To Paradise (48 page)

I went back to the hallway and pulled out the box, because I wanted to look at the pictures of Grandfather. But as I was removing the envelope with our birth certificates, the papers inside slid out and fell to the floor, and so did another envelope, one I hadn’t seen before. It wasn’t an old envelope, but it had clearly been used before, and I opened it, and inside were six pieces of paper. Actually, they weren’t so much pieces as scraps, and they had been torn from different sheets: some were lined and others were obviously ripped from books, and none of them were dated or addressed to anyone or signed, and all of them had very little written on them, just a few words each, in black ink, and in a hurried, jagged hand. “I miss you,” one read. Another read, “22:00, the usual spot.” “20:00,” read
the third. The fourth and fifth said the same thing: “Am thinking of you.” And then there was the sixth, which contained only one word: “Someday.”

For a while, I sat there, looking at the pieces of paper, and wondering where they came from. But I knew they must have been my husband’s, because they weren’t mine, and no one else ever entered the apartment. Someone had written these notes to my husband, and he had kept them. I knew I wasn’t supposed to ever see them, because they had been stored with our papers, and it was my husband, not me, who took care of our paperwork, who renewed our citizenship certificates every year.

It would be many hours still until my husband came home, and yet, after I finished reading the notes, I hurriedly shoved them back into the envelope and then replaced the box without even looking at the pictures I’d wanted to see, as if at any moment I might hear my husband’s knock at the door. And then I went to our bedroom and lay down on my bed fully clothed, and stared at the ceiling.

“Grandfather,” I said.

But of course there was no one to answer me.

I lay there, trying to think of something other than those torn pieces of paper with their statements and instructions, so complicated because they were so simple: I thought of the pinkies, Grandfather, the things I’d seen at the Square. But the entire time, all I could hear was the word on that final note, which someone had written to my husband, and which he had kept.
Someday,
someone had written, and he had saved it, and the left-hand edge of the paper was softer than the other, as if it had been rubbed between someone’s fingers, as if it had been held many times as it was read again and again and again.
Someday, someday, someday.

Dear Peter,
September 1, 2043

Thanks so much for the flowers, which arrived yesterday and which you really didn’t need to send. But they’re gorgeous, and we love them—thank you.

Speaking of flowers, the florist messed up. I told them we wanted white or purple Miltonias, and what did they order? Bunches and bunches of chartreuse Cattleyas. The shop looked like it’d been hosed down in bile. How do things like this happen? As you know, I don’t care that much, but Nathaniel is apoplectic, which means I must project sympathetic apoplexy if I’m to keep the household calm: peace over chaos, and all that.

Less than forty-eight hours until the big day. I still can’t believe I agreed to this. Nor can I believe you’re not going to be here with us. I forgive you, of course, but it won’t be the same without you.

Nathaniel and the baby send their love. And so do I.

Dear P,
September 5, 2043

Well, I’m still alive. Barely. But alive.

Where to start? It rained the night before, and it never rains on the north side of the island. All night I had to listen to Nathaniel fretting—What about the mud? What if the rain didn’t stop? (We
didn’t have a contingency plan.) What about the pit we’d dug for the pig? What if it was too damp for the kiawe branches to dry out? Should we ask John and Matthew to move them indoors?—until I finally had to tell him to shut up. When that didn’t work, I made him take a pill, and he eventually fell asleep.

Naturally, once he did, I couldn’t sleep myself, and at around three in the morning, I went outside to find that the rain had stopped and the moon was huge and silver and that the few shreds of clouds that remained were sailing north out to sea, and that John and Matthew had moved the cords of wood under the porch and had covered the pit with monstera leaves, and that everything smelled sweet and green, and I felt—not for the first time, and not the last—a sense of what can only be called wonder: that I was getting to live in this beautiful place, at least for a little while longer, and that I was having a wedding.

And then, thirteen hours later, Nathaniel and I got married. I’ll spare you (most of) the details, but will say that I was, again, unexpectedly moved, and that Nathaniel cried (obviously), and that I cried as well. We had it on John and Matthew’s back lawn, and Matthew had for unknown reasons built a chuppah-like structure from bamboo. After we’d said our vows, Nathaniel had the idea of jumping over the fence and running into the ocean, and so that’s what we did.

So that was it, and now we’re back to business as usual—the house is still in a terrific state of disarray, and the movers are coming in less than two weeks, and I haven’t even begun sorting through the lab
and
I have to finish our review of my final paper of my life as a postdoc: The honeymoon (such as it’ll be, with the baby in tow) will have to wait. By the way, he was very happy with your presents, and thank you for sending them—they were ingenious, and the perfect way to reassure him that, although it might’ve been the only day in his short life that wasn’t meant to be all about him, it actually really was. (Before the wedding, he had a tantrum, and when Nathaniel and I, fluttering about him like distressed mother crows, begged him to calm down, he shouted: “And stop calling me ‘the baby’! I’m
almost
four
!” Well, we started laughing, and that made him even angrier.)

