been a worthy successor, though she’d followed his own fifteen-year term with a mere four. The new Chair was long-winded, unpredictable, and in the Dean’s pocket.
“Now’s the time to look sharp,” said Keelan. “No messing about.” He thought about the end of the world and reasoned that drunkenness was an appropriate response. But this, right now, was merely a crisis. He reached for the third glass of water.
There was a clip of a memorial service with all the mourners wearing face masks, a convention that had not yet made its way to Lansdowne. A Jacksonville family had lost a mother, father, and aunt, and all five children were still hospitalized. Keelan’s eyes began to close.
A funeral director was talking about adapting mourning rituals to suit pandemic protocols. “It’s really about showing respect to our loved ones,” he was saying. “They wouldn’t want their last rites to become a source of infection for their nearest and dearest.” Keelan opened his eyes and saw that the man on television looked afraid.
He remained on the couch watching the news until all the lights and the television abruptly shut off. Then he groped for the flashlight on the table in the hall and lit his way up to bed.
* * *
The next morning, Keelan awoke late and in a panic, until he checked his watch and remembered classes were suspended. He had been dreaming of Julia again. The time she’d had the flu when she was a teenager and the fever had stripped away some of her toughness, and how his anxiety had done the same for him. She’d stayed home from school and he’d taken the whole week off—the first week of vacation he’d taken since Annie’s death three years earlier—and the two of them had played Scrabble and read books and she’d even talked to him a little about her life, which had become a mystery to him. Or rather, once she’d started telling him about her life, he’d realized he knew nothing about it. Something could only really be a mystery if it had ever occurred to you to be curious about it. That week Julia had talked a great deal about her friend Leah, at first tentatively, and then with such intensity that Keelan began to deflect the conversations, confused by what he’d worried was some type of unhealthy obsession with the girl. Back then, he’d thought everything to do with Julia’s emerging identity was connected to losing her mother—it was the lack of feminine influence manifesting in a misplaced need for female intimacy.
Julia had been such a good girl, so uncomplaining and diligent at school. She had never sulked or raged the way that he had heard other teenagers did. Or, he wondered now, had she sensed he wouldn’t have been there to listen if she had? Keelan felt a sob rising, which shocked him. It was a curse of old age, this late-breaking sentimentality. This wanting to go back to Julia’s adolescence—a time that he could barely remember. And why should he cherish it, when it seemed to bring Julia, and certainly Dory, so much pain?
He turned over onto his side, away from the window, then grabbed a pillow and covered his eyes. The map from last night’s newscast kept coming back to him: the pulsing orange and red dots of Miami, Savannah, Austin, Los Angeles. Though it had started in New York, cities in the south were having a harder time containing it, which gave him an uneasy Yankee smugness he wasn’t proud of. Boston, for whatever reason, was still amber. Lansdowne wasn’t even on the map.
It was so sad, really. He wasn’t sure if the tears threatening to spill over were for Julia or for the world, or for fear of ARAMIS. No matter what he said on the news about the importance of cooperative principles and natural empathy, he did not really think that the human race would come through with flying colours. Not ethically. People with power would fear losing it, fuelling unwarranted instances of panic that would no doubt be distorted out of all proportion by the media. At a certain point, all governments traded in utilitarianism, and surviving a pandemic would become a numbers game, with the penalties and restrictions that went along with protectionism. There might not be witch hunts and persecutions like during the Black Death, but there would certainly be civic unrest and related reprisals. Harsh legislation to deal with disorder, a spreading-too-thin of police resources, the breakdown