Parasites Like Us

by Adam Johnson

  I heard the courtroom doors swing open again. When I turned, it was the new stenographer instead. She wore wire-rim glasses and carried a roll of tape. “Sorry, Judge,” she said, making haste for her seat.

  I leaned back and stared at the courthouse ceiling, where there was a grand oculus whose natural light filled the room. Craning my neck, I studied the leaded glass dome and the great circular mural surrounding it. Chiseled from marble was a series of vignettes depicting the history of South Dakota: In quartz-veined stone, a red man in feathers offered an ear of corn to a loose-shirted fur-trapper. The next panel showed three buffalo kneeling, their horns pointing down, as a horse, returning after ten thousand years, approached through the wheat. A sodbuster yoked his plow to the rising sun as a row of boys, standing in descending order, observed and learned. A locomotive named Progress—its caboose a covered wagon—split the state in two. And in the final panel, an owl sat under an Indian moon, looking not at pilgrims or prairie schooners but down through the vault of justice, to me.

  People were talking. Farley was talking.

  “I have that right here, Your Honor,” Farley said, and the bailiff came to take a sheaf of paper from his hand. This bailiff was the guy who dressed up like a Civil War cavalryman on the weekends, who was known to eat hardtack and jerky at lunch, who made his own soap and smelled of lye. All of these people Janis had spoken of now played a role in my arraignment, but I don’t have the heart to describe them, to give their names or render the look in their eyes. They’re dead now, every last one of them in that room, every person but Farley, and how can I bring the entire courtroom to life as mere backdrop, as window dressing to my one morning there? There’s no such thing as doing quick justice to the deceased. To speak of the dead is to conjure them, and it would be a crime to beckon them from their graves, to prance them around in some conga line of history before vanquishing them back to the cold, as if their lives were no more than footnotes in the tale of another.

  The more you learned about life, the more it seemed an engine of little design, and to survive its queer lottery was what we called living. You could choose to celebrate this survival, as my father did, or you could mourn the misfortunes of others, which I figured was the least we could do. But the future would prove us both wrong—to live when others do not, we were to learn, isn’t survival, but being left behind.

  The next ocular mural of South Dakota, assuming you rebuild the courthouses, my friends of tomorrow, will not be chiseled with images of clerks or bailiffs or little people like me. Were the million Lakota who died of smallpox included in this one? No, the marble of the next history of this land will be inscribed with flames leaping to the sun, chains of dogs lashed together, and, of course, a great red hand.

  * * *

  Because the charges were federal, Farley managed to get me transferred to the federal prison camp at Parkton while I awaited a trial date. Before the sun was high in the sky, I’d been remanded to Club Fed, formerly Parkton College, a moderately religious school that had gone bankrupt some years earlier. I was “processed” in what had once been the main cafeteria, now filled with the old-carpet odor of bureaucratic cubicles and the scent, like aspirin, of copy toner in the air. The dining-hall windows, however, were still stained glass, and their luminous depictions—an anointing of grape leaves, the multiplication of fish, a last supper—cast a fruit-bowl light across the correctional system’s laminate desks and morguelike filing drawers.

  They handed me receipts for all my property, and then I was placed in a white room that had once been part of the vast kitchen—still visible in the floor were marks where the old industrial freezers had been bolted down. Here I was forced to watch an orientation video. Following that, I had my head and nethers shaved, and was ordered to drink a chalky liquid, then made to urinate into a paper cup. Next, I was briefly violated, and before the rubber gloves even popped off, without so much as a glass of orange juice to calm my nerves, I was dusted with a delousing powder that tasted, in my nose and mouth, bitter as vitamin C.

  Wearing only a towel, I was shown another video, this time focusing on the parasitic cycle. The only place to sit—no thanks—was on a freezing metal table. This video focused mainly on head lice and genital crabs, but as I stood there alone on the examination floor, my mind wandered to ticks and fleas, lamprey and ichneumon larvae, to all the flukes of the world, each leeching off the life of another, so desperate to exist they called the scrotum home, the colon cathedral. In that cold white room, I lifted my feet in turn off the icy floor, wondering what manner of beast could make it through life alone. I thought of Alexander Pope. A hunchback, a cripple, he once said,

  Man, like the weedy vine, supported, lives.

