To Paradise (71 page)

“Well,” he said, and he shifted a bit, “I wouldn’t be opposed to that.” He paused. “We’re not getting back together, you know.”

“I know,” I said. I wasn’t even offended.

“We’re not having sex, either.”

“We’ll see,” I said.

He rolled his eyes. “We’re really not, Charles.”

“Okay,” I said. “Maybe we will, maybe we won’t.” But I was just teasing him. I wasn’t interested in having sex with him, either.

Anyway, just an update. I’m sure you’ll have questions, and please ask away. I’ll see you in a few days, anyway. Maybe you can help me move? (A joke.)

Love, Charles

Dear Peter,
September 3, 2065

Thanks so much to you and Olivier for the toys: They came right on time, and Charlie loves them, by which I mean she immediately stuffed the cat into her mouth and started chomping away, which I think is a pretty inarguable indication of affection.

I don’t have a lot of experience with first-birthday parties, but this one was small: Just me and Nathaniel and even David. And Charlie, of course. You may have heard the latest conspiracy theory, which is that the government invented last month’s illness (to do what and to what ends are never discussed, as logic does tend to get in the way of these theories), but David seems to have bought it and tried to talk to me as little as possible over the course of the afternoon.

I was holding Charlie when he came in, looking bedraggled and unshaven, but no more so than usual, and after taking off his suit and cleaning his hands, he walked over and simply lifted her from my lap, like I was a receptacle, nothing more, and lay down with her on the carpet.

You remember David as a baby—he was so skinny and silent, and when he wasn’t silent, he was crying. When I was eight, my mother, shortly before she left, told me that a parent decides what she thinks about her child in the first six weeks (or was it months?) of its life, and although I tried hard not to remember those words, they came to me, unbidden, at unwelcome moments during David’s infancy.
Even now, I wonder if, somewhere deep inside me, I had never liked him, and if, somewhere deep inside him, he knows that.

That memory is partly why Charlie is such a joy—and not just a joy but a relief. She’s so easy to love, to cuddle, to hold. David used to arch and buck out of my arms (and Nathaniel’s too, to be fair) when I tried to hug him, but Charlie presses into you, and when you—I—smile at her, she smiles back. Around her, we’re all softer, kinder, as if we’ve mutually agreed to hide from her the truth of who we are, as if she’d disapprove if she knew, as if she’d get up and walk out the door and leave us forever. Her pet names all involve meat. “Pork loin,” we call her; “lamb chop”; “short rib”—all things that we haven’t eaten in months now, ever since the rationing began. Sometimes we pretend to gnaw on her leg, making growling doglike sounds as we do. “I’m gonna eat you up,” Nathaniel says, gumming her thigh as she giggles and gasps. “I’m gonna eat you right up!” (Yes, I know this is all a little disturbing if you think about it too hard.)

Nathaniel had splurged and baked a lemon cake, which all of us ate except for Charlie, because Nathaniel doesn’t let her eat sugar yet, and it’s probably for the best, as who knows how much sugar will be left when she’s our age. “C’mon, Dad, just a bit,” David said, holding a crumb out to her, like she was a dog, but Nathaniel shook his head. “Absolutely not,” he said, and David smiled and sighed, almost proudly, as if he were the grandparent and was tutting over his son’s unreasonably strict ways. “What can I say, Charlie?” he asked his daughter. “I tried.” And then the inevitable moment came in which Charlie had to be put to bed, after which David rejoined us in the parlor and launched into one of his canned rants about the government, the refugee camps (which he’s convinced are still operating), the relocation centers (which he insists on calling “internment camps”), the ineffectiveness of the decontamination chambers and helmets (with which I secretly agree), the effectiveness of herbal medications (with which I do not), and various conspiracies about how the CDC, as well as “other state-funded research institutes” (i.e., Rockefeller), are spending their time trying not to cure diseases but to manufacture them. He thinks that the state is run by a vast
conspiracy, dozens of somber, gray-haired white men in military uniforms sitting in padded-wall bunkers with holograms and listening devices—the truth would be crushing in its banality.

