Despite our losses, merriment shines on most of the faces here. Please understand: I don’t judge them, these people who are trying to return to the past. I understand the urge to repress the memories. Everyone lost someone. The particular hell of the artiovirus was its precise targeting of the otherwise young and healthy. It turned our immune systems against us, generating not a cytokine storm but a cytokine tsunami, sometimes felling people in a matter of hours. You could feel fine in the morning and be dead by evening.

But, as everyone in the country now knows, the virus harbored an even more terrible secret, one we would not suspect for months.

—

WHEN A HAND brushes my shoulder, I expect one of the three friends who are meeting me here tonight, or possibly somebody I know from the time when I worked at the CDC. Instead, I encounter a ferrety bald man who’s made the unfortunate decision to groom his mustache into a pencil-thin line. The effect is reminiscent of a cartoon villain or, perhaps, a weasel.

“Artie Smert,” he says, offering his hand in what appears to be a misguided reflex. Even before the pandemic I wasn’t big on shaking hands, so I ignore his outstretched arm. Batting his eyes, the man attempts to execute a face-saving maneuver by raising the hand to smooth back his hair, which might seem a tad more natural if he weren’t bald. After a brief awkward slide along his scalp, the hand drifts back down to his side.

I hadn’t intended to make this guy look stupid, so I offer him an elbow to bump. Unfortunately this doesn’t go any better, as he’s grabbed a business card from his pocket and apparently mistakes my gesture as an invitation to deposit the card on my elbow. I retrieve it with my other hand and study it.

“You’re Dr. Kira Marchand,” says the man. “I’ve been wanting to meet you for some time.”

The voice rings a bell. I read the card again. “Artie Smart?”

“It’s Smert, actually, not Smart. Are you familiar with the Midwest? The Dakotas, maybe?”

I blink at the non sequitur. “I was raised in Kentucky. I bounced around the world for a while and now I live here, but I’ve never lived in the Midwest. Why?”

“My friend in the Dakotas pronounces smart as smert.”

This line of conversation is of such confusing irrelevance I do not know how to respond. No wonder I always go mute at parties. “You left a bunch of messages with my office last year,” I say finally. “You’re a television producer.”