To Paradise

PART VI

Spring, thirty years earlier

Dearest Peter, March 2, 2064

Before I launch right in: Congratulations. A very well-deserved promotion, though I suppose it’s telling that the higher you go, the less grand and more opaque the title gets. And the less you get publicly acknowledged. Not that that matters. I know we’ve spoken about this before, but do you feel as much of a phantom as I do these days? Able to pass through doors (if not walls) that are closed to most, but never seen: An object of horror and fright, rarely encountered but known to exist. An abstraction rather than an actual human being. I know some people relish this kind of spectral existence. I did too, once.

Anyway. Yes, thank you for asking, today was indeed the final signing of the paperwork, after which Aubrey’s house became, officially, Nathaniel’s house. Nathaniel will at some point pass the house on to David, and David eventually will pass the house on to someone else, which I’ll tell you about in a bit.

Although Nathaniel had been living there for a few years now, he had never referred to it, never thought of it, as his. It was always “Aubrey and Norris’s,” and then it was “Aubrey’s.” Even at Aubrey’s funeral, he was telling people to “come back to Aubrey’s for a reception,” until I finally reminded him it wasn’t Aubrey’s house but his. He had given me one of his looks, but later I heard him refer to it as “the house.” Not Aubrey’s, not his, not anyone’s, just a house that had agreed to accommodate us.

I had been spending much more time at the house (see? I do it too) this past year or so. First, there was Aubrey’s death. There was a stateliness to his dying, I always thought: He looked fairly well, by which I mean that although he was wasted, he had been spared so many indignities we’d both seen afflict the dying in the past decade—no weeping sores, no pus, no drooling, no blood. Then there was his funeral, and the sorting through of his papers, and then of course I had to go away on business for a while, and by the time I’d returned, the staff had been dismissed (each with a severance specified in Aubrey’s will) and Nathaniel was trying to conceive of himself as the owner of an enormous home on Washington Square.

I was surprised, stepping into the place today, by how changed it was. There was nothing Nathaniel could do about the bricked-up parlor-floor windows or the bars on the windows of the upper floors, but the overall effect was airier, brighter. The walls were still hung with a few key pieces of Hawaiian art—the rest had gone to the Metropolitan, which now also sheltered most of the important works once owned by the royal family, things they had meant to keep safe and someday return, but which are now permanently theirs—but he had changed the lighting and painted the walls a deep gray, which made the space feel perversely sunnier. It was still full of Aubrey and Norris, and yet their presence had been vanished.

We walked around and looked at the works. Now that Nathaniel was their owner—a Hawaiian man with Hawaiian objects—I was able to appreciate them more; it was less as if they were being displayed and more as if they were being shown off, if that makes sense. Nathaniel talked about each textile, each bowl, each necklace: where it had come from, how it had been made. As he did, I studied him. For so long, he had wanted a beautiful house, with beautiful things, and now he had them. Even though Aubrey’s estate was much smaller than either of us had imagined—the money having been squandered on security services and junk-science disease preventatives and, yes, given away in large quantities to charities—there was enough left so that Nathaniel could, finally, feel secure. Around New Year’s, the baby, in one of his more hateful moods, had told me that Nathaniel was seeing someone, some lawyer in the Justice Ministry—“Yeah, he’s a pretty cool guy”: I didn’t say that if he worked in Justice, he was by definition complicit in maintaining the quarantine camps—but Nathaniel didn’t mention it, and I of course didn’t ask.

After the tour, we returned to the parlor, and Nathaniel said he had something for me, something from Aubrey. One of my final visits to Aubrey had coincided with one of his more lucid moments, and during it, he asked if I wanted anything from his collection. But I had said no. I had grown to accept Aubrey, even to like him, but beneath that acceptance and affection was a knot of resentment: not, in the end, for the objects he’d collected and for the fact that he possessed more of Hawai‘i than I do, but for the fact that he and my husband and child had become a family, and I had been cast out. Nathaniel had met Aubrey and Norris, and everything had started ending, so slowly that I at first couldn’t tell it was even happening, and then so thoroughly that I couldn’t have hoped to stop it.

I sat on one of the sofas, and Nathaniel took something out of one of the side-table drawers: a little black velvet box, about the size of a golf ball.

“What is it?” I asked him, in the idiotic way people do when they’re given a gift, and he smiled. “Open it and see,” he said, so I did.

Inside was Aubrey’s ring. I removed it, feeling its weight in my hand, how warm the gold was. I opened the pearl lid, but there was nothing inside.

“Well?” asked Nathaniel, but lightly. He sat down next to me.

“Well,” I said.

“He said he thought you hated him for this ring most of all,” Nathaniel said, but serenely, and I looked up at him, surprised. “Oh, yes,” he said. “He knew you hated him.”

“I didn’t hate him,” I said, feebly.

“Yes, you did,” Nathaniel said. “You just wouldn’t admit it to yourself.”

“Yet another thing Aubrey knew that I didn’t,” I said, trying and failing to not sound sarcastic, but Nathaniel only shrugged.

“Anyway,” he said. “It’s yours now.”

I put it on my left pinkie and held up my hand for him to look at. I still wore my wedding ring, and he touched it, gently. He had stopped wearing his years ago.

At that moment, I sensed that I could have leaned over and kissed him, and that he would have let me. But I didn’t, and he, as if sensing the same possibility, abruptly stood.

“Now,” he said, businesslike, “when David arrives, I want you to be not just civil but encouraging, all right?”

“I’m always encouraging,” I said.

“Charles, I mean it,” he said. “He’s going to be introducing you to—to a friend of his, who’s very important to him. And he has some…some news.”

“Is he going back to school?” I asked, just to be a brat. Even I knew the answer to that. David was never going back to school.

He ignored the provocation. “Just promise me,” he said. Then, in another abrupt change of mood, he sat back down next to me. “I hate that it’s like this between you two,” he said. I said nothing. “Everything else aside, you’re still his father,” he said.

“You tell him that.”

“I have. But The Light matters to him.”

“Oh god,” I said. I had been hoping we could get through the conversation without either one of us mentioning The Light.

At that moment, the decontamination chamber hissed, and David appeared, followed by a woman. I stood, and we nodded at each other. “Look, David,” I said, and showed him the ring, and he grunted and smiled simultaneously. “Nice, Pops,” he said. “You finally got it after all.” I was stung but didn’t say anything. And anyway, he was right: I had.

Things had been stable between us, which is to say we had, without explicitly agreeing to it, reached a détente. I wouldn’t needle him about The Light, and he wouldn’t bait me about my work. But this agreement could only last for around fifteen minutes, and only if we had something else to discuss: I don’t mean to sound callous, but Aubrey’s death had been very helpful in that regard. There were always details of his chemo to review, and his mood and water intake to monitor, and his pain management to detail. And I had been moved—moved, and, if I have to admit it, a little jealous—when I saw how carefully, how gently, the baby had cared for Aubrey in his final months: how he patted his head with a cold cloth, how he held his hand, how he talked to him in a way that many people can’t to the dying, an effortless, unpatronizing patter that somehow seemed to acknowledge Aubrey even as it made clear he didn’t expect a reply. He had a gift for helping the dying, a rare and valuable gift, one that could have been put to good use in any number of ways.

For a moment, we all stood there, and then Nathaniel, always having to play the negotiator, the mediator, said, “Oh! And, Charles—this is Eden, David’s good friend.”

She was older, in her mid-thirties, at least a decade older than the baby, a pale-skinned Korean, with the same ridiculous hairstyle as David. Tattoos crept from her sleeves and up her throat; the backs of her hands were stippled with a series of tiny stars that I would later learn formed constellations—the left hand was decorated with the spring constellations of the northern hemisphere; the right with the spring constellations of the south. She wasn’t attractive, exactly—the haircut and tattoos and overdone eyebrows, the ink so thick it looked like impasto, had ensured that—but she did have a coiled quality, something lean and feral and sensual.

We bowed to each other. “Nice to meet you, Eden,” I said.

I couldn’t tell if she was smirking, or if that was what her smile looked like. “You too, Charles,” she said. “David’s told me a lot about you.” This was said meaningfully, though I did not engage.

“I’m glad to hear it,” I replied. “Oh, and call me Charles.”

“Charles,” Nathaniel hissed, but David and Eden only looked at each other and smiled, the same smirking smiles. “Told you,” David told her.

Nathaniel had ordered in—flatbreads and mezze—and we went to the table. I had brought a bottle of wine, and David and Nathaniel and I all had some; Eden said she’d just drink water.

The conversation began. All of us, I could feel, were being very careful, which made for a very dull conversation. It wasn’t so bad that we were left to speak of the weather, but it wasn’t much better. The list of topics I was forbidden from mentioning to David was by now prohibitively lengthy, and so it was easiest to remember instead the ones on which I could engage him without taking us into perilous territory: organic farming, films, robotics, yeast-free baking. I found myself missing Aubrey, who knew exactly how to conduct us, and how to redirect anyone who strayed onto dangerous grounds.

