Parasites Like Us

by Adam Johnson

  She just looked at me.

  I said, “I only buy clear toothbrushes, because they seem more sanitary. When I come home, I hang my keys on a peg below a picture of my stepmother. I wash my underwear separately. The presets on my stereo are all tuned to classic rock. Jazz drives me crazy, because I never know what notes they will play next. I don’t recycle. I should, I know, but I don’t.”

  I stopped. My breathing was fast, and I paused to search Yulia’s face for signs she’d indulge me. She moved to rock back in her chair, and I let go of the arms.

  “Mu shu pork,” she said. “I like the angel hair, but Vadim only eats noodles with shapes, such as elbows and bow ties.”

  I smiled. “That was perfect,” I said. “We couldn’t have had a better start.”

  Her face was fixed somewhere between flattery and amazement.

  “Start?” she asked. “You want more?”

  “I want it from the beginning,” I said. “I want to take it from the top.”

  * * *

  The closing credits of Impossible Journey were playing when we returned, though nobody laughed at the Pomeranian outtakes. The kids had fallen asleep, and the adults were teary, especially Farley and Eggers, who had reddened, stoned eyes and stupid smiles, even as the tears ran. The popcorn bowl was empty, and the room reeked of mushrooms and cheese.

  Gerry stood, the venomous expression he’d had earlier replaced now with some brand of sadness and inspiration. Pieces of Keno’s popcorn clung in the folds of his shirt. These he brushed to the floor. “You’ll find yourself on cleanup duty,” he told me, and began rounding up the children.

  People roused themselves, stretching and making for the bathroom, mumbling their goodbyes and good nights until we were alone, Yulia and I and her son, who was curled up asleep on the couch.

  Yulia stood watching Vadim sleep. She shook her head. “I used to just pick him up when he was like this,” she told me. “When he was little, I would scoop him up, and only later, when we were home and I was putting him to bed, would he wake.”

  “What hotel are you staying at?” I asked.

  “The Red Dakotan,” she said. She looked deep into my eyes and smiled. “The third floor. The bedspreads are blue. On the wall is a painting of a riverboat. Through the window you can see the dam and the frozen lake behind it. What is the name of this body of water?”

  “Lewis and Clark.”

  “Yes,” she said. “The explorers.” She nodded at her own recognition, then pulled my arm, to get me to lean over. “I will kiss you now, before we wake him up.”

  * * *

  Later that night, alone in my cold room, I sat up in bed. A fever had gripped me. My ribs were quivering, and when I tried to stand, I nearly went down. On the sheets, I saw I’d left a sweat angel. When the saliva began pooling in my mouth, I knew I didn’t have much time. Nearly naked, I ran down the hall to the bathroom, wondering if I’d make it. When I burst through the door, Gerry and his kids occupied all the stalls, so I was forced to vomit in the sink I’d cleaned that morning. That’s how we finished out the night, the six of us. You’d think you were done retching, but then you’d hear a child vomit or smell the contents of another man’s stomach, and you’d start anew. No one had even turned on the lights. We voided our stomachs by the red glow of the backup lamps, which hung silently in all public rooms, waiting for the right emergency to turn themselves on.

  Chapter Nine

  I will now attempt to tell a joke:

  A banker must take a business trip. Before he leaves, he asks his neighbor to help watch his home and family while he’s gone. Days pass, and after the banker calls home to find no answer, he rings the neighbor.

  “How are things going?” the banker asks.

  “Just awful,” the neighbor says. “First of all, your cat died.”

  “Oh, God, don’t say that,” the banker says. “Man, that hurts. Did you have to say it like that? Couldn’t you have eased the blow a little? Maybe you could have started by saying the cat wasn’t feeling well. Or, better yet, you could have said the cat was playing in a tree, and the cat was having the best time of its life chasing a squirrel higher and higher through the branches, until it got stuck at the top. Maybe you called the fire department, who brought the ladder truck, and a rescue worker went to the very top, and could almost reach the cat, but at the last second the cat slipped and . . . You know what I’m saying. You could at least tell me they took him to the vet and there was a struggle.”

  “You’re right,” the neighbor said. “Gosh, I’m sorry.”

