To Paradise (44 page)

PART II

PART III

PART IV

PART V

PART VI

PART VII

PART VIII

PART IX

PART X

Normally, I catch the 18:00 shuttle home, which drops me off at Eighth Street and Fifth Avenue somewhere between 18:30 and 18:40, depending on disruptions, but today I knew there was going to be a Ceremony, so I asked Dr. Morgan if I could leave early. I was worried the shuttle would get stalled near Forty-second Street, and then who knew how long I would be delayed, and then I might be too late to buy dinner for my husband. I was explaining all this to Dr. Morgan when he interrupted me. “I don’t need to hear all the details,” he said. “Of course you have permission. Take the 17:00 shuttle.” So I thanked him and did.

The passengers on the 17:00 shuttle were different from the passengers on the 18:00 shuttle. The 18:00 passengers were other lab techs and scientists, even some of the principal investigators, but the only person I recognized on the 17:00 was one of the janitors. I even remembered to wave at her, just a second after she passed me, turning in my seat to do so, but I don’t think she saw me, because she didn’t wave back.

As I had predicted, the shuttle slowed and then stopped just south of Forty-second Street. The windows on the shuttle are covered with bars, but you can still see everything outside pretty well. I had chosen a seat on the right so I could see the Old Library, and sure enough, there were the chairs, six of them, arranged in a row facing the avenue, although no one was sitting in them and the ropes hadn’t yet been uncoiled. The Ceremony wouldn’t begin for another two hours, but there were already radio technicians
strolling about in their long black coats, and two men were filling the wire trash cans with rocks from the back of a big truck. It was the truck that had stopped the flow of traffic, but there was nothing we could do except wait until the men had filled all the trash cans and then had climbed back into the truck and moved out of the way, and from there, the rest of the trip was very fast, even with the checkpoints.

By the time we reached my stop, it was 17:50, and while the drive itself had taken longer than normal, I was still home much earlier than usual. But I did what I always do after work, which was to go straight to the grocery store. Today was a meat day, and because it was the third Thursday, I was also entitled to our monthly ration of soap and toilet paper. I had saved one of my vegetable coupons from the previous week, so, along with the potatoes and carrots, I was also able to get a can of peas. That day, along with the usual assortment of flavored protein bricks and soy patties and artificial meats, there was also real horse meat, dog meat, deer meat, and nutria meat. The nutria meat was the cheapest, but my husband says it’s too greasy, so I bought a half kilo of horse meat, and some cornmeal because we were almost out. We needed milk, but if I saved up another week of rations, I’d be able to buy a pint of pudding, so I instead bought the powdered version, which my husband and I both dislike but would have to do.

Then I walked the four blocks home to our building, and it was only when I was safe inside our apartment, browning the horse meat in vegetable oil, that I remembered that it was my husband’s free night, and that he wouldn’t be home for dinner. But by that time, it was too late to stop cooking, so I finished frying the meat and then ate it with some of the peas. Above me, I could hear the echoey sound of screams, and knew that the neighbors were listening to the Ceremony on their radios, but I didn’t want to listen myself, and after cleaning the dishes, I sat on the couch and waited for my husband for a while, even though I knew he wouldn’t be home anytime soon, before finally going to bed.

The next day, everything was as usual, and I caught the 18:00 shuttle home. As we passed the Old Library, I looked for remaining signs of the Ceremony, but there weren’t any: The rocks were gone and the chairs were gone and the banners were gone and the steps were clean and gray and empty, just like normal.

At home, I was warming a little oil to fry some more of the meat when I heard my husband’s knock on the door—tap-tap-thunk-thunk-thunk—and then his call—“Cobra”—to which I called back “Mongoose,” and then the clunk of the bolts unlocking: one, two, three, four. And then the door opened and there he was, my husband, my Mongoose.

“Dinner’s almost done,” I said.

“I’ll be right out,” he said, and went back to our room to change.

I put a piece of meat on his plate and a piece on mine, as well as peas and half of a potato for each of us, which I’d baked that morning, after my husband left for work, and had reheated. And then I sat and waited for him to come sit down at the table across from me.

