Invasive Species Read online

  But standing by the rail as the ferry docked, Sheila wondered if this part of her life was reaching its end. She was wearing out, losing interest.

  She knew the signs of burnout. She’d seen enough of it.

  * * *

  MEGAN CONNELLY SEEMED tired, too. Worn.

  “What’s wrong?” Sheila said as they hugged. “You look awful.”

  That was Sheila. She always said what was on her mind and had no patience with those who didn’t. This had tended to make her life noisy and tumultuous.

  Pulling away a little, Megan smiled up at her. “There’s this thing that happens, love,” she said. “Experts call it ‘getting old.’”

  She had a point. How old was she now? Sixty-one? -two? Old enough that the years were beginning to take a toll, laying down lines across her forehead and around her mouth, turning her fair skin papery, bringing out spots on her hands. Megan had been too active throughout her life to ever develop severe osteoporosis, but she seemed a little more stooped than she had six months earlier, the last time Sheila had seen her.

  Still. There was more. A gray undertone to her skin. Something odd about the whites of her eyes.

  “I’ll examine you later,” Sheila told her.

  Megan laughed. “Oh, you flatterer,” she said. “You’ll have me in my grave before lunch.”

  Then she returned to her daughter’s inspection. “I like your hair,” she said. “What there is of it.”

  Since they’d last seen each other, six months earlier, Sheila had gotten tired of her long coppery ponytail. So she’d cut most of it off, giving herself something approaching a pixie cut.

  “How about this?” she asked, half turning to reveal the new tattoo on the back of her left shoulder, peeking out from under her sleeveless white shirt. A regal sunbird with wings spread, all glittering green and yellow and red.

  Megan’s eyes widened. “How many is that?”

  “Just three.”

  “I remember,” her mother said, setting off toward the market, “when Ariel stickers were enough for you.”

  “Long time ago,” Sheila said.

  “Seems like yesterday to me.”

  * * *

  THEY STOPPED AT the stand run by the same old woman who’d been selling fried corn cakes with cane sugar sprinkled on top for as long as Sheila had been coming to the market. Twenty years it was now, ever since her mom and dad moved here on a three-year mission with the Presbyterian church, fell in love with the place, the people, the African light, and decided to stay.

  Twenty years out of Sheila’s twenty-nine. She could hardly imagine what it felt like not to live in Africa, which was another reason why, after graduating from medical school, she’d come back.

  She’d also wanted to be close to her parents, though not too close. On the same continent, at least.

  “A shilingi for your thoughts,” her mother said.

  Sheila smiled.

  “I’m still hungry,” she said.

  The market stalls sold corn cakes, wooden carvings, textiles, weapons . . . and bushmeat.

  The bodies of wild animals taken from the vanishing forests to the west and denuded savannas to the east. Hunted with bows and arrows and wire snares and Kalashnikov semiautomatics, then brought back to the towns and cities.

  Too many Africans still considered the eating of wild game a birthright, and would do so until all the game was gone.

  The crowd around the bushmeat tables was large and boisterous. Sheila, pausing, saw whole baby crocodiles; rain forest rats, piled four to a stick, with their mouths pulled back into rictus grins; civets smelling like swamp water; tiny antelopes with legs as delicate as green sticks; a sliding pile of algae-scummed river turtles, still barely alive.

  On the next table over were piles of smoked monkey meat, brown and dry like old leather. The guenons had been transported whole, their heads bent back over their bodies by the smoking process, while the larger mangabeys and colobuses had been hacked into steaks and burned-fur-covered limbs.

  Sheila had lost her appetite.

  Her mother’s hand touched her arm. “Let’s go, honey.”

  Sheila hesitated. Then, just as she made to turn away, the crowd stirred, parting before something new. Three living baby chimps, tied together with ropes, pulled by a slab-faced man in dusty cotton pants, a shirt that had once been white, and a faded old baseball cap with what looked like a bullet hole just above the brim.

  Orphans of the bushmeat trade, these babies were. Worth more alive to zoos or medical laboratories than for the meat on their bones. Two of them seemed merely exhausted and terrified, clinging to each other and staring up at the faces in the crowd. They were making little moaning sounds, calls to their family that would never be heard.

  The third had had a rougher time. Its eyes were glassy, its arms and legs quivering. Its stomach was swollen, Sheila saw, most likely from malnutrition. It wouldn’t last long now.

  “Sheila,” her mom said, more insistently, “I’ve seen more of these than I’d like, these past months. Let’s go.”

  The sound of the baby chimps’ cries followed them almost to the edge of the busy marketplace.

  * * *

  “OKAY,” SHEILA SAID.

  Dinner over, they were sitting with their coffee on the porch of the compact house Megan and Scott had built here, outside Ujiji. The sun was dipping toward the horizon, and the cool evening breeze was chasing away the afternoon’s huddled storm clouds. It would be another gorgeous starlit evening, perfect for the kind of companionable quiet that Sheila craved.

  But first there was something they needed to take care of.

  It was a ritual. Her parents hadn’t believed in visiting doctors except in emergencies. There had been a few of those over the years, a fracture here, a kidney stone there, that had necessitated the hour-long drive to the nearest hospital, in Kigoma. Since Sheila had become an M.D., the Connellys had waited for her occasional visits for more routine checkups.