Now off to oversee his thank-you email to his uncle P.

Love, Me

P.S. I almost forgot: the Mayfair incident. Horrific. They keep playing clips of it on the news, again and again. Wasn’t that café just down the street from that bar we went to a few years ago? I imagine it’s keeping you very busy. Not that that’s the worst part of it, of course. But still.

Dear Petey,
September 17, 2043

We made it. Phew. Nathaniel in tears, the baby too, and I’m not far behind. More soon. Love, Me

My dear Peter,
October 1, 2043

Sorry I’ve been such a bad correspondent: Every day for the past three-odd weeks I’ve thought, I must write Petey a long message of all the things that have happened today, and every night, all I manage to do is our standard How are you, miss you, have you read such-and-such article. So, my apologies.

This email is in two parts: the professional and the personal. One will be slightly more interesting than the other. Guess which.

We are now settled into Florence House East, which is an old high-rise just west of the FDR. It’s almost eighty years old, but, like a lot of buildings constructed in the mid-sixties, feels both newer and older, misplaced in time and also not quite of it. Many of the postdocs and almost all of the principal investigators (a.k.a. the lab chiefs) live on campus in one of these units. Apparently, our arrival
has caused some controversy because our unit is (1) on a high floor (twentieth); (2) a corner apartment; (3) faces southeast (best light, etc.); and (4) has three real bedrooms (as opposed to most of the other three-bedroom units, which are conversions of large two-bedroom units, which means the third bedroom doesn’t have a window). According to one of our neighbors, there was supposed to be a lottery based on family size, tenure, and—as with everything here—volume of publication, but instead the place was assigned to us, which gives everyone yet another reason to preemptively hate me. Oh well. Story of my life.

The apartment is large and well-situated (I’d be bitter, too), with views of the old smallpox hospital on Roosevelt Island that they’re now preparing to use as one of the new refugee camps. If the skies are clear, you can see all the way up the spine of the island, and when it’s sunny, the river, which is normally brown and creamy, instead glitters and appears almost pretty. Yesterday we saw a tiny police boat chugging north, which, I was later told by the same neighbor, is a frequent occurrence: Apparently, people kill themselves by jumping off the bridge and float downstream, and the police have to drag them out. I like it when it’s overcast and the sky turns metallic—yesterday it stormed, and we watched the lightning flicker over the water, and the baby jumped up and down and cheered.

Speaking of the baby, he’s already enrolled in the on-campus school (subsidized, though still not cheap), which he can attend through eighth grade, after which—barring disaster, expulsion, or failure—he’ll go directly into Hunter for high school (free!). The school is open to children whose parents are either professors or postdocs at RU or are fellows or post-fellows at Memorial Sloan Kettering, which is one block west and one block south, which means the student body showcases a vast range of racial diversity, from Indian to Japanese, and all the ethnicities in between. There’s a Soviet-aesthetic cement bridge that connects the apartment building to the campus’s old hospital-wing building, and from there you can descend to a series of tunnels that connect the entire campus, which people seem to prefer to, you know, the outdoors, and emerge in the basement of the Child and Family Center. So far, there seems
to be little evidence of actual education—as far as I can tell, they spend most of their days going to the zoo and being read to—but Nathaniel claims this is what school is these days, and I defer to him on these subjects. Anyway, the baby seems happy, and I don’t know what else I can reasonably expect from a four-year-old.

I only wish I could say the same for Nathaniel, who’s pretty clearly miserable but also pretty clearly determined not to say anything, which I love him for but which also makes me a little heartsick. There was never any doubt that I’d take this job, but we both knew that there was unlikely to be a curatorial post in New York for an expert in 19th-century Hawaiian textiles and textile art, and this unfortunately has proven to be true. I think I told you that he’d been in touch with a friend from grad school who’s a researcher in the Oceania department at the Met and thought there might be a way to get him in there, even as a part-timer, but it seems it’s not to be, and that was really his best lead. We’d been talking, on and off, for the past year about what else he might do and how he might retrain, but neither of us allowed ourselves to engage as deeply in those conversations as we ought to have: on his part, I think, out of fear, and on mine, because I knew that any discussion would inevitably end up spotlighting how selfish this decision was, how our moving here deprives him of a livelihood and a professional identity. So, every morning, I leave early for the lab, and he drops off the baby and spends the rest of his day trying to decorate the apartment, which I know depresses him: the low ceilings, the hollow doors, the mauve bathroom tiles.