  “God, my wife must be a wreck,” the banker said. “How is she?”

  “Well,” the neighbor began. “Your wife was chasing a squirrel in a tree . . .”

  As you can see, I am not so much the jokester. Humor is a poor mode of discourse, and I discourage it now. My point, however, is well illustrated. I have set out to speak the tale of the end of my culture, and I must admit I am more like the banker than the neighbor. There are grim scenes ahead, and perhaps it is true that I have become carried away with the details of this story in a feeble attempt to postpone relating what I now must. Now the dark ink must flow.

  It was a normal week at the prison after Yulia left. The fever that gripped us was savage, to say the least, and, concerning my gastrointestinal tract, it took no prisoners. Luckily, the illness left as quickly as it struck, though my lips remained red and swollen and a certain darkness lingered under the eyes. The only other calling card was a cough that would not go away. Misfortunes happen.

  I found it best to shift my focus to the tasks at hand, and get to work. There was a terrific amount of cleaning to do. I procured some yellow gloves and a couple squirt bottles, then made a crash cart to hold all my cleaning gear, one I could wheel anywhere. Farley had filed several motions concerning jurisdiction and precedents, and he hoped to have some “results,” whatever those would be, in the coming weeks. I cleaned in the mornings, tackled my correspondence to Yulia midday, and, evenings, I donated my services as a tenor in the Club Fed Follies, as the boys called themselves. The group’s signature number was the doo-wop hit “Cathy’s Clown,” and I was the only one who could nail the falsetto refrain.

  After these first days of regaining my strength, I decided it was time to begin my rotation as a reader for the blind. The prison had a model program in which books were read twenty-four hours a day, broadcast on AM radio across the Midwest and southern Canada by way of the old university radio tower. One of the inmates came down with the flu, so I was given his slot—prime time, just after the dinner hour each evening.

  In the afternoon I went to the library, looking for a candidate to read that night. Conrad and Melville came to mind, though I knew Trudy would be on my back if I didn’t pick a female author. I couldn’t exactly name a book I’d read by a female writer, so I surfed the stacks, curious to see what these woman novelists had to offer. At one of the reading tables, I saw Gerry, head bent, a host of books about dog sledding spread before him. The only thing I’d ever seen him read was a pornographic periodical named Shaved Sniz, but here were journals of the old Yukon postal teams, racing through fields of snow so deep only the tops of trees could be seen. One of the Iditarod books looked interesting, as did Winter of Darkness, Summer of Light, which contained grand pictures of Russian researchers crossing Antarctica via high-speed, stripped-down dog sleds. I saw that Gerry had traced one of these pictures out of the book, except that, in front of the sled, instead of huskies and malamutes, he’d drawn a chain of little dogs, three dozen deep. In the book, the Russians’ faces were both fine and hale, which made me think of Yulia, and I slipped off before Gerry noticed.

  It took me a while, but in the subbasement I found Yulia’s book, Gender Dander: Reproductive Strategies of Extinct Pollens. I read the first paragraph, and though the writing was certainly stimulating on an intellectual level, the words lacked voice and rhythm, that ineffable thing I referred to as “it.” Of course, it must be noted that
English was her adopted language. On the back flap I found the author photo. Here was a Yulia from many years ago, a bit fresher of face perhaps, but no more beautiful than today. In the picture, she leaned against a giant Russian computer, tape reels spinning. Her hair was trimmed in a wild bob, the frizz of which stood nearly sideways. Her neck shone sleeker with shorter hair, more articulate, and her eye shadow was perestroika-blue. I’ve never been much of a breast man, but one couldn’t help being impressed with the way they were outlined by the casual drape of her lab coat.

  I affirm here my great respect for books, research materials, and libraries, yet I had no choice but to tear that photo out and slip it in my pocket.

  Rummaging further through the stacks, I made, by chance, a surprise discovery: a copy of The Depletionists stared down from a high shelf. A wave of panic ran through me. Only the most obscure research libraries had purchased editions of my book, which meant this copy had to have been a donation from someone who’d attended my one local book-signing, held years ago in the annex of USSD’s audiovisual department. But who had pawned my book upon the prison library? Who had abandoned my words to criminals? If inside there was an inscription to my father or a label that read Ex Libris Peabody, I wouldn’t be able to go on.

