To Paradise (61 page)

And so, after we ate, Norris and Nathaniel and I went to the parlor, and Aubrey and David remained in the dining room for a game of chess. After thirty minutes or so, they rejoined us, and I could tell that Aubrey had somehow convinced David to go to the school, and that David had confided in him, and despite my envy
of their rapport, I was relieved, and heartbroken, too—that someone had reached my son; that that someone wasn’t me. He seemed easier, David, lighter, and I wondered again what it was that he saw in Aubrey. How was Aubrey able to comfort him in a way I wasn’t? Was it just because he wasn’t his parent? But, then, I couldn’t think that way, because doing so would remind me that it wasn’t his
parents
David hated—it was just one parent. It was me.

Aubrey sat down on the sofa next to me, and as he poured himself some tea, I noticed that his hand was trembling, just a bit, and that his fingernails had grown slightly too long. I thought of Adams, and how he would never have allowed his employer to pour his own tea, or to come down to dinner with guests, even us, in such a state. It occurred to me that, as much as I might have felt trapped in this house, Aubrey and Norris actually
were
trapped. Aubrey was richer than anyone else I knew, and yet here he was, just a few years from eighty, stuck in a house he could never leave. He had made a series of miscalculations: Three hours north, the Newport property sat unoccupied, now surely run over by squatters; out east, in Water Mill, Frog’s Pond Way had been declared a health hazard and razed. Four years ago, he had had an opportunity—I knew from Nathaniel—to flee to a house he had in Tuscany, but he hadn’t, and now Tuscany was no longer inhabitable, anyway. And it increasingly seems that, eventually, none of us will be allowed to travel anywhere. All his money, and nowhere to go.

As we drank our tea, the talk turned, as it always does, to the quarantine camps, in particular the events of last weekend. I had never considered Aubrey or Norris particularly interested in the plight of the common man, but it seemed they were part of a group that was arguing for the camps’ shutdown. Needless to say, so were Nathaniel and David. On and on they went, comparing outrages and quoting statistics (some true, some not) about all the things that went on in them. Of course, none of them had ever actually
seen
the inside of one of these camps. No one has.

“And did you see that story today?” asked the baby, more animated than I’d witnessed him in a while. “About that woman and her child?”

“No, what happened?”

“This woman from Queens has a baby, and the baby tests positive. She knows the hospital authorities are gonna send her to a camp, so she says she has to go to the bathroom, and then she flees back to her apartment. She’s there for two days, and then there’s a banging on her door, and the soldiers burst in. She’s screaming and the baby’s screaming, and they say she can either let them take the baby, or she can come with her. So she decides to go with her.

“They load her onto a truck with a lot of other sick people. Everyone’s jammed in. Everyone’s coughing and crying. The kids are peeing. The truck drives and drives, and then they stop at one of the camps in Arkansas, and they’re all herded out. They sort them into groups: people who’re at the beginning, middle, or end stage of the illness. The woman’s baby is diagnosed to be at the middle stage. So they’re taken to this big building and given a single cot that they have to share. They don’t give medicine to people in the middle stage, just those in the first stage. They wait two days to see if you get sicker, and everyone does, because they don’t have any medication. And once you get sicker, they move you to the end-stage building. So the woman, who’s now sick herself, moves with her baby, and they both get sicker, because there’s no medicine, there’s no food, there’s no water. And forty-eight hours later, they’re dead, and someone comes through every night and moves all the dead bodies outside and burns them.”

He was becoming excited telling this story, and I looked at my son and thought how beautiful he was, how beautiful and how credulous, and I was scared for him. His passion, his anger, his need for something I couldn’t identify and couldn’t give him; the fights he had with other students at his school, with teachers, the rage he carried everywhere: If we had stayed in Hawai
‘
i, would he be like this? Had I made him what he was?

