To Paradise (66 page)

It may sound surprising to hear that despite this the mood at the laboratory was pleasant. The scientists liked having something to focus on, and the initial worry had changed to excitement. This would be most of the young scientists’ first major illness; many of the Ph.D.s were around my age, and like me, they would have barely remembered the events of ’70, and since the travel prohibition, there were fewer illnesses in general. Outwardly, everyone said they hoped that it was just an isolated incident, and that it could quickly be localized, but later, I would hear them whispering, and sometimes I would see them smiling, just a bit, and I knew it was because they were always being told by the older scientists that they were spoiled because they hadn’t actually experienced a pandemic from a professional perspective, and now they might.

I wasn’t scared, either; my daily life remained just as it had been. The lab would always need the pinkies, whether the illness turned out to be something big or not.

But the other reason I was so calm was because I had a friend. About a decade ago, the state had instituted a law that ordered people to register their friends’ names at their local center, but it had been quickly repealed. Even Grandfather had said it was a ridiculous
notion. “I understand what they’re trying to do,” he had said, “but people are less idle, and therefore less troublesome, when they’re allowed to have friends.” Now even I had come to realize that this was true. I found myself gathering observations, things to tell David. I would never tell him what was happening at the lab, of course, but I sometimes tried to imagine the kinds of conversations we’d have if I did. At first this was difficult, because I couldn’t understand how he thought. Then I realized that he would usually say the opposite of what a typical person would say. So, if I were to say, “They’re worried about some new disease at the lab,” then a regular person would say, “Is it very bad?” But David would say something different, maybe something very different, such as “How do you know they’re worried?,” and then I would really have to think about the answer: How
did
I know they were worried? In this way, it was like talking to him on days I didn’t see him.

Some observations, though, I could tell him, and I did. Riding home on the shuttle, for example, I saw one of the police dogs, which were normally silent and disciplined, jump and bark and wag its tail as a butterfly flew in front of it. Or when Belle, the Ph.D., gave birth to her daughter, she sent dozens of boxes of cookies made with real lemons and real sugar to all the labs on our floor, and everyone got one, even me. Or when I discovered the pinky with two heads and six legs. Before, I would have saved these items to tell my husband over dinner. But now I thought only of what David would say, so that, even as I was observing something, part of me was thinking of the future and what his face would look like as he listened to me.

The next Saturday we met it was almost too hot to walk, even with our cooling suits. “You know what we should do?” asked David, as we moved slowly west. “We should meet instead at the center—we could listen to a concert.”

I thought about this. “But then we won’t be able to talk,” I said.

“Well, that’s true,” he said. “Not during the concert. But we could talk afterward, on the track.” There was an indoor track at the center, where you could walk in a loop in the air-conditioning.

I didn’t say anything to this, and he looked at me. “Do you go to the center often?”

“Yes,” I said, although that was a lie. But I didn’t want to say the truth—that I had been too scared to go inside. “My grandfather always said I should go more often,” I said, “that I might enjoy it.”

“You’ve mentioned your grandfather before,” David said. “What was he like?”

“He was nice,” I said, after a silence, although this hardly seemed like an adequate way to describe Grandfather. “He loved me,” I said, finally. “He took care of me. We used to play games together.”

“Like what?”

I was about to answer when it occurred to me that the games Grandfather and I played—like the one in which we pretended to have a conversation, or in which I gave him observations of someone we had passed on the street—wouldn’t seem much like a game to anyone but ourselves, and that calling them games would make me seem odd: odd because I would think they were games, and odd because I would need to play them. So instead I said, “Ball, and cards, things like that,” because I knew those were regular games, and I felt pleased with myself for thinking of the answer.

“That sounds nice,” said David, and we walked a little more. “Was your grandfather a lab tech, like you?” he asked.

This wasn’t as strange a question as it sounds. If I had had a child, he would probably become a lab tech as well, or have an equivalent rank, unless he was exceptionally bright and therefore tracked at an early age to become, say, a scientist. But back in Grandfather’s day, you could choose to become whatever you wanted, and then you went and did it.

