M. Hanover - Unclean Spirits

“I was an English major, when I was anything,” I said. “If Shakespeare wrote a sonnet about it, I might have run into it. Otherwise, no.”

“It’s a really cool organism,” he said. “Pretty much the classic example of parasitic mind control.”

“Parasitic mind control?” I said. My flesh crawled a little.

“In mammals at least. There are some pretty great ones for insects and mollusks too, but if you want to play with hosts that have spinal cords, T. gondii is the best game in town.”

Aubrey’s eyes were bright, and he leaned forward over the steering wheel as he spoke. Enthusiasm made him seem younger than he was. I kind of wished he was getting jazzed about something with a lower ick factor, but as he went on, the urge to wash my hands lessened a little and I found myself getting interested.

“It usually lives in a cat’s intestinal tract,” he said. “We call the cat the final host. It’s where the organism really wants to be.”

“So what does it do to the cat’s mind?” I asked.

“Nothing. Zip. Nada. But there’s a middle part. In order to get from one cat to another, it passes through mice. So the first step is to go from the inside of a cat to the inside of a mouse.”

“And you do that by…?” I asked just a heartbeat before I figured it out. I made a face. “We’re about to talk about mice eating cat poop, aren’t we?”

“Well, yeah,” he said. I weighed whether to change the subject back to mystical assassins and my recent slaughter thereof, and reluctantly decided to stay with the poop-eating mice. We paused at a red light. Two homeless men passed beside the car, faces flushed with the heat.

“The thing that’s interesting is what happens once it’s inside the mouse,” Aubrey continued. “Normally, mice avoid anyplace that smells like a cat’s living there. Just good sense. But infect a mouse with T. gondii, and it isn’t afraid anymore. In fact, it starts liking the smell. The infected mouse starts hanging out where cats are more likely to be. Good for the cat, because it’s more likely to get a meal. Good for the parasite. It can get into a fresh host. Lousy for the mouse.”

“Okay, that’s the creepiest thing ever,” I said. “I think I get it, though. That’s like riders. The things that are inside Coin? And the ones we killed last night?”

The light turned green. Traffic started moving.

“Some riders can be like that, yeah,” Aubrey said. “I don’t think the Invisible College ones are quite that flavor. But there are also a lot of riders that will just hang out in the back of someone’s mind and… change them. You know?”

“The way your amoeba thing changes mice,” I said.

“Actually, the way it changes people. T. gondii infects humans too. People with the cysts in their brain suffer mild disinhibitions. Men become more prone to violence.”

“And women?”

Aubrey glanced over at me and then back at the road.

“Sex,” he said. “It makes women more affectionate and prone to…ah…”

“Get prone?” I suggested. A green sedan cut in front of us. Aubrey swore, hitting the brakes and his horn at the same time. I took the opportunity to switch subjects.

“So Eric read your paper and tracked you down?”

“Yeah,” Aubrey said. He seemed relieved not to be talking about sex. I wasn’t sure whether I was or not. “He was working on an idea about riders. See, there are some things about riders that look a lot like biological agents. And then there are things that really just don’t. What we were doing was sort of reverse-engineering riders. Figuring out what kinds of constraints are on them from the way they act.”

“Hey, that was Stout,” I said, pointing back at the street sign we’d just passed.

“It’s a one-way. They all are downtown. We’ll go down Champa and turn around.”

“Okay,” I said. “Sorry. You were saying? Reverse engineering something?”

“Yeah, like cicadas. Did you know cicadas have prime-numbered cycles?”

“I did hear about that, yeah,” I said. “Something about staying away from things that eat them, right?”

“That’s the theory. If the cicadas are trying to avoid a predator with a five-year cycle, they develop a thirteen-year period and only coincide with the predator every sixty-five years.”

“Okay,” I said. I was getting a little lost, but I didn’t want Aubrey to think I was stupid. “So what’s the five-year predator?”

“There isn’t one,” he said. “At least not now. But that the prime numbers show up suggests that there was one, even if it’s already gone extinct. So when primes show up in riders, maybe it’s because there’s something out there that they’re avoiding. The Invisible College is actually a good example of that. They have this ceremony every seven years. Why seven?”

“Because it’s a prime, and they’re avoiding something?” I said.

“Maybe, yeah. Or then again, maybe because there are seven wandering stars,” Aubrey said. “Or because God made the world in seven days. Or there are supposed to be seven categories of the soul. It’s hard to know what kinds of rules actually apply. Eric wasn’t about to let any good hypothesis go untested, though. Here, this is Seventeenth Street. I’m going to grab that space and we can walk from here.”

“Sounds good,” I said, noticing for no good reason that seventeen was a prime. I got out of the minivan, stepping into the beating sun. I felt a little light-headed, but whether it was the conversation or the altitude or just the spiritual jet lag that my utterly transformed life brought on, I couldn’t say. Aubrey came up at my side, his fingertips brushing my arm. I let him lead me across the street.

“Eric thought if we could figure out how riders changed people, we could make a better guess at what they wanted. What their agenda was.”

“Midian said they’re an infection,” I said.

“Midian has some simplistic ideas about infection,” Aubrey said.

The bank was down a very short block. As if we’d agreed on it, Aubrey and I dropped the subjects of parasites and spirits when we entered the dry, cool desert of the financial world. The lawyer had given me the name of the woman to ask for when I got to the desk. I expected to be put in one of the little wood-grain cubicle offices that competed for space with the line of tellers, but instead Aubrey and I were escorted to an elevator, and then up to a plush private office where I presented my paperwork, signed theirs, and was given access to the first of Eric’s cash accounts. They promised me an ATM card in about a week. Just to see if I could, I withdrew ten thousand dollars in cash. The woman didn’t blink.

“Dinner’s on me,” I said as we walked back out onto the street. Aubrey looked stunned.

“It really is,” he said.

There were other banks and more paperwork, but I put them aside. My hands kept finding their way to the keys for the storage units, fidgeting with them. Whatever I was getting into, I now had enough money in my name to do whatever needed doing. Aubrey was oddly quiet as we walked, and I took the chance to pull out the MapQuest printouts and see which of my next stops looked closest. I didn’t realize how much the August heat had been pressing on me until Aubrey started up the car and the first blast of the air conditioner hit my skin.

“Okay,” I said. “This one’s on Eighteenth Street. That should be pretty close, right?”

“What? Oh. Yeah, that’s over by the Children’s Hospital. We could almost walk to that.”

“Let’s drive anyway,” I said. And then, “Hey, are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” Aubrey said. “I just…Eric and I never talked about money. I didn’t know that he was in that kind of tax bracket.”