To Paradise (69 page)

“
What?
” I asked.

“Fourteen weeks,” Eden said, and leaned back, and that strange half smile moved across her face. “I’m due September fourth.”

“She wasn’t sure she wanted it,” the baby continued, excited now, when Eden interrupted him.

“But then I thought”—she shrugged—“I might as well. I’m thirty-eight; I don’t have forever.”

Oh, Peter, you can just imagine what I could have said, maybe even what I should have said. But instead, with such effort I began to sweat, I just sat on my hands and closed my eyes and leaned my head back and said nothing. When I opened them—who knows how much later: it could have been an hour—I found all of them staring at me, not mockingly but curiously, maybe even a little fearfully, as if they were worried that I might actually explode.

“I see,” I said, as evenly as I could. (Also: thirty-eight?! David’s only twenty-four, and a very young twenty-four at that.) “And so you three will live here, with Dad?”

“Three?” asked David, and then his face cleared. “Oh. Right. The baby.” He raised his chin a little, unsure if the question was a challenge or just a question. “Yeah, I guess. I mean, there’s plenty of room.”

But here Eden made a sound like a grunt, and we all looked at her. “
I’m
not living here,” she said.

“Oh,” said the baby, crestfallen.

“No offense,” she said, maybe to David, maybe to Nathaniel, maybe even to me. “I just need my space.”

There was silence. “Well,” I said, “it sounds like you both have a lot to work out,” and David shot me a hate-filled look, both because I was right and because I had seen him humiliated.

After this, there didn’t seem anywhere I could go, conversationally, without starting some sort of conflagration, so I announced I had to leave, and no one stopped me. I did bring myself to hug
David, although both of us were so awkward that it was really more of a bumble, and then I attempted to hug Eden as well, her skinny, boyish body rigid in my arms.

Nathaniel followed me out. Once we were on the stoop, he said, “Before you say anything, Charles, I want you to know that I agree.”

“Nate, this is crazy,” I told him. “He barely knows her! She’s practically forty! Do we know anything about this woman?”

He sighed. “I asked a—a friend of mine, and he said—”

“The friend in Justice?”

He sighed again, and looked upward. (He rarely looks me in the eyes these days.) “Yes, the friend in Justice. He looked into her and said there’s nothing to be concerned about—just a mid-level member, a lieutenant in the organization, comes from a middle-class family in Baltimore, went to art school, no major criminal record.”

“She sounds amazing,” I said, but he didn’t answer. “Nate,” I said, “you know you’re going to be taking care of this baby, don’t you? You know David can’t do it alone.”

“Well, he’ll have Eden, and—”

“I wouldn’t count on her, either.”

He sighed, again. “Well, it may come to that,” he admitted.

I wondered, as I often did, when Nathaniel had become so passive. Or maybe not passive—there’s nothing passive about raising a baby—but resigned. Was it when I moved them here? Was it when the baby began misbehaving? Was it when he lost his job? Was it Norris’s death, or Aubrey’s? Was it when our son joined an unsuccessful and marginal insurgency cell? Or was it years of living with me? I wanted to say, “Well, you did a great job raising a kid the first time,” before I realized that the only person implicated in that statement was me.

So I said nothing. Instead, we watched the Square. The bulldozers had returned, and the most recent iteration of shantytowns had been cleared away—a soldier stood guard at each entrance, making sure no one tried to come in to reestablish it. Above us, the sky was white with floodlights.

“I don’t know how you sleep, with all this light,” I said, and he shrugged, resigned again.

“All the windows facing the Square are boarded up anyway,” he said. He turned to me. “I heard they’re shutting down the refugee camps.”

Now it was my turn to shrug. “But what’ll happen to all those people?” he asked. “Where will they go?”

“Why don’t you ask your friend at Justice?” I asked, childishly.

He sighed. “Charles,” he said, wearily, “I’m just trying to make conversation.”

But I didn’t know where the refugees would go. There was such movement of people—to hospitals and from hospitals; to quarantine camps and to crematoriums and to graves and to prisons—that I could no longer keep track of where any one group was at any one time.

