To Paradise (62 page)

He took a breath. His helmet’s dehumidifier filter needed cleaning, and as he breathed, his face disappeared and appeared as the screen fogged over and then cleared itself. “Were you involved in setting up those camps?” he asked. He looked away, looked back at me. “Are you still involved with them?”

I didn’t know what to say. I had seen the reports myself, of course—the ones published in the paper and shown on television, as well as the other reports, the ones you’ve seen, too. I had been in a Committee meeting the day they screened the footage that had come out of Rohwer, and someone in the room, one of the lawyers from Justice, had gasped when she saw what had happened in the babies’ quarters, and shortly after had left the room. I hadn’t been able to sleep that night, either. Of course I wished that we hadn’t had a need for the camps at all. But we did, and I couldn’t change that. All I could do was try to protect us. I couldn’t apologize for that; I couldn’t explain it. I had volunteered for this job. I couldn’t now disavow it because things were happening that I wish hadn’t.

But how to explain any of this to Nathaniel? He wouldn’t understand; he would never understand. And so I just stood there, my
mouth open, suspended between speech and silence, between apologizing and lying.

“I think you should stay at the lab tonight,” he said at last, still in that same soft voice.

“Oh,” I said, “all right,” and as I did, he took a step backward, as if I had slugged him in the chest. I don’t know: Maybe he had expected me to fight with him, to plead with him, to deny everything, to lie to him. But it was as if, by acquiescing, I was also confirming everything he hadn’t wanted to believe. He looked at me again, but his face screen was getting foggier and foggier, and finally, he got in the car and drove north.

I walked. At 14th Street, I stopped to let a tank pass me, and then a brigade of foot soldiers, all in protective gear, the new military-issue uniforms in which the face screen is a one-way mirror, so that when you talk to anyone wearing one, all you see is yourself staring back. On and on I walked, past the barricade at 23rd Street, where a soldier directed me east to avoid Madison Park, which had been contained beneath an air-conditioned geodesic dome, and where the corpses were stored until they could be taken by one of the crematoriums. Above each corner of the park, a drone camera twirled, its strobes briefly illuminating outlines of the cardboard coffins, stacked four high in precise rows. As I crossed Park Avenue, I approached a man crossing from the other side; as he neared me, he lowered his eyes. Have you encountered this too, this general unwillingness to make eye contact, as if the illness is spread not by breath but by looking each other in the face?

Finally, I was back at Rockefeller, and I took a shower and made a bed for myself on my sofa. But I couldn’t sleep, and after a couple of hours, I got up and raised the blackout shades and watched the morgue helicopters make their deliveries to Roosevelt Island, their blades flashing as the klieg lights swooped over them. Here, the crematoriums never stop, but they’ve suspended barge transport because of the waterway closures—the hope is that they’ll deter those rafts of climate refugees, who were being dropped off late at night at the mouth of the Hudson or the East River and made to swim for shore.

And now I am very tired, tireder than I think I’ve ever been. Tonight, all of us are sleeping in separate places. You, in London. Olivier, in Marseilles. My husband, four blocks north. My son, three miles south. Me, here in my lab. How I wish I were with one of you, any of you. I have kept one shade open, so on the wall opposite, a square of light flickers and vanishes, flickers and vanishes, flickers and vanishes, like a code meant only for me.

Love, Me

Dear Peter,
September 20, 2058

Today was Norris’s funeral. I met Nathaniel and David at the Friends meeting house on Rutherford Place. It had been three months since I had seen David, a week since I had seen Nathaniel, and out of respect for Norris, we were all excruciatingly polite with one another. Nathaniel had called me beforehand asking me not to try to hug David hello, and I didn’t, but he surprised us both by patting me on the back a little and grunting a bit.

During the service, which was small and modest, I stared at David’s face. He was sitting in the row in front of me, one seat to the left, and I was able to study his profile, his long bony nose, the new way he was wearing his hair, which made his head look like it was bristling with thorns. He had begun his new school, the one Aubrey had convinced him to attend after he dropped out of the other school Aubrey had convinced him to attend two years ago, and as far as I knew, there were no complaints, from them or from him. Granted, the school year was only three weeks old.

