To Paradise

PART IX

Autumn 2094

Over the following weeks, David and I discussed our plan. Or, rather, it was his plan, and it was being shared with me.

On October 12, I would leave Zone Eight. He wouldn’t tell me how, exactly, until just before. Until then, I was to do nothing out of the ordinary. I was to maintain all my daily rhythms: I was to go to work, I was to go to the grocery, I was to take the occasional walk. We would continue to meet every Saturday at the storyteller’s, and if David needed to communicate with me between those meetings, he would find a way to send me word. But if I didn’t hear from him, I wasn’t to worry. I was to prepare nothing, and pack nothing beyond what I could carry in my tote bag. I would not need to bring clothes, or food, or even my papers: New ones would be issued to me once I was in New Britain.

“I have a lot of extra chits I’ve saved up over the years,” I told David. “I could exchange them for coupons for extra water or even sugar—I could bring those.”

“You won’t need those, Charlie,” David said. “Bring only things that mean something to you.”

At the end of our first meeting after our talk on the benches, when I had begun to believe him, I had asked David what would happen to my husband. “Of course your husband can come,” he said. “We’ve prepared for him as well. But, Charlie—he may not want to.”

“Why not?” I had asked, but David hadn’t answered. “He loves to read,” I said. On that walk on the track, I had asked David lots of questions about New Britain, but he had said that he would tell me more about it on our travels—that it was too dangerous to share too much now. But one thing he had said was that in New Britain you could read whatever you wanted, as much as you wanted. I thought of my husband, how he made himself read slowly, because you could only borrow one book every two weeks, and he had to make each one last. I thought of him sitting at our table, resting his right cheek in his right hand, completely still, a small smile on his face, even when the book was about the care and feeding of tropical water-grown edible plants.

“Yes,” David said, slowly, “but, Charlie—are you sure he’d want to leave?”

“Yes,” I said, although I wasn’t sure at all. “He could read any book he wanted, over there. Even the illegal ones.”

“That’s true,” said David. “But there might be other reasons he’d want to stay here, in the end.”

I considered this, but I couldn’t think of any. My husband had no family here except for me. There would be no other reason for him to stay. And yet, like David, I also somehow wasn’t confident that he would want to leave. “What do you mean?” I asked, but David didn’t answer.

At our next meeting, before the storyteller began, David asked me if I’d like his help in talking to my husband. “No,” I said. “I can do it myself.”

“Your husband knows how to be discreet,” David said, and I didn’t ask how he knew this. “So I know he’d be smart about this.” There seemed to be something else that he wanted to say, but he didn’t.

After the storyteller’s session, we walked. I had assumed our meetings would be complicated, full of information for me to memorize, but they were not. Mostly, they seemed to be opportunities for David to make sure I was remaining calm, that I was doing nothing, that I trusted him, although he never asked if I did.

“You know, Charlie,” he said, suddenly, “homosexuality is completely legal in New Britain.”

“Oh,” I said. I didn’t know what else I could say.

“Yes,” he said. Once again, he seemed to want to say something else, but once again, he didn’t.

That night, I thought about how much David already knew about me. In some ways, it was disturbing, even frightening. But it was also relaxing, even comforting. He knew me the way Grandfather knew me, and that knowledge had of course come from Grandfather himself. David had not met Grandfather, but his employer had, and so in a small way it felt as if Grandfather were actually alive and with me still.

Yet there were certain things I did not want David to know. I had come to realize that he understood that my husband did not love me, and would never love me, not the way a husband is supposed to love his wife, and not the way that I had hoped I would be loved. It made me ashamed, because while loving someone is not shameful, it is shameful not to be loved at all.

I knew I would need to ask my husband if he wanted to come with me. But the days passed and I did not. “Did you ask him?” David asked at our next meeting, and I shook my head. “Charlie,” he said, not meanly but not gently, either, “I need to know if he’s going to come. It affects things. Do you want me to help you?”

“No, thank you,” I said. My husband may not have loved me, but he was still my husband, and it was my responsibility to talk to him.

“Then do you promise you’ll ask him tonight? We only have four weeks left.”

“Yes,” I said. “I know.”

But I didn’t ask him. That night, as I lay in bed, I clenched Grandfather’s ring, which I kept under my pillow, where I knew it’d be safe. In the other bed, my husband slept. He had been tired again, tired and breathless, and on his way to the kitchen with our dishes, he had stumbled, although he caught himself on the table before he dropped anything. “It’s nothing,” he’d said to me. “Just a long day.” I had told him to go to bed, that I would do the dishes, and he had argued with me a little, but then had left.

All I had to do was say his name, and he would wake, and I would ask him. But what if I asked him, and his answer was no? What if he said he wanted to stay here instead? “He will always take care of you,” Grandfather had said. But if I left, it would be the end of always, and then I would be alone, all alone, with no one but David to protect me, and no one who remembered me, and who I was, and where I had once lived, and who I had been. It was safer not to ask at all—if I didn’t ask, I was both here, in Zone Eight, and also not, and as October 12 drew closer and closer, that seemed like the best place to be. It was like being a child, when all I had to do was follow directions, and I never had to think about what might happen next, because I knew that Grandfather had already thought of everything for me.

