To Paradise (67 page)

“Oh,” I said. I thought about this. “I wouldn’t want to be separated from you, Grandfather,” I said, and he smiled.

“And I would never be separated from you, little cat,” he said. “This is why the policy changed, and now the entire family goes to the center together.”

I didn’t need to ask what happened at the centers, because I already knew: You died. But at least you died somewhere clean, and safe, and well-equipped—there were schools for the children to go to, and sports for the adults to play, and when you got very sick, you were taken to the center hospital, which was gleaming and white, and where doctors and nurses took care of you until you died. I had seen pictures of the centers on television, and there were pictures of them in our textbook as well. There was one, taken at Heart Mountain, of a laughing young woman holding a little girl, who was also laughing; in the background, you could see their cabin, which had an apple tree planted in front of it. Standing next to the woman and little girl was a doctor, and even though she was wearing her full protective suit, you could tell she was laughing as well, and she had her hand on the woman’s shoulder. You couldn’t go visit people at the centers, for your own protection, but the sick person could bring whomever he or she wanted, and sometimes whole extended families would go in a group: mothers and fathers and children and grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins. At first, going to the centers was voluntary. Then it became required, which was controversial, because Grandfather said that people didn’t like being told what to do, even if it was for the good of their fellow citizens.

Of course, by that point—this was in 2075—there were fewer people in the centers, because the pandemic had been almost contained by then. Sometimes I looked at that picture in my textbook and wished I lived in one of the centers myself. Not because I wanted to be sick, or wanted Grandfather to be sick, but because it looked so nice there, with the apple trees and wide green fields. But we would never go, not only because we weren’t allowed but because
Grandfather was needed here. That was why we hadn’t gone to a center when I had been sick—because Grandfather needed to be near his lab, and the nearest center was on Davids Island, many miles north of Manhattan, which would have been too inconvenient.

“Do you have any more questions?” Grandfather had asked, smiling at me.

“No,” I said.

That had been a Friday. The following Monday, I had gone to school, and instead of my teacher standing at the front of the room, there had been someone else, a short, dark man with a mustache. “Where’s Miss Bethesda?” someone had asked.

“Miss Bethesda is no longer at this school,” said the man. “I am your new teacher.”

“Is she sick?” someone else asked.

“No,” said the new teacher. “But she is no longer at this school.”

I don’t know why, but I didn’t tell Grandfather that Miss Bethesda was gone. I never told him, even though I never saw Miss Bethesda again. Later, I learned that the centers may not have resembled the pictures in my textbook after all. This was in 2088, at the beginning of the second uprising. The following year, the insurgents were defeated for good, and Grandfather’s name was cleared and his status was restored. But by that point, it was too late. Grandfather was dead, and I was left alone with my husband.

Over the years, I have occasionally wondered about the relocation centers: Which version of them was the correct one? In the months before Grandfather was killed, protestors marched outside our home carrying blown-up photographs they said were taken at the centers. “Don’t look,” Grandfather would tell me, on the rare occasions we left the house. “Look away, little cat.” But sometimes I did look, and the people in the photographs were so deformed that they didn’t even look like humans any longer.

But I never thought Grandfather was bad. He had done what had needed to be done. And he had taken care of me for my entire life. There was no one who was kinder to me, no one who loved me more. My father, I knew, had disagreed with Grandfather; I don’t remember how I had come to know this, but I did. He had wanted
Grandfather to be punished. It was an odd thing, knowing that your own father had wanted his father to be imprisoned. But it didn’t change my feelings. My father had left me when I was young—Grandfather never had. I didn’t see how someone who abandoned his child could be any better than someone who had only tried to save as many people as he could, even if he had made mistakes while doing so.

The following Saturday, I met David in the Square as always, and he once again suggested we go to the center, and this time, I agreed, as it was by now very hot. We walked the eight and a half blocks north slowly, so as not to overtax our cooling suits.

