In a Perfect World

people in St. Sophia. Stuck in St. Sophia. Spending their days in St. Sophia. Without school, without sports, without work, without the malls in the city and suburbs open, they were wired with energy and exhausted at the same time. They actually sat on the park benches, which had seemed to be merely decorations to Jiselle until then. Mothers pushed children on the swings in the park. They walked on the sidewalks.

One morning, as she stood in line at the St. Sophia Credit Union (Mark had told her to go, to make sure the airline was still depositing his checks and to get some cash “in case”), she saw ahead of her in the line, which snaked out the door and around the corner of the bank’s brick facade, Bobby’s mother, Tara Temple. She was wearing patent leather high heels. Black, they glinted in the sun bouncing off the sidewalk and sent thin beams of light straight up the insides of her long, tanned legs. She was wearing shorts so short that Jiselle could see the fold between her thigh and her buttocks, and, on the inside of one sleek thigh, a little rose, which looked like either a temporary tattoo or a brand-new one.

Tara Temple had met Jiselle only those two or three times (the last time was when she’d brought over the Wholeness book) and didn’t appear to recognize her. Between them, a man in a necktie and Bermuda shorts stood very close to Tara, and Jiselle watched as, saying nothing, he reached behind Tara and smoothed three fingers down the small of her back to the place where her tailbone clefted into her tight shorts.

Jiselle looked quickly away. Bobby’s mother had to have been at least ten years older than she, but standing behind her in that line, wearing flat black sandals and one of Mark’s baggy T-shirts over a pair of worn-out khaki shorts, Jiselle felt old, and maternal, and disapproving. She liked Paul Temple, Bobby’s father, who had stopped by several times recently to help Bobby with the yard work, which Bobby had agreed to take on for forty dollars a week. (He’d wanted to do it for free—because “I eat like five meals a day here!”—but Jiselle had insisted on paying him.) Because Paul Temple taught history at St. Sophia High, he’d had nothing to do since the schools closed down. A week earlier, he and Bobby had spent the whole day cutting down dead brush between the lawn and the ravine for her, and then they’d burned it in a barrel in the backyard. It had been an especially great day for Sam, who adored Mr. Temple, who liked to punch Sam in the shoulder and call him Bud.

A bank teller came out then and announced that the computers had frozen, and the wait could be “days.” She strongly suggested their leaving and coming back another time.

Jiselle watched as Tara Temple turned to look at the man behind her.

They smiled sleepily at each other and left the line together.

GOODBYE TO THE NECKTIE was a news bulletin for days. Men were being encouraged to go without them. The “New Businessman” had an open collar and short sleeves. He wore cargo pants or shorts, carried a satchel instead of a briefcase. There was some joyful speculation that the days of eight-to-five were over forever, replaced by siestas, long vacations—an entirely different way of life having been glimpsed in this brief, strange period. It was a side benefit to the collapse of the economy, the devastation wrought by the Phoenix flu. The rules for behavior of all kinds had changed overnight—or changed while Jiselle had been making grilled cheese sandwiches for Sam and reading novels at home.

Camilla had hauled out all the books she’d been assigned in her Advanced Placement English course that year, lining them up in the order she thought would be most educational and appealing. Jiselle had just finished Tess of the d’Urbervilles, which had left her weeping in the bathtub the night she’d finished it. Now, she was halfway through Mrs. Dalloway, which kept her in a kind of dreamy reverie long after she put it down.

“I can’t believe you didn’t read this stuff in high school,” Camilla said, and Jiselle felt the familiar prickle of her skin at one of Camilla’s seemingly harmless observations. “Or at least in college.”

Jiselle looked up at her. Camilla was looking at her curiously from the couch. For the first time, perhaps, Jiselle noticed that the girl had a very fine, blond down on her shoulders and arms. She was wearing a sundress with thin straps, and no makeup, and Jiselle felt as if she were looking at a stranger.

