The lock to his hotel room clicked upon the insert of his key. The servo rotating the bolt whirred like a vending machine lapping at a dollar. After the sound the second sense that hit Viral was the smell of dirty socks. Cringing, he entered the room, felt for the light switch against the yellowing wall paper to his right.

Upon flipping the switch Viral heard a yelp. From around the corner next to the bathroom he saw a pair of legs kick from beneath a comforter. "Dude, what the fuuuu..." Alan said, groggy.

Viral came around the corner from the room's entrance sheepishly. "Sorry, man," he said, "Were you sleeping?"

"No, dude," Alan said, rubbing his eye with his fist, "I was transcribing Beethoven's Fifth."

Stunned, Viral asked, "You write sheet music?"

Alan stared, squinting in the room's harsh light. "Could you like turn a lamp on instead, or something?" he said.

"Oh, right, sorry," Viral said. Viral clicked the button at the base of a lamp near the television, switched off the light at the door. "Better?" he asked.

"No," Alan said.

"You want the bedside lamp, too?" Viral asked.

"No, I mean the light's fine. I don't write sheet music. I was being sarcastic," Alan said.

"Oh," Viral said, feeling embarrassed.

"Don't take this the wrong way, but, like, are you special or something?" Alan asked.

"Like gifted?"

"Yeah, or on the spectrum."

"My psychiatrist says I'm hyper-focused."

"Oh word? I saw a psychiatrist for a bit, too," Alan said, reaching for his glasses on the night stand.

"I didn't know you wore glasses," Viral said.

"I'm surprised you don't," said Alan.

Viral nodded. He too had looked around at the Indians collected in his computer and mathematics classes, struck by the notion that he had won some consolation prize in the genetic sweepstakes.

"Do you write sheet music?" Alan asked.

"No," Viral said, "But I think I want to learn after I teach myself Rust."

"Teach yourself Rust?"

"The low-level assembly language for the web?"

"My shrink would have definitely called you special," Alan said. "Where's my shirt?"

Viral bent to help Alan look beneath the bed, but Alan stopped him. "Don't bother," he said, "the air will be good to get some fuzz on my nips."

As Viral was about to follow-up for clarification, Alan asked him for how long he'd been seeing his psychiatrist.

"Since I was five," Viral said.

"Oh snap," Alan said, "My shrink most def would have slapped you with that auti tag."

Viral sat on the second double bed, began untying his sneakers. "My dad is a big believer in mental health."

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

"No offense, but your shit sounds chronic," Alan said.

Viral couldn't disagree. "How long did you see yours?" Viral asked.

Alan propped his hands behind his head against the bed frame. "About two years," he said. "I was mandated after high school."

"This was related to the dead girlfriend thing?" Viral asked.

"She isn't dead...I don't think," Alan said. "But yeah, it was tied to that debacle."

"Is that how Monica got her hooks in you?"

Alan reached across his shoulder, scratched at his fuzzless armpit. "Yeah, you could say that."

"Will you get mad if I ask what happened?"

"Nah, it's cool," Alan said. And Alan told Viral the story of how he had gone to Canadian jail in Vancouver for two years after high school on suspicion of killing his ex-girlfriend. "I didn't kill her, by the way," Alan said.

Viral held up his hands, waving away the suggestion that he cared.

"It's okay," Alan said, "People like to know. Most of the time I let them believe what they want, you know, for the cred, but the truth is I'm a pussy. She fell in love with this Muslim dude at another school who fancied himself some kind of Pakistani Hemingway. She eloped with him and moved to Syria to fight against Assad."

"She joined ISIS?" Viral asked gingerly.

"That's the impolite way to say it," Alan mentioned. "But whatever the cause, she bailed. Snuck out of her parents' house at night and left a diary saying that I beat her. I didn't, of course, she was a hard ass Vietnamese. She could break my dick by flicking it."

"Oh," Viral said, wincing.

"Anyway, I was the easiest scapegoat for her to blame her disappearance on. She knew I loved her so much that I'd never rat. I never had the balls to tell her parents the truth. So I just ate it, thinking that maybe someday she'd come back and thank me with a bj."

Viral hadn't expected that coda to Alan's love story, but a small part of him swooned at the romance of sacrifice.

Alan continued, "I lost my free ride to an accelerated medical program at Utah State, was banned from getting a visa to study in America."

"What kind of doctor did you want to be?"

"A hematologist. Blood's my bitch. That used to be my saying in high school. It didn't help at my trial."

"That's a bold slogan," Viral added.

"True, though. My dad's a cardiologist, and I used to think I wanted to be a surgeon, but ever since I can remember I've been fascinated by blood. I never wanted to dissect things to open them up. I just wanted to see them bleed."

Viral dug his toes through his socks, into the carpet. He began to wonder if Alan didn't have a little OJ in him after all.

"Is that why Monica recruited you?" Viral said. "Because of your specialty with blood?"

"I can only guess. I don't know what else she could've seen. A pair of mounties rolled up to my parent's house, what, four days ago? They showed me and my folks a letter from the US consulate saying I could qualify for a student visa with my scholarship at Utah reinstated if I flew to Baltimore the next night. That's all I knew."

"So you're here by choice," Viral said.

"Hell yeah," Alan said, leaning forward at the waist. "An opportunity to study in America? For free? Without the need to take the MCAT or the FMLE? No immigrant could pass that up."

"But you don't even know what we're involved with here," Viral said.

"Who cares?" Alan said. "It's just like football; it's a game. There's a goal, we got teammates, a common purpose. What does it matter if we're saving the world or helping to destroy it?"

"Seems like it matters a bit to me," Viral said.

"Yeah, I get that," Alan said. "But you were born here. Don't get me wrong, as a Canadian I have my own reservations about America, but the people who are born here, I don't know, it just seems like you all are a bit more skeptical of what your government can do."

Viral thought back on the Black Lives Matters protests he had attended with Lron in the fall on their college campus; the right-wing speakers they lobbied to bar from speaking at academic events; the online petitions they circulated to have Scarlett Johansson digitally removed from anime features. Viral's political awakening had come entirely as a byproduct of his relationship with his queer, black roommate. He had taken for granted that the dominant discourse of his freshman core humanities classes, and Lron's consciousness raising mitzvahs with his Young Socialists comrades in their dorm room was the lingua franca of American adulthood. To be grown was to be left.

But here he sat, his back turned to the window somewhere outside of which Lron curled into a ball on a sleeping mat in a detention center. The warmth Viral felt elevate through his toes from the carpet heated by the Ramada's dated, floor-level radiators served as a reminder that he had chosen comfort over conscience.

As if failing to stifle a burp, Viral spoke without reflex. "But I love being an American," he said.

Alan smiled and snapped a finger gun in Viral's direction. "Well now's your chance to prove it," he said.

Then, from beneath the mattress on which Alan leisurely reclined, Viral heard what sounded like a groan.

Alan's eyes opened and he propped himself up on his fingertips. "Oh shit, I almost forgot," he said.

And just like that Viral lost the thread of Alan's American tale, and wondered what the canuck this Canadian was hiding.