We know more about the brain in love than ever before, thanks to technology such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) that maps brain activity in real time. And it’s shed light on how taking the Pill might affect the men that a woman’s attracted to (which could possibly be the reason behind some divorces); how love can be addictive (especially for women); how meditation might make you a better lover (who wouldn’t want to be?); and how taking acetaminophen just might relieve some of the often devastating pain of being jilted.

Horstman’s book “The Scientific American Book of Love, Sex and the Brain: The Neuroscience of How, When, Why, and Who We Love” examines how our biggest sex organ builds the emotion we all need. In Viral Times, Jenny Nation wins a Nobel Prize for her research into mapping brain activity in 2017. The discoveries lead her to develop a new drug that will impart love to all who take it — a most holy kind of love.

Our world of the present is infused with these ancient remedies, ones we will come to rely upon as the insurance complex reduces the range of the populace that can afford traditional medicine. Lemongrass, witch hazel, slippery elm root, licorice, lavender — all these can boost the body’s ability to heal and repel viral effects. Look for them in a healing tea together. It’s okay, adding honey won’t inhibit the healing effects.

St. John’s Wort has antiviral properties as well, but it doesn’t play a role in Viral Times. The plant can suppress viral growth in cells. It’s applied as an oil when it’s most effective, and that’s going to trigger some fear in a society of 2020 that’s under siege from a touch-transmitted virus like HIVE-5. But we don’t have that struggle today. It’s got side-effects at high dosages that include extra sensitivity to the sun; sunburns are more likely. As an anti-viral, scientists have tried to separate the active ingredient hypericum out and put it in capsule form. But for the moment it’s only offered as a homeopathic remedy, meaning that a minute amount of the substance is used. And there’s tea, too, since it comes from a plant that grows throughout the US. St. John’s Wort has an classic history as a natural anti-depressant — and that’s also a state that will raise your immunity in Viral Times.

There are many people to thank for their energy and patience over the years it took to finish this first novel. It almost feels like the close of a movie, when those many minutes of credits roll over the screen. Writing the acknowledgements turned out to be a joyful trek down the lane of history. Now the new life of the book begins, as I work — like every author — to share my newborn with the world of readers.

Although SimSuits keep the virus at bay, they also open the door for attack. Nobel-winner Jenny Nation’s evangelistic faith sparks the geneticist’s mission to erase the SexNet, the Suits’ lure, plus any sinner who wears one. On the seventh day after her ultimatum, Nation’s engineered virus Mighty Hand will sweep through the net and into the Suits to infect the millions who believe they are safe. She places her faith in a God that kills any who love outside His laws.

Humiliated and broken by a counter-attack against his investigations, Dayton meets Angie, a naturopath with her own losses in love and sex to bear. Spreading the medicine of natural immunity through ageless practices and cures, she finds herself on a head-on course with Mighty Hand’s death and Dayton’s love. Mighty Hand threatens to change their world forever, unless Angie and Dayton can find and forestall the first biological virus to attack through a network. Only if they can touch upon acts of faith—and believe that their past might heal the future—will they hope to recover love during Viral Times.

Viral Times: Going viral on 2-12-12 on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple’s iBookstore and more.

Tabitha Parker

Utne Reader has posted an article about medicine that plays a major role in defense of viruses in my novel Viral Times. Dr. Tabatha Parker’s skill set is similar to Delta’s, as well as my co-protagonist Angie Consoli. They are naturopaths, 10 years into the future.

The global health care system is in crisis, says Dr. Tabatha Parker, founder of Natural Doctors International (NDI). It relies on the exportation of a Western model—one that doesn’t even work in the countries it’s coming from—to developing countries that can’t afford it.

Parker, a naturopathic doctor, sees NDI as a bridge between exported conventional medicine and centuries-old indigenous healing techniques, such as the use of herbal medicine, which in some places in the world is the dominant type of health care. “That has to be a part of the system if you’re going to actually reach people,” Parker says. Naturopathic doctors “are trained in a way that no one else in the world is trained: to be [that] bridge.”

Read more: http://www.utne.com/Mind-Body/Utne-Reader-Visionaries-Dr-Tabatha-Parker-Natural-Doctors-International.aspx#ixzz1dPVANRIL

As I said last time, this revision process is guided by taking the storytelling that was in first person and shifting it to “close third,” the kind that lets a writer deliver the POV character’s feelings and sometimes internal dialogue. All to serve the Man vs. Self conflict. Jennifer Nation, the evangelistic neuro-scientist, is the story’s main antagonist, taking her role as the person who stands in the way of my hero Dayton’s wish — to live in a world safe from the viruses that make biological touch-sex deadly. He strives to find love again after losing his wife to the pandemic.

But in a way, Dayton is also does antagonist work in the story. He helps Angie (introduced in Chapter 3) to erase the threat of the new man-made virus Jennifer desires to build.

These pages were a pleasure to revise because I liked the tension that was already there. I do wonder about how seamless they appear, since the scenes happen in different locales but the same time-frame. They felt heavy with scene, but the sequel was in there, embedded and concise.

In our entry this time, we learn more about , who’s Jennifer, who earned a Nobel for her work in brain mapping — the evolution of fMRI brain scan sciences of our current day. She’s left her post at PharmAlliance (see the First Four chapters for details). Now she’s on a road trip to recover her faith.

Chapter 6
Pilgrim’s Progress

Jennifer
October 2021, Outer Banks, North Carolina

She missed her parents most on Sundays. It was the day they would picnic together, take photos and read aloud to each other. Sunday was also the only day of the week they prayed.  Ten years later they were both gone, taken by God’s plan on that fiery day. He left her prayers for their survival of that crash in the woods unanswered.

