarettes on the job, they probably thought Unstoppable Corn was a good idea at the time.

  Scientists working for Dr. Grady McKeon experimented with corn.

  I know that’s an oddly funny thing to say, and I may have to strike that line from my history book, but that’s what they did.

  They experimented with corn.

  Scientists at McKeon Industries, like Robby Brees and I, had no idea what the results of their experiment would be, but they did it anyway.

  Dr. Grady McKeon and his colleagues attempted to blend genetic material from the semen of grasshoppers into the pollen from corn plants.

  Pollen is plant sperm.

  It was not a good idea.

  The corn they produced from their plant-sperm-and-grasshopper-semen experiment was lively and strong. It was also true that, as hoped, bugs would not eat it. It was unstoppable. Dr. Grady McKeon was very happy. His company’s stock was worth an incalculable fortune.

  Fortune is also an odd word.

  Unfortunately, the corn that was produced by the plant-sperm-and-grasshopper-semen experiment at McKeon Industries also caused an undesirable side effect in teenage boys: Their balls dissolved.

  Testicular dissolution among developing adolescent males, is how Dr. Grady McKeon described it.

  That sounded nicer.

  If a doctor told me, “You are merely experiencing testicular dissolution,” it would not frighten me nearly as much as if he said, “Your balls are going to dissolve, Austin.”

  Actually, the scientists from McKeon Industries at first concluded that their Unstoppable Corn only caused boys undergoing puberty to have their balls dissolve. That was because the slightest amount of Unstoppable Corn affected adolescent boys that way. Ultimately it was discovered that Unstoppable Corn would pretty much dissolve anyone’s balls if you ate enough of it, and if you also had balls.

  Enough of it turned out to be about an ear and a half.

  The corn that was harvested in all the McKeon farms across Iowa that year was shipped as a goodwill gesture from the United States of America to the people of Canada.

  That was the end of Reel Two.

  Robby and I both squirmed at the thought of eating some of the McKeon plant-sperm-and-grasshopper-semen corn. We also felt sorry for Canada.

  “I am never eating anything with corn in it again,” Robby said.

  “Do they even make food that doesn’t have corn in it in Iowa?” Shann asked.

  “Uh,” Robby said.

  I wondered, “Did Dr. Grady McKeon ever get married?”

  “It seems like he probably practiced breeding a lot,” Robby said.

  “He never was married,” Shann answered.

  “Maybe he ate some of his own corn,” I suggested.

  “I need a cigarette,” Robby said.

  We found out later that Dr. Grady McKeon, indeed, did not eat his own corn and experience testicular dissolution. You will see.

  INFINITA FRUMENTA! INFINITA FRUMENTA!

  THREE OF FIVE

  REEL THREE, WHICH was the final part of the film we saw that night, ended on a cliffhanger.

  Dr. Grady McKeon’s Eden Orientation Series Part Three was a true corker.

  At the end of it, all I could say at first was, “Holy shit.”

  Robby said, “Holy shit.”

  Here is what happened in Reel Three:

  Fortunately for Dr. Grady McKeon and his company, it turned out that during the 1960s anything that could look like corn and make your balls dissolve was of tremendous interest to the Department of Defense. McKeon Industries received its first of many lucrative contracts to develop Unstoppable Weapons and, later, Unstoppable Soldiers.

  That was how the six-foot-tall, tooth-armed mantises that were more powerful than grizzly bears came about. But that was through an accident of nature, too.

  By 1965, McKeon Industries employed 2,700 people in Ealing, Iowa.

  In 1965, Ealing, Iowa, was a Cold War boomtown.

  That year, my father, Eric Andrew Szerba, who had been baptized in the Catholic Church, enrolled in kindergarten.

  After the mishap with the grasshopper-semen-and-plant-sperm experiment, McKeon Industries went to work on a variety of theoretical methods aimed at stopping the global spread of Communism. There were multiple units within the scientific department at McKeon Industries, each of which was developing its own creative anti-Communist ideas.

  One of the units worked with the Unstoppable Corn material. In that particular lab, scientists attempted to invent some type of delivery system that would result in the testicular dissolution of enemy armies.

  Nobody would ever take an army of Communists without balls seriously.

  Another of the units worked on a human replication project. It was a first attempt to actually c
lone soldiers. That was where the human head, penis, and the praying hands in the jars came from. Robby and I found those when we broke into Johnny McKeon’s office the night we climbed up on the roof at Grasshopper Jungle. The Human Replication Unit was also where the little two-headed boy was created.

  We found this out later.

  Reel Three of Eden Orientation Series involved Robby and me in ways we never anticipated.

  This was how it happened:

  The film showed how the Unstoppable Corn lab team had been extracting cellular material from crop yields that had been stored in a silo on one of the remaining McKeon Industries Unstoppable Corn farms.

  Their goal was to dissolve Russian balls around the world.

  Later, I did find out by researching archived records in Eden that President Richard Nixon also brought some of Dr. Grady McKeon’s Unstoppable Corn to China as a gift. In what was called Eden’s Brain Room, I discovered a black-and-white photograph that showed the prime minister of China, a man whose name was Chou En-lai, eating some of Dr. Grady McKeon’s Unstoppable Corn while the president of the United States of America looked on and smiled warmly.

  Prime Minister Chou En-lai’s balls dissolved.

  When the Unstoppable Corn team began off-loading silos of Unstoppable Corn in Iowa, they discovered the corn, when decaying, produced a new variety of mold that they had never seen before. They had never seen it before because the mold was an accident of nature. The mold gave off a blue photoluminescent glow.

  This second accident of nature became known as Plague Strain 412E.