Virus Profile
originally published in Marginalia
File Name concutere.exe
Length: 124,928 bytes
Indications of Infection:
And if I passed out in a Belgian rental bed in a former women’s psychiatric ward? And if I passed out in a Belgian rental bed in a former black nun’s cloister? And if I woke up in a sick house at the top of a hill across from a pastry shop at 0400? And if I couldn’t sleep on my right side (D), left side (A), front side (W). And if I hit the fat underneath my chin on the top of a curly haired cherub from Long Island via Wisconsin, and what if my head snapped back, and I saw stars, not real stars, but stars nonetheless? And what if it was all a game, a beautiful game, yet not a real game, one with rules to abide by and white spray painted grass to stay within? And what if there was a girl there from Long Island via olam haba, and what if she would sleep in the same room as a future lover? And what if I looked up at the Flanders clouds and saw six (not five) arms outside of a Katholieke University, a sure sight, if any, that I was going to become a footnote? And what if I were certain there would be a quick jump to a new scene, a postscript correction of an error, and a formal request from a delegate, self-reconstructed as a result of historical tongues? And what if I’m so dazed that I can’t tell the difference between being any character on a string, or zero repetitions of a pattern?
Removal Instructions:
This is what would happen. My insides would be replaced, leaving behind a beginning B and an ending U, and the rest read like a chain of states and days of the week.
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File Name: hyperthermia.exe
Length: 159,209 bytes
Indications of Infection:
And if I was in a red state in August in a red state after a summer of moving words around on pages and proper punctuation, and moving my belongings, my salt (it is all made of salt) and others from a town with a Yankee killer to a town with a handshake killer I collapsed. And now, there was a room that was now mine as the result of a piece of paper printed out in a second floor computer lab and a handshake of a reluctant homeowner. I took my clothes out of garbage bags and hung them on white wire racks. I grabbed both sides of my bookshelf like a GI instructing a grunt to “get yourself together, private”. I walked it, swinging edges wide, twisting like a drop-stepping power forward. I placed rusted brackets on the floor, two disconnected Ls to make a square. I balanced a box spring. I balanced a mattress. I put a fitted sheet around the mattress, marbled and blue. This room is new. Colors and curtains and closets that don’t remind me contractors, remind me of hospitals, remind me of computer and car crashes and remind me of you. This, this is my thermal runaway, I thought to myself as I passed out on my pillow on top of a fitted sheet on top of a mattress on top of a box spring on top of a box on top of a floor I had never walked upon. The heat from my overclocked body dissipated as I sank into the pocket caused by the broken box spring. No operating fans, just an empty prayer as I began to shut down that something in wreck of a chamber will serve as a thermosiphon and commence a phase-change cooling. I was in need of my osmolality to be mimicked by something, anything.
Removal Instructions:
And as I burn, I never look back.
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File Name: scorbutus.exe
Length: 212,094 bytes
Removal Instructions:
Past Exit 47A through East, South, West, and namesake there is an airport that will take me to a country that I lived in for eleven months that serves Chinese apples, a state synonymous with shark attacks in pools, grandparents, and transplanted Brooklyn kitsch, and a county where I am the patron saint of a child with a Chinese dragon chip implanted underneath his skin. Map it out. Blemishes like centers of Rosy Periwinkles like a heart soaking through a Lover’s Tale may appear. Apply pressure with cloth from a stolen loom. Ignore the alligators. Recreate the glue that will keep me together.
Removal Instructions (2):
And if I returned home after all of this, to the place where I feel as I belong, closer ever to the remembered ideal of memory, this is what you would do.