March 10, 2020
US Coronavirus cases: 1,001
"Everywhere we go, we're afraid we're going ot catch it."
- Barrie Beth Mesner, Mamoreneck, N.Y.
Monica leaned on the horn; her Ford Taurus swerving back and over the solid yellow on the street. “C’mon you piece of soda, pick a freaking lane!” she yelled. Viral looked at the back of the CD Monica played in her stereo. The music was smooth yet bouncy. He’d never heard it before. He didn’t recognize the artist’s name, John B., either.
He and Monica seemed worlds apart, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that they were somehow cosmically connected. Maybe opposite halves like in the song “Origin of Love” that Lron routinely sang while moisturizing himself after a shower. Even though she wasn’t that much older than him -- ten or twelve years tops -- Viral felt as if he and she were from totally different generations.
From the passenger seat he stole a look at her. She had her elbow propped against the half-open window holding her vape pen in the corner of her mouth. Viral saw the fading ink of a tattoo near the base of her neck. Some kind of Arabic symbol, he thought. When she caught him looking she smiled at him wide.
“Kismet,” she said.
Viral told her that he didn’t know what that meant. She said it was the name of a frog. Then she slapped the stitched leather steering wheel with her palm and laughed like a duck.
The building she lived in looked like a run-down junior high from the street. Monica said it was the “artsy” part of Wilmington back in 2010, when she first moved from Maryland, where she’d gone to school. From the station Viral had expected them to check-in with Lron and go through some kind of debriefing with a shrink, but the Potato Man’s misplacement of Viral’s clothes meant he needed underwear and toiletries fast.
The little bit of pee he’d let escape when Monica laid her trap on him had run down the side of his thigh and begun to chafe in the sandpaper onesie Homeland Security had forced him into. They’d stopped at a Walgreen’s, but there wasn’t any parking. There was a line down the block to get in, too. The JC Penny had a hand-written sign on its door that said “Closed cuz noones working.” Normally, Viral would’ve been irate about his situation -- legally an adult and trapped in a second-hand Taurus with a diaper rash fomenting in his pants -- but Monica took them through a Sonic drive-through, and the milkshake Viral ordered gave him a generous dose of the I-don’t-give-a-flips.
Swiping a fry from his carry-out bag, Monica told him she had a change of clothes Viral could wear at her apartment. They belonged to her husband.
“I didn’t know you were married,” Viral said.
“Is that gonna be a problem?” she asked.
Viral thought it over. Yeah, he realized. It sure as flip was.
The inside of her apartment smelled like pumpkins. It wasn’t the kind in latte spice, but the old-fashioned kind that came from the dirt. After fiddling with her keys in the lock, Monica had to lean her shoulder heavy into the door to get it past its sticking.
“Then with the Sandinistas it had all gone to hell,” she’d been saying.
After the bit about her husband Monica took the conversation back to the events precipitating the fall of the Twin Towers in 2001. Before she led him out of the interrogation room, Viral had asked her why both the FBI and the CIA had any interest in a freshman computer science major like him when he couldn’t offer anything on the mysterious figure known as Tyler Osterhauf. Monica had told him an explanation started with 9/11.
It turned out that most everything Viral had heard from Mr. Kratz about the worst domestic act of war since 1941 wasn’t all that accurate. From Monica Viral learned that the U.S. government had known about the dangers posed by the rag-tag group of militant idealogues called Al Qaeda. In fact, not only had the U.S. armed and trained them, originally to fight a proxy war against the Russians, but the insiders who circulated between Presidential administrations regardless of party had more than a good idea that Saudi Arabian oil revenue was disappearing into a dark corner of the mountains to the east of Iran.
“How do you know all this?” Viral had asked Monica as he tried to keep a sliced pickle from sliding out of the side of his mushroom swiss burger while Monica slalomed down I-95.