David, I reflected, as I often did during these conversations, was still a child, and it was this—his enthusiasm for the subjects he was passionate about, the way his speech would accelerate and his voice would pitch upward—that made me wish that he had gone to college. He would have found his tribe there; he would have felt less alone. He might even have become less strange, or at the very least found people around whom he didn’t seem strange at all. I could see him in a room full of young people, all of them giddy in their excitements—I could see him feeling that he finally belonged somewhere. And yet the place he had chosen instead was The Light, which, thanks to you, I can now monitor as obsessively as I want, but which I rarely have the desire to do. Once, I wanted to know everything about what David was doing and thinking—now I just want to not know, to pretend my son’s life, the things that give him joy, don’t exist.

But the person whom I was really watching was Eden. She was at the foot of the table, David on her left, and she stared at him with a kind of indulgent fondness, as a mother would at her unruly but gifted child. David did not include her in his monologue, but from time to time, he would glance at her, and she would nod, briefly, almost as if he were reciting lines and she was affirming that he’d gotten them correct. I noticed that she’d eaten very little—her flatbread lay untouched; there was a small dent in the scoop of hummus she’d taken, but everything else remained intact, congealing on her plate. Even her glass of water remained untasted, the round of lemon drifting toward the bottom.

Finally, when the baby had paused for a moment, Nathaniel interjected. “Before I get dessert,” he said, “David, maybe you want to tell your father your news?”

The baby looked so uncomfortable that I knew that, whatever this news was, I didn’t want to hear it. So, before he could say anything, I turned to Eden. “How did you two meet?” I asked.

“At a meeting,” she said. She had a slow, almost languorous way of speaking, nearly a drawl.

“A meeting?”

She looked at me disdainfully. “The Light,” she said.

“Ah,” I said, not looking at Nathaniel. “The Light. And what is it that you do?”

“I’m an artist,” she said.

“Eden’s an amazing artist,” David said, eagerly. “She designs all our websites, all our advertisements—everything. She’s really talented.”

“I’m sure,” I said, and although I had been careful not to sound sarcastic, she smirked anyway, as if I had and yet I, not she, was the butt of my own sarcasm. “How long have you been seeing each other?”

She shrugged, just a slight hunch of her left shoulder. “About nine months.” She directed one of her half smiles at the baby. “I saw him and just had to have him.” The baby reddened at this, embarrassed and flattered, and her smile grew a little wider as she watched him.

Now Nathaniel interrupted again. “Which brings us to David’s news,” he said. “David?”

“Excuse me,” I said, and quickly got up, ignoring Nathaniel’s glare, and hurried to the little powder room tucked beneath the stairs. Aubrey had always claimed that this was the site of many after-dinner-party blow jobs between guests when he was younger, but it had long ago been covered in a fussy black-rose-patterned wallpaper that always made me think of a Victorian-era brothel. Here, I washed my hands and inhaled and exhaled. The baby was going to tell me he was marrying this odd, weirdly seductive, much-too-old-for-him woman, and it was my duty to stay calm. No, he wasn’t ready to be married. No, he didn’t have a job. No, he hadn’t moved out of his parent’s house. No, he wasn’t educated. But it was not my place to say anything; indeed, what I thought was not only not relevant, it wasn’t even wanted.

Resolution made, I returned to my place at the table. “Sorry,” I said to all of them. And then, to David, “Tell me your news, David.”

“Well,” said David, and he looked a little bashful. But then he blurted, “Eden’s pregnant.”

“What?” I asked.

“Fourteen weeks,” Eden said, and leaned back, and that strange half smile moved across her face. “I’m due September fourth.”

“She wasn’t sure she wanted it,” the baby continued, excited now, when Eden interrupted him.

“But then I thought”—she shrugged—“I might as well. I’m thirty-eight; I don’t have forever.”

Oh, Peter, you can just imagine what I could have said, maybe even what I should have said. But instead, with such effort I began to sweat, I just sat on my hands and closed my eyes and leaned my head back and said nothing. When I opened them—who knows how much later: it could have been an hour—I found all of them staring at me, not mockingly but curiously, maybe even a little fearfully, as if they were worried that I might actually explode.

“I see,” I said, as evenly as I could. (Also: thirty-eight?! David’s only twenty-four, and a very young twenty-four at that.) “And so you three will live here, with Dad?”

“Three?” asked David, and then his face cleared. “Oh. Right. The baby.” He raised his chin a little, unsure if the question was a challenge or just a question. “Yeah, I guess. I mean, there’s plenty of room.”

But here Eden made a sound like a grunt, and we all looked at her. “I’m not living here,” she said.

“Oh,” said the baby, crestfallen.

“No offense,” she said, maybe to David, maybe to Nathaniel, maybe even to me. “I just need my space.”

There was silence. “Well,” I said, “it sounds like you both have a lot to work out,” and David shot me a hate-filled look, both because I was right and because I had seen him humiliated.

After this, there didn’t seem anywhere I could go, conversationally, without starting some sort of conflagration, so I announced I had to leave, and no one stopped me. I did bring myself to hug David, although both of us were so awkward that it was really more of a bumble, and then I attempted to hug Eden as well, her skinny, boyish body rigid in my arms.

Nathaniel followed me out. Once we were on the stoop, he said, “Before you say anything, Charles, I want you to know that I agree.”

“Nate, this is crazy,” I told him. “He barely knows her! She’s practically forty! Do we know anything about this woman?”

He sighed. “I asked a—a friend of mine, and he said—”

“The friend in Justice?”

He sighed again, and looked upward. (He rarely looks me in the eyes these days.) “Yes, the friend in Justice. He looked into her and said there’s nothing to be concerned about—just a mid-level member, a lieutenant in the organization, comes from a middle-class family in Baltimore, went to art school, no major criminal record.”

“She sounds amazing,” I said, but he didn’t answer. “Nate,” I said, “you know you’re going to be taking care of this baby, don’t you? You know David can’t do it alone.”

“Well, he’ll have Eden, and—”

“I wouldn’t count on her, either.”

He sighed, again. “Well, it may come to that,” he admitted.

I wondered, as I often did, when Nathaniel had become so passive. Or maybe not passive—there’s nothing passive about raising a baby—but resigned. Was it when I moved them here? Was it when the baby began misbehaving? Was it when he lost his job? Was it Norris’s death, or Aubrey’s? Was it when our son joined an unsuccessful and marginal insurgency cell? Or was it years of living with me? I wanted to say, “Well, you did a great job raising a kid the first time,” before I realized that the only person implicated in that statement was me.

So I said nothing. Instead, we watched the Square. The bulldozers had returned, and the most recent iteration of shantytowns had been cleared away—a soldier stood guard at each entrance, making sure no one tried to come in to reestablish it. Above us, the sky was white with floodlights.

“I don’t know how you sleep, with all this light,” I said, and he shrugged, resigned again.

“All the windows facing the Square are boarded up anyway,” he said. He turned to me. “I heard they’re shutting down the refugee camps.”

Now it was my turn to shrug. “But what’ll happen to all those people?” he asked. “Where will they go?”

“Why don’t you ask your friend at Justice?” I asked, childishly.

He sighed. “Charles,” he said, wearily, “I’m just trying to make conversation.”

But I didn’t know where the refugees would go. There was such movement of people—to hospitals and from hospitals; to quarantine camps and to crematoriums and to graves and to prisons—that I could no longer keep track of where any one group was at any one time.

Mostly, though, I thought about how the worst part of David’s bringing a baby into this world was not his own inadequacies as a potential parent. It was the very fact of producing a new life. People do it all the time, of course—we depend on them to. But why would you do it as a lark? His life is spent trying to destroy what this country is. So why would he want to bring a baby into it? Who would want a child to grow up in this time, in this place? It takes a special kind of cruelty to make a baby now, knowing that the world it’ll inhabit and inherit will be dirty and diseased and unjust and difficult. So why would you? What kind of respect for life is that?

Love, Charles

Dearest Peter, September 5, 2064

Not words I thought I’d be writing at this age, but—I’m a grandfather. Charlie Keonaonamaile Bingham-Griffith, born September 3, 2064, 5:58 a.m., seven pounds, thirteen ounces.

Lest I start getting flattered, it was quickly clarified that the baby is named not after me but, rather, Eden’s mother (deceased), who went by Charlie. A pretty girl’s name, and yet she isn’t a pretty girl. Her chin is weak and her nose is blobby and her eyes are small and slitty.

Yet I adore her. I was reluctantly allowed into the mother’s room that morning, and the baby was reluctantly turned over to me. Above me, David hovered, saying things like “Support the head, Pops. You’ve got to support the head!” as if I had not ever before held a baby, beginning with him. But I didn’t mind his hectoring—it was moving, in fact, to hear him so anxious on another person’s behalf, to see him so vulnerable, to watch how tenderly he held his daughter.

Now that the baby is here, many questions remain, including whether Eden will finally move in to the Washington Square house instead of continuing on in her place in Brooklyn. Also, who’s going to raise Charlie, as Eden has already claimed she won’t give up her “work” with The Light, and David, conventional as only young people are, feels they need to get married and cohabitate.

But for now, it was time for the four of us to be together. (Along with Eden, of course.) She’s easily the best thing David has done, but before you interpret that as backhanded, I should also say that she’s the best thing he could ever do. My little Charlie.

Anyway, that’s it. I’m cautiously happy to hear Olivier’s back in the picture. And speaking of pictures, I’ve of course attached about a hundred here.

Love you, C.

