What We Can Learn from Ancient Asexuals
Illustration: Caroline Brewer. From the airport, we went straight to the welcome reception. Odd, the similarities between a mite conference and a casino: windowless rooms, burgundy carpet, too much or not enough oxygen. Folding walls. Unnatural refreshments. Desperate, aging, middle-class white men.
My first conference.
The Florida Entomological Society invited Davy to present a paper I’d helped him with, so he thought it would be good for me to come, too. He made a deal with our university—he’d stay somewhere for free if they’d buy two flights instead of one—and they agreed as long as the total was less than or equal to blah, blah.
I’d geo-referenced the specimens: reading tiny, yellowed cards stuck through the center with the same pin impaling the bee, then looking up the latitude and longitude of the capture site. I’d taken the mites off the bees and mounted them onto slides with tiny instruments Davy made himself. I’d washed and prepared DNA for his analysis. I’d double-checked his labeling, thank god. I’d cleaned the office while he wrote, and sent him links to read or watch or listen to while I copyedited.
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Though he was not the greatest entomologist—even I knew that—Davy was the prom king, compulsively likable, comparatively young. You can get a lot of places by just not being an asshole. And Davy could hang, always outlasting even the Russians and Spaniards when we had guests at school.
Davy’s charm came from his genuine love of people. I’ve never seen anyone so content to stand and talk to the same sixty-year-old Eastern European population dynamics guy for four hours, never looking away. When the guy finally bows out, Davy says, “Is that it?” Many of these guys—and one woman—are people he’d invited to speak at our university, convincing the administration to pay them, taking them out. He’d throw parties at his house in their honor, and seventy people would show up, more people than the honored guest knew in their lifetime. And he was always collecting new people. Rosie, the bartender at the U Club with a neck tattoo of her own name; Chris, the guy who raids estate sales and sells used books on the street. They’d come blow it out with the scientists, and no one could ever remember when they’d had a better time. Davy never rushed. He was slow and generous, always putting another log on the fire, always offering to meet with people and read their papers, buy their drinks, watch their dogs.
While the host at the mite conference was telling us where to get our name tags and how accomplished we all certainly were to be there, I stood at Davy’s elbow, looking at our bags piled by the trash can and the cucumber water, wondering if it’d been my job to arrange transportation between the conference center and wherever his friend lived—where we’d be staying.
It hadn’t been. Davy had a plan, which was to stay at the reception till we were the last ones there, forget Charles’s address, forget to tell Charles when we were arriving until he called to ask for the address, and pay $88 to take a cab thirty miles to the other side of the nature preserve. I wondered if I should be more proactive as his assistant.
