To Paradise (68 page)

I felt bad then for being so impatient with him, even if he was behaving recklessly. He was my friend, and friends were understanding of each other, even if it was confusing. I had not been understanding with David, and it was because of my guilt about this that I did something strange: I reached out my arms and put them around him.

It wasn’t easy to do, because both of our cooling suits were inflated to maximum capacity, and so I couldn’t so much embrace him as pet at his back. As I did so, I found myself pretending something odd: that we were married, and that he was my husband. It wasn’t typical to show someone, even your spouse, affection in public, but it wasn’t frowned upon, either; it was simply uncommon. Once, however, I had seen a couple kiss goodbye; the woman was standing in the doorway of their building, and the man, a tech, was leaving for the day. She was pregnant, and after they kissed, he pressed his palm to her stomach and they looked at each other and smiled. I had been on the shuttle, and I had turned in my seat to watch them, the man putting his hat on and walking away, the smile still on his face. I found myself imagining that David was my husband, and that we were a couple like that one, the kind that would embrace in public because we couldn’t stop ourselves from doing so; the kind with so much extra affection that it had to be expressed in gestures because we had run out of words.

I was thinking this when I realized that David wasn’t returning my gesture, that, beneath my arms, he was stiff and still, and I abruptly withdrew, stepping backward as I did.

Now I was very embarrassed. I could feel my face getting hot, and I quickly jammed my helmet on. I had done something very foolish. I had made a fool of myself. I needed to get away.

“Goodbye,” I said, and began walking.

“Wait,” he said, after a moment. “Wait, Charlie. Wait.”

But I pretended I couldn’t hear him and kept moving. I didn’t look behind me. I ventured into the Square and stood in the
herbalists’ section and waited until I was certain he had left. Then I turned and walked home. Once I was inside the safety of our apartment again, I took off my helmet and suit. My husband was out somewhere; I was alone.

All of a sudden, I felt very angry. I am not an angry person—even when I was little, I never threw tantrums, I never screamed, I never demanded anything. I tried to be as good as I knew how for Grandfather. But now I wanted to hit something, to hurt something, to break something. But there was nothing and no one in the house to hit or hurt or break: The plates were made of plastic; the mixing bowls were made of silicone; the pots were made of metal. Then I remembered how, even though I had not been angry as a child, I had often been frustrated, and I would moan and buck and claw at myself as Grandfather tried to hold me still. So now I went to my bed and practiced the method he’d taught me when everything seemed overwhelming, which was to lie on my stomach and press my face into the pillow and inhale until I felt dizzy.

After this, I got up again. I couldn’t stay in the apartment—I couldn’t bear it. And so I rezipped myself into my cooling suit and went back outside.

It was now late afternoon, and the day was becoming slightly less hot. I began walking around the Square. It felt queer to be walking alone after so many weeks of doing so with David, and it was perhaps because of that that, instead of just walking around the Square, I entered it on the western side. There was nothing I needed or wanted in the Square, but despite my aimlessness, I found myself moving toward the southeastern section.

I’m not sure why, but this quadrant of the Square had a reputation for being unseemly. How this had happened was something of a mystery; as I have said, the southeastern part was mostly occupied by carpenters, and if you weren’t too bothered by the sound of buzz saws and hammers, it was actually a nice place to be—the wood smelled clean and sharp, and you could stand and watch the woodworkers make or repair chairs or tables or buckets, and they wouldn’t shoo you away like some of the other vendors would. And yet, for some reason, this was where you came if you wanted to find
one of the people I have mentioned earlier, the people who weren’t licensed and who didn’t have a stall and yet who also occupied the Square, the people who could solve problems you didn’t know how to ask about.

One theory I’d heard about how this had happened didn’t make any sense. The southeastern part of the Square was closest to a tall brick building that had once been the library of a university that had been located nearby. After the university was closed, the building served for a period as a prison. Now it was the archive office for four of the island’s southern zones, including Zone Eight. This was where the state kept its birth and death records for everyone who lived in these areas, as well as any files or notes on those residents. The front of the building was all glass, so you could look in and see the tiers of cases filled with files; in the lobby, on the street level, there was a windowless black cube, about ten feet on all sides, and inside that black cube sat the archivist, who could find any file you needed. Of course, the archive hall was only accessible to state officials, and only those officials with the highest clearance. There was always someone in the black cube, and it was one of the few buildings that were always lit, even during the hours it was illegal to turn on the lights because it was a waste of electricity. I never understood what the southeastern corner’s proximity to the archive hall had to do with its illicit activity, but that was what everyone said: that it was easier to do dangerous things closer to a state building, because the state would never consider that anyone would do anything illegal so nearby. That was what everyone said, anyway.

