Peeps

“Didn’t have a clue,” she said, and rang a small, high-pitched bell on her desk. Somewhere out of sight but within earshot, a minder tapped away at a computer keyboard. A moment later, the printer on my side of the red line began to hum, its cartridge jerking to life below the plastic cover.

“This was recently brought to my attention, Cal. Now that you’ve dealt with Sarah, I thought you might want to see it.”

I stood and went to the printer and lifted with trembling fingers the warm piece of paper that slid into its tray. It was a sca

Dick’s Bar Is Back in Business!

— Seven Days a Week—

The Health Department Couldn’t Keep Us Down!

*The One and Only Home of the Bahamalama-Dingdong*

Dr. Prolix watched me read it, steepling her fingers again.

“Feeling thirsty?” she asked.

Chapter 4

TOXOPLASMA

Flip a coin. Tails? Relax.

Heads? You’ve got parasites in your brain.

That’s right. Half of us carry the Toxoplasma gondii parasite. But don’t reach for the power drill just yet.

Toxoplasma is microscopic. Human immune systems usually kick its ass, so if you’ve got it, you’ll probably never even know. In fact, toxoplasma doesn’t even want to be in your head. Trapped inside your thick skull, under assault by your immune defenses, it can’t lay eggs, which is a big evolutionary Game Over.

Toxoplasma would much rather live in your cat’s digestive system, eating cat food and laying eggs. Then, when kitty takes a crap, these eggs wind up on the ground, waiting for other scurrying creatures. Like, say, rats.

A quick word about rats: They’re basically parasite subway trains, carrying them from place to place. In my job, we call this being a vector. Rats go everywhere in the world, and they breed like crazy. Catching a ride on the Rat Express is a major way that diseases have evolved to spread themselves.

When toxoplasma gets into a rat, the parasite starts to make changes to its host’s brain. If a normal rat bumps into something that smells like a cat, it freaks out and runs away. But toxoplasma-infected rats actually like the smell of cats. Kitty pee makes them curious. They’ll explore for hours trying to find the source.

Which is a cat. Which eats them.

And that makes toxoplasma happy, because toxoplasma really, really wants to live in the stomach of a cat.

Parasite geeks have a phrase for what cats are to toxoplasma: the “final host.”

A final host is the place where a parasite can live happily ever after, getting free food, having lots of babies. Most parasites live in more than one kind of animal, but they’re all trying to reach their final host, the ultimate vector … parasite heaven.

Toxoplasma uses mind control to get to its heaven. It makes the rat want to go looking for cats and get eaten. Spooky, huh?

But nothing like that would work on us humans, right?

Well, maybe. No one’s really sure what toxoplasma does to human beings. But when researchers collected a bunch of people with and without toxoplasma, gave them personality tests, observed their habits, and interviewed their friends, this is what they learned:

Men infected with toxoplasma don’t shave every day, don’t wear ties too much, and don’t like following social rules. Women infected with toxoplasma like to spend money on clothes, and they tend to have lots of friends. The rest of us think they’re more attractive than non-infected women. In general, the researchers found that infected people are more interesting to be around.

On the other hand, people without toxoplasma in their brains like following the rules. If you lend them money, they’re more likely to pay you back. They show up for work on time. The men get into fewer fights. The women have fewer boyfriends.

Could this be toxoplasma mind control?

But that’s just too weird, isn’t it? There has to be another explanation.

Maybe some people always hated getting to work on time, and they like having felines around because cats wouldn’t go to work on time either, if they had any work to go to. These people adopted cats and then got toxoplasma.

Maybe the other half of humanity, the ones who enjoy following the rules, usually get dogs. Fetch. Sit. Stay. So, their brains stay toxoplasma-free.

Maybe these are two kinds of people who were already different.

Or maybe not.

That’s the thing about parasites: It’s hard to tell if they’re the chicken or the egg. Maybe we’re all really robots, walking around doing the bidding of our parasites. Just like those hungry, twitching snails …

Do you really love your cat? Or is the toxoplasma in your head telling you to take care of kitty, its final host, so that one day it too will reach parasite heaven?

Chapter 5

BAHAMALAMA-DINGDONG

Dick’s Bar hadn’t changed all that much, but I had.

It wasn’t just my superpowers. I was older, wiser, and had lived in New York for just over a year now. I had grown-up eyes.

It turned out that Dick’s Bar didn’t get a lot of female patronage. Not much at all. Just a lot of guys playing pool in their leather chaps, drinking beer and swigging the occasional Jell-O shot, listening to a mix of country and classic disco. A typical West Village bar.

It was a relief, really. I could hang out here without having to stare into my drink, trying to avoid contact with any hot girls. Even better, any woman who was a regular would stick out like a banana in a highball glass. Surely someone would remember a tall, pale-ski

“Drink?” the bartender asked.

I nodded. A little stimulus for my fugitive memories wouldn’t hurt.

“A Bahamalama-Dingdong, please.”

The bartender raised an eyebrow, then turned to ring a bell over the bar. A few guys playing pool in the back chuckled, and something dislodged itself from the cloudy sky of memories inside my head.

Ding! said my brain, as I recalled that whenever anyone ordered a Bahamalama-Dingdong, they rang a special bell. Hence the “dingdong” part of the name.

Well, partly. I watched the bartender take a banana from the freezer. He put it in a tall highball glass and poured rum over it, then mystery juice from a plastic container marked BID, and finally a careful layer of red liqueur across the top. I detected a scent like cough medicine rising up.

“Nassau Royale?” I asked.

The bartender nodded. “Yeah. Do I remember you?”

“You mean, from before the Health Department shut you down?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said. “You don’t look so familiar, though.”

I nodded. “I’ve only been here once, actually. But I had a friend who used to come all the time. Named Morgan?”

“Morgan?”

“Yeah. Tall, dark hair, pale skin. Black dresses. Kind of gothy?”

Pause. “A woman?”

“Yeah.”

He shook his head. “Not ringing a bell. You sure you got the right place?”

I looked down at the Bahamalama-Dingdong, the Nassau Royale-stained banana looking back at me like a bloodshot eye, and took a sip. Tropical fruit sweetness poured over my tongue, textured by strips of rind shedding from the frozen banana. That night of more than a year before began to flood back into my mind, carried on pineapples and the burnt taste of dark rum.

“I’m positive,” I said.

There wasn’t much to do but get drunk.

The bartender asked around, but no one remembered Morgan or even vaguely recalled a gothlike woman who had hung out here in the old days. Maybe, like me, she’d randomly wandered in off the street that night.