I video-called my wife and Yumi. They were both wearing construction-paper crowns when they answered. I said I would be home soon, maybe a month or two, and I wanted to believe this was true. Yumi had been chosen to play the sun in a school play and had started taking violin lessons. My wife’s sister and brother-in-law had moved in to help, since Miki held regular art shows in New York, and other relatives stopped by on weekends, resulting in regular potlucks.
“I sold two paintings of Clara and Yumi,” my wife added. “A couple in Brooklyn said they could sense the love between them, and also a kind of longing. I didn’t intend that, but I couldn’t help noticing the sadness in Clara’s eyes.”
“I think she was happy out here,” I said.
When Yumi chimed in after, I told her about an extraordinary girl who had the lungs and heart of an Olympic athlete, and who may have possessed the ability to heal from minor wounds in a matter of hours like a starfish or an octopus.
“Like a superhero?” Yumi asked.
“Kind of,” I said.
“But you said she got sick.”
“Everyone gets sick sometimes,” I said. “And that’s why I need to stay here for a little while longer. I want to make sure people don’t get sick if they don’t have to.”
“But you’re okay?”
“I’m okay.”
After Yumi left the call, I reassured my wife that what I had said was true. I told Miki to make teriyaki beef for the next family dinner, to soak it in sauce overnight in the fridge, and to cut the meat extra thin because that’s how Yumi likes it. I promised I would call if anything changed.
At night I wrote to Clara in her journal, instead of watching The Goonies or The Shining for the umpteenth time. Most of the researchers had dispersed to their own pods as the quarantine dragged on, as winter storms limited our research to the domes. The outpost alcohol and cigarette stash ran low between supply drops. Some took on new hobbies—learning how to play chess, crocheting, drawing, magic card tricks. Yulia was sketching a group portrait of the entire team. I opened Clara’s notebook one night and wrote YOU WERE RIGHT on the interior cover in big bold letters, circled and underlined.
Dear Clara,
It’s strange to think I’ve started to build a life in the same place I saw as your escape from home. But you saw something else, and I think I understand now why you never could rest. It wasn’t about us or a job or all the little things we call a life. You saw a future of dead soil and dead oceans, all of us fighting for our lives. You had a vision of what life would be like for future generations and acted like the planet had a gun to our head. And maybe it does. I was always so proud of you, but it took Siberia, a quarantine, and the mystery of a 30,000-year-old girl to help me realize that. Maybe tonight I’ll look at the stars and make up a new constellation for the both of us, a woman standing at the precipice of a great chasm. I’ll be here with you.
Love,
Your father
Sometimes, late at night, Yulia and I overheard Dave and Maksim talking in Russian as we were finishing our evening game of chess in the common room. They tried to be covert, but voices ricocheted off the walls around here. She’d translate what little she understood around the scientific jargon—video conferences with medical and government officials, reports that a strain similar to the Batagaika virus had been found hundreds of kilometers away in soil and ice cores. But no one had gotten sick and so maybe we were all okay. Perhaps we possessed an immunity to the illness deep inside of us because some of our ancestors had fought the virus. Dave reiterated this to us all: unless we’re taking shots out of lab test tubes or snorting infected amoebas, we shouldn’t be overly paranoid.
“But they’re still going to keep us here,” Alexei, the mechanic, said. “They can’t keep us here if nothing is wrong with us.”
“Actually, they can,” Dave said. “Right now, we’re their best bet for learning more about the virus.”
We looked at the amoeba samples under the microscope every day. Maksim and Dave explained any changes, how the cytoplasmic structures inside them had begun to disintegrate. We watched a rat injected with the virus inexplicably slip into a coma.
“It’s like the virus is instructing the host cells to serve other functions, like a chameleon—brain cells in the liver, lung cells in the heart. Eventually, normal organ function shuts down,” Dave explained. “There’s still no reason to think any of us are infected, though, or could be infected.”