Parasites Like Us Read online

  Praise for Parasites Like Us

  “A blackly comic satire . . . [Parasites Like Us] is a challenging novel, defying expectation time and again until finally a grateful reader gives up expecting anything but surprise.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  “The pratfalls, plot twists, and sardonic humor that fill this book lighten even the direst disaster. Parasites Like Us makes the end of the world seem downright entertaining.”

  —The Cleveland Plain-Dealer

  “This is not quite to deify Adam Johnson, but it’s undeniable that the man is gifted with a delightful, vibrant, and occasionally all-encompassing vision. His Parasites Like Us is a strange, remarkable novel that is hilarious and infused with sparklingly imaginative and vivid detail—part love story, part midlife crisis, part anthropological treatise and part futuristic science fiction. . . . Johnson displays an effortless command of a wide spectrum of prose styles answerable to a wide sweep of artistic visions, from comedic to chaotic, amusing to apocalyptic, from farce to finality. . . . Johnson’s ability to marry the comic with a genuinely horrific vision of the future is further evidence of his inventive powers. It is reason enough to hunt down, gather, and devour his splendid novel.”

  —St. Louis Post-Dispatch

  “There is no one else right now writing quite the way Adam Johnson writes. In his debut collection from a couple of years back, Emporium, Johnson set his stories of teenage snipers and bulletproof-vest outlet stores in the near future. His five-minutes-from-now strategy allowed him to forge a funky new science fiction that was part irony and part pure dread. In his first novel, Parasites Like Us, everyone’s apocalyptic fears are horribly realized. . . . This apocalyptic comedy bristles with ambition. The humans in Parasites Like Us might be witnessing the end of their race, but Johnson is a writer who’s here to stay.”

  —The Seattle Times

  “A teeming black-comedy-as-parable about greed, overconsumption, and the destructive impulses that connect us to our prehistoric forebears. Johnson’s prose . . . calls to mind Sebastiao Salgado’s photographs of Brazilian workers in the way he draws grace and beauty out of the most horrific scenes. Although a satirist fond of exaggerating scale, Johnson excels in the quieter, more personal realms. He shows great compassion for his characters . . . exhibits a prolific imagination and vigorous prose.”

  —Bookforum

  “Wildly entertaining. Johnson . . . blends the real and what could possibly be real into mind-bending absurdity. This novel is remarkable for its vision, its brilliant writing, its satire.”

  —The Kansas City Star

  “Teeming with clever conceits, superb turns of phrase, observations as precise as Updike’s, and tonal echoes of Vonnegut, Boyle, and George Saunders. The author is wise, weird, and worth watching.”

  —Seattle Weekly

  “Parasites Like Us is a very funny story. . . . What’s so interesting about the book is that it manages to fuse its comic nightmare to an epistemological critique of plot, of causality, of what we think of as story. Like George Saunders, Johnson uses satire to expose the fragile underpinnings of human longings.”

  —Newsday

  “A strange novel that is filled with humor mixed with doomsday somberness.”

  —The Denver Post

  “A wonderful, inventive, exhilarating mess, the novelistic equivalent of a long drunken whacked-out binge with your closest, smartest, craziest friend. Undeniably entertaining and . . . unforgettable. It’s a book with the messy thumbprints of genius on it. The last hundred pages of Parasites Like Us are remarkable, one of the best-realized, realistic, horrifying accounts of disaster I’ve ever read—and trust me, I’ve read a few. Johnson’s narrative grabs you by the hair and yanks you along, and there’s not much point in resisting. [A] chilling, prophetic novel.”

  —Fantasy & Science Fiction

  “Johnson displays the same inventiveness, black humor, and penetrating insight that marked his short story collection Emporium in this weird but masterfully written debut novel.”

  —Booklist

  “Highly original, largely entertaining . . . Johnson manages somehow to squeeze in some very tender observations about childhood and loss in the midst of this weird and ominous avalanche. Maybe overwriting is the only way to handle the end of civilization. Seems to work here.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PARASITES LIKE US

  Adam Johnson is the author of four works of fiction: the short story collection Fortune Smiles (2015), winner of the National Book Award and The Story Prize; the novel The Orphan Master’s Son (2012), winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize; the novel Parasites Like Us (2003); and the short story collection Emporium (2002). Johnson’s other awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writers’ Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and a Stegner Fellowship. Johnson teaches creative writing at Stanford University and lives in San Francisco with his wife and children.

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  visit our Web site at www.penguin.com.