For many weeks, I had been keeping two things secret: The first was knowledge of the new illness. The second was knowledge of my departure. But while only one other person knew the second thing, many people—all of the people in my lab; many of the people at RU; various employees of the state; generals and colonels; unseen people in Beijing and Municipality One whose faces I couldn’t even imagine—knew the first.

And now more people were learning of it as well. There had been no official announcement in the various zones’ newsletters, no radio bulletin, yet everyone knew that something was happening. One day at the end of September, I walked outside to discover that the Square was completely empty. Gone were the vendors, their tents, even the fire that constantly burned. And it was not just empty but clean: There were no wood shavings on the ground, no bits of metal, no snippets of thread blowing through the air. It had all vanished, and yet I had heard nothing during the night, no sound of bulldozers, no industrial scrubbers or sweepers. The cooling stations were gone as well, and the gates to each of the four entrances, which had been removed long ago, had been replaced, and locked.

The mood on the shuttle that morning was very tense, less of a silence than a complete absence of sound. There was no recognizable protocol for disease preparedness, because the state had changed so much since ’70, but it was as if everyone already knew what was happening, and no one wanted to hear their suspicions confirmed.

At work, there was a note waiting for me beneath one of the mouse cages, the first since David and I had begun meeting at the storyteller’s. “Rooftop greenhouse, 13:00,” it said, and at 13:00, I went to the roof. There was no one there but a gardener in his green cotton suit, watering the specimens, and before I could wonder how I was going to search for David’s next note in the greenhouse if the gardener wouldn’t leave, he turned and I saw it was David.

He quickly raised his finger to his mouth, gesturing me to be silent, but I was already weeping. “Who are you?” I asked. “Who are you?”

“Charlie, quiet,” he said, and came over and sat down next to where I had fallen to the ground, and put his arm around my shoulder. “It’s all right, Charlie,” he said. “It’s all right.” He held me and rocked me, and eventually I was quiet. “I disabled the cameras and microphones, and we have until 13:30 before the Flies return,” he said. “You saw what happened today,” he continued, and I nodded. “The illness is all over Prefecture Four now, and it’ll be here soon as well. The worse it gets, the harder it’s going to be for us to leave,” he said. “So the date’s been moved up: October 2. The state will make an official announcement the next day; testing and evacuations to the relocation centers will begin that evening. They’ll instate a curfew the following day. It’s cutting it too close for my taste, but there was so much rearranging that this was the best I could do. Do you understand me, Charlie? You have to be ready to leave on October 2.”

“But that’s this Saturday!” I said.

“Yes, and I apologize,” he said. “I miscalculated—I was told the state wouldn’t announce until October 20 at the earliest. But I was wrong.” He took a breath. “Charlie,” he said, “have you talked to your husband?” And, when I didn’t say anything, he turned me by my shoulders to look at him. “Listen to me, Charlie,” he said, his voice stern. “You must tell him. Tonight. If you don’t, I’ll assume you’re going to leave without him.”

“I can’t leave without him,” I said, and I began crying again. “I won’t.”

“Then you must tell him,” said David. Then he looked at his watch. “We have to leave,” he said. “You go first.”

“What about you?” I asked.

“Don’t worry about me,” he said.

“How did you get in here?” I asked.

“Charlie,” he said, impatiently, “I’ll tell you later. Now go. And talk to your husband. Promise me.”

“I promise,” I said.

But I didn’t. The next day, there was another note waiting for me: Did you? But I crushed it into a ball and burned it in a Bunsen burner.

That was Tuesday. On Wednesday, the same thing happened. Then it was Thursday, three days before we were to leave, my husband’s free night.

And that night, my husband didn’t come home.

Now, if I was asked, I could not say why I decided to trust David. The truth was that I did not in fact trust him, or at least not completely. This David was different from the David I had known: He was more serious, less surprising, scarier. Yet the other David had been scary, too; he had been so reckless, so unusual. In some ways, this David was easier for me to accept, even as I felt that with each day I knew him less. Sometimes I would hold Grandfather’s ring and think of all David knew about me, and tell myself that David was someone I could believe in, that he was someone who would protect me, that he had been sent by someone Grandfather had trusted. Other times, I examined the ring, holding the flashlight beneath the covers as my husband slept, wondering if it was Grandfather’s after all. Hadn’t his been bigger? Had the gold been dented on the right side? Was it real, or a copy? And what if he hadn’t sent it to this friend after all? What if it had been stolen from him? Then I would think: It wasn’t worth his lying—I wasn’t worth kidnapping. No ransom would be paid for me; no one would miss me. There was no reason for David to want to take me.

And yet there was no reason for him to want to save me, either. If I was not worth taking, I was also not worth saving.

And so I cannot say why I decided to go, or even that I had really decided. It seemed too far off, so unlikely, like a make-believe story. All I knew was that I was going somewhere better, somewhere Grandfather wanted me to go. But I knew nothing about New Britain, other than it was a country, and it had once had a queen, and then a king, and that they spoke English there, too, and that the state had ceased relations with them back in the late ’70s. I suppose it seemed a bit like a game, like the kind I had played with Grandfather in which we pretended to have conversations—this was a pretend conversation, too, and my leaving would be pretend as well. At our last meeting, I had argued with David again about leaving the extra chits behind, for what if I needed them later, when I returned, when David interrupted me. “Charlie, you’re never coming back,” he said. “Once you leave this place, you will never return. Do you understand me?”

“What if I want to?” I said.

