To Paradise (45 page)

But then there had been a raid, and the people next door were found guilty of harboring an enemy, and the deck had been destroyed the same night they had been taken away. That had been the last search, five months ago. I never did know who they were.

My husband had begun putting things back in the closet before he left, but I was only able to do a little more cleaning before it was time for me to catch the 08:30 shuttle for work. Our shuttle stop was on Sixth Avenue and Ninth Street, just three blocks away. There were eight shuttles leaving every morning from Zone Eight, one every half hour from 06:00. The shuttles made four stops in Zone Eight and three in Zone Nine before stopping in Zone Ten, where my husband works, Zone Fifteen, where I work, and Zone Sixteen. Then, every evening beginning at 16:00 and until 20:00, it went in reverse, from Zone Sixteen to Zone Fifteen to Zone Ten, and then back to Zones Nine and Eight before cutting east to Zone Seventeen.

When I began taking the shuttle, I had liked to look at the other passengers and guess what they did and where they would disembark: The tall man, thin and long-legged like my husband, I imagined was an ichthyologist and worked in the Pond in Zone Ten; the mean-looking woman with small, dark, seedlike eyes was an epidemiologist who worked in Zone Fifteen. I knew they were all scientists or techs, but beyond that, I would never know anything more.

There was never anything new to see on the ride to work, but I always took a window seat anyway, because I liked to look outside. When I was young, we had had a cat, and the cat had liked car rides—he would stand between my legs and put his front paws on the bottom of the window and look outside, and I would look outside with him, and Grandfather, who sometimes sat in the front seat with the driver when I wanted extra room, would look back at us and laugh. “My two little cats,” he would say, “watching the
world go by. What do you see, little cats?” And I would tell him—a car, a person, a tree—and Grandfather would ask me, “Where do you think the car is going? What do you think that person had for breakfast this morning? What do you think those flowers on the tree would taste like, if you could eat them?,” because he was always helping me make up stories, which I knew from my teachers was something I didn’t do very well. Sometimes, on my ride to work, I would tell Grandfather in my head the things I saw: a brown brick building with a fourth-floor window over which two strips of black tape had been stuck in an X, and in the cleft of which a small boy’s small face had briefly appeared, like a wink; a black police wagon, one of its back doors partially opened, from which I could see a long white foot emerge; a group of twenty children in their dark-blue uniforms, each holding on to a knot tied into a long piece of gray rope, queuing at the checkpoint at Twenty-third Street so they could cross into Zone Nine, where the elite schools were. And then I would think of Grandfather, and I would wish I had more to tell him, but the truth was that very little changed in Zone Eight, which was one of the reasons we were so lucky to live there. In other zones there was more to see, but we never saw those things in Zone Eight, which was another reason why we were lucky.

One day about a year ago, I was riding the shuttle to work when I did see something I had never seen before in Zone Eight. We were moving up Sixth Avenue, as usual, and crossing Fourteenth Street, when a man suddenly ran into the intersection. I had been sitting in the middle of the shuttle, on the left, and so I hadn’t seen where the man had come from, but I could see that he didn’t have a shirt on, and that he was wearing the gauzy white pants that people in the containment centers wore before they were sent to the relocation centers. The man was clearly saying something, but the windows on the shuttle, along with being bulletproof, were also soundproof, so I couldn’t hear him, but I could still see he was shouting: His arms were stretched out in front of him, and I could see the muscles in his neck, so stiff and hard that for a minute he looked like he was carved out of stone. On his chest were about a dozen places where he had tried to hide signs of the illness, which people often did, burning the
lesions with a match and leaving behind dull black scars that resembled leeches. I never understood why they did this, because even though everyone knew what the lesions meant, everyone knew what the scars meant as well, so it was really just exchanging one mark for another. This man was young, in his twenties probably, and white, and even though he was gaunt and his hair had almost disappeared, as happened in the second stage of the disease, I could tell he had once been nice-looking, and now he was standing in the street in his bare feet and yelling and yelling. And then two attendants came running toward him in their silver biohazard suits with the reflective screens over their faces, so that, when you looked into one, all you could see was your own face staring back at you, and one of them leapt at the man to try to tackle him to the ground.

