"Alright, 20 questions is over," Monica said. She uncrossed her legs with the kick of a Rockette and tossed her magazine on the counter near the sink. Dr. Hackman followed her finger to the back of the lab where he dragged his chair to rejoin the group. Monica snapped her fingers at the girl and three boys seated around Helen, the young woman who'd grilled Hackman on his illicit past.
A short Indian boy in dark green highwaters and a pinstripe shirt that billowed around him like a bonnet strutted toward a lectern at the corner of the lab. On his nod another boy cut a third of the overhead lights at the switch on the wall. Through large, oval glasses that gave her the appearance of a Korean owl, Helen watched the two others in her group erase what Agent LeGrande had written on the blackboard before lunch. A tall boy in a baseball cap pulled a screen down from near the top of the board. A projector overhead hummed into operation showing the index slide of a Powerpoint deck. The names of the group members were printed on it along with a moniker for their tribe. They called themselves the Fear Mongers. Matching name to face, Viral surmised the diminutive Indian at the lectern was the boy whose name was listed first: Ankur Bhalla, BS, MS.
“The patient studied was a 41-year-old man with no history of hepatitis, tuberculosis or diabetes,” Ankur began. “He was admitted to and hospitalized in the Central Hospital of Wuhan on December 26, 2019, six days after the onset of disease.”
Ankur clicked a remote in one hand and put his other in a pocket on his hip. Monica rummaged through her purse for the plastic bag of Swedish Fish she'd bought with Viral at CVS. Viral hadn't realized he was in for a show.
Ankur began to walk across the front of the room. For such a shrimp his confidence was massive. Immediately, Viral resented him. Ankur continued, “Physical examination of cardiovascular, abdominal and neurological characteristics was that these were normal. His white blood cell and platelet counts gave no reason for pause. And yet...”
Click. The image behind him transformed into four CT scans of a pair of lungs.
Plank, the NorCal skater with a surprising amount of Christian iconography inked on his body, leaned in toward Smooshy and whispered, “How the F did he get those?” Smooshy’s answer was to roll her shoulder as if it was Plank’s hot breath that came from the lungs under investigation. Scowling, Plank leaned out of her personal space.
“Day seven after the onset of disease, chest radiographs were abnormal with air-space shadowing,” Ankur said. “At Hopkins we called these ground-glass opacities. As you can see, if you know what to look for, there’s both lobar and patchy consolidation in each lung.” He paused. Then he added, “Especially in the lower lung."
A hot heat flushed across Viral’s forehead. He wondered if Ankur really expected his audience to follow his jerk fest of jargon. Stealing a look around at the members of his cohort, Viral expected to see faces equally contorted and confused. Yet everyone was rapt; Viral felt like the only one grasping for straws. The heat moved into his neck, which tightened. From Ankur’s appearance, Viral wouldn’t have put his age at much more than 15, but the boy spoke with the gravity of Dr. House. His brown, braided belt suggested his mother still dressed him, and his hair had the wet part of a Telegu cinema star from the 1980s. Despite Ankur’s embarrassments, the boy carried himself with vigor. Virl wondered if it was maybe because he was a Brahmin.
“Preliminary aetiological investigations exclude the presence of influenza virus and Mycoplasma pneumoniae,” Ankur said, reaching the end of his pace and turning on his heels. “Other common respiratory pathogens, including human adenoviruses, also tested negative."
As Ankur finished, Helen stepped forward into the space he left. The choreography, not to mention the content, of the Fear Mongers’ presentation made Viral feel like a toddler at a tea party. The seed of a quiet rage began to sprout in his gut. He was surprised it chose as its target Monica. It was her fault, after all, that he was here, in this laboratory, in this abandoned women’s college feeling the hot shame of stupidity in the shadow of Ankur’s monolithic intellect. While Viral seethed, Helen began her part of the presentation.
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“Epidemiological investigations revealed that the patient worked at a local indoor seafood market,” she said. “Notably, in addition to fish and shellfish, a variety of live wild animals were available for sale in the market before the outbreak began.” Smooshy held her middle finger up over her shoulder, presumably, Viral thought, to taunt Alan in the rear. Earlier, during lunch, the two had locked horns over the potential source of the virus in question. Smooshy insisted it had come from animals in a wet market; Alan suggested something more sinister sponsored by the Chinese state had played a part. “To investigate the possible aetiological agents associated with this disease,” Helen said, “Researchers collected bronchoalveolar lavage fluid and performed deep meta-transcriptomic sequencing.”
From where Helen had been standing, Ankur clicked his remote. Pointing toward an image of two phylogenetic trees standing parallel like redwoods, Helen said, “Of the 384,000 contigs assembled, the longest sequence containing 30,474 nucleotides had a high abundance of potential aetiological agents. It was also closely related to SL-CoVZC45, a bat SARS-like coronavirus isolate sampled previously in China. The genetic similarity was almost 90%.”
Even Viral, who had understood less than one third of the words Helen had uttered, felt the air fly out of his chest. From the corner of his eye, Viral saw Aleph rub her upper arm to warm her goose flesh.
“This virus strain was designated as WH-Human1 coronavirus -- WuHu1, also known as CoVid-19,” Helen concluded.
Staring at the phylogenetic branches, Viral thought of the brackets for the NCAA pools he had begun to review for the coming tournament. Part of his mind wondered if the games would continue with colleges closed; another part asked why the mundanity of a sports tournament would hold his attention when faced with the mugshot of global killer number one.
Viral remembered how when he had rebuffed Lron's suggestions to visit the campus therapist after he threw a bowl of oatmeal at his computer following a poor performnace on a quiz, Lron began his introductory lecture on the subconscious. From Lron, Viral learned that the human brain craved certainty; “it will cling to the devil it knows,” Lron had told him. Viral realized that what he was staring at behind Helen Cho wasn’t data; it was the manifestation of his death.
He recalled the black and white movie Lron had fired up on the Toshiba for his first film assignment in the fall. It was a story of a knight who played chess against the Reaper. Lron had called it a Bergman; the link from the library called it The Seventh Seal. Even though Viral had a problem-set due for his Data Structures lab in the morning, he couldn’t help but follow the story of the Crusader who returned from war in the Holy Land only to find his home gripped by plague. When the film was done and Viral had only completed half of his own homework, he asked Lron what the movie meant. Lron had used a lot of large words Viral did not understand, like Kierkegaard and solipsism and Calvinist homo-chastity, but one phrase stuck with him like a chicken pock. “God was dead,” Lron had said. That was what the movie was about.
As Viral beheld the phylogenetic trees looming over Helen he saw the Twin Towers; he saw the names of the salvaged and damned on St. Paul's list outside the Pearly Gates. He felt sad to discover that he didn’t have Ankur’s stoicism, or Smooshy’s cool. He couldn’t even boast a human fear like Aleph's. Instead, he felt only numb, preoccupied with the potential seeding of Gonzaga and Purdue in a tournament that wasn't even likely to happen. Though college basketball wasn't something that truly concerned him, it was, at the very least, something he understood: ball orange; UNLV black; Duke white. While the games had stakes, they were low. Guessing wrong on a team in the Final Four didn’t mean -- what had Ankur called it? -- ground glass opacities and consolidation in both lungs. If Ankur, Helen and the other Mongers were playing chess, then Viral feared he was playing Connect Four with pieces meant for the checkers set. He was in over his head, a sixteenth seed who’d stumbled, thanks to Monica, into the play-in of the Big Dance. He hoped he could be a Cindarella and see his way through to the end. If not, well then maybe God wouldn’t be the only one that was dead.