The Wilds (30 page)

“Shut the door,” she said. “The air conditioner’s on.”

As he lurched toward her, she worried about his posture (was he developing curvature of the spine?), his teeth (would failure to provide braces lead to social ostracism and poor employment opportunities?), his sexuality (would he catch an
STD
?), and his attention span (when was the last time he read a book?). The Internet was crawling with sexual predators. Teens were gobbling salvia, guzzling Robitussin, snorting Adderall. A gonorrhea superbug was developing resistance to antibiotics.

“You need to pick up after yourself,” she said.

A fresh crop of pustules had erupted on his nose, which had recently grown too big for his face, though he had the elfin features of boyhood. She could almost see him wrapping his arms around her legs. Could still picture him riding on his father’s shoulders. He was too big for these things now, of course. His unwashed hair
was brushed absurdly forward, almost obscuring his eyes, which looked unnaturally shiny.

“Right,” he said. She couldn’t tell if the word seethed with sarcasm or if it was a simple acknowledgment of the truth of her statement.

“You need to eat a decent breakfast. Some fruit. Some whole-grain cereal.”

He rolled his eyes and grinned like a gargoyle. Yes, she thought, he had to have braces, which would cost at least $5,000.

“I already ate,” he said.

“What did you have?”

“What is this Guantanamo Bay shit?”

She felt somewhat relieved. He was still capable of creating analogies.

“Watch the language and answer me.”

“Pop-Tarts and orange juice.” He dropped to the floor, rolled onto his belly, and took up his deluxe controller.

Good. Orange juice. She bought the
USDA
organic calcium + vitamin D stuff from Publix. It contained no preservatives, colorants, or corn syrup. Adam had just had some, which meant that he had not developed intolerance to fruits and vegetables. And he was lolling at least three feet from the media screen, so he was probably safe—for now.

Miles Escrow could never tell if the world was turning to shit or if the drunks at Lizard Man tended to natter on about the darker elements of life. Now they were discussing accidents on Lake Wateree: Jet Ski collisions and capsizing pontoons, drownings and disastrously executed water-ski stunts, exploding gas grills and feral campfires and murderous clouds of wasps. A renegade fishhook had gotten stuck in Wanda Bonnet’s uncle’s cheek and ripped a big gash. Marty Bouknight’s cousin had lost three fingers pulling a hydrilla clump from the blades of his outboard motor. Kim Dewlap’s preacher’s stepbrother had snorkeled into a nest of water moccasins. And then there were the brain-eating amoebas, floating in stagnant water, waiting to be sucked up into the nasal passages of hapless swimmers. But that was old news. There was still just the one local case—the teen who’d died last month.

Miles Escrow had come up with three possible explanations for the shit ton of recent lake-connected disasters: (1) the patrons were exaggerating; (2) get any group together and it could generate an impressive list of mishaps associated with any random location; and (3) that flooded reservoir Lake Wateree was the site of an ancient Indian burial ground, and hence was cursed. Miles Escrow preferred the drama of option three. After
drinking another Miller, he shared his proposition with his companions.

“I think I saw a movie about that,” said Tammy Horton. “There was a monster in the lake, an angry spirit or whatnot.”

“Every body of water has its cryptid,” said Stein.

“What the hell’s that?” said Carla Marlin.

“An imaginary creature that lives there, like the Lizard Man of Scape Ore Swamp.”

“My uncle saw the Lizard Man rooting through his garbage,” said Brandy Wellington.

Hereupon commenced a conversation that Miles Escrow had heard a thousand times in this particular bar. Everybody knew at least one person who had seen the Lizard Man, but none of the patrons, it seemed, had spotted a glimmer of the fabled creature with their own eyes. It had been raining for a week and Miles had been arguing with Tina Flame, the same arguments they’d been slogging through for ten years: spats about his drinking, tiffs about her Internet shopping, and, even though they were almost forty, rows about whether or not they ought to have children. Fed by the weather, the arguments grew lush and green. Before Miles and Tina knew it, a thousand insults bloomed. Miles had to get out of the house for a few hours. Tonight, however, Lizard Man was boring him.

But then the crowd turned to the topic of Winger’s cousin’s grandchild Kayla, who was still out cold at Palmetto Baptist. Carla Marlin said she lived beside a phlebotomist who worked at the hospital, and she had some top-secret information she really ought not to share. Looking solemn, she made everybody promise to keep this material hush-hush. And then, after ordering another daiquiri, rooting through her faux-snakeskin purse, and retrieving her Droid to check a text message, Carla cleared her throat and revealed that three teens were now laid up in comas at Palmetto Baptist. Not only that, but each patient had demonstrated the same peculiar symptoms as Winger’s cousin’s grandchild. Before losing consciousness, their obsession with digital media had gotten way out of hand. They’d also eaten so much junk food that one of the first hypotheses as to the cause of their illness was food poisoning. But the doctors ruled that out, along with electric shock via media gadget.

