put both of his hands on hers, even though the romance of the gesture was something he found faintly galling. It was a gesture reserved for one’s wife. “It’s not that I don’t want a child with you, Rachel. I don’t want one with anyone. That’s just not something I can do, remember? We’re talking nuclear fallout. It’s impossible.”
“I understand.” Rachel was just a curtain of hair across the table from him, her chin dropped down almost to her chest.
It was horrible to see her sad—his sunny, positive Rachel. It was even worse than he’d imagined, and he’d imagined it every time he’d thought there was a chance he was going to get caught with another woman. To see her fine figure brought low was a travesty against her classic beauty. Owen remembered the tenderness between the mother and child at the drugstore, the intimacy that had excluded him so completely. But the trust and adoration in the little boy’s expression was something that Rachel deserved. It was what he felt for her himself.
“Do you want to leave me?” he said, and he could feel his face spasm. “You deserve to have a child. You deserve to have everything you want.” He felt the truth of this, and an answering echo at the back of his mind confirmed he had already failed her. “If you want to leave, I’ll understand.” The words strangled in his throat.
“I don’t,” said Rachel. His wife’s face as she raised it to him was fierce and without tears. She stood up and, coming around the table, kissed him full on the mouth. “I want to work on splitting the atom. On making the impossible, possible.”
Up close, the old poles of their magnetism still pulled. His desert rose. His only hope. The kiss was a beautiful lie, as beautiful as his wife. The lie that he alone could be enough for her, or that there might be a life in which he could compromise and still be happy. He kissed her back and felt the truth, waiting to be spoken, as heavy as a stone.
ARAMIS NEWS UPDATED 11:57 A.M.
“Have you seen this woman?”
How one doctor’s request led to a worldwide furor
September 21, 2020
NEW YORK—The jokes are all over social media. ARAMIS Girl dragging people into the sewer. ARAMIS Girl wants YOU for U.S. Army. She even has her own meme, popularly known as “Dead-Eye Girl Doesn’t Want to Be Found.”
The notoriety of the so-called ARAMIS Girl began during a September 2 press briefing, when Dr. Keisha Delille, Associate Director of Infection Control at Methodist Morningside Hospital, released a low-quality photo of a woman in her late teens or early twenties with Asian features who had worked as a server at cipolla, the Italian restaurant on the Lower East Side now known as the site of the first ARAMIS infection cluster in North America. “We have a strong interest in locating her,” Dr. Delille said at the time. “We need to alert people she was in contact with who may have been exposed to the virus.” The only catch: nobody was sure of her name.
But more than two weeks after the photo’s release, the identity and whereabouts of ARAMIS Girl remain a mystery, sustained partially by the ARAMIS-related deaths of co-workers who knew her, as well as by a loss of paper records when cipolla was firebombed on August 20, an unsolved crime authorities believe is linked to the outbreak. cipolla’s owner, restauranteur Paolo Fabbrini, says her name is Naomi but he does not recall a surname. He believes she was only a visitor to New York City, possibly a summer college student who left shortly before the CDC investigation began in earnest.
But the idea of someone remaining unidentifiable and un-locatable in our current information age has captured the public imagination. Self-styled online detectives have tried to track down the mystery woman, so far to no avail. People all across the globe are now actively looking for ARAMIS Girl via a massive virtual research collaboration. Known in China as the “human flesh search engine,” this type of information crowd-sourcing for the purposes of pinpointing the identity of a wrongdoer or other social offender is a long-standing practice in that country and is becoming increasingly prevalent worldwide.
The writer Owen Grant, who has become a household name due to his prescient novel How to Avoid the Plague—one of the bestselling novels of the past five years—commented via email that he believes the public release of the photo was irresponsible.