Viral, Lron, and Tyler sat in front of Tyler's 75" TV. A PlayStation 3 hummed on the console near the base of the screen, and a USB cable ran to a controller Tyler held in his hairy, meaty hands. After bringing up the web browser Tyler typed into Google: "Barack Obama vice peepee president thing Biden."
Tyler navigated to the first result, the official web page of Joe Biden's 2020 campaign for US President. On the site's homepage Tyler selected a tab near the top labelled Media and navigated to a section called Videos. The thumbnail of the first video showed the former Vice President with his arm around the 44th President of the United States, Barack Obama. Tyler clicked the image and the video started playing.
It wasn't a video of the former Vice President though. It wasn't even a video of former President Obama. It was a video of then Presidential candidate and Biden opponent for the Democratic nomination Tulsi Gabbard sitting on a bus next to a man with curly hair holding a ukulele. The two stared into each other's eyes and sang the song "Imagine."
The song from the 1970s was currently undergoing a resurgence as celebrities had taken to social media to share their renditions during the world's mounting panic amidst news of a spreading virus. Rarely one to follow, Lron turned his nose at most anything that smacked of mass culture. "Uh, I'm so tired of this meme," he said. "Whoever wrote that song should be shot."
Viral had just caught up with what he was watching. He said to Tyler, "You hacked the presumptive Democratic nominee's YouTube page?"
"Hell no," Tyler said. "I hacked his main web page. I didn't mess with their videos. I just replaced all the links to point to this one."
"But how --"
Lron squealed. Viral turned to look and saw Tyler body-rolling with a 3-foot glass bong. "Shall we dig in?" he asked through a sleeve of cigar matches clenched between his teeth.
"Yes please, mon amie" Lron said.
Tyler gingerly placed the bong in Lron's hands before dropping himself into the armchair. From the left-hand pocket of his bathrobe he unfurled a balled-up plastic bib that said Red Lobster. He tucked its edges beneath the tattered collar of his undershirt and didn't see to mind that it was backwards.
Viral watched as Lron lit up the smoke stack, held his breath, closed his eyes, and elegantly released a plume of smoke from his nose like a Buddhist dragon. Turning to Viral he held out the bong.
"No thanks," Viral said.
"All good, pass it this way," Tyler added.
“Hold on,” Lron said. “VR, you know I hate little else in this world more than peer pressure, other than the Gap, but I’m going to have to insist that you tap this glass.”
Viral felt his palms go sweaty. Sure, Lron had nudged him from his comfort zone since they'd become roommates seven months ago, but that had included trying the sashimi in the cafeteria or standing on a skateboard with his right foot in the front. Lron had never pushed him toward the illicit.
“No, it’s okay, I’m good,” Viral countered.
“It’s all good, Ellie,” Tyler said. "This is a safe space. You've seen the sticker on the front window."
“I know that, Ty. And Viral, I'm not suggesting that you hit this to fit-in, but rather so you can let go of the trauma that you’re internalizing.”
Occasionally, over the course of the semester, Lron had begun to encourage Viral to talk about his feelings. The problem the two encountered, however, was that Viral didn’t actually feel his feelings. One time when Viral had responded to Lron’s inquiries about his emotional state by raising his voice Viral noted that his friend looked less upset than frightened. Viral knew his roommate had just wanted to help, and he felt guilty for scaring him. To show his contrition, Viral agreed to take down a handle of Absolute vodka and 2 liters of cranapple juice while he and Lron watched pirated torrents of RuPaul's Drag Race. That night had ended with Lron rubbing Viral’s back on the bathroom floor of their dorm as Viral threw up into his laundry.
But Viral’s sashimi dinner wasn’t all that had come out that night. He’d also learned that he was tremendously terrified of failure. Yet the realization, crystal in its clarity while he heaved into his hamper, faded in its certainty beneath the lights of his Organic Chem lecture. He had made it to an Ivy League college on a near full scholarship. Throughout his youth he had walked into upper level math classes with students years older than him and never felt anything short of pride. It was only when he balked an answer that morning after the professor had called on him that he understood the seething flush of embarrassment and its accompanying compulsion to flee fast and hard into the middle of traffic for what it was, the true source of his motivation. Not love, not passion, not even purpose. His actions had no organizing principle, no enthalpy, as Tyler had called it. He was chaos. He was fear.
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But maybe Viral had never confronted his fear of failure because he had so rarely failed. He even said as much to Lron on the bathroom floor that night. It was Lron who had told him that the man who is afraid of heights is the one who never leaves the ground.
Lron's words and the smell of his own vomit from that night returned to Viral as he looked at the sleek and slender bong in Lron's hands. "I just never really saw myself as a smoker," Viral said. "I had asthma when I was younger."
“No worries, James Comey,” Tyler said, kicking the coffee table between them. A drawer on Viral's side slid out. Inside Viral saw a metallic tin the size of a deck of playing cards labelled Minty Boy Fresh Fresh. The writing looked like the kind one would find on the brunch menu of an old-timey saloon in Deadwood. Beneath the writing, anachronistically, was an anime drawing of an octopus wearing sunglasses and spinning on eight turntables.
