Consumed

“It is the same old Lance. Then maybe I just go home to NYC. To where you aren’t.”

“I hate that part.”

“The New Yorker part?”

“The part where we say goodbye,” said Naomi, now sitting on the floor and playing with her new iPhone, still not looking at him.

Nathan stood up and leaned against the windowsill. “And you leave me alone in yet another hotel room,” he said.

Naomi looked up and flinched, almost startled to see him, as though she had just discovered an exotic bird at the window. Using the High Dynamic Range option, she took his flashless backlit picture with the phone. “I leave you desolate and alone. And I go back to Paris.”

NATHAN WAS FINISHING UP his solitary room-service meal. On a website called mediascandals.com (http://mediascandals.com) was a page devoted to Dr. Zoltán Molnár. His iPhone quavered and he answered it. “Hi, it’s Nathan.”

A very little female voice: “Nathan?”

“Yes?”

“It’s me. It’s Dunja.”

“Dunja? Where are you?”

“I’m at home. You know. Somewhere in Slovenia.”

“Yeah.” An awkward pause. Her voice was too little for comfort. “How are you?”

Dunja inhaled raggedly, suggesting to Nathan that she had been crying just before she called him. “Nathan, I think I gave you a disease. I’m so sorry.”

“A disease? You mean, literally?”

“Roiphe’s, Nathan. Roiphe’s disease. Dr. Molnár just phoned to tell me. It showed up by accident in some tests …” Her little voice hung there, suspended, weightless.

Almost without thought, or rather exactly like thought involving memory and information, Nathan was googling Roiphe’s disease and within seconds was downloading data into the conversation. Fingers flying and swiping.

“Roiphe’s?” said Nathan, net-borrowed argument tinting his tone. “Nobody’s had Roiphe’s since 1968.”

Dunja’s tone was the flattened tone of unassailable logic. “I’ve been immune-suppressed for a long time, and I have it. And so do you, now, I think. Probably.”

“The Roiphe’s survived all that radiation?”

“Radiation is not a treatment for Roiphe’s.”

“No,” said Nathan, “I see that.”

“You … you see that? On your computer? On the internet?”

A photo of Dr. Barry Roiphe on the cover of Time magazine, May 1968. He looked lanky and shy, a bespectacled Jimmy Stewart. The caption, in screaming yellow, read, “Dr. Barry Roiphe: Sex and Disease.” Dunja began to sob huge, liquid, globular sobs. For a moment, Nathan thought the sobs were coming from Dr. Roiphe himself, his apologetic, twisted grin now morphing into a rictus of grief and shame.

“I wonder whatever happened to him?” said Nathan.

“Who?” said Dunja, amid shudders.

“Roiphe. Dr. Barry Roiphe.”

NATHAN WAS HAVING A PEE, and it hurt. He talked to the pain: “Ow, fuck, ow, shit, that really hurts! Barry, Barry, what did I do to you?” The pee dribbled to an uncertain halt, then dripped morosely. Nathan shook his penis angrily and reached over to his shaving-kit bag. He took out a large magnifying glass with a ring of battery-operated LEDs, swiveled around to the sink, flicked on the LEDs, flopped his penis over the edge of the basin, and examined its tip. The word suppurating came to mind. “Fuck,” said Nathan. “Fuck, fuck, fuck!”

Back in the Schiphol Airport Lounge, despondent, he sat with laptop closed while others browsed with professional intensity. He hadn’t finished his Hungarian piece, his Slovenian, Dunja piece. The hotel room had started to feel like a disease ward, a holding compound for infectious disaster. His phone released the frog trill that said Naomi. He would have to consider changing her ringtone. The endangered frog species thing. Spooky, symbolic, something not good. Slide to answer. “Yeah, hi. Nathan.”

“I hear airport. Are you in an airport?”