To Paradise

PART IV

Winter, forty years earlier

Dearest P, February 3, 2054

Something strange happened to me today.

It was about two p.m., and I was about to catch the eastbound crosstown bus on 96th Street when, at the last minute, I decided to walk home instead. It’s been raining for weeks, so much that the East River flooded again, and they had to sandbag the entire eastern part of campus, and this was the first clear day. Not sunny, but not rainy, and warm, almost hot.

It had been a long time since I had walked through the Park, and after a few minutes, I found myself wandering north. It occurred to me as I did that I hadn’t been to this part of the Park—the Ravine, as it’s called, which is the wildest part, a large patch of simulated nature—since I was visiting New York as a university student, and how exotic it had seemed to me back then, exotic and beautiful. It had been December, when December was still cold, and although I had seen enough of East Coast and New England foliage by then, I had still been mesmerized by how brown it had been, brown and black and chill, dazzling in its starkness. I remember I had been impressed by how noisy winter was. The fallen leaves, the fallen twigs, the thin layer of ice that had accumulated on the paths: You stepped on them and they crunched and cracked beneath you, and above you the branches rustled in the wind, and around you there was the sound of melting ice dripping onto stone. I was used to being in jungles, where the plants are silent because they never lose their moisture. Instead of shriveling, they sag, and when they fall to the ground, they become not husks but paste. A jungle is silent.

Now, of course, the Ravine looks very different. It sounds different, too. Those trees—elms, poplars, maples—are long gone, withered to death by the heat, and replaced with trees and ferns that I remember from growing up, things that still look out of place here. But they’ve done well in New York—arguably, better than I have. Around 98th Street, I walked through a large copse of green bamboo, one that stretched north for at least five blocks. It created a tunnel of cool, green-scented air, something enchanted and lovely, and for a while I stood in it, inhaling, before finally exiting around 102nd Street, near the Loch, which is a man-made river that runs from 106th to 102nd Street. That picture I sent you, years ago, of David and Nathaniel wearing those scarves you gave to us? That was taken here, on one of his school field trips. I hadn’t been there.

Anyway, it was as I was leaving the bamboo tunnel, distracted, oxygen-dizzy, that I heard a sound, a splashing, coming from the Loch to my right. I turned, expecting to see a bird, perhaps, one of the flock of flamingos that flew north last year and then never left, when I saw it: a bear. A black bear, an adult by the looks of it. He was sitting, almost humanlike, on one of the large flat rocks on the riverbed, and leaning forward, resting his weight on his left paw as, with his right, he scooped the water, letting it run through his claws. As he did, he made a low sound, a growling. He wasn’t angry, I felt, but frantic—there was something intense and focused about his searching; he looked almost like a prospector from an old Western movie panning for gold.

I stood there, unable to move, trying to remember what you were supposed to do when you encountered a bear (Make yourself big? Or make yourself small? Make noise? Or run?), but he didn’t even turn toward me. But then the wind must have changed, and he must have smelled me, for he suddenly looked up, and as I took a first, tentative step away from him, he drew himself up on his hind legs and roared.

He was going to run at me. I knew it before I knew it, and I opened my mouth too, to scream, but before I could, there was a swift popping noise and the bear tumbled backward, all seven feet of him falling into the stream with a loud splash, and I saw the water staining itself red.

Then a man was by my side, another jogging toward the bear. “That was close,” said the man nearest me. “Sir? You okay? Sir?”

He was a ranger, but I wasn’t able to speak, and he unzipped a pocket on his vest, handed me a plastic sleeve of liquid. “You’re in shock,” he said. “Drink it—there’s sugar in it.” But my fingers wouldn’t work, and he had to open it for me, and help me detach my mask so I could drink. Next to me, I heard a second gunshot, and flinched. The man spoke into his radio: “We got him, sir. Yeah. The Loch. No—one passerby. No apparent fatalities.”

Finally, I was able to speak. “That was a bear,” I said, stupidly.

“Yes, sir,” said the ranger, patiently (I saw then that he was very young). “We’ve been hunting this one for a while.”

“This one?” I asked. “So there’ve been others?”

“Six over the past twelve months or so,” he said, and then, seeing my face, “We’ve kept it quiet. No fatalities, no attacks. This was the last of a clan we’ve been tracking. He’s the alpha.”

They had to take me back through the bamboo forest to their wagon to interrogate me about my encounter, and then they let me go. “Probably best not to be in this area of the Park anymore,” said the senior ranger. “Word is, the city’s going to shut it down in a couple of months anyway. The state’s commandeered it, going to use it as some facility.”

“The whole Park?” I asked.

“Not yet,” he said, “but likely north of Ninety-sixth Street. You take care, now.”

They drove away, and I stood there on the path for a few minutes. Next to me was a bench, and I stripped off my gloves and unbuckled my mask and sat there inhaling and exhaling, smelling the air, and running my hands over the wood, which was worn smooth and glossy from years of people sitting on it and touching it. It registered that I was lucky; to be saved, of course, and that my saviors were city rangers and not soldiers, who would surely have removed me to an interrogation center for questioning, because questioning is what soldiers do. Then I got up and walked quickly toward Fifth Avenue, and from there I caught a bus the rest of the way east.

No one was in the apartment when I got home. It was only about half past three by then, but I was too jumpy to return to the lab. I texted Nathaniel and David, put my mask and gloves in the sanitizer, washed my hands and face, took a pill so I could relax, and lay down in bed. I thought of the bear, the last of his clan, about how, when he stood, I could see that, despite his size, he was skinny, gaunt even, and that his fur had fallen out in patches. It was only now, now that I was away from him, that I could understand that what had terrified me most about him was not how large he was, or the bear-ness of him, but how I had intuited his panic, the kind of panic that resulted only from extreme hunger, the kind of hunger that drove you crazy, that drove you south, along highways and through streets, into a place you knew instinctively never to go, where you would be surrounded by creatures who only meant you harm, where you would be going toward your own inevitable death. You knew that, and yet you went anyway, because hunger, stopping that hunger, is more important than self-protection; it is more important than life. I saw, again and again, his huge red mouth opened wide, his front incisor rotted away, his black eyes bright with terror.

I slept. When I woke, it was dark—I was still alone. The baby was seeing his therapist; Nathaniel would be working late. I knew I should do something useful, get up and make dinner, go down to the lobby and ask the super if he needed help changing the filter on the decontamination pod. But I didn’t. I just lay there in the dark, looking at the sky and watching night approach.

Now comes the part I’ve been avoiding.

I suppose, if you’ve read this far, you’re wondering why I was walking across the Park in the first place. And you’ve probably guessed that it relates to the baby, because everything I have done wrong seems to relate to him in some way.

As you know, this is the baby’s third school in three years, and it’s been made clear to me by the principal that this is his last chance. How can it be his last chance when he’s not even fifteen? I’d asked, and the principal, a sour little man, frowned at me. “I mean you’re out of good options,” he said, and although I wanted to punch him, I didn’t, in part because I knew he was right: This is David’s last chance. He has to make this one work.

The school is across the Park, on 94th just west of Columbus, in what was once a grand apartment building and had been purchased by the school’s founder back in the ’20s, at the height of the charter-school craze. Then it got converted into a private school for boys with “behavioral difficulties.” They have small classes, and every student gets after-school therapy if he or his parents request it. It was emphasized to me and Nathaniel many times that David was very, very lucky to be admitted, as they have many, many more applicants than the school can accommodate, more than in the school’s history in fact, and it was only because of our special connections—the RU president knows one of the trustees and wrote a letter, in part I think out of guilt that David had been expelled from the RU school, thus leading to this three-year-long shuffle—that he was there at all. (Later, I thought about the improbability of this statement: Statistically, the number of boys under the age of eighteen had decreased significantly in the last four years. So how was it that admissions had become more difficult than ever? Had they adjusted the size of the student body accordingly? That night, I asked Nathaniel what he thought about this, and he only groaned and said he was just grateful that I had known not to ask the principal that.)

Since the school year began in October—as I told you earlier, they moved it back a month after what turned out to be a localized flare-up of the virus in late August, source still unknown—the baby has been in trouble twice. The first time was for talking back to his math teacher. The second time was for skipping two of his behavioral-therapy sessions (unlike the after-school sessions, which are one-on-one and voluntary, these are conducted in small groups and are mandatory). And then, yesterday, we were called again, about a paper David had written for his English class.

“You’re going to have to go,” Nathaniel said last night, tiredly, as we read the email from the principal. He didn’t need to say it—I had had to go to the last two conferences myself as well. Another detail I didn’t mention is that the school is fiendishly expensive; after his school shut down last year, Nathaniel was finally able to find a job tutoring a set of six-year-old twins in Cobble Hill. Their parents haven’t let them out of the house since ’50, and Nathaniel and another tutor spend all day with them—it’s impossible for him to come back to the city before evening.

Upon arriving at the school, I was led to the principal’s office, where a young woman, the English teacher, was waiting as well. She was nervous, fluttery, and when I looked at her, she turned away, her hand flitting about her cheek. Later, I saw that she had tried to hide the pockmarks on her jawline with makeup, and that her wig was cheap and probably itchy, and I felt a tenderness for her, despite the fact that she had reported my son: She was a survivor.