  This system had worked fine until Sheila’s father had died of a sudden heart attack two years earlier. Sheila had always wondered if waiting for her visit had cost her father his life.

  Megan, face a blur in the encroaching darkness, said, “Can’t we do this tomorrow morning?”

  Sheila knew that if they waited, some obstacle would come up in the morning, another in the afternoon, and soon enough she’d be back on the ferry and Megan would have escaped her checkup.

  “I don’t want to know” was Megan’s mantra.

  “Nope,” Sheila said. “Now.”

  With a sigh, her mother got to her feet.

  “You’re not going to find anything, you know,” she said.

  Sheila thought, I hope not.

  * * *

  MEGAN’S BLOOD PRESSURE was low, as were her pulse and temperature. None of them outside the normal range, but all lower than usual.

  Sheila sat back and thought about this. Her mother stayed silent.

  They were in the small room, once a study, that Sheila had insisted they turn into an examining room and storage area for medical supplies. Clamps, scalpels, forceps. Splints and bandages. Antibiotics to ward off infection, epinephrine in case of allergic reactions, rabies vaccine, gamma globulin. Pills for fever, for stomach disorders, for Megan’s migraine headaches, for whatever other treatable malady Sheila could think of.

  Nothing to treat a sluggish pulse and heart rate, though. Not until she knew what was causing it.

  “Diagnosis, doc?” Megan said lightly.

  Sheila shook her head. “I’m thinking we’ll have to pay a visit to Nyerere.”

  The hospital in Kigoma.

  “No need. I’m fine.”

  Sheila didn’t bother to argue. “Off with your shirt,” she said. “I want to listen to your lungs.”

  With a sh
rug, Megan unbuttoned her blouse. Slipped it off. Half turned to drape it across the table beside her. Turned back and gave her daughter a bright-eyed look, as if to say, “Can we get this over with?”

  But Sheila barely noticed. She was staring at the exposed skin between the bottom of her mother’s white bra and the top of her blue cotton pants. And trying to breathe.

  Megan’s belly was swollen, round, as if someone had surgically implanted an inverted bowl under her skin. Dead center in the swelling was a round black hole, perhaps a third of an inch across.

  Tumbu fly larva, Sheila thought. It must be a tumbu fly.

  Anyone who lived in tropical Africa for any length of time had encountered tumbu flies. The adults were innocuous, just one among a billion small winged creatures that infested the tropics. But they had a clever survival trick: They were parasites. And they used large mammals to host their young. Horses, cows, antelopes, and gazelles. Dogs.

  And humans.

  The eggs, laid on the ground or in wet laundry, would hatch into tiny larvae. As soon as one came into contact with a potential host, it would grab hold and then eat its way through the skin and into the flesh.

  It was a perfect home, the mammalian body. Warm, safe from predators, providing abundant food and moisture as the larva matured.

  The first sign of tumbu fly infection was usually a myiasis, a tumorlike swelling that indicated where the tunnel lay. A round opening in the skin, which the larva used as an airhole, confirmed the diagnosis.

  But tumbu fly myiases were tiny, since the larvae rarely exceeded a few centimeters in length. This swelling was different. Judging by the size of the swelling and the airhole, the larva within would have to be huge, a couple of inches long. The biggest Sheila had ever seen.

  As she watched, something wriggled just below the surface of her mother’s skin.

  “Sheila?”

  She raised her eyes. Megan was staring at her curiously.

  “Sheila, what’s wrong?”

  Sheila wet her lips, but still her voice was a croak when she spoke. “Mom,” she said, “why didn’t you tell me? You should have gone to the doctor days ago!”

  Megan blinked. “Tell you what?”

  Sheila ground her teeth so hard she could hear them. “This,” she said, pointing. “This!”

  Her mother’s gaze followed the direction of her finger. For a long moment she stared at her swollen belly, but when she lifted her head her face showed no comprehension.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  Sheila felt a kind of cold fear spread outward from her heart. But she had to set it aside. There would be time for more questions later. She had a job to do.

  “Well,” she said, “let’s get this thing out of you. I’d guess you’ve got an allergic reaction going on there, too. I’ll put you on prophylactic antibiotics and an antihistamine. The swelling should go down fast once it’s out.”

  Talking to herself, that was what she was doing. Her mother was simply staring at her, as if she hadn’t understood a word. There was definitely something strange about her eyes.

  Sheila stood, stepped over to the supply cabinet, found two ampules of lidocaine hydrochloride. The first she injected near the airhole, to anesthetize the area.

  “Don’t.”

  Surprised, Sheila glanced up into her mother’s face. Megan had always been a stoic. Once, though gray-faced from the pain of a broken arm, she hadn’t protested as Sheila had rigged a field splint, nor during the long, bumpy ride to the hospital.

  “Almost done,” Sheila said, trying but failing for the same light tone she used with her young patients. “Just sit still.”

  Megan said, “No. Please. Sheila.”

