Songs for the End of the World

by Saleema Nawaz

  It was horrible to see her sad—his sunny, positive Rachel. It was even worse than he’d imagined, and he’d imagined it every time he’d thought there was a chance he was going to get caught with another woman. To see her fine figure brought low was a travesty against her classic beauty. Owen remembered the tenderness between the mother and child at the drugstore, the intimacy that had excluded him so completely. But the trust and adoration in the little boy’s expression was something that Rachel deserved. It was what he felt for her himself.

  “Do you want to leave me?” he said, and he could feel his face spasm. “You deserve to have a child. You deserve to have everything you want.” He felt the truth of this, and an answering echo at the back of his mind confirmed he had already failed her. “If you want to leave, I’ll understand.” The words strangled in his throat.

  “I don’t,” said Rachel. His wife’s face as she raised it to him was fierce and without tears. She stood up and, coming around the table, kissed him full on the mouth. “I want to work on splitting the atom. On making the impossible, possible.”

  Up close, the old poles of their magnetism still pulled. His desert rose. His only hope. The kiss was a beautiful lie, as beautiful as his wife. The lie that he alone could be enough for her, or that there might be a life in which he could compromise and still be happy. He kissed her back and felt the truth, waiting to be spoken, as heavy as a stone.

  ARAMIS NEWS UPDATED 11:57 A.M.

  “Have you seen this woman?”

  How one doctor’s request led to a worldwide furor

  September 21, 2020

  NEW YORK—The jokes are all over social media. ARAMIS Girl dragging people into the sewer. ARAMIS Girl wants YOU for U.S. Army. She even has her own meme, popularly known as “Dead-Eye Girl Doesn’t Want to Be Found.”

  The notoriety of the so-called ARAMIS Girl began during a September 2 press briefing, when Dr. Keisha Delille, Associate Director of Infection Control at Methodist Morningside Hospital, released a low-quality photo of a woman in her late teens or early twenties with Asian features who had worked as a server at cipolla, the Italian restaurant on the Lower East Side now known as the site of the first ARAMIS infection cluster in North America. “We have a strong interest in locating her,” Dr. Delille said at the time. “We need to alert people she was in contact with who may have been exposed to the virus.” The only catch: nobody was sure of her name.

  But more than two weeks after the photo’s release, the identity and whereabouts of ARAMIS Girl remain a mystery, sustained partially by the ARAMIS-related deaths of co-workers who knew her, as well as by a loss of paper records when cipolla was firebombed on August 20, an unsolved crime authorities believe is linked to the outbreak. cipolla’s owner, restauranteur Paolo Fabbrini, says her name is Naomi but he does not recall a surname. He believes she was only a visitor to New York City, possibly a summer college student who left shortly before the CDC investigation began in earnest.

  But the idea of someone remaining unidentifiable and un-locatable in our current information age has captured the public imagination. Self-styled online detectives have tried to track down the mystery woman, so far to no avail. People all across the globe are now actively looking for ARAMIS Girl via a massive virtual research collaboration. Known in China as the “human flesh search engine,” this type of information crowd-sourcing for the purposes of pinpointing the identity of a wrongdoer or other social offender is a long-standing practice in that country and is becoming increasingly prevalent worldwide.

  The writer Owen Grant, who has become a household name due to his prescient novel How to Avoid the Plague—one of the bestselling novels of the past five years—commented via email that he believes the public release of the photo was irresponsible. “We’re living in desperate times, and people are scared. With over 2,000 confirmed cases of ARAMIS in New York at the time the photo was released, I’m not sure what practical purpose it served to launch a manhunt for this young woman. The virus had already found a foothold in the city. It seems like a classic case of the authorities overreacting to make up for being caught off guard.”

