“Listen,” the journalist said, “I don’t mean to make you uncomfortable or put you on the spot. But I’m curious if you experienced something strange in the Oklahoma City Airship Terminal.”
In the quiet, Olive could hear the soft hum of the building, the sounds of ventilation and plumbing. Perhaps she wouldn’t have admitted it if he hadn’t caught her toward the end of the tour, if she hadn’t been so tired. The journalist, Gaspery-Jacques Roberts, was watching her closely. She felt he already knew what she was about to say.
“I don’t mind talking about this,” she said, “but I’m afraid I’ll seem too eccentric if it makes it into the final version of the interview. Could we go off the record for a moment?”
“Yes,” he said.
“I was in the terminal. I was walking toward my flight, and I remember I walked by a guy playing a violin. And then all of a sudden, everything went dark and I was in a forest. Just for a second. It was…”
“It was exactly like you described it in the book,” Gaspery said.
“Yes.”
“Can you tell me anything else?”
“There’s not much else. It was so fast. I had an impression…This is going to sound crazy, but I was in two places at once. When I say I was in a forest, I was also still in the terminal.”
“I knew it,” he said.
“I’m not sure…” Olive didn’t know how to ask the question. “Does it mean something?” she asked.
He looked at her, and seemed to grapple with what to say next. “This will sound silly,” he said, in tones of forced lightness, “but my editor over at Contingencies Magazine likes me to end interviews with a fun question.”
Olive clenched her hands together and nodded.
“Okay, so,” he said, “this is kind of a question about destiny, I guess?” Olive noticed that he was sweating. “Barring some kind of unforeseen catastrophe, assuming that our technology continues to advance, we’ll probably have time travel in the next century. If a time traveler appeared before you and told you to drop everything and go home immediately, would you do it?”
“How would I know they were a time traveler?”
The door was opening, and Olive’s publicist was coming in.
“Well, let’s say there was something about the person that couldn’t be reconciled.”
“For example.”
Gaspery leaned forward, speaking softly and quickly. “Well, for example, suppose this person were an adult,” he said. “Now suppose this person, this adult in his thirties, had a name you’d made up for a book that you only published five years ago.”
“How’s it going in here?” Aretta asked.
“Great,” Gaspery said. “Your timing’s perfect.”
“You could’ve changed your name,” Olive said.
“I could have.” He held her gaze. “But I didn’t.” His tone brightened as he rose. “Olive, thanks so much for your time. Especially that last question. I know fun questions are the worst.”
“Olive, you look tired,” Aretta said. “You doing okay?”
“Just tired,” Olive said, parroting the explanation.
“But you’re going home right after this, aren’t you?” Gaspery said smoothly. “Straight from here to the airship terminal, right? Well, anyway, goodbye, thank you!”
“No, she has another— Oh,” Aretta said, “yes, goodbye!” Gaspery was gone. “He’s a little odd, isn’t he?”
“A little,” Olive said.
“What was that about going home? You have another three days on Earth.”
“Something’s come up.”
She frowned. “But—”
But Olive had never been more certain of anything. She’d never been warned more clearly in her life. “I’m sorry,” she said, “I know this causes problems for everyone, but I need to go to the airship terminal. I’m going home on the next flight.”
“What?”
“Aretta,” Olive said, “you should go home to your family.”
It’s shocking to wake up in one world and find yourself in another by nightfall, but the situation isn’t actually all that unusual. You wake up married, then your spouse dies over the course of the day; you wake in peacetime and by noon your country is at war; you wake in ignorance and by evening it’s clear that a pandemic is already here. You wake on a book tour with several days left to go, and by evening you’re racing toward home, your suitcase abandoned in a hotel room.
Olive called her husband from the car. It was a self-driven car, for which she was grateful; there was no driver to hear her and wonder if she’d lost her mind, which was something she was wondering herself. “Dion,” she said, “I’m going to ask you to do something that’s going to sound kind of extreme.”
“Okay,” he said.
“We need to pull Sylvie out of school.”
“Like, not bring her in tomorrow? I have to work.”
“Could you go and pick her up now?”
“Olive, what’s this about?”
