5
Gaspery stepped out of a New York City men’s room in the winter of 2007, into the warmth and light of a party in an art gallery. He moved slowly through the crowd, trying to orient himself. He was looking for Vincent Smith. He knew she’d be here—her presence had been entered into the historical record, because somewhere in this room was a society photographer—but what that meant, in 2007, was that Mirella Kessler was here too, and after his strange encounter with her in 2020, Gaspery hoped to avoid her.
He saw them together at the far end of the room, admiring a large-scale oil painting. He plucked a glass of red wine from a little round tray and went to stare at a different painting and plot his next move. He was utterly unnerved by the crowd. They were shaking hands, which even after all of his cultural-sensitivity training seemed like a bizarre thing to do in flu season, and kissing one another on the cheek. These people have no direct experience of pandemics, he reminded himself. None of them were old enough to remember the winter of 1918–1919; Ebola was a few years out and would mostly be confined to the other side of the Atlantic; Covid-19 would not arrive for another thirteen years. Gaspery began moving slowly around the periphery of the room, sidling toward Vincent.
In 2007, Vincent was wealthy, and possessed of a sheen of elegance and self-confidence that he wouldn’t have expected of the blue-haired waif he’d just encountered in Caiette. Her arm was looped through Mirella’s, and they were standing in front of a painting, but, he saw now, not really looking at it. They were speaking in a conspiratorial way. Mirella laughed softly. They had a look of inseparability that brought him close to despair. But then Vincent extricated herself to say hello to someone else, while Mirella turned to find her husband, and Gaspery saw his chance.
“Vincent?”
“Hello.” She had a warm smile, and he found that he liked her immediately.
“I’m sorry to bother you. I’m conducting an investigation on behalf of an art collector, and I wondered if I might ask you a quick question about your brother Paul’s videos.”
He had her attention. Her eyes widened. “My brother? But I didn’t think—I didn’t know he did videos. He’s a musician. Or a composer, I guess.”
“That’s my suspicion,” he said. “I don’t think he shot those videos. I think someone else did.”
She frowned. “Can you describe them?”
“Well, there’s one in particular,” Gaspery said. “The videographer was walking through a forest. British Columbia, I think. It was a sunny day. Judging by the quality of the footage, I’d say probably sometime in the mid-nineties.”
Her gaze softened. Gaspery had a sense of performing some kind of hypnosis. “The videographer walked along a path,” he continued, “toward a maple tree.”
She nodded. “I used to record on that path all the time,” she said.
“On this particular video, something strange happens. There’s this weird flash of something,” Gaspery said, “like it all goes dark for a second, probably just some kind of glitch on the tape—”
“It seemed like a glitch,” Vincent said, “but it wasn’t on the tape.”
“You saw it?”
“I heard these weird noises, and everything went dark.”
“What did you hear?”
“Violin music. Then a noise like hydraulics. It was inexplicable.” Her eyes focused suddenly. “I’m sorry,” she said, “what did you say your name was?”
Her husband was moving through the crowd toward them, he was handing Vincent a glass of wine, and Gaspery took advantage of this momentary distraction to slip away from them. He felt a strange elation that was equal parts exhaustion and joy. He had a corroborating interview, recorded on his device. He had his own observations. For the first time since his interview with Olive Llewellyn, on the morning of this strange and seemingly infinite day, he felt he might not be doomed.
But Gaspery hesitated by the men’s room door for a moment, watching the party, and his happiness faded. Here was the awfulness that Zoey had warned him of, the utterly miserable knowledge of how everyone else’s stories would end. He looked out over the room, and for the first time in his life, Gaspery felt old.
Vincent and her husband clinked their glasses together. In fourteen months Alkaitis would be arrested for running a massive Ponzi scheme, then released on bail, at which point he would flee to Dubai—abandoning Vincent—and live out the rest of his long life in a series of hotels.
Vincent would live for another twelve years, and then disappear under mysterious circumstances from the deck of a container ship.
Nearby was Mirella, talking with her husband, Faisal. Faisal was an investor in Jonathan’s fraud scheme, and when the scheme collapsed in a year he would lose everything, as would the family members who’d invested at his urging. Faisal would die of suicide.
Mirella would find the body, and the note. Then she would remain for more than a decade in New York City, until in March 2020 she would travel to Dubai for unknown reasons, arriving just in time to be stranded by the Covid-19 pandemic. There she would meet Himesh Chiang, a guest at the same hotel where she was staying, and after some time the two of them would return to his native London, where they would survive the pandemic, marry, and live out the rest of their lives together; she would give birth to three children, have a successful career in retail management, and die of pneumonia at eighty-five, a year after her husband’s death in a car accident.
But so much is inevitably left out of any biography, any accounting of any life. Before all of that, before Mirella lost Faisal, before this party in this city by the sea, she’d been a child in Ohio. Gaspery shivered. He was thinking of the way she’d looked at him in the park, in January 2020. You were under the overpass, she’d said to him, with terrible certainty, in Ohio, when I was a kid. Not just that. She’d said he was arrested there.
He’d been thinking of 1918 as his final trip. He had made every effort to save himself, and after 1918 he was going home to face the consequences. But what he realized now, watching Mirella, was that it was too late. He was going to go to 1918, but there would be one more destination after that.
