The crucial problem facing any parasite is the health of the host upon which it feeds, whose substance it steals, and whose balance it upsets, because on the day that the host becomes a husk, sucked dry as dust, the parasite must be prepared to live on small bites bitten from itself, something the tapeworm may not be prepared to do but which the human worm has practiced its entire span, gnawing on the sweet knuckles of its young, cutting into small squares many of the members of its presumptive community.
Professor Skizzen was a fretter, he just couldn’t help himself, and if he was not fretting about this, he was fretting about that, because, in his experience, when things were looking their best, the worst would infallibly happen; thus it was that when he thought that the human race would come a cropper, a result it deserved and would be a boon for the earth, he fell to fretting that such a benevolent catastrophe might not occur, and if it did not, such a disaster would be, among dire consequences, the most dreadful injustice he could imagine.
Because Professor Skizzen, as he grew older and was more established in his work and community, found himself with increasingly large periods of time to spend as he pleased, he was now able to dream of improvising, while riffing the piano keys, a kind of music that would somnolize its listeners and render them serenely comatose until they quietly passed away from indolence and immobility, not having eaten any more of the earth’s provenance or ravaged another inch of its land or consumed, in their scurrying about, any additional portion of its minerals; but alas these lullabies were made of dream chords too immaterial even for angels to sound, and there was nothing to be done, not even in nightmare, to relieve the planet of its deadliest denizen — every man jack a ripper.
Justice was never served, so why shouldn’t the race of men get away with their crimes, since individuals did, more often than not, and the idea that ultimately each one of us paid the piper (by burning in hell if not through some type of anticipatory suffering) was no more than a comforting fiction promulgated by the same criminals who gave us God and the Holy Ghost and who offer us a few paintings of their Christ on the cross or one or two smug-faced Madonnas as proof that men are on balance better than weevils and have their hearts in the right place (see the Sistine Ceiling or Chartres in the moonlight) (contemplate the advance of science or our voyages to the stars); or, conversely, those who tell us that HIV is a man-made epidemic designed by puritans ashamed of our fleshly sins to get rid of us, ironically through the very copulations by which we come to be; and that this effort, when you view it from the right perspective, proves humans to be humane after all, and that they are trying their best to cleanse the world of their company before they do it irrevocable harm; but their best will not be good enough because hermits, honest priests, and ugly virgins shall survive; fat Adams, thin Eves, shall take up nakedness as nature’s way, and, although they will look round then and see the world gloriously alive and lush and orderly, warning erections will not prevent the opportunity, and the formerly chaste will fall to fornicating with a glee the world before has never entertained.
The Inhumanity Museum made Professor Skizzen think of death a great deal — no, rather, of the dead, of the dead in heaps, of the dead in holes, in the forks of trees, of bones in Catacombs, of a body left like the remains of a blown tire in the road, and how the body goes back to being a mere heap of stuff that might have some nutritional value to fungi. It made him think of bodies less alive than plant stems, less alive than leaves, or even streams, oak smoke, a breeze, except when the cavities are filled with little nibblefish, maggots, or a greedy eel, or when the body simply ascends as stench or turns into its underclothes; and he would now and then stand naked in front of the mirror in his bedroom door to wonder why he was standing there, why anything — his wardrobe, his bed — was there, why he was so thin and why he had let a beard appear — oh vanity! because he wanted to be thought idiosyncratic by his students — and why his hair was unkempt — oh vanity! because he wanted to be seen as quite a character on the campus; but so naked now he couldn’t look at everything that was shamelessly mirrored there disgracing any self he might have chosen as his public image; though in better moments he would argue that his reflection, apparently stripped of all subterfuge, was really a misleading appearance and not his real self, which was five foot eight and one hundred forty-two, muscular though not by much, absent his mirror’s identifying marks — for instance, the rough patch on his knee where he so often picked off scabs, and that small mole like a dot of dye on his chest — really bare of body hair and so utterly ordinary no attentions would be drawn to it even if it stood nude as a statue, loincloth unattached, in a public square.
The evidence initially pointed in the direction of human extinction, but biologists suggested that, although no one would admire what they had become, a few, the most adaptable to execrable conditions (with their claws, fangs, and double stomachs), would survive.
A virus is the best bet. However, there are billions of people. A few of them are bound to be, by sheer chance, immune.
CON. No true human will survive — if any of us do — by being reduced to a species, by becoming a scarcely remaining member of a class the way there are some salmon left; because out of our species has emerged the individual like a flower from a dung heap, the self blooming as a unique person should, valued for her singularity, the quality of her consciousness, the gifts of her genius. This is our extraordinary, our miraculous achievement; it is the legacy of the great Athenians. When a genuine individual dies, he or she is not replaced. Every day, the individual has to be achieved anew. Appeals to the collective would return us to the evolutionary fold. It is true that the individual cannot survive alone; but what he or she needs is the help of other individuals not more loud-mouthed members of mankind; rather the community of those who are fully aware of the world. What a dream it was to imagine the universal kingdom of ends. That, Professor Skizzen would whisper to himself, is the moral imperative. It is totally impossible to realize. So Man may survive, after all, but only as a flock, a pack, a horde.
PRO. But every snowflake is unique, it is alleged; every salmon, petal, pinch of dirt, is as different as Mondays in Montana, Tuesdays in Tucson, Wednesdays in Waco. Fingerprints, retinas, DNA: they distinguish us. Besides, we can find the world in a grain of sand.
CON. Phooey to that hooey. Those distinctions disappear whenever we vote. Each of us becomes a number. The belief that we are special — you and I and he and she — is revealed as an illusion. Two thousand six hundred twenty-nine died in the April storm. Mud slides buried thirty-five. Shot while sitting on the porch swing, seventeen this summer. That’s the norm, the average age of, the median for … Six miners were found alive. When the ferry capsized twenty-one Chevys drowned. Twenty-nine million cans of tuna were returned to have their engines tuned. Last year at this time he was batting.334. When Charlie died three people noticed and one cried. Most men have no more than six different sexual relationships during their erectile lives. The tornado caused 18 million dollars’ damage. Christmas sales are up. The lottery pays 60 mil to anyone holding ticket number 8210759364. That’s my phone number at work.