Periphery, page 9
He’d had a vague notion of someday becoming the next Jane Goodall, only maybe specializing in crows or pigs instead of chimps. Pigs were extremely intelligent, ranked fourth among mammals right after humans, chimps, and dolphins. And crows were right behind them. William liked the notion of such common creatures possessing unexpected capabilities, of the extraordinary lurking just below the everyday, staring out from the seemingly mundane, awaiting discovery.
He remembered the first time he’d laid eyes on Laura, how she had paused in the doorway for an instant to survey the classroom, how her glance had passed through him without pause before turning to the chalkboard with the words BIOLOGICAL DIVERSITY 201 written in block letters across the center. And yet she had sat in the desk next to his, even though the room was still nearly empty. He’d doodled in his notebook for several minutes as the chairs filled, feigning indifference while attempting to study her out of the corner of an eye. Auburn hair pulled into a ponytail and tumbling to the seatback. A freckled shoulder. One long leg, bare, ending in a white sneaker.
He wanted more than the brief glance of her face he’d caught from the doorway and was thinking up some casual question he could ask her that wouldn’t come across as creepy or pathetic, when she leaned over and said, “Tell me your name isn’t Tim.”
“My name isn’t Tim.” The blue of her eyes could not be contained. It seemed to reflect off her pale cheeks and shimmer over the bridge of her freckled nose. His first impression of her features was glacial, an Arctic landscape of snow-softened details accented by the ethereal cobalt glow of ocean ice. The room pitched lightly and righted itself, and William gripped the desktop to keep from sliding to the floor.
“Good,” she said. She pulled the band from her hair and gathered the strands again with her fingers. “I couldn’t stand sitting next to someone whose frat brothers called him Tiny Tim. What is it with tall guys and nicknames?”
William watched, fascinated, as she re-tamed her hair and cinched the band once more. To have those locks fall around his face as she hovered above him, tenting them both in a private place of lips and whispers and unbroken gazes. He pressed his back against his chair and reminded himself to breathe.
“Or short guys,” she added after a pause. “If you were five-three and a hundred-and-ten pounds soaking wet they’d call you Bruiser, or Stilts, or Bull, or Big Al.”
“Most people just call me Will. And I’m not in a fraternity.” He didn’t mention that since overtaking his brother in height, Oscar had started calling him Little Billy.
On an intellectual level, Little Billy understood all these things had happened. He understood he had met Laura on the first day of class in his sophomore year and that they had dated throughout college. He remembered the scare in their junior year when she was a week-and-a-half late and the mixture of relief and disappointment when it turned out to be a false alarm.
He understood he had excelled in his classes enough to attract the attention of the dean of the school of biology, that Dr. Tate had taken him under his wing and encouraged him to apply to the nation’s top universities for grad school, promising a letter of recommendation that would make any admission board swoon.
He understood he’d been accepted at Duke, that his father bought him a used Audi with low mileage as a graduation gift, and that he and Laura had driven up to Durham one weekend in May to scout out apartments.
And he understood that Dr. Tate had offered him the opportunity to participate in a little summer project he was planning, a CV builder with minimal leg-work, a job right here in Tampa that wouldn’t take more than a weekend or two of fieldwork.
He remembered all these things happening, but they were on the far side of The Great Divide, and the more he tried to solidify the details, the more unreal they became. To feel the satisfying punch of a baseball hitting the center of a mitt, to drive a car—one that he actually owned—to a supermarket, a movie theater, to sleep every night indoors, to have a family he could visit, parents he could talk to, a woman he loved and planned to grow old with. For years, he would dream about what he had lost, every morning waking somewhere new, somewhere a little farther from Tampa, until he was no longer certain where dream ended and reality began.
If it weren’t for the faded picture of Laura he kept in his wallet, he doubted he would remember the details of her face. The snow would have erased everything, even the iceberg gleam of her eyes. Little Billy had decided long ago if that ever happened, he would tie a cement block around his neck and walk into the nearest body of water.
