But viruses have always fascinated me, and I couldn’t look at a New York skyline without thinking of them. The water towers on many buildings reminded me of bacteriophages, or viruses that infect bacteria, with a capsid-bound head and legs that can attach themselves to the host and force entry. Fascinating to me that viruses could infect living cells and take over, but not be living themselves. Only carriers of genetic code, only genes bound by membrane. Not being alive means that viruses are ungovernable by evolutionary laws like survival of the fittest or reproductive strength. So, without this basic constraint and purpose, how have they persisted through millennia, invading cell after cell? Plagues, the outcomes are always bad for animals, for humans, but viruses themselves are neither good nor bad. They have no moral compass or desire to live, and so the only reason I had for their existence was random chance.
* * *
—
ON FRIDAY, JANUARY 17, at around 3:00 p.m., the time our office seemed to have the most visitors, a woman I’d never met came in and asked if she could have a few moments of my time. Another attending was here, but she was on the other side of the room, wearing large, noise-canceling headphones that looked like earmuffs and plowing through her emails at a hundred words a minute.
Where should I sit? the woman asked, and I gestured to Reese’s empty chair. Reese had a messy desk that I tried not to look at. Pens were scattered everywhere and papers fanned out, brown rings where coffee mugs used to be. Some of his shelving had collapsed yesterday, over his desk and keyboard. Against my advice, he had stuck them to the wall with Command strips instead of real screws.
The woman took notice and said the desk was in violation of several health codes, hinging on unsafe.
My co-worker is not well, I said.
Who? She asked and after I told her, she wrote a note to herself, on a small spiral notebook, that she had in her black blazer pocket.
I asked if she was a detective. Had Reese perished on vacation and an ongoing investigation been started?
She said no, not a detective, and that my office mate who, in the workplace, should be more correctly referred to as Dr. Mayhew, was doing better. Like all of us with respect to wellness, he was taking it one day at a time.
But I’m not here to discuss Dr. Mayhew, she continued, and produced from her black tote a manila folder that had my full name, first and last, handwritten on the tab. I’d watched enough television now to know. Appearance of a mysterious blazered woman was never good, compounded with your name on a tab was worse. But I was taken aback that employee records were still being kept manually, that this folder, my folder, had been filled in and written on, then put into a physical cabinet to be plucked out for today, and that there were still cabinets around and not supercooled rooms with banks of supercooled processors.
I asked the woman about all this.
We’re HR, she said, not Mission Impossible.
I laughed, because this time I got the reference. I’d seen one of those movies, I said. Disavowed. Crazy stunts. Boom, bam, pow.
She smiled at me, but it was an uncomfortable smile, like she knew something I didn’t and wasn’t looking forward to what was ahead. Then she opened my file and started to read from it. It was my CV and certifications, a short paragraph of biographical information.
You have a brother in Greenwich, parents in Shanghai, though your father recently passed, our most sincere condolences.
I tilted my head and asked how she’d heard about that.
About what?
My father.
It’s stated here in your file.
But how did it get in my file? I hadn’t told HR in any official capacity; I hadn’t updated any biographical information since I was hired.
She straightened the papers in my file. Now the four sheets of paper were perfectly stacked.
Is this information incorrect? she asked.
I said no.
Then she didn’t see the issue. The woman’s eyes were uneven, in that one sat slightly higher than the other. Her cheeks had a layer of fine peach fuzz.
Recently we processed your raise, she said. Thank you for your hard work and dedication to our hospital. Your director deeply respects and advocates for you. He has identified you as a must-keep personnel, so we will do our best.
But, the woman continued, when we processed your raise, we did notice some inconsistencies. For instance, we noticed that after visiting China for two days last September, you resumed work that immediate Monday.
The director’s paranoia became my own, and my mind jumped to whether this woman was here to punish me for having taken an unsanctioned trip to a foreign land. I’d learned about the McCarthy era in school and how ever since the words communism and red have become synonymous with China and its people. Some patients liked to know if I was born here, if English was my first language, and I worried that this woman was here to ask the third follow-up question that those patients never thought of but an unsolicited mailing from a random Asian cultural center had: Still, despite being born here and fluent, were you ever part of the CCP, and if so, do you plan to quit?