To Paradise

PART II

Autumn, fifty years earlier

Dear Peter, September 1, 2043

Thanks so much for the flowers, which arrived yesterday and which you really didn’t need to send. But they’re gorgeous, and we love them—thank you.

Speaking of flowers, the florist messed up. I told them we wanted white or purple Miltonias, and what did they order? Bunches and bunches of chartreuse Cattleyas. The shop looked like it’d been hosed down in bile. How do things like this happen? As you know, I don’t care that much, but Nathaniel is apoplectic, which means I must project sympathetic apoplexy if I’m to keep the household calm: peace over chaos, and all that.

Less than forty-eight hours until the big day. I still can’t believe I agreed to this. Nor can I believe you’re not going to be here with us. I forgive you, of course, but it won’t be the same without you.

Nathaniel and the baby send their love. And so do I.

Dear P, September 5, 2043

Well, I’m still alive. Barely. But alive.

Where to start? It rained the night before, and it never rains on the north side of the island. All night I had to listen to Nathaniel fretting—What about the mud? What if the rain didn’t stop? (We didn’t have a contingency plan.) What about the pit we’d dug for the pig? What if it was too damp for the kiawe branches to dry out? Should we ask John and Matthew to move them indoors?—until I finally had to tell him to shut up. When that didn’t work, I made him take a pill, and he eventually fell asleep.

Naturally, once he did, I couldn’t sleep myself, and at around three in the morning, I went outside to find that the rain had stopped and the moon was huge and silver and that the few shreds of clouds that remained were sailing north out to sea, and that John and Matthew had moved the cords of wood under the porch and had covered the pit with monstera leaves, and that everything smelled sweet and green, and I felt—not for the first time, and not the last—a sense of what can only be called wonder: that I was getting to live in this beautiful place, at least for a little while longer, and that I was having a wedding.

And then, thirteen hours later, Nathaniel and I got married. I’ll spare you (most of) the details, but will say that I was, again, unexpectedly moved, and that Nathaniel cried (obviously), and that I cried as well. We had it on John and Matthew’s back lawn, and Matthew had for unknown reasons built a chuppah-like structure from bamboo. After we’d said our vows, Nathaniel had the idea of jumping over the fence and running into the ocean, and so that’s what we did.

So that was it, and now we’re back to business as usual—the house is still in a terrific state of disarray, and the movers are coming in less than two weeks, and I haven’t even begun sorting through the lab and I have to finish our review of my final paper of my life as a postdoc: The honeymoon (such as it’ll be, with the baby in tow) will have to wait. By the way, he was very happy with your presents, and thank you for sending them—they were ingenious, and the perfect way to reassure him that, although it might’ve been the only day in his short life that wasn’t meant to be all about him, it actually really was. (Before the wedding, he had a tantrum, and when Nathaniel and I, fluttering about him like distressed mother crows, begged him to calm down, he shouted: “And stop calling me ‘the baby’! I’m almost four!” Well, we started laughing, and that made him even angrier.)

Now off to oversee his thank-you email to his uncle P.

Love, Me

P.S. I almost forgot: the Mayfair incident. Horrific. They keep playing clips of it on the news, again and again. Wasn’t that café just down the street from that bar we went to a few years ago? I imagine it’s keeping you very busy. Not that that’s the worst part of it, of course. But still.

Dear Petey, September 17, 2043

We made it. Phew. Nathaniel in tears, the baby too, and I’m not far behind. More soon. Love, Me

My dear Peter, October 1, 2043

Sorry I’ve been such a bad correspondent: Every day for the past three-odd weeks I’ve thought, I must write Petey a long message of all the things that have happened today, and every night, all I manage to do is our standard How are you, miss you, have you read such-and-such article. So, my apologies.

This email is in two parts: the professional and the personal. One will be slightly more interesting than the other. Guess which.

We are now settled into Florence House East, which is an old high-rise just west of the FDR. It’s almost eighty years old, but, like a lot of buildings constructed in the mid-sixties, feels both newer and older, misplaced in time and also not quite of it. Many of the postdocs and almost all of the principal investigators (a.k.a. the lab chiefs) live on campus in one of these units. Apparently, our arrival has caused some controversy because our unit is (1) on a high floor (twentieth); (2) a corner apartment; (3) faces southeast (best light, etc.); and (4) has three real bedrooms (as opposed to most of the other three-bedroom units, which are conversions of large two-bedroom units, which means the third bedroom doesn’t have a window). According to one of our neighbors, there was supposed to be a lottery based on family size, tenure, and—as with everything here—volume of publication, but instead the place was assigned to us, which gives everyone yet another reason to preemptively hate me. Oh well. Story of my life.

The apartment is large and well-situated (I’d be bitter, too), with views of the old smallpox hospital on Roosevelt Island that they’re now preparing to use as one of the new refugee camps. If the skies are clear, you can see all the way up the spine of the island, and when it’s sunny, the river, which is normally brown and creamy, instead glitters and appears almost pretty. Yesterday we saw a tiny police boat chugging north, which, I was later told by the same neighbor, is a frequent occurrence: Apparently, people kill themselves by jumping off the bridge and float downstream, and the police have to drag them out. I like it when it’s overcast and the sky turns metallic—yesterday it stormed, and we watched the lightning flicker over the water, and the baby jumped up and down and cheered.

Speaking of the baby, he’s already enrolled in the on-campus school (subsidized, though still not cheap), which he can attend through eighth grade, after which—barring disaster, expulsion, or failure—he’ll go directly into Hunter for high school (free!). The school is open to children whose parents are either professors or postdocs at RU or are fellows or post-fellows at Memorial Sloan Kettering, which is one block west and one block south, which means the student body showcases a vast range of racial diversity, from Indian to Japanese, and all the ethnicities in between. There’s a Soviet-aesthetic cement bridge that connects the apartment building to the campus’s old hospital-wing building, and from there you can descend to a series of tunnels that connect the entire campus, which people seem to prefer to, you know, the outdoors, and emerge in the basement of the Child and Family Center. So far, there seems to be little evidence of actual education—as far as I can tell, they spend most of their days going to the zoo and being read to—but Nathaniel claims this is what school is these days, and I defer to him on these subjects. Anyway, the baby seems happy, and I don’t know what else I can reasonably expect from a four-year-old.

I only wish I could say the same for Nathaniel, who’s pretty clearly miserable but also pretty clearly determined not to say anything, which I love him for but which also makes me a little heartsick. There was never any doubt that I’d take this job, but we both knew that there was unlikely to be a curatorial post in New York for an expert in 19th-century Hawaiian textiles and textile art, and this unfortunately has proven to be true. I think I told you that he’d been in touch with a friend from grad school who’s a researcher in the Oceania department at the Met and thought there might be a way to get him in there, even as a part-timer, but it seems it’s not to be, and that was really his best lead. We’d been talking, on and off, for the past year about what else he might do and how he might retrain, but neither of us allowed ourselves to engage as deeply in those conversations as we ought to have: on his part, I think, out of fear, and on mine, because I knew that any discussion would inevitably end up spotlighting how selfish this decision was, how our moving here deprives him of a livelihood and a professional identity. So, every morning, I leave early for the lab, and he drops off the baby and spends the rest of his day trying to decorate the apartment, which I know depresses him: the low ceilings, the hollow doors, the mauve bathroom tiles.

The worst thing is how his unhappiness makes me self-conscious about how much I discuss the lab with him, because I don’t want to remind him of what I have and he doesn’t. For the first time, we’re keeping secrets from each other, and they’re more difficult because they’re so quotidian, the stuff we’d discuss when we were doing the dishes after the baby had been put to bed, or in the morning as Nathaniel made the baby his lunch. And there are so many of them! For example: I made my first hire the day after we arrived, a lab tech who’d been at Harvard and moved here because her husband’s a jazz musician and thought there’d be better opportunities in New York; she’s probably in her early forties and worked in mouse immunology for ten years. This week I hired my second postdoc, a very smart guy from Stanford named Wesley. So I have funding for three more postdocs and four to five grad students, who cycle in and out of labs on twelve-week rotations. Grad students normally wait until a lab’s up and running until they decide whether they want to join or not—it’s a little like rushing a fraternity, I’m sorry to say—but I’m told that, given my “reputation,” I may be able to get some earlier. Promise I’m not trying to brag here. Just repeating what I’ve been told.

