To Paradise (75 page)

Anyone could come visit this greenhouse, though few people ever did. In fact, few people ever came up to the roof at all, which was mysterious to me, as it was very pleasant. As I mentioned earlier, the entire campus is under a biodome, which means it’s always climate-controlled, and near the greenhouse there were a few tables and benches so you could sit and look over the East River, or at the rooftops of the other buildings, some of which are dedicated to growing vegetables and fruits and herbs that the cafeteria uses to make food for the employees of the university. Anyone who worked at Rockefeller could buy lunch at the cafeteria at a subsidized rate, and I often brought my lunch up to the roof, where I could eat alone but not feel self-conscious about it.

It was especially nice to sit on the roof in the summer. You almost felt like you were outside, except better, because unlike actually being outside, you didn’t have to wear your cooling suit. You could just sit there in your jumpsuit and eat your sandwich and look at the brown water beneath.

As I ate, I thought, as I often did, about David. It had been almost a month since I had seen him last, and although I was trying my best to forget him, I still saw things every day that I thought he might be interested in hearing about, and it took a great effort to remind myself that I wasn’t going to see him again, and that I should stop making observations and storing them to share with him. Though then I remembered that Grandfather had said that you don’t have to make observations only so you can tell someone else; that making them just for the sake of making them was a good thing. “Why?” I had asked him, and he had thought about it for a moment. “Because we can,” he had said, finally. “Because it’s what humans do.” Sometimes I worried that my lack of interest in making observations meant I wasn’t human, though I know that wasn’t what Grandfather had intended.

I was thinking about this when the elevator doors opened and three people, a woman and two men, stepped off. I knew instantly
from how they were dressed that they were state employees, and I could tell that they were in the middle of an argument, as one of the men was leaning toward the other, and they were all whispering. Then the woman looked over and saw me and said, “Oh, Christ—people, let’s try someplace else,” and before I could offer to go away, they got back in the elevator and left.

Grandfather had always said that the people who worked for the state and the people who didn’t were united in their desire to never encounter one another: The state didn’t want to see us, and we didn’t want to see them. And for the most part, it didn’t happen. The ministries were all in one zone, and the state workers had their own shuttles and grocery stores and clusters of apartment buildings. They didn’t live in just one zone, though many of the senior members lived in Zone Fourteen, the same as many of the senior scientists at RU and senior engineers and researchers at the Farm and the Pond.

It was well-known that there was an office of state employees at every biological research institution in the country. It was necessary, so they could watch over us. But although we all knew there was an office at RU, no one knew where it was or how many people worked there. Some people said it was fewer than ten people. But others said it was more, many more, maybe as many as a hundred, two for almost every principal investigator here. There were rumors that their office was many layers underground, even beneath the supposed additional labs with the supposed additional mice, and the supposed operating rooms, and that these underground offices connected to special tunnels, where there were special trains that could take them back to their ministries, or even all the way down to Municipality One.

But other people said that they were just in a small set of rooms in one of the lesser-used buildings, which was probably the truth, though RU wasn’t so large a campus that you didn’t cross everyone at some point or another, and yet I had never seen these state employees, though I had recognized them the moment I did.

Their presence here was actually a relatively recent development. When Grandfather had begun working at Rockefeller, for example,
it was just a research facility. The labs received funding from the state, and they sometimes worked with various ministries, especially the Health and Interior Ministries, but the state had no jurisdiction over any of their work. After ’56, though, that changed, and in ’62, when the state was established, it was given oversight of all the country’s research facilities. The following year, the forty-five states were divided into eleven prefectures, and in ’72, the year after the zones were established, the state was one of ninety-two countries that signed a treaty with Beijing, allowing them full access to all scientific institutions in return for funding and other resources, including food and water and medicines and other humanitarian supplies. This meant that, while every federal project was monitored by the state, only the state employees who oversaw institutions such as RU ultimately reported back to Beijing—Beijing didn’t care about other domestic enterprises, only the ones that worked with illnesses and illness prevention, as we did.

Along with the people who were visibly members of the state, you also had to assume that there were a number of scientists and other researchers who worked for both the institute and the state. This didn’t mean they were informants—the institute would be informed of their dual responsibilities. Grandfather had been one of those people: He had begun as a scientist, but eventually he had also worked with the state. When I was born, he had been very powerful. But then his power had diminished, and when the insurgents briefly took control of the country the second time, he had been killed for his association with the state, and for what he had done to try to stop the spread of disease.

The point is that it was strange to see these state officers moving about the campus so openly and behaving so strangely. So I suppose it wasn’t that surprising that, about a week or so later, I returned from eating my lunch on the roof to find five of the Ph.D.s excitedly whispering in one corner of the break room about an announcement that had just come down from the Health Ministry that all the containment centers in our prefecture were to be closed, effective immediately.

“What do you think it means?” asked one of the Ph.D.s, who
always began these conversations with the same question, and whom I would sometimes later hear repeating the answers he’d heard to other people.

“It’s obvious,” said another, who was large and tall, and whose uncle was rumored to be one of the interior minister’s deputies, “it means this new thing is not only real but projected to be highly deadly, and easy to spread.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because. If it were easy to treat, or to contain, then the old system would still be fine: Someone gets sick, you hold them for a week or two and see if they get better, and then, if they don’t, they get transferred to a relocation center. It’s worked perfectly fine for the past, what, twenty-five years, right?”

“Actually,” said another of the Ph.D.s, who rolled his eyes when the interior minister’s deputy’s nephew said anything, “I’ve never thought the system that effective. Too much of a margin for error.”

