“But why?” Aubrey asked. “We have immeasurably better public health systems, not to mention medications and sanitation, than in 1918, not to mention than we did just twenty years ago.”
“That’s true,” I said. “But the only thing that ended up making the 1918 flu less disastrous than it should’ve been was the rate at which the infection was able to spread: The microbe traveled among continents by boat, and back then, it took a week, if you hurried, to get from Europe to America. The mortality rate of the infected on that journey was so great that you had far fewer carriers who were able to spread the illness on the other shore. But that’s not true any longer, and hasn’t been for more than a century. The only thing that contains a potentially rampant infectious disease now—and they are all potentially rampant, as far as we’re concerned—is less technology than the swift segregation and isolation of the affected area, and that depends upon the local authorities reporting it to their national or local epidemiological center, which should in turn trigger an immediate lockdown of the site.
“The problem, of course, is that municipalities are reluctant to report new diseases. Besides the immediate overreaction and loss of business, a stigma attaches itself to the place, one that in many cases far outlasts the successful containment of the disease. For example: Would you go to Seoul now?”
“Well—no.”
“Exactly. And yet it’s been four years since the threat of EARS was for all purposes eradicated. And we were lucky there: The mayor was informed by a local councilperson after the third death, and after the fifth death, he’d contacted the National Health Services, and within twelve hours, they had tented the entirety of Samcheong-dong, and managed to contain fatalities to that neighborhood alone.”
“But there were so many.”
“Yes. And it was unfortunate. But there would have been far more had they not done what they did.”
“But they killed those people!”
“No. They didn’t. They just didn’t let them leave.”
“But the result ended up being the same!”
“No—the result ended up being far fewer deaths than there would have been otherwise: nine thousand deaths instead of, potentially, fourteen million. That, and the containment of a particularly pathogenic microbe.”
“But what about the argument that isolating the district doomed them rather than helped them? That if they’d opened the area to international assistance, they could’ve saved them?”
“You’re talking about the globalist argument, and in many cases, that’s correct,” I said. “Nationalism means that there’s less exchange of information between scientists, and that’s extremely dangerous. But that wasn’t the case here. Korea isn’t a hostile government; they didn’t try to conceal anything; they freely and honestly shared what they were learning with the international scientific community, not to mention other governments: They behaved perfectly, exactly how a country should. What looked like a unilateral choice, to isolate the neighborhood, was in reality a selfless one—they prevented a potential pandemic by sacrificing a relatively small number of their own people. That’s exactly the kind of calculation that we need any community to make if we’re to contain, truly contain, a virus.”
Aubrey shook his head. “I suppose I’m too old-fashioned to view nine thousand deaths as a happy outcome. And I also suppose that’s why I’ve never been back: I can’t unsee those pictures—those black plastic tents covering the whole neighborhood, and beneath them, you knew people were just waiting to die. You never saw them. But you knew they were.”
There wasn’t anything I could say to this without sounding callous, so I just drank my wine and said nothing.
There was a silence, and Aubrey shook his head again, quickly, as if collecting himself. “How did you get interested in Hawaiian antiquities?” I asked him, for I felt I must.
He smiled then. “I’d been visiting for decades,” he said. “I love it there. I have some family history there, actually: My great-great-grandfather was stationed on Kaho‘olawe, when it was a U.S. military base, just before secession.” He caught himself. “I mean Restoration,” he said.
“It’s okay,” I said. “Nathaniel says you have an impressive collection.”
He beamed at this, and babbled on for some time about his various holdings, and their provenances, and how he’d built a special climate-controlled room for some of them in the basement, which, were he to do it over, he would have instead put on the fourth floor, as basements are always inclined to be damp, and although he and his air-conditioning guy had managed to maintain a steady temperature of seventy degrees, they couldn’t stabilize the humidity, which should be forty percent but was always creeping upward to fifty no matter what they did. Listening to him, I realized two things: first, that I had learned more by osmosis about 18th-and 19th-century Hawaiian weaponry, textiles, and objects than I had known I had; and second, that I would never understand the pleasure of collecting—all that hunting, all that dust, all that trouble, all that maintenance. And for what?
It was his tone—confiding, shyly proud—that made me look up at him again. “But my biggest treasure,” he continued, “my biggest treasure never leaves my hand.” He held up his right hand, and I saw that on his pinkie he wore a thick band of dark, battered gold. Now he turned the band, and I could see that he had kept facing toward his palm the band’s stone, a clouded, opaque, inexpertly cut pearl. I already knew what he would do next, but I watched anyway as he squeezed the small latches at either side of the ring and the pearl hinged open, a little door, to reveal a tiny compartment. He angled it toward me, and I looked: empty. This was exactly the kind of ring my great-great-grandmother had once worn, the kind that hundreds of women had sold off to treasure hunters in their attempts to raise funds for their campaign to restore the sovereign. They had kept a few grains of arsenic in the chamber, a symbolic declaration of their willingness to commit suicide unless their queen was returned to her throne. And now here it was on this man’s hand. For a moment, I was unable to speak.
“Nathaniel says you yourselves don’t collect,” Aubrey was saying.
“We don’t need to collect Hawaiiana,” I said. “We are Hawaiiana.” I had spoken more fiercely than I knew I would, and for a moment, there was another silence. （Note: This sounded less pretentious in the moment than it does here.）
But the uncomfortable aftermath of my gaffe （though was it a gaffe, really?） was interrupted by the arrival of the cook, who was offering me a platter of blackberry cake. “Fresh from the farmers’ market,” he said, like he had invented the very idea of the farmers’ market, and I thanked him and took a slice. And from here the conversation turned to the subjects that every conversation between friendly, like-minded people inevitably did: the weather （bad）， the sunken boat of Filipino refugees off the coast of Texas （also bad）， the economy （bad as well, but not as bad as it was going to get; like most money people, Aubrey was slightly gleeful about this, as, to be fair, am I when talking about the next big pandemic）， the coming war with China （very bad, but would be over “within a year,” according to Norris who, it turned out, was a litigator and had a client who “sold military equipment,” i.e., an arms dealer）， the latest news about the environment and the predicted onslaught of climatic refugees （extremely bad）。 I wanted to say, “My best friend, Peter, is very high up in the British government, and he says that the war with China is going to last three years minimum and is going to cause a global migration crisis that will number in the millions,” but I didn’t. I just sat there and said nothing, and Nathaniel didn’t look at me, and I didn’t look at him.