And the father and his sons going into the house, understanding that no one is to enter that bedroom, which Dorian has of course already done, thinking now that his head hurts, thinking he feels both hot and cold, and knowing for a fact that there’s a sick feeling in his stomach, though he is aware that it may not be the bacterium or the virus giving him nausea and causing him to shake, but rather the terror they’ve started in him, infected him with — imagining their satisfaction at how very frightened they’ve made him, having made him see his mother bent over a toilet, hair viscous with sweat, blood dripping from her mouth, looking twenty years too old as if aged by black magic, and making him fear now that he will be next, looking from father to brother (both touching and scrolling on their phones), reasoning: in the bed I was less than six feet from her; if the incubation period is twenty-four hours, I’ll be vomiting blood in the morning; and Cliff saying:
“Dad, here’s the thing.”
“What.”
“It’s spread through coughing or bodily fluids. So last night … Did you and Mom. I’m just saying. If you did—”
“We didn’t.”
“And you don’t have a headache or feel feverish.”
“No.”
“Or like you’re going to throw up …” And the voice in Dorian’s head going further: and I kissed someone tonight, and our tongues touched, and if I’ve got it then I gave it to her, and moving already, as if being pulled like something roped, across the safe room into the half-bath where he riffles through the medical supplies and finds a thermometer and puts it with trembling hands into his mouth, feeling a rush of heat in his face which he knows may not be due to the bacterium or the virus, but to a terrible sense of responsibility for what he’s done and embarrassment at how ill-fated he must be to have done it, imagining some survivor friend of the girl he kissed after all this has run its course and life gone back to normal (though not for him, and not for her, because they’re both dead) — hearing the friend saying in a near-whisper, standing by a row of school lockers, in a school decimated and in mourning: He had it and he kissed her and she died. She died because he kissed her. And someone else: Who was he. And the first: Who knows. Nobody. Just some boy. His mother was sick all day but he didn’t notice. Nobody did. And then he kissed her … By the time his father comes to the door, he’s taken the thermometer out of his mouth because he’s crying too hard to keep it in place.