To Paradise (49 page)

Anyway, as I was saying—
this
is the context in which our funding is being cut? Can they really be so shortsighted as to think that this’ll be the last outbreak? There seems to be this unvoiced but persistent belief that illness is something that happens
over there,
and that, just because we have money and resources and a sophisticated research infrastructure, we’ll be able to halt any future disease in its tracks before it “gets too bad.” But what is “too bad,” and how do they propose we do this with
less
intelligence and
fewer
resources? I’m not one of those scientists—not like Wesley, bless his shriveled heart—who see apocalypse around every corner, who predict with something near glee the imminence of “the big one.” But I
do
think it’s terrifically foolish to react to an outbreak by scaling back, as if, by starving us of a solution, we might also be starving the problem from even beginning. We’ve all become so inured to these outbreaks that we forget that there’s no such thing as a minor virus; there are just those whose progress is halted early, and those that aren’t. We’ve been lucky so far. But we won’t be lucky forever.

So that’s work. Home has been less than great as well. Nathaniel has finally found a job, and just in time—things have been very strained between us. Being in an apartment he hates all day has not been conducive to making new friends, and though, as you know, he’s been trying to keep himself busy, volunteering at the baby’s school and also at a homeless shelter, where he goes every Thursday morning to prepare meals, he feels (as he told me) “useless and meaningless.” I mean, he
knew
he wasn’t going to find work in his field, but actually accepting that, instead of just
saying
he accepts that, has taken the better part of two years. So now he’s teaching art to fourth- and fifth-graders at a small, expensive, low-rated school in Brooklyn, one that attracts parents with dim kids and lots of money. Nathaniel has never actually taught before, and the commute is a hassle, but he seems much happier. He’s a last-minute replacement for a woman who was diagnosed with third-stage uterine cancer and quit midterm.

One of the unforeseen consequences of this move—me being at work and satisfied, Nathaniel being at home and resentful—is that he and the baby have constructed a life that feels separate from me and mine. Now, Nathaniel was always the baby’s primary parent anyway, but something seems to have shifted in the past year or so, and I find myself being frequently reminded that they have developed a relationship that in certain ways excludes me, that I am in certain ways ignorant of their daily lives. These reminders are manifested in tiny moments: a shared joke between them at the dinner table which I can’t understand and which they sometimes don’t bother to illuminate (and I, resentful myself, don’t inquire about and feel ashamed about later); a guilt-driven purchase of a gift for the baby, an electric-purple tin robot, only to learn upon giving it to him that purple is no longer his favorite color, that his favorite color is red, information delivered in an impatient, disappointed tone that wounds me more than it ought to.

Then there was last night, when I was putting the baby to bed, and he announced, suddenly, “Mama’s in heaven.”

Heaven? I thought. From where did he learn that? And “mama”? We had never referred to Nathaniel’s cousin as the baby’s mama—we
had always been truthful with him: Nathaniel’s distant cousin had carried him, but he was ours alone, by our choice. And when she died, we had been exacting in our language:
Daddy’s cousin, the one who helped make you, died last night.
But I suppose he took my silence for confusion of another sort, because he added, in a clarifying way, “She died. So she’s in heaven.”

For a moment, I was stymied. “Well, yes, she is dead,” I said, weakly, thinking that I would ask Nathaniel to investigate where this talk of heaven was coming from (surely not the school?), and then couldn’t think of anything else to say that wouldn’t necessitate a much, much longer conversation.

He was silent for a moment, and I wondered, as I have many times, what happens in a child’s brain, how they are able to hold two or three ideas, completely contradictory or completely different, in their consciousness at once, and how to them these are all not only related but intertwined, and dependent on one another. When do we stop being able to think like that?

Then he said, “Daddy and Mama made me.”

“Yes,” I said, at last. “Daddy and your mama made you.”

He was quiet again. “But now I’m alone,” he said, softly, and I felt something in me weaken.

“You’re not alone,” I said. “You have Daddy, and you have me, and we love you very much.”

He thought about this. “Are you going to die?”

“Yes,” I told him, “but not for a very long time.”

