To Paradise (78 page)

“Charlie,” said David, somewhere above my head, “I know this is a great shock for you. I know you don’t believe me. I know all this. And I’m sorry. I wish I could have made it easier for you.” And then I felt him slip something into my cooling suit’s pocket, something small and hard. “I want you to open this only when you’re back at home, and alone,” he said. “Do you understand me? Only when you’re absolutely certain you’re not being watched—not even by your husband.” I nodded against his chest. “Okay,” he said. “Now we’re going to separate, and I’m going to walk west, and you’re going to walk north and go up to your apartment, and then I’m going to send you a message about where our next meeting will be, all right?”

“How?” I asked.

“Don’t worry about that,” he said. “Just know I will. And if what’s in your pocket now doesn’t convince you, then you just won’t show up. Though, Charlie”—and here he inhaled; I could feel his stomach retracting—“I hope you do. I’ve promised my employer I won’t return to New Britain without you.”

And then he abruptly dropped his arms and left, walking west: not too fast, not too slow, as if he were just another shopper in the Square.

I remained standing there for a few seconds. I had the odd sensation that what had happened had been a dream, and that I was dreaming still. But I wasn’t. Above me, the sun was hot and white, and I could feel sweat trickling down my side.

I turned the cooling suit up to its maximum level and did as David had told me. Once I was in my apartment, though, with the front door safely locked behind me and my helmet removed, I felt like I was going to faint, and I sat down, right on the floor, resting my back against the door and inhaling big gulps of air until I felt better.

Finally, I stood. I checked the locks on the door again, and then I called my husband’s name, even though it was clear he wasn’t at home. Yet I still checked every room: the kitchen, the main room, our bedroom, the bathroom. I even checked the closets. After that, I returned to the main room. I drew the blinds on the windows, one of which looked onto the back of another building, the other of which looked into an air shaft. And only then did I sit on the sofa and reach into my pocket.

It was a package about the size of a walnut shell, of brown paper wrapped around something hard. The paper had been secured with tape, and after peeling it off, I found that beneath the first layer of paper was a second, and then a layer of thin white tissue, which I also tore away. And then I was left with a small black pouch made of a soft, dense fabric and pulled tight with a drawstring. I loosened the drawstring and held out my palm and shook the bag, and into my hand fell Grandfather’s ring.

I hadn’t known what to expect, and only afterward did I realize
that I should have been scared, that I could have been carrying anything: an explosive, a vial of viruses, a Fly.

But in certain ways, the ring was worse. I cannot quite say why, but I’ll try. It was as if I was learning that something I had known to be one way was actually another. Of course, that had already happened: David had told me he was not who he said he was. But I had been able to disbelieve him until I saw the ring. I had had what Grandfather had once called “plausible deniability,” which means you can pretend to not know something while knowing it as well. And so, if David was telling me the truth about himself, then were the other things he said also true? How did he know about the disease? Had he really been sent to find me?

Were
other countries not like this one after all?

Who
was
David?

I looked at the ring, which was as heavy as I remembered, its pearl lid still smooth and shiny. “It’s called nacre,” Grandfather had explained. “It’s a kind of calcium carbonate that a mollusk produces, building layers and layers of it around an irritant—like a speck of sand—in its mantle. You can see it’s very strong.”

“Can humans make nacre?” I had asked, and Grandfather had smiled.

“No,” he said. “Humans have to protect themselves in other ways.”

It had been almost twenty years since I had seen the ring, and now I clenched it in my fist: It was warm and solid.
I had to give it to the fairy,
Grandfather had said.
The fairy who looked over you while you were sick.
And although I had always known he was teasing, and although I knew there were no such thing as fairies, I think this is what made me saddest of all: That Grandfather hadn’t had to pay a price for me returning to him after all. That I had just come back to him anyway, and that, one day, he had sent the ring someplace else, to someone else, and now that it had been returned to me, I no longer knew what it meant, or where it had been, or what it had once stood for.

