To Paradise (76 page)

By mid-July, I felt like I was living in two worlds. The lab had been transformed: The rooftop of Larsson had been made into an office for a team of epidemiologists from the Health Ministry, and a section of the largest of the basement passageways was converted into
an office for some employees of the Interior Ministry. The scientists hurried about looking worried, and even the Ph.D.s were silent. All I knew was that whatever had been found was very dangerous, so dangerous that it had overshadowed even the excitement surrounding its discovery.

But outside of RU, everything continued as it always did. The shuttle picked me up; the shuttle dropped me off. There were groceries at the store, and there was one week when horse was even discounted, as it occasionally was when there was a surplus of meat from the factories out west. The radio played music when it was supposed to and bulletins when it was supposed to. You saw nothing of the preparations that I knew from school had happened in advance of the ’70 illness: There was no increase in military personnel, no requisitioning of buildings, no reinstatement of the curfew. On the weekends, the Square filled with people, as usual, and although David had stopped waiting for me, I still stood at the front door and looked out its window every Saturday at the same time we had once met, looking for him as he had looked for me. But I never saw him. A few times, I wondered if I should have bought the powder from the vendor and slipped it into David’s drink, as she had said, before remembering that it hadn’t been David who had chosen to stop seeing me—I had been the one who had chosen to stop seeing him. I would wonder then whether I should go to the Square and let that woman find me again—not for the powder that would make David fall in love with me but for a different powder, a powder that would make me believe that someone could love me at all.

The one thing that was different outside of work, I suppose, was that my husband was home more than usual, often sleeping in his bed or napping on the sofa. He even came home earlier on his free nights, and when he did, I could hear that he moved slowly, even heavily. Normally, he walked lightly, but now his walk was different, and when he climbed into bed, he groaned, quietly, as if he were in pain, and his face often looked puffy. He had been working extra hours at the Pond, just as I had been working extra hours at the lab, but I didn’t know if he knew what I knew, which wasn’t very much, anyway. People who worked at the Pond and the Farm did vital jobs,
but just as I didn’t know what they were actually doing in those jobs, they often didn’t, either. It could be that he was staying late, for example, because a lab—maybe even a lab at RU—had urgently requested a certain kind of material from a certain kind of plant, but just as I didn’t know why I was preparing the mice, he wouldn’t know why he was preparing a sample. He would just be told to do it, and he would. The difference was that I wasn’t curious about why I was told to do anything; it was enough for me to know that my work was necessary, that it was useful, and that it had to be done. But my husband had been two years away from completing his doctorate when he was declared an enemy of the state and expelled from his university—he would want to know why he was asked to do things. He would even, perhaps, want to contribute an opinion. And yet he never would.

I remember that, once, I had been very upset after one of my lessons with Grandfather about the sort of questions I should ask people. I was often frustrated after our sessions, because I was reminded of how difficult it was for me to do and say and think things that seemed to be so easy for other people. “I don’t know how to ask the right questions,” I said to Grandfather, even though that wasn’t exactly what I wanted to say, even though I didn’t know how to say what I really wanted to say.

Grandfather had been quiet for a moment. “Sometimes not asking questions is a good thing, little cat,” he said. “Not asking questions can keep you safe.” Then he looked at me, really looked at me, as if he were memorizing my face and might never see it again. “But sometimes you need to ask, even if it’s dangerous.” He stopped again. “Will you remember that, little cat?”

“Yes,” I said.

The next day at work, I went to see Dr. Morgan. Dr. Morgan was the most senior postdoc at the lab, and he oversaw all the techs. But even though he was the most senior, the Ph.D.s didn’t want to be like him. “God help me if I turn out like Morgan,” I sometimes heard one of them say to the others. This was because Dr. Morgan didn’t have a lab of his own and was still working for Dr. Wesley, seven years after he’d begun. In fact, Dr. Morgan and I had joined
Dr. Wesley’s lab in the same year. Grandfather had told me that every lab would have at least one postdoc who never left, who stayed on and on, but I should never mention that fact to them, or remind them of how long they’d been there, or ask them why they hadn’t gone somewhere else.

