by Chris Eaton
The community he had gone to explore for a potential future mission was called Hersop Trvandi, located on one of the smaller islands in the Corregimiento de Carti. His guide, who spoke fluent Spanish, Kuna and some English, was poor at holding his liquor, which he found far too often in a place where alcohol was not allowed. But he was nice enough for it, if perhaps a little too clingy and cloying when he was most under the influence. Chris Eaton stayed with his family in a home that was made almost entirely out of sticks, with cans of beer holding the thatched roofs out from the beams to prevent extra seepage. He spent much of his time there cocooned in his hammock, pretending to be asleep. In it he could see nothing, and was periodically bumped by what he imagined to be the dog he had seen earlier wearing a necklace, which just made him miss his own dog Bolivar even more. He got Bolivar in the north, on a trip to Nova Scotia with a girlfriend whose name he could no longer remember. They’d decided to canoe the province’s National Park, and they’d both bought tobacco pipes at the Duty Free to complete the pastoral. She had worn her hair in a bob and had enjoyed aerobics, with a weakness for other vices, too. “So long as they aren’t super-addictive, you know?” For most of the trip, around joyful coughing fits that frightened away nearly all of the wildlife, she had insisted on calling him Bumbridge, and had told him stories about her time in the Boer War, her paddle drifting unenergetically at her side as she stopped, once again, to relight. He had chosen for her the name Bigglesworth, and had spoken of converting tribal pagans. She had laughed. She enjoyed his irony, she had said. And he had no idea what she was talking about.
On the canoe back to the ranger station, they had passed another couple with a Lab perched regally in the canoe’s bottom. Already bored of his date and immediately smitten with the canine’s regal nonchalance, Chris Eaton had asked them where they had bought her, and they had told him of a woman just the other side of the border into New Brunswick. Despite the breeder’s reluctance to sell a dog for what she deemed the wrong reasons (“Folks should never buy an animal on impulse,” she warned him), she had also felt there was no harm in dealing with someone who wouldn’t bother making a trip this far back just to return him.
Chris Eaton and Bolivar had been together ever since. Even on most of his missions. Particularly to South America, where the name Bolivar still really meant something. But he’d been warned that the dogs in Panamanian towns were particularly feral, with a pecking order to their street-living that Bolivar might not readily adapt to. And he’d become too old to go through the quarantine procedure on the way back. So, this time, he decided to leave him at home.
***
One morning on Trvandi, Chris Eaton woke with a pain in his back, and a slight fever, and he didn’t roll out of his hammock until noon. His guide took him to a neighbouring island to snorkel, and the white sand and beautifully clear water made him feel so natural and pure that he momentarily forgot his aches. But when he climbed back into the boat, the guide made a clicking noise with his cheek and said they needed to see a woman when they returned. She looked reassuringly like a tree stump. And she moved almost as slowly, with a bark that gave off threatening cracks as she scowled around the hut. Whatever traditional clothing the Kuna had once worn had, over the years, been replaced by remaindered lots of clothing from American Kmarts and Zellers, and her t-shirt said Blondes have more fun. She was an expert in lancing boils, and she stuck Chris Eaton with various needles, none of which made him feel any prick, nor did they make him feel better. Nothing could make him feel better. He knew he was dying. His limbs were so swollen that they felt like flippers. He found it difficult to breathe and longed only to throw himself back in the water. Was this the end, he wondered? How would he be remembered? He began a list of regrets, at the top of which, almost trivially, was not praying more, not maintaining closer ties with his sister, not making the trip to a friend’s wedding. He regretted making that joke during the debate at the Suncoast Tiger Bay Club. He regretted that he had mistakenly started as a Republican and was later seen as indecisive. He regretted having supported John Edwards in the 2004 Primary or perhaps not having supported him more.
Most recently, he regretted leaving Bolivar with a service instead of a friend, although he’d been too proud to ask for help in that way. He could imagine Bolivar whimpering in the corner of the kennel, unused to the noise of so many other animals. When he’d made the decision, he’d only been thinking of himself. He also regretted some of the relationships he’d fouled in various ways, telling Julie that he loved her, for example, or never telling Emily at all. Letting Melissa take that job. Leaving Chanté to die in that earthquake. Before leaving for Panama he had dated a woman named Tina Cerosh. She said she was a writer but he’d never had a chance to check out anything she’d produced. The date had gone well but he had been too preoccupied with his pending trip to call her before leaving. If he ever made it out of here, he vowed to himself, he would make a point of asking her out again on his return.