In return, Jennifer believed God owed her an answered prayer. She prayed for resources to keep building drugs, this time the kind no company could hijack: biological pharmaceuticals. God could find her an HP Gross-spectral Epigenome Navigator. They didn’t look down her bra at that final PharmAlliance exit search when she was starting her sabbatical, so she snuck out her code for the GEN interface. That was a sign. The security team was usually anything but chaste. In exchange for her parents, the Almighty would have to get her a heads-up display for a GEN. She brushed her hair and felt the inputs for her brain’s neuron backplane. God didn’t build any of that, but it was like divine intuition to gene combinations and RNA derivatives. She played the GEN like Paderewsky on a Steinway. An investor angel, yes. She had faith she could find one to deliver such an instrument again.

So she started her pilgrimage on a Sunday with a road trip to search out fresh promise. She filled her heart with hunger and her passenger seat with her assistant Frieda. Jennifer was surprised that the woman felt a calling to follow her. She didn’t know if an acolyte or a friend was sitting in the Cooper beside her. When they arrived in the morning sun of the vacation town of Duck, the Pentacostal Wave Evangelical church was starting to fill. It stood alongside the steady surf of the Outer Banks, a windswept wooden building no larger than a nave and only a dozen pews deep. But when Jennifer walked in, it felt as big as the eager pounding in her chest.

From the pulpit, Thurungian Brother Ignacio spoke the words that galvanized her desire. The man with sandy hair and a well-freckled tan shouted a sermon to inspire hope. He spelled out the challenges to fidelity, but he had few answers.

“Sex is everywhere, spread across anonymous networks.” He paused to stare upward and wave his hand. “In game shows hosted by fornicating film stars. In the promises of lust that drain all the way down to web ads for Dry-Day Senior Diapers and Retro Flush antiviral toilet cleansers.” He called out most pernicious sin, lurid pornography, a word now out of vogue in favor of “passion.” Men and women who taught lessons over these nets about how to go down on each other, techniques to practice while inside the virtual sex networks.

Jennifer squirmed at the language. She had tried to program it all out of her web Fetcher and TVola Capture Deck. There was too much to erase it all, so she had to disconnect.

The Brother unfurled a campaign to drown those diseased morals. “No more promiscuity, led by pride and lust,” She rang with the words that he pealed out from the front of the church sanctuary. A woman with a tight French weave of brunette hair stood stock still to block the view, so Jennifer couldn’t see the brother’s face. But his words rose above all. “His holy army will wipe the hedonism off this planet. This New Flu is only the first wave of God’s attack on sins of illicit love.”

Brother Ignacio spoke, and her skin warmed in a feeling of his rapt service to God. Joy powered her breath when she moved closer in the after-service fellowship in his to speak with him.

She pulled along Frieda. But Brother Ignacio looked at the brunette first before his eyes met Jennifer’s. Frieda nudged her and turned to wink, then canted her head toward the man. His blue eyes bore a searching smile for every woman he greeted in the departing congregation. Jennifer watched him shift the smile from firm to inviting when he talked with the women. She saw the Holy Spirit pump more life into his bronzed face when a female took his hand in fellowship.

“He’s called me, clear and strong,” she said to Frieda as they moved up the linoleum aisle between the rows of pews. Frieda lifted an eyebrow at her. “I want to be the first of us to receive his word,” she told her friend.

Just as in their work relationship, she uttered the words like a command. Frieda was no longer a subordinate, but her years of obedience had not washed away on the road to the tiny church.

Jennifer walked toward the church’s chancel to connect with this man. He had looked over Frieda’s head to lock onto her gaze. Jennifer felt a sharper breath, a burning like when she’d run along the riverbank on the PharmAlliance campus, her pulse high and a joy lifting her spirit.

He spoke to her first, praise God. A question of greeting came, something easy to answer and to match the fire she felt with each breath. God’s serendipity working in her life. Or maybe God’s plan, drawn down like a bolt to this lightning rod of a man. She could feel the Holy Spirit connecting the dots of her life. First the shame and disgrace at Pharmacorp. The vision of delivering righteous death as God’s revenge. She had dreamed of forming an army of joyful attack in a campaign. She wanted a man to draw other followers, sisters like Frieda.

“Sister, today you look blessed,” he said. He beamed a brighter smile. She heard his word spoken as “bless-ed,” as if the word itself had opened his gaze wider upon her. “What might you offer to God’s plan, I wonder? You look upon others as if you were a creator. God needs creators, now that the time for action is upon us.”

#

She was among the last to leave the church. When she poked her head outside, an army of clouds stepped across the sky. They had wiped away the morning’s sunshine and fogged some of her new-found hope. There was something about the clouds that reminded her of what she yearned for. They hung low in the sky, their mottled bottoms darker in the places that threatened rain. The winds pushed the clouds that carried the wet-hay tang of the beach community’s anti-viral spraying.

The clouds bristled in a thick veil above the parking lot. An opening bounced a weak sunbeam off the silver Bug Wraps that covered the few remaining hoods and their air intakes. It had been weeks since it rained, so the Outer Bank barrier islands were coiled in anticipation of a downpour. The forecasts said the rains that might deal airborne diseases.

Maybe not this afternoon, she prayed with a look at the remaining sunbeam. She descended the steps from the church portico two at a time while she searched for her car. As she hit the bottom step she twisted an ankle. It would slow her, but she looked down at enough short boot under her skirt to keep her moving, even though it hurt.

Then the first big, wet drops slapped onto her head and off her brow and then grazed her hands. She held the Safe-Band on her wrist up to the drops and watched it turn from light green to deep orange. This rain was hot. The viruses which could travel among cloudtops were riding these showers. Safety was a matter of how much rain fell on her body’s exposed skin. She had to make it to the Coupe before the skies opened up.

She steeled herself with a prayer. After all, God led her to Brother Ignacio, under the portico and worn down with questions from Frieda. Jennifer fetched the car. It was no time to panic, though her ankle pounded with each step.

She started to skip off her good leg, covering her nose and mouth while she struggled toward a run. A boom of thunder followed a lightning flash, so she counted like she did as a child. Nearby, just five. The charge of a bolt could spark even more virus activity. She nearly stepped in a puddle that looked hot enough to pool up in a Level 4 virus lab.