My lab (my lab!) is in one of the newer buildings, Larsson, part of which literally forms a bridge between Manhattan and a man-made landmass adjacent to Roosevelt Island. From my office, I can look over a slightly different view than the one I see from home: the water, the highway, the cement bridge, and Florence Houses East and West. All the labs here have official titles; mine is the Laboratory of Emerging and Incipient Infections. But when one of the service guys came early this morning to deliver my supply of Erlenmeyers, he asked, “You the Department of New Diseases?” I laughed, and he said, “What? Did I get it wrong?” and I told him he’d gotten it just right.

Sorry this has been so self-absorbed, but you did ask for it. Next week we have our final interviews with Immigration, after which we will be, officially, full-time, legal, permanent United States residents (eek!). Tell me what’s going on with you, and work, and that weirdo you’re seeing, and everything else. In the meantime, sending you love from the Department of New Diseases.

Your loving old pal, C.

Dear Peter, April 11, 2045

Thanks for your most recent note; it cheered me up a bit, which is a near-impossible feat these days.

I wonder, given how much you already know about these things (not to mention what’s happening in your part of the world), whether you’ve already heard about the cutbacks, which are going to be rolled out before the end of summer and will supposedly affect every federal scientific agency in the country. The official line is that the money is being redirected toward the war, and in a way it is, but everyone in the community knows that the money is actually going to Colorado, where rumor has it they’re working on a new bioweapon of some kind. I’m lucky insofar as RU isn’t completely dependent on government grants, but it is still largely dependent on them, and I’m worried my own work is going to be affected.

Then there’s the fact of the war itself, which is really hampering me in other ways. The Chinese are, as you know, responsible for the most advanced and most diverse infectious-disease scholarship in the world, and the new sanctions mean we can’t communicate with them anymore—not officially, at least. There’s been months of back-channeling between us and NIH and the CDC and Congress ever since the sanctions were proposed last year, but it hasn’t seemed to make a difference. Again, my work isn’t as affected as some of my colleagues’, but all that means is that it someday will be as affected, and so far, there’s nothing to be done.

It seems particularly insane that they should be doing this given the South Carolina incident—I don’t know if word made it to you, but in early February, there was an outbreak of an unknown virus just outside the town of Moncks Corner, in the southeast of the state, which is also home to a landscaped blackwater swamp called Cypress Gardens. A local woman—forties, otherwise healthy—became ill with what seemed to be a flu after being bitten by a mosquito while kayaking through the swamp. Forty-eight hours after diagnosis, she began seizing; seventy-two hours after, she was paralyzed; ninety-six hours after, she was dead. By this time, however, the woman’s son and their next-door neighbor, an elderly man, were displaying similar symptoms. It sounds, I know, a little like Eastern equine encephalitis, but it isn’t; rather, it’s a novel alphavirus. It was only good, weird, rare fortune that the town mayor had been, of all things, a missionary in East Africa during their ’37 chikungunya outbreak and suspected that something might be amiss; he contacted the CDC, and they came and locked down the town. The old man died, but the son lived. Of course, the CDC is treating this as a major triumph: Not only did the disease not spread but they also kept it out of the national news. They kept it out of the news altogether, actually—they in fact urged the president to order the mayor not to speak of it to any media, much less his citizens, which he did, and it’s rumored that this will lead next to an executive order that prohibits media outlets from publishing non-preapproved information about future outbreaks in the interest of national safety. The thinking is that panic would lead to people trying to flee the area, and early and aggressive containment is the only thing that halts a fast-spreading illness. I see the wisdom of this, of course, but I also think it’s a dangerous solution. Information has a way of finding its way around bans, and once the population discovers they’ve been lied to, or at the very least kept ignorant, it’ll only lead to greater mistrust and suspicion, and, therefore, even greater panic. But the government will do anything to delay confronting and correcting the actual problem: Americans’ scientific illiteracy.

Anyway, as I was saying—this is the context in which our funding is being cut? Can they really be so shortsighted as to think that this’ll be the last outbreak? There seems to be this unvoiced but persistent belief that illness is something that happens over there, and that, just because we have money and resources and a sophisticated research infrastructure, we’ll be able to halt any future disease in its tracks before it “gets too bad.” But what is “too bad,” and how do they propose we do this with less intelligence and fewer resources? I’m not one of those scientists—not like Wesley, bless his shriveled heart—who see apocalypse around every corner, who predict with something near glee the imminence of “the big one.” But I do think it’s terrifically foolish to react to an outbreak by scaling back, as if, by starving us of a solution, we might also be starving the problem from even beginning. We’ve all become so inured to these outbreaks that we forget that there’s no such thing as a minor virus; there are just those whose progress is halted early, and those that aren’t. We’ve been lucky so far. But we won’t be lucky forever.

So that’s work. Home has been less than great as well. Nathaniel has finally found a job, and just in time—things have been very strained between us. Being in an apartment he hates all day has not been conducive to making new friends, and though, as you know, he’s been trying to keep himself busy, volunteering at the baby’s school and also at a homeless shelter, where he goes every Thursday morning to prepare meals, he feels (as he told me) “useless and meaningless.” I mean, he knew he wasn’t going to find work in his field, but actually accepting that, instead of just saying he accepts that, has taken the better part of two years. So now he’s teaching art to fourth- and fifth-graders at a small, expensive, low-rated school in Brooklyn, one that attracts parents with dim kids and lots of money. Nathaniel has never actually taught before, and the commute is a hassle, but he seems much happier. He’s a last-minute replacement for a woman who was diagnosed with third-stage uterine cancer and quit midterm.

One of the unforeseen consequences of this move—me being at work and satisfied, Nathaniel being at home and resentful—is that he and the baby have constructed a life that feels separate from me and mine. Now, Nathaniel was always the baby’s primary parent anyway, but something seems to have shifted in the past year or so, and I find myself being frequently reminded that they have developed a relationship that in certain ways excludes me, that I am in certain ways ignorant of their daily lives. These reminders are manifested in tiny moments: a shared joke between them at the dinner table which I can’t understand and which they sometimes don’t bother to illuminate (and I, resentful myself, don’t inquire about and feel ashamed about later); a guilt-driven purchase of a gift for the baby, an electric-purple tin robot, only to learn upon giving it to him that purple is no longer his favorite color, that his favorite color is red, information delivered in an impatient, disappointed tone that wounds me more than it ought to.

Then there was last night, when I was putting the baby to bed, and he announced, suddenly, “Mama’s in heaven.”

Heaven? I thought. From where did he learn that? And “mama”? We had never referred to Nathaniel’s cousin as the baby’s mama—we had always been truthful with him: Nathaniel’s distant cousin had carried him, but he was ours alone, by our choice. And when she died, we had been exacting in our language: Daddy’s cousin, the one who helped make you, died last night. But I suppose he took my silence for confusion of another sort, because he added, in a clarifying way, “She died. So she’s in heaven.”

For a moment, I was stymied. “Well, yes, she is dead,” I said, weakly, thinking that I would ask Nathaniel to investigate where this talk of heaven was coming from (surely not the school?), and then couldn’t think of anything else to say that wouldn’t necessitate a much, much longer conversation.

He was silent for a moment, and I wondered, as I have many times, what happens in a child’s brain, how they are able to hold two or three ideas, completely contradictory or completely different, in their consciousness at once, and how to them these are all not only related but intertwined, and dependent on one another. When do we stop being able to think like that?