Until then, however, he would have to live on this side of the Divide, the side where otherworldly gastropods denned in the flowerbeds of public libraries and living pincushions floated unnoticed in the grassy mediums of four-lane highways. The side where everything that mattered most—a new fiancée, grad school, a future free of guilt and toxic nightmares—could all vanish one bright summer afternoon in a backyard drenched in blood.
For nearly an hour, Andrew’s moans had been low but constant, soft exhalations of discomfort escaping between the seams of an unquiet doze. Now they rose in intensity, sharpening into exclamations of protest, cries of anguish. There were words as well, no longer a mush of syllables but a series of pleas and angry negations. One word, in particular, called over and over, sometimes with a tremble of tears, sometimes in alarm, but mostly in a long wail of despair: Anna. The first few times Andrew’s agitation crescendoed, Little Billy had attempted to wake him, but there was no breaking through the delirium. He was locked in his own hell now, and the most Little Billy could do was make sure he didn’t harm himself as he flailed and thrashed.
Anna. He remembered the girl in the purple bathing suit. Chestnut hair braided down her back, green eyes like something off a magazine cover, dimpled chin an exact miniature of her father’s. Did he realize how much she favored him, especially around the nose and mouth? The type of child whose adult features were already apparent, lurking just beneath the soft contours of pre-adolescence.
And of course, the scars. He remembered those as well, covering her right arm up to the shoulder, still pink and shining. Skin graphs. The girl had obviously suffered severe burns recently. Maybe within the last year. He was beginning to suspect those injuries had something to do with her father.
Guilt.
Little Billy rose and crossed to the window, lowered a blind with a fingertip and peered out at the mostly-empty parking lot. Everyone has their share. He’d come to understand that very well over the years. Most of the time it’s kept hidden, the little acts of cruelty: the classmate tripped on the schoolyard, the coworker blamed for our own screw-up, the candy bar slipped into a pocket at the convenience store. But sometimes the guilt is too big, the wrongs too monstrous to hide. Sometimes everyone knows what you’ve done.
Or thinks they do.
After all, when the policed arrive at a crime scene and find a man covered in blood ranting about monsters amid the shredded remains of four bodies, it’s fairly obvious who the guilty party is. And if you somehow manage to survive their accusations, avoid their reprisals, it’s not because you’re innocent. It’s only because you’ve played the system well enough to squirm out of the noose you so richly deserve. But what then? Crawl away on your belly. Crawl, because that’s what murdering worms do. They burrow through the filth until they’re buried, until not a single piece of them is visible to the respectable, civilized world.
Little Billy let the blinds fall back into place, reducing the late-afternoon light to a few thin ribbons slanting across the threadbare carpet. It would be dark soon. And then the long night would begin. Andrew was quiet for the moment, but that wouldn’t last. The bilantu were diurnal. Little Billy smiled. The word had bubbled up effortlessly.
“Diurnal,” he said aloud, relishing the feel of it in his mouth. Active during the day. During the bright hours monsters were supposed to shun. But there were other things in the dark, worse things maybe. A daughter with burn scars across her arms, for instance. Or a fiancée who drags herself from the grave to stand silently under a highway overpass as the man she once loved and trusted, the man who got her entire family slaughtered on a cheerful, cloudless Saturday afternoon, writhed in the grip of his toxic dreams.
The day William crossed The Great Divide was hot and bright, a typical August afternoon in Florida. There would be rain later, there always was this time of year. The storms would drop the temperature ten, fifteen degrees and wring some of the moisture out of the air, but for once he wasn’t thinking about the stifling heat and the promised relief of late-afternoon thunderstorms. He was too restless to feel the sweat soaking his shirt and stinging his eyes.