My dear Peter, February 21, 2065

One of Nathaniel’s qualities I’ve come to appreciate is his sense of responsibility to those he feels are less capable. In earlier years, this bothered me. I, for example, having been deemed capable, was considered not in need of help or attention or time. But his children, and then, after he left the school, Norris and Aubrey and David, had been classified as vulnerable, and therefore deserving of his care.

Even after Nathaniel inherited his share of Aubrey’s estate, he continued to see his two former students, Hiram and Ezra, those boys I once told you about who had survived the ’50 illness and then had never been allowed out of the house again. After they turned twelve, their mother hired a new set of tutors, ones that could teach them algebra and physics, but Nathaniel continued to make almost weekly trips over the bridge to visit them. Then, once Charlie arrived, he began having regular video meetings with them instead, because he’s been too busy taking care of her.

As I predicted, most of Charlie’s care has fallen to Nathaniel. There’s a nanny, but really, it’s him: David’s hours are unreliable, and Eden’s less so. I suppose I should add here (as Nathaniel always does) that when David is available, he’s very sweet with the baby. But really, isn’t the point as much to simply be there, to be consistent? I’m not sure if good behavior is as much a virtue as constancy. As for Eden: Well, I have nothing to say. I don’t even know if she and David are still together, though I know David’s still in love with her. But she seems to have remarkably little interest in her own daughter. She’d once told me she wanted the “experience” of pregnancy, but it doesn’t seem she wanted or even considered the attendant experience of parenting. This month, for example, she’s only come over twice, and never when David’s around. Nathaniel always offers to bring the baby to her, but she always demurs: She’s too busy, or her place is too unsafe, or she’s coming down with a cold. Then Nathaniel re-offers a floor in the house, or at least money to fix up her apartment, both of which he can tell unsettle her, and neither of which she accepts.

Last week, Nathaniel asked me if I’d go out to the Holsons’ and visit the boys—they’d missed their last two video appointments, and weren’t returning any of his calls or messages. “Are you kidding?” I asked him. “Why don’t you go visit them?”

“I can’t,” he said. “Charlie has a cough, and I should be here with her.”

“Well, why don’t I stay with Charlie, and you can go?” I asked him. I am always greedy for the baby: Every free night I have, I go downtown to spend with her.

“Charles,” he said, hoisting the baby from one shoulder to the other, “just do this for me, all right? Besides, if something’s wrong, maybe you can help them.”

“I’m not a clinician,” I reminded him, but there was really no point in arguing. I had to go. Somehow, Nathaniel and I have settled into a relationship that’s more married than when we were actually married. Much of this is because of the baby—it feels like we’re reliving our early lives together, except now both of us know exactly how disappointed we are in the other and aren’t waiting to find out.

So, after my final meeting on Monday, I drove to Cobble Hill. I had last seen the boys five years ago, when their parents (well, their mother; the absent Mr. Holson was absent as usual) threw Nathaniel a belated farewell party—a farewell from Hiram and Ezra’s lives as their teacher, that is. The twins were thirteen then, and looked nine or ten. They were well-mannered, handing around pieces of cake to me and Nathaniel and their housekeeper and their mother—all of us in full protective gear because the boys found it difficult to breathe in theirs—before finally taking a slice apiece for themselves. The boys weren’t allowed sugar, which Nathaniel said Mrs. Holson was worried would lead to internal inflammation (whatever that means), but the cake, which was only faintly sweet, from pureed apples that had been whisked into the batter, was clearly a special treat for them. They answered my questions in their high, nasal voices, and when Mrs. Holson told them to get the card they’d made for Nathaniel, they ran off together with the same stiff-legged gait, their oxygen packs bouncing against their lower backs.

When Nathaniel had told me of Mrs. Holson’s educational plans for her boys, I had thought them peculiar, even cruel. Yes, the boys might one day virtually attend college and earn a degree. They might even get jobs, working side by side as engineers or programmers, sitting behind twinned screens. But the question of what their lives would be—in their house forever, with only each other and their mother for company—had always troubled me.

I can’t say that seeing them persuaded me otherwise. But I did understand that while their mother had prepared them for a world they would never inhabit—evidenced by their careful manners, their ability to look you in the eye, their conversational skills: all things, I recognized, that we had never been able to properly teach David—she had also taught them to accept the boundaries and limitations of their lives. When one of them, Hiram or Ezra (I still couldn’t tell them apart), said to me, “Nathaniel said you were just in India,” I had to stop myself from reflexively saying, “Oh, yes, have you been?” Instead I said that I had indeed just been there, and the other twin sighed and said, “Oh, how marvelous it must have been.” It was the right answer, the polite answer (if a little old-fashioned), but there was no yearning in it, no jealousy. Further conversation revealed they knew a good deal about the country’s history and current political and epidemiological disasters, even as they seemed to imply that they understood that those were not things they would ever witness for themselves; they had managed to know the world while also accepting that they would never be a part of it. However, many of us are this way: We know of India but will never be a part of it. What was stirring and disturbing about these boys was that, to them, Brooklyn was India. Cobble Hill was India. The back garden, which they could see from their playroom, now converted to a schoolroom, was India—places they would learn about but would never visit.

And yet, as well-behaved as they were, as smart as they were, I pitied them. I thought of David at fifteen, getting kicked out of one school after the next, the beautiful lines his body made when he tried to do a jump on his skateboard, the way he practically sprung back up after tumbling to the ground, the way he did a one-hand cartwheel in the grass at Washington Square, the way his skin seemed to glint in the sun.

The boys would be almost eighteen now, and as I knocked on their door, I thought, as I often did, of my Charlie. Let them be safe, I thought, because if they’re safe, my Charlie will be safe as well. But I also thought: If something happened to them, then nothing will happen to her. None of it made sense, of course.

When no one answered, I entered the code Nathaniel had given me into the keypad, and then I walked inside. I could tell from the moment the decontamination chamber opened that something had died. These new helmets enhance every scent, and I tore mine off and tugged my sweater up to cover my nose and mouth. The house was as dim as ever. There was no sound, no movement: only that stench.

“Frances!” I called. “Ezra! Hiram! It’s Charles Griffith—Nathaniel sent me. Hello?”

But no one answered. There was a door separating the foyer from the rest of the parlor floor, and I pushed it open and nearly gagged. I stepped into the living room. For a while, I saw nothing, and then I heard a faint sound, a buzzing, and I saw that there was a small, dense cloud hovering over the sofa. When I stepped closer, the cloud revealed itself as a swarm of black flies, whirring and humming in a tornado-like pattern. What they were circling was the form of a woman, Frances Holson, tucked up into herself, dead for at least two weeks, maybe more.

I moved away, my heart pounding. “Boys!” I shouted. “Hiram! Ezra!” But again, there was silence.

I continued moving through the living room. Then I heard something else, a faint crinkling. At the end of the space, I saw something moving, and when I got closer, I saw that it was a sheet of clear plastic, one that filled the entire doorframe that separated the living room from the kitchen, and that sealed the kitchen off from the rest of the house. There were two windows cut near the bottom right corner of the sheet: One had two plastic sleeves drooping through it, into the living area, and the other was just a plain rectangle. It was this window that had come loose, and was moving in the breeze from some unseen source.

I looked through the plastic into the kitchen. The first thing I thought was that it resembled some kind of animal’s burrow: a gopher’s, for example; a prairie dog’s. The window shades were drawn, and every surface was covered. I unzipped the plastic wall and walked inside, and here, too, there was a stench of decay, though here the scent was not animal but vegetal. The counters were covered with dishes and pots and pans, and stacks of textbooks. In the sink, there were more pots and pans submerged in an oily scum, like someone had tried to clean them and had given up midway through. Next to the sink sat two soup bowls, two spoons, and two mugs, all wiped clean. Pushed into every corner were bulging black garbage bags, and when I made myself untie one, I saw they were filled not with chopped-up human remains but with scraps of carrot and crumbs of bread so rotten they had gone slimy, tea bags that looked like they’d been sucked dry. The recycling bin was spilling over, a parodic cornucopia. I picked up a tin of garbanzo beans, and saw that inside, it was not just empty but meticulously empty, so clean it gleamed. The next tin, the same thing, and the next as well.

In the center of the floor, about a foot apart, divided by another stack of books, atop of which sat two laptops, were two sleeping bags, each with a pillow, and—a detail that upset me—each with a stuffed bear tucked beneath the top layer of the bag, their heads resting on the pillows, their black eyes staring at the ceiling. Around this sleeping area was a clear path, leading to a bathroom, where two oxygen packs were plugged into the wall; there were two glasses on the edge of the sink, and two toothbrushes, and a tube of toothpaste, still mostly full. The bathroom led to a laundry room, and here too nothing seemed amiss: The cupboards were stocked with towels and extra toilet paper and flashlights and batteries and laundry detergent; a set of pillowcases and two pairs of child-size jeans still lay in the dryer.

I returned to the kitchen and picked my way back through the detritus to the center of the room, where I looked around, considering what I should do next. I called Nathaniel, but he didn’t answer.

And then I went to the refrigerator to get something to drink, and inside was—nothing. Not a bottle of juice, not a jug of mustard, not a stray lettuce leaf withering in the back of a drawer. The freezer, too: nothing. And then a dread moved over me, and I began opening all of the cupboards, all of the drawers—nothing, nothing, nothing. There wasn’t a single edible thing in that kitchen, not even anything—flour, baking soda, yeast—that could be used to make something edible. That was why the cans were so clean: They had licked out every bit of food they could. It was why the kitchen was so messy: They had searched everywhere for something to eat.

