To Paradise (65 page)

“Your husband seems nice,” said David, finally, because I wasn’t saying anything.

“Yes,” I said. “He is nice.”

“Was it an arranged marriage?”

“Yes; my grandfather arranged it,” I said.

I remembered when Grandfather first spoke to me about marriage. I was twenty-one; the previous year, I had been asked to leave my college because my father had been declared an enemy of the state, even though he was long dead. It was a strange period: Depending on the week, there were rumors that the insurgents were gaining ground, followed by reports that the state had beaten them back. The official news promised that the state would prevail, and Grandfather had assured me that that would be true. But he had also said that he wanted to make sure I was safe, that I would have someone to take care of me. “But I have you,” I had said, and he had smiled. “Yes,” he said, “you have my whole heart, little cat. But I won’t live forever, and I want to make sure that you’ll always have someone to protect you, even long after I’m gone.”

I hadn’t said anything to that, because I didn’t like it when Grandfather spoke of dying, but the next week, Grandfather and I had gone to a marriage broker. This was when Grandfather still had a little bit of influence, and the marriage broker he had chosen was one of the most elite in the prefecture; he usually only arranged marriages for residents of Zone Fourteen, but he had agreed to see Grandfather as a favor.

At the marriage broker’s office, Grandfather and I sat in a waiting room, and then another door opened and a tall, thin, pale-faced man came in. “Doctor?” he asked Grandfather.

“Yes,” Grandfather said, standing. “Thank you for seeing us.”

“Of course,” said the man, who had been staring at me since he entered. “And this is your granddaughter?”

“Yes,” said Grandfather, proudly, and he drew me to his side. “This is Charlie.”

“I see,” said the man. “Hello, Charlie.”

“Hello,” I whispered.

There had been a silence. “She’s a little shy,” said Grandfather, and he stroked my hair.

“I see,” said the man, again. Then he spoke to Grandfather. “Would you come in alone, Doctor, so we can speak?” He looked at me. “You can wait here, young lady.”

I sat there for about fifteen minutes, knocking my heels against the chair legs, which was a bad habit I had. There was nothing in the room to look at, nothing to see: just four plain chairs and a piece of plain gray carpet. But then I heard raised voices from behind the other door, the sound of arguing, and I went over and pressed my ear against the wood.

The first voice I heard was the man’s. “With respect, Doctor—with
respect
—I think you have to be realistic,” he was saying.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” asked Grandfather, and I was surprised to hear that he sounded angry.

There had been a silence, and when the man spoke again, he was quieter, and I had to concentrate hard to hear him again.

“Doctor, forgive me,” the man was saying, “but your granddaughter is—”

“My granddaughter is what?” Grandfather snapped, and there was another silence.

“Special,” the man said.

“That’s right,” Grandfather said. “She
is
special, she is very special, and she will need a husband who understands how special she is.”

I had had enough then, and I had sat down again, and a few minutes later, Grandfather had walked briskly out and opened the office door for me and we had left. On the street, neither of us spoke. Finally, I asked, “Did you find someone for me?”

Grandfather had snorted. “That man’s an idiot,” he said. “No clue what he’s doing. We’re going to go to someone else, someone different. I’m sorry I wasted our time, little cat.”

After that, we had gone to two more brokers, and both times, Grandfather had swept from the room, ushered me out, and, once we were in the street, announced that the broker was a moron or a fool. Then he said I didn’t have to come with him on the appointments, as he wasn’t going to waste both of our time. Finally, he found a broker he liked, one who specialized in matching sterile people, and one day, he told me he had found someone for me to marry, someone who would always take care of me.

He had shown me a picture of the man who was to become my husband. On the back of the picture was his name, birth date, height, weight, racial makeup, and occupation. The card had been debossed with the special stamp that everyone who was sterile had applied to their papers, as well as a stamp denoting that at least one of his immediate family members was an enemy of the state. Usually, cards like this listed the applicant’s parents’ names and occupations, but here that information had been left blank. Yet, even though my husband’s parents had been declared enemies, he must have known someone or been related to someone with some influence or power, because, like me, he was not in a labor camp, or jail, or detention, but free.

