To Paradise

PART VII

Summer 2094

I was nervous on the day I met my husband for the first time. This was in the spring of 2087; I was twenty-two. The morning I was to meet him, I woke earlier than usual and put on the dress that Grandfather had gotten for me somewhere—it was green, like bamboo. There was a sash around the middle that I tied in a bow, and long sleeves, which hid the scars I had from the sickness.

At the marriage broker’s office, which was in Zone Nine, I was taken to a plain white room. I had asked Grandfather if he would be there for the meeting with me, but he had said that I should meet with the candidate alone, and he would be right outside, in the waiting room.

After a few minutes, the candidate entered. He was nice-looking, as nice-looking as he was in his picture, and I felt unhappy, because I knew I wasn’t nice-looking myself, and his attractiveness would make me less so. I thought he might laugh at me, or look away from me, or turn around and leave.

But he did none of those things. He bowed to me, deeply, and I bowed back, and we introduced ourselves. Then he sat, and I sat, too. There was a pot of powdered tea and two cups, and a little dish with four cookies. He asked if I wanted some tea, and I said I did, and he poured me some.

I was anxious, but he tried to make the conversation easy. We already knew all the important things about each other: I knew that his parents and sister had been declared guilty of treason and had been sent to labor camps, and had later been executed. I knew that he had been a graduate student in biology, and that he had been studying for his doctorate before he was expelled for having traitorous relatives. He knew who Grandfather was, and who my father was. He knew the disease had left me sterile; I knew that he had chosen to be sterilized rather than be sent to the rehabilitation camps. I knew he had been a promising student. I knew he was very smart.

He asked me what I liked to eat, what kind of music I liked, if I was enjoying my job at Rockefeller, if I had any hobbies. Meetings between relatives of state traitors were usually recorded, even meetings such as these, so we were both careful. I liked that he was careful, and that he hadn’t asked me any questions that I wouldn’t be able to answer; I liked his voice, which was soft and gentle.

But I still hadn’t known if I wanted to marry him. I knew I had to be married someday. But getting married would mean it would no longer be just me and Grandfather, and I wanted to delay that for as long as I could.

Finally, though, I decided I would. The next day, Grandfather visited the broker to finalize the arrangements, and soon, a year had passed, and it was the night before my marriage ceremony. We had a celebratory dinner, for which Grandfather had found apple juice, which we drank from our favorite teacups, and oranges, which were dry and sour but which we dipped in artificial honey for sweetness. The next day I would again see the man who would be my husband; he had failed in his attempt to appeal his expulsion, but Grandfather had found him a job at the Pond, which he would begin the following week.

As we were finishing our meal, Grandfather said, “Little cat, I want to tell you something about your future husband.”

He had been serious, and quiet, all through dinner, but when I asked him if he was angry at me, he had only smiled and shaken his head. “No, not angry,” he said. “But this is a bittersweet moment. My little cat, all grown up and getting married.” Now he continued: “I have debated whether to tell you this or not. But I think—I think I must, for reasons I will explain.”

He got up to turn on the radio, and then he sat down again. For a long time, he was silent. Then he said, “Little cat, your future husband is like I am. Do you understand what I mean by this?”

“He’s a scientist,” I said, though I already knew that. Or he was an aspiring scientist, at least. That was a good thing.

“No,” Grandfather said. “Well, yes. But that’s not what I’m trying to say. I’m trying to say that he is like—he is like me, but also like your other grandfather is. Was.” He was quiet, then, until he saw I understood what he was trying to say.

“He’s a homosexual,” I said.

“Yes,” Grandfather said.

