Rabid Read online

  Her daughters, they were so small, a little younger than his nieces. His sister had not divorced because of the children.

  He removed his covering hand from their grasping fingers. Mrs. Sloan held onto his other hand. “Si, yes. I do it.”

  “Can we come tomorrow?” she asked.

  So soon. “Six and a half o’clock. For a moment, to meet. We will do real counseling later.” Her hand still clamped his hand to the table between them. “How old, your daughters?”

  “Eight and ten. Why?”

  “Some things about the school, I should like to ask them about, too.” Dante loosened his grip on her fingers and flinched, to suggest she release his hand. His palm was sweaty, encased in that morass of hand flesh and fingernails.

  He liked it too much, so he let go.

  “Um,” Mrs. Sloan fluttered her eyes. “All right.” She touched her eyes with the tissue and untangled her small hand from the raw meat of his paw.

  They prayed the Act of Contrition together and Mrs. Sloan rose to leave. She smeared another wet streak from her eyelashes to the pale brown hair at her temple. “We’ll see you in a few days, Father Dante.”

  It was odd, hearing the English Father instead of Padre or Monsignor or Professor.

  He was so far from Roma, but he had volunteered for this. Rooting out an evil as ancient as the Adversary itself was more important than his creature comforts and routine of Roma. He could shout above a screaming demon-possessed man or dodge flying chairs, but this assignment in New Hamilton—his primary assignment, not this tangential marital counseling—required delicacy and empathy, which were qualities he did not exercise as an exorcist.

  She smeared another blossoming tear from her eye to her hair.

  Her tears infused the library with suffocating humidity.

  Dante said, “Mrs. Sloan, the sex, to men, it is nothing. It is animal instinct. Friction. It is appetite or domination or an attempt at their own damnation, for a man, but it is never love.”

  ~~~~~

  Conroy opened the door from the wintry garage to the house. As his face broke into the warm air, browning meat scent lingered in his nose and traveled up the neurons to his brain.

  Ah, the olfactory bulb, a source of stem cells that migrated from the hippocampus and, when damaged, cause olfactory hallucinations, phantom scents.

  “Hello, ladies!” he called.

  Dinah, his younger daughter, clattered over the tile. “Daddy!” She flung herself at him.

  Beverly hadn’t hollered hello. “Dinah, where’s your mom?” he asked the little girl who was clinging to his leg.

  “Making supper,” she said. “It’s late ‘cause we went to confession. The new priest took her away somewhere.”

  New priest?

  “Beverly!” he yelled. “You here?” He walked into the house.

  Priests were twisted creatures, repressed by a sick corporate structure that wrung them into castrated caricatures of men.

  ~~~~~

  Bev heard Conroy yell from the mud room but she didn’t yell back.

  She stirred the gravy, scraping up the browned bits. The rich scent of reducing gravy rose through the yellow kitchen and ascended with her soul, seeking God.

  She had to get Conroy to counseling. She had to do this right.

  A fragment of the Rosary hovered in her head, Be with us now and at the hour of our deaths.

  Footsteps clacked on the tile. Conroy’s arm slipped around Bev’s waist, and he kissed her ear with a smacking sound. “Beverly,” he whispered.

  Bev’s angry spine wound tight at the touch of his body, still slimy from Washingtonian sex. Be with us now and at the hour of our deaths. “Hello, Conroy.”

  “Sorry I had to run this afternoon.”

  He moved away, and her spine, no longer touching his defiled body, unkinked.

  “Did you see your friend Mary at church?” he asked.

  “No.” She tossed the vegetables. Parti-colored bits showered down into the pan.

  Not Mary, but Father Dante.

  He had seemed kind when he took her hand, but he was so young. Priests should be older, aged men with the manliness in them burned away so that they were beyond gender, beyond handsomeness, a black robe wrapping an emissary of God.

  There was no reason a priest shouldn’t hold her hand when she was distraught. He belonged to God. It was as if God were holding her hand.