Outside the window, the Philadelphia suburbs were a blur of apartment towers. You can have an excellent marriage and still be unable to tell your spouse absolutely everything. “It’s about this new virus,” Olive said. “I met someone at the hotel with some inside knowledge.”
“What kind of inside knowledge?”
“It’s bad, Dion, it’s spreading out of control.”
“In the colonies too?”
“How many flights are there every day between Earth and the moon?”
He drew in his breath. “Okay,” he said. “Okay. I’ll go get her.”
“Thank you. I’m on my way home.”
“What? I know it’s serious if you’re cutting a book tour short.”
“It’s serious, Dion, it seems like it’s really serious,” and Olive realized she was beginning to cry.
“Don’t cry,” he said softly. “Don’t cry. I’m heading to the school now. I’ll bring her home.”
In the departure lounge, Olive found a corner far from anyone else and took out her device. There was no new news of the pandemic, but she ordered three months’ worth of pharmaceutical supplies, then bottled water for good measure, then a mountain of new toys for Sylvie. By the time she boarded the flight she had spent a small fortune and felt mildly insane.
What it was like to leave Earth:
A rapid ascent over the green-and-blue world, then the world was blotted out all at once by clouds. The atmosphere turned thin and blue, the blue shaded into indigo, and then—it was like slipping through the skin of a bubble—there was black space. Six hours to the moon. Olive had bought a package of surgical masks at the airport—sold to travelers who’d picked up colds on the road—and she was wearing three of them, which made it difficult to breathe. She had a window seat and was all but curled around her armrest, trying to stay as far from other people as possible. The surface of the moon rose out of blackness, bright from a distance and gray up close, the opaque bubbles of Colonies One, Two, and Three gleaming in the sunlight.
Her device lit up with a soft chime. She frowned at the new appointment alert, because she couldn’t remember having scheduled a doctor’s appointment, and then she understood: Dion had scheduled the appointment for her. He’d seen how much money she’d just spent on canned goods. He thought she was losing her grip.
Then the landing, so gentle after that hurtling speed between Earth and the moon. Olive put on dark glasses to hide her tears. But it wasn’t unreasonable, actually, the doctor’s appointment. If Dion had called from a business trip to say that a plague was coming and she should pull their child out of school, if she’d seen those massive charges go through on their shared credit account, she would’ve feared for his sanity too. She waited as long as possible before disembarking, in order to create some distance between herself and other people, and stayed as far away as possible from everyone in the spaceport and on the platform for the Colony Two train. In the train car she stared out the window at the passing tunnel lights, through the composite glass to the moon’s bright surface. She disembarked on a platform, where she kept reaching for her suitcase and then remembering that she was never going to see it again.
Olive had a moment of passing regret for the strange star-weapon burrs that she’d pulled from her socks in the Republic of Texas—she’d looked forward to showing them to Sylvie—but beyond that there was nothing of any real value in that suitcase, she told herself. (But she felt bereft: she’d been traveling with the suitcase for years now and it was almost a friend.) The trolley arrived. Olive sat close to the doors, for increased airflow—it was all coming back to her now, all of her research into pandemics—and the trolley glided through the streets and boulevards of this city of white stone, which had never looked more beautiful to her. The bridges arching over the street were possessed of uncommon architectural grace; the trees lining the boulevards and softening the tower balconies were almost unnaturally verdant, oversaturated in their green; and then there were the countless little shops with people walking in and out—unmasked, ungloved, oblivious, blind to the imminent catastrophe—and the sight of them was too much, actually, she could bear no more but of course she had to. Olive was weeping quietly, so no one came near her.
She disembarked early, and walked the last ten blocks in the sunlight. The Colony Two dome was displaying her favorite kind of sky, white skittering clouds on a background of deep blue. What was missing was the sound of suitcase wheels on cobblestones.
Olive turned the corner and there was the complex where she lived, a line of square white buildings with staircases leading down from the second and third floors to the sidewalk. She took the stairs to the second floor with a sense of unreality. How could she be home so soon? Without her suitcase? And why, because a journalist had said something strange about time travel? She raised her hand to knock—her keys were in her suitcase, on Earth—but froze. What if the contagion were on her clothes? She took off her jacket, her shoes, and then—after only a moment of hesitation—her pants and shirt. She looked down at the street and a passerby looked quickly away.