We met again the following Thursday. That morning at work, I had gone to the bathroom, and when I returned to my desk, there was a small folded piece of paper tucked beneath one of the boxes of saline, and I grabbed at it, looking around to see if anyone was watching me, although of course no one was: It was only me and the pinkies.

When I reached the center at 19:00, he was already there, standing outside, and held up his hand to me. “I thought we’d walk around the track,” he said, and I nodded. Inside, he bought us both fruit juices, and then we began to walk, slowly but not too slowly, at our regular pace. “Keep your helmet on,” he’d said, and so I did, opening the little slot around the mouth when I wanted to take a sip. It was cool inside the center, but some people kept their helmets on anyway, just out of laziness, and so this raised no suspicions. “I’m glad to see you,” David said, in a low voice. “Your husband’s on his free night,” he added, and it was not a question but a statement, and as I turned toward him, he shook his head, just slightly. “No amazement, no anger, no alarm,” he reminded me, and I redirected my gaze.

“How do you know about our free nights?” I asked, trying to stay calm.

“Your grandfather told my employer,” he said.

It may seem odd that David had not asked to meet in my apartment, or in his. But aside from the fact that I would not want him in my apartment, and would not be willing to go to his, the reason is that it was simply safer to meet in public. In the year of the uprisings, before the state’s return to power, it was widely assumed that most private spaces were being monitored, and even now, you had to deeply trust someone before visiting his or her apartment.

For a while, neither of us said anything. “Do you have any questions for me?” he asked, in that same quiet voice, which sounded so unlike the David I knew. But, then again, I had to remind myself, the David I knew did not exist. Or maybe he did, but he was not who I was talking to now.

I had many questions, of course, so many that it was impossible to know where to begin: What to say, what to ask.

“Don’t people in New Britain sound different?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said. “We do.”

“But you sound like you’re from here,” I said.

“I’m pretending,” he said. “If we were somewhere safe, I would use my regular voice, and I would sound different to you.”

“Oh,” I said. For a while we were silent. Then I asked him something I’d been wondering for a long time. “Your hair,” I said, “it’s long.” He looked at me, surprised, and I was proud of myself for having surprised him. “Some of it fell out of your cap that first day I saw you in the shuttle queue,” I said, and he nodded.

“It’s true, I had long hair,” he said. “But I cut it, months ago.”

“To fit in?” I asked him, and he nodded again.

“Yes,” he said, “to fit in. You’re very observant, Charlie,” and I smiled, just a bit, pleased that David thought I was observant, and pleased because I knew Grandfather would be proud of me for noticing something that perhaps some other people would not have.

“Do people in New Britain have long hair?” I asked.

“Some do,” he said. “Some don’t. People wear their hair how they like.”

“Even men?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said, “even men.”

I thought about this, a place where you could wear your hair long if you wanted—if you were able to grow it long, that is. Then I asked, “Did you ever meet my grandfather?”

“No,” he said. “I was never so lucky.”

“I miss him,” I said.

“I know, Charlie,” he said. “I know you do.”

“Were you really sent here to get me?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said. “It’s the only reason I’m here.”

Then I didn’t know what to say again. I know this will sound vain, and I am not a vain person, but hearing that David had come just for me, just to find me, made me feel light inside. I wished I could hear it again and again; I wished I could tell everyone. Someone had come here to find me: I was his only reason. No one would believe it—I didn’t believe it myself.

“I don’t know what else to ask,” I finally said, and once again, I could feel him looking at me, just a bit.

“Well,” he said, “why don’t I begin by telling you the plan,” and he looked at me again, and I nodded, and he began to talk. Around and around the track we went, sometimes passing other walkers, sometimes being passed by them. We were neither the fastest nor the slowest there, neither the youngest nor the oldest—and if you were watching us all from above, you wouldn’t have been able to tell who was talking about something safe, and who was, at that moment, discussing something so dangerous, so impossible, that you wouldn’t have thought they could still be alive at all.