I didn’t know why they had sealed themselves—or, more likely, why their mother had sealed them—in the kitchen, except that it would have been for their safety. But once they had run out of food, I understood that they would have explored the entire house, looking for it.

I ran out of the kitchen and up the stairs. “Ezra!” I shouted. “Hiram!” Their parents’ bedroom was on the second floor, and it had been overturned as well: Underwear and socks and men’s undershirts vomited from the drawers; shoes were scattered outside the closet.

On the third floor, the same pattern: drawers emptied, closets in disarray. Only their own study was as tidy as I remembered it—they would have known it intimately; they wouldn’t have needed to search for what they knew wasn’t there.

Here, I stopped, trying to calm down. I called and texted Nathaniel again. And it was as I was waiting for him to answer that I looked through the window and saw, far below me, two forms lying facedown in the back garden.

It was the boys, of course. They were wearing wool coats, even though it was far too warm for wool. They were very thin. One of them, Hiram or Ezra, had angled his head to face his brother, whose own face was pressed into the flagstones. Their oxygen packs were still attached to their pants, the chambers long depleted. And although it was warm, the stones were cool, and this had helped preserve their bodies to some degree.

I stayed until the forensic team came, told them what I knew, and then went to the house to tell Nathaniel, who did not take the news well. “Why didn’t I go over there sooner?” he cried. “I knew something was wrong, I knew it. Where was their housekeeper? Where was their fucking father?”

I made some inquiries; I argued that this could be a public-health matter, and asked that a full investigation be conducted, as swiftly as possible. Today I got the report of what happened, or at least what is thought to have happened: The theory is that, about five weeks ago, Frances Holson became sick with “an illness of unknown pathology.” She, realizing it was contagious, sealed the boys into the kitchen, and asked their housekeeper to come by regularly with food. For the first week, at least, she did. But as Frances deteriorated, the housekeeper was too frightened to return. It’s thought that Frances moved herself downstairs to be closer to her boys, and gave them the rest of the food she’d set aside for herself, handing it to them with sterile gloves through one of the windows cut into the sheet. The boys would have watched her die, and then lived with the sight of her dead body for at least another two weeks. It was thought they ventured out to hunt for food about five days before I found them, exiting through the door in the kitchen and climbing down the metal stairs to the garden. Hiram—the one lying facedown—had died first; it was thought that Ezra, who had turned his head to face him, had died a day later.

But then there were all the things we don’t know, and may never know: Why didn’t they—Frances, Hiram, Ezra—call anyone? Why hadn’t their teachers seen the disarray in the kitchen on their video lessons and asked if they needed help? Did they not have family they could call? Did they not have friends? How could the housekeeper just leave such vulnerable people there alone? Why had Frances not ordered more food? Why hadn’t the boys? Had they been infected by Frances’s unknown virus? They wouldn’t have starved to death in a week, or even two. Was it the shock of being outdoors? Was it the fragility of their immune systems? Or was it something for which there is no clinical name: Was it despair? Was it hopelessness? Was it fear? Or was it a kind of surrender, a giving up of life—for surely they could have found help, couldn’t they? They had a way to communicate with the outside world: Why had they not tried harder to do so, unless, perhaps, they had had enough of life itself, of being alive?

And most of all: Where was their fucking father? The Health Ministry team tracked him down, just a mile or so away, in Brooklyn Heights, where apparently he had been living for the past five years with his new family—his new wife, with whom he had begun an affair seven years ago, and his two new children, five and six, both healthy. He told the investigators that he had always made sure Hiram and Ezra were taken care of, that he sent Frances money monthly. But when they asked which funeral home he wanted his sons sent to after the autopsy, he shook his head. “The city crematorium is fine,” he said. “They died a long time ago.” And then he shut the door.

I didn’t tell Nathaniel any of this. It would have upset him too much. It upset me. How could someone disavow their children so completely, so neatly, as if they had never existed at all? How could any parent be so dispassionate?

Last night, I lay awake thinking of the Holsons. As bad as I felt for the boys, I felt worse for Frances: to have raised them, and protected them so carefully, so vigilantly, only to have them die from desperation. And as I was about to fall asleep, I wondered if the boys hadn’t called anyone for help for one simple reason—because they wanted to see the world. I imagined them joining hands and walking out the door, down the steps, and into their backyard. There they’d stand, holding each other’s hands, smelling the air, and looking up at the treetops all around them, their mouths opening in wonder, their lives becoming glorious—for once—even as they ended.

Love—Me

My dear Peter, April 19, 2065

Sorry for the lack of communication. I know it’s been weeks. But I think you’ll understand when I tell you what happened.

Eden left. And by “left,” I don’t mean that she vanished one night, leaving only a note behind. We know exactly where she is—in her apartment in Windsor Terrace, presumably packing her things. By “left,” I mean she just doesn’t want to be a parent anymore. That was how she phrased it, in fact: “I just don’t think I have it in me to be a parent.”

There’s really not a lot else to say, and really not much reason to be surprised. Since Charlie was born, I’ve seen Eden maybe six times. Now, granted, I don’t live in the house, so it’s possible that she was coming more frequently than just Thanksgiving and Christmas and New Year’s, and so on, but given how careful and anxious Nathaniel always seemed around her, I somehow doubt it. He would never speak badly about her to me—not, I think, because he thought well of her but more because he felt that if he said aloud, “Eden is a bad mother,” then she really would be a bad mother. Though she already was a bad mother. I know it doesn’t make sense, but this is how Nathaniel thinks. You and I know what bad mothers are like, but Nathaniel doesn’t—he always loved his mother, and still finds it difficult to comprehend that not all mothers will remain mothers out of a sake of duty, much less affection.

I wasn’t present for the conversation she had with Nathaniel. Neither was David, whose own whereabouts are less and less known to either of us. But she apparently texted him one day, and said that she needed to talk, and that she would meet him in the park. “I’ll bring Charlie,” Nathaniel said, and Eden quickly said he shouldn’t, because she had a flu “or something” and didn’t want to pass it on. (What did she think, that she would say she wasn’t interested in Charlie anymore, and Nathaniel would shove her into her arms and run away?) So they met in the park. Nathaniel said that Eden was thirty minutes late (she blamed the fact that the subways were closed, although the subways have been closed for six months now), and that she came with some guy, who waited for her on a different bench a few yards away while she told Nathaniel she was moving out of the country.

“To where?” asked Nathaniel, after he overcame his initial shock.

“Washington,” she said. “My family used to vacation on Orcas Island back when I was a kid, and I always wanted to try living out there.”

“But what about Charlie?” he asked.

And here, he said, something—guilt, maybe; shame, I hope—flashed across her face. “I just think she’s better here with you,” she said, and then, when Nathaniel didn’t say anything, “You’re good at this, man. I just don’t think I have it in me to be a parent.”

In my new efforts at brevity, I’m going to spare you all the back and forth, the pleading, the many attempts to get David involved, the attempts at negotiation, and just say that Eden is no longer a part of Charlie’s life. She signed papers terminating her rights, which leaves David as Charlie’s sole parent. But as I’ve said, David is rarely around, which means that in fact, if not in law, Nathaniel is now her sole parent.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” Nathaniel said. This was last night, after dinner. We were sitting on the sofa in the parlor. Charlie was asleep in his arms. “I’m going to put her to bed.”

“No,” I said, “let me hold her,” and he looked at me, that particular Nathaniel look—half annoyance, half fondness—before transferring her to my arms.

For a while, we sat there, me looking down at Charlie, Nathaniel stroking her head. I had the funny sensation that time had fallen away beneath us, and that we had been given another chance—as parents, as a couple. We were both younger and older than we were right now, and we knew everything that we might do wrong and yet nothing about what might happen, and this was our baby, and nothing in the past two decades that had occurred—my job, the pandemics, the camps, our divorce—had actually transpired. But then I realized that, by erasing all that, I was also erasing David and, therefore, Charlie.

I reached over and began stroking Nathaniel’s hair, and he raised his eyebrow at me, but then he leaned his head back, and for a while, we remained there, me stroking his hair, he stroking Charlie’s.

“I think maybe I should move in,” I said, and he looked at me, and raised his other eyebrow.

“Do you?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said. “I could help you, and spend more time with Charlie.” I hadn’t been planning on making this offer, but now that I had, it seemed right. My apartment—formerly our apartment—had become less a place to live and more a repository for inanimate objects. I slept at the lab. I ate at Nathaniel’s. And then I went back to the apartment to change. It didn’t really make sense.

“Well,” he said, and he shifted a bit, “I wouldn’t be opposed to that.” He paused. “We’re not getting back together, you know.”

“I know,” I said. I wasn’t even offended.

“We’re not having sex, either.”

“We’ll see,” I said.

He rolled his eyes. “We’re really not, Charles.”

“Okay,” I said. “Maybe we will, maybe we won’t.” But I was just teasing him. I wasn’t interested in having sex with him, either.

Anyway, just an update. I’m sure you’ll have questions, and please ask away. I’ll see you in a few days, anyway. Maybe you can help me move? (A joke.)