A band of dark green clouds was sweeping across the west side of the parking lot. She had only moments to make it to the haven of the car. She looked back to judge the distance to return and could see the Brother and Frieda watching her. Bolting back would take even longer.

She stopped for what felt like an eternity to shake off her boots and gain speed. She ran in Tyvek Protect hose, holding the boots in one hand to cover her face. As she neared the Cooper she slapped a palm onto the bio-lock while she shrieked “Door open!” She flung herself headfirst into the car and hit the panic button to seal the door.

The mucous rain pelted those beige boots she had dropped outside the car. She never liked that pair much anyway. She shook as she pressed her face to the window’s glass. Being saved from this act of God must be an act of deliverance, even more so at the Brother’s church. She reached overhead to feel for the flame of Pentecostal faith. Brother Ignacio emerged from the portico bearing an umbrella and a scowl, but he smiled once, and so she honked her horn and waved at him.

#

After the rains, the brother carried her and her twisted ankle back to the church. They sat together and searched for the solution for his unsaved world. God would not leave her side. She had already lost the two people she loved most in that jetcopter crash. She told Ignacio her secret — that she felt her parents fading from her memory.

“It’s not that you don’t love them anymore,” he said.

In the little church’s fellowship hall, his hand lay near hers on the table. She stole glances at his fingers while she replied. “I do love them, brother. I just can’t remember much of them. Now I see what God intends for me, not my past, the things I cannot reclaim.” She picked up the cup of Cafe Motion and peered over its edge at him. She found him waiting for her look. His eyes were set like traps.

She unspooled her vision of a virus that would wipe out the sinners. He kept at her with the dogged demand of a wolf. “You must do this one thing you have envisioned. It will be a thing the world calls awful, madness, full of terror.”

“Who calls it that?” She wanted to fall into those traps of his, surrender to his vision. She wanted to let it lay down over hers.

“We know who’ll call your mission awful. The unsaved, and–”

“The fornicators. The men and fallen women, hungry for what God intended only for holy unions, not today’s science of lust.”

“They lose God’s dreams for love in those suits,” he said. “Couples in marital love make families strong. The Suit sinners make our world weak while they revel in pornography they can touch upon each other. The Lord God’s blessed sex is the only way to keep his creatures safe in these times. Tested, protected and pure in fidelity. This blessing is offered to any who accept salvation.”

“Yes, family and love.” She flashed on my night back in that forest. “God’s love for us.” She swallowed. “For me, I mean.”

“Very good. I mean, God’s words welling up in your heart and then spoken. You must feel his calling to safe families.” He paused. “So feel it with the passion of a mission.”

She retold how God took her family for a reason, part of His plan. The sadness, a feeling of being lost. Then an aunt who delivered her to the academy, that first school of science. From there, the scholarship, the pharma work. “Even the Nobel,” she said, gazing off away from his face. “I didn’t finish my list with Praizone miracle, the one PharmAlliance twisted. Turned into a burning mockery of a drug to compel lust.” Hot as her mug of Motion in her hand.

“I praise your path to this mission, hard as it has been,” he said. “Not all of heavenly justice is served in one sitting. God’s love must keep you in his palm until the ending.”

“I still love them both. But then I saw that He gave me so much to do. I couldn’t have them, plus make this virus God has called me to create.” The she stood and shook her head slowly, weak at her knees. He drained his cup and held it toward her.

“We must drink from this cup the Lord gives us to drain. Now it becomes time to use your ability to forge a creation that God meant for you. Unleash His sacred sword, as only a called creature can do in faith.”

“All I know, Brother, is how much I ached until I caught my calling. You are my guide to His path.” She jumped at the warmth of his hand when he placed it upon on shoulder, gentle at the edge of her damp, sleeveless top. She felt a deeper pull from inside. Jennifer struggled to admit that this luminous Brother could now stand before her, under God’s watchful eyes, without any sin in the air of the church. Ignacio’s eyes, his mouth and voice. All move in God’s rhythm to unearth something richer from my life.

She stepped toward him. He lavished a look like God was staring, even daring her to embrace this task of terror. This brother was God’s gift to her, too — not just a guide of spirit, but one she now had to take up in a fresh sweep of faith. God would understand her feelings in Ignacio’s presence. This was not like any encounter at PharmAlliance, when she had sinned once in a dark night to protect her Praizone. Brother Ignacio would encamp in her life, infusing his energy with hers. But his terms seemed daunting: only if she could establish a base for the acolytes and creators she would call the League of Joy.

But no matter how that work succeeds, there are lessons for me, and for my workshop writers, about how to break the ice of revisions.

So here goes: My work on Chapter 5, Love’s Hurts. The first four chapters’ story are available in the sidebar link, a revision that benefits from my editor Jill Dearman’s pen on a wooly 350 pages of a book. That entire earlier draft was in five first-person points of view. A real challenge, Jill said.

You gave yourself a very tricky challenge by putting all your protagonists in first person. Early on Jennifer’s voice and Dayton’s don’t sound so different. You could still change back to 3d person if you want. But if you are committed to all 1st person, your job is to make everyone’s voice as distinct as say Crawford’s or Zeke’s. Or their point of view as incredibly vivid and unmistakable as Angie’s. Dayton and Jennifer –because they both take themselves so seriously!—are sometimes hard to tell apart voice-wise.

I revised Love’s Hurts back into third person this morning — and I found myself crying while I slid back into the moments of Delta’s finale. I’ve never been at a bedside while someone I loved died, so this is all imagining my own loved one’s final days to come somewhere in the future, or the memory of tending to her after illness.

But the important thing is that I was crying, so it felt real enough to me. And maybe it might to someone else, too. I also did the revision after reading a chapter of Donna’s Johnson’s “Holy Ghost Girl” — so the prayer aspect of Delta’s healing rose up. I can see how Donna’s book is going to seep into this final version of mine.

