Sea of Tranquility(22)

“Well, some of us don’t have doctorates in literature, Jim,” Jessica said to the interviewer, in response to some imperceptible provocation. The look on his face mirrored Olive’s thought at that moment: Well, that escalated quickly. But a man in the audience was standing up with a question about Marienbad. Almost all of the questions were about Marienbad, which was awkward because Jessica was there too, Jessica with her book about coming of age in the moon colonies. Olive was pretending that she hadn’t read Moon/Rise, because she’d hated it. Olive had lived the real thing, and it wasn’t nearly as poetic as Jessica’s book suggested. Growing up in a moon colony was fine. It was neither great nor dystopian. It was a little house in a pleasant neighborhood of tree-lined streets, a good but not extraordinary public school, life lived at a consistent 15° to 22° Celsius under carefully calibrated dome lighting, scheduled rainfalls. She didn’t grow up longing for Earth or experience her life as a continual displacement, thank you.

“I wanted to ask Olive about the death of the prophet in Marienbad,” the man in the audience said. Jessica sighed and slumped a little in her chair. “It could have been a much bigger moment, but you decided to make it a relatively small, not-climactic event.”

“Really? I thought of it as climactic,” Olive said, as mildly as possible.

He smiled, humoring her. “But you chose to make it really small, almost inconsequential, when it could have been cinematic, something really big. Why is that?”

Jessica sat up straight, excited by the possibility of combat.

“Well,” Olive said. “I suppose everyone has a different idea of what constitutes a big moment.”

“You’re a master of deflection,” Jessica murmured, without looking at her. “You’re like some kind of deflection ninja.”

“Thank you,” Olive said, although she knew it wasn’t a compliment.

“Let’s move on to the next question,” the interviewer said.



* * *



—

“You know the phrase I keep thinking about?” a poet asked, on a different panel, at a festival in Copenhagen. “?‘The chickens are coming home to roost.’ Because it’s never good chickens. It’s never ‘You’ve been a good person and now your chickens are coming home to roost.’ It’s never good chickens. It’s always bad chickens.”

Scattered laughter and applause. A man in the audience was having a coughing fit. He left quickly, bent over in an apologetic way. Olive wrote no good chickens in the margin of her festival program.



* * *



—

Was the death of the prophet in Marienbad too anticlimactic? It seemed possible. Olive was sitting alone at a hotel bar near the Copenhagen festival, drinking tea and eating a wilted salad with too much cheese on it. On the one hand the prophet’s death was dramatic, after all he’d been shot in the head, but maybe there should’ve been some kind of battle scene, maybe the death really was too casual, in the way he went from perfect health to death over the course of a paragraph and the story kept moving without him—

“May I get you anything else?” the bartender asked.

“Just the check, please,” Olive said.

—but on the other hand, isn’t that reality? Won’t most of us die in fairly unclimactic ways, our passing unremarked by almost everyone, our deaths becoming plot points in the narratives of the people around us? But obviously Marienbad was fiction, i.e., reality wasn’t relevant to the question at hand, and maybe the death of the prophet really was a flaw. Now Olive was holding the pen over the check, but there was a difficulty: she’d forgotten her room number. She had to go to the front desk to retrieve it.

“It happens more often than you’d think,” the clerk at the front desk said.



* * *



—

At the airship terminal the next morning, she sat next to a business traveler who wanted to tell her about his job, which had something to do with detecting counterfeit steel. Olive listened for a long time, because the monologue distracted her from how much she missed Sylvie. “And what do you do?” the other traveler asked finally.

“I write books,” Olive said.

“For children?” he asked.



* * *



—

When Olive circled back to the Atlantic Republic, seeing her AR publicist again was like seeing an old friend. Aretta and Olive sat together at a dinner for booksellers in Jersey City.

“How’s it been since I saw you last?” Aretta asked.

“Fine,” Olive said, “it’s all going fine. I have no complaints.” And then, because she was tired and she knew Aretta a little by now, she broke her own rule about never revealing anything personal, and said, “It’s just a lot of people.”

Aretta smiled. “Publicists aren’t supposed to be shy,” she said, “but I get a little overwhelmed at these dinners sometimes.”

“Me too,” Olive said. “My face gets tired.”



* * *



—

That night’s hotel room was white and blue. The thing with being away from her husband and daughter was that every hotel room was emptier than the one before.