To Paradise

PART I

Autumn 2093

Normally, I catch the 18:00 shuttle home, which drops me off at Eighth Street and Fifth Avenue somewhere between 18:30 and 18:40, depending on disruptions, but today I knew there was going to be a Ceremony, so I asked Dr. Morgan if I could leave early. I was worried the shuttle would get stalled near Forty-second Street, and then who knew how long I would be delayed, and then I might be too late to buy dinner for my husband. I was explaining all this to Dr. Morgan when he interrupted me. “I don’t need to hear all the details,” he said. “Of course you have permission. Take the 17:00 shuttle.” So I thanked him and did.

The passengers on the 17:00 shuttle were different from the passengers on the 18:00 shuttle. The 18:00 passengers were other lab techs and scientists, even some of the principal investigators, but the only person I recognized on the 17:00 was one of the janitors. I even remembered to wave at her, just a second after she passed me, turning in my seat to do so, but I don’t think she saw me, because she didn’t wave back.

As I had predicted, the shuttle slowed and then stopped just south of Forty-second Street. The windows on the shuttle are covered with bars, but you can still see everything outside pretty well. I had chosen a seat on the right so I could see the Old Library, and sure enough, there were the chairs, six of them, arranged in a row facing the avenue, although no one was sitting in them and the ropes hadn’t yet been uncoiled. The Ceremony wouldn’t begin for another two hours, but there were already radio technicians strolling about in their long black coats, and two men were filling the wire trash cans with rocks from the back of a big truck. It was the truck that had stopped the flow of traffic, but there was nothing we could do except wait until the men had filled all the trash cans and then had climbed back into the truck and moved out of the way, and from there, the rest of the trip was very fast, even with the checkpoints.

By the time we reached my stop, it was 17:50, and while the drive itself had taken longer than normal, I was still home much earlier than usual. But I did what I always do after work, which was to go straight to the grocery store. Today was a meat day, and because it was the third Thursday, I was also entitled to our monthly ration of soap and toilet paper. I had saved one of my vegetable coupons from the previous week, so, along with the potatoes and carrots, I was also able to get a can of peas. That day, along with the usual assortment of flavored protein bricks and soy patties and artificial meats, there was also real horse meat, dog meat, deer meat, and nutria meat. The nutria meat was the cheapest, but my husband says it’s too greasy, so I bought a half kilo of horse meat, and some cornmeal because we were almost out. We needed milk, but if I saved up another week of rations, I’d be able to buy a pint of pudding, so I instead bought the powdered version, which my husband and I both dislike but would have to do.

Then I walked the four blocks home to our building, and it was only when I was safe inside our apartment, browning the horse meat in vegetable oil, that I remembered that it was my husband’s free night, and that he wouldn’t be home for dinner. But by that time, it was too late to stop cooking, so I finished frying the meat and then ate it with some of the peas. Above me, I could hear the echoey sound of screams, and knew that the neighbors were listening to the Ceremony on their radios, but I didn’t want to listen myself, and after cleaning the dishes, I sat on the couch and waited for my husband for a while, even though I knew he wouldn’t be home anytime soon, before finally going to bed.

The next day, everything was as usual, and I caught the 18:00 shuttle home. As we passed the Old Library, I looked for remaining signs of the Ceremony, but there weren’t any: The rocks were gone and the chairs were gone and the banners were gone and the steps were clean and gray and empty, just like normal.

At home, I was warming a little oil to fry some more of the meat when I heard my husband’s knock on the door—tap-tap-thunk-thunk-thunk—and then his call—“Cobra”—to which I called back “Mongoose,” and then the clunk of the bolts unlocking: one, two, three, four. And then the door opened and there he was, my husband, my Mongoose.

“Dinner’s almost done,” I said.

“I’ll be right out,” he said, and went back to our room to change.

I put a piece of meat on his plate and a piece on mine, as well as peas and half of a potato for each of us, which I’d baked that morning, after my husband left for work, and had reheated. And then I sat and waited for him to come sit down at the table across from me.

For a while, we ate in silence. “Horse?” my husband asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“Hmm,” my husband said.

Even though I’ve been married to my husband for more than five years, I still find it difficult to know what to say to him. It was like this when we first met, too, and as we left the marriage broker’s office, Grandfather had put his arm around me and brought me close to his body, but he didn’t speak until we were back home. “What did you think?” he had asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. I wasn’t supposed to say I don’t know—I had been told I said it too much—but in this case, I really didn’t know. “I didn’t know what to say to him when I wasn’t answering his questions,” I said.

“That’s normal,” said Grandfather. “But it’ll get easier, over time.” He was quiet. “You just have to remember the lessons we’ve had,” he said, “the things we discussed. Do you remember?”

“Yes, of course,” I said. “ ‘How was your day?’ ‘Did you hear the story on the radio?’ ‘Did anything interesting happen today?’ ” We had made a list together, Grandfather and I, of all the questions one person might ask another. Sometimes, even now, I reviewed that list before I went to bed, thinking that the next day I might ask one of them to my husband, or to one of my colleagues. The problem was that some of the questions—What do you want to eat tonight? What books are you reading? Where are you taking your next vacation? The weather’s been great/terrible, hasn’t it? How are you feeling?—had become either irrelevant or unsafe to ask. When I looked at the list, I remembered having those practice conversations with Grandfather, but I was unable to remember his replies.

Now I said to my husband, “How is the meat?”

“Fine.”

“Not too tough?”

“No, no, it’s fine.” He took another bite. “It’s good.”

This made me feel better, more relaxed. Grandfather had told me that when I was anxious I could help calm myself by adding numbers in my head, and that’s what I had been doing until my husband reassured me. After that, I felt relaxed enough to say something else to him. “How was your free night?” I asked him.

He didn’t look up. “Fine,” he said. “Nice.”

I didn’t know what else to say. Then I remembered: “There was a Ceremony last night. I passed it on the ride home.”

Now he did look at me. “Did you listen to it?”

“No,” I said. “Did you?”

“No,” he said.

“Do you know who they were?” I asked, even though we all knew not to ask that question.

I had asked just to make conversation with my husband, but to my surprise, he looked again at me, directly at me, and for a few seconds he said nothing, and I said nothing, too. Then “No,” he said. It seemed to me like he wanted to say something else, but he didn’t, and we finished eating in silence.

