The elevator doors opened on to a hallway that smelled of stale, cigarette smoke. The languid ride in the creaky car with a "Last Inspected by…" certificate as authentic as Mitch McConnel's marriage had given Viral ample opportunity to wallow in the wake of his most recent failure.
The request had been simple: to use his friendship with Monica to force Ankur and the Fear Mongers to share their data of the makeup of Covid-19's most nefarious protein complex -- its spike. But the giggles he'd interrupted between Monica and the Highway Patrolman, Avril, gave Viral an answer of another sort -- either Monica was both dyslexic and color-blind, believing Avril to have been Viral, or -- as the periodicity of his past too often revealed to be his truth -- in the heart of one, he had been replaced by another -- again.
Squinting through his one good eye, Viral pressed his hands against the stucco drywall of the Oberoi Ramada corridor. Toward room 314 he groped. Soon, though, the strain of monocular depth perception ripped a migraine through the center of his forehead. Therefore, it was with rich relief that his fingers found the numbers of his room elevated and embossed on the outside of their metal door.
He ached to get water into his eye, to breathe hot breath on a wash-cloth and foment the sting of jalapeno juice from his cornea -- anything to quell the simmering, seething torture of hovering blindness. With his fingers he tried to unclasp the brass hook that secured the envelope Monica had given him, but impatience won out. Biting into the fold he ripped the header from the package with his teeth. From inside a flash drive curiously stamped with what looked to be an Elvin character from Lord of the Rings -- Clairmythicine -- and a key card fell to the garishly patterned carpet. Bending over to retrieve them, Viral hit his head against the handle to his door. Like a Milwaukee sausage his evening was moving from worse to worst.
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After swiping his card into its reader, Viral opened the door to a room that smelled of eucalyptus. The tension in his shoulders melted, and the pain in his head evaporated with each step toward the Sonos speaker playing rainfall and Imogen Heap. Like mist he floated into the cool humidity and found the light switch in the bathroom.
Commonly, Viral avoided the hard water of the hotel tap for anything other than washing; drinking it had the curious effect of making him thirstier after than before. But the alkaline sediment, he found, of the hotel's pipes served his purpose in spades. It quickly neutralized the acid from the jalapeno slice. After a light scrub and a quick foment, Viral felt more confident in the full return of his sight.
Outside the bathroom, opposite the door, Viral tucked his check-in packet into a drawer beneath the safe in the closet. To his left he found two arm chairs, a long bureau that served as a console, a mounted TV, and the familiar tier of hotel drapes -- one sheer and useless against the sun, and another other thick, heavy and unreasonably opaque. Remembering the newscast from the television he had seen in the bistro, he searched across the console for the TV's remote. He tapped the power button on the Sonos speaker located next to a thick binder that Viral presumed held room service menus and information about the laundry service. Locating the remote control he pressed On. The TV remained dark. He pressed On again. Still, nothing.
Sorting through the list he kept mentally to troubleshoot electronics in his parents' house, he moved on to step 2. Placing his thumb on the groove at the butt of the remote he slipped off the controller's rear and flipped out its batteries. He would have caught them in his hand, too, and not inadvertently kicked them against the dresser, if he hadn't been startled by what sounded like a key sliding into the reader at his door. Fortunately for Viral his propensity toward nerves tuned to the torque of a Mustang sent him leaping from his socks for a hiding place in time. The electronic lock on the front door clicked, and the door opened. Someone else had come to room 314.