“Victims of the Antonine Plague, as it came to be called, developed fevers, vomiting, and diarrhea. A few days later, a terrible rash would appear on their skin. The population had no immunity.” Olive had delivered the lecture so many times that she felt at this point like a neutral observer. She listened to the words and cadences from some distance away.
“When the Antonine Plague raged through the Roman Empire,” Olive told the audience, “the army was decimated. There were parts of the empire where one in three people died. Here’s something interesting: the Romans wondered if they’d brought this calamity upon themselves, by their actions in the city of Seleucia.”
* * *
—
She was in that night’s hotel room—mostly beige and blue, with pink accents—when Dion called. This was unusual: generally speaking, she called him. Dion sounded tired. He’d been working long hours, he said, and the new university project was creepy, and Sylvie was being difficult. When he’d picked Sylvie up at school today she hadn’t wanted to leave and had made a scene and everyone had felt sorry for him, he could see it in their soft expressions. “Have you been following the news about this new illness in Australia?” he asked. “I’m kind of worried about it.”
“Not really,” Olive said. “To be honest, I’ve been too tired to think.”
“I wish you could come home.”
“I’ll be home soon.”
He was silent.
“I should go,” she said. “Good night.”
“Good night,” he said, and hung up.
* * *
—
“In the city of Seleucia,” Olive told a crowd at the Mercantile Library in Cincinnati, a day or two later, “the Roman army had destroyed the temple of Apollo. In that temple, the historian Ammianus Marcellinus wrote, Roman soldiers had discovered a narrow crevice. When the Romans opened this hole wider, in the hope that it might contain valuables, Marcellinus wrote that there ‘issued a pestilence, loaded with the force of incurable disease, which…polluted the whole world from the borders of Persia to the Rhine and Gaul with contagion and death.’？”
A beat. A sip of water. Pacing is everything.
“This explanation might seem a little silly to us now, but they were grasping wildly for an explanation for the nightmare that had befallen them, and I think that in its outlandishness, the explanation touches upon the root of our fear: illness still carries a terrible mystery.”
She looked over the crowd and saw, as always at this point in the lecture, that particular look on the faces of some of the audience, a specific grief. In any given crowd, several people will inevitably be incurably sick, and several others will have recently lost someone they love to illness.
* * *
—
“Are you worried about the new virus?” Olive asked the library director in Cincinnati. They were sitting together in the director’s office, which Olive had immediately ranked as possibly her favorite of all the offices she’d ever seen. It was located beneath the stacks, which were hundreds of years old and made of wrought iron.
“I’m trying not to be,” the director said. “I’m hoping it’ll just fizzle out.”
“I suppose they usually do,” Olive said. Was this true? She was unsure as she spoke.
The library director nodded, her eyes wandering. She clearly didn’t want to talk about pandemics. “Let me tell you something magnificent about this place,” she said.
“Oh, please do,” Olive said. “It’s been a while since anyone’s told me anything magnificent.”
“So we don’t own the building,” the director said, “but we hold a ten-thousand-year lease on the space.”
“You’re right. That’s magnificent.”
“Nineteenth-century hubris. Imagine thinking civilization would still exist in ten thousand years. But there’s more.” She leaned forward, paused for effect. “The lease is renewable.”
* * *
—
The window in that night’s hotel room opened, which after a dozen rooms with nonopening windows felt like something of a miracle. Olive spent a long time reading a novel by the window, in the beautiful fresh air.
* * *
—
The next morning, leaving Cincinnati, Olive saw a sunrise from the airport lounge. Heat shimmering over the tarmac, the horizon cast in pink. Paradox: I want to go home but I could watch Earth’s sunrises forever.
* * *
—
“The truth is,” Olive said, behind a lectern in Paris, “even now, all these centuries later, for all our technological advances, all our scientific knowledge of illness, we still don’t always know why one person gets sick and another doesn’t, or why one patient survives and another dies. Illness frightens us because it’s chaotic. There’s an awful randomness about it.”