Body Surfing

someone to talk him into sleeping with his girlfriend.
    Q. saw where he was looking. “Play your cards right and you won’t have to live till your anniversary. Wait , I mean. You won’t have to wait till your anniversary. Think of it as a test of character.”
    Even as Q. spoke, Michaela melted into the party. In the moment of silence between Usher’s “Yeah” and some extra-crunky Ying Yang Twins, Jasper heard the faint sound of moans coming from the Playhouse across the lawn.
    “How’s this for a test of character? Grow the fuck up .”
    His friend no longer blocked his path, but Jasper shoved him anyway, jogged into the house. He’d show Q. what he was made of. Show them both what he was made of—Q. and Michaela. Fuck if he wouldn’t show them.
    If he’d looked back he might’ve seen his friend smile. A curious, wistful, patient smile that looked about nineteen hundred years older than the face of the teenager on which it appeared.
    Then again, if Jasper had looked back, his friend probably wouldn’t have smiled. He would have just looked at his watch.
    Twenty-four hours.
    And counting.

3
    I should have written something on the note, Ileana thought to herself. I shouldn’t have given the clerk a blank note, which would only make her target suspicious. An elementary mistake. Alec would never have done something so stupid.
    It had been more than an hour since they’d arrived. Still no sign of Soma. She thought about retrieving the note, but Dumas’s hand fell heavily on her knee. Cocker Spaniard may have tasted like shit, but it got the job done: the Frenchman’s conversation had acquired the volubility of the intoxicated, and more than once over the past hour he’d found it necessary to put his hand on her leg.
    Ileana sighed, crossed her leg so it was out of Dumas’s reach. The note would have to wait. She tried to concentrate on what her companion was saying.
    “It is like 1918 out there. Or worse. The plague. With bureaucrats blocking every attempt at aid, and the international community devoting all its attention to the war on terror, there is little we can do besides bury the victims.”
    Ileana nodded. The last stop on their tour had been a refugee camp where rampant dysentery left corpses so dried out and blackened they looked like pieces of charred timber, and a virulent strain of flu snuffed out life after life with the kind of ruthless efficiency one associated with the guillotine.
    “It seemed to me especially tragic,” she said now, “the way the diseases seemed to target the children.”
    Dumas peered at her. “But this is the way it always happens. I’m surprised you do not know.”
    Ileana rubbed her watch nervously. Yet another thing Alec had been better at than she was. Maintaining cover.
    “As I said before, my organization formed less than a year ago. This is the first real catastrophe we’ve dealt with.”
    “Ah yes, your ‘anonymous American billionaire.’ I had forgotten. It is so hard to believe you could be inexperienced at anything.” Dumas gave her a meaningful smile. “Influenza almost always affects the young the worst. Older people have stronger resistance. Their immune systems are fully developed, perhaps they have had flu one or two times before. The children are virgins, as it were. They have no such defenses.”
    “Virgins,” Ileana echoed, then added quickly, “And the other…symptoms?”
    “Mon Dieu, yes. The other symptoms, as you say. It is enough to make one crave even this poison. Well,” the Frenchman shrugged, “the other symptoms are not so unusual, either, I suppose. We were both in Yugoslavia, no?”
    “I don’t just mean the rapes.” Ileana’s voice was brittle as glass. “The sexual activity was more widespread than that. Almost as if there was an epidemic of lust, despite the horrific circumstances.”
    Her question seemed to touch a chord.
    “Despite? Or because?” The Frenchman touched the taut flesh of Ileana’s upper arm. “I became a doctor because of my fascination with the human body. Its strength, its frailty. Its mystery. But my years with Médecins Sans Frontières and WHO have made me more and more fascinated by the mind that dwells within that body. How is it that this seemingly mechanical accumulation of a hundred trillion cells produces something as intangible as consciousness? As, if I may take a small leap, the soul?”
    Ileana smiled a bit uncomfortably. “I’m afraid I don’t quite follow.”
    “A