The news cut to an enhanced version of the photo with the caption Have you seen this woman? Call the Department of Health.
The feed cut back to Keisha. “It’s important from a research point of view to reconstruct the spread of the disease in order to understand it.” Then she appealed directly to the camera. “And the sooner we can track down and monitor everyone who has been exposed, the better the chance we have of containing this.” She was every bit as serious and no-nonsense as Elliot remembered her. He considered calling the Department of Health again to see if he could request to speak to her directly, but there was no point; he was already in quarantine and had sent in a detailed list of his prior movements.
Even when they were dating, Keisha had been a force of nature, practically dripping with verve and purpose and action. He wondered if she had somehow sucked up all the ambition around her, so that people like him came to drift in her slipstream. Like small boats caught in the wake of an ocean liner, bobbing on the water, unable to motor away under their own power. Maybe it was the same with him and Sarah. Their parents had enough drive and ambition for all four of them.
Quarantine Day Seventeen
As Elliot jogged on his treadmill, he could see that the world outside had changed while he’d been indoors, ticking days off on a calendar. The foot traffic had slowed. The runners wore masks. The ladies no longer lunched. The teens did not laugh their way down the street in a lolling clump but walked separately, heads down, as they hurried to their destinations. It was not business as usual.
By now Elliot was sure that he had not contracted the virus, but after sitting so long with his own thoughts, he was less certain there was not some other sickness in him—some chronic avoidance of the real business of living. Perhaps he had always sensed it, without knowing what it was. If anyone would know, it was Dory, but he did not intend to ask her.
Dory had passed out of his life in a way he’d never dreamed possible. Their six-year marriage was unimaginable to him even though there was nothing to imagine—it had already happened. It was as though he had been somebody else back then, when the middling happiness of their life together was about as much as he believed he deserved. Mingling with her friends, mustering opinions about curtains and upholstery, and enjoying the thousand thoughtless comforts of home that he could just as easily forego—and had. Dory had always joked that she’d bullied him into falling in love with her, but the joke’s kernel of truth had developed into a version of the past he couldn’t escape. Not that he’d minded the idea of her being the leader in their partnership; it said something about his manhood, his own confidence in it. Or so he’d thought. He knew there must have been tender moments at the very beginning of their relationship, gentle and dizzying and insatiable, but he could remember none of them. It felt like another lifetime, a time when he had been blind to himself. He didn’t understand, altogether, why he had done the things he had done in his life: donating sperm, becoming a cop, marrying Dory. Or why he had failed to do other things. Maybe nobody did. These days, when her name came up, he felt duped and a little embarrassed.
But even though it had been Dory’s choice to leave him for Julia, Elliot still felt responsible for the dissolution of their marriage. To be divorced was to have failed. But then failure was good for the soul. It was humbling. More people ought to be humbled. He repeated this to his sister when she called him after Noah was in bed.
“You’re awfully introspective all of a sudden,” said Sarah. “I’m not sure I like it.”
“Don’t worry, it’ll pass.” He was about to spin his desk chair away from the computer when he saw a notification of another email from JKG. “One sec,” he said, turning the chair back and clicking open the message.
Hi. I just wanted to say that I hope you’re okay. Given everything going on, I really wish you would reconsider. JKG
Even ghosts were feeling the pressure. Elliot rolled his chair towards the window, once again debating whether to tell Sarah about the quarantine. The idea of not telling her broke over him in a wave of loneliness.
He cleared his throat. “Sarah.”
“What? What’s wrong?” He could already hear the concern in her voice. It wasn’t often he entered into a serious register.
“I have something I need to tell you,” he said. “I’ve been keeping a secret.”
“So have I,” blurted Sarah. “I’m so sorry. I should have told you as soon as I found out.”
Elliot blinked. “Found out what?” He wondered if there was a way for someone in his building to have mentioned the quarantine notice to his sister.
“Dory and Julia are having a baby.” Sarah let out a breath. “Isn’t that what you were going to tell me?”
He was too surprised to offer more than a vague murmur of assent.
“I’ve actually known for months,” she said in a rush. “Dory asked me to tell you. But I’ve been trying to figure out how to bring it up.”
Elliot got up from his chair and sat down on the couch. He felt a slight irritation with Sarah’s need to rehash exactly how hard it had been for her to broach the subject, then let the blow-by-blow swirl over him, feeling the ebb of some instinctive dismay wash away with it.
“I should have told you as soon as I found out, Ell, because the more I thought about it, the more it seemed like there was never a good moment. I was going to tell you at dinner a few weeks ago but then you cancelled, and I don’t know…Have I even seen you since then? Is that possible? Honestly, I was on the point of asking Dory to just tell you herself. Except, of course, she thinks I did it ages ago.”
The baby he and Dory never had grew in his mind’s eye from a grey wisp to a silvery pink balloon. Faceless, it floated up and away from him, off into the distance, where it receded to a mere speck on the horizon of everything that might happen in a man’s life. Then it popped.