The worst thing is how his unhappiness makes me self-conscious about how much I discuss the lab with him, because I don’t want to remind him of what I have and he doesn’t. For the first time, we’re keeping secrets from each other, and they’re more difficult because they’re so quotidian, the stuff we’d discuss when we were doing the dishes after the baby had been put to bed, or in the morning as Nathaniel made the baby his lunch. And there are so many of them! For example: I made my first hire the day after we arrived, a lab tech who’d been at Harvard and moved here because her husband’s a jazz musician and thought there’d be better opportunities in New York;
she’s probably in her early forties and worked in mouse immunology for ten years. This week I hired my second postdoc, a very smart guy from Stanford named Wesley. So I have funding for three more postdocs and four to five grad students, who cycle in and out of labs on twelve-week rotations. Grad students normally wait until a lab’s up and running until they decide whether they want to join or not—it’s a little like rushing a fraternity, I’m sorry to say—but I’m told that, given my “reputation,” I may be able to get some earlier. Promise I’m not trying to brag here. Just repeating what I’ve been told.

My lab (
my
lab!) is in one of the newer buildings, Larsson, part of which literally forms a bridge between Manhattan and a man-made landmass adjacent to Roosevelt Island. From my office, I can look over a slightly different view than the one I see from home: the water, the highway, the cement bridge, and Florence Houses East and West. All the labs here have official titles; mine is the Laboratory of Emerging and Incipient Infections. But when one of the service guys came early this morning to deliver my supply of Erlenmeyers, he asked, “You the Department of New Diseases?” I laughed, and he said, “What? Did I get it wrong?” and I told him he’d gotten it just right.

Sorry this has been so self-absorbed, but you
did
ask for it. Next week we have our final interviews with Immigration, after which we will be, officially, full-time, legal, permanent United States residents (eek!). Tell me what’s going on with you, and work, and that weirdo you’re seeing, and everything else. In the meantime, sending you love from the Department of New Diseases.

Your loving old pal, C.

Dear Peter,
April 11, 2045

Thanks for your most recent note; it cheered me up a bit, which is a near-impossible feat these days.

I wonder, given how much you already know about these things (not to mention what’s happening in your part of the world), whether you’ve already heard about the cutbacks, which are going to be rolled out before the end of summer and will supposedly affect every federal scientific agency in the country. The official line is that the money is being redirected toward the war, and in a way it is, but everyone in the community knows that the money is actually going to Colorado, where rumor has it they’re working on a new bioweapon of some kind. I’m lucky insofar as RU isn’t completely dependent on government grants, but it is still
largely
dependent on them, and I’m worried my own work is going to be affected.

Then there’s the fact of the war itself, which is really hampering me in other ways. The Chinese are, as you know, responsible for the most advanced and most diverse infectious-disease scholarship in the world, and the new sanctions mean we can’t communicate with them anymore—not officially, at least. There’s been months of back-channeling between us and NIH and the CDC and Congress ever since the sanctions were proposed last year, but it hasn’t seemed to make a difference. Again, my work isn’t as affected as some of my colleagues’, but all that means is that it someday
will
be as affected, and so far, there’s nothing to be done.

It seems particularly insane that they should be doing this given the South Carolina incident—I don’t know if word made it to you, but in early February, there was an outbreak of an unknown virus just outside the town of Moncks Corner, in the southeast of the state, which is also home to a landscaped blackwater swamp called Cypress Gardens. A local woman—forties, otherwise healthy—became ill with what seemed to be a flu after being bitten by a mosquito while kayaking through the swamp. Forty-eight hours after diagnosis, she began seizing; seventy-two hours after, she was paralyzed; ninety-six hours after, she was dead. By this time, however, the woman’s son and their next-door neighbor, an elderly man, were displaying similar symptoms. It sounds, I know, a little like Eastern equine encephalitis, but it isn’t; rather, it’s a novel alphavirus. It was only good, weird, rare fortune that the town mayor had been, of all things, a missionary in East Africa during their ’37
chikungunya outbreak and suspected that something might be amiss; he contacted the CDC, and they came and locked down the town. The old man died, but the son lived. Of course, the CDC is treating this as a major triumph: Not only did the disease not spread but they also kept it out of the national news. They kept it out of the news altogether, actually—they in fact urged the president to order the mayor not to speak of it to any media, much less his citizens, which he did, and it’s rumored that this will lead next to an executive order that prohibits media outlets from publishing non-preapproved information about future outbreaks in the interest of national safety. The thinking is that panic would lead to people trying to flee the area, and early and aggressive containment is the only thing that halts a fast-spreading illness. I see the wisdom of this, of course, but I also think it’s a dangerous solution. Information has a way of finding its way around bans, and once the population discovers they’ve been lied to, or at the very least kept ignorant, it’ll only lead to greater mistrust and suspicion, and, therefore, even greater panic. But the government will do anything to delay confronting and correcting the actual problem: Americans’ scientific illiteracy.