To Paradise (54 page)

“Do you want to play?” Grandfather whispered to me.

“Oh, no,” I said. “I don’t know how.”

“You can learn,” Grandfather said. But I knew I couldn’t.

As we left the building that afternoon, Grandfather said, “You
can come back, little cat. All you do is sign up for the team, and ask someone to play with you.” I was quiet then, because sometimes Grandfather said these things as if they were easy for me to do, and I became frustrated because he didn’t understand, he didn’t understand that I couldn’t do the things he thought I could, and I felt myself growing itchy and angry. But then he noticed, and he stopped walking and turned to me and put his hands on my shoulders. “You
know
how to do this, little cat,” he said, quietly. “You remember how we practiced talking to other people? You remember how we practiced having a conversation?”

“Yes,” I said.

“I know it’s not easy for you,” said Grandfather. “I know it’s not. But I wouldn’t be encouraging you to do this if I didn’t believe, with everything I am, that you were capable of it.”

And so up I went to the Recreation Center, if only because I wanted to be able to tell Grandfather—who was still alive then—that I had. But once I was there, I wasn’t even able to make myself walk inside. Instead, I sat on a ledge outside the building and watched other people walk in, in twos or alone. Then I noticed that there was a window on the other side of the front door, and that if I stood at the correct angle, I could watch the people inside playing ping-pong, and it was nice, because it was almost like I was one of them, but I didn’t have to actually speak to anyone.

That was how I spent my first month or so of free nights—standing outside the center and watching ping-pong through the window. Sometimes the matches were particularly exciting, and I would walk home quickly, thinking that I might tell my husband about one game or another I’d seen, even though he never asked what I did on my free nights, and never told me what he did on his free nights, either. Sometimes I imagined that I had made a new friend: the woman with the short curly hair and dimples who slammed the ball across the table, lunging back on her left heel as she did; the man who wore a red tracksuit printed with white clouds. Sometimes I imagined that I joined them at the hydration bar afterward, and I thought about what it would be like to tell my husband that I wanted to use one of the bonus liquid coupons so I could have a drink with
my friends, and how he would say that of course I could, and maybe he would come and watch me play a game someday.

But after a few months of this, I stopped going to the center. For one thing, Grandfather was dead, and I didn’t feel like trying any longer. For another, it was getting hotter, and I was feeling bad. And so, the next Tuesday, my next free night, I told my husband that I was tired, that I was going to stay indoors instead.

“Are you ill?” he asked me. He was washing the dinner dishes.

“No,” I said. “I just don’t feel like going out.”

“Do you want to go out on Wednesday instead?” he asked.

“No,” I said. “This will be my free night. I just won’t go out.”

“Oh,” he said. He placed the last plate on the drying rack. Then he asked, “Which would you like, the main room or the bedroom?”

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“Well,” he said, “I want to give you your privacy. So which would you rather have, the main room or the bedroom?”

“Oh,” I said. “The bedroom, I guess.” I thought about this. Was this the right answer? “Is that all right?”

“Of course,” he said. “It’s your night.”

And so I went to the bedroom, where I changed into my nightclothes and then lay down on the bed. After a few minutes, there was a soft knock on the door, and when my husband entered, he was carrying the radio. “I thought you might want to listen to some music,” he said, and plugged it in and turned it on and left, closing the door behind him.

I lay there listening to the radio for a long while. Finally, I went to use the toilet and brush my teeth and clean my face and body with hygiene wipes, and as I did, I looked into the main room, where my husband was sitting on the sofa, reading. He has a higher clearance than I do and so is allowed to read certain books, those that relate to his field, which he borrows from work and then returns. This one was a book about the care and cultivation of tropical water-grown edible plants, and even though I am not interested in tropical water-grown edible plants, I was suddenly jealous of him. My husband could sit and read for hours, and I looked at him and wished for Grandfather, who would know just what to say to make me feel
better. But instead, I got ready for bed and returned to our room, and finally, after what felt like many hours, I heard my husband sigh and turn off the light in the main room, and go to the bathroom himself, and then, finally, come quietly into our room, where he changed clothes as well and got into his bed.

Ever since then, I have spent my free nights indoors. Every once in a while, if I’m feeling very restless, I’ll take a walk: maybe around the Square, maybe up to the center. But usually, I go to our bedroom, where my husband has always set up the radio. I change, I turn off the lights, I get into bed, and I wait: for the sound of him sitting down on the sofa, for the sound of him cracking his knuckles as he reads, and, at last, for the sound of him shutting the book and switching off the lamp. Every Thursday for the past six and a half years, I have waited for my husband to come home from his free night, which he begins directly after work. Every Tuesday, I lie in my bed in our bedroom, waiting for my free night to be over, waiting for my husband to come back to me, even if he doesn’t say a word.

I had gotten the idea about following my husband on his free night from the lab. This happened on a Friday. It was January 1, 2094, and Dr. Wesley, who was interested in Western history and only celebrated the new year according to the traditional calendar, assembled everyone who worked in the lab for a glass of grape juice. Everyone got some, even me. “Six more years until the twenty-second century!” he announced, and we all clapped. The juice was a dark, cloudy purple, and so sweet that it made my throat hurt. But it had been a long time since I had had juice, and I wondered if this was something that was interesting enough to tell my husband, because it was at least different from what usually happened at work, yet also not classified material.

On my way back to my part of the lab, I took a break and went to the bathroom, and as I sat there on the toilet, I heard two people come in and begin washing their hands. They were women, neither
of whose voices I recognized, and they were both Ph.D.s, I think, because they sounded young and they were talking about an article in a journal they had both read.

They discussed the article—which was about some kind of new antiviral that was being engineered out of a real virus whose genetics had somehow been altered—and then one of them said, very fast, “So, I thought Percy was cheating on me.”

“Really?” asked the other. “Why?”

“Well,” said the first, “he’d been acting really strange, you know? Late coming home from work, and
really
forgetful—he even forgot to meet me for my six-month checkup. And he started leaving the house really early in the morning, saying he had a lot of work and had to get it done, and then he started acting strangely around my father when we went over to my parents’ for Saturday lunch, kind of avoiding his gaze. So one day, after he left for work, I waited a few minutes, and then I followed him.”

“Belle! You didn’t!”

“I did! I was rehearsing what I was going to say to him, and what I’d say to my parents, and what I was going to do, when I realized that he was going into the Housing Development Unit. And I called out his name, and he was really surprised. But then he told me that he was trying to get us a better unit in a better part of the zone for when the baby comes, and that he and my father had been working on it together as a surprise.”

“Oh, Belle—that’s amazing!”

“I know. I felt so guilty for hating him, even if it was just a few weeks.”

She laughed, and so did her friend. “Well, Percy can take a little hatred if it’s from you,” said the second woman.

“Yes,” the first woman said, and laughed again. “He knows who’s in charge.”

They left the bathroom, and then I flushed and washed my hands and left too, and as I did, I passed the two women, still talking, but now in the hallway. They were both very pretty, and they both had shiny dark hair that they wore in neat buns at the base of their skulls,
and little gold earrings shaped like planets. They were both wearing lab coats, of course, but beneath their hems I could see they were wearing colorful silk skirts and leather shoes with low heels. One of them, the prettier one, was pregnant; as she spoke to her friend, she rubbed her stomach in a slow circular movement.

I went back to my area, where I had a new batch of pinkies to move into individual petri dishes, which I had to fill with saline. As I worked, I thought of those notes my husband had kept. And then I thought of the woman in the bathroom, who had thought her husband might be seeing someone else, someone who wasn’t her. But her husband hadn’t been doing anything wrong after all: He had only been trying to find her a bigger unit to live in, because she was pretty and educated and pregnant, and there would be no reason to find someone else, someone better, because there wouldn’t be someone better. I could tell by her hair that she must live in Zone Fourteen, and if she was a Ph.D., it meant that her parents probably lived in Zone Fourteen too, and had paid for her to go to school, and then paid more for her to live nearby. I found myself thinking of what they all ate for Saturday lunch—I had once heard that in Zone Fourteen there were stores where you could buy any kind of meat that you wanted, and as much as you wanted. You could have ice cream every day there, or chocolate or juice or even wine. You could buy candy or fruit or milk. You could go home and take a shower every day. I was thinking about this, and growing more and more agitated, when I dropped one of the pinkies. It was so tender that it turned into a smear of jelly upon impact, and I let out a cry: I was so careful. I never dropped pinkies. But now I had.

I thought about this woman who lived in Zone Fourteen throughout the weekend and Monday, and by the time it was Tuesday, and therefore my free night, I was thinking about her still. After dinner, I went straight to the bedroom instead of helping my husband with the dishes as I normally did just to use up some time. There I lay on the bed and rocked myself back and forth and talked to Grandfather, asking him what I should do. I imagined him saying, “It’s okay, little cat,” and “I love you, little cat,” but I couldn’t think of what else he
might say. If Grandfather had been alive, he would have helped me figure out what I was upset about, and how to fix it. But Grandfather was not alive, and so I had to figure it out on my own.

Then I remembered what the woman in the bathroom had said, that she had followed her husband. Unlike her husband, my husband didn’t leave especially early in the morning. He didn’t come home late at night. I always knew where he was—except for Thursdays.

And that was when I decided that, on my husband’s next free night, I was going to follow him, too.

The next day, I realized that my plan had a flaw: My husband never came home from work on his free nights, so either I would have to find a way to follow him from the Farm or I would have to find a way to make him come home first. I decided the second option was more feasible. I thought and thought about what I was going to do, and then I came up with a solution.

That night, at dinner, I said, “I think there’s a leak in the showerhead.”

He didn’t look up from his plate. “I haven’t heard anything,” he said.

“But there’s some water pooled in the bottom of the tub,” I said.

He looked up then and pushed his chair back and went to the bathroom, where I had emptied half a cup of water into the tub; there would be just enough left to appear as if the spout had developed a leak. I heard him open the curtain and then turn the taps on and off, quickly.

As he did this, I remained in my seat, sitting straight, as Grandfather had taught me, waiting for him to return. When he did, he was frowning. “When did you notice this?” he asked me.

“Tonight, when I came home,” I said. He sighed. “I asked the zone super to tell someone from building management to come inspect it,” I said, and he looked at me. “But they can’t come until tomorrow at 19:00,” I continued, and he looked at the wall and sighed again, a big sigh, one that made his shoulders rise and fall. “I know it’s your
free night,” I said, and I must have sounded scared, because my husband looked at me and gave me a small smile.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll come home first, to be with you, and I’ll go to my free night after.”

“Okay,” I said. “Thank you.” Later, I would realize that he could have just said that he would take his free night on Friday instead. And then, later still, I would realize that the fact that he wanted to take his free night as usual meant that someone—the someone who’d sent those notes—was probably waiting for him on Thursdays, and that now he would have to find a way to tell this person that he would be late. But I knew that he would wait until the inspector came—our water consumption was monitored every month, and if you went over your allotment, you had to pay a penalty and it would be noted on your civilian records.

That Thursday, I told Dr. Morgan that I had a leak in my shower and I needed permission to go home early, which was granted. Then I took the 17:00 shuttle home, so by the time my husband got home—at 18:57, as he always does—I was making dinner. “Am I too late?” he asked.

“No,” I said, “he hasn’t come.”

I had made an extra nutria patty, just in case, and extra yams and spinach as well, but when I asked my husband if he wanted to eat something as we waited, he shook his head. “But you should eat it now, while it’s hot,” he said. Nutria meat congealed unless you ate it right off the stove.

So I did, sitting down at the table and moving the pieces around with my fork. My husband sat at the table, too, and opened his book. “Are you sure you’re not hungry?” I asked, but he shook his head again. “No, thank you,” he said.