To Paradise

PART V

Spring 2094

In the weeks following our initial meeting, we met more and more. At first it was just a coincidence: The Sunday after we met at the storyteller’s session, I was walking around the Square when I became aware of someone behind me. Of course, there were many people behind me, and ahead of me, too—I was walking in the center of the group—but this presence felt different, and when I turned, there he was again, smiling at me.

“Hello, Charlie,” he said, smiling.

The smiling made me nervous. Back when Grandfather was my age, everyone smiled all the time. Grandfather said that was something Americans were known for: smiling. He wasn’t an American himself, although he became one. But I didn’t smile very often, and neither did anyone I know.

“Hello,” I said.

He joined me, and we walked together. I had been worried he would try to have a conversation, but he didn’t, and we made three laps around the Square. Then he said it had been nice to see me, and maybe he’d see me at the next story session, and then he smiled again and walked west before I even had a chance to figure out what to say in response.

The following Saturday, I returned to the storyteller. I hadn’t thought I was hoping to see him, but when I did, sitting in the same spot in the back row where we’d sat on the day we met, a funny feeling came over me, and I hurried the last few feet, in case someone should take my place. Then I stopped. What if he didn’t want to see me? But then he turned and saw me and smiled and waved me over, patting the ground next to him with his hand. “Hello, Charlie,” he said, as I approached him.

“Hello,” I said.

His name was David. He had told me that the first time we met. “Oh,” I had said, “my father’s name was David.”

“Oh, really?” he had asked. “So was mine.”

“Oh,” I’d said. It seemed like there was something else I should say, and finally I said, “That’s a lot of Davids,” and then he smiled, very wide, and even laughed a little. “That’s true,” he said, “that is a lot of Davids. You’re funny, aren’t you, Charlie?”—which was one of those questions I knew wasn’t really a question, and besides, wasn’t even true. No one had ever told me I was funny before.

This time, I had brought some tofu skin that I had skimmed and dried myself and cut into triangles, and a container of nutritional yeast to dip them into. As the storyteller was settling into his folding chair, I held out the bag to David. “You can have some,” I said, and then I was worried I sounded too gruff, too unfriendly, when really I was just nervous. “If you want,” I added.

He looked into the bag, and I was afraid he’d laugh at me and my snack. But he just took out a chip, and dipped it into the yeast, and crunched it. “Thanks,” he whispered, as the storyteller began, “these are good.”

In that day’s story, the husband and wife and their two children wake one morning to discover a bird in their apartment. This wasn’t very realistic either, as birds were rare, but the storyteller did a good job of describing how the bird kept frustrating their attempts to catch it, and how father and son and mother and daughter kept crashing into one another as they ran about the house with a pillowcase. Finally, the bird is caught, and the son suggests they eat it, but the daughter knows better, and the whole family takes the bird to the local animal center, just as they’re supposed to, and later they’re rewarded with three extra protein coupons, which the mother uses to buy some protein patties.

After the story was over, we walked to the northern end of the Square. “What did you think?” David asked, and I didn’t say anything, because I was embarrassed to admit that I had felt betrayed by the story. I had thought that the husband and wife were just husband and wife, like my husband and me, and yet suddenly they had two children, a boy and a girl, which meant they weren’t like my husband and me after all. They weren’t just a man and a woman: They were a father and a mother.

But it was silly to say any of this, so instead I said, “It was okay.”

“I thought it was dumb,” David said, and I looked up at him. “Whose apartment is that big that they can run around in it? Who’s such a goody-goody that they’d actually take the bird into the center?”

This was thrilling to hear, but also alarming. I looked down at my shoes. “But it’s the law.”

“Of course it’s the law, but he’s a storyteller,” David said. “Does he really expect us to believe that, if a big, plump, juicy pigeon flew into any of our windows, we wouldn’t just kill it, pluck it, and put it straight into the oven?” I looked up then, and saw that he was looking back at me with a crooked little smile.

I didn’t know what to say. “Well, it’s just a story,” I said.

“That’s exactly my point,” he said, like I had agreed with him, and then he gave me a little salute. “Bye, Charlie. Thanks for the snack and company.” And then he left, walking westward, back to Little Eight.

He hadn’t said he would see me next week, but when I returned the following Saturday, there he was again, standing outside the storyteller’s tent, and again, I got that same strange feeling in my stomach.

“I thought we’d take a walk instead, if that’s okay,” he said, even though it was very hot, so hot I’d had to wear my cooling suit. He, however, was in his same gray shirt and pants, his same gray cap, and didn’t look hot at all. He spoke as if we had made plans to meet here, as if we had an arrangement that he was now changing.

As we walked, I remembered to ask him the question I’d been wondering about all week. “I don’t see you at the shuttle stop anymore,” I said.

“That’s true,” he said. “My shift changed. I catch the 07:30 now.”

“Oh,” I said. Then I said, “My husband catches the 07:30, too.”

“Really,” David said. “Where does he work?”

“The Pond,” I said.

“Ah,” said David. “I work at the Farm.”

It wasn’t worth asking if they knew each other, because the Farm was the biggest state project in the prefecture, with dozens of scientists and hundreds of techs, and what’s more, Pond employees stayed isolated in the Pond, and rarely had any reason to encounter anyone who worked in the larger enterprise.

“I’m a bromeliad specialist,” said David, although I hadn’t asked, because asking someone what they did wasn’t done. “That’s what it’s called, but really, I’m just a gardener.” This was unusual, too: both to describe your work but also to make it sound less important than it was. “I help crossbreed the specimens we have, but mostly, I’m just there to take care of the plants.” His voice was cheerful as he said this, matter-of-fact, but I suddenly felt the need to defend his own job to him.

“That’s important work,” I said. “We need all the research from the Farm we can get.”

“I suppose,” he said. “Not that I’m doing any of the actual research myself. But I do love the plants, as silly as that sounds.”

“I love the pinkies, too,” I said, and as I did, I realized that it was true. I did love the pinkies. They were so fragile and their lives had been so short; they were poor, unformed things, and had been created only to die and be pulled apart and examined, and then they were incinerated and forgotten.

“The pinkies?” he asked. “What are those?”

So I explained a little about what I did, and how I prepared them, and how the scientists got impatient when I didn’t deliver them on time, which made him laugh, and his laughter made me flustered, because I didn’t want him to think I was complaining about the scientists, or making fun of them, because they did essential work, and I said so. “No, I don’t think that you’re disparaging them,” he said. “It’s just—they’re such important people, but really, they’re people, you know? They get impatient and in bad moods, just like the rest of us.” I had never thought about the scientists like that before, as people, and so I didn’t say anything.

“How long have you been married?” David asked.

This was a very forward question, and for a moment, I didn’t know what to say. “Maybe I shouldn’t have asked,” he said, looking at me. “You have to forgive me. Where I come from, people talk much more openly.”

“Oh,” I said. “Where are you from?”

He was from Prefecture Five, one of the southern prefectures, but he didn’t have an accent. Sometimes people transferred prefectures, but they usually did so only when they had unusual or in-demand skills. This made me wonder whether David was actually more important than he was saying; it would explain why he was here, not only in Prefecture Two but in Zone Eight.