It was the same speech, with a few variations, that I’d been listening to for the past six years. And yet it no longer upset me—or at least, it no longer upset me for the same reasons. This time, as I had the time before, I looked over at my son, still so passionate, speaking so quickly and so loudly that he had to keep wiping saliva away from his mouth, leaning toward Nathaniel, who was nodding at him tiredly, and felt a perverse sorrow. I knew he believed in what The Light represented, but I also knew that he had in part joined it to try to find a place where he belonged, a place where he might at last feel he had found his own.

And yet, for all his devotion to The Light, it did not seem devoted to him. As you know, The Light has a quasi-military power structure, with members adding tattoos of stars to the insides of their right arms as they’re promoted by committee through its ranks. Eden had had three when we met her; she had added a fourth when Nathaniel had last seen her. But David’s wrist was decorated with a single lonely star. He was an eternal foot soldier, relegated to (I know from your reports) scut work: procuring the bits and pieces of material that the engineers would wire into bombs, never thanked by name in the fulsome speeches from headquarters that followed each successful attack. He was a nobody, an unnamed, a forgotten. Of course, I was glad for this, for his irrelevance, for his being overlooked—it kept him safe, it kept him uninvolved. But I also realized that I had come to loathe The Light not just for what it propagated but for how it refused to recognize my son’s efforts. He had joined it looking for home, and it had ended up treating him the same as everyone else had. As I say, I know this is perverse—would I have been happier if his arm had been aswim with blue stars? No, of course not. But it would be a different kind of unhappiness, an unhappiness mingled with, perhaps, a distorted pride, a relief that if Nathaniel and I were not his family, he had found one after all, no matter how dangerous or wrong. Aside from Eden, he had never brought anyone home
to meet us, he spoke of no friends, he never grabbed his phone in the middle of our dinners because he was getting so many messages that he had to answer them, grinning at the screen as he tapped out a reply. Although I had never seen him in action, as it were, I had a persistent image of him on the edges of groups, of listening to conversations but never being asked to join one. I cannot prove this, naturally, but I think this friendlessness was in part what kept him from spending more time with his daughter—it was as if he feared he might infect her with his loneliness, as if she too might come to see him as someone of little consequence.

It made me ache for him. I thought again, as I often did—far too often, given that he is now twenty-five, a grown man, a father, even—of him as a small boy on the playground in Hawai
‘
i, how the other children had run from him, how he had known even then that there was something not right about him, something that repelled people, something that would set him apart and aside for the rest of his life.

All I can do now is continue to hope for him, and to do better with and for his child. I can’t say that I can use her to make up for how I failed with him, but I
do
know that it’s my responsibility to try. So much has changed since David was a baby; so much has been lost. Our home, our family, our hopes. But children need adults. That much hasn’t changed. And so I can try again. I not only can: I have to.

Love, Charles

My dear Peter,
January 7, 2067

It’s the end of a very long day, at the end of a very long week. I returned late from the Committee—the nanny had already put Charlie to bed, hours ago; the cook had left a bowl of rice and tofu and pickled cucumbers. Next to the bowl was a sheet of paper with
a thick green line of crayon forking across the page. “From Charlie, for her Papa,” the nanny had written in the bottom right corner. I put it in my briefcase so I could take it to the lab on Monday.

The Committee had discussed what was happening in the U.K.—sorry, New Britain—since the election. You’ll be happy to hear that everyone thought that the transition seemed much more harmonious than you do. And you’ll be not at all surprised to hear that everyone thinks that, despite everything, you’ve made the wrong decision, and that you’ve been far too lenient with the population, and that you’ve conceded to the protestors. Everyone also agreed it was crazy that you were reopening the Underground. You know I don’t entirely disagree.

After I ate, I wandered the house. This is something I’ve begun doing at the end of each week. It began that first Saturday after the event, when I had woken from a dream. In it, Nathaniel and I were back in Hawai
‘
i, in the house we once lived in, but at the age we are now. I don’t know if David existed in this dream—if he was in his own house, or living with us but out running an errand, or if he had never been born at all. Nathaniel had been looking for a photo, one from shortly after we’d met. “I noticed something funny in it,” he said. “I have to show you. I just can’t remember where I put it.”

