To Paradise

PART III

Winter 2094

One nice memory I have is of Grandfather brushing my hair. I liked to sit in the corner of his study and watch him work; I could stay there for hours, drawing or playing, and rarely make a sound. Once, one of Grandfather’s research assistants had come in and had seen me there, and I could see he was surprised. “I can take her away if she’s bothering you,” said the research assistant, quietly. Then it was Grandfather who was surprised. “My little one?” he asked. “She’s no bother to anyone, especially to me.” Hearing that, I had felt proud, like I had done something correct.

I had a cushion I sat on while Grandfather read or typed or wrote, and when I wasn’t watching him, I had a set of wooden blocks I would play with. The wooden blocks were all painted white, and I was careful not to stack them too high, so they wouldn’t topple over and make a noise.

But sometimes, Grandfather would stop what he was doing and turn around in his chair. “Come here, little one,” he’d say, and I’d take my cushion and put it on the floor between his knees, and he’d take the big, flat-backed brush from his drawer and start stroking my hair with it. “What beautiful hair you have,” he’d say. “Who gave you this beautiful hair?” But that was what is called a rhetorical question, which means I didn’t have to answer it, and I didn’t. In fact, I didn’t have to say anything at all. I always waited for those times when Grandfather would brush my hair. It felt so good, so relaxing, like I was falling slowly down a long, cool tunnel.

After my illness, though, I no longer had beautiful hair. None of us who survived it do. It was because of the drugs we had to take: First all our hair fell out, and when it grew back, it was wispy and thin and dust-colored, and you couldn’t grow it past your chin or it would break off. Most people cut it very short, so that it just covered the scalp. The same thing had happened to many of the survivors of the sicknesses of ’50 and ’56, but it was more severe for us survivors of ’70. For a while, that was how you could tell who had survived the illness, but then a variation of the same drug was prescribed for the illness of ’72, and then it got harder to tell, and having short hair was just more practical: It was less hot, and it took less water and soap to clean. So now lots of people have short hair—you need money if you want to keep it long. That’s one way you can tell who lives in Zone Fourteen; all of them have long hair, because everyone knows that Zone Fourteen gets three times as much water as the second-highest water allotment zone, which is our zone, Zone Eight.

The reason I started thinking about this is because last week I was waiting for the shuttle, and a man I had never seen before joined the queue. I was near the end of the queue, and so I was able to get a good look at him. He was dressed in a gray jumpsuit of the kind my husband wore, which meant he was some sort of service technician at the Farm, maybe even at the Pond, and over his jumpsuit he was wearing a lightweight nylon jacket, also gray, and a cap with a wide brim.

I had been feeling strange for the past few weeks. On the one hand, I was happy, because it would soon be December, and December was the best time of year: The weather sometimes grew cool enough for us to even wear an anorak at night, and although there were no rains, the smog that hung over the city lifted, and the store began stocking produce that only grew in the cold season, like apples and pears. In January, the storms would come, and then in February, it would be the Lunar New Year, and everyone who worked on a state site or for a state institution would get four extra grain coupons and either two extra dairy coupons or two extra produce coupons for the month, whichever you wanted. My husband and I would usually split our extra coupons, so between us, we would have eight extra grain coupons and two extra dairy coupons and two extra produce coupons. The year after we got married, which was also the first year my husband worked on the Farm, we had bought a wedge of hard cheese with our surplus coupons: He had wrapped it in paper and put it in the far back corner of our hallway closet, which he said was the coolest place in the apartment, and it had kept for a long time. This year, there was a rumor that we might get an extra day that week for bathing and laundry, which we had gotten two years ago, but not last year, because there had been a drought.

But on the other hand, despite everything I had to look forward to, I also found myself thinking about the notes. Every week on my husband’s free night, I emptied out the box again to check if they were still there, which they always were. I would read all of them again, turning the scraps of paper in my hand and holding them up to the lamplight, and then I would replace them all in the envelope and put the box back in the closet.

I was puzzling over the notes the morning I saw the man in the gray jumpsuit join the queue. His presence meant that someone in the zone must have died or been taken, because the only way to get a housing assignment in Zone Eight was to wait for someone to leave it, and no one left Zone Eight willingly. And then something strange happened: The man adjusted his hat, and as he did, a long piece of hair fell loose, brushing against his cheek. He swiftly pushed it back under his hat, and looked around, quickly, to make sure no one had seen, but everyone was staring straight ahead, as was considered polite. Only I had seen him, because I had turned around, though he hadn’t seen me looking at him. I had never seen a man with long hair before. The thing that interested me most, however, was how much the man resembled my husband—they had the same color skin, the same color eyes, the same color hair, although my husband’s hair is short, like mine.

I have never liked it when new things happened, not even when I was a child, and I have never liked it when things aren’t as they’re supposed to be. When I was young, Grandfather would read mysteries to me, but they always made me anxious—I liked to know what was happening; I liked things to be the same. I didn’t tell Grandfather this, however, because it was clear that he liked them, and I wanted to try to enjoy something he enjoyed. But then we weren’t allowed to read mysteries anymore, and so I was able to stop pretending.

Now, though, I had two mysteries of my own: The notes were the first. And this man, with his long hair, living in Zone Eight, was the second. It made me feel like something had happened and no one had told me, and that there was a secret that everyone knew but that I couldn’t figure out on my own. This happened at work every day, but that was fine, because I wasn’t a scientist, and it wasn’t my right to know what was happening—I wasn’t educated enough, and I wouldn’t have understood anyway. But I had always thought that I understood where I lived, and now I was beginning to worry I was wrong about that after all.

It was Grandfather who explained free nights to me.

When he told me I was going to be married, I was excited but also scared, and I started walking around in circles, which is something I do only when I’m very happy or very nervous. Other people get uncomfortable when I do this, but all Grandfather said was “I know how you feel, little cat.”

Later, he came to tuck me into bed, and to give me the photograph of my husband to keep, which I hadn’t thought to ask for earlier. I looked and looked at that picture, touching it as if I could actually feel his face. When I tried to return it to Grandfather, he shook his head. “It’s yours,” he said.

“When is it going to happen?” I asked him.

“In a year,” he said. “So, for the next year, I’ll tell you everything you need to know about being married.”

This made me feel a lot calmer—Grandfather always knew what to say, even when I didn’t know it myself. “We’ll start tomorrow,” he promised me, and then he kissed me on the forehead before turning off the light and going to the main room, where he slept.

The next day, Grandfather began his lessons. He had a piece of paper on which he had written a long list, and every month, he would pick three topics for us to discuss. We practiced conversation, and being helpful, and he taught me different circumstances in which I might have to ask for help, and how I should phrase it, and what I should do in the case of an emergency. We also discussed how I might come to trust my husband, and what I could do to be a good spouse to him, and what it was like to live with another person, and what I should do if my husband ever did anything that made me feel frightened.

I know it seems strange, but after my initial anxiety, I was less nervous about getting married than I think Grandfather thought I might be. After all, aside from Grandfather, I had never lived with anybody else. Well, that isn’t completely true—I had lived with my other grandfather and my father, once, but only when I was a baby; I couldn’t even really remember what they looked like. I suppose I assumed that living with my husband would be like living with Grandfather.

It was toward the end of the sixth month of my training that Grandfather told me about free nights: Every week, my husband would leave the apartment and I would have a night all to myself. And then, another night, I could leave the apartment and be by myself, and do whatever I wanted. He watched me closely as he told me this, and then waited as I thought.

“What night of the week will it be?” I asked him.

“Whichever you and your husband decide,” he said.

I thought some more. “What am I supposed to do on my night?” I asked him.

“Whatever you want,” Grandfather said. “Maybe you’ll want to take a walk, for example, or maybe you’ll want to go to the Square. Or maybe you’ll want to go to the Recreation Center and play a game of ping-pong with someone.”

“Maybe I can come visit you,” I said. The one thing I had learned that had surprised me the most was that Grandfather wouldn’t be living with us; once I was married, I would remain with my husband in our apartment, and Grandfather would move someplace else.

“I always love spending time with you, little cat,” said Grandfather, slowly. “But you need to get used to being with your husband; you shouldn’t begin your new life thinking about how often you’re going to see me.” I was quiet then, because I felt that Grandfather was trying to say something else to me without quite saying it, and I didn’t know what it was, but knew that it was something I didn’t want to hear. “Come on, little cat,” said Grandfather at last, and he smiled and patted my hand. “Don’t be upset. This is an exciting time—you’re getting married, and I’m so proud of you. My little cat, all grown up and about to start a household of her own.”