“What are these?” Viral asked.
“Cannabi gummies,” Tyler said. “All THC, no CBD. Guaranteed to make you remember all the times your daddy spanked you.”
Though the proposition did not appeal to Viral, when he opened the tin a welcoming array of colored candies made him smile. He felt like he used to unwrapping treats from the Easter Baskets he hunted for as a child in the mall. "These are the same as that?" he asked, pointing at the bong Lron had passed to Tyler.
Tyler had the sound recording app on his phone held to the vent of the bong as he gurgled smoke through the water at the pipe's base. Lron pinched a gummy from the Minty Boy tin and popped it into his mouth. "More or less," he said.
Tyler began a hacking coughing fit and fell from the arm chair to the floor on all fours. As he crawled toward the outlet bus beneath the entertainment system, Lron said, “I recommend the grape artichoke.”
Viral held the candy in his hand. If he was honest with himself, he had to admit that it looked not only innocuous but also kind of tasty. As Tyler sputtered through the end of his spasm, Viral nodded toward him with his head. Waving his hand as if he’d seen it all before, Lron said “He’s just plugging in his iPhone so he can upload that sound of the water bubbling in the bong that he recorded. There’s some ASMR label that pays him royalties for their compilations.”
Viral shrugged. Twenty minutes in Tyler’s loft and he was already acclimating to the eccentricity of his hundred-millionaire host.
Impressed with his expansive tolerance, Viral decided that he was in fact growing. As the end of the school year neared he felt that he may be missing out on the important rites of youth by foregoing midnight screenings of the Rocky Horror Picture Show with Lron in favor of all nighters in a study carrol memorizing covalent and ionic bonds.
He placed the gummy on his tongue and sucked. A sweet yet complicated flavor born from the combination of grapes and artichokes bloomed inside his mouth. As he chewed the candy he thought of the fruit snacks his mother had packed in his lunch during elementary school. Viral rarely thought of those days; he had always been focused on looking toward the future. But now, as the news of a potential global pandemic took over daily conversation, a future seemed less certain. The distance between his family and him felt more real than ever. Distance separated them but so did time. He would never be a child eating fruit snacks packed into his school lunch by a mother again.
Viral stymied the sorrow before it consumed him and returned to the moment only to realize he had already swallowed his gummy. He'd expected the Minty Boy to leave a more lasting impact if it was indeed the same substance that had sent Tyler into spasm.
Rising from the floor and arching his back into a luxurious stretch , Tyler said, “There’s only one difference.”
Distracted by the tip of the penis poking out of Tyler’s boxer shorts Viral asked Tyler to repeat himself.
“If I'm not mistaken, and I rarely am, you asked if those, the cannabi Minty Boys, were the same as this, the contents of Bong Joon Ho.”
Viral nodded.
“And Lron here told you that the two were the same, more or less?”
“Correct,” Lron confirmed.
“Dope. So that’s, like, all pretty much true except for one thing. Those Minty Boys are, like, forty times stronger.”
Viral felt his hands begin to sweat again. His tummy gurgled.
“Don't listen to him, Viral,” Lron said. “I hit Bong Joon Ho and I ate a Minty Boy, too. I’ll be right there with you no matter how high you get.” He patted Viral’s arm, which made Viral feel much better.
He heard music coming from the TV. He looked and saw Tulsi Gabbard still singing the song “Imagine” with the man playing the ukelele. It really was soothing. Viral felt soothed.
When he remembered the context of the video, Viral asked Tyler: “Aren’t you going to get in trouble for hacking into Joe Biden’s website?”
"Nah, that's probably not even the part that will piss them off the most," Tyler said.
“He’s such a coquettish little criminal,” Lron added glowingly, massaging the space between his toes.
“It’s probably more irksome to the DNC that I got the login from a tarball of hashed user names and passwords that I bought online from Gucifer,” Tyler said.
Viral didn’t even have to turn his head for an explanation before Lron translated: “Julian Assange.”
Viral reflected on his circumstance for a moment. His father was sick; his mother was quarantined; his college was indefinitely closed, and all he had to his name was what he could squish into his backpack. Yet, here he sat, watching a Hawaiin congresswoman sing anti-war hymns on a video illegally uploaded to the website of the presumptive Democratic nominee for President by a thirty-something recluse with a floppy penis.
His life today was a million miles from the one he left in Aurora, and he felt gratitude for friends like Lron who gently led him into the great big world beyond the suburbs that he had always hoped to see.
Well, here he was; he'd made it, and he was about to rocket into orbit on the wings of a THC-laced grape apricot Minty Boy Fresh Fresh while the rest of the world burned. This quarantine might just turn out to be okay, he thought.
And yet, Viral couldn’t shake the sensation that there was a ringing in his ears. That he was hearing sirens. And that he was hearing lots of them.