“I’ve been married almost six years,” I said, and then, because I knew what he was going to ask next, I added, “We’re sterile.”

“I’m sorry, Charlie,” he said. His voice was gentle, but it wasn’t pitying, and, unlike some people, he didn’t turn away from me, as if my sterility were something contagious. “Was it an illness?” he asked.

This too was very forward, but I was getting used to him, and I wasn’t as shocked as I would have been had someone else asked me. “Yes, of ’70,” I said.

“And your husband—the same reason?”

“Yes,” I said, though that wasn’t true. And then I was truly done with the topic, which was really not something to be discussed with strangers, or casual acquaintances, or with anyone, really. The state had worked hard to decrease the stigmatization of sterility. It was now illegal to refuse to rent to a sterile couple, but most of us clustered together anyway, because it was just easier that way: No one looked at you oddly, and moreover, you didn’t have to be confronted by other people’s babies and children, daily reminders of your own inadequacy. Our building, for example, was almost wholly occupied by sterile couples. The previous year, the state made it legal for a sterile person of either sex to marry a fertile person, but as far as I knew, no one actually had, because if you were fertile there was no point in ruining your life like that.

I must have looked strange then, because David touched my shoulder, and I flinched and moved away, but he didn’t seem offended. “I’ve upset you, Charlie,” he said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to pry.” He sighed. “It doesn’t mean you’re a bad person, though.”

And then, before I could think of how to respond, he turned and left, giving me another of his salutes. “I’ll see you next week,” he said.

“Okay,” I said, and I stood and watched him walk west until he had disappeared from sight completely.

I saw David every Saturday after that, and soon it was April and becoming even warmer, so warm that we’d no longer be able to take our walks, and I was trying not to think about what would happen then.

One evening, about a month after I started meeting with David, my husband looked at me at dinner and said, “You seem different.”

“Do I?” I asked. Earlier, David had been telling me stories about growing up in Prefecture Five, and how he and his friends used to climb pecan trees and eat so many nuts they’d get sick. I asked him if he wasn’t scared to pick the nuts, because, legally, all fruiting trees belonged to the state, but he said the state was more relaxed in Prefecture Five. “They really only care about Prefecture Two, because that’s where all the money and power is,” he said. He announced these things comfortably, for anyone to hear, but when I asked him to lower his voice, he looked confused. “Why?” he asked. “I’m not saying anything treasonous,” and I had had to think about it. He wasn’t, it was true, but something about the way he said it made me feel like he was. “I’m sorry,” I said.

“No,” my husband said. “It’s nothing to apologize for. You just look”—and here he studied me, closely, looking at me for much longer than he maybe ever had, so long that I began to feel anxious—“healthy. Content. I’m glad to see it.”

“Thank you,” I finally said, and my husband, whose head was once again bent over his tofu patty, nodded.

That night, as I lay in bed, I realized that it had been weeks now since I had wondered how my husband was spending his free nights. I hadn’t even thought to look in the box for more notes. As I was thinking this, I suddenly saw the house on Bethune Street, and my husband slipping past the half-open door, the man’s voice saying, “You’re late tonight,” as he did, and to distract myself, I thought instead about David, how he had smiled and said I was funny.

Later that night, I woke from a dream. I rarely dreamed, but this one had been so vivid that I was momentarily disoriented when I opened my eyes. I had been walking through the Square with David, and we were standing at the northern entrance, where the Square met Fifth Avenue, when he had put his hands on my shoulders and kissed me. Frustratingly, I couldn’t remember the actual sensation of it, but I knew it had felt good, and that I had enjoyed it. Then I had woken up.

Over the next nights, I dreamed of David kissing me again and again. I felt different things in the dreams: I was scared, but mostly I was excited, and I was also relieved—I had never been kissed before, and I had learned to accept that I never would be. But now here I was, being kissed after all.

Two Saturdays after the kissing dream began, I was once again in the Square with David. It was now the third week of April and therefore unbearably hot, and even David had begun wearing his cooling suit. Cooling suits were effective, but because they were so puffy, they made you walk strangely, and we had to move slowly, both because the suits were bulky and because you didn’t want to overexert yourself.

We were making our second lap around the Square, David telling me more stories about growing up in Prefecture Five, when, all of a sudden, I saw my husband moving in our direction.

I stopped walking. “Charlie?” asked David, looking at me. But I didn’t answer.

By that point, my husband had seen me, and he came toward us. He was alone, and also wearing his cooling suit, and he raised his hand in greeting as he approached us.

“Hello,” he said, as he drew near.

“Hello,” David said.

I introduced them to each other, and they both bowed. They exchanged a few sentences about the weather—effortlessly, as so many people seemed to be able to do. And then my husband continued on his way, heading north, and David and I, west.

“Your husband seems nice,” said David, finally, because I wasn’t saying anything.

“Yes,” I said. “He is nice.”

“Was it an arranged marriage?”

“Yes; my grandfather arranged it,” I said.

I remembered when Grandfather first spoke to me about marriage. I was twenty-one; the previous year, I had been asked to leave my college because my father had been declared an enemy of the state, even though he was long dead. It was a strange period: Depending on the week, there were rumors that the insurgents were gaining ground, followed by reports that the state had beaten them back. The official news promised that the state would prevail, and Grandfather had assured me that that would be true. But he had also said that he wanted to make sure I was safe, that I would have someone to take care of me. “But I have you,” I had said, and he had smiled. “Yes,” he said, “you have my whole heart, little cat. But I won’t live forever, and I want to make sure that you’ll always have someone to protect you, even long after I’m gone.”

I hadn’t said anything to that, because I didn’t like it when Grandfather spoke of dying, but the next week, Grandfather and I had gone to a marriage broker. This was when Grandfather still had a little bit of influence, and the marriage broker he had chosen was one of the most elite in the prefecture; he usually only arranged marriages for residents of Zone Fourteen, but he had agreed to see Grandfather as a favor.

At the marriage broker’s office, Grandfather and I sat in a waiting room, and then another door opened and a tall, thin, pale-faced man came in. “Doctor?” he asked Grandfather.

“Yes,” Grandfather said, standing. “Thank you for seeing us.”

“Of course,” said the man, who had been staring at me since he entered. “And this is your granddaughter?”

“Yes,” said Grandfather, proudly, and he drew me to his side. “This is Charlie.”

“I see,” said the man. “Hello, Charlie.”

“Hello,” I whispered.

There had been a silence. “She’s a little shy,” said Grandfather, and he stroked my hair.

“I see,” said the man, again. Then he spoke to Grandfather. “Would you come in alone, Doctor, so we can speak?” He looked at me. “You can wait here, young lady.”

I sat there for about fifteen minutes, knocking my heels against the chair legs, which was a bad habit I had. There was nothing in the room to look at, nothing to see: just four plain chairs and a piece of plain gray carpet. But then I heard raised voices from behind the other door, the sound of arguing, and I went over and pressed my ear against the wood.