Then he said, “Daddy and Mama made me.”

“Yes,” I said, at last. “Daddy and your mama made you.”

He was quiet again. “But now I’m alone,” he said, softly, and I felt something in me weaken.

“You’re not alone,” I said. “You have Daddy, and you have me, and we love you very much.”

He thought about this. “Are you going to die?”

“Yes,” I told him, “but not for a very long time.”

“How long?” he asked.

“Too long,” I said. “So long that I can’t even count that high.”

He finally smiled. “Good night,” he said.

“Good night,” I told him. I kissed him. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

I got up to turn off the light (noticing, as I left, the purple robot kicked into a corner, facedown, which made my throat hurt with sorrow, as if the stupid thing had feelings and wasn’t just something I’d picked up from the toy store ten minutes before it closed for the night), and was about to march over to our bedroom and interrogate Nathaniel, when I was suddenly overcome with exhaustion. Here I was, a man with my own lab and my own family and my own covetable apartment, and everything was good, or good enough, and yet I had the sensation at that moment that I was atop a large piece of white plastic tubing, and the tube was rolling down a dirt path, and I was surfing it, almost, my feet constantly moving, trying to stay upright. That was what life felt like. So I went to our room, but I didn’t say anything about the conversation with the baby, and instead Nathaniel and I had sex for the first time in a long time, and he went to sleep, and eventually I did as well.

So. That’s what’s going on with me. I’m sorry this has been so self-pitying, and so self-absorbed. I know how hard you’ve been working, and I can only imagine the kinds of problems you’ve been dealing with. I know this won’t mean much, but whenever my colleagues are complaining about the bureaucrats, I think of you, and how, as much as I may disagree with some of your brethren’s conclusions, I know too there are some of you who are endeavoring to make the best decisions, the right decisions, and I know you’re one of those people. If only you could be the right kind of bureaucrat here in America—I’d feel a lot better for all of us if you were.

With love, C.

Dear dear Petey, November 22, 2045

Well, it happened. I know you’ve been following the news, and I know you know we were at risk for a big federal cut, but as you also know, I didn’t actually expect it to happen. Nathaniel says I was being naïve, but was I really? Let’s see: Nation barely stable from the flu of ’35. At least six mini-outbreaks within North America in the past five years. Given these circumstances, what seems like the dumbest thing to do? Oh, I know, cut funding to one of the premier biological sciences centers in the country! The problem, one of the other lab chiefs told me, is that although we all know how closely we came to disaster in ’35, the rest of the country does not. And we can’t tell them now, because no one would care. (And we couldn’t have told them then, because they’d all have panicked. It occurs to me, and not for the first time, that an increasingly and dismayingly large part of our jobs is spent debating how and when and if we should reveal findings that took years and millions of dollars to discover.) The point is that if we complain, no one will believe us. In other words, we’re getting penalized for our competence.

Not that I’m supposed to say that to anyone outside the university. This is according to both the institute’s head of communications, who gathered us in an auditorium to lecture us shortly before the news broke, and this is especially according to Nathaniel, as we sat in traffic last night on our way to dinner. Which is what this message is really about.

I haven’t mentioned this for reasons I’ll try to articulate later—maybe next week, when we see each other—but Nathaniel has made new friends. Their names are Norris and Aubrey (Aubrey!), and they’re a pair of ancient and very rich queens whom Nathaniel met a few months ago when he was asked by an auction house to authenticate a private collection of what were allegedly 18th-century, allegedly Hawaiian kapa bedcovers that had been no doubt stolen from who knows whom. Anyway, Nathaniel examined them, and authenticated both their origin and the date—he thinks they’re early 1700s, which would make them precontact and therefore extremely rare.

The point is that the auction house already had an interested buyer, a guy named Aubrey Cooke, who collects precontact Polynesian and Micronesian artifacts. So the house set up a meeting with him and Nathaniel, and the two of them fell in instant love, and now Nathaniel has a freelance consulting gig cataloguing Aubrey Cooke’s collection, which is, according to Nathaniel, “diverse and spectacular.”

I feel several ways about this. The first is relief. Ever since we moved here, I’ve been carrying within me a hollowness, an ache, over what I’ve done to Nathaniel and, even, the baby. They were so happy in Honolulu and, except for the fact of my own ambition, I was, too. But despite my frustrations, we belonged there. We all had work—me being a scientist at a small but respected lab; Nathaniel being a curator at a small but respected museum; the baby being a baby at a small but respected kindergarten—and I made us leave because I wanted to be at Rockefeller. I can’t pretend, as I sometimes do, that it was because I wanted to save lives or I thought I’d do more good here: it’s because I wanted to be at a prestigious facility, and because I love the hunt. I spend my days dreading a new outbreak, but I yearn for one as well. I want to be here when the next big pandemic happens. I want to be the one to discover it, I want to be the one to solve it, I want to be the one who looks up from his desk and sees the sky outside a dense black and realizes that he doesn’t know how long he’s been at the lab, that he’s been so involved, so immersed, that the fact of a day has ceased to hold any significance. I know all this, and I feel guilty about it, and yet it doesn’t stop me from wanting it. And so when Nathaniel came to me after that first meeting at the auction house, so happy—so happy—I felt exonerated. I realized how long it had been since I had seen him so excited, and how, always, I had been hoping for this, had been hoping that he would, as I kept telling him he would, find his place, find some meaning in this city and country he quietly hates. And then, when he came back joyful from meeting Aubrey Cooke, I was happy, too. He’s made a few friends here, but not many, and most of them are parents of other kids at the baby’s school.

That joy, however, soon shaded into something else, and although I’m ashamed to admit it, that something else is of course jealousy. Every Saturday for the past two-odd months, Nathaniel has taken the subway down to Washington Square, where Aubrey has an actual house on the park, and I stay home with the baby (the implicit message is that it’s my turn to stay home with him after two years of spending every weekend at the lab while Nathaniel watched him). And when Nathaniel returns in the late afternoon, he’s aglow. He picks up the baby, swings him around, and starts making dinner, and as he cooks, he tells me about Aubrey and his husband, Norris. How incredibly deep and rich Aubrey’s knowledge of 18th- and 19th-century Oceania is. How gorgeous Aubrey’s house is. How Aubrey made his money as a manager of a fund of funds. How Aubrey and Norris met. How and where Aubrey and Norris like to vacation. How Aubrey and Norris have invited us “out east” to Frog’s Pond Way, their “estate” in Water Mill. What Norris said about X book or Y play. What Aubrey thinks about the government. The brilliant idea Aubrey and Norris had about the refugee camps. What we must see/do/visit/eat/try, according to Aubrey and Norris.

To all of this, I say, “Wow,” or “Wow, babe, that’s great.” I really try to sound sincere, but frankly, it wouldn’t matter if I couldn’t, because Nathaniel is barely listening to me. My life outside the lab has always consisted of two fixed poles: him and the baby. But now his life is (not in order of importance) me, the baby, and Aubrey and Norris. Every Saturday he springs out of bed, gets dressed for the gym (he’s been going more since meeting Aubrey and Norris), works out, comes home to shower and feed the baby, kisses us both, and leaves for his day downtown. I want to be clear that it’s not that I think he’s in love with them, or that he’s fucking them—you know neither of us is weird about that. It’s that in his fascination with them, I hear a repudiation of me. Not us, not me and the baby, but me.

I had always thought that Nathaniel was content with our life. He’s never been someone who’s been seduced by money or ease or glamour. But after an evening spent listening to detailed descriptions of Aubrey and Norris’s beautiful house, and their beautiful things, I lie awake staring at our low ceilings, at our flapping slatted plastic blinds, at the track light with its blackened bulb that I’ve been promising Nathaniel I’ll change for the past six months, and wondering whether my accomplishments, and my position, have really given him what he wants and deserves. He has always been happy for me, and proud of me, but have I helped make a good life for him? Would he not leave me for another?

