Upon walking into the lobby of the Oberoi Ramadan Inn, Viral was struck by its dilapidated grandeur. The vaulted ceiling rose 50 feet from the scuffed and weathered marble floor. Colorful rugs stitched with thick coils of wool lay across the foyer’s expanse suggesting a majesty ill suited for the surrounding business parks of Central Delaware.
When the yellow school bus pulled into the Oberoi parking lot Monica had stood in the aisle and gave them their marching orders. "The adults are going to handle the check-in so you all can play with your diddles on the grounds for the next 2 hours," she'd said. "Rendezvous by the large table in the center of the lobby at 0600. We will get you your check-in packets then." Monica licked her finger, snapped, and rolled her shoulder like one of the contestants who'd reached the end of the walkway on the old television show “America’s Next Top Model”, which Lron had analyzed during his Gender, Race, and False Consciousness Seminar. Monica hopped down the stairwell from the bus's exit; Highway Man followed close while Dr. Hackman fumbled with his shoulder bag and scurried to catch up like a rescue puppy.
Still squaring the hanging portraits of colonial viceroys with the mural near the rest room of George Washington crossing the Delaware River, Viral heard Farooq, Aleph, and Plank talk about heading to the swimming pool. As he watched them laugh with each other walking toward the elevator bank he envied how easily they found their Joi de vivre. From their demeanor one wouldn’t guess that they’d just heard a federal agent reveal that the CDC was soon going to publicly declare a pandemic. Gyn, Alan, and Smooshy came into the lobby behind him and stopped at his shoulder, nodding with surprise at the Oberoi's first impression.
“Is that a viceroy?” Alan asked.
Viral heard the voice of Ankur and Helen bickering over his right shoulder as the soft thump of the revolving doors told of their arrival. Ankur pulled a black backpack on wheels behind him that had stitched on to its flap the insignia of John Hopkins. On their heels, Emir, Choco, and Fey followed. Emir held the iPad up in front of the others as they walked, speaking about the varying sequences of codons across which his finger slid.
The Fear Mongers, the name of their clique, passed Viral and his group without acknowledgement. They moved with purpose toward a hallway over which Viral saw a sign that read Business Center.
"Man, sitting at those tables all day really did a number on my lower back," Alan said to Viral's left.
"Yeah, I'm feeling it in my neck, too," Smooshy added.
"I could really use a lift," Alan said, rubbing his tricep.
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"You think they have a Peloton?”
"One way to find out," Alan said.
The two of them walked shoulder to shoulder toward a map of the grounds hanging on the wall next to the front desk. Viral half expected them to hold hands.
Next to him, Gyn yawned. "Man, I could really use a pick me up," she said. Viral nodded toward an open plan cafe in the lobby's corner. Gyn shrugged, a tacit Why Not?
---
Viral blew across the meniscus of his Chamomile while Gyn stirred a fourth Splenda into her Americano. He recalled the conversation he'd had with Monica in the holding room after he'd spoken with Mr. Noogle. Two cups of tea with two different women in the span of two days -- Viral felt a brief buzz in his brain stem he attributed to his body's acclimating taste for testosterone.
He found it difficult to understand how much in his life had changed since that cup of tea with Monica. She'd told him that she knew his father's work; she'd told him, later, that she'd hatched the plan to recruit him when she overheard Mr. Noogle speak of his father's intelligence. She said she found his essay he'd submitted to the Westinghouse science competition for which he placed third amongst high school juniors in the country. The notoriety, significant in the small circles in which he had been raised, brought the attention of colleges like he was a division one athlete. His father's alma mater, Emory, had offered Viral what they called the Maybach of Bachelor's degrees. If he agreed to commit to their cognitive science program they would offer him de jure admittance to the PhD track. He'd be a doctor by the time he was 28. Modhi, his father, had not only attended Emory as a graduate student fresh off the jet from India in the 1970's but he'd risen to prominence as a faculty member who published three of the most celebrated papers in his nascent field of bio-chemical psychotherapy. One issue of the Emory alumni magazine featured a photograph of him on the cover with a headline heralding him as the next Dr. Freud.
Unfortunately for Modhi, his ascent to the rafters of the former Vienese-Austrian psychoanalytic greats coincided with the nation-wide awakening of campus identity politics. What seemed like overnight, as his father recounted routinely from under ⅕ of Glenlivet, Dr. Chodha's views on the psychology of cross-dressing men and masculine women harboring vengeful envy of robust, male cocks went from accepted dogma to fascist hate speech. The universal Hero's Journey of Jung, Freud, and Campbell, which Modhi taught his freshman acolytes as the template for a righteous life, had become universal to only white, heterosexual males. It did not matter, Dr. Chodha lamented, that he himself was not a white male. Even his non-Occidental heritage didn't spare him from accusations of white supremacy. He'd found his world view sufficiently flipped when his self-identification as a member of the latter on the Occidental--Oriental spectrum became a cause of outrage during his public remarks. He left Emory and shortly after Academia as a field when even a post as an adjunct lecturer at a public university in Virginia sparked a student body protest.
As Viral remembered his father's inebriated recollection of events, which Viral had assembled non-linearly over years of listening to and watching his father descend myopically into alcoholism, the indignity of dismissal from even a public university, let alone one in the mid Atlantic, was too much from which Modhi could save face. His reputation was ruined, worth less than the rupees with which he'd arrived in America in his pockets.