  I opened the spine, which complained all the way. The loan card was blank—never been checked out. On the title page, there was an inscription. In my own handwriting, it read, “Laura—may this humble tale of the indomitable spirit of humanity inspire you to chase your own dreams, whatever size they may be.” In a script both bold and flourished, I’d signed it “Yours, yours, yours—Hank ‘The King of Spades’ Hannah.”

  Still, the book was a rare find. Few were printed, and too, too few made it into the hands of the general public, exactly the people who needed it. The common people were the readers I dreamed of when I wrote the thing, people who’d talk about it at their local coffee shops and town-hall forums. I wondered, how many times did the blind of the Dakotas get to hear works read by their authors? Who else could fully interpret the nuances and inflections of my prose? Who else knew the thesis of the sequel? What other reader had twenty-seven boxes of supplementary material to the books they aired?

  Book in hand, photo in pocket, I stopped by the Warden’s Residence on the way back to the dorm. Discovering The Depletionists had inspired me to try a little flint-knapping, and I remembered all the mineral samples here. I had some time to kill until Farley cleared up the legal mess surrounding the ridiculous charges against me. By making a few spear points, at least I could pretend I was still a scientist. Kicking around in the snow for a nice piece of chert, I found a hunk about the size of a melon. Using everything I had in me, I hefted a meteorite high above my head, and if you ever want to feel the engine of the universe, send a meteor smashing down on a chert core, the slivers of which you’ll later chip into razor-sharp Stone Age knives.

  When I reached my dorm room, a strange visitor was waiting. He wore pleated khakis and a mint-green turtleneck, probably cashmere, over which he sported a fleece jacket. His hair was trimmed in a crisp buzz cut, and his feet were clad in flashy new tennis shoes. I had a strange feeling he was a former student. I confess I didn’t always read my students’ final projects, so I was nervous whenever they approached me—often they wanted to talk about lame papers from years ago. I walked past this young person, as if to grab a glass of water. When he followed me into the common area, I knew he’d been a student. He caught me at the sink and delivered this cryptic message:

  “They’ve opened the other one,” he said.

  At the sound of his voice, I was sure I knew him. I looked at his watch, which was pretty sharp, one of those titanium self-winding models, and I studied the small hoop in his ear. But they didn’t strike any notes of recognition. I noticed his fingernails were speckled white from mineral deficiencies. His jaw was clean-shaven, his eyeglasses were new and hip, but his skin was weathered, and no barber can trim off ringworm.

  “Eggers?” I asked. “Is that you?”

  Eggers did a slow turn to show himself off.

  “What do you think, Dr. Hannah?” he asked. “I mean, check me out.” He hopped on one foot, to show me a sneaker. “Nikes, my man. These are freakin’ Nikes. I’m walking on pillows here. I’m strolling through clouds. No more broken toes. Goodbye, festering nails.”

  More than just the clothes had changed. His whole demeanor was different, as if he’d traded in cool and capable for cocky and posturing. I tried to remember that quiet, earnest kid who once sat in the back of my classes, asking no questions. Where was the solemn young man who, in the doorway of my office one afternoon, looked more as if he wanted to propose Jesus to me than living on Paleolithic technology for a year?

  “My word,” I told him, “I can’t believe it’s you.”

  “Watch this,” Eggers said. He jogged in place to demonstrate his sneakers. “You can’t believe the instep on these things. My arches are singing.”

  In the face of absurdity, practicality took hold. I said, “You aren’t going to wear those in the snow, are you? You’ll freeze your feet off.”

  “You thought those leather booties were warm?” he asked. “The doc says they’re why I don’t exactly feel my extremities so well. That and a minor case of rickets. Let’s see him find sources of vitamin C in the winter. Compared with my dentist’s to-do list, though, the rickets is small potatoes. All that orthodontia, all those years in braces—shot to hell.”

  “Who are they,” I asked Eggers, “and what have they opened?”

