The Wilds (29 page)

“She ain’t totally out but not exactly there either,” said Winger.

“What you think caused it?” asked Wanda Bonnet.

“They don’t know. They’re testing for organ failure caused by her junk-food diet.”

Every parent of a teen child felt sick, but then relieved that this misfortune had happened to someone else. A few drunken mothers clutched their bosoms. But when Carla Marlin started bragging about her new swimming pool, the conversation shifted toward brighter subjects—like waterskiing, catfish noodling, and time-share condos going cheap at Surf City.

Beth Irving was a vegetarian, partially for health reasons, but mostly because her line of work made her hyperaware of the intricate life cycles of infectious organisms. She couldn’t look at a piece of meat without imagining it swarming with bacteria and one-celled organisms, crawling with trichinosis roundworms or tapeworm larvae. Once again, she’d found herself in a godforsaken town with a malarial climate and no health-food store, and the
only decent place to eat was an Indian buffet that put too much sugar in its eggplant vindaloo. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had stumbled upon another cluster of
Toxoplasma hermeticus
cases. And though Beth was thrilled to be on the research vanguard of what was quickly becoming recognized as one of the weirdest behavior-modifying protozoan organisms to emerge since
Toxoplasma gondii
, she always got depressed in these backwater towns with dead Main Streets and flood zones packed with double-wides.

Because Beth had grown up in a dying town in South Georgia, she always felt an uncanny sensation when cruising empty downtown streets or walking from pounding summer heat into the deep chill of a Piggly Wiggly. She feared she was getting sucked back into the haunted swamplands of Clinch County, locale of her birth. She pictured a giant Venus flytrap swelling up from boggy land, opening its green jaws, and swallowing her. And so, with a few hours to kill before meeting the ID specialist at Palmetto Baptist, she had no choice but to return to her room at the Days Inn, where she succumbed to the narcotic allure of the television. Flipping through channels, she felt a panicky wash of pleasure as the borders of her identity began to dissolve.

She remembered a film from Biology 629, a time-lapse sequence of a fox carcass devoured by necrophagous
insects. The mammal shrank and then expanded with a moist infestation of writhing maggots that soon transformed into bluebottle flies that darted off to feed on wildflower nectar. Embracing the flux of disassociation might yield some exquisite Zen transcendence, she thought. Out of her usual context, she felt her self diffusing. Her Atlanta town house and boyfriend and collection of Scandinavian glass, her PhD and lucrative job with the
CDC
, her whole-foods organic vegetarian diet and Ashtanga yoga regime—all of it relegated to the realm of the theoretical, especially the boyfriend, who was eight years her junior, and whom she envisioned, with a shiver of arousal, making love to some faceless female with wavering limbs.

Of course, wholeness and bodily integrity were illusions. The body was a conceptually organized system of potentially chaotic processes and minute, volatile ecosystems. Beth thought of
Cymothoa exigua
, the enterprising sea louse that ate the tongue of its fish-host and then masqueraded as that tongue, slurping up a portion of the spotted rose snapper’s food while the oblivious fish went on with its business. The elegance of this poetic adaptation took her breath away. And then there were more obscure parasites, micromanagers of evolution that changed the surface of biological “reality” with their incessant, ingenious niche marketing.

Caught up in intricate mechanisms, these parasites hopped from one organism to another at different stages of their life cycles, migrating from intestines to lungs, hearts, or brains, sometimes reprogramming the behavior of their hosts. Such was the case with
T. gondii
, cousin of
T. hermeticus
, which made rodents act irrationally, drawing them toward the smell of cat urine, compelling them to flirt with disaster until they were devoured by felines, who caught the bug and spread it through their droppings, thus repeating the cycle.

Though
T. gondii
had evolved in a cat/rat system, it also infected humans, causing them to undergo personality changes—becoming more neurotic, more obsessive, and, even stranger, enacting more traditional gender roles. Suffering slower reaction times, they became more accident-prone. They had trouble concentrating. Some positive-testing males demonstrated a disregard for convention and indulged in risky behaviors. Scientists were even linking the bug to schizophrenia. Unlike the rat, the human host served no discernible purpose for the protozoan (unless the host was devoured by a large cat). As far as researchers knew, Homo sapiens was an evolutionary dead end for
T. gondii
, which infected about 16.8 percent of the American population.

But
T. hermeticus
was a different animal, a mutant variation of the
T. gondii
species. So far, only a dozen
teenaged humans throughout the United States had tested positive in serologic tests for
T. hermeticus
antibodies. And though they had ingested the protozoan the usual ways (via undercooked meat, contaminated soil, or cat dung), their responses to the infection were beginning to form a distinct pattern. Over the past two months, Beth had personally investigated ten cases in hot, humid regions of the United States, all of them ending in hospitalizations due to toxic-metabolic encephalopathic coma. It was not clear whether this was the normal upshot of
T. hermeticus
infection or whether these extreme cases were the only ones that had been medically documented.

