To Paradise (47 page)

I didn’t really want to walk around the Square, first, because it was very hot, even hotter than usual for late October, and second, because walking around the Square could be frightening. But I also couldn’t sit much longer in the apartment, with nothing to do and no one to look at, and so, finally, I put on some sunscreen and my hat and a long-sleeved shirt and walked downstairs and outside and across the street, and then I was in the Square.

You could get whatever you needed in the Square. In the northwest corner were the metalworkers, who could make you anything from a lock to a pan, and who would also buy any old metal you had. They would weigh it, and tell you what it was, whether it was cobalt mixed with aluminum or iron mixed with nickel, and give you gold
or food or water coupons, whichever you wanted, and then they would smelt it and make it into something else. South of them were the cloth merchants, who weren’t just merchants but also tailors and seamstresses, and who would also buy any clothes or fabrics that you didn’t need anymore, or could remake old clothes into new clothes. In the northeast corner were the moneylenders, and next to them were the herbalists, and south of them were the carpenters, who could make or repair anything out of wood. There were also rubber repairmen and rope-makers and plastic merchants, who would buy or trade you anything made of plastic, and could also make you something new.

Not all of them were licensed to be in the Square, and every few months or so there’d be a raid, and everyone, even the vendors who had permits, would disappear for a week, and then they’d return. People—not all people, not people like the scientists and ministers, but most other people—depended on the vendors. Up in Zone Fourteen, there were stores you could go to and buy things, I don’t know what, but except for the grocery, there were no stores in Zone Eight, and so instead we had the Square. Anyway, the officials didn’t really care about the cloth merchants and carpenters and metalworkers: The ones they cared about were the people who moved among the vendors. These people didn’t have fixed positions in the Square, like the vendors did—a wooden table, with a tarp stretched above to protect them from the sun or the rain. At most, these other people usually would have only a stool and an umbrella, and they would sit in a different spot every day. Sometimes they didn’t even have that, and would just wander through the Square, walking between the stalls. Yet everyone, all the other vendors and regular shoppers, knew who they were and where to find them, though no one ever used their actual names. There were people who could help reset a bone or give you stitches, and who could help you get out of the prefecture, and who could help procure anything you wanted, from illegal books to sugar to even a specific person. There were people who could find you a child, and people who could take one away. There were people who could get someone into a good containment center, and people who could get someone out of one. There were
even people who claimed they could cure you of the illnesses, and they were the ones that the authorities looked for the hardest, but it was said that they could disappear at will, and they could never be caught. This was illogical, of course: People can’t disappear. And yet there were rumors about them, about how they could elude the authorities again and again.

In the center of the Square was a large, shallow cement pit in the shape of a ring, and in the middle of the pit, on an elevated pedestal, was a fire that was never extinguished, not even in the hottest weather, except during the raids, and surrounding the fire were more vendors. There were twenty to thirty of them, depending on the day, and they sat in the ring, and on the raised lip of the ring they each unrolled a plastic tarp, and on the tarps they displayed different cuts of meat. Sometimes you could tell what kind of animal the meat was from, and sometimes you couldn’t. Each vendor had his own sharp knife and a pair of long metal tongs and a set of long metal skewers and a fan made from woven plastic that they would wave over the meat to keep the flies away. The vendors accepted gold or coupons, and they would either cut the meat for you and wrap it in a piece of paper so you could take it home, or they would stab a skewer through it and cook it for you right there in the fire, whichever you wanted. Around the fire were metal trays that collected the fat that dripped from the meat, and if you couldn’t afford the meat, you could buy just the fat, and take that home and use it to cook. The strange thing was that all the vendors who worked in the pit were very skinny, and you never saw them eat. People always said that was because they would never dare eat the meat they sold, and every few months there were rumors that the meat was actually human, and had been procured from one of the camps. But that didn’t stop people from buying it, from tearing the meat off the skewers with their teeth, sucking the metal clean and bright before handing it back to the vendor.

Even though the Square was right outside our building, I rarely visited it. Maybe my husband did. But I did not. It was too loud, it was too confusing, and the crowds and the smells and the vendors’ shouting—
Brii-iing me your metal! Brii-iing me your metal!
—and the
sounds of hammers constantly tocking against wood made me nervous. And it was so hot, the fire turning the air watery, that I thought I might faint.