Chapter 5
Love’s Hurts

Angie Consoli
Assateague Island, Spring 2021

She couldn’t recall a time she slept so much. When she opened her eyes, the mornings were already lit up. That dog — what a name, Sherlock — once he heard her stir in the deep-down comforter, he’d pad over from the doorway where he slept. He’d put his snout on the edge of the rough oaken sleigh bed and wag his tail. Angie knew dogs that barked at people in the morning. Sherlock was as quiet as Delta, who would bring Angie herbal teas and massage her meridians. Then she’d shuffle back to the kitchen, or hum to herself on the porch at her workbench, reclaiming whatever junk the surf threw up onto what she called her beach.

The sounds from her house felt different to Angie, noises distinct from Philly or the Hamptons, the places where the music never stopped and somebody was always wheedling or snorting or uncapping a moan in closed room. Angie was starting to think of those sounds as the soundtrack of a former life. In the mornings she drifted in and out of sleep while the sound of the waves boomed loudest, the hours when Delta said the sea was at high tide.

     Delta was none of the things that Aurora or Tiffany or Alexandra had been on Angie’s sex video sets: no swagger or panache, no buffed skin or enhanced parts or perfect painted smiles. Delta had looks to drive away anyone but devoted nieces, parents or siblings. No one would ever start a family with a woman so coarse. But something made Angie drink in the sight of her caretaker.

She stared at the comforter wrapped around her knees and sat up in bed. The squares of brown, beige and canvas on the cover were common cloth, scrubbed cotton or maybe the Duralast sails Angie remembered from boats up in Sag Harbor. She pulled a palm across the comforter, feeling the differences in textures. Outside the window Angie could see Delta washing sand off a sail, the cloth strung over a hawser lashed between two beech trees.

Even though she’d been there for weeks, Angie still had to scan the room to remember where she was while she woke. She gathered the comforter over her shoulders and put her bare feet on the rough cedar of the floor. A rag rug of faded pastels lay in front of the doorway. Candles lined the shelves of the room, set beside some vases with gray sprigs of what looked like weeds, burnt at their tops. Then there were all those library books — or what must’ve been the kind of books people borrowed and returned from a library, books that Angie’s grandmother read to her.

She made her way outside with Sherlock at her heels, the dog bolting past her through the open screen door and down the steps, then coming back to escort her. The air lay heavy with water and spray, the smell of kelp off the beach, all borne on the nip of a brisk wind. Angie sat on the next-to-bottom step and watched Delta work, unobserved until Sherlock barked and wagged his tail.

Delta turned to look at them both. “He thinks you’ve come out to play.”

Angie stretched her legs out toward her. “Maybe I have.”

Delta grabbed a corner of the sail she was washing and shook it. The spray covered the dog. He shook himself from head to tail. “So, you feel better then.”

“I guess I do, a little. I just wanted to hear something more than the ocean.”

“Too quiet for you?”

“Quieter than I’ve ever heard.” She ran a hand through her hair to brush it off her forehead. “Or maybe not,” Angie added after a moment. “There was nap time in kindergarten. This feels as good. Then the family had to move away. No kindergarten in the next school, not for me.”

While she sat on the rough-cut steps watching Delta work the sail, she felt warm. The day’s weather was not, but inside her chest she felt a soft pulse grow, like a blot of orange ink spreading in a clear bowl of water. In kindergarten Mrs. Elgin would stand beside me, holding a brush with a mouse-ear of bristles and coax, “Go ahead. Dip in, and make something new.”

So Angie made a start at talking away the old. The baby, making it in high school with Phil without knowing it. Until her shame was swollen, then giving it away, the adoption when it was obvious they wouldn’t make it as a couple. She stayed with Phil afterward until she forgot why.

Delta listened to the stories drain out like a bad wound that month. She burned sage and hermabane, or used reflexology on Angie’s feet and calves. She brewed grip-grass tea and infused things like hedgeburrs to draw out toxins. After the weeks of both listening and the internal healing, Delta made a start at teaching the cures she was using, the work of what natural healing.  “They’re a naturopath’s art and crafts,” she told Angie after a few weeks of casual lessons. “No one more able to carry on the craft than the cured, that’s you.” Since Angie had no plans beyond their beach life, she learned.

One evening after a lesson in healing with prana hand motions, Delta balanced herself on the rope swing, fitting the round wooden seat under her broad bottom. Angie watched the effort, figuring the woman to be too big for any swing. She shook her head and felt a smirk in her cheekbones while she looked away.

But Delta was strong. She had a sense of balance that didn’t fit a woman over 200 pounds. Angie hadn’t met women after she left her Italian neighborhood in New Trenton. The skin trade didn’t use many women like Delta, either. She wasn’t beautiful, comely or fair. Even plain would have been a flattering way to describe her.

Angie washed into Delta’s life dying from being too pretty. In the quiet of the beach days, she decided that beauty carried a sadness, somehow. While Angie studied the woman swinging, Delta looked happy. Here was a woman who’d crossed into her 40s built more like a linebacker than a mystic from a movie. She wore muscle where curves lived on the girls in the videos. Her nose was too large to overlook, and her knees had dimples below and above those fleshy joints. But under the mottled skin of her chest Angie imagined a heartbeat so beautiful that her own heart stung just thinking of it.
She didn’t spot the smirk while she pumped on that swing with verve Angies compared to acrobatics of a three-way harness fuck. Delta pushed off with thick toes in the sand, spreading it apart until the dark underside of the sand surfaced. The shore breeze blew back her mussed hair while she glanced at Angie. She slowed down when she became aware that her new student was watching her.

Angie walked to the swing and stood behind her, then gave her a push as she swung back. She let out a squeal, a sound as sharp as the gulls crying above the beach.
Angie pushed harder. Delta began to twist her legs together at the peak of each swing. On the downswing she spun toward Angie, who caught her. Delta pushed her hair from her face, and then Angie plucked away a few loose strands. She held Delta’s face in her hands.