The first voice I heard was the man’s. “With respect, Doctor—with respect—I think you have to be realistic,” he was saying.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” asked Grandfather, and I was surprised to hear that he sounded angry.

There had been a silence, and when the man spoke again, he was quieter, and I had to concentrate hard to hear him again.

“Doctor, forgive me,” the man was saying, “but your granddaughter is—”

“My granddaughter is what?” Grandfather snapped, and there was another silence.

“Special,” the man said.

“That’s right,” Grandfather said. “She is special, she is very special, and she will need a husband who understands how special she is.”

I had had enough then, and I had sat down again, and a few minutes later, Grandfather had walked briskly out and opened the office door for me and we had left. On the street, neither of us spoke. Finally, I asked, “Did you find someone for me?”

Grandfather had snorted. “That man’s an idiot,” he said. “No clue what he’s doing. We’re going to go to someone else, someone different. I’m sorry I wasted our time, little cat.”

After that, we had gone to two more brokers, and both times, Grandfather had swept from the room, ushered me out, and, once we were in the street, announced that the broker was a moron or a fool. Then he said I didn’t have to come with him on the appointments, as he wasn’t going to waste both of our time. Finally, he found a broker he liked, one who specialized in matching sterile people, and one day, he told me he had found someone for me to marry, someone who would always take care of me.

He had shown me a picture of the man who was to become my husband. On the back of the picture was his name, birth date, height, weight, racial makeup, and occupation. The card had been debossed with the special stamp that everyone who was sterile had applied to their papers, as well as a stamp denoting that at least one of his immediate family members was an enemy of the state. Usually, cards like this listed the applicant’s parents’ names and occupations, but here that information had been left blank. Yet, even though my husband’s parents had been declared enemies, he must have known someone or been related to someone with some influence or power, because, like me, he was not in a labor camp, or jail, or detention, but free.

I turned the picture card back around and looked at the man. He had a handsome, serious face, and his hair was cut close, neat and clean. His chin was slightly raised, which made him look bold. Often people who were sterile or related to traitors looked down, like they were ashamed, or apologetic, but he did not.

“What do you think?” Grandfather asked me.

“All right,” I answered, and Grandfather said he would arrange for me to meet him.

After our meeting, our marriage date was set for one year later. As I have mentioned, my husband had been in graduate school when he was blacklisted, but he was trying to appeal his case, which was another indication that someone was helping him, and he had asked to delay the marriage until after his trial, which Grandfather had agreed to.

One day, a few months after we had both signed our promissory contracts, Grandfather and I were walking down Fifth Avenue when Grandfather said, “There are many different kinds of marriages, little cat.”

I waited for him to say more, and when he finally did, he spoke much more slowly than he usually did, pausing after every few words.

“Some couples,” he began, “are very attracted to each other. They have a—a—physical chemistry, a hunger for each other. Do you know what I mean by that?”

“Sex,” I said. Grandfather himself had explained sex to me, years ago.

“That’s right,” he said. “Sex. But some couples don’t have that attraction. The man you are going to marry, little cat, is not interested in…with…Well. Let’s just say that he isn’t interested.

“But that doesn’t make your marriage any less valid. And that doesn’t mean your husband isn’t a good person, or that you aren’t. I want you to know, little cat, that sex is a part of a marriage, but only sometimes. And it’s not all that makes a marriage, not at all. Your husband will always treat you well, I promise you that. Do you understand what I’m trying to say?”

I thought maybe I did, but then I also thought that what I thought Grandfather was saying might not be what he meant after all.

“I think so,” I said, and he looked at me and then nodded.

Later, when he was kissing me good night, Grandfather said, “Your husband will always be kind to you, little cat. I have no fears,” and I had nodded, though I suppose Grandfather actually did have fears, because he eventually told me what to do if my husband ever treated me unkindly—though, as I have already said, he never has.

I was thinking of all this when I finally returned to our apartment after saying goodbye to David in the Square. My husband came home just as I was finishing cooking our dinner, and changed out of his cooling suit before setting the table and pouring us both some water.

I had been nervous to see my husband after our encounter, but it seemed it would be a meal like any other. I didn’t know where my husband went on Saturdays, except he usually wasn’t gone all day. He did the grocery shopping in the mornings, and on Sundays, we did our chores together: laundry, if it was our turn, and cleaning, and then we both went to the community garden to work our shifts, though not at the same time.

Dinner that night was leftover tofu, which I had made into a cold stew, and as we were eating, my husband said, not lifting his head, “I was glad to meet David today.”

“Oh,” I said. “Yes, it was nice.”

“How did you meet him?”

“At one of the storyteller sessions. He sat next to me.”

“When?”

“About seven weeks ago.”

He nodded. “Where does he work?”

“The Farm,” I said. “He’s a plant tech.”

He looked at me. “Where’s he from?” he asked.

“Little Eight,” I said. “But before that, Prefecture Five.”

My husband pressed his napkin to his mouth and then leaned back in his chair, looking up at the ceiling. He seemed to be struggling to speak. Then he said, “What do you do together?”

I shrugged. “We go to the storyteller’s,” I began, though we had not been to the storyteller in at least a month. “We walk around the Square. He tells me about growing up in Prefecture Five.”

“And what do you tell him?”

“Nothing,” I said, and as I said it, I realized it was true. I had nothing to tell—not to David, not to my husband.

My husband sighed, and passed his hand before his eyes, as he did when he was tired. “Cobra,” he said, “I want you to be careful. I’m glad you have a friend, I am. But you—you barely know this person. I just want you to be vigilant.” His voice was gentle, the same as it always was, but he was looking directly at me, and finally I looked away. “Have you considered that he might be from the state?”

I didn’t say anything. Something was building inside of me. “Cobra?” my husband asked, gently.

“Because no one would want to be my friend, is that what you mean?” I asked. I had never raised my voice to my husband, had never been angry with him, and now he looked surprised, and his mouth opened a bit.

“No,” he said. “That’s not what I mean. I just,” he started. Then he began again. “I promised your grandfather I’d always take care of you,” he said.

For a moment, I sat there. Then I got up and left the table and went to our room and closed the door and lay down on my bed. There was a silence, and I heard my husband’s chair scrape back, and the sounds of him washing the dishes, and the sound of the radio, and then him coming into our room, where I was pretending to be asleep. I heard him sit on his bed; I thought he might speak to me. But he didn’t, and soon I could hear from his breathing that he was asleep.

Naturally, it had in fact occurred to me that David might be an informant for the state. But if he was, he was a very poor one, as informants were quiet and invisible, and he was neither quiet nor invisible. Though I had also wondered whether that too was intentional: that his unsuitability as an informant increased the likelihood that he was one. The curious thing about the informants was that they were so quiet and invisible that you were usually able to tell who they were. Not immediately, perhaps, but eventually; there was a quality about them, what Grandfather had called a bloodlessness, that distinguished them. In the end, though, what convinced me that David was not an informant was me. Who would be interested in me? What secrets did I have? Everyone knew who Grandfather and my father had been; everyone knew how they had died; everyone knew what they had been convicted of and, in Grandfather’s case, how that conviction had been overturned, albeit too late. The only thing I had done wrong was those nights I had followed my husband, but that was hardly an offense for which one was assigned an informant.