She called Dion.
“Olive, where are you?”
“Could you unlock the door, and then take Sylvie into the bedroom, and stay in there till I come into the room?”
“Olive…”
“I’m afraid of the contagion,” Olive said. “I’m outside the front door, but I want to take a shower before either of you hug me. It could be on my clothes.” Her clothes were puddled around her feet.
“Olive,” he said, and she heard the pain in his voice. He thought she was terribly, desperately unwell, but not from the approaching pandemic.
“Please.”
“Okay,” he said. “I’ll do it.”
The lock clicked open. Olive waited for a slow count of ten, then let herself in, dropped her device and underwear into a heap on the floor, and went straight to the shower room. She scrubbed herself with soap, then found the cleaning alcohol, retraced her footsteps, and disinfected every surface she’d touched, then turned on the air purifier to its highest setting and opened all the windows, then used her towel to lift her underwear from the floor and dropped both underwear and towel into the garbage disposal, then disinfected her device, then disinfected the floor where the device had been, then disinfected her hands again. This will be our lives now, she thought dully, memorizing which surfaces we’ve touched. Olive took a deep breath, and arranged her face into a semblance of calm. She opened the door to the bedroom, naked and deranged, and her daughter flew across the room and leaped into her arms. Olive fell to her knees, tears running hot down her face and onto Sylvie’s shoulder.
“Mama,” Sylvie said, “why are you crying?”
Because I was supposed to die in the pandemic but I was warned by a time traveler. Because a lot of people are going to die soon and there’s nothing I can do to prevent it. Because nothing makes sense and I might be insane.
“I just missed you so much,” Olive said.
“You missed me so much you had to come home early?” Sylvie asked.
“Yes,” Olive said. “I missed you so much I had to come home early.”
A strange alarm filled the room: Dion’s device was blaring with a public alert. Over Sylvie’s shoulder, Olive watched Dion staring at the screen. He looked up and saw her watching him.
“You were right,” he said. “I’m sorry for doubting you. The virus is here.”
For the first one hundred days of lockdown, Olive closed herself into her office every morning and sat at her desk, but it was easier to stare out the window than to write. Sometimes she just took notes on the soundscape.
Siren
Quiet; birds
Siren
Another siren
A third? Overlapping, from at least two directions
All quiet
Birds
Siren
The blur of passing days: Olive woke at four a.m. to work for two hours while Sylvie slept, then Dion worked from six a.m. to noon while Olive made an attempt to be a schoolteacher and to keep their daughter reasonably sane, then Olive worked for two hours while Dion and Sylvie played, then Sylvie got an hour of hologram time while both her parents worked, then Dion worked while Olive played with Sylvie, then somehow it was time to make dinner and then dinner blurred into the bedtime hour, then by eight p.m. Sylvie was asleep and Olive went to bed not long after, then Olive’s alarm rang because it was once again four a.m., etc.
“We could think of it as an opportunity,” Dion said, on the seventy-third night of lockdown. Olive and Dion were sitting together in the kitchen, eating ice cream. Sylvie was sleeping.
“An opportunity for what?” Olive asked. Even on Day 73, she still felt a little stunned. There was an element of incredulity—a pandemic? Seriously?—that hadn’t quite faded.
“To think about how to re-enter the world,” Dion said, “when re-entry is possible.” There were certain friends he didn’t miss, he said. He was quietly applying for new jobs.
“Let’s pretend this seltzer bottle is a friend,” Sylvie said, at dinner on Day 85. “Make it talk to me.”
“Hello, Sylvie!” Olive said. She moved the glass bottle closer to Sylvie.
“Hi, bottle,” Sylvie said.
In lockdown, there was a new kind of travel, but that didn’t seem the right word. There was a new kind of anti-travel. In the evenings Olive keyed a series of codes into her device, donned a headset that covered her eyes, and entered the holospace. Holographic meetings had once been hailed as the way of the future—why go to the time and expense of physical travel, when one could transport oneself into a strange silvery-blank digital room and converse there with flickering simulations of one’s colleagues?—but the unreality was painfully flat. Dion’s job required a great many meetings, so he was in the holospace six hours a day and was dazed with exhaustion in the evenings.