I knew a little about homosexuality. I knew what it was; I knew Grandfather was one, and I knew it had once been legal. Now it was neither legal nor illegal. You could be a homosexual. You could have homosexual intercourse, even though it was discouraged. But you could never get married to someone of your same sex. Technically, all adults could reside with another person to whom they weren’t related, which meant you could be two men or two women and live together, but very few people chose to do that—if you were two people living together and weren’t married, you would receive food coupons and water and electricity tokens for only one person. There were only three kinds of dwellings: dwellings for single people, dwellings for married couples (no children), and dwellings for families (one for families with one child; one for families with two or more children). Until you were thirty-five, you could live in a single-person residence. But then, according to the 2078 Marriage Act, you had to get married. If you were married and got divorced or were widowed, you had four years to get remarried and were eligible for a state-sponsored re-partnering within two years. There were a few exceptions made, of course, for people like Grandfather. The state also honored all preexisting legal homosexual unions, but only for twenty years after the law’s passage. The point is that it was illogical to choose to live with someone to whom you weren’t married; it was almost impossible for two people to survive on a single person’s benefits. A society was more stable and healthier when its citizens were married, which was why the state tried to dissuade people from alternative arrangements.

Other countries had banned homosexuality for religious reasons, but that was not the case here. Here, it had been discouraged because it was the duty of adults to produce children, as the country’s birth rate had fallen to catastrophic levels, and because so many children had died in the illnesses of ’70 and ’76, and so many of the survivors had been left sterile. Moreover, the way the children had died had been so horrific that many parents and former parents had been reluctant to have more children, because they were certain that those, too, would die in an equally horrific manner. But the other reason homosexuals had been targeted was because so many of them had joined the ’67 rebellion; they had sided with the insurgents, and the state had had to punish them and, moreover, keep them under control. Grandfather had once told me that many members of racial minority groups had also joined the rebellion, but punishing them in the same way was counterproductive, as the state needed everyone they could to replenish the population.

But even though homosexuality was not illegal, it was also not something people discussed. Aside from Grandfather, I knew no other homosexuals. I thought of them neither one way nor another. They were simply not people who affected my life in any significant way.

“Oh,” I said to Grandfather now.

“Little cat,” Grandfather began, and then stopped. Then he started again. “I hope someday you’ll understand why I decided this match was the best one for you. I wanted to find you a husband who I knew would always look after you, who would always take care of you, who would never raise a hand to you, who would never shout at or diminish you. I am confident this young man is that person.

“I could have not told you. But I want to tell you, because I don’t want you to think it’s your fault that you and your husband don’t have sexual relations. I don’t want you to think it’s your fault if he doesn’t love you in some ways. He will love you in other ways, or at least show love for you in other ways, and those are the ways that matter.”

I thought about this. Neither of us said anything for a long time.

Then I said, “Maybe he will change his mind.”

Grandfather looked at me, and then he looked down. There was another silence. “No,” he said, very softly. “He will not, little cat. This is not something that he can change.”

I know this will sound very foolish, because Grandfather was so smart, and as I have said, I believed everything he said. But even though he had told me otherwise, I have always hoped that he might have been wrong about my husband, that one day, my husband might grow to be physically attracted to me. I wasn’t sure how, exactly, this would happen. I know I am not attractive. I also knew that even if I was attractive, it wouldn’t have mattered to my husband.

Yet for the first two or so years of our marriage, I had a dream of how he might fall in love with me. It wasn’t a typical dream but, rather, a waking one, as I never had it while I slept, though I always wished I would. In it, I was lying in my bed, and suddenly I felt my husband get into bed next to me. He held me, and then we kissed. That was the end of that dream, but sometimes I had other dreams, in which my husband kissed me while we were standing, or that we went to the center and listened to some music and held hands.

I understood that Grandfather had told me the truth about my husband before I was married so I wouldn’t think it was my fault that my husband wasn’t attracted to me. But knowing the truth didn’t make it easier; it didn’t make me stop wishing that maybe my husband was an exception, that maybe our life would end up being different than Grandfather had told me it would. And even though it hadn’t, it was difficult to stop hoping. I had always been good at accepting things as they were, but it was harder for me than I had expected to accept this. Every day I tried; every day I failed. There were some days, some weeks, even, when I didn’t hope that maybe, maybe Grandfather had been wrong about my husband—that maybe someday he would love me back. I knew it was more realistic and ultimately less distressing to spend my time working on accepting, rather than hoping. But hoping, though it made me feel worse, also made me feel better.

