The Dreamers

by Karen Thompson Walker

quarantine, but Mei looks it up. From the Italian, quaranta giorni, forty days. Forty days: the period that ships were once required to wait before entering the port of Venice—time enough, they hoped, for a contagious disease to burn itself out.

In Mandarin, for example, verbs operate entirely in the present tense. There is no special tense for the past or the future.