To Paradise (80 page)

People began shouting questions at once. Of the thirty-two people in that room, at least nine of us—including, I was fairly certain, one of the authors of the proposal, a rabbity little woman—would not be eligible for state benefits if this act passes. If there had been only two or three of us, I would be more worried—in such
situations, people tend to vote against their own interests because they think it offers them greater personal protection. But in this case, there are too many of us for such a proposal to be realized, not to mention the fact that there are too many unanswerables: Would this mean that barren couples’ marriages would become ineligible for state benefits? What about same-sex parents who had biological children, or have means to have more? What would happen to widows and widowers, of whom there were now historic numbers? Were we actually,
really
talking about paying citizens for having children? What if they had children and the children died—would they keep their benefits? Was this effectively eliminating a fertile person’s right to choose to have children or not? What if the fertile person was physically or mentally unfit—would we still be encouraging them to have children? What about divorce? Wouldn’t this be encouraging women to stay in abusive marriages? Would a sterile person be allowed to marry a fertile person? What if a person had transitioned to another gender—would this legislation not leave them in an irresolvable legal gray area? From where was the money coming to support this plan, especially as two of our primary trading partners were expected to cease relations with us? If procreation is so essential to the country’s survival, would it not make more sense to pardon state traitors and encourage them to have children, even in a controlled environment? Why wouldn’t we just adopt some of the refugees’ children, now orphans, or import children from climatically ravaged countries, and thus divorce the idea of parenthood from biology? Were the authors really suggesting that we exploit a national and existential trauma, the disappearance of a generation of children, to advance a moralistic agenda? By the end of the session, both of the proposal’s authors seemed about to cry, and the meeting disbanded with everyone in a foul temper.

I was walking to my car when I heard someone call my name, and turned and saw it was the pharmacology minister. “It’s not going to happen,” he said, so firmly that I almost smiled: He was so young, and so certain. Then I remembered that he had lost his entire family, and that he deserved my respect for that alone.

“I hope you’re right,” I said, and he nodded. “I have no doubt,” he said, and then bowed and walked off toward his car.

We shall see. Over the years, I’ve been astonished at and dismayed by and fearful of how acquiescent the public has proven to be: Fear of disease, the human instinct to stay healthy, has eclipsed almost every other desire and value they once treasured, as well as many of the freedoms they had thought inalienable. That fear was yeast to the state, and now the state generates its own fear when they feel the population’s is flagging. Monday begins the third consecutive week of debates about the Marriage Act, and it looks like we may be able to stop this after all—your condemnation helped, certainly. I don’t see how this proceeds without alienating us completely from Old Europe, but of course I’ve been wrong before.

Keep your fingers crossed for all of us. I’ll write more next week. Send my love to Olivier. And save some for yourself.

Charles

February 3, 2078

Dear Peter—the act passed. It’ll be announced tomorrow. I don’t know what else to say. More soon. Charles

Dear Peter,
April 15, 2079

It’s very early, just dawn, and I can’t sleep. I haven’t been sleeping at all, it seems, these past few months. I’ve been trying to go to bed earlier, closer to eleven instead of past midnight, and then I lie there. Sometimes I don’t so much fall as slip into a liminal state between wakefulness and slumber, one in which I’m acutely aware of both the mattress beneath me and the sound of the fan wicking away above me. In these hours, I relive the events of the day, yet in this replay, I’m sometimes participant and sometimes witness, and I
never know at which moment the camera might swing on its dolly and my perspective will shift.

Last night I saw C. again. He’s not exactly my type, and I can’t imagine I’m his. But we both have the same security clearance and rank, which means that he can come to my house or I can go to his and we can have our respective cars wait outside to drive us home afterward without any questions or difficulties.

You forget, sometimes, how much you need to be touched. It’s not food or water or light or heat—you can go for years without it. The body doesn’t remember the sensation; it does you the kindness of allowing you to forget. The first two times, we had sex quickly, almost brutally, as if we might never have the opportunity again, but the past three instances have been more leisurely. He lives in a state-appointed townhouse in Zone Fourteen, bare of anything but the essentials, one mostly empty room opening into another.