When his own secret came out, it was anticlimactic. Sarah screeched and fretted and peppered him with questions, but he had lost any zest for describing the past two weeks.
“So do you know about this girl they’re looking for? The one from the restaurant who might be infected?” asked Sarah.
“I think I might have talked to her,” said Elliot, a memory stirring. “I spoke to a waitress there.” He could still picture her solemn, unstudied beauty, the barbed and wary look in her eyes. If it was her, the photo didn’t do her justice. He remembered having felt the sudden, uncharacteristic urge to impress her, as well as the sense that he hadn’t quite pulled it off.
“Hmm, okay.” Sarah seemed to be doing some kind of private calculation that came out in favour of dismissing whatever concern had surged to the fore. “Well, do you know her name?”
“Nah.”
“So you’re really okay? You’re sure? But you still have to stay inside?”
“Just be grateful it isn’t you, boxed into a couple of hundred square feet.” He stood up and moved towards the treadmill. “You start to feel like a rat.”
Quarantine Day Nineteen
As the quarantine wound down, Elliot came up against the limit of his own self-sufficiency. When the woman who delivered his food lingered for five minutes to talk from the hallway, Elliot cried in gratitude. The sight of his tears made her draw back down the corridor.
Quarantine Day Twenty
He was expecting another food delivery when there was a knock on the door instead of the usual text message alert. Curious, he peered through the peephole. It was a tall woman with long, blond hair and a huge bulge of a stomach under a paisley shirt. She looked both vaguely familiar and like an apparition in the dark hallway, her whole person bright with colour and something that bore a terrible resemblance to hope. Elliot opened the door a crack, keeping it on the chain.
“Did you read the sign?” he called, still behind the door. Everyone stopped to read the sign. He preferred to watch people recoil from him only throug
h the funhouse mirror of the peephole. It was a lens that matched his current perspective on life: circumscribed but far-reaching, and consequently distorted. Exposure to a deadly virus had a way of helping you see the big picture, even as it simultaneously cut you off from doing anything about it.
She looked at the notice then. “Quarantine.” She glanced down at her stomach and took a step back.
“So you can’t come in, do you see?”
“I see.” She took another step back, sideways this time, but didn’t leave. “Elliot.”
“Yes,” he said, and before he’d closed his mouth, he knew who it was. Julia, Dory’s wife.
“Dory misses you,” said Julia Katherine Gibbs. JKG. “But she doesn’t think she deserves to be forgiven.”
“We have a lot in common, me and my ex-wife.”
“You shouldn’t blame her.”
“I don’t,” said Elliot. “I blame you.”
The faint smile that had already begun to bloom evaporated at once. Julia nodded. “Right.”
“You went after her when she was already taken.” It was Julia who had provoked the romantic and sexual awakening—in their breakup conversation, Dory had referred to it as a “flowering”—that had upended their lives. Elliot blamed himself, too, though it irked him that he couldn’t get past it. Nothing major had happened to him besides losing his wife in the most anodyne way possible.
“It was wrong,” said Julia. “The way it happened. And I’m sorry about that, I am. But it was the right thing for Dory. And for me.”
“Sounds ideal,” said Elliot. As Dory had said in that same conversation, as though it might actually be a comfort, their breakup had “nothing to do with him.” According to that logic, he didn’t need to feel bad about what had happened. And in fact, the past three weeks had dismantled some of the scaffolding of his resentment: his usual emotions on the topic came back to him as if through the wrong end of a telescope. He knew that there was no logical reason for him to keep feeling bad about his divorce. It was an insult to his dead friends and their families, to the terrible unfolding of catastrophic events the world over, to retain any feelings about it at all. “I guess I’m the only one who still thinks that vows are supposed to mean something. Or, you know, that words matter.”
Julia seemed taken aback, glancing around as though she’d accidentally stepped into a yard with a snarling dog. “I do,” she said, hesitating. “We both—”
“I saw your wedding announcement in the Times last year,” he went on. He had allowed himself to wallow in a pleasurable fury about it for a day or two. Dory Karen Applebaum and Julia Katherine Gibbs exchanged vows at four o’clock in the afternoon on the grounds of ABC Winery in Rensselaer County, New York. He and Dory had married in his parents’ living room. “Congratulations.”
“Dory wished you could have been there, but didn’t want to invite you,” said Julia, finding her voice and shuffling her weight from foot to foot. She probably needed to sit down. Strands of hair clung to her cheeks, which were shiny with sweat. “I mean, for you to feel like you had to come.”
“Well, that’s something.” He leaned his head against the door and closed his eyes. Everything about her—her protruding belly, her clammy, beseeching face—made him want to relent.
“And I didn’t want you there, if you were still going to be angry.”
Elliot yanked the door open as far as the latch would allow and thrust his body forward in all of its possibly infected glory. He jutted his chin out above the chain.
“Sorry I’m tripping up your happiness.” It came out more bitter than he intended.
