FRANÇOIS DIALLO: Thank you for taking the time to speak with me today.
KIRSTEN RAYMONDE: My pleasure. What are you writing?
DIALLO: It’s my own private shorthand. I made it up.
RAYMONDE: Is it faster?
DIALLO: Very much so. I can transcribe an interview in real time, and then write it out later. Now, I appreciate you talking to me this afternoon. As I mentioned yesterday, I’ve just started a newspaper, and I’ve been interviewing everyone who comes through New Petoskey.
RAYMONDE: I’m not sure I have much news to tell you.
DIALLO: If you were to talk about the other towns you’ve passed through, that would count as news to us. The world’s become so local, hasn’t it? We hear stories from traders, of course, but most people don’t leave their towns anymore. I think my readers will be interested in hearing from people who’ve been to other places since the collapse.
RAYMONDE: Okay.
DIALLO: And more than that, well, publishing the newspaper has been an invigorating project, but then I thought, Why stop with a newspaper? Why not create an oral history of this time we live in, and an oral history of the collapse? With your permission, I’ll publish excerpts from this interview in the next edition, and I’ll keep the entirety of the interview for my archives.
RAYMONDE: That’s fine. It’s an interesting project. I know you’re supposed to be interviewing me, but could I ask you a question first?
DIALLO: Of course.
RAYMONDE: You’ve been a librarian for a long time—
DIALLO: Since Year Four.
RAYMONDE: Those comics I showed you just now, with the space station. Have you ever seen them before, or others in the series?
DIALLO: Never, no, they’re not part of any comic-book series I’ve ever come across. You said someone gave them to you as a gift?
RAYMONDE: Arthur Leander gave them to me. That actor I told you about.
17
A YEAR BEFORE THE Georgia Flu, Arthur and Clark met for dinner in London. Arthur was passing through town en route to Paris at a moment when Clark happened to be visiting his parents, and they agreed to meet for dinner in a corner of the city that Clark didn’t know especially well. He’d set out early, but when he stepped out of the Tube station he had a vision of his phone lying where he’d left it on his parents’ kitchen counter, a map application open on the screen. Clark liked to think he knew London but the truth was he’d spent most of his adult life in New York, secure within the confines of Manhattan’s idiot-proof grid, and on this particular evening London’s tangle of streets was inscrutable. The side street for which he was searching failed to materialize and he found himself wandering, increasingly late, angry and embarrassed, retracing his footsteps and trying different turns. He hailed a cab when the rain began.
“Easiest two quid I ever made in me life,” the cabbie said, when Clark told him the address. The cabbie performed two left turns in rapid succession and they were at the restaurant, on a side street that Clark could’ve sworn hadn’t been there when he’d passed by ten minutes ago. “Of course,” the cabbie said, “you don’t know where you’re going unless you know where you’re going,” and when Clark went in, Arthur was waiting, caught under a beam of track lighting in a booth at the back. There had been a time when Arthur would never have faced the dining room of a restaurant, long periods when the only way to eat a meal in peace was to sit with his back to the room and hope no one would recognize his hunched shoulders and expensive haircut from behind, but now, Clark realized, Arthur wanted to be seen.
“Dr. Thompson,” Arthur said.
“Mr. Leander.” The disorientation of meeting one’s sagging contemporaries, memories of a younger face crashing into the reality of jowls, under-eye pouches, unexpected lines, and then the terrible realization that one probably looks just as old as they do. Do you remember when we were young and gorgeous? Clark wanted to ask. Do you remember when everything seemed limitless? Do you remember when it seemed impossible that you’d get famous and I’d get a PhD? But instead of saying any of this he wished his friend a happy birthday.
“You remembered.”
“Of course,” Clark said. “That’s one thing I like about birthdays, they stay in one place. Same spot on the calendar, year in, year out.”
“But the years keep going faster, have you noticed?”
They settled into the business of ordering drinks and appetizers, and all Clark could think of as they talked was whether or not Arthur had noticed that a couple at a nearby table was looking at him and whispering. If Arthur had noticed, he seemed supremely unconcerned, but the attention put Clark on edge.
“You’re going to Paris tomorrow?” Clark asked somewhere between the first martini and the appetizers.
“Visiting my son. Elizabeth’s vacationing there with him this week. It’s just been a bitch of a year, Clark.”