But the man was surprisingly quick, and he darted out of the attendant’s way and ran instead toward our shuttle, and everyone on board, who had been silent and watching, gasped, as a single great intake of breath, and the driver, who had had to stop the shuttle so he didn’t hit the attendants, honked his horn, as if that might scare the man away. And then the man jumped up toward my window, and for just a moment, I saw his eye, the iris so large and glittering blue that I was very frightened, and I could finally hear what he was yelling, even through the window: Help me. And then there was a bang, and the man’s head kicked backward, and he fell out of my sight, and I could see the attendants running toward him; one of them had his weapon still held aloft.

After that, the shuttle started moving again, quite fast, as if driving faster could erase what had happened, and everyone became silent again, and I felt as if everyone were looking at me, as if they thought it was my fault, as if I had asked the man to try to communicate with me. People rarely spoke on the shuttle, but I heard a man announce, in a low voice, “He shouldn’t still have been on the island,” and although no one responded, you could feel that people agreed with him, and even I could sense that they were frightened, and that they were frightened because they were confused. But although people were often frightened about things they couldn’t understand, this
time I agreed with them—someone that sick should have been sent away by now.

That day at work had been slow, which was unfortunate, because my mind kept returning to what had happened. But what I thought about most was not the man himself, or his bright eye, but about how, when he fell, he had made almost no noise at all, he was so light and soft. A few months after that, it was announced that the containment centers in Zones Eight and Nine were being relocated, and although there were stories about what that meant, we of course never knew for sure.

Since that day, there had been no further strange incidents in Zone Eight, and on this morning, I looked out the window and everything was the same, so predictable that it felt, as it sometimes did, less as if we were moving through it and more as if the city were a series of sets and performers moving past us on a track. Here came the buildings where people lived, and then the chain of children holding one another’s hands, and then Zone Nine, the two large hospitals now empty, and here the clinic, and here, just before the Farm, the row of ministries.

This was the sign that you were crossing into Zone Ten, the most important zone. No one lived in Zone Ten. Aside from some of the ministries, the district was dominated by the Farm, which had once been an enormous park that had bisected the island. It had been so big, this park, that it had accounted for a significant percent of the island’s acreage. I didn’t remember it as a park, but Grandfather had, and he used to tell me stories of how it had been crisscrossed with paths, both cement and dirt, and how people would run through it, and bicycle and walk, and have picnics there. There had been a zoo, where people would pay just to go look at strange, useless animals, who were expected to do nothing but sit and eat the food they were provided, and a lake, on which people would row small boats, and in the spring, people would gather to look at colored birds that had flown up from below the equator, and to find mushrooms and look at flowers. At various points there had been sculptures made of iron in whimsical forms that were meant to entertain children. A long
time ago, it had even snowed, and people would come to the park and strap long, thin planks to their feet and shuffle across the low icy hills, which Grandfather said were slick and could make you fall, but not in a bad way—in a way that made people want to do it again and again. I know it’s now difficult to understand what this park had been meant for, but Grandfather said it hadn’t been
for
anything: It was simply for people to spend time in and enjoy. Even the lake was meant only for enjoyment—you went to float paper boats on it, or walk around it, or just sit and look at it.

The shuttle stopped at the main entrance of the Farm, and people got off and began queuing for the entrance. Only the two thousand or so people who were certified to work at the Farm could get in, and even before you joined the queue, you had to have a retinal scan to prove you had the right to enter, and there were always guards waiting with weapons in case someone tried to dash inside, which people occasionally did. You heard rumors about the Farm: that they were breeding new kinds of animals there—cows with two sets of udders, to produce double the amount of milk; brainless, legless chickens that could be packed, fat and square, into cages and would be fed by tubes; sheep that had been engineered to eat only waste, so that you wouldn’t have to use land and resources to grow grass. But none of these rumors had ever been confirmed, and if there were in fact new animals being made, we never saw them.