Mostly, though, I thought about how the worst part of David’s bringing a baby into this world was not his own inadequacies as a potential parent. It was the very fact of producing a new life. People do it all the time, of course—we depend on them to. But why would you do it as a lark? His life is spent trying to destroy what this country is. So why would he want to bring a baby into it? Who would want a child to grow up in this time, in this place? It takes a special kind of cruelty to make a baby now, knowing that the world it’ll inhabit and inherit will be dirty and diseased and unjust and difficult. So why would you? What kind of respect for life is that?

Love, Charles

Dearest Peter,
September 5, 2064

Not words I thought I’d be writing at this age, but—I’m a grandfather. Charlie Keonaonamaile Bingham-Griffith, born September 3, 2064, 5:58 a.m., seven pounds, thirteen ounces.

Lest I start getting flattered, it was quickly clarified that the baby is named not after me but, rather, Eden’s mother (deceased), who went by Charlie. A pretty girl’s name, and yet she isn’t a pretty girl.
Her chin is weak and her nose is blobby and her eyes are small and slitty.

Yet I adore her. I was reluctantly allowed into the mother’s room that morning, and the baby was reluctantly turned over to me. Above me, David hovered, saying things like “Support the head, Pops. You’ve got to support the head!” as if I had not ever before held a baby, beginning with him. But I didn’t mind his hectoring—it was moving, in fact, to hear him so anxious on another person’s behalf, to see him so vulnerable, to watch how tenderly he held his daughter.

Now that the baby is here, many questions remain, including whether Eden will finally move in to the Washington Square house instead of continuing on in her place in Brooklyn. Also, who’s going to raise Charlie, as Eden has already claimed she won’t give up her “work” with The Light, and David, conventional as only young people are, feels they need to get married and cohabitate.

But for now, it was time for the four of us to be together. (Along with Eden, of course.) She’s easily the best thing David has done, but before you interpret that as backhanded, I should also say that she’s the best thing he could ever do. My little Charlie.

Anyway, that’s it. I’m cautiously happy to hear Olivier’s back in the picture. And speaking of pictures, I’ve of course attached about a hundred here.

Love you, C.

My dear Peter,
February 21, 2065

One of Nathaniel’s qualities I’ve come to appreciate is his sense of responsibility to those he feels are less capable. In earlier years, this bothered me. I, for example, having been deemed capable, was considered not in need of help or attention or time. But his children, and then, after he left the school, Norris and Aubrey and David, had been classified as vulnerable, and therefore deserving of his care.

Even after Nathaniel inherited his share of Aubrey’s estate, he continued to see his two former students, Hiram and Ezra, those boys I once told you about who had survived the ’50 illness and then had never been allowed out of the house again. After they turned twelve, their mother hired a new set of tutors, ones that could teach them algebra and physics, but Nathaniel continued to make almost weekly trips over the bridge to visit them. Then, once Charlie arrived, he began having regular video meetings with them instead, because he’s been too busy taking care of her.

As I predicted, most of Charlie’s care has fallen to Nathaniel. There’s a nanny, but really, it’s him: David’s hours are unreliable, and Eden’s less so. I suppose I should add here (as Nathaniel always does) that when David
is
available, he’s very sweet with the baby. But really, isn’t the point as much to simply
be there,
to be consistent? I’m not sure if good behavior is as much a virtue as constancy. As for Eden: Well, I have nothing to say. I don’t even know if she and David are still together, though I know David’s still in love with her. But she seems to have remarkably little interest in her own daughter. She’d once told me she wanted the “experience” of pregnancy, but it doesn’t seem she wanted or even considered the attendant experience of parenting. This month, for example, she’s only come over twice, and never when David’s around. Nathaniel always offers to bring the baby to her, but she always demurs: She’s too busy, or her place is too unsafe, or she’s coming down with a cold. Then Nathaniel re-offers a floor in the house, or at least money to fix up her apartment, both of which he can tell unsettle her, and neither of which she accepts.

Last week, Nathaniel asked me if I’d go out to the Holsons’ and visit the boys—they’d missed their last two video appointments, and weren’t returning any of his calls or messages. “Are you kidding?” I asked him. “Why don’t
you
go visit them?”