“I never finished college,” Jiselle said. She opened her mouth again and realized that she was about to tell Camilla about her father, about Ellen, about the accident, as if that explained why she’d left college, but then she closed her mouth again and gave a little apologetic smile.

“That’s no biggie,” Camilla said. “Some of the dumbest people I know finished college.”

The second week of May, there were the first officially confirmed reports of massive outbreaks of hemorrhagic zoonosis in Arizona, Nevada, and Idaho. Some newscasters used the word hundreds. Others said thousands. All nonessential government services nationwide were closed down by executive order, although there was grumbling about this in the Midwest and on the East Coast. Wasn’t this clearly, mostly, a Western disease? Wouldn’t the most prudent thing be to limit travel over and across the Mississippi until the cause of the illness, the source of the contagion, could be determined? Why shouldn’t people in Ohio be allowed to keep their post offices and libraries open if they wanted to? They weren’t infected with hemorrhagic zoonosis.

People in the Western states thought the same things about the East.

“During the Black Plague the English called it the French disease, the French called it the Italian disease, and so on and so on. People blaming other people for the plague is nothing new,” Paul Temple said. He’d started coming by most days around five o’clock, if he wasn’t already there working on the yard, walking the two miles from his own house. He’d knock politely on the door and wait for Jiselle or one of the children to open it for him, although Jiselle had told him it was fine just to come in. When she opened the door, he’d smile apologetically and say he was “just looking for something to do. With the schools closed, not a big demand for history teachers in St. Sophia.”

When the power was on and there was cold beer, Jiselle would offer him one. Often, sitting across from her on the deck in his T-shirt and jeans—looking rugged, Jiselle thought, like an outdoorsman, not a historian— he’d seem as if he were about to tell Jiselle something or ask her for advice, but he never did.

There was no denying now that people were dying in large numbers, all over the country—and that even if it was not being called a plague, it was a plague. The suppression of information until recently had not been a conspiracy, the public was assured, but rather a complexity that had kept those numbers from being interpreted and disseminated in an accurate manner. And although no one had called it the Phoenix flu or hemorrhagic zoonosis, there had been deaths in St. Sophia as well—a child who’d gone to Sam’s school, a woman who’d worked at the library, an elderly couple and their disabled son. When Jiselle and Sam went into town for the goose food, she had seen graves being dug in the St. Sophia Cemetery, and then the fresh dirt mounded over them. Despite the ban, a white balloon had managed somehow to snag itself in one of the tallest trees in the center of town. It blew around there erratically in a high breeze for a couple of days before the Fire Department came with a truck and ladder and took it down. Apparently, it had been upsetting residents of St. Sophia.

“It’s hype,” Mark said over the phone. “The whole thing. The pharmaceutical companies and the European Union have a lot of money to make over this hype.” He no longer sounded anxious on the phone. “The airline is paying my salary, right? As long as the checks don’t bounce, everything’ll be okay.”

The checks were not bouncing. They continued to be deposited directly into Mark’s and Jiselle’s shared account every week. So, Mark pointed out, there had been no hardship, really, had there? The Gesundheitsschutzhaus was clean, comfortable, he said. The food was good. They were allowed to go outside into a small fenced garden. There was a gym for exercise. No one had gotten sick. They would soon be allowed to leave. He might even miss it. Germany was an amazingly efficient and beautiful place.

“I miss you,” Jiselle said. “I can’t tell you how much—”

“Keep yourself busy,” Mark said. “That’s what I’m doing. This’ll be over before we know it.”

Sam taught Jiselle how to play chess.

It took her days to learn and memorize the fundamentals, only to find that she was the kind of player who might make a fine move that set in motion a long series of self-defeats, unable as she was to think more than one move ahead. But Sam was patient, and Jiselle was learning from her mistakes. When she made a good move, he was delighted: “Yeah!” he’d shout when she took his pawn.

For her part, Jiselle could not believe that after a lifetime of looking down at the mystery of a chessboard