Dearest Peter,
June 17, 2074

Thank you for your lovely, kind note, and apologies for this late reply. I wanted to write earlier, because I knew you’d be anxious, but I hadn’t found a new courier I can trust completely until now.

Of course I’m not angry with you. Of course not. You did everything you could. It was my fault—I should have let you get me out when I (and you) had the chance. Again and again, I think: If I had asked you just five years ago, we would be in New Britain now. It wouldn’t have been easy, but it at least would’ve been possible. Then, invariably, my thoughts grow more dangerous and more despairing: If we had left, would Charlie still have gotten sick? If she hadn’t gotten sick, would she be happier now? Would I?

Then I think that maybe this, her no-longer-new way of thinking, of being, has perhaps better equipped her for the realities of this country after all. Maybe her affectlessness is a kind of stolidity, one that will see her through whatever this world becomes. Maybe the qualities whose loss I mourned on her behalf—an emotional complexity, a demonstrativeness, even a rebelliousness—are actually ones about whose disappearance I should feel relief. In more hopeful moments, I can almost imagine that she’s somehow evolved and become the sort of person who’s better-suited for our time and our place.
She
isn’t sad about who she is.

But then the old cycle replays itself: If she hadn’t gotten sick. If she hadn’t taken Xychor. If she had grown up in a country where tenderness, vulnerability, romance were still, if not encouraged,
then at least tolerated. Who would she be? Who would I be, without this guilt, this sorrow, and the sorrow about the guilt?

Don’t worry about us. Or, rather,
do
worry, but not any more than you would. They don’t know I tried to escape. And as I know I keep reminding the both of us, they still need me. As long as there’s disease, there’ll be me.

With thanks and love. (As always.) Charles

Dear Peter,
July 21, 2075

I’m writing this to you in haste, because I want to make sure I catch the courier before he leaves. I nearly called you today and might still, even though it’s been harder and harder to get a secure line. But if I figure out a way in the next few days, I will.

I think I mentioned that at the start of the summer, I began letting Charlie go out on brief walks by herself. And when I say brief, I mean brief: She can walk one block north to the Mews, and then east to University, and then south to Washington Square North, and then west to home. I had been reluctant, but one of her tutors encouraged it—she’ll be eleven in September, she reminded me; I had to let her out in the world, just a little.

So I did. For the first three weeks, I had security follow her, just to make sure. But she did exactly as I’d told her, and I watched from the second-floor window as she climbed the stairs to the house.

I hadn’t wanted her to know how nervous I had been, and so I waited until dinner to talk to her about it. “How was your walk, little cat?” I asked.

She looked up at me. “Good,” she said.

“What did you see?” I asked.

She thought. “Trees,” she said.

“That’s nice,” I said. “What else?”

Another silence. “Buildings,” she said.

“Tell me about the buildings,” I said. “Did you see anyone in any
of the windows? What color were the buildings? Did any of them have flower boxes outside? What color were their doors?” It helps her, these exercises, but they also make me feel like I’m coaching a spy: Did you see anyone suspicious? What were they doing? What were they wearing? Can you identify them from these pictures I’m showing you?

She tries so hard to give me what she thinks I want. But all I want is for her to one day come home and tell me that she saw something funny or beautiful or exciting or scary—all I want for her is the ability to tell herself a story. She looks at me occasionally as she talks, and I nod or smile to show her I approve, and whenever I do, there’s that awful squeezing in my chest, that sensation only she is capable of causing.

In late June, I began letting her go alone. When I’m not home, her nanny is to wait for her arrival; it only takes her seven minutes to make the loop, and that’s allowing her plenty of time to stop and look at things as she goes. She’s never been curious to go any farther, and it’s too hot, besides. But then, at the beginning of the month, she asked if she could walk into the Square.

