Julia Elliott - The Wilds

Each patient was between the ages of twelve and fourteen, and therefore in the early stages of puberty. Sixty percent of them kept pet cats. According to family members, their comatose states had been preceded by an increasing obsession with video games, Internet pornography, or social-networking sites — screen-addicted behaviors not uncommon among their demographic. This was accompanied by social withdrawal and changing feeding habits, an intensifying distaste for sunlight and fresh foods, and a voracious appetite for junk food high in chemical additives—“chips, candies, and other knickknacks,” as one distressed mother had put it.

The parents of infected patients had been difficult for Beth to deal with, hailing, as they mostly did, from small Southern towns and reminding her of her own parents with their bad diets, paranoid religious ideation, and right-wing political affiliation. In an hour she would talk to the ID specialist. Over coffee in the hospital cafeteria, they would discuss strategies for persuading parents to let them conduct MRI scans that, while helping them understand more about the organism, would not necessarily lead to any breakthrough treatments. What Beth really needed was not a cartoon brain pulsing on a computer screen, its amygdalae lit up with fluorescent red cysts. She itched to perform craniotomy biopsies, to suck tissue from the cysts and observe the mysterious bradyzoites under an atomic-force microscope.

When a GEICO commercial came on, the one with the talking lizard, she shuddered, for she’d hated lizards ever since she’d stepped on one as a child. Feeling the crunch of its frail skeleton under her bare foot, she’d screamed as though burned. Now she punched the remote until she landed on the Weather Channel. She lay in bed for another minute, watching a Doppler radar image of Hurricane Anastasia sweep toward the Gulf Coast.

Jenny stared out at a green wall of rain. The only sheltered place to smoke outside was the carport, and she felt exposed before the double-pane eyes of neighboring ranch homes. No health-conscious middle-aged woman in her right mind would smoke cancer sticks. But her husband was 7,337 miles away, and there she was, sucking another one down as Anastasia’s rain shields enveloped South Carolina in a sultry monsoon. Whenever hurricane season hit, there was a sense of foreboding on the Internet. Many sibyl.com seekers inquired about global warming, wondering if Homo sapiens’ unchecked ecological plundering was finally building up to a karmic bite in the ass. In the hinterlands of the Internet, on poorly designed websites with flashy fonts and bad grammar, the more hysterical demographics chattered about the Rapture and the reptilian elite.

Unable to sleep the previous night and clocking in on Sibyl to earn a few extra bucks, Jenny had noticed, as she always did when working during the wee hours, a delirious urgency in the questioning:

Do rh negative people have reptile blood or do they descend from the nephilim?

I have twelve fibroids in my uterus and wander can I get pregnant?

My boy got an Aztec sun god tattoo is he mixed up with the Mexican Mafia?

So when she encountered her first question about T. hermeticus early the next morning, she assumed it was another phantom from the shadowlands of insomnia.

A girl I know said there was a bug that can get in your head and make you hooked to your computer screen. What is this thing?

Google searches yielded low-budget sci-fi movies and clusters of conspiracy sites, but then, nestled within the wing-nut comment boards and glib blogs of camp-cinema enthusiasts was a PDF file on the Stanley Medical Research Institute site, an article describing the species variation and its relevance to T. gondii schizophrenia research. At the time of publication, only two cases of toxoplasmosis via T. hermeticus had been documented, but the behavior of the two hospitalized teen hosts was similar: withdrawal from physical reality, computer- and television-screen addiction, the unbridled consumption of junk food. And both teens had suffered comas resulting from toxic-metabolic encephalopathy.

Jenny’s stomach flipped. Her heart beat faster. She did not run to the den, where her son was camped with a pile of Xbox discs he’d swapped with friends. She walked purposefully and slowly, like a killer in a horror film, into the kitchen and down the steps. This time she didn’t knock first. She pushed the door open and stepped into the atmosphere . But her son was not there.

A screenshot from his paused video game showed his Dose avatar frozen in midfrenzy, clutching a pill bottle and spilling capsules as he struggled to get the right drug into his system. The game was sinister and funny at once. The main character, suffering from a variety of behavioral, psychological, and physical issues, was constantly in danger of malfunctioning. He had to be kept on track with the right pharmaceuticals. The player could consult the electronic pharmacopoeia built into the game, but the character quickly melted down, sank into unconsciousness, or became otherwise unstable, so a good working knowledge of contemporary medical drugs was required to play the game well. In this particular shot the character was very thin, with bulging eyes and a comic goiter.

“Adam,” Jenny called, thinking he might be in the half bath.

No answer, but at least he wasn’t huddled close to the media screen. She did notice an obscene amount of discarded junk-food packaging littering the floor: chip bags and plastic cookie trays, flattened cartons and half-crushed cans. Walking deeper into the atmosphere , she felt heart palpitations and a shortening of breath. She picked up a Doritos bag and read the ingredients: MSG, at least three artificial colors, and a lengthy list of unwholesome compounds, such as disodium inosinate.

“What are you doing?” The voice was mocking, croaky from its recent change.

Her son stood just inside the open sliding glass door, the insulated drapery jerked open, rain falling in the blurred green depths of the backyard. She wondered if he’d been out there smoking something, huffing something, popping some newfangled multiple-use product of the medical-industrial complex.

“Shut the door,” she said. “The air conditioner’s on.”

As he lurched toward her, she worried about his posture (was he developing curvature of the spine?), his teeth (would failure to provide braces lead to social ostracism and poor employment opportunities?), his sexuality (would he catch an STD?), and his attention span (when was the last time he read a book?). The Internet was crawling with sexual predators. Teens were gobbling salvia, guzzling Robitussin, snorting Adderall. A gonorrhea superbug was developing resistance to antibiotics.

“You need to pick up after yourself,” she said.

A fresh crop of pustules had erupted on his nose, which had recently grown too big for his face, though he had the elfin features of boyhood. She could almost see him wrapping his arms around her legs. Could still picture him riding on his father’s shoulders. He was too big for these things now, of course. His unwashed hair was brushed absurdly forward, almost obscuring his eyes, which looked unnaturally shiny.

“Right,” he said. She couldn’t tell if the word seethed with sarcasm or if it was a simple acknowledgment of the truth of her statement.

“You need to eat a decent breakfast. Some fruit. Some whole-grain cereal.”

He rolled his eyes and grinned like a gargoyle. Yes, she thought, he had to have braces, which would cost at least $5,000.

“I already ate,” he said.

“What did you have?”