In the years since my husband and I were married, I have had to make use of very few of Grandfather’s lessons. I have never had to go to the police because my husband hit me, for example, and I have never had to ask my husband for help with the chores, and I have never had to worry about him withholding his food coupons from me, and I have never had to pound on a neighbor’s door because my husband was yelling at me. But I wish I had known that I should have asked Grandfather more questions about free nights, and how they would make me feel.

Shortly after we were married, my husband and I decided that Thursday would be his free night, and Tuesday would be mine. Or, rather, my husband had decided, and I had agreed. “Are you sure you don’t mind Tuesday?” he had asked me, and he sounded concerned, as if I could say, “No, I’d rather have Thursday after all,” and he would switch with me. But it was fine with me, because it didn’t matter which night I had.

At first, I tried to spend my free night elsewhere. Unlike my husband, I would come home from work and have dinner with him first, and then I would change into my casual clothes and leave. It was strange being outside the apartment at night after all those years of Grandfather’s reminding me that I was never to leave the house by myself, and absolutely never when it was dark. But that was when things were bad, and it was dangerous, before the second uprising.

For those first few months, I did what Grandfather had suggested and went to the Recreation Center. The center was on Fourteenth Street, just west of Sixth Avenue, and because it was already June, I had to wear my cooling suit so I wouldn’t overheat. Up Fifth Avenue I walked, and then west on Twelfth Street, because I liked the old buildings on that block, which looked like versions of the building my husband and I lived in. Some of buildings’ windows were lit up, but most of them were dark, and there were only a few other people in the street, also walking toward the center.

The center was open between 06:00 and 22:00, and only to residents of Zone Eight. Everyone was allowed twenty hours of time at the center per month for free, and you had to thumbprint in and then thumbprint out when you left. You could take a class in cooking at the center, or sewing, or tai chi or yoga, or you could join one of the clubs: There were clubs for people who liked to play chess, or badminton, or ping-pong, or checkers. Or you could do volunteer work, making bundles of sanitary supplies for people in the relocation centers. One of the best things about the center was that it was always cool, because it had a big generator, and during the temperate months, people would stay home and conserve their hours so they could spend more of the long summer days in the air-conditioning, rather than in their apartments. You could take an air shower here as well, and sometimes, when I was desperate to be clean and it wasn’t yet a water day, I would use some of my time at the center for an air shower. You also came to the center for your annual vaccinations, and your biweekly blood work and mucus smears, and to claim your monthly food coupons and allowances, and, from May through September, the three kilos of ice per month that every resident was entitled to buy at a subsidized rate.

But until my first free nights, I had never been to the center for recreation, even though that was one of the things the center was for. Grandfather had brought me once, after the center had opened, and we had stood and watched a game of ping-pong. The center had two tables, and while people played, other people sat in chairs around the perimeter of the room and watched them, and clapped when someone scored a point. I remember thinking that it looked like fun, and it sounded like fun, too, the bright, sharp tap that the ball made as it struck the table, and I stood there for a long time.

“Do you want to play?” Grandfather whispered to me.

“Oh, no,” I said. “I don’t know how.”

“You can learn,” Grandfather said. But I knew I couldn’t.

As we left the building that afternoon, Grandfather said, “You can come back, little cat. All you do is sign up for the team, and ask someone to play with you.” I was quiet then, because sometimes Grandfather said these things as if they were easy for me to do, and I became frustrated because he didn’t understand, he didn’t understand that I couldn’t do the things he thought I could, and I felt myself growing itchy and angry. But then he noticed, and he stopped walking and turned to me and put his hands on my shoulders. “You know how to do this, little cat,” he said, quietly. “You remember how we practiced talking to other people? You remember how we practiced having a conversation?”

“Yes,” I said.

“I know it’s not easy for you,” said Grandfather. “I know it’s not. But I wouldn’t be encouraging you to do this if I didn’t believe, with everything I am, that you were capable of it.”

And so up I went to the Recreation Center, if only because I wanted to be able to tell Grandfather—who was still alive then—that I had. But once I was there, I wasn’t even able to make myself walk inside. Instead, I sat on a ledge outside the building and watched other people walk in, in twos or alone. Then I noticed that there was a window on the other side of the front door, and that if I stood at the correct angle, I could watch the people inside playing ping-pong, and it was nice, because it was almost like I was one of them, but I didn’t have to actually speak to anyone.

That was how I spent my first month or so of free nights—standing outside the center and watching ping-pong through the window. Sometimes the matches were particularly exciting, and I would walk home quickly, thinking that I might tell my husband about one game or another I’d seen, even though he never asked what I did on my free nights, and never told me what he did on his free nights, either. Sometimes I imagined that I had made a new friend: the woman with the short curly hair and dimples who slammed the ball across the table, lunging back on her left heel as she did; the man who wore a red tracksuit printed with white clouds. Sometimes I imagined that I joined them at the hydration bar afterward, and I thought about what it would be like to tell my husband that I wanted to use one of the bonus liquid coupons so I could have a drink with my friends, and how he would say that of course I could, and maybe he would come and watch me play a game someday.

But after a few months of this, I stopped going to the center. For one thing, Grandfather was dead, and I didn’t feel like trying any longer. For another, it was getting hotter, and I was feeling bad. And so, the next Tuesday, my next free night, I told my husband that I was tired, that I was going to stay indoors instead.

“Are you ill?” he asked me. He was washing the dinner dishes.

“No,” I said. “I just don’t feel like going out.”

“Do you want to go out on Wednesday instead?” he asked.

“No,” I said. “This will be my free night. I just won’t go out.”

“Oh,” he said. He placed the last plate on the drying rack. Then he asked, “Which would you like, the main room or the bedroom?”

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“Well,” he said, “I want to give you your privacy. So which would you rather have, the main room or the bedroom?”

“Oh,” I said. “The bedroom, I guess.” I thought about this. Was this the right answer? “Is that all right?”

“Of course,” he said. “It’s your night.”

And so I went to the bedroom, where I changed into my nightclothes and then lay down on the bed. After a few minutes, there was a soft knock on the door, and when my husband entered, he was carrying the radio. “I thought you might want to listen to some music,” he said, and plugged it in and turned it on and left, closing the door behind him.

I lay there listening to the radio for a long while. Finally, I went to use the toilet and brush my teeth and clean my face and body with hygiene wipes, and as I did, I looked into the main room, where my husband was sitting on the sofa, reading. He has a higher clearance than I do and so is allowed to read certain books, those that relate to his field, which he borrows from work and then returns. This one was a book about the care and cultivation of tropical water-grown edible plants, and even though I am not interested in tropical water-grown edible plants, I was suddenly jealous of him. My husband could sit and read for hours, and I looked at him and wished for Grandfather, who would know just what to say to make me feel better. But instead, I got ready for bed and returned to our room, and finally, after what felt like many hours, I heard my husband sigh and turn off the light in the main room, and go to the bathroom himself, and then, finally, come quietly into our room, where he changed clothes as well and got into his bed.

Ever since then, I have spent my free nights indoors. Every once in a while, if I’m feeling very restless, I’ll take a walk: maybe around the Square, maybe up to the center. But usually, I go to our bedroom, where my husband has always set up the radio. I change, I turn off the lights, I get into bed, and I wait: for the sound of him sitting down on the sofa, for the sound of him cracking his knuckles as he reads, and, at last, for the sound of him shutting the book and switching off the lamp. Every Thursday for the past six and a half years, I have waited for my husband to come home from his free night, which he begins directly after work. Every Tuesday, I lie in my bed in our bedroom, waiting for my free night to be over, waiting for my husband to come back to me, even if he doesn’t say a word.

I had gotten the idea about following my husband on his free night from the lab. This happened on a Friday. It was January 1, 2094, and Dr. Wesley, who was interested in Western history and only celebrated the new year according to the traditional calendar, assembled everyone who worked in the lab for a glass of grape juice. Everyone got some, even me. “Six more years until the twenty-second century!” he announced, and we all clapped. The juice was a dark, cloudy purple, and so sweet that it made my throat hurt. But it had been a long time since I had had juice, and I wondered if this was something that was interesting enough to tell my husband, because it was at least different from what usually happened at work, yet also not classified material.

On my way back to my part of the lab, I took a break and went to the bathroom, and as I sat there on the toilet, I heard two people come in and begin washing their hands. They were women, neither of whose voices I recognized, and they were both Ph.D.s, I think, because they sounded young and they were talking about an article in a journal they had both read.

They discussed the article—which was about some kind of new antiviral that was being engineered out of a real virus whose genetics had somehow been altered—and then one of them said, very fast, “So, I thought Percy was cheating on me.”

“Really?” asked the other. “Why?”

