Viral hadn’t seen a mammal jump into the air with such purpose and grace since the sea lion show at the Shedd Aquarium in the 7th grade. Tyler’s corpulent form looked weightless as his folds jiggled slowly in concert with the trajectory of his leap. He took on the appearance of a bovine superhero soaring over and past the moon. Viral could even swear he saw horns at Tyler’s temples, a bell suspended from his neck. Time slowed. Viral realized he was high-dee-bee-high-high.
To Viral’s right Lron sat cross-legged on the beige sofa like a lotus flower. His mouth moved from side to side as if he was chanting. Viral knew of his roommate's tendency to grind his teeth while sleeping, but despite Lron’s celebrated propensity to nap anywhere, including the Chipotle near campus at lunchtime, Viral thought it hard to slumber through the mayhem that Tyler’s contorted face suggested. And yet, Viral himself was calm; he was almost tranquil. Perhaps this was a dream.
Tyler’s mouth moved in slow motion, and the sound waves tapped on Viral’s eardrums what felt like minutes later. “This. Is. Not. A. Dream,” he had said, the words lapping over Viral like a tide of molasses. Viral watched, motionless, and tried to locate the muscle in his throat that would allow him to swallow, as Tyler landed with feline prowess on the threshold of the kitchenette. He reached into a cupboard above the microwave and pulled a black and gray nylon duffel bag from behind a jar of yerba mate. He unzipped it and appeared to check its contents. Viral thought he saw the snout of a gas mask and what looked like crisp Jordanian dinars. Tyler caught Viral’s eye and again moved his mouth slowly. Viral couldn’t hear much beyond his heartbeat between his ears, but it appeared to him that Tyler had shouted something akin to...sun? Rum?
The slap across his face felt like he’d been clubbed with a stale loaf of pumpernickel. While he still couldn’t feel his fingers Viral’s sense of time and sound returned. Tyler stood over him soothing his throbbing hand. “I’m sorry about the love tap, homey, but you weren’t heeding my commands to run,” he said. Viral opened his mouth to speak but all that came out was saliva. Tyler showed a toothy grin. He said, “Nooooooooyce. That Minty Boy got you chillin’.”
Viral drooled some more.
“Listen, can you lock the door behind you before the popo come?” Tyler asked.
Viral’s eyes widened.
Tyler nodded, bit his lip. “Good point. They’ll probably have a warrant.”
Viral tried to scream but his breath was still lost somewhere near the bottom of his neck.
Tyler disappeared into the kitchenette then returned with a garbage bin hoisted near his shoulder. He heaved the bin toward the tabletop of monitors and processing towers that had served as his bespoke mainframe. Water arced from the bin and splashed across the electronics. Sparks erupted from the surge protector plugged into the wall and lit the corner of a black-light tapestry emblazoned with the logo for a group called Widespread Panic. Viral hadn’t seen fire move so fast since Lron had experimented with cosmetology.
By the time Viral had realized the scope of the danger in which he found himself, and the flammability of an industrial loft carpeted in sawdust, Tyler had already hurled himself from a second floor window in the hallway by the bathroom.
Though Viral couldn’t feel his leg it responded to his instinct to kick the sofa on which Lron sat. Without interrupting the massage he was giving the bottom of his jaw with his fingers, Lron told Viral, shouting calmly over the snap of electrical wire exploding, that in his experience it was better to accept the fuzz than fight them. Mindfulness, he said, was jiu jitsu against their tyranny. Viral wanted to argue but when he opened his mouth to yell his tongue slid idly down his chin. He saw the fire growing behind Lron and could smell the burning plastic of the towers that held what were probably a couple million dollars worth of Turing-architectured RTX GPU’s. Viral felt a stinging pang in his testicle at the sight of so many wasted cores, but before he could give in to the senselessness of such loss, he noted that he had feeling somewhere in his body.
He tried to move his feet but they remained stuck to the floor. His hands, too, stayed unresponsive on their arm rests. A mental scan of his body revealed that the only muscle over which he had any control was a sphincter at the bottom of his ball sack. A tinge of relief swept over him. At the very least, with the ability to clench his anus retained, he was unlikely to repeat the disaster that occured when he took too many Tylenol PM at the Ramadan dinner hosted by the Muslim student group.
