Something Going Around Read online

  Something else crossed my beady little mind, probably because I’d soaked up all those beers. “Suppose there’s a parasite that can live in people but needs some other host to mate in,” I said.

  “All right. Suppose there is.” Indira sounded as if she was humoring me. No doubt she was. She’d made a career of this. I was making conversation in a bar. She’d put away a fair bit of scotch, too. “What then?”

  “What I wondered was, how would the parasites get out?” I said. “People would be inconvenient to them, wouldn’t they? Uh, wouldn’t we? We live too long, and the parasites in us would just be sitting there twiddling their thumbs waiting for us to die. If they had thumbs, I mean.”

  “You are not including an insect vector, like the mosquito for malaria.” Even with the scotch she’d taken aboard, Indira was very precise. To go into a line of research like hers, she’d have to be.

  And I said, “No, I didn’t have anything like that in mind. Too easy.”

  “Too easy.” Indira made a little clucking noise. “I said before that you found interesting questions, didn’t I? That one … I don’t know the answer to that one yet. I wonder if I ever will. We are harder to influence than rats and mice, thank heaven. Whether we’re impossible, I also don’t know.” She glanced down at her glass, and seemed amazed to see only a few melting rocks in there. “I do know I’d like another drink.”

  I wasn’t sorry to have another one myself. We talked some more. We gave each other cell numbers and e-mail addresses that didn’t belong to the university system. Yes, the modern mating dance. After a while, Indira checked her iPhone and said something about how late it was getting.

  When she stood up, I did too, though I wasn’t planning on leaving quite yet. She wore sparkly shoes. Before long, I found out she did that all the time, even when she exercised. She never met footwear with sequins or sparkles or rhinestones that she didn’t like. It was part of her style, the way gaudy bow ties are with some men.

  “I enjoyed talking with you,” I said.

  “And I did, with you,” she answered.

  “I’ll call you,” I said. If she decided she didn’t feel like going out with a random professor of Germanic philology she’d met in a bar, she’d let me know. Even if she didn’t want to, I doubted she’d be mean about it. The way things are, you can’t hope for more than that. Too often, you don’t even get so much.

  Call her I did. She didn’t pretend she had no idea who I was. We went to dinner a few times, and to plays, and to a folk club I like. We went to each other’s places and met each other’s children. All the kids got that their parents had lives of their own. They weren’t always thrilled about it, but they got it.

  We talked more about languages, and about parasites, and about other things, too.

  Yes, we arranged some privacy. That was private, though, so I won’t go on about it. I know—my attitude is old-fashioned these days. Everyone puts everything online as soon as it happens, or sometimes even before. But if someone who specializes in Gothic isn’t entitled to be old-fashioned, who the devil is?

  After I finished the last blue book of finals week and e-mailed grades to the registrar’s office, I headed over to Mandelbaum’s to celebrate my liberation. I heard the sirens while I was walking, but I didn’t pay much attention to them. You do hear sirens every so often in the city. People rob other people, or whack them over the head with fireplace pokers, or shoot them. Cars run lights and smash each other. Sirens are part of life.

  They’re part of death, too. This time, the accident had happened only a few doors up from Mandelbaum’s. It reminded me too much of the other one I’d seen. Another humongous set of wheels with a stove-in front end. Another body on the street with something covering up the worst of things. Another goddamn enormous splash of blood with nasty little critters licking or drinking or nibbling at the edges.

  This time, the driver was a man. He sounded just as appalled, just as stunned, as the blond gal had the last time. “Oh, my God!” he told the cop with the notebook. “She just sailed out in front of me like she didn’t have a care in the whole wide world. I couldn’t stop—no fuckin’ way. Oh, my God!”

  She. Yes, those were a woman’s legs sticking out from under the tarp. The feet were bare. She’d got knocked clean out of her shoes. You don’t like to look at death up close and personal. You don’t like to, but sometimes you can’t help it. I noticed her skin was brown.

  One of her shoes lay on the hood of a car a startlingly long way down the street. It glittered under the streetlamp—it was sequined to a fare-thee-well.

  Now I was the one who choked out, “Oh, my God!” I started to turn to the cop, but what could I have told him? Nothing he’d believe. Nothing I even knew, not really.

  I went into Mandelbaum’s instead. Excuse me—I ran into Mandelbaum’s instead. Yes, Victor was behind the bar. “Hey, Stan,” he said, and then, “Stan? Are you all right?”

  “No.” I bolted into the men’s room at the back. In there, I knelt down in front of the toilet and gave back everything I’d eaten for the past week and a half. I haven’t heaved like that since I don’t know when. Somehow, I was very neat. It all went into the bowl. When the spasm finally passed, I stood up and flushed it away. I washed my face at the sink. Half a dozen different kinds of tears were streaming down my cheeks. I dried myself with paper towels.

  Then I rinsed my mouth again and again, for all the good it did. The taste doesn’t go away so fast. You only wish it would. And after that, with soap and the hottest water I could stand, I washed my hands and washed them and washed them some more. Lady Macbeth would have been proud of me.

  Of course, blood wasn’t what I was trying to get rid of. And I had no idea whether breaks in the skin there were what might let it in to begin with. But all you can do is try.

  Wish me luck, Indira.

  END

  Copyright (C) 2014 by Harry Turtledove

  Art copyright (C) 2014 by Greg Ruth