  The strength he gains is from th’embrace he gives.

  The video screen went blue, and then the tape began to auto-repeat. I walked over to the rolling metal cart and turned it off. I thought, Do we cling any less tightly than the suckerfish, and without it, doesn’t the shark swim alone? I returned to where I had been standing, tried to find the spots where my feet had warmed the floor, but couldn’t.

  “Hey,” I yelled to the ceiling, “it’s freezing in here.”

  My voice still echoing off the ceramic-tile walls, I began to pound the metal door.

  I pounded and pounded until, finally, I heard footsteps.

  When the door opened, a little man stood there. He wore a tiny jumpsuit, khaki with a black stripe, and his wiry hair was filled with what looked like sawdust.

  “Small world, Hanky,” he said. “Here’s your boots and bibs.”

  These he thrust in my chest. It backed me up a step.

  “Gerry,” I said, taking in his uniform. “What are you doing here?”

  He grabbed his ID tag and aimed it at me. “It’s Officer Gerry,” he said.

  “This is some kind of joke,” I told him. “Gerry, tell me this is a charade.”

  “Officer Gerry,” he said. “That’s a week of toilets.”

  Gerry was enjoying this, I could tell. I shifted strategies.

  I said, “I’m terribly sorry about what happened to your miniature dog.”

  “Laundry detail.”

  “We’re old friends,” I reminded him. “You’re not mad about getting fired, are you? You know I’d never purposely try to get you fired.”

  “Now you bought yourself twenty. Let’s have ’em.”

  “Twenty what?”

  “Push-ups, shitbird,” he said, pointing down. “Drop and give me twenty.”

  My skin went goosepimply under the white powder.

  I looked down to my waist. “I’m only wearing a towel,” I said. “And there was nothing like this in the orientation video. The video said there were no violent offenders here.” The video had depicted the campus—that’s what they called it, a “campus”—as integrated into the community, with a montage of townsfolk using the grounds as a park, walking their dogs, checking books out of the prison library, and watching one of those old 3D outer-space movies in the theater. There was even footage of the high-school swim team holding a meet in the prison pool.

  Gerry glared at me. “Keep pushing me,” he said. “Go ahead and keep pushing.”

  With as much dignity as possible, I let my towel go and crouched down to the cold floor. The first couple were easy, but then my elbows started to shake, and soon my chest was burning! I wanted to scream every time the tip of my manhood touched the icy floor.

  Gerry mimicked my moans, trying to make me sound like a pussy. Still I kept pumping, and when I got to push-up number seven, Gerry counted out “six.”

  That little “miscount” trick was one they had persecuted me with during my mandatory physical-education class at Mactaw High. Always there was some jocko like Gerry to count off your calisthenics, and always they would horse around with you in the middle of your squat thrusts and T-bones, when you didn’t have the wind to tell anyone off. Even if you had a good comeback ready, even if there was a put-down on the t
ip of your tongue, you were wheezing too hard to say it.

  “What’s that?” Gerry said, putting his finger to his ear. “You want more?”

  I put my head down, arms quivering, to squeeze out a last push-up. Instead, I collapsed. I’d done only thirteen, the last few girl-style, using my knees.

  Completely pooped, I just lay there, face-down on the floor. That’s when Gerry removed a large tool from one of the steel cabinets. The device looked like a big set of bolt cutters. He stood over me with it.

  “Working nights,” he said, “I never got to orient the new inmates. On night detail, I never got to use this device. But now this is my day job.”

  Then Gerry sat down on me. At first, I thought he was going to choke me again, but then he positioned himself atop my bare buttocks and turned his attention to my legs. This was not in the video! Gerry grabbed a foot and tweaked it back. I felt cold metal on my calf, and then, with a flash of pain, I heard a pneumatic clamping sound.

  Gerry stood. “Get dressed,” he said and kicked those new boots and baby-blue coveralls toward me. I looked down, and there, on my ankle, was a hard metal band lined with rubber, a wispy wire antenna hanging down.