“I don’t think you will,” he said, slowly. “But at any rate, you can’t. You would be captured and killed in a Ceremony if you tried, Charlie.”

I said I understood, and I thought I did, but maybe I didn’t. One Saturday, I had asked David what would happen to the pinkies, and he had said I couldn’t think about the pinkies, and that they would be fine: Another tech would take care of them. And then I got upset, because although I knew I wasn’t the only one who could handle the pinkies, I sometimes liked to pretend I was. I liked to pretend that I was the best at preparing them, the most careful, the most thorough, that no one else could be as good as I was. “You’re right, Charlie, you’re right,” he’d said, and after a while, I calmed down.

That Thursday, as I waited for my husband, I thought about the pinkies. They were such an important part of my life here, and I decided that when I went in to work tomorrow, on what David had reminded me would be my last day at Rockefeller University, ever, I should steal a petri dish of them. Just one dish, with just a few pinkies in just a little saline. David had said I should bring only what was personally meaningful to me, and the pinkies were meaningful.

I had lots of room in my bag. The only things I had packed were half of the gold coins we kept under my bed, and four pairs of underwear, and Grandfather’s ring, as well as the three photographs of him. David had said not to bring clothes, or food, or even water—all those would be provided to me. As I was packing, I had suddenly thought I might pack the notes my husband had kept, but then I had changed my mind, just as I had changed my mind about taking all of the gold coins. I told myself that, when my husband decided to come with me, he would carry the other half. Once packed, the bag was still so small and light that I could roll it into a tube and stuff it into the pocket of my cooling suit, which was now hanging in the closet.

I knew that I would need to talk to my husband tonight, and so, rather than changing into my sleep clothes, I lay down on my bed fully dressed, thinking that if I was less comfortable I’d not fall asleep. But I fell asleep anyway, and when I woke, I could tell that it was very late, and when I checked the clock, it was 23:20.

Immediately, I was frightened. Where was he? He had never stayed out so late, not ever.

I didn’t know what to do. I paced the main room, clapping my hands together and asking myself aloud where he was again and again. Then I realized that I knew where he was: He was at the house on Bethune Street.

Before I could get scared again, I put my papers in my pocket, in case I was stopped. I got the flashlight from under my pillow. I put on my shoes. And then I left the apartment and walked downstairs.

Outside, everything was very quiet and, without the light from the fire in the Square, very dark. There was only the occasional spotlight, swooping in slow circles, illuminating the side of a building, a tree, a parked wagon, for a moment, before they were again left in darkness.

I had never been out so late before, and although it wasn’t illegal to be out at this hour, it also wasn’t typical. You just had to look like you knew where you were going, and I did know where I was going. I walked west, through Little Eight, looking up at the apartments and wondering which one was David’s, and then crossed Seventh Avenue, and then Hudson. As I was crossing Hudson, a troop of soldiers walked by, and turned to look at me, but when they saw who I was, just a short, plain, dark-skinned Asian woman, they continued on without even stopping me. On Greenwich Street, I turned right and began walking north, and soon I was turning left on Bethune and walking to number 27.

As I was about to climb the stairs, I stopped, overtaken by fear, and for a while I rocked myself, and I could hear myself whimpering. But then I walked up, stumbling on the missing stone in the second step, and knocked out the rhythm I had memorized from months ago: tap-ta-taptap-tap-tap-tap-ta-tap-taptap.

At first, there was silence. And then I heard someone coming down a flight of stairs, and the little window slid open, and a sliver of a man’s face, a reddish face with blue eyes, was looking out at me. He looked at me, and I at him. There was a brief silence. Then he said, “There was never any more inception than there is now; nor any more youth or age than there is now,” and, when I didn’t answer him, he repeated it.

“I don’t know what to say in response,” I said, and before he could slide the window shut, I added, “Wait—wait. My name is Charlie Griffith. My husband hasn’t come home, and I believe he’s in your house. His name’s Edward Bishop.”

At this, the man’s eyes widened. “You’re Edward’s wife?” he asked. “What did you say your name was, again?”

“Charlie,” I said. “Charlie Griffith.”

The little window slammed closed then, and the door opened, just a few inches, and the man on the other side, a tall, white, middle-aged man with thin, pale-blond hair, beckoned me inside and locked the door behind us. “Upstairs,” he said, and as I followed him, I looked to my left and saw a door that was ajar a few inches, through which I could see the glow of a lamp.

The staircase had been laid with a carpet in a dark red-and-blue pattern of swirling shapes and lines, and creaked as we moved up it. On the second landing, there was another door, and I realized that the house had been converted into a series of apartments, one per floor, and yet it was still being used as a single house, the way it had originally been built: The staircase wall had been painted with roses, and the painting extended past the second story, all the way up. Drying laundry—socks and shirts and men’s underwear—had been draped over the banister.

The man knocked on the door and turned its handle at the same time, and I followed him inside.

The first thing I thought was that I had somehow returned to Grandfather’s study, or at least the version of it I could remember from just before I got sick. Every wall was covered with bookcases, and in them were what looked like thousands of books. There was a rug on the floor, a bigger, more intricately patterned version of the one that covered the staircase, and there were soft chairs and an easel in one corner with a half-completed painting of a man’s face. The large windows were hidden with dark-gray curtains, and there was a low table on which were stacked more books, as well as a radio and a chessboard. And, in the far corner, opposite the easel, was a television, which I hadn’t seen since I was a child.