Two nights later, we woke to a pounding, and the sound of men’s voices. My husband sprung out of his bed, cursing, and I leaned over and switched on the lamp. “Stay here,” he told me, but I was already following him to the front door.

“Who’s there?” he demanded of the closed door, and I was impressed, as I always was in these instances, by my husband’s bravery, by how unafraid he seemed.

“Municipality Three Investigative Unit 546, Officers 5528, 7879, and 4578,” replied a voice on the other side of the door. I could hear a dog barking. “Pursuing suspect accused of violating Codes 122, 135, 229, 247, and 333.” Codes beginning with a one were crimes against the state. Codes beginning with a two were trafficking crimes. Codes beginning with three were crimes of information, which usually meant the accused had somehow accessed the internet or was in possession of an illegal book. “Permission to search the unit.”

They weren’t asking for permission, but you had to give it anyway. “Permission granted,” my husband said, and unlocked the locks, and three men and a tall, lean, wedge-faced dog entered our unit. The biggest of the men remained in the doorway, pointing his gun at us, and we stood against the far wall facing him, our hands raised and elbows bent at right angles, while the other two men opened our closets and searched our bathroom and bedroom. These events were meant to be quiet, but I could hear the men in the bedroom lifting first one mattress and then the next, and the mattresses falling back onto the bed frames with a thud, and although the man in the doorway was large, I could still see other police units behind him, one entering the apartment to the left and the other running up the stairs.

Then they were done, and the two men and the dog came out of the bedroom and one of the men said “Clear” to the man in the door and “Signature” to us and we both applied our right thumbprints to the screen he held out and spoke our names and identity numbers into the scanner’s microphone and then they left and we locked the door behind them.

Searches always made a mess, and all of our clothes and shoes had been yanked out of the closet, and the mattresses were askew in their frames, and the window had been opened when the officers had checked to see if there was anyone dangling from the windowsill or hiding in the trees, as had apparently happened a year ago. My husband made sure the folding iron gate outside the window was secure and locked, and then he closed the window and drew the black curtain across it and helped me straighten first my mattress and then his. I was going to start organizing at least a little of the closet, but he stopped me. “Leave it,” he said. “It’ll still be there tomorrow.” And then he got into his bed and I got into mine, and he turned off the lamp and it was dark again.

Then it was quiet and yet not quite quiet. We could hear the officers moving around in the apartment above us—something heavy fell, and we could hear the light fixture in our ceiling rattle. There were muffled shouts, and the sound of a dog barking. And then we heard the units’ footsteps descending again, and then the all-clear, announced over the speakers mounted atop one of the police vans: “Zone Eight; Thirteen Washington Square North; eight units plus basement; all units checked.” After that, we heard the whup-whup-whup of the police helicopter’s blades, and then it really was quiet again, so quiet we could hear the sound of someone crying, a woman, from either above or next to us. But then that too stopped, and there was a period of real silence, and I lay and watched my husband’s back as the strobe light moved across it and up the wall and disappeared again out the window. The curtains were supposed to block the strobe, but they didn’t entirely, though after a while you forgot it was happening.

Suddenly I was scared, and I scooted down the bed until my head was below the pillows and pulled the blanket over myself, the way I had as a child. I had still been living with Grandfather when I experienced my first search, and that night I had been so frightened afterward that I had started moaning, moaning and rocking, and Grandfather had had to hold me so I didn’t hurt myself. “It’ll be fine, it’ll be fine,” he repeated, again and again, and the next morning, when I woke, I was still scared, but less so, and he had told me that it was normal to be scared, and that I would get used to the searches with time, and that I was a good person and a brave person and that I shouldn’t forget that.

But—like talking to my husband—it hadn’t ever gotten easier, though in the years since the first search, I had learned how to make myself feel better afterward, had learned how, if I covered myself so that the air I breathed in was the same air I breathed out, so that, soon, the entire space I made for myself was filled with my hot, familiar breath, I would eventually be able to convince myself that I was someplace else, in a plastic pod tumbling through space.

That night, though, I couldn’t make the plastic pod feel real. I realized then I wanted something to hold, something warm and dense and full of its own breath, but I couldn’t think of what that might be. I tried to think of what Grandfather might say if he were here, but I couldn’t imagine what that might be, either. So instead I did my math sums in my head, whispering into the sheets, and eventually I was able to calm myself and fall asleep.

The morning after the search, I woke later than usual, but I still wasn’t going to be late: I typically get up in time to see my husband off to work, but today I missed him.

My husband’s shuttle leaves earlier than mine, because he works in a higher-security location than I do, and every employee has to be scanned and examined before entering the site. Every day before he goes, he makes us both breakfast, and today, he had left mine in the oven: a stone bowl of oatmeal, with what I knew were the last of the almonds, toasted in a pan and crushed on top. As I ate my breakfast, I looked out the window in our main room through the metal grate. To the right you could see the remains of what had been a wooden deck attached to a unit in the building next to ours. I had liked looking at that deck, watching its pots of herbs and tomatoes grow taller and thicker and greener, and after it became illegal to grow food privately, the people in the unit had decorated the patio with fake plants made of plastic and paper they’d somehow painted green, and it had reminded me of Grandfather, how, even after things got bad, he had found paper to cut into shapes for us—flowers, snowflakes, animals he had seen when he was a child—and had stuck them to our window with a blob of porridge. The people in the building next door had eventually covered their plants with a piece of blue tarp they’d gotten somewhere, and as I ate breakfast, I would stand at the window and look at the tarp and imagine the fake plants and feel calm.

But then there had been a raid, and the people next door were found guilty of harboring an enemy, and the deck had been destroyed the same night they had been taken away. That had been the last search, five months ago. I never did know who they were.

My husband had begun putting things back in the closet before he left, but I was only able to do a little more cleaning before it was time for me to catch the 08:30 shuttle for work. Our shuttle stop was on Sixth Avenue and Ninth Street, just three blocks away. There were eight shuttles leaving every morning from Zone Eight, one every half hour from 06:00. The shuttles made four stops in Zone Eight and three in Zone Nine before stopping in Zone Ten, where my husband works, Zone Fifteen, where I work, and Zone Sixteen. Then, every evening beginning at 16:00 and until 20:00, it went in reverse, from Zone Sixteen to Zone Fifteen to Zone Ten, and then back to Zones Nine and Eight before cutting east to Zone Seventeen.

