Parasites Like Us

by Adam Johnson

  Trudy was right behind Vadim. I scruffed the kid’s hair and stepped past him. Why hadn’t I been telling people these things all along? When I neared her, I saw Keno’s cracked ball on the table next to the chip bowl. Trudy was fingering it, inspecting it.

  “Trudy,” I said, “never has such a gift been bestowed upon me.”

  “It looks great on you,” she said. “We were worried it wouldn’t fit.”

  “Well, I have a gift for you. Whenever I can be of service to you, anytime, anyplace, and no matter what engaged, I will assist you.”

  “Oh, that’s sweet, Dr. Hannah.” She patted my hand.

  When I realized I had just pledged her own vow back to her, I felt like an absolute idiot. The only thing I could do was strengthen the pledge even more. “Trudy, I declare, by way of gratitude, never to leave you when you need my aid, no matter how perilous your situation, no matter what personal risk I may incur.”

  I didn’t want her to up the ante as well, and possibly refer to my pledge as “cute,” so I quickly sidestepped her. I returned to Yulia, who still had a bit of a stunned look on her face. I handed her the bag, half full of corn. She held it up between us, examining the contents. “Here’s the genuine article,” I said. “This is a one-in-a-million find.”

  Did she want me to grab her again? Had her bosom forgotten me so soon?

  “We shall see,” she said. “I will have to get it into my lab. There it will be subject to many late nights of rigorous testing and strict standards.”

  I was no schoolyard kid when it came to the art of double-entendre. I knew exactly what the little lady was getting at. When she lowered the bag, I gave her, unmistakably, the eye. “Perhaps you could use a lab partner,” I said. “A man with experience and ability, a man who has the endurance to take on a challenge, who will keep delivering and delivering until he unlocks the dark mystery and makes it burst with song.”

  Yulia leaned against the counter and shook the ice in her soda. “I have high-tech equipment for that kind of work,” she said. “I would not waste man-hours in the lab that way.”

  I took a sip of my soda. “Are you saying you prefer to work alone?”

  “Not necessarily,” Yulia said. “Much of botany takes place in the field, where patience and attentiveness are required. This man you imagine—he would not begin as a partner. Starting as an assistant, he would have to listen and take direction. He would need to trust my judgment. In the hothouse is steam and convection. Bright flowers distract and delight, pollens intoxicate the senses, and botanical emanations prevent clear thinking. This man would have to know that, inside the hothouse, there can be only one boss.”

  Yulia looked me in the eye. I was imagining the dank work of germination. On my hands I felt the nectar of hybrid breeding. I downed my soda—I had to chew some ice!

  She continued: “Scientists like us, Dr. Hannah, we wish to engage the world beyond observation and participation. We wish to make meaning of life, which takes time, discipline, and sacrifice. Certainly, when the Beatificius gentillia drip their once-a-decade pollen from the hothouse rafters, it is only human to strip the clothes. For the most part, however, this man you speak of would have to follow orders. He would have to find satisfaction in learning the ways of another, and when he finally wanted to become a partner, he would have learned when the time was right. By then, he would know how to ask.”

  Yulia looked to me for a reaction. I chewed my stupid ice and stood there stunned. Then she turned to speak to someone else. I took a step backward. I took another, until it felt as if I was watching the events before me like a movie. Yulia had told me the man I needed to become in order to be with her. And I froze.

  That old sense of detachment came over me again. A few feet away, people drank sodas and ate chips. Conversations were made. Eggers put a skillet on the stovetop and sparked the burner. He poured a puddle of cooking oil in the pan and began making some sort of a speech that everyone in the room could hear but me. An invisible membrane separated myself from the others. Yulia was right in front of me, but unless I found the guts to become the man she needed, she might as well have been in godforsaken North Dakota.

  Manning the stove, Eggers gestured largely, explaining his theory of why the Clovis, nomads who founded an empire of meat, might value corn. As the oil began to smoke and spit in the pan, he postulated that the Clovis would have popped their corn, rather than baking it and so on. He cited a few examples of corn popping in early petroglyphs. He listed the tribes who still popped corn in hot sand, and as he ran through the history of corn popping in the oral tradition, he began to remind me of myself at his age.