And so, last night. When the dinner invitation came, as I knew it would, I at first had the baby for an excuse. He’s been suffering from minor respiratory issues all fall: The days are hot and then cool and then hot again, and the crocuses, which last year bloomed in October, started shooting in September, followed by the plum trees a month later, so he’s been coughing and sneezing for weeks. But then he began to get better, and less physically miserable, plus Nathaniel found a babysitter he likes, and I was out of arguments. So last night we got in a taxi and went downtown to Aubrey and Norris’s.

I hadn’t been entirely sure who I had imagined Aubrey and Norris to be, other than people I needed to be suspicious of and whom I was already disinclined to like. Oh, and white—I had expected them to be white. But they weren’t. The door was opened by a very handsome blond man in his early fifties wearing a suit, and I blurted out, “You must be Aubrey,” only to hear Nathaniel’s hiss of embarrassed laughter beside me. The man smiled. “If only I could be so lucky!” he said. “No, I’m Adams, the butler. But come in: They’re waiting for you upstairs in the drawing room.”

Up a gleaming dark staircase we went, me seething at Nathaniel, who had been embarrassed by me, of me, and as Adams led us through a pair of half-open double doors made of that same satiny wood, the two men inside stood.

I knew from Nathaniel that Aubrey was sixty-five and Norris a few years younger, though they both had that kind of ageless, shiny face that the very rich have. Only their gums gave them away: Aubrey’s were a dark purple, and Norris’s were the gray-pink of a much-used eraser. But the other surprise was their skin: Aubrey was Black, and Norris was Asian…but also something else. He looked, in fact, a little like my grandfather, and before I could stop myself, I was once again blurting: “Are you from Hawai‘i?” Again, there was Nathaniel’s uncomfortable titter, joined this time by Norris’s and Aubrey’s laughter. “Nathaniel asked me that same question when we met,” Norris said, unoffended. “But no, I’m afraid not. I hate to be such a disappointment, but I’m just a dark Asian.”

“Not just,” Aubrey said.

“Well, part Indian,” Norris said. “But that’s Asian, Aub.” And then to me: “Indian and English on my father’s side; my mother was Chinese.”

“So was mine,” I said, stupidly. “Chinese Hawaiian.”

He smiled. “I know,” he said. “Nathaniel said.”

“Why don’t you sit?” Aubrey said.

We did, obediently. Adams returned with drinks, and we talked about the baby for a while, until Adams reappeared and said dinner was ready to be served, at which point we all stood again and went to the dining room, where there was a small round table covered with what I at first, heart-stoppingly, mistook for a piece of kapa cloth. I looked up to see Aubrey smiling at me. “It’s a contemporary weaving, inspired by the real thing,” he said. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” I swallowed, mumbled something vague.

We sat. Dinner—a “seasonal celebration” of sausage-and-pumpkin soup served from a massive, hollowed-out white squash; veal chops with buttery green beans; a tomato galette—was served. We ate. At some point, Norris and Nathaniel started talking, and I was left with Aubrey, who was sitting next to me. I had to speak. “So,” I began, and then I couldn’t think of a single thing to say. Or, rather, I could think of too many, but none of them seemed appropriate. I had, for example, been planning to try to pick a fight with Aubrey by subtly suggesting he was a cultural appropriator, but given the fact that he hadn’t, as I feared, made me take a tour of his collection, and by the fact of his Blackness (later, Nathaniel and I would have an argument about whether Black people could indeed be cultural appropriators), that idea no longer seemed quite as exciting or provocative as it might have been.

I was quiet for so long that Aubrey finally laughed. “Why don’t I start,” he said, and although he was kind, I could feel myself flushing regardless. “Nathaniel’s told us a little about what you do.”

“I tried to, anyway,” Nathaniel suddenly interjected from across the table, before turning back to Norris.

“He tried, and I tried to understand,” Aubrey said. “But I’d be honored to hear it from the source, as it were.”

So I gave him my short speech about infectious diseases and how I spent my days trying to anticipate the newest ones, playing up the statistics that civilians love hearing, because civilians love to panic: How the 1918 flu killed fifty million people, which led to additional, but less disastrous, pandemics in 1957, 1968, 2009, and 2022. How, since the 1970s, we’ve been living in an era of multiple pandemics, with a new one announcing itself at the rate of every five years. How viruses are never truly eliminated, only controlled. How decades of excessive and reckless prescribing of antibiotics had given rise to a new Family of microbes, one more powerful and durable than any in human history. How habitat destruction and the growth of megacities has led to our living in closer proximity to animals than ever before, and therefore to a flourishing of zoonotic diseases. How we’re absolutely due for another catastrophic pandemic, one that this time will have the potential to eliminate up to a quarter of the global population, putting it on par with the Black Death of more than seven hundred years ago, and how everything in the past century, from the outbreak of 2030 through last year’s episode in Botswana, has been a series of tests that we’ve ultimately failed, because true victory would be treating not each outbreak individually but developing a comprehensive global plan, and because of that, we’re inevitably doomed.

“But why?” Aubrey asked. “We have immeasurably better public health systems, not to mention medications and sanitation, than in 1918, not to mention than we did just twenty years ago.”

“That’s true,” I said. “But the only thing that ended up making the 1918 flu less disastrous than it should’ve been was the rate at which the infection was able to spread: The microbe traveled among continents by boat, and back then, it took a week, if you hurried, to get from Europe to America. The mortality rate of the infected on that journey was so great that you had far fewer carriers who were able to spread the illness on the other shore. But that’s not true any longer, and hasn’t been for more than a century. The only thing that contains a potentially rampant infectious disease now—and they are all potentially rampant, as far as we’re concerned—is less technology than the swift segregation and isolation of the affected area, and that depends upon the local authorities reporting it to their national or local epidemiological center, which should in turn trigger an immediate lockdown of the site.

“The problem, of course, is that municipalities are reluctant to report new diseases. Besides the immediate overreaction and loss of business, a stigma attaches itself to the place, one that in many cases far outlasts the successful containment of the disease. For example: Would you go to Seoul now?”

“Well—no.”

“Exactly. And yet it’s been four years since the threat of EARS was for all purposes eradicated. And we were lucky there: The mayor was informed by a local councilperson after the third death, and after the fifth death, he’d contacted the National Health Services, and within twelve hours, they had tented the entirety of Samcheong-dong, and managed to contain fatalities to that neighborhood alone.”

“But there were so many.”

“Yes. And it was unfortunate. But there would have been far more had they not done what they did.”

“But they killed those people!”

“No. They didn’t. They just didn’t let them leave.”

“But the result ended up being the same!”

“No—the result ended up being far fewer deaths than there would have been otherwise: nine thousand deaths instead of, potentially, fourteen million. That, and the containment of a particularly pathogenic microbe.”

“But what about the argument that isolating the district doomed them rather than helped them? That if they’d opened the area to international assistance, they could’ve saved them?”

“You’re talking about the globalist argument, and in many cases, that’s correct,” I said. “Nationalism means that there’s less exchange of information between scientists, and that’s extremely dangerous. But that wasn’t the case here. Korea isn’t a hostile government; they didn’t try to conceal anything; they freely and honestly shared what they were learning with the international scientific community, not to mention other governments: They behaved perfectly, exactly how a country should. What looked like a unilateral choice, to isolate the neighborhood, was in reality a selfless one—they prevented a potential pandemic by sacrificing a relatively small number of their own people. That’s exactly the kind of calculation that we need any community to make if we’re to contain, truly contain, a virus.”

Aubrey shook his head. “I suppose I’m too old-fashioned to view nine thousand deaths as a happy outcome. And I also suppose that’s why I’ve never been back: I can’t unsee those pictures—those black plastic tents covering the whole neighborhood, and beneath them, you knew people were just waiting to die. You never saw them. But you knew they were.”

There wasn’t anything I could say to this without sounding callous, so I just drank my wine and said nothing.