  “I’ll herd the girls to the table.” Conroy walked out of her kitchen.

  Bev was a swamp of revenge and spite.

  She breathed deep into her soul and created space for God and the Blessed Virgin to fill her with peace, but They didn’t.

  Anger whirled faster behind her smarting eyes as she finished cooking and plated four suppers.

  She settled into her place at the end of the dining room table, opposite Conroy. The glass chandelier reflected in the glass table top and twinkled in the silver structure below. Christine and Dinah sat between them on the long sides of the table.

  Conroy sat with his back to the bay window. He flapped open his paper napkin and said, “Study section was interesting. The usual assortment of solid work and this one wild, off-the-wall submission.”

  Wild, off the wall, against the wall, was he still talking about grants? Bev ate a carrot and chewed slowly to avoid grinding her teeth.

  Conroy shook his head. “He thinks he can vaccinate against cholesterol. It’s not even a peptide.”

  Bev ate a bite of something. “Insane, thinking he could fool you like that.”

  “Yes,” Conroy said. “Dr. Lindh made some interesting comments.”

  Dr. Lindh, Bev couldn’t remember him or her. “I’m sure he did.”

  “Valerie Lindh. She did.”

  Bev knifed her beef. “Such talk about business. Didn’t you do anything fun?” and she couldn’t believe she had said that. Mary, be with us now and at the hour of our deaths.

  “No. Didn’t even go out for dinner. Just ate in the hotel.” Conroy smiled at Christine. He asked, “Did you score this weekend, honey?”

  Conroy had certainly scored this weekend. Bev tried to breathe slowly.

  Christine said, “No, but I stopped the other team from scoring twice.”

  Dinah swung her legs, bouncing in her chair. “Mommy, can I have some more potatoes?”

  On Dinah’s plate, the vegetables and meat huddled, trying to look small and eaten.

  Bev turned to Christine. “Honey, would you help Dinah dish up some potatoes?”

  Christine mumbled, “Yes,” and folded her napkin.

  “Thank you, dear. Just one spoonful.”

  Dinah and Christine went to the kitchen. Christine held Dinah’s hand.

  Bev turned back to Conroy and whispered, “I found panties in your suitcase. Pink ones. Whose are they?” Her harsh stage whisper carried through the dining room, bounced off the modest chandelier, and reflected back to her in fragments. Found. Pink. Whose.

  Conroy leaned back in his chair, his palms pressed against the table. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “You know what I’m talking about. Do you love her?”

  Conroy blinked, his gray lashes and crumpled eyelids flapping over his fluorescent blue eyes. He breathed slowly and looked like he was thinking fast. “What are you going to do?”

  Bev leaned back. Her fork clattered onto her plate. “We need counseling.”

  Conroy launched into the old routine. “We know all the counselors in town.”

  From the kitchen, a spoon clinked and potatoes splatted on a plate. Dinah said, “More.”

  Bev said. “There’s a new priest down at the Church.”

  Conroy rolled his eyes. “Priests aren’t doctors. They’re not even married.”

  Her voice dropped. “Our first appointment with Father Dante is tomorrow at six-thirty.”

  “Dante, for our own private trip to Hell, that’s appropriate.”

  “I mean it. We’ll get counseling, or els
e I’ll take the girls and walk out right now.”

  “You can’t take the girls.” He picked up his fork and held it in his fist.

  Bev leaned forward. “I will.”

  His hands balled into fists and shuddered in the air like a baby preparing to wail. He said calmly, “People will talk.”

  “That’s right,” Bev said, “Everyone will know, all your friends, the administration, the committee.”

  “You wouldn’t.” His hands dropped below the table. Through the white twinkles in the glass tabletop, she could see his fingers curling around the cushion on the metal chair seat. “You wouldn’t do that to me.”

  “I thought you would never do this to me.”

  Conroy’s jaw was clenched hard. He looked away and whispered, “Fine.”

  “And you will break it off with whoever she is.”

  The skin over his nose and cheekbones reddened. “Obviously.”

