Parasites Like Us

by Adam Johnson

  “What?” Eggers asked. “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m not finished,” I said. “This next part is very important: I need to know whether or not you saw Vadim eat the popcorn.”

  Eggers shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t remember it.”

  “The popcorn,” Trudy said. “Of course. Keno’s corn. We all ate it.”

  “Trudy,” I said, “did you see him?”

  “No,” she said, still shaking her head. “Cooking the corn must’ve somehow killed the disease. It must’ve inoculated us.”

  I turned to Eggers. I grabbed him by the sleeve of his fancy imported jacket. “Tell me this,” I said. “And by God answer me straight, boy: can you or can you not fly a helicopter?”

  “No,” he said.

  “Okay,” I told them. “We improvise. Come on, we’ve got dogs waiting by the woodshop.”

  “Waiting for what?” Trudy asked.

  “To take us to Farley,” I said. “I think I know where Farley is.”

  * * *

  We parked our sled teams next to the lake. Though the dogs were tired, they were restless in their lanyards, wearily eyeing lake ice that growled and moaned. The lake had risen ten feet at least, submerging the boat ramp, leaving floating docks pinned underwater by their tethers. Without circulating water, the lake was colder, more ice-choked. Slabs of white busted up at odd angles, rising jagged and treacherous. As these sheets abutted and broke, new pieces bobbed up and froze like tombstones, welded in place with scars of clear water.

  The four of us stood there, Eggers, Trudy, Dad, and I.

  We raised our mittens to scan the ice. All the fishing shacks had been crushed and pulled under. Only stray boards and occasional bits of hardware shone against the white.

  Trudy was the one who spotted Farley, a fuzzy speck far out on the lake.

  “Ahoy,” I yelled.

  We all listened for a response, but he’d gone a great way out, and the snow and wind swallowed everything. On the count of three, we cupped our mouths and shouted, “Farley.”

  Everyone has a Heroics Bone, the source of fear-induced valor and idiotic acts of daring. You know it—it’s that nervy vertebra in your lower back, the one that plays hell with your bladder and prostate. While we listened for Farley’s response, I looked at Dad and Trudy and Eggers. They were all would-be lionhearts. When we heard nothing but our echo back, I preempted their obligatory chivalries:

  “Let me go,” I said. “The man will listen to me.”

  A normal spill on the ice would result in some accidental urine and seven days of heating pads. This ice was waiting to grab you, freeze you white, then fold you up like airplane luggage. What made it most dangerous was its beauty and playfulness. There was something jocular about the way sheets of it raced downstream to the lake, then nose-dived below the waiting ice or rode upon its back. Great slabs of it would tumble, surface like whales, then bob like bath toys.

  But people weren’t exactly falling down to block the path of my possible death.

  “Be careful,” Trudy said. “It looks pretty awful out there.”

  “Yeah,” Eggers added, “watch your step.”

  Only my father cautioned me against going. “There’s no need for this,” he said. “Your friend will come off the ice when he’s ready.”

  “He needs me,” I said.

  Dad clapped me on the back. “Okay,” he said. “I understand.”

  Eggers gave me his sledding goggles, and Trudy closed the toggles of my coat.

  “You might want to take a few dogs with you,” Eggers said. “If you fall through the ice, they can pull you out.”

  I looked at those loafy dogs. Labs stood with drool frozen to their chins, and a Saint Bernard wept mucus. Kicking down the doors of my neighbors, I’d run across plenty of dogs like these. Invariably, they were the ones who, upon the deaths of their masters, scratched open the cabinets, ate all the dog biscuits, then jumped on the bed to sleep off their tummy aches. And you don’t want to know what the little dogs did.

  “I’ll take my chances,” I said. “Eggers, Trudy—I’m sending you two on a mission. This afternoon brings with it the beginning of a perilous journey, and I’ll need you two to secure my provisions. Meet me back on campus, at Central Green.”

  They stood there nodding. “Get going, then,” I told them.

  I turned to Dad.

  “I’ll wait here for you,” Dad told me.

  “So be it.”