There was a silence, and Aubrey shook his head again, quickly, as if collecting himself. “How did you get interested in Hawaiian antiquities?” I asked him, for I felt I must.

He smiled then. “I’d been visiting for decades,” he said. “I love it there. I have some family history there, actually: My great-great-grandfather was stationed on Kaho‘olawe, when it was a U.S. military base, just before secession.” He caught himself. “I mean Restoration,” he said.

“It’s okay,” I said. “Nathaniel says you have an impressive collection.”

He beamed at this, and babbled on for some time about his various holdings, and their provenances, and how he’d built a special climate-controlled room for some of them in the basement, which, were he to do it over, he would have instead put on the fourth floor, as basements are always inclined to be damp, and although he and his air-conditioning guy had managed to maintain a steady temperature of seventy degrees, they couldn’t stabilize the humidity, which should be forty percent but was always creeping upward to fifty no matter what they did. Listening to him, I realized two things: first, that I had learned more by osmosis about 18th- and 19th-century Hawaiian weaponry, textiles, and objects than I had known I had; and second, that I would never understand the pleasure of collecting—all that hunting, all that dust, all that trouble, all that maintenance. And for what?

It was his tone—confiding, shyly proud—that made me look up at him again. “But my biggest treasure,” he continued, “my biggest treasure never leaves my hand.” He held up his right hand, and I saw that on his pinkie he wore a thick band of dark, battered gold. Now he turned the band, and I could see that he had kept facing toward his palm the band’s stone, a clouded, opaque, inexpertly cut pearl. I already knew what he would do next, but I watched anyway as he squeezed the small latches at either side of the ring and the pearl hinged open, a little door, to reveal a tiny compartment. He angled it toward me, and I looked: empty. This was exactly the kind of ring my great-great-grandmother had once worn, the kind that hundreds of women had sold off to treasure hunters in their attempts to raise funds for their campaign to restore the sovereign. They had kept a few grains of arsenic in the chamber, a symbolic declaration of their willingness to commit suicide unless their queen was returned to her throne. And now here it was on this man’s hand. For a moment, I was unable to speak.

“Nathaniel says you yourselves don’t collect,” Aubrey was saying.

“We don’t need to collect Hawaiiana,” I said. “We are Hawaiiana.” I had spoken more fiercely than I knew I would, and for a moment, there was another silence. (Note: This sounded less pretentious in the moment than it does here.)

But the uncomfortable aftermath of my gaffe (though was it a gaffe, really?) was interrupted by the arrival of the cook, who was offering me a platter of blackberry cake. “Fresh from the farmers’ market,” he said, like he had invented the very idea of the farmers’ market, and I thanked him and took a slice. And from here the conversation turned to the subjects that every conversation between friendly, like-minded people inevitably did: the weather (bad), the sunken boat of Filipino refugees off the coast of Texas (also bad), the economy (bad as well, but not as bad as it was going to get; like most money people, Aubrey was slightly gleeful about this, as, to be fair, am I when talking about the next big pandemic), the coming war with China (very bad, but would be over “within a year,” according to Norris who, it turned out, was a litigator and had a client who “sold military equipment,” i.e., an arms dealer), the latest news about the environment and the predicted onslaught of climatic refugees (extremely bad). I wanted to say, “My best friend, Peter, is very high up in the British government, and he says that the war with China is going to last three years minimum and is going to cause a global migration crisis that will number in the millions,” but I didn’t. I just sat there and said nothing, and Nathaniel didn’t look at me, and I didn’t look at him.

“This is quite a house,” I said at one point, and although it wasn’t quite a compliment, or meant as one (I could feel Nathaniel staring at me, hard), Aubrey smiled. “Thank you,” he said. Then there was a long story about how he’d bought it from the scion of a supposedly storied banking family I’d never heard of, and how the man had been nearly destitute, full of tales about his family’s lost wealth, and how it had been such a thrill to be a Black man, buying a house like this from a white man who’d assumed he’d have it forever. “Look at you,” I heard my grandfather saying, “bunch of dark-skinned men trying to be white,” although he wouldn’t have said “white” but “haole.” Anything I did that was foreign to him was haole: reading books, going to grad school, moving to New York. He saw my life as an indictment of his simply because it was different.

By then it was late enough to make a polite escape, and after sitting for what I judged to be about twenty minutes with my coffee, I made a big show of stretching and saying we had to get home to the baby: I had the sense, as one does about the person one’s lived with for fifteen years, that Nathaniel was about to suggest we go see Aubrey’s collection, and I had zero interest in that. I could also feel Nathaniel about to protest, but then I suppose he figured that he’d put me through enough (or that it was only a matter of time before I said something truly inappropriate), and we all stood and said our goodbyes, and Aubrey said we should get together again so I could see the collection, and I said I’d be honored, even though I have no intention of doing so.

On the way back uptown, I didn’t say anything to Nathaniel and he didn’t say anything to me. We didn’t say anything as we entered the apartment, and as we paid the babysitter, and as we went to check on the baby, and as we got ready for bed. It was only when we were lying next to each other in the dark that Nathaniel finally said, “You might as well say it.”

“What?” I said.

“Whatever it is you’re going to say,” he said.

“I’m not going to say anything,” I said. (A lie, obviously. I had spent the last thirty minutes composing a speech, and then thinking about how I could make it sound spontaneous.) He sighed. “I just think it’s a little odd,” I said. “Nate, you hate people like that! Haven’t you always said that collecting native objects is a form of material colonization? Haven’t you always argued for their return to the Hawaiian state, or at the very least to a museum? And now you’re, what, best friends with this rich fuck and his weapons-dealing husband, and not only tolerating their trophy-collecting but complicit in it? Not to mention that he thinks the kingdom is a joke.”

He was still. “I never got that impression.”

“He called it secession, Nate. He corrected himself, but come on—we know the type.”

He was quiet for a long time. “I promised I wouldn’t get defensive,” he said at last. Then he was quiet again. “You make it sound like Norris is an arms dealer.”

“Well, isn’t he?”

“He defends them. It’s not the same thing.”

“Oh, come on, Natey.”

He shrugged: We weren’t looking at each other, but I could hear the blanket move up and down on his chest.

“Also,” I barreled on, “you never told me they weren’t white.”

He looked at me. “Yes, I did.”

“No, you didn’t.”

“Of course I did. You just weren’t listening to me. As usual. Anyway, why does it make a difference?”

“Oh, stop, Natey. You know why it does.”

He grunted. There wasn’t much he could say to that. Then—another silence. Finally, he said, “I know it seems strange. But—I like them. And I’m lonely. I can talk about home with them.”

You can talk about home with me, I should have said. But I didn’t. Because I knew, and he knew, that I was the one who had taken us from home, and that it was because of me that he had left a job, a life, that he was proud of. And now he had become someone he didn’t recognize and didn’t like, and he was doing everything he could to not blame me, even up to and including denying what and who he was. I knew this, and he knew this.

So I didn’t say anything at all, and by the time I knew what to say, he was already asleep, or pretending to be, and I had once again failed him.

This was going to be our life, I realized. He would grow closer and closer to Aubrey and Norris, and I would have to encourage him, or else his resentment toward me would grow so large and unwieldy that he wouldn’t be able to pretend it didn’t exist. And then he would leave me, he and the baby, and I would be on my own, without my family.

So, that’s all. I know you have much bigger problems to deal with than your old friend’s, but I’d appreciate any words of comfort you might have. I can’t wait to see you. Tell me everything on your end, or as much as you can. I will be silent as the tomb, or the grave, or however the expression goes.

Love you. C.

My dear Peter, March 29, 2046

Instead of apologizing at the end of this message for being so self-absorbed, I’m going to start with an apology for being so self-absorbed.

