Obliteration
I met Stan on his hands and knees, croaking to a Sonoran Desert toad that had escaped its enclosure. SDT-4, a wily and tenacious explorer according to Stan’s notes, was wedged in the space between the lab oven and the wall. Later, when I dried out SDT-4’s skin in the same oven, I concluded that this voyage was more than likely a suicide attempt.
When Stan noticed me standing there, he pointed to the door. “The net,” he said when I went for the knob. The net that hung on the back of the door was wide with a thick plastic handle, printed with butterflies and made for a child with a big backyard and parents who didn’t mind if the local insect population was decimated by their little girl, an expert in consumption and whacking things.
“Who are you?” Stan asked. “Did Margot send you?” He flipped over a stack of paper next to the mass spec.
I explained that I was his new lab assistant and that I had never met anyone named Margot. It was a name for a lustrous woman, a woman without fear. I thought only in worst-case scenarios. I was not the kind of person who fostered feelings like hope, to my mother’s dismay. To my father’s dismay, I was not the kind of person who enjoyed golf. Instead, I imagined the end—the equal chance of an apocalyptic asteroid and the inevitable eruption of the Yellowstone Caldera, for instance, or even more likely, a massive solar storm that wiped out the power grids, shot us back to the 17th century. This was to say nothing about the things we could have prevented before it was too late to prevent them. I was a masochist, my doctor explained. I would need to interrupt this compulsive thinking. I would need to try a hobby. I chose frisbee golf because at the very least the course didn’t require the heavy watering of non-native grasses. This made my father happy. I reminded Stan that I was recommended by his mentor’s daughter’s friend, who I knew from the frisbee golf league.
“I hope you’re not expecting to have free time for frolfing,” Stan said.
“No,” I said.
“And if you meet anyone named Margot, tell her to fuck off and die.”
I wrote this in the journal I carried for times like this. Principal Investigators always slipped some important direction into casual conversation because they were always thinking about their project, even if you were only just discussing the local doomsday cult, whose leader dove off the I-17 overpass believing she could fly—everybody had their thing. But it didn’t matter the context; if you didn’t remember every offhand comment, you were basically useless. I was determined to be useful this time.
“What does Margot look like?” I asked.
“Like a tinctorius azureus. Absolutely gorgeous.”
“And who is Margot?”
“Ex-wife,” Stan said. “Former grad student. We split early in our research. She moved down to Tucson with my best friend and my hypothesis. I still love her, but she’s not allowed in my lab.”
I nodded, wrote it all down.
“We need trust here. Margot’s racing me to publication. But there’s something she doesn’t know, and she knows she doesn’t know it, and she’s trying to know it, and she will ask you if you know it. I need you to tell her you don’t.”
Stan pushed himself off the floor. He looked like he might roll an ankle, not quite used to the lifts he purchased after Margot left him the first time. I imagined he might be handsome if he never opened his mouth to speak and fixed his hair, which still showed the inky smudges of a bathtub dye job. His eyes were a muddy green that I liked, but I told myself that I wouldn’t go there. That I had been there, and that I had regretted going there, and that I wouldn’t go there again. Never. I wrote this in my journal, underlined it twice.
NEVER. NOT EVEN IF THE WORLD IS ENDING AND NOTHING MATTERS.
“Have you skinned before?” Stan asked.
“Nothing with limbs.”
“Just the same,” he said. “First, we milk.”
Stan pulled SDT-4 and a pair of scissors from his pocket. I hadn’t seen him catch the toad. He snipped its spinal cord, squeezed its parotoid gland until it leaked. He collected the secretion with a dropper and placed the body into a small freezer, swapping it for an already-dead toad.
“One out, one in,” he said, picking up SDT-3. “They don’t feel a thing this way.”
He made little slits around SDT-3’s body, near each foot. He pinched the skin at the toad’s midsection, cut a circle all the way around.
“The key is to give it clothing. A pair of pants and a sweater.”
With the tweezers he gripped the skin, wiggled it.
“It firms up a bit, with the cold. Now we peel. The pants.” He dropped the skin into a jar of ethanol. “And the sweater. We’ll dry tomorrow.”
In my journal, I sketched SDT-4 in pants and a nice sweater, exploring the wilderness with a pair of binoculars and a bindle on its shoulder.