That was when I had woken up. I knew I had been dreaming, and yet something compelled me to get up and start looking as well. For the next hour, I walked from floor to floor—this is before the nanny and the cook moved onto the fourth floor—opening random drawers and taking random books from shelves and flipping through their pages. I sifted through the bowl of junk on the kitchen counter—twist ties and rubber bands and paper clips and safety pins: all the small, poor, necessary items that I remembered from my childhood, all the stuff that had remained even when so much else had changed. I looked through Nathaniel’s closet, his shirts that still smelled of him, and his bathroom cabinet, the vitamins he took, even long after they had been proven ineffective.

In those first weeks, I had neither the right nor the inclination to enter David’s room, but even after the investigation had finished, I kept the door shut, moving downstairs to what had been
Nathaniel’s room so that there was no need to ever visit the third floor. It wasn’t until two months later that I was finally able to do so. The bureau had left the room very tidy. Part of this was simply a matter of reduced volume: Gone were David’s computers and phones, the papers and books that had covered the floor in heaps, the rolling plastic cupboard containing dozens of tiny drawers, each filled with items, nails and tacks and bits of wire, meant for things I couldn’t contemplate too hard, for if I had, I would have had to report him to the bureau myself long ago. It was as if they had erased the past decade altogether, so that what remained—his bed, some clothes, some monster figurines he had made when he was a teenager, the Hawaiian flag that had hung in whatever room he occupied from the time he was a baby—was his teenage self, just before he had joined The Light, before he and Nathaniel and I had broken from one another, before the experiment of our family had failed. The only indication that time had indeed passed after all were two framed pictures of Charlie atop the table near his bed: The first, which Nathaniel had given him, was of her on her first birthday, grinning hugely, with mashed peaches smeared over her face. The second is a short video Nathaniel took a few months later, of David holding her by her arms and spinning her around. The camera moves first to his face, and then to hers, and you can see they’re both shouting with laughter, their mouths wide with happiness.

Now, nearly four months after that day, I find that hours can pass in which I think of neither of them, in which the flashes of delusion—wondering, in the middle of a dull meeting, what Nathaniel would be making for dinner, for example, or whether David would stop by this weekend to see Charlie—no longer flatten me. What I cannot stop doing is thinking of the moment itself, even though I didn’t witness it, even though, when I was offered the chance to review the classified images, I declined: the explosion, the people nearest to the device bursting into bits, the jars around them shattering. I know I’ve told you before that the one image I did look at, before I closed the file for good, was taken that night. It was of the ground, close to where the device had gone off, in the sauces-and-soups aisle. The floor was covered with a gluey red substance, though it wasn’t blood
but tomato paste, and scattered through it were hundreds of nails, burned black and twisted by the heat of the explosive. On the right-hand side of the image was a man’s disembodied hand and part of an arm, a watch still strapped to the wrist.

The other image I saw was the video clip documenting the moment David rushes into the store. There’s no sound on the video, but you can tell by how he swivels his head that he’s frantic. Then he opens his mouth, and you can see him shout something, a single syllable:
Dad! Dad! Dad!
And then he runs deeper into the store, and then there’s nothing, and then the image of the door, now shut, wobbles and goes white.

It’s this video clip that I’ve been showing investigators and ministers for months, ever since I got it, trying to prove to them that David couldn’t have been responsible for the explosive, that he had loved Nathaniel, that he would never have wanted to kill him. He knew Nathaniel did his grocery shopping there; when he had realized what The Light had planned, and when Nathaniel had sent him a message saying he was going to the store, had he not run inside to find him, to save him? I could not definitively say he wouldn’t have wanted to kill anyone else—though I said so anyway—but I knew he wouldn’t have wanted to kill Nathaniel.

But the state does not agree with me. On Tuesday, the interior minister himself came to see me, and explained that, as David was a “prominent and known” member of an insurgent organization responsible for the deaths of seventy-two people, they would have to issue him a postmortem censure for treason. This meant that he could not be buried or interred at a cemetery, and that his descendants would be prohibited from inheriting any of his assets, which would be seized by the state.