When I began taking the shuttle, I had liked to look at the other passengers and guess what they did and where they would disembark: The tall man, thin and long-legged like my husband, I imagined was an ichthyologist and worked in the Pond in Zone Ten; the mean-looking woman with small, dark, seedlike eyes was an epidemiologist who worked in Zone Fifteen. I knew they were all scientists or techs, but beyond that, I would never know anything more.

There was never anything new to see on the ride to work, but I always took a window seat anyway, because I liked to look outside. When I was young, we had had a cat, and the cat had liked car rides—he would stand between my legs and put his front paws on the bottom of the window and look outside, and I would look outside with him, and Grandfather, who sometimes sat in the front seat with the driver when I wanted extra room, would look back at us and laugh. “My two little cats,” he would say, “watching the world go by. What do you see, little cats?” And I would tell him—a car, a person, a tree—and Grandfather would ask me, “Where do you think the car is going? What do you think that person had for breakfast this morning? What do you think those flowers on the tree would taste like, if you could eat them?,” because he was always helping me make up stories, which I knew from my teachers was something I didn’t do very well. Sometimes, on my ride to work, I would tell Grandfather in my head the things I saw: a brown brick building with a fourth-floor window over which two strips of black tape had been stuck in an X, and in the cleft of which a small boy’s small face had briefly appeared, like a wink; a black police wagon, one of its back doors partially opened, from which I could see a long white foot emerge; a group of twenty children in their dark-blue uniforms, each holding on to a knot tied into a long piece of gray rope, queuing at the checkpoint at Twenty-third Street so they could cross into Zone Nine, where the elite schools were. And then I would think of Grandfather, and I would wish I had more to tell him, but the truth was that very little changed in Zone Eight, which was one of the reasons we were so lucky to live there. In other zones there was more to see, but we never saw those things in Zone Eight, which was another reason why we were lucky.

One day about a year ago, I was riding the shuttle to work when I did see something I had never seen before in Zone Eight. We were moving up Sixth Avenue, as usual, and crossing Fourteenth Street, when a man suddenly ran into the intersection. I had been sitting in the middle of the shuttle, on the left, and so I hadn’t seen where the man had come from, but I could see that he didn’t have a shirt on, and that he was wearing the gauzy white pants that people in the containment centers wore before they were sent to the relocation centers. The man was clearly saying something, but the windows on the shuttle, along with being bulletproof, were also soundproof, so I couldn’t hear him, but I could still see he was shouting: His arms were stretched out in front of him, and I could see the muscles in his neck, so stiff and hard that for a minute he looked like he was carved out of stone. On his chest were about a dozen places where he had tried to hide signs of the illness, which people often did, burning the lesions with a match and leaving behind dull black scars that resembled leeches. I never understood why they did this, because even though everyone knew what the lesions meant, everyone knew what the scars meant as well, so it was really just exchanging one mark for another. This man was young, in his twenties probably, and white, and even though he was gaunt and his hair had almost disappeared, as happened in the second stage of the disease, I could tell he had once been nice-looking, and now he was standing in the street in his bare feet and yelling and yelling. And then two attendants came running toward him in their silver biohazard suits with the reflective screens over their faces, so that, when you looked into one, all you could see was your own face staring back at you, and one of them leapt at the man to try to tackle him to the ground.

But the man was surprisingly quick, and he darted out of the attendant’s way and ran instead toward our shuttle, and everyone on board, who had been silent and watching, gasped, as a single great intake of breath, and the driver, who had had to stop the shuttle so he didn’t hit the attendants, honked his horn, as if that might scare the man away. And then the man jumped up toward my window, and for just a moment, I saw his eye, the iris so large and glittering blue that I was very frightened, and I could finally hear what he was yelling, even through the window: Help me. And then there was a bang, and the man’s head kicked backward, and he fell out of my sight, and I could see the attendants running toward him; one of them had his weapon still held aloft.

After that, the shuttle started moving again, quite fast, as if driving faster could erase what had happened, and everyone became silent again, and I felt as if everyone were looking at me, as if they thought it was my fault, as if I had asked the man to try to communicate with me. People rarely spoke on the shuttle, but I heard a man announce, in a low voice, “He shouldn’t still have been on the island,” and although no one responded, you could feel that people agreed with him, and even I could sense that they were frightened, and that they were frightened because they were confused. But although people were often frightened about things they couldn’t understand, this time I agreed with them—someone that sick should have been sent away by now.

That day at work had been slow, which was unfortunate, because my mind kept returning to what had happened. But what I thought about most was not the man himself, or his bright eye, but about how, when he fell, he had made almost no noise at all, he was so light and soft. A few months after that, it was announced that the containment centers in Zones Eight and Nine were being relocated, and although there were stories about what that meant, we of course never knew for sure.

Since that day, there had been no further strange incidents in Zone Eight, and on this morning, I looked out the window and everything was the same, so predictable that it felt, as it sometimes did, less as if we were moving through it and more as if the city were a series of sets and performers moving past us on a track. Here came the buildings where people lived, and then the chain of children holding one another’s hands, and then Zone Nine, the two large hospitals now empty, and here the clinic, and here, just before the Farm, the row of ministries.

This was the sign that you were crossing into Zone Ten, the most important zone. No one lived in Zone Ten. Aside from some of the ministries, the district was dominated by the Farm, which had once been an enormous park that had bisected the island. It had been so big, this park, that it had accounted for a significant percent of the island’s acreage. I didn’t remember it as a park, but Grandfather had, and he used to tell me stories of how it had been crisscrossed with paths, both cement and dirt, and how people would run through it, and bicycle and walk, and have picnics there. There had been a zoo, where people would pay just to go look at strange, useless animals, who were expected to do nothing but sit and eat the food they were provided, and a lake, on which people would row small boats, and in the spring, people would gather to look at colored birds that had flown up from below the equator, and to find mushrooms and look at flowers. At various points there had been sculptures made of iron in whimsical forms that were meant to entertain children. A long time ago, it had even snowed, and people would come to the park and strap long, thin planks to their feet and shuffle across the low icy hills, which Grandfather said were slick and could make you fall, but not in a bad way—in a way that made people want to do it again and again. I know it’s now difficult to understand what this park had been meant for, but Grandfather said it hadn’t been for anything: It was simply for people to spend time in and enjoy. Even the lake was meant only for enjoyment—you went to float paper boats on it, or walk around it, or just sit and look at it.