  Elsewhere, sympathy for ARAMIS Girl is thin on the ground. Many blame her for the spread of the virus to New Jersey, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania. There is a popular belief that ARAMIS Girl is a kind of modern-day Typhoid Mary, well aware of her disease and recklessly infecting others. According to Dr. Delille, this is highly improbable. “Given everything we know about ARAMIS so far, this woman has most likely been hospitalized or has already succumbed to the virus. I want to emphasize that there have been no observed cases of healthy carriers, only incubatory carriers, and the median incubation period of the virus is five days, with a range of two to 14 days. If this woman is still alive and asymptomatic seven weeks after exposure, she remains of interest to us from an epidemiological standpoint only.”

  But false information continues to proliferate online, where an informal poll on CNN.com revealed that 66 per cent of respondents incorrectly believed ARAMIS Girl to be the original index patient in North America. Experts from the WHO have identified the first carrier of the disease from rural China to the United States as Zhihuan Tsiang, a visiting martial arts expert from Yunnan province who spent eight days in New York City before he died in Beijing on August 2.

  This widespread misapprehension may trace its origin to a darker theory about ARAMIS Girl. Users on popular conspiracy sites have seized on the fact that ARAMIS Girl’s initials (A.G.) are the same as the abbreviation for antigen (Ag), short for antibody generator: a toxin or other foreign substance that binds to an immune receptor and induces a defensive response in the body. Based on this coincidence, online theorists have speculated that ARAMIS Girl might be a biological warfare agent activated by the American or Chinese governments. Fake news stories promoting this connection have proliferated on social media, which many believe has contributed to an alarming spike in the negative public perception of ARAMIS Girl and the Asian-American population as a whole. At least three dozen incidents of anti-Asian hate crimes have been documented in 14 states across the country since the photo went viral, ranging from verbal assaults and acts of vandalism to serious physical attacks.

  Dr. Delille continues to defend the decision to release the photo. “We were trying to reconstruct the spread of the virus, both from a containment point of view but also for information-gathering purposes.” She points out that, thanks to the rapid efforts of the Department of Health, all of the other restaurant patrons and employees were located and either treated or quarantined within weeks of the first infection cluster on July 31. “There was no reason to believe that taking this simple action at a small news conference was going to result in such misinformation or violence. The 24-hour news cycle should take responsibility for feeding the idle curiosity of internet troublemakers.”

  Whether ARAMIS Girl will ever be found, or whether she will simply become another forgotten obsession of the viral internet age, is unknown. Dr. Delille admits that in light of the current number of infected patients, locating ARAMIS Girl is no longer essential to reconstructing the spread of the disease.

  “But if this young woman is still alive, I hope that she receives the support she needs. We seem to have forgotten that there’s a real person at the bottom of all this.”

  EDITH

  JULY 2020

  Edith is not the name of a pretty girl. It is an old-fashioned name, an old woman’s name. People hear her name and think of grandmothers, of loosely gummed dentures and brown shoes squared off into stiff, orthopedic contours, of starched doilies and handwritten notes in medical charts that read No heroic measures.

  Edith grasps this fact about her name at the age of ten and begins insisting that she be called Ed. It is not very much of a change, she explains, not very much to demand of the people who brought her over from China and have defined her very existence with a word so unsuitable, so revolting, as to
make her almost despise herself. It is only the softening of a vowel and a shortening in full. It is not as though she is asking anyone to call her Xiaolan, the name on her birth certificate and adoption papers. Still, her father resists.

  “Edith was my mother’s name.” He has a tendency to become mawkish, crying over outgrown dresses and broken dolls.

  Edith’s mother is game for anything. She says, “It’ll be one in the eye for the old lady.” Even though the old lady has been dead for ages, Edith’s mother still likes to think of putting one over on her.

  * * *

  —

  Ed has been known as Ed for eleven years when she begins an affair with a middle-aged novelist named Owen Grant, who is the writer-in-residence at Beaton College in New York City, where she is taking a summer course. She meets him on the first day of June at one of his readings, after he signs her well-loved copy of his second novel, Blue Virginia. There are notes to herself scribbled in the margins, thick pencil lines under particularly beautiful sentences, paragraphs hugged by stubby, eager exclamation marks; Ed only realizes they are embarrassing as Owen flicks through the pages and raises his eyebrows, which are crinkled and wry, before drawing a line through his printed name on the title page and signing underneath.