“I don’t know why it’s so tiring,” he said. “So much more tiring than normal meetings, I mean.”
“I think it’s because it isn’t real.” It was very late, and they were standing by the living room windows together, looking down at the deserted street.
“Maybe you’re right. Turns out reality is more important than we thought,” Dion said.
The thing with the tour—the thing with all the tours—is that there was no moment when she wasn’t grateful, but also it was always too many faces. She’d always been shy. On tour all those faces kept appearing before her, face after face after face, and most of them were kind but all of them were the wrong faces, because after a few days on the road the only people Olive wanted to see were Sylvie and Dion.
But when the world shrank to the size of the interior of the apartment, and to a population of three, the people were what she missed. Where was the driver who was writing the book about the talking rats? She’d never even known the woman’s name. Where was Aretta—the out-of-office message on Aretta’s device was weeks out of date, which was worrying—and the other authors she’d met on that last tour, Ibby Mohammed and Jessica Marley? Where was the driver who sang an old jazz song as they drove through Tallinn, and the woman in Buenos Aires with the tattoo?
In lockdown, Colony Two was a strange, frozen place, silent except for the ambulance sirens and the soft whir of passing trolleys with their freight of masked medical workers. No one was supposed to go outside except for medical appointments and essential work, but on the one-hundredth night, while Sylvie was sleeping, Olive slipped out of the kitchen door and into the outside world. She moved swiftly and silently down the stairs to the garden, where she sat on the grass, under a small tree shaped like an umbrella. She was inches from the sidewalk but hidden by leaves. Being out of the apartment was disorienting. She was certain that the air here hadn’t changed, but after her time on Earth it seemed wrong to her, flat and overly filtered. She stayed outdoors for an hour, then slipped back in with a sense of revelation. After that she went out every night to sit under the umbrella tree.
It was on one of those nights that the journalist appeared. The last journalist, as she’d always think of him, Gaspery-Jacques Roberts of Contingencies Magazine. On the night he appeared, she was under the umbrella tree, cross-legged on the grass, trying not to think of the day’s numbers—752 dead today in Colony Two, with 3,458 new cases—and trying to let go of conscious thought, when she heard soft footsteps approaching. She didn’t think it could be a patrol officer—they walked in pairs—but the fines for being outside in lockdown were steep, so she stayed very still and tried to breathe as quietly as possible.
The footsteps stopped, so close that she could see the person’s shadow angled over the sidewalk. Could they have sensed her? It didn’t seem possible. Someone else—another set of footsteps—was approaching, from the opposite direction.
“Zoey? What are you doing here?” Olive recognized the man’s voice immediately, and her breath caught in her chest.
“I could ask you the same thing,” a woman said. She had his accent.
“I told you in the travel chamber five minutes ago,” Gaspery said. “I want to interview a literary scholar who interviewed Olive Llewellyn. One more layer of confirmation.”
“I thought it was strange that you wanted to leave again after your interview with her, on an unscheduled trip,” she said.
Gaspery didn’t speak for a moment. “I thought you didn’t travel anymore,” he said finally.
“Yes, well, I felt the circumstances warranted an exception. Gaspery, how could you?”
“I was going to just talk to her,” Gaspery said. “I was going to stick to the plan, but Zoey, I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t just let her die.”
There was a moment of silence, during which both of these incomprehensible people were, Olive imagined, staring directly into her living room window. She looked up, but from her angle she could see only patches of the living room ceiling, mostly obscured by leaves.
“It’s like you warned me,” he said quietly. “You said the job required a lack of humanity, and it did. It does.”
“You shouldn’t come back to the present,” Zoey said.
What?
“Of course I’ll come back to the present,” Gaspery said. “I believe in facing consequences.”
“But the consequences will be terrible,” Zoey said. “I’ve seen it happen before.”
There was silence then. Gaspery didn’t respond.
“The Night City’s beautiful in this era,” he said finally.
“I know.” She was crying, Olive could hear it in her voice. “It isn’t the Night City yet.”
“You’re right,” he said. “The dome lighting still works. Are we standing on cobblestones?”
