Bug Chaser

“Come on. come on. Janus”

My classics professor, Dr. Fuggati, still has his tie on, but his pants are at his feet. His legs are slick and glistening, splayed open on the desk, like a sow hanging on a hook. He’s got a salt and pepper mustache, and olive skin that clutches his hips like cling wrap when he hugs his knees. He grips the desk till his knuckles gasp blue, and I am having trouble staying focused. He shakes impatiently

“Worried about your test tomorrow?”

He’s joking, but irritated. He runs his hand up my nipple tying to awaken something neither of us can see.

“Haha, yea I guess so.”

I tug at myself. I kiss his chin. I kiss his feet. I tell him to touch me,

“like here, no here.”

I wish my mouth down the side of him. I try my way inside. I try to begin what’s already ended. I step back into my defeated jeans.

“Have you ever seen a virus before?”

I look up from my phone.

“You mean, you have one?”

“Yea.” A clock inside him ticks. “you wanna see it?”

He clicks a button on his phone, and the tv behind me thunders green. His virus throbs across the monitor.

“He’s sexy, isn’t he?” The professor hugs me from behind, rubbing his facial hair on my cheek.

“He is.”

And I mean it. The virus is sly, bright, a chameleon crusted in pixels. His skin is chrome for a moment, but I look again and then it’s oak. He flickers fangs, snake hide, all my fantasies at once. He is James Dean, and Tom of Finland, and Josephine Baker, and Jessica Rabbit, and Porfirio Rubirosa, and Helen of Troy. He is a war I will go to die inside.

The professor rubs me, slowly. I can smell his zinc shampoo and rain. I can feel his virus watching me, as the professor bites lightly on my Adam’s apple. The hair on our chests stand in unison.

This is my first time seeing the virus, but this is not the virus’ first time seeing me. The professor slips an earbud in while I take his tie off with my teeth. I am not allowed to listen. This is his virus. I have to get my own. I don’t know what it is saying to the professor, but his nostrils open hot, and I can feel his stiffness against mine as he grips my hair like the steering wheel of a car before collision.

//

I know for sure that I want one next month, when the professor’s landlady finds him dead in his studio apartment. He is naked except for his socks, his whole body greased in Vaseline, bound to an office chair with bright red hemp rope. His eyes, still open, burn like cigarettes in front of the computer screen.

What could take a man to that place? Men, like me, who are conditioned our whole lives to believe we’ve got something everyone else should want. How do you snap that fiction in half? How do you separate humility and humiliation? When it’s gone what’s beneath him? That truth, it must have been so good, or so true, he couldn’t bear any other life. I need it. I need Him.

The government hardly makes any provisions to prevent an outbreak because, in their eyes, it is the ethical responsibility of the individual to inoculate themselves through sheer moral fortitude. Those who come in contact with the virus are regarded as social degenerates who earned their punishment. Politicians, in vague depraved platitudes, maintain that the virus can only take the lonely, the old, and stupid. This is, in a way, true, but we are all lonely. We’ve all whittled our minds down to hollow gourds by now. He is coming for us. You can either lie, and tell yourself you are well managed enough to survive (silently running from the sad blue beetle in your mind) or you can admit that you, like everyone else, are infested with lonely, want, fuck, and hunger. You can give yourself to the virus, like an offering. You can be raptured on the altar of your loneliness.

//

There are two ways to get the virus. Enter a virtual dungeon and wait until one smells you or steal one from someone you know.

I try the first method.

“VDs” connect users through wifi, and emit a sound frequency which creates neurochemically induced hallucinations. As you watch the screen, you feel like you’re in a crowded neon room and everyone wants to fuck you, nurse you, or watch as you’re burned alive.

There are illegal apps that can take you to a VD but they all have a price. QuickClick lets you in, but once a month someone doesn't make it out. SpeedDeed has a glitch that could give everyone your brother’s face. Blink is time limited, and if you’re greedy, light and blood switch places.

I click the icon for Blink on my tablet. It looks like a heart shaped locket. I unlock it, and then it unlocks me.

I think, if I try to describe this VD , it looks like the inside of the mind. I am in a house with no living, no kitchen, just hallways that lead to other hallways. There are no light fixtures, but everything is red, the color moves like a creature, it purrs through the room. Both the walls are mirrors, even the doors that line them. There are eyes, asses, tight nipples, there are at least a hundred people, but when I blink they grow a little bigger, like a fungus.