  I set out upon the ice, avoiding places where the snow had piled, trying to find sure footing, hopping from one piece of clear ice to the next. I tried to keep my eyes on the horizon and, by way of baby steps, both my prison-issue boots under me. Frozen inside the ice was lots of trash—white napkins, crumpled brown sacks, and patches of black that looked like roofing tarpaper. As I made my way toward the center of the lake, there was more refuse in the ice, but most things I couldn’t identify. I came across only one human. He was entombed about a foot and a half down, so it was hard to make out detail. Because the ice had fractured and migrated, I saw his feet first, then about ten inches away were his shins. His knees were snapped clean, as were his femurs, and this kind of cross-sectioning went on. Above his midsection, nothing was in attendance.

  It was easy to get turned around on the lake. You couldn’t see far enough to make out landmarks, and the monolith of the dam, which could always be counted on as a frame of reference, was now merely a curtain wall above the ice. Snow blindness was a problem—yellow spots haunted my peripheral vision. Once, neglecting to watch my footing, I stepped into a pool of open water, only to realize it was perfectly transparent ice, transmitting the true black of below. And only when I fell did I realize those pieces of frozen trash were birds. There were millions of them, all the birds that I’d have seen littering the landscape of Parkton were it not for the snow.

  In the light through the ice, I could discern each filament of even the blackest feather. Pink marrow was visible in even the tiniest bones of broken wings. I could make out the fluting of nearly invisible quills. I’d never been so close to birds. They’d always been up in trees or at great heights. Now, when they were inches away, just past my cheek, they were locked away behind ice. With their nautilus beaks, the red rings of their feet, and the flecks of color in their eyes, there was no denying that each one of them was a ravishing thing. If the history of humanity has been the history of extinguishing other forms of life, it’s hard to say whether we have been evolving. The Clovis built an empire of meat, and their parting gift to the earth was to leave it thirty-five species lighter. And our last gasp was to eradicate hogs and birds. The Clovis outdid us in the variety of their extinctions, but we had them in terms of time. The hogs were gone in two weeks, and whatever happened to the birds—a poison, a nerve agent, a virus?—took place in two days.

  Farley, when I finally neared him, held a tilt-up rig like a fishing rod and was sitting on an upturned bucket. Slumped, he focused his eyes on the line in the hole.

  “Farley,” I called, but he didn’t look up.

  When I neared, I saw another bucket sitting there, as if waiting for me.

  “Farley, it’s me. Hey, buddy, I’m here.”

  When I sat on the bucket, Farley glanced up, but only for a second.

  “Not you, too,” Farley said.

  “Are you okay? It’s me, Hank.”

  “Are you Hank? Or more to the point, eh—are you the ghost of Hank?”

  Ghost of Hank? “I’m alive, Farley. I’m here to help.”

  Farley started reeling in his line, turning the handle slowly while pinching the water off the incoming line so his tackle wouldn’t freeze.

  “I left these buckets out here,” Farley said. “And here they are. Everything else is gone, the warming huts and ice shacks, but the ice left these two white buckets.”

  When the hook came up, I said, “Looks like they stole your bait.”

  “I didn’t bait it,” he said. “Isn’t t
hat funny? You wander around knee-deep in death all week, and a guy doesn’t have the heart to put a cricket on his hook.”

  “Farley,” I said, “you don’t really think I’m a ghost, do you? I know you’re Native American and all, but you realize I’m really here, talking to you, right?”

  “I’ve seen a lot of ghosts this week,” Farley said. “My old man would talk about spirits and that kind of business. That stuff was never for me, but I’ve seen ghosts now, a lifetime’s worth of them.” Here he pulled out a cough drop. “I was sitting here thinking, What if I’m the one who has left the world of the living, and now I’m in a place where I’m the only one? Does that make me dead? Am I the ghost, Hank?”

  “Give me the rod,” I said. “I’m going to stick that hook in my finger. Maybe blood will prove this is me, Hank, the guy you used to eat lunch with at the cafeteria, the guy you’d let copy off your exam papers. Give me that hook, and I’ll show you alive.”

  I thought Mr. Wouldn’t Hurt a Cricket would wave that notion off and take me at my word. Instead, Farley handed me the rod.