But on the other hand, I don’t feel I should have to be so apologetic, when last week was all about you, and gloriously so. It was such a beautiful wedding, Petey. Thank you so much for having us. I forgot to tell you that when we were leaving the temple, the baby looked up at me and said, solemnly, “Uncle Peter looked very happy.” He was right, of course. You were very happy—you are. And I am happy, so happy, for you.

Right now, you and Olivier are somewhere over India, I expect. As you know, Nathaniel and I never took our honeymoon. We were supposed to, and then I had the lab to set up, and we had the baby to settle, and, I don’t know, it just never happened. And then it kept not happening. (We had, as you remember, wanted to go to the Maldives. I have a way of picking them, don’t I.)

I’m writing you from Washington, D.C., where I’m attending a conference on zoonoses—N and the baby are back home. Actually, they’re not home at all: They’re out with Aubrey and Norris at Frog’s Pond Way. It’s the first weekend it’s warm enough to swim, and Nathaniel’s trying to teach the baby how to surf. He had planned to teach him in January, when we were back in Honolulu, but there were so many jellyfish that we ended up avoiding the beaches altogether. But things are a little better between us, thank you for asking. I’ve been feeling a bit more connected to both of them—though, well, that could’ve just been because you and Olivier needed receptacles to catch the overflow of love you have, and the three of us were there to do just that. So we’ll see. I think part of our renewed semi-closeness is because, as you observed, I’m trying to get used to the fact of Aubrey and Norris. They’re in our lives for good, or so it seems. For months, I fought against it. Then I resigned myself. Now? Well. I suppose they’re fine. They’ve been very generous with us, that’s for sure. Nathaniel’s formal consulting work with Aubrey is long over, but he’s down there at least a couple of times a month. And the baby likes them a lot, Aubrey in particular.

The mood here is grim. First, the rations are much more stringent than they are in New York—last night the hotel lost water completely. It was just for an hour, but still. Second, and more worrisome, everyone’s funding has been cut—again. Our third round is probably going to be announced next week. My lab is less exposed than some of the others—we only get thirty percent of our funding from the government, and the Howard Hughes Institute is making up some of the shortfall—but I’m anxious. All the Americans are talking about it between sessions: How much have you lost? Who’s stepping in to make up the difference? What’s been imperiled, or is about to be?

But the mood is grim for other, more alarming reasons, far beyond the Americans’ administrative struggles and our collective discomfort. The keynote was by two scientists from Erasmus University in Rotterdam, who had done early work on the Venice outbreak of ’39, which as you know was attributed to a mutation of the Nipah virus. Their session was unusual for a number of reasons, primarily because it was more speculative than these speeches usually are. On the other hand, this has been happening with increasing frequency—when I was a doctoral student, these sorts of presentations would largely concern lab findings and would usually address a second- or third-generation mutation of one virus or another. But now there are so many new viruses that these conferences have become opportunities to elucidate reports we’ve read about on our institutions’ private networks, to which any scientist at an accredited university can upload their findings or questions. The absence of China from this network (and from the conference at large) is one of the international community’s most pressing problems, and one of the revelations from this conference—whispered from one scientist to the next—is that a group of researchers within mainland China have created a secret portal, one to which they’re uploading their own findings. My feeling is that if we know about it, so must their government, and so the information on it cannot be totally trustworthy—and yet not to take these reports seriously might lead to catastrophe.

Anyway. The Erasmus team claims to have discovered a new virus, which they claim once again originated in bats. It too is being classified as a Henipavirus, which means it’s an RNA virus that mutates at a high rate. Back in the 20th century, this Family of viruses was thought to be endemic only in Africa and Asia—though, as the ’39 outbreak proves, Nipah in particular has proven to be capable of frequent reemergence, and has inspired a good deal of research in the last seven years about its ability not only to withstand climatic changes but to adapt zoonotically in hosts—dogs, in the Italian case—it had never before infected. Though it had decimated livestock and other domesticated animals, Nipah had never been too serious a threat to us previously because it was a notably non-transmissible disease among humans, one unable to exist for more than a few days without a receptive host. By the time it did infect humans, it quickly lost steam: Transmission rates were poor, and the virus proved unable to transmit itself onward. After Venice eradicated its dog population, for example, the disease vanished as well.

But now the Erasmus team is suggesting that this new strain, which they’re calling Nipah-45, is capable not just of infecting humans but is both highly contagious and extremely fatal. Like its parent virus, it can be transmitted through contaminated food as well as by the airborne route, and unlike its evolutionary ancestor, it can exist in the host for perhaps months. Their study was of a group of small villages north of Luang Prabang, where the government has been relocating Muslim minorities who come over the border from China. According to them, six months ago the virus was responsible for the decimation of this community: almost seven thousand people dead within eight weeks. The virus switched from bat to water buffalo, and from there into the food supply. The disease manifests itself in humans as a cough, which rapidly leads to full-blown respiratory failure, followed by organ failure—patients were dead within eleven days, on average, after diagnosis. And as shocking as the death rate is, the Erasmus team said that the community’s isolation and inability to travel within the country (the group is denied movement by law) prevented widespread dissemination.

Half a year later, these villages remain isolated. Still, the Laotian government, abetted by the American one, is desperately trying to keep the story out of the news, because, along with the spread of disease, the gravest concerns are (1) the all-but-inevitable stigmatization of these poor people, which might easily lead to their mass murder, as we saw in Malaysia in ’40; and (2) another refugee crisis. Hong Kong’s borders are protected; so are Singapore’s, India’s, China’s, Japan’s, Korea’s, and Thailand’s. So, if there’s another large-scale population shift, it seems inevitable that the refugees will attempt to make their way across the Pacific. Those who aren’t shot on sight off the Philippine, Australian, New Zealand, Hawaiian, or American coasts will (the thinking goes) try to make their way to Oregon or Washington or Texas, and from those countries, over the border to the U.S.

Not surprisingly, the report kicked off a furor. Not about the team’s findings—those were incontrovertible—but about their suggestion, never actually stated but heavily implied, that this virus might be the one we had all been waiting and preparing for. Mingled with the fear was a certain amount of professional jealousy, along with resentment (if we’d had governments as dedicated to funding our research as the Netherlands’ is, then we’d have been the ones to discover this), as well as a certain amount of excitement. Someone on one of the bulletin boards had compared speculative virology to being an understudy in a long-running Broadway show: You wait and wait for the chance to go on, and most of the time it never happens, but you have to stay alert regardless, because what if someday it’s your turn?

Now, because I know you’ll ask: The answer is that I don’t know. Will this be the one? I can’t say. My sense is it won’t be, that if Nipah-45 had the potential to be truly devastating we would have known about it far earlier. You would have known about it far earlier. It would have spread far beyond this network of villages. The fact that it hasn’t should be comforting. But, then again, a lot of things should be comforting these days.

I’ll keep you updated. You keep me updated, too. It seems remarkable that a deputy minister of the interior should increasingly have more information about global outbreaks than I do, but here we are. In the meantime: My love to you, always, and to Olivier as well. Stay out of trouble and keep away from bats.

Love, Me

My dearest Peter, January 6, 2048

We are all transfixed with horror by what’s happening over there. The labs more or less ceased operations today because everyone was watching the news, and when the bridge exploded, there was an audible gasp, not just in our lab but throughout the floor. That astonishing scene, of London Bridge collapsing, of those people and cars falling through the air—in the report we were watching, the newscaster cried out: no words, just a sound, and then was quiet, and all you could hear were the helicopters flying overhead. After, we sat around talking about who might be responsible, and one of my Ph.D.s said we should be thinking instead of who we hoped it wouldn’t be, because there were so many possible culprits. Do you think it was an attack on the refugee camp? Or something else?

But mostly, Peter, I was so, so sorry to hear that Alice is one of the dead. I know how close you two were, and how long you’d worked together, and I can only imagine what you and your colleagues must be feeling right now.

Nathaniel and the baby join me in sending you love. Olivier is taking good care of you, I know, but text or just call me if you want to talk.

I love you. C.