I didn’t know most of the people at the service—there were some I recognized by sight, from years-ago dinners and parties—but the feeling was of emptiness: They had lost more friends than I had realized in ’56, and although the room was half filled, there was also the persistent and troubling sensation that something, someone, was missing.

After, Nathaniel and the baby and I went back to Aubrey’s house,
where a few other people had gathered as well; Aubrey wore his decontamination suit so his guests could remove theirs. Over the past year or so, as Norris slowly died, they had begun keeping the house dim, lighting the rooms with candles. It helped, somewhat—both Aubrey and the house looked less careworn in that gloom—but also made stepping into that space feel like entering some other era, one before electricity was invented. Or maybe it was that the house now felt less occupied by humans than by some other kind of animal: moles, perhaps, creatures with small, poor, beady eyes that couldn’t bear the full reality of sunlight. I thought of Nathaniel’s students, Hiram and Ezra, now eleven years old, still living in their shadowed world.

Eventually, only the four of us remained. Nathaniel and David had offered to spend the night in the house, and Aubrey had accepted. I’d take advantage of their absence at the apartment to pick up a few things and take them back to the RU dormitory, where I’m still living.

For a while, we were all silent. Aubrey had leaned his head against the back of the sofa and eventually closed his eyes. “David,” Nathaniel whispered, signaling to him that he should help rotate Aubrey on the sofa so he could lie flat, and the baby was standing to help him when Aubrey began to speak.

“Do you remember that conversation we had shortly after the first person in New York was reported diagnosed in ’50?” he asked, his eyes still closed. None of us answered. “You, Charles—I remember asking you if this was the one we’d been waiting for, the sickness that would eliminate us all, and you said, ‘No, but it’ll be a good one.’ Do you remember that?”

His voice was gentle, but I cringed anyway. “Yes,” I said, “I do.” I heard Nathaniel sigh, a soft, sad sound.

“Mmm,” he said. There was another pause. “You were right, as it turns out. Because then ’56 came.

“I never told you this,” he said, “but in November of ’50, an old friend of ours contacted us. Well, he was more Norris’s friend than mine, someone he’d known since college, when they had dated for a brief period. His name was Wolf.

“By this point, we’d been living out at Frog’s Pond Way for about three months. We thought, as did many people—even your lot, Charles—that we’d be somehow safer out there, that it was better to be away from the city, with all its crowds and filth. This was after the lootings had begun; everyone was scared to leave their houses. It wasn’t as bad as ’56—you didn’t have people lunging at you in the street, trying to cough at you and infect you because they wanted you to get sick as well. But it was bad. You remember.

“Anyway, one night, Norris told me that Wolf had gotten in touch with him; he was in the area and wanted to know if he could come see us. Well. We were taking all the recommendations seriously. Norris had asthma, and the reason we’d gone out to Long Island to begin with was to avoid running into other people. So we decided that we’d tell Wolf that we’d love to see him, but for his sake as well as ours, we didn’t think it was safe, though once things calmed down we’d love to get together.

“So Norris sends him that message, but Wolf writes back immediately: He doesn’t
want
to come see us; he
needs
to come see us. He needs our help. Norris asks if we can video-chat, but he insists: He needs to see us.

“What could we do? The next day, we get a text at noon: ‘I’m outside.’ We go outside. For a while, we don’t see anything. Then we hear Wolf call Norris’s name, and we walk down the path, but we still don’t see anything. Then we hear Wolf again, and we proceed a little farther down the path. This happens a few more times, and then we hear Wolf say ‘Stop.’

“We do. Nothing happens. And then we hear some twigs being crunched behind that big poplar near the guardhouse, and Wolf steps out into the open.

“It’s immediately clear that he’s very sick. His face is covered with sores; he’s skeletal. He’s using a magnolia branch as a cane, but he doesn’t quite have the strength to lift it, so it kind of drags behind him like a broom. He’s carrying a small knapsack. He’s holding up his pants with one hand: He’s wearing a belt, but it doesn’t help.

“Norris and I immediately step backward. It’s obvious Wolf’s nearing the end stage of the disease and is therefore highly contagious.