She started to rise and walk past Angie, but she pulled at her arm. When Angie drew her close enough, she put a kiss on her lips with a lingering peck.

“Why’d you do that?”

Angie didn’t hear any distaste in the question. But she studied Angie like a sailor would eye a buoy in a channel.

“Well, I’ve been wanting to kiss you for a long time now. Ever since I got better.”

“Got your wellness back, you mean,” she replied, stepping closer. Her lips trembled. “I was expecting you to kiss me days ago. I just wanted to know what was special about now, this day.”

“Maybe it’s just a sign that I’m well. I don’t have to hold in all that hurt, maybe. I’m thinking about love again. Part of that Wellness from Weary you preach, you know?”

Angie wrapped her arms around her and kissed her mentor with enough verve to answer any other questions.
#

Weeks later, she shared secrets with Delta in pecks from her past. The stories were about dark yesterdays, slick with details of sweat-soaked sofa cushions in the gonzo sex films. No story or dialogue in them, just work that kept her in rent money from producers who filled her days with a bony ache of humiliation. After a year, they pretended to make real movies with bad dialogue to accompany the sex. Before those nights in the beach refuge, Angie never told the stories to anyone. She cleansed herself in the fireplace light, night after night.

Delta said she took in many people with scars on their souls, but the tales of the trade broke the water inside her heart. She healed as a calling, but no person she ever rescued had spilled out so much failed love.

“I can see it hurts you to tell me these stories. It even hurts me to listen.”
Angie tossed out a chuckle. “Yeah, they hurt even worse before they became stories. But I think I love having my past exposed. I love giving up the whorey truth to you.”

Delta folded her legs under thick thighs. “So good, that word you used. You are right in choosing hoary.” She was saying it differently than Angie did.

“Well, for every producer who was my boyfriend, I was a whore. I made my money, sure. Even earned all my awards, Best New Starlet of 2019, then Best Femme Performer. But I earned it all on my back, or my knees, or doing really bad dialogue.”

“Oh. Not hoary, then,” she said.

“Like there’s another way that it means?”

“Good question. Yes, that’s a kind of rough, scabby experience.”

“Oh, it was rough, plenty, especially in the gonzo vids. But here on our beach I see scabs can heal over. My scars will always be out there on the networks. I’m just another avatar girl for the boys to do in their SimSuits, to work over in action.” Angie threw her calves over the wingback chair’s arm and pointed her toes at her, stretching. “I believe in you—I mean, that healing you do. I want to learn it from you. I love how it feels.”

September, 2021
As their ocean refuge life crept out of the summer months, Angie worked to pick her way through lessons about healing. Her steps did not come easy. In the dim light before dawn she looked down while she whispered her feet around each sheaf of paper, piled in stacks that teetered upon each flat surface or bare spot of floor in the beach house. The study smelled of garlic, rosemary and anise — and that was only this week’s stew.

    She crept quietly through the stacks, pages torn from magazines and newsletters all yellow with age, copies of charts already worn at their edges. The books that lay open near the windows gave off the smell of old cotton paper, toasted by the sun.

    The writings had been passed on from the other healers Angie was learning to recognize: Stephen Coe’s work on prana and mystic movements of the hands, Madame Journeau on the heat in aromatherapies, Dr. Weistein on psychic surgery, and Dack Modray on crystal powers. The practices could sometimes be mixed, too. There was the direct remedy of making a gem elixir from the black tourmaline, malachite and amethyst. Endocrine repair, Delta said. But not the same as the immune system elixirs, or direct application of the crystals yellow jasper and fire agate.

   It made Angie restless at nights, trying to sort it all out. They all had crystal in common, didn’t they? She couldn’t sleep, not deep anyway, feeling the fog from the night’s sea wrap around her as tight as any spandex the men peeled off her for those cameras. She felt unprepared for the healing of the day to come. The gemstones laid out on the wood floor between her bare legs all looked like beach pebbles, their colors a puzzle even after Delta explained their powers one at a time in a patient tone last night. Lapis lazuli, Angie remembered that one, used both for restoring immune function and restoration of endocrine systems. But there were both pink and black versions of the crystal. Which was which? It felt harder than memorizing those video scripts with the lines nobody would every speak in the real world.

    She fingered the stones in the growing light of dawn. The pony master who’d staggered onto their porch yesterday was wheezing in the chamber next to the bedroom. They’d need to give the man called Willem an internal elixir, then bathe him in the ones which were more toxic. They would need all those therapies, Delta said, if they were to edge him away from death.

    Angie couldn’t tell Delta how few of the mudra movements she could recall. The stones she might be able to manage, though. So in the growing light she painted and then polished her short fingernails. The nail colors were her crib notes for the 10 gems they’d use in the rescue attempt. Angie was to lead this one, and her shoulders were already tight.

    Willem’s life lay across the transom of transition next door. He trained Assateague’s wild ponies for the wealthy seashore folk, but then rode bareback to Delta’s door fevered and bleeding from the corners of his eyes. Angie listened to him during the dawn, breathing with drawn effort. She looked for Delta’s book covered with purple leather, the one about, oh, what was it? Yamas, and niyamas. They would pray out these together to balance the two life forces, so Willem might rally his antibodies.

    Angie squeezed into a nook between two of the stacks, clutching the purple book and crossing her legs. She read aloud, sounding out the foreign words like a six-year-old on the first day of school. The braided bookmark showed where Delta directed her to take a final look at the mysterious prayers. To save Willem, who worked his ponies and now gripped the horn of his life’s saddle, she would have to chant with Delta together, praying the ancient words for her first time over a patient.

    She thought of herself as a keen student. But when Delta woke and found her cramming, she asked if learning the lessons felt like a calling.  “Of course,” Angie said. “I’ll do anything I can to earn my keep here. I don’t want to have to leave a place this safe. I know I can learn this stuff.”

    “Not so simple as stuff,” Delta said. “It’s a web of practices strong as any spider’s home. Complex, too.”