Dearest Peter, March 14, 2049

I’m writing you from our new apartment. Yes, the rumors are true: We’ve moved. Not far, and not really up—the new place, a two-bedroom, is on 70th and Second, on the fourth floor of a 1980s-era building—but we had to, for Nathaniel’s happiness and therefore my sanity. It was, however, fairly cheap, and this is only because there are reports that the East River will finally flood the dams sometime between next year and never. (Of course, this is also why we should’ve stayed in RU housing, which is even more likely to be flooded than this new place, and therefore even less expensive, but Nathaniel had had it and there was no arguing with him.)

There’s nothing much to say about the new neighborhood, because it’s the same as the old neighborhood, more or less. The difference is that, here, the living-room windows look down onto a sanitation center across the street. You don’t have those yet, do you? You will. They’re abandoned storefronts (this one had been—irony of ironies—an ice-cream parlor) that the government’s taken over and fitted out with industrial-grade air-conditioning, as well as, typically, ten to twenty air showers, which is a new technology they’re testing out: You take off your clothes and go into the stall, which resembles an upright tubular coffin, and press a button and get blasted by powerful bursts of air. The concept is that you don’t need to use water, because the force of the air will blast away the grime. It sort of works, I guess. At any rate, it’s better than nothing. Anyway, they’re opening these centers all over the city, and the idea is that you pay a monthly fee and can use them whenever you want; the really expensive ones, which are still federally regulated but privately owned, allow you to stay all day in the air-conditioning, and offer unlimited air shower time, and there are also work spaces and beds for people who need to spend the night because their building’s had a blackout. The one across the street from us, however, is an emergency center, which means that it’s for people whose buildings have lost water or electricity for an extended period (meaning more than ninety-six hours), or whose neighborhoods don’t have enough generators to go around. So, all day long, you have these miserable people, hundreds of them—lots of children, lots of old people, none of them white—standing in the sweltering heat for literally hours, waiting to get in. And because of last month’s scare, you’re not allowed to enter if you have a cough, and even if you don’t, you still have to submit to a temperature check, which is ridiculous because by that point you’ve been standing in the heat for so long that your body temperature will be naturally elevated. The city officials claim that the guards can tell the difference between a fever from infection and simple overheating, but I seriously doubt that. And to further complicate matters, you now also have to show your identity papers at the door: only U.S. citizens and permanent residents accepted.

One day last month, Nathaniel and I took over some of baby’s old clothes and toys to donate, standing for a few minutes in a separate, much shorter queue, and though I’m not shocked by much anymore in this shit-ass city, I was shocked by that center: There were probably a hundred adults and fifty kids in a space meant for maybe sixty people, and the stench—of vomit, of feces, of unwashed hair and skin—was so overpowering that you could almost see it, coloring the room a dull mustard. But the thing that really struck us was how quiet it was: Except for one baby, who cried and cried in a thin, helpless way, there was no sound. Everyone was standing mutely in lines for one of the seven air showers, and when one person exited, the next would silently enter the shower space and draw the curtain closed.

We navigated through the crowds, which parted, wordlessly, to let us pass, and headed toward the back, where there was a plastic table, behind which stood a middle-aged woman. On the table was an enormous metal cauldron, and in front of the table was another queue of people, all holding ceramic mugs. When they reached the front of the line, they held out their cups, and the woman dipped a ladle into the pot and poured them a drink of cold water. Next to her were two more pots, their sides perspiring, and behind those pots was a guard, his arms crossed, a holster with a gun at his hip. We told the woman we’d brought some clothes for donation, and she told us we could put them in one of the bins beneath the windows, which we did. As we were leaving, she thanked us, and asked if we might have any liquid antibiotics at home, or diaper cream, or nutritional drinks. We had to say we didn’t, that our son had long outgrown all of these things, and she nodded again, wearily. “Thanks anyway,” she said.

We walked back across the street—the heat so thick and stunning it felt as if the air had been knitted from wool—and up to our apartment in silence, and once we were inside, Nathaniel turned to me and we put our arms around each other. It had been a long, long time since we’d held each other like that, and even though I knew he was clinging to me out of sorrow and fear more than affection, I was glad for it.

“Those poor people,” he said into my shoulder, and I sighed back. Then he pulled away from me, angry. “This is New York,” he said. “It’s 2049! Jesus Christ!” Yes, I wanted to say, it’s New York. It’s 2049. That’s exactly the problem. But I didn’t.

We took a long shower then, which was a grotesque thing to do, given what we’d just seen, but there was something delicious about it, and defiant, too—a way of telling ourselves that we could get clean whenever we wanted, that we weren’t those people, that we never would be. Or at least that’s what I said as we lay there in bed, after. “Tell me that won’t happen to us,” Nathaniel said. “That will never happen to us,” I said. “Promise me,” he said. “I promise you,” I told him. Though I couldn’t promise. But what else was I going to say? Then we lay there for a while, listening to the purr of the air conditioner, and then he left to pick the baby up from swimming lessons.

I know I mentioned this briefly in my last communiqué, but aside from finances, the baby is the other reason we had to stay in this neighborhood, because we’re trying to keep things as normal as possible for him. I told you about that incident on the basketball court last year, and two days ago, there was another: They called me at the lab (Nathaniel was upstate with his students on a field trip) and I had to hurry over to the school, where I found the baby sitting in the principal’s office. He had clearly been crying but was pretending he hadn’t, and I was so overcome—angry and afraid and helpless—that I think I probably just stood there for a moment, stupidly staring at him, before I ordered him out, and he left, feigning a kick toward the doorframe as he left.

What I should have done, though, is hugged him and told him everything was going to be okay. Increasingly, all of my human interactions seem to follow this pattern—I see a problem, I get overwhelmed, I don’t offer compassion when I should, and the other person storms off.

The principal is this tough middle-aged dyke named Eliza, and I like her—she’s the kind of person who’s unimpressed by all adults and interested in all kids—but when she set the syringe down on the desk between us, I had to grip the sides of my chair to keep from slapping her: I hated the dramatics of it, the staginess of the presentation.

“I’ve worked at this school a long time, Dr. Griffith,” she began. “My father was a scientist, too. So I don’t need to ask where your son got this from. But I have never seen a child try to use a needle as a weapon.” To which I thought: Really? Never? What’s wrong with kids’ imagination these days? I didn’t say this, though—I just apologized on the baby’s behalf, said he had an overactive imagination, and that he’d had a difficult time adjusting to America. All of which was true. I didn’t say how shocked I was, though that was true, too.

“But you’ve been living in America, what”—she glanced at her computer screen—“almost six years now, am I right?”

“It’s still hard for him,” I said. “A different language, a different environment, different customs—”

“I hate to interrupt you, Dr. Griffith,” she interrupted me. “I don’t need to tell you that David is very, very bright.” She looked at me sternly, as if the baby’s brightness were somehow my fault. “But he’s had consistent problems with impulse control—this isn’t the first time we’ve had this conversation. And he’s had some…challenges with socialization. He has difficulty comprehending social cues.”

“So did I, when I was his age,” I said. “My husband would say that I still do.” I smiled, but she didn’t smile back.

Then she sighed, and leaned forward in her chair, and something in her face—some veneer of professionalism—dropped. “Dr. Griffith,” she said, “I’m worried about David. He’ll be ten in November: He understands the consequences of what he’s doing. He only has four more years here, and then he’s off to high school, and if he doesn’t learn lessons now, this year, about how to interact with kids his own age…” She stopped. “Did his teacher tell you what happened?”

“No,” I admitted.

And out came the story. In brief: There’s a clique of boys—not athletic, not good-looking: these are kids of scientists, after all—who’re considered “popular” because they make robots. The baby wanted to join them, and had been trying to hang out with them at lunch. But they rebuffed him, multiple times (“Respectfully, I can assure you. We don’t tolerate bullying or unkindness here”), and then I guess the baby brought in the syringe and told the head of the pack that he was going to give him a virus if he didn’t let him join. The entire class witnessed this exchange.