“He says, ‘I wouldn’t come here if I had somewhere else to go. You know I wouldn’t. But I need help. I’m not going to live much longer. I know what an imposition this is. But I’m hoping—I’m hoping you’ll let me die here.’

“He had escaped from one of the centers. Later, we’d learn that he’d approached a few other people, and all of them had sent him away. He said, ‘I won’t ask to come inside. But I thought—I thought maybe I could stay in the pool cottage? I won’t ask you for anything else. But I want to die indoors, in a house.’

“I didn’t know what to say. I could feel Norris just behind me, gripping my arm. Finally, I said, ‘I need to talk to Norris,’ and Wolf nodded and retreated behind the poplar again, as if to give us privacy, and Norris and I walked back up the path. He looked at me, and I looked at him, and neither of us said anything. We didn’t need to—we knew what we would do. I had my wallet with me, and I took out everything I had—a little more than five hundred dollars. And then we walked again toward the tree, and Wolf reappeared.

“ ‘Wolf,’ I said, ‘I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. But we can’t. Norris is vulnerable, you know that. We can’t, we just can’t. I’m so sorry.’ I invoked you, Charles. I said, ‘A friend of ours has connections in the administration; he can get you help, he can get you into a better center.’ I wasn’t sure if there
was
such a thing, even, as a ‘better center,’ but I promised it. Then I put the money down, about a foot away from us. ‘I can get you more, if you need it,’ I said.

“He didn’t say anything. He just stood there, panting, looking down at the money, swaying slightly on his feet. And then I grabbed Norris’s hand, and we hurried back to the house—by the last hundred feet, we were running, running as if Wolf had the strength to pursue us, as if he’d suddenly soar into the air like a witch and block the doorway. Once inside, we bolted the door and then went about the house checking every window and every lock, as if Wolf would suddenly charge through one of them and fill the house with his disease.

“But do you know what the worst part was? How
angry
Norris and I were. We were angry that Wolf had gotten sick, that he had come to us, that he had asked for our help, that he had put us in
such a position. That was what we said to ourselves that night as we gorged ourselves, all the window shades drawn, all the security systems armed, the pool house—as if he might even now go there—padlocked shut: How
dare
he. How
dare
he make us feel that way, how
dare
he make us say no to him. That was what we thought. A friend was helpless and afraid, and that was how we reacted.

“Things were never quite the same between us after that. Oh, I know everything always looked fine. But something changed. It was as if our connection was no longer founded in love but in shame, in this terrible secret we had, in this terrible, inhumane thing we had done together. And I blame Wolf for that as well. Every day, we stayed indoors, scanning the property with binoculars. We offered the security team double pay to come back, but they said no, and so we prepared ourselves for a siege, a one-man siege. We kept all the shades drawn, the shutters closed. We lived as if we were in a horror film, like at any moment we might hear a thump against one of the windows and draw the shade to find Wolf plastered against it. We
were
able to convince the local police to monitor the death tolls for the area, but when the word came two weeks later that Wolf had been found alongside the highway, dead for apparently several days, we still weren’t able to give up our watch: We stopped answering our phones, we stopped checking our messages, we stopped making ourselves available to anyone, because if we weren’t in contact with the outside world, then nothing would be asked of us, and we would be safe.

“After we were given the all-clear, we returned to Washington Square. But we never went back to Water Mill. Nathaniel, you asked once why we never went out to Frog’s Pond Way. This is why. We also never spoke of Wolf again. It wasn’t something we had to agree on; we just both knew not to. Over the years, we tried to make reparations for our guilt. We gave to charities that helped the sick; we gave to hospitals; we gave to activist groups fighting against the camps. But when Norris was diagnosed with leukemia, the first thing he said after the doctor had left the room was ‘It’s punishment for Wolf.’ I know he believed it. In his final days, when he was delirious from the drugs, it wasn’t my name he repeated, but Wolf’s. And
even though I’m telling you this story like I don’t, I believe it, too. That one day—one day, Wolf will come for me, too.”

We were all quiet. Even the baby, who was consistent in his moral absolutism, was somber and silent. Nathaniel sighed. “Aubrey,” he began, but Aubrey interrupted him.