“How long?” he asked.

“Too long,” I said. “So long that I can’t even count that high.”

He finally smiled. “Good night,” he said.

“Good night,” I told him. I kissed him. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

I got up to turn off the light (noticing, as I left, the purple robot kicked into a corner, facedown, which made my throat hurt with sorrow, as if the stupid thing had feelings and wasn’t just something I’d picked up from the toy store ten minutes before it closed for the night), and was about to march over to our bedroom and interrogate Nathaniel, when I was suddenly overcome with exhaustion.
Here I was, a man with my own lab and my own family and my own covetable apartment, and everything was good, or good enough, and yet I had the sensation at that moment that I was atop a large piece of white plastic tubing, and the tube was rolling down a dirt path, and I was surfing it, almost, my feet constantly moving, trying to stay upright. That was what life felt like. So I went to our room, but I didn’t say anything about the conversation with the baby, and instead Nathaniel and I had sex for the first time in a long time, and he went to sleep, and eventually I did as well.

So. That’s what’s going on with me. I’m sorry this has been so self-pitying, and so self-absorbed. I know how hard you’ve been working, and I can only imagine the kinds of problems you’ve been dealing with. I know this won’t mean much, but whenever my colleagues are complaining about the bureaucrats, I think of you, and how, as much as I may disagree with some of your brethren’s conclusions, I know too there are some of you who are endeavoring to make the best decisions, the right decisions, and I know you’re one of those people. If only you could be the right kind of bureaucrat here in America—I’d feel a lot better for all of us if you were.

With love, C.

Dear dear Petey,
November 22, 2045

Well, it happened. I know you’ve been following the news, and I know you know we were at risk for a big federal cut, but as you also know, I didn’t
actually
expect it to happen. Nathaniel says I was being naïve, but was I really? Let’s see: Nation barely stable from the flu of ’35. At least six mini-outbreaks within North America in the past five years. Given these circumstances, what seems like the dumbest thing to do? Oh, I know, cut funding to one of the premier biological sciences centers in the country! The problem, one of the other lab chiefs told me, is that although
we
all know how closely we came to disaster in ’35, the rest of the country does not. And we can’t tell
them now, because no one would care. (And we couldn’t have told them
then,
because they’d all have panicked. It occurs to me, and not for the first time, that an increasingly and dismayingly large part of our jobs is spent debating how and when and if we should reveal findings that took years and millions of dollars to discover.) The point is that if we complain, no one will believe us. In other words, we’re getting penalized for our competence.

Not that I’m supposed to say that to anyone outside the university. This is according to both the institute’s head of communications, who gathered us in an auditorium to lecture us shortly before the news broke, and this is especially according to Nathaniel, as we sat in traffic last night on our way to dinner. Which is what this message is really about.

I haven’t mentioned this for reasons I’ll try to articulate later—maybe next week, when we see each other—but Nathaniel has made new friends. Their names are Norris and Aubrey (Aubrey!), and they’re a pair of ancient and very rich queens whom Nathaniel met a few months ago when he was asked by an auction house to authenticate a private collection of what were allegedly 18th-century, allegedly Hawaiian kapa bedcovers that had been no doubt stolen from who knows whom. Anyway, Nathaniel examined them, and authenticated both their origin and the date—he thinks they’re early 1700s, which would make them precontact and therefore extremely rare.

The point is that the auction house already had an interested buyer, a guy named Aubrey Cooke, who collects precontact Polynesian and Micronesian artifacts. So the house set up a meeting with him and Nathaniel, and the two of them fell in instant love, and now Nathaniel has a freelance consulting gig cataloguing Aubrey Cooke’s collection, which is, according to Nathaniel, “diverse and spectacular.”