As I have said, these people I have mentioned had no permanent station or stall, and so it wasn’t as if you could just go to one area or another and expect to find them—they had to find you, instead. What you did was wander slowly among the vendors. You didn’t look up; you didn’t look around. You just walked, looking down at the curls of wood that covered the ground, and eventually, someone would come up to you and ask you a question. The question was usually only two or three words, and if it wasn’t the right question, you just kept walking. If it was the right question, you looked up. I had never done this myself, but I had once stood near one of the woodworkers
and watched it happen. There had been a young woman, pretty and fair, and she had been walking very slowly, with her hands behind her back. She had worn a green scarf on her head, and I could see some of her hair, which was thick and red and chin-length, peeking out beneath. I had watched her pace in a loop for about three minutes before the first person, a short, thin, middle-aged man, approached her and said something I couldn’t hear. But she kept walking, almost like she hadn’t heard him, and he moved away. A minute later, another person approached her, and still she kept walking. The fifth time, a woman walked up to her, and this time, the young woman raised her head and followed the woman, who led her to a small tent made from a tarp on the very eastern edge of the Square, then lifted one side of it and looked around her for Flies before ushering the young woman in and slipping inside herself.

I don’t know what made me start walking about the southeastern quadrant myself that day. I concentrated on my feet moving through the sawdust. Sure enough, after a few moments, I felt someone following me. And then I heard a man’s voice say, very low, “Looking for someone?” But I kept walking, and soon the man walked away as well.

Shortly after, I saw another man’s feet approach me. “Sickness?” he asked. “Medicine?” But I kept walking.

For a while, nothing happened. I walked more slowly. And then I saw a woman’s feet coming my way; I could tell the feet belonged to a woman because they were small. They drew very near me, and then I heard a voice whisper, “Love?”

I looked up and realized it was the same woman I’d seen earlier, with a tent on the eastern edge. “Come with me,” she said, and I followed her to her area. I wasn’t thinking about what I was doing; I wasn’t thinking at all. It was as if what was happening was something I was watching, not something I was doing. At the tent, I saw her scan the sky for Flies—the same as she’d done for the young woman—and then beckon me inside.

Inside, the tent was stiflingly hot. There was a rough wooden box that had been secured with a padlock, and two dirty cotton cushions, one of which she sat on and one of which I sat on.

“Take off your helmet,” she said, and I did. She wasn’t wearing a helmet, but she had a scarf wrapped around her mouth and nose, and now she unwound it, and I saw that the bottom left part of her cheek had been eaten away by disease, and that she was younger than I had thought.

“I’ve seen you before,” she said, and I stared at her. “Yes,” she said, “walking around the Square with your husband. A nice-looking man. But he doesn’t love you?”

“No,” I said, after I had recovered myself. “He isn’t my husband. He’s my—he’s my friend.”

“Ah,” she said, and her face relaxed. “I understand. And you want him to fall in love with you.”

For a moment, I was unable to speak. Was that what I wanted? Was that why I had come here? But that would be impossible—I knew I would never be loved, not in the way people talked about love. I knew I would never love, either. It was not for me. It was so difficult for me to know what I felt. Other people were able to say, “I am happy,” or “I am sad,” or “I miss you,” or “I love you,” but I never knew how. “I love you, little cat,” Grandfather would say, but I could only rarely say it back to him, because I didn’t know what it meant. The feelings I had—what words did I have for them? The feeling I had reading the notes written to my husband; the feeling I had watching him enter the house on Bethune Street; the feeling I had listening to him return late on a Thursday night; the feeling I had lying in bed, wondering if he might someday touch me, or kiss me, and knowing he never would—what were those feelings? What were they called? And with David: The feeling I had when I stood at the north of the Square, watching him wave as he came toward me; the feeling I had when I watched him walk away from me at the end of one of our days together; the feeling I got on Friday night, knowing that I would see him the next day; the feeling I had when I had tried to embrace him, and the feeling I had when I had seen his face, the confusion on it, the way he had pulled away from me—what were those feelings? Were they all the same? Were they all love? Was I able to feel it after all? Was what I had always assumed was impossible for me something I had known all along?