Part of me thrilled to this: My little Charlie, who never asks for anything or to go anywhere, who seems at times devoid of appetites and desires and preferences at all. Though that isn’t true—she knows the difference between sweet and salty, for example, and she prefers the salty. She knows the difference between a pretty shirt and an ugly one, and she prefers the pretty. She knows when someone’s laughter is mean and when it’s joyful. She can’t articulate why, but she knows. I remind her constantly: It’s fine to ask for what she wants; it’s fine to like someone, or something, or someplace, more than another. It’s fine to dislike, too. “All you have to do is say,” I tell her, “all you have to do is ask. Do you understand me, little cat?”

She looks at me, and I can’t tell what she’s thinking. “Yes,” she says. But I don’t know if she does.

I wouldn’t have allowed her into the Square at all six months ago. But now that the state has taken over, you can only enter it if you’re a resident of Zone Eight—there are guards posted at each of the entrances to check people’s papers. I had been worried, after
last year’s conversion of the rest of Central Park, that they were going to repurpose all the parks as research facilities, even though that hadn’t been the original plan. But in a rare alliance, the health and justice ministers partnered to persuade the rest of the Committee that a lack of public gathering spaces would
increase
treasonous activity, and force potential insurgent groups underground, where we’d be less able to monitor them. So we won this round, but barely, though it now seems that Union Square will eventually go the way of Madison Square and become, if not a research facility, then an all-purpose, state-run staging site: one month a makeshift morgue, the next a makeshift prison.

Washington Square, however, is a different matter. It’s a small park, in a residential zone, and therefore has been of no great concern to the state. Over the years, the shantytowns were built, and then destroyed, and then rebuilt, and then re-destroyed: Even from my vantage at the upstairs window, I could sense something rote about their destruction, a halfheartedness in the way the young soldier by the northern gate twirled his baton by its loop, the way the bulldozer operator leaned back her head and yawned, one hand on the controls, the other dangling out the window.

Four months ago, though, I woke to the sound of something large falling with a dull crash, and looked outside to see that the bulldozer had returned, but this time to unearth the trees on the western side of the Square. Two bulldozers worked for two days, and when they were finished, the transplant team arrived and bound up the fallen trees’ roots in great tangles of burlap and clods of soil, and then they too disappeared, presumably to Zone Fourteen, where they’re relocating many of the mature trees.

Now the Square sits empty, denuded of trees except for a strip that extends from the northeast corner to the southeast corner. Here, there are still benches, still paths, still a few remnants of the playground. But this, I have to imagine, is temporary; in the rest of the park, workers spend the day pouring cement across areas that had once been covered with grass. One of my colleagues in the Home Ministry said the space will be converted into some kind of outdoor bazaar, with vendors who will compensate for the loss of stores.

So it was here, to this final remaining section of green, that I let Charlie venture. She was to confine herself only to this area, and she was to talk to no one, and if anyone approached her, she was to go straight home. For the first two weeks, I watched her—I had set up a camera in one of the upstairs windows, and as I sat in the lab, I could see her on the screen, walking briskly to the southern end of the park, never stopping to look around her, and then resting for a few seconds before marching back. Soon she was home again, and the second camera showed her walking inside, locking the front door behind her, and going to the kitchen for a glass of water.

She usually walks late in the afternoon, when the sun’s lower in the sky, and as I talk or write, I can still see her movements, a stripe on the screen moving farther away from the camera and then closer, her round little body and round little face receding from view and then returning.

Then came this past Thursday. I was on a Committee call. The topic was the cooling suit, which will likely be introduced next year, and differs from your version because ours comes with a full hard-shell helmet with a pollutant-filtering shield. Have you tried one yet? You don’t walk so much as waddle, and the helmet is so heavy that the manufacturer is incorporating a neck brace into the design. But they’re truly effective. A group of us tested them out one evening, and for the first time in years, I didn’t reenter the lab and immediately begin coughing and wheezing and sweating. They’re going to be expensive, though, and the state is investigating whether we can reduce the price from astronomical to extraordinary.

Anyway, I was half listening to the call, half watching Charlie begin her walk through the park. I went to the bathroom, got some tea, returned to my desk. One of the interior ministers was droning on, still in the midst of his presentation about the difficulties of producing the suits on a mass scale, and so I looked back at my screen—only to see that Charlie was missing.