“Yes, the system has its flaws,” said the interior minister’s deputy’s nephew, irritated at being contradicted. “But let’s not forget what the containment centers accomplished.” I had heard the interior minister’s deputy’s nephew defend the containment centers before; he would always remind people that the centers gave scientists the opportunity to conduct real-time human research, and to identify subjects among their residents for drug trials. “Now they’re guessing that, whatever this is, they either won’t have time for the stopgap of the containment center, or there’ll be no point because the morbidity rate will be so high, and so fast, that it’s best and most efficient to just send all cases straight to the relocation centers and to get them off the island as soon as possible.”

He sounded very excited about this. They all did. A big new disease was definitely coming, and now it was their time to witness it, to try to solve it. None of them seemed scared; none of them seemed worried that they might get sick themselves. Maybe they were right not to be scared. Maybe this disease wouldn’t affect them—they knew more about it than I did, so I couldn’t say that they were wrong.

On the shuttle ride home, I thought of the man I had seen two years ago, the one who had tried to escape the containment
center and had been stopped by the guards. Ever since, I had looked out the window whenever we passed the center. I don’t know why I did—the center no longer existed, and anyway the facade was completely mirrored, so you couldn’t see inside at all. But I still continued to look, as if, one day, the same man might appear again, this time walking out of the center in his regular clothes because he had been cured, and he was going home to wherever he had lived before he had gotten sick.

The next few weeks at the lab were extremely busy for everyone, including me. This made it more difficult to eavesdrop, because there were far more meetings among the scientists, many of them led by Dr. Wesley, and therefore far less time for the Ph.D.s to gather and discuss what had happened in those meetings, and less time for me to try to listen to them.

It took me several days to understand that even the older scientists were taken aback by what was happening. Many of them had been Ph.D.s or postdocs themselves during the ’70 illness, but the state was much stronger now than it had been then, and they were made confused and even anxious by the constant and multiplying presence of state employees: the three people I’d seen on the roof, but dozens of others as well, from many different ministries. They would be organizing the response to the illness, and they would be taking over not only our lab but all of RU’s labs.

The new disease was not yet named, but all of us were under strict orders to discuss it with no one. If we did, we could be charged with treason. For the first time, I was happy that David and I were no longer speaking, as I had never had to keep a secret from a friend and so was unsure how good I’d be at it. But now that was no longer a problem.

Since I had stopped seeing David, I had renewed my Thursday-night monitoring of my husband. There was no more to see than there had been—just him approaching the door of the house on Bethune Street, knocking his special knock, saying something I
couldn’t hear into the opening, and then disappearing inside—and yet I continued to watch him, standing beneath the stairwell of the house across the street. Once, the door opened slightly wider than usual, and I saw the person inside, a white man about my husband’s age with light-brown hair, poke his head out and quickly look left and right before pulling the door shut again. After the door closed, I would stand there for a few minutes longer, waiting to see if anything more happened, but it never did. Then I would go home.

Everything, in fact, had returned to how it had been before I had met David, and yet things were also different, because I had felt like somebody else when I had had David as a friend, and now that I no longer did, it was difficult to remember who I actually was.

One night, about six weeks after I had last met up with David, my husband and I were eating dinner when he said, “Cobra, are you all right?”

“Yes,” I said. “Thank you,” I remembered to say.

“How is David?” he asked, after a silence, and I looked up.

“Why are you asking?” I said.

He lifted one shoulder and let it fall. “I just thought I would,” he said. “It’s so hot now—are you two still walking, or are you spending more time at the center?”

“We aren’t friends anymore,” I said, and across from me, my husband was silent.

“I’m sorry, Cobra,” he said, and now I shrugged. Suddenly I was mad: I was mad that my husband wasn’t jealous of David or of my friendship with him; I was mad that he wasn’t relieved that David and I were no longer friends; I was mad that he was so unsurprised.

“Where do you go on your free nights?” I asked him, and I was pleased to see him look startled, and lean back in his seat.

“I go to see friends,” he said, after a silence.

“What do you do with them?” I asked, and he was silent again.

“We talk,” he said, at last. “We play chess.”

Then we were both silent. I was still angry; I still wanted to ask him questions. But I had so many that I didn’t know where to begin, and besides, I was scared: What if he told me something I didn’t want to hear? What if he got angry at me and shouted? What if he
ran out of the apartment? Then I’d be alone, and I wouldn’t know what to do.

Finally, he stood and began gathering the dishes. We had had horse that night, but neither of us had finished our servings; I knew my husband would wrap the leftovers in paper so we could use the bones to flavor our porridge.

It was Tuesday, and my free night, but as I began walking toward our bedroom and my husband set down the dishes to bring me the radio, I stopped him. “I don’t want to listen to the radio,” I said. “I want to go to sleep.”

“Cobra,” my husband said, stepping close to me, “are you sure you’re all right?”

“Yes,” I said.

“But you’re crying,” my husband said, even though I didn’t think I was. “Did—did David hurt you in some way, Cobra?”

“No,” I said. “No, he didn’t hurt me. I’m just very tired and would like to be left alone, please.”

He moved away from me, and I went to the bathroom and then to my bed. A few hours later, my husband came in. It was unusual for him to go to bed this early, but we had both been working long hours, and he was very tired, as was I. Yesterday there had been an early-morning raid that had woken us both. But although we were both tired, only he fell asleep quickly, while I stayed awake, watching the searchlight move across the ceiling. I imagined my husband at Bethune Street playing chess with somebody else, but as hard as I tried, I could only envision the inside of the house looking like our own apartment, and the only other person I could see playing with my husband was not the man who had opened the door for him, but David.