There are many other projects being worked on in the Farm as well. There are the greenhouses, where all sorts of new plants are being grown, both to eat and as possible medicines, and the Forest, where new kinds of trees are being raised, and the Lab, where scientists are working on creating new kinds of biofuels, and the Pond, where my husband works. The Pond is split into two parts: the animal-cultivating half and the plant-cultivating half. Ichthyologists and geneticists work in the first part, botanists and chemists work in the second. My husband works in the second, though he isn’t a scientist because he hadn’t been able to finish his graduate degree. He’s an aquatic gardener, which means that he plants the specimens that the botanists have approved or engineered—different algae, mostly—and then oversees the specimens’ growth and harvesting.
Some of those plants will be developed as medicines, and some will be made into food, and the plants that can be used as neither will be turned into compost.

But though I say this, the truth is that I don’t actually know what my husband does. I
think
this is what he does—the planting and tending and harvesting—but I don’t know for certain, just as he doesn’t know for certain what I do.

This morning, as always, I looked out the shuttle window very hard, but, as always, there was nothing to see. The entire Farm is surrounded by a twelve-foot-high stone wall, and atop the wall, spaced a foot apart, are sensors, so that even if you were able to scale it, your presence would be detected almost immediately, and then you would be captured. Most of the Farm is beneath an enormous biodome, but there are a few feet near the southern wall that aren’t protected, and just beyond that wall are two rows of acacia trees that stretch along the entire border, from Farm Avenue West to Fifth Avenue. There were trees all over the city, of course, but you almost never saw them with leaves, which people picked—to boil for tea or broth—as soon as they appeared. Picking leaves was against the law, naturally, but everyone did it anyway. But no one dared to touch the leaves inside or around the Farm, and whenever the shuttle rounded the corner and turned east onto Farm Avenue South, you would see them, clouds of bright green, and although I saw them five days a week, I was always surprised when I did.

After stopping at the Farm, the shuttle continued toward Madison Avenue, and then turned north, and then turned right again at Sixty-eighth Street, and then south on York Avenue, where it stopped in front of Rockefeller University, which is on Sixty-fifth Street. This is where I got off, as well as the other people who work either at Rockefeller or at the Sloan Kettering Research Facility, which is a block west. Everyone going into RU split into two lines: the scientists stood in one, the lab techs and support staff in another. We had to have our fingerprints checked and our bags searched and our bodies scanned before we entered the campus, and then again before we entered our buildings. Last week, my supervisor announced that, because of an incident, they were going to be initiating retinal
scans as well. Everyone had been upset about this, because there’s no canopy to stand under when it rains, not like at the Farm, and although the campus itself is beneath a biodome, the security area is not, which means we could be waiting for thirty minutes in the heat. My supervisor told us that they were going to set up cooling units in case the wait was excessive, but so far they haven’t arrived. But they did start staggering our arrival and departure times, so we wouldn’t all be waiting at once.

“What was the incident?” asked one of the techs from another lab, a man I didn’t know, but the supervisor didn’t answer, and no one had expected him to.

I work in the Larsson Center, which was constructed in the 2030s and is a building but also has a bridge that connects the main campus with a much smaller campus extension on a man-made island in the East River. There are nine labs in Larsson, and they all specialize in various kinds of influenza. One lab studies the descendants of the 2046 flu, which has proven to be evolutionarily aggressive; another studies descendants of the 2056 flu, which, according to Dr. Morgan, wasn’t actually a flu at all. My lab, which is run by Dr. Wesley, specializes in predictive influenza, which means we try to anticipate the next unknown flu, which might be altogether different from the other two. Ours is one of the biggest labs in the institution: Aside from Dr. Wesley, who’s the principal investigator, or lab chief, there are also twenty-four postdoctoral students—like Dr. Morgan—which means they have their Ph.D.s and are trying to discover something important so they can someday get their own lab; nine graduate students, who are called the Ph.D.s; and ten technical and support staff, of which I am one.