But if it was impossible that David was an informant, then why was he spending time with me? I had never been someone people wanted to be around. After I had recovered from the sickness, Grandfather had taken me to activities, classes with children my own age. The parents sat in chairs arranged around the room, and the children played. But after a few sessions, we stopped going. It was all right, though, because I always had Grandfather to play with and talk to and spend time with—until the day I didn’t.

As I lay there that night, listening to my husband’s breathing and thinking about what he had said, I wondered if it was possible that I was actually not who I thought I was. I knew I was dull, and unexciting, and that I often didn’t understand people. But maybe I had changed, somehow, without even knowing it. Maybe I wasn’t who I knew I was.

I got up and went to the bathroom. There was a small mirror above the sink, which you could angle so you could see your entire body. I took off my clothes and looked at myself, and as I did, I realized I had not changed after all. I was still the same person, with the same thick legs and thin hair and small eyes. Nothing was any different; I was as I already knew myself to be.

I got dressed and turned off the light and returned to our bedroom. Then I felt very bad, because my husband was right—there was something strange about David talking to me. I was nobody, and he was not.

You’re not nobody, little cat, Grandfather would have said. You’re mine.

But this is the stranger thing: I didn’t care why David wanted to be friends with me. I just wanted him to keep being friends with me. And I decided that, whatever his reason was, it wouldn’t make a difference. I also realized that the sooner I went to sleep, the sooner it would be Sunday, and then Monday, and Tuesday, and with each day that passed, I would be that much closer to seeing him once more. And it was this understanding that made me close my eyes and, finally, fall asleep.

I haven’t spoken for some time about what was happening at the lab.

The truth is that my friendship with David had so preoccupied me that I had less time and inclination to eavesdrop on the Ph.D.s. On the other hand, there was also less of a need for stealth, because something was clearly happening, and the scientists had begun to discuss it openly, even though they weren’t supposed to. Of course, it was difficult for me to learn the details—and I wouldn’t have been able to understand them even if I had—but it seemed likely that there was another disease, and that it was projected to be highly deadly. But this was all I knew. I knew it had been discovered somewhere in South America, and I knew that most of the scientists suspected it was an airborne virus, and that it was probably hemorrhagic in nature, and spread by fluids as well, which was the worst kind of illness of all, and one we were less equipped to combat because so much research and money and prevention had gone toward respiratory illnesses. But I didn’t know anything else, because I don’t think the scientists knew anything else: They didn’t know how infectious it was, or how long its incubation was, or what the death rate was. I don’t even think they knew how many people had died from it, not yet. The fact that it had begun in South America was unfortunate, because South America was historically the least forthcoming about their research and infections, and in the last flare-up, Beijing had had to threaten them with severe sanctions to make them cooperate.

It may sound surprising to hear that despite this the mood at the laboratory was pleasant. The scientists liked having something to focus on, and the initial worry had changed to excitement. This would be most of the young scientists’ first major illness; many of the Ph.D.s were around my age, and like me, they would have barely remembered the events of ’70, and since the travel prohibition, there were fewer illnesses in general. Outwardly, everyone said they hoped that it was just an isolated incident, and that it could quickly be localized, but later, I would hear them whispering, and sometimes I would see them smiling, just a bit, and I knew it was because they were always being told by the older scientists that they were spoiled because they hadn’t actually experienced a pandemic from a professional perspective, and now they might.

I wasn’t scared, either; my daily life remained just as it had been. The lab would always need the pinkies, whether the illness turned out to be something big or not.

But the other reason I was so calm was because I had a friend. About a decade ago, the state had instituted a law that ordered people to register their friends’ names at their local center, but it had been quickly repealed. Even Grandfather had said it was a ridiculous notion. “I understand what they’re trying to do,” he had said, “but people are less idle, and therefore less troublesome, when they’re allowed to have friends.” Now even I had come to realize that this was true. I found myself gathering observations, things to tell David. I would never tell him what was happening at the lab, of course, but I sometimes tried to imagine the kinds of conversations we’d have if I did. At first this was difficult, because I couldn’t understand how he thought. Then I realized that he would usually say the opposite of what a typical person would say. So, if I were to say, “They’re worried about some new disease at the lab,” then a regular person would say, “Is it very bad?” But David would say something different, maybe something very different, such as “How do you know they’re worried?,” and then I would really have to think about the answer: How did I know they were worried? In this way, it was like talking to him on days I didn’t see him.

Some observations, though, I could tell him, and I did. Riding home on the shuttle, for example, I saw one of the police dogs, which were normally silent and disciplined, jump and bark and wag its tail as a butterfly flew in front of it. Or when Belle, the Ph.D., gave birth to her daughter, she sent dozens of boxes of cookies made with real lemons and real sugar to all the labs on our floor, and everyone got one, even me. Or when I discovered the pinky with two heads and six legs. Before, I would have saved these items to tell my husband over dinner. But now I thought only of what David would say, so that, even as I was observing something, part of me was thinking of the future and what his face would look like as he listened to me.

The next Saturday we met it was almost too hot to walk, even with our cooling suits. “You know what we should do?” asked David, as we moved slowly west. “We should meet instead at the center—we could listen to a concert.”

I thought about this. “But then we won’t be able to talk,” I said.

“Well, that’s true,” he said. “Not during the concert. But we could talk afterward, on the track.” There was an indoor track at the center, where you could walk in a loop in the air-conditioning.

I didn’t say anything to this, and he looked at me. “Do you go to the center often?”

“Yes,” I said, although that was a lie. But I didn’t want to say the truth—that I had been too scared to go inside. “My grandfather always said I should go more often,” I said, “that I might enjoy it.”

“You’ve mentioned your grandfather before,” David said. “What was he like?”

“He was nice,” I said, after a silence, although this hardly seemed like an adequate way to describe Grandfather. “He loved me,” I said, finally. “He took care of me. We used to play games together.”

“Like what?”

I was about to answer when it occurred to me that the games Grandfather and I played—like the one in which we pretended to have a conversation, or in which I gave him observations of someone we had passed on the street—wouldn’t seem much like a game to anyone but ourselves, and that calling them games would make me seem odd: odd because I would think they were games, and odd because I would need to play them. So instead I said, “Ball, and cards, things like that,” because I knew those were regular games, and I felt pleased with myself for thinking of the answer.

“That sounds nice,” said David, and we walked a little more. “Was your grandfather a lab tech, like you?” he asked.

This wasn’t as strange a question as it sounds. If I had had a child, he would probably become a lab tech as well, or have an equivalent rank, unless he was exceptionally bright and therefore tracked at an early age to become, say, a scientist. But back in Grandfather’s day, you could choose to become whatever you wanted, and then you went and did it.

It was also then that I realized that David didn’t know who Grandfather was. There was a time in which everyone had known who he was, but now, I suppose, only people in the government and in science knew his name. But I hadn’t told David my last name. To him, my grandfather was only my grandfather, and nothing else.

“Yes,” I said. “He was a lab tech, too.”

“Did he work at Rockefeller as well?”