No, that wasn’t quite right. He could feel it, but he savored the discomfort, relished it. Didn’t every great discoverer experience some kind of distress in the field? Darwin was seasick during most of his eighteen months on the Beagle. Amundsen lost a good part of both heels to frostbite during his trek to the South Pole. Hell, Marie and Pierre Curie eventually died from their pioneering research with radiation. Sweating in the August heat was laughably trivial compared to those, but he would make note of the temperature in his journal, a document he had come to believe would one day be held in the same historical esteem as Darwin’s Voyage.
“How long?” Dr. Tate asked. They were both lying on their bellies in the grass at the Lowry Park Zoo band shell. Across the street, families ambled from the parking lot toward the zoo entrance, happy and oblivious of the things lurking unseen all around them. William doubted he would ever get used to the juxtaposition of the mundane and the exotic, the blandly every-day and the breathtakingly bizarre. If they only knew the true nature of things, those moms with their strollers, those dads finishing their Cokes and fishing for their wallets at the ticket gate. Would they still be so complacent? So indifferent to their environment? Would they even dare step foot outside their front doors?
“Will?” John Tate lowered the binoculars and glanced toward William, one brow raised.
“Sorry, professor.” He checked the stopwatch ticking in his hand. “Two minutes, forty seconds. Forty-one. Forty-two.”
“Stay focused, Will. I want this data to be as accurate as possible. I have no intention of being out here all afternoon.” He returned to the binoculars. “And for the love of Christ stop calling me ‘professor.’ Firstly, it makes me feel like the guy from Gilligan’s Island. Secondly, I have a goddamn Ph.D. If you’re not going to call me John, I’ll have to insist you call me doctor.”
Over the summer, William had gained a keen appreciation of Dr. Tate’s wry and usually understated sense of humor. “Sorry, John.”
“You really are a rather impertinent lad. I often find myself questioning your commitment to this project. Your personal hygiene as well.”
William squinted toward the patch of sandy earth near the picnic shelter. The two gray squirrels were still there, one moving in twitches, digging, darting, digging some more, behaving so typically squirrel-like as to be effectively invisible. The other was up on its hind legs, diligent as a prairie dog, watching, always watching, ready to sound the alarm if it was fortunate enough to see the threat before it was too late. In the four weeks since they had begun their observations, he and John had witnessed thirty-four hunts. They seldom ended well for the squirrels. One in five might get away. The rest ended up a meal for any one of the eight new species they had discovered over the summer. Eight! And they were still finding more. It was getting so easy to see them now. He hardly had to strain at all. How could he have been so blind before? How could any of them have been so blind?
“It’s happening!” Tate shifted forward on his elbows. “The guard’s agitated. It’s doing the spin. Mark the time.”
William checked the stopwatch again and penciled 3:32 in the notebook next to the words “SPIN STARTS”. The spin was what they called the whirling immediately prior to a strike, as if the squirrel knew something deadly was approaching but not from which direction.
He shielded his eyes with his free hand and strained to witness the kill. It would be fast. That never varied. Sometimes it came from above, a blur of undulating, flange-like wings as an ectokete plucked up its dinner. Sometimes it came from a nearby tree when a fidelax used its yard-long flagellum to lasso a victim. And sometimes it came from beneath the ground, although he and John had yet to glimpse whatever was burrowing through the soil.
Even from this distance, he could hear the spinning squirrel’s sudden chirps of alarm, but though its foraging companion darted toward the trees immediately, it didn’t make it past the nearest picnic table before vanishing in a puff of fur and blood.
“Time!”
William checked the watch. “Four minutes, seventeen seconds. What was it?”
“Apperix. Big one. Three, maybe three-and-a-half feet long. Took the second animal with a flick of its uropod.”
“Hard to believe squirrels haven’t gone extinct by now.” He wrote the time in the notebook. Four minutes, seventeen seconds from leaving the tree to being devoured. Dr. Tate’s theory appeared to be correct. At least so far. If a kill was going to be made, it was going to happen in the first five minutes of exposure. They had never witnessed a strike taking longer than—William riffled quickly through the notebook—four minutes, forty-seven seconds. If the squirrels made it to the five-minute mark without being taken, they were safe. Why this was, was still a mystery, but he had no doubt they would ferret out an answer sooner or later.
