Infectress
Infectress
Arabella wore a red dress
as evocatively as a fire wore flame. She undulated in the sunlight, her hips swaying and
her buttocks swiveling in the form of a figure eight, the back drape of her skirt swinging
inward, outward. As her hands swung, golden bracelets chimed. The steel of her heels rang
on pavement in the rhythm of a woman unafraid of stares. In the brilliant sunlight of the
Atlanta city street, Arabella's raven hair shined so vibrantly that its blackness seemed
white. Her skin appeared pale.
In pursuit of her quarry, Arabella
descended into the MARTA underground. Chameleonlike, she seemed to change color. Under the
subdued lighting of the tunnel, her skin seemed dusky. Passengers on the train perceived a
different woman than had the pedestrians in the street. After a short ride, she arrived in
the glittering promenade of Underground Atlanta. By the gala lights, her cinnamon skin,
glowing with sweat, made her gold necklace seem mere brass. Men turning to gaze wondered
whether they whiffed a trace of precious perfume. Desperately, they investigated their
olfactory sense, lost the trace and clung to the memory of the mysterious odor. Glancing
at her wristwatch, Arabella smiled. She was never late for a seduction.
Moments later, she turned into the
Falcon's Nest bar. Standing in the mezzanine, she surveyed the crowd below. There,
she thought, at the bar. That's him.
Arabella made her way around the mezzanine
and appeared at the top of the staircase, high above the crowd. She danced down the
staircase.
It was the first time Freddie Hanson saw
Arabella. He fell in love. So did forty-nine other men. Five men in the corner were
drinking Heinekens and watching Falcons football, so they did not fall in love, at least
not until they saw Arabella during the commercial break.
Freddie was leaning against the red
leather pad of the mahogany bar. With the lovely chime of ringing crystal stemware, the
bartender was just removing a wine glass from the overhead rack. The crowd parted
reluctantly for Arabella, who sauntered up to stand so close to Freddie that he could
smell her perfume. Freddie wracked his brain for one word to say to the gorgeous woman who
had materialized by his side.
"Wine," Arabella said to the
bartender.
"What sort, miss?" the bartender
asked.
Arabella turned and looked up into
Freddie's face.
"What sort of wine are you
drinking?" she asked.
"White. White wine," Freddie
stammered.
Arabella smiled gently and turned to the
bartender.
"You have the Sauvignon Blanc from
Stag's Leap Hill, '15?"
"Yes, ma'am."
"Please, a glass. And fill a glass
for the gentleman."
Freddie barely stopped himself from
stammering thanks like a schoolboy. Quietly along with Arabella he watched the bartender
uncork the bottle and pour two glasses. Awo glarabella laid a hundred dollar bill on the
barkeep's shelf. He made her thirty dollars change, which she ignored. Arabella handed
Freddie one of the glasses and lifted her own to eye level.
"Wine with you, sir," she said.
Her voice was low and mellow.
Their glasses chimed.
The wine changed colors inside Freddie's
mouth.
"Thanks," he said. "This is
really an excellent wine."
"It's white," Arabella said,
grinning, revealing gleaming teeth and a deep dimple in her left cheek. Here in the
subdued light of the bar, she looked Mediterranean.
Freddie chuckled. "My name's Freddie.
Freddie Hanson."
"I'm Arabella."
"I won't tell you that's a beautiful
name. I'm sure that's what you always get."
"Almost always, but I don't mind
hearing it."
"Well, then, I'll tell you. Arabella
is a beautiful name."
"Thank you."
"And you're a beautiful woman."
Arabella laughed and said, "According
to the legend." She tossed her hair, sipped the wine and gazed up into Freddie's
face.
Freddie Hanson was a tall, slender man. He
wore his blond hair long on top, clipped short across the temples. Together with his
straight-haired blond beard and his sharp blue eyes, this style of haircut made him look
fierce. He had a long, straight nose and a firm chin. His hands were large and his fingers
around the wineglass stem made the crystal look a toy. His wits and his looks had served
him well with university women. Now, twenty- two, standing at the professionals' bar and
talking with Arabella, he felt as if he had graduated into the major leagues.