“Yes,” I said, because that was true.

“What did he look like?” he asked.

It sounds strange to say, but although I spent a great deal of time thinking about Grandfather, I could remember less and less what he looked like. What I remembered more was the sound of his voice, the way he smelled, the way he made me feel when he put his arm around me. The way I saw him most frequently in my mind was the day he was being marched to the platform, when he was looking for me in the crowd, his eyes moving across the hundreds of people who had gathered to watch and yell at him, calling my name before the executioner lowered the black hood over his head.

But of course I couldn’t say that. “He was tall,” I began. “And skinny. His skin was darker than mine. He had gray hair, short, and—” And here I faltered, because I really didn’t know what else I could say.

“Did he wear fancy clothes?” David asked. “My maternal grandfather liked to wear fancy clothes.”

“No,” I said, though as I did, I remembered a ring that Grandfather had worn when I was little. It was very old, and gold, and on one side it had a pearl, and if you pressed the little latches on the sides of the setting, the pearl hinged open and there was a tiny compartment. Grandfather had worn it on his left pinkie, and had always turned the pearl inward, toward his palm. Then, one day, he had stopped wearing it, and when I had asked him why, he had praised me for being so observant. “But where is it?” I had demanded, and he had smiled. “I had to give it to the fairy as payment,” he said. “What fairy?” I had asked. “Why, the fairy who looked over you while you were sick,” he said. “I told her I would give her anything she wanted if she took care of you, and she said she would, but I needed to give her my ring in exchange.” By this point, I had been well for several years, and I also knew that fairies didn’t exist, but whenever I asked Grandfather about it, he had only smiled and repeated the same story, and eventually, I stopped asking.

But, again, this wasn’t the kind of story I could tell David, and anyway, he had begun talking about his other grandfather, who had been a farmer in Prefecture Five before it was called Prefecture Five. He had raised pigs and cows and goats, and had had a hundred peach trees, and David told me about being young and visiting his grandfather and eating as many peaches as he wanted. “I’m ashamed to admit this, but I hated peaches when I was a kid,” he said. “There were just so many of them: My grandmother baked them into pies, and cakes, and bread, and she made them into jam, and leather—oh, that’s when you dry slices of them in the sun until they become tough, like jerky—and ice cream. And this is after she’d canned as many as we and our neighbors needed to get us through the rest of the year.” But then the farm had become state property, and his grandfather had gone from owning it to working on it, and the peach trees were cut down to make room for soybean fields, which were more nutritious than peaches and therefore a more efficient crop. It was unwise to talk as freely about the past as David did, much less about governmental claims, but he did so in the same light, easy, matter-of-fact tone that he had used to discuss the peaches. Grandfather had once told me that discussing the past was discouraged because it made many people angry or sad, but David sounded neither angry nor sad. It was as if what he was describing had happened not to him but to someone else, someone he barely knew.

“Now, of course, I’d kill for a peach,” he said, cheerily, as we neared the north of the Square, where we met and parted every Saturday. “I’ll see you next week, Charlie,” he said as he left. “Think about what you might like to do at the center.”

Once I was back at home, I took out the box in the closet and looked at the pictures I had of Grandfather. The first one was taken when he was in medical school. He was laughing, and his hair was long and curly and black. In the second, he was standing with my father, who was a toddler, and my other grandfather, the one to whom I’m genetically related. In my mind, my father resembles Grandfather, but in this picture, you can see that he actually looked like my other grandfather: They were both lighter skinned than Grandfather, with straight dark hair, like I used to have. In the third picture, my favorite, Grandfather looks as I remember him. He’s smiling, a big smile, and in his arms he is holding a small, thin baby, and that baby is me. “Charles and Charlie,” someone wrote on the back of this photo, “September 12, 2064.”

I found myself thinking about Grandfather both more and less since I had met David. I didn’t need to talk to him in my head as much as I used to, but I also wanted to talk to him more, mostly about David, and about what it was like to have a friend. I wondered what he would have thought of him. I wondered whether he would have agreed with my husband.

I wondered as well what David would have thought of Grandfather. It was strange to think that he didn’t know who Grandfather was, that to him, he was simply a relative of mine, whom I had loved and who had died. As I have said, everyone I worked with knew who Grandfather was. There was a greenhouse on top of a building at RU that was named for him, and there was even a law named for him, the Griffith Act, which established the legality of the relocation centers, which had once been called quarantine camps.

But it was not so long ago that many people hated Grandfather. I suppose there are people who still hate him, but you never hear about those people anymore. I first became aware of this hatred when I was eleven, in civics class. We were learning about how, in the aftermath of the illness of ’50, a new government began to take form, so by the time the illness of ’56 arose, they were more properly prepared, and by ’62, the new state had been established. One of the inventions that had helped contain the illness of ’70—which, as bad as it was, could have been much worse—was the relocation centers, which were originally located only in the west and midwest but by ’69 were in every municipality. “These camps became very important to our scientists and doctors,” my teacher had said. “Does anyone know the names of the early, original camps?”

People started shouting out answers: Heart Mountain. Rohwer. Minidoka. Jerome. Poston. Gila River.

“Yes, yes,” my teacher said after each name. “Yes, that’s right. And does anyone know who founded those camps?”

No one knew. And then Miss Bethesda looked at me. “It was Charlie’s grandfather,” she said. “Dr. Charles Griffith. He was one of the architects of the camps.”

Everyone turned to look at me, and I felt myself grow hot with embarrassment. I liked my teacher—she had always been kind to me. When the other children ran away from me on the playground, laughing as they did, she would always come over and ask if I might like to come back into the classroom and help her distribute the art supplies for the afternoon lesson. Now I looked up, and my teacher was looking back at me, the same as always, and yet something was wrong. I felt as if she were angry with me, but I hadn’t known why.

That night, at dinner, I asked Grandfather if he was the person who had invented the centers. He had looked at me then, and had waved his hand, and the servant who was pouring my milk had set down the pitcher and left the room. “Why do you ask that, little cat?” he asked, after the man shut the door behind him.

“We learned about it in civics class,” I said. “My teacher said you were one of the people who invented them.”

“Did she,” Grandfather said, and although his voice sounded the same as it always did, I could see that he was holding his left hand in a fist, so tightly that it trembled. Then he noticed me looking, and he opened his hand and laid his palm flat on the table. “What else did she say?”

I explained to Grandfather how Miss Bethesda had said that the centers had prevented more deaths, and he nodded, slowly. For a while he was silent, and I listened to the ticking of the clock, which sat on the mantel above the fireplace.

Finally, Grandfather spoke. “Years ago,” he said, “there were people who opposed the camps, who didn’t want them built, who thought I was a bad person because I supported them.” I must have looked surprised, because he nodded. “Yes,” he said. “They didn’t understand that the camps were created to keep us—all of us—healthy and safe. Eventually, people came to see that they were necessary, and that we had to build them. Do you understand why?”

“Yes,” I said. I had learned this in civics class as well. “Because it meant that the sick people were in one place, so people who were healthy wouldn’t get sick, too.”

“That’s right,” Grandfather said.