David had said that we were going to listen to a concert, but when we paid for our tickets, there was only a lone musician at the front of the room, a young, dark-skinned man with a cello. Once we had all sat down, he bowed to us, and then he began to play.

I had never thought I cared for cello music very much, but when the concert was over, I wished I hadn’t agreed to walk on the indoor track afterward and could instead go home. Something about the music made me think of the music Grandfather had played on the radio in his study when I was small, and I missed him so badly that it was difficult to swallow.

“Charlie?” asked David, looking worried. “Are you okay?”

“Yes,” I said, and I made myself stand up and walk out of the room, which everyone else, even the cellist, had already left.

At the edge of the indoor track there was a man selling iced fruit drinks. We both looked at the man and then at each other, because neither of us knew whether the other could afford to buy one.

“It’s okay,” I said at last, “I can.”

He smiled. “I can, too,” he said.

We bought the drinks and sipped them as we walked around the track. There were only about a dozen other people there. We were still wearing our cooling suits—once you were in them, it was easier
to just keep them on—but had deflated them, and it felt good to move as we usually did.

For a while, we walked in silence. Then David said, “Do you ever wish you could visit another country?”

“It’s not allowed,” I said.

“I know it’s not allowed,” he said. “But do you ever wish you could?”

Suddenly I was tired of David’s strange questions, his tendency to always ask things that were, if not illegal, then at least impolite, subjects that you didn’t think about, much less discuss. And what was the point of wishing for anything that wasn’t allowed? Wishing for things would change nothing. For months, I had wished every day that Grandfather would come back—if I am to be honest, I wished for it still. But he never would. It was better not to want at all: Wanting just made you unhappy, and I was not unhappy.

I remember once, when I had been in college, one of the girls in my class had figured out a way to access the internet. This was very hard to do, but she had been very smart, and though a few of the other girls had wanted to see what it was like as well, I had not. I knew what the internet was, of course, though I was too young to remember it: I was only three when it became illegal. I wasn’t sure I even understood, exactly, what it did. Once, when I was a teenager, I had asked Grandfather to explain it to me, and he had been quiet a long time, and then he finally said it was a way for people to communicate with one another across vast distances. “The problem with it,” he said, “was that it often allowed people to exchange bad information—untrue things, dangerous things. And when that happened, there were serious consequences.” After it was forbidden, he said, things became safer, because everyone was receiving the same information at the same time, which meant there was less chance for confusion. This seemed like a good reason to me. Later, when the four girls who had looked at the internet disappeared, most people thought they’d been taken by the state. But I remembered what Grandfather had said, and wondered if they had been contacted by people on the internet with dangerous information and something
bad had happened to them. The point is that there was little purpose in wondering what it would be like to do things or go places that I would never be able to. I did not think about trying to find the internet, and I did not think of going to another country. Some people did, but I did not.

“Not really,” I said.

“But don’t you want to see what another country is like?” David asked, and now even he lowered his voice. “Maybe things are better someplace else.”

“Better how?” I asked, despite myself.

“Well, better in lots of ways,” he said. “Maybe in another place we would have different jobs, for example.”

“I like my job,” I said.

“I know,” he said. “I like my job, too. I’m just thinking out loud.”

But I didn’t see how things would be any different in another country. Every place had been ravaged by the illnesses. Every place was the same.

When he was my age, however, Grandfather had traveled to many different countries. Back in those days, you could go anywhere you wanted, as long as you had the money. So, after he finished college, he got on an aeroplane and landed in Japan. From Japan, he traveled west, through Korea, across the People’s Republic of China, down through India, and over to Turkey, Greece, Italy, Germany, the Low Countries. For a few months he remained in Britain, staying with friends of a friend from college, and then he began moving again: Down one coast of Africa and back up the other; down one coast of South America and back up the other. He went to Australia and New Zealand; he went to Canada and Russia. In India he rode a camel across a desert; in Japan he hiked to the top of a mountain; in Greece he swam in water he said had been bluer than the sky. I had asked him why he didn’t just stay home, and he said that home was too small—he wanted to see how other people lived, what they ate, what they wore, what they wanted to do with their lives.