  Eggers checked his watch. “Okay,” he said, “more about the dentist later. Now it’s time to turn on the TV.”

  He grabbed the remote control and hopped over the back of the couch, landing on a stack of cushions. Sprawled so, he flipped through the channels. With a haircut and a trip to the dentist, this could be Keno, I thought. In my lectures, I tried to impart a sense of connection to the peoples of antiquity, a sense of the humanity that underlies the very notion of anthropology. But there’s no substitute for direct observation. It was clear that, given a polo shirt and a pair of sunglasses, Keno could ride the Dragon at Glacier Days, throw some blackjack at the Thunderbird, then book a flight for Florida and just slip away into America.

  When the local news came on, Eggers set the remote aside.

  He said, “The footage is from this morning, but the evening news always replays it.”

  On the screen was a program entitled Parkton 7 Action Report. In the world update, a forest fire gripped Eastern Europe, a Russian pyramid scheme had collapsed, and, like twisters crossing open water, twin columns of civil war walked tall and storm-faced across Africa. Locally, there was a warehouse fire, a funeral-home lawsuit, and a couple of lost dogs.

  “Here we go,” Eggers said.

  On the screen came a typical powder-puff public-relations segment for a local ground-breaking ceremony: there was footage of a big ribbon being cut, and then a tedious shot of several guys in white hard hats and business suits pretending to push shovels into the frozen earth. There were a few sound bites from a speech—the bright future, partnerships for tomorrow, and so on.

  “Eggers, please,” I said, “is this what you’ve been doing with yourself? Did your year as a Clovis impart to you nothing but a love for Nikes, Doritos, and the couch?”

  “Calm down, Dr. Hannah,” he told me. “Watch.”

  On the screen came a shot of the thunderbird logo, and I realized this was an expansion celebration for Phase II of the casino.

  The Parkton 7 Action anchor then cut “live” to a Parkton 7 Action reporter. The two women looked identical to me—lots of puffy hair and bright suits. On the screen came a standard Native American purification ceremony, held in the casino’s parking lot. Cedar and hemp were burned, an Honor Circle was maintained, and there was a very serious execution of the Dance of the West Winds. When one of the Elders entered the circle and appealed to the Great Spirit, I needed to know what he was saying.
r />   “Eggers,” I said, “turn it up, would you? Pass the remote.”

  “Shh,” Eggers said, trying to figure out how to work the thing.

  The volume went up, but all you could make out was the babbling of the Parkton 7 Action reporter’s voice-over. I stared at the Elder. It was time, I knew, for the sacrifice, but instead of offering the Winds objects of previous good fortune, like proven arrows, musical instruments of particular sweetness, or heirlooms with strong medicine, the Elder hefted Keno’s other ball.

  Suddenly the camera panned to film the assembled crowd. Just when Keno’s ball was about to be destroyed in an act of sacrifice, we were given images of the geriatric gamblers, convention-goers from the American Meat Wholesalers Association, and a fleet of sleeping tour buses, their parking lights outlining them in the cold mist. When I needed to hear the Confirmation of Elders and see which dance they chose, I was instead forced to watch off-duty meat cutters and guards from Club Fed as they fed their fat kids cotton candy and Indian fry bread. That’s what drove me crazy about television—you could never see the images you wanted to see. I stood. “Eggers, I can’t take this shoddy videography!”

  “Please, Dr. Hannah,” Eggers said, “control yourself.”

  Finally, the camera did one last pan of the ceremony. The dancers, of course, were moving under trance, and members of the Honor Council wore gazes that come only when one contemplates the millennia. The Elder, after appealing to the sky with force and purpose, simply smashed the ball against the pavement before moving on to conduct his other duties—sanctifying the circle’s perimeter with handfuls of flax that quickly blew away, and making appeals to the wind that swept the circle’s four corners. That was the end of the segment, but as the camera cut to the reporter’s pitiful summary, we could see in the background something that nearly made us jump out of our seat: a cloud of grainy black dust issued forth from the smashed ball, looking like instant coffee as waves of it took to the wind, blowing in streaks down the line of spectators. The cloud smudged ties, blacked faces, left old people coughing and meat wholesalers shaking out their collars.