“Then why didn’t people like them?” I asked.

He looked up at the ceiling, which was something he did when he was thinking of how to answer me. “It’s difficult to explain,” he said, slowly, “but one of the reasons is that, back in those days, you would remove just the infected person, not their whole family, and some people thought it was cruel to separate people from their families.”

“Oh,” I said. I thought about this. “I wouldn’t want to be separated from you, Grandfather,” I said, and he smiled.

“And I would never be separated from you, little cat,” he said. “This is why the policy changed, and now the entire family goes to the center together.”

I didn’t need to ask what happened at the centers, because I already knew: You died. But at least you died somewhere clean, and safe, and well-equipped—there were schools for the children to go to, and sports for the adults to play, and when you got very sick, you were taken to the center hospital, which was gleaming and white, and where doctors and nurses took care of you until you died. I had seen pictures of the centers on television, and there were pictures of them in our textbook as well. There was one, taken at Heart Mountain, of a laughing young woman holding a little girl, who was also laughing; in the background, you could see their cabin, which had an apple tree planted in front of it. Standing next to the woman and little girl was a doctor, and even though she was wearing her full protective suit, you could tell she was laughing as well, and she had her hand on the woman’s shoulder. You couldn’t go visit people at the centers, for your own protection, but the sick person could bring whomever he or she wanted, and sometimes whole extended families would go in a group: mothers and fathers and children and grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins. At first, going to the centers was voluntary. Then it became required, which was controversial, because Grandfather said that people didn’t like being told what to do, even if it was for the good of their fellow citizens.

Of course, by that point—this was in 2075—there were fewer people in the centers, because the pandemic had been almost contained by then. Sometimes I looked at that picture in my textbook and wished I lived in one of the centers myself. Not because I wanted to be sick, or wanted Grandfather to be sick, but because it looked so nice there, with the apple trees and wide green fields. But we would never go, not only because we weren’t allowed but because Grandfather was needed here. That was why we hadn’t gone to a center when I had been sick—because Grandfather needed to be near his lab, and the nearest center was on Davids Island, many miles north of Manhattan, which would have been too inconvenient.

“Do you have any more questions?” Grandfather had asked, smiling at me.

“No,” I said.

That had been a Friday. The following Monday, I had gone to school, and instead of my teacher standing at the front of the room, there had been someone else, a short, dark man with a mustache. “Where’s Miss Bethesda?” someone had asked.

“Miss Bethesda is no longer at this school,” said the man. “I am your new teacher.”

“Is she sick?” someone else asked.

“No,” said the new teacher. “But she is no longer at this school.”

I don’t know why, but I didn’t tell Grandfather that Miss Bethesda was gone. I never told him, even though I never saw Miss Bethesda again. Later, I learned that the centers may not have resembled the pictures in my textbook after all. This was in 2088, at the beginning of the second uprising. The following year, the insurgents were defeated for good, and Grandfather’s name was cleared and his status was restored. But by that point, it was too late. Grandfather was dead, and I was left alone with my husband.

Over the years, I have occasionally wondered about the relocation centers: Which version of them was the correct one? In the months before Grandfather was killed, protestors marched outside our home carrying blown-up photographs they said were taken at the centers. “Don’t look,” Grandfather would tell me, on the rare occasions we left the house. “Look away, little cat.” But sometimes I did look, and the people in the photographs were so deformed that they didn’t even look like humans any longer.

But I never thought Grandfather was bad. He had done what had needed to be done. And he had taken care of me for my entire life. There was no one who was kinder to me, no one who loved me more. My father, I knew, had disagreed with Grandfather; I don’t remember how I had come to know this, but I did. He had wanted Grandfather to be punished. It was an odd thing, knowing that your own father had wanted his father to be imprisoned. But it didn’t change my feelings. My father had left me when I was young—Grandfather never had. I didn’t see how someone who abandoned his child could be any better than someone who had only tried to save as many people as he could, even if he had made mistakes while doing so.

The following Saturday, I met David in the Square as always, and he once again suggested we go to the center, and this time, I agreed, as it was by now very hot. We walked the eight and a half blocks north slowly, so as not to overtax our cooling suits.

David had said that we were going to listen to a concert, but when we paid for our tickets, there was only a lone musician at the front of the room, a young, dark-skinned man with a cello. Once we had all sat down, he bowed to us, and then he began to play.

I had never thought I cared for cello music very much, but when the concert was over, I wished I hadn’t agreed to walk on the indoor track afterward and could instead go home. Something about the music made me think of the music Grandfather had played on the radio in his study when I was small, and I missed him so badly that it was difficult to swallow.

“Charlie?” asked David, looking worried. “Are you okay?”

“Yes,” I said, and I made myself stand up and walk out of the room, which everyone else, even the cellist, had already left.

At the edge of the indoor track there was a man selling iced fruit drinks. We both looked at the man and then at each other, because neither of us knew whether the other could afford to buy one.

“It’s okay,” I said at last, “I can.”

He smiled. “I can, too,” he said.

We bought the drinks and sipped them as we walked around the track. There were only about a dozen other people there. We were still wearing our cooling suits—once you were in them, it was easier to just keep them on—but had deflated them, and it felt good to move as we usually did.

For a while, we walked in silence. Then David said, “Do you ever wish you could visit another country?”

“It’s not allowed,” I said.

“I know it’s not allowed,” he said. “But do you ever wish you could?”

Suddenly I was tired of David’s strange questions, his tendency to always ask things that were, if not illegal, then at least impolite, subjects that you didn’t think about, much less discuss. And what was the point of wishing for anything that wasn’t allowed? Wishing for things would change nothing. For months, I had wished every day that Grandfather would come back—if I am to be honest, I wished for it still. But he never would. It was better not to want at all: Wanting just made you unhappy, and I was not unhappy.

I remember once, when I had been in college, one of the girls in my class had figured out a way to access the internet. This was very hard to do, but she had been very smart, and though a few of the other girls had wanted to see what it was like as well, I had not. I knew what the internet was, of course, though I was too young to remember it: I was only three when it became illegal. I wasn’t sure I even understood, exactly, what it did. Once, when I was a teenager, I had asked Grandfather to explain it to me, and he had been quiet a long time, and then he finally said it was a way for people to communicate with one another across vast distances. “The problem with it,” he said, “was that it often allowed people to exchange bad information—untrue things, dangerous things. And when that happened, there were serious consequences.” After it was forbidden, he said, things became safer, because everyone was receiving the same information at the same time, which meant there was less chance for confusion. This seemed like a good reason to me. Later, when the four girls who had looked at the internet disappeared, most people thought they’d been taken by the state. But I remembered what Grandfather had said, and wondered if they had been contacted by people on the internet with dangerous information and something bad had happened to them. The point is that there was little purpose in wondering what it would be like to do things or go places that I would never be able to. I did not think about trying to find the internet, and I did not think of going to another country. Some people did, but I did not.

“Not really,” I said.

“But don’t you want to see what another country is like?” David asked, and now even he lowered his voice. “Maybe things are better someplace else.”

“Better how?” I asked, despite myself.

