Sea of Tranquility(28)

(We were still thinking in terms of getting work done. The most shocking thing in retrospect was the degree to which all of us completely missed the point.)


“God,” Willis said, a few days before the schools closed, but after the news headlines had started, “this all seems so retro.”

“I know,” Dov said. They were both in their forties, which is to say they were old enough to remember Ebola X, but those sixty-four weeks of lockdown had faded to the hazy province of childhood memory, a span of time that was neither awful nor pleasant, months populated by cartoons and imaginary friends. You couldn’t call it a lost year, because it did have nice moments. Their parents were competent enough at parenting to shield them from the horror, which meant it was lonely but not unbearable. There was a lot of ice cream and extra screen time. They’d been glad when it was over, but after a few years had passed they didn’t think of it much.

“What does retro mean?” Sam asked.


As Willis glanced at his younger son, he did have the thought—he clung to this later—that perhaps school wasn’t such a great idea. Nonetheless, the old world hadn’t slipped away just yet, so in the morning he packed Sam’s and Isaac’s lunches and dropped them off at the academy, stepped back out into the bright sunlight and caught a transporter to the airship terminal. Just an ordinary morning under a harmless blue sky.


In the terminal he stopped to listen to a musician, a violinist playing for spare change in one of the cavernous entry corridors. The violinist was an old man who played with his eyes closed, coins accumulating in a hat by his feet. He played an ancient-looking violin—it looked like it was made of real wood—and Willis was by no means an expert in acoustics, but it seemed to him that there was a kind of warmth in the sound. Willis was listening to the music, to the way it rose up over the susurration of the morning commuter crowd, but then—


—a flash of darkness, weird sudden light—


—a fleeting hallucination of forest, fresh air, trees rising around him, a summer’s day—


—and then he was back in the Oklahoma City Airship Terminal, in the cool white of the west entry corridor, blinking and disoriented. Something just came over me, he found himself thinking, but this was inadequate as an explanation, because what had just come over him? That flash of darkness, then the forest rising around him, what was that?


It hit him all at once: an afterlife.


The darkness was death, he told himself. The forest was the after.


Willis didn’t believe in an actual afterlife, but he did believe in the subconscious, he believed in knowing without consciously knowing, and almost without thought he was walking away in the wrong direction, away from his commute. He didn’t know where he was going until he found himself on the doorstep of his sons’ school.


“But why are you pulling your boys out of school?” the principal asked. “I’ve been following the news closely, Willis, and there’s just that tiny cluster of cases in Vancouver.”


I closed the file and put my device in my pocket, unsettled in a way I couldn’t explain.

“Do you see it?” Zoey asked. “The way the video mirrors the passage in the book?”

I did see it. A person in a forest in the twenty-first century sees a flash of darkness and hears noises from an airship terminal two centuries later. A person in an airship terminal in the twenty-third century sees a flash of darkness and is struck by the overwhelming sensation that he’s standing in a forest.

“She could have seen the video,” I suggested. “Olive Llewellyn, I mean. She could’ve seen it and worked it into her fiction.” I was pleased with myself for this suggestion.

“I thought of that,” Zoey said. Of course you did, I didn’t say aloud. That was a major difference between us: Zoey always thought of everything. “There’s something else, though. My team’s spent the last month researching the region where the composer grew up, and this afternoon we found a letter.” She was scrolling through files on her projection, but it was set to privacy mode, so it appeared from my angle that she was moving her hand through clouds. “Here,” she said.

A projection snapped into place in the air between us. It was a handwritten document in a foreign alphabet.

“What is this?”

“I think it might be supporting evidence. It’s a letter,” she said. “From 1912.”

“What alphabet’s this?” I asked.

“Seriously?”

“What, should I be able to read it?” I peered closer, and recognized a word. No, two. It was almost English, but warped and slanted; there was a certain beauty to it, but the letters were misformed. Some kind of proto-English?

“Gaspery, that’s cursive,” she said.

“I don’t know what that is.”

“Right,” she said, with that maddening patience I’d come to expect from her. “Let me switch to audio.”

She toggled something in the clouds, and a man’s voice filled the room.


Bert,

Thank you for your kind letter of 25th April, which made its way across the Atlantic and across Canada at a snail’s pace and arrived in my hands only this evening.

How am I, you ask? The honest answer, brother, is that I’m unsure. This comes to you from a candlelit room in Victoria—you’ll forgive, I hope, the dash of melodrama, but I feel that I’ve earned it—where I’ve taken up lodging in a pleasant boardinghouse. I have given up all thought of establishing myself in business and wish only to return home, but this is a comfortable exile and my remittance provides for my day-to-day necessities.