  * * *

  Outside, Gerry led me across campus toward the extradition wing, where I was to be housed in a mostly empty unit. The air was cutting, and because the campus was on a hill, currents of mist swept through the buildings. Newly bald, I felt as if I had no scalp, no skull even, as if my brain were out there, wind whistling through the hemispheres.

  I followed Gerry along a sidewalk inset with grates to fight the ice, and something about the metallic rasp of our footsteps made me think of ice climbing.

  Gerry glared back at me. “Shoe’s on the other foot now, isn’t it, Hanky?”

  I didn’t say anything, not after all those push-ups.

  “You’re used to sitting up there on your throne, laughing at the little guy. It feels different to be the one who gets pushed around, who always gets crapped on. What, you want me to do some tricks for you, so you can be amused? You want to laugh at my backflips? Fat chance.”

  Gerry turned around, so he was walking backward. Every time he gestured I winced, as if he was going to jump on me again.

  “Your fat Corvette,” he said. “That cush job. What do you know about life? When have you ever lived? You’ve obviously never been arrested before. I bet you never even been fired from a job. Well, get ready to pound the pavement with a felony on your record, get ready for doors slammed in your face and the unemployment line, ’cause you’re the poodle now.”

  “Actually,” I said, “I have tenure.”

  Gerry stopped and looked at me funny, as if he had an idea what the term meant but wasn’t completely sure. I wasn’t about to explain it all. I only said, “I won’t be losing my job. Things will be inconvenient, sure. I suppose I’ll have to direct student dissertations during visiting hours, and my classes will have to make do with handouts for a while. But with full tenure, I could work from anywhere, from France if I wanted. And I’d have to do something pretty bad to get fired.”

  “Worse than animal mutilation and grave-robbing?”

  “Look here,” I said, then paused. “Well, yeah, it’d have to be worse than that.”

  Gerry stared at me. Maybe the idea of tenure offended him, or maybe it thrilled him. I couldn’t tell from the way he shook his head, like now he’d heard it all. He used his teeth to tug off a glove, then pulled a watch from his pocket. He said, “We have to make a pit stop.”

  Gerry veered off the path, and we pushed on through knee-deep powder toward a cluster of buildings beyond the dean’s residence, which was now called the Warden’s Residence. There weren’t any guard towers or Cyclone fences at Club Fed—the only security was a wire, buried along the perimeter of the school, which would trigger an alarm if an ankle monitor crossed it. Still, the place no longer felt like the Parkton College I’d visited over the years as a guest lecturer. Gone were the benches and fountains. Missing were the kiosks and bike racks. No coffeehouse. No food court. This was how a university must look in Russia.

  We passed groups of middle-aged white men in blue thermal jumpsuits, their faces pink with cold. They smoked in tight huddles, avoiding the icicle-laden eaves of buildings whose names had been sandblasted off. Branner Hall was now named G-4, and Peterson Auditorium, where all the seniors of Parkton College had graduated, was simply H-l. Yulia and Ivan probably met at a school like this, an unadorned bunker of a campus, an institution where people studied radiation technology and weapons development.

  Outside the Warden’s Residence was a winterized rose garden that resembled, on a smaller scale, the President’s Promenade at USSD—beds of frozen, thorny stalks were surrounded by heaps of mulch and burlap, all ringed by circles of brightly colored rocks. One stone I recognized as obsidian. When we got closer, I saw that there were large pieces of quartz and feldspar. Stacked at the foot of an irrigation box were chunks of Siberian marble—mint-green shot through with pearl. Suddenly I realized these stones were mineral samples, commandeered from the college’s old geologic collection, which had been housed in display cases in the library’s concourse.

  Gerry stopped and checked his watch again.

  “So this tenure thing,” he said. “What about sleeping with a student? Does tenure let you do that?”

  “Do you mean a student, or my student?”

  “What’s the difference?” Gerry asked.

  “Well, the practice, in general, is frowned upon.”

  “So you’ve done it.”

  “They weren’t my students,” I said. “I’m not proud of it.”