And yet—even as I was thinking this, I could feel myself opening my mouth, could feel the words floating from me as if I had no control over them, could feel myself raising my voice above their exclamations of horror and righteousness, their declaring to themselves what monsters the state had become, how the woman’s civil liberties
had been violated, how there was a price to be paid for the control of these illnesses, but it couldn’t be the price of our collective humanity. Soon they would be trading the same stories that were always traded by people like this in conversations like these: The fact that different races were sent to different camps, with Blacks going to one camp and whites to another, and the rest of us, presumably, to a third. The fact that women were being offered up to five million dollars to donate their healthy babies to be experimented on. The fact that the government was
giving
people the sickness (through the plumbing, through baby formula, through aspirin) in order to eliminate them later. The fact that the disease wasn’t an accident at all but something engineered in a lab.

“That story isn’t true,” I said.

They went quiet, immediately. “Charles,” Nathaniel began, warningly, but David sat up, instantly ready to fight. “What do you mean?” he asked.

“It’s not true,” I said. “That’s not what’s happening at those camps.”

“How do you know?”

“Because. Even if the government were capable of that, they wouldn’t be able to keep things like that hidden from the public for long.”

“You’re so fucking naïve!”

“
David!
” This was Nathaniel. “Don’t talk to your father like that!”

For the briefest of moments, I was happy: How long had it been since Nathaniel had defended me so unthinkingly, so passionately? It felt like a declaration of love. But, no, I barreled on. “Think about it, David,” I said, hating myself even as I did. “Why would we
stop
giving people medicine? This isn’t like how it was six years ago—there’s plenty of medicine available. And why even have the stopgap of—what did you call it, a ‘middle-stage’ building? Why not just send everyone straight to the end-stage building?”

“But—”

“What you’re describing is a death camp, and we don’t have death camps here.”

“Your faith in this country is touching,” said Aubrey, quietly, and
for a moment, I was almost dizzy with rage.
He
was patronizing
me,
someone whose house was stuffed full of stolen goods from my country? “Charles,” said Nathaniel, standing abruptly, “we should go,” at the same time that Norris put his hand on Aubrey’s. “Aubrey,” he said, “that’s not fair.”

But I didn’t turn on Aubrey. I didn’t. I instead spoke only to David. “And, David, if that story
were
true, then you’d have identified the wrong villain. The enemy here isn’t the administration, or the army, or the Health Ministry—it’s the woman herself. Yes: a woman who
knew
her baby was sick, who bothers to take her into the hospital, and then, instead of letting her get treated, steals her away. And she goes where? Back on the subway or the bus; back to her apartment building. How many streets does she walk down along the way? How many people does she jostle past? How many people does her baby breathe on, how many spores does she spread? How many units are in her building? How many people live there? How many of those people have comorbidities? How many are children, or sick, or disabled?

“How many of them does she tell: ‘My baby’s sick; I think she has the infection; you should keep away’? Does she call the health department, report that there’s an illness in the household? Does she think of anyone else? Or does she think only of herself, only of her own family? Of course, you could say that that’s what a parent does. But it’s because of that,
because
of that understandable selfishness, that the government
has
to involve itself, don’t you see? It’s to keep all the people around her safe, all the people she herself didn’t give a damn about, all the people who’ll lose their children because of her, that they’ve
had
to intervene.”

The baby had been very still and silent throughout my speech, but now he shrank, as if I’d smacked him. “You said ‘we,’ ” he said, and something, some quality in the room, shifted.

“What?” I asked.

“You said ‘that
we’ve
had to intervene.’ ”

“No, I didn’t. I said ‘that
they’ve
had to intervene.’ ”

“No. You said ‘we.’ Holy shit. Holy
shit
. You’re in on this, aren’t you? Holy shit. You helped plan these camps, didn’t you?” And then,
to Nathaniel, “Dad.
Dad.
Do you hear this? Do you hear this? He’s involved! He’s behind this!”

We both looked at Nathaniel, who was sitting there, slightly openmouthed, looking back and forth between us. He blinked. “David,” he began.

But now David was standing, as tall and skinny as Nathaniel is, pointing at me. “You’re one of them,” he said, his voice high and excited. “I
know
you are. I always knew you were a collaborator. I always knew you were behind these camps. I
knew
it.”

