Sea of Tranquility(17)
“Yes. A scientifically implausible flu.” Olive couldn’t keep her eyes open anymore, so she surrendered, she closed her eyes and let herself fall into the kind of half-sleep from which she knew she could be summoned by a voice—
“Have you been following the news about this new thing,” the driver said, “this new virus in Australia?”
“Kind of,” Olive said, with her eyes closed. “It seems like it’s been fairly well contained.”
“You know, in my book,” the driver said, “there’s a kind of apocalypse too.” She talked for some time about a catastrophic rip in the space-time continuum, but Olive was too tired to follow.
“I’ve kept you up this whole time!” the driver said brightly, as the car pulled into the airport. “You didn’t get to sleep at all!”
* * *
—
Twelve hours later, Olive was delivering her Marienbad lecture, which leaned heavily on her research into the history of pandemics. The lecture was so familiar at this point that it required very little in the way of conscious thought, and her mind was wandering. She kept thinking about the conversation with the driver, because she remembered saying It seems like it’s been fairly well contained, but here’s an epidemiological question: if you’re talking about outbreaks of infectious disease, isn’t fairly well contained essentially the same thing as not contained at all? Focus, she told herself, and pulled herself back to the reality of the podium, the hard bright light, the microphone.
“In the spring of 1792,” she said, “Captain George Vancouver sailed northward up the coast of what would later become British Columbia, aboard the HMS Discovery. As he and his crew traveled northward, the men found themselves increasingly unsettled. Here was this temperate climate, this incredibly green landscape, and yet it seemed strangely empty. Vancouver wrote in his shipboard diary: ‘We traveled nearly one hundred fifty miles of those shores, without seeing that number of inhabitants.’?” A pause to let that sink in, while Olive took a sip of water. A virus is either contained or it isn’t. It’s a binary condition. She hadn’t been sleeping enough. She set down her water glass.
“When they ventured ashore, they found villages that could have housed hundreds, but those villages were abandoned. When they ventured farther, they realized that the forest was a graveyard.” This was the part of the lecture that had been easy before giving birth to her daughter, and was now almost impossible. Olive paused to steady herself. “Canoes with human remains were strung three or four meters up in the trees,” she said. Human remains that were not Sylvie. Not Sylvie. Not Sylvie. “Elsewhere, they found skeletons on the beach. Because smallpox had already arrived.”
* * *
—
In the signing line after that night’s lecture, signing her name over and over again, Olive’s thoughts kept drifting toward disaster. To Xander with best wishes Olive Llewellyn. To Claudio with best wishes Olive Llewellyn. To Sohail with best wishes Olive Llewellyn. To Hyeseung with best wishes Olive Llewellyn. Was there going to be another pandemic? A new cluster of cases had appeared in New Zealand that morning.
* * *
—
The hotel room that night was mostly beige, with a painting of some extravagantly petaled pink Earth flower—a peony?—over the bed.
* * *
—
“A year earlier,” Olive told another crowd, same lecture/different city, “in 1791, a trading ship, the Columbia Rediviva, had sailed those same waters. They were trading sea otter skins.” What did a sea otter even look like? Olive had never seen one. She resolved to look this up later. “They had a similar experience. They found a depopulated land, and the very few survivors they encountered had terrible stories and terrible scars. ‘?’Twas evident that these Natives had been visited by that scourge of mankind the smallpox,’ wrote a crew member, John Boit. Another sailor, John Hoskins, was moved to outrage: ‘Infamous Europeans, a scandal to the Christian name; is it you,’ he wrote, ‘who bring and leave in a country with people you deem savages the most loathsome diseases?’?”
A sip of water. The audience was silent. (A passing thought that felt like triumph: I am holding the room.) “But of course,” she said, “there’s always a beginning. Before smallpox could be brought from Europe to the Americas, smallpox had to arrive in Europe.”
* * *
—
She got out of bed that night and walked into a side table, because she’d been thinking about the layout of the previous night’s hotel room.
* * *
—
The next morning, on a long drive between cities, the driver asked if Olive had kids back home.
“I have a daughter,” Olive said.
“How old?”
“Five.”
“What are you doing here, then?” the driver asked.
“Well, this is how I provide for her,” she said, in her mildest voice, and didn’t add Fuck you, I know you would never ask a man that question, because after all it was just the two of them alone in the car, this man and Olive. Watching the trees slip by outside the window; they were passing through a forest preserve. Imagining Sylvie was here beside her, imagining that if she wanted to she could reach out and hold that warm little hand.