“I can’t,” he said. “Charlie has a cough, and I should be here with her.”

“Well, why don’t I stay with Charlie, and you can go?” I asked him. I am always greedy for the baby: Every free night I have, I go downtown to spend with her.

“Charles,” he said, hoisting the baby from one shoulder to the other, “just do this for me, all right? Besides, if something’s wrong, maybe you can help them.”

“I’m not a clinician,” I reminded him, but there was really no point in arguing. I had to go. Somehow, Nathaniel and I have settled into a relationship that’s more married than when we were actually married. Much of this is because of the baby—it feels like we’re reliving our early lives together, except now both of us know exactly how disappointed we are in the other and aren’t waiting to find out.

So, after my final meeting on Monday, I drove to Cobble Hill. I had last seen the boys five years ago, when their parents (well, their mother; the absent Mr. Holson was absent as usual) threw Nathaniel a belated farewell party—a farewell from Hiram and Ezra’s lives as their teacher, that is. The twins were thirteen then, and looked nine or ten. They were well-mannered, handing around pieces of cake to me and Nathaniel and their housekeeper and their mother—all of us in full protective gear because the boys found it difficult to breathe in theirs—before finally taking a slice apiece for themselves. The boys weren’t allowed sugar, which Nathaniel said Mrs. Holson was worried would lead to internal inflammation (whatever that means), but the cake, which was only faintly sweet, from pureed apples that had been whisked into the batter, was clearly a special treat for them. They answered my questions in their high, nasal voices, and when Mrs. Holson told them to get the card they’d made for Nathaniel, they ran off together with the same stiff-legged gait, their oxygen packs bouncing against their lower backs.

When Nathaniel had told me of Mrs. Holson’s educational plans for her boys, I had thought them peculiar, even cruel. Yes, the boys might one day virtually attend college and earn a degree. They might even get jobs, working side by side as engineers or programmers, sitting behind twinned screens. But the question of what their lives would be—in their house forever, with only each other and their mother for company—had always troubled me.

I can’t say that seeing them persuaded me otherwise. But I did understand that while their mother had prepared them for a world they would never inhabit—evidenced by their careful manners,
their ability to look you in the eye, their conversational skills: all things, I recognized, that we had never been able to properly teach David—she had also taught them to accept the boundaries and limitations of their lives. When one of them, Hiram or Ezra (I still couldn’t tell them apart), said to me, “Nathaniel said you were just in India,” I had to stop myself from reflexively saying, “Oh, yes, have you been?” Instead I said that I had indeed just been there, and the other twin sighed and said, “Oh, how marvelous it must have been.” It was the right answer, the polite answer (if a little old-fashioned), but there was no yearning in it, no jealousy. Further conversation revealed they knew a good deal about the country’s history and current political and epidemiological disasters, even as they seemed to imply that they understood that those were not things they would ever witness for themselves; they had managed to know the world while also accepting that they would never be a part of it. However, many of us are this way: We know of India but will never be a part of it. What was stirring and disturbing about these boys was that, to them,
Brooklyn
was India. Cobble Hill was India. The back garden, which they could see from their playroom, now converted to a schoolroom, was India—places they would learn about but would never visit.

And yet, as well-behaved as they were, as smart as they were, I pitied them. I thought of David at fifteen, getting kicked out of one school after the next, the beautiful lines his body made when he tried to do a jump on his skateboard, the way he practically sprung back up after tumbling to the ground, the way he did a one-hand cartwheel in the grass at Washington Square, the way his skin seemed to glint in the sun.

The boys would be almost eighteen now, and as I knocked on their door, I thought, as I often did, of my Charlie.
Let them be safe,
I thought,
because if they’re safe, my Charlie will be safe as well.
But I also thought:
If something happened to them, then nothing will happen to her.
None of it made sense, of course.

When no one answered, I entered the code Nathaniel had given me into the keypad, and then I walked inside. I could tell from the moment the decontamination chamber opened that something had
died. These new helmets enhance every scent, and I tore mine off and tugged my sweater up to cover my nose and mouth. The house was as dim as ever. There was no sound, no movement: only that stench.