If Smert considers this approach to be an enticement, he’s mistaken. I don’t watch television. While I have streamed a scientific documentary or two, I’ve never seen a reality show. I am ignorant of celebrity news. I barely even talk to regular people, unless I already know and like them.

Speaking of people I know and like, I spy my friends—Vani, Compton, and Hannah—perhaps twenty feet away, standing together but each speaking to people I don’t recognize. None of them lives in Atlanta; they’re here to support me when I give a speech later tonight. How had they managed to strike up such animated conversations with strangers?

Vani, my closest friend, catches my eye first, but then again Vani generally catches everyone’s eye first. She’s my age—early forties—and infinitely more alluring. Tonight, indifferent to the attention she draws, she’s dressed in an electric-yellow silk concoction with an array of jeweled bracelets crawling up her arms. Even from this distance, I can read her expression, so characteristic of Vani, somehow combining an aura of peace with a ridiculous, endearing sense of humor. She’s like a human embodiment of both Xanax and one of those party drugs that make people giggly.

Compton flanks her, her cap of sleek dark hair set off by an equally sleek black dress. Compton is the Ritalin to Vani’s Xanax; she’s beaming an intense, skeptical look to two chatty blond men who appear to be in their forties. On her other side, Hannah, pink-cheeked and fair, with her shapeless dress and messy bun, might have registered as dowdy compared to the other two were it not for the warmth in her expression, which she’s aiming at an older gentleman who is apparently hard of hearing. He’s got a hand cupped round his ear and I’m fairly certain the entire room can hear him shouting delightedly in her direction.

Oblivious to my distraction, Artie’s still going strong. “We’d want to showcase your particular, ah, style in the show, of course. You were one of the first Americans to contract the illness. You were one of the few worldwide experts on this particular virus before the pandemic. People must wonder: why does a woman want to become an expert on germs?”

Why? I’ve considered viruses to be my mortal enemy ever since missing my own tenth birthday party after coming down with what my mother erroneously referred to as “the stomach flu.” The stomach flu is not a flu at all, but everyone on earth is familiar with its symptoms.