Just in front of me was a sofa, not the kind we had at home but something deep and comfortable-looking, and on that sofa was a man, and that man was my husband.

I ran over to him and knelt by his head. His eyes were shut, and he was sweating, and his mouth was partly open because he was gasping for breath. “Mongoose,” I whispered to him, and I took one of his hands, which were crossed over his chest, and which was sticky and cold. “It’s me,” I said. “Cobra.” He made a faint moaning noise, but nothing else.

Then I heard someone say my name, and I looked up. It was a man I’d not noticed before, with dark-blond hair and green eyes, about my age, who was also kneeling by my husband, and who I then saw was cupping my husband’s head in one hand and stroking his hair with the other. “Charlie,” the man repeated, and I was surprised to see that there were tears in his eyes. “Charlie, it’s good to finally meet you.”

“You have to get him out of here,” someone else said, and I turned and saw it was the man who had let me in.

“Jesus, Harry,” said another voice, and I looked up and saw that there were three other men in the room, all of whom were standing a few feet away from the sofa and looking at my husband. “Don’t be so heartless.”

“Don’t you lecture me,” said the man from the door. “This is my house. He’s putting us all at risk by being here. He has to get out.”

Another of the men started to protest, but the man who had been stroking my husband’s hair stopped them. “It’s okay,” he said. “Harry’s right; it’s too risky.”

“But where will you go?” asked one of the men, and the blond man looked back at me.

“Home,” he said. “Charlie, will you help me?” and I nodded that I would.

Harry left the room, and two of the other men helped the blond man stand my husband up, even though he groaned as he did. “It’s all right, Edward,” said the blond man, who had his arm around my husband’s waist. “It’s all right, sweetheart. It’s going to be okay.” Together, they began to move him slowly down the stairs, my husband groaning and panting with each step, the blond man soothing him and stroking his face. At the base of the staircase, the door to the ground-floor apartment was now fully ajar, and the blond man said he had to get his and my husband’s bags, and entered.

I followed him, though I wasn’t aware that I had until I found myself in the room, and all of the men within it staring at me. There were six, though I was unable to register any of their faces, only the room itself, which was decorated like the room upstairs but grander, the furnishings fancier, the fabrics richer. Then I noticed that everything was frayed: the edge of the carpet, the seams on the sofa, the spines of the books. Here, too, there was a television, though it was also silent, just a black screen. Here, too, the walls had been removed, transforming what could have been a one-bedroom apartment into a single large space.

Then the men were gathering near the doorway, and one of them was holding the blond man against him. “Fritz, I know someone who can help,” he was saying, “let me tell him,” but the blond man shook his head. “I can’t do that to you,” he said. “You’ll be hanged or stoned for sure, and so will your friend,” and the other man, as if admitting he was correct, nodded and stepped away from him.

I was looking at them when I felt someone watching me, and I turned to the left and saw one of the Ph.D.s, the one who always rolled his eyes at the interior minister’s deputy’s nephew.

He stepped closer to me. “Charlie, right?” he asked, quietly, and I nodded. He looked toward the foyer, where the two men were still holding my husband upright, surrounded by other men. “Edward’s your husband?” he asked.

I nodded. I could not speak, could barely even nod, could barely even breathe. “What’s wrong with him?” I asked.

He shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said, and he looked worried. “I don’t know. It seems like heart failure to me. But I know it’s not—it’s not the illness.”

“How do you know?” I asked.

“We’ve seen some of the affected,” he said. “And it’s not that—I know it. He’d be oozing blood from his nose and mouth if it were. But, Charlie: Don’t take him to the hospital, whatever you do.”

“Why not?” I asked.

“Because. They’ll assume it’s the illness—they don’t know as much as we do—and he’ll be sent straight to one of the containment centers.”

“There are no more containment centers,” I reminded him.

But he shook his head again. “There are,” he said. “They just don’t call them that anymore. But it’s where they’re taking early cases, to—to study them.” He looked back at my husband, and then at me once more. “Take him home,” he said. “Let him die at home.”

“Die?” I asked. “He’s going to die?”

But then the blond man was approaching me again, this time with both his and my husband’s bags slung over his shoulder. “Charlie, we have to go,” he said, and I followed him, again without my knowing it.

Some of the men kissed the blond man on the cheek; others kissed my husband. “Goodbye, Edward,” one said, and then they all said it: “Goodbye, Edward—goodbye.” “We love you, Edward.” “Goodbye, Edward.” And then the door opened, and the three of us stepped into the night.

We walked east. The blond man was on my husband’s right, I on his left. My husband’s arms were looped around our necks, and we each had an arm around his waist. He could barely walk, and his feet dragged behind him much of the time. He wasn’t heavy, but because the blond man and I were both shorter than he was, he was difficult to guide.

At Hudson Street, the blond man looked around us. “We’ll cut across Christopher, and then go past Little Eight and east on Ninth Street before turning south on Fifth,” he said. “If we’re stopped, we’ll say he’s your husband and I’m his friend and he—he got drunk, all right?” It was illegal to be publicly drunk, but I knew that, in this circumstance, it was better to say my husband was drunk than sick.

“All right,” I said.