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As the fire burned through the hardware at the center of Tyler’s loft, Viral admired Lron’s patience in the face of death. Viral had always hoped that he too would confront the moment of his mortality with stoicism. He liked to remind himself that when a man has nothing left before him but the fall then the manner in which he falls matters a great deal. His father had recited the line many times over dinners of cumin-seasoned meats while he was growing up. Viral had assumed it was a quotation from one of his father’s favorite Tennyson poems, but in February Lron showed him the episode of the West Wing from which his father likely stole it.
It was too fitting, Viral thought, that as the silicon engorged flames neared the living room, thoughts of his father would dominate his final moments. He had dominated the rest of his life, why not its end? Viral felt sad that he would never see his parents again, but he felt even more sad that his father, perhaps dying on a hospital bed at that very moment, would still outlive him. It was yet another example of the many ways Viral had come up short in his father’s footsteps. Even in his death Viral would be a disappointment.
While academic journals around the world published essays remembering the contributions to Neuroscience made by his father, Viral’s death would hardly go noticed but for the coda of shame that matched his birth. He shuddered thinking of the tales that would regale neurology conferences for years to come about the time Dr. Modi Chodha helped his wife give birth while she prematurely crowned during his acceptance of the Gustard Chirac Award for Advancement in the Science of Hysteria. After delivering his one and only son, Dr. Chodha held Viral’s tiny body in his hands before an applauding crowd of men and slayed with a joke about mistaking the umbilical cord for little Viral’s penis. His life had begun under threat of castration and it would end with crime scene photographs depicting his charred corpse beneath a seared aluminum tin that read, ironically, Minty Boy Fresh Fresh.
Just then a spray of water hit Viral in the nose and sent him toppling backward over the armchair into the floorboards at the base of the bar. He wondered if death was supposed to hurt so badly.
...
Viral came-to on a gurney next to Lron outside Tyler’s loft. Behind him the bay doors of an ambulance opened up to a mobile triage center. To his right a firetruck idled. Three squad cars had sealed off the block.
“If you invoke your right to remain silent now I can’t promise that these local boys in blue won’t smack you around a bit before you find your way to an attorney.” The woman who spoke to him had strikingly straight hair parted in the center that ended abruptly at her chin. She wore a milk-chocolate, herringbone jacket over a creamy yellow polyester blouse she had tucked into brown pants. Viral noted her black boots had 2-inch heels. She balled her fists on her hips and created the impression of lording over Viral even though the gurney raised him past her shoulders and her head was ⅓ the circumference of his.
Peeking behind her, Viral saw the door to Tyler’s loft smashed open. Smoke escaped from two broken windows, and a parade of firemen dressed in yellow, rubber jumpers carried armloads of soldered heaps of processors to the sidewalk where Midwestern-thick men and women in boxy suits sorted them into translucent, blue bags. Trailing his gaze from the detritus of the fire, Viral caught the enormous Glock at the woman’s waist.
She saw Viral’s eyes stop at the sight of her piece. She took the opening her sidearm offered. Placing her hand on the butt of her gun, she shifted her weight to her left and blocked the setting sun from her eyes with her fingers. “All you gotta do is tell me what you know about Mr. Osterhauf’s whereabouts and we can get you and your partner here checked out at the hospital,” she said.
Next to him, Viral saw Lron’s hand shake as he lifted it to remove the oxygen mask feeding him air. With great effort he pushed his voice through what sounded like a fried windpipe and said, “He’s not my type.” Lron pulled the mask back over his mouth and slumped further beneath the weighted blanket draped over his shoulders. Though a bit hurt, Viral admired the strength Lron had summoned to flame him.
Taking inspiration from his friend and roommate he opened his own mouth to speak, but the few sounds he offered were more squeaks than phonemes. After swallowing a mouthful of spit, Viral managed to rasp, “Are you FBI?”
Tapping her boots impatiently on the blacktop, the woman shook her small head. “No,” she said.
To his left, beyond the squad car parked diagonally across the intersection in front of Tyler’s building, Viral saw four men and women wearing suits noticeably more fitted than the humps sorting evidence on the sidewalk. One of the women swiped her finger across an iPad that Viral knew had not yet become commercially available.
“Are you CIA?” he asked.
The woman cracked a smile, revealing a chipped canine tooth on the left side of her mouth. “No,” she said.
"Who are you then?" Viral asked.
Viral couldn't say for certain but he thought he heard the woman cluck her tongue against the roof of her mouth before she said, "We're both."