I knew that whoever was writing my husband those notes was a man—I could tell from the handwriting. Knowing this made me feel bad, but not as bad as it would have if the notes had been written by a woman: It meant that Grandfather had been right; that my husband was as he had said. But it still made me unhappy. It still made me feel that I had failed, even though Grandfather had said that I wasn’t to think like that. In a way, I didn’t need to know who the person was, just as I didn’t need to know what happened in the house on Bethune Street—whatever more I learned would be useless, just extra details. I would be unable to change them; I would be unable to correct them. Yet I still wanted to know—it was as if knowing was better than not knowing, as difficult as knowing would be. It was for this same reason, I suppose, that Grandfather had told me about my husband.

As unhappy as my husband’s inability to love me made me, however, David’s inability was worse. It was worse because I hadn’t truly comprehended how I had felt about him; it was worse because I knew that at some point, I had begun thinking that he might like me as well, that he might like me in a way my husband couldn’t. And it was worst of all because I had been wrong—he hadn’t felt for me what I felt for him.

The following Saturday at 16:00, I stayed indoors. My husband was taking a nap in our bedroom; he had been tired lately, he said, and needed to lie down. But after ten minutes, I went downstairs and opened the door to our building. It was a bright, hot day, and the Square was very busy. There was a crowd of people waiting in front of the metal merchant whose stall was closest to the northern edge. But then some of them moved aside, and I suddenly saw David. Although it was hot, the air quality was good, and he was holding his helmet in one hand. With his other hand, he was shielding his eyes, and he was turning his head back and forth, slowly, looking for something or someone.

I realized then he was looking for me, and I shrank against the door before remembering that I had never told David where I lived—all he knew was that I lived in Zone Eight, just like him. I was thinking this when he seemed to look directly at me, and I held my breath, as if it would make me invisible, but then he turned his head in the opposite direction.

Finally, after another two minutes or so, he left, looking back over his shoulder one last time as he moved west.

The next Saturday, the same thing happened. This time I was waiting at the door exactly at 15:55, so I could watch him approach, stand at the center of the north edge of the Square, and, for the next eleven minutes, look for me before finally leaving. The next Saturday, the same thing; and again the next.

It made me feel good that he still wanted to see me, even after I had embarrassed myself. But it made me sad as well, because I knew I could no longer see him. I know this sounds silly, or even childish, because even though David didn’t feel for me as I did him, he still wanted to be my friend, and hadn’t I been saying all along that I wanted a friend?

But I just couldn’t see him again. I know that sounds illogical. But it took so much energy and discipline for me to remind myself to not hope for my husband’s love that I didn’t think I had enough strength to remind myself not to hope for David’s love, either. It was too difficult for me. I would have to learn to forget or ignore my feelings for David, and I wasn’t going to be able to do that if I kept seeing him. It was better to pretend I had never met him at all.

At the top of the building where I worked, there was a greenhouse. This was not the greenhouse that had been named for Grandfather—that was atop a different building.

The greenhouse at Larsson Center was not a working greenhouse but, rather, a museum. Here the university maintained a specimen of each of the plants that had been engineered at RU for use in antiviral medications, dating all the way back to 2037. The plants were grown in individual clay pots and arranged in rows, and although they didn’t look all that remarkable, they each had a label beneath them listing their Latin name, and the name of the lab that had developed them, and the drug they had contributed to. The bulk of botanical research had been long ago transferred to the Farm, but there were still a few RU scientists who collaborated in the development program.

Anyone could come visit this greenhouse, though few people ever did. In fact, few people ever came up to the roof at all, which was mysterious to me, as it was very pleasant. As I mentioned earlier, the entire campus is under a biodome, which means it’s always climate-controlled, and near the greenhouse there were a few tables and benches so you could sit and look over the East River, or at the rooftops of the other buildings, some of which are dedicated to growing vegetables and fruits and herbs that the cafeteria uses to make food for the employees of the university. Anyone who worked at Rockefeller could buy lunch at the cafeteria at a subsidized rate, and I often brought my lunch up to the roof, where I could eat alone but not feel self-conscious about it.

It was especially nice to sit on the roof in the summer. You almost felt like you were outside, except better, because unlike actually being outside, you didn’t have to wear your cooling suit. You could just sit there in your jumpsuit and eat your sandwich and look at the brown water beneath.