“Well,” said the first, “he’d been acting really strange, you know? Late coming home from work, and really forgetful—he even forgot to meet me for my six-month checkup. And he started leaving the house really early in the morning, saying he had a lot of work and had to get it done, and then he started acting strangely around my father when we went over to my parents’ for Saturday lunch, kind of avoiding his gaze. So one day, after he left for work, I waited a few minutes, and then I followed him.”

“Belle! You didn’t!”

“I did! I was rehearsing what I was going to say to him, and what I’d say to my parents, and what I was going to do, when I realized that he was going into the Housing Development Unit. And I called out his name, and he was really surprised. But then he told me that he was trying to get us a better unit in a better part of the zone for when the baby comes, and that he and my father had been working on it together as a surprise.”

“Oh, Belle—that’s amazing!”

“I know. I felt so guilty for hating him, even if it was just a few weeks.”

She laughed, and so did her friend. “Well, Percy can take a little hatred if it’s from you,” said the second woman.

“Yes,” the first woman said, and laughed again. “He knows who’s in charge.”

They left the bathroom, and then I flushed and washed my hands and left too, and as I did, I passed the two women, still talking, but now in the hallway. They were both very pretty, and they both had shiny dark hair that they wore in neat buns at the base of their skulls, and little gold earrings shaped like planets. They were both wearing lab coats, of course, but beneath their hems I could see they were wearing colorful silk skirts and leather shoes with low heels. One of them, the prettier one, was pregnant; as she spoke to her friend, she rubbed her stomach in a slow circular movement.

I went back to my area, where I had a new batch of pinkies to move into individual petri dishes, which I had to fill with saline. As I worked, I thought of those notes my husband had kept. And then I thought of the woman in the bathroom, who had thought her husband might be seeing someone else, someone who wasn’t her. But her husband hadn’t been doing anything wrong after all: He had only been trying to find her a bigger unit to live in, because she was pretty and educated and pregnant, and there would be no reason to find someone else, someone better, because there wouldn’t be someone better. I could tell by her hair that she must live in Zone Fourteen, and if she was a Ph.D., it meant that her parents probably lived in Zone Fourteen too, and had paid for her to go to school, and then paid more for her to live nearby. I found myself thinking of what they all ate for Saturday lunch—I had once heard that in Zone Fourteen there were stores where you could buy any kind of meat that you wanted, and as much as you wanted. You could have ice cream every day there, or chocolate or juice or even wine. You could buy candy or fruit or milk. You could go home and take a shower every day. I was thinking about this, and growing more and more agitated, when I dropped one of the pinkies. It was so tender that it turned into a smear of jelly upon impact, and I let out a cry: I was so careful. I never dropped pinkies. But now I had.

I thought about this woman who lived in Zone Fourteen throughout the weekend and Monday, and by the time it was Tuesday, and therefore my free night, I was thinking about her still. After dinner, I went straight to the bedroom instead of helping my husband with the dishes as I normally did just to use up some time. There I lay on the bed and rocked myself back and forth and talked to Grandfather, asking him what I should do. I imagined him saying, “It’s okay, little cat,” and “I love you, little cat,” but I couldn’t think of what else he might say. If Grandfather had been alive, he would have helped me figure out what I was upset about, and how to fix it. But Grandfather was not alive, and so I had to figure it out on my own.

Then I remembered what the woman in the bathroom had said, that she had followed her husband. Unlike her husband, my husband didn’t leave especially early in the morning. He didn’t come home late at night. I always knew where he was—except for Thursdays.

And that was when I decided that, on my husband’s next free night, I was going to follow him, too.

The next day, I realized that my plan had a flaw: My husband never came home from work on his free nights, so either I would have to find a way to follow him from the Farm or I would have to find a way to make him come home first. I decided the second option was more feasible. I thought and thought about what I was going to do, and then I came up with a solution.

That night, at dinner, I said, “I think there’s a leak in the showerhead.”

He didn’t look up from his plate. “I haven’t heard anything,” he said.

“But there’s some water pooled in the bottom of the tub,” I said.

He looked up then and pushed his chair back and went to the bathroom, where I had emptied half a cup of water into the tub; there would be just enough left to appear as if the spout had developed a leak. I heard him open the curtain and then turn the taps on and off, quickly.

As he did this, I remained in my seat, sitting straight, as Grandfather had taught me, waiting for him to return. When he did, he was frowning. “When did you notice this?” he asked me.

“Tonight, when I came home,” I said. He sighed. “I asked the zone super to tell someone from building management to come inspect it,” I said, and he looked at me. “But they can’t come until tomorrow at 19:00,” I continued, and he looked at the wall and sighed again, a big sigh, one that made his shoulders rise and fall. “I know it’s your free night,” I said, and I must have sounded scared, because my husband looked at me and gave me a small smile.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll come home first, to be with you, and I’ll go to my free night after.”

“Okay,” I said. “Thank you.” Later, I would realize that he could have just said that he would take his free night on Friday instead. And then, later still, I would realize that the fact that he wanted to take his free night as usual meant that someone—the someone who’d sent those notes—was probably waiting for him on Thursdays, and that now he would have to find a way to tell this person that he would be late. But I knew that he would wait until the inspector came—our water consumption was monitored every month, and if you went over your allotment, you had to pay a penalty and it would be noted on your civilian records.

That Thursday, I told Dr. Morgan that I had a leak in my shower and I needed permission to go home early, which was granted. Then I took the 17:00 shuttle home, so by the time my husband got home—at 18:57, as he always does—I was making dinner. “Am I too late?” he asked.

“No,” I said, “he hasn’t come.”

I had made an extra nutria patty, just in case, and extra yams and spinach as well, but when I asked my husband if he wanted to eat something as we waited, he shook his head. “But you should eat it now, while it’s hot,” he said. Nutria meat congealed unless you ate it right off the stove.

So I did, sitting down at the table and moving the pieces around with my fork. My husband sat at the table, too, and opened his book. “Are you sure you’re not hungry?” I asked, but he shook his head again. “No, thank you,” he said.

We sat in silence for a while. He shifted in his seat. We never talked much over dinner, but at least we were doing an activity together when we sat down to eat. But now it was like we were in two glass boxes that had been placed next to each other, and although other people could see us, we couldn’t see or hear anything outside our own boxes, and had no idea of how close we were to each other.

He shifted in his seat again. He turned the page and then turned it back, rereading what he’d already looked at. He looked up at the clock, and so did I. It was 19:14. “Damnit,” he said. “I wonder where he is?” He looked at me. “There hadn’t been a note, had there?”

“No,” I said, and he shook his head and looked down at his book again.

Five minutes later, he looked up. “What time was he supposed to be here?” he asked.

“Nineteen hundred,” I said, and he shook his head once more.

A few minutes later, he closed his book entirely, and we both sat there, staring at the clock, its blank, round face.

Suddenly my husband stood. “I have to go,” he said, “I have to leave.” It was 19:33. “I—I have to be somewhere. I’m already late.” He looked at me. “Cobra—if he comes, can you handle this on your own?”

I knew that he wanted me to be able to handle things on my own, and all at once I felt scared, as if I really were facing the prospect of talking to the building manager by myself, without my husband here; it was almost like I had forgotten that the manager wasn’t coming at all, that this entire incident was something I’d invented in order to do something that should have been much scarier: following my husband on his free night.

“Yes,” I said. “I can handle it.”

He smiled then, one of his rare smiles. “You’re going to be fine,” he said. “You’ve met the manager before; he’s a nice man. And I’ll come home early tonight, while you’re still awake, all right?”

“All right,” I agreed.

“Don’t be nervous,” he said. “You know how to do this.” This was something that Grandfather used to say to me as well: You know how to do this, little cat. There’s nothing to be afraid of. And then he took his anorak from the hook. “Good night,” he said, as the door closed.

“Good night,” I said to the closed door.

I waited just twenty seconds after my husband closed the door before I too left the apartment. I had already packed a bag with some things I thought I might need, including one of the small flashlights, and a notebook and pencil, and a thermos of water in case I got thirsty, and my anorak in case I got cold, though that was unlikely.

Outside, it was dark and warm, but not hot, and there were more people than usual, walking around the Square, walking home from the store. I spotted my husband immediately: He was heading briskly north on Fifth Avenue, and I followed him as he turned west on Ninth Street. It was the same route we both took every morning, at separate times, to the shuttle stop, and for a second, I wondered whether he was going to wait for the shuttle again and go back up to work. But he kept walking, crossing Sixth Avenue and through the area we called Little Eight, for its complex of high-rise apartment towers that made it feel like its own zone within Zone Eight, and then across Seventh Avenue as well, and still he kept going.

