Eventually, President Corbett disconnected from Mr. Amir and returned to the cold business of triaging an entire country. She made one painful decision after another, weighing the options with the full measure of her formidable intelligence before issuing a series of clear, carefully articulated plans. But underneath the steeliness etched into her face, I could still see the track of that solitary tear sliding down her cheek, more precious than any diamond.

14

The Archaic Clock

COMPTON

NEW YORK CITY

172 Days After Patient Zero

The wave crashed through New York, flattening buildings, toppling the Statue of Liberty, and sweeping away vast swathes of the city before receding and leaving the dazed survivors to totter out into the sunlight with their fists raised in silent defiance. Just as you’d expect in a good apocalyptic film, the monster had been vanquished by the resilience of the human spirit, and all was, or would be, well again.

Compton flipped her laptop shut. Disaster movies were having a moment, which was kind of ironic if you thought about it. She’d have thought people would desire escapism of a happier sort, like sappy romances and feel-good flicks about heroic dogs. But here she was, battered by insomnia, glued to every stupid, low-budget tornado/asteroid/sunspot movie she could dredge up from Netflix.

She rolled to her side and glanced at the clock: 4:39. Still too early to get up. Through her unshaded window poured the grayish-orange haze of the city. In pre-ART days, she’d slept in total blackness engineered by way of a pair of expensive motorized blackout curtains, a purchase any ER doctor would consider well worth the cost. When you had to shift your sleep cycles from night to day to midafternoon on a random, rotating basis, you became a devotee of every sleep aid imaginable. But now, for some reason, Compton couldn’t stand the dark.

It being late November, there was a lot of dark.

With a brief whirring sound punctuated by a decisive click, the number on the clock changed to 4:40. Every minute of the day, this archaic clock made a scritchy, whirring, clicking sound as the numbers changed inside the burled fake-wood veneer of its exterior. A marvel of primitive engineering, the clock contained a Rolodex of stiff black cards with numbers printed on them—or half numbers, to be precise—and a 60-hertz, 120-volt power supply that caused little internal wheels to spin, which activated little gears, which flipped the top or bottom half of the little number cards. There was nothing digital about it.

The reason Compton knew so much about this clock, this noisy little relic from the 1970s, was that Ellis had loved it. He’d had a fascination with small machines, taking them apart and putting them back together whenever he was bored or agitated. He’d possessed a fleet of four or five disclike robotic vacuums, which he’d lovingly and devotedly disassembled and reassembled on a regular basis. He had liked to deploy them all at once, sending them around the not-overly-large apartment, cheering them on as they bumped around the rooms munching up dog hair and Cheerios and Rose’s little elastic ponytail holders.