Suddenly I was frightened. I had behaved rashly, dangerously, by coming here. I had lost my common sense. “I have to go,” I said, standing. “I’m sorry. Goodbye.”

“Wait,” the woman called out to me. “There’s something I can give you: a powder. You slip it into a drink, and in five days—”

But I was already leaving, I was walking out of the tarp, quickly, so that I wouldn’t be able to hear what else she said, so I wouldn’t be tempted to return, but not so quickly that I would attract the attention of a Fly.

I exited the Square at the eastern entrance. I had only a few hundred yards to go and then I would be back in my apartment, safe, and once I was there, I could pretend all of this had never happened; I could pretend I had never met David. I would be once again who I was, a married woman, a lab tech, a person who accepted the way the world was, who understood that to wish for anything else was useless, because there was nothing I could do, and so it was best not even to try.

Dearest Peter,
March 2, 2064

Before I launch right in: Congratulations. A very well-deserved promotion, though I suppose it’s telling that the higher you go, the less grand and more opaque the title gets. And the less you get publicly acknowledged. Not that that matters. I know we’ve spoken about this before, but do you feel as much of a phantom as I do these days? Able to pass through doors (if not walls) that are closed to most, but never seen: An object of horror and fright, rarely encountered but known to exist. An abstraction rather than an actual human being. I know some people relish this kind of spectral existence. I did too, once.

Anyway. Yes, thank you for asking, today was indeed the final signing of the paperwork, after which Aubrey’s house became, officially, Nathaniel’s house. Nathaniel will at some point pass the house on to David, and David eventually will pass the house on to someone else, which I’ll tell you about in a bit.

Although Nathaniel had been living there for a few years now, he had never referred to it, never thought of it, as his. It was always “Aubrey and Norris’s,” and then it was “Aubrey’s.” Even at Aubrey’s funeral, he was telling people to “come back to Aubrey’s for a reception,” until I finally reminded him it wasn’t Aubrey’s house but his. He had given me one of his looks, but later I heard him refer to it as “the house.” Not Aubrey’s, not his, not anyone’s, just a house that had agreed to accommodate us.

I had been spending much more time at the house (see? I do it too) this past year or so. First, there was Aubrey’s death. There
was a stateliness to his dying, I always thought: He looked fairly well, by which I mean that although he was wasted, he had been spared so many indignities we’d both seen afflict the dying in the past decade—no weeping sores, no pus, no drooling, no blood. Then there was his funeral, and the sorting through of his papers, and then of course I had to go away on business for a while, and by the time I’d returned, the staff had been dismissed (each with a severance specified in Aubrey’s will) and Nathaniel was trying to conceive of himself as the owner of an enormous home on Washington Square.

I was surprised, stepping into the place today, by how changed it was. There was nothing Nathaniel could do about the bricked-up parlor-floor windows or the bars on the windows of the upper floors, but the overall effect was airier, brighter. The walls were still hung with a few key pieces of Hawaiian art—the rest had gone to the Metropolitan, which now also sheltered most of the important works once owned by the royal family, things they had meant to keep safe and someday return, but which are now permanently theirs—but he had changed the lighting and painted the walls a deep gray, which made the space feel perversely sunnier. It was still full of Aubrey and Norris, and yet their presence had been vanished.

We walked around and looked at the works. Now that Nathaniel was their owner—a Hawaiian man with Hawaiian objects—I was able to appreciate them more; it was less as if they were being displayed and more as if they were being shown off, if that makes sense. Nathaniel talked about each textile, each bowl, each necklace: where it had come from, how it had been made. As he did, I studied him. For so long, he had wanted a beautiful house, with beautiful things, and now he had them. Even though Aubrey’s estate was much smaller than either of us had imagined—the money having been squandered on security services and junk-science disease preventatives and, yes, given away in large quantities to charities—there was enough left so that Nathaniel could, finally, feel secure. Around New Year’s, the baby, in one of his more hateful moods, had told me that Nathaniel was seeing someone, some lawyer in the Justice Ministry—“Yeah,
he’s a pretty cool guy”: I didn’t say that if he worked in Justice, he was by definition complicit in maintaining the quarantine camps—but Nathaniel didn’t mention it, and I of course didn’t ask.