This was much farther west than I typically had reason to go. Zone Eight extended from New First Street at its southernmost point to Twenty-third Street in its north, and from Broadway on its east over to Eighth Avenue, and the river, on its west. Technically, the zone had extended farther still, but ten years ago, most of the territory beyond Eighth Avenue had been flooded during the last great storm, which meant that the people who had chosen to remain in river flats were residents of Zone Eight as well. But with every year, more and more of them were relocated, because strange things were being discovered in the river, and it was unclear how safe it was to live there.

Zone Eight was Zone Eight, and there was meant to be no hierarchy within it, no area that was considered better than any other. That was what the state told us. But if you lived in Zone Eight, you knew that there were in fact places—like where my husband and I lived—that were more desirable than others. There were no grocery stores west of Sixth Avenue, for example, or washing or hygiene centers except for the one that was only accessible to people who lived in Little Eight, which also maintained something called a Pantry, where you could buy nonperishable items, like grains and powdered food, but nothing that would spoil.

As I have said, Zone Eight was one of the safest districts on the island, if not in the entire municipality. Still, there were rumors about what happened near the river, just as there were rumors about what happened in Zone Seventeen, which ran along Zone Eight’s north and south axes but then extended all the way to the riverbanks on First Avenue, on the eastern shore. One rumor is that the far western part of Zone Eight was haunted. I had asked Grandfather about that once, and he had taken me over to Eighth Avenue to show me that there were no ghosts there. He said that story had begun before I was born, when there had been a series of underground tunnels that ran beneath the streets, and had extended all the way to the relocation centers, although back then they weren’t centers, they were districts, like Zone Eight, where people lived and worked. Then, after the pandemic of ’70, they were closed, and people began telling stories that the state had used these tunnels as isolation centers for the affected, who by that point numbered in the hundreds of thousands, and then had sealed them up with cement, and everyone in them had died.

“Is that true?” I asked Grandfather. We were standing near the river by then, and speaking very softly, for it was treasonous to even discuss this. I always felt scared when Grandfather and I talked about illegal topics, but also good, because I knew that he knew that I could keep secrets, and that I would never betray him.

“No,” Grandfather said. “Those stories are apocryphal.”

“What does that mean?” I asked him.

“It means untrue,” he said.

I thought about this. “If it’s not true, why do people tell them?” I asked him, and he looked away, into the distance, to the factories on the other side of the river.

“Sometimes, when people tell stories like that, what they’re really trying to express is their fear, or their anger. The state did a lot of horrible things back then,” he said, slowly, and I felt that same thrill, hearing someone talking about the state that way, and that that someone was my grandfather. “Many horrible things,” he repeated, after a pause. “But that was not one of them.” He looked at me. “Do you believe me?”

“Yes,” I said. “I believe everything you say, Grandfather.”

He looked away from me again, and I worried I had said something wrong, but he only put his palm on the back of my head, and said nothing.

What remained true is that the tunnels had been sealed up long ago, and it was said that if you went close to the river late at night, you would hear the sobs and moans of the people who had been left to die within them.

The other thing that people said about the far western edge of Zone Eight is that there were buildings there that looked like buildings, but in which nobody lived. It took me a few years of eavesdropping on the Ph.D.s to understand what they meant by that.

Much of Zone Eight had been built centuries ago, in the eighteen hundreds and early nineteen hundreds, but a good deal of it had been demolished shortly before I was born and replaced with towers, which had doubled as clinics. Before then, the population had been very high, and people came to the municipality from all over the world. But then the illness of ’50 had stopped almost all immigration, and then the illnesses of ’56 and ’70 had solved the problem of overcrowding, which meant that, while Zone Eight was still a high-density district, no one lived here illegally now. However, some of the zone’s original buildings had been spared, especially those close to Fifth Avenue and the Square, and those close to Eighth Avenue. Here, the buildings resembled the one my husband and I lived in; they were made from red brick and were rarely more than four stories high. Some of them were even smaller, and held only four units.

According to the Ph.D.s whose conversations I listened to, there were a few of these buildings close to the river that had once been divided into apartments, the same as our building, but had over the years become places where nobody lived. Instead, you went to these buildings to—well, I did not know what you went to the buildings to do, only that it was illegal, and that when the Ph.D.s talked about them, they laughed and said things like “You’d know all about that, wouldn’t you, Foxley?” This is how I surmised that these were dangerous but also exciting places that the Ph.D.s pretended they knew about but would never actually be bold enough to visit.

By this time, I was very near the river, on a street called Bethune. When I was a child, the state had tried to relabel all the named streets with numbers instead, which mostly affected Zones Seven, Eight, Seventeen, Eighteen, and Twenty-one. But it hadn’t worked, and people continued to call them by their twentieth-century names. All this time, my husband hadn’t looked behind him once. It had grown very dark, and I was lucky he was wearing a light-gray anorak, one I could easily follow. He had clearly walked this route many times before—at one point, he abruptly stepped down from the sidewalk to the street, and when I looked at the sidewalk, I saw there was an enormous gouge in it, and he had known to avoid it.

Bethune was one of the streets people thought was haunted, even though it wasn’t near one of the former entrances to the underground tunnels. But it still had all its trees, even though they were mostly bare, and I suppose that was what made it look so old-fashioned and gloomy. It was also one of the streets that hadn’t been flooded, and therefore extended all the way west to Washington Street. Here, my husband walked to the middle of the block and then he stopped, and looked about him.

There was no one on the street but me, and I quickly moved behind one of the trees. I wasn’t concerned about him seeing me: I was wearing black clothes and black shoes, and my skin is fairly dark—I knew I wouldn’t be visible. In fact, my husband’s coloring is similar to mine, and it was by that point so dark that, had I not known to look for his anorak, I might not have seen him myself.

“Hello?” my husband called. “Is anyone there?”

I know this will sound foolish, but in that moment, I wanted to respond. “I’m here,” I would have said, and stepped onto the sidewalk. “I just want to know where you go,” I would have said. “I want to be with you.” But I couldn’t think of what he would say in response.

So I said nothing, just hid behind the tree. But I did think of how calm my husband sounded, how calm and how determined.

Then he was moving again, and I came out from behind the tree and followed him, this time with a little more distance between us. Finally, he reached number 27, one of the final houses on the block, an old-fashioned building somewhat like the one we lived in, and he looked around again before climbing the stone steps and rapping a complicated knock on the door: tap-ta-taptap-tap-tap-tap-ta-tap-taptap. Then a little window slid open in the door, and my husband’s face was illuminated by a rectangle of light. Someone must have asked him something, because he said something back, something I couldn’t hear, and then the window shut and the door opened just wide enough for my husband to slip inside. “You’re late tonight,” I heard someone, a man, say before the door closed once more.

And then he was gone. I stood outside the building, staring up at it. From the street, it looked unoccupied. There was no light, there was no sound. After I had waited five minutes, I climbed the steps myself and pressed my ear against the door, which was covered in peeling black paint. I listened and listened. But there was nothing. It was as if my husband had disappeared—not into a house but into another world altogether.

It wasn’t until the next day, when I was back in the safety of my room at the lab, that I comprehended fully the riskiness of the previous night’s activities. What if my husband had seen me? What if someone had seen me following him and had suspected me of illegal activities?

But then I had to remind myself that my husband had not seen me. No one had seen me. And if by chance I had been recorded by some stray Fly that was patrolling the area, I would simply tell the police that my husband had forgotten his glasses when he went on his nightly walk, and that I was taking them to him.

After I returned to the apartment, I had gone to bed early, so that when my husband came home I was already pretending to be asleep. I had left him a note in the bathroom saying that the leak had been fixed, and I heard him push back the curtain to examine the showerhead. I couldn’t tell if he had in fact returned earlier than he normally did, as there was no clock in the bedroom. I could tell he thought I was asleep, because he was very quiet, undressing and dressing in the dark.

I had been so distracted that day that it took me some time to realize that there was something amiss in the lab, and it was only when I brought over a fresh batch of pinkies to the Ph.D. cluster that I noticed that the reason they were so quiet was that they all had their headsets on and were all listening to the radio.

There were two radios in the lab. One was a normal radio, of the sort everyone had. The second was a radio that only broadcast to sanctioned research facilities around the world, so that different scientists could announce any pertinent findings and give lectures or updates. Typically, of course, such research would be shared in papers that could only be accessed by accredited scientists on highly secure computers. But when there was something urgent, it would be shared on this special radio, which broadcast a soundscreen of noise atop the person speaking; this meant that, unless you had the proper headphones to cancel the soundscreen, you would hear only a randomized, meaningless sound, like crickets chirping or a fire burning. Each person who was authorized to listen to this radio had a sequence of numbers that they had to enter first, and each sequence was registered to a different user, so the state could monitor who was listening at any time. The headphones, too, were only activated once you entered your code, and before leaving the lab for the night, the scientists locked their sets in a safe that was arranged as a series of small boxes; they each had to enter another code for their box door to open.

