To Paradise

Up a gleaming dark staircase we went, me seething at Nathaniel, who had been embarrassed by me, of me, and as Adams led us through a pair of half-open double doors made of that same satiny wood, the two men inside stood.

I knew from Nathaniel that Aubrey was sixty-five and Norris a few years younger, though they both had that kind of ageless, shiny face that the very rich have. Only their gums gave them away: Aubrey’s were a dark purple, and Norris’s were the gray-pink of a much-used eraser. But the other surprise was their skin: Aubrey was Black, and Norris was Asian…but also something else. He looked, in fact, a little like my grandfather, and before I could stop myself, I was once again blurting: “Are you from Hawai‘i?” Again, there was Nathaniel’s uncomfortable titter, joined this time by Norris’s and Aubrey’s laughter. “Nathaniel asked me that same question when we met,” Norris said, unoffended. “But no, I’m afraid not. I hate to be such a disappointment, but I’m just a dark Asian.”

“Not just,” Aubrey said.

“Well, part Indian,” Norris said. “But that’s Asian, Aub.” And then to me: “Indian and English on my father’s side; my mother was Chinese.”

“So was mine,” I said, stupidly. “Chinese Hawaiian.”

He smiled. “I know,” he said. “Nathaniel said.”

“Why don’t you sit?” Aubrey said.

We did, obediently. Adams returned with drinks, and we talked about the baby for a while, until Adams reappeared and said dinner was ready to be served, at which point we all stood again and went to the dining room, where there was a small round table covered with what I at first, heart-stoppingly, mistook for a piece of kapa cloth. I looked up to see Aubrey smiling at me. “It’s a contemporary weaving, inspired by the real thing,” he said. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” I swallowed, mumbled something vague.

We sat. Dinner—a “seasonal celebration” of sausage-and-pumpkin soup served from a massive, hollowed-out white squash; veal chops with buttery green beans; a tomato galette—was served. We ate. At some point, Norris and Nathaniel started talking, and I was left with Aubrey, who was sitting next to me. I had to speak. “So,” I began, and then I couldn’t think of a single thing to say. Or, rather, I could think of too many, but none of them seemed appropriate. I had, for example, been planning to try to pick a fight with Aubrey by subtly suggesting he was a cultural appropriator, but given the fact that he hadn’t, as I feared, made me take a tour of his collection, and by the fact of his Blackness (later, Nathaniel and I would have an argument about whether Black people could indeed be cultural appropriators), that idea no longer seemed quite as exciting or provocative as it might have been.

I was quiet for so long that Aubrey finally laughed. “Why don’t I start,” he said, and although he was kind, I could feel myself flushing regardless. “Nathaniel’s told us a little about what you do.”

“I tried to, anyway,” Nathaniel suddenly interjected from across the table, before turning back to Norris.

“He tried, and I tried to understand,” Aubrey said. “But I’d be honored to hear it from the source, as it were.”

So I gave him my short speech about infectious diseases and how I spent my days trying to anticipate the newest ones, playing up the statistics that civilians love hearing, because civilians love to panic: How the 1918 flu killed fifty million people, which led to additional, but less disastrous, pandemics in 1957, 1968, 2009, and 2022. How, since the 1970s, we’ve been living in an era of multiple pandemics, with a new one announcing itself at the rate of every five years. How viruses are never truly eliminated, only controlled. How decades of excessive and reckless prescribing of antibiotics had given rise to a new Family of microbes, one more powerful and durable than any in human history. How habitat destruction and the growth of megacities has led to our living in closer proximity to animals than ever before, and therefore to a flourishing of zoonotic diseases. How we’re absolutely due for another catastrophic pandemic, one that this time will have the potential to eliminate up to a quarter of the global population, putting it on par with the Black Death of more than seven hundred years ago, and how everything in the past century, from the outbreak of 2030 through last year’s episode in Botswana, has been a series of tests that we’ve ultimately failed, because true victory would be treating not each outbreak individually but developing a comprehensive global plan, and because of that, we’re inevitably doomed.

“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.