I turned the picture card back around and looked at the man. He had a handsome, serious face, and his hair was cut close, neat and clean. His chin was slightly raised, which made him look bold. Often people who were sterile or related to traitors looked down, like they were ashamed, or apologetic, but he did not.

“What do you think?” Grandfather asked me.

“All right,” I answered, and Grandfather said he would arrange for me to meet him.

After our meeting, our marriage date was set for one year later. As I have mentioned, my husband had been in graduate school when he was blacklisted, but he was trying to appeal his case, which was another indication that someone was helping him, and he had asked to delay the marriage until after his trial, which Grandfather had agreed to.

One day, a few months after we had both signed our promissory contracts, Grandfather and I were walking down Fifth Avenue when
Grandfather said, “There are many different kinds of marriages, little cat.”

I waited for him to say more, and when he finally did, he spoke much more slowly than he usually did, pausing after every few words.

“Some couples,” he began, “are very attracted to each other. They have a—a—physical chemistry, a hunger for each other. Do you know what I mean by that?”

“Sex,” I said. Grandfather himself had explained sex to me, years ago.

“That’s right,” he said. “Sex. But some couples don’t have that attraction. The man you are going to marry, little cat, is not interested in…with…Well. Let’s just say that he isn’t interested.

“But that doesn’t make your marriage any less valid. And that doesn’t mean your husband isn’t a good person, or that you aren’t. I want you to know, little cat, that sex is a part of a marriage, but only sometimes. And it’s not all that makes a marriage, not at all. Your husband will always treat you well, I promise you that. Do you understand what I’m trying to say?”

I thought maybe I did, but then I also thought that what I thought Grandfather was saying might not be what he meant after all.

“I think so,” I said, and he looked at me and then nodded.

Later, when he was kissing me good night, Grandfather said, “Your husband will always be kind to you, little cat. I have no fears,” and I had nodded, though I suppose Grandfather actually
did
have fears, because he eventually told me what to do if my husband ever treated me unkindly—though, as I have already said, he never has.

I was thinking of all this when I finally returned to our apartment after saying goodbye to David in the Square. My husband came home just as I was finishing cooking our dinner, and changed out of his cooling suit before setting the table and pouring us both some water.

I had been nervous to see my husband after our encounter, but it seemed it would be a meal like any other. I didn’t know where my husband went on Saturdays, except he usually wasn’t gone all day. He did the grocery shopping in the mornings, and on Sundays, we did our chores together: laundry, if it was our turn, and cleaning,
and then we both went to the community garden to work our shifts, though not at the same time.

Dinner that night was leftover tofu, which I had made into a cold stew, and as we were eating, my husband said, not lifting his head, “I was glad to meet David today.”

“Oh,” I said. “Yes, it was nice.”

“How did you meet him?”

“At one of the storyteller sessions. He sat next to me.”

“When?”

“About seven weeks ago.”

He nodded. “Where does he work?”

“The Farm,” I said. “He’s a plant tech.”

He looked at me. “Where’s he from?” he asked.

“Little Eight,” I said. “But before that, Prefecture Five.”

My husband pressed his napkin to his mouth and then leaned back in his chair, looking up at the ceiling. He seemed to be struggling to speak. Then he said, “What do you do together?”

I shrugged. “We go to the storyteller’s,” I began, though we had not been to the storyteller in at least a month. “We walk around the Square. He tells me about growing up in Prefecture Five.”

“And what do you tell him?”

“Nothing,” I said, and as I said it, I realized it was true. I had nothing to tell—not to David, not to my husband.

My husband sighed, and passed his hand before his eyes, as he did when he was tired. “Cobra,” he said, “I want you to be careful. I’m glad you have a friend, I am. But you—you barely know this person. I just want you to be vigilant.” His voice was gentle, the same as it always was, but he was looking directly at me, and finally I looked away. “Have you considered that he might be from the state?”

I didn’t say anything. Something was building inside of me. “Cobra?” my husband asked, gently.

“Because no one would want to be my friend, is that what you mean?” I asked. I had never raised my voice to my husband, had never been angry with him, and now he looked surprised, and his mouth opened a bit.