Their research was only just beginning. They both had the rest of their lives to study this vast, unsuspected ecosystem, this shadow biosphere covertly coexisting within the natural one.
William closed the notebook thoughtfully. The natural one. The thought had been so matter-of-fact he was a little surprised it had given him pause. The natural ecosystem. Our ecosystem. It implied a fundamental differentiation between the everyday world of people and parks and squirrels and birds and everything else we considered part of life on our planet, and them. That these creatures, which both he and John had begun referring to collectively as the bilantu offalate, were not of this planet was becoming increasingly obvious, at least to William.
It wasn’t just their unheard-of morphology with its often confounding locomotion, their tendency toward epidermal translucency, their seeming defiance of gravitation constraints (how did the damn votasin manage to float like that, were they filled with helium?). It was their aura of otherness, their complete disconnection from everything around them, as if they were four-dimensional creatures hovering a few inches above our three-dimensional world. William could actually feel their alienness as a subtle pressure against the hollow places of his skull, his sinuses and inner ear, the corners of his eyes, the gaps between his teeth. He knew Dr. Tate felt it was well, although he claimed otherwise.
“I think we’ve done enough today,” John said, rising to his knees with an exaggerated groan of exhaustion. “I promised my wife I’d be home by four. If I’m late for my kid’s Little League game one more time, she’s going to change the locks on me.”
When they had begun their study of the local urban squirrel population at the behest of Tampa Electric, John had described it as a few weekends of surveying, getting a sense of their numbers and distribution, especially around particularly vulnerable utility assets. Three substations had been damaged in the previous nine months due to chewed-through cables, the perpetrators’ remains nothing more than blackened husks bu the time the linemen arrived, and the company wanted a better sense of what they were up against. The two of them would be noting dietary trends, foraging habits.
It was kid’s stuff, really, nothing particularly taxing, but how often did you get the chance to poke around the urban/suburban environment while getting paid for it? And who knows, they might even end up with enough original observations to get a paper published. A minor paper, mind you. They were studying squirrels after all, but it would be another line on his CV.
He’d have been foolish to turn down the opportunity to do field research the summer before starting grad school. But he almost had, weighing the benefit of the experience against several lost weekends with Laura and finding the scale tipped decidedly toward his new fiancée. In the end, of course, he had accepted Dr. Tate’s offer, but he should probably mention his near-refusal in the journal. It would add a nice element of early precariousness to his later fame, a recognition that he had very nearly missed the boat.
“Let’s sit in the shade, do a quick review of last week’s data and call it a day.” Tate pointed toward the picnic shelter.
Halfway across the park, William cleared his throat. “Summer’s going fast. Hard to believe it’s August.”
John grunted, but did not look up from his own notebook filled with drawings and hastily scrawled observations.
William hesitated until they had reached the shelter and settled onto a picnic bench before adding, “Only a few more weeks before I’m off to Duke.”
“Your next adventure begins. But no stories about your summer exploits.”
“No. No.” They had agreed early on not to say anything about their astonishing discoveries until Dr. Tate was ready to formally announce their findings, a promise William had promptly broken, making Laura a sort of silent partner in their pursuits.
John would flip if he knew he had been telling his fiancée everything, even teaching her how to see the creatures (she was nearly as apt at finding them as William was), but the truth was, he didn’t entirely trust that Dr. Tate would make mention of his undergraduate assistant when he went public with one of the biggest scientific discovery of the century. John had assured him they would be partners in all subsequent announcements, that both their names would appear on the papers they would publish, the books they would write. But William found it a little hard to believe a doctor of biology and department dean would be so gracious as to elevate a lowly undergraduate to the rank of partner, even a junior one.