Hearing this, I felt two competing sensations: First, I was horrified that my child was threatening another child, and not just threatening him but threatening him with what he claimed was a disease. And second, I was heartbroken for him. I have blamed and do blame the baby’s loneliness on his homesickness, but the truth is that, even in Hawai‘i, he never had many companions. I don’t think I’ve ever told you this, but once, when he was about three, I saw him go over to some other kids on the playground who were playing in the sandbox and ask if he could join them. They said yes, and he got in, but as he did, they all got up and ran over to the jungle gym and left him there alone. They didn’t say anything, they didn’t call him names, but how could he see their departure as anything other than what it was—a rejection?

But the worst thing is what happened after: He sat there in the sandbox, looking at them, and then he slowly began playing by himself. Every few seconds he’d look over at them, waiting for them to come back, but they never did. After five or so minutes, I couldn’t take it any longer, and I went and gathered him up and told him we could have ice cream but he wasn’t to tattle on me to Daddy.

That night, though, I didn’t tell Nathaniel what had happened in the sandbox. I felt ashamed, somehow, implicated in the baby’s sorrow. He had failed, and I had failed to help him. He had been rejected, and I was somehow responsible for that rejection, if only because I had seen it and been unable to repair it. The next day, when we were walking to the playground again, he pulled on my hand and asked if we had to go. I told him no, we didn’t, and instead we went to get another illicit ice cream. We never went back to that playground. But now I think we should have. I should have told him that those other children had been unkind, and that it had nothing to do with him, and that he would find other friends, people who really loved and appreciated him, and that anyone who didn’t wasn’t someone who deserved his attention anyway.

But I didn’t. Instead, we never spoke of it. And over the years, the baby has become more and more withdrawn. Not necessarily with Nathaniel, maybe, but—well, maybe even with him. I just don’t know if Nathaniel sees it. It’s not something I could even accurately describe. But I increasingly feel as if he’s not quite present, even when he is, as if he’s already detaching himself from us. He has a couple of friends here, quiet, earnest boys, but they rarely come over to our apartment, and he’s rarely invited to theirs. Nathaniel always says he’s mature for his age, which is one of those things worried parents say about their children when their children baffle them, but I think what he’s mature in is his loneliness. A child can be alone. But he shouldn’t be lonely. And our child is.

Eliza recommended handwritten letters of apology, a two-week suspension, weekly counseling, an organized sport or two—“to challenge him, let him burn off some resentment”—and “greater participation from both of his parents,” which was meant for me, because Nathaniel attends every school meeting, game, event, and play. “I know it’s hard for you, Dr. Griffith,” she said, and before I could protest or make some defensive remark, she continued, more gently, “I know it is. I don’t mean that sarcastically. We’re all proud of the work you’re doing, Charles.” Suddenly I could feel my eyes fill, stupidly, with tears, and mumbled, “I’ll bet you say that to all the virologists,” and left, grabbing the baby by his shoulder and steering him out.

The baby and I walked back to the apartment in silence, but once we were inside, I turned on him. “What the hell were you thinking, David?” I yelled. “You realize the school could’ve expelled you, could’ve had you arrested? We’re guests in this country—don’t you know you could’ve been taken from us, been sent to a state institution? You know kids have been sent away for less?” I was about to continue when I saw the baby was crying, and that made me stop, because the baby rarely cries. “I’m sorry,” he was saying, “I’m sorry.”

“David,” I groaned, and I sat down next to him and pulled him into my lap like I used to when he was in fact a baby, and rocked him, also as I had done when he was a baby. For a while we were silent.

“Nobody likes me,” he said, quietly, and I said the only thing I could, which was “Of course they do, David.” But really, what I should have said is “No one liked me when I was your age either, David. But then I grew up, and people did like me, and I found your daddy, and we had you, and now I’m the luckiest person I know.”

We sat there a while longer. It had been a long, long time—years—since I had held the baby like this. Finally, he spoke. “Don’t tell him,” he said.

“Daddy?” I asked. “I have to tell him, David, you know that.”

He seemed resigned to this, and stood up to leave. But one thing had been troubling me. “David,” I said, “where did you get the syringe?”

I thought I might get some evasive answer, like “some kids” or “I dunno” or “I found it.” But instead he said, “I ordered it.”

“Show me,” I said.

And so he walked me over to the study, where I watched him log on to my computer—bypassing the retinal scan by tapping in my password with a deftness that proved this wasn’t the first time he’d done so—and then onto a site so illegal that I would be forced to file a report explaining what had happened and requesting a new laptop. He stood back from my chair and dropped his hand by his side, and for a while we both stared at the screen, on which a graphic of an atom whirred. Every few revolutions, the atom would halt, and a new category of offerings would appear above it: “Viral Agents.” “Needles and Syringes.” “Antibodies.” “Toxins and Antitoxins.”

You can imagine how I felt. But my first questions were practical ones: How had he known about such a site? How had he breached the security walls in order to access it? How had he known what to order? Who had given him the idea?

Was this normal for a child his age?

Was there something wrong with him?

Who was my child?

I looked at him. “David,” I began, though I had no idea what I was going to say next.

He wouldn’t look up, not even when I repeated his name. “David,” I said, for a third time, “I’m not angry”—which wasn’t exactly true, but what I was, I couldn’t identify—“I just need you to look at me,” and when he finally did, I saw from his face that he was scared.

And then—I don’t know why, I don’t—I hit him: with the flat of my palm, across his face. He yelped and fell backward, and I jerked him upright and hit him again, this time on his left cheek, and he burst into tears. It relieved me, somehow, that he was still capable of being frightened, of being frightened by me; it reminded me that he was still a child after all, that there was hope for him, that he wasn’t wrong or bad or evil. But I would only be able to articulate this to myself later—in that moment, I was only scared: scared for him, and also scared of him. I was about to hit him again when, suddenly, there was Nathaniel, pulling me off of him and shouting. “What the fuck are you doing, Charles?” he yelled at me. “You fucking asshole, you psycho, what the fuck are you doing?” He pushed me, hard, and I fell and hit my face on the floor, and then he took the baby, now sobbing, into his arms, consoling him. “Shh,” he murmured. “It’s okay, David, it’s okay, sweetheart, I’m here, I’m here, I’m here.”

“He’s hurting people,” I said, quietly, but my nose was bleeding so badly that my speech was garbled. “He was trying to hurt people.”

But Nathaniel didn’t answer me. He took off his shirt and pressed it against the baby’s own bleeding nose, and then they stood and left, Nathaniel’s arm around our son’s shoulders. He never looked back at me.

All of this is a long way of saying: I’m in our new apartment. I’m writing you from the study, where I have been banished for the foreseeable future. Nathaniel still hasn’t said a word to me, and neither has the baby. Yesterday I delivered my laptop to the head of technological security and explained what had happened—he seemed less shocked than I had anticipated, which made me think that there was less of a reason to be worried than I had feared. But as he was issuing me a new computer, he asked, “How old is your son, again?”

“Almost ten,” I said.

He shook his head. “And you’re foreign nationals, am I correct?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Dr. Griffith, I know you know this, but—you have to be careful,” he said. “If your son had accessed that site and you hadn’t had the security clearances that you do—”

“I know,” I said.

“No,” he said, looking at me, “you don’t. Be careful, Dr. Griffith. There’s only so much the institute could do to protect your son if this happens again.”

Suddenly I wanted to be far away from him. And not just him but all of it: Rockefeller, my lab, New York, America, even Nathaniel and David. I wanted to be back home, on my grandparents’ farm, as miserable as I had been there, long before any of this—all of this—had ever happened. But I can never go home again. My grandparents and I don’t speak, the farm is flooded, and this is my life now. I have to make the best of it. And I will.

But sometimes, I worry that I won’t.

I love you—Charles