  Illustrations by Stephanie Harrell

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 2003

  Published in Penguin Books 2004

  Copyright © Adam Johnson, 2003

  All rights reserved

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGED THE HARDCOVER EDITION AS FOLLOWS:

  Johnson, Adam.

  Parasites like us / Adam Johnson.

  p. cm.

  ISBN: 978-1-101-66587-9

  1. Anthropologists—Fiction. 2. Plague—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3610.O3P3 2003

  813’.54—dc21 2002041181

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions and do not participate in or encourage e
lectronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  Cover design: Matt Vee

  Cover illustration: Matt Taylor

  Version_2

  For my mother, Patricia,

  and her mother, Lavina

  Table of Contents

  Praise for Parasites Like Us

  About the Author

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter One

  This story begins some years after the turn of the millennium, back when gangs were persecuted, back before we all joined one. In those days, birds and pigs were still our friends, and we held some pretty crazy notions: People said the planet was warming. Wearing fur was a no-no. Dogs could do no wrong. Back then, we’d pretty much agreed that guns were good, that just about everybody needed one. Firearms, we were all to discover, were feeble, finicky things, prone to laughable inaccuracy.

  During this brief moment in human evolution, a professor of anthropology might, for the half-year he worked, fish in the morning, lecture midday, and stroll excavation sites until early evening, after which was personal/leisure time. I was a professor of anthropology, one of the very, very few. I owned a bass boat, a classic Corvette, and a custom van, all of which I lost during the period of this story, the brief sentence I served inside the cushiest prison in the Western Hemisphere, the minimum-security federal prison camp at Parkton, South Dakota.

  Camp Parkton, we called it. Club Fed.

  As an anthropologist, I had the job of telling stories about the past. My area of study was the Clovis people, the first humans to cross the Bering Land Bridge from Siberia about twelve thousand years ago. As you know, the Clovis colonized a hemisphere that had never seen humans before, and their first order of business was to invent a new kind of spear point, which they used to eradicate thirty-five species of large mammals. The stories I told about the Clovis were not new ones: A people developed a technology that allowed them to exploit all their resources. They then created a vast empire. And once they had consumed everything in sight, they disbanded—in the case of the Clovis, into small groups that would form the roughly six hundred Native American tribes that exist today.

  I had a ’72 Corvette and a custom van!

  Dear colleagues of tomorrow, fellow anthropologists of the future, how can I express my joy in knowing there is only one profession in the years to come, that each and every one of you has become a committed anthropologist? The trials of my life seem petty compared with their inevitable reward: that the turbulent story of our species should end with all its members’ becoming experts on humanity.

  The fate of the culture we called “America” is certainly no mystery to you. Of that tale, countless artifacts stand testament, and who could fail to hear such a song of conclusion, endlessly whistling through the frozen teeth of time? Yet you must have questions. Dig as you might, there must be gaps in the record. Who is buried in the Tomb of the Unknown Indian? you might ask. Was the hog truly smarter than the dreaded dog? Were owls really birds, or some other manner of animal? So, my dedicated peers, I will share with you how the betterment of humanity began, and let no one claim I slandered the past. I am the past.

  I’m not sure I can tell you the exact year this story begins, but I’ll never forget the day. It was the season in South Dakota in which the Missouri River nearly freezes over—day by day, shelves of white extend their reach from the riverbanks, calciumlike, until they enter the central channel, where the current rips great sheets free and sends them hurtling downstream.

  From my office on the campus of the University of South-eastern South Dakota, I could hear the frozen river wail and moan before a lurching crack tore loose a limb of ice. When the day was clear, I could even see from my window in the anthropology building scattered stains of red on the ice, where eagles had landed with freshly snatched fish and stripped them on the frozen ledges. An eagle was a kind of bird, quite large, and it was famous for the boldness it displayed when stealing another’s prey. Most birds were about the size of rats, though some came as big as jackrabbits. The eagle, however, weighed in closer to a dog. Picture a greyhound, then add ferocity and wings.

  It was a gray, brooding day when Eggers, one of my star doctoral students, stuck his head in my office. He was vigorously chewing something, and the odds were it wasn’t gum.

  Eggers wore goatskin breeches and a giant poncho of dark, matted fur, which he’d fashioned himself from animal hides begged off the Hormel meatpacking plant at the edge of town. I could smell him long before he made his way to the stacks of cardboard boxes that filled my doorway and spilled into the hall.

  “Careful of Junior,” I said and waved him in. I had just received an exciting new crate of raw ice-core data from Greenland, and Eggers’ booties were covered with God-knows-what.

  “Life’s good, Dr. Hannah,” Eggers said, making his way around the boxes. He displayed that impish grin of his. “Life is good,” he repeated.