***
He recalled a story about two entomologists he had read about in the tourist guide, documenting the Hora insect, a tiny beetle closest in resemblance to the Malachite (which is actually quite plentiful in the mountainous areas of Panama but not in the coastal jungles where they encountered the Hora) and with a similarly acidic defense mechanism to the Black Blister beetle or Meloid only much more fatal. Their names were Juan Chorea, from Portugal, whose grandfather was the first to develop a neurological disease that they later named after him, and Albert Nits, a Brit whose main claim to fame before the Hora was not that he had survived the sinking of the Titanic but that he had arrived too late to get on it, thereby narrowly avoiding what many people would call his fate. Chorea and Nits had actually been tracking a mythological species of ant called heroic ants, or antioch ers, after an archeological discovery in a heavily eroded Mayan pyramid north of La Libertad in Guatemala. The mound-like pyramid had actually been discovered by German officials who had gone to Mexico to convince the locals to rise up against the potential threat of the United States to enter the First World War. They thought they had stumbled upon evidence that the Central American indigenous groups were actually the Biblical thirteenth tribe. After the Germans were forced to flee, however, a team of British anthropologists was sent to excavate and study, and when the tunnels suddenly opened up beneath them, they knew they were looking at something much different, something much more confusing and spectacular, something no one had ever seen before. The structure of the underground tunnels, for one, was far more complex than anything the Mayans had ever created, with occasional, rough-hewn, circular chambers and tunnels that dropped straight down without any perceivable mechanism for raising and lowering. They found one hundred and thirty-five of these chambers before abandoning the project. The vertical spiraling shafts descended, as far as they could tell, for approximately six or seven kilometres, exceeding any mining operations before or since.
Then they found the engravings, the sight of which made their Guatemalan guides bolt off into the surrounding jungle: ants the size of men, battling what they assumed to be the Mayans on horseback, carved directly into the rock and still dripping with a mucus that shimmered in the torchlight. That was when Chorea and Nits were brought in. Chorea discovered traces of chemicals that could not conclusively be disproved as ant pheromones. Nits confirmed the markings seemed not incongruous with the mandibles of something like a bull ant, if said bull ant happened to be over a metre tall. They were convinced, and hastily sent a letter off to the Royal Entomological Society in London. But what had happened to them? These heroic ants? Most ants are known to carry their dead back to the nest for proper reverence. Without any bodies or graves, Chorea assumed they must have voluntarily packed up their wagons and moved on. Nits agreed. The question was where. So they spent several months studying the wall markings, scraping their torchlight across every rounded inch until they discovered another hidden antechamber. Images on that wall included a cucaracha, or cockroach, and th
ere was a tiny roach inset that seemed to claim the heroic ants had merely sensed a change in global temperature and headed south. Nits and Chorea followed. In Honduras, an old Miskito woman told them in her Creole English of a legend where large, wasp-like aliens had visited their king and shared secrets of building temples. A Nicaraguan elder also spoke of a black, shiny people who “arrived first from the sky” and taught them how to domesticate animals. By this point, the presumed exaggeration of their numbers seemed to have been cut in half. In fact, in one local story, the aliens seemed slow and lethargic, ill. They had been struck by a sickness, it seemed, which had caused them to first lose their wings, and then, two at a time, their extra legs. By the time they appeared in the mythology of the peoples of Costa Rica, they were merely shiny black men and women with antennae, imposing and silent.