“And make sure you always lock up. The undergrads go crazy for this stuff.”
*
It was the night before Thanksgiving, and the science building was empty. The halls echoed with the croaking of toads and the squeaking of my shoes. Stan had holiday plans with Margot. It was tradition, he said, to spend the day in waders, fly fishing with his girl. When I asked if he and Margot had made up, he blinked. “Don’t be ridiculous,” he said.
Before Stan left—a bounce in his step and rod on his shoulder— he said, “I know the timing isn’t great, but we need forty-eight hours. We’re on a deadline, and we should be done with data collection by now. I’ve mapped it out. If you follow it all, we’ll be ready for analysis early next week.”
I didn’t bother telling him that the reason I hadn’t run samples was that the other labs in the department had been hogging the mass spec. Each lab was on a deadline. Each believed their data the most important. This information was useless to Stan. He’d already petitioned the department for more equipment. They’d needed the funding for Sushi Fridays.
Instead, I said: “There aren’t any breaks scheduled.”
“Ah, breaks,” he said. “Well, some of the tasks won’t take the full hour; try to rest between.” Stan gestured to the dejected loveseat in the corner of the lab. “For naps. Just don’t leave the toads unattended. Not everyone goes home for Thanksgiving.” He looked at me as if to make a point.
Our toads had been trending thanks to an unfortunately popular podcaster. On his show a month earlier, the host advocated for the suckling of the glands. Hypnotoads, he called them. Carriers of the God molecule. Unlock that, he said, and you unlock the world. You’ll finally understand it all.
Almost immediately after the episode aired, the National Park Service put out a warning against toad-licking. It was bad, they said, for the lickers and the lickees. The warning was turned into a meme within the hour. Local police were still looking for two men and a woman who’d been caught on camera at Spur Cross Ranch Conservation Area, smuggling toads in plastic bags.
People licked for comfort, for ego death, for a visit from the mother goddess who would heal their inner child. They licked for a good high, for stress relief, for a reason to live. I could list all the motives. I just couldn’t figure the point if any progress ever made was only made in somebody’s head.
“What’s the point?” I asked my classmate’s boyfriend—a self-proclaimed psychonaut—at a dirty bar after class one night. The boyfriend was always leaking. His eyes watered, his pits drenched themselves in sweat. There was always some stain on his shirt.
He suggested a good trip, an opening of the mind’s eye, a nice mellowing to iron out the deep creases in my personality. I needed to obliterate space and time and self, he said, until there was nothing left to fret over, and I could focus on the important things. He did not elaborate on what those were.
“Obliteration,” I said.
For a moment, I almost understood, but before I could, he said: “Get zen, girl. And let me know when you dispose of those samples.”
Later, I told my doctor what the psychonaut had said. I’d read of micro-dosing in the news, between reports of mass shootings and floods. I wanted to know if she thought it would make me more productive. She explained that I was the kind of person who should never do hallucinogens.
Stan didn’t object to our toad’s growing popularity. “Follow up on social media. Contribute if you can. We need these guys in the spotlight when our study is published.”
*
I got to the housekeeping first. Stan’s cleaning procedure alone had twenty-seven steps. I knelt on the yellowed tiles that smelled sharply of isopropanol, took to the corners for a good scrub. Others found Stan’s lists tedious, each task broken down into its smallest parts. I found comfort in the minutiae, in crossing out each completed task—not a mental note or checked box, but a deep gash of ink across the page of my journal, slicing the words in half and leaving nothing but what they used to mean. I could see each small victory and each victory to come. Each slashed task was a thing I was sure of, without a doubt. No predictions or probabilities. Just progress.
Hours passed. I finished cleaning the lab, the tanks, the freezer where we stored our samples. I moved on to toad care. Each toad had its allotted diet. Group A: crickets and wood beetles. Group B: pinkie mice and worms. We studied how the toads’ diet affected the toxicity of its secretions. When afraid, they released that milky white toxin—5-MeO-DMT—from the parotoid glands behind their eyes. Stan wanted to prove that once the projected 65% of insects went extinct by the end the century, the rest of the toad’s diet wouldn’t produce the needed chemicals to fend off predators. Without their fear-defense system, the species would go extinct. It was an obvious hypothesis if you thought about it.