Love, Charles

Dear Peter, September 3, 2065

Thanks so much to you and Olivier for the toys: They came right on time, and Charlie loves them, by which I mean she immediately stuffed the cat into her mouth and started chomping away, which I think is a pretty inarguable indication of affection.

I don’t have a lot of experience with first-birthday parties, but this one was small: Just me and Nathaniel and even David. And Charlie, of course. You may have heard the latest conspiracy theory, which is that the government invented last month’s illness (to do what and to what ends are never discussed, as logic does tend to get in the way of these theories), but David seems to have bought it and tried to talk to me as little as possible over the course of the afternoon.

I was holding Charlie when he came in, looking bedraggled and unshaven, but no more so than usual, and after taking off his suit and cleaning his hands, he walked over and simply lifted her from my lap, like I was a receptacle, nothing more, and lay down with her on the carpet.

You remember David as a baby—he was so skinny and silent, and when he wasn’t silent, he was crying. When I was eight, my mother, shortly before she left, told me that a parent decides what she thinks about her child in the first six weeks (or was it months?) of its life, and although I tried hard not to remember those words, they came to me, unbidden, at unwelcome moments during David’s infancy. Even now, I wonder if, somewhere deep inside me, I had never liked him, and if, somewhere deep inside him, he knows that.

That memory is partly why Charlie is such a joy—and not just a joy but a relief. She’s so easy to love, to cuddle, to hold. David used to arch and buck out of my arms (and Nathaniel’s too, to be fair) when I tried to hug him, but Charlie presses into you, and when you—I—smile at her, she smiles back. Around her, we’re all softer, kinder, as if we’ve mutually agreed to hide from her the truth of who we are, as if she’d disapprove if she knew, as if she’d get up and walk out the door and leave us forever. Her pet names all involve meat. “Pork loin,” we call her; “lamb chop”; “short rib”—all things that we haven’t eaten in months now, ever since the rationing began. Sometimes we pretend to gnaw on her leg, making growling doglike sounds as we do. “I’m gonna eat you up,” Nathaniel says, gumming her thigh as she giggles and gasps. “I’m gonna eat you right up!” (Yes, I know this is all a little disturbing if you think about it too hard.)

Nathaniel had splurged and baked a lemon cake, which all of us ate except for Charlie, because Nathaniel doesn’t let her eat sugar yet, and it’s probably for the best, as who knows how much sugar will be left when she’s our age. “C’mon, Dad, just a bit,” David said, holding a crumb out to her, like she was a dog, but Nathaniel shook his head. “Absolutely not,” he said, and David smiled and sighed, almost proudly, as if he were the grandparent and was tutting over his son’s unreasonably strict ways. “What can I say, Charlie?” he asked his daughter. “I tried.” And then the inevitable moment came in which Charlie had to be put to bed, after which David rejoined us in the parlor and launched into one of his canned rants about the government, the refugee camps (which he’s convinced are still operating), the relocation centers (which he insists on calling “internment camps”), the ineffectiveness of the decontamination chambers and helmets (with which I secretly agree), the effectiveness of herbal medications (with which I do not), and various conspiracies about how the CDC, as well as “other state-funded research institutes” (i.e., Rockefeller), are spending their time trying not to cure diseases but to manufacture them. He thinks that the state is run by a vast conspiracy, dozens of somber, gray-haired white men in military uniforms sitting in padded-wall bunkers with holograms and listening devices—the truth would be crushing in its banality.

It was the same speech, with a few variations, that I’d been listening to for the past six years. And yet it no longer upset me—or at least, it no longer upset me for the same reasons. This time, as I had the time before, I looked over at my son, still so passionate, speaking so quickly and so loudly that he had to keep wiping saliva away from his mouth, leaning toward Nathaniel, who was nodding at him tiredly, and felt a perverse sorrow. I knew he believed in what The Light represented, but I also knew that he had in part joined it to try to find a place where he belonged, a place where he might at last feel he had found his own.

And yet, for all his devotion to The Light, it did not seem devoted to him. As you know, The Light has a quasi-military power structure, with members adding tattoos of stars to the insides of their right arms as they’re promoted by committee through its ranks. Eden had had three when we met her; she had added a fourth when Nathaniel had last seen her. But David’s wrist was decorated with a single lonely star. He was an eternal foot soldier, relegated to (I know from your reports) scut work: procuring the bits and pieces of material that the engineers would wire into bombs, never thanked by name in the fulsome speeches from headquarters that followed each successful attack. He was a nobody, an unnamed, a forgotten. Of course, I was glad for this, for his irrelevance, for his being overlooked—it kept him safe, it kept him uninvolved. But I also realized that I had come to loathe The Light not just for what it propagated but for how it refused to recognize my son’s efforts. He had joined it looking for home, and it had ended up treating him the same as everyone else had. As I say, I know this is perverse—would I have been happier if his arm had been aswim with blue stars? No, of course not. But it would be a different kind of unhappiness, an unhappiness mingled with, perhaps, a distorted pride, a relief that if Nathaniel and I were not his family, he had found one after all, no matter how dangerous or wrong. Aside from Eden, he had never brought anyone home to meet us, he spoke of no friends, he never grabbed his phone in the middle of our dinners because he was getting so many messages that he had to answer them, grinning at the screen as he tapped out a reply. Although I had never seen him in action, as it were, I had a persistent image of him on the edges of groups, of listening to conversations but never being asked to join one. I cannot prove this, naturally, but I think this friendlessness was in part what kept him from spending more time with his daughter—it was as if he feared he might infect her with his loneliness, as if she too might come to see him as someone of little consequence.

It made me ache for him. I thought again, as I often did—far too often, given that he is now twenty-five, a grown man, a father, even—of him as a small boy on the playground in Hawai‘i, how the other children had run from him, how he had known even then that there was something not right about him, something that repelled people, something that would set him apart and aside for the rest of his life.

All I can do now is continue to hope for him, and to do better with and for his child. I can’t say that I can use her to make up for how I failed with him, but I do know that it’s my responsibility to try. So much has changed since David was a baby; so much has been lost. Our home, our family, our hopes. But children need adults. That much hasn’t changed. And so I can try again. I not only can: I have to.

Love, Charles

My dear Peter, January 7, 2067

It’s the end of a very long day, at the end of a very long week. I returned late from the Committee—the nanny had already put Charlie to bed, hours ago; the cook had left a bowl of rice and tofu and pickled cucumbers. Next to the bowl was a sheet of paper with a thick green line of crayon forking across the page. “From Charlie, for her Papa,” the nanny had written in the bottom right corner. I put it in my briefcase so I could take it to the lab on Monday.

The Committee had discussed what was happening in the U.K.—sorry, New Britain—since the election. You’ll be happy to hear that everyone thought that the transition seemed much more harmonious than you do. And you’ll be not at all surprised to hear that everyone thinks that, despite everything, you’ve made the wrong decision, and that you’ve been far too lenient with the population, and that you’ve conceded to the protestors. Everyone also agreed it was crazy that you were reopening the Underground. You know I don’t entirely disagree.

After I ate, I wandered the house. This is something I’ve begun doing at the end of each week. It began that first Saturday after the event, when I had woken from a dream. In it, Nathaniel and I were back in Hawai‘i, in the house we once lived in, but at the age we are now. I don’t know if David existed in this dream—if he was in his own house, or living with us but out running an errand, or if he had never been born at all. Nathaniel had been looking for a photo, one from shortly after we’d met. “I noticed something funny in it,” he said. “I have to show you. I just can’t remember where I put it.”

That was when I had woken up. I knew I had been dreaming, and yet something compelled me to get up and start looking as well. For the next hour, I walked from floor to floor—this is before the nanny and the cook moved onto the fourth floor—opening random drawers and taking random books from shelves and flipping through their pages. I sifted through the bowl of junk on the kitchen counter—twist ties and rubber bands and paper clips and safety pins: all the small, poor, necessary items that I remembered from my childhood, all the stuff that had remained even when so much else had changed. I looked through Nathaniel’s closet, his shirts that still smelled of him, and his bathroom cabinet, the vitamins he took, even long after they had been proven ineffective.

In those first weeks, I had neither the right nor the inclination to enter David’s room, but even after the investigation had finished, I kept the door shut, moving downstairs to what had been Nathaniel’s room so that there was no need to ever visit the third floor. It wasn’t until two months later that I was finally able to do so. The bureau had left the room very tidy. Part of this was simply a matter of reduced volume: Gone were David’s computers and phones, the papers and books that had covered the floor in heaps, the rolling plastic cupboard containing dozens of tiny drawers, each filled with items, nails and tacks and bits of wire, meant for things I couldn’t contemplate too hard, for if I had, I would have had to report him to the bureau myself long ago. It was as if they had erased the past decade altogether, so that what remained—his bed, some clothes, some monster figurines he had made when he was a teenager, the Hawaiian flag that had hung in whatever room he occupied from the time he was a baby—was his teenage self, just before he had joined The Light, before he and Nathaniel and I had broken from one another, before the experiment of our family had failed. The only indication that time had indeed passed after all were two framed pictures of Charlie atop the table near his bed: The first, which Nathaniel had given him, was of her on her first birthday, grinning hugely, with mashed peaches smeared over her face. The second is a short video Nathaniel took a few months later, of David holding her by her arms and spinning her around. The camera moves first to his face, and then to hers, and you can see they’re both shouting with laughter, their mouths wide with happiness.