    “I understand. I’ll catch on quick.”

    “We will see. I hope you will do the best you can.”

    “You can count on that much. I’d follow you anywhere.”

    Delta looked at her for a minute or more, brows knitted and then relaxing. “I want you to follow a love of the learning. I think we both understand that following me is a different kind of love.”

   Angie heard Delta’s reply sweep over her like a prayer. The prayers they recited together were mostly in the language that Delta called Sanskrit. They made a healing session feel like many of the past months, unfamiliar but also assuring. Angie had to believe she could bring the trainer to consciousness. She could feel her head swim in the minutes when she chanted together with Delta. They were not prayers like the ones in Latin she learned for First Communion at St. Stevens. But the language sounded just as mystic. She could only recite it as rote, as any line of some video script that she didn’t understand. But later, she could ask again what each word and phrase meant. Delta also called upon those powers of the crystals, which she’d mounted on copper wands, a part of the healing arts. At least art was Angie’s favorite subject in school.

   Later that day, she felt like it was a week waiting for Willem to open his eyes. Delta cradled Angie’s shoulders, standing behind her and placing thick palms on her bare arms. Together they chanted the ni-yama mantra — maybe as much to help Angie, she thought, to wait out the awakening — as to heal the horseman.

    But during such apprenticed afternoons and novice nights she felt held and accepted, even when she misunderstood. It was all new to her, this steady embrace of learning. Delta delivered a prayer that Angie held close to her breast. Delta said that her mistakes in those arts “were the necessary reminders of how careful and focused you must hold healing’s powerful flower.”

#
The next afternoon, they walked the July beach together and then fell onto that sleigh bed exhausted. The calico of the comforter waited to embrace them, tangling together in its folds. Angie had already brushed the sand from Delta’s forehead. She pretended to find more to brush off, an easy way to let her hands run over Delta’s body. While the healer’s eyes fluttered toward a nap, Angie brushed her shoulders, her back. Delta cuddled closer, like a cat toward a caress. Angie used her hands to stroke softly, crossing a line to settle her debt to her, so she could lift herself to an equal place in the relationship. She reached out to graduate, to teach Delta about the thing that Angie learned in front of video cameras. She could lift her toward the red-rocket glare of real sex. They slept in more than the night bathed in that loving light.

    When Delta got sick, Angie faced the dreaded truth that she hadn’t learned enough healing arts to save her mentor. They studied the texts together over the too-few weeks, especially Langine’s classic healing crystals book. But each day Delta grew weaker, took back to the bed earlier. The circles crept downward away from her eyes and widened across her pock-marked cheeks, hollowed more with every week. Near the end Angie could see a glint of a hardened edge in those eyes.

   “Don’t hate me,” Angie said on the last day.

    “Not your fault. Not anybody’s.” Delta managed to get up on one elbow, a faint musk of sweat rising off her bedclothes. “You gave me the only thing I hadn’t learned about bodies. Gave it in love, too.”

    “Not death. I didn’t give you death in the light of love.”

    Up on that elbow, Delta started to shiver again. The shivering was the week’s new trial, uncontrollable shakes Angie would feel from Delta in the middle of the night while wrapped next to her. Angie would offer to leave the bed, to make Delta more comfortable by giving her more room. She’d always grab her wrist with a grip that surprised Angie. “It’s better when you’re here,” she’d say. “I can sleep through these when I can feel you against me.”

    Angie couldn’t sleep, though. She felt no room to complain about it when Delta was dying. She wouldn’t use the drugs that had just surfaced with promise, not even when Angie begged.

    “You’re killing yourself if you don’t!”

    “Not true, and you know that.”

    “But why then? Why?”

    Delta closed her eyes and raised a hand to brush sweaty curls from her forehead. Angie thought for a moment she’d broken through with the question, maybe made a case for pharmaceutical salvation at last.

    “Oh little love,” she said in a voice that wavered. “If I take those drugs, then what has my life been about, if I use that which most people cannot get? Did I make any mark, help anybody weak and poor who can’t afford to be saved by this drug-addled system? Why should I have even lived, if I follow their path of pharmacy — controlled by politics that can only serve health to the wealthy, or the indentured?”

    “But you helped me, Delta. I wouldn’t have lived, washed up on that beach. Don’t I count enough to make your mark in life?”

    “More than you know, especially now. By now you know what I’ve learned: the aromas, the crystals, the bodywork, the homeopathy, especially the prayer. But I know something else about my best student. You’ll keep learning. Even teach others, after awhile.”

   Then she told Angie all about the afterward that would soon arrive, when her body would be spent and the Departadas would arrive to employ the ancient Hindu burial practices. Delta held Angie’s hand tight, but then sank back into the musky bedclothes from the effort of relating the details: Angie should welcome the women who would carry away her lifeless body. Delta’s body would depart in a shroud, spun with antiseptic fibers, heading to a furnace where healers and Hindus were offered up. Angie needed only to confirm Delta’s identity to the Departadas.
#
While Delta slept, Angie wrote her an apology.

    There was something I asked of you. I wanted you to say yes, but I knew later on you should have said no, I can’t do that. I might have even known when I asked that it was wrong. No, not wrong altogether. Just wrong for me to want to be with you, even closer in that bed we had learned to share as friends, as student and mentor. In that bed in our house, we slept as lovers do after they’ve heard the cry of pleasure from each other. Not like those cries you must have heard from me behind a closed bathroom door, or out in the winds on a night walk, when I couldn’t sleep and sank onto the far side of a dune, awake and wanting you in that way.

   Yes, you were too good to hold anything back from me. I told you that I loved you in that dark hour in that bed, when only the half-moon’s light gave me a glimpse of your thick untamed eyebrows, your long lashes that fluttered over your gray-green eyes. What I asked of you joined my past with a lonely future. What I gave to you cut you down, after you rose your body up on your elbows with those mighty hips lifted. I made you stretch into a pose you taught me in yoga, but one I never saw you practice on a bed.

