Dr. Hackman looked like a dog. His whispy, blond hair hung over his ears like dead leaves bulging from a gutter. Beneath his cordury sportcoat his shoulders slumped. Though the man didn’t move Viral felt like he could hear the boomer’s arthritis.
“The mosquitos were God awful,” Hackman said. “They’d hover around me while I tried to eat dinner. I slept with a sweatband around my head to keep them from buzzing in my ears. The temperature was thirty-two degrees -- er, about ninety Fahrenheit - at night. I don’t think I ever stopped sweating.”
Hackman clasped his hands between his knees. The denim pants and New Balance sneakers matched Viral’s expectations of a white man in his fifties. The black leather strap around his wrist connected to a gold watch head, however, struck Viral as novel. Even more unique was the watch’s face. Tilting his head to the side, Viral saw it didn’t have numbers. It was black as onyx; like a mirror looking back into the night; like a placid pool at the bottom of a chasm.
From the Howie Young Correctional Center Monic had brought Viral back to the Bethany Women’s College Tech Building. Viral had kept the window down in the car, bent on ignoring Monica. Not only had she gone through his phone, but she’d also lied to his mother. She had told Dr. Priti Chodha that Viral was staying with her and her parents at a coastal mansion on Wrigley Beach, twenty-five miles south of Newport. As if it weren’t bad enough that Viral had just watched his college roommate experience what he assumed was a dissociative episode, he now had to share a ride with a woman who shot as straight as a smooth bore musket. The tedium of mistrust had begun to weigh on his nerves.
“Why’d you tell her that?” Viral had asked Monica when the silence between them had become too unbearable at an interminable stoplight. Monica had shrugged and told him the next few days would be easier for him if his mother didn’t call to ask questions.
“You seemed like the kind of boy whose immigrant mother would be too excited that her son wasn’t gay to worry about his whereabouts for seventy-two hours,” she’d said. Viral had to hand it to her; the woman had clearly paid attention during her behavioral psychology classes at Langley.
After stopping at a CVS, where Monica bought deoderant for Viral and a gossip magazine for herself, the two swung through a Taco Bell drive-thru and ate Chalupas in the parking lot outside Bethany Tech. When Viral blocked the sun from his eyes he’d been able to see Farooq and Aleph doing sun salutations on the roof. Monica spoke banally about cinammon sticks. Viral waited for the flow of her monologue to ebb into more still waters so he could wade into the topic of Slim Jane, the woman with the meat tattoo whom Monica had ordered to be karate chopped. When he finally broached the topic, Monica belched. Viral could smell the onions; Monica told him curiosity killed the Caliphate.
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As Dr. Hackman wound his way through the story of his life, Viral caught his head bobbing toward an afternoon siesta. Pinching the loose skin at the side of his neck, Viral forced himself to focus on the doctor’s story to lull him out of slumber. He listened with increasing interest as Dr. Hackman told him and the other ten of what remained of Monica’s 12 Disciples about a quarter life spent in Africa. For seven years spanning his late twenties and thirties, Hackman had lived and travelled between the DRC and Uganda. As a freelancer for the National Institute of Health he accepted the most demanding assignments that the other field researchers avoided. Like the plague, he joked. But it was toward the plague that Dr. Hackman ran with an ambiguous fervor somewhere between hope and a death-wish. With no wife, no children, no family to mourn his remains if they returned stateside liquified in a cooler, Dr. Hackman accepted his marching orders with equanimity. To the lepers of the modern world he tended; to the untouchables too taboo for Mother Theresa he talked. Outside Kinshasa he was a first responder for a disease called Marburg. Then later for one called Ebola Zaire.
From the parking lot, after she’d drained her Dr. Pepper, Monica led Viral to the laboratory they’d visited in the morning. The bustling energy of the building had waned. The bodies Viral had thought were setting up a command center earlier in the day must have been breaking one down, he surmised. Why he was only coming while others had been going was just the latest entry into the catalogue of indecipherables Viral had filed into the back of his mind. In the lab Viral had reunited with the six others from his cohort. The five members of the second group Monica had divided from the first had resettled, too, at the black, lacquered tables. It was as if the hours had begun to repeat themselves, Viral thought. Untethered from his daily life, he wondered how elastic time would become.
Dr. Hackman was finishing his introduction. “I was back in the states after the markets soured in 2008. Teaching down at the University of Maryland,” he raised his hand toward Monica, “Where I met Agent Treyna, who of course, wasn’t an agent yet.” Monica smiled, licked her finger, and turned the page of her magazine. After scratching his nose, Dr. Hackman continued, “Afterward I spent some time on the Syrian border doing infectious disease work with the refugees, and -- well, here I am.”
Helen Cho, a young woman Viral recognized from their first meeting as a group, raised her hand. “On your Wikipedia page it says you were fired from the NIH in 2013 for inappropriate conduct toward a minor. Can you elaborate on that?”
Dr. Hackman rubbed the back of his neck. “Well, minor is an unfair characteristic as he was in college at the time.”
“And the part about being inappropriate?” Helen followed up.
Hackman grimaced like he'd just run his tongue across a cavity. "Yeah, he said, "I can't get into that because of the settlement, but all I can say is that my heart was in the right place." The hangdog look he gave was enough to lathe Viral’s moral framework, but Helen audibly gagged and Farooq hissed like a snake.