Afterward, we pretend the listening devices don’t exist—we have that privilege, too—and talk. He’s fifty-two, twenty-three years younger than I am, only twelve years older than David would have been. He speaks, sometimes, about his sons, the younger of whom would have been sixteen this year, just a year older than Charlie will be this September, and his husband, who had been in the marketing department of the pharmaceutical company where he’d once worked. C. had considered killing himself after they had died, all within six months, but in the end, he hadn’t, and now, he said, he couldn’t remember why.

“I can’t remember why I didn’t, either,” I said, though as soon as I spoke, I realized that was a lie.

“Your granddaughter,” he said, and I nodded.

“You’re lucky,” he said.

You’ll recall it had been C. who’d been so certain that the Marriage Act would fail. Even now, even as we were meeting in semisecret, he continued to argue that it’d be overturned imminently. “What’s the point of having marriage for people who aren’t going to have children?” he asked. “If the point is to raise more children in general, why not use some of us as child-carers, or assign us other supportive roles? Isn’t the whole point to try to get maximum
advantage out of all our citizens?” When I once suggested the inevitable conclusion—that, despite the Committee’s promises, the Marriage Act will only lead to the eventual criminalization of gayness on moral grounds—he contradicted me with such fury that I had no choice but to gather my things and leave. “What’s the point of that?” he asked me, again and again, and when I said that the point was the same wherever and whenever homosexuality was criminalized—to create a useful scapegoat on whom the fortunes of a faltering state could be blamed—he accused me of being bitter and cynical. “I believe in this state,” he said, and when I said I had, once, too, he had told me to get out, that we were too distant from each other philosophically. For weeks, there was silence. But then need drew us back together, the source of our reunion the same thing we could no longer discuss.

Afterward, he walks me to the door; we embrace, rather than kiss, confirm our next encounter. At Committee meetings, we’re cordial. Not too distant, not too friendly. I imagine no one can tell anything different. At our last encounter, he told me that safe houses have started cropping up, mostly at the far western edges of Zone Eight, for people who can’t meet as we do in a private house. “They’re not brothels,” he clarified. “They’re more like gathering places.”

“What do people do there?” I asked.

“The same things we do here,” he said. “But not just sex.”

“No?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “They also talk. They go there and talk.”

“About what?” I asked.

He shrugged. “The things people talk about,” he said, and as he did, I realized: I no longer knew what people talk about. If you were to listen to us on the Committee, you would think that all people talk about is how to overthrow the state, how to escape the country, how to cause mayhem. And yet what else is there to discuss? There are no movies, no television, no internet. You can’t, as we once had, spend an evening debating an article or a novel or bragging about a vacation to someplace far away. You can’t discuss the person you’ve just had sex with, or how you were interviewing for a new job, or how much you wanted to buy a new car or apartment or pair of
sunglasses. You can’t do these things because none of those things are possible any longer, at least not openly, and with their elimination has also disappeared hours’, days’ worth of conversations. The world we live in now is about survival, and survival is always present tense. The past is no longer relevant; the future has failed to materialize. Survival allows for hope—it is, indeed, predicated on hope—but it does not allow for pleasure, and as a topic, it is dull. Talk, touch: the things C. and I kept reuniting to find—somewhere downtown, in a house by the river, there were other people like us, talking to each other just to hear the sound of someone responding to them, proof that the self they remembered still existed after all.

Later, I went home. I had a female guard from Security sit downstairs on the nights I knew I’d be out, and after I had dismissed her, I climbed up to Charlie’s room and sat on the edge of her bed, staring at her. She’s one of those children who look like neither their mother nor their father. Her nose resembles Eden’s perhaps, and I suppose she has David’s long, thin mouth, but somehow nothing in her face reminds me of either of them, and I am grateful for that. She is her own creature, one unfreighted by history. She was wearing a pair of short-sleeved pajamas, and I ran my fingers over her arms, which are pocked by little craters left behind by the scars. Next to her wheezed Little Cat, a sore on his right foreleg oozing pus, and I knew that I would soon have to take him to the clinic, have him injected with poison, come up with a lie to tell Charlie.