As I ate, I thought, as I often did, about David. It had been almost a month since I had seen him last, and although I was trying my best to forget him, I still saw things every day that I thought he might be interested in hearing about, and it took a great effort to remind myself that I wasn’t going to see him again, and that I should stop making observations and storing them to share with him. Though then I remembered that Grandfather had said that you don’t have to make observations only so you can tell someone else; that making them just for the sake of making them was a good thing. “Why?” I had asked him, and he had thought about it for a moment. “Because we can,” he had said, finally. “Because it’s what humans do.” Sometimes I worried that my lack of interest in making observations meant I wasn’t human, though I know that wasn’t what Grandfather had intended.

I was thinking about this when the elevator doors opened and three people, a woman and two men, stepped off. I knew instantly from how they were dressed that they were state employees, and I could tell that they were in the middle of an argument, as one of the men was leaning toward the other, and they were all whispering. Then the woman looked over and saw me and said, “Oh, Christ—people, let’s try someplace else,” and before I could offer to go away, they got back in the elevator and left.

Grandfather had always said that the people who worked for the state and the people who didn’t were united in their desire to never encounter one another: The state didn’t want to see us, and we didn’t want to see them. And for the most part, it didn’t happen. The ministries were all in one zone, and the state workers had their own shuttles and grocery stores and clusters of apartment buildings. They didn’t live in just one zone, though many of the senior members lived in Zone Fourteen, the same as many of the senior scientists at RU and senior engineers and researchers at the Farm and the Pond.

It was well-known that there was an office of state employees at every biological research institution in the country. It was necessary, so they could watch over us. But although we all knew there was an office at RU, no one knew where it was or how many people worked there. Some people said it was fewer than ten people. But others said it was more, many more, maybe as many as a hundred, two for almost every principal investigator here. There were rumors that their office was many layers underground, even beneath the supposed additional labs with the supposed additional mice, and the supposed operating rooms, and that these underground offices connected to special tunnels, where there were special trains that could take them back to their ministries, or even all the way down to Municipality One.

But other people said that they were just in a small set of rooms in one of the lesser-used buildings, which was probably the truth, though RU wasn’t so large a campus that you didn’t cross everyone at some point or another, and yet I had never seen these state employees, though I had recognized them the moment I did.

Their presence here was actually a relatively recent development. When Grandfather had begun working at Rockefeller, for example, it was just a research facility. The labs received funding from the state, and they sometimes worked with various ministries, especially the Health and Interior Ministries, but the state had no jurisdiction over any of their work. After ’56, though, that changed, and in ’62, when the state was established, it was given oversight of all the country’s research facilities. The following year, the forty-five states were divided into eleven prefectures, and in ’72, the year after the zones were established, the state was one of ninety-two countries that signed a treaty with Beijing, allowing them full access to all scientific institutions in return for funding and other resources, including food and water and medicines and other humanitarian supplies. This meant that, while every federal project was monitored by the state, only the state employees who oversaw institutions such as RU ultimately reported back to Beijing—Beijing didn’t care about other domestic enterprises, only the ones that worked with illnesses and illness prevention, as we did.

Along with the people who were visibly members of the state, you also had to assume that there were a number of scientists and other researchers who worked for both the institute and the state. This didn’t mean they were informants—the institute would be informed of their dual responsibilities. Grandfather had been one of those people: He had begun as a scientist, but eventually he had also worked with the state. When I was born, he had been very powerful. But then his power had diminished, and when the insurgents briefly took control of the country the second time, he had been killed for his association with the state, and for what he had done to try to stop the spread of disease.

The point is that it was strange to see these state officers moving about the campus so openly and behaving so strangely. So I suppose it wasn’t that surprising that, about a week or so later, I returned from eating my lunch on the roof to find five of the Ph.D.s excitedly whispering in one corner of the break room about an announcement that had just come down from the Health Ministry that all the containment centers in our prefecture were to be closed, effective immediately.

“What do you think it means?” asked one of the Ph.D.s, who always began these conversations with the same question, and whom I would sometimes later hear repeating the answers he’d heard to other people.