We were silent as we walked east on Christopher Street. The streets were so empty and dark that I could barely see where we were going, but the blond man moved quickly and surely, and I tried to keep up. Eventually, we reached Waverly Place, which formed the westernmost border of Little Eight, which was well-lit with spotlights, and we flattened ourselves against a nearby building to avoid being seen.

The blond man looked at me. “Just a little longer,” he said to me, and then again, softly, to my husband, who coughed and groaned. “I know, Edward,” he said to my husband. “Almost there, I promise—we’re almost there.”

We moved as quickly as we could. To my left, I could see the towers of Little Eight, their windows now mostly black. I wondered what time it was. Ahead of us, I could see the large building that had been built several centuries ago as a prison. Then it became a library. Then it became a prison again. Now it was an apartment building. Behind it was a cement playground, but it was usually too hot for the children to use.

It was just as we were approaching this building that we were stopped. “Halt,” we heard, and we did, abruptly, almost dropping my husband. A guard, dressed all in black, which meant he was a municipal officer, not a soldier, had stepped in front of us, holding his weapon at our faces. “Where are you going at this time of night?”

“Officer, I have my papers,” the blond man began, reaching for his bag, and the guard snapped, “I didn’t ask for your papers. I asked where you were going.”

“Back to her apartment,” said the blond man. I could tell he was afraid but trying not to be. “Her husband—her husband had a little too much to drink, and—”

“Where?” asked the officer, and I thought he sounded eager. Officers got extra points for arresting people for quality-of-life crimes.

But before we could answer, we heard another voice, one saying, “There you are!” as if he were greeting someone, a friend who was late to meet him for a concert or a walk, and the blond man and the officer and I turned and saw David. He was approaching us from the west, not in his gray jumpsuit but in a blue cotton shirt and pants, similar to what the blond man was wearing, and although he was moving quickly, he also wasn’t hurrying, and he was smiling and shaking his head. In one hand he carried a thermos, in the other, a small leather case. “I told you to stay put—I’ve been looking all over the complex for you,” he said, still smiling, to the blond man, who had opened his mouth in surprise but now shut it and nodded.

“I’m sorry, officer,” David said to the man in black. “This is my foolish big brother, and his wife, and our friend”—he nodded at the blond man—“and I’m afraid my brother had a little too much fun tonight. I went to get him some water from our flat, and when I came back, these three”—he smiled at us, fondly—“decided to take off without me.” And here he smiled at the officer, and shook his head a little, and rolled his eyes upward. “Here, I have all three of our papers,” he said, and handed the case to the officer, who had still not lowered his weapon, and who had been looking at each of us in turn as David spoke, but who accepted the case and unzipped it. As the officer pulled out the cards, I saw a flash of silver.

The officer read the papers, and as he read the final one, he suddenly straightened, and saluted. “Apologies,” he said to David. “I didn’t know, sir.”

“No apologies necessary, officer,” David said. “You’re doing exactly what you’re supposed to.”

“Thank you, sir,” said the officer. “Do you need help getting him back home?”

“That’s very generous of you, officer, but no,” David said. “You’re doing a fine job here.”

The officer saluted again, and David saluted back. Then he took my place at my husband’s left side. “Oh, you silly man,” he said to my husband. “Let’s get you home.”

None of us spoke until we had crossed Sixth Avenue. “Who are—” the blond man began, and then, “Thank you,” and David, no longer smiling, shook his head. “If we pass another officer, let me handle it,” he said, quietly. “If we’re stopped, no one should look worried. You have to seem—exasperated, all right? But not scared. Charlie, do you understand?” I nodded. “I’m Charlie’s friend,” he said to the blond man. “David.”

The blond man nodded. “I’m Fritz,” he said. “I’m—” But he couldn’t continue.

“I know who you are,” David said.

The blond man looked at me. “Fritz,” he said, and I gave him a nod to show I understood.

We reached home without being stopped again, and once he had closed the front door behind us, David handed me the thermos and then picked my husband up in his arms and carried him up the flights of stairs. I didn’t understand how he did this, as they were about the same size, but he did.

Inside, he took my husband to our bedroom, and even through everything that was happening, I felt a burn of embarrassment, that both David and Fritz should be seeing how we slept, not touching, in separate beds. Then I remembered that they already knew, and felt even more embarrassed.

But neither of them seemed to notice. Fritz had sat next to my husband on his bed and was stroking his head again. David was holding my husband’s wrist and looking at his watch. After a few moments, he gently laid my husband’s arm down by his side, as if he was returning it to him. “Charlie, will you get me some water?” he asked, and I did.

When I returned, David was kneeling by the bed as well, and he took the water I gave him and held it to my husband’s lips. “Edward, can you swallow any? Good; good. A little more. Good.” He set the mug on the floor next to him.

“You know this is the end,” he said, though it was unclear to whom he was speaking: me or Fritz.

It was Fritz who answered. “I know,” he said, quietly. “He was diagnosed a year ago. I just thought he’d have a little more time.”

“With what?” I heard myself ask. “Diagnosed with what?”

They both looked at me. “Congestive heart failure,” Fritz said.

“But that’s treatable,” I said. “That can be fixed.”

But Fritz shook his head. “No,” he said. “Not for him. Not for relatives of state traitors,” and as he said this, he began to cry.

“He didn’t tell me,” I said, when I could speak again. “He didn’t tell me.” And I began to pace, to flap my hands, to repeat myself—“He didn’t tell me, he didn’t tell me”—until Fritz left my husband’s side, and grabbed my hands in his own.

