Peeps

Chapter 16

THE WEALTHY DISEASE

Some more thoughts on the goodness of parasites …

Meet Crohn’s disease, a nasty ailment of the digestive system. It gives you the runs and causes severe pain in your stomach, and there’s no known way to cure it. No matter what foods you eat, the pain of Crohn’s won’t stop. The disease keeps its victims awake night after night and is strong enough to drive many into a deep depression.

People who get Crohn’s often suffer their entire lives. The symptoms may go away for a few years but invariably return in all their destructive glory. There is no escape.

So what kind of parasite causes Crohn’s?

Hah, fooled you! Unlike all the other diseases in this book, Crohn’s is not caused by parasites. Quite the opposite. It is probably caused by the absence of parasites.

Say what now? Well, no one knows for sure, but here’s what some scientists have noticed:

Crohn’s disease didn’t exist before the 1930s, when members of a few wealthy families in New York City got it. As time passed, the disease spread to the rest of the United States. It always started in rich neighborhoods first, only making its way into the bad parts of town much later. It took until the 1970s to reach the poorest parts of our country.

These days, Crohn’s is on the march across the world. In the 1980s, it appeared in Japan, just when a lot of Japanese were starting to get really rich. Lately it’s been making its way through South Korea, in the wake of that country’s economic boom.

And guess what? It still doesn’t exist anywhere in the third world. Poor people never get Crohn’s disease. And this has led many scientists to think that Crohn’s results from the most common sign of a rich society: clean water.

That’s right: clean water.

You see, most of the invaders of our guts come from dirty water. If you drink clean water your whole life, you’ll have a lot fewer parasites. But that can actually be a problem. Your immune system has evolved to expect parasites in your stomach. And when no parasites show up, your immune defenses can get kind of … twitchy. Sort of like a night watchman with nothing to do, drinking too much coffee and cleaning his gun again and again.

So when your twitchy, understimulated immune system detects the slightest little stomach bug, it launches into emergency mode and goes looking for a hookworm to kill. Unfortunately, there are no hookworms inside you, because your water supply is cleaner than at any time in human history. (Which you thought was a good thing.)

But your immune defenses have to do something, so they attack your digestive system, tearing it to pieces.

Lucky you.

We humans have lived with our parasites for a long time, evolving alongside them, walking hand in hand down the generations. So maybe it’s not surprising that when we get rid of them all at once, strange things happen. Our bodies freak out in the absence of our little friends.

So the next time you’re eating a rare steak and start worrying about parasites, just remember: All those worms and worts and other little creatures trying to wriggle down your throat can’t be all bad.

They’ve been making us their home for a long, long time.

Chapter 17

TROUBLE IN BROOKLYN

On the way home, I bought bacon.

The gnawing in my stomach was reaching critical proportions, my body crying out for meat to keep the parasite happy. One thing about being a carrier. Saving the world from mutant felines is no excuse for missing meals.

I put a can of tuna in front of Cornelius, then headed straight for the stove and set it alight. Then I shut the gas off, sniffing the air.

Something was different about my apartment.

Then I realized what it was—the smell of Lace all around me. She’d slept here, filling the place like a slow infusion.

My parasite growled with hunger and lust, and I hurriedly relit the stove, working until my largest di

The first piece was halfway into my mouth when keys jingled in the door. Lace burst through, dropping her backpack to the floor.

“Excellent smell, dude,” she said.

For a second, I forgot to eat, a piece of bacon hovering in midair. Her face was lit up with happiness, so different than it had been the night before. An almost orgasmic look of contentment came over her as she breathed in the scent of bacon.

“What?” she said, meeting my dorky stare with a raised eyebrow.

“Um, nothing. Want some?” I pushed the bacon into the center of the table, then remembered the vegetarian thing and pulled it back. “Oh, right. Sorry.”

“Hey, no problem.” She put down her backpack. “I’m not a vegan or anything.”

“Um, Lace, this is bacon. That’s not a judgment call on the plant-or-animal issue.”

“Thanks for the biology lesson. But like I said, it smells good, and I’m going to enjoy it.” She sat down across from me.

I smiled. On the excellent-smell front, Lace’s scent was much more powerful in person. I let myself breathe it in, carefully sampling it in between bites. I had expected her staying in my apartment to be torture every minute, but maybe it was worth fighting my urges, just for this simple pleasure.

Still, I ate fast to keep the beast in check.

“So,” I asked, “are you one of those fake vegetarians?”

“No, not fake. I haven’t eaten meat in, like, a year?” She frowned at the plate of seared flesh and dumped a tub of potato salad and a brand-new toothbrush onto the table from a paper bag. “But the whole vampire thing has been very stressful, and that smell is comforting, like Mom cooking up a big breakfast. It takes me back.”

“That’s natural. When humans were evolving, the smelling part of our monkey brains got assigned to the task of remembering stuff. So our memories get all tangled up with smells.”

“Huh,” she said. “Is that why locker rooms make me think of high school?”

I nodded, recalling my descent under the exhaust towers, how powerfully the scent of the huge hidden thing had affected me. Maybe I’d never smelled anything like the beast before the day before, but some fears went deeper than memory. As deep as the parasite’s traces hidden in my marrow.

Evolution is a wonderful thing. Somewhere back in prehistoric time, there were probably humans who actually liked the smell of lions, tigers, or bears. But those humans tended to get eaten, and so did their kids. You and I are descended from folks who ran like hell when they smelled predators.

Lace had opened her tub of potato salad and was digging in with a plastic deli fork. After a few bites, she said, “So, what’s with the face?”

“Oh, this.” I touched the bandage gingerly. “Remember how I warned you about cats?”

Lace nodded.

“Well, I went down into the Underworld through your swimming pool this afternoon. And I managed to catch… Um, what’s wrong?”

Lace looked like she’d bitten down on a cockroach. She blinked, then shook her head. “Sorry, Cal. But are you wearing a Garth Brooks T-shirt?”

I glanced down at my chest. Through the muck and puckered claw marks, his smiling face looked back at me. I’d been too hungry coming in to take a shower or even change my shirt. “Uh, yes, it is.”

“Ashlee Simpson, and now Garth Brooks?”

“It’s not what you think. It’s really more sort of… protection.”

“From what? Getting laid?”

I coughed, bits of bacon lodging in my throat, but I managed to swallow them. “Well, it has to do with the parasite.”

“Sure, it does, Cal. Everything’s about the parasite.”

“No, really. There’s this thing that happens to peeps: They hate all the stuff they used to love.”