“It’s obvious,” said another, who was large and tall, and whose uncle was rumored to be one of the interior minister’s deputies, “it means this new thing is not only real but projected to be highly deadly, and easy to spread.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because. If it were easy to treat, or to contain, then the old system would still be fine: Someone gets sick, you hold them for a week or two and see if they get better, and then, if they don’t, they get transferred to a relocation center. It’s worked perfectly fine for the past, what, twenty-five years, right?”

“Actually,” said another of the Ph.D.s, who rolled his eyes when the interior minister’s deputy’s nephew said anything, “I’ve never thought the system that effective. Too much of a margin for error.”

“Yes, the system has its flaws,” said the interior minister’s deputy’s nephew, irritated at being contradicted. “But let’s not forget what the containment centers accomplished.” I had heard the interior minister’s deputy’s nephew defend the containment centers before; he would always remind people that the centers gave scientists the opportunity to conduct real-time human research, and to identify subjects among their residents for drug trials. “Now they’re guessing that, whatever this is, they either won’t have time for the stopgap of the containment center, or there’ll be no point because the morbidity rate will be so high, and so fast, that it’s best and most efficient to just send all cases straight to the relocation centers and to get them off the island as soon as possible.”

He sounded very excited about this. They all did. A big new disease was definitely coming, and now it was their time to witness it, to try to solve it. None of them seemed scared; none of them seemed worried that they might get sick themselves. Maybe they were right not to be scared. Maybe this disease wouldn’t affect them—they knew more about it than I did, so I couldn’t say that they were wrong.

On the shuttle ride home, I thought of the man I had seen two years ago, the one who had tried to escape the containment center and had been stopped by the guards. Ever since, I had looked out the window whenever we passed the center. I don’t know why I did—the center no longer existed, and anyway the facade was completely mirrored, so you couldn’t see inside at all. But I still continued to look, as if, one day, the same man might appear again, this time walking out of the center in his regular clothes because he had been cured, and he was going home to wherever he had lived before he had gotten sick.

The next few weeks at the lab were extremely busy for everyone, including me. This made it more difficult to eavesdrop, because there were far more meetings among the scientists, many of them led by Dr. Wesley, and therefore far less time for the Ph.D.s to gather and discuss what had happened in those meetings, and less time for me to try to listen to them.

It took me several days to understand that even the older scientists were taken aback by what was happening. Many of them had been Ph.D.s or postdocs themselves during the ’70 illness, but the state was much stronger now than it had been then, and they were made confused and even anxious by the constant and multiplying presence of state employees: the three people I’d seen on the roof, but dozens of others as well, from many different ministries. They would be organizing the response to the illness, and they would be taking over not only our lab but all of RU’s labs.

The new disease was not yet named, but all of us were under strict orders to discuss it with no one. If we did, we could be charged with treason. For the first time, I was happy that David and I were no longer speaking, as I had never had to keep a secret from a friend and so was unsure how good I’d be at it. But now that was no longer a problem.

Since I had stopped seeing David, I had renewed my Thursday-night monitoring of my husband. There was no more to see than there had been—just him approaching the door of the house on Bethune Street, knocking his special knock, saying something I couldn’t hear into the opening, and then disappearing inside—and yet I continued to watch him, standing beneath the stairwell of the house across the street. Once, the door opened slightly wider than usual, and I saw the person inside, a white man about my husband’s age with light-brown hair, poke his head out and quickly look left and right before pulling the door shut again. After the door closed, I would stand there for a few minutes longer, waiting to see if anything more happened, but it never did. Then I would go home.

Everything, in fact, had returned to how it had been before I had met David, and yet things were also different, because I had felt like somebody else when I had had David as a friend, and now that I no longer did, it was difficult to remember who I actually was.

One night, about six weeks after I had last met up with David, my husband and I were eating dinner when he said, “Cobra, are you all right?”

“Yes,” I said. “Thank you,” I remembered to say.

“How is David?” he asked, after a silence, and I looked up.

“Why are you asking?” I said.

He lifted one shoulder and let it fall. “I just thought I would,” he said. “It’s so hot now—are you two still walking, or are you spending more time at the center?”

“We aren’t friends anymore,” I said, and across from me, my husband was silent.