So I never had. But Dr. Morgan had always been nice to me, and, unlike many of the other scientists in the lab, he always said hello to me if he saw me in the hallway. Still, I rarely sought him out except to ask for permission to leave early or come in late, and as I didn’t know the best way to approach him, I spent about five minutes waiting near his station while most of the lab was away eating lunch, not knowing what to do and hoping he would eventually look up from his work.

Finally, he did. “Someone’s watching me,” he announced, and turned around. “Charlie,” he said. “What are you doing, just standing there?”

“I’m sorry, Dr. Morgan,” I said.

“Is something wrong?” he asked.

“No,” I said. Then I couldn’t think of what else to say. “Dr. Morgan,” I said, quickly, before I lost my nerve, “will you tell me what’s happening?”

Dr. Morgan looked at me, and I looked back at him. There had always been something about Dr. Morgan that reminded me of Grandfather, though for a while, I couldn’t figure out why: He was much younger than Grandfather, just a few years older than I am. He was a different race. And, unlike Grandfather, he wasn’t acclaimed or influential. But then I realized it was because he always answered me when I asked a question—other people in the lab, even if I asked them, would tell me I wouldn’t understand, but Dr. Morgan never said that.

“It’s a zoonosis, and definitively a hemorrhagic fever,” he finally said. “And it’s spread by both respiratory aerosols and droplets as well as by bodily fluids, which makes it profoundly contagious. We don’t yet have a clear sense of its incubation period, or of how long the period is between diagnosis and death. It was identified in
Brazil. The first case in this country was found about a month ago, in Prefecture Six.” He didn’t need to say that this was a lucky thing, as Prefecture Six was the most sparsely populated of the prefectures. “But since then, we know it’s been spreading—we don’t yet know how fast. And that’s all I can say.”

I didn’t ask whether that was because Dr. Morgan didn’t know more or because he couldn’t tell me more. I just thanked him and returned to my area, so I could think about what he had told me.

I know that the first thing someone might wonder is how this disease got here in the first place. One of the reasons there hadn’t been a pandemic in almost twenty-four years is because, as I’ve said, the state closed down all the borders, as well as banned all international travel. Many countries did the same. In fact, there were only seventeen countries in total—New Britain, a cluster in Old Europe, and a second cluster in Southeast Asia—with reciprocal movement rights for their citizens.

But although no one was allowed to come in and no one was allowed to go out, it didn’t
actually
mean that no one came in and no one went out. Four years ago, for example, there was a rumor that a stowaway from India had been found in a shipping container at one of the ports in Prefecture Three. And as Grandfather always said, a microbe can travel in anyone’s throat: a person’s, of course, but also a bat’s or a snake’s or a flea’s. (This is a figure of speech, as snakes and fleas don’t have throats.) As Dr. Wesley always said, all it took was one.

Then there was another theory, one I would never repeat—though other people did—that the state invented the diseases themselves, that half of every research institute, even RU, was dedicated to making new illnesses, and the other half was dedicated to figuring out how to destroy them, and that whenever the state thought it needed to, it deployed one of the new diseases. Don’t ask me how I know that people thought this way, because I couldn’t say—I just do. I
can
say that my father thought this way, and it was one of the reasons he was declared an enemy of the state.

But though I had heard these theories before, I didn’t believe
them myself. If that had been true, then why wouldn’t the state have deployed an illness in ’83 or ’88, during the uprisings? Then Grandfather would still be alive, and I would still have him to talk to.

I would also never say this, but sometimes I wished there
would
be another disease from far away. Not because I wanted people to die but because it would be proof. I wanted to know for certain that there were other places, and other countries, with people living in them and riding their own shuttles and working in their own labs and making their own nutria patties for dinner. I knew I would never be able to visit these places—I didn’t even
want
to be able to visit them.