“Yes,” she said, “I believe we are.”
“There’s a patrol coming,” Gaspery said suddenly, and they were gone, walking quickly away together.
Olive stayed there for a long time in the shadows, in the strangeness. She was supposed to die in the pandemic, as she understood it, but then Gaspery had saved her. Hadn’t he even told her what he was? If a time traveler appeared before you…
That night she looked up Gaspery-Jacques Roberts and the results were flooded with references to her own work, the book and the screen adaptation of Marienbad. She looked up Contingencies Magazine, and found a website with a few dozen articles, but the more she searched, the more it seemed like a front. It hadn’t been updated in a long time, and its social media accounts were dormant.
She heard a small noise and started, but it was only Sylvie, standing in the doorway in unicorn pajamas.
“Oh, sweetie,” Olive said, “it’s the middle of the night. Let me tuck you in.”
“I have an insomnia,” Sylvie said.
“I’ll sit with you for a bit.”
Olive lifted her daughter, this warm weight in her arms, and carried her back to her bedroom. Everything in the room was blue. Olive tucked her in under an indigo duvet and sat beside her. I was supposed to die in the pandemic.
“Could we play Enchanted Forest?” Sylvie asked.
“Of course,” Olive said. “Let’s play for a few minutes, till you feel sleepy.” Sylvie shivered with delight. The Enchanted Forest was a new invention: Sylvie had never gone in for imaginary friends, but in lockdown she had an entire kingdom filled with them, and she was their queen.
“When I feel sleepy we’ll stop,” Sylvie said agreeably. “We’ll stop before I fall asleep.”
“The portal door opens,” Olive said, because that was how the game always began. Sylvie’s bedroom was quieter than Olive’s office, being at the back of the building, but Olive still heard the faint wail of an ambulance siren.
“Who comes through?” Sylvie asked.
“Magic Foxy leaps through the portal. ‘Queen Sylvie,’ says Magic Foxy, ‘come quickly! There’s a problem in the Enchanted Forest!’ ”
Sylvie laughed, delighted. Magic Foxy was her favorite friend. “And only I can help, Magic Foxy?”
“ ‘Yes, Queen Sylvie,’ says Magic Foxy, ‘only you can help.’ ”
Another lecture, this one virtual. No, the same lecture, just performed now in the holospace. (In non-space. Nowhere.) Olive was a hologram in a room of holograms, a sea of dim lights flickering before her, all of them gathered in a minimalistic suggestion of a room. She gazed out at several hundred slightly luminescent facsimiles of people, their actual bodies in individual rooms all over Earth and in the colonies, and had the unhinged thought that she was speaking directly to a congregation of souls.
“An interesting question,” Olive said, “which I’d like to consider in these last few minutes, is why there’s been such interest in postapocalyptic literature over this past decade or so. I’ve had the tremendous good fortune of getting to travel a great deal in the service of Marienbad—”
Blue sky over Salt Lake City, birds wheeling overhead
The rooftop of a hotel in Cape Town, lights sparkling in the trees
Wind rippling over a field of long grass by a train station in northern England
“Can I show you my tattoo?” the woman in Buenos Aires said
“—which is to say I’ve had the opportunity to speak with a great many people about postapocalyptic literature. I’ve heard a great many theories about why there’s such interest in the genre. One person suggested to me that it had to do with economic inequality, that in a world that can seem fundamentally unfair, perhaps we long to just blow everything up and start over—”
“That’s just how it seems to me,” the bookseller had said,
in an old shop in Vancouver, while Olive admired his pink glasses
“—and I’m not sure I agree with that, but it’s an intriguing thought.” The holograms shifted and stared. She liked the idea that she could still hold a room, even if now the room was just in the holospace, even if the room wasn’t really a room. “Someone suggested to me that it has to do with a secret longing for heroism, which I found interesting. Perhaps we believe on some level that if the world were to end and be remade, if some unthinkable catastrophe were to occur, then perhaps we might be remade too, perhaps into better, more heroic, more honorable people.”