“What do they think it is then?” asked Titus Redmond.

“My neighbor wouldn’t say, but, judging by the look in his eye, it ain’t pretty.”

Although Beth had been communicating with big shots on the cutting edge of
T. gondii
research for
months—mostly male evolutionary biologists, parasitologists, and neurobiologists—the word was just getting around about
T. hermeticus
, and she feared she’d be muscled out of the game. As she awaited the arrival of a certain eminent neurovirologist from Johns Hopkins, she demonstrated behaviors that psychologists had placed on the lower end of the obsessive-compulsive-disorder spectrum: nail biting, cuticle picking, napkin tearing. In the air-conditioned depths of Bombay Palace, she sipped iced water and studied her laptop screen. An
MRI
scan of an infected teen brain glowed before her. The fluorescent red cysts conglomerated mostly in the pleasure and fear centers. Just like schizophrenics suffering from
T. gondii
toxoplasmosis, infected patients were producing elevated levels of dopamine.

Beth had a theory that made her heart race. Like
T. gondii
, the
hermeticus
species had genes that allowed it not only to jack up dopamine production but also to create optimal survival conditions that depended on an intricate blend of its host’s onset-puberty hormones, specific chemical food additives in the blood, and the heady neurochemical combinations produced by video-game play, intense social networking, and Internet porn use. She didn’t know if this brain cocktail improved conditions for the dormant bradyzoites or if the tweaked behavior of the teens was a form of parasite-induced
“mind control” recently perfected to land the protozoan’s intended rodent host in the jaws of a cat.

Once again, she navigated the twists and turns of her theory, puzzling out the evolutionary logic of the adaptation, but became flustered when she noticed Dr. Bloom hovering over her with a bemused expression on his long, thin face. He was somewhat handsome, early forties, with an ectomorphic body that had probably pushed him into nerdy seclusion as an adolescent, forming the foundation of his brilliant career in the hard sciences. His hazel eyes were almost obscenely beautiful.

“Dr. Irving, I presume.” He lifted a sparse eyebrow.

Beth knew that she looked young for her age. Torn between revealing her true age to enhance her authority and concealing it to enhance her sexual attraction, she chose the latter.

“Dr. Bloom. Sorry we’re having supper in a strip mall, but this is the best I could do in this savage land.”

“Supper,” he said. “You must be Southern.”

“I grew up in Argyle, Georgia.”

“So you immersed yourself in academia to escape a life of drudgery at the sock factory there?”

Beth tittered. Dr. Bloom sat down. They ordered Maharaja beers.

As a joke they continued to call each other by their professional titles, even when swept into a passionate
discussion about parasitic mind control. Dr. Bloom asked her if she had tested her male patients’ responses to cat urine, and she tactfully reminded him that the teens were in comatose states, surrounded by bereaved relatives. Drawing a lock of hair to her mouth and taking a compulsive nibble, she asked him if it was true that males infected with
T. gondii
had higher testosterone levels and were hence more attractive to women.

“What do
you
think?” He flexed his right bicep and smirked.

“What?” Beth smiled. “Did you test positive?”

“Actually,” he said, “I don’t know. I’ve never been tested. Have you?”

“No. Maybe I should be.”

She examined his clothing: a plaid shirt, rumpled, but not demonstrating a lack of concern with personal grooming. His gray-streaked hair was tousled but clean. Beth blushed and changed the subject to another organism.

“I heard you did a postdoc with
Polysphincta gutfreundi
.”

Gesticulating expressively, opening his mouth to reveal half-masticated meat, Dr. Bloom held forth on the parasitic wasp larva that, after hatching in the body of the orb spider, released chemicals that made its host weave a custom cocoon for it. The spider essentially became a zombie that did the worm’s bidding.

Lit from within by his third beer and his zeal for parasitic organisms, Dr. Bloom began to look strangely attractive. Beth remembered an article she’d read about the flu virus that argued that infected humans became more social than usual, optimizing the virus’s chance of spreading. She thought of her boyfriend, a beautiful, frivolous creature, knowing that she’d allow their relationship to grow like an extravagant mushroom that would, one hot summer day, suddenly lapse into slime.

Whenever Jenny found herself in front of her computer screen, she could not stop searching for more information on
T. hermeticus
, which flared occasionally in the outer reaches of cyberspace like gamma-ray bursts. Her talent for obscure searches had led to the discovery that at least two dozen teens had been infected nationally, six of whom were now in comatose states at Palmetto Baptist. She’d ferreted this last bit out on a local church prayer board: