To Paradise (60 page)

The only question now is what, if anything, can be done in terms of containment. I fear it’s not going to be much. I’ll keep you posted
on whatever I hear, and consider this information—such as it is—not for attribution.

Love, C.

Hi dear P,
October 11, 2055

This morning I had my first MuFIDRT meeting. What does MuFIDRT stand for? I’m so glad you asked. It means: Multi-Field Infectious Disease Response Team. MuFIDRT. Written out, it looks like it might be either a Victorian-era simulacrum of a woman’s genitals or a science-fiction villain’s lair. It’s pronounced Moofid-RT, if that helps, and it was apparently the best acronym a group of civil servants could come up with. (No offense.)

The goal is to try to formulate (well, reformulate) a global, cross-disciplinary response to what’s coming by assembling a group of epidemiologists, infectious disease specialists, economists, assorted civil servants from the Federal Reserve, as well as the Transportation, Education, Justice, Public Health and Human Safety, Information, Security, and Immigration Ministries, representatives from all the major pharma companies, and two psychologists, both specializing in depression and suicidal ideations: one among children, one among adults.

I’m assuming you’re at least sitting in on your equivalent group’s meetings. I also assume that your meetings are more organized, calmer, thoughtful, and less contentious than ours was. By the end of ours, we had a list of things we agreed we
weren’t
going to do (most of which would be illegal under the current version of the Constitution anyway), as well as a list of things whose consequences we were going to ponder based on our respective areas of expertise. The plan is for each of the member countries to try to come up with a uniform agreement.

Again, I don’t know about your group, but the biggest argument in ours concerned the isolation camps, which we’ve all tacitly
agreed to call quarantine camps instead, even though it’s a deliberate misnomer. I had assumed that the split would be ideological, but to my surprise, it wasn’t; indeed, anyone who had any kind of scientific background recommended them—even the psychologists, reluctantly—and anyone who didn’t opposed them. But unlike in ’50, I don’t see how we can avoid it this time. If the predictive modeling is correct, this disease will be far more pathogenic and contagious, swifter-moving, and deadlier than its predecessor; our only hope is mass evacuation. One of the epidemiologists even suggested the preemptive removal of at-risk groups, but everyone else agreed that would cause too much of an uproar. “We can’t make this political,” said one of the suits from Justice, which was such an asinine comment—both stupidly obvious and impossible to address—that everyone just ignored him.

The meeting ended with a discussion of when to close the borders. Too early, and you panic everyone. Too late, and the measure becomes pointless. My guess is that they’ll announce by end of November at the very latest.

Speaking of which: Given what we both know, I don’t think it’s responsible of us to come visit you and Olivier. I say this with sorrow and regret. David was looking forward to it. Nathaniel was looking forward to it. And I was looking forward to it most of all. It’s been so long since we’ve seen each other, and I miss you. I know I can say this perhaps only to you, but I’m not ready to go through another pandemic. There’s no choice, obviously. One of the epidemiologists said today, “This is our chance to get it right.” He meant that we could do better than we did in ’50: We’re better prepared, more communicative, more realistic, less frightened. But we’re also wearier. The problem with doing something the second time is that, while you know what you can correct, you also know what’s beyond the scope of your powers—and I have never wished more for ignorance than I do now.

I hope you’re doing okay over there. I worry about you. Has Olivier given you any sense of when he might come back?

Love you. Me

Dearest Peter,
July 13, 2056

It’s very late here, almost three in the morning, and I’m in my office at the lab.

Tonight we went to Aubrey and Norris’s. I hadn’t wanted to go. I was tired, we all were, and I hadn’t wanted to put on a full decontamination suit just to go to their house. But Nathaniel insisted: He hadn’t seen them in months, and he was worried about them. You know, Aubrey turns seventy-six next month; Norris will be seventy-two. They haven’t left their house since the first case was diagnosed in New York State, and because there are so few people who have full protective suits, they’re pretty isolated. Aside from checking in on them, there was another matter on the agenda too, which involved David. So down we went.