  I found the fishhook and lined it up with my fingers. After careful examination, I decided on the pinkie finger. With that little silver hook poised to draw blood, I said, “You think you’re funny, don’t you? You’re going to make me do this. Tell me this first, do ghosts bleed?”

  “I don’t know, eh,” he said. “They might. They might bleed more than people.”

  I shook my head. “You are in some kind of state,” I said. I set the fishing rod down. “You would make your friend stick himself in the finger, wouldn’t you? Well, now you’re just being silly. Now it’s time to snap out of it. I have a journey to make, my friend, and I can’t leave with you out here on the ice.”

  Still Farley sat there. He shifted the cough drop in his mouth.

  I stood. “And what if you are a ghost, Farley? Then what? You going to sit out here and fish forever? I can tell that you really haven’t thought this afterlife thing through. Loneliness and a bucket—that’s as far as you’ve gotten on your own. And say I am a ghost. I happen to be the one ghost on earth out here talking to you. I happen to be the only spook who cares.”

  Farley stood. “Jeez, Hank, do you always have to be like that?”

  “Be like what?”

  “Oh, bring your bucket,” he said. “We’ll use them for flotation if we fall through the ice.”

  * * *

  Once we were off the ice, I sent Dad and Farley to the library for topographical maps and river charts, and then I sledded home to University Village. I hadn’t been back to my apartment, and when I walked up the steps to the courtyard, everything looked ominously the same. The professors who shared the complex with me were a closed-shade, locked-door bunch, and their disappearance from the earth left not a trace. I felt my pockets for keys and panicked when I remembered they’d gone down with the Corvette. But when I got to my place, it was wide open. On the door, above the busted deadbolt, was Eggers’ calling card: a shoe print with a Nike swoosh.

  Snow had drifted in, and all of Janis’ plants had gone limp before freezing. I’d been in a lot of houses lately, and what struck me about my apartment was that it looked more like a motel room than a home. In the bedroom, I went through the hampers until I found some good clothes for the trip, ones that seemed durable and warm. These I stuffed into the washing machine, and only after I’d added detergent did I remember there was no electricity.

  That move left me with little to pack. I pulled my carry-on bag down from the shelf, and into this I threw socks, undershirts, and drawers, and a toiletries bag stuffed with dental floss, Q-tips, and my liquid antibacterial soap. I thought the carry-on bag was a pretty good choice—compact, sturdy, with wheels and an extendable handle. I also packed the cast of my mother’s leg, the photo of Janis, and Peabody’s bottle of bourbon. I looked around my house, thinking there must be something else to take. I looked at my rock-and-roll collection. I opened and closed drawers in the kitchen. I studied the tools hanging beside the hot-water heater. All of those items looked foreign and worthless to me.

  Professors of tomorrow, as you excavate the empire that was America, you’ll find a million unusual objects to puzzle over. Don’t bother. Make no theories concerning the purpose of a Slinky. Postulate not over flip-flops. I’ve made sketches of selected objects that no longer exist, and I include these only because they have a certain bearing on the drama I deliver to you now. So, please, muse not over food dehydrators, subwoofers, and blow-dryers. Waste no time attempting to understand golf carts, greeting cards, StairMasters, and car alarms. Ignore high heels, cycling pants, pet cemeteries, carpeted cat condos, videotapes of child birthings, and anything you stumble upon that is cryogenically frozen.

  I left the door open on my way out.

  This time, when I reached the prison the dogs needed no special prodding to race uphill. Their backsides remembered the way. At the workshop, Gerry had a grand sled waiting. The runners measured out at eleven feet, and the litter, nearly eight feet itself, was capable of carrying a driver, a passenger, and a few hundred pounds of gear. Inside, the kids were putting the final touches on the dog harness, a chain of lanyards tailored from seatbelt webbing and anchored back to the sled with two long copper cables. These had been the grounding cables for the workshop’s lightning rods. The rig was so large I’d have to use the snowbrake to steer it.

  “It’ll take thirteen dogs to pull her,” Gerry told me, marveling at his own creation. “But I wouldn’t advise mushing through any electrical storms.”