Each patient was between the ages of twelve and fourteen, and therefore in the early stages of puberty. Sixty percent of them kept pet cats. According to family members, their comatose states had been preceded by an increasing obsession with video games, Internet pornography, or social-networking sites—screen-addicted behaviors not uncommon among their demographic. This was accompanied by social withdrawal and changing feeding habits, an intensifying distaste for sunlight and fresh foods, and a voracious appetite for junk food high in chemical additives—“chips, candies, and other knickknacks,” as one distressed mother had put it.

The parents of infected patients had been difficult for Beth to deal with, hailing, as they mostly did, from small Southern towns and reminding her of her own parents with their bad diets, paranoid religious ideation, and right-wing political affiliation. In an hour she would talk to the ID specialist. Over coffee in the hospital cafeteria, they would discuss strategies for persuading parents to let them conduct
MRI
scans that, while helping them understand more about the organism, would not necessarily lead to any breakthrough treatments. What Beth really needed was not a cartoon brain pulsing on a computer screen, its amygdalae lit up with fluorescent red cysts. She itched to perform craniotomy biopsies, to suck tissue from the cysts and observe the mysterious bradyzoites under an atomic-force microscope.

When a
GEICO
commercial came on, the one with the talking lizard, she shuddered, for she’d hated lizards ever since she’d stepped on one as a child. Feeling the crunch of its frail skeleton under her bare foot, she’d screamed as though burned. Now she punched the remote until she landed on the Weather Channel. She lay in bed for another minute, watching a Doppler radar image of Hurricane Anastasia sweep toward the Gulf Coast.

Jenny stared out at a green wall of rain. The only sheltered place to smoke outside was the carport, and she felt exposed before the double-pane eyes of neighboring ranch homes. No health-conscious middle-aged woman in her right mind would smoke cancer sticks. But her husband was 7,337 miles away, and there she was, sucking another one down as Anastasia’s rain shields enveloped South Carolina in a sultry monsoon. Whenever hurricane season hit, there was a sense of foreboding on the Internet. Many
sibyl.com
seekers inquired about global warming, wondering if Homo sapiens’ unchecked ecological plundering was finally building up to a karmic bite in the ass. In the hinterlands of the Internet, on poorly designed websites with flashy fonts and bad grammar, the more hysterical demographics chattered about the Rapture and the reptilian elite.

Unable to sleep the previous night and clocking in on Sibyl to earn a few extra bucks, Jenny had noticed, as she always did when working during the wee hours, a delirious urgency in the questioning:

Do rh negative people have reptile blood or do they descend from the nephilim?

I have twelve fibroids in my uterus and wander can I get pregnant?

My boy got an Aztec sun god tattoo is he mixed up with the Mexican Mafia?

So when she encountered her first question about
T. hermeticus
early the next morning, she assumed it was another phantom from the shadowlands of insomnia.

A girl I know said there was a bug that can get in your head and make you hooked to your computer screen. What is this thing?

Google searches yielded low-budget sci-fi movies and clusters of conspiracy sites, but then, nestled within the wing-nut comment boards and glib blogs of camp-cinema enthusiasts was a
PDF
file on the Stanley Medical Research Institute site, an article describing the species variation and its relevance to
T. gondii
schizophrenia research. At the time of publication, only two cases of toxoplasmosis via
T. hermeticus
had been documented, but the behavior of the two hospitalized teen hosts was similar: withdrawal from physical reality, computer- and television-screen addiction, the unbridled consumption of junk food. And both teens had suffered comas resulting from toxic-metabolic encephalopathy.

Jenny’s stomach flipped. Her heart beat faster. She did not run to the den, where her son was camped with a pile of Xbox discs he’d swapped with friends. She walked purposefully and slowly, like a killer in a horror film, into the kitchen and down the steps. This time she didn’t knock first. She pushed the door open and stepped into the
atmosphere
. But her son was not there.

A screenshot from his paused video game showed his Dose avatar frozen in midfrenzy, clutching a pill bottle and spilling capsules as he struggled to get the right drug into his system. The game was sinister and funny at once. The main character, suffering from a variety of behavioral, psychological, and physical issues, was constantly in danger of malfunctioning. He had to be kept on track with the right pharmaceuticals. The player could consult the electronic pharmacopoeia built into the game, but the character quickly melted down, sank into unconsciousness, or became otherwise unstable, so a good working knowledge of contemporary medical drugs was required to play the game well. In this particular shot the character was very thin, with bulging eyes and a comic goiter.

“Adam,” Jenny called, thinking he might be in the half bath.

No answer, but at least he wasn’t huddled close to the media screen. She did notice an obscene amount of discarded junk-food packaging littering the floor: chip bags and plastic cookie trays, flattened cartons and half-crushed cans. Walking deeper into the
atmosphere
, she felt heart palpitations and a shortening of breath. She picked up a Doritos bag and read the ingredients:
MSG
, at least three artificial colors, and a lengthy list of unwholesome compounds, such as disodium inosinate.

“What are you doing?” The voice was mocking, croaky from its recent change.

Her son stood just inside the open sliding glass door, the insulated drapery jerked open, rain falling in the blurred green depths of the backyard. She wondered if he’d been out there smoking something, huffing something, popping some newfangled multiple-use product of the medical-industrial complex.