It was also then that I realized that David didn’t know who Grandfather was. There was a time in which everyone had known who he was, but now, I suppose, only people in the government and in science knew his name. But I hadn’t told David my last name. To him, my grandfather was only my grandfather, and nothing else.

“Yes,” I said. “He was a lab tech, too.”

“Did he work at Rockefeller as well?”

“Yes,” I said, because that was true.

“What did he look like?” he asked.

It sounds strange to say, but although I spent a great deal of time
thinking about Grandfather, I could remember less and less what he looked like. What I remembered more was the sound of his voice, the way he smelled, the way he made me feel when he put his arm around me. The way I saw him most frequently in my mind was the day he was being marched to the platform, when he was looking for me in the crowd, his eyes moving across the hundreds of people who had gathered to watch and yell at him, calling my name before the executioner lowered the black hood over his head.

But of course I couldn’t say that. “He was tall,” I began. “And skinny. His skin was darker than mine. He had gray hair, short, and—” And here I faltered, because I really didn’t know what else I could say.

“Did he wear fancy clothes?” David asked. “My maternal grandfather liked to wear fancy clothes.”

“No,” I said, though as I did, I remembered a ring that Grandfather had worn when I was little. It was very old, and gold, and on one side it had a pearl, and if you pressed the little latches on the sides of the setting, the pearl hinged open and there was a tiny compartment. Grandfather had worn it on his left pinkie, and had always turned the pearl inward, toward his palm. Then, one day, he had stopped wearing it, and when I had asked him why, he had praised me for being so observant. “But where is it?” I had demanded, and he had smiled. “I had to give it to the fairy as payment,” he said. “What fairy?” I had asked. “Why, the fairy who looked over you while you were sick,” he said. “I told her I would give her anything she wanted if she took care of you, and she said she would, but I needed to give her my ring in exchange.” By this point, I had been well for several years, and I also knew that fairies didn’t exist, but whenever I asked Grandfather about it, he had only smiled and repeated the same story, and eventually, I stopped asking.

But, again, this wasn’t the kind of story I could tell David, and anyway, he had begun talking about his other grandfather, who had been a farmer in Prefecture Five before it was called Prefecture Five. He had raised pigs and cows and goats, and had had a hundred peach trees, and David told me about being young and visiting his grandfather and eating as many peaches as he wanted. “I’m ashamed
to admit this, but I hated peaches when I was a kid,” he said. “There were just so many of them: My grandmother baked them into pies, and cakes, and bread, and she made them into jam, and leather—oh, that’s when you dry slices of them in the sun until they become tough, like jerky—and ice cream. And this is after she’d canned as many as we and our neighbors needed to get us through the rest of the year.” But then the farm had become state property, and his grandfather had gone from owning it to working on it, and the peach trees were cut down to make room for soybean fields, which were more nutritious than peaches and therefore a more efficient crop. It was unwise to talk as freely about the past as David did, much less about governmental claims, but he did so in the same light, easy, matter-of-fact tone that he had used to discuss the peaches. Grandfather had once told me that discussing the past was discouraged because it made many people angry or sad, but David sounded neither angry nor sad. It was as if what he was describing had happened not to him but to someone else, someone he barely knew.

“Now, of course, I’d kill for a peach,” he said, cheerily, as we neared the north of the Square, where we met and parted every Saturday. “I’ll see you next week, Charlie,” he said as he left. “Think about what you might like to do at the center.”

Once I was back at home, I took out the box in the closet and looked at the pictures I had of Grandfather. The first one was taken when he was in medical school. He was laughing, and his hair was long and curly and black. In the second, he was standing with my father, who was a toddler, and my other grandfather, the one to whom I’m genetically related. In my mind, my father resembles Grandfather, but in this picture, you can see that he actually looked like my other grandfather: They were both lighter skinned than Grandfather, with straight dark hair, like I used to have. In the third picture, my favorite, Grandfather looks as I remember him. He’s smiling, a big smile, and in his arms he is holding a small, thin baby, and that baby is me. “Charles and Charlie,” someone wrote on the back of this photo, “September 12, 2064.”