“He was trying to find the right time to tell you, Charlie,” he said. “But he didn’t want to worry you. He didn’t want you to be upset.”

“But I am upset,” I said, and this time it was David who had to take me and sit with me on my bed, and rock me back and forth, just the way Grandfather used to.

“Charlie, Charlie, you’ve been so brave,” he said, while rocking me. “It’s almost over, Charlie, it’s almost over.” And I cried and cried, even though I was ashamed to be crying, and ashamed to be crying for myself as much as for my husband: I was crying because I knew so little, and because I understood so little, and because, although my husband had not loved me, I had loved him, and I think he had known that. I was crying because he did love someone, this someone who knew all about me and about whom I knew nothing, and I was crying because this someone was now losing him as well. I was crying because he had been sick and he hadn’t thought to tell me or been able to tell me—I didn’t know which, but it didn’t make a difference: I hadn’t known.

But I was also crying because I knew that my husband was the only reason I would have stayed in Zone Eight, and now my husband was dying, and I would not stay either. I was crying because we were both leaving, to different places, and we would be doing so separately, and neither of us would ever return, back to this apartment in this zone in this municipality in this prefecture, ever again.

We waited the rest of the night and all day Friday for my husband to die. In the early morning, David had left to register all three of our absences from work at the center. Fritz, who was unmarried, also lived in Building Six, just as David had said he himself did, and so we didn’t need to worry about his spouse missing him, as he had none.

When David returned, he gave my husband a little more of the liquid in his thermos, which made my husband’s face relax and made his breaths deeper and longer. “We can give him more if he really begins suffering,” he said, but neither Fritz nor I said anything in response.

At noon, I made some lunch, but no one ate it. At 19:00, David reheated the lunch in the oven, and this time, all three of us ate, sitting on the floor in my husband’s and my bedroom, watching him sleep.

None of us said anything, or not much. At one point, Fritz asked David, “Are you from the Interior?” and David smiled, a bit, and said, “Something like that,” which made Fritz stop asking questions.

“I’m in the Finance Ministry,” he said, and David nodded. “I guess you knew that already,” Fritz said, and David nodded again.

I suppose it would be natural to wonder if I asked Fritz about how and when he and my husband had met, and how long they had known each other, and if he was the person who had sent my husband those notes. But I did not. I thought about it, of course, over many hours, but in the end, I didn’t. I didn’t need to know.

I slept in my bed that night. David slept on the sofa in the main room. Fritz slept next to my husband in his bed, holding him even though my husband couldn’t hold him back. When I heard someone saying my name, I opened my eyes to see David standing over me. “It’s time, Charlie,” he said.

I looked over to where my husband was lying, very still. He was breathing, but barely. I went and sat on the floor next to his head. His lips were a faint purplish blue, a strange color I had never seen on a human. I held his hand, which was still warm, but then I realized that it was warm only because Fritz had been holding it.

We sat there for a very long time. As the sun began to rise, my husband’s breathing became harsh, and Fritz looked over at David, who was sitting on my bed and said, “Now, please, David,” and then looked over at me, because I was his wife, and I nodded, too.

David opened my husband’s mouth. Then he took a piece of cloth from his pocket and dipped it into the thermos, and then wrung the cloth into my husband’s mouth before wiping it around his gums, the inside of his cheeks, and his tongue. And then we all listened as my husband’s breathing became slower, and deeper, and less frequent, and then finally stopped altogether.

Fritz was the first to speak, but it was not to us, but to my husband. “I love you,” he said. “My Edward.” I realized then that he had been the last person to speak to my husband, because when I had finally seen him, on Thursday night, he was no longer responsive. He bent to kiss my husband on his lips, and although David looked away, I did not: I had never seen someone kiss my husband, and I never would again.

Then he stood. “What do we do?” he asked David, and David said, “I’ll take care of him.” Fritz nodded. “Thank you,” he said, “thank you so much, David. Thank you,” and I thought he was going to cry again, but he didn’t. “Well,” he said. He looked at me, next. “Goodbye, Charlie,” he said. “Thank you for—for being so kind to me. And to him.”

“I didn’t do anything,” I said, but he shook his head.

“Yes, you did,” he said. “He cared about you.” He sighed, a long, shaky sigh, and picked up his bag. “I wish I had something of his,” he said, “something to remember him by.”

“You can have his bag,” I said. Earlier, we’d looked through his bag, as if it might contain a cure, or another heart, but there had only been his work uniform, and his papers, and a small twist of paper holding a few cashews, and his watch.

“Are you sure?” Fritz asked, and I said I was. “Thank you,” he said, and carefully placed my husband’s bag in his own.

David and I walked Fritz to the door. “Well,” he said again, and then he did begin to cry. He bowed to David, and then to me, and we bowed back to him. “I’m sorry,” he said, because he was crying. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I loved him so much.”

“We understand,” David said. “You don’t need to apologize.”

And then I remembered the notes. “Wait,” I told Fritz, and I went to the closet and took out the box and opened the envelope, and removed the notes. “These are yours,” I said, as I gave them to Fritz, and he looked at them and began crying again.

“Thank you,” he told me, “thank you.” For a moment, I thought he would touch me, but he didn’t, because it wasn’t done.

