There was silence then. Gaspery didn’t respond.
“The Night City’s beautiful in this era,” he said finally.
“I know.” She was crying, Olive could hear it in her voice. “It isn’t the Night City yet.”
“You’re right,” he said. “The dome lighting still works. Are we standing on cobblestones?”
“Yes,” she said, “I believe we are.”
“There’s a patrol coming,” Gaspery said suddenly, and they were gone, walking quickly away together.
Olive stayed there for a long time in the shadows, in the strangeness. She was supposed to die in the pandemic, as she understood it, but then Gaspery had saved her. Hadn’t he even told her what he was? If a time traveler appeared before you…
* * *
—
That night she looked up Gaspery-Jacques Roberts and the results were flooded with references to her own work, the book and the screen adaptation of Marienbad. She looked up Contingencies Magazine, and found a website with a few dozen articles, but the more she searched, the more it seemed like a front. It hadn’t been updated in a long time, and its social media accounts were dormant.
She heard a small noise and started, but it was only Sylvie, standing in the doorway in unicorn pajamas.
“Oh, sweetie,” Olive said, “it’s the middle of the night. Let me tuck you in.”
“I have an insomnia,” Sylvie said.
“I’ll sit with you for a bit.”
Olive lifted her daughter, this warm weight in her arms, and carried her back to her bedroom. Everything in the room was blue. Olive tucked her in under an indigo duvet and sat beside her. I was supposed to die in the pandemic.
“Could we play Enchanted Forest?” Sylvie asked.
“Of course,” Olive said. “Let’s play for a few minutes, till you feel sleepy.” Sylvie shivered with delight. The Enchanted Forest was a new invention: Sylvie had never gone in for imaginary friends, but in lockdown she had an entire kingdom filled with them, and she was their queen.
“When I feel sleepy we’ll stop,” Sylvie said agreeably. “We’ll stop before I fall asleep.”
“The portal door opens,” Olive said, because that was how the game always began. Sylvie’s bedroom was quieter than Olive’s office, being at the back of the building, but Olive still heard the faint wail of an ambulance siren.
“Who comes through?” Sylvie asked.
“Magic Foxy leaps through the portal. ‘Queen Sylvie,’ says Magic Foxy, ‘come quickly! There’s a problem in the Enchanted Forest!’？”
Sylvie laughed, delighted. Magic Foxy was her favorite friend. “And only I can help, Magic Foxy?”
“？‘Yes, Queen Sylvie,’ says Magic Foxy, ‘only you can help.’？”
* * *
—
Another lecture, this one virtual. No, the same lecture, just performed now in the holospace. （In non-space. Nowhere.） Olive was a hologram in a room of holograms, a sea of dim lights flickering before her, all of them gathered in a minimalistic suggestion of a room. She gazed out at several hundred slightly luminescent facsimiles of people, their actual bodies in individual rooms all over Earth and in the colonies, and had the unhinged thought that she was speaking directly to a congregation of souls.
“An interesting question,” Olive said, “which I’d like to consider in these last few minutes, is why there’s been such interest in postapocalyptic literature over this past decade or so. I’ve had the tremendous good fortune of getting to travel a great deal in the service of Marienbad—”
Blue sky over Salt Lake City, birds wheeling overhead
The rooftop of a hotel in Cape Town, lights sparkling in the trees
Wind rippling over a field of long grass by a train station in northern England
“Can I show you my tattoo?” the woman in Buenos Aires said
“—which is to say I’ve had the opportunity to speak with a great many people about postapocalyptic literature. I’ve heard a great many theories about why there’s such interest in the genre. One person suggested to me that it had to do with economic inequality, that in a world that can seem fundamentally unfair, perhaps we long to just blow everything up and start over—”
“That’s just how it seems to me,” the bookseller had said,
in an old shop in Vancouver, while Olive admired his pink glasses
“—and I’m not sure I agree with that, but it’s an intriguing thought.” The holograms shifted and stared. She liked the idea that she could still hold a room, even if now the room was just in the holospace, even if the room wasn’t really a room. “Someone suggested to me that it has to do with a secret longing for heroism, which I found interesting. Perhaps we believe on some level that if the world were to end and be remade, if some unthinkable catastrophe were to occur, then perhaps we might be remade too, perhaps into better, more heroic, more honorable people.”