But sometimes I wanted to know that they existed, that all those countries that Grandfather had been to, all those streets he had walked on, were still there. Sometimes I even wanted to pretend that he wasn’t dead at all, that I hadn’t seen him be killed with my own eyes, but that, when he dropped through the platform hole, he had instead landed in one of the cities he had traveled to when he was young: Sydney or Copenhagen or Shanghai or Lagos. Maybe he was there, and thinking of me, and although I would miss him just as much, it would be enough for me to know he was still alive, remembering me as he sat in a place I couldn’t even begin to know how to imagine.

Over the next weeks, things began to change. Not in any immediately obvious way—it wasn’t as if you saw lines of transport trucks or military mobilizations—and yet it was becoming clear that something was happening.

They did most of the work at night, so it was when I was on the shuttle, heading north to RU, that I began noticing the differences. One morning, for example, we lingered longer at the checkpoint than usual; another, there was a soldier who scanned our foreheads before we boarded with a new kind of temperature wand I’d never seen. “Move it along,” said the soldier, but not meanly, and then, though none of us had asked, “Just some new equipment the state is
testing.” The next day, he was gone, but in his place was a different soldier, standing and watching us, one hand on his weapon, as we boarded the shuttle. He said nothing, and did nothing, but his eyes moved back and forth across us, and when the man in front of me was stepping up, the soldier held out his hand. “Halt,” he said. “What’s that?” and pointed to a splotch the color of smashed grapes on the man’s face. “Birthmark,” said the man, who didn’t sound scared at all, and the soldier took a device out of his pocket and beamed a light at the man’s cheek, and then read what the device said and nodded, waving the man onto the shuttle with the tip of his weapon.

I cannot say what other people on my shuttle route did or didn’t notice. On the one hand, so little changed in Zone Eight that it was impossible not to recognize things that had. On the other hand, most people weren’t looking for changes. But I have to assume that most of us knew, or suspected, what was happening: Every one of us worked for state-run research institutions, after all; those of us who worked for places that studied biological sciences perhaps knew more than those who worked at the Pond or the Farm. Still, none of us said anything. It was easy to believe nothing was happening if you tried.

One day, I was in my usual seat on the shuttle, looking out the window, when I suddenly saw David. He was in his gray jumpsuit and he was walking down Sixth Avenue. This was just before we had to stop for the Fourteenth Street checkpoint, and as we waited our turn in the queue, I saw him turn right on Twelfth Street, heading west and disappearing from sight.

The shuttle inched forward, and I turned back around in my seat. I realized that it couldn’t have been David after all; it was an hour past his usual shuttle time—he would already have been at work at the Farm.

And yet I had been so sure I had seen him, even though it was impossible. For the first time, I felt a kind of fear about everything that was happening—the illness, how little I knew, what was going to happen next. I was not afraid of getting sick myself; I wasn’t sure why. But that day on the shuttle, I had the strange sensation that the world was truly being split, and that in one world, I was riding the
shuttle to my job taking care of the pinkies, while in another, David was going somewhere completely different, somewhere I had never seen or heard of, as if Zone Eight were actually much bigger than I knew it to be, and within it were places that everyone else knew about, but that I somehow did not.

I was always thinking of Grandfather, and yet there were two days on which I thought about him especially hard. The first was September 20, the day he was killed. The second was August 14, the day he was taken from me, the last day I ever spent with him, and though I know this will sound strange, this date was even more difficult for me than the actual day of his death.

I had been with him that afternoon. It was a Saturday, and he had come to meet me at what had been our apartment but was now my husband’s and my apartment. My husband and I had only been married since June 4, and of all the things that were strange and difficult for me about being married, the strangest and most difficult was not seeing Grandfather every day. He had been resettled into a very tiny flat near the eastern edge of the zone, and for the first two weeks of my marriage, I had gone over to his building every day after work and waited in the street, sometimes for several hours, until he came home. Each day, he would smile but also shake his head. “Little cat,” he would say, patting my hair, “it’ll never get easier if you keep coming over here every night. Besides, your husband will worry.”