The trail finally ended in the coastal regions of Kuna Yala. There, Chorea and Nits found no heroic ants. Instead, they found the Hora. Or rather, the Hora found them. Nits woke up feeling as though he’d been shot in the backside, so great was the pain that erupted from his posterior, particularly when he attempted to sit. The British, however, are a modest troupe, and so he refrained from showing his ass to Chorea, or even discussing it. Meanwhile, Chorea could not believe the pain between his shoulder blades, on the back of his neck, and even behind his ear. He reached back and found all three areas swollen and wet. But this was not entirely surprising since they hadn’t stopped sweating since they arrived. Over the next several months, they studied multiple colonies of the Hora, and realized that the bright beetles were extremely careful not to mix, not even to take members of neighbouring colonies as slaves. Another characteristic that seemed rare in the insect world was the existence of multiple queens in one hive, and that, although they did live together, the progeny of one queen was unlikely to ever interact directly with the progeny of another. They performed experiments where they extracted the queens and tried transplanting them to different hives. Was one queen the same as another? They expected the soldiers to attack the new intruder, and possibly defect to another of their hive’s own royalty. But remarkably, it seemed to have no effect. Everything carried on exactly as it had before.
Then Chorea and Nits realized the affected Hora were no longer reproducing. The queen, for all of her resilience in producing eggs, was not having them fertilized by her male counterparts. And eventually they came to the realization that the queen could only mate with the males she had, herself, produced. This Hora incest was, naturally, an evolutionary problem that possibly explained why their numbers were so low and why they had never been discovered before.
Other intriguing characteristics of the Hora included their diet, which seemed to include nothing but the gigantic carcasses of beached whales. But the one thing Chorea and Nits never seemed to figure out was that the Hora excreted a pheromone when they walked, squeezing it from underneath the sclerite plates that covered their bodies, in a trail wherever they walked. The multiple sores that eventually killed Chorea and Nits were the direct result of their first encounters with the insects, and their repeated handling of the creatures without gloves. By the end, they had blisters all over their hands, and anywhere they later scratched, which meant most of their arms and face. Their bodies bloated to such an extent that they looked like manatees, and thirsted for water as much as air. They were in a constant state of hallucinatory fever and one night, as we know from the discovery of his journal in the mid-eighties, Nits was sure their camp was visited by a small party of antioch ers, who probed him relentlessly for honeydew thinking he was a gigantic, pale aphid. After some Kuna children found them in their hut, some Colombian smugglers apparently agreed to take the bodies away for a fee. But it is believed that they were simply dumped in the water once the islands were out of sight.
***
By the next morning, Chris Eaton’s fever had broken. So they arranged to take him immediately back to the city, and then place him on the first plane back to America, which happened to be destined for California. When he eventually exited the hut, he surprised the dog with the necklace and another dog fucking. In their embarrassment they tried to extricate themselves but only succeeded in sticking themselves fast, their rumps practically pasted together, and he was reminded, no doubt like Pujom, or even Nits and Chorea, of the inevitability of fate.
And then it all came rushing back. According to the 1962 book by Hadice Kiebler-Krauss called The 4 Stages of Loss, the four stages of loss, as Chris Eaton experienced them, were:
1 regret,
2 anger,
3 sadness, and
4 acceptance.
The first was the hardest because he felt as though he had done something wrong, that he was somehow responsible, that he might have done something to save her. The second was simple, a flood of energy that he had merely to allow, focusing all of his energy, as he had in the past, on that one point of comprehension, so basic and real, which he believed to be true because it was the only fact on which he could lay total understanding. The third – a return to frustration – was marked mostly by the realization that his anger would never truly allow him, as he had first imagined, to make any sense of the world, and would most certainly never bring her back. And the fourth was by far the easiest because all he had to do was hire the hitman, which he did under the reluctant recommendation of a man named Joseph Herre, whom he had kept under retainer for the past two years.
***
Joseph Herre was part of a long line of Joseph Herres. Or rather, a long line of Josef Herres. Germans. Also, a long line of bankers, until he met Erkki Varisto in Vermont, where both Varisto and the German – second generation American, as a matter of fact – were attending college at Bennington. Varisto was on a temporary exchange from Stockholms Universitet and also the son of a son of a banker. His parents were both of Finnish descent, only in Sweden for his father’s work with MeritaNordbanken after the two Nordic banking giants merged to begin their swift acquisition of other financial institutions across Scandinavia, but Varisto told everyone at school that his parents had moved to the Swedish arctic circle to more accurately track the semi-nomadic patterns of the Northern Saami. It was Varisto who planted the idea in Jospeh Herre’s head that they should become private investigators, and soon after graduation the two of them set up shop in New York City as Herre Varisto. It wasn’t until they were joined by the Frenchman, Pierre-Jules Chapot, that their agency really took off.