She told him about the consecutive internships she had on the Hill while at the University of Maryland and the three months she spent at the Green Zone in Iraq. It was where she’d met her husband Jaxon, she’d said, but Viral steered the conversation back to Al Qeda because anything, even homicidal jihad, was preferable to hearing Monica talk about her husband while pee dried in Viral’s pants.
The summers she spent as an intern for a senator on the Foreign Intelligence Committee had watered the seed of a dream job in law enforcement that had been planted by her biological dad. She called him that because she said he didn’t do much to really be considered more. But what he did do was work fifteen years as Police in the Bronx; five before Monica was born and another ten after.
“Why’d he stop?” Viral asked. By this point of the drive he’d gotten halfway through his milkshake and felt the ‘itus creeping on, which, in concert with the cloth-upholstered bucket seat that had likely cost the original owner of the Taurus $350 on top of MSRP, gave Monica’s story the feeling to him of a bedtime fairy tale.
It turned out the reason Monica’s dad had stopped being police was the same reason for a lot of things in Monica’s life: 9/11. Officer Treyna had been cleaning the above-ground pool at the split-level in Younkers he’d bought for his new family, Monica said, the morning two planes hijacked by Saudi nationals struck the World Trade Center in downtown Manhattan. He wasn’t even at Ground Zero, she said, until five days later when he signed up with the other members of his precinct to pull a shift sorting through the rubble. Monica had asked him not to go. There wasn't going to be any more survivors, she'd said. He told her that he knew that, and that he was going to do the least he could, even if it meant just scanning for tokens family members would want of the loved ones they lost. It wasn’t the jihadis who’d taken out Monica’s father. It was the sediment of dust they left in the wake of their destruction that settled in his lungs. Two years, eight months, and fourteen days after he found a broken coffee cup in the smoking ruins just off Fulton Street that said “Dad of the Year”, Officer Treyna breathed his last. Another light eclipsed by the long shadow of 9/11.
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Never one to linger on feelings, especially bad ones, and especially especially the bad ones of other people, Viral pushed past the hurting his heart had when Monica told him of her loss. “What do the Sandinistas have to do with Al Qaeda?” he asked, following her into her unit. She turned a sharp right, and Viral almost stubbed his foot against a circular dining table placed uncomfortably close to the entrance.
“That’s my point. It’s all connected,” she said, pulling her jacket and purse from her shoulders and tossing them on a dark blue recliner. The banana blouse she wore beneath her blazer had short sleeves. Viral expected her forearms to be wider given the size of her knuckles.
Crossing into an open kitchen to Viral’s left, she continued: “Once the CIA got started fighting communism on this continent then everything got mixed together.” She pulled a carton of milk from the fridge and drank from it. Viral declined when she offered him some. While Viral was ready for a deep sleep after an all-nighter in federal detention and a combo meal from Sonic, Monica had the manic energy of a conspiracy theorist pulling red yarn across a cork board.
“Reagan gutted the budget and all of a sudden CIA, DEA, FBI, INS, ATF -- all these different groups that had been their own little kingdoms up to that point -- found themselves competing for the same disappearing stack of resources,” she said.
Viral noticed the apartment was one large room with four off-shoots. To the right of the dining table, behind him, was the living area where Monica had thrown her stuff. In addition to the Lazy-Boy it had a sofa backed against a window, a bookcase, and a tube TV that sat on a particle wood cabinet. On the opposite side of the dining table was the kitchen that had another door next to its fridge. It was closed, but from the decorations on the outside Viral assumed it led to a bedroom. The frilly pink border around some of the photos pasted on the door didn’t look to be Monica’s style, and Viral had doubts that an Iraq vet named Jaxon would tape black-and-white postcards from Paris on the entrance to his boudoir.
Monica was leaning on the island countertop between the kitchen and the common area. Viral could see the sweat staining the shirt under her arms. “With everyone competing against each other, the bigger the bust, the more powder or guns on a table for a photo on the frontpage of the Times became the difference between getting enough money to keep your team intact or laying off vets for rookies.”