"What else does the legend say?"
he asked.
"Oh, that would be telling,"
Arabella said.
"What do you do?" Freddie asked,
as Americans must.
"I travel," Arabella said.
"And what do you do?"
"I'm a biotech. I work at the Centers
for Disease Control."
Arabella made her eyes grow wider. She
leaned in close enough to Freddie that he could feel her body heat. Freddie watched her
mouth so attentively that he could see the lipstick-moistened membranes of her lips unseal
slowly from center to corners.
"Biotech," Arabella breathed.
"Centers for Disease Control."
"Yes."
"I find that . . . fascinating."
She laid her hand on his forearm.
They migrated to a nitrous oxide club,
where they laughed hysterically and danced until two in the morning. Arabella danced well.
She believed in dancing, because she thought that nothing was better for enslaving the
male libido. After they closed down the club, Arabella slipped her card into Freddie's
blazer jacket. She kissed him lightly on the cheek and whispered, "Call me."
Freddie called the next day. Arabella
talked lightly with him on the phone and consented to see him on Saturday. Freddie
dry-cleaned his suit, readied his apartment and waxed his car. He bought a single long
stem rose. Arabella insisted on meeting him in the restaurant. They dined and drank wine
and laughed. Afterwards, they went dancing in a Brazlian night club. Arabella performed
the latest dances so well that Freddie kept insisting that she must be Brazilian.
"Oh, I know Brazil," Arabella
said. "I love Brazil. I hate Brazil. But I'm not Brazilian."
"What are you, then?" Freddie
blurted.
Arabella smiled and ran her fingertips
across Freddie's hand. "I'm human," she said.
"But what's your nationality? Are you
American?"
"I'm a citizen of the world,"
Arabella answered, then sipped her champagne.
"Oh, you're so mysterious,"
Freddie said, half in admiration, half in frustration. "Why do you always answer me
in riddles?"
"Why do you always expect simple
answers to complex questions?"
"Look, some things are simple. You've
got a passport, right?"
"Yes, one or two."
"One -- what? How many?"
"More than one. Less than the number
I need."
"How many passports could you
possibly need?"
"There are three hundred and fifteen
nations in the world. I need three hundred and sixteen."
"All right, I'll bite. What's the
three hundred and sixteenth for?"
"To leave with the police,"
Arabella said.
She and Freddie laughed together.
"So you're some sort of desperado,
then?" Freddie asked.
"That would be telling,"
Arabella answered. "Would it matter to you if I were?"
"Were what?"
Arabella gazed into Freddie's eyes.
"Answer me."
"That depends what for," Freddie
answered.
"Oh, and what felonies are you okay
with? How about robbery? Ah, say, diamond heisting? That's a nice clean glamorous crime,
huh?" Arabella smiled, crossing her eyes slightly in a ludicrous way.
Freddie laughed. "You're a
burglar?"
"Speaking hypothetically, would you
be with me if I were?"
"What's the hypothesis? That you're a
burglar? Or that I'm going to be with you?"
Arabella smiled. "Hypothesize,
please, that I were . . . was . . . a burglar. Would you want to be with me?"
"I don't know," Freddie said
earnestly.
"What if I only stole from the
Afrikaner's kraal?"
"I guess."
"So you'd allow me to steal diamonds
from white men who enslave black people?"
"Okay. Sure. Is that what you've
done?"
"I've done nothing," Arabella
said. "Nothing that I can say."
"You're deep, Arabella."
"You have no idea, Freddie. You have
no idea. So far you've just seen the glimmering on the surface, like . . . moonlight on
the surface of the Loch Ness."
"And who's the monster?"
"Monsters," Arabella corrected.
"There is a tribe of monsters."
That night, Freddie invited Arabella back
to his apartment, but she refused. They parted in front of the Brazilian dance club.
Arabella gave Freddie a deep, passionate kiss good- bye.
"I'll call you," she said.
Then she disappeared.