    But with our love I also planted that seed that brought sorrow into your healing body. And now into my life, too. I didn’t know how far we could go together that night and avoid the risk of not returning together. Now I wish you had said no, so you wouldn’t have to go, and leave me with that memory of the asking.
#
Angie pressed the bandages against Delta’s thigh, watching the flesh fade from gray to a dull white at the effort. The sores had opened up, the latest insult. Angie wrapped a hand tight around that thinning thigh, a too-easy grasp after weeks of bedridden days and nights.

    The touch of gauze on her palm carried her back to that New Jersey dairy farm. The memory of that fourth-grade field trip made her shiver. When Angie slipped on the farm’s rocky path — Mr. Samuels had insisted, over the thunder, that the girls see the barns — Angie fell onto the rusty plow.

   The gauze on the bed grew moist with a seep of warm fluid underneath it. Angie readied another bandage with a free hand, her gaze riveted on the gauze. Angie didn’t want to focus at what AIDS was doing to Delta’s thighs. The memory of those strong limbs on the swing still sparkled for her.

    Back in that damp dairy barn Angie had looked away, too. Samuels was good in a crisis, it turned out. He located the gash quickly even in the driving rain, pressed down hard on it with his palm and then wrapped his scarf around her wound. With classmates in close formation behind him, he carried her to the barn, gentle as a mother cat toting kittens.

    Now the stale bandage dripped the milky fluid, which smelled as strong as any cow’s dung. Ignoring what her nose told her, Angie smiled when Delta’s eyes fluttered open after a fevered nap.
Samuels’ voice on that day in the barn had seemed to calm the rain pounding off the roof. “You’ll be all right, Angie.” Angie remembered searching his look for any clue that it was untrue.

    Now Angie swallowed hard while she knelt at the edge of Delta’s bed, pressing the fresh bandage on Delta’s decaying skin. “You’ll be–” She paused, only a moment. “You’ll be at peace, my love. Whatever I can do, I will for you.” She watched her break a weak grin, but Angie could only turn her face away in reply.
#
Delta’s face, still lined with the trails of her life of laughter, had become a map Angie read each day since the sickness, looking for a fresh path to hope. Delta wanted her to follow her road toward healing others. Her death was supposed to prod Angie to take steps into that future, alone.

    Later, but not long enough for Angie, Delta’s body lay still in the sweat-soaked sheets, motionless as the stopped clock in the hall outside the bedroom. Angie was sure that she was gone now — no pulse, no breathing. The crystals she placed around Delta’s head reflected no colors back, not even when Angie held them over the solar plexus. She had held them close to Delta, as close as Delta held her hand upon that great, generous heart in its last minute of beating.

    She had a gentle laugh escape at the very end. Angie thought of it as a laugh, not a grunt of pain. The pain had been constant over the last day. Her suffering had been a sensation Angie felt in every crack of every day, insistent and harrowing as a mouse burrowing inside a bedroom wall. Now the emptiness rolled onto her like a bulldozer crushing a screen door. What was she going to do next?  Angie knew she would have to leave this woman she loved, give over the emaciated body for the Departadas to carry out of this house and her life.

    Until those robed women arrived, though, Angie could roll in the scent of those sheets, a part of Delta that would remain a little while longer. Even though the fabric was probably teeming with disease, it didn’t daunt Angie. She now faced a life of surviving something harder than death, the road of being left behind.

It’s a chair that mimics human touch. Inada says it’s shaped for 106 different human body types. If the programming could be transferred to a suit, like those in Viral Times, this touch could be used for immunotherapy while people are isolated during a viral storm. The same SimSuit that offers Secure Sex could serve as a naturopath’s healing tool.

During pre-programmed massages, kneading speeds automatically vary between 10 and 32 strokes per minute while tapping varies between 180 to 500 taps per minute. Proprietary 3-D rollers thrust forward and relax backward up to 2.8 inches, creating highly desirable movements of the spine. All these actions and many others are carefully managed by the chair’s electronics.

Over at VentureBeat, the reporter there was calling it a “glove chair.” Just drop the first letter off of that name and you’ll get another sensual purpose for the technology of today. Give a society a roadblock to physical contact like the New Flu and you’ll create a market demand for a love chair, or suit, that can be sold for a lot less than $5,799.

Given enough years and enough desire, haptics will offer the engine to drive the most serious home electronics device: The SimSuit. You only need to look at the Wikipedia definition of haptics to see how a well-built, broadband suit could help us reach out and touch.

Haptics is the study of touching as nonverbal communication. Touches that can be defined as communication include handshakes, holding hands, kissing (cheek, lips, hand), back slapping, high fives, a pat on the shoulder, and brushing an arm. Touching of oneself may include licking, picking, holding, and scratching. These behaviors are referred to as “adaptor” and may send messages that reveal the intentions or feelings of a communicator. The meaning conveyed from touch is highly dependent upon the context of the situation, the relationship between communicators, and the manner of touch.

In 1992 I worked as a computer tech journalist and followed an emerging video game experience that let players fight in role-play onscreen, their movements tracked by a sensory ring on the floor, surrounding them. Less than 17 years later we have the Nintendo Wii — so popular it was sold out for stretches of 2008 — and advanced enough to let us play sports with one another. Or Just Dance.

An article today in Fast Company tracks the fun quotient and sweat rating of Wii games. By 2019, an emerging crisis of viral times can create a very different, haptic kind of sweat.

While the rains fall, we fall back in retreat from disease.

I type those words into my ScribePad and wipe sweat off my brow. I’m sweltering in my apartment while my Condo Cooler is forced to idle. I’m not supposed to be home now, a journalist writing in his private journal while the sun sets on a Texas hot with climate and viruses. Government clocks cycle our energy to restrain the temperature. But in these times, nothing we’ve tried controls the viruses.

