I Prepared for Everything, but Not Coronavirus on a Cruise Ship

Some bad outcomes, you half expect: This time the mammogram will detect an abnormality; this time the cop will notice you were 10 miles over the speed limit; this time the IRS is serious about a total audit. But you don’t expect that your luxury cruise from Japan will harbor a killer virus, resulting in your being returned to the U.S. in a cargo plane that lands at a remote Air Force base where you are ordered into federal quarantine for a minimum of two weeks, leaving you without rights, without agency, and on the wrong side of a heavily guarded fence.

At least, I didn’t expect any of this, even though I wrote a thriller set on a cruise ship—or perhaps in part I wrote a thriller set on a cruise ship, and figured my imagination was more fevered than reality. I had imagined a