“Dr. Griffith,” said the principal. “Thank you for coming in. We wanted to talk to you about David’s paper for English class. Do you know about this paper?”

“Yes,” I said. It had been his assignment last week: Write about a significant anniversary in your life. It can be about the first time you went somewhere or experienced something or met someone now important to you. Be creative! Just don’t write about your birthday, because that’s too easy. Five hundred words. Make sure to give your paper a title! Due next Monday.

“Did you read what he wrote?”

“Yes?” I said. But I hadn’t. I had asked David if he needed help, and he had said no, and then I had forgotten to ask what he ended up writing.

The principal looked at me. “No,” I admitted. “I know I should have, I’ve just been so busy, and my husband has a new job, and—”

He raised his hand. “I have the paper here,” he said, and handed me his screen. “Why don’t you read it now.” It wasn’t a request. (I have cleaned up the misspellings and grammatical errors within.)

“four years.” an anniversary. by david bingham-griffith

This year is the fourth anniversary of the discovery of NiVid-50, more commonly known as Lombok syndrome, and the most serious pandemic in history since AIDS in the last century. It has killed 88,895 people in New York City alone. It is also the fourth anniversary of the death of civil rights and the beginning of a fascist state spreading misinformation to people who want to believe anything they’re told by the government.

Take, for example, the common name of the disease, which supposedly originated in Lombok, an island in Indonesia. The disease is a zoonosis, which means it is a disease that began in an animal and then got transferred into the human population. Zoonoses have been increasing in incidence every year for the past eighty years, and the reason is because more and more wild land has been developed, and animals have lost their habitats and have been forced to come into closer contact with humans than they were ever meant to. In this case, the disease was in bats, which were later eaten by civet cats, and then those civet cats infected the livestock, which infected humans. The problem is that Lombok doesn’t have the land to sustain cattle, and as Muslims, they don’t eat pork. So how can the illness really have originated there? Isn’t this another case of blaming Asian countries for global diseases? We did it in ’30, and in ’35, and in ’47, and now we are doing it again.

Various governments worked quickly to try to contain the virus, while also blaming Indonesia for being dishonest, but the American government is hardly honest itself. Everyone thought this was all good, but then all immigration to America ceased, and families were torn apart, and thousands of people either drowned at sea or were turned away to die on boats. My homeland, the Kingdom of Hawai‘i, completely isolated themselves, but it didn’t make a difference, and now I can never return to the place where I was born. Here in America, martial law was declared, and large camps for sick people and desperate refugees were opened on Roosevelt and Governor’s Islands in New York, and in many other places, too. The American government needs to be overthrown.

My father is the scientist who did early work on the disease. He didn’t discover it, someone else did that, but he was the one who found out it was a mutation of an earlier diagnosed disease called a Nipah virus. My father works for Rockefeller University and is very important. He supports the quarantines, as well as the camps. He says that sometimes you just have to hold your nose and do these things. He says that a disease has no better friend than a democracy. My other father says that he

And then it ended, just there on “says that he.” I tried flicking past the screen, to see if there might be a second page, but there wasn’t. When I looked up at the principal and the teacher, they were both studying me with serious expressions.

“Well,” said the principal. “You can see the issue here. Or, rather, issues.”

But I couldn’t. “Like what?” I asked.

They both sat straighter in their chairs. “Well, for one, he had help writing this,” said the principal.

“That’s not a crime,” I said. “Anyway, how do you know? It’s not even that sophisticated.”

“No,” he admitted, “but, given David’s difficulty with writing, it’s clear he had a lot of help, help that goes beyond just proofreading or editing.” A pause, and then, with some triumph: “He already confessed, Dr. Griffith. He’s been paying a college student he met online to write his papers.”

“Then he’s been wasting his money,” I said, but neither of them answered. “It’s not even complete.”

“Dr. Griffith,” said the English teacher, in a surprisingly soft and melodic voice, “we take cheating very seriously here. But we both know that the bigger problem is that it’s not—it’s not safe for David to be writing such things.”

“Maybe not, if he were a government functionary,” I said. “But he’s not. He’s a fourteen-year-old boy whose entire extended family died before he even got to say goodbye to them, and he’s a student in a private school to which my husband and I pay a great deal of money to protect and instruct him.”

They sat up again. “I resent the implication that we’d ever—” the principal began, but the teacher stopped him, laying a hand on his arm. “Dr. Griffith, we would never turn David in,” she said, “but he needs to be careful. Do you monitor who his friends are, who he’s talking to, what he’s saying at home, what he’s doing online?”

“Of course,” I said, because I did, but as I spoke, I felt myself flushing, as if they knew that I knew that I hadn’t been watching him closely enough, and also that they knew why—I didn’t want to discover that David was drifting further from us; I didn’t want to have to face the fact of more misbehavior; I didn’t want more evidence that I didn’t understand my own son, that for years he had been becoming increasingly unknowable to me, that for years I had felt it was my fault.

I got out of there soon after with a promise to talk to David about being careful with what he said and wrote about the government, and to remind him about the anti-state language statutes that had been implemented shortly after the riots, and that we were still living under martial law.

But I didn’t talk to him. I walked through the Park, I saw the bear, I came home, I took a nap. And then, before Nathaniel or David came home, I hurriedly left for the lab, where I’m sitting at midnight and writing you this letter.

I never thought we would have lived here for almost eleven years, Peter. I never meant for David to have to spend his childhood in this city, in this country. “When we’re back home,” we always said to him, until we didn’t. And now there is no home to return to; this is home, except it has never felt like it, and still doesn’t. From my office window, I have a direct view of the crematorium they built on Roosevelt Island. The president of RU vigorously protested it—the ash clouds would, he said, drift westward toward the university—but the city built it anyway, with the argument that if everything went as planned, the crematorium would only be used for a few years. Which has turned out to be true: Three times a day for three years, we would watch black smoke trail from its chimneys, vanishing into the sky. But now the burnings have been reduced to once a month, and the skies are clear again.

Nathaniel is texting me. I’m not answering.

But the thing I keep thinking about is the final lines of David’s essay. He had written them himself—I could tell. I could see his face as he typed them out, that look of bafflement and disdain I sometimes catch him giving me. He doesn’t understand why I’ve made the decisions I’ve had to make, but he doesn’t have to—he’s a child. So why do I feel this overwhelming guilt, this sense of apology, when all I’ve done is what needed to be done in order to stop the spread of illness? “My other father says”: What? What is Nathaniel saying about me? We fought, terribly, loudly, the day I told him I had decided to work with the government on the containment measures. The baby hadn’t been there—he had been downtown, with Aubrey and Norris—but I wonder if Nathaniel said something to him; I wonder what they talked about while I was away. How was that final sentence going to end? “My other father says that my father is trying to do what’s right in order to protect us”? “My other father says that my father is doing the best that he can”?

Or was it, as I fear, something else entirely? “My other father says that my father has become someone we can’t respect”? “My other father says that my father is a bad person”? “My other father says that it’s my father’s fault we’re here, alone, with no one to save us”?

Which one, Peter? How was it going to end?

Charles

Dearest Peter, October 22, 2054

I have to start by thanking you for talking to me about David last week—you made me feel a little better. There’s more to say, but I’ll say it in another email. And we can also discuss Olivier—I have some thoughts.

I’m afraid that I don’t know any more about the reports coming out of Argentina than you do, only that they look potentially troubling. I talked to a friend at NIAID, who said that the next three weeks will be critical; if it hasn’t spread by then, we should be fine. The Argentine government, as I understand it, is being surprisingly cooperative—meek, even. They suspended all access in and out of Bariloche, but I suspect you already know this. You’re going to have to give me an update—I know a little about the epidemiological aspect of it, but my understanding is mainly limited to virology, and I doubt would be very illuminating considering what you already know.

Now some updates of my own. As I mentioned, our request for a car was finally approved, and on Sunday, one was delivered. It’s a standard-issue government model, navy-blue, very basic. But with the subway system still so hampered, it made sense—it takes Nathaniel almost two hours to get to Cobble Hill in the mornings. And I was able to make a persuasive case that I needed to make regular trips to Governor’s Island and Bethesda, and that getting a car would ultimately be cheaper than biweekly plane or train tickets.

The plan was that the car would be mostly Nathaniel’s to use, but as it happened, I was called down to NIAID on Monday (a bureaucratic check-in as part of this new cross-institutional effort, unrelated to Bariloche), so I took the car and spent the night there and drove up from Maryland on Tuesday. As I was crossing the bridge, though, I got a text from the Holsons, the family whose sons Nathaniel tutors: Nathaniel had fainted. I tried calling them, but as usual these days, there was no reception, and so I turned and sped into Brooklyn.

Nathaniel has worked for this family for more than a year, but we speak about them very little. Mr. Holson, who brokers corporate mergers, spends most of his time in the Gulf. Mrs. Holson was a corporate lawyer but quit to stay home with her sons when they were diagnosed.

