Monica disappeared into the deep right of the rack, losing half her body like a spermatoza in an egg. Out she popped holding a blue and orange quarter zip sweatshirt. Back in and out, she reappeared with blue jeans too. She laid them on the bed. To Viral they looked to be at least 3 sizes too large.
"I’m gonna need stuff for the undies, too," Viral said.
From the drawer to Viral's left, the one he'd seen open upon entering, the one that boasted a bouquet of women's unmentionables, Monica picked a slingshot of black lace. She pulled her underwear taught between her thumbs and peered at Viral through the fabric. "Very funny," Viral said, hoping his voice hadn't cracked.
"I think I got some Jaxon left,” she said, leaving to the main room. Viral looked at the clothes she'd laid out. The sweatshirt said “Iceberg” on it. The inside of the jeans did, too. He thought about smelling her sheets before she came back, but just then a red web thwapped against his temple.
He saw they were a pair of men's compression briefs. Holding them up to his waist he figured they were the smallest shorts he had ever seen on a man not born in Brazil.
“I wasn’t kidding, Chodha,” Monica said. Snapping her fingers, she added, “Strip. Let’s get going.”
“Privacy, please?” Viral asked.
Agent Treyna scoffed. "Nice try. I’m not leaving you alone in my bedroom. Did you forget you’re still in federal custody?”
“Can you turn around, at least?”
“So you can attack me from behind? No chance.” Monica crossed her arms like a prison guard.
“Then you’re going to have to look to the side or something because I’m not comfortable with this.”
Monica huffed and rolled her eyes but turned 45 degrees to her left. The only things Viral heard were a man yelling at a delivery truck blocking the street outside Monica's open window and the tap tap tap of her impatient boots. When the unzipping of Viral's DHS jumpsuit echoed like an ice sheet crashing off a glacier, Viral started to feel a bit sick.
“I need some music,” Viral said.
Monica shook her head. “You are such a wimp,” she said, but she pulled her phone from her back pocket and wirelessly connected to the blue tooth speaker on the empty box of wine next to her bed. “It’s my workout mix. I hope it gets you moving faster.”
The first track started playing and Viral recognized it from the lines he waited in at Jamba Juice and the dorm rooms where other people sounded like they were enjoying college. Viral pulled the jumpsuit off his legs and used it to wipe at the pee that had dried on his thigh. He felt the first breeze of spring through Monica's window waft against his butt cheeks. When the beat dropped on the music Viral recognized it as the song for the video he'd watched a dozen times on YouTube. The video where the singer Dua Lipa danced in a pleather-strapped brassiere that reminded Viral of the first woman who tickled his hormones -- Mila Jovavich, the illiterate alien from The Fifth Element. When he later learned she had also starred in the film adaptation of one of his favorite video game series, Resident Evil, he googled her agent’s address in Los Angeles and sent a hand-written letter asking her to his homecoming dance. Viral never heard back; he hadn’t used the United States Postal Service since.
The memories of Mila, the visions of Dua -- and the sensory stimulus he maneuvered under his laptop while watching her dance -- mixed with the present circumstance of standing nude mere feet from a real woman, got the blood rushing south from Viral's head.
“Um, can you change the music, please?” he asked.
“I thought you said--” Through her peripheral vision Monica saw Viral pinching his knees together and holding the balled-up jumpsuit over his privates. She grew up with younger half brothers; she knew what Viral’s chicken dance meant. A rising tide was lifting his li'l yachty.
She quickly opened her phone’s music app. “I don’t know what will make you -- um -- less --”
“Anything! Baseball!” Viral shouted.
Monica panicked. "Opening day’s been postponed!” she yelled.
The beat and bass of Dua Lipa stirred the atoms in the room into a frenzy, and Viral felt he was losing the battle to his bottom body's salute. "Just play something less sexy!" he screamed.
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For a moment Monica fumbled before finding a streaming station on her phone.
Finally, Viral felt his heart rate begin to slow and his...phalange...begin to lower.
From the tone of the woman's voice speaking through Monica's speaker, Viral could tell she'd chosen a public radio station. He was relieved. Little else mitigated the chub than DC bureau updates delivered by a nasal monotone. Monica's eyes were back on the wall, and Viral felt a bit less anxious in his buff. The calm restored helped him balance like a stork into Monica's husband's red, moisture-wicking briefs.
But after only one foot in and knee raised to his chest, Viral felt the remnants of his Sonic mushroom-swiss slide from his small intestine to his large. It left an emerging bubble buoyed in his duodenum. It was even odds that it'd break top or bottom. Viral hoped he could will it to dissolve. Silently.
