“Olive,” he said, and she heard the pain in his voice. He thought she was terribly, desperately unwell, but not from the approaching pandemic.
“Please.”
“Okay,” he said. “I’ll do it.”
The lock clicked open. Olive waited for a slow count of ten, then let herself in, dropped her device and underwear into a heap on the floor, and went straight to the shower room. She scrubbed herself with soap, then found the cleaning alcohol, retraced her footsteps, and disinfected every surface she’d touched, then turned on the air purifier to its highest setting and opened all the windows, then used her towel to lift her underwear from the floor and dropped both underwear and towel into the garbage disposal, then disinfected her device, then disinfected the floor where the device had been, then disinfected her hands again. This will be our lives now, she thought dully, memorizing which surfaces we’ve touched. Olive took a deep breath, and arranged her face into a semblance of calm. She opened the door to the bedroom, naked and deranged, and her daughter flew across the room and leaped into her arms. Olive fell to her knees, tears running hot down her face and onto Sylvie’s shoulder.
“Mama,” Sylvie said, “why are you crying?”
Because I was supposed to die in the pandemic but I was warned by a time traveler. Because a lot of people are going to die soon and there’s nothing I can do to prevent it. Because nothing makes sense and I might be insane.
“I just missed you so much,” Olive said.
“You missed me so much you had to come home early?” Sylvie asked.
“Yes,” Olive said. “I missed you so much I had to come home early.”
A strange alarm filled the room: Dion’s device was blaring with a public alert. Over Sylvie’s shoulder, Olive watched Dion staring at the screen. He looked up and saw her watching him.
“You were right,” he said. “I’m sorry for doubting you. The virus is here.”
* * *
—
For the first one hundred days of lockdown, Olive closed herself into her office every morning and sat at her desk, but it was easier to stare out the window than to write. Sometimes she just took notes on the soundscape.
Siren
Quiet; birds
Siren
Another siren
A third? Overlapping, from at least two directions
All quiet
Birds
Siren
The blur of passing days: Olive woke at four a.m. to work for two hours while Sylvie slept, then Dion worked from six a.m. to noon while Olive made an attempt to be a schoolteacher and to keep their daughter reasonably sane, then Olive worked for two hours while Dion and Sylvie played, then Sylvie got an hour of hologram time while both her parents worked, then Dion worked while Olive played with Sylvie, then somehow it was time to make dinner and then dinner blurred into the bedtime hour, then by eight p.m. Sylvie was asleep and Olive went to bed not long after, then Olive’s alarm rang because it was once again four a.m., etc.
* * *
—
“We could think of it as an opportunity,” Dion said, on the seventy-third night of lockdown. Olive and Dion were sitting together in the kitchen, eating ice cream. Sylvie was sleeping.
“An opportunity for what?” Olive asked. Even on Day 73, she still felt a little stunned. There was an element of incredulity—a pandemic? Seriously?—that hadn’t quite faded.
“To think about how to re-enter the world,” Dion said, “when re-entry is possible.” There were certain friends he didn’t miss, he said. He was quietly applying for new jobs.
* * *
—
“Let’s pretend this seltzer bottle is a friend,” Sylvie said, at dinner on Day 85. “Make it talk to me.”
“Hello, Sylvie!” Olive said. She moved the glass bottle closer to Sylvie.
“Hi, bottle,” Sylvie said.
* * *
—
In lockdown, there was a new kind of travel, but that didn’t seem the right word. There was a new kind of anti-travel. In the evenings Olive keyed a series of codes into her device, donned a headset that covered her eyes, and entered the holospace. Holographic meetings had once been hailed as the way of the future—why go to the time and expense of physical travel, when one could transport oneself into a strange silvery-blank digital room and converse there with flickering simulations of one’s colleagues?—but the unreality was painfully flat. Dion’s job required a great many meetings, so he was in the holospace six hours a day and was dazed with exhaustion in the evenings.
“I don’t know why it’s so tiring,” he said. “So much more tiring than normal meetings, I mean.”