For a while, we ate in silence. “Horse?” my husband asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“Hmm,” my husband said.

Even though I’ve been married to my husband for more than five years, I still find it difficult to know what to say to him. It was like this when we first met, too, and as we left the marriage broker’s office, Grandfather had put his arm around me and brought me close to his body, but he didn’t speak until we were back home. “What did you think?” he had asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. I wasn’t supposed to say
I don’t know
—I had been told I said it too much—but in this case, I really didn’t know. “I didn’t know what to say to him when I wasn’t answering his questions,” I said.

“That’s normal,” said Grandfather. “But it’ll get easier, over time.” He was quiet. “You just have to remember the lessons we’ve had,” he said, “the things we discussed. Do you remember?”

“Yes, of course,” I said. “ ‘How was your day?’ ‘Did you hear the story on the radio?’ ‘Did anything interesting happen today?’ ” We had made a list together, Grandfather and I, of all the questions
one person might ask another. Sometimes, even now, I reviewed that list before I went to bed, thinking that the next day I might ask one of them to my husband, or to one of my colleagues. The problem was that some of the questions—What do you want to eat tonight? What books are you reading? Where are you taking your next vacation? The weather’s been great/terrible, hasn’t it? How are you feeling?—had become either irrelevant or unsafe to ask. When I looked at the list, I remembered having those practice conversations with Grandfather, but I was unable to remember his replies.

Now I said to my husband, “How is the meat?”

“Fine.”

“Not too tough?”

“No, no, it’s fine.” He took another bite. “It’s good.”

This made me feel better, more relaxed. Grandfather had told me that when I was anxious I could help calm myself by adding numbers in my head, and that’s what I had been doing until my husband reassured me. After that, I felt relaxed enough to say something else to him. “How was your free night?” I asked him.

He didn’t look up. “Fine,” he said. “Nice.”

I didn’t know what else to say. Then I remembered: “There was a Ceremony last night. I passed it on the ride home.”

Now he did look at me. “Did you listen to it?”

“No,” I said. “Did you?”

“No,” he said.

“Do you know who they were?” I asked, even though we all knew not to ask that question.

I had asked just to make conversation with my husband, but to my surprise, he looked again at me, directly at me, and for a few seconds he said nothing, and I said nothing, too. Then “No,” he said. It seemed to me like he wanted to say something else, but he didn’t, and we finished eating in silence.

Two nights later, we woke to a pounding, and the sound of men’s voices. My husband sprung out of his bed, cursing, and I leaned over
and switched on the lamp. “Stay here,” he told me, but I was already following him to the front door.

“Who’s there?” he demanded of the closed door, and I was impressed, as I always was in these instances, by my husband’s bravery, by how unafraid he seemed.

“Municipality Three Investigative Unit 546, Officers 5528, 7879, and 4578,” replied a voice on the other side of the door. I could hear a dog barking. “Pursuing suspect accused of violating Codes 122, 135, 229, 247, and 333.” Codes beginning with a one were crimes against the state. Codes beginning with a two were trafficking crimes. Codes beginning with three were crimes of information, which usually meant the accused had somehow accessed the internet or was in possession of an illegal book. “Permission to search the unit.”

They weren’t asking for permission, but you had to give it anyway. “Permission granted,” my husband said, and unlocked the locks, and three men and a tall, lean, wedge-faced dog entered our unit. The biggest of the men remained in the doorway, pointing his gun at us, and we stood against the far wall facing him, our hands raised and elbows bent at right angles, while the other two men opened our closets and searched our bathroom and bedroom. These events were meant to be quiet, but I could hear the men in the bedroom lifting first one mattress and then the next, and the mattresses falling back onto the bed frames with a thud, and although the man in the doorway was large, I could still see other police units behind him, one entering the apartment to the left and the other running up the stairs.

Then they were done, and the two men and the dog came out of the bedroom and one of the men said “Clear” to the man in the door and “Signature” to us and we both applied our right thumbprints to the screen he held out and spoke our names and identity numbers into the scanner’s microphone and then they left and we locked the door behind them.