  “I really love the character of Naomi,” says Ed. “She’s so forthright and principled.” Owen is wearing a white T-shirt under an olive button-down dress shirt, and as he nods, she can see the sinewy muscles of his neck. “She’s like a beacon to everyone around her,” Ed adds, already blushing.

  “Do you think so?” he says. Delight transforms his chiselled features. His ice blue eyes are mischievous but somehow still sincere. “That’s exactly how I imagined her when I wrote the book.”

  He asks Ed to have a drink with him and she accepts without hesitation. His voice is a gravelly baritone that plucks at the base of her spine until she feels her every nerve strumming. Just before making love to her the first time, he tells her that he is married.

  She writes a great deal in her diary during the early days of their affair: filmic reports of their sexual encounters, and snippets of song lyrics which have begun to seem meaningful. She stays up late worrying about his wife and the integrity of her own soul. There’s a line from the new Dove Suite single that she can’t get out of her head: A woman in the small hours / waiting in the dark. She tells herself that there is a kind of nobility in being reduced to the emotional banality of pop music. In becoming so absolutely simple. Girl wants boy. Boy is trouble. Love hurts.

  Outside of the fleetingness of Owen’s touch, she exists for his words. Fragments of things he wrote before meeting her, the graphic longings and stunning compliments he utters when they’re in bed. Pretty lies, she reminds herself, a Joni Mitchell lyric she copies out in swirling cursive. Still, his words creep in, envelop her, trap her in the impression of wanting him, inspire an urge to get down to the source of his language, his vision, his point of view.

  And beyond that, there is the invisible pull of Owen’s celebrity. Ed is drawn to the aura of fame as though it might catch her in its glow and light her up from within. And then, maybe, people will finally see her.

  * * *

  —

  When the affair starts to cool off after just a few weeks, she mopes, reads the London Review of Books, buys herself chocolate and stockings. Counts it as a good day when she goes half an hour without picturing Owen naked, kneeling over her in his final exertions, falling into the moments when words fail him. Their trysts have become sporadic and unpredictable; somehow he always sends her a message just when she has made peace with never seeing him again.

  She stalks the campus with a view to finding a replacement, stopping whenever she sees a man broad in the back with a book in his hand. But she fears the men she might bring to herself this way, with her hungry, sidelong looks. She worries everyone can hear it: the pulsing call from her groin. She imagines it as a kind of current, a sucking sound. A tongueless mouth aiming for speech.

  * * *

  —

  Ed gets a job at a new restaurant at the beginning of July to pay for her extra expenses. Living and studying in New York City is more expensive than going home to Boston, even with her scholarships. She dislikes waitressing, but it’s better than having to endure a whole summer with her parents and her little brother, and spending the break in Lansdowne, Massachusetts, her tiny college town, is scarcely more appealing. For some reason, the city feels twice as real to her as any place else. In New York, Ed skips lunch to pay for breakfast at Balthazar and to be anywhere she’s liable to catch sight of someone she’s seen on television. By the time she interviews with Mr. Fabbrini, her bank account is down to fifty dollars.

  Fabbrini waves away her resumé until she tucks it back into her bag. “I go with the gut,” he says. “Not paper.” Then his gaze moves over the neckline of her sundress and her bare shoulders, and Ed tries not to flinch.

  “We already hired a full staff for the summer,” he continues. “I can’t put you on the payroll until September.” His hands are small with dark hair on the backs, and his fingers worry the fabric of his pants across the knees.

  “I’m happy to just cover the occasional shift until then,” says Ed. She will be gone by the last week of August, anyway, though there’s no need to mention that now. “Whatever you have.”