Now everyone was silent, frowning and listening to the radio. I placed the tray of petri dishes with the new pinkies on the side of the counter, and one of the Ph.D.s flapped his hand at me, impatiently, signaling me to go away; the rest didn’t even look up from their notepads, where they were scribbling words, stopping and pausing to listen, and then writing more.

I went back to the room with my mice and watched the scientists through the window. The entire lab had gone still. Even Dr. Wesley, shut in his office, was listening, frowning at his computer.

After twenty or so minutes, the broadcast must have ended, because everyone yanked off their headsets and then hurried into Dr. Wesley’s office—even the Ph.D. students, who were normally excluded from such meetings. As I saw them turn off the radio, I went over to the Ph.D.s’ area and began stacking empty petri dishes on a tray, which wasn’t my job. But as I did, I heard one of them say to another, “Do you think it’s true?” and the other reply, “Fuck, I hope not.”

Then they were in the office, and I couldn’t hear anything more. But I could see Dr. Wesley speaking, and the rest of them nodding, and everyone looking very grave. I was scared then, because normally when something bad happened—when, say, a new virus got discovered—the scientists weren’t scared but excited.

But now they were frightened, and serious, and when I went to the bathroom on my break, I passed the other labs on the floor, and in those, too, the only people I saw were the techs and support staff moving around, cleaning and organizing like we always did, because the scientists were all gathered in their respective principal investigators’ offices, talking among themselves with the doors closed.

I waited and waited, but everyone remained in Dr. Wesley’s office, talking. The glass was soundproof, so I couldn’t hear. Finally, I was going to miss my shuttle and so I had to leave, though I wrote a note to Dr. Morgan explaining that I’d gone, and placed it on his desk, just in case he was looking for me.

It took me another week to discover some of what the scientists had overheard on the radio, and the intervening days were very strange ones. Normally, I’m able to find out information fairly quickly. The scientists are discouraged from gossiping and speculating out loud, but they all do so anyway, albeit in whispers. Besides their lack of discretion, however, the other thing that benefits me is that they rarely seem to notice when I’m around. Sometimes, that bothers me. But most of the time, I can use it to my advantage.

I have learned many things simply by listening. I learned, for instance, that Roosevelt Island, in the East River, was one of the city’s first relocation centers, during the ’50 pandemic, and later a prison camp, and finally, after it had become overrun with rodents carrying an infection, the state had moved the camp to Governor’s Island, in the south, which had previously been a refugee camp, and had scattered thousands of poisoned food pellets that killed all the rodents, and no one had been to Roosevelt Island since except the crematorium workers. I learned that Dr. Wesley regularly traveled to the Western Colonies, where the state had built a large research facility where they kept an underground vault storing a sample of every known microbe in the world. I learned that the state was predicting a severe drought in the next five years, and that there was a team of scientists elsewhere in the country who were trying to figure out how to generate rain on a mass scale.

Aside from all of that information, I learned other things from eavesdropping on the Ph.D.s as well. Most of them were married, and sometimes they discussed romance, things that had happened with their husbands or wives. But here, they often spoke in silences, not details. They said things like “You know what happened next,” and the other person would say, “I do,” and I sometimes felt like saying, “What happened next? What are you talking about?” Because I didn’t know, and I wanted to know. Though of course I knew not to ask.

But in the week after the radio conference, they were all unusually quiet, quiet and serious, and everyone was working much harder, though what they were working on exactly I couldn’t say, and I wouldn’t have understood besides. I just knew that there was something different about their behavior, and that something in the lab had changed.

Before I was to discover what that was, however, I followed my husband again. I don’t know why. I suppose I wanted to know if that was what he did every Thursday, because then it would at least be something else I knew about him.

This time, I went directly from the shuttle stop to the far west end of Bethune Street, and waited. There was a house right across from the one my husband had entered, and, like all the houses that had been built back then, it had a main entrance, which was up a flight of stairs, and a second entrance that was hidden beneath the stairs. Grandfather had told me that in the old days, this door would have been protected by an iron gate, but the gate had been removed long ago to be smelted for military use, which meant I was able to stand just beneath the stairway and have a good view of the opposite side of the street.

There hadn’t been much traffic that day, so I was in my hiding place by 18:42. I looked at the house, which was as abandoned-looking as it had been the previous Thursday. It was already dark, it being January, but not as dark as it had been the previous week, and I could see that the windows had been covered with black paper or black paint, something that obscured views both in and out. I could also see that, although the building was shabby, it was in decent structural repair: the staircase was old, but except for a missing piece of stone in the second step, the rest of it was solid. The compost compactor was neat and clean, and there were no gnats buzzing overhead.

Three minutes or so later, I saw someone coming west down the street, and I withdrew beneath the staircase, thinking it was my husband. But it wasn’t. It was a man around my husband’s and my age, but white, and wearing a button-down shirt and a pair of lightweight pants. He was walking briskly, as my husband had, and when he reached the house opposite me, he climbed the steps without checking the number first, and tapped the same rhythmic knock that my husband had the previous week. Then the same thing happened: the window sliding open, the rectangle of light, the question and answer, the door opening just enough to let the man inside.

For a while, I couldn’t believe I’d actually seen this all happen. It was as if I’d willed it into existence. I had been so busy watching the event of the man’s arrival that I hadn’t even registered any useful details about him. “With every person you see, you should try to notice five things,” Grandfather would say when I was struggling to describe someone. “What race are they? Are they tall or short? Are they fat or thin? Do they move quickly or slowly? Do they look down or straight ahead? These will tell you a lot of what you need to know about them.”

“How?” I had asked. I hadn’t understood.

“Well, for example, let’s say they’re hurrying down the street or through the halls,” Grandfather said. “Are they looking behind them? Maybe they’re running from something, or someone. So that would tell you that they’re frightened, maybe. Or maybe they’re muttering to themselves, and checking their watch, which would let you know that they’re late to something. Or let’s say they’re walking slowly, and looking down at the ground as they do. That might tell you that they’re deep in thought, or that they’re just daydreaming. But in either case, you’ll know that their attention is elsewhere, and that they should—depending on the context—perhaps not be bothered. Or maybe that they need to be bothered, that you need to alert them to something that’s about to happen.”

Recalling this, I tried to describe the man to myself. He was white, as I have said, and he had been moving quickly, but not looking behind him. He had walked like the postdocs walked through the halls of the lab: looking neither left nor right, and never behind themselves. Other than that, the man was difficult to analyze. He was neither fat nor thin, young nor old, tall nor short. He was just a man on Bethune Street who had entered the house my husband had entered last week.

As I was thinking this, I heard another set of footsteps, and when I looked up, I saw that it was my husband. Once again, it was as if I had dreamed him into being, as if he wasn’t quite real. He was carrying his nylon bag and was wearing his street clothes, which meant he would have changed out of his jumpsuit at the Farm. This time, he didn’t look around him, didn’t suspect he was being watched; he climbed the stairs and knocked on the door and was admitted.

And then everything was quiet. I waited for another twenty minutes to see if someone else might come, but no one else did, and finally, I turned and walked home. On the way, I passed a few other people—a woman, walking by herself; two men, who were discussing electrical repairs they’d made in one of the schools; a single man with bristly dark eyebrows—and with each of them, I wondered: Were they too going to the house on Bethune Street? Would they be climbing those stairs, knocking on that door, saying some secret code, and being allowed inside? And once inside, what would they do? What did they talk about? Did they know my husband? Was one of them the person who had been sending him those notes?

How long had he been going there?

Once I was back in our apartment, I opened the box in the closet again and looked at the notes. I thought there might be a new one, but there wasn’t. As I was rereading them, I realized they didn’t say anything that interesting—they were just everyday words. And yet I somehow knew that they were never the sort of notes that my husband would write me or that I would write him. I knew this, but I couldn’t explain how they were different. I looked at them again, and then I put them all away and lay down on my bed. I realized that I wished I had never followed my husband, because what I had learned hadn’t helped me at all. In fact, all I had learned was that my husband was probably going to the same place on every one of his free nights, although this was just a theory, and I couldn’t prove it unless I followed him every free night from now on. But the detail that had upset me most was how, after my husband had answered the person on the other side of the door, he had laughed. I couldn’t remember the last time I had heard my husband laugh, or indeed, if I ever had—he had a nice laugh. He was in another house, laughing, and I was at home, waiting for him to return.