The species would go extinct anyway, a climate scientist would say. It’s eco-system collapse. We know the problem; we know the outcome. When are we going to focus on preventative measures and stop fucking around with minutiae? Our toads were endangered, but that didn’t mean anything. Not really. We were all endangered, every moment we didn’t do something, anything, to stave off the end. We used terms like endangered, near-extinction, as a way of pretending we were further from it than the rest of the planet.
I kept my focus narrow, anyway—not climate studies, but a sub-section of climate studies. A sub-section so small and tedious that the details almost shrouded those crushing predictions and probabilities. I had my own fear-defense system.
“What those big guys don’t understand,” Stan said one night between bites of leftover carne asada, “is that they are going to need the data to convince anyone to do anything. When the data has a cute face, people are more likely to care.” He held up one of our toads, scratched it beneath the chin.
“I think there are people who care a whole lot about this toad’s secretions.” Stan chewed; his throat bulged with the meat. “We’re going to need something to cope.”
*
Our toads were used to my presence, no longer oozed in fear upon my approach. Instead, they thrilled at the sight of me. They clambered at the glass of their tanks. Their tongues worked for the cricket between my tweezers.
The cricket’s legs scrambled, fruitless in its effort. SDT-16 leaped, higher than it normally would, and teetered on the lip of its tank. I tipped it back, not a moment too soon, but in doing so released the cricket I’d been ready to feed it. The insect hopped across my clean floor, out of sight.
“Fuck.”
I let it go for the time being. I couldn’t delay the task at hand. I added “Catch cricket” to my list of things to do and returned to feeding.
The pinkie mice were easier, too young and too blind from birth to be afraid. They dropped into the tanks nicely, wiggled just enough to get the toads’ attention.
SDT-16 was still on its back, unable to right itself. I flipped it over. Above the tank, Stan’s safety warning mocked me: NO TOUCHING OR LICKING THE SPECIMEN. I added “Scrub hands” to my list, scrubbed, and crossed it off.
With the feeding done, I was ready to pipette. The way Stan had written it, he wanted me to pipette at the top of every hour, run the tests every half, check my work and start again. Pipetting and running and pipetting and running. All our tests required identical proportions of secretion to chemical, and for the first time, I couldn’t see the logic behind Stan’s broken-down tasks. It made more sense to pipette all at once, run all at once, and use the time saved for something useful. I set my pipette to 0.10 and got to work. While the cricket chirped and the corner fluorescent flickered, I filled each tube with its designated base. When I was done, I calculated that I had saved at least an hour on the prep.
I popped my first run into the mass spec, sat on my clean floor and crossed out all I had done.
*
When I was a child, I put myself to bed. My parents would sit at the kitchen island—a malbec between them—arguing about things I didn’t understand. Bills. Couples’ retreats. A friend of my mother’s who’d been acting oddly, or not—answer dependent on which parent was asked about it. I had my own routine. Thirty-minutes after sunset I got myself changed, read a book, went to my parents in the kitchen to say goodnight.
“Goodnight,” I said. “Come check on me.”
When they didn’t answer, I repeated, “Come check on me, please.”
“Alright,” they said, and one of them would. I left a certain light on to ensure it. My father hated to waste electricity.
What they were checking on had to do with what new thing I’d learned about the world that week, through a book or an episode of Scooby Doo or my classmates who feared nothing. It could be a volcano. A sinkhole. A lightning strike to my metal bedframe. It could be an earthquake, the land-swallowing tidal wave that followed, and so on. The thing changed so often that my parents stopped asking exactly why I was afraid. “What’s the point of being so scared all the time?” they asked, instead.
Our dog—Bellie—was an addict, a nervous yellow lab with sad eyes. During monsoon seasons, when the toads emerged from the earth and the shrubbery, we’d lose her out on the property that ended where the mountains began. One night, I went looking and found her stiff and drooling. I watched as her eyes rolled into the back of her head. I ran to the house screaming.
“She’s dying! Bellie’s dying!”
“She’s not,” my parents soothed. “It’s alright. She does this whenever it rains.”
I sobbed while they explained that while they knew what Bellie was up to out there, they allowed it once they found her nerves calmed and her personality softened. She stopped shaking when strangers came to the house, stopped hiding in closets after one-too-many cabinet doors slammed. And besides, she seemed to know her limit.