I feel several ways about this. The first is relief. Ever since we moved here, I’ve been carrying within me a hollowness, an ache, over what I’ve done to Nathaniel and, even, the baby. They were so happy in Honolulu and, except for the fact of my own ambition, I was, too. But despite my frustrations, we belonged there. We all had work—me being a scientist at a small but respected lab; Nathaniel
being a curator at a small but respected museum; the baby being a baby at a small but respected kindergarten—and I made us leave because I wanted to be at Rockefeller. I can’t pretend, as I sometimes do, that it was because I wanted to save lives or I thought I’d do more good here: it’s because I wanted to be at a prestigious facility, and because I love the hunt. I spend my days dreading a new outbreak, but I yearn for one as well. I want to be here when the next big pandemic happens. I want to be the one to discover it, I want to be the one to solve it, I want to be the one who looks up from his desk and sees the sky outside a dense black and realizes that he doesn’t know how long he’s been at the lab, that he’s been so involved, so immersed, that the fact of a day has ceased to hold any significance. I know all this, and I feel guilty about it, and yet it doesn’t stop me from wanting it. And so when Nathaniel came to me after that first meeting at the auction house, so happy—
so
happy—I felt exonerated. I realized how long it had been since I had seen him so excited, and how, always, I had been hoping for this, had been hoping that he would, as I kept telling him he would, find his place, find some meaning in this city and country he quietly hates. And then, when he came back joyful from meeting Aubrey Cooke, I was happy, too. He’s made a few friends here, but not many, and most of them are parents of other kids at the baby’s school.

That joy, however, soon shaded into something else, and although I’m ashamed to admit it, that something else is of course jealousy. Every Saturday for the past two-odd months, Nathaniel has taken the subway down to Washington Square, where Aubrey has an actual house on the park, and I stay home with the baby (the implicit message is that it’s my turn to stay home with him after two years of spending every weekend at the lab while Nathaniel watched him). And when Nathaniel returns in the late afternoon, he’s aglow. He picks up the baby, swings him around, and starts making dinner, and as he cooks, he tells me about Aubrey and his husband, Norris. How incredibly deep and rich Aubrey’s knowledge of 18th- and 19th-century Oceania is. How gorgeous Aubrey’s house is. How Aubrey made his money as a manager of a fund of funds. How Aubrey and Norris met. How and where Aubrey and Norris like to vacation.
How Aubrey and Norris have invited us “out east” to Frog’s Pond Way, their “estate” in Water Mill. What Norris said about X book or Y play. What Aubrey thinks about the government. The brilliant idea Aubrey and Norris had about the refugee camps. What we
must
see/do/visit/eat/try, according to Aubrey and Norris.

To all of this, I say, “Wow,” or “Wow, babe, that’s great.” I really try to sound sincere, but frankly, it wouldn’t matter if I couldn’t, because Nathaniel is barely listening to me. My life outside the lab has always consisted of two fixed poles: him and the baby. But now
his
life is (not in order of importance) me, the baby, and Aubrey and Norris. Every Saturday he springs out of bed, gets dressed for the gym (he’s been going more since meeting Aubrey and Norris), works out, comes home to shower and feed the baby, kisses us both, and leaves for his day downtown. I want to be clear that it’s not that I think he’s in love with them, or that he’s fucking them—you know neither of us is weird about that. It’s that in his fascination with them, I hear a repudiation of me. Not us, not me
and
the baby, but
me
.

I had always thought that Nathaniel was content with our life. He’s never been someone who’s been seduced by money or ease or glamour. But after an evening spent listening to detailed descriptions of Aubrey and Norris’s beautiful house, and their beautiful things, I lie awake staring at our low ceilings, at our flapping slatted plastic blinds, at the track light with its blackened bulb that I’ve been promising Nathaniel I’ll change for the past six months, and wondering whether my accomplishments, and my position, have really given him what he wants and deserves. He has always been happy for me, and proud of me, but have I helped make a good life for him? Would he not leave me for another?

And so, last night. When the dinner invitation came, as I knew it would, I at first had the baby for an excuse. He’s been suffering from minor respiratory issues all fall: The days are hot and then cool and then hot again, and the crocuses, which last year bloomed in October, started shooting in September, followed by the plum trees a month later, so he’s been coughing and sneezing for weeks. But then he began to get better, and less physically miserable, plus Nathaniel
found a babysitter he likes, and I was out of arguments. So last night we got in a taxi and went downtown to Aubrey and Norris’s.