* * *
—
At the airship terminal the next morning, she sat next to a business traveler who wanted to tell her about his job, which had something to do with detecting counterfeit steel. Olive listened for a long time, because the monologue distracted her from how much she missed Sylvie. “And what do you do?” the other traveler asked finally.
“I write books,” Olive said.
“For children?” he asked.
* * *
—
When Olive circled back to the Atlantic Republic, seeing her AR publicist again was like seeing an old friend. Aretta and Olive sat together at a dinner for booksellers in Jersey City.
“How’s it been since I saw you last?” Aretta asked.
“Fine,” Olive said, “it’s all going fine. I have no complaints.” And then, because she was tired and she knew Aretta a little by now, she broke her own rule about never revealing anything personal, and said, “It’s just a lot of people.”
Aretta smiled. “Publicists aren’t supposed to be shy,” she said, “but I get a little overwhelmed at these dinners sometimes.”
“Me too,” Olive said. “My face gets tired.”
* * *
—
That night’s hotel room was white and blue. The thing with being away from her husband and daughter was that every hotel room was emptier than the one before.
* * *
—
The last interview of the tour was the following afternoon in Philadelphia, where Olive met a man in a dark suit who was her age or a little younger, in a beautiful meeting room at a hotel. The room was on a high floor with a wall of glass, and the city rolled away beneath them.
“Here we are,” said Aretta brightly. “Olive, this is Gaspery Roberts, Contingencies Magazine. I have to make a couple of quick calls, so I’ll leave you two.” She receded. Olive and the interviewer sat in matching green velvet chairs.
“Thank you for meeting with me,” the man said.
“My pleasure. Do you mind if I ask about your name? I’m not sure I’ve ever met a Gaspery.”
“I’ll tell you something even stranger,” he said. “My first name is actually Gaspery-Jacques.”
“Seriously? I thought I’d made up the name for that character in Marienbad.”
He smiled. “My mother was astonished when she came across the name in your book. She thought she’d made it up too.”
“Perhaps I came across your name somewhere and didn’t consciously remember it.”
“Anything’s possible. It’s hard to know what we know sometimes, isn’t it?” He had a gentle way of speaking that Olive liked, and a faint accent that she couldn’t quite place. “Have you been in interviews all day?”
“Half the day. You’re my fifth.”
“Ouch. I’ll keep this brief, then. I’d like to ask you about a specific scene in Marienbad, if I may.”
“Okay. Sure.”
“The scene in the spaceport,” he said. “Where your character Willis hears the violin and he’s…transported.”
“It’s an odd passage,” Olive said. “I get a lot of questions about it.”
“I’d like to ask you something.” Gaspery hesitated. “This might seem a bit—I don’t mean to pry. But is there an element of—I’m wondering if that bit of the book was inspired by a personal experience.”
“I’ve never been interested in auto-fiction,” Olive said, but it was difficult to meet his eyes now. She’d always found something steadying in looking at her own clasped hands, but she didn’t know if it was the hands or the shirt, the impeccable white cuffs. Clothes are armor.
“Listen,” Gaspery said, “I don’t mean to make you uncomfortable or put you on the spot. But I’m curious if you experienced something strange in the Oklahoma City Airship Terminal.”
In the quiet, Olive could hear the soft hum of the building, the sounds of ventilation and plumbing. Perhaps she wouldn’t have admitted it if he hadn’t caught her toward the end of the tour, if she hadn’t been so tired.
“I don’t mind talking about this,” she said, “but I’m afraid I’ll seem too eccentric if it makes it into the final version of the interview. Could we go off the record for a moment?”
“Yes,” he said.
4
Bad Chickens /
2401
1
No star burns forever. You can say “It’s the end of the world” and mean it, but what gets lost in that kind of careless usage is that the world will eventually literally end. Not “civilization,” whatever that is, but the actual planet.