  Bev sat back in her chair. From the kitchen, again there was a spoon clinking and the splatting of potatoes.

  Dinah said, “More.”

  Bev called over her shoulder, “Girls, that’s enough.” To Conroy, “Then it’s settled.”

  Conroy smiled tightly at the girls coming back in. Potatoes covered Dinah’s plate and were puddled with three gravy pools.

  ~~~~~

  Conroy hid in his home office, reading scientific papers.

  In the kitchen, Beverly splashed and clanked.

  In the Journal of Virology, an article detailed a glowing-green virus that traced nerve connections from a pig’s eye to its brain. The virus was named pseudorabies virus because PRV caused symptoms similar to rabies—foaming, hallucinations, psychosis, photophobia, encroaching paralysis—but so did a host of other neurotropic viruses, including mad cow prions. Conroy had been particularly interested in rabies and other neuropathological viruses, lately. He made a couple notes in the margin about the fusogenic action of the viral glycoprotein.

  A clank in the kitchen, and the dishwasher growled and whooshed.

  Lingerie in his suitcase after a weekend trip was damning.

  Idiot.

  He should have checked for something stupid like that.

  He wandered out of his den. In the kitchen, Beverly was washing pots. She swiped a suds-covered hand at her brown hair, inhaled a shuddering breath, and began scrubbing again.

  He didn’t want his wife to cry. Poor Beverly. No wonder she had gone to the Church.

  Perhaps he was lucky that she had gone to a priest. Priests were supposed to keep secrets. If Beverly had confided in Laura or Mary, he might have come home to an empty house and divorce papers. The department would have gossiped until, like a water buffalo in a piranha-infested river, they reduced him to a skeleton. “Beverly?”

  She didn’t look at him. If anything, she scrubbed harder. “Yes?”

  “I wanted to say,” he said, and she stopped scrubbing, “that I think we can work through this.”

  Beverly’s shoulders slumped, but she still didn’t look at him. Her voice was steady. “I think so, too.”

  Conroy retreated to his office and read papers on RNA viruses, neurovirulent viruses, herpesviruses and rabies.

  He didn’t go to bed until he thought Beverly was asleep.

  ~~~~~

  Bev lay in the dark bed under the covers, her fists clenched against her breastbone. Conroy’s clothes shushed against his polluted skin as he undressed on the other side of the bed. He lifted the covers. Chill air sucked her toes.

  In the morning, things might not look so bleak. Problems expanded in the sun’s absence.

  Darkness pressed her, weakening her knees like vodka, so she lay in the bed beside that bastard.

  She dreamed that smoke filled the air, and her two girls, unfathomably both two-year-old toddlers, rested on her hips. She could hardly walk under their weight and she flowed with the crowd away from the smoke and the screaming and falling debris.

  Another fireball lit the sky behind her and its heat scorched her neck.

  Ahead of her, Conroy jogged easily with the crowd.

  Plaster and concrete dust rushed through the air and closed off the path between them.

  The whiteout parted and a man’s hand, swathed in black, reached out to her.

  She took the warm, comforting hand and held on.

  ~~~~~

  The Daily Hamiltonian:

  Still No Med Head

  By Kirin Oberoi

  After interviewing several candidates, the selection committee is still looking for a new Dean of the Medical College. “All the candidates were well qualified, but none had that spark of enthusiasm for the University of New Hamilton,” said Dr. Stan Lugar, a committee member.

  The committee is interviewing more candidates, including an unnamed UNH candidate, before their February 15th meeting. The selection committee will base its decision on career milestones such as awards, grants, publications, community connections, and career potential.

  ~~~~~

  Leila sat at her desk, a tablet propped up on her knees, reading the DNA sequence in the fluorescent light. She bit her finger and stared at the page, sorting the groups of letters in her mind into sequences that meant something or junk DNA.

  She scanned the pages crowded with wordless jumbles of letters, and her finger stopped on a short sequence of A’s, C’s, T’s, and G’s.