Meanwhile, the public radio feed on the speaker continued: “...at odds with the comments made by the President more than two weeks ago. In a tweet dated February 24th of 2020, the President wrote:
“‘The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA. We are in contact with everyone and all relevant countries. CDC & World Health have been working hard and very smart. Stock Market starting to look very good to me!’”
Monica shut the speaker off. “Hey!” Viral said.
“Lamestream lies aren’t going to be of any help to us,” she said.
Viral started pulling his legs through Jaxon's pants. “Is that what this is about?” he asked.
“Just hurry up," she said.
Viral stopped dressing. Even though shirtless in Jaxon’s denim he looked like a broken Twix ready for a rave, Viral stood his ground. “I’m not moving until you tell me what is going on.”
“It’s too long to get into,” Monica said.
“Then you better start fast." He felt his little, brown nipples harden at the authority vibrating in his chest.
Monica leaned on a cluttered table against her wall. “You have three questions," she said. "Go.”
Viral slipped his arms through the oversized Iceberg sweatshirt Monica had laid on the bed. “First, let’s start with how you got my essay on your phone.”
Before she had led Viral into her bedroom, Monica showed Viral a PDF of the essay he had submitted to the National Westinghouse Science Competition when he was a junior in high school. She told him all Westinghouse finalists had their submissions logged with the national copyright office. “Second question?” she asked.
Sitting on the edge of Monica’s bed, Viral pulled Jaxon’s white tube socks up past his calves. “Second, what’s that paper have to do with now?”
Monica said she looked up whatever she could find on Viral when she overheard him calculate the average number of times a day a person touched their face. She’d been watching and listening over a closed circuit TV as Viral met with the attorney hired by his father to straighten out whatever mess he’d found himself in courtesy of Lron and Tyler Osterhauf.
“After reviewing the material you submitted to the Westinghouse contest, I started to think that maybe you’d be a good fit for the project the Bureau’s putting together,” Monica said.
“You understood the point of that project?”
“That your third question?”
“No.”
“Too bad. That’s three, and I don’t know if I understood what you wrote. Me being a girl and a public school graduate and all. Tell me what I missed.”
Monica went on to share her understanding of Viral’s paper about imaginary numbers in higher dimensions. She reiterated Viral’s thesis, that imaginary numbers became real numbers as quaternions in multi-dimensional space. In her own words, she explained the translation of the square root of negative numbers into rotations around axes. She expressed agreement with the conclusion Viral had presented near the end of his project, the conclusion that had awarded him third amongst more than 35,000 submissions.
“And I figured maybe the kid who submitted this paper, with some more training, could be of service to his country applying what he knows about non-Euclidian space to the rebuilding of the neural nets Osterhauf doused.”
Color Viral impressed. He’d taken Monica to be a brawn over brain kind of person who thought mixed numbers were something you ordered at a bar. Yet she’d perfectly distilled what he had barely managed to collect into a report even after his father rewrote it. He never even considered the application of his project on imaginary numbers to reverse engineering Tyler’s artificial neural networks. Not until Monica told him, just now. He was grateful Jaxon’s wardrobe was so baggy; it hid the excitement he felt rising in his mankini bottoms for not just Monica’s battered beauty but her off-beat brain, too.
Viral had never flirted with a girl before; he figured now would be as opportune a time as any to start. “I didn’t think --” he began, but the sound of the front door of Monica’s apartment closing shut him up.
With a start, Viral asked, “Who’s that?”
“Probably my roommate,” Monica said. “Finish getting dressed.”
Monica left, and on her exit Viral caught his reflection in the full-length mirror she’d been blocking with her body. His confidence flushed. He couldn’t imagine a more stark summation of his inadequacies compared to Jaxon than literally not filling out the clothes of Monica’s husband.
“Viral, come out! I want to introduce you!” Monica yelled from the common room.
Viral swallowed the shame he felt looking at himself. It pushed the bubble in his gut further through his colon. He reminded himself that feelings were a weakness. He stuffed everything he’d begun to feel for Monica over the past three hours into the ice box that served as his heart. His father had told him loneliness fled if he held close to his ambition; his long term goals would keep him company. He raised the zipper on the Iceberg sweatshirt in which his bird-boned torso swam. The clothing was his armor, surrogate for his flailing self esteem, which had prematurely accepted that he always was and would be infrior to whatever and whomever Monica already had.
He touched the doorknob to the common room and caught his breath, resigned to meet the man Monica loved, the better version of himself whom he could never be. The bubble inside him passed through his butt. It gathered in the baggy seat of his denim bottoms. It was the kind of flatulence for which Viral had hoped. Silent. But deadly.