The shuttle stopped at the main entrance of the Farm, and people got off and began queuing for the entrance. Only the two thousand or so people who were certified to work at the Farm could get in, and even before you joined the queue, you had to have a retinal scan to prove you had the right to enter, and there were always guards waiting with weapons in case someone tried to dash inside, which people occasionally did. You heard rumors about the Farm: that they were breeding new kinds of animals there—cows with two sets of udders, to produce double the amount of milk; brainless, legless chickens that could be packed, fat and square, into cages and would be fed by tubes; sheep that had been engineered to eat only waste, so that you wouldn’t have to use land and resources to grow grass. But none of these rumors had ever been confirmed, and if there were in fact new animals being made, we never saw them.

There are many other projects being worked on in the Farm as well. There are the greenhouses, where all sorts of new plants are being grown, both to eat and as possible medicines, and the Forest, where new kinds of trees are being raised, and the Lab, where scientists are working on creating new kinds of biofuels, and the Pond, where my husband works. The Pond is split into two parts: the animal-cultivating half and the plant-cultivating half. Ichthyologists and geneticists work in the first part, botanists and chemists work in the second. My husband works in the second, though he isn’t a scientist because he hadn’t been able to finish his graduate degree. He’s an aquatic gardener, which means that he plants the specimens that the botanists have approved or engineered—different algae, mostly—and then oversees the specimens’ growth and harvesting. Some of those plants will be developed as medicines, and some will be made into food, and the plants that can be used as neither will be turned into compost.

But though I say this, the truth is that I don’t actually know what my husband does. I think this is what he does—the planting and tending and harvesting—but I don’t know for certain, just as he doesn’t know for certain what I do.

This morning, as always, I looked out the shuttle window very hard, but, as always, there was nothing to see. The entire Farm is surrounded by a twelve-foot-high stone wall, and atop the wall, spaced a foot apart, are sensors, so that even if you were able to scale it, your presence would be detected almost immediately, and then you would be captured. Most of the Farm is beneath an enormous biodome, but there are a few feet near the southern wall that aren’t protected, and just beyond that wall are two rows of acacia trees that stretch along the entire border, from Farm Avenue West to Fifth Avenue. There were trees all over the city, of course, but you almost never saw them with leaves, which people picked—to boil for tea or broth—as soon as they appeared. Picking leaves was against the law, naturally, but everyone did it anyway. But no one dared to touch the leaves inside or around the Farm, and whenever the shuttle rounded the corner and turned east onto Farm Avenue South, you would see them, clouds of bright green, and although I saw them five days a week, I was always surprised when I did.

After stopping at the Farm, the shuttle continued toward Madison Avenue, and then turned north, and then turned right again at Sixty-eighth Street, and then south on York Avenue, where it stopped in front of Rockefeller University, which is on Sixty-fifth Street. This is where I got off, as well as the other people who work either at Rockefeller or at the Sloan Kettering Research Facility, which is a block west. Everyone going into RU split into two lines: the scientists stood in one, the lab techs and support staff in another. We had to have our fingerprints checked and our bags searched and our bodies scanned before we entered the campus, and then again before we entered our buildings. Last week, my supervisor announced that, because of an incident, they were going to be initiating retinal scans as well. Everyone had been upset about this, because there’s no canopy to stand under when it rains, not like at the Farm, and although the campus itself is beneath a biodome, the security area is not, which means we could be waiting for thirty minutes in the heat. My supervisor told us that they were going to set up cooling units in case the wait was excessive, but so far they haven’t arrived. But they did start staggering our arrival and departure times, so we wouldn’t all be waiting at once.

“What was the incident?” asked one of the techs from another lab, a man I didn’t know, but the supervisor didn’t answer, and no one had expected him to.

I work in the Larsson Center, which was constructed in the 2030s and is a building but also has a bridge that connects the main campus with a much smaller campus extension on a man-made island in the East River. There are nine labs in Larsson, and they all specialize in various kinds of influenza. One lab studies the descendants of the 2046 flu, which has proven to be evolutionarily aggressive; another studies descendants of the 2056 flu, which, according to Dr. Morgan, wasn’t actually a flu at all. My lab, which is run by Dr. Wesley, specializes in predictive influenza, which means we try to anticipate the next unknown flu, which might be altogether different from the other two. Ours is one of the biggest labs in the institution: Aside from Dr. Wesley, who’s the principal investigator, or lab chief, there are also twenty-four postdoctoral students—like Dr. Morgan—which means they have their Ph.D.s and are trying to discover something important so they can someday get their own lab; nine graduate students, who are called the Ph.D.s; and ten technical and support staff, of which I am one.

I work with the mice. At any given time, we have at least four hundred, which is significantly more than either of the other two labs have. I sometimes overhear my counterparts in those other labs discussing how their chiefs complain about how much money Dr. Wesley has, money he spends on “fishing expeditions,” which is a term Grandfather taught me and means they think that he doesn’t have any real evidence or information, that he’s just looking for something he can’t even identify. I repeated this once to Dr. Morgan, who frowned and said that it was inappropriate for them to be talking that way, and anyway, they were just lab techs. Then he asked me their names, but I pretended they had been temporary help and I hadn’t known, and he looked at me for a long time and made me promise I would tell him if I ever heard such discussions again, and I said I would, but I haven’t.

I am responsible for the mouse embryos. What happens is that the mice—already one week pregnant—are delivered in crates from the supply company. I get a list from the scientists telling me how old they need the embryos to be: usually ten days but sometimes a little older. Then I exterminate the mice and harvest their fetuses, which I prepare either in tubes or in dishes, depending, and then I shelve them in the refrigerator by age. My job is to make sure there’s always mice when the scientists need them.