After we parked, David slouching out of the car ahead of us, I stopped and looked at their house. I had the clear memory of my first visit, standing on the sidewalk and staring up at the windows, all golden with light. Even from the street, their wealth was unmistakable, the sort of wealth that had always been its own kind of protection—no one would think of breaking in to a house like this, even though at night, you could see all its art and goods laid out, ready to be taken, ready to be yours.

Now, though, the parlor-floor windows had been completely bricked up, which a lot of people did after the first sieges. There had been stories, enough of which had been true—people waking to find strangers in their house or apartment, not to steal but to beg for help: for food, for medicine, for shelter—that most people who lived beneath the fourth floor decided to seal themselves in. The upper windows had all been covered with iron cages, and I knew without looking that the windows themselves had been soldered shut.

There were other changes, too. Inside, the house was frayed in a way that I had never remembered it being; I knew from Nathaniel that both of their longtime maids had been among the first wave of deaths, in January; Adams had died in ’50, and had been replaced with a sallow guy named Edmund, who always looked like he was recovering from a cold. He had taken over most of the
housekeeping duties, but not very convincingly; the inside of the decontam chamber needed scrubbing, for example, and when we stepped into the foyer, the force of the suction made little clouds of dust skitter across the floor. The Hawaiian quilt hanging on the foyer wall was gray along its seams; the carpet, which Adams had been vigilant about rotating every six months, was shiny along one edge, worn by footsteps. Everything smelled a little musty, like a sweater taken out of a drawer after a long period of storage.

But the other change was Aubrey and Norris themselves, now approaching us with smiles, their arms outstretched; because the three of us were wearing suits, we could hug them, and as I did, I could feel they’d lost weight, could feel they’d grown feeble. Nathaniel noticed it, too—when Aubrey and Norris turned, he looked at me, worried.

Dinner was simple: a white-bean soup with cabbage and pancetta, good bread. Soup is the most difficult thing to eat with these new masks, but none of us, not even David, mentioned it, and Aubrey and Norris seemed not to notice us struggling. Meals here were typically served by candlelight, but this time a large globe hung suspended over the table, emitting a faint buzzing sound and a bright white light: one of those new sunlamps, meant to give the homebound their vitamin D. I’d seen them before, of course, but never one this big. The effect wasn’t unpleasant, but it did illuminate more evidence of the room’s faint but unignorable decay, the
grottiness
that inevitably accumulates when a space is continuously occupied. Back in ’50, when we were self-isolating, I often thought that the apartment wasn’t really equipped for our being there all day, every day—it needed breaks from our habitation, the windows flung open to the air, relief from our dander and skin cells. Around us, the air-conditioning—that, at least, was as powerful as I’d remembered it—made deep sighs as it cycled through its settings; the dehumidifier rumbled in the background.

I hadn’t seen Aubrey and Norris in person in months. Three years ago, Nathaniel and I had had a massive fight about them, one of our biggest. This was about eleven months after it became evident that Hawai
‘
i was unrecoverable, when the first classified reports about
the looters began surfacing. Incidents like these were happening in other decimated places as well, throughout the South Pacific; marauders were finding their way there by private boats and landing at the ports. Teams of them would disembark—in full protective gear—and make their way around the island, stripping every museum and house bare of its artifacts. It was being funded by a group of billionaires who called themselves the Alexandria Project, whose aim was “to preserve and protect the greatest artistic accomplishments of our civilization,” by “rescuing” them from places “that had regrettably lost the stewards responsible for their protection.” The members said that they were building a museum (location unspecified) with a digital archive to protect these works. But what was actually happening was that they were keeping everything for themselves, stored in giant warehouses where it would never be seen again.

Anyway, I had become convinced that Aubrey and Norris, if not among the project’s members, had at least bought some of the stolen items. I had a waking dream of Aubrey shaking out my grandmother’s quilt, the one that had been meant for me and which, like every other soft good my grandparents had owned, was burned in a fire after they died. (No, I hadn’t liked my grandparents, nor they me; no, that was not the point.) I had a vision of Norris wearing an 18th-century feather cape of the sort my grandfather had had to sell to a collector decades ago in order to pay for my schooling.