“Doesn’t it seem possible?” the librarian in Brazzaville asked,
her eyes shining, and outside on the street
someone was playing a trumpet,
“I mean, no one wants this to happen, obviously,
but think of the opportunity for heroism…”
“Some people have suggested to me that it’s about the catastrophes on Earth, the decision to build domes over countless cities, the tragedy of being forced to abandon entire countries due to rising water or rising heat, but—”
A memory: waking in an airship between cities,
looking down at the dome over Dubai,
and believing for a wildly disorienting moment that she’d left Earth
“—that doesn’t ring true to me. Our anxiety is warranted, and it’s not unreasonable to suggest that we might channel that anxiety into fiction, but the problem with that theory is, our anxiety is nothing new. When have we ever believed that the world wasn’t ending?
“I had a fascinating conversation with my mother once, where she talked about the guilt she and her friends had felt about bringing children into the universe. This was in the mid-2160s, in Colony Two. It’s hard to imagine a more tranquil time or place, but they were concerned about asteroid storms, and if life on the moon became untenable, about the continued viability of life on Earth—”
Olive’s mother drinking coffee in Olive’s childhood home:
yellow flowered tablecloth
hands clasped around a blue coffee mug
her smile
“—and my point is, there’s always something. I think, as a species, we have a desire to believe that we’re living at the climax of the story. It’s a kind of narcissism. We want to believe that we’re uniquely important, that we’re living at the end of history, that now, after all these millennia of false alarms, now is finally the worst that it’s ever been, that finally we have reached the end of the world.”
In a world that no longer exists but whose exact end date is unclear,
Captain George Vancouver stands on the deck of the HMS Discovery,
gazing anxiously out at a landscape with no people in it
“But all of this raises an interesting question,” Olive said. “What if it always is the end of the world?”
She paused for effect. Before her, the holographic audience was almost perfectly still. “Because we might reasonably think of the end of the world,” Olive said, “as a continuous and never-ending process.”
An hour later, Olive removed her headset and was once again alone in her office. She wasn’t sure if she’d ever been so tired. She sat still for a while, absorbing the details of the physical world: the bookshelves, the framed drawings by Sylvie, the painting of a garden that her parents had given her as a wedding present, the odd piece of metal she’d once found on Earth that she’d hung on the wall because she loved the shape of it. She rose and went to the window to look out at the city. White street, white buildings, green trees, ambulance lights. It was midnight, and so the ambulances had no need of sirens. Lights flashed blue and red up the street and then receded.
I was supposed to die in the pandemic. She didn’t entirely understand what that meant, and yet it was the point around which all of her thoughts revolved. A trolley passed, carrying medical workers, then another ambulance, then the stillness returned. Movement in the air: an owl flying silently through the dark.
“When we consider the question of why now,” Olive said, before a different audience of holograms the following evening, “I mean why there’s been this increased interest in postapocalyptic fiction over the past decade, I think we have to consider what’s changed in the world in that timeframe, and that line of thinking leads me inevitably to our technology.” A hologram in the front row was shimmering oddly, which meant the attendee had an unstable connection. “My personal belief is that we turn to postapocalyptic fiction not because we’re drawn to disaster, per se, but because we’re drawn to what we imagine might come next. We long secretly for a world with less technology in it.”
“So I’m guessing I’m not the first to ask you what it’s like to be the author of a pandemic novel during a pandemic,” another journalist said.
“You might not be the very first.”
Olive was standing by the window, staring up at the sky. The Colony Two dome had the same pixelations as Colonies One and Three, a shifting pattern of blue sky and clouds, but it seemed to her that there was a glitchy patch on the horizon, a section that flickered just slightly so that a square of black space showed through. It was hard to tell.
“What are you working on these days? Are you able to work?”
“I’m writing this crazy sci-fi thing,” Olive said.
“Interesting. Can you tell me about it?”
“I don’t know much about it myself, to be honest. I don’t even know if it’s a novel or a novella. It’s actually kind of deranged.”
“I suppose anything written this year is likely to be deranged,” the journalist said, and Olive decided she liked her. “What drew you to sci-fi?”
That patch of sky had definitely just flickered. What would it look like if the dome lighting failed? It was a strange thought. She’d always taken the illusion of an atmosphere for granted.
