Sea of Tranquility(27)

“Oh, thank god,” she said, when I held out a cupcake. “I completely forgot dinner.”

“You seem agitated.”

“Can I show you something?”

“Sure.”

She touched a discreet console on her office wall, and a projection filled half the room. There was a man on a stage, surrounded by bulky antique machines of some kind, inscrutable instruments. Above his head was an old-fashioned screen, a rectangle of white floating there in the dim light. It seemed to me that the scene we were looking at was quite old.

“A friend sent this to me,” Zoey said. “She works in the art history department.”

“Who is he? The guy in the projection.”

“Paul James Smith. Twenty-first-century composer and video artist.”

She pressed play, and the room filled with three-hundred-year-old music in a vague, shifting genre. Ambient, I supposed. I didn’t know much about music, but found this guy’s composition faintly annoying.

“Okay,” she said, “now pay attention to the white screen above him.”

“What am I looking for? It’s blank.”

“Watch.”

The screen came to life. The video had been shot in a forest on Earth. The quality was a little jerky; the videographer had been walking on a forest path, toward an enormous leafy tree, some Earth species that didn’t grow in the colonies. The music stopped, and the man looked up at the screen above him. The screen went dark. There was a strange cacophony of noise—notes of a violin, the indistinct murmur of a crowd, the hydraulic whoosh of an airship taking off—and then it was over, the forest was back, and for a moment the image was dizzying, as if the videographer had forgotten that they were holding a camera. The forest faded out, but the music continued.

“Listen carefully,” Zoey said. “Listen to the way the music’s changed. You hear how the violin notes from the video are there in Smith’s music? That same motif, that five-note pattern?”

I couldn’t hear it, and then I could. “Yes. Why is that important?”

“Because it means that…that weirdness, that glitch, whatever it was, it was part of the performance. It’s not a technical problem.” She stopped the recording. She looked troubled in a way I didn’t understand. “It goes on,” she said, “but the rest of the performance is uninteresting.”

“You brought me here to show me that,” I said, just checking.

“I need to talk this through with someone I trust.” She picked up her device, and I heard my own device chime with an incoming document.

She’d sent me a book: Marienbad, by Olive Llewellyn.

“Mom’s favorite novel,” I said. I was thinking of our mother, reading on the porch at twilight.

“Have you read it, Gaspery?”

“I’ve never been much of a reader.”

“Just jump to the highlighted passage and tell me if you notice anything.”

It was disorienting, leaping into the middle of a book I’d never read. I started a few paragraphs before the passage she’d highlighted:


We knew it was coming.


We knew it was coming and we prepared accordingly, or at least that’s what we told our children—and ourselves—in the decades that followed.


We knew it was coming but we didn’t quite believe it, so we prepared in low-key, unobtrusive ways—“Why do we have a whole shelf of canned fish?” Willis asked his husband, who said something vague about emergency preparedness—


—Because of that ancient horror, too embarrassingly irrational to be articulated aloud: if you say the name of the thing you fear, might you attract that thing’s attention? This is difficult to admit, but in those early weeks we were vague about our fears because saying the word pandemic might bend the pandemic toward us.


We knew it was coming and we were breezy about it. We deflected the fear with careless bravado. On the day reports broke of a cluster in Vancouver, which was three days after the British prime minister announced that the initial outbreak in London was fully contained, Willis and Dov went to work as usual, their sons Isaac and Sam went to school, and then they all met up for dinner at their favorite restaurant, which was crowded that night. (Bit of a horror movie in retrospect: imagine clouds of invisible pathogens drifting through the air, floating from table to table, swirling in the wake of passing servers.) “If it’s in Vancouver it’s obviously here,” Dov said to Willis, who said, “I’d bet money on it,” and refilled Dov’s water glass.

“If what’s in Vancouver?” Isaac asked. He was nine.

“Nothing,” they said in unison, and felt no guilt at all because it didn’t feel like a lie. Pandemics don’t approach like wars, with the distant thud of artillery growing louder every day and flashes of bombs on the horizon. They arrive in retrospect, essentially. It’s disorienting. The pandemic is far away and then it’s all around you, with seemingly no intermediate step.


Dov, practicing his lines in front of the bedroom mirror after the community theater closed: “Is this the promised end?”


We knew it was coming but we behaved inconsistently. We stocked up on supplies—just in case—but sent our children to school, because how do you get any work done with the kids at home?