Bellie saw things when she did it, they said. Shapes, probably, in colors she couldn’t see as a dog. They’d been thinking to try it themselves. They wouldn’t wait until it rained and lick the toads, no, but maybe they could take a trip to Sedona, dry and smoke the bufotenine like how they heard the spiritualists did it.
“It’s good for her,” they said. “Don’t worry so much.”
I couldn’t understand what they meant.
Thirty minutes later, Bellie tumbled back inside the house, unsteady. She rested her head on the rim of her water bowl, lapped periodically.
I fell asleep on the couch that night counting each time her tongue reached for water. I never asked to be checked on again.
*
I had the same dream most nights. In the dream, I stood in a huge crowd, trying to get anyone’s attention. The location was always different, but what I said was the same. I started out quiet. “Please,” I said. “It’s raining.” I would do this for hours it seemed, until I was screaming. The crowd chattered away. They had their reasons.
*
Every thirty minutes, I ran another set of data, did what I could between sets. I straightened the staples in the drawer, refilled the printers with fresh paper, dusted and re-sanitized beakers and test tubes. For our article, I outlined the literature review, fleshed out the methodology. I ran and ran and ran the data. I printed it, paperclipped and organized it, all in a nice stack beside the mass spec. I wrote and wrote my ass off. After a while, you could almost forget that you had a body in this world.
The rogue cricket chirped. I found it and crushed it beneath my shoe.
I’d been up for thirty-one hours without more than a couple twenty-minute naps. The deep warmth of the loveseat repulsed me. Each hour that stretched out before me was an infinite list. The heaviness in my limbs, a weighted blanket. I thought of Bellie and her endless lapping.
“I’m more relaxed than I’ve been in months,” I said to SDT-12. “I should’ve stopped sleeping years ago.” I sat with her on the floor, stroked her head, snipped her spine. I used a dropper to collect the secretion.
“This is useful,” I said to her. “You are soooo useful. We’re doing something, right now, together.”
I closed my eyes, and for a moment, I didn’t think about a thing.
*
I woke up to the sound of vibrating glass. My phone buzzed beside the tank. It was Stan, checking in. I smiled.
“All good, here,” I said, very awake now. “Nearing the end of my list. Is there anything else I can do?”
“You can start analysis,” he said, emphasizing the words for the benefit of someone on the other end. “We’re almost there, aren’t we? Just about ready to publish.”
In the background I heard a woman’s voice, unbothered and self-assured. Maybe I could be a Margot after all.
“I’m on it,” I said. “And thank you.”
I took my stack of data—the kind of data that can do something—and sat down at the computer to calculate.
The numbers looked wrong, all zeros and ones. Maybe I had crossed the line into too tired. I rubbed my eyes, blinked away the sleep, but the numbers didn’t change. I couldn’t make sense of it.
I checked the mass spec. Fine. I checked the methanol. As expected. I checked the computer and printer for an error. It all ran perfectly.
“No,” I said. “No, no, no. No.”
There were Stan’s instructions, pinned up on the door. There was my list, full of gashes, the number copied wrong in rushed excitement. There was my pipette in the lab sink, waiting for a wash and set to the wrong measurement.
And there it was. The end. Everything for nothing.
*
A lifetime passed. I looked down to find SDT-12’s dropper, still clenched in my sweating hands. There was nothing left for me to do. I put a few drops of fear on my tongue. The secretion tasted bitter and sour and ammonic.
I’d imagined I’d smell turpentine, glow molten, hear the feet of a thousand toads delivering the next plague to the world. There was none of that.
When I closed my eyes, I saw that I was Bellie, out in the desert, the smell of rain rising from the earth I’d be buried beneath soon enough. The quiet around me was no longer that of an empty lab but that of a vast expanse of land far from the constant, hopeless noise of humans. I lapped at the water of a nearby puddle and waited for my obliteration.
Alexandra Salata is from Tempe, Arizona. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Black Warrior Review, Puerto del Sol, and Timber, among other journals, and she was named a finalist for the 2024 Salamander Fiction Prize. She holds degrees from John Carroll University and the Northeast Ohio MFA program.