Searches always made a mess, and all of our clothes and shoes had been yanked out of the closet, and the mattresses were askew in their frames, and the window had been opened when the officers
had checked to see if there was anyone dangling from the windowsill or hiding in the trees, as had apparently happened a year ago. My husband made sure the folding iron gate outside the window was secure and locked, and then he closed the window and drew the black curtain across it and helped me straighten first my mattress and then his. I was going to start organizing at least a little of the closet, but he stopped me. “Leave it,” he said. “It’ll still be there tomorrow.” And then he got into his bed and I got into mine, and he turned off the lamp and it was dark again.

Then it was quiet and yet not quite quiet. We could hear the officers moving around in the apartment above us—something heavy fell, and we could hear the light fixture in our ceiling rattle. There were muffled shouts, and the sound of a dog barking. And then we heard the units’ footsteps descending again, and then the all-clear, announced over the speakers mounted atop one of the police vans: “Zone Eight; Thirteen Washington Square North; eight units plus basement; all units checked.” After that, we heard the whup-whup-whup of the police helicopter’s blades, and then it really was quiet again, so quiet we could hear the sound of someone crying, a woman, from either above or next to us. But then that too stopped, and there was a period of real silence, and I lay and watched my husband’s back as the strobe light moved across it and up the wall and disappeared again out the window. The curtains were supposed to block the strobe, but they didn’t entirely, though after a while you forgot it was happening.

Suddenly I was scared, and I scooted down the bed until my head was below the pillows and pulled the blanket over myself, the way I had as a child. I had still been living with Grandfather when I experienced my first search, and that night I had been so frightened afterward that I had started moaning, moaning and rocking, and Grandfather had had to hold me so I didn’t hurt myself. “It’ll be fine, it’ll be fine,” he repeated, again and again, and the next morning, when I woke, I was still scared, but less so, and he had told me that it was normal to be scared, and that I would get used to the searches with time, and that I was a good person and a brave person and that I shouldn’t forget that.

But—like talking to my husband—it hadn’t ever gotten easier, though in the years since the first search, I had learned how to make myself feel better afterward, had learned how, if I covered myself so that the air I breathed in was the same air I breathed out, so that, soon, the entire space I made for myself was filled with my hot, familiar breath, I would eventually be able to convince myself that I was someplace else, in a plastic pod tumbling through space.

That night, though, I couldn’t make the plastic pod feel real. I realized then I wanted something to hold, something warm and dense and full of its own breath, but I couldn’t think of what that might be. I tried to think of what Grandfather might say if he were here, but I couldn’t imagine what that might be, either. So instead I did my math sums in my head, whispering into the sheets, and eventually I was able to calm myself and fall asleep.

The morning after the search, I woke later than usual, but I still wasn’t going to be late: I typically get up in time to see my husband off to work, but today I missed him.

My husband’s shuttle leaves earlier than mine, because he works in a higher-security location than I do, and every employee has to be scanned and examined before entering the site. Every day before he goes, he makes us both breakfast, and today, he had left mine in the oven: a stone bowl of oatmeal, with what I knew were the last of the almonds, toasted in a pan and crushed on top. As I ate my breakfast, I looked out the window in our main room through the metal grate. To the right you could see the remains of what had been a wooden deck attached to a unit in the building next to ours. I had liked looking at that deck, watching its pots of herbs and tomatoes grow taller and thicker and greener, and after it became illegal to grow food privately, the people in the unit had decorated the patio with fake plants made of plastic and paper they’d somehow painted green, and it had reminded me of Grandfather, how, even after things got bad, he had found paper to cut into shapes for us—flowers, snowflakes, animals he had seen when he was a child—and had stuck them to
our window with a blob of porridge. The people in the building next door had eventually covered their plants with a piece of blue tarp they’d gotten somewhere, and as I ate breakfast, I would stand at the window and look at the tarp and imagine the fake plants and feel calm.