“I was from a very tiny island,” he said. “I knew that all around me were other kinds of people, doing things I would never be able to see if I just stayed. So I had to leave.”

“Was what they were doing better?” I asked.

“Not better,” he said. “But different. The more I saw, the less I felt I could ever go back to where I was from.” We spoke in whispers, even though Grandfather had turned on the radio so the music would obscure our conversation from the listening devices that were wired throughout the house.

But the rest of the world must have been better after all, because in Australia, Grandfather met another person from Hawai
‘
i, and they fell in love, and went back to Hawai
‘
i, where they had a son, my father. And then they moved to America and never returned to live at home again, not even before the illness of ’50. And then it was too late, because everyone in Hawai
‘
i had died, and by this point, all three of them were American citizens. And then, after the laws of ’67, no one was allowed to leave the country anyway. The only people who remembered other places were older, and they didn’t talk about those years.

After circling the track ten times, we decided to leave. But as we were walking outside, we heard the sounds of a dull thumping, and soon a flatbed truck pulled slowly into sight. In the back knelt three people. You couldn’t tell if they were men or women, because they wore those long white gowns and black hoods that covered their entire heads and which must have been very hot. Their hands were bound in front of them, and two guards stood behind them, wearing cooling suits with reflective helmets. Over the drumbeat, a voice was repeating over the speaker, “Thursday at 18:00. Thursday at 18:00.” They only announced Ceremonies like this when the convicted had been found guilty of treason, and usually only when they were of high rank, perhaps even state employees. Usually, state employees were punished this way if they had been caught trying to leave the country, which was illegal, or if they were trying to smuggle someone
into
the country, which was both unsafe and illegal, because it meant you could introduce a foreign microbe, or because they were trying to disseminate unauthorized information, usually via technology they weren’t allowed to use or possess. They were put on a truck and driven through all of the zones, so you could look at them and heckle them if you wanted. But I never
did, and neither did David, though we both stood and watched as the vehicle drove past us, and then turned south on Seventh Avenue.

After the truck had disappeared, though, something strange happened: I looked over at David, and saw that he was staring after it, his mouth slightly open; and that he had tears in his eyes.

This was astonishing and also deeply dangerous—showing even the smallest sympathy for the accused could get you noticed by a Fly, which had been programmed to interpret human expressions. I quickly whispered his name, and he blinked, and turned to me. I looked around; I didn’t think anyone had seen us. But just in case, it was best to keep moving, to seem normal, and so I began walking east, back to Sixth Avenue, and after a moment, he followed me. I wanted to say something to David, but I didn’t know what. I was frightened, but I didn’t know why, and angry as well, at him for reacting in such a strange way.

As we were crossing Thirteenth Street, he said to me, in a low voice, “That was terrible.”

He was right—it
was
terrible—but it happened all the time. I didn’t like seeing the trucks go by, either; I didn’t like watching the Ceremonies, or listening to them on the radio. But it was the way things worked—you did something wrong and were punished, and there was no way to change any of it: not the wrongdoing, and not the punishment.

Yet David was acting as if he’d never seen one of the trucks before. He stared straight ahead, but he was silent, chewing on his lip. We usually didn’t wear our helmets on our walks together, but now he took his from his bag and put it on, and I was glad, because it wasn’t typical to show emotion in public, and doing so could draw attention to you.

At the northern edge of the Square, we stopped. It was the customary place we said goodbye, where he turned left to go to Little Eight, and I turned right to go home. For a while, we stood there in silence. Our departures were never awkward, because David always had something to say, and then he would wave goodbye and leave.
But now he wasn’t saying anything, and through his helmet’s screen, I could see he was still upset.