I wasn’t the only person the Square made uneasy, which was silly, really, because there were at least twenty Flies that monitored the area, buzzing back and forth from one end to the other, and if anything really bad were to happen, the police would be there in an instant. Still, there was a group of us who regularly walked the sidewalk that encircled its perimeter, looking at the activity through the fence but not stepping into it. Many of these people were old and out of work, though I didn’t recognize any of them—they might not even have lived in Zone Eight but came from other zones, which was technically illegal but only rarely enforced. The southern and eastern zones had their own versions of the Square, but Zone Eight’s was considered the best, because Zone Eight was a stable and healthy and calm place to live.

After walking around the Square several times, I was desperately hot. On the southern edge of the Square was a row of cooling stations, but there was a long queue for them and it was foolish to pay for one when I could just walk back to the apartment. When Grandfather was my age, there were no cooling stations and no vendors. Back then, the Square had been planted with trees and covered with grass, and the pit in the center had been a fountain, where water erupted in bursts and then fell back into the pit again. Over and over the water exploded and fell, exploded and fell, for no other reason than because people liked it. I know this sounds queer, but it’s true: Grandfather showed me a photograph of it once. Back then, people lived with dogs, which they kept as companions, like children, and the dogs had their own special food, and they were all named, like they were people, and their owners would bring them to the Square and they would run around on the grass and their owners would watch them from benches that had been placed there for exactly that reason. That was what Grandfather said. Back then, he would come to the Square and sit on a bench and read a book, or walk through here on the way to Zone Seven, which wasn’t called Zone Seven but
had an actual name, also like a person. A lot of things were named, back then.

I was thinking about all this as I was walking along the southern side of the Square, when a group of people who had been gathered around one vendor close to the entrance moved away, and I saw that the vendor was standing near an instrument shaped like a giant metal clamp, and in the clamp he was fitting a large block of ice. It had been a long time since I had seen a piece of ice that big, and although it wasn’t quite pure—it was a very light brown, and you could see little specks of gnats that had been trapped in it—it looked clean enough, and I was standing there looking at it when the vendor turned and saw me.

“Something cold?” he asked. He was an old man, older than Dr. Wesley, almost as old as Grandfather had been, and he was wearing a long-sleeved sweater, even in the heat, and plastic gloves on his hands.

I wasn’t used to having strangers talk to me, and I felt panicked, but then I closed my eyes and breathed in and out, like Grandfather had taught me, and when I opened them, he was still there and still looking at me, though not in a way that made me nervous.

“How much?” I finally managed to say.

“One dairy or two grain,” he said.

This was a lot to ask, because we only got twenty-four dairy coupons and forty grain coupons a month, and it was more so because I didn’t even know what the man was selling. I know I could have asked him, but I didn’t. I don’t know why.
You can always ask,
Grandfather used to remind me, and although that wasn’t true, not anymore, it
is
true that I could have asked the vendor. No one would have been mad at me; I wouldn’t have gotten into any trouble.

“You look like you’re hot,” the man said, and when I didn’t reply, he said, “I promise you it’s worth it.” He was a nice old man, I decided, and he had a voice a little like Grandfather’s.

“Okay,” I said, and I reached into my pocket and tore off a dairy coupon and gave it to him, and he tucked it away in his apron pocket. Then he positioned a paper cup into a hole in the machine directly
beneath the ice and began to turn the crank very fast, and as he did, shavings of ice fell into the cup. When the ice had reached the top, he tapped the cup rapidly against the clamp, tamping it down, and set it back in its place and began turning the crank again, rotating the cup as he did until there was a mound of ice. Finally, he patted the ice into place and picked up from next to his feet a glass bottle containing a cloudy, pale liquid, which he poured atop the ice for what seemed like a long time, and then he handed it to me.

“Thank you,” I said, and he nodded. “Enjoy it,” he said. He brought his arm up to rub at his forehead, but when he did, his sweater sleeve drooped, and I saw from the scars on the inside of his forearm that he had survived the illness of ’70, which had mostly affected children.