The Holsons live in a beautiful brownstone, two hundred years or more old, renovated with money and taste; the steps leading to the front door had been rebuilt so that the landing could be extended and the decontamination pod could be sealed within a small stone chamber of its own, as if it had always been there—once it hissed open, so too did the front door, which was painted a glossy black. Inside, the house was dim, the blinds were all drawn, and the floors were painted the same shiny dark as the door. A woman—white, small, black-haired—approached me. She took my mask and handed it to a maid, and we bowed; she gave me a pair of latex gloves to wear. “Dr. Griffith,” she said, “I’m Frances Holson. He’s come around, but I thought I should call you anyway, have you take him home.”

“Thank you,” I said, and I followed her up the staircase, where she led me to what was clearly a spare bedroom, where Nathaniel was lying on the bed. He smiled when he saw me.

“Don’t sit up,” I said, but he already was. “What happened, Natey?”

He said he’d just had a head rush, maybe because he hadn’t eaten today, but I knew it was because he was exhausted, though I made a show of putting my hand on his forehead, feeling for fever, and then looking into his mouth and eyes for spots.

“Let’s go home,” I told him. “I have the car.”

I expected him to argue, but he didn’t. “All right,” he said. “I just want to say goodbye to the boys first.”

We walked across the landing and toward a room at the end of the hall. The door was ajar, but he tapped on it, lightly, before we entered.

Inside, two boys were sitting at a child-size table, assembling a puzzle. I knew they were seven, but they looked four. I had read the research about juvenile survivors, and these children were in some ways instantly recognizable to me: They both wore tinted glasses, even in this low light, to protect their eyes, and they were both very pale, their limbs soft and thin, their rib cages blocky and wide, their cheeks and hands pitted with scars. They had both regrown their hair, but it was thin and fine, like an infant’s, and the drugs that helped generate hair growth were also responsible for the fuzz of fur that grew across their chins and foreheads, and along the sides and backs of their necks. Each of them had a slim tracheal tube that attached to a small ventilator pack that clipped to his waistband.

Nathaniel introduced them as Ezra and Hiram, and they waved at me with their small, limp, salamander-like hands. “I’ll be back tomorrow,” he told them, and although I knew it already, I could tell from his tone that he liked these boys, that he cared about them.

“What’s wrong, Nathaniel?” asked one of them, Ezra or Hiram, in a tiny, breathy voice, and Nathaniel stroked the boy’s head, his hair lifting and floating from the static caused by Nathaniel’s gloves. “I’m just feeling a little tired,” he said.

“Do you have the sickness?” the other one asked, and Nathaniel winced, just a bit, before smiling at him. “No,” he said. “Nothing like that. I’ll be back tomorrow. I promise.”

Downstairs, Frances was waiting, and she handed us our masks, made me promise to take care of Nathaniel. “I will,” I said, and she nodded. She was pretty, but between her eyes there were two deep grooves; I wondered if she had always had them, or if she had acquired them over the past four years.

Back at our apartment, I put Nathaniel to bed and texted David to warn him to be quiet and let his father sleep, and then I went to the lab. On my way there, I thought about David, about how lucky we were that he was safe, safe and healthy. Protect him, I would say to myself, unclear whom I was addressing, as I walked to work, or washed the dishes, or showered. Protect him, protect him. Protect my son. It was irrational. But it had worked so far.

Later, while I was eating dinner at my desk, I thought about the two boys, Ezra and Hiram. It was like something out of a fairy tale: the quiet house with its gentle light, Frances Holson and Nathaniel the parents, me the skulking guest, and those elfin creatures—half human and half pharmaceuticals—whose realm it was. One of the reasons I never became a clinician is because I was never convinced that life—its saving, its extension, its return—was definitively the best outcome. In order to be a good doctor, you have to think that, you have to fundamentally believe that living is superior to dying, you have to believe that the point of life is more life. I didn’t administer therapies to those infected by NiVid-50; I didn’t have a role in developing the drugs. I didn’t think about what the survivors’ lives might be like—that wasn’t my job. But in the past few years, now that the disease has been contained, I find myself confronted with the facts of their lives almost daily. Some, like the teacher at David’s school, who was already an adult, and probably healthy, when she contracted the illness, have been able to return to a version of their lives before.

But those boys will never have a normal life. They will never be able to go outside; they will never be able to be touched by the bare hands of anyone but their mother. It’s a life; it’s their life. They’re too young to remember anything else. Though maybe the people I was pitying wasn’t them but their parents—their worried mother, their absent father. What must it have been like, to watch your children come so close to death and then, in saving them, realize that you’ve transported them to a place that you can leave but they never can? Not death, not life, but existence, their entire world in one house, your hopes of everything they’d be and see and experience buried in the backyard, never to be unearthed. How could you encourage them to dream of anything else? How could you live with the sorrow and guilt that you had condemned them to a life stripped of all that’s pleasurable: movement; touch; the sun on your face? How could you live at all?

With love, Charles

August 7, 2055

Dear P, please forgive this very rushed response, but I’m racing here (for obvious reasons). All I can say is that it certainly seems to be the case. I read the same report you did, but I also got another, this one from a colleague, and I can’t interpret the findings any other way. There’s a multi-institute team that leaves for Manila, and from there to Boracay, tomorrow. I was asked if I could go, because this new one looks very similar to the ’50 strain. But I can’t—things are so bad with David now that I just can’t do it. Not going feels like a dereliction of duty, but leaving would as well.

The only question now is what, if anything, can be done in terms of containment. I fear it’s not going to be much. I’ll keep you posted on whatever I hear, and consider this information—such as it is—not for attribution.

Love, C.

Hi dear P, October 11, 2055

This morning I had my first MuFIDRT meeting. What does MuFIDRT stand for? I’m so glad you asked. It means: Multi-Field Infectious Disease Response Team. MuFIDRT. Written out, it looks like it might be either a Victorian-era simulacrum of a woman’s genitals or a science-fiction villain’s lair. It’s pronounced Moofid-RT, if that helps, and it was apparently the best acronym a group of civil servants could come up with. (No offense.)

The goal is to try to formulate (well, reformulate) a global, cross-disciplinary response to what’s coming by assembling a group of epidemiologists, infectious disease specialists, economists, assorted civil servants from the Federal Reserve, as well as the Transportation, Education, Justice, Public Health and Human Safety, Information, Security, and Immigration Ministries, representatives from all the major pharma companies, and two psychologists, both specializing in depression and suicidal ideations: one among children, one among adults.

I’m assuming you’re at least sitting in on your equivalent group’s meetings. I also assume that your meetings are more organized, calmer, thoughtful, and less contentious than ours was. By the end of ours, we had a list of things we agreed we weren’t going to do (most of which would be illegal under the current version of the Constitution anyway), as well as a list of things whose consequences we were going to ponder based on our respective areas of expertise. The plan is for each of the member countries to try to come up with a uniform agreement.

Again, I don’t know about your group, but the biggest argument in ours concerned the isolation camps, which we’ve all tacitly agreed to call quarantine camps instead, even though it’s a deliberate misnomer. I had assumed that the split would be ideological, but to my surprise, it wasn’t; indeed, anyone who had any kind of scientific background recommended them—even the psychologists, reluctantly—and anyone who didn’t opposed them. But unlike in ’50, I don’t see how we can avoid it this time. If the predictive modeling is correct, this disease will be far more pathogenic and contagious, swifter-moving, and deadlier than its predecessor; our only hope is mass evacuation. One of the epidemiologists even suggested the preemptive removal of at-risk groups, but everyone else agreed that would cause too much of an uproar. “We can’t make this political,” said one of the suits from Justice, which was such an asinine comment—both stupidly obvious and impossible to address—that everyone just ignored him.

The meeting ended with a discussion of when to close the borders. Too early, and you panic everyone. Too late, and the measure becomes pointless. My guess is that they’ll announce by end of November at the very latest.

Speaking of which: Given what we both know, I don’t think it’s responsible of us to come visit you and Olivier. I say this with sorrow and regret. David was looking forward to it. Nathaniel was looking forward to it. And I was looking forward to it most of all. It’s been so long since we’ve seen each other, and I miss you. I know I can say this perhaps only to you, but I’m not ready to go through another pandemic. There’s no choice, obviously. One of the epidemiologists said today, “This is our chance to get it right.” He meant that we could do better than we did in ’50: We’re better prepared, more communicative, more realistic, less frightened. But we’re also wearier. The problem with doing something the second time is that, while you know what you can correct, you also know what’s beyond the scope of your powers—and I have never wished more for ignorance than I do now.

I hope you’re doing okay over there. I worry about you. Has Olivier given you any sense of when he might come back?

Love you. Me

Dearest Peter, July 13, 2056

It’s very late here, almost three in the morning, and I’m in my office at the lab.

Tonight we went to Aubrey and Norris’s. I hadn’t wanted to go. I was tired, we all were, and I hadn’t wanted to put on a full decontamination suit just to go to their house. But Nathaniel insisted: He hadn’t seen them in months, and he was worried about them. You know, Aubrey turns seventy-six next month; Norris will be seventy-two. They haven’t left their house since the first case was diagnosed in New York State, and because there are so few people who have full protective suits, they’re pretty isolated. Aside from checking in on them, there was another matter on the agenda too, which involved David. So down we went.

