virus, claiming that she only developed symptoms the day before she was admitted to hospital.
Though the patient has not yet been independently verified as the restaurant server who was present at the first infection cluster in New York City, anonymous sources within the hospital have confirmed she matches the physical description of the unknown third woman in the infamous ARAMIS Girl photograph released by Dr. Keisha Delille of Methodist Morningside Hospital on September 2.
ELLIOT
NOVEMBER 2020
Elliot’s first call of the day was a welfare check on East 147th Street. A pair of sisters in California hadn’t heard from their mother in a few days and she wasn’t answering the phone. He mounted the steps of the red-brick building and visited the super, who occupied a glass-fronted office just inside the entryway. She was ensconced behind a wraparound desk and appeared to be playing computer solitaire. A typed sign on her door said KNOCK FOR EMERGENCY.
Elliot pushed it open without knocking. “Hello, ma’am. I noticed the outside lock is broken.”
The super turned away from the game on her screen and shrugged. Elliot could see her noting his uniform. “Doesn’t seem to make much difference,” she said, with what seemed like an effort at politeness. “I used to buzz in everyone who rang, anyway.” She rolled back a few inches in her desk chair. “People aren’t really missing the human touch these days.”
Elliot showed her his badge. “We received a call about apartment 4A. Can I have the key?”
She produced it from a drawer and prodded it across the desk to him, using a piece of plastic tubing she seemed to keep for this purpose. She wouldn’t meet his eyes. He wondered if she suspected what might be awaiting him on the fourth floor.
Elliot mounted the stairs without passing any other tenants. It was not so different from his own building: seemingly rent-controlled, and unrenovated since the 1970s.
He began to smell the slightly sweet, putrid odour as he was unlocking the door, and he braced himself for a dash inside. Protocol required a hazmat team, but only once he had eyes on the deceased and could call it in.
* * *
—
The delicate duty of death notification was passed along to officers in California, but Elliot waited at the precinct for the call he knew would come from the sisters, for the details they both needed and dreaded to hear.
At home later that evening, he discarded his mask and gloves, showered and changed, then turned on the television and tried to erase from his mind what he had seen in the apartment, as well as the raw guilt and grief of the woman’s daughters. He had listened as they told him about their mother, a retired math teacher who was planning to move out to the West Coast.
“She loved the city,” the older daughter had told him. “Broadway, galleries. Even her crazy neighbours. If it wasn’t for ARAMIS, she might never have agreed to leave.”
“She’d already bought her ticket,” said the younger one. Her voice sounded hoarse. “Nine more days and she would have been with us. Just nine days.”
Elliot had said, “I’m sure she knew how much you loved her.” But he thought about the time between phone calls and emails, the space between messages so much larger than the space between two people in the same room. Communication technology lashed people together, but there was no substitute for being there.
When a commercial came on, Elliot muted the TV and read a new email from Sarah: Hi Ell. Owen has been looking at the forecasts and says the warm fall is a good thing for lowering transmission rates. A small mercy, I guess.
The note went on, but reading it left him more depressed than before. For all the writing Sarah did for her job, her particular voice—caring, teasing, yet determinedly sincere—was often hard to discern in her brief emails, and Noah was only present via the occasional photo. And Elliot suspected he was doing an even worse job with his own messages. But there was no way around it. Sarah had explained that the boat’s satellite phone couldn’t handle Skype, and they were rationing their minutes for internet access and weather forecasts.
The daily emails at least assured him their boat was still afloat, but Elliot had a hard time mustering enthusiasm for his side of the correspondence. It sometimes felt more like a duty to discharge than a lifeline to the person in the world who understood him best. He hoped