  When hot oil formed golden waves along the bottom of the pan, Eggers hefted Keno’s ball.

  I knew Eggers could have offered a lecture. He could have explained that corn found in eighth-century Anasazi ruins had been successfully popped. So, too, had corn discovered at a Peruvian site dating to before Christ. He could have explained how kernels were designed to store moisture, and how moisture then turned to steam and caused the kernel to explode. Without moisture, the corn would’ve turned to dust ages ago. Eggers could even have confessed what I knew to be true, that his tenure as a Clovis had ended a few days ago, that his nontechnology pact was complete.

  Instead, Eggers poured the corn into the hissing pan and placed a lid on top. That shut people up. The room fell silent enough to hear the muted sizzle of the oil inside, and when Eggers shook the pan over the burner, everybody flinched but me.

  Everyone stood there, staring at the pan, waiting for the first ping of fluffy white to strike the lid. I stood there with them, at the edge of the world they lived in. I could smell Farley’s bacon bits through the oven door. I could hear Gerry and his ex–old lady’s kids coming down the stairs before they even reached our floor. I could feel the radiating body heat of Yulia beside me. I was among this group of people, and yet I didn’t believe something essential that all of them did: that people could simply come together and stay together. It seemed to me that what Eggers was really demonstrating was that it was easier to put your faith in the possibility that twelve-thousand-year-old corn could pop than in the hope that the person you needed also needed you.

  The first ping of popcorn came as Gerry and his crew tromped into the common area, each kid holding a pillow half again his size. The kernel rang loud and clear; then the pan fell silent again. Was it a fluke? Had we imagined it?

  The kids claimed the sofa and cued up Impossible Journey on the television as Gerry headed my way, casting an unsure glance toward my new coat.

  “I got a bone to pick with you, Hanky,” he said.

  I stared at him, detached.

  “Right now I’ve got a video to watch,” he said. “But mark my words—you and I will have a little mano-mano before this evening is out. And this is not about skipping morning orientation or neglecting coffee-cleanup detail, both major demerits. This is about one of my boys getting it in his head that his mom isn’t at the dude ranch. This is about someone telling him his mama’s in a hospital. You have any clue who might’ve done that?”

  Gerry went off to join the kids in watching that Pomeranian movie no one would shut up about. As the opening credits began to roll, the soundtrack swelled with some inspired French horns—sonorous, foreboding, yet somehow uplifting. This was the accompaniment we heard as Eggers’ popcorn came to life, first crackling with the occasional volley, then bursting into salvos of Black Cats and repeating rifles.

  Eggers turned off the heat when the old maids began to smoke. Opening the lid sent a cloud of steam to the ceiling, and we beheld a mass of grayish popcorn, the pieces smaller, fatter than I’d expected.

  Farley spoke first. He studied that pan the same way he looked into the ice when we fished. “I’ll give it a go, then,” he said, grabbing a few kernels.

  Farley chewed for a bit. There was a distracted look on his face. Eggers waited for him to say something, to give some sort of response, but after a while Farl
ey only gave a simple affirmative nod.

  Trudy tasted the popcorn next.

  Eggers snarfed a little, then passed the bowl to my father, who refused.

  “It always gets stuck in my teeth,” he said. “I’ll be flossing all night.”

  “Just taste it,” Lorraine told him. “I will if you will.”

  Dad shook his head no.

  Lorraine flashed her eyes toward me. “This is what your son does for a living,” she told Dad. “This stuff is important to him. You want him to think you don’t admire what he does?”

  “I admire plenty of stuff about him,” Dad said.

  “Like what?” Lorraine asked.

  Dad looked over at me. “Oh, all right,” he said, and ate a couple of kernels.

  When he tried to make Lorraine eat some, she laughed.

  “No, thank you,” she said. “My work is done here.”

  My father looked at me. “See what I put up with,” he said.

  When the bowl came to Vadim, he shook his head with some disgust and stood with his arms folded. Of course, he then looked around to make sure everyone noticed his aloof pose. “I see little science here,” Vadim said.