The next day, I went to RU, as always, where the mood in the lab was still strange, the postdocs still quiet and busy, the Ph.D.s still anxious and excited. I moved among them, distributing the new pinkies, removing the old ones, lingering near the Ph.D.s I knew were naturally talkative, the ones who liked to gossip. This time, however, there was only silence.

But I was patient, which Grandfather always said was an underrated virtue, and I knew that the Ph.D.s tended to relax around 15:00 through 15:30, when most of them took a break to drink tea. They weren’t supposed to drink tea around their work spaces, of course, but most of them did, especially as the postdocs were in another room then, having their daily meeting. And so I waited until a few minutes past 15:00 before I went to pick up the old embryos from the Ph.D.s’ area.

For a few moments, there was just the sipping of tea, which wasn’t actually tea but a nutrient-rich powder that was supposed to taste like tea and had been developed at the Farm. It always made me think of Grandfather. I was ten when tea was declared a restricted asset, but Grandfather had a small supply of smoked black tea that he had saved, and for a year, we drank that. He would measure it so carefully—just a few shreds of it per pot—but the leaves were so powerful that that was all you needed. After we finally ran out, he got the powder, but he never drank it himself.

Then, though, one of the Ph.D.s said, “Do you think it’s true?”

“They’re acting like it,” said another.

“Yeah, but how do we know this isn’t just another false positive?” asked a third.

“The genomic sequencing is different here,” said a fourth, and then the conversation became too technical for me to follow, though I stayed and listened anyway. I couldn’t comprehend much, but what I did understand was that there had been another new disease diagnosed, and that it was very bad, potentially disastrous.

New diseases were often being discovered at RU, and not just at RU but in other laboratories around the world as well. Every Monday, Beijing would send the principal investigators at every accredited research organization a status report listing the previous week’s tally of fatalities and new diagnoses of the three to five most severe ongoing pandemics, as well as new developments they were tracking. The tallies were broken down by continent, and then by country, and then, if need be, by prefecture and municipality. Then, every Friday, Beijing would compile and send out the latest research findings—whether clinical or epidemiological—reported by the member nations. The goal, Dr. Wesley once said, was not to eradicate the diseases, because that would be impossible—it was to contain them, preferably within the regions where they were discovered. “Epidemics, not pandemics,” Dr. Wesley said. “Our goal is to discover them before they disseminate.”

I have worked at RU, and in Dr. Wesley’s lab, for seven years, and at least once a year there was at least one scare, when there was an emergency radio announcement, as there had been the week before, and everyone in the institute grew frightened and excited, because it seemed that we were at risk of experiencing the next great pandemic, one as bad as the illnesses of ’56 and ’70, both of which Dr. Wesley said had “remapped the world.” But in the end, every one of those threats had been contained. In fact, none of them had even affected the island; there had been no quarantine or isolation mobilization, no special bulletins, no coordination with the National Pharmacology Unit. Still, the pattern was to remain alert in the first thirty days after the discovery of a new disease, because that was the typical incubation period of most of these illnesses—even though, as everyone would admit in private, just because that had been the pattern of these diseases, it didn’t mean that the successive diseases would behave the same way. That was why what the scientists in our lab did was so important—they tried to predict the next mutation, the next illness that would endanger us all.

I know this will be a surprising thing to hear, but many scientists can be very superstitious. I say this because, over the last few years, the alarm about these reports has grown; I think everyone believes that the upcoming plague—whatever it will be—is overdue. There had been fourteen years between the illness of ’56 and the illness of ’70; now it was ’94, and nothing catastrophic had happened. Of course, as Dr. Morgan likes to say, we are in a much better position now than they were in ’70, and this is true. Our labs are more sophisticated; there’s more scientific cooperation. It’s much more difficult to spread misinformation and therefore breed panic; you can’t just get on a plane and unknowingly infect people in other countries; you can’t just share your theories of whatever’s happening on the internet with whomever you want, whenever you want; there are systems in place to segregate and humanely treat the affected. So things are better.

I was not superstitious. I may not have been a scientist, but I knew that things don’t happen according to patterns, even if it may look like it. This is why I was confident that this was just another minor incident, just as the others had been, one that would excite for a few weeks longer and then vanish, another disease not even worthy of a name.

Every Lunar New Year, there was a limited amount of pig meat available at the grocery. Typically, the National Nutritional Unit would know by December how much pig they would be able to make available for chosen zones, and by the end of the month, a sign would go up in the grocery telling you how many half-kilo portions would be available, and how many extra protein coupons you would need to spend to purchase them. Then you had to sign up for the lottery, which was drawn on the last Sunday of January, unless the New Year came early, in which case the lottery was drawn ten days before the holiday, so you would have plenty of time to rearrange your plans if you didn’t win.

I had only won the pig lottery once, the second year my husband and I were married. After that, there had been bad weather in the prefectures and colonies where the pigs were grown, and there had been very little meat. But 2093 had been a good year, with no significant climatic events, and well-controlled outbreaks, and I was hopeful that this time, we would have pig for the holiday.

I was very excited when my number was among the chosen. It had been a long time since I had had pig, and I loved the taste of it—my husband liked it, too. I had been worried that the New Year celebration would fall on a Thursday, as it had two years ago, and I would be alone, but instead it was on a Monday, and my husband and I spent the day cooking. This is something that—two years ago aside—we had done every lunar holiday since we got married, and because of that, it was the day I looked forward to most.

I had been very smart about saving our coupons for the past four months so we could have a real feast, and along with the pig, I had also accumulated enough coupons so we could make dough: Half of the dough would be set aside for dumplings, and the other for an orange-flavored loaf. But mostly, I was excited about the pig. Every year or so, the state tried to introduce a new substitute for pig and other kinds of animal meat, and while some were very successful, the pig- and cow-protein replacements never were. There was something wrong with the flavor, no matter how hard they tried. Eventually, though, they would stop trying, because those of us who still remembered what cow and pig tasted like would forget, and at some point, there would be children born who would never know in the first place.

We spent the morning cooking, and then ate an early dinner at 16:00. There was enough food so that we were each able to have eight dumplings, as well as rice and mustard greens my husband had stewed in some sesame oil that we had saved up to buy, and we each had a slice of cake. This was the one day every year when conversation with my husband was easy, because we were able to talk about the food. Sometimes, we even talked about food we had eaten when we were young, between the periods of severe rationing, but that was always dangerous, because it made you start thinking about a lot of other things from when you were young.

Now my husband said, “My father used to make the best shredded pig.” It didn’t seem like I needed to reply, because it was a statement, not a question, and, indeed, he continued speaking. “We had it at least twice a year, even after the rationing, and he would slow-cook it for hours, and you only needed to touch it with your fork and it would fall apart on the plate. We’d have it with runner beans and macaroni, and if there were leftovers, my mother would make it into sandwiches. My sister and I used to—” And then he stopped talking abruptly, and put down his chopsticks, and looked at the wall for a moment before picking them up again. “Anyway,” he said, “I’m glad we were able to have this tonight.”

“As am I,” I said.

That night, as we lay in our beds, I wondered what my husband had been like before we met. I thought about this more the longer we were married, especially as I didn’t know that much about him. I knew that he was from Prefecture One, and that both of his parents had been professors at a big university, and that at some point both of them had been arrested and taken to rehabilitative camps, and that he had an older sister, who had also been removed to the camps, and that because his immediate family members had been declared enemies of the state, he had been expelled from the university where he had been a graduate student. We both had been officially forgiven under the 2087 Forgiveness Act and given good jobs, but we would never be allowed to reenroll in a university. Unlike my husband, I had no desire to return—I was satisfied being a lab tech. But my husband had wanted to be a scientist, and yet he never would. Grandfather had told me this. “I can only do so much, little cat,” he had said, but he never explained what he meant by that.

After Lunar New Year came Honor Day, which was always on a Friday. The state had instituted it in ’71. All businesses and institutes were closed on that day, and you were supposed to spend it quietly, thinking of people who had died, not just in ’70 but from any of the illnesses. The motto for Honor Day was “Not all who died were innocent, but all who died are forgiven.”

Couples usually spent Honor Day together, but my husband and I did not. He went to the center, where the state sponsored a concert of orchestral music, and lectures about grieving, and I took a walk around the Square. But now I wondered if he had in fact gone to Bethune Street.

Mostly, though, I thought of Grandfather, who had not died of an illness but was dead nonetheless. We had spent every Honor Day together, and Grandfather would show me pictures of my father, who had died in ’66, when I was two. He hadn’t died of disease, either, but it wasn’t until later that I learned that. That was also when my other grandfather had died—they had died at the same time, in the same place. It was this other grandfather to whom I was genetically related, although I can’t say I missed him, because I didn’t remember him at all. But Grandfather always said that he had loved me very much, and I liked hearing that, even though I didn’t remember him.

