Sea of Tranquility(20)

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—

She kept searching for the song the driver in Tallinn had been singing, but she couldn’t find it. The lyrics evaded her. She kept entering search terms into her device (love + rain + death + money + lyrics + song) and getting nowhere.



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—

In Lyon, at a festival dedicated to mystery fiction, Olive’s French publicist brought her to a media room where the interviewer, a woman who worked for a magazine, was programming an array of hologram cameras. “Olive,” the interviewer said, “I love your work.”

“Thank you, that’s really nice to hear.”

“Will you sit in that chair, please?”

Olive sat. An assistant affixed a mic to her shirt.

“So this is a feature I’m doing with all of the authors at the festival,” the interviewer said, “just a brief interview feature. It’s a fun thing for our audience.”

“A fun thing?” Olive was troubled. Her French publicist shot the interviewer a look of alarm.

“Shall we get started?”

“Sure.” Ten holographic cameras floated through the air and surrounded Olive like a ring of stars, building their composite impression.

“So these questions,” the interviewer said, “they have a mystery focus!”

“Because we’re at a mystery festival,” Olive said.

“Exactly. Okay. Number one: what’s your favorite alibi?”

“My favorite…alibi?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t really…I just say I have other plans. When I don’t want to do something.”

“I understand you’re married to a man,” the interviewer said. “When you met your husband, what was your first clue that you loved him?”

“Well,” Olive said, “I guess just a sense of recognition, if that makes sense. I remember the first time I saw him, I looked at him and I knew he’d be important in my life. Is that a clue, though?”

“What’s your idea of the perfect murder?”

“I remember reading a story once where a guy got stabbed with an icicle,” Olive said. “I guess that’s sort of perfect, a crime where the murder weapon melts. Do you mind if I ask, though, do you have any questions that have to do with my work?”

“I just have one more. Okay, last question. Sex with or without handcuffs?”

Olive unclipped the mic from her shirt as she stood. She placed the mic carefully on the chair. “No comment,” she said, and left the room before the interviewer could see the tears in her eyes.



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—

In Shanghai, Olive spent a combined total of three hours talking about herself and about her book, which meant talking about the end of the world while trying not to imagine the world ending with her daughter in it, and then returned to her hotel, where she noticed in the corridor that she was having difficulty walking in a straight line. She never drank, but drunkenness and fatigue look the same sometimes. Olive weaved down the hallway and stumbled into her room. She closed the door behind her and stood just inside for a long time, her forehead resting on the cool wall above the light switch. After a while, she heard her own voice, repeating It’s too much. It’s too much. It’s too much.

“Olive,” the room’s AI system said softly, when some time had passed, “do you desire assistance?” When Olive didn’t answer, it repeated the inquiry in Mandarin and Cantonese.



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—

“Olive, this is totally random, but I was your agent’s babysitter,” a woman told her, in a signing line in Singapore the next day.



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—

“What message would you like your readers to take away from Marienbad?” another interviewer asked.

Olive and the interviewer were onstage together in Tokyo. The interviewer was a hologram, because for unspecified personal reasons he’d been unable to leave Nairobi. Olive suspected the personal reason was illness: the interviewer kept freezing up, but the sound had no lag, which meant the interviewer wasn’t freezing due to a bad connection, he was freezing because he kept pressing the Cough button on his console.

“I was just trying to write an interesting book,” Olive said. “There’s no message.”

“Are you sure?” the interviewer asked.



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—

“Will you sign a used book?” a woman asked, in a signing line.

“Of course, I’d be happy to.”

“Also,” the woman said, “is this your handwriting?”

Someone, not Olive, had already written in this woman’s copy of Marienbad: Harold: I enjoyed last night. xoxoxoxo Olive Llewellyn.

Olive stared at the message and felt just a touch of vertigo. “No,” she said, “I don’t know who wrote that.”



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—

(She was distracted for days afterward by the thought of a shadow Olive moving over the landscape, on a kind of parallel tour, writing uncharacteristic messages in Olive’s books.)



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