A spring cold was basic biology.
Annie had learned her freshman year in high school how viruses worked, what they looked like, how they attacked the body. She remembered being disappointed when the most delicate, alien looking viruses were specific only to bacteria, designed like lunar landing pods for organisms without the basic humanity of a nucleus. The other viruses seemed so run-of-the-mill, a bit anticlimactically average.
She remembered how they invaded the doomed territory of a cell. Skip-rope of dna unlooped. Cells dividing, splitting, lysing. Her molecules in riot. Against the plain-Jane influenza virus with her runny playground nose, knotted sinuses.
She knew how these things went.
She sneezed. Her only kleenex was wet, crumpled. She put it back in her pocket as she walked down the sidewalk.
It was May, and the cherry trees in Brooklyn were leaking petals – a muffled dismantling of the their genitalia. A little joyfully, Annie thought – relieved that that frantic part of their life was over. Annie was a bit envious of their cycles. Or, at least how quickly they were resolved. The blossoms were never stuck. They were never bored, never had life crises, or felt unfulfilled. They were in a constant state of shedding, growing, preening, flux.
And now this late spring Vesuvius of petals.
She wanted to step out of herself for a little bit, and blossom, and join them.
Be unafraid of bees for once.
Annie walked down Central. She was going nowhere in particular. It was a Saturday. She did not have to work on Saturday, unlike her husband Jay, who was employed by Schneider & Gillespie on 44th. Somehow, Annie thought that he probably wasn't admiring the little plows of spring petals outside his office.
She had met the receptionist before.
Things you just wouldn't forget: an earring, two wine-glasses, to change the bedsheets.
It was spring. It wasn't allergies this time. She was pretty sure that the landlady had given her this. It was okay. She was long due for sickness. She was getting it out of the way.
At breakfast, her husband had turned his face when she went to kiss him.
He said he didn't want to get sick, become contagious.
Make other people miserable.
Annie thought that what she liked most about the streets of New York and their springs were the fruit vendors. She liked to stop and look at the stacked pyramids of fruit, bright, displaced. The blood oranges, the native headdress of the pineapples, subversive presence of tomatoes, vegetable, not fruit. How the rot of one led to the rot of another.
She stopped at a fruit cart on the street corner.
The vendor ran his hands over the mangoes, which came from Fiji. They were bewildered on the street, and far from home. They peeked from behind his apron, like children on the first day of school. She talked to him for a while about the oranges, a little soft and bruised. About the late frost in Florida that year. How the price of oranges would probably go up more than fifty cents a pound. She thought about all those perished oranges in the sunny, frosty orchards of Florida, sunken like cheeks.
The flies they must attract.
She thought about buying some apples, and that made her think of Jay, and their first joint shopping venture after they were married. It was at the Granny Smiths. Arms around the waist, inhaling the nape of her neck. She would tuck her head to one side. He would comment on her veins, angles, triggers. How everything about her was so close to the surface of her skin. How he loved the way the muscles in her neck stood out. They breathed each other for a little while, standing by the mounds Granny Smith apples.
Human and fruitless.
She wanted desperately then for her husband to come up behind her now, there in the street and embrace her.
Instead, she bought oranges, preemptively. Thanked the vendor and kept walking. She couldn't stay around fruit for too long. Especially in the spring. With its flowers, closed sex. The morning breath of loose pollen.
*
Annie liked to sit alone in the coffee shops. Alone, but at a table where she could easily hear conversations. She was a hopeless eavesdropper. She liked to listen to strangers' conversations, draw conclusions about their lives, relationships, small secrets. Through this, there was a certain feeling of symbiosis, of connectedness. She liked to feel as if she was actually a part of New York. Somehow woven in. Somehow felt in presence by the cab driver on the street, the parking meter attendant, the homeless woman. Not known. But felt, acknowledged. Settled nicely, with a ring of dust around her place, if removed.
That Saturday, however, she sat at a table in the far corner of the Starbucks and read an old copy of The Sound and The Fury. She wasn't in the mood to listen. Maybe it was because she was sick. Maybe it was because she couldn't stop seeing children. How the rot of one blossom led to the rot of the other. The shop was warm, stuffy, like closeness before a kiss. She felt as though she hadn't seen Jay in ages. As if he was on the other side of the world. As far away as Japan, with its own fleets of cherry blossoms, instead of at work, a few blocks away, at a desk. Maybe he was in Japan. He was.