This all takes a lot of time, especially if you’re careful, but there are still moments when I find myself with nothing to do. Then I ask for permission to use one of my two twenty-minute breaks. Sometimes I spend it taking a walk. All of the buildings at RU are connected by underground tunnels, so you never have to go outside. During the ’56 epidemic, they built a series of storage rooms and safe rooms, but I’ve never seen them. Everyone says that beneath these tunnels are two more stories of rooms: operating rooms and laboratories and cold-storage units. But Grandfather always told me not to trust what I couldn’t prove. “Nothing is true to a scientist until he proves it so,” he used to say. And even though I am not a scientist, I remind myself of this whenever I walk through the tunnels and suddenly get scared, when I become certain that the air has grown colder and that I can hear, as if from very far away, the scrabbly sounds of mice far beneath me, and of groans and whispers. The first time it happened, I couldn’t move, and when I did, I woke up in a corner of the corridor, near one of the staircase doorways, and I was yelling for Grandfather. I don’t remember this, but later, Dr. Morgan told me that they’d found me and I’d urinated on myself, and I had had to sit in the reception room with a tech from another lab whom I didn’t know until my husband came to pick me up.

That was shortly after we had been married, shortly after Grandfather had died, and when I woke, it was night and I was confused until I realized that I was in my bed, in our apartment. And then I looked over and saw someone sitting on the other bed and staring at me: my husband.

“Are you all right?” he’d asked.

I was feeling strange, sleepy, and I couldn’t quite form the words I needed. He hadn’t turned any of the lights on, but then the spotlight swept past the windows, and I could see his face.

I tried to say something, but my mouth was too dry, and my husband handed me a cup, and I drank and drank, and when the water was gone, too soon, he took the cup from me and left the room, and I could hear him remove the lid from the stone water-container in the kitchen, and the wooden dipper knocking against the inside, and the slish of liquid as he refilled the cup.

“I don’t remember what happened,” I said, after I’d drunk some more.

“You fainted,” he said. “At work. They called me and I came to get you and brought you home.”

“Oh,” I said. Then I remembered, but only somewhat, as if it were a story that Grandfather had told me long ago. “I’m sorry,” I said.

“Don’t worry,” my husband said. “I’m glad you’re better.”

He stood, then, and came toward me, and for a second, I thought he was going to touch me, maybe even kiss me, and I didn’t know how I felt about that, but he only looked down into my face, and put his palm briefly on my forehead: His hand was cool and dry, and I suddenly wanted to grab his fingers, but I didn’t, because we don’t touch each other like that.

And then he left the room, closing the door behind him. I lay awake for a long time, listening for his footfall, or the sound of the main-room lamp turning on. But I heard nothing. He spent the night in the main room, in the dark, not doing anything, not going anywhere, but not in the same room as I was.

That night I thought of Grandfather. I thought about him often, but that night I thought about him especially hard: I repeated to myself all the nice things he had said to me that I could remember, and I thought of how, when I had done something good, he would grab me and squeeze me, and although I hadn’t liked it, I had liked it, too. I thought of how he called me his little cat, and how, when I was scared, I would go to him and he would take me back to my bed and sit there next to me, holding my hand, until I fell asleep again. I tried not to think of the last time I saw him, when he was being led away, and he turned back and I saw his eyes scanning the crowd, looking for me, and how I had tried to scream out to him but hadn’t been able to, I was so frightened, and how I had just stood there, my husband, whom I had just married, beside me, watching Grandfather’s eyes track back and forth, back and forth, until, finally, as he was being led up the stairs to the stage, he had called out, “I love you, little cat,” and I still wasn’t able to say anything.

“Do you hear me, little cat?” he shouted, and he was still looking for me, but he wasn’t looking in the right direction, he was shouting to the mass of people, and they were jeering at him, and the man on the stage was stepping forward with the black cloth in his hands. “I love you, little cat, never forget that. No matter what.”

I lay in bed and rocked myself and talked to Grandfather. “I won’t forget,” I said aloud. “I won’t forget.” But although I hadn’t forgotten, I had forgotten what being loved felt like: Once, I had understood it, and now I no longer did.

A few weeks after the raid, I was listening to the morning broadcast and learned that the air-conditioning system at RU had malfunctioned and everyone was being told not to come to work that day.

There were four daily morning bulletins—one at 05:00, one at 06:00, one at 07:00, and one at 08:00—and you had to listen to one of them, because they might have information that you needed. Sometimes, for example, the shuttle would be rerouted because of an incident, and the man or woman would tell you which areas were affected and where you should wait instead. Sometimes there was an announcement about the air quality, and you knew you should wear your mask, or about the sun index, and then you would wear your shroud, or the heat index, so you knew to wear your cooling suit. Sometimes there was news about a Ceremony or a trial, and you’d know to adjust your schedule accordingly. If you worked for one of the big state projects or institutions, like my husband and I did, there would also be information about any closures or strange circumstances affecting them. Last year, for example, there had been another hurricane, and while RU had been closed completely, my husband and other technical staff had still had to go to the Farm to feed and clean up after the animals and double-check the measurements of the water salinity in the classified tanks and do all the things the computers couldn’t. A special shuttle, one that wound through all the zones, instead of just certain ones, came and picked my husband up and then dropped him off again, right in front of our building, just as the skies turned black.

When I began working at RU, six years ago, there were never air-conditioning malfunctions. But in the past year, there had been four. The buildings were never completely without power, of course: There were five large generators that were programmed to compensate for any loss of electricity almost immediately. But after the last blackout, in May, we were told not to come in if there was another, because the generators were running at full capacity just to keep the refrigerators at the proper temperature, and our collective body heat would tax the system further.

Even though I didn’t have to go to work that day, I did everything I normally did. I had my oatmeal, I brushed my teeth, I cleaned myself with some hygiene wipes, I made my bed. Then I was done with everything I could do: I could only go to the grocery store during my allotted hours, and even if I had wanted to do the laundry, I could only do that on our extra-water day, which wasn’t until next week. Finally, I got the broom out of the closet and swept the apartment, which I usually do on Wednesdays and Sundays. This didn’t take up very much time, as it was Thursday and I had just swept the day before and the floors were still clean. Then I reread the monthly Zone Eight bulletin, which was distributed to every household and listed any upcoming repairs to streets in our area, as well as updates about the new trees that were being planted on Fifth and Sixth Avenues, and new items that the grocery store would likely be stocking, and when they’d arrive and how many coupons each would cost. The bulletin also always featured a recipe from a Zone Eight resident, which I usually tried to make. This time, the recipe was for broiled raccoon with lovage and grits, which was especially interesting because I disliked cooking with raccoon and was always trying to find ways to improve the flavor. I cut this one out and put it in a kitchen drawer. Every few months or so, I submitted a recipe that I had invented, but mine were never chosen for publication.