“So am I,” said Julia without flinching, and her smile showed a trace of teeth. “I guess I’m here to try to make things perfect. Isn’t that stupid?”
“Let me guess: Dory doesn’t like the idea of someone hating her.” Even as the words came out, Elliot knew it wasn’t true. Dory had never been bothered by that.
Julia shook her head. “She misses you. But she respects your feelings, and your space.”
“But you don’t.”
“I guess not?” Julia shrugged and a hoarse laugh escaped. With one hand on her belly, she gazed down the hallway at the elevator, and Elliot realized he admired her for coming. For thinking that there was still something that could be done about him and the mess of regret that clung to him like a second skin.
“When are you due?” Sarah had taught him never to ask this, but it looked like Julia was hiding a beach ball under there.
“Five weeks or so.” Maybe she sensed him softening then, because she said, “Look, you guys were close, weren’t you? With everything going on, it might be nice to…make amends.”
“Nice for her, maybe.” He folded his arms. “Do you want that?”
Julia pressed her lips together as she declined to answer. “But it’s okay, isn’t it? That I came?”
“It’s okay,” he said. It was the longest face-to-face conversation he’d had in weeks.
She adjusted her cotton tote bag on her shoulder. “We don’t have to be friends.”
“We’re not.”
Julia nodded. Elliot watched her retreat down the hallway with wide, deliberate steps. When she reached the elevator she turned back to wave at him, her face unsmiling and inscrutable, as though signalling from a distant shore. And he waved back.
Quarantine Day Twenty-One
When twenty-one days had elapsed, Elliot put on a tank top and shorts and ran around the block. People stared and dodged him on the pavement. A mother walking grimly with her daughter jerked her child out of the way and glared as he sped by, even though Elliot had been nowhere near colliding with them. He called out an apology that was carried off on the breeze. He resisted the urge to strip, to feel the air on every inch of his body. The whispering scrape of his sneakers on the gritty sidewalk felt like a secret percussion to his victory lap.
As the sun began to set, he headed further afield, not stopping to plan a route or think about anything besides the cool air entering his lungs. Every green light was a path opening up, an invitation to surrender. Even the smog tasted good—sweet and salty. He was tempted to run to Sarah and Noah’s apartment, but they lived too far, so he sprinted crosstown on a street he wasn’t sure he’d ever been down before, feeling freer than he had in years. But the further he ran, the more self-conscious he became. The people he passed who weren’t bent on some errand or destination began to look less like citizens and more like odd, willful loners, dangerous and suspect. The changes he’d observed through his window held true on the ground and began to weigh on him. He slowed, losing steam after his sprint.
When he’d run about four miles, he spotted a staircase to the High Line. The elevated park was normally too crowded for runners at any time besides the early morning, but it was deserted now apart from a few tourists who shot him nervous glances as he approached at speed. One couple in particular, with visors and fanny packs, appeared determined to see through their holiday, although their body language conveyed only a diffuse dread. They stepped nearer to one another as he drew closer, as if expecting something to happen. As Elliot dashed past, he thought he could feel the electricity in the air mount and then dissolve, as though the invisible line that might bind them all together in every possible future had been pulled taut, snapped, and tied off by some industrious Fate. He hoped, for maybe the first time, for nothing to happen. Not then, not ever.
They should all be so lucky.
August 26, 2020, 11:04 a.m.
Hi. This is Owen. Leave me a message and I’ll call you back.
[beep]
Owen! It’s Dory from Shillelagh. I wanted to congratulate you on How to Avoid the Plague being a #1 bestseller again after all these years! And thanks to the latest CDC alert, it looks like we’ll be calling another printing any day now. Terrible about the virus, of course, but what a silver lining for us
. There’s a pile of interview requests coming in—print, TV, the works. So be sure to get back to Colleen soon so she can finalize your publicity schedule. And let’s find a date for you to come over for a celebratory dinner before the baby’s due. We’ve got another seven weeks until D-Day, and Julia has been cooking enough food for an army. Just drop me a line. Ciao for now.
OWEN
SEPTEMBER 2009
Owen booted up his computer, opened the file for his third novel, then circled the desk and dropped to the threadbare Mexican rug for a set of push-ups.
The nubbly inside of his worn grey track pants, the sagging ribbing of his white tank top: these were his controlled reality. These were the means by which Owen could travel to where he needed to go—to Rachel. Rachel as she used to be. He’d had the idea for this book a dozen years ago, when they were first dating and she’d told him about Chanoch, a gifted violinist who had followed her from Tel Aviv to Chicago before dying—tragically but nevertheless conveniently, from Owen’s perspective—at the age of twenty-four, from a lung infection. Though she had only mentioned him once or twice in passing, Owen had often thought of Chanoch and his brief illness and the reckless singularity of his devotion, which back then he had found only too easy to relate to. But at the heart of the Chanoch story was the idea of love as a kind of salvation, and it was a feeling that Owen was having a hard time accessing these days. Even his lucky track pants weren’t helping.
Songs for the End of the World Page 3