“I’m sorry, Cobra,” he said, and now I shrugged. Suddenly I was mad: I was mad that my husband wasn’t jealous of David or of my friendship with him; I was mad that he wasn’t relieved that David and I were no longer friends; I was mad that he was so unsurprised.

“Where do you go on your free nights?” I asked him, and I was pleased to see him look startled, and lean back in his seat.

“I go to see friends,” he said, after a silence.

“What do you do with them?” I asked, and he was silent again.

“We talk,” he said, at last. “We play chess.”

Then we were both silent. I was still angry; I still wanted to ask him questions. But I had so many that I didn’t know where to begin, and besides, I was scared: What if he told me something I didn’t want to hear? What if he got angry at me and shouted? What if he ran out of the apartment? Then I’d be alone, and I wouldn’t know what to do.

Finally, he stood and began gathering the dishes. We had had horse that night, but neither of us had finished our servings; I knew my husband would wrap the leftovers in paper so we could use the bones to flavor our porridge.

It was Tuesday, and my free night, but as I began walking toward our bedroom and my husband set down the dishes to bring me the radio, I stopped him. “I don’t want to listen to the radio,” I said. “I want to go to sleep.”

“Cobra,” my husband said, stepping close to me, “are you sure you’re all right?”

“Yes,” I said.

“But you’re crying,” my husband said, even though I didn’t think I was. “Did—did David hurt you in some way, Cobra?”

“No,” I said. “No, he didn’t hurt me. I’m just very tired and would like to be left alone, please.”

He moved away from me, and I went to the bathroom and then to my bed. A few hours later, my husband came in. It was unusual for him to go to bed this early, but we had both been working long hours, and he was very tired, as was I. Yesterday there had been an early-morning raid that had woken us both. But although we were both tired, only he fell asleep quickly, while I stayed awake, watching the searchlight move across the ceiling. I imagined my husband at Bethune Street playing chess with somebody else, but as hard as I tried, I could only envision the inside of the house looking like our own apartment, and the only other person I could see playing with my husband was not the man who had opened the door for him, but David.

By mid-July, I felt like I was living in two worlds. The lab had been transformed: The rooftop of Larsson had been made into an office for a team of epidemiologists from the Health Ministry, and a section of the largest of the basement passageways was converted into an office for some employees of the Interior Ministry. The scientists hurried about looking worried, and even the Ph.D.s were silent. All I knew was that whatever had been found was very dangerous, so dangerous that it had overshadowed even the excitement surrounding its discovery.

But outside of RU, everything continued as it always did. The shuttle picked me up; the shuttle dropped me off. There were groceries at the store, and there was one week when horse was even discounted, as it occasionally was when there was a surplus of meat from the factories out west. The radio played music when it was supposed to and bulletins when it was supposed to. You saw nothing of the preparations that I knew from school had happened in advance of the ’70 illness: There was no increase in military personnel, no requisitioning of buildings, no reinstatement of the curfew. On the weekends, the Square filled with people, as usual, and although David had stopped waiting for me, I still stood at the front door and looked out its window every Saturday at the same time we had once met, looking for him as he had looked for me. But I never saw him. A few times, I wondered if I should have bought the powder from the vendor and slipped it into David’s drink, as she had said, before remembering that it hadn’t been David who had chosen to stop seeing me—I had been the one who had chosen to stop seeing him. I would wonder then whether I should go to the Square and let that woman find me again—not for the powder that would make David fall in love with me but for a different powder, a powder that would make me believe that someone could love me at all.

The one thing that was different outside of work, I suppose, was that my husband was home more than usual, often sleeping in his bed or napping on the sofa. He even came home earlier on his free nights, and when he did, I could hear that he moved slowly, even heavily. Normally, he walked lightly, but now his walk was different, and when he climbed into bed, he groaned, quietly, as if he were in pain, and his face often looked puffy. He had been working extra hours at the Pond, just as I had been working extra hours at the lab, but I didn’t know if he knew what I knew, which wasn’t very much, anyway. People who worked at the Pond and the Farm did vital jobs, but just as I didn’t know what they were actually doing in those jobs, they often didn’t, either. It could be that he was staying late, for example, because a lab—maybe even a lab at RU—had urgently requested a certain kind of material from a certain kind of plant, but just as I didn’t know why I was preparing the mice, he wouldn’t know why he was preparing a sample. He would just be told to do it, and he would. The difference was that I wasn’t curious about why I was told to do anything; it was enough for me to know that my work was necessary, that it was useful, and that it had to be done. But my husband had been two years away from completing his doctorate when he was declared an enemy of the state and expelled from his university—he would want to know why he was asked to do things. He would even, perhaps, want to contribute an opinion. And yet he never would.