And then he opened the door and slipped out. We listened to him walk down the stairs, and down the hallway, and then there was the sound of him opening the front door, and letting it fall shut behind him, and then he was gone, and everything was silent once more.

Then the only thing to do was wait. At 23:00 precisely, I was to be waiting at the banks of Charles and Hudson Streets, where a boat would meet me. This boat would take me to another boat, a much bigger boat, and that boat would take me to a country I’d never heard of, called Iceland. In Iceland, I would be placed in isolation for three weeks, to make certain I wasn’t carrying the new illness, and then I would board a third boat, and that boat would take me to New Britain.

But David would not be meeting me at the shore. I would have to do it myself. He had some things to finish here, and so I wouldn’t see him again until I landed in Iceland. Hearing this, I began to cry once more. “You can do it, Charlie,” he said. “I know you can. You’ve been so brave. You are brave.” And finally, I wiped my eyes and nodded.

In the meantime, David said, I should stay inside and try to sleep, though I must be careful to leave with enough time. He would make sure my husband’s body was picked up and cremated, although not until after I had left. We were lucky the weather was cooperating, he said, but he still fit my husband into his cooling suit and turned it on, though he left his helmet off.

“It’s time for me to go,” he said. We stood at the door. “Do you remember the plan?” he asked. I nodded. “Do you have any questions?” he asked. I shook my head. Then he put his hands on my shoulders, and I flinched, but he held on. “Your grandfather would be proud of you, Charlie,” he said. “I am, too.” He released me. “I’ll see you in Iceland,” he said. “You’ll be a free woman.”

I didn’t know what that meant, but “I’ll see you,” I said in return, and he saluted me, as he had saluted the officer on Thursday night, and then he left.

I went back to my husband’s and my room, which was now my room, and which tomorrow would be somebody else’s room. I took three of the remaining coins from the drawer beneath my bed. I remember Grandfather telling me that certain cultures put gold coins over the eyes of their deceased, and some put coins under the dead person’s tongue. I can’t remember why they did this. But I did the same: One coin over each eye, one beneath his tongue. The rest of the coins I put in my bag. I wished I had remembered to give the extra chits we had to Fritz, but I had forgotten.

And then I lay down next to my husband. I put my arms around him. It was a little difficult because of the cooling suit, but I was still able to do it. It was the first time I had been so close to him, the first time I had touched him. I kissed his cheek, which was cold and smooth, like stone. I kissed his lips. I kissed his forehead. I touched his hair, his eyelids, his eyebrows, his nose. I kissed and touched him for a long time. I talked to him. I told him I was sorry. I told him I was going to New Britain. I told him that I would miss him, that I would never forget him. I told him I loved him. I thought of Fritz saying that my husband had cared about me. I had never imagined that I would actually meet the person who had written my husband those notes, but now I had.

When I woke, it was dark, and I was anxious because I had forgotten to set my alarm. But it was only just after 21:00. I took a shower, even though it was not a water day. I brushed my teeth, and put my toothbrush in my bag. I was afraid if I lay back down I would fall asleep again, so I instead sat on my own bed and stared at my husband. After a few minutes, I put his cooling helmet on, so his face and head wouldn’t begin to rot before he could be cremated. I knew it didn’t make a difference to him, or to anyone, really, but I didn’t want to think of his face turning black and soft. I had never spent so much time around a dead person, not even Grandfather—it was my husband who had overseen his cremation, not me, because I had been too upset.

At 22:20 I stood. I was wearing a plain black shirt and pants, as David had instructed. I put my bag over my shoulder. At the last minute, I added my papers, which David had said I wouldn’t need, but which I thought I might if I were stopped on the way over to the western banks. Then I took them out again, and put them under my pillow. I thought of the petri dish of pinkies I would now never be able to retrieve. “Goodbye, pinkies,” I said aloud. “Goodbye.” My heart was beating so fast that I was having trouble breathing.

I locked my apartment for the final time. I slid the keys beneath the door.

And then I was outside and I was walking west, almost like the walk I had taken just two nights ago. Above me, the moon was so bright that, even when the spotlights had arced away, I could still see where I was going. David had told me that after 21:00 the majority of the Flies would be diverted in order to form clusters around the hospitals and monitor high-density zones, in anticipation of tomorrow’s announcement, and, indeed, I saw only one or two, and instead of their normal drone, there was only silence.

I reached the banks by 22:45. I sat on a dry patch of land to keep myself from pacing. Here there was absolutely no light. Even the factories across the river were dark. The only sound was of the water slapping against the cement barriers.

Then, very faintly, I heard something. It sounded like a whisper, or like wind. And then I saw something: a faint blob of yellowish light that seemed to float over the river like a bird. Soon it grew bigger, and more distinct, and I saw that it was a small wooden boat, the kind I knew from pictures that people used to row across the Pond back when it had been an actual pond.

I stood, and the boat drew to the shore. There were two people inside it, both dressed completely in black, one of them holding a lantern, which he lowered as they approached land. Even their eyes were covered in thin pieces of black gauze, and I struggled to see them in the poor light.

“Cobra?” one of them asked.

“Mongoose,” I replied, and the man who had spoken reached out his hand and helped me into the boat, which rocked beneath me, and I thought I might fall over.

