C liked to come into my office and say hi to the people on my screen. My fifth novel was published and for a long time – weeks – I did Zoom events in the evenings. Groceries arrived once a week and we spent a long time washing everything with soap before we put it away. I expended a great deal of energy in maintaining a façade of cheerfulness for my daughter – let’s call her C – because the western leg of the book tour had included a weekend off to see my family in British Columbia, and when would I see them again? The border was closed. No one I knew who was sick had been tested. I followed the NYC numbers with diligence, but we all knew the numbers were artificially low.

There was no more child care, so my husband and I traded off all day and never had quite enough time for our work – but how lucky we were, to still have jobs. I cancelled a 25-city book tour in increments, one month and one country at a time. On her last day at school, seven kids and three teachers were sent home with fevers. The next day, I pulled our four-year-old daughter out of preschool. Overnight, the President spoke to the country and a professional sports league shut down and celebrities, for all their gilded lives, were diagnosed with the virus. I cancelled my trip in a late-night text to my lecture agent. My husband asked me to reconsider the trip and I realized he was right: The world in which I got on airplanes had somehow already slipped away. On March 11 – or now, Day 1, the first of all of these kinds of days – I was supposed to pack my suitcase for an early flight the next morning, but as the day drifted into evening, I found that I just couldn’t do it. I was still shaking hands with strangers in early March.

And yet, for the most part – and this is hard to account for, in retrospect – we continued on more or less as normal until an absurdly late date. We knew our federal government lacked the competence and possibly the will to protect us. We knew our population density and our reliance on public transit made us vulnerable. In New York City, we knew what was coming. John Mandel is the author of Station Eleven and, most recently, The Glass Hotel.

Station 11 emily st john mandel