I open a door and a strong rippled man is suspended upside down, his face blushes purple like a screaming infant. He has thin red curls that drip with sweat. Pacing the stone floor in patent black stilettos, a dark woman in a matching dog mask zaps him with a tiny pen. Through his legs, she looks at me and grins.

In another room middle aged men swat each other with riding crops. They’re all wearing diapers.

There’s a room with nuns who tell boys how to sin, and a room that swallows light like water, though you can hear invisible people breathing.

I enter the room, where everything happened. My fifth grade teacher, Mr. Ameliano, is waiting for me. He walks me to his laptop, and tells me it’s ok to watch the video as long as he is there.

I feel a splash of acid hit the back of my throat. I’m about to leave when the computer screen starts gushing, the ceiling weeps, I watch thin white rivers gorge through my skin before my eyes get too hot to see.

//

I didn’t find the virus I was looking for that night, just memories.

//

When my mom got the virus, my sister Jasmine and I weren’t surprised. She never started dating after our father passed away, and, though we don’t want to think about it, she is still a woman with a right to her own desire.

We walk in on her before the computer, like an apostle, dripping candle wax on her bare thighs, or sniffing our father’s shoes, whispering softly into the microphone of her phone.

Let me let me let me let let let me let me let let let

We bow our heads, not in shame, but in ceremony. Our mother deserves her profanity. Growing up, she had always given us ours. Besides, it is dangerous to know that much about your creation story, to know everything you come from, and everything you might be.

My sister and I visit her twice a week to check in on her, pull her away from the flickering on the screen if we can, just for a little. We know she is dead tonight in July when we come over and the house smells like cinnamon. It was our dad’s favorite scent. He used to sway in the kitchen Sunday mornings while baking sweet rolls, humming Aretha Franklin to himself.

Ain’t no way, for me to love you, if you won’t let me.

It ain’t no way, for me to give you all ya need

If you won’t let me give all of me

When he passed away (before the virus) our mother had an enormous candle made, infused with cinnamon oil. Every year, on the anniversary of his death, she would light it, and let it burn all day until she forgot he was gone. The night we find her is two months before the anniversary. She is in the bathtub fully clothed, the water lukewarm. She is dressed in a dark blue men’s suit, turning purple where it clings to her, and a pair of headphones in her ears which connect to a phone in the breast pocket. The coat floats around her along with the black cloud of her hair. It is as if all the color in her life is dissolving right here, like a pill. She didn’t want to be cured. She slammed head first into everything she ever wanted. The weight of it, all at once, crushed her like a bug.

“How are you feeling?”

“We’re going to have to start a Go Fund Me for the funeral costs”

“Janus!”

“What? How are you feeling?”

“It hasn’t hit me yet.”

We take a screenshot of our dead mom in our minds.

“Janus, I want to feel something.”

“Then feel it.”

“I can’t find it.”

“Then you don’t feel it.”

“Shut up! That’s our mother!”

“She had the virus, Jasmine. We knew what was happening.”

“I know, but I want it to hurt.”

We take a screenshot of a daughter and a son trying to cry at the foot of their maker.

“I’m sorry, mom. Mom, I’m sorry”

Jasmine starts undressing. Shoes, jeans, tank top, bra. My sister is naked in front of me. My mother is dressed and dead. She sticks her hand in the water, and cups it, palm by palm into her hair.

I am watching far away.

//

“I’m sorry you saw that Janus.”

“Shh, come here” I wrap my dripping sister in a towel, like a delivered infant. She gets dressed. I walk her to her car. The car pulls away— two cigarettes burn my sister out.

I’m with my dead mother in the bathroom, and she’s still dead. She looks like she died a little more when we left. There is a door in front of my heart, barely open at all. Quietly, I feel it shut.

I take a screen shot of a boy, alone, with his beginning and his end.

I know what I am doing, when I take the phone from my mother’s pocket. I know the price of entering is to lose my way back. I know His promise, that He will hollow me through, like a flute, but I want His wind, His music. I want to be the hole into which He sings His name. So, I do not wait for Him to find me. I don’t run from what I have become.

You want to know why I am trying to die this way. I want to ask you the same thing.

When I get home, I close the windows, and light three candles. I place my mother’s phone on the table, but I know that I’m the lamb.

I enter the password, my father’s birthdate, and I am afraid.

I am afraid for the first time in years, and I miss what it means to have fear.