Sea of Tranquility(41)
“Mama,” Sylvie said, “why are you crying?”
Because I was supposed to die in the pandemic but I was warned by a time traveler. Because a lot of people are going to die soon and there’s nothing I can do to prevent it. Because nothing makes sense and I might be insane.
“I just missed you so much,” Olive said.
“You missed me so much you had to come home early?” Sylvie asked.
“Yes,” Olive said. “I missed you so much I had to come home early.”
A strange alarm filled the room: Dion’s device was blaring with a public alert. Over Sylvie’s shoulder, Olive watched Dion staring at the screen. He looked up and saw her watching him.
“You were right,” he said. “I’m sorry for doubting you. The virus is here.”
* * *
—
For the first one hundred days of lockdown, Olive closed herself into her office every morning and sat at her desk, but it was easier to stare out the window than to write. Sometimes she just took notes on the soundscape.
Siren
Quiet; birds
Siren
Another siren
A third? Overlapping, from at least two directions
All quiet
Birds
Siren
The blur of passing days: Olive woke at four a.m. to work for two hours while Sylvie slept, then Dion worked from six a.m. to noon while Olive made an attempt to be a schoolteacher and to keep their daughter reasonably sane, then Olive worked for two hours while Dion and Sylvie played, then Sylvie got an hour of hologram time while both her parents worked, then Dion worked while Olive played with Sylvie, then somehow it was time to make dinner and then dinner blurred into the bedtime hour, then by eight p.m. Sylvie was asleep and Olive went to bed not long after, then Olive’s alarm rang because it was once again four a.m., etc.
* * *
—
“We could think of it as an opportunity,” Dion said, on the seventy-third night of lockdown. Olive and Dion were sitting together in the kitchen, eating ice cream. Sylvie was sleeping.
“An opportunity for what?” Olive asked. Even on Day 73, she still felt a little stunned. There was an element of incredulity—a pandemic? Seriously?—that hadn’t quite faded.
“To think about how to re-enter the world,” Dion said, “when re-entry is possible.” There were certain friends he didn’t miss, he said. He was quietly applying for new jobs.
* * *
—
“Let’s pretend this seltzer bottle is a friend,” Sylvie said, at dinner on Day 85. “Make it talk to me.”
“Hello, Sylvie!” Olive said. She moved the glass bottle closer to Sylvie.
“Hi, bottle,” Sylvie said.
* * *
—
In lockdown, there was a new kind of travel, but that didn’t seem the right word. There was a new kind of anti-travel. In the evenings Olive keyed a series of codes into her device, donned a headset that covered her eyes, and entered the holospace. Holographic meetings had once been hailed as the way of the future—why go to the time and expense of physical travel, when one could transport oneself into a strange silvery-blank digital room and converse there with flickering simulations of one’s colleagues?—but the unreality was painfully flat. Dion’s job required a great many meetings, so he was in the holospace six hours a day and was dazed with exhaustion in the evenings.
“I don’t know why it’s so tiring,” he said. “So much more tiring than normal meetings, I mean.”
“I think it’s because it isn’t real.” It was very late, and they were standing by the living room windows together, looking down at the deserted street.
“Maybe you’re right. Turns out reality is more important than we thought,” Dion said.
* * *
—
The thing with the tour—the thing with all the tours—is that there was no moment when she wasn’t grateful, but also it was always too many faces. She’d always been shy. On tour all those faces kept appearing before her, face after face after face, and most of them were kind but all of them were the wrong faces, because after a few days on the road the only people Olive wanted to see were Sylvie and Dion.
But when the world shrank to the size of the interior of the apartment, and to a population of three, the people were what she missed. Where was the driver who was writing the book about the talking rats? She’d never even known the woman’s name. Where was Aretta—the out-of-office message on Aretta’s device was weeks out of date, which was worrying—and the other authors she’d met on that last tour, Ibby Mohammed and Jessica Marley? Where was the driver who sang an old jazz song as they drove through Tallinn, and the woman in Buenos Aires with the tattoo?
* * *
—
In lockdown, Colony Two was a strange, frozen place, silent except for the ambulance sirens and the soft whir of passing trolleys with their freight of masked medical workers. No one was supposed to go outside except for medical appointments and essential work, but on the one-hundredth night, while Sylvie was sleeping, Olive slipped out of the kitchen door and into the outside world. She moved swiftly and silently down the stairs to the garden, where she sat on the grass, under a small tree shaped like an umbrella. She was inches from the sidewalk but hidden by leaves. Being out of the apartment was disorienting. She was certain that the air here hadn’t changed, but after her time on Earth it seemed wrong to her, flat and overly filtered. She stayed outdoors for an hour, then slipped back in with a sense of revelation. After that she went out every night to sit under the umbrella tree.