After we parked, David slouching out of the car ahead of us, I stopped and looked at their house. I had the clear memory of my first visit, standing on the sidewalk and staring up at the windows, all golden with light. Even from the street, their wealth was unmistakable, the sort of wealth that had always been its own kind of protection—no one would think of breaking in to a house like this, even though at night, you could see all its art and goods laid out, ready to be taken, ready to be yours.

Now, though, the parlor-floor windows had been completely bricked up, which a lot of people did after the first sieges. There had been stories, enough of which had been true—people waking to find strangers in their house or apartment, not to steal but to beg for help: for food, for medicine, for shelter—that most people who lived beneath the fourth floor decided to seal themselves in. The upper windows had all been covered with iron cages, and I knew without looking that the windows themselves had been soldered shut.

There were other changes, too. Inside, the house was frayed in a way that I had never remembered it being; I knew from Nathaniel that both of their longtime maids had been among the first wave of deaths, in January; Adams had died in ’50, and had been replaced with a sallow guy named Edmund, who always looked like he was recovering from a cold. He had taken over most of the housekeeping duties, but not very convincingly; the inside of the decontam chamber needed scrubbing, for example, and when we stepped into the foyer, the force of the suction made little clouds of dust skitter across the floor. The Hawaiian quilt hanging on the foyer wall was gray along its seams; the carpet, which Adams had been vigilant about rotating every six months, was shiny along one edge, worn by footsteps. Everything smelled a little musty, like a sweater taken out of a drawer after a long period of storage.

But the other change was Aubrey and Norris themselves, now approaching us with smiles, their arms outstretched; because the three of us were wearing suits, we could hug them, and as I did, I could feel they’d lost weight, could feel they’d grown feeble. Nathaniel noticed it, too—when Aubrey and Norris turned, he looked at me, worried.

Dinner was simple: a white-bean soup with cabbage and pancetta, good bread. Soup is the most difficult thing to eat with these new masks, but none of us, not even David, mentioned it, and Aubrey and Norris seemed not to notice us struggling. Meals here were typically served by candlelight, but this time a large globe hung suspended over the table, emitting a faint buzzing sound and a bright white light: one of those new sunlamps, meant to give the homebound their vitamin D. I’d seen them before, of course, but never one this big. The effect wasn’t unpleasant, but it did illuminate more evidence of the room’s faint but unignorable decay, the grottiness that inevitably accumulates when a space is continuously occupied. Back in ’50, when we were self-isolating, I often thought that the apartment wasn’t really equipped for our being there all day, every day—it needed breaks from our habitation, the windows flung open to the air, relief from our dander and skin cells. Around us, the air-conditioning—that, at least, was as powerful as I’d remembered it—made deep sighs as it cycled through its settings; the dehumidifier rumbled in the background.

I hadn’t seen Aubrey and Norris in person in months. Three years ago, Nathaniel and I had had a massive fight about them, one of our biggest. This was about eleven months after it became evident that Hawai‘i was unrecoverable, when the first classified reports about the looters began surfacing. Incidents like these were happening in other decimated places as well, throughout the South Pacific; marauders were finding their way there by private boats and landing at the ports. Teams of them would disembark—in full protective gear—and make their way around the island, stripping every museum and house bare of its artifacts. It was being funded by a group of billionaires who called themselves the Alexandria Project, whose aim was “to preserve and protect the greatest artistic accomplishments of our civilization,” by “rescuing” them from places “that had regrettably lost the stewards responsible for their protection.” The members said that they were building a museum (location unspecified) with a digital archive to protect these works. But what was actually happening was that they were keeping everything for themselves, stored in giant warehouses where it would never be seen again.

Anyway, I had become convinced that Aubrey and Norris, if not among the project’s members, had at least bought some of the stolen items. I had a waking dream of Aubrey shaking out my grandmother’s quilt, the one that had been meant for me and which, like every other soft good my grandparents had owned, was burned in a fire after they died. (No, I hadn’t liked my grandparents, nor they me; no, that was not the point.) I had a vision of Norris wearing an 18th-century feather cape of the sort my grandfather had had to sell to a collector decades ago in order to pay for my schooling.

I didn’t have any actual proof of this, mind you: I just threw out the accusation one night, and suddenly I had unleashed years of resentments, which we batted between us. How I had never really trusted Aubrey and Norris, even after they had given Nathaniel purpose and intellectual stimulation when he’d been left stranded in New York because of my job; how Nathaniel was too trusting and naïve, and had made allowances for Aubrey and Norris that I had never understood; how I hated them just because they were rich, and how my resentment of wealth was childish and silly; how Nathaniel secretly wanted to be rich, and I was sorry that I had been such a disappointment to him; how he had never begrudged me anything I wanted to do professionally, even if it meant sacrificing his own career and his own interests, and how he was grateful for Norris and Aubrey because they took an interest in his life, and what’s more, David’s life as well, especially when for months, for years, I hadn’t been there for our son, our son who was now being expelled for “extreme insubordination” from one of the last schools in Manhattan that would have him.

We were hissing at each other, standing on opposite sides of the bedroom, the baby asleep in his own room next door. But as serious as the fight was, as real as our anger was, there ran beneath our conversation another, truer set of resentments and accusations, things that if we ever dared say them to each other would end our life together forever. How I had ruined their lives. How David’s disciplinary problems, his unhappiness, his rebellion, his lack of friends, were my fault. How he and David and Norris and Aubrey had made their own family and had excluded me. How he had sold his homeland, our homeland, to them. How I had taken us away from that homeland forever. How he had turned David against me.

My other father says.

Neither of us said any of these things aloud, but we didn’t need to. I kept waiting—I know he did, too—for one of us to say something unspeakable, something that would make us both tumble down and down, crashing through the floors of our shitty apartment building until we reached the pavement.

But neither of us did. The fight ended, somehow, as these fights always do, and for a week or so after, we were careful and polite with each other. It was almost as if the ghost of what we could have said had forced its way between us, and we were afraid of antagonizing it, lest it become a demon. In the following months, I almost wished we had said some of what we both wanted to, because then at least we would have said it, instead of just constantly thinking about it. But if we had—I had to keep reminding myself—then the only thing to do afterward would have been to break up.

It seemed both inevitable and right that the result of this blowup was that Nathaniel and David began spending more time at Aubrey and Norris’s. At first Nathaniel claimed it was just because I was working so late, and then he said it was because Aubrey was a good influence on David (which he was; he soothed him somehow, which I never understood—even as David became more and more of a Marxist, he continued to consider Aubrey and Norris exceptions), and then he said it was because Aubrey and Norris (Aubrey, especially) had become increasingly housebound, frightened that if they left their home they’d catch the illness, and that so many of Aubrey and Norris’s friends their age had died that Nathaniel felt responsible for their well-being, especially after they’d been so generous to us. Finally, I was made to go down there myself, and we had an unmemorable evening, the baby even consenting to a game of chess with Aubrey after dinner, as I tried not to look for evidence of recent acquisitions, while finding them anyway: Had that kapa weaving always been there, framed and hung over the stairway? Was that lathe-turned wooden bowl a new purchase, or had it just been in storage? Had Aubrey and Nathaniel exchanged the briefest of glances when they saw me noticing the framed shark-tooth ornament, or had I been imagining it? The entire night I had felt like I was an intruder in someone else’s play, and after that, I had stayed away.

One of the reasons we had gone tonight was because Nathaniel and I had agreed that we needed Aubrey’s help with David. He still had two more years of high school and nowhere to complete them, and Aubrey was friendly with the founder of a new for-profit school that was opening in the West Village. The three of us—Nathaniel, David, and I, that is—had had a shouting match in which David made it clear that he didn’t intend to return to school at all, and Nathaniel and I (united again, in a way we hadn’t been for what felt like years) told him that he had to. In a previous age, we would have told him he had to get out if he wouldn’t go to school, but we were afraid he’d take us up on it, and then our nights would be spent not going to meetings with his principal but searching the streets for him.

And so, after we ate, Norris and Nathaniel and I went to the parlor, and Aubrey and David remained in the dining room for a game of chess. After thirty minutes or so, they rejoined us, and I could tell that Aubrey had somehow convinced David to go to the school, and that David had confided in him, and despite my envy of their rapport, I was relieved, and heartbroken, too—that someone had reached my son; that that someone wasn’t me. He seemed easier, David, lighter, and I wondered again what it was that he saw in Aubrey. How was Aubrey able to comfort him in a way I wasn’t? Was it just because he wasn’t his parent? But, then, I couldn’t think that way, because doing so would remind me that it wasn’t his parents David hated—it was just one parent. It was me.

Aubrey sat down on the sofa next to me, and as he poured himself some tea, I noticed that his hand was trembling, just a bit, and that his fingernails had grown slightly too long. I thought of Adams, and how he would never have allowed his employer to pour his own tea, or to come down to dinner with guests, even us, in such a state. It occurred to me that, as much as I might have felt trapped in this house, Aubrey and Norris actually were trapped. Aubrey was richer than anyone else I knew, and yet here he was, just a few years from eighty, stuck in a house he could never leave. He had made a series of miscalculations: Three hours north, the Newport property sat unoccupied, now surely run over by squatters; out east, in Water Mill, Frog’s Pond Way had been declared a health hazard and razed. Four years ago, he had had an opportunity—I knew from Nathaniel—to flee to a house he had in Tuscany, but he hadn’t, and now Tuscany was no longer inhabitable, anyway. And it increasingly seems that, eventually, none of us will be allowed to travel anywhere. All his money, and nowhere to go.