Then I felt very strange, and I turned and walked away as fast as I could, and it wasn’t until I reached the west corner, with the queue of people waiting for the cooling stations, and felt the ice dripping down my hand that I remembered the treat. I licked it and found that the ice had been doused with syrup, and the syrup was sweet. Not from sugar—sugar was too rare—but from something that tasted like sugar and was almost as good. The ice was so cold, but by now I was upset, and after a few more licks, I threw the cup into a trash can and started moving as fast as I could toward our house, my tongue numb and burning.

I was relieved when I was safely back in our apartment, and I went to the sofa and sat there, taking deep breaths until I felt better. After a few minutes, I did, and I turned on the radio and sat down again and breathed some more.

But after a while, I began to feel bad. I had gotten scared for no reason, and I had spent one of our dairy coupons, and it was still only the middle of the month, which meant we would have to go an extra two days without milk or curds, and not only that but I had spent it on ice that was probably unhygienic, and to make matters worse still, I hadn’t even eaten it.
And
I had gone outside, so I was
now very sweaty, and it was only 11:07, which meant I would have to wait another nine hours, almost, until I could take my shower.

Suddenly I wished my husband were here. Not because I would tell him what I had done but because he was proof that nothing bad was going to happen to me, that I was safe, that he would always take care of me, just as he had promised.

And then I remembered that it was Thursday, which meant it was my husband’s free night, and he wouldn’t be coming home until after dinner, maybe even after I was asleep.

Remembering this gave me the funny, jumpy feeling that sometimes came over me, which was different from the nervous feeling I sometimes had and which occasionally even felt exciting, like something was going to happen. But of course nothing was going to happen: I was in our apartment, and we were in Zone Eight, and I would always be protected because Grandfather had made sure of that.

But I was still unable to sit quietly, and I got up and began walking round and round the apartment. Then I started opening doors, which is something I did when I was young, too, and I was looking for something I couldn’t describe. “What are you looking for, little cat?” Grandfather used to ask me, but I was never able to respond. When I was small, he had tried to stop me, pulling me onto his lap and holding my wrists, whispering into my ear. “It’s okay, little cat,” he would say, “it’s okay,” and I would scream and thrash because I didn’t like being held, I liked my freedom, I liked to roam. Then, when I was a little older, he would simply get up from whatever he was doing and start looking with me. I’d open a cupboard beneath the sink, and close it, and he would do the same, very serious, until I had opened and shut all the doors in the house, on every floor, and he had, too. By then I would be very tired, and I still wouldn’t have found what I needed, and Grandfather would pick me up and carry me to bed. “We’ll find it next time, little cat,” he would tell me. “Don’t worry. We’ll find it.”

Now, though, everything was where it was supposed to be: In the kitchen, there were the tins of beans and fish and the jars of pickled cucumbers and radishes and the containers of oats and dried tofu
skin and the glass ampoules with artificial honey. In the front closet were our umbrellas and raincoats and our cooling suits and shrouds and masks and our emergency bag stocked with four-liter bottles of water and antibiotics and flashlights and batteries and sunscreen and cooling gels and socks and sneakers and underwear and protein bricks and fruit and nuts; in the hallway closet were our shirts and pants and underwear and extra shoes, and our fourteen-day supply of drinking water, and on the ground there was a box with our birth certificates and our citizenship and residence papers and copies of our security clearances and our most recent health records and a few pictures of Grandfather I had managed to keep; in the bathroom cupboard were our vitamins and backup supply of antibiotics, our extra sun cream and sunburn gel and shampoo and soap and hygiene wipes and toilet paper. In the drawer beneath my bed, there were our gold coins and paper chits. Our grade of state employee got paid enough allowance so we could buy two extra treats a week, like ice milk, or some combination of between three and six extra food coupons. But because neither of us bought anything extra, we had a lot saved, which we could use for something bigger, like new clothes or a new radio. But we didn’t need anything else: Along with our uniforms, the state gave us each two new outfits a year, and a new radio every five years, so it was silly to spend our coins and chits on those. We didn’t spend them on anything, even on things we wanted, like extra dairy coupons—I don’t know why.