For all intents and purposes.
For weeks, she had been sending him small postcards:
touches, smiles, whispers.
With pictures of places they could be, ought to be.
She thought that she had known all along that this would happen. It was the twenty-first century after all, and everyone were searching for regressive patterns. Everyone was looking back, like Lot's wife, salt on her lips. Except the old curses were not holding true. Scientists studied spider silk, the wingspan of the albatross, saw great symbolism in the food chains. Annie knew that it was old-fashioned to view herself as separate from nature, to view her race as something superior. Non-animal.
But the kingdoms, after all, were Animalia, Plantae, Protista, Fungi, Monera.
There was no Kingdom Humana.
With their hair, mammary glands, egg sacks.
She looked outside, and watched May-swollen robins sing. She knew them for their polyandry. This was how things worked. A nest was only made of twigs and spit, a spool of twine, a hopeful tune.
A man approached the table and asked her about Faulkner. He was gray, held a briefcase and a coffee in his hands. Something Semitic in his facial structure, the tight precise clockwind of each of the curls of his hair. She said that she couldn't get through the first part of the book. He understood. The part from the point of view of the mentally retarded thirty-three year old? Had she read any Faulkner before?
This was her first.
He said he was interested that she hadn't started with As I Lay Dying and asked if he could sit.
“I'm contagious,” she said.
He smiled, and sat. He talked to her about the intimacy of contagiousness. Sex was one thing. There was an exchange, but a baby, the product, was an unrelated manifestation. The two lovers left without having physically altered the other. Now, did she know anything about viruses. A virus is an ever-changing organism. A virus will first change a cell's basic coding – unravel the DNA, weave in its own. This will lead to the production of more viruses. However, when the cell bursts open, the emerging viruses are different than the initial virus in that they contain some of the DNA from the original cell, personalized by the infected individual.
He smiled again and said that a virus passed on was like imbedding your DNA in another person. You became them. They became you. A molecular memento.
It was all very romantic and forward of her to be sneezing on him like that.
She asked him if used Kleenexes were a turn-on.
He asked if he could buy her another coffee.
*
The clouds outside her kitchen window were big and hammocked, like afternoon naps. Getting ready for dinner, Annie cut her thumb pretty badly while slicing a tomato with a new Wüsthof cook's knife, and clutched at it, as if it were a slackly foaming bottle of champagne. She could literally smell the blood. It pulsed redly like a told secret and dribbled down her hand, down her arm until it dripped off her elbow and onto the linoleum. Into satellite spatters. She swore and went dizzy and pulled a hand towel off the oven handle. Tried to remember where she kept the first aid kit. Wrapped her thumb.
Since she was a kid, she couldn't look at wounds like this. She avoided looking at her thumb. Hopped around a little. Hummed. She didn't know why she hummed and hopped. She felt the urge to suck the wound. Bite on it. Curse God.
The blood was bright.
She rummaged for gauze and bandaids under the bathroom sink. She wanted to call Jay at his office. She wanted him to tell her that he was going to drop everything and hurry over. Dress her wound. Make this an excuse to cradle her on the bathroom floor and kiss her, beginning at her thumb, and radiating upward.
Things to remember: do not stay out past three in the morning, wash lipstick from lapel, use a lint-roller to collect long singular strands of hair from jacket.
Instead, she felt the strong impulse to call the guy from the coffee shop.
She wondered what he would do. He would talk to her about the erotic nature of blood, about vampires, real vampires who knew their way around a woman and a crucifix. He would clean her wound with hydrogen peroxide. Wrap it very carefully in gauze. He would touch the freckles on her arm, trace them like small pacific islands, in their archipelagos, straits. What would he do next would he kiss her. Would he kiss her very softly. Would he not say anything about viruses, about doubts, apprehensions crippling sorrow discovery.
Just warm kisses. Starting at her thumb. Traveling up the soft skin of her upper arm.
She gritted her teeth and looked at the thumb, with a little nightcap of severed skin attatched by a hinge.
In the shop, she didn't know why she hadn't told him she was married.
Or why she had accepted his phone number.
No.
She knew exactly why.
It was spring. She had a cold. She was contagious.
She was tired of knowing, and not doing anything about it.
) But one little thing, para where you talk about the lytic viral pathway, maybe you could restructure it so it looks less like an info (read science) dump on the readers.