As we drank our tea, the talk turned, as it always does, to the quarantine camps, in particular the events of last weekend. I had never considered Aubrey or Norris particularly interested in the plight of the common man, but it seemed they were part of a group that was arguing for the camps’ shutdown. Needless to say, so were Nathaniel and David. On and on they went, comparing outrages and quoting statistics (some true, some not) about all the things that went on in them. Of course, none of them had ever actually seen the inside of one of these camps. No one has.

“And did you see that story today?” asked the baby, more animated than I’d witnessed him in a while. “About that woman and her child?”

“No, what happened?”

“This woman from Queens has a baby, and the baby tests positive. She knows the hospital authorities are gonna send her to a camp, so she says she has to go to the bathroom, and then she flees back to her apartment. She’s there for two days, and then there’s a banging on her door, and the soldiers burst in. She’s screaming and the baby’s screaming, and they say she can either let them take the baby, or she can come with her. So she decides to go with her.

“They load her onto a truck with a lot of other sick people. Everyone’s jammed in. Everyone’s coughing and crying. The kids are peeing. The truck drives and drives, and then they stop at one of the camps in Arkansas, and they’re all herded out. They sort them into groups: people who’re at the beginning, middle, or end stage of the illness. The woman’s baby is diagnosed to be at the middle stage. So they’re taken to this big building and given a single cot that they have to share. They don’t give medicine to people in the middle stage, just those in the first stage. They wait two days to see if you get sicker, and everyone does, because they don’t have any medication. And once you get sicker, they move you to the end-stage building. So the woman, who’s now sick herself, moves with her baby, and they both get sicker, because there’s no medicine, there’s no food, there’s no water. And forty-eight hours later, they’re dead, and someone comes through every night and moves all the dead bodies outside and burns them.”

He was becoming excited telling this story, and I looked at my son and thought how beautiful he was, how beautiful and how credulous, and I was scared for him. His passion, his anger, his need for something I couldn’t identify and couldn’t give him; the fights he had with other students at his school, with teachers, the rage he carried everywhere: If we had stayed in Hawai‘i, would he be like this? Had I made him what he was?

And yet—even as I was thinking this, I could feel myself opening my mouth, could feel the words floating from me as if I had no control over them, could feel myself raising my voice above their exclamations of horror and righteousness, their declaring to themselves what monsters the state had become, how the woman’s civil liberties had been violated, how there was a price to be paid for the control of these illnesses, but it couldn’t be the price of our collective humanity. Soon they would be trading the same stories that were always traded by people like this in conversations like these: The fact that different races were sent to different camps, with Blacks going to one camp and whites to another, and the rest of us, presumably, to a third. The fact that women were being offered up to five million dollars to donate their healthy babies to be experimented on. The fact that the government was giving people the sickness (through the plumbing, through baby formula, through aspirin) in order to eliminate them later. The fact that the disease wasn’t an accident at all but something engineered in a lab.

“That story isn’t true,” I said.

They went quiet, immediately. “Charles,” Nathaniel began, warningly, but David sat up, instantly ready to fight. “What do you mean?” he asked.

“It’s not true,” I said. “That’s not what’s happening at those camps.”

“How do you know?”

“Because. Even if the government were capable of that, they wouldn’t be able to keep things like that hidden from the public for long.”

“You’re so fucking naïve!”

“David!” This was Nathaniel. “Don’t talk to your father like that!”

For the briefest of moments, I was happy: How long had it been since Nathaniel had defended me so unthinkingly, so passionately? It felt like a declaration of love. But, no, I barreled on. “Think about it, David,” I said, hating myself even as I did. “Why would we stop giving people medicine? This isn’t like how it was six years ago—there’s plenty of medicine available. And why even have the stopgap of—what did you call it, a ‘middle-stage’ building? Why not just send everyone straight to the end-stage building?”

“But—”

“What you’re describing is a death camp, and we don’t have death camps here.”

“Your faith in this country is touching,” said Aubrey, quietly, and for a moment, I was almost dizzy with rage. He was patronizing me, someone whose house was stuffed full of stolen goods from my country? “Charles,” said Nathaniel, standing abruptly, “we should go,” at the same time that Norris put his hand on Aubrey’s. “Aubrey,” he said, “that’s not fair.”

But I didn’t turn on Aubrey. I didn’t. I instead spoke only to David. “And, David, if that story were true, then you’d have identified the wrong villain. The enemy here isn’t the administration, or the army, or the Health Ministry—it’s the woman herself. Yes: a woman who knew her baby was sick, who bothers to take her into the hospital, and then, instead of letting her get treated, steals her away. And she goes where? Back on the subway or the bus; back to her apartment building. How many streets does she walk down along the way? How many people does she jostle past? How many people does her baby breathe on, how many spores does she spread? How many units are in her building? How many people live there? How many of those people have comorbidities? How many are children, or sick, or disabled?

“How many of them does she tell: ‘My baby’s sick; I think she has the infection; you should keep away’? Does she call the health department, report that there’s an illness in the household? Does she think of anyone else? Or does she think only of herself, only of her own family? Of course, you could say that that’s what a parent does. But it’s because of that, because of that understandable selfishness, that the government has to involve itself, don’t you see? It’s to keep all the people around her safe, all the people she herself didn’t give a damn about, all the people who’ll lose their children because of her, that they’ve had to intervene.”

The baby had been very still and silent throughout my speech, but now he shrank, as if I’d smacked him. “You said ‘we,’ ” he said, and something, some quality in the room, shifted.

“What?” I asked.

“You said ‘that we’ve had to intervene.’ ”

“No, I didn’t. I said ‘that they’ve had to intervene.’ ”

“No. You said ‘we.’ Holy shit. Holy shit. You’re in on this, aren’t you? Holy shit. You helped plan these camps, didn’t you?” And then, to Nathaniel, “Dad. Dad. Do you hear this? Do you hear this? He’s involved! He’s behind this!”

We both looked at Nathaniel, who was sitting there, slightly openmouthed, looking back and forth between us. He blinked. “David,” he began.

But now David was standing, as tall and skinny as Nathaniel is, pointing at me. “You’re one of them,” he said, his voice high and excited. “I know you are. I always knew you were a collaborator. I always knew you were behind these camps. I knew it.”

“David!” Nathaniel called out, anguished.

“Fuck you,” said the baby, clearly, looking at me, vibrating with passion. “Fuck you.” He wheeled, then, on Nathaniel. “And fuck you, too,” he said. “You know I’m right. We’ve talked about this, how he’s working for the state. And now you won’t even back me up.” And before any of us could do anything, he was running to the door, opening it; the decontamination chamber made a loud sucking noise as he left.

“David!” Nathaniel yelled, and was running to the door himself when Aubrey—who had been sitting with Norris on the sofa watching us, their eyes flicking between us, gripping each other’s hands as if they were at the theater and we were actors in some particularly charged play—stood. “Nathaniel,” he said. “Don’t worry. He won’t go far. Our security guys will watch him.” (This is another phenomenon here: people hiring security guards, in full protective gear, to patrol their property all night and all day.)

“I don’t know if he brought his papers,” Nathaniel continued, distressed—we had reminded David again and again and again that he had to have his identity card and health certificate on him whenever he left the apartment, but he kept forgetting.

“It’s okay,” Aubrey said. “I promise you. He won’t get far, and the team will watch him. I’ll go call them now,” and he left for his study.

And then there were only the three of us. “We should go,” I said. “Let’s get David, and we’ll go,” but Norris put his hand on my arm. “I wouldn’t wait for him,” he said, gently. “Let him stay here tonight, Charles. Security will bring him in and we’ll take care of him. We’ll have one of them take him home tomorrow.” I looked at Nathaniel, who gave me a small nod, and so I nodded, too.

Aubrey returned, and there were apologies and thanks, but only in a muted sort of way. As we walked out, I turned and saw Norris, who looked back at me with an expression I couldn’t understand. Then the door closed and we were out in the night, the air hot and humid and still. We switched on our masks’ dehumidifiers.

“David!” we called. “David!”

But no one answered.

“Do we leave?” I asked Nathaniel, even after Aubrey called to tell us that David was in the security team’s little stone hut that they’d appended to the back of their house, safe with one of the guards.

He sighed and shrugged. “I suppose,” he said, tiredly. “He won’t come home with us, anyway. Not tonight.”

We both looked south, toward the Square. For a while, neither of us spoke. There was a bulldozer, the operator’s way lit by a single bright light, pushing the remains of the latest shantytown into a hill of plastic and plywood. “Do you remember the first time we came to New York?” I asked him. “We were staying in that shitty hotel up near Lincoln Center, and we walked all the way down to TriBeCa. We stopped in this park and had ice cream. There was that piano that someone had set up under the arch, and you sat down and played—”

“Charles,” Nathaniel said, in that same gentle voice. “I don’t really want to talk now. I just want to go home.”