I found myself thinking about Grandfather both more and less since I had met David. I didn’t need to talk to him in my head as
much as I used to, but I also wanted to talk to him more, mostly about David, and about what it was like to have a friend. I wondered what he would have thought of him. I wondered whether he would have agreed with my husband.

I wondered as well what David would have thought of Grandfather. It was strange to think that he didn’t know who Grandfather was, that to him, he was simply a relative of mine, whom I had loved and who had died. As I have said, everyone I worked with knew who Grandfather was. There was a greenhouse on top of a building at RU that was named for him, and there was even a law named for him, the Griffith Act, which established the legality of the relocation centers, which had once been called quarantine camps.

But it was not so long ago that many people hated Grandfather. I suppose there are people who still hate him, but you never hear about those people anymore. I first became aware of this hatred when I was eleven, in civics class. We were learning about how, in the aftermath of the illness of ’50, a new government began to take form, so by the time the illness of ’56 arose, they were more properly prepared, and by ’62, the new state had been established. One of the inventions that had helped contain the illness of ’70—which, as bad as it was, could have been much worse—was the relocation centers, which were originally located only in the west and midwest but by ’69 were in every municipality. “These camps became very important to our scientists and doctors,” my teacher had said. “Does anyone know the names of the early, original camps?”

People started shouting out answers: Heart Mountain. Rohwer. Minidoka. Jerome. Poston. Gila River.

“Yes, yes,” my teacher said after each name. “Yes, that’s right. And does anyone know who founded those camps?”

No one knew. And then Miss Bethesda looked at me. “It was Charlie’s grandfather,” she said. “Dr. Charles Griffith. He was one of the architects of the camps.”

Everyone turned to look at me, and I felt myself grow hot with embarrassment. I liked my teacher—she had always been kind to me. When the other children ran away from me on the playground,
laughing as they did, she would always come over and ask if I might like to come back into the classroom and help her distribute the art supplies for the afternoon lesson. Now I looked up, and my teacher was looking back at me, the same as always, and yet something was wrong. I felt as if she were angry with me, but I hadn’t known why.

That night, at dinner, I asked Grandfather if he was the person who had invented the centers. He had looked at me then, and had waved his hand, and the servant who was pouring my milk had set down the pitcher and left the room. “Why do you ask that, little cat?” he asked, after the man shut the door behind him.

“We learned about it in civics class,” I said. “My teacher said you were one of the people who invented them.”

“Did she,” Grandfather said, and although his voice sounded the same as it always did, I could see that he was holding his left hand in a fist, so tightly that it trembled. Then he noticed me looking, and he opened his hand and laid his palm flat on the table. “What else did she say?”

I explained to Grandfather how Miss Bethesda had said that the centers had prevented more deaths, and he nodded, slowly. For a while he was silent, and I listened to the ticking of the clock, which sat on the mantel above the fireplace.

Finally, Grandfather spoke. “Years ago,” he said, “there were people who opposed the camps, who didn’t want them built, who thought I was a bad person because I supported them.” I must have looked surprised, because he nodded. “Yes,” he said. “They didn’t understand that the camps were created to keep us—all of us—healthy and safe. Eventually, people came to see that they were necessary, and that we had to build them. Do you understand why?”

“Yes,” I said. I had learned this in civics class as well. “Because it meant that the sick people were in one place, so people who were healthy wouldn’t get sick, too.”

“That’s right,” Grandfather said.

“Then why didn’t people like them?” I asked.

He looked up at the ceiling, which was something he did when he was thinking of how to answer me. “It’s difficult to explain,” he said,
slowly, “but one of the reasons is that, back in those days, you would remove just the infected person, not their whole family, and some people thought it was cruel to separate people from their families.”