After that, I sat on the sofa and listened to the radio. They played music between 08:30 and 17:00, when there would be three evening bulletins, and more music between 18:30 and 23:59. Then the station stopped broadcasting until 04:00, both so it could air encrypted messages for military personnel, which we heard as a long, low buzzing noise, and to encourage everyone to sleep, because the state wanted us to live healthily, which is also why the electricity grids halved their capacity during those same hours. I didn’t know the name of the music, but it was nice, and it made me feel calm, and as I listened, I thought of the mouse embryos drifting in their saline pools, with their paws that hadn’t yet developed completely and still looked like very tiny human hands. They didn’t have tails yet, either, just slight elongations of the spine, and if you hadn’t known what they were, you wouldn’t be able to tell they were mouse embryos at all. They could be cats, or dogs, or monkeys, or humans. The scientists called them pinkies.

I worried about the embryos, though that was silly; the generators would keep them cold, and anyway, they were dead. What they were was what they would remain—they would never transform into anything else, they would never get bigger, their eyes would never open, and they would never grow white fur. And yet the embryos were why the air-conditioning was broken. This was because there were different groups of people who didn’t like RU. Some people thought that the scientists there weren’t working hard enough—that if they worked faster, then the sicknesses would be cured and things would become better, and maybe even go back to how they had been, back when Grandfather was my age. Some people thought that the scientists were working on the wrong solutions. Then there were some people who thought the scientists were creating the sicknesses in our labs, because they wanted to eliminate certain kinds of people or because they wanted to help the state maintain control of the country, and those were the most dangerous people of all.

The primary thing the second two groups tried to do was starve the scientists of the pinkies: If they didn’t have the pinkies, they couldn’t inject them with viruses, and if they couldn’t do that, they would have to stop their work, or they would have to change how they did their work. That was what these groups thought. Along with the blackouts, there had been rumors of armored transport trucks of lab animals being attacked by insurgent groups on their way from the buildings where they were bred, out on Long Island. After the ’88 incident, every truck driver was armed, and every truck was accompanied by three soldiers. But two years ago, something had happened anyway: A truck was successfully stopped by an insurgent group, and everyone on it was killed, and for the first time in the university’s history, the specimens hadn’t arrived. It was around then that there was the first attack on the electrical system. Back then, RU had only two generators, and it hadn’t been enough, and the Delacroix wing had lost power altogether, and hundreds of specimens had spoiled, and months of work had been destroyed, and after that, the president of the university had gone to the state and appealed for more security, and more generators, and harsher punishments against the insurgents, and all of this was granted.

Of course, no one told me any of these things. I had to figure them out from eavesdropping on the scientists, who gathered in corners of the lab and whispered, and as I delivered the embryos and took others away, I lingered, not long enough to be noticed, and tried to overhear what they said. None of the scientists paid any attention to me as I came and went, even though everyone knew who I was, because of Grandfather. I always knew when the new postdocs or Ph.D.s learned who I was, because I would enter the room and they would stare at me, and then they would thank me when I gave them their new batch of mice, and thank me for taking away the old batch. But eventually they would get used to me, and they would stop thanking me, and they would forget I was even there, and that was fine.

I listened to the music for what felt like a long time, even though when I looked at the clock, I could see it had only been twenty minutes, and it was still just 09:20, which meant I had nothing to do until my grocery hours began at 17:30, which was a long way away. And so it was then that I decided that I would take a walk around the Square.

My husband’s and my apartment is on the north side of the Square, on the eastern corner of Fifth Avenue. When I was a child, the building had been a house, and only Grandfather and I had lived there, along with a cook and two servants. But during the ’83 uprising, the state divided it into eight apartments, two per floor, and let us choose which one we wanted. Then, when I was married, my husband and I remained in our apartment and Grandfather moved out. One unit on each floor faces the Square, and the other unit faces north. Our apartment faces north, which is quieter and therefore better, and is on the third floor. These units overlook what used to be the area where the family who built this house more than two hundred years ago kept its horses, which they kept not to eat but to pull them around the city.

I didn’t really want to walk around the Square, first, because it was very hot, even hotter than usual for late October, and second, because walking around the Square could be frightening. But I also couldn’t sit much longer in the apartment, with nothing to do and no one to look at, and so, finally, I put on some sunscreen and my hat and a long-sleeved shirt and walked downstairs and outside and across the street, and then I was in the Square.

You could get whatever you needed in the Square. In the northwest corner were the metalworkers, who could make you anything from a lock to a pan, and who would also buy any old metal you had. They would weigh it, and tell you what it was, whether it was cobalt mixed with aluminum or iron mixed with nickel, and give you gold or food or water coupons, whichever you wanted, and then they would smelt it and make it into something else. South of them were the cloth merchants, who weren’t just merchants but also tailors and seamstresses, and who would also buy any clothes or fabrics that you didn’t need anymore, or could remake old clothes into new clothes. In the northeast corner were the moneylenders, and next to them were the herbalists, and south of them were the carpenters, who could make or repair anything out of wood. There were also rubber repairmen and rope-makers and plastic merchants, who would buy or trade you anything made of plastic, and could also make you something new.

