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wouldn’t go to work on time either, if they had any work to go to. These people adopted cats and
then
got toxoplasma.
    Maybe the other half of humanity, the ones who enjoy following the rules, usually get dogs. Fetch. Sit. Stay. So, their brains stay toxoplasma-free.
    Maybe these are two kinds of people who were
already
different.
    Or maybe not.
    That’s the thing about parasites: It’s hard to tell if they’re the chicken or the egg. Maybe we’re all really robots, walking around doing the bidding of our parasites. Just like those hungry, twitching snails …
    Do you really love your cat? Or is the toxoplasma in your head telling you to take care of kitty, its final host, so that one day it too will reach parasite heaven?
     

Chapter 5
BAHAMALAMA-DINGDONG
    D ick’s Bar hadn’t changed all that much, but I had.
    It wasn’t just my superpowers. I was older, wiser, and had lived in New York for just over a year now. I had grown-up eyes.
    It turned out that Dick’s Bar didn’t get a lot of female patronage. Not much at all. Just a lot of guys playing pool in their leather chaps, drinking beer and swigging the occasional Jell-O shot, listening to a mix of country and classic disco. A typical West Village bar.
    It was a relief, really. I could hang out here without having to stare into my drink, trying to avoid contact with any hot girls. Even better, any woman who was a regular would stick out like a banana in a highball glass. Surely
someone
would remember a tall, pale-skinned creature wearing a long black dress and picking up wayward Texans.
    “Drink?” the bartender asked.
    I nodded. A little stimulus for my fugitive memories wouldn’t hurt.
    “A Bahamalama-Dingdong, please.”
     
    The bartender raised an eyebrow, then turned to ring a bell over the bar. A few guys playing pool in the back chuckled, and something dislodged itself from the cloudy sky of memories inside my head.
    Ding
! said my brain, as I recalled that whenever anyone ordered a Bahamalama-Dingdong, they rang a special bell. Hence the “dingdong” part of the name.
    Well, partly. I watched the bartender take a banana from the freezer. He put it in a tall highball glass and poured rum over it, then mystery juice from a plastic container marked
BID
, and finally a careful layer of red liqueur across the top. I detected a scent like cough medicine rising up.
    “Nassau Royale?” I asked.
    The bartender nodded. “Yeah. Do I remember you?”
    “You mean, from before the Health Department shut you down?” I asked.
    “Yeah,” he said. “You don’t look so familiar, though.”
    I nodded. “I’ve only been here once, actually. But I had a friend who used to come all the time. Named Morgan?”
    “Morgan?”
    “Yeah. Tall, dark hair, pale skin. Black dresses. Kind of gothy?”
    Pause. “A woman?”
    “Yeah.”
    He shook his head. “Not ringing a bell. You sure you got the right place?”
    I looked down at the Bahamalama-Dingdong, the Nassau Royale-stained banana looking back at me like a bloodshot eye, and took a sip. Tropical fruit sweetness poured over my tongue, textured by strips of rind shedding from the frozen banana. That night of more than a year before began to flood back into my mind, carried on pineapples and the burnt taste of dark rum.
    “I’m positive,” I said.
     
    There wasn’t much to do but get drunk.
    The bartender asked around, but no one remembered Morgan or even vaguely recalled a gothlike woman who had hung out here in the old days. Maybe, like me, she’d randomly wandered in off the street that night.
    On the other hand, if her inner parasite had been pulling her strings, making her desperately horny, then why had she chosen a gay bar, the place she was least likely to get lucky? (Had she been as clueless as my younger self? Hmm.)
    I let the drinks take hold, ringing more bells, bringing back stray fragments of memory from that night. There definitely had been a river involved; I recalled reflected lights