“No,” he said. “That’s not what I mean. I just,” he started. Then
he began again. “I promised your grandfather I’d always take care of you,” he said.

For a moment, I sat there. Then I got up and left the table and went to our room and closed the door and lay down on my bed. There was a silence, and I heard my husband’s chair scrape back, and the sounds of him washing the dishes, and the sound of the radio, and then him coming into our room, where I was pretending to be asleep. I heard him sit on his bed; I thought he might speak to me. But he didn’t, and soon I could hear from his breathing that he was asleep.

Naturally, it had in fact occurred to me that David might be an informant for the state. But if he was, he was a very poor one, as informants were quiet and invisible, and he was neither quiet nor invisible. Though I had also wondered whether that too was intentional: that his unsuitability as an informant increased the likelihood that he was one. The curious thing about the informants was that they were
so
quiet and invisible that you were usually able to tell who they were. Not immediately, perhaps, but eventually; there was a quality about them, what Grandfather had called a bloodlessness, that distinguished them. In the end, though, what convinced me that David was not an informant was me. Who would be interested in me? What secrets did I have? Everyone knew who Grandfather and my father had been; everyone knew how they had died; everyone knew what they had been convicted of and, in Grandfather’s case, how that conviction had been overturned, albeit too late. The only thing I had done wrong was those nights I had followed my husband, but that was hardly an offense for which one was assigned an informant.

But if it was impossible that David was an informant, then why
was
he spending time with me? I had never been someone people wanted to be around. After I had recovered from the sickness, Grandfather had taken me to activities, classes with children my own age. The parents sat in chairs arranged around the room, and the children played. But after a few sessions, we stopped going. It was all right, though, because I always had Grandfather to play with and talk to and spend time with—until the day I didn’t.

As I lay there that night, listening to my husband’s breathing and thinking about what he had said, I wondered if it was possible that I was actually not who I thought I was. I knew I was dull, and unexciting, and that I often didn’t understand people. But maybe I had changed, somehow, without even knowing it. Maybe I wasn’t who I knew I was.

I got up and went to the bathroom. There was a small mirror above the sink, which you could angle so you could see your entire body. I took off my clothes and looked at myself, and as I did, I realized I had not changed after all. I was still the same person, with the same thick legs and thin hair and small eyes. Nothing was any different; I was as I already knew myself to be.

I got dressed and turned off the light and returned to our bedroom. Then I felt very bad, because my husband was right—there was something strange about David talking to me. I was nobody, and he was not.

You’re not nobody, little cat,
Grandfather would have said.
You’re mine.

But this is the stranger thing: I didn’t care why David wanted to be friends with me. I just wanted him to
keep
being friends with me. And I decided that, whatever his reason was, it wouldn’t make a difference. I also realized that the sooner I went to sleep, the sooner it would be Sunday, and then Monday, and Tuesday, and with each day that passed, I would be that much closer to seeing him once more. And it was this understanding that made me close my eyes and, finally, fall asleep.

I haven’t spoken for some time about what was happening at the lab.

The truth is that my friendship with David had so preoccupied me that I had less time and inclination to eavesdrop on the Ph.D.s. On the other hand, there was also less of a need for stealth, because something was clearly happening, and the scientists had begun to discuss it openly, even though they weren’t supposed to. Of course, it was difficult for me to learn the details—and I wouldn’t have been
able to understand them even if I had—but it seemed likely that there was another disease, and that it was projected to be highly deadly. But this was all I knew. I knew it had been discovered somewhere in South America, and I knew that most of the scientists suspected it was an airborne virus, and that it was probably hemorrhagic in nature, and spread by fluids as well, which was the worst kind of illness of all, and one we were less equipped to combat because so much research and money and prevention had gone toward respiratory illnesses. But I didn’t know anything else, because I don’t think the scientists knew anything else: They didn’t know how infectious it was, or how long its incubation was, or what the death rate was. I don’t even think they knew how many people had died from it, not yet. The fact that it had begun in South America was unfortunate, because South America was historically the least forthcoming about their research and infections, and in the last flare-up, Beijing had had to threaten them with severe sanctions to make them cooperate.