For some reason, this was the most upsetting thing I’d experienced all night. Not Aubrey and Norris’s diminished state; not how clear it was that David hated me. It would have been better if Nathaniel had been mad at me, had blamed me, had confronted me. Then I could fight back. We had always fought well. But this resignation, this tiredness—I didn’t know what to do with it.

We’d parked on University, and now we began to walk. There was no one in the streets, of course. I remembered a night about, oh, ten years ago, when I was still accepting that Aubrey and Norris were going to be part of our lives, because they were a part of Nathaniel’s. They had had a dinner party, and we had left David—only seven, really just a baby—with a sitter and had taken the subway south. The party was all Aubrey and Norris’s rich friends, but a couple of them had boyfriends or husbands around our age, and even I had had a good time, and after we left, we had decided that we would walk home. It had been a long walk, but it had been March, and so it had been perfect weather, not too hot, and we had both been a little drunk, and at 23rd Street, we had stopped at Madison Park and made out on a bench, among other people also making out on other benches. Nathaniel had been happy that night because he thought we’d made a bunch of new friends. This was when we were both still pretending that we’d only be in New York for a few years.

Now we walked in silence, and as I was unlocking the car, Nathaniel stopped me, turning me toward him. This evening was the first time in months that he had touched me so much, so deliberately. “Charles,” he said, “were you?”

“Was I what?” I asked him.

He took a breath. His helmet’s dehumidifier filter needed cleaning, and as he breathed, his face disappeared and appeared as the screen fogged over and then cleared itself. “Were you involved in setting up those camps?” he asked. He looked away, looked back at me. “Are you still involved with them?”

I didn’t know what to say. I had seen the reports myself, of course—the ones published in the paper and shown on television, as well as the other reports, the ones you’ve seen, too. I had been in a Committee meeting the day they screened the footage that had come out of Rohwer, and someone in the room, one of the lawyers from Justice, had gasped when she saw what had happened in the babies’ quarters, and shortly after had left the room. I hadn’t been able to sleep that night, either. Of course I wished that we hadn’t had a need for the camps at all. But we did, and I couldn’t change that. All I could do was try to protect us. I couldn’t apologize for that; I couldn’t explain it. I had volunteered for this job. I couldn’t now disavow it because things were happening that I wish hadn’t.

But how to explain any of this to Nathaniel? He wouldn’t understand; he would never understand. And so I just stood there, my mouth open, suspended between speech and silence, between apologizing and lying.

“I think you should stay at the lab tonight,” he said at last, still in that same soft voice.

“Oh,” I said, “all right,” and as I did, he took a step backward, as if I had slugged him in the chest. I don’t know: Maybe he had expected me to fight with him, to plead with him, to deny everything, to lie to him. But it was as if, by acquiescing, I was also confirming everything he hadn’t wanted to believe. He looked at me again, but his face screen was getting foggier and foggier, and finally, he got in the car and drove north.

I walked. At 14th Street, I stopped to let a tank pass me, and then a brigade of foot soldiers, all in protective gear, the new military-issue uniforms in which the face screen is a one-way mirror, so that when you talk to anyone wearing one, all you see is yourself staring back. On and on I walked, past the barricade at 23rd Street, where a soldier directed me east to avoid Madison Park, which had been contained beneath an air-conditioned geodesic dome, and where the corpses were stored until they could be taken by one of the crematoriums. Above each corner of the park, a drone camera twirled, its strobes briefly illuminating outlines of the cardboard coffins, stacked four high in precise rows. As I crossed Park Avenue, I approached a man crossing from the other side; as he neared me, he lowered his eyes. Have you encountered this too, this general unwillingness to make eye contact, as if the illness is spread not by breath but by looking each other in the face?

Finally, I was back at Rockefeller, and I took a shower and made a bed for myself on my sofa. But I couldn’t sleep, and after a couple of hours, I got up and raised the blackout shades and watched the morgue helicopters make their deliveries to Roosevelt Island, their blades flashing as the klieg lights swooped over them. Here, the crematoriums never stop, but they’ve suspended barge transport because of the waterway closures—the hope is that they’ll deter those rafts of climate refugees, who were being dropped off late at night at the mouth of the Hudson or the East River and made to swim for shore.

And now I am very tired, tireder than I think I’ve ever been. Tonight, all of us are sleeping in separate places. You, in London. Olivier, in Marseilles. My husband, four blocks north. My son, three miles south. Me, here in my lab. How I wish I were with one of you, any of you. I have kept one shade open, so on the wall opposite, a square of light flickers and vanishes, flickers and vanishes, flickers and vanishes, like a code meant only for me.

Love, Me

Dear Peter, September 20, 2058

Today was Norris’s funeral. I met Nathaniel and David at the Friends meeting house on Rutherford Place. It had been three months since I had seen David, a week since I had seen Nathaniel, and out of respect for Norris, we were all excruciatingly polite with one another. Nathaniel had called me beforehand asking me not to try to hug David hello, and I didn’t, but he surprised us both by patting me on the back a little and grunting a bit.

During the service, which was small and modest, I stared at David’s face. He was sitting in the row in front of me, one seat to the left, and I was able to study his profile, his long bony nose, the new way he was wearing his hair, which made his head look like it was bristling with thorns. He had begun his new school, the one Aubrey had convinced him to attend after he dropped out of the other school Aubrey had convinced him to attend two years ago, and as far as I knew, there were no complaints, from them or from him. Granted, the school year was only three weeks old.

I didn’t know most of the people at the service—there were some I recognized by sight, from years-ago dinners and parties—but the feeling was of emptiness: They had lost more friends than I had realized in ’56, and although the room was half filled, there was also the persistent and troubling sensation that something, someone, was missing.

After, Nathaniel and the baby and I went back to Aubrey’s house, where a few other people had gathered as well; Aubrey wore his decontamination suit so his guests could remove theirs. Over the past year or so, as Norris slowly died, they had begun keeping the house dim, lighting the rooms with candles. It helped, somewhat—both Aubrey and the house looked less careworn in that gloom—but also made stepping into that space feel like entering some other era, one before electricity was invented. Or maybe it was that the house now felt less occupied by humans than by some other kind of animal: moles, perhaps, creatures with small, poor, beady eyes that couldn’t bear the full reality of sunlight. I thought of Nathaniel’s students, Hiram and Ezra, now eleven years old, still living in their shadowed world.

Eventually, only the four of us remained. Nathaniel and David had offered to spend the night in the house, and Aubrey had accepted. I’d take advantage of their absence at the apartment to pick up a few things and take them back to the RU dormitory, where I’m still living.

For a while, we were all silent. Aubrey had leaned his head against the back of the sofa and eventually closed his eyes. “David,” Nathaniel whispered, signaling to him that he should help rotate Aubrey on the sofa so he could lie flat, and the baby was standing to help him when Aubrey began to speak.

“Do you remember that conversation we had shortly after the first person in New York was reported diagnosed in ’50?” he asked, his eyes still closed. None of us answered. “You, Charles—I remember asking you if this was the one we’d been waiting for, the sickness that would eliminate us all, and you said, ‘No, but it’ll be a good one.’ Do you remember that?”

His voice was gentle, but I cringed anyway. “Yes,” I said, “I do.” I heard Nathaniel sigh, a soft, sad sound.

“Mmm,” he said. There was another pause. “You were right, as it turns out. Because then ’56 came.

“I never told you this,” he said, “but in November of ’50, an old friend of ours contacted us. Well, he was more Norris’s friend than mine, someone he’d known since college, when they had dated for a brief period. His name was Wolf.

“By this point, we’d been living out at Frog’s Pond Way for about three months. We thought, as did many people—even your lot, Charles—that we’d be somehow safer out there, that it was better to be away from the city, with all its crowds and filth. This was after the lootings had begun; everyone was scared to leave their houses. It wasn’t as bad as ’56—you didn’t have people lunging at you in the street, trying to cough at you and infect you because they wanted you to get sick as well. But it was bad. You remember.

“Anyway, one night, Norris told me that Wolf had gotten in touch with him; he was in the area and wanted to know if he could come see us. Well. We were taking all the recommendations seriously. Norris had asthma, and the reason we’d gone out to Long Island to begin with was to avoid running into other people. So we decided that we’d tell Wolf that we’d love to see him, but for his sake as well as ours, we didn’t think it was safe, though once things calmed down we’d love to get together.

“So Norris sends him that message, but Wolf writes back immediately: He doesn’t want to come see us; he needs to come see us. He needs our help. Norris asks if we can video-chat, but he insists: He needs to see us.

“What could we do? The next day, we get a text at noon: ‘I’m outside.’ We go outside. For a while, we don’t see anything. Then we hear Wolf call Norris’s name, and we walk down the path, but we still don’t see anything. Then we hear Wolf again, and we proceed a little farther down the path. This happens a few more times, and then we hear Wolf say ‘Stop.’

“We do. Nothing happens. And then we hear some twigs being crunched behind that big poplar near the guardhouse, and Wolf steps out into the open.