I remember that, once, I had been very upset after one of my lessons with Grandfather about the sort of questions I should ask people. I was often frustrated after our sessions, because I was reminded of how difficult it was for me to do and say and think things that seemed to be so easy for other people. “I don’t know how to ask the right questions,” I said to Grandfather, even though that wasn’t exactly what I wanted to say, even though I didn’t know how to say what I really wanted to say.

Grandfather had been quiet for a moment. “Sometimes not asking questions is a good thing, little cat,” he said. “Not asking questions can keep you safe.” Then he looked at me, really looked at me, as if he were memorizing my face and might never see it again. “But sometimes you need to ask, even if it’s dangerous.” He stopped again. “Will you remember that, little cat?”

“Yes,” I said.

The next day at work, I went to see Dr. Morgan. Dr. Morgan was the most senior postdoc at the lab, and he oversaw all the techs. But even though he was the most senior, the Ph.D.s didn’t want to be like him. “God help me if I turn out like Morgan,” I sometimes heard one of them say to the others. This was because Dr. Morgan didn’t have a lab of his own and was still working for Dr. Wesley, seven years after he’d begun. In fact, Dr. Morgan and I had joined Dr. Wesley’s lab in the same year. Grandfather had told me that every lab would have at least one postdoc who never left, who stayed on and on, but I should never mention that fact to them, or remind them of how long they’d been there, or ask them why they hadn’t gone somewhere else.

So I never had. But Dr. Morgan had always been nice to me, and, unlike many of the other scientists in the lab, he always said hello to me if he saw me in the hallway. Still, I rarely sought him out except to ask for permission to leave early or come in late, and as I didn’t know the best way to approach him, I spent about five minutes waiting near his station while most of the lab was away eating lunch, not knowing what to do and hoping he would eventually look up from his work.

Finally, he did. “Someone’s watching me,” he announced, and turned around. “Charlie,” he said. “What are you doing, just standing there?”

“I’m sorry, Dr. Morgan,” I said.

“Is something wrong?” he asked.

“No,” I said. Then I couldn’t think of what else to say. “Dr. Morgan,” I said, quickly, before I lost my nerve, “will you tell me what’s happening?”

Dr. Morgan looked at me, and I looked back at him. There had always been something about Dr. Morgan that reminded me of Grandfather, though for a while, I couldn’t figure out why: He was much younger than Grandfather, just a few years older than I am. He was a different race. And, unlike Grandfather, he wasn’t acclaimed or influential. But then I realized it was because he always answered me when I asked a question—other people in the lab, even if I asked them, would tell me I wouldn’t understand, but Dr. Morgan never said that.

“It’s a zoonosis, and definitively a hemorrhagic fever,” he finally said. “And it’s spread by both respiratory aerosols and droplets as well as by bodily fluids, which makes it profoundly contagious. We don’t yet have a clear sense of its incubation period, or of how long the period is between diagnosis and death. It was identified in Brazil. The first case in this country was found about a month ago, in Prefecture Six.” He didn’t need to say that this was a lucky thing, as Prefecture Six was the most sparsely populated of the prefectures. “But since then, we know it’s been spreading—we don’t yet know how fast. And that’s all I can say.”

I didn’t ask whether that was because Dr. Morgan didn’t know more or because he couldn’t tell me more. I just thanked him and returned to my area, so I could think about what he had told me.

I know that the first thing someone might wonder is how this disease got here in the first place. One of the reasons there hadn’t been a pandemic in almost twenty-four years is because, as I’ve said, the state closed down all the borders, as well as banned all international travel. Many countries did the same. In fact, there were only seventeen countries in total—New Britain, a cluster in Old Europe, and a second cluster in Southeast Asia—with reciprocal movement rights for their citizens.