  My office in those days was filled with houseplants of every variety, though I found indoor gardening so pointless and sad I could barely stand to look at them. Eggers ducked under the hanging tendrils of plants whose names escaped me, his feet crunching across the layer of flint chips that littered the floor from the hours I whiled away knapping out primitive tools and weapons.

  He took a seat, and I was confronted with my daily update on Eggers’ dissertation project, which was to exist using nothing but Paleolithic technology for an entire year. More than eleven months into the experiment, some of the results were already clear: the wafting custard of his breath, the thin mistletoe of his beard, the way the oiled gloss of his face had attained the yellowy hue of earwax.

  I should have been working on a grant proposal or grading some of the endlessly simple student papers that flowed across my desk. But I couldn’t concentrate, because of Glacier Days, a yearly carnival intended to lighten the gloom of winter by celebrating the recession of the glaciers that had carved the Missouri River Valley. They’d set up the midway in the Parkton Square parking lot, catty-corner to campus, and every so often you’d hear the muffled, rising moan and long wail of young people on the thrill rides.

  “Okay, Eggers,” I said. “Life’s grand. We’ll go with that hypothesis.”

  Eggers shrugged, as if everything was self-evident. “Oh, it’s not some theory, Dr. Hannah. Life is tiptop,” he said, moving aside a dusty stack of my book, The Depletionists, and settling into a high-backed chair. He slumped enough that his hair left a sheeny streak down the leather upholstery. God, his game bag reeked!

  I was about to hear one of Eggers’ continuing intrigues with a coed, or how he’d won some prestigious new grant. The anthropology journals were already fighting to publish his story. But I couldn’t get that “life is good” phrase out of my head. It’s what my stepmother, Janis, kept saying at the end, and it became one of my father’s refrains after we lost her. I could see behind Eggers, framed in the window, a piece of ice slowly turning down the Missouri River—it drifted in from the future, caught the sun for a moment, and disappeared out into the past. From the Glacier Days carnival, a slow whoop arose from the next generation of South Dakotans as they mocked their deaths on bloodcurdling rides, and my eyes naturally fell to Junior—nineteen thousand notecards and twenty-seven cardboard boxes of research, all yet to be examined, all those stories waiting to be told.

  Eggers shifted what he was chewing and went after it with his molars.

  “Is this about Trudy?” I asked.

  “Trudy? Why bring her up?” he asked. “Are you feeling guilty, Dr. Hannah?”

  “What would I have to feel guilty about?
”

  “Nothing,” Eggers said. “Nothing. Except you did file the paperwork to revoke her Peabody Fellowship and give it to me.

  “The school’s doing that. That’s out of my hands. Congrats, by the way.”

  “You know me, Dr. Hannah. I yawn at money. Money’s obsolete to me.”

  Eggers pulled something out of his mouth, inspected it, and put it back in.

  “Don’t gloat,” I told him. “Everything will be hunky-dory once I explain things to her.”

  “Trudy’s pretty upset. I mean, I was the one who broke it to her.”

  “This isn’t even official yet.”

  “She needed to hear it from someone who cared,” Eggers said.

  “Please,” I said. “Anyway, that’s only half the story. Losing her Peabody is only the bad news of a good-news/bad-news thing. I’ll explain it to her.”

  Eggers swallowed hard enough to make his eyes water, and then he opened the flap of his game bag. I could see a fuzzy tail sticking out of it, and it hadn’t escaped the notice of the school paper that all the squirrels on campus had disappeared during the time that Eggers, an adult omnivore, had taken up residence in the middle of the quad.

  “I wouldn’t worry about Trudy,” Eggers said. “Trudy can take care of herself. She’ll bounce back.” He removed another sinewy morsel and slid it into his mouth. Though grayish-brown, it crunched like celery. He chewed it contemplatively. “I’ve got my own good and bad news,” he added.

  I removed my glasses, folded them, rubbed the bridge of my nose.

  “Just the good,” I said. “Only tell me the good.”

  “I found something.”

  Eggers was always finding things. He was the only person in town who walked everywhere, and over eleven months, his travels on foot had netted him countless arrow points, bison skulls, mastodon teeth, and a brass bell that may or may not have belonged to Meriwether Lewis. Sleeping in the same stretch of sand in South Dakota, you were likely to find a buffalo soldier’s pistol, a conquistador’s breastplate, the hooves of rhino-pigs from the early Eocene, T-rex teeth, and maybe even a Cambrian trilobite, frozen mid-wriggle at the dawn of time.