“Well, better in lots of ways,” he said. “Maybe in another place we would have different jobs, for example.”

“I like my job,” I said.

“I know,” he said. “I like my job, too. I’m just thinking out loud.”

But I didn’t see how things would be any different in another country. Every place had been ravaged by the illnesses. Every place was the same.

When he was my age, however, Grandfather had traveled to many different countries. Back in those days, you could go anywhere you wanted, as long as you had the money. So, after he finished college, he got on an aeroplane and landed in Japan. From Japan, he traveled west, through Korea, across the People’s Republic of China, down through India, and over to Turkey, Greece, Italy, Germany, the Low Countries. For a few months he remained in Britain, staying with friends of a friend from college, and then he began moving again: Down one coast of Africa and back up the other; down one coast of South America and back up the other. He went to Australia and New Zealand; he went to Canada and Russia. In India he rode a camel across a desert; in Japan he hiked to the top of a mountain; in Greece he swam in water he said had been bluer than the sky. I had asked him why he didn’t just stay home, and he said that home was too small—he wanted to see how other people lived, what they ate, what they wore, what they wanted to do with their lives.

“I was from a very tiny island,” he said. “I knew that all around me were other kinds of people, doing things I would never be able to see if I just stayed. So I had to leave.”

“Was what they were doing better?” I asked.

“Not better,” he said. “But different. The more I saw, the less I felt I could ever go back to where I was from.” We spoke in whispers, even though Grandfather had turned on the radio so the music would obscure our conversation from the listening devices that were wired throughout the house.

But the rest of the world must have been better after all, because in Australia, Grandfather met another person from Hawai‘i, and they fell in love, and went back to Hawai‘i, where they had a son, my father. And then they moved to America and never returned to live at home again, not even before the illness of ’50. And then it was too late, because everyone in Hawai‘i had died, and by this point, all three of them were American citizens. And then, after the laws of ’67, no one was allowed to leave the country anyway. The only people who remembered other places were older, and they didn’t talk about those years.

After circling the track ten times, we decided to leave. But as we were walking outside, we heard the sounds of a dull thumping, and soon a flatbed truck pulled slowly into sight. In the back knelt three people. You couldn’t tell if they were men or women, because they wore those long white gowns and black hoods that covered their entire heads and which must have been very hot. Their hands were bound in front of them, and two guards stood behind them, wearing cooling suits with reflective helmets. Over the drumbeat, a voice was repeating over the speaker, “Thursday at 18:00. Thursday at 18:00.” They only announced Ceremonies like this when the convicted had been found guilty of treason, and usually only when they were of high rank, perhaps even state employees. Usually, state employees were punished this way if they had been caught trying to leave the country, which was illegal, or if they were trying to smuggle someone into the country, which was both unsafe and illegal, because it meant you could introduce a foreign microbe, or because they were trying to disseminate unauthorized information, usually via technology they weren’t allowed to use or possess. They were put on a truck and driven through all of the zones, so you could look at them and heckle them if you wanted. But I never did, and neither did David, though we both stood and watched as the vehicle drove past us, and then turned south on Seventh Avenue.

After the truck had disappeared, though, something strange happened: I looked over at David, and saw that he was staring after it, his mouth slightly open; and that he had tears in his eyes.

This was astonishing and also deeply dangerous—showing even the smallest sympathy for the accused could get you noticed by a Fly, which had been programmed to interpret human expressions. I quickly whispered his name, and he blinked, and turned to me. I looked around; I didn’t think anyone had seen us. But just in case, it was best to keep moving, to seem normal, and so I began walking east, back to Sixth Avenue, and after a moment, he followed me. I wanted to say something to David, but I didn’t know what. I was frightened, but I didn’t know why, and angry as well, at him for reacting in such a strange way.

As we were crossing Thirteenth Street, he said to me, in a low voice, “That was terrible.”

He was right—it was terrible—but it happened all the time. I didn’t like seeing the trucks go by, either; I didn’t like watching the Ceremonies, or listening to them on the radio. But it was the way things worked—you did something wrong and were punished, and there was no way to change any of it: not the wrongdoing, and not the punishment.

Yet David was acting as if he’d never seen one of the trucks before. He stared straight ahead, but he was silent, chewing on his lip. We usually didn’t wear our helmets on our walks together, but now he took his from his bag and put it on, and I was glad, because it wasn’t typical to show emotion in public, and doing so could draw attention to you.

At the northern edge of the Square, we stopped. It was the customary place we said goodbye, where he turned left to go to Little Eight, and I turned right to go home. For a while, we stood there in silence. Our departures were never awkward, because David always had something to say, and then he would wave goodbye and leave. But now he wasn’t saying anything, and through his helmet’s screen, I could see he was still upset.

I felt bad then for being so impatient with him, even if he was behaving recklessly. He was my friend, and friends were understanding of each other, even if it was confusing. I had not been understanding with David, and it was because of my guilt about this that I did something strange: I reached out my arms and put them around him.

It wasn’t easy to do, because both of our cooling suits were inflated to maximum capacity, and so I couldn’t so much embrace him as pet at his back. As I did so, I found myself pretending something odd: that we were married, and that he was my husband. It wasn’t typical to show someone, even your spouse, affection in public, but it wasn’t frowned upon, either; it was simply uncommon. Once, however, I had seen a couple kiss goodbye; the woman was standing in the doorway of their building, and the man, a tech, was leaving for the day. She was pregnant, and after they kissed, he pressed his palm to her stomach and they looked at each other and smiled. I had been on the shuttle, and I had turned in my seat to watch them, the man putting his hat on and walking away, the smile still on his face. I found myself imagining that David was my husband, and that we were a couple like that one, the kind that would embrace in public because we couldn’t stop ourselves from doing so; the kind with so much extra affection that it had to be expressed in gestures because we had run out of words.

I was thinking this when I realized that David wasn’t returning my gesture, that, beneath my arms, he was stiff and still, and I abruptly withdrew, stepping backward as I did.

Now I was very embarrassed. I could feel my face getting hot, and I quickly jammed my helmet on. I had done something very foolish. I had made a fool of myself. I needed to get away.

“Goodbye,” I said, and began walking.

“Wait,” he said, after a moment. “Wait, Charlie. Wait.”

But I pretended I couldn’t hear him and kept moving. I didn’t look behind me. I ventured into the Square and stood in the herbalists’ section and waited until I was certain he had left. Then I turned and walked home. Once I was inside the safety of our apartment again, I took off my helmet and suit. My husband was out somewhere; I was alone.

All of a sudden, I felt very angry. I am not an angry person—even when I was little, I never threw tantrums, I never screamed, I never demanded anything. I tried to be as good as I knew how for Grandfather. But now I wanted to hit something, to hurt something, to break something. But there was nothing and no one in the house to hit or hurt or break: The plates were made of plastic; the mixing bowls were made of silicone; the pots were made of metal. Then I remembered how, even though I had not been angry as a child, I had often been frustrated, and I would moan and buck and claw at myself as Grandfather tried to hold me still. So now I went to my bed and practiced the method he’d taught me when everything seemed overwhelming, which was to lie on my stomach and press my face into the pillow and inhale until I felt dizzy.