Pierre-Jules was a second cousin of the Chapot family of Olympic equestrian fame, but as a child he was thought to be afraid of horses (in reality he had a very rare condition called micro-acrophobia: a fear of small heights), and so he spent most of his time around the stables hiding in the hay. It was through this clandestine observation that he came to know many things about his family that he might not have otherwise discovered, including any and all acts of infidelity, cruelty to the animals and disgusting bodily habits, but also just the general way people behave. He came to understand the psychology of people in a way most others did not. And by the time he joined Erkki and Joseph in the U.S., Chapot had made his own name in Belgium and France as the lead investigator on several previously unsolved crimes, including: a mysterious case in a coastal town of Southern France, where the local baker had mistakenly poisoned the entire town by using bleach in his recipe to meet the demands of the French to have the whitest bread imaginable; the kidnapping of the exiled first Malagasy President, Philibert Tsiranana, in 1975 off the streets of Paris shortly after his declared intention to return to his homeland to free the people from military dictatorship, which turned out to be a plot sanctioned by both the French government and the Parisian mafia; and the capture of the glamorous Russian jewel thief, known widely as The Countess, who had escaped justice for her crimes when she had first committed them in 1927, and who was thus nearly a century old when he captured her and no longer quite as glamorous. In European detective circles, he was actually quite a celebrity, while Herre Varisto were really just sp
ying on spouses and locating lost pets. But when they met at a conference in Brussels, Chapot was having trouble accessing the proper paperwork to shift his business to the more profitable, litigious, North American market, so they decided to sponsor him and offer a partnership.
Chris Eaton approached Varisto, Herre and Chapot with a case that never ended well. In fact, Chapot, who had built his business on a foundation of integrity, voted that they refuse it immediately. But Varisto, who was more travelled and thus prone to waxing philosophic in such instances, preached tolerance, prudence and acceptance. Who were they to dismiss a potential client as a crackpot? Who were they to play God? Besides, as the Finn rightly pointed out, this guy was made of money, the recent recipient of a huge legal settlement from a Swiss pharmaceutical company owned mostly by the Japanese called NeoChartis. Mrs. Varisto, he added, could use a new dishwasher.
The settlement, as it turned out, was Chris Eaton’s second in as many years, the result of a gross malpractice during the latest round of federally funded and recommended flu vaccinations. Their client – because Varisto had successfully convinced Herre to take it on – had lost both his wife and newborn to the illness, and the Swiss/Japanese claimed a gross miscalculation at the plant in Central America, mistakenly filling several vaccine shipments with ten times the recommended dosage, effectively infecting Chris Eaton’s pregnant wife and several people in California with an advanced stage of the hybrid flu rather than protecting them against it. They took full responsibility and offered as many synonyms for condolences, sympathy, commiseration and prayer that they could fit in one masterfully executed press release. Chris Eaton had received the settlement (enough to ensure that he would never have to work another day in his life) after lengthy negotiations through his lawyer Archie Nots, who Herre quickly discovered was not exactly who he claimed to be. The man had actually never graduated from an accredited law school and had been suspended in several states. But this wasn’t what Chris Eaton was after – why he had hired Joseph Herre and company – at all. Not to look into the practices of NeoChartis, and not to expose Archie Nots. Instead, he wanted them to prove one of the most outlandish conspiracy theories Joseph Herre had ever heard, involving the treason of a high-ranking government official with the goal of culling the American population and placing the country at war, first with negligible forces like Afghanistan and Iraq but eventually India, France and Canada, followed by Australia, Mexico and Chile, for which Herre had to ask for confirmation three times to make sure he’d heard him correctly. Let’s forget the salt thing, Chapot suggested to Herre when he finally accepted they were going to take it all on. Let’s just concentrate on linking Secretary Chi to either the Pentagon crash or the vaccination deaths. Because if this Chi treason is true, then we’ll be uncovering one of the greatest American traitors since Benedict Arnold.
