The goal is to try to formulate （well, reformulate） a global, cross-disciplinary response to what’s coming by assembling a group of epidemiologists, infectious disease specialists, economists, assorted civil servants from the Federal Reserve, as well as the Transportation, Education, Justice, Public Health and Human Safety, Information, Security, and Immigration Ministries, representatives from all the major pharma companies, and two psychologists, both specializing in depression and suicidal ideations: one among children, one among adults.
I’m assuming you’re at least sitting in on your equivalent group’s meetings. I also assume that your meetings are more organized, calmer, thoughtful, and less contentious than ours was. By the end of ours, we had a list of things we agreed we weren’t going to do （most of which would be illegal under the current version of the Constitution anyway）， as well as a list of things whose consequences we were going to ponder based on our respective areas of expertise. The plan is for each of the member countries to try to come up with a uniform agreement.
Again, I don’t know about your group, but the biggest argument in ours concerned the isolation camps, which we’ve all tacitly agreed to call quarantine camps instead, even though it’s a deliberate misnomer. I had assumed that the split would be ideological, but to my surprise, it wasn’t; indeed, anyone who had any kind of scientific background recommended them—even the psychologists, reluctantly—and anyone who didn’t opposed them. But unlike in ’50, I don’t see how we can avoid it this time. If the predictive modeling is correct, this disease will be far more pathogenic and contagious, swifter-moving, and deadlier than its predecessor; our only hope is mass evacuation. One of the epidemiologists even suggested the preemptive removal of at-risk groups, but everyone else agreed that would cause too much of an uproar. “We can’t make this political,” said one of the suits from Justice, which was such an asinine comment—both stupidly obvious and impossible to address—that everyone just ignored him.
The meeting ended with a discussion of when to close the borders. Too early, and you panic everyone. Too late, and the measure becomes pointless. My guess is that they’ll announce by end of November at the very latest.
Speaking of which: Given what we both know, I don’t think it’s responsible of us to come visit you and Olivier. I say this with sorrow and regret. David was looking forward to it. Nathaniel was looking forward to it. And I was looking forward to it most of all. It’s been so long since we’ve seen each other, and I miss you. I know I can say this perhaps only to you, but I’m not ready to go through another pandemic. There’s no choice, obviously. One of the epidemiologists said today, “This is our chance to get it right.” He meant that we could do better than we did in ’50: We’re better prepared, more communicative, more realistic, less frightened. But we’re also wearier. The problem with doing something the second time is that, while you know what you can correct, you also know what’s beyond the scope of your powers—and I have never wished more for ignorance than I do now.
I hope you’re doing okay over there. I worry about you. Has Olivier given you any sense of when he might come back?
Love you. Me
Dearest Peter, July 13, 2056
It’s very late here, almost three in the morning, and I’m in my office at the lab.
Tonight we went to Aubrey and Norris’s. I hadn’t wanted to go. I was tired, we all were, and I hadn’t wanted to put on a full decontamination suit just to go to their house. But Nathaniel insisted: He hadn’t seen them in months, and he was worried about them. You know, Aubrey turns seventy-six next month; Norris will be seventy-two. They haven’t left their house since the first case was diagnosed in New York State, and because there are so few people who have full protective suits, they’re pretty isolated. Aside from checking in on them, there was another matter on the agenda too, which involved David. So down we went.
After we parked, David slouching out of the car ahead of us, I stopped and looked at their house. I had the clear memory of my first visit, standing on the sidewalk and staring up at the windows, all golden with light. Even from the street, their wealth was unmistakable, the sort of wealth that had always been its own kind of protection—no one would think of breaking in to a house like this, even though at night, you could see all its art and goods laid out, ready to be taken, ready to be yours.
Now, though, the parlor-floor windows had been completely bricked up, which a lot of people did after the first sieges. There had been stories, enough of which had been true—people waking to find strangers in their house or apartment, not to steal but to beg for help: for food, for medicine, for shelter—that most people who lived beneath the fourth floor decided to seal themselves in. The upper windows had all been covered with iron cages, and I knew without looking that the windows themselves had been soldered shut.
There were other changes, too. Inside, the house was frayed in a way that I had never remembered it being; I knew from Nathaniel that both of their longtime maids had been among the first wave of deaths, in January; Adams had died in ’50, and had been replaced with a sallow guy named Edmund, who always looked like he was recovering from a cold. He had taken over most of the housekeeping duties, but not very convincingly; the inside of the decontam chamber needed scrubbing, for example, and when we stepped into the foyer, the force of the suction made little clouds of dust skitter across the floor. The Hawaiian quilt hanging on the foyer wall was gray along its seams; the carpet, which Adams had been vigilant about rotating every six months, was shiny along one edge, worn by footsteps. Everything smelled a little musty, like a sweater taken out of a drawer after a long period of storage.
But the other change was Aubrey and Norris themselves, now approaching us with smiles, their arms outstretched; because the three of us were wearing suits, we could hug them, and as I did, I could feel they’d lost weight, could feel they’d grown feeble. Nathaniel noticed it, too—when Aubrey and Norris turned, he looked at me, worried.
Dinner was simple: a white-bean soup with cabbage and pancetta, good bread. Soup is the most difficult thing to eat with these new masks, but none of us, not even David, mentioned it, and Aubrey and Norris seemed not to notice us struggling. Meals here were typically served by candlelight, but this time a large globe hung suspended over the table, emitting a faint buzzing sound and a bright white light: one of those new sunlamps, meant to give the homebound their vitamin D. I’d seen them before, of course, but never one this big. The effect wasn’t unpleasant, but it did illuminate more evidence of the room’s faint but unignorable decay, the grottiness that inevitably accumulates when a space is continuously occupied. Back in ’50, when we were self-isolating, I often thought that the apartment wasn’t really equipped for our being there all day, every day—it needed breaks from our habitation, the windows flung open to the air, relief from our dander and skin cells. Around us, the air-conditioning—that, at least, was as powerful as I’d remembered it—made deep sighs as it cycled through its settings; the dehumidifier rumbled in the background.
I hadn’t seen Aubrey and Norris in person in months. Three years ago, Nathaniel and I had had a massive fight about them, one of our biggest. This was about eleven months after it became evident that Hawai‘i was unrecoverable, when the first classified reports about the looters began surfacing. Incidents like these were happening in other decimated places as well, throughout the South Pacific; marauders were finding their way there by private boats and landing at the ports. Teams of them would disembark—in full protective gear—and make their way around the island, stripping every museum and house bare of its artifacts. It was being funded by a group of billionaires who called themselves the Alexandria Project, whose aim was “to preserve and protect the greatest artistic accomplishments of our civilization,” by “rescuing” them from places “that had regrettably lost the stewards responsible for their protection.” The members said that they were building a museum （location unspecified） with a digital archive to protect these works. But what was actually happening was that they were keeping everything for themselves, stored in giant warehouses where it would never be seen again.