Not all of them were licensed to be in the Square, and every few months or so there’d be a raid, and everyone, even the vendors who had permits, would disappear for a week, and then they’d return. People—not all people, not people like the scientists and ministers, but most other people—depended on the vendors. Up in Zone Fourteen, there were stores you could go to and buy things, I don’t know what, but except for the grocery, there were no stores in Zone Eight, and so instead we had the Square. Anyway, the officials didn’t really care about the cloth merchants and carpenters and metalworkers: The ones they cared about were the people who moved among the vendors. These people didn’t have fixed positions in the Square, like the vendors did—a wooden table, with a tarp stretched above to protect them from the sun or the rain. At most, these other people usually would have only a stool and an umbrella, and they would sit in a different spot every day. Sometimes they didn’t even have that, and would just wander through the Square, walking between the stalls. Yet everyone, all the other vendors and regular shoppers, knew who they were and where to find them, though no one ever used their actual names. There were people who could help reset a bone or give you stitches, and who could help you get out of the prefecture, and who could help procure anything you wanted, from illegal books to sugar to even a specific person. There were people who could find you a child, and people who could take one away. There were people who could get someone into a good containment center, and people who could get someone out of one. There were even people who claimed they could cure you of the illnesses, and they were the ones that the authorities looked for the hardest, but it was said that they could disappear at will, and they could never be caught. This was illogical, of course: People can’t disappear. And yet there were rumors about them, about how they could elude the authorities again and again.

In the center of the Square was a large, shallow cement pit in the shape of a ring, and in the middle of the pit, on an elevated pedestal, was a fire that was never extinguished, not even in the hottest weather, except during the raids, and surrounding the fire were more vendors. There were twenty to thirty of them, depending on the day, and they sat in the ring, and on the raised lip of the ring they each unrolled a plastic tarp, and on the tarps they displayed different cuts of meat. Sometimes you could tell what kind of animal the meat was from, and sometimes you couldn’t. Each vendor had his own sharp knife and a pair of long metal tongs and a set of long metal skewers and a fan made from woven plastic that they would wave over the meat to keep the flies away. The vendors accepted gold or coupons, and they would either cut the meat for you and wrap it in a piece of paper so you could take it home, or they would stab a skewer through it and cook it for you right there in the fire, whichever you wanted. Around the fire were metal trays that collected the fat that dripped from the meat, and if you couldn’t afford the meat, you could buy just the fat, and take that home and use it to cook. The strange thing was that all the vendors who worked in the pit were very skinny, and you never saw them eat. People always said that was because they would never dare eat the meat they sold, and every few months there were rumors that the meat was actually human, and had been procured from one of the camps. But that didn’t stop people from buying it, from tearing the meat off the skewers with their teeth, sucking the metal clean and bright before handing it back to the vendor.

Even though the Square was right outside our building, I rarely visited it. Maybe my husband did. But I did not. It was too loud, it was too confusing, and the crowds and the smells and the vendors’ shouting—Brii-iing me your metal! Brii-iing me your metal!—and the sounds of hammers constantly tocking against wood made me nervous. And it was so hot, the fire turning the air watery, that I thought I might faint.

I wasn’t the only person the Square made uneasy, which was silly, really, because there were at least twenty Flies that monitored the area, buzzing back and forth from one end to the other, and if anything really bad were to happen, the police would be there in an instant. Still, there was a group of us who regularly walked the sidewalk that encircled its perimeter, looking at the activity through the fence but not stepping into it. Many of these people were old and out of work, though I didn’t recognize any of them—they might not even have lived in Zone Eight but came from other zones, which was technically illegal but only rarely enforced. The southern and eastern zones had their own versions of the Square, but Zone Eight’s was considered the best, because Zone Eight was a stable and healthy and calm place to live.

After walking around the Square several times, I was desperately hot. On the southern edge of the Square was a row of cooling stations, but there was a long queue for them and it was foolish to pay for one when I could just walk back to the apartment. When Grandfather was my age, there were no cooling stations and no vendors. Back then, the Square had been planted with trees and covered with grass, and the pit in the center had been a fountain, where water erupted in bursts and then fell back into the pit again. Over and over the water exploded and fell, exploded and fell, for no other reason than because people liked it. I know this sounds queer, but it’s true: Grandfather showed me a photograph of it once. Back then, people lived with dogs, which they kept as companions, like children, and the dogs had their own special food, and they were all named, like they were people, and their owners would bring them to the Square and they would run around on the grass and their owners would watch them from benches that had been placed there for exactly that reason. That was what Grandfather said. Back then, he would come to the Square and sit on a bench and read a book, or walk through here on the way to Zone Seven, which wasn’t called Zone Seven but had an actual name, also like a person. A lot of things were named, back then.

I was thinking about all this as I was walking along the southern side of the Square, when a group of people who had been gathered around one vendor close to the entrance moved away, and I saw that the vendor was standing near an instrument shaped like a giant metal clamp, and in the clamp he was fitting a large block of ice. It had been a long time since I had seen a piece of ice that big, and although it wasn’t quite pure—it was a very light brown, and you could see little specks of gnats that had been trapped in it—it looked clean enough, and I was standing there looking at it when the vendor turned and saw me.

“Something cold?” he asked. He was an old man, older than Dr. Wesley, almost as old as Grandfather had been, and he was wearing a long-sleeved sweater, even in the heat, and plastic gloves on his hands.

I wasn’t used to having strangers talk to me, and I felt panicked, but then I closed my eyes and breathed in and out, like Grandfather had taught me, and when I opened them, he was still there and still looking at me, though not in a way that made me nervous.

“How much?” I finally managed to say.

“One dairy or two grain,” he said.

This was a lot to ask, because we only got twenty-four dairy coupons and forty grain coupons a month, and it was more so because I didn’t even know what the man was selling. I know I could have asked him, but I didn’t. I don’t know why. You can always ask, Grandfather used to remind me, and although that wasn’t true, not anymore, it is true that I could have asked the vendor. No one would have been mad at me; I wouldn’t have gotten into any trouble.

“You look like you’re hot,” the man said, and when I didn’t reply, he said, “I promise you it’s worth it.” He was a nice old man, I decided, and he had a voice a little like Grandfather’s.

“Okay,” I said, and I reached into my pocket and tore off a dairy coupon and gave it to him, and he tucked it away in his apron pocket. Then he positioned a paper cup into a hole in the machine directly beneath the ice and began to turn the crank very fast, and as he did, shavings of ice fell into the cup. When the ice had reached the top, he tapped the cup rapidly against the clamp, tamping it down, and set it back in its place and began turning the crank again, rotating the cup as he did until there was a mound of ice. Finally, he patted the ice into place and picked up from next to his feet a glass bottle containing a cloudy, pale liquid, which he poured atop the ice for what seemed like a long time, and then he handed it to me.