“David!” Nathaniel called out, anguished.

“Fuck you,” said the baby, clearly, looking at me, vibrating with passion. “Fuck you.” He wheeled, then, on Nathaniel. “And fuck you, too,” he said. “You know I’m right. We’ve talked about this, how he’s working for the state. And now you won’t even back me up.” And before any of us could do anything, he was running to the door, opening it; the decontamination chamber made a loud sucking noise as he left.

“David!” Nathaniel yelled, and was running to the door himself when Aubrey—who had been sitting with Norris on the sofa watching us, their eyes flicking between us, gripping each other’s hands as if they were at the theater and we were actors in some particularly charged play—stood. “Nathaniel,” he said. “Don’t worry. He won’t go far. Our security guys will watch him.” (This is another phenomenon here: people hiring security guards, in full protective gear, to patrol their property all night and all day.)

“I don’t know if he brought his papers,” Nathaniel continued, distressed—we had reminded David again and again and again that he had to have his identity card and health certificate on him whenever he left the apartment, but he kept forgetting.

“It’s okay,” Aubrey said. “I promise you. He won’t get far, and the team will watch him. I’ll go call them now,” and he left for his study.

And then there were only the three of us. “We should go,” I said. “Let’s get David, and we’ll go,” but Norris put his hand on my arm. “I wouldn’t wait for him,” he said, gently. “Let him stay here tonight, Charles. Security will bring him in and we’ll take care of him. We’ll
have one of them take him home tomorrow.” I looked at Nathaniel, who gave me a small nod, and so I nodded, too.

Aubrey returned, and there were apologies and thanks, but only in a muted sort of way. As we walked out, I turned and saw Norris, who looked back at me with an expression I couldn’t understand. Then the door closed and we were out in the night, the air hot and humid and still. We switched on our masks’ dehumidifiers.

“David!” we called. “David!”

But no one answered.

“Do we leave?” I asked Nathaniel, even after Aubrey called to tell us that David was in the security team’s little stone hut that they’d appended to the back of their house, safe with one of the guards.

He sighed and shrugged. “I suppose,” he said, tiredly. “He won’t come home with us, anyway. Not tonight.”

We both looked south, toward the Square. For a while, neither of us spoke. There was a bulldozer, the operator’s way lit by a single bright light, pushing the remains of the latest shantytown into a hill of plastic and plywood. “Do you remember the first time we came to New York?” I asked him. “We were staying in that shitty hotel up near Lincoln Center, and we walked all the way down to TriBeCa. We stopped in this park and had ice cream. There was that piano that someone had set up under the arch, and you sat down and played—”

“Charles,” Nathaniel said, in that same gentle voice. “I don’t really want to talk now. I just want to go home.”

For some reason, this was the most upsetting thing I’d experienced all night. Not Aubrey and Norris’s diminished state; not how clear it was that David hated me. It would have been better if Nathaniel had been mad at me, had blamed me, had confronted me. Then I could fight back. We had always fought well. But this resignation, this tiredness—I didn’t know what to do with it.

We’d parked on University, and now we began to walk. There was no one in the streets, of course. I remembered a night about, oh, ten years ago, when I was still accepting that Aubrey and Norris were going to be part of our lives, because they were a part of
Nathaniel’s. They had had a dinner party, and we had left David—only seven, really just a baby—with a sitter and had taken the subway south. The party was all Aubrey and Norris’s rich friends, but a couple of them had boyfriends or husbands around our age, and even I had had a good time, and after we left, we had decided that we would walk home. It had been a long walk, but it had been March, and so it had been perfect weather, not too hot, and we had both been a little drunk, and at 23rd Street, we had stopped at Madison Park and made out on a bench, among other people also making out on other benches. Nathaniel had been happy that night because he thought we’d made a bunch of new friends. This was when we were both still pretending that we’d only be in New York for a few years.

Now we walked in silence, and as I was unlocking the car, Nathaniel stopped me, turning me toward him. This evening was the first time in months that he had touched me so much, so deliberately. “Charles,” he said, “were you?”

“Was I what?” I asked him.