“When they ventured ashore, they found villages that could have housed hundreds, but those villages were abandoned. When they ventured farther, they realized that the forest was a graveyard.” This was the part of the lecture that had been easy before giving birth to her daughter, and was now almost impossible. Olive paused to steady herself. “Canoes with human remains were strung three or four meters up in the trees,” she said. Human remains that were not Sylvie. Not Sylvie. Not Sylvie. “Elsewhere, they found skeletons on the beach. Because smallpox had already arrived.”
* * *
—
In the signing line after that night’s lecture, signing her name over and over again, Olive’s thoughts kept drifting toward disaster. To Xander with best wishes Olive Llewellyn. To Claudio with best wishes Olive Llewellyn. To Sohail with best wishes Olive Llewellyn. To Hyeseung with best wishes Olive Llewellyn. Was there going to be another pandemic? A new cluster of cases had appeared in New Zealand that morning.
* * *
—
The hotel room that night was mostly beige, with a painting of some extravagantly petaled pink Earth flower—a peony?—over the bed.
* * *
—
“A year earlier,” Olive told another crowd, same lecture/different city, “in 1791, a trading ship, the Columbia Rediviva, had sailed those same waters. They were trading sea otter skins.” What did a sea otter even look like? Olive had never seen one. She resolved to look this up later. “They had a similar experience. They found a depopulated land, and the very few survivors they encountered had terrible stories and terrible scars. ‘？’Twas evident that these Natives had been visited by that scourge of mankind the smallpox,’ wrote a crew member, John Boit. Another sailor, John Hoskins, was moved to outrage: ‘Infamous Europeans, a scandal to the Christian name; is it you,’ he wrote, ‘who bring and leave in a country with people you deem savages the most loathsome diseases?’？”
A sip of water. The audience was silent. （A passing thought that felt like triumph: I am holding the room.） “But of course,” she said, “there’s always a beginning. Before smallpox could be brought from Europe to the Americas, smallpox had to arrive in Europe.”
* * *
—
She got out of bed that night and walked into a side table, because she’d been thinking about the layout of the previous night’s hotel room.
* * *
—
The next morning, on a long drive between cities, the driver asked if Olive had kids back home.
“I have a daughter,” Olive said.
“How old?”
“Five.”
“What are you doing here, then?” the driver asked.
“Well, this is how I provide for her,” she said, in her mildest voice, and didn’t add Fuck you, I know you would never ask a man that question, because after all it was just the two of them alone in the car, this man and Olive. Watching the trees slip by outside the window; they were passing through a forest preserve. Imagining Sylvie was here beside her, imagining that if she wanted to she could reach out and hold that warm little hand.
“You grew up there? In the colonies?” he asked abruptly, after some time had passed. They’d been talking about the moon colonies earlier.
“Yes. My grandmother was one of the first settlers.”
She liked to picture her grandmother sometimes, twenty years old, rising out of the Vancouver Airship Terminal in the first light of dawn, her ship streaking out into the dark.
“Always meant to go up there,” the driver said. “Never made it.”
Remember that you’re lucky to get to travel. Remember that some people never leave this planet. Olive closed her eyes, in order to better imagine that Sylvie was sitting beside her.
“You smell nice, by the way,” the driver said.
* * *
—
The next four hotel rooms were white and gray and had identical layouts, because all four hotels were part of the same chain.
“Is this your first time staying with us?” a woman at a reception desk for the third or fourth hotel said to her, and Olive wasn’t sure how to answer, because if you’ve stayed in one Marriott, haven’t you stayed in all of them?
* * *
—
Another city:
“Before smallpox could be brought from Europe to the Americas, smallpox had to arrive in Europe.” Olive was regretting her decision to wear a sweater. The lights in Toronto were too hot. “In the middle of the second century, Roman soldiers returning from their siege of the Mesopotamian city of Seleucia brought a new illness back to the capital.