A bird louse under a microscope has no secrets; the light shining through its body makes it transparent—an X-ray of itself—the lens amplifying every motion of the dissecting needle so that what feels like the slightest movement to the hand controlling the needle can be as devastating to the specimen as a pile driver on an egg…. And this is what they are trying to do to me, Mohammed thought, peering through a microscope to remove the salivary gland of a louse. Its tiny corpse suspended in a clear drop of PBS, he held down its thorax with the point of one needle while he used another to gently pull away the black dot that was its head. The head off, he repositioned his dissecting needle on the last segment of the abdomen and gently pulled it away from the body, but not so fast that it detached from the internal organs, the cloudy filament that was its crop and other organs coming out of the body cavity as though he was drawing a long slimy snail from its shell. Escargot in an Algerian restaurant. He kept the needle moving, teasing out the intestines, yellowish Malpighian tubules—named after the illustrious Marcello Malpighi who first described them by looking through one of the first microscopes—uncoiling the way a frayed thread could be pulled from a sweater if the seamstress applies just enough tension to keep it coming but not so much that it breaks.
Gabe was supposed to have stopped their blood diet over the weekend. Empty digestive tracts would have made these dissections easier, but he could tell that they’d been sucking the blood from her parrots all week: this was the eighth louse in a row whose crop was as full as the bladder of a man fed on beer and so exerted pressure on the midgut, making it hard to get the chain of intestines to pull out without breaking—but finally there they were—as clean as a textbook photo—the two salivary glands he was really after, lying outside the broken body, their membranes intact. The glands glistened like a pair of minute dew- drops on the slide. Both were full of the saliva Jak would run his assays on.
Mouth parts connected to the foregut, he hummed; he and his fellow students at Simón Bolívar University had set the words to the merengue “Chupa Tu Mamey” to help them memorize lice anatomy—the foregut’s connected to the thoracic midgut, the thoracic midgut’s connected to the abdominal midgut, hindgut, Malpighian tubules, crop, and all the rest…. Even butchers understood that to take a body apart you had to know how it went together, but governments didn’t seem to bother with those niceties when it came to people. He transferred the salivary glands into a thimble-sized vial of PBS, snapped its plastic cap shut, labeled it, stuck it in the crushed ice along with the vials containing the glands he’d already removed.
His scratch pad told him that had been the 61st dissection he’d done that morning. Thanks to Gabe, the full crops were slowing him down. Normally, he would have been up around a hundred by lunch. But to be honest, he knew that he was probably slowing himself down by thinking so much about the FBI. They wanted to talk to him and instead of louse glands, he could think of nothing but what they might want to talk about. Was there some problem with his green card? Given the tightening net around Bottom Billion immigrants and the ever-smaller excuses needed to deport them, it could only be trouble. Was his name placed on some secret list? Because of something he had written? Or simply read?—the visits to his wall, the walls he visited, the merengues he liked, the pistachios from Iran that he bought at the local Arab market—the whole data cloud he generated creating a profile of him that was ‘suspicious’ according to whatever algorithm they used?...
A sense of dread came over him when he realized how many connections he had to the places where the U.S. had launched pop-up wars: when China, which held 95% of the world’s neodymium, stopped exporting neodymium, an element needed in hybrid cars, the U.S. launched swarms of drones to protect the few neodymium mines left in Vietnam, where his father worked. When Bolivia nationalized 93% of the world’s lithium—lithium needed in all those batteries in all those computers, iFlexes, and other electronic gadgets—the Bolivian dictator had ordered American companies to leave, which made not leaving a matter of national defense. And the U.S. began supporting indigenous insurgents in their struggle against the dictator—who also happened to have awarded an exclusive contract to mine lithium to the Chinese. (The enemy of my enemy is my friend.) Rather than fight the U.S. directly, China gave military aide to Venezuela, which came to the aide of the Bolivians.
Mohammed had been educated in Venezuela, which probably made him suspicious enough. But he had been born in Bahrain, and grew up there before he had to flee, and also exchanged emails with biologists from Congo, where the tantalum needed in capacitors had been ‘secured.’ Paraguay, Congo, Bolivia, Vietnam…. All the places that the bird lice they were studying came from had either had a pop-up war—or ‘policing action’ as they called it—or were threatened by one. While doing research in Paraguay, he had picked up some Guaraní—one of the reasons Olympia had picked him for her research group.
Was he following the wars or were the wars following him? Maybe something he wrote had popped a flag in one of those programs that trolled millions of emails, looking for points of contingency, linking an Eid greeting he had sent to a colleague in the Congo who had e-mailed a field researcher in Pakistan who had a cousin in London who had emailed an uncle in Lahore, who had a nephew who had once sold a car that had later been filled with cans of gasoline and bags of nails, wired to a cell phone and left in a crowded market. Zero degrees of separation. Everyone in the world was that close to everyone else, the software said, doing millions of comparisons to offer up a list of ‘people of interest’ as they referred to him the time he was stopped at the airport, his profile—a Muslim, Venezuelan speaker of Guaraní with access to biolab equipment—calling to them like a siren.
He wiped the louse remains off the slide to prepare the next set, using the hand aspirator to deposit 8 drops of PBS on the slide, 8 drops to hold the bodies of 8 lice.
Then he paused mid-reach….
Above his workstation was a picture of his wife. Dressed in black, she stood out starkly against the vast, white plain of the Salar de Uyuni, a salt flat in Bolivia that was now secured by swarms of U.S. drones. She was smiling for the camera, the two of them postdocs on a weekend getaway. She could have been standing at the South Pole if she wasn’t wearing a summer-thin hijab for the heat, the salt flats that they’d gone to see white and flat to the horizon behind her. Little did they know that in a few years it would become a battleground.