Now, nearly four months after that day, I find that hours can pass in which I think of neither of them, in which the flashes of delusion—wondering, in the middle of a dull meeting, what Nathaniel would be making for dinner, for example, or whether David would stop by this weekend to see Charlie—no longer flatten me. What I cannot stop doing is thinking of the moment itself, even though I didn’t witness it, even though, when I was offered the chance to review the classified images, I declined: the explosion, the people nearest to the device bursting into bits, the jars around them shattering. I know I’ve told you before that the one image I did look at, before I closed the file for good, was taken that night. It was of the ground, close to where the device had gone off, in the sauces-and-soups aisle. The floor was covered with a gluey red substance, though it wasn’t blood but tomato paste, and scattered through it were hundreds of nails, burned black and twisted by the heat of the explosive. On the right-hand side of the image was a man’s disembodied hand and part of an arm, a watch still strapped to the wrist.

The other image I saw was the video clip documenting the moment David rushes into the store. There’s no sound on the video, but you can tell by how he swivels his head that he’s frantic. Then he opens his mouth, and you can see him shout something, a single syllable: Dad! Dad! Dad! And then he runs deeper into the store, and then there’s nothing, and then the image of the door, now shut, wobbles and goes white.

It’s this video clip that I’ve been showing investigators and ministers for months, ever since I got it, trying to prove to them that David couldn’t have been responsible for the explosive, that he had loved Nathaniel, that he would never have wanted to kill him. He knew Nathaniel did his grocery shopping there; when he had realized what The Light had planned, and when Nathaniel had sent him a message saying he was going to the store, had he not run inside to find him, to save him? I could not definitively say he wouldn’t have wanted to kill anyone else—though I said so anyway—but I knew he wouldn’t have wanted to kill Nathaniel.

But the state does not agree with me. On Tuesday, the interior minister himself came to see me, and explained that, as David was a “prominent and known” member of an insurgent organization responsible for the deaths of seventy-two people, they would have to issue him a postmortem censure for treason. This meant that he could not be buried or interred at a cemetery, and that his descendants would be prohibited from inheriting any of his assets, which would be seized by the state.

Then a strange look came over his face, and he said, “So it’s fortunate—if I may use that word in this horrible situation—that your ex-husband had specified in his will that his house and all his property would bypass your son and go directly to your granddaughter.”

I was so dazed by what he had just said about David’s censure that I couldn’t understand what he was trying to communicate to me. “No,” I said, “no, that’s not true. It was all to go to David.”

“No,” said the minister, and he drew something from the pocket of his uniform, which he handed me. “I believe you’re mistaken, Dr. Griffith. It reads quite clearly in his will that his entire estate is to be left to your granddaughter, with you as its executor.”

I unfolded the sheaf of papers, and there it was, as if I had not been witness to the creation and signing of this will just a year ago: There was to be a trust established for Charlie, but David would inherit the house, with the provision that he must leave it to Charlie upon his death. But now here was a document, signed by Nathaniel and by me, watermarked and stamped with all three of our name seals—the lawyer’s, Nathaniel’s, and mine—attesting to what the minister had said. And something else: Charlie’s official name on the document was listed not as “Charlie Bingham-Griffith,” but as simply “Charlie Griffith”—her father’s name, Nathaniel’s name, edited out of existence. I looked up, and the minister looked back at me, a long, unreadable stare, before standing. “I’ll leave you that copy for your records, Dr. Griffith,” he said, and then he left. It wasn’t until I got home that night that I held it to the light, looking at how perfect the signatures were, at how exact the seals were. And then I was suddenly frightened, and convinced the paper itself was somehow bugged, although that technology is a decade off, at least.

Since then, I have tried to find the original will, even though doing so would be both pointless and, even, perilous. I’ve removed all the documents Nathaniel kept from the safe, and every night I go through a few of them, watching life present itself in reverse: papers assigning Nathaniel formal, legal guardianship of Charlie, signed three weeks before the attack; papers signed by Eden forfeiting any legal claims to her daughter; Charlie’s birth certificate; the deed to the house; Aubrey’s will; our divorce papers.

And then I begin to wander. I tell myself I’m looking for the will, but I don’t suppose I really am, because the places I look are nowhere Nathaniel would have put it in the first place, and if he had kept a copy in the house, it had been removed long ago, without us noticing. There was no point in looking, just as there had been no point in calling our lawyer and listening to him claim that, no, I had been mistaken, that the will as I described it had never existed. “You’re under a lot of strain, Charles,” he said. “Grief can make people”—he paused—“misremember.” Then I became scared again, and told him I was certain he was correct, and hung up.

I am lucky, I know. Much worse has happened to relatives of insurgents, to people associated with far less deadly attacks than David has been. I am still too useful to the state. You don’t need to worry about me, Peter. Not yet. I’m in no immediate danger.

But sometimes I wonder if what I’m really searching for is not the will but evidence of the person I was before this all began. How far would I have to go back? Before the state was established? Before I answered that first call from the ministry, asking if I wanted to be an “architect of the solution”? Before the illness of ’56? Before the one of ’50? Earlier? Before I joined Rockefeller?

How far back do I have to go? How many decisions must I regret? Sometimes I think that somewhere in this house is hidden a piece of paper with the answers, and that if I hope hard enough, I’ll wake up in the month or year when I first began to go astray, only this time, I’ll do the opposite of what I did. Even if it hurts. Even if it feels wrong.

Love, Charles

Dear Peter, August 21, 2067

Hello from the lab on a Sunday afternoon. I’m just here catching up on some things and reading some of the reports from Beijing—what did you make of Friday’s? We haven’t discussed it, but I doubt you’re surprised, either. Christ: to learn, definitively, that not only those stupid decontam chambers but also the helmets are completely useless is going to spark riots. People went bankrupt installing them, maintaining them, replacing them for fifteen years, and now we’re telling everyone that, oops, it was a mistake, get rid of them? That announcement is scheduled for a week from Monday, and it’s going to be bad.

But the next five days will be the hardest. On Tuesday they’ll announce that the internet will be “suspended” for an indefinite period of time. On Thursday they’ll announce that all international travel, to and from other countries, including Canada, Mexico, the Western Federation, and Texas, will also be suspended.

I’ve been very anxious, and Charlie can sense it. She crawls into my lap and pats my face. “Are you sad?” she asks me, and I tell her I am. “Why?” she asks, and I tell her it’s because people in this country are fighting, and we have to try to make them stop fighting. “Oh,” she says. “Don’t be sad, Papa,” she says. “I’m never sad with you,” I tell her, although I am—sad that this is the world she lives in. But maybe I should tell her the truth after all: that I am sad, all the time, and that it’s all right to be sad. But she’s such a happy baby, and it seems immoral to do so.

The Justice Ministry and the Interior Ministry seem certain they can quash the protests in three months. The military is ready to deploy, but as I know you saw in the last report, the number of infiltrators in the ranks has become alarming. The army says they need time to “test the loyalties” of its members (god knows what that means); Justice and Interior say that they can’t spare any time. The most recent report claims that large numbers of “historically disadvantaged groups of citizens” are helping the insurgency efforts, but there’s been no talk of special punishment, and thank goodness—I know I’m protected, I know I’m an exception, yet it makes me nervous all the same.

Don’t worry about me, Peter. I know you do, but try not to. They can’t get rid of me yet. My digital access isn’t being curtailed, of course—for one, I need it to communicate with Beijing—and although all our communication is encrypted, I may start sending you letters through our mutual friend just as a precaution. This means they’ll likely be less frequent (lucky you) but also lengthier (unlucky you). Let’s see how it goes. Though you know how to reach me in an emergency.

Love to you and Olivier, C.

My dear Peter, September 6, 2070

It’s very early in the morning, and I’m writing you from the lab. Thank you and Olivier for the books and presents, by the way—I meant to write you last week, when they arrived, but I forgot. I’d hoped Charlie would be discharged in time to spend her birthday at home, but she had another grand mal seizure on Tuesday, and so they decided to keep her for a few more days; if she remains stable over the weekend, they’ll let her leave on Monday.

I’ve obviously been spending every day with her, and most of the nights. The Committee’s been almost too humane about it. It’s as if they knew that one of us would have a child or grandchild who’d get infected—the odds were too great for that not to be the case—and they’re relieved that it was my grandchild, not theirs. Their relief makes them guilty, and their guilt makes them generous: Charlie’s hospital room is filled with more toys than she’ll ever play with, as if the toys were a kind of sacrifice, and she a minor god, and by appeasing her, they’ll protect their own.

We’ve been here at Frear for two months now. Nine weeks, actually, come tomorrow. Many years ago, when Nathaniel and I first moved to the city, this had been a ward for adult cancer patients. Then, in ’56, they converted it to an infectious-disease wing, and then last winter, to a pediatric infectious-disease wing. The rest of the patients are in what used to be the burn unit, and the burn patients have been dispatched to other hospitals. In the early days of the infection, before it was announced to the public, I would hurry past this hospital, never looking up at its bulk, because I knew that this was the place best-equipped to care for the children who would get sick, and because I felt that if I never looked at the outside of it, I would never see the inside of it.