“It’s immediately clear that he’s very sick. His face is covered with sores; he’s skeletal. He’s using a magnolia branch as a cane, but he doesn’t quite have the strength to lift it, so it kind of drags behind him like a broom. He’s carrying a small knapsack. He’s holding up his pants with one hand: He’s wearing a belt, but it doesn’t help.

“Norris and I immediately step backward. It’s obvious Wolf’s nearing the end stage of the disease and is therefore highly contagious.

“He says, ‘I wouldn’t come here if I had somewhere else to go. You know I wouldn’t. But I need help. I’m not going to live much longer. I know what an imposition this is. But I’m hoping—I’m hoping you’ll let me die here.’

“He had escaped from one of the centers. Later, we’d learn that he’d approached a few other people, and all of them had sent him away. He said, ‘I won’t ask to come inside. But I thought—I thought maybe I could stay in the pool cottage? I won’t ask you for anything else. But I want to die indoors, in a house.’

“I didn’t know what to say. I could feel Norris just behind me, gripping my arm. Finally, I said, ‘I need to talk to Norris,’ and Wolf nodded and retreated behind the poplar again, as if to give us privacy, and Norris and I walked back up the path. He looked at me, and I looked at him, and neither of us said anything. We didn’t need to—we knew what we would do. I had my wallet with me, and I took out everything I had—a little more than five hundred dollars. And then we walked again toward the tree, and Wolf reappeared.

“ ‘Wolf,’ I said, ‘I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. But we can’t. Norris is vulnerable, you know that. We can’t, we just can’t. I’m so sorry.’ I invoked you, Charles. I said, ‘A friend of ours has connections in the administration; he can get you help, he can get you into a better center.’ I wasn’t sure if there was such a thing, even, as a ‘better center,’ but I promised it. Then I put the money down, about a foot away from us. ‘I can get you more, if you need it,’ I said.

“He didn’t say anything. He just stood there, panting, looking down at the money, swaying slightly on his feet. And then I grabbed Norris’s hand, and we hurried back to the house—by the last hundred feet, we were running, running as if Wolf had the strength to pursue us, as if he’d suddenly soar into the air like a witch and block the doorway. Once inside, we bolted the door and then went about the house checking every window and every lock, as if Wolf would suddenly charge through one of them and fill the house with his disease.

“But do you know what the worst part was? How angry Norris and I were. We were angry that Wolf had gotten sick, that he had come to us, that he had asked for our help, that he had put us in such a position. That was what we said to ourselves that night as we gorged ourselves, all the window shades drawn, all the security systems armed, the pool house—as if he might even now go there—padlocked shut: How dare he. How dare he make us feel that way, how dare he make us say no to him. That was what we thought. A friend was helpless and afraid, and that was how we reacted.

“Things were never quite the same between us after that. Oh, I know everything always looked fine. But something changed. It was as if our connection was no longer founded in love but in shame, in this terrible secret we had, in this terrible, inhumane thing we had done together. And I blame Wolf for that as well. Every day, we stayed indoors, scanning the property with binoculars. We offered the security team double pay to come back, but they said no, and so we prepared ourselves for a siege, a one-man siege. We kept all the shades drawn, the shutters closed. We lived as if we were in a horror film, like at any moment we might hear a thump against one of the windows and draw the shade to find Wolf plastered against it. We were able to convince the local police to monitor the death tolls for the area, but when the word came two weeks later that Wolf had been found alongside the highway, dead for apparently several days, we still weren’t able to give up our watch: We stopped answering our phones, we stopped checking our messages, we stopped making ourselves available to anyone, because if we weren’t in contact with the outside world, then nothing would be asked of us, and we would be safe.

“After we were given the all-clear, we returned to Washington Square. But we never went back to Water Mill. Nathaniel, you asked once why we never went out to Frog’s Pond Way. This is why. We also never spoke of Wolf again. It wasn’t something we had to agree on; we just both knew not to. Over the years, we tried to make reparations for our guilt. We gave to charities that helped the sick; we gave to hospitals; we gave to activist groups fighting against the camps. But when Norris was diagnosed with leukemia, the first thing he said after the doctor had left the room was ‘It’s punishment for Wolf.’ I know he believed it. In his final days, when he was delirious from the drugs, it wasn’t my name he repeated, but Wolf’s. And even though I’m telling you this story like I don’t, I believe it, too. That one day—one day, Wolf will come for me, too.”

We were all quiet. Even the baby, who was consistent in his moral absolutism, was somber and silent. Nathaniel sighed. “Aubrey,” he began, but Aubrey interrupted him.

“I had to confess to someone,” he said, “which is part of why I’m telling you. But the other reason I’m telling you is because—David, I know you have a lot of resentment toward your father, and I understand it. But fear makes many of us do things that we regret, things we never thought we were capable of doing. You’re so young; you’ve spent almost your entire life living alongside death and the possibility of death—you’ve become inured to it, which is heartbreaking. So you won’t quite understand what I mean.

“But when you’re older, you do anything you can to try to stay alive. Sometimes you’re not even aware you’re doing it. Something, some instinct, some worse self, takes over—you lose who you are. Not everyone does. But many of us do.

“I suppose what I’m trying to say is—you should forgive your father.” He looked at me. “I forgive you, Charles. For—for whatever it is you’ve done with—with the camps. I wanted to tell you that. Norris never blamed you like I did, so he had nothing to forgive, and no forgiveness to ask. But I do.”

I realized I was supposed to say something. “Thank you, Aubrey,” I said, to a man who had hung the most valuable and sacred objects from my country on his walls like they were posters in a college dorm room and just two years earlier accused me of being a stooge of the American government. “I appreciate that.”

He sighed, and so did Nathaniel, as if I had somehow failed to play my part. Across the room, David sat with his face turned from us, so that I couldn’t see his expression. He loved Aubrey. He respected him. I could imagine what he was thinking, and I felt for him.

I wasn’t so selfish that I intended to actually ask him for his forgiveness right then. But even before I could stop myself, I was dreaming of our reunion: I’d move back in, and Nathaniel would love me again, and the baby would stop being so angry with me, and we would be a family once more.

I didn’t say anything, however. I just got up and said goodbye to everyone and went to our apartment as I’d planned, and then back to the dormitory.

I have heard—we both have heard—many terrible stories about what humans did to other humans over the past two years. Aubrey’s was not the worst, not even close to the worst. Over those months, there were reports of parents abandoning their children on subways, of a man who shot his parents in the back of their heads as they sat in their yard, of a woman who wheeled her dying husband of forty years to the scrapyard near the Lincoln Tunnel and left him there. But I guess what struck me the most about Aubrey’s story wasn’t even the story itself but, rather, how small his and Norris’s life had become. I saw them clearly: The two of them in that house I used to so resent and envy, every shutter closed to blot out the light, huddling in a corner together to make themselves small, hoping that, if they did, then the great eye of illness would fail to see them, would leave them be, as if they could elude capture altogether.

Love, C.

Dear Peter, October 30, 2059

Thank you for the belated birthday message; I’d completely forgotten. Fifty-five. Separated. Hated by my own son and much of the rest of the Western world (what I do, if not me precisely). Somehow fully transitioned from once-promising scientist into shadowy government operative. What else is there to say? Not much, I guess.

There was a rather wan celebration at Aubrey’s house, where Nathaniel and the baby are now living full-time. I know I haven’t mentioned this, and I suppose it’s because it just happened, without either Nate or me really being aware of it. First he and David began spending more time downtown to keep Aubrey company in the weeks following Norris’s death. He’d text me when this was happening, so I’d know I could go back to our apartment and stay there for a night. I’d wander the rooms, opening the baby’s desk drawers and rooting around; looking through Nathaniel’s sock drawer. I wasn’t searching for anything in particular—I knew that Nathaniel had no secrets, and that David would have taken his with him. I was just looking. I refolded some of David’s shirts; I stood over Nathaniel’s underwear, inhaling their scent.

Eventually, I began noticing that things were disappearing—David’s sneakers, the books on Nathaniel’s bedside table. One night, I arrived home and the ficus tree was gone. It was almost like something in a cartoon; I left during the day and all these objects scurried out while I wasn’t looking. But, of course, they were being moved down to Washington Square. After about five months of this slow-drip departure, Nathaniel texted me that I could move back in, into our home, if I wanted, and although I had been planning to refuse him on principle—every few weeks, we briefly discussed the possibility of him buying me out of the apartment so I could find my own, while being fully aware that he had no money to do so and neither did I—I was too weary by then, and so back in I moved. They didn’t take everything down to Aubrey’s, though, and in my more self-pitying moments, I am able to see the symbolism in this. The baby’s old picture books, a few jackets of Nathaniel’s it’s now far too hot to wear, a pot permanently singed by years of burned meals—and me: all the detritus of Nathaniel’s and David’s lives; all the stuff they didn’t want.