  Gerry shook his head. “Pitiful,” he said. “What a shameful abuse of power. That’s twenty.”

  I didn’t argue. I knelt in the snow and began my pushups, though I could barely do any, especially staring at what was once a college’s prized geological cache. Before me were amethyst clusters and batholite cores. There were azurite, fluorspar, and bitumen. Oh, what a Clovis wouldn’t give. Straining on rubbery arms, I realized I was staring directly at a meteorite, an escapee from the very ovens of creation, an object marooned on our planet after being orphaned by some ancient star extinction or distant galactic collision.

  I did a handful of push-ups, leaving a face print in the snow, and then we pressed on down the hill, to the old industrial-arts building, its aged brick façade reminiscent of times when hands-on manufacturing was a proper university subject. At the door, we could hear the muted whine of machinery.

  “Wait here,” Gerry said, and disappeared inside.

  I danced in place for a little bit, clapping my hands to keep them warm, but then my curiosity took over, and I slipped inside to see what was happening. The door opened into a dark work area filled with idle industrial-arts equipment. It was empty except for four preadolescent children running power tools by the glow of a single droplight. Shop-goggled and saw-dusted, they were hard at work: one fed wood into the whiny teeth of the bandsaw, while another stabbed the lathe with a spoon chisel that spit wood shavings directly into his face. A third child was precariously perched atop a stool that allowed his short arms to feed strips of lumber all the way through the ripsaw in a single swipe. The last boy ran a drum sander that turned at such revolutions that it burned the wood, sending up curls of cedar smoke, a spicy smell, thick with resin, that instantly cleared my sinuses.

  Gerry approached them and began sorting through what looked like a pile of miniature wooden skis the kids had made. He picked up one of the tiny skis, sighted down its crown. This he repeated several times. Then he lifted a finger to his throat and mimed, Cut. One by one, the kids shut down their machines and lifted their goggles, revealing pale skin and rabbity, bloodshot eyes.

  “These are all lefts,” Gerry said. “Tell me you’ve been making the rights, too.”

  The kids looked from one to another. Slobbers of glue had dried in their hair, on their cut-off shirts. Bursts of blue-and-red marking
powder splotched their arms and backs, so you could tell there had been some pitched battles earlier with glue guns and chalk boxes. Now, however, none of them spoke.

  Gerry asked them, “What will happen if you only make left skis?”

  His voice sounded more instructional than angry, though the kids looked used to being punished. They stepped from behind their machines, reluctantly, and lined up as if it was an old drill. Side by side, the boys looked like quadruplets, with a couple of inches in height the only thing separating them. How could they all look eleven? Who could ever tell them apart?

  Gerry asked, “Won’t left skis make everything go in circles?”

  The kids were wearing prison-issue visitor name-tags clipped to their cut-off shirts, and I watched as Dana looked to Kelly, who looked to Rene. Standing at the end, a hair shorter than the rest, was Pat.

  The biggest one, Dana, said, “We figured it would be faster to cut all the lefts first and then cut all the rights. That way we don’t have to adjust the saw blade after every cut.”

  “Right,” Gerry said. “Okay. Good idea.”

  Pat pointed my way. He asked, “Who’s that guy?”

  Gerry looked over and noticed me for the first time since I’d entered.

  “That,” Gerry said, “is the man who murdered Spark.”

  I suddenly realized that the bigger boy still held a glue gun. The second wielded a rat-tail file. “That,” Gerry continued, “is what happens when you horse around too much and don’t listen to directions. He’s what happens when you think you’re better than the other kids in school, when you hide in the restroom to gang up on them. This man is what you get when you won’t stop pestering people about your mom.”

  “What are you talking about?” I asked Gerry.

  Little Pat approached me, cautiously, with sidesteps. His lower lip was downturned in anger. When Pat was a couple paces from me, he threw a handful of sawdust in my face and ran.

  My eyes, my nostrils!

  Gerry turned to the boys. “See how he cowers? This is the kind of man who hurts animals. Go ahead, ask him how many push-ups he can do. Let’s see how tough the animal abuser is.”