But although no one was allowed to come in and no one was allowed to go out, it didn’t actually mean that no one came in and no one went out. Four years ago, for example, there was a rumor that a stowaway from India had been found in a shipping container at one of the ports in Prefecture Three. And as Grandfather always said, a microbe can travel in anyone’s throat: a person’s, of course, but also a bat’s or a snake’s or a flea’s. (This is a figure of speech, as snakes and fleas don’t have throats.) As Dr. Wesley always said, all it took was one.

Then there was another theory, one I would never repeat—though other people did—that the state invented the diseases themselves, that half of every research institute, even RU, was dedicated to making new illnesses, and the other half was dedicated to figuring out how to destroy them, and that whenever the state thought it needed to, it deployed one of the new diseases. Don’t ask me how I know that people thought this way, because I couldn’t say—I just do. I can say that my father thought this way, and it was one of the reasons he was declared an enemy of the state.

But though I had heard these theories before, I didn’t believe them myself. If that had been true, then why wouldn’t the state have deployed an illness in ’83 or ’88, during the uprisings? Then Grandfather would still be alive, and I would still have him to talk to.

I would also never say this, but sometimes I wished there would be another disease from far away. Not because I wanted people to die but because it would be proof. I wanted to know for certain that there were other places, and other countries, with people living in them and riding their own shuttles and working in their own labs and making their own nutria patties for dinner. I knew I would never be able to visit these places—I didn’t even want to be able to visit them.

But sometimes I wanted to know that they existed, that all those countries that Grandfather had been to, all those streets he had walked on, were still there. Sometimes I even wanted to pretend that he wasn’t dead at all, that I hadn’t seen him be killed with my own eyes, but that, when he dropped through the platform hole, he had instead landed in one of the cities he had traveled to when he was young: Sydney or Copenhagen or Shanghai or Lagos. Maybe he was there, and thinking of me, and although I would miss him just as much, it would be enough for me to know he was still alive, remembering me as he sat in a place I couldn’t even begin to know how to imagine.

Over the next weeks, things began to change. Not in any immediately obvious way—it wasn’t as if you saw lines of transport trucks or military mobilizations—and yet it was becoming clear that something was happening.

They did most of the work at night, so it was when I was on the shuttle, heading north to RU, that I began noticing the differences. One morning, for example, we lingered longer at the checkpoint than usual; another, there was a soldier who scanned our foreheads before we boarded with a new kind of temperature wand I’d never seen. “Move it along,” said the soldier, but not meanly, and then, though none of us had asked, “Just some new equipment the state is testing.” The next day, he was gone, but in his place was a different soldier, standing and watching us, one hand on his weapon, as we boarded the shuttle. He said nothing, and did nothing, but his eyes moved back and forth across us, and when the man in front of me was stepping up, the soldier held out his hand. “Halt,” he said. “What’s that?” and pointed to a splotch the color of smashed grapes on the man’s face. “Birthmark,” said the man, who didn’t sound scared at all, and the soldier took a device out of his pocket and beamed a light at the man’s cheek, and then read what the device said and nodded, waving the man onto the shuttle with the tip of his weapon.

I cannot say what other people on my shuttle route did or didn’t notice. On the one hand, so little changed in Zone Eight that it was impossible not to recognize things that had. On the other hand, most people weren’t looking for changes. But I have to assume that most of us knew, or suspected, what was happening: Every one of us worked for state-run research institutions, after all; those of us who worked for places that studied biological sciences perhaps knew more than those who worked at the Pond or the Farm. Still, none of us said anything. It was easy to believe nothing was happening if you tried.

One day, I was in my usual seat on the shuttle, looking out the window, when I suddenly saw David. He was in his gray jumpsuit and he was walking down Sixth Avenue. This was just before we had to stop for the Fourteenth Street checkpoint, and as we waited our turn in the queue, I saw him turn right on Twelfth Street, heading west and disappearing from sight.

The shuttle inched forward, and I turned back around in my seat. I realized that it couldn’t have been David after all; it was an hour past his usual shuttle time—he would