* * *
—
In the morning she flew to a city in the far north for a day of interviews, and then she had an evening lecture, and then there was a long signing line and a late dinner, followed by three hours of sleep and a three-forty-five a.m. airport pickup.
“What do you do, Olive?” the driver asked.
“I’m a writer,” Olive said. She closed her eyes and rested her head against the window, but the driver spoke again:
“What do you write?”
“Books.”
“Tell me more.”
“Well,” Olive said, “I’m traveling because of a novel called Marienbad. It’s about a pandemic.”
“That’s your most recent?”
“No, I’ve written two others since then. But Marienbad’s being made into a film, so I’m on tour for a new edition.”
“That’s so interesting,” the driver said, and started talking about a book she wanted to write. It seemed to be some kind of sci-fi/fantasy epic, the modern world except with wizards, demons, and talking rats. The rats were good. They helped the wizards. They were rats because in all the books the driver had read that involved helpful talking animals, the animals were just too big. Horses and dragons and whatnot. But how do you discreetly move through the world with a dragon or a horse? It’s untenable. Try taking a horse into a bar sometime. No, what you want, she said, is a pocket-sized animal sidekick, a rat for example.
“Yeah, I guess rats are more portable,” Olive said. She was trying to keep her eyes open, but it was very difficult. The massive transport truck in front of them kept weaving over the center line. Human-driven, or a flaw in the software? Unsettling either way. The driver was talking about the possibilities of the multiverse: rats can’t talk here, she pointed out, but does it logically follow that they can’t talk anywhere? She seemed to be waiting for a reply.
“Well, I don’t know much about rat anatomy,” Olive said, “like if their voice boxes and vocal cords or whatever are up to the task of human speech, but I’ll have to think about it, maybe rats in different universes could have different anatomy…” （She may have been mumbling by that point, or possibly not speaking at all. It was so hard to stay awake.） The back of the transport truck was beautiful, a diamond-patterned textured steel that glinted and shone in the headlights.
“I mean, for all we know,” the driver was saying, “there’s a universe where your book is real, I mean nonfictional!”
“I hope not,” Olive said. She could only keep her eyes half-open, so the lights in her field of vision were streaked into vertical spikes, the dashboard, the taillights, the reflections off the back of the truck.
“So your book,” the driver said, “it’s about a pandemic?”
“Yes. A scientifically implausible flu.” Olive couldn’t keep her eyes open anymore, so she surrendered, she closed her eyes and let herself fall into the kind of half-sleep from which she knew she could be summoned by a voice—
“Have you been following the news about this new thing,” the driver said, “this new virus in Australia?”
“Kind of,” Olive said, with her eyes closed. “It seems like it’s been fairly well contained.”
“You know, in my book,” the driver said, “there’s a kind of apocalypse too.” She talked for some time about a catastrophic rip in the space-time continuum, but Olive was too tired to follow.
“I’ve kept you up this whole time!” the driver said brightly, as the car pulled into the airport. “You didn’t get to sleep at all!”
* * *
—
Twelve hours later, Olive was delivering her Marienbad lecture, which leaned heavily on her research into the history of pandemics. The lecture was so familiar at this point that it required very little in the way of conscious thought, and her mind was wandering. She kept thinking about the conversation with the driver, because she remembered saying It seems like it’s been fairly well contained, but here’s an epidemiological question: if you’re talking about outbreaks of infectious disease, isn’t fairly well contained essentially the same thing as not contained at all? Focus, she told herself, and pulled herself back to the reality of the podium, the hard bright light, the microphone.
“In the spring of 1792,” she said, “Captain George Vancouver sailed northward up the coast of what would later become British Columbia, aboard the HMS Discovery. As he and his crew traveled northward, the men found themselves increasingly unsettled. Here was this temperate climate, this incredibly green landscape, and yet it seemed strangely empty. Vancouver wrote in his shipboard diary: ‘We traveled nearly one hundred fifty miles of those shores, without seeing that number of inhabitants.’？” A pause to let that sink in, while Olive took a sip of water. A virus is either contained or it isn’t. It’s a binary condition. She hadn’t been sleeping enough. She set down her water glass.