They fall on us from the skies in rainstorms and leap between us in casual touch. These times have caused love to fail. A half-century ago people had sex–dad would say make love in one of his editorials–with no fears if they used simple precaution. Even when I grew up, sexual disease needed blood to cross between bodies. But HIV-5 is more aggressive than its viral ancestors. It enters the body while you battle the Blue Flu, a disease with an airborne range of 10 feet that’s soared into a 19-month pandemic. Nobody gets close now without the Hugo Boss masks, antiviral clothes, the viro-screen gel. In the ultimate of social distancing, the lucky ones can suit up and go virtual for sex. Secure Sex, they call it, breeding faster than mosquitoes in a holding pond.

I write to disinfect myself from my mission tomorrow and leave behind this record.

First the Flu, then HIV, and at the last, AIDS Ultra. Can love survive the terrors of touch? Nobody has an answer yet, although the new Simulation Suits mimic touch to make sex safe again. General Connectrics owns the field of haptics, game touch technology grown up to serve sex.Real sex now courts death, not joy or peace or rest, or even work. Germs work to kill off sex with an AIDS any man or woman can catch. Small bugs bust up large towns and break down long lives. Have sex and die, or don’t and feel your heart grow cold.

I can’t push that kind of writing past my editor Roni at Viral Times, my latest media outlet. I skip work tonight to write this testimony. Tomorrow I have to risk everything on a mission I can’t dodge, to try to break into the Government Health Camp outside Waco. The camps pen up the infected. Healthland Safety says the detentions ensure national security. I report these official lies because they need light to wither.

To crack into that Camp I’ll be on the move in tomorrow’s wan light, a dim path compared to the quartz lights of show business video stages. My celebrity stories at SatNews were easier. Entertainment people liked to talk to me about themselves, their projects. Then my wife Melissa swept into my life and challenged my charm. “Do more good,” she said. A fat lot of good her legal doings have brought our dreams. She started fighting for the rights of the sick. The feds fought back by locking her up in the Health Camp where she went yesterday to depose Ultra victims.

I wipe sweat off my forehead and onto the table. We missed that wetness, the smell of us, the one night we played with prototype Suits. They record sex, too, but I don’t have the stomach yet to replay that episode into a Suit. I won’t need the replay if I can get her out, somehow.

SimSuits surfaced when HIV hit the rich. You can use them now if you know the right people. The right people are fucking each other now in SimSuits, safe from disease and stimulating each other across their bodies. Outside the suits, people are dying. Inside, freedom, and maybe addiction.

People cocoon indoors, order basic needs, receive their work online and deliver it. A few, the lucky, open a package in a SafeFoyer at their front door from General Connectrics. The Suit connects them so they can touch each others’ bodies. You don’t risk being corralled into a Camp with Ultra if you can have sex in a Suit.

Melissa wants to stop the detentions, even empty the camps. She always wants something for somebody else. We could’ve had it easier, if she didn’t always want to do the hard thing. “Hard is what makes it good,” she told me. “If it were easy, everybody would do it.”

Ultra crams sex into the back alley of the Suits. After just nine months, they’re already leading a revival of the screw-anything ’70s. Low-cost SimSuits, in viral times, to hook up anonymously–well, there will be nothing to stop a leap into what preachers call the wanton wasteland.

The Evangelical Party rails against “hell-bearing acts of filth in a populace linking up in full rut.” But words can’t stop sex, not even with the fear of God.  What difference can sermons make? Not even, “God has a plan to wipe out this state of lust — to restore the blessed order of man and woman rejoicing in safe, married relations.”

I feel my head grow wet, but not with sweat.  The rain patters against my skylight, where a small crease admits drops. I duck out of the way and disinfect with viro-screen wipe, then spray down the table. I throw up a sealer blob against the skylight to patch the hole. The viruses can travel in the rain, drops of nature nobody can be sure are safe. I gotta rescue Melissa from the viruses raining through that death camp. I want to talk God into saving her.

I do more than pray for luck to extract Melissa. Milo Sensi down in the Times info-digger bullpens helped me snare the Camp’s GPS maps, then used his probability algorithms to trace her trail inside since she entered. I check the seals on my protective SafeCloak, then stretch to ready my muscles, both slow-twitch and fast, the strength of a high school gymnast and speed of a cyclist. All that strength and desperation might not be enough to rescue my lover. I can at least die trying to save our dreams.

• • • •

When I wake in the hour before dawn, I rise to find my brown journal, the one with all my bad courting poetry and good memories. The fountain pen feels different in my hand. But applying ink to paper suits my dim wanderings among words. A dream has sparked memories that I grope to recall on the journal’s page.

I wanted to make Melissa my wife, so I knew the kissing had to go well. I couldn’t be sure how I’d done on our first kiss. It was late that night, well into the cricket-and-cicada movement of the evening symphony. I wanted to hear her moan on the next kiss. That sound would be certain.

She giggled on that first kiss. This was no laughing moment to me, not this early in our courting. Through the threat of flu, kissing had become serious, dangerous, mysterious. I wanted all three from her.

She stood at the tip of Enchanted Rock that faced the charcoal canyon, the stone growing darker before the moon would rise. I wanted her facing away from that canyon, so her eyes would be focused on us, not on the dying vista. But I needed the beauty of the rocks in my view to romance the moment. The rest was up to me.

I held her close, our breaths still coming short after our climb onto the tip of the rock. She grabbed my arms while I gripped her waist. Then she cocked her head back. I thought of horses at a racecourse start, eager for the gates to fly open and begin the gallop.

I rushed to her lips, but then I remembered her complaints on the habits of kissers she’d known. I didn’t want to know how many of them, only what she disliked.

“Too hasty at the start,” she’d said earlier, over coffee in a café beside those crickets. “Most guys are in too much of a hurry.” I took it to heart.

On the second kiss I pressed our lips tight, my fingers playing the wide chords of her back. I inhaled her breath as our mouths nibbled then lingered, tongues still not touching. How many moments could I make out of one kiss? She helped me find more than I knew. On the whisper of the canyon wind, I heard the moan I desired, drawn out of imagination and into my ear.