“You’ll stay down here,” he said, and helped me crouch into the space between him and the other oarsman, and once I had made myself as small as possible, they covered me with a tarp. “Don’t make a sound,” he said, and I nodded, even though he wouldn’t have been able to see me do so. And then the boat began to move, and the only noise was the sound of the oars slicing through the water, and the men’s breathing, in and out.

After David had told me he wouldn’t be meeting me at the banks, I had asked him how I would know that the people coming to get me were the right people. “You’ll know,” he’d said. “There’s no one else at the banks at that time. Or ever, really.” But I had said I needed to know for certain.

Two weeks after my husband and I were married, there had been a raid in our building. It was the first raid I had experienced without Grandfather, and I was so terrified that I hadn’t been able to stop moaning, moaning and batting at the air and rocking. My husband hadn’t known what to do, and when he tried to reach for my hands, I slapped him away.

That night, I had a dream that I was at home after work, making dinner, and heard the sound of keys turning in the lock. But when the door opened, it was not my husband but a group of policemen, shouting and ordering me to get on the floor, their dogs lunging at me and barking. I woke up, calling for Grandfather, and my husband had gotten me a glass of water and then had sat next to me until I had fallen asleep again.

The next evening, I was making dinner when I heard the noise of keys in the locks, and although of course it was only my husband, in the moment I was so frightened that I dropped the entire pan of potatoes on the floor. After he had helped me clean them up, and as we were eating dinner, my husband said, “I have an idea. Why don’t we have a pair of code words, something we can say when we’re entering the apartment, so we’ll each know it’s the other? I’ll say my word, and you’ll say yours, and then we’ll both know that we are who we say we are?”

I thought about it. “What words will we use?” I asked.

“Well,” my husband said, after thinking. “Why don’t you be—let’s see—a cobra?” I must have looked surprised, or offended, because he smiled at me. “Cobras are very fierce,” he said. “Small, but quick, and deadly if they catch you.”

“And what will you be?” I asked.

“Let’s see,” he said, and I watched him think. My husband liked zoology, he liked animals. The day we met, there had been a report on the radio that Magellanic penguins had been declared officially extinct, and my husband had expressed sorrow over that, had said that they were resilient animals, more resilient than people thought, and more human than people knew as well. When they were sick, he said, they toddled away from their flock so they could die alone, with none of their kin to watch them.

“I’ll be a mongoose,” he said at last. “A mongoose can actually kill a cobra, if it wants to—but they very rarely do.” He smiled again. “It’s too much work. So they just respect each other. But we’ll be a cobra and a mongoose that do more than just respect each other: We’ll be a cobra and a mongoose that unite to keep each other safe from all the other animals in the jungle.”

“Cobra and Mongoose,” I repeated, after a pause, and he nodded.

“A little more dangerous than Charlie and Edward,” he said, and smiled again, and I saw that he was teasing, but teasing in a nice way.

“Yes,” I said.

I had told David that story on one of our earliest walks, back when he was still a tech at the Farm, and my husband was still alive. And so, as we stood at my door before he left, he said, “What about using code words—like Cobra and Mongoose? That’s how you’ll know the people coming to meet you are who they should be.”

“Yes,” I agreed. It was a good idea.

Now I stayed crouched in position beneath the middle plank seat. The boat bobbed and rocked, and yet it kept moving, the sounds of the oars stroking through the water steady and swift. Then, rumbling through the bottom of the boat, I heard the sound of a motor, and as I listened, it grew louder and louder.

“Oh shit,” I heard one of the men curse.

“Is that one of ours?” the other asked.

“Too far to tell,” said the first, and swore again.

“What the fuck is that craft doing out here?”

“Fuck if I know,” said the first man. He swore once more. “Well, there’s no way out. We just have to take our chances, and hope it’s one of ours.” He nudged me with his foot, not hard. “Miss: Be very quiet and keep very still. If it’s not one of our people—”

But then I could no longer hear him, because the sound of the motor was now too loud. I realized that I had never asked David what I should do if I was caught, and that he had never told me. Was he so certain everything would unfold as he had described? Or was this in fact the plan, and was I being delivered to people who would hurt me, who would take me somewhere and do things to me? Surely David, who knew so much and had foreseen so much, would have told me what I was to do if something went wrong? Surely I wasn’t so helpless that I wouldn’t have thought to ask him? I began to cry, quietly, folding a piece of the tarp into my mouth. Had I been wrong to trust David? Or had I been right, and had something happened to him? Had he been arrested, or shot, or disappeared? What would I do if I was caught? Officially, I was nobody: I didn’t even have my papers with me. Of course, they could do whatever they wanted to me even if I had my papers, but without them, it would be that much easier. I wished I had Grandfather’s ring in my hand, so I could squeeze it and pretend I was safe. I wished I was at home, and my husband was alive, and I hadn’t seen or experienced any of the things I had in the past three days. I wished I had never met David; I wished he were with me now.

But then I realized: No matter what happened, this was the end of my life. Perhaps it was the actual end. Perhaps it was just the end of the one I had known. But either way, my life mattered less to me, because the person to whom it had mattered most was gone.

“You,” I heard someone say, but over the motor, I couldn’t tell if it was one of the people in the boat with me, or in the other boat, which I could feel was pulling alongside us, or to whom they were speaking. And then the tarp was being pulled away from me, and I could feel the breeze on my face, and I lifted my head so I could see who was speaking to me, and where I was going next.