Nathaniel and I have been making an effort to speak once a week. Sometimes these interactions go well. Other times, not. We don’t fight, exactly, but every conversation, no matter how pleasant, is a brittle sheet of ice, and just beneath is a dark, freezing pool of water: decades of resentment, of blame. Much of that blame involves David, but so does much of our affinity. We both worry about him, though Nathaniel is more sympathetic to him than I am. He’ll be twenty next month, and we don’t know what to do with or for him—he has no high-school degree, no intention of attending college, no intention of getting a job. Every day, Nathaniel tells me, he disappears for hours, and only returns for dinner and a game of chess with Aubrey before disappearing again. At least, Nathaniel says, he’s still tender with Aubrey; with us, he rolls his eyes and snorts when we ask him about finding a job, about finishing his degree, but he listens patiently to Aubrey’s occasional mild lectures; before he leaves at night, he helps Aubrey climb the stairs to his bedroom.

Tonight, we were having cake when the decontam chamber slapped close, and David appeared. I never know what kind of mood the baby will be in when he sees me: Will he be scornful, rolling his eyes at whatever I say? Will he be sarcastic, asking me how many people I’ve been responsible for killing this week? Will he be, unexpectedly, shy, almost puppyish, bashfully shrugging when I give him a compliment, when I tell him how much I miss him? Every time, I tell him I miss him; every time, I tell him I love him. But I don’t ask for his forgiveness, which I know he wants, because there is nothing for him to forgive.

“Hello, David,” I said to him, and watched an uncertain expression cross his face: It occurred to me that he could as little predict his reaction to seeing me as I could.

He settled on sarcasm. “I didn’t know we were having international war criminals over for dinner tonight,” he said.

“David,” said Nathaniel, wearily. “Stop. I told you—it’s your father’s birthday today.”

Then, before he could say anything more, Aubrey added, gently, “Come sit, David, come spend some time with us.” And then, when David still hesitated, “There’s lots of extra food.”

He sat, and Edmund brought him a plate, and the three of us watched for a while as he swiftly demolished it, leaned back, and belched.

“David,” Nathaniel and I said as one, and the baby suddenly grinned, looking at us in turn, which made Nathaniel and me look at each other as well, and for a moment, all of us were smiling together.

“Can’t help yourselves, can you?” asked David, almost fondly, addressing Nathaniel and me as a unit, and we smiled again: at him, at each other. Across from us, the baby forked into his carrot cake. “How old are you, Pops?” he asked.

“Fifty-five,” I said, ignoring the “Pops” provocation, which I hated, and which he knew I hated. But it had been years since he had called me “Papa,” and then another period of years in which he had called me nothing at all.

“Jesus,” said the baby, but with genuine excitement. “Fifty-five! That’s so old!”

“Ancient,” I agreed, smiling, and next to David, Aubrey laughed. “An infant,” he corrected. “A baby.”

This would have been the perfect time for David to begin one of his rants—about the average age of the children removed to the camps, about the death rate among nonwhite children, about how the government was using this illness as an opportunity to kill off Black and Native American people, which was why all the recent diseases had been allowed to spread unchecked in the first place—but he didn’t, just rolled his eyes, but good-naturedly, and cut himself another slice of cake. Before he began eating it, though, he untied the bandanna around his neck, and as he did, I saw that the entire right side of his neck was covered by an enormous tattoo.

“Jesus!” I said, and Nathaniel, understanding what I’d seen, spoke my name, warningly. I had already been given a list of the many topics I wasn’t allowed to mention to David or inquire about, among them his degree, his plans, his future, how he spent his day, his politics, his ambitions, and his friends. But he hadn’t mentioned huge disfiguring tattoos, and I rushed to the other side of the table, as if it might disappear if I didn’t examine it in the next five seconds. I pulled down the neck of David’s T-shirt and looked at it: It was an eye, about six inches wide, large and menacing, and radiating from it were rays of light; written in Gothic script beneath it were the words “Ex Obscuris Lux.”

I let go of his shirt and stepped back. David was smirking. “Did you join the American Academy of Ophthalmology?” I asked him.

He stopped smiling and looked confused. “Huh?” he asked.

“ ‘Ex obscuris lux,’ ” I said. “ ‘From darkness, light.’ That’s their motto.”

For a moment, he looked confused again. Then he recovered himself. “No,” he said, tersely, and I could tell he was embarrassed, and then angry because he was embarrassed.

“Well, what’s that for, then?” I asked.

“Charles,” Nathaniel said, sighing, “not now.”

“What do you mean, ‘not now’? I can’t even ask my son why he got an enormous”—I nearly said “hideous”—“tattoo on his neck?”

“It’s because I’m a member of the light,” David said, proudly, and when I didn’t answer, he rolled his eyes again. “Jesus, Pops,” he said, “The Light. It’s a group.”

“What kind of group?” I asked.

“Charles,” Nathaniel said.

“Oh, Nate, stop with the Charles, Charles—he’s my son, too. I can ask him what I want.” I looked back at David. “What kind of group?”

He was smirking again, and I wanted to slap him. “A political group,” he said.

“What kind of political group?” I asked.

“A group that tries to undo the work you’ve been doing,” he said.

At this point, Peter, you would have been proud of me. I had one of those rare moments in which I foresaw, perfectly and vividly, where this conversation would lead. The baby would try to provoke me. I would be provoked. I would say something rash. He would respond in kind. Nathaniel would stand on the sidelines, wringing his hands. Aubrey would remain slumped in his seat, watching us with sorrow and pity and a bit of revulsion—that he should have us in his life, and that the three of us should have come to such an unhappy end.

But I did none of those things. Instead—in a display of composure not even I thought myself capable of—I simply said I was happy he’d found his mission in life, and that I wished him and his comrades all the best in their struggle. And then I thanked Aubrey and Nathaniel for dinner, and I walked out. “Oh, Charles,” Nathaniel said, following me to the door. “Charles, don’t leave.”

I pulled him into the parlor. “Nathaniel,” I said, “does he hate me?”

“Who?” he asked, though he knew perfectly well who I meant. Then he sighed. “No, of course not, Charles,” he said. “He’s going through a phase. And—and he’s passionate about his beliefs. You know this. He doesn’t hate you.”

“But you hate me,” I said.

“No, I don’t,” he said. “I hate what you did, Charles. I don’t hate you.”

“I did what needed to be done, Natey,” I said.

“Charles,” said Nathaniel, “I’m not going to discuss this with you right now. The point is, you’re his father. You always will be.”

Somehow, this wasn’t very comforting, and after I left (I had hoped Nathaniel would try harder to make me stay, but he hadn’t), I stood at the north entrance of Washington Square and watched the most recent generation of shantytown dwellers move about. A few were bathing in the fountain, and there was a family—two parents and a little girl—who had built a small fire next to the arch, where they were roasting an unidentified animal over the flames. “Is it done yet?” the little girl kept asking, excitedly. “Is it done, Daddy? Is it done yet?” “Almost, sweetheart,” the father said. “Almost, almost.” He pinched the tail off the creature and handed it to the girl, who squealed with joy and immediately began gnawing at it, and I turned away. There were about two hundred people living in the Square, and although they knew that one night their homes would be bulldozed away, they kept coming: It was safer to be here than beneath a bridge or in a tunnel. Still, I didn’t know how they slept, with those floodlights beating down on them, but I suppose people get used to anything. Many of the dwellers wear sunglasses even at night, or a piece of black gauze tied around their eyes. The majority of them don’t have protective helmets, so from afar, they look like an army of ghosts, their entire faces wrapped in cotton.

Back in the apartment, I looked up The Light, which was much as I suspected: an anti-government, anti-science group dedicated to “revealing the truth of state manipulation and ending the age of plagues.” It appears to be small, even by these groups’ standards; no major attacks to their name and no major claimed incidents. But I sent an email to my contact in Washington anyway, asking them to send me their full dossier—I didn’t say why I was asking.

Peter, I never ask you for these favors. But will you find out what you can, whatever you can? I’m sorry to ask. I really am. I wouldn’t unless I had to.

I know I can’t stop him. But maybe I can help him. I have to try. Don’t I?

All my love. Charles

Dear Peter, July 7, 2062

This is going to be a brief one, because I have to be down in Washington in six hours. But I wanted to write while I had a few minutes.

It’s unbearably hot here.

The new state will be announced today at four p.m. eastern time. The original plan was to announce on July 3, but everyone agreed that people should be allowed to celebrate a final Independence Day. The thinking was that if we announced now, at the end of the day, it would be easier to lock down certain parts of the country before the weekend begins, and then give everyone a couple of days for the shock to wear off before the markets reopen on Monday. By the time you read this, it’ll already have happened.

Thank you for your counsel over these past months, dear Peter. In the end, I took your advice and turned down a ministry position: I’ll remain behind the scenes after all, and what I give up in influence I gain in safety. Anyway, I have enough influence regardless—I’ve asked Intelligence to put a tracker on David now that The Light has become so problematic, and there are plainclothes guards stationed outside Aubrey’s house to protect him and Nathaniel just in case the rioting gets as bad as they fear. Aubrey isn’t doing well at all—the cancer’s metastasized to his liver, and Nathaniel says Aubrey’s doctor thinks he only has another six to nine months.

I’ll call you on your secure line tonight my time, early tomorrow yours. Wish me luck. Love to you and Olivier—

Charles