After the tour, we returned to the parlor, and Nathaniel said he had something for me, something from Aubrey. One of my final visits to Aubrey had coincided with one of his more lucid moments, and during it, he asked if I wanted anything from his collection. But I had said no. I had grown to accept Aubrey, even to like him, but beneath that acceptance and affection was a knot of resentment: not, in the end, for the objects he’d collected and for the fact that he possessed more of Hawai
‘
i than I do, but for the fact that he and my husband and child had become a family, and I had been cast out. Nathaniel had met Aubrey and Norris, and everything had started ending, so slowly that I at first couldn’t tell it was even happening, and then so thoroughly that I couldn’t have hoped to stop it.

I sat on one of the sofas, and Nathaniel took something out of one of the side-table drawers: a little black velvet box, about the size of a golf ball.

“What is it?” I asked him, in the idiotic way people do when they’re given a gift, and he smiled. “Open it and see,” he said, so I did.

Inside was Aubrey’s ring. I removed it, feeling its weight in my hand, how warm the gold was. I opened the pearl lid, but there was nothing inside.

“Well?” asked Nathaniel, but lightly. He sat down next to me.

“Well,” I said.

“He said he thought you hated him for this ring most of all,” Nathaniel said, but serenely, and I looked up at him, surprised. “Oh, yes,” he said. “He knew you hated him.”

“I didn’t hate him,” I said, feebly.

“Yes, you did,” Nathaniel said. “You just wouldn’t admit it to yourself.”

“Yet another thing Aubrey knew that I didn’t,” I said, trying and failing to not sound sarcastic, but Nathaniel only shrugged.

“Anyway,” he said. “It’s yours now.”

I put it on my left pinkie and held up my hand for him to look at. I still wore my wedding ring, and he touched it, gently. He had stopped wearing his years ago.

At that moment, I sensed that I could have leaned over and kissed him, and that he would have let me. But I didn’t, and he, as if sensing the same possibility, abruptly stood.

“Now,” he said, businesslike, “when David arrives, I want you to be not just civil but encouraging, all right?”

“I’m always encouraging,” I said.

“Charles, I mean it,” he said. “He’s going to be introducing you to—to a friend of his, who’s very important to him. And he has some…some news.”

“Is he going back to school?” I asked, just to be a brat. Even I knew the answer to that. David was never going back to school.

He ignored the provocation. “Just promise me,” he said. Then, in another abrupt change of mood, he sat back down next to me. “I hate that it’s like this between you two,” he said. I said nothing. “Everything else aside, you’re still his father,” he said.

“You tell him that.”

“I have. But The Light matters to him.”

“Oh god,” I said. I had been hoping we could get through the conversation without either one of us mentioning The Light.

At that moment, the decontamination chamber hissed, and David appeared, followed by a woman. I stood, and we nodded at each other. “Look, David,” I said, and showed him the ring, and he grunted and smiled simultaneously. “Nice, Pops,” he said. “You finally got it after all.” I was stung but didn’t say anything. And anyway, he was right: I had.

Things had been stable between us, which is to say we had, without explicitly agreeing to it, reached a détente. I wouldn’t needle him about The Light, and he wouldn’t bait me about my work. But this agreement could only last for around fifteen minutes, and only if we had something else to discuss: I don’t mean to sound callous, but Aubrey’s death had been very helpful in that regard. There were always details of his chemo to review, and his mood and water intake to monitor, and his pain management to detail. And I had been
moved—moved, and, if I have to admit it, a little jealous—when I saw how carefully, how gently, the baby had cared for Aubrey in his final months: how he patted his head with a cold cloth, how he held his hand, how he talked to him in a way that many people can’t to the dying, an effortless, unpatronizing patter that somehow seemed to acknowledge Aubrey even as it made clear he didn’t expect a reply. He had a gift for helping the dying, a rare and valuable gift, one that could have been put to good use in any number of ways.

For a moment, we all stood there, and then Nathaniel, always having to play the negotiator, the mediator, said, “Oh! And, Charles—this is Eden, David’s good friend.”

She was older, in her mid-thirties, at least a decade older than the baby, a pale-skinned Korean, with the same ridiculous hairstyle as David. Tattoos crept from her sleeves and up her throat; the backs of her hands were stippled with a series of tiny stars that I would later learn formed constellations—the left hand was decorated with the spring constellations of the northern hemisphere; the right with the spring constellations of the south. She wasn’t attractive, exactly—the haircut and tattoos and overdone eyebrows, the ink so thick it looked like impasto, had ensured that—but she did have a coiled quality, something lean and feral and sensual.

We bowed to each other. “Nice to meet you, Eden,” I said.

