Grasshopper Jungle (26 page)

In 1961, which was the year after my father, Eric Andrew Szerba, was born, McKeon Industries moved into its main plant, the one that recently shut down in Ealing. At the new facility, Dr. Grady McKeon unveiled the redesigned company symbol.

The Great Seal of McKeon Industries looked like something you might find in an Ayn Rand novel.

Ayn Rand was an author who had no books at all on the shelves of Dr. Grady McKeon's library in Eden.

The new symbol for McKeon Industries depicted a gigantic woman, sitting calmly with her legs folded beneath her, apparently gazing out from her two-hundred-foot-high face upon the beautiful and fruitful fields of Iowa. She had an expression like she had just swallowed some blue kayaks.

They would have naturally been full-sized kayaks, since the woman was as tall as an oil derrick.

Arranged before her bare knees (she was wearing a modestly styled dress that adequately covered her perfect thighs), like a child's toys at Christmas, were hand-sized factories with smokestacks, a gleaming and modern steel locomotive, and, for whatever reason, a trio of bare-chested men in overalls working behind what looked like yoked teams of oxen.

Ahead of the unnaturally enormous woman, perfect rows of sequoia-sized cornstalks grew, stretching off forever into the Iowa horizon. And inscribed around the curving edge at the bottom of the McKeon Seal were the words:

INFINITA FRUMENTA! INFINITA FRUMENTA!

Infinita frumenta!
is Latin for Unstoppable Corn! or some shit like that.

You could pretty much put anything you wanted to in Latin at the bottom of a picture and people in Iowa would either beat you up, or think you were a messenger from God.

Dr. Grady McKeon believed he was God.

He preached the gospel of
infinita frumenta
.

History provides evidence that
infinita frumenta
made Dr. Grady McKeon one of the Cold War's largest profiteers. His success entirely resulted from an accident of nature.

In Reel Two of
Eden Orientation Series
, Dr. Grady McKeon narrated from off-camera as we saw clips of hardworking scientists in perfectly clean white lab coats, while they peered into microscopes and tilted their cigarettes with smirking intelligence and engaged in academic discussions with one another.

Scientists loved a good smoke back in the 1960s.

There were also ashtrays built in to the armrests of the Eden theater. When Robby and I saw those smart, hardworking scientists lighting up their
fags
, we couldn't resist the urge to join them.

It was our duty to smoke along with the
Eden Orientation Series
.

“Ahhh . . . ,” I said, after I took a drag.

“Ahhh . . . ,” Robby said.

In the 1960s,
infinita frumenta
meant that McKeon Industries was working toward the development of corn plants that could not be eaten by insects.

Unstoppable Corn.

Like smoking cigarettes on the job, they probably thought Unstoppable Corn was a good idea at the time.

Scientists working for Dr. Grady McKeon experimented with corn.

I know that's an oddly funny thing to say, and I may have to strike that line from my history book, but that's what they did.

They
experimented
with corn.

Scientists at McKeon Industries, like Robby Brees and I, had no idea what the results of their experiment would be, but they did it anyway.

Dr. Grady McKeon and his colleagues attempted to blend genetic material from the semen of grasshoppers into the pollen from corn plants.

Pollen is plant sperm.

It was not a good idea.

The corn they produced from their plant-sperm-and-grasshopper-semen experiment was lively and strong. It was also true that, as hoped, bugs would not eat it. It was unstoppable. Dr. Grady McKeon was very happy. His company's stock was worth an incalculable fortune.

Fortune is also an odd word.

Unfortunately, the corn that was produced by the plant-sperm-and-grasshopper-semen experiment at McKeon Industries also caused an undesirable side effect in teenage boys: Their balls dissolved.

Testicular dissolution among developing adolescent males, is how Dr. Grady McKeon described it.

That sounded nicer.

If a doctor told me, “You are merely experiencing testicular dissolution,” it would not frighten me nearly as much as if he said, “Your balls are going to dissolve, Austin.”