I can remember almost nothing of my father as well, because I have only a few memories of my life before the illness. Sometimes I had the sense that I had been a different person altogether, someone who didn’t have such a difficult time understanding other people and what they were really trying to say beneath the thing they were actually saying. One time, I asked Grandfather if he had liked me more before I got sick, and he turned his head away for a moment and then grabbed me and held me to him, even though he knew I didn’t like that. “No,” Grandfather said, in a funny, smothered voice, “I have always loved you just the same since the day you were born. I wouldn’t want my little cat any other way,” which was nice to hear and made me feel good, like I did when it was cool enough outside to wear long sleeves and I could walk and walk and never get overheated.

But one of the reasons I suspected that I might have been different was because, in the most vivid memory I have of my father, he is laughing and twirling a little girl around by her hands, spinning her so fast that she is soaring, her feet sweeping through the air. The little girl is wearing a pale-pink dress and has a black ponytail that sails behind her, and she is laughing, too. One of the only things I remember about being sick is this image, and after I got better, I had asked Grandfather who that little girl was, and he got a strange expression on his face. “That was you, little cat,” he said. “You and your father. He would spin you around like that until you both got dizzy.” At the time, I had thought this was impossible, because I was bald and couldn’t imagine having so much hair. But then, as I got older, I thought: Suppose that was me, with all that hair? What else had I had that I couldn’t remember? I thought of the little girl laughing, her mouth wide open, her father laughing with her. I could never make anyone laugh, not even Grandfather, and no one could make me laugh. But once I had. It was like being told I had once known how to fly.

Grandfather had always said that Honor Day was to honor me, because I had lived. “You have two birthdays in one year, little cat,” he said. “The day you were born, and the day you came back to me.” This is why I always thought of Honor Day as my day, though I would never say that aloud, because I knew it was selfish and, moreover, was impolite, because it disregarded all those who had died. The other thing I would never say aloud was that I had liked to hear Grandfather tell me about when I was sick; how I had lain in a hospital bed for months, and for weeks my fever had been so high that I couldn’t even talk; how almost all of my fellow patients on the ward had died; how I had one day opened my eyes and asked for Grandfather. I felt cozy hearing those stories, hearing Grandfather say how worried he had been, how he had sat by my bed every night, how he had read to me every day, how he had described to me the kinds of cakes he would get for me if I got better, cakes made with real strawberries swirled into the batter, or topped with sheets of chocolate that had been stamped to look like tree bark, or sprinkled with toasted sesame seeds. Grandfather said I had loved all sweets, especially cake, when I was a little girl, but after the illness, I had lost most of my taste for them, which was just as well, since by that point sugar had also been declared a restricted asset.

Since Grandfather had died, however, no one remembered that I had once been sick, or that someone had wanted me to get better so badly that he had come to visit me every night.

That year, Honor Day was particularly lonely. The building was silent. The day after the lunar holiday, our next-door neighbors had been taken in a raid, and although they had never been loud, it turned out that they had made more noise than I had thought, because our apartment was deeply quiet without them next to us. The day before, I had checked the envelope that contained my husband’s notes, and had found a new one, written in the same hand, on another scrap of paper. “I’ll wait for you,” it said, and that was it.

I wished, as I often did, that Grandfather were alive, or that I at least had a recent picture of him, something I could look at and talk to. But I didn’t, and I never would, and thinking about that made me so upset that I got up and began pacing, and suddenly the apartment seemed so small that I was unable to breathe, and I took my keys and ran downstairs and out onto the street.

Outside, the Square was as busy as always, as if it wasn’t actually Honor Day, and I joined the group of people who walked around and around it, feeling myself becoming calmer as I did. I felt less alone being with them, even though the reason we were all together was because we were all alone.

I used to come to the Square with Grandfather when he was alive. Back then, there had been a cluster of storytellers who would congregate in the northeastern corner of the Square, which had been Grandfather’s favorite place to come read outdoors when he had been younger. He once told me a story about how he had been sitting on one of the wooden benches that had then snaked all along the Square, and had been eating a pig-and-egg sandwich when a squirrel leapt on his shoulder and grabbed the sandwich out of his hands and ran away with it.

I had been able to tell from Grandfather’s expression that this was a funny story, and yet I hadn’t found it funny. He had looked at me and had added, quickly, “This was before,” meaning before the epidemic of ’52, which had originated in squirrels before being transferred to humans, and had resulted in the eradication of all North American squirrels.

Anyway, when Grandfather and I had gone to the Square, it mostly had been to listen to the storytellers. They usually assembled on weekends and on occasional weekday evenings, so people could come hear them after work, and they worked in what Grandfather called a guild, meaning that they split their earnings among themselves, and arranged their own schedules so that there would never be more than three there at the same time. You came at a certain hour—say, 19:00 on the weekdays and 16:00 on the weekends—and paid either in chits or in coins. You paid in half-hour increments, so every thirty minutes, one of the storytellers’ helpers went around the audience with a bucket, and if you wanted to stay for longer, you gave him more payment, and if you wanted to leave, you left.

Different storytellers told different kinds of stories. You went to one person if you liked romances, and another if you liked fables, and another if you liked stories about animals, and another if you liked history. The storytellers were considered gray vendors. This meant that they were licensed by the state, same as the carpenters and plastic makers, but they were also much more heavily monitored. All of their stories had to be submitted to the Information Unit for approval, but there were always Flies at their sessions, and certain storytellers were known to be more dangerous than others. I remember once going to a session with Grandfather, and when he saw who the storyteller was, he had gasped. “What is it?” I had asked. “The storyteller,” he whispered in my ear. “When I was young, he was a very famous writer. I can’t believe he’s still alive.” He had looked up at the man, who was old and had a limp and was settling onto his stool; we took our places on the ground around him, sitting on pieces of cloth or plastic bags we had brought from home. “I barely recognize him,” Grandfather murmured, and, indeed, there was something wrong with the storyteller’s face, as if the entire left-hand side of his jaw had been removed; every few sentences, he brought a handkerchief to his mouth and blotted at the saliva that was dribbling down his chin. But once I got used to his speech, the story he told—about a man who had lived here, on this very island, on this very Square, two hundred years ago, and who had forsaken great riches from his family to follow the person he loved all the way to California, a person who his family was certain would betray him—was so absorbing that I even stopped hearing the drone of the Flies that hovered above us, so absorbing that even the money collectors forgot to circulate, and it wasn’t until an entire hour had passed that the storyteller had sat back and said, “And next week, I’ll tell you what happened to the man,” and everyone, even Grandfather, had groaned with disappointment.

The next week, a large group of us were waiting for the storyteller to reappear, and we waited and waited, until, finally, another of the storytellers came over and said that she was very sorry to report that her colleague was suffering from a terrible migraine, and that he wouldn’t be coming to the Square today.

“Will he be back next week?” someone called out.

“I don’t know,” the woman admitted, and even I could tell she was scared, and worried. “But we have three other excellent storytellers here with us today, and you’re all welcome to come listen to them.”

About half the crowd did join the circles of those other storytellers, but the rest of us, including Grandfather and I, did not. Instead, we walked away, Grandfather looking at the ground, and when we reached our home, he went into the bedroom and lay down facing the wall, which he did when he wanted privacy, and I stayed in the other room and listened to the radio.

For the next few weeks, Grandfather and I went back again and again to the Square, but the storyteller, the one who had been a famous writer, never appeared again. The strange thing was how upset Grandfather had been; after every trip to the Square, he would walk more slowly than usual back home.

Finally, after about a month of looking and waiting for the storyteller, I asked Grandfather what he thought had happened to him. He looked at me for a long time before he answered. “He was rehabilitated,” he said, at last. “But sometimes rehabilitations are temporary.”

I didn’t really understand what he was saying, but I somehow knew not to ask more questions. Shortly after that, the storytellers disappeared entirely, and when they finally reappeared, about eight years ago, Grandfather hadn’t wanted to go any longer, and I hadn’t wanted to go without Grandfather. But then Grandfather died, and I made myself start going, just a few times a year or so. But even all these years later, I still found myself wondering what had happened to the man who was going to California: Had he done so after all? Had his beloved been waiting for him? Was he in fact betrayed? Or had we all been wrong: Had they been reunited and become happy? Maybe they were in California together and happy still. I knew it was foolish, because they weren’t even real people, but I thought about them often. I wanted to know what had become of them.