  Her tongue licked her upper lip.

  Hot damn. That short DNA sequence was the reason that her mutant virus kept dying. Relief slipped through her chest and sighed.

  It was a little exasperating, because it was obvious now that she had figured it out, but it was worth a short paper. Heck, she could probably crank out those experiments in a month and submit the paper two weeks after that.

  A key scraped the lock in the lab’s door.

  She looked over, tense.

  Conroy opened the lab door, said, “You’re early,” and jiggled his keys to extricate them from the jimmied lock.

  She kept a finger on the block of DNA code and typed it into her laptop with her left hand to confirm what she already knew.

  Conroy set his coffee on the lab bench beside the breadbox-sized PCR machine and shifted his bundled papers and journals to his other arm. “I found an interesting paper. PRV neurovirulence.”

  “Pig herpes. No one works with herpesviruses. You might catch something in the lab.”

  “Just read the article.” He flapped the hard copy of the paper on the desk beside her computer.

  Leila told him, “The kinase and the late glycoprotein are on a bicistronic mRNA.”

  Conroy sat at the other computer and checked his email. “Bi-cistronic. Sounds kinky.”

  She folded her arms across her chest and waited. Surely he would figure out what that meant.

  She waited another ten seconds.

  Conroy’s head clicked to the left. “Jesus. Why are you sitting here? Go make that mutant. You have other experiments going?”

  “None to speak of. You?”

  Conroy chuckled, a bit of bitter in a single cluck. “None to speak of.”

  Anyone else, postdocs or grads or undergrads or techs, would have stopped there, but Leila wanted to know what he was doing, and she had certain privileges that came with screwing the boss. “Your writing is on eight flasks of cells. You have five cages of mice.”

  Conroy’s face surged into his wry smirk. “Don’t play with them.”

  “Your technique is so sloppy that I bleached the incubator and the hoods.”

  He laughed his usual bass rumble. “That’s probably for the best.”

  “You aren’t growing pig herpes, are you?”

  “No. It’s finicky in culture.”

  “So, what are you doing?”

  “It’s preliminary work. I’ll tell you when I’ve got something to talk about.” His hand covered hers. “When can I see you?”

  Leila pulled her hand away, and his palm slid on her skin. “Don’t do that in the lab.”


  His hand slipped over her hip. A thrill slithered up her spine at the same leisurely pace as when she had panther-crawled onto Conroy yesterday in her bed surrounded by gauzy curtains under the Persian red, gold-spangled canopy.

  Persian Empire harem women, though sequestered, had expressed the range and depth of their sexuality, before the Abrahamic religions had twisted women into the male ideal: monogamous, unimaginative, repressed.

  “Dinner, tonight?” he asked.

  “Nope. I’m busy.” She walked out of the computer room.

  As a rule, sleeping with married men creeped her out, so she rarely indulged. Conroy was one of the very few exceptions.

  Marriage reeked of religion and other perversions.

  ~~~~~

  Chapter Three

  Conroy was editing his next R01 grant proposal on the outrageously expensive, oversized computer monitor.

  First grants are easy. You pull up all your results from your postdoc, wave your hands around a bit, and it goes through.

  Many associate professors don’t receive tenure because they don’t get their second grant, which should be based on results since the first grant because they shot their wad to get that first grant, and if they don’t get the money, then they can’t hire techs or accept new grad students to produce new data, and then they can’t publish papers, and thus they cannot apply for grants.

  Conroy had kept at least one R01 grant for twenty years by holding back some data from each re-application and writing one of the research goals for that very data. Thus, he met at least one of his goals on every grant. Usually, he met all of them, but he always had that one in reserve. It wasn’t cheating. He did that research, and it was real research with real results. It was just good grantsmanship, and his lab hummed along, flush with money to buy equipment that his people needed to do their work and to send his people to conferences where they made contacts that helped them the rest of their professional lives.

  He wanted this new R01 grant under review, preferably with an encouraging rumor floating, before the department chair selection committee meeting,