I didn’t have any actual proof of this, mind you: I just threw out the accusation one night, and suddenly I had unleashed years of resentments, which we batted between us. How I had never really trusted Aubrey and Norris, even after they had given Nathaniel purpose and intellectual stimulation when he’d been left stranded in New York because of my job; how Nathaniel was too trusting and naïve, and had made allowances for Aubrey and Norris that I had never understood; how I hated them just because they were rich, and how my resentment of wealth was childish and silly; how Nathaniel secretly wanted to be rich, and I was sorry that I had been such a disappointment to him; how he had never begrudged me anything I wanted to do professionally, even if it meant
sacrificing his own career and his own interests, and how he was grateful for Norris and Aubrey because they took an interest in his life, and what’s more, David’s life as well, especially when for months, for years, I hadn’t been there for our son, our son who was now being expelled for “extreme insubordination” from one of the last schools in Manhattan that would have him.

We were hissing at each other, standing on opposite sides of the bedroom, the baby asleep in his own room next door. But as serious as the fight was, as real as our anger was, there ran beneath our conversation another, truer set of resentments and accusations, things that if we ever dared say them to each other would end our life together forever. How I had ruined their lives. How David’s disciplinary problems, his unhappiness, his rebellion, his lack of friends, were my fault. How he and David and Norris and Aubrey had made their own family and had excluded me. How he had sold his homeland, our homeland, to them. How I had taken us away from that homeland forever. How he had turned David against me.

My other father says.

Neither of us said any of these things aloud, but we didn’t need to. I kept waiting—I know he did, too—for one of us to say something unspeakable, something that would make us both tumble down and down, crashing through the floors of our shitty apartment building until we reached the pavement.

But neither of us did. The fight ended, somehow, as these fights always do, and for a week or so after, we were careful and polite with each other. It was almost as if the ghost of what we could have said had forced its way between us, and we were afraid of antagonizing it, lest it become a demon. In the following months, I almost wished we
had
said some of what we both wanted to, because then at least we would have
said
it, instead of just constantly thinking about it. But if we had—I had to keep reminding myself—then the only thing to do afterward would have been to break up.

It seemed both inevitable and right that the result of this blowup was that Nathaniel and David began spending more time at Aubrey and Norris’s. At first Nathaniel claimed it was just because I was working so late, and then he said it was because Aubrey was a good
influence on David (which he was; he soothed him somehow, which I never understood—even as David became more and more of a Marxist, he continued to consider Aubrey and Norris exceptions), and then he said it was because Aubrey and Norris (Aubrey, especially) had become increasingly housebound, frightened that if they left their home they’d catch the illness, and that so many of Aubrey and Norris’s friends their age had died that Nathaniel felt responsible for their well-being, especially after they’d been so generous to us. Finally, I was made to go down there myself, and we had an unmemorable evening, the baby even consenting to a game of chess with Aubrey after dinner, as I tried not to look for evidence of recent acquisitions, while finding them anyway: Had that kapa weaving always been there, framed and hung over the stairway? Was that lathe-turned wooden bowl a new purchase, or had it just been in storage? Had Aubrey and Nathaniel exchanged the briefest of glances when they saw me noticing the framed shark-tooth ornament, or had I been imagining it? The entire night I had felt like I was an intruder in someone else’s play, and after that, I had stayed away.

One of the reasons we had gone tonight was because Nathaniel and I had agreed that we needed Aubrey’s help with David. He still had two more years of high school and nowhere to complete them, and Aubrey was friendly with the founder of a new for-profit school that was opening in the West Village. The three of us—Nathaniel, David, and I, that is—had had a shouting match in which David made it clear that he didn’t intend to return to school at all, and Nathaniel and I (united again, in a way we hadn’t been for what felt like years) told him that he had to. In a previous age, we would have told him he had to get out if he wouldn’t go to school, but we were afraid he’d take us up on it, and then our nights would be spent not going to meetings with his principal but searching the streets for him.