The first report arrived eleven days later.
It was Anselm Roth who called me. I knew his voice at once, even through the cough. "Daniel," he said. "I think I carried something home from your laboratory."
I said nothing. I could hear a hospital behind him, the particular noise of too many people in too small a space.
"Three of my staff," he said. "Then a patient. I wanted you to hear it from me." He coughed again for a long time. "Whatever you gave her, Daniel, it did not slow this down in us. I don't know if that matters."
I said I was sorry. It was the only thing I said. After a moment he thanked me, as though I had done him a courtesy, and hung up.
Then there were nine cases, and then twenty. At first nobody connected them. The symptoms looked like a dozen other infections: fever, fatigue, trouble breathing, and, in the worst cases, confusion. People fell sick in different places, in a school, a hospital, an airport, a family gathering, a nursing home. The first public-health reports spoke of clusters. Then they stopped saying clusters and said outbreaks, then transmission chains, then community spread, and then the word nobody wanted to use. Pandemic.
I watched the press conference from my mother's kitchen with the television too loud, and I turned it down. A journalist asked whether the government was prepared, and an official said that it was. I laughed. I do not know why. Perhaps because I knew, and wanted somebody to say the truth out loud. Nobody was prepared, not for this.
Lena called that evening.
"Daniel. We need the treatment data."
"I sent it."
"I mean everything. We need your notes."
"They're in the laboratory."
"Then come." I looked at the kitchen door and could not make my feet go toward it. "I can't."
There was a silence. "You have to."
"I can't."
"People are dying."
I closed my eyes. "I know."
"Daniel."
"I know."
She was quiet. Then she said, very softly, "Please."
I hung up. I regret that more than I can say. I regret every call I ended and every message I did not answer, every person who needed something from me while I sat at my mother's table staring at a cup she would never use again.
The cases multiplied. Airports closed, reopened, and closed again. Countries stopped flights and tightened their borders, and hospitals raised tents in their parking lots. The city grew strange. The traffic thinned and then vanished. Restaurants shut, schools shut, and the streets outside our house emptied one house at a time. One evening I walked to the end of the road and found nobody there. I stood beneath the streetlight, which had buzzed all my life, five seconds of light and five of dark, and I watched it until the rain began. Then I went home.