  “You seem like a nice young lady.” His eyes are leering, but he has the beneficent smile of an old grandfather. “Okay, we’ll call you when we need you. Cash at the end of the night.” He asks for her phone number and copies it into a little notebook he keeps in his jacket. “Remind me what your name is, dear?”

  Ed thinks about the protagonist in Owen’s second novel. Her fearlessness and calm virtue. “Naomi.”

  When Fabbrini shakes her hand, he cups it between his palms and pulls her in close to kiss her on both cheeks. His skin is as soft and dry as a Kleenex.

  * * *

  —

  So a few nights a week, Ed puts on eyeliner and a tight black dress and kitten heels to go to the restaurant. She lets down the hair that she usually wears pulled back, styling it into face-framing waves. Maybe she should have looked for another kind of job. Maybe being a waitress in New York City is a cliché almost as tired as a restauranteur hoping to make it big with a new word-of-mouth eatery on the Lower East Side. But Fabbrini’s restaurant, cipolla, has stayed at the top of the weekly rankings in New York magazine since its opening in May. It turns out that Fabbrini is the uncle of a trendy designer who came up with the concept (country Italian remix), floor plan (cozy urban bistro), and a decor that taps into the naturalistic yearnings of thirty-something hipsters who’ve grown up in the urban jungle. There are antlers in the entryway, wooden barrels in the restrooms, and antiquated farm tools embellishing the walls above the wainscotting. The niece has somehow even managed to make everything match the expensive rug and the reproduction Art Deco chandeliers that are evidently beloved by Fabbrini. And she has pinpointed the right fonts for the logo and the discreet, rusticated sign: small serifs, lower case, oblique. Ed has a pet theory that the importance of fonts in a restaurant’s success has been wildly underestimated, a view she airs to the talented niece, who thrills and vindicates her by agreeing, but then quickly surpasses her interest in the topic by enthusing about the benefits of manual kerning.

  Fabbrini got lucky in the hire of his chef, too, who is coming off of a run at Enoteca Bella. In fact, if one didn’t know Fabbrini personally, you’d be forgiven for thinking he was a canny entrepreneur with a prescient eye for the next big thing. The downside is that Fabbrini believes the restaurant’s success is due to his own ingenious management, rather than—as far as Ed can tell—in spite of it. Fabbrini’s main gift seems to be in catering to his rich and influential patrons—the wealthy with no taste who will follow a trend off a cliff. Though he struggles with the hip power set under forty-five and the arts a
nd media types with cultural capital who have put his restaurant on the map, they at least think him a charming throwback, with his musical accent and waxed moustache.

  Still, cipolla started making an absurd amount of money almost immediately. Anyone who manages to get seated is only too happy to make a night of it: tasting menu, wine, the works. For a waitress working under the table and living mostly on tips, the evening shift at cipolla is about as good as it gets.

  * * *

  —

  Owen writes to Ed regularly, even though they have stopped sleeping together. His emails are terse two-liners dashed off while his wife is in the shower. He makes inquiries after Ed’s studies, sly references to their encounters, and repeated requests for nude photos.

  She fumbles in the bathroom to pull off her shirt, and her hair sticks up in staticky bunches. In her reflection, her eyes are either the only part of her that is still, or the only trace of movement. She thinks about Owen and shudders run through her; a quivering begins again below her navel. With her back to the mirror, she holds the cool silver totem of the phone at eye level, and when the fake shutter-sound clicks there is a flash as she commits her small breasts to the memory card. The light reflecting in the mirror obscures her face like a blazing sun, her whole head disappearing into a halo.

  Later, when she looks at the photo, she realizes for the first time that her right breast is slightly larger than the left. She decides not to send it.

  * * *

  Ed would rather be a hostess, but all the hostesses at cipolla are white girls. Hostesses wear nice outfits of their own choosing: silk blouses, wrap dresses, statement necklaces. All the waitresses wear the same tight black dresses with no jewellery but lots of makeup.