None of the storytellers I had seen in the years since that time with Grandfather were as good as the old man had been, but most of them were fine. And most of the stories were much happier. There was one storyteller in particular who told stories about animals who did silly things and played pranks and got into mischief, but in the end, they always apologized and everything worked out fine.

This storyteller wasn’t here today, but I recognized another I liked, who told funny stories about a married couple who were always getting into mishaps: There was one in which the husband couldn’t remember if it was his turn or his wife’s turn to do the grocery shopping, and as it was their anniversary, he didn’t want to ask her, because he didn’t want her to be disappointed, and so he went to the store and bought the tofu himself. Meanwhile, the wife also couldn’t remember if it was her turn or her husband’s to go to the store, and because it was their anniversary, she didn’t want to ask him, and so she also went to the grocery and bought some tofu. The story ended up with them both laughing over how much tofu they had bought, and making it into all kinds of delicious stews, which they ate together. Of course, this story was unrealistic: From where were they getting all these protein coupons? Wouldn’t they have fought after realizing they’d wasted so many of them? Who forgot whose turn it was to go to the store? And yet that wasn’t part of the story. The teller mimicked their voices—the man’s high and worrying, the woman’s low and dithering—and the audience laughed, not because it was true but because it was a problem that wasn’t actually a problem yet was being treated like it was.

As I crouched in the back row, I felt someone sit next to me. Not too close, but close enough so that I could feel their presence. But I didn’t look up, and they didn’t look over. This story was about the same married couple, both of whom thought they had misplaced a dairy coupon. It wasn’t as good as the tofu story, but it was good enough, and when the collectors came around, I put a coupon into the bucket so I could stay for the next half hour.

The storyteller announced there would be a short intermission, and some people brought out little tins of snacks and began to eat. I wished I had thought to bring a snack as well, but I hadn’t. But as I was thinking that, the person next to me spoke.

“Do you want one?” he asked.

I turned and saw that he was holding out a small paper bag of precracked walnuts, and I shook my head: It was unwise to take food from strangers—no one had enough food to just offer it to someone they didn’t know, and so if they did, it generally meant that something was potentially suspicious. “Thank you, though,” I said, and as I did, I looked at him and realized it was the man I had seen at the shuttle stop, the one with the long curls. I was so surprised that I just stared at him, but he didn’t seem offended, and even smiled. “I’ve seen you before,” he said, and when I still didn’t say anything, he tilted his head to one side, still smiling. “In the mornings,” he said, “at the shuttle stop.”

“Oh,” I said, as if I hadn’t recognized him immediately. “Oh, yes. Right.”

He bent over another walnut, splitting it in half with his thumb and breaking off the remaining bits of its shell in neat shards. As he did, I was able to study him; he was wearing a cap again, but I couldn’t see any hair under it, and beneath it he wore a gray nylon shirt and gray pants, of the sort my husband also wore. “Do you come to hear this storyteller often?” he asked.

It took a moment for me to realize he was talking to me, and when I did, I didn’t know what to say. No one talked to me unless they had to: the grocer, asking me if I wanted nutria or dog or tempeh; the Ph.D.s, telling me they needed more pinkies; the dispenser at the center, holding out her machine and asking for my fingerprint to confirm I’d received the correct number of coupons for the month. And yet here was this person, a stranger, asking me a question, and not only asking me but smiling, smiling like he really wanted to know the answer. The last person who had smiled at me and asked me questions was, of course, Grandfather, and, remembering that, I became very upset, and started to rock in place, just a little, but when I caught myself and looked up again, he was still looking at me, still smiling, as if I were just another person.

“Yes,” I said, but that wasn’t really true. “No,” I corrected myself. “I mean, sometimes. Sometimes I do.”

“Me too,” he replied, in that same voice, as if I were no different from anyone else, as if I were the kind of person who had conversations all the time.

Then it was my turn to say something, but I couldn’t think of anything, and once again, the man saved me. “Have you lived in Zone Eight for long?” he asked.

This should have been an easy question, but I hesitated. In truth, I had lived in Zone Eight for my entire life. When I was born, however, there were no zones; this was simply an area, and you could move all around the island as you wanted, and you could live in whatever district you preferred, assuming you had enough money to afford it. Then, when I was seven, the zones were established, but as Grandfather and I already lived in what was now called Zone Eight, it wasn’t as if we had to move, or be reassigned.

But all that seemed like too much to say, so I just said I had.

“I just moved here,” said the man, after I had forgotten to ask him if he had lived in the zone for very long. (“A good thing to remember in a conversation is reciprocity,” Grandfather had said. “That means that you should ask the person what they just asked you. So, if they say to you, ‘How are you?,’ then you should reply and then ask, ‘And how are you?’ ”) “I used to live in Zone Seventeen, but this is much nicer.” He smiled again. “I live in Little Eight,” he added.

“Oh,” I said. “Little Eight’s nice,” I said.

“It is,” he said. “I live in Building Six.”

“Oh,” I said again. Building Six was the biggest building in Little Eight, and you could only live there if you were unmarried, had worked for at least three years for one of the state projects, and were under the age of thirty-five. You had to enter a special lottery to live in Building Six, and no one lived there for longer than two years at most, because one of the benefits of living there was that the state helped arrange your marriage. This was the kind of task that had once fallen to your parents, but fewer adults had parents these days. People called it “Building Sex.”

It was unusual but not unheard-of to be transferred from Zone Seventeen into Zone Eight, and specifically into Building Six. It was more common if you were a scientist or a statistician or an engineer, someone learned, but I already knew from the jumpsuit he had been wearing at the shuttle stop that this man was a tech, maybe a higher-grade tech than I was, but still not someone with top clearance. Still, perhaps he had performed some exceptional service: For example, there were sometimes reports of how a botany tech at the Farm had quickly moved all the seedlings in his care to another laboratory when his own lab’s generator failed; or, in a more extreme case, how an animal tech had thrown himself in front of his fetus jars to save them from gunfire when his convoy was set upon by insurgents. (That person had died, but was given a posthumous promotion and commendation.)

I was wondering what the man had done to merit his move when the storyteller returned and started talking again. The new story was about the man and woman planning an anniversary present for each other. The man asked his supervisor for time off and entered the lottery for orchestra tickets. Meanwhile, the woman had also asked her supervisor for time off and had also entered a lottery, for a concert of folk music. But in their attempts to keep their plans a surprise, they had forgotten to coordinate their dates, and had gotten the tickets for the same night. In the end, though, it had all worked out, because the man’s colleague had offered to trade his own orchestra tickets for a later date, so the man and the woman got to have two celebrations, and both were pleased that their spouse had been so thoughtful.

Everyone clapped and began gathering their things, but I remained seated. I was wondering what the man in the story did on his free nights, and what the woman did on hers.

Then I heard someone speak to me. “Hey,” the person said, and I looked up, and the man with the long hair was standing next to me, holding out his hand. For a moment I was confused, and then I realized he was offering me help to stand, though I got up on my own, dusting off my pants as I did.

I was worried I had been rude to reject him, but when I looked at him again, he was still smiling. “That was nice,” he said.

“Yes,” I said.

“Are you going to come next week?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Well,” he said, shifting his bag on his shoulder, “I am.” He paused. “Maybe I’ll see you again.”

“All right,” I said.

He smiled again and turned to leave. But after he had walked a few steps, he stopped and turned back around. “I never asked you your name,” he said.

He made it sound as if this were unusual, as if everyone I met or worked with knew my name, as if it were rude or extraordinary to not know. I cannot say that other people were not asked for their names; I cannot say that it was unsafe to tell someone your name. I thought of the two young women scientists at work, and how people must ask their names all the time. I thought of my husband in the house on Bethune Street, the familiar way that the man at the door had said, “You’re late tonight,” and how, in that house, everyone would know his name. I thought of the person sending him notes, and how that person too would know his name. I thought of the postdocs and scientists and Ph.D.s at work, all of whose names I knew—they knew my name, too, though not because it was mine; they knew it because they knew what it represented, they knew that my name explained why I was there at all.

But when was the last time someone had asked me my name simply because they wanted to know? Not because they needed it for a form or for a sample or to check my records—but because they wanted something to call me, because they were curious, because someone had thought to give it to me and they wanted to know what it was.

It had been years; it had been since I met my husband seven years ago in that marriage broker’s office in Zone Nine. I had told him my name, and he had told me his, and then we had talked. One year later, we were married. Three months after that, Grandfather was dead. It felt like no one had asked me since then.

So I turned to the man in gray, who was still standing there, waiting for me to answer.

“Charlie,” I told him. “My name is Charlie.”

“I’m pleased to meet you, Charlie,” he said.