Failure. It was a word Viral knew well. Intellectually he kept the concept at arm's length, submerged in ager, confined to a petri dish, and hid beneath a microscope. Desiccated and dissected, the word lost its heft, shriveling into its constituent phonemes, as innocuous as bird poo on a park bench. And like bird poo on a park bench, failure was something Viral couldn't help but stick his butt on.

Viral walked through the hallways of the Ramada in a daze. The ragged, red carpet and the cream-colored dry wall sucked in the hours of the day with the gravity of a black hole. When he had left the hotel room shared by Farooq and Dr. Hackman, daylight had risen over the squat buildings of the Wilmington business district and cast its white light with a cool glare that revealed in full force the shadows that hung from the haggard faces of Viral and Farooq. After his cold shower, Dr. Hackman had shaken off the worst of his melatonin hangover and had bounded to the honeymoon suite to collect the pastries promised by Agent Treyna and Officer Avril. Farooq chose to build himself into a blanket fort to catch-up on the sleep Viral deprived him; alone, Viral decided to walk, hoping the shadow of his ineptitude would not choose to follow.

The elevator's bell dinged. The sliding doors spread and Viral followed the shuffle of his feet into the hall. The carpet felt different beneath his feet, somehow more ragged than before, more threadbare than he had imagined possible. It was dark, too. The carpet and the hallway. Viral looked down the corridor to his right. The florescent lights secured above polyurethane screens had mostly burned out. A lone pair of tubes near the end of the hallway flickered, casting a greenish light the color of a bulimic's pallor.

To his left Viral saw at the end of what seemed like a mile, the ominously red lettering of an exit sign. Viral heard the elevator doors begin to close behind him. Turning quickly on his heels he tried to throw his hand in the narrowing gap. The doors shut. He was too late.

Viral slapped at the elevator's call button to go down but the light behind the arrow did not come on. The up button too was unresponsive. Stenciled to the frame of the elevator bank was the number six. This was the floor he was warned about. Upon closing the hotel to the public and brokering a deal with the Ramada's manager, Agent Treyna had told her disciples that the sixth floor was off-limits. It had been reserved by management to quarantine the employees of the hotel who had sick members at home. Though Viral and the members of his coterie had been inoculated with a convalescent plasma from frontline workers in Atlanta, Monica could not guarantee their safety from each other let alone a cadre of service-sector immigrants. It was best practice to avoid the sixth floor at all costs.

Viral asked himself how he had arrived here. Upon leaving Farooq and Dr. Hackman's room, he had wandered back to his own seeking a couple hours of long-overdue shuteye. Inside he found Alan and Smooshy wrapped in each other's arms. Stone cold asleep he assumed from Smooshy's lion-like snore and Alan's nasal, piccolo whistle. Pulling back the corners of the comforter Viral climbed beneath his covers. Dangling his feet over the side of the bed he peeled his sneakers off with his heels. Defeat had already begun to sap his will for self-sufficience.

Thinking of defeat had the same the effect on him as it always had. It led him to thinking about his father. Viral felt a full ache in his chest imagining the condition in which his father found himself isolated in an ICU during the opening salvo of what was becoming a global pandemic. Was he lonely, Viral wondered. Was he scared. The ache beneath his sternum dropped into his belly with the weight of hot, soppy guilt. Viral felt nauseous.

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He wiggled his head from beneath the comforter and grabbed the cordless phone from the nightstand. Back beneath the covers he dialed the telephone number for his home. Other than his own it was the only one he knew by heart. His mother answered after the fourth ring.

"Hello?" she said with curt trepidation.

"Mom, it's me," Viral said.

"What's happened?" She asked.

"Nothing, ma. I'm just calling to check on you and dad."

"Are you in Rhode Island?"

"What?"

"Providence. Are you with that girl I talked to...what was it...two days ago? She said you were going to stay with her family near the Vanderbilt house."

Viral recalled the conversation Monica had told him she had with his mother while he was visiting Lron at the detention center.

"Oh right, yes we arrived safely."

"Why are you talking so quiet?"

Viral looked over his shoulder at Alan and Smooshy. He crawled further beneath the covers. "Sorry," he said, "People here are sleeping."

"Is it safe?" his mother asked.

"Uh, yeah, Monica's, um, mother, Gigi, is a nurse. She has enough PPP for all of us."

"How many of you are there?"

"Just four. Me, Monica, and her parents."

Viral hated how easy it was for him to lie to his mother. He had never done it before. The closest he had come was rounding his algebra grade up two tenths of a point to qualify for his middle school honor roll.

"Good. You had me worried calling so late," his mother said.

"I couldn't sleep. I've been worried about dad."

"Your father is doing well, I suppose. The nurse told me that he is stable. The years of smoking aren't helping matters."

Viral remembered counting the cigarette buttes in the ashtray of his father's BMW after a math meet in which Viral's team placed second. He had begged his father to stop smoking. His father's response was that he would when Viral stopped causing him so much grief.

Viral had taken the comment to mean that his father wanted his son to not only succeed but achieve, to stand on the neck of his competitors and swing the good medal around his head like a helicopter. The china cabinet in their dining room held instead of dishware his father's medals from academic competitions his father had won in India and the UK. His father would stop smoking, Viral thought, when Viral earned the right to demand it. And that right would only come with victories over peers on math and science tests.

"Did the doctors say when he can come home?" Viral asked his mother. His breathing beneath the covers was beginning to suffocate him.

"No. No one knows anything. At one point they told me it was bronchitis, at another that it was pneumonia. No one seems to want to use the word Covid."

"Why?" Viral asked.

"Who knows?" His mother said. "Probably something about politics."

"What's political about Covid?"

"I don't know. You know I don't follow these kinds of things. I ask the doctor if your father has Covid and the doctor says it could be comingling factors."

"Comingling?"

"I don't know, Vudu. Are you sure you are all right staying with this girl and her family?"

"Yes, I am sure."

"Because I know how bothersome you can become to people after long periods of time."

"I am on my best behavior, mom".

"Good. This girl, Monica is it?"

"Yes."

"She sounds educated and thin. If her family lives near the Vanderbilt home and she can afford tuition at Brown then she may be the best you can ever find. Is she on scholarship?"

"No, I don't think so."

"Good, then don't mess it up, bub."

"I'll try, mom."

"Please do better than that, Vudu. I have to get some sleep now. Your father is expecting me to bring some of his papers to the hospital in a few hours."

"Tell him I said hello and that I'm doing my best to help him."

"That's sweet, bub. He will appreciate the laugh. Talk soon."

Click.

Viral stared at the phone. He'd never felt further from his parents. The encroaching isolation wrapped around him like a snake. It was becoming impossible to breath beneath the covers. He hung up the phone and gasped for air.

Alan stirred. "Viral, are you here?"

"No," Viral said. "I'm just leaving."