  I folded my arms as well. “I concur,” I said. “Still, a scientist must gather data to truly analyze a situation.” I grabbed a handful of popcorn and made a show of studying the kernels appraisingly, thoughtfully. I ate a few pieces. “Edible,” I said to Vadim, offering him some from my hand.

  He shot me a suspicious look, then glanced at the movie Gerry and the kids were watching. On the screen was an old cargo plane, flying high over snowy Canada. In the hold were a bunch of circus people and lots of animals. Pomeranians were frolicking, chasing each other around the seats. Suddenly a red light flashes, an engine flames out, and black oil begins streaking down the fuselage. It was the same old story of life. We’d seen it all a hundred times: things are going along fine, and then, for no reason at all, the unforeseen strikes and everything falls apart.

  Vadim looked back to the popcorn in my hand. “No thanks,” he said, and then slunk over to watch the movie, leaving me standing there alone, copping an adolescent pose for no one. Hadn’t he heard my pledge? Didn’t that mean anything to him? I sighed and ate the rest of my popcorn, which tasted like a long drive down a dusty road.

  Yulia was looking sharply at Vadim, slouched on the sofa. She turned her eyes to me. Her look might have been apologetic, or she might just have been seeking my scientific attention when she engaged my eyes and put a kernel in her mouth. She held one hand up, authoritatively, and closed her eyes. For a long time, she just chewed. We all watched her. She was the paleobotanist on duty, after all. I loved the way her facial muscles moved, how they flexed and articulated.

  “What’s your opinion?” I asked her.

  She opened her eyes. “What is yours?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  She studied me a moment, and then lifted her fingers to my face. Nails red, fingers lean, she placed one kernel in my mouth.

  “Don’t chew,” she said. “Just wait. Wait, and we will test this Ice Age kernel.”

  I stood there, a spitty piece of popcorn in my mouth. I looked around the room. Farley lifted his eyebrows and went to join the party watching the movie. Yulia remained focused on me.

  “Cooking has transformed the kernel’s pulp,” she said. “The initial starchy taste comes as the enzymes in your saliva begin converting sugars. Now feel the hull with your tongue. It should have the texture of cellulose. Note the bitter taste. That is from potassium and alkaloids, which give the outer casing its impermeability. This bitter taste suggests the seed was intact. At the heart of the corn is the germ, where the protein is stored. Here the texture is more oily, like a nut, and the flavor is slightly rich. When that flavor is strong, the seed is likely to be viable.”

  I opened my eyes—when had they closed? Eggers and Trudy were also watching the movie. Dad and Lorraine were nowhere to be seen.

  “What is your opinion now?” Yulia asked me.

  “I have much to learn about botany,” I said. “And your assessment?”

  “I conclude that perhaps you take direction well after all.”

  I studied Yulia. I wasn’t so good at picking up on notes of conciliation, let alone invitation. Yet, in Yulia’s eyes, in the way her coffee-dark irises fixed upon me and opened some to show me other colors—cumin and gold—there was some kind of welcome.

  I buttoned the toggles of my coat.

  I said, “Maybe I’ll test this Ice Age coat, see how it performs in the elements. Would you join me for a promenade around the federal prison camp?”

  Yulia looked to Vadim, who was sandwiched between the other kids on the couch. She walked over to him, said something, then grabbed her white jacket.

  “Let us bring our minds to bear upon this coat of yours,” she said.

  * * *

  Outside, the night was quiet and still. The cold was a force, a pressure you felt against your eyes, and along the frosted buildings the prison lights shone sodium and shrill, casting stiff, cement-colored halos off the corrugated roofs. The rising moon had its say, too—upon open expanses, in the branches of trees, its tincture recast the night in hues of indigo, iodine, and tulle.

  We walked along a grated path. It was good to see Yulia’s breath in the air again. I hadn’t forgotten that. We passed a building where the prison choir was practicing. As we approached, they were doing the chorus of “Home on the Range” before breaking into a sprightly “Buffalo Girls, Won’t You Come Out Tonight?”

  We stopped only once, so Yulia could souse her nostrils with saline spray. Her throat, when she leaned her head back, was the underside of white.