After this, I got up again. I couldn’t stay in the apartment—I couldn’t bear it. And so I rezipped myself into my cooling suit and went back outside.

It was now late afternoon, and the day was becoming slightly less hot. I began walking around the Square. It felt queer to be walking alone after so many weeks of doing so with David, and it was perhaps because of that that, instead of just walking around the Square, I entered it on the western side. There was nothing I needed or wanted in the Square, but despite my aimlessness, I found myself moving toward the southeastern section.

I’m not sure why, but this quadrant of the Square had a reputation for being unseemly. How this had happened was something of a mystery; as I have said, the southeastern part was mostly occupied by carpenters, and if you weren’t too bothered by the sound of buzz saws and hammers, it was actually a nice place to be—the wood smelled clean and sharp, and you could stand and watch the woodworkers make or repair chairs or tables or buckets, and they wouldn’t shoo you away like some of the other vendors would. And yet, for some reason, this was where you came if you wanted to find one of the people I have mentioned earlier, the people who weren’t licensed and who didn’t have a stall and yet who also occupied the Square, the people who could solve problems you didn’t know how to ask about.

One theory I’d heard about how this had happened didn’t make any sense. The southeastern part of the Square was closest to a tall brick building that had once been the library of a university that had been located nearby. After the university was closed, the building served for a period as a prison. Now it was the archive office for four of the island’s southern zones, including Zone Eight. This was where the state kept its birth and death records for everyone who lived in these areas, as well as any files or notes on those residents. The front of the building was all glass, so you could look in and see the tiers of cases filled with files; in the lobby, on the street level, there was a windowless black cube, about ten feet on all sides, and inside that black cube sat the archivist, who could find any file you needed. Of course, the archive hall was only accessible to state officials, and only those officials with the highest clearance. There was always someone in the black cube, and it was one of the few buildings that were always lit, even during the hours it was illegal to turn on the lights because it was a waste of electricity. I never understood what the southeastern corner’s proximity to the archive hall had to do with its illicit activity, but that was what everyone said: that it was easier to do dangerous things closer to a state building, because the state would never consider that anyone would do anything illegal so nearby. That was what everyone said, anyway.

As I have said, these people I have mentioned had no permanent station or stall, and so it wasn’t as if you could just go to one area or another and expect to find them—they had to find you, instead. What you did was wander slowly among the vendors. You didn’t look up; you didn’t look around. You just walked, looking down at the curls of wood that covered the ground, and eventually, someone would come up to you and ask you a question. The question was usually only two or three words, and if it wasn’t the right question, you just kept walking. If it was the right question, you looked up. I had never done this myself, but I had once stood near one of the woodworkers and watched it happen. There had been a young woman, pretty and fair, and she had been walking very slowly, with her hands behind her back. She had worn a green scarf on her head, and I could see some of her hair, which was thick and red and chin-length, peeking out beneath. I had watched her pace in a loop for about three minutes before the first person, a short, thin, middle-aged man, approached her and said something I couldn’t hear. But she kept walking, almost like she hadn’t heard him, and he moved away. A minute later, another person approached her, and still she kept walking. The fifth time, a woman walked up to her, and this time, the young woman raised her head and followed the woman, who led her to a small tent made from a tarp on the very eastern edge of the Square, then lifted one side of it and looked around her for Flies before ushering the young woman in and slipping inside herself.

I don’t know what made me start walking about the southeastern quadrant myself that day. I concentrated on my feet moving through the sawdust. Sure enough, after a few moments, I felt someone following me. And then I heard a man’s voice say, very low, “Looking for someone?” But I kept walking, and soon the man walked away as well.

Shortly after, I saw another man’s feet approach me. “Sickness?” he asked. “Medicine?” But I kept walking.

For a while, nothing happened. I walked more slowly. And then I saw a woman’s feet coming my way; I could tell the feet belonged to a woman because they were small. They drew very near me, and then I heard a voice whisper, “Love?”

I looked up and realized it was the same woman I’d seen earlier, with a tent on the eastern edge. “Come with me,” she said, and I followed her to her area. I wasn’t thinking about what I was doing; I wasn’t thinking at all. It was as if what was happening was something I was watching, not something I was doing. At the tent, I saw her scan the sky for Flies—the same as she’d done for the young woman—and then beckon me inside.

Inside, the tent was stiflingly hot. There was a rough wooden box that had been secured with a padlock, and two dirty cotton cushions, one of which she sat on and one of which I sat on.

“Take off your helmet,” she said, and I did. She wasn’t wearing a helmet, but she had a scarf wrapped around her mouth and nose, and now she unwound it, and I saw that the bottom left part of her cheek had been eaten away by disease, and that she was younger than I had thought.

“I’ve seen you before,” she said, and I stared at her. “Yes,” she said, “walking around the Square with your husband. A nice-looking man. But he doesn’t love you?”

“No,” I said, after I had recovered myself. “He isn’t my husband. He’s my—he’s my friend.”

“Ah,” she said, and her face relaxed. “I understand. And you want him to fall in love with you.”

For a moment, I was unable to speak. Was that what I wanted? Was that why I had come here? But that would be impossible—I knew I would never be loved, not in the way people talked about love. I knew I would never love, either. It was not for me. It was so difficult for me to know what I felt. Other people were able to say, “I am happy,” or “I am sad,” or “I miss you,” or “I love you,” but I never knew how. “I love you, little cat,” Grandfather would say, but I could only rarely say it back to him, because I didn’t know what it meant. The feelings I had—what words did I have for them? The feeling I had reading the notes written to my husband; the feeling I had watching him enter the house on Bethune Street; the feeling I had listening to him return late on a Thursday night; the feeling I had lying in bed, wondering if he might someday touch me, or kiss me, and knowing he never would—what were those feelings? What were they called? And with David: The feeling I had when I stood at the north of the Square, watching him wave as he came toward me; the feeling I had when I watched him walk away from me at the end of one of our days together; the feeling I got on Friday night, knowing that I would see him the next day; the feeling I had when I had tried to embrace him, and the feeling I had when I had seen his face, the confusion on it, the way he had pulled away from me—what were those feelings? Were they all the same? Were they all love? Was I able to feel it after all? Was what I had always assumed was impossible for me something I had known all along?

Suddenly I was frightened. I had behaved rashly, dangerously, by coming here. I had lost my common sense. “I have to go,” I said, standing. “I’m sorry. Goodbye.”

“Wait,” the woman called out to me. “There’s something I can give you: a powder. You slip it into a drink, and in five days—”

But I was already leaving, I was walking out of the tarp, quickly, so that I wouldn’t be able to hear what else she said, so I wouldn’t be tempted to return, but not so quickly that I would attract the attention of a Fly.

I exited the Square at the eastern entrance. I had only a few hundred yards to go and then I would be back in my apartment, safe, and once I was there, I could pretend all of this had never happened; I could pretend I had never met David. I would be once again who I was, a married woman, a lab tech, a person who accepted the way the world was, who understood that to wish for anything else was useless, because there was nothing I could do, and so it was best not even to try.