Early the next morning, hideously early
for Freddie, he stumbled past the security checkpoints of the Infection and Plague
Laboratory of the Centers for Disease Control. In the locker room, he hung up his jeans
and sweatshirt.
"Rough night, eh, Freddie?" Bill
Smith, one of his coworkers, shouted.
"Danced all night," Freddie
answered.
"Horizontally or vertically?"
Most of the men in the locker room
guffawed, snorted or laughed. Others, concentrating on their private concerns, did not
react.
"Vertically, I'm afraid."
In the shower, he scrubbed with a stiff
brush and astringent soap. In the far room, he toweled and stood under infrared lamps and
blasts of warm air. He proceeded to the sterile rooms, where he donned his clean clothes.
Once inside the controlled area, he felt more secure. It was a testament to the world's
septic state that Freddie felt safer inside the controlled area, trapped inside with the
thousands of containers of plague, than he did in the world at large.
Freddie drank his morning cup of
decaffeinated coffee and scanned the biotechnology journal headlines. He read a few
articles concerning his speciality, frightened and fascinated when a colleague described
new ground and condescending and relieved when a colleague covered old ground.
At nine o'clock, he was seated at his
workstation. He read the results of the previous night's experiments. Freddie had chipped
away a protein from the shell of an engineered virus. During the night, the new virus had
stewed in the computer model of an adult woman. The results showed that the new virus was
sixty percent less effective than the original virus, but still able to replicate.
All day long, Freddie experimented with
his protein- chipped virus. Despite his weariness from dancing all night with Arabella, he
worked straight through lunch. Before he realized, it was nine o'clock at night.
Freddie wondered why his feet didn't want
to walk as they normally should. In his state of intense concentration, he didn't realize
how exhausted he was. He stumbled into the office of the senior researcher, Doctor Adams.
"Dr. Adams," he said, "I've
sent some model work results into your queue. I think I've found a way to degrade the
virulence of Yarno's disease. I've created a viable mutant that seems much less effective.
Could be an inoculator." "I've got a couple of other things to look at, but what
do you want to do?"
"I'd like some nanoengineer lab time
to create a real- world mutant. To see how it behaves in culture. Later, maybe, in some
test populations."
Dr. Adams scowled at Freddie. Nanoengineer
laboratory time was extremely expensive. Freddie Hanson was not a medical doctor. He was a
doctor of biotechnology. Nor was he senior staff. Worse, Freddie was not well published.
Yet here he was demanding laboratory time.
"Let me review your results. I'll get
back to you," Doctor Adams said.
As Freddie stepped through the hygienic
ritual to return to the septic outer world, he wondered when Doctor Adams would have the
time to read his results. Then, Freddie worried about his status in the Centers for
Disease Control. His griping about his superiors, especially at local bars on Friday
nights, had originally put Arabella onto his scent.
Freddie rode the MARTA subway homeward. He
stood, hanging from a strap, his left ribcage compressed by the shoulders of a teenage
Mexican and his right by a woman with a shaven head. By the time he fought his way through
the throngs and emerged into the arc-lighted streets, his fatigue made everything seem
hallucinatory.
Outside his apartment building, he ignored
the beggar who slept on the lawn. Turning the corner, Freddie surprised a ten-year-old
zapper, who was attempting to violate the security of the apartment building's tenant
identification system.
"Hey, get out! Scram!" Freddie
shouted, his voice hoarse with fear. He knew that even prepubescent punks were capable of
murder.
Eyes wild, startled, the ten-year-old
whipped around. He held a crowbar in one hand and a screwdriver in the other. Freddie
stood aside, hoping the ten-year-old would run. Fortunately, he did, leaving most of his
tools on the sidewalk.
Freddie pushed his palm against the plate
of the identification system, feeling it loose, since the ten-year- old had pried it.
Nothing happened. The door remained locked.
Wearily, Freddie leaned against the wall.
Fatigued, his eyes returned the brutish stare of the beggar.
Why should I work so hard just to
increase the longevity of scum? Freddie thought.