The ward is on the tenth floor and faces east to the river, and therefore to the crematoriums, whose fires have burned without pause since March. In the early days, when I was visiting as an observer, not as a guest—or a “loved one,” as the hospital calls us—you could look outside and see the vans full of corpses being unloaded onto the boats. The bodies were so small that they could stack them four or five to a stretcher. After the first six weeks, the state had a fence built on the eastern edge of the river, because parents were jumping into the water as the boats pulled away, screaming for their children, trying to paddle toward the other shore. The fence prevented that, but it didn’t prevent the people on the tenth floor (the parents, largely, as most of the children were insensate) from looking outside for distraction and instead encountering, in the cruelest of ironies, the place where most of their children would go next, as if Frear were simply a layover before their final destination. So then the hospital covered up all the eastern-facing windows, on this floor and all the others, and hired art students to paint on them. But as the months dragged by, the scenes the students had drawn—of Fifth Avenue, lined with palm trees and happy children walking down the sidewalk; of the Central Park peacocks being fed bread by happy children—also began to seem cruel, and eventually they were covered with white paint.

The ward is meant to accommodate a hundred and twenty patients but now holds around two hundred. Charlie is its longest-term resident. Over the past nine weeks, various other children have come and gone. Most remain for just ninety-six hours, though there was a little boy who was probably a year older than Charlie—he looked seven, maybe eight—who had been admitted three days before she was and who died last week. He was the second-longest-term resident. Everyone here is related to someone who works for the state, or related to someone to whom the state owes a favor, a favor big enough to keep them out of a relocation center. For the first seven weeks, we had a private room, and although I had been assured we would always have it, for as long as we needed, there came a point where I could no longer morally justify it to myself. So now Charlie has two roommates, in a space that could sleep three more. The other parents and I nod at one another—everyone is wearing so much protective clothing that we can only see one another’s eyes—but otherwise we all pretend that the others don’t exist. Only our children exist.

I’ve seen what you’re doing over there, but here, each child’s bed is surrounded by walls of transparent plastic sheeting, like the one Ezra and Hiram had lived behind; the parents sit outside and stick their hands through the gloves built into one of the walls so we can at least offer some semblance of touch. The few parents who for whatever reason had never been exposed to the earlier virus, the one that’s cross-reactive to the current one, aren’t allowed to enter Frear at all—they’re just as vulnerable as the children, and should really be in isolation themselves. But they’re not, of course. Instead, they stand outside the hospital, even in the heat, which has been almost unbearable these past few months, and look up at its windows. Years ago, when I was a child, I saw an old video of a crowd of people waiting beneath a Paris hotel for a pop singer to emerge from his room onto his balcony. The crowd here is as big, but whereas that other gathering had been restive, on the verge of hysteria, this one is quiet, eerily so, as if making any noise might upset their chances of getting inside to see their children. Though they have no hope at all of doing so, not while they’re still contagious or capable of spreading contagion. The lucky ones can at least watch a livestream of their children lying, unresponsive, in bed; the unlucky ones, not even that.

The children enter Frear as distinct people, but within two weeks of being treated with Xychor, they look more alike than different. You know what it looks like, too: the shrunken faces, the softened teeth, the hair loss, the boil-covered extremities. I read the report from Beijing, but here, the fatality rate is highest among those ten and younger; adolescents are much more likely to survive, though even those rates of survival—depending on whose reports you’re seeing—are grim.

What we don’t know yet, and won’t know for another decade or so at least, is Xychor’s long-term consequences. It wasn’t made for children, and it certainly shouldn’t be administered to them in the doses it is. One thing we do know, as of last week, is that its toxicity alters—we don’t know how—pubertal development, which means there’s a strong possibility that Charlie will be sterile. After I heard this in one of the Committee meetings I managed to attend, I barely made it to the bathroom before I started crying. I had kept her safe for so many months. If I had been able to keep her safe for just nine more, we’d have a vaccine. But I couldn’t.

I knew from reports that she would be changed, and she is, though among the many things I don’t yet know is how much. “There will be damage,” I read in the latest report, which then outlined, in vague terms, what that damage might be: Cognitive differences. Slowed physical reflexes. Stunted growth. Sterility. Scarring. The first is the most terrifying, because “cognitive differences” is so meaningless a phrase. Her new quiet, where she’d once chattered away—is that a cognitive difference? Her sudden affectlessness—is that a cognitive difference? Her new formality—“Who am I, Charlie?” I asked her, the first day she regained consciousness. “Do you know me?” “Yes,” she said, after studying me, “you’re my grandfather.” “Yes,” I said, and I was beaming, smiling so hard my cheeks hurt, but she was only staring at me, silent and inexpressive. “It’s me. Your Papa, who loves you.” “Grandfather,” she repeated, but that was all, and then she closed her eyes again—is that a cognitive difference? Her halting conversation, her new humorlessness, the way she studies my face, her expression composed but slightly puzzled, as if I were another species and she were trying to interpret me—is that a cognitive difference? Last night I read her a story she had loved, about a pair of talking rabbits, and when I was finished, where she would have normally chimed “Again!,” she instead looked at me, her eyes blank. “Rabbits can’t speak,” she said, finally. “That’s true, sweetheart,” I said, “but it’s a story.” And then, when she said nothing in response, only continued to stare at me, her face unreadable, I added, “It’s make-believe.”

Read it again, Papa! Do the voices better this time!

“Oh,” she said at last.

Is that a cognitive difference?

Or is her new seriousness—her use of “Grandfather” makes her sound slightly disapproving, like she’s aware that the title is grander than I deserve—an inevitable result of all the death she’s seen? Even though I’ve been careful not to discuss it with her, the severity of her illness, the now hundreds of thousands of children who have died, she must have intuited it anyway, mustn’t she? Already her roommates have been replaced seven times in two weeks, the children turned in a single exhalation to corpses and hurried out of the room beneath a tent of muslin so Charlie, asleep anyway, wouldn’t witness their departure—there have been some of these kindnesses, even now.

I stroked her scalp, which is stubbly with scabs and the first fine bristles of new hair. I thought again of the sentence from the report that I now repeat to myself multiple times a day: These findings remain speculative until we have a larger sample set of survivors to study, as does the duration of these effects. “Go to sleep, little Charlie,” I told her, and whereas, before, she would whine a bit, plead for another story, she instead closed her eyes immediately, an act of submission that made me shiver.

Last Friday, I watched her sleep until about eleven p.m. (or 23:00, as the state would now have it), until I finally made myself leave. Outside, the streets were empty. For the first month, they made a curfew exception for the parents who wait on the street, and who would sleep on the pavement on blankets they brought from home; typically, the other parent, if there was one, would relieve the sleeper at dawn, bringing them food and taking their place on the sidewalk. But then the state became afraid of riots and banned overnight gatherings, even though the only thing those people wanted was what was inside the hospital. Naturally, I was in favor of this dispersal, if only from an epidemiological perspective, but what I hadn’t realized until everyone left is that the small, human sounds of this gathering, the sighs and snores and murmurs, the sharp flick of someone flipping the page of a book, the glug of water being swigged from a bottle, somehow balanced the other noise: the refrigerated trucks idling at the docks, the cottony thud of sheet-wrapped bodies being stacked atop one another, the boats chugging to and fro. Everyone who worked on the island had been trained to do so in silence, out of respect, but sometimes you heard one of them exclaim, or swear, or occasionally cry out, and you couldn’t know whether it was because they had dropped a body, or because a shroud had come loose, revealing a face, or because they were simply overwhelmed by the work of burning so many bodies, bodies of children.

The driver knew where I was going that night, and I was able to lean my head against the window and sleep for half an hour before I heard him announce our arrival at the center.

The center is on an island that, half a century ago, was a nature preserve for endangered birds: terns, loons, ospreys. By ’55, the terns were extinct, and the next year, another crematorium had been erected on the southern shore. But then the island flooded in the storm, and sat abandoned until ’68, when the state started quietly rebuilding it, constructing artificial sand beds and concrete barrier walls.

The walls are meant to protect the island from future floods, but they’re also a necessary obfuscation. It was never the intention, but this center has ended up serving mostly children. There was a debate over whether we should allow parents in or not. I argued that we should—the majority of them were immune. But the psychologists on the Committee argued we shouldn’t—the problem was, they said, that they would never recover from what they saw there, and this trauma, on such a mass scale, could lead to social instability. Finally, a dormitory was built for the parents on the north side of the island, but then there was that incident in March, and now no parents at all are allowed. So instead, the parents have built a shantytown—the richer people have actually erected tiny houses from brick, the poorer from cardboard—on the coast in New Rochelle, though all they can see from there is the wall that surrounds the island, and the helicopters lowering themselves from the sky.

There had been, as you recall, a good deal of debate about where we should locate this center. Most of the Committee had argued for one of the former refugee camps: Fire Island, Block Island, Shelter Island. But I had fought for this island: far enough north from Manhattan so there’d be few unexpected visitors; not too far for the helicopters and boats, which could easily float downriver to the crematorium now that the waterways have been reopened.