Actually, the scientists from McKeon Industries at first concluded that their Unstoppable Corn only caused boys undergoing puberty to have their balls dissolve. That was because the slightest amount of Unstoppable Corn affected adolescent boys that way. Ultimately it was discovered that Unstoppable Corn would pretty much dissolve anyone's balls if you ate enough of it, and if you also had balls.

Enough of it turned out to be about an ear and a half.

The corn that was harvested in all the McKeon farms across Iowa that year was shipped as a goodwill gesture from the United States of America to the people of Canada.

That was the end of Reel Two.

Robby and I both squirmed at the thought of eating some of the McKeon plant-sperm-and-grasshopper-semen corn. We also felt sorry for Canada.

“I am
never
eating anything with corn in it again,” Robby said.

“Do they even
make
food that doesn't have corn in it in Iowa?” Shann asked.

“Uh,” Robby said.

I wondered, “Did Dr. Grady McKeon ever get married?”

“It seems like he probably practiced breeding a lot,” Robby said.

“He never was married,” Shann answered.

“Maybe he ate some of his own corn,” I suggested.

“I need a cigarette,” Robby said.

We found out later that Dr. Grady McKeon, indeed, did not eat his own corn and experience testicular dissolution. You will see.

INFINITA FRUMENTA! INFINITA FRUMENTA!

REEL THREE, WHICH
was the final part of the film we saw that night, ended on a cliffhanger.

Dr. Grady McKeon's
Eden Orientation Series
Part Three
was a true corker.

At the end of it, all I could say at first was, “Holy shit.”

Robby said, “Holy shit.”

Here is what happened in Reel Three:

Fortunately for Dr. Grady McKeon and his company, it turned out that during the 1960s anything that could look like corn
and
make your balls dissolve was of tremendous interest to the Department of Defense. McKeon Industries received its first of many lucrative contracts to develop Unstoppable Weapons and, later, Unstoppable Soldiers.

That was how the six-foot-tall, tooth-armed mantises that were more powerful than grizzly bears came about. But that was through an accident of nature, too.

By 1965, McKeon Industries employed 2,700 people in Ealing, Iowa.

In 1965, Ealing, Iowa, was a Cold War boomtown.

That year, my father, Eric Andrew Szerba, who had been baptized in the Catholic Church, enrolled in kindergarten.

After the mishap with the grasshopper-semen-and-plant-sperm experiment, McKeon Industries went to work on a variety of theoretical methods aimed at stopping the global spread of Communism. There were multiple units within the scientific department at McKeon Industries, each of which was developing its own creative anti-Communist ideas.

One of the units worked with the Unstoppable Corn material. In that particular lab, scientists attempted to invent some type of delivery system that would result in the testicular dissolution of enemy armies.

Nobody would ever take an army of Communists without balls seriously.

Another of the units worked on a human replication project. It was a first attempt to actually clone soldiers. That was where the human head, penis, and the praying hands in the jars came from. Robby and I found those when we broke into Johnny McKeon's office the night we climbed up on the roof at Grasshopper Jungle. The Human Replication Unit was also where the little two-headed boy was created.

We found this out later.

Reel Three of
Eden Orientation Series
involved Robby and me in ways we never anticipated.

This was how it happened:

The film showed how the Unstoppable Corn lab team had been extracting cellular material from crop yields that had been stored in a silo on one of the remaining McKeon Industries Unstoppable Corn farms.

Their goal was to dissolve Russian balls around the world.

Later, I did find out by researching archived records in Eden that President Richard Nixon also brought some of Dr. Grady McKeon's Unstoppable Corn to China as a gift. In what was called Eden's
Brain Room
, I discovered a black-and-white photograph that showed the prime minister of China, a man whose name was Chou En-lai, eating some of Dr. Grady McKeon's Unstoppable Corn while the president of the United States of America looked on and smiled warmly.