“Thank you,” I said, and he nodded. “Enjoy it,” he said. He brought his arm up to rub at his forehead, but when he did, his sweater sleeve drooped, and I saw from the scars on the inside of his forearm that he had survived the illness of ’70, which had mostly affected children.

Then I felt very strange, and I turned and walked away as fast as I could, and it wasn’t until I reached the west corner, with the queue of people waiting for the cooling stations, and felt the ice dripping down my hand that I remembered the treat. I licked it and found that the ice had been doused with syrup, and the syrup was sweet. Not from sugar—sugar was too rare—but from something that tasted like sugar and was almost as good. The ice was so cold, but by now I was upset, and after a few more licks, I threw the cup into a trash can and started moving as fast as I could toward our house, my tongue numb and burning.

I was relieved when I was safely back in our apartment, and I went to the sofa and sat there, taking deep breaths until I felt better. After a few minutes, I did, and I turned on the radio and sat down again and breathed some more.

But after a while, I began to feel bad. I had gotten scared for no reason, and I had spent one of our dairy coupons, and it was still only the middle of the month, which meant we would have to go an extra two days without milk or curds, and not only that but I had spent it on ice that was probably unhygienic, and to make matters worse still, I hadn’t even eaten it. And I had gone outside, so I was now very sweaty, and it was only 11:07, which meant I would have to wait another nine hours, almost, until I could take my shower.

Suddenly I wished my husband were here. Not because I would tell him what I had done but because he was proof that nothing bad was going to happen to me, that I was safe, that he would always take care of me, just as he had promised.

And then I remembered that it was Thursday, which meant it was my husband’s free night, and he wouldn’t be coming home until after dinner, maybe even after I was asleep.

Remembering this gave me the funny, jumpy feeling that sometimes came over me, which was different from the nervous feeling I sometimes had and which occasionally even felt exciting, like something was going to happen. But of course nothing was going to happen: I was in our apartment, and we were in Zone Eight, and I would always be protected because Grandfather had made sure of that.

But I was still unable to sit quietly, and I got up and began walking round and round the apartment. Then I started opening doors, which is something I did when I was young, too, and I was looking for something I couldn’t describe. “What are you looking for, little cat?” Grandfather used to ask me, but I was never able to respond. When I was small, he had tried to stop me, pulling me onto his lap and holding my wrists, whispering into my ear. “It’s okay, little cat,” he would say, “it’s okay,” and I would scream and thrash because I didn’t like being held, I liked my freedom, I liked to roam. Then, when I was a little older, he would simply get up from whatever he was doing and start looking with me. I’d open a cupboard beneath the sink, and close it, and he would do the same, very serious, until I had opened and shut all the doors in the house, on every floor, and he had, too. By then I would be very tired, and I still wouldn’t have found what I needed, and Grandfather would pick me up and carry me to bed. “We’ll find it next time, little cat,” he would tell me. “Don’t worry. We’ll find it.”

Now, though, everything was where it was supposed to be: In the kitchen, there were the tins of beans and fish and the jars of pickled cucumbers and radishes and the containers of oats and dried tofu skin and the glass ampoules with artificial honey. In the front closet were our umbrellas and raincoats and our cooling suits and shrouds and masks and our emergency bag stocked with four-liter bottles of water and antibiotics and flashlights and batteries and sunscreen and cooling gels and socks and sneakers and underwear and protein bricks and fruit and nuts; in the hallway closet were our shirts and pants and underwear and extra shoes, and our fourteen-day supply of drinking water, and on the ground there was a box with our birth certificates and our citizenship and residence papers and copies of our security clearances and our most recent health records and a few pictures of Grandfather I had managed to keep; in the bathroom cupboard were our vitamins and backup supply of antibiotics, our extra sun cream and sunburn gel and shampoo and soap and hygiene wipes and toilet paper. In the drawer beneath my bed, there were our gold coins and paper chits. Our grade of state employee got paid enough allowance so we could buy two extra treats a week, like ice milk, or some combination of between three and six extra food coupons. But because neither of us bought anything extra, we had a lot saved, which we could use for something bigger, like new clothes or a new radio. But we didn’t need anything else: Along with our uniforms, the state gave us each two new outfits a year, and a new radio every five years, so it was silly to spend our coins and chits on those. We didn’t spend them on anything, even on things we wanted, like extra dairy coupons—I don’t know why.

I went back to the hallway and pulled out the box, because I wanted to look at the pictures of Grandfather. But as I was removing the envelope with our birth certificates, the papers inside slid out and fell to the floor, and so did another envelope, one I hadn’t seen before. It wasn’t an old envelope, but it had clearly been used before, and I opened it, and inside were six pieces of paper. Actually, they weren’t so much pieces as scraps, and they had been torn from different sheets: some were lined and others were obviously ripped from books, and none of them were dated or addressed to anyone or signed, and all of them had very little written on them, just a few words each, in black ink, and in a hurried, jagged hand. “I miss you,” one read. Another read, “22:00, the usual spot.” “20:00,” read the third. The fourth and fifth said the same thing: “Am thinking of you.” And then there was the sixth, which contained only one word: “Someday.”

For a while, I sat there, looking at the pieces of paper, and wondering where they came from. But I knew they must have been my husband’s, because they weren’t mine, and no one else ever entered the apartment. Someone had written these notes to my husband, and he had kept them. I knew I wasn’t supposed to ever see them, because they had been stored with our papers, and it was my husband, not me, who took care of our paperwork, who renewed our citizenship certificates every year.

It would be many hours still until my husband came home, and yet, after I finished reading the notes, I hurriedly shoved them back into the envelope and then replaced the box without even looking at the pictures I’d wanted to see, as if at any moment I might hear my husband’s knock at the door. And then I went to our bedroom and lay down on my bed fully clothed, and stared at the ceiling.

“Grandfather,” I said.

But of course there was no one to answer me.

I lay there, trying to think of something other than those torn pieces of paper with their statements and instructions, so complicated because they were so simple: I thought of the pinkies, Grandfather, the things I’d seen at the Square. But the entire time, all I could hear was the word on that final note, which someone had written to my husband, and which he had kept. Someday, someone had written, and he had saved it, and the left-hand edge of the paper was softer than the other, as if it had been rubbed between someone’s fingers, as if it had been held many times as it was read again and again and again. Someday, someday, someday.