Sea of Tranquility(18)

“You grew up there? In the colonies?” he asked abruptly, after some time had passed. They’d been talking about the moon colonies earlier.

“Yes. My grandmother was one of the first settlers.”

She liked to picture her grandmother sometimes, twenty years old, rising out of the Vancouver Airship Terminal in the first light of dawn, her ship streaking out into the dark.

“Always meant to go up there,” the driver said. “Never made it.”

Remember that you’re lucky to get to travel. Remember that some people never leave this planet. Olive closed her eyes, in order to better imagine that Sylvie was sitting beside her.

“You smell nice, by the way,” the driver said.



* * *



—

The next four hotel rooms were white and gray and had identical layouts, because all four hotels were part of the same chain.

“Is this your first time staying with us?” a woman at a reception desk for the third or fourth hotel said to her, and Olive wasn’t sure how to answer, because if you’ve stayed in one Marriott, haven’t you stayed in all of them?



* * *



—

Another city:

“Before smallpox could be brought from Europe to the Americas, smallpox had to arrive in Europe.” Olive was regretting her decision to wear a sweater. The lights in Toronto were too hot. “In the middle of the second century, Roman soldiers returning from their siege of the Mesopotamian city of Seleucia brought a new illness back to the capital.

“Victims of the Antonine Plague, as it came to be called, developed fevers, vomiting, and diarrhea. A few days later, a terrible rash would appear on their skin. The population had no immunity.” Olive had delivered the lecture so many times that she felt at this point like a neutral observer. She listened to the words and cadences from some distance away.

“When the Antonine Plague raged through the Roman Empire,” Olive told the audience, “the army was decimated. There were parts of the empire where one in three people died. Here’s something interesting: the Romans wondered if they’d brought this calamity upon themselves, by their actions in the city of Seleucia.”



* * *



—

She was in that night’s hotel room—mostly beige and blue, with pink accents—when Dion called. This was unusual: generally speaking, she called him. Dion sounded tired. He’d been working long hours, he said, and the new university project was creepy, and Sylvie was being difficult. When he’d picked Sylvie up at school today she hadn’t wanted to leave and had made a scene and everyone had felt sorry for him, he could see it in their soft expressions. “Have you been following the news about this new illness in Australia?” he asked. “I’m kind of worried about it.”

“Not really,” Olive said. “To be honest, I’ve been too tired to think.”

“I wish you could come home.”

“I’ll be home soon.”

He was silent.

“I should go,” she said. “Good night.”

“Good night,” he said, and hung up.



* * *



—

“In the city of Seleucia,” Olive told a crowd at the Mercantile Library in Cincinnati, a day or two later, “the Roman army had destroyed the temple of Apollo. In that temple, the historian Ammianus Marcellinus wrote, Roman soldiers had discovered a narrow crevice. When the Romans opened this hole wider, in the hope that it might contain valuables, Marcellinus wrote that there ‘issued a pestilence, loaded with the force of incurable disease, which…polluted the whole world from the borders of Persia to the Rhine and Gaul with contagion and death.’?”

A beat. A sip of water. Pacing is everything.

“This explanation might seem a little silly to us now, but they were grasping wildly for an explanation for the nightmare that had befallen them, and I think that in its outlandishness, the explanation touches upon the root of our fear: illness still carries a terrible mystery.”

She looked over the crowd and saw, as always at this point in the lecture, that particular look on the faces of some of the audience, a specific grief. In any given crowd, several people will inevitably be incurably sick, and several others will have recently lost someone they love to illness.



* * *



—

“Are you worried about the new virus?” Olive asked the library director in Cincinnati. They were sitting together in the director’s office, which Olive had immediately ranked as possibly her favorite of all the offices she’d ever seen. It was located beneath the stacks, which were hundreds of years old and made of wrought iron.

“I’m trying not to be,” the director said. “I’m hoping it’ll just fizzle out.”

“I suppose they usually do,” Olive said. Was this true? She was unsure as she spoke.

The library director nodded, her eyes wandering. She clearly didn’t want to talk about pandemics. “Let me tell you something magnificent about this place,” she said.

“Oh, please do,” Olive said. “It’s been a while since anyone’s told me anything magnificent.”

“So we don’t own the building,” the director said, “but we hold a ten-thousand-year lease on the space.”