In bed, I thought about Nathaniel. If I’m lucky, I can conjure him as a source not of shame or self-flagellation but of neutrality. When I’m with C., I can sometimes close my eyes and pretend he’s Nathaniel at fifty-two. C. looks and smells and sounds and tastes entirely different than Nathaniel did, but skin is skin. I dare not admit this to anyone but you (not that there’s anyone else left to tell), but increasingly I have these dreams in which I revisit scenes and moments from my life with Nathaniel but in which David—and later, Eden, and later still, even Charlie—are missing, as if they never existed. These dreams are often banal: Nathaniel and I, getting older and older, arguing about whether we should plant sunflowers or not, or, once, trying to chase a raccoon out of our attic. We seem to live in
a cottage by the sea in Massachusetts, and although I never see the outside of the structure, I have a sense of what it looks like anyway.

In the daytime, I sometimes speak aloud to Nathaniel. Out of respect, I rarely discuss work, for that would upset him too much. Instead, I ask him about Charlie. After that first incident with those boys, I had told her about sex, and sexual threats, in a much more complete way than I had told her before. “Do you have any questions?” I had asked her, and after a silence, she had shaken her head. “No,” she’d said. She still doesn’t like to be touched by anyone, and while I sometimes mourn for her, I envy her, too: To live a life without desire (not to mention imagination) would once have been something to pity, but now it might ensure her survival—or at least increase her chances. Yet her distaste has not stopped her from wandering off again, and after the second incident, I sat down with her again. “Little cat,” I began, and then I didn’t know what else to say. How could I tell her that those boys weren’t attracted to her, that they saw her only as something to use and toss aside? I couldn’t, I couldn’t—I felt traitorous even thinking the words. In those moments, I wished that someone felt lust for her, that even if that lust was muddied with cruelty, it would at least be passion, or a form of it—it would mean that someone saw her as lovely and special and desirable; it would mean that someone might one day love her as deeply as I do, but differently, too.

More and more frequently these days, I think about how, of all the horrors the illnesses wreaked, one of the least-discussed is the brisk brutality with which it sorted us into categories. The first, most obvious one was the living and the dead. Then there was the sick and the well, the bereaved and the relieved, the cured and the incurable, the insured and the uninsured. We kept track of these statistics; we wrote them all down. But then there were the other divisions, the kind that didn’t appear to warrant recording: The people who lived with other people, and the people who lived alone. The people who had money, and the people who didn’t. The people who had connections, and the people who didn’t. The people who had somewhere else to go, and the people who didn’t.

In the end, it hadn’t made as much of a difference as we thought it would. The rich died anyway, maybe more slowly than they should have; some of the poor survived. After the first round of the virus had whipped through the city, scooping up all the easiest prey—the indigent and the infirm and the young—it had returned for seconds, and thirds, and fourths, until it was only the luckiest who remained. And yet no one was truly lucky: Is Charlie’s life lucky? Perhaps it is—she is here, after all, she can talk and walk and learn, she is able-bodied and lucid, she is loved and, I know, capable of loving. But she is not who she might have been, because none of us are—the illness took something from all of us, and so our definition of luck is a matter of relativity, as luck always is, its parameters designated by others. The disease clarified everything about who we are; it revealed the fictions we’d all constructed about our lives. It revealed that progress, that tolerance, does not necessarily beget more progress or tolerance. It revealed that kindness does not beget more kindness. It revealed how brittle the poetry of our lives truly is—it exposed friendship as something flimsy and conditional; partnership as contextual and circumstantial. No law, no arrangement, no amount of love was stronger than our own need to survive, or, for the more generous among us, our need for our people, whoever they were, to survive. I sometimes sense a faint mutual embarrassment among those of us who lived—who had sought to deprive someone else, maybe even someone else we knew, or a relative of someone we knew, of medication or hospitalization or food if it meant we could save ourselves? Who had reported someone they knew, perhaps even liked—a neighbor, an acquaintance, a colleague—to the Health Ministry, and who had turned up the volume on their headphones to muffle the sounds of them begging for help as they were led away to the waiting van, shouting all the while that someone had been misinformed, that the rash that had spread across their daughter’s arm was only eczema, that the sore on their son’s forehead was only a pimple?