  When we started walking again, Yulia pointed to the old observatory on top of the hill. She asked if it was operational. I said I didn’t know, but we kept walking toward it anyway. Yulia’s jacket had no pockets, so she crossed her arms as she walked. “Here,” I said, and opened my coat, so the two of us huddled together under the fur. This made our steps awkward in a youthful way, and though I knew where I was and why, I ignored the criminals out smoking their evening cigarettes, I ignored that buried wire not far from our feet, and I pretended that Yulia and I were undergraduates, crossing a college campus by the river. I’d never written The Depletionists, I imagined. She’d never married Ivan.

  The observatory was silo-shaped, with a lens window on the dome that made it resemble a lighthouse on the prairie. The door was small and metal, the kind you’d find on a ship. The hinges and handle suffered from disrepair, but inside, the heat was on and the light switch worked. In the warmth, Yulia pulled away from me, but for some reason I didn’t panic. A circular flight of stairs rose to a landing, where a ladder led through a trapdoor in the floor above. Yulia climbed it first, and, watching her hips sway as she ascended, observing her legs pump above me, I became aroused. By the time she squeezed her buttocks through the trapdoor, my groin was fully involved.

  The observation room was hemispherical, with plastered walls and hardwood floors. A lone notation desk sat beside the crank you used to turn the dome, and aside from a rolling chair, the room contained only a suspended telescope—longer, sleeker than you’d think.

  Yulia sat in the chair and rolled to the eyepiece. She peered into it, squinting.

  “What do you see?” I asked.

  “I cannot tell,” she said, adjusting the knobs. “The lens is fuzzy.”

  I knelt next to her chair, so our arms were touching, and gave it a go. The image in the viewfinder was a haze. It looked gaseous and nebular, though we were most likely inspecting galactic birdshit.

  “I don’t know how to work this thing, either,” I said.

  Yulia rotated in her chair to face me. Right there, at eye level, her jacket hung open, and I witnessed the play of her breathing as it, ever so slightly, raised and lowered the hem of her shirt. Before me were Yulia’s dark jeans, legs slightly parted. She put a finger to her mouth and s
tudied me with curiosity and intention. She rocked forward and back in her wooden chair, deciding, it seemed to me, at least to entertain my advance.

  I was close enough to smell her clothes, clean and womanly, and this was the point in the evening where a man could get premonitions of the events to come, where a guy might begin to think that, if he said the right words and conjured the right look in his eye, ardor was imminent. This is the point where the old Hank Hannah would’ve applied his magic touch. Moves would be made, garments would be shed, and after he’d paid a little lip service to the nipples, he’d locate the vagina, introduce himself, and attempt to speak its tongue.

  But tonight, this prospect sent a wave of fear through me. Yulia would be flying back in the morning, and I didn’t know when I’d see her again. Already I felt gripped by uncertainty and speculation. I’d spent my life learning to tolerate great unknowns, and yet of Yulia even the tiniest, most frivolous one seemed unbearable.

  I took hold of the arms of her chair. I pulled her upright and close. “I have a question to ask,” I said. “It sounds stupid, I know, but I need you to tell me where you rent your videos.”

  “You mean movies?” she asked.

  “Exactly,” I said. “Where do you rent your movies?”

  A spark of amusement flashed on her face. “There’s a little place in downtown Croix, a couple blocks from our house. An old man runs it. Mr. Wong.”

  “Do you walk there or drive?”

  “If it is a school day, I stop on the way home. On weekends, we walk.”

  “Do you get old movies or new?”

  “Myself, I prefer Westerns,” she said. “For Vadim it is only space movies.”

  “This Mr. Wong, he runs the Chinese restaurant as well, doesn’t he? I know how small towns work. Please, tell me your favorite dish, the one you always order.”

  She looked at me. “Why do you want to know all this?”

  “I’m going to think about you,” I said. “You’re leaving in the morning, and when I wonder how you’re doing, when you visit my imagination, I want to get it right. I need to know what your office looks like. I need to know whether you prefer linguine or fettuccine. What color is your toothbrush?”