  Roaming through the shop were a few dozen dogs that Gerry and the boys had captured. They were big, goofy-looking things with no idea how their lives were about to change. One kid moved from dog to dog, cutting off collars with tin snips. The collars went into a pile not unlike the one on Sheriff Dan’s desk.

  “You really think these dogs are up for it?” I asked.

  “I’ve got a randy bitch for the lead,” Gerry said. “Putting a female up front is an old Eskimo trick I read about. The male dogs will follow her to the end of the earth. You’ll pull five miles an hour, fifty miles a day, guaranteed. The question is—are you up for it?”

  “That doesn’t matter,” I told him. “I leave from Central Green in an hour.”

  “That’s the spirit, Hanky,” Gerry said. The kids were saddling up the first dog, an Irish setter with a case of the shakes. “You hear that?” he called to them. “The professor’s going to go see his old lady.”

  * * *

  From the Hall of Man, I retrieved the bones of Keno’s hands and placed them in a large Ziploc bag. Upstairs, in my office, I dug Peabody’s old bullwhip out of the closet and stuffed it under my belt. From the coat rack, I grabbed my university regalia—the robes, hood, and mortarboard I wore at graduation ceremonies to grant degrees to my students. Packing these things was a no-brainer. Next, however, I was faced with a hard choice.

  When it came to Junior, I had to admit there was no way all twenty-seven boxes were going to fit on the sled. I stared at the stacks of paper, a life’s work. It would have been easy to get all soggy thinking about wasted years of my life, but the more legitimate fear was that I was about to strand myself hopelessly in North Dakota, where I was likely to perish. That thought kept me sane. Plus, I had been given a gift not everyone received, not the young playwright dying in the street, not the old man trying to save the chickens he’d raised from eggs. I was the one with an opportunity to salvage what I could of a life’s work.

  I narrowed the boxes down to the most essential fourteen, which I humped one at a time down the stairs and lashed to the sled. It took a lot of bungee cords. I didn’t save the scientific studies that were most crucial in supporting my argument. Instead, I saved the data that were gathered under the most extreme circumstances, and would therefore be more difficult to replace in whatever future was ahead. These included ice cores recovered from three miles beneath the Greenlandia Ice Sheet, gas samples gathered from me
tallic balloons cruising the lower ionosphere, and sulfur-to-C0 2 ratios in molten lava harvested from the Colvenas Trench, at the bottom of the Pacific.

  It was only a short ride to Central Green, where I would make my departure. The sled was overburdened and kept threatening to spill. Whenever the dogs got rebellious, a taste of Peabody’s lash was needed to secure their allegiance. I almost got weepy crossing campus—there are few things more difficult than leaving your home, and it makes no difference whether that home is a palace, a prison, or the playing fields of death. As I mushed, I tried to think of the words I might speak to my friends, family, and students. I didn’t want to get speechy, but I hoped to convince them to set aside their worries for me. Certainly I was scared silly, but I felt called to do something. My whole life I’d been chasing the inaccessible and unavailable. But things were different now. Yulia needed me, Hank Hannah, and not any other person in the world. She needed me, and I would go to her.

  The dogs hadn’t even begun to froth when I halted in the middle of the quad. I looked around, then checked my watch. No one was there to see me off. Not Eggers and Trudy, who were supposed to outfit me. Not my father, not Farley.

  I checked my watch again. Remembering Gerry’s reward system, I gave the dogs some biscuits. I adjusted the straps on my boxes. The most dangerous chapter of my life had arrived, and no one could be troubled to see me off. I paced up and down in the snow. Could anyone be counted on? Were humans even capable of being true? I kept practicing the address I was about to give, but the more I went over it, the more I rehearsed the words, the more hollow they sounded. Out in the white, wild dogs circled and pawed. Somewhere beyond my vision, mastication was taking place.

  Finally, several dog teams approached. When their drivers pulled up and lifted their goggles, however, I saw it was not my father or Trudy, but Gerry and his kids. Their sleds were packed, and the kids were equipped with foul-weather boots and proper snowshoes. “We’re coming along,” Gerry said. “The kids want to visit their old lady after you visit yours.”