Sea of Tranquility(16)
* * *
—
Did the book end too abruptly? She fixated on the question for three days, from the Republic of Texas to western Canada.
* * *
—
“I’m trying not to be pessimistic,” Olive said, on the phone to her husband, “but I’ve barely slept in three days and I doubt I’ll be terribly impressive in my lecture tonight.” This was in Red Deer. Outside the hotel room window, the lights of residential towers glimmered in the dark.
“Don’t be pessimistic,” Dion said. “Think of that quote I’ve got pinned up in my office.”
“?‘It’s a great life if you don’t weaken,’?” Olive said. “How’s work going, speaking of your office?”
He sighed. “I got assigned to the new project.” Dion was an architect.
“The new university?”
“Yeah, kind of. A center for the study of physics, but also… I signed an ironclad confidentiality agreement, so don’t tell anyone?”
“Of course. I won’t tell a soul. But what’s so secret about the architecture of a university?”
“It’s not quite…I’m not sure it’s exactly a university.” Dion sounded troubled. “There’s some serious weirdness in the blueprints.”
“What kind of weirdness?”
“Well, for starters, there’s a tunnel under the street connecting the building to Security Headquarters,” he said.
“Why would a university need a tunnel to the police?”
“Your guess is as good as mine. And the building backs up on the government building,” Dion said, “which, I mean, at first I thought nothing of it. That’s prime downtown real estate, so you know, why shouldn’t the university build next to the government building, but the two buildings aren’t separate. There are so many passageways between them that it’s functionally the same building.”
“You’re right,” Olive said, “that seems weird.”
“Well, it’s a good project for my portfolio, I guess.”
Olive understood from his tone that he wanted to change the subject. “How’s Sylvie?”
“Doing fine.” Dion immediately pivoted the conversation to some trivial matter involving the grocery order and Sylvie’s school lunches, from which she understood that Sylvie probably wasn’t in fact doing particularly well in her absence, and she was grateful for his kindness in not telling her this.
* * *
—
In the morning she flew to a city in the far north for a day of interviews, and then she had an evening lecture, and then there was a long signing line and a late dinner, followed by three hours of sleep and a three-forty-five a.m. airport pickup.
“What do you do, Olive?” the driver asked.
“I’m a writer,” Olive said. She closed her eyes and rested her head against the window, but the driver spoke again:
“What do you write?”
“Books.”
“Tell me more.”
“Well,” Olive said, “I’m traveling because of a novel called Marienbad. It’s about a pandemic.”
“That’s your most recent?”
“No, I’ve written two others since then. But Marienbad’s being made into a film, so I’m on tour for a new edition.”
“That’s so interesting,” the driver said, and started talking about a book she wanted to write. It seemed to be some kind of sci-fi/fantasy epic, the modern world except with wizards, demons, and talking rats. The rats were good. They helped the wizards. They were rats because in all the books the driver had read that involved helpful talking animals, the animals were just too big. Horses and dragons and whatnot. But how do you discreetly move through the world with a dragon or a horse? It’s untenable. Try taking a horse into a bar sometime. No, what you want, she said, is a pocket-sized animal sidekick, a rat for example.
“Yeah, I guess rats are more portable,” Olive said. She was trying to keep her eyes open, but it was very difficult. The massive transport truck in front of them kept weaving over the center line. Human-driven, or a flaw in the software? Unsettling either way. The driver was talking about the possibilities of the multiverse: rats can’t talk here, she pointed out, but does it logically follow that they can’t talk anywhere? She seemed to be waiting for a reply.
“Well, I don’t know much about rat anatomy,” Olive said, “like if their voice boxes and vocal cords or whatever are up to the task of human speech, but I’ll have to think about it, maybe rats in different universes could have different anatomy…” (She may have been mumbling by that point, or possibly not speaking at all. It was so hard to stay awake.) The back of the transport truck was beautiful, a diamond-patterned textured steel that glinted and shone in the headlights.
“I mean, for all we know,” the driver was saying, “there’s a universe where your book is real, I mean nonfictional!”
“I hope not,” Olive said. She could only keep her eyes half-open, so the lights in her field of vision were streaked into vertical spikes, the dashboard, the taillights, the reflections off the back of the truck.
“So your book,” the driver said, “it’s about a pandemic?”