“Weh,” said Joanie Ruth. As Georgia had said, her babble seemed to reflect a sincere desire to communicate; she watched us, intent and tolerant, for a long time, as if waiting for us to respond with the correct answer. Eventually her head drooped back against her mother and her eyes drifted shut as Georgia cuddled her against her chest. Our last image on that call was of Georgia and Jonah and Joanie Ruth—Jonah’s dark head and Georgia’s red one both bent toward her drowsy baby girl, the three of them locked in a tight little circle against the darkening sky.

—

“THAT’S THE LAST time I heard her speak,” I tell the crowd in the Buckhead home. “A week later she began to forget names, and a few days after that, she could only manage answers to yes-or-no questions. By the end of the next week, she could say almost nothing. The woman we love was gone.”

The crowd watches me. A blond woman in the front is sobbing silently, her pretty features contorted into a gargoyle of pain. The man next to her, a silver fox old enough to be her father—perhaps he is her father; they look a bit alike—rubs her shoulders, murmuring something into her ear until the two of them slip from the room. They’re not the only ones to take this personally. Plenty of the people standing in front of me wear wretched looks. I’m the ultimate buzzkill.

“How is she now?” someone asks, quietly, from the middle of the crowd.

“She’s alive. She’s started an intensive regimen of physical and cognitive therapy.”

There’s a rustle of interest, but I move on, deciding to limit how much I tell them about her current condition. I don’t want this speech to evolve into a Q&A about AAROD. “Most of you here tonight know someone—or know of someone—who’s been affected,” I say. “We’ve learned a lot. We know AAROD is an autoimmune condition. It’s not direct viral toxicity to the brain; instead, in some unlucky people, the virus triggers the creation of antibodies that react to proteins on nerve cells. It can cause your gray-matter neurons to go haywire or your white-matter neurons to lose their protective covering, or both, and this can cause seizures and dementia. We don’t know what the future holds; could there be a later cohort of dementia patients we’ve yet to identify? Could there be another complication manifesting itself years down the road? Our scientists and physicians killed themselves—literally, in some cases—caring for patients, developing a vaccine, and seeking a cure, both for the virus itself and for the sequelae it causes.”