I stood, as if that would help matters. After reaching the southern end of the park, she usually sits on one of the benches. If she has a snack with her, she eats her snack. And then she stands and begins moving north. But now there was nothing: just a state employee
sweeping the sidewalk, and, in the background, a soldier, facing south.

I accessed the camera and swiveled it to the right, but there were only the soldiers in their navy-blue uniforms, an engineer corps, it seemed, taking measurements of the Square. Then I swiveled the camera to the left, as far as I could.

For a while, there was nothing. Just the sweeper and the soldier and, on the northeast corner, another soldier, rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet: one of those casual, carefree gestures that startle me more than anything else—that, even with everything that’s changed, people still rock on their feet, they still pick their noses, they still scratch their behinds and belch.

But then, at the very edge of the southeast corner, I saw something, a movement. I magnified the image as much as I could. There were two boys—young teenagers, I thought—both standing with their backs to the camera, talking to someone else who was facing the camera. I could only see this person’s feet, their white sneakers.

Oh,
I thought.
Oh, please.

And then the boys moved, and I saw that the third person was Charlie, in her white sneakers and red T-shirt dress, and she was following those boys, who didn’t even look around them, as they began walking east on Washington Square South.

“Officer!” I shouted at the screen, uselessly. “Charlie!”

But of course no one stopped, and I sat and watched as all three of them vanished from sight, strolling offscreen. One of the boys had his arm draped loosely around her neck; she was so short that the top of her head fit just beneath his armpit.

I told my secretary to have a security unit deployed, and then I ran downstairs to my car, calling and re-calling the nanny as we drove south. When she finally picked up, I yelled at her. “But, Dr. Griffith,” she said, quaveringly, “Charlie’s right here. She just got home from her walk.”

“Give her to me,” I snapped, and when Charlie’s face appeared on the screen, her expression the same as always, I nearly sobbed. “Charlie,” I said to her. “Little cat. Are you all right?”

“Yes, Grandfather,” she said.

“Don’t leave,” I told her. “Stay right there. I’m coming home.”

“All right,” she said.

At home, I dismissed the nanny (leaving it intentionally unclear whether that dismissal was for the day or forever) and went upstairs to Charlie’s room, where she was sitting on her bed, holding the cat. I had been fearing torn clothes, bruises, tears, but she looked the same as she always did—a little flushed, maybe, but that could have been the heat.

I sat down next to her, trying to calm myself. “Little cat,” I said, “I saw you in the Square today.” She didn’t turn from me. “On the camera,” I told her, but she remained silent. “Who were those boys?” I asked, and, when she still didn’t speak, “I’m not angry, Charlie. I just want to know who they are.”

She was silent. After four years, I’ve grown used to her silences. She isn’t being insubordinate or stubborn—she’s just trying to think of how to answer, and it takes time. Finally, she said, “I met them.”

“All right,” I said. “When did you meet them? And where?”

She frowned, concentrating. “A week ago,” she said. “On University Place.”

“Near the Mews?” I asked, and she nodded. “What are their names?” I asked, but she shook her head, and I knew she was getting upset—that she didn’t know, or didn’t remember. It was one of the things I was always reminding her:
Ask people’s names. And if you forget, ask them again. You can always ask—you have every right.
“It’s okay,” I told her. “Have you seen them every day since you met them?” Again, a shake of her head.

Finally, she said, in a small voice, “They told me to meet them in the park today.”

“And what did you do?” I asked.

“They said we should go on a walk,” she said. “But then—” And here she stopped, and pressed her face into Little Cat’s back. She began to rock herself, which she does when she’s upset, and I rubbed her back as she did. “They said they were my friends,” she said, at last, and she hugged the cat so tightly that he yelped. “They said they wanted to be friends,” she repeated, almost in a moan, and I pulled her close to me, and she didn’t resist.