But though I never said so, the reason I really chose this place was because of its name: Davids Island. Not singular—David’s—but many, as if this land were inhabited not by an ever-changing population of (mostly) children, but by Davids. My son, in duplicate, at all different ages, doing all the things my son had liked to do at various points in his life. Building bombs, yes. But also reading, and playing basketball, and running about like a crazed puppy to make me and Nathaniel laugh, and spinning his daughter around, and climbing into bed next to me when it was thundering and he was frightened. The older Davids would be parents to the younger Davids, and when one finally died—though that wouldn’t be for a very long time, as the oldest inhabitants were still only thirty, the age my David would have been, had he lived—he would be replaced by another, so that the population of Davids always would remain the same: never increasing, never diminishing. There would be no misunderstandings, no concerns that the younger Davids might be somehow different, somehow strange, because the older Davids would understand them. There would be no loneliness, because these Davids would not have ever known parents, or classmates, or strangers, or people who wouldn’t play with them: They would only know one another, which is to say themselves, and their happiness would be complete, because they would never know the agony of wanting to be someone else, for there was no one else to admire, no one else to envy.

I come here sometimes, late, when even the residents of the shantytown have gone to sleep, and sit at the edge of the blackish, brackish water and look out onto the island, which is always lit, and think about what my Davids might be doing now: Maybe the older ones are having a beer. Maybe some of the teenagers are playing volleyball under those bright white lights, the ones that never switch off and transform the water around the island into a shimmer of oil. Maybe the younger ones are reading comic books under their covers with a flashlight—or whatever it is kids do these days when they’re goofing off. (Do they still goof off? They must, mustn’t they?) Maybe they’re cleaning up after dinner, because the young Davids have been taught to be helpful, they have been taught to be good people, to be kind to one another; maybe there’s a pile of them flopped on a bed many yards wide, in which they all sleep in a jumble, one’s breath hot against the back of another’s head, one’s hand stretching out to scratch his thigh and scratching his neighbor’s instead. But it won’t matter: They’ll both feel it anyway.

“David,” I say to the water, quietly, so as not to wake the parents who sleep behind me. “Can you hear me?” And then I listen.

But no one ever answers.

Love—Charles

My dear Peter, September 5, 2071

Today was Charlie’s seventh birthday party, which we weren’t able to have on Thursday, as we’d planned, because she wasn’t feeling well. I didn’t get to mention it when we talked, but for the past month she’s been having petit mal seizures: They only last eight to eleven seconds, but she’s been experiencing them more frequently than I had realized. She had one at the neurologist’s office, in fact, but I hadn’t noticed it until the doctor pointed it out to me—a long, silent stare, her mouth slightly open. “That’s what you have to look for,” her doctor said, but I was too ashamed to admit that she often looked like that, that I had seen her wear that expression before and had thought it simply part of who she now was, not a sign of any neurological condition. An aftereffect of Xychor, again, especially for children who were given the drug before puberty. The doctor thought she’d grow out of them without medication—I couldn’t bear to put her on another, especially one that might further deaden her—but isn’t certain “what the developmental damages will be.”

After these seizures, she’s limp, acquiescent. Since coming home, she’s been so wooden; when I reach out a hand to her, she teeters backward with a kind of stiff-limbed rigidity that would be comical if it weren’t so dismaying. Now I know just to pick her up and hold her next to me, and when she begins to squirm—she no longer likes being held—I know she’s recovered.

I try to make things as easy for her as I can. The Rockefeller Child and Family Center has closed for lack of students, and so I enrolled her in a small, expensive primary school near Union Square, where each student has her own teacher, and where they agreed she could begin in late September, once she gains a little more weight and grows a little more hair. I, of course, don’t care whether she has hair or not, but it’s the one aspect of her appearance that seems to make her self-conscious. Anyway, I was happy to keep her at home with me for a while longer. The school’s dean suggested I get her an animal, to give her something to interact with, and so on Monday I got her a cat, a small gray thing, and presented her with it when she woke up. She didn’t exactly smile—she rarely smiles these days—but she did immediately express an interest in it, taking it in her arms and looking into its face.

“What’s his name, Charlie?” I asked her. Before the sickness, she had named everything: people she saw on the street, the plants in their pots, the dolls on her bed, the two sofas downstairs that she claimed resembled hippos. Now she looked up at me with her newly disquieting gaze, in which you can see either profundity or nothingness.

“Cat,” she said, finally.

“How about something more—descriptive?” I asked her. (“Make her describe things to you,” her psychologist said. “Make her keep talking. You won’t necessarily be able to reawaken her imagination, but you can remind her that it’s there for her to use.”)

She was quiet for so long, staring at the kitten and stroking its fur, that I thought she’d had another seizure. Then she spoke again. “Little Cat,” she said.

“Yes,” I said, and my eyes grew hot. I felt, as I often do when watching her, a deep ache, one that radiates from my heart to every part of my body. “He is little, isn’t he?”

“Yes,” she agreed.

She’s so different now. Before the illness, I would watch her from the doorway of her bedroom, unwilling to interrupt her play by speaking, listening to her talk to her stuffed animals, using one pitch of voice to command them and another to inhabit each one, and feel something inside me swell. When I was in med school, I remember a woman, the mother of a child with Down syndrome, had come to talk to us about the manner in which the doctors and geneticists had discussed her daughter’s postnatal diagnosis with her, which ranged from heartless to clueless. But then, she said, on the day she and her baby were being discharged, the attending resident had come to say goodbye to them. “Enjoy her,” he had said to this woman. Enjoy her: No one had ever told her that she might delight in her baby, that her baby might be a source not of troubles but of pleasure.

And in the same way, I had always enjoyed Charlie. I always knew I did—that enjoyment, that pleasure I took in the fact of her, was inextricable from my love for her. Now, though, that enjoyment is gone, replaced by some other sensation, one deeper and more painful. It’s as if I cannot see her without experiencing her in triplicate: the shadow of who she once was, the reality of who she is, the projection of who she might become. I mourn one, am bewildered by the next, and fear for the third. I had never realized just how much I had assumed about her future until she emerged from her coma so changed. I knew I wouldn’t be able to predict what New York, this country, the world might look like then—but I always knew that she’d be able to meet her future bravely and forthrightly, that she had the self-possession and charm and intuition to survive.

But now I fear for her constantly. How will she live in this world? Who will she be? That image I hadn’t even realized I had, of her banging into the house, a teenager, after visiting a friend, me lecturing her for being late—will that still happen? Will she be able to walk through the Village—sorry, Zone Eight—alone? Will she have friends? What will become of her? My love for her at times feels terrible, huge, dark: a wave so towering and silent that there is no fighting, no hope against it—you can only stand and wait for it to smother you.

I understand that this dreadful love is being compounded by a growing awareness of how the world that we live in—a world that, yes, I helped create—is not one that will be tolerant of people who are fragile or different or damaged. I have always wondered how people knew it was time to leave a place, whether that place was Phnom Penh or Saigon or Vienna. What had to happen for you to abandon everything, for you to lose hope that things would ever improve, for you to run toward a life you couldn’t begin to imagine? I had always imagined that that awareness happened slowly, slowly but steadily, so the changes, though each terrifying on its own, became inoculated by their frequency, as if the warnings were normalized by how many there were.

And then, suddenly, it’s too late. All the while, as you were sleeping, as you were working, as you were eating dinner or reading to your children or talking with your friends, the gates were being locked, the roads were being barricaded, the train tracks were being dismantled, the ships were being moored, the planes were being rerouted. One day, something happens, maybe something minor, even, like chocolate disappears from the stores, or you realize there are no more toy shops in the entire city, or you watch the playground across the street from you be destroyed, the metal jungle gym disassembled and loaded into a truck, and you understand, suddenly, that you’re in danger: That TV is never returning. That the internet is never returning. That, even though the worst of the pandemic is over, the camps are still being built. That when someone said, in the last Committee meeting, that “certain people’s chronic procreation was welcome for once in history,” and no one reacted, not even you, that everything you had suspected about this country—that America was not for everyone; that it was not for people like me, or people like you; that America is a country with sin at its heart—was true. That when the Cessation and Prevention of Terrorism Act was passed, allowing convicted domestic insurgents the choice between internment and sterilization, it was inevitable that Justice would eventually find a way to extend that punishment to first the children and then the siblings of those convicted insurgents.

And then you realize: I can’t stay here. I can’t raise my granddaughter here. So you reach out to some contacts. You make some discreet inquiries. You reach out to your best, your oldest friend, your former lover, and you ask him to help get you out. But he can’t. No one can. You are told by your government that your presence is essential. You are told that you’d be allowed to travel on a limited-term passport, but that a passport cannot be issued for your granddaughter. You know that they know that you would never leave without her—you know that she is the reason you have to leave; you know she is how they will ensure that you never will.

You lie awake at night; you think of your dead husband, your dead son, the bill being proposed that would make a family like the one you once had illegal. You think of how proud you once were: how you once bragged about being a young lab chief; how you volunteered to help build the systems you now want to escape. You think of how your safety is guaranteed only by your ongoing participation. You want nothing more than to scroll back through time. It is your dearest dream and wish.

But you can’t. You can only try to keep your granddaughter safe. You are not a brave man—you know that. But, as much of a coward as you are, you will never abandon her, even as she has become someone you can’t access and don’t understand.

You ask every night for forgiveness.

You know you’ll never receive it.

Love, Charles