  Sheila wanted to put her hands over her ears. Without responding, she squirted the second dose of lidocaine through the airhole to calm down the larva. It was a lot easier to pull out a sleeping worm than a wriggling one.

  As the anesthetic sluiced into the burrow beneath the skin, she saw a flash of writhing white come to the surface of the airhole, then something black, and then white again.

  Her mother spoke no more. Nor did she make a sound when Sheila reached in with her sterilized thumb forceps, got hold of the larva, and slowly pulled it out of the hole.

  She could see at once that this grub came from no tumbu fly. Those were oblong, resembling white kidney beans.

  This larva, however, was two inches long, with an opalescent white body; big eyes like pearls made of onyx; soft, half-formed legs; and curved black mandibles. Even as she stared, it twisted its body into a U shape and, seemingly unaffected by the lidocaine, bit viciously at the end of the forceps.

  Sheila felt her heart thud against her ribs. Over the years, she’d evicted her share of scorpions from various bedrooms, bathrooms, and tents, often using forceps much like this one to transport them safely. She’d always marveled at the tensile strength of the armored creatures, an inherent will to survive that she both admired and feared.

  But she’d never felt anything like the strength that seemed to course through this writhing larva. It mashed away at the forceps with its powerful mandibles, creating a vibration that Sheila could feel through her fingers and all the way up into her forearm. Without thinking, she tightened her grip on the handle.

  And then, just like that, the larva died. Some grayish goo came out of its jaws, and suddenly it was just a limp wormy thing hanging from the forceps’ metal tips. A bitter smell filled the room.

  “Christ,” Sheila said. “Mom, what the hell is this?”

  But Megan didn’t respond with words, only with a low, guttural groan.

  Alarmed, Sheila looked up, but even as she did Megan’s eyes rolled up so only the silvery whites were showing. Her mouth stretched wide.

  Sheila had barely dropped the forceps and begun to reach out when her mother toppled sideways and fell to the floor.

  SEVEN

  Manhattan

  THERE WAS A big cockroach in Trey’s subway car, a water bug like the ones you see scattering from the light in the bathrooms of third-rate hotels all over the world. Not a native New Yorker—an invader of a species from the forests of Asia—but it didn’t seem to care. To a roach, one warm, dirty, food-rich environment is as good as another.

  Trey watched it scuttle over to investigate some sticky yellowish stuff, maybe spilled soda, on the orange plastic seat across the car from his. Tan in color, flat as something that had been stepped on, it looked alert, energetic, fully alive.

  And alien.

  Somewhere in our nervous system is an inherent belief that all other creatures are in some way like us, that we can relate to them, understand their thinking, get inside their heads. We make cats, dogs, parrots, even lizards human in our eyes, ascribing our emotions to our pets to justify the food, housing, and love we offer.

  But the truth is, if you got inside a cockroach’s head, you’d find plenty of nothing. No brain, no control tower for the central nervous system. In fact, if you decapitate a roach, it doesn’t die. It doesn’t even take a break from running around. True, it can’t see, but the only severe damage you’ve done is to deprive it of the ability to eat. A headless roach will live on until it starves to death.

  This is not a creature we can relate to, no matter how hard we try.

  The train pulled into the 81st Street station. As it jerked to a halt, the cockroach hustled across the seat and inserted itself into a crack that Trey doubted he could have slid a dime into. He got to his feet and saw, as he stepped out of the car, a young woman sit down right in front of where the roach was hiding.

  Most likely the bug was now going to hitch a ride home in the woman’s Coach bag or in a pocket of her North Face jacket or snuggled in the fleece lining of her Uggs.

  It was perfectly adapted to life in this big city.

  Certainly better adapted than he was.


  * * *

  “HEY, HAMLET,” JACK Parker said. “What are you pondering?”

  “Cockroaches,” Trey said.

  Jack stared at him for a moment. “Well,” he said, “you’re in the right building, the right floor, but the wrong office. Cockroaches are down the hall.”

  He laughed. “Cockroaches and the men who love them.”

  Jack was a senior scientific assistant in the Department of Entomology at the American Museum of Natural History. Short, squat, bearded, with a bald head and a barrel chest, he looked like a battering ram and had a personality to match.

  The two of them were sitting in Jack’s office on the fifth floor, where most of the museum’s staff scientists worked. Its anthropologists and paleontologists and ichthyologists and experts in biodiversity and extinction, all laboring away here, mostly hidden from the public.

  And entomologists, too. The people who studied insects, bugs, and spiders.

  There were more entomologists at the museum than scientists in any other field. This made sense, since at two million species (give or take thirty million), there were more insects, bugs, and spiders than all other creatures in the animal kingdom combined.

  “They should make a permanent exhibition about cockroaches,” Trey said.

  Jack growled. This was a sore subject for him.

  No visitor to the museum would realize the abundance—or importance—of entomology at a glance, since there wasn’t a single permanent exhibit anywhere in the public areas dedicated to bugs. Dinosaurs, of course. African mammals, sure. Meteors and gems and ancient peoples and even New York trees. But no cockroaches or butterflies or walking sticks or rhinoceros beetles. When it came to arthropods—insects and spiders, basically—no nothing.

  Jack had a simple theory about why this was: People were idiots.