I couldn’t tell if she was smirking, or if that was what her smile looked like. “You too, Charles,” she said. “David’s told me a lot about you.” This was said meaningfully, though I did not engage.

“I’m glad to hear it,” I replied. “Oh, and call me Charles.”

“Charles,” Nathaniel hissed, but David and Eden only looked at each other and smiled, the same smirking smiles. “Told you,” David told her.

Nathaniel had ordered in—flatbreads and mezze—and we went to the table. I had brought a bottle of wine, and David and Nathaniel and I all had some; Eden said she’d just drink water.

The conversation began. All of us, I could feel, were being very careful, which made for a very dull conversation. It wasn’t so bad that we were left to speak of the weather, but it wasn’t much better. The list of topics I was forbidden from mentioning to David was by
now prohibitively lengthy, and so it was easiest to remember instead the ones on which I could engage him without taking us into perilous territory: organic farming, films, robotics, yeast-free baking. I found myself missing Aubrey, who knew exactly how to conduct us, and how to redirect anyone who strayed onto dangerous grounds.

David, I reflected, as I often did during these conversations, was still a child, and it was this—his enthusiasm for the subjects he was passionate about, the way his speech would accelerate and his voice would pitch upward—that made me wish that he had gone to college. He would have found his tribe there; he would have felt less alone. He might even have become less strange, or at the very least found people around whom he didn’t seem strange at all. I could see him in a room full of young people, all of them giddy in their excitements—I could see him feeling that he finally belonged somewhere. And yet the place he had chosen instead was The Light, which, thanks to you, I can now monitor as obsessively as I want, but which I rarely have the desire to do. Once, I wanted to know everything about what David was doing and thinking—now I just want to not know, to pretend my son’s life, the things that give him joy, don’t exist.

But the person whom I was really watching was Eden. She was at the foot of the table, David on her left, and she stared at him with a kind of indulgent fondness, as a mother would at her unruly but gifted child. David did not include her in his monologue, but from time to time, he would glance at her, and she would nod, briefly, almost as if he were reciting lines and she was affirming that he’d gotten them correct. I noticed that she’d eaten very little—her flatbread lay untouched; there was a small dent in the scoop of hummus she’d taken, but everything else remained intact, congealing on her plate. Even her glass of water remained untasted, the round of lemon drifting toward the bottom.

Finally, when the baby had paused for a moment, Nathaniel interjected. “Before I get dessert,” he said, “David, maybe you want to tell your father your news?”

The baby looked so uncomfortable that I knew that, whatever
this news was, I didn’t want to hear it. So, before he could say anything, I turned to Eden. “How did you two meet?” I asked.

“At a meeting,” she said. She had a slow, almost languorous way of speaking, nearly a drawl.

“A meeting?”

She looked at me disdainfully. “The Light,” she said.

“Ah,” I said, not looking at Nathaniel. “The Light. And what is it that you do?”

“I’m an artist,” she said.

“Eden’s an amazing artist,” David said, eagerly. “She designs all our websites, all our advertisements—everything. She’s really talented.”

“I’m sure,” I said, and although I had been careful not to sound sarcastic, she smirked anyway, as if I had and yet I, not she, was the butt of my own sarcasm. “How long have you been seeing each other?”

She shrugged, just a slight hunch of her left shoulder. “About nine months.” She directed one of her half smiles at the baby. “I saw him and just had to have him.” The baby reddened at this, embarrassed and flattered, and her smile grew a little wider as she watched him.

Now Nathaniel interrupted again. “Which brings us to David’s news,” he said. “David?”

“Excuse me,” I said, and quickly got up, ignoring Nathaniel’s glare, and hurried to the little powder room tucked beneath the stairs. Aubrey had always claimed that this was the site of many after-dinner-party blow jobs between guests when he was younger, but it had long ago been covered in a fussy black-rose-patterned wallpaper that always made me think of a Victorian-era brothel. Here, I washed my hands and inhaled and exhaled. The baby was going to tell me he was marrying this odd, weirdly seductive, much-too-old-for-him woman, and it was my duty to stay calm. No, he wasn’t ready to be married. No, he didn’t have a job. No, he hadn’t moved out of his parent’s house. No, he wasn’t educated. But it was not my place to say anything; indeed, what I thought was not only not relevant, it wasn’t even wanted.

Resolution made, I returned to my place at the table. “Sorry,” I said to all of them. And then, to David, “Tell me your news, David.”

“Well,” said David, and he looked a little bashful. But then he blurted, “Eden’s pregnant.”