Viral turned with Monica as she brushed past him from behind the countertop. "Communication fizzled. Collaboration was D.O.A," she said while backpedalling past the dining table. Viral saw that it was covered in unfolded newspaper mottled by hardened wax. “And that’s where I and you come into the story,” she said.
The crash course had sent Viral’s head spinning. “And this was in the eighties?” he asked.
“Yeah,” Monica said, pushing aside the electric mixer, ball of twine, glass jars, and scissors that sat on the dining table. She perched on the edge of a chair and motioned for Viral to sit next to her. He picked at a scab of wax on the tabletop. “Don’t worry about that,” she said. “My roommate’s into making candles.”
Roommate? Was that how adults like Monica had started referring to their partners? The mythos of Jaxon began to coalesce into an admirable jack of all trades in Viral's imagination.
“Even though it turned out we had all this information that pointed to Osama Bin Laden, and Al Qaeda, and Afghanistan, and the planning of a big attack, we couldn’t do anything about it because none of us were talking. The CIA had some pieces here, the FBI had some pieces there, Army intelligence had some, the NSA -- it was all over. No one was putting any of it together. Do you follow?”
Viral lied. “Yes,” he said.
“When I joined up I made it my mission to make sure that didn’t happen again. I got to talking to some new recruits at the CIA and the Joint Chiefs whom I’d known at the Hill, and we decided we were going to work together. We were going to share our sources; no more pissing contests.”
“And that’s me?” Viral asked. “A shared source?”
“Well, yes,” Monica said, “And...no.”
Suddenly Viral felt very, very tired.
Monica could see his eyelids getting heavy so she cut to the chase. “The best and the brightest don’t work for us anymore, Viral. They’re in Silicon Valley. They’re designing robotic surgeons at MIT and going public with biotech startups in Seattle. What talent we could attract using the 'Uncle Sam Needs You' pitch is more interested in playing with the fancy toys the Pentagon has than teaming up with the dusty FBI. Even the Army gets its pick of the scraps because it pumps a third of its budget into making war feel like a video game. Have you ever fired a drone? It feels like Call of Duty. You kill a bad guy, get to take a dump in a nice toilet, and order Uber Eats for dinner. The FBI, and the CIA for that matter, get the runts of the litter. The brains too raw for Google, too timid for the Army, too provincial for the State Department, and too dumb for the Pentagon.”
“And that’s where I come in?” Viral asked.
“Sorry,” Monica said, leaning back, taking a breath for the first time in what seemed to Viral like an hour.
“I guess I’m flattered just to be considered,” Viral said.
Monica stood and went to the living room. “That reminds me. Let me show you something,” she said. Viral studied the framed photograph of a log-burning fire that leaned against the wall behind him.
Monica returned sliding her finger across the surface of her phone. She placed it on the table for Viral to look at and stood behind him. Viral could feel her hand holding the back of his chair, inches from his shoulder. He wondered if one of her big knuckles would graze the fabric of his jumpsuit, but the image on the phone shook him. “How’d you get this?” he asked.
“It’s a long story even longer, but first we got to get you changed because we’re running late,” she said.
Viral followed her past another long sofa and a love seat that both looked on the photograph of the log-burning hearth. Viral studied the collection of items that had been marshalled into the corner of the room, covered with a dusty, white table cloth. One of its corners didn’t quite touch the carpet and beneath it Viral could see the bottom edge of a crate which held a record that had the name Caldwell on it.
Viral was going to ask Monica about it when she touched him on the elbow and said, “In here.” Viral looked up in time to see her disappear into a doorway. This part of the apartment didn’t smell like pumpkins. It smelled like vanilla. And it smelled like sweat. When Viral saw women’s underwear in the top drawer of a dresser left open, it hit him like an arrow to the heart that not only was he alone with a married woman, but he was alone with her in her bedroom.
Viral must have froze in place because Monica was saying his name. “We don’t have much time,” she said.
“Huh?” Viral said. And when he still didn’t move, she made things a lot more clear, and she said, “Strip.”