Prime Minister Chou En-lai's balls dissolved.

When the Unstoppable Corn team began off-loading silos of Unstoppable Corn in Iowa, they discovered the corn, when decaying, produced a new variety of mold that they had never seen before. They had never seen it before because the mold was an accident of nature. The mold gave off a blue photoluminescent glow.

This second accident of nature became known as
Plague Strain 412E
.

There was no significance to the
412E
part of the name. The marketing division of McKeon Industries believed the name sounded good for a sales pitch to the Defense Department, as though it came about after hundreds of trials and tests. In reality,
412E
was just an accident of nature that occurred when scientists attempted to splice together the genetic material from grasshopper semen with plant sperm and fertilize corn with it.

Scientists at McKeon Industries took the mold into their labs, where they grew great heaps of the stuff inside long glass boxes that looked like massive aquariums. They didn't know what to do with the mold, but they were fascinated by the sponge-like form of the mold, and how it moved and pulsated, and gave off light.

Despite seeing it in the black-and-white film, Robby and I recognized the familiar glow of the
412E
mold when the camera captured its luminescence after the scientists in the film turned off the laboratory's lights.

Dr. Grady McKeon, the film's narrator, said this:

Behold the wondrous glow of a new being!

I said, “Uh.”

Shann said, “He's a little overly impressed by something that looks like rotten cauliflower.”

“That's the same shit Johnny had in his office,” Robby said.

“
What
is?” Shann asked.

“
That
shit,” I said.

Robby added, “Um. Yeah.”

Robby Brees and I had some explaining to do.

“Your stepfather,” I said. “He had some of that stuff inside his office at
From Attic to Seller Consignment Store
. Robby and I saw it.”

“When were
you
inside Johnny's office?” Shann asked.

“Shh—” Robby said, playing the part of the irritated moviegoer who is distracted by talkers in the theater. “Be quiet and listen to the film.”

Here was where
Eden Orientation Series
turned into a horror show.

It turned into a horror show for two reasons.

First, the scientists who were working on the Unstoppable Corn/Unstoppable Soldier project decided to try mixing the genetic material from the mold with a fresh sample of human blood.

They decided to use Dr. Grady McKeon's own blood.

Dr. Grady McKeon thought of himself as a kind of God. So he drew his own blood to mix with the genetic material from the photoluminescent mold.

It was not a good idea.

The idea to mix human blood material with the
412E
mold was even less reasonable than laboratory scientists deciding it was a good idea to smoke on the job and screw around with grasshopper semen by grafting it into plant sperm and injecting it into corn seeds.

Dr. Grady McKeon's blood made the
412E
mold very happy.

Here was the beginning of the end of the world, and it took place in the 1960s.

“This is the shit that was drawn on the blackboard in the lecture hall,” I said.

“Huh?” Shann said.

Robby said, “Uh-oh.”

It was all starting to come together.

The roads were intersecting.

But it got worse, too.

I said, “Robby, hop back there and freeze the film on that part.”

Robby, who was our
projector monitor
, said, “What?”

I said, “Back up to that part where the scientist is adding blood to the petri dish and stop it on
that
frame.”

Robby did what I asked him to do.

And here was the second reason
Eden Orientation Series
truly turned into a horror show right before my eyes: The scientist who was feeding the human blood host to
412E
, who also happened to be starting an initial infestation event, looked exactly like my father, Eric Andrew Szerba.

Of course, the scientist in the film could not be my father because Eric Andrew Szerba would have been a kindergartner at exactly the same time that portion of the film was shot.

“Hey, Porcupine,” Robby said, “that guy looks exactly like your dad.”

I said, “Uh.”

Shann agreed, “He
does
look exactly like your dad, Austin.”

The film was grainy, but we all could see how the scientist's lab coat had been monogrammed with a name:
F
ELIX
S
ZERBA

It was my grandfather, Felek Szczerba, whose father, like me, had been born with the name Andrzej.