“I’ve been in lockdown for one hundred and nine days,” Olive said. “I think I just wanted to write something set as far away as possible from my apartment.”
“Is that all it is?” the journalist asked. “Physical distance, a way of traveling during lockdown?”
“No, I guess not.” An ambulance siren was approaching, and then the ambulance stopped in front of the building across the street. Olive turned her back to the window. “There’s just…Look,” Olive said, “I don’t mean to be melodramatic, and I know it’s like this in a lot of places now, but there’s just, there is so much death. There’s death all around us. I don’t want to write about anything real.”
The journalist was quiet.
“And I know it’s like this for everyone else too. I know how fortunate I am. I know how much worse it could be. I’m not complaining. But my parents live on Earth, and I don’t know if…” She had to stop and take a breath to compose herself. “I don’t know when I’ll see them again.”
Two ambulances passed, one after the other, then silence. Olive looked over her shoulder. The ambulance across the street was still there.
“Are you there?” Olive asked.
“I’m sorry,” the journalist said. Her voice was choked.
“What’s your situation?” Olive asked softly. It occurred to her that the journalist sounded very young. She glanced at her calendar. The journalist’s name was Annabel Escobar, and she worked in the city of Charlotte, which Olive dimly recalled visiting on a long-ago tour of United Carolina.
“I live alone,” Annabel said. “We’re not supposed to leave our houses, and it’s just…” But she was crying now, truly weeping.
“I’m sorry,” Olive said. “That sounds so lonely.” She was staring out the window. The ambulance hadn’t moved.
“I just haven’t been in a room with anyone in a very long time,” Annabel said.
On another night of searching, a centuries-old academic journal yielded a reference to a Gaspery J. Roberts. The journal had been devoted to prison reform. The hit sent Olive down a rabbit hole, at the end of which she found prison records from Earth: Gaspery J. Roberts had been sentenced to fifty years for a double homicide in Ohio in the late twentieth century. But there was no picture, so Olive couldn’t be sure it was the same man.
“So, Olive,” another journalist said. They were holograms in a silvery holospace room, along with two other authors who’d also written books whose plots involved pandemics. The four of them flickered like ghosts. “How many copies of Marienbad have you sold since the pandemic began?”
“Oh,” Olive said. “I’m not sure. A lot.”
“I know you’ve sold a lot,” he said. “It’s been on bestseller lists in a dozen Earth countries, all three moon colonies, and two of the three colonies on Titan. I’m asking you to be more specific.”
“I’m afraid I don’t have my sales numbers in front of me,” Olive said. All of the holograms were staring at her.
“Really?” the journalist asked.
“It didn’t occur to me to bring my royalty statements to this interview,” Olive said.
An hour later, when the interview was over, she removed her headset and sat for a while with her eyes closed. She’d been home from Earth for long enough that when she opened the window, the night air of the Second Colony seemed fresh again. The air might be filtered, but there were plants, there was running water, there was a world outside her window as real as any world that anyone had ever lived in. Olive found herself thinking of Jessica Marley, for the first time in a while, and Jessica Marley’s insufferable little coming-of-age-on-the-moon novel. Look, she wanted to tell her, there’s no pain in unreality happening here. A life lived under a dome, in an artificially generated atmosphere, is still a life. A siren wailed and receded. Olive picked up her device, ran a search on Jessica’s name, and discovered that she’d died two months ago in Spain.
“Mama?” Sylvie was in the doorway. “Is your interview over?”
“Hi, sweetie. Yes. It ended early.” Jessica Marley was thirty-seven years old.
“Do you have another interview?”
“No.” Olive knelt before her daughter, and then hugged her quickly. “No more till tomorrow.”
“Then can we play Enchanted Forest?”
“Of course.”
Sylvie wriggled a little in anticipation. I was supposed to die in the pandemic. Olive knew now that she was going to spend the rest of her life trying to understand that fact. But her effervescent five-year-old sat before her, grinning, and what she found at that moment, as the lights of yet another ambulance flickered over the ceiling, was that it was possible to smile back. This is the strange lesson of living in a pandemic: life can be tranquil in the face of death.
“Mama? Let’s play Enchanted Forest.”
“Okay,” Olive said. “The portal door opens…”
