When the lockdown was first announced and nobody knew for sure how bad things were going to get, Caber did what many people with the means and opportunity did. He headed for the hills. He had a cottage in Muskoka. The night before he left he invited me over for dinner. I showed up at his door wearing a mask in public for the first time, and he laughed in my face. We ate shrimp and rice Caber had cooked himself, drank three bottles of wine out of his cellar. The authorities were already telling people not to travel unnecessarily, which Caber took to mean that if he did not leave right now he might end up stuck in the city indefinitely.

‘I do think it’s an irresponsible, hysterical and absolutely cowardly thing to do, and I sincerely hope that nobody else but me does it,’ Caber said. ‘But it can’t be helped. I’ve a book to finish.’

‘There’s always a book,’ I said.

‘There’s always a book,’ Caber said.

We talked about it. The virus. The pandemic. Caber knew people on the city council, in the mayor’s office. The city, anticipating scenarios where the health system might become overwhelmed, was quietly preparing contingencies, and contingencies for the contingencies. Talking about these things made my scalp prickle, like my skin was a piece of fabric being slowly knotted tighter and tighter at the base of my neck. Caber, by contrast, could see something like the funny side to it all, because he was getting to run away but also because even a ­world-­stopping pandemic had brought with it a stroke of good fortune. He told me his phone had been going ­non-­stop, even more than usual, because of a short, obscure novel he’d written almost ten years ago called The Low, Shimmering Black Drone which, with the onset of the pandemic, had lately returned to public attention.

The book begins with the unnamed protagonist, a writer, waking up in bed with his wife. As they go through their morning routine they hold a groggy, intimate conversation, in the way of any ­long-­married couple, except the writer notices that every time his wife speaks, he hears, in the back of his head, a noise he describes as a ‘low, shimmering black drone’. The same thing happens when the writer’s daughter speaks to him, and later on, when he is out in public. Any human voice within earshot triggers the low, shimmering black drone. The writer describes the drone as just loud enough to make communication ‘continually irritating and clumsy, but not so loud that communication is impossible’.