Back at his condo, Jack finds the UW Extension call sheet where he left it, on the counter. The paper is browned and wrinkled from where he spilled coffee on it but still legible. He double- and triple-checks. He was in the right place. He pulls out his phone and tries the contact info again, and this time the line doesn’t even ring. An automated voice says, “I’m sorry, but this number has been disconnected.”

He opens his laptop and plugs Annabelle Ricketts into Google Scholar and the UW library’s search engine. He scrolls through the hundreds of results. There are thirty different people who are some version of Anna or Ana and Ricketts or Rickets who work in paleontology, in feminist studies, in comparative literature, in electrical engineering, but there is only one Annabelle Ricketts; she’s listed as a coauthor of a paper titled “The Biology of Nationalism.” The lead author was a professor of international studies at Texas A&M, and the article abstract indicates she argued that humans are inherently tribal, and when people bond over common appearance, myths, and sense of place, they historically have the greatest odds of survival and success. He doesn’t have time to read it, but it sounds like an anti-globalist stance that could be used as a justification for everything from eugenics to closed borders.

He seeks her name in a general Google search and turns up a few possibilities of military service, a Pentagon post, and a fuzzy photo from a political gala in China, but nothing conclusive.

He realizes then that he is coughing. A tiny itchy hack punctuates each breath. He goes over to the sink and drinks straight from the faucet. He pounds his chest and calms his breathing. His throat rattles with crud, so he decides on a hot shower to clear his thoughts and his lungs.

The water needles his face and he takes in big gulps of steam and coughs again and spits out some greenish-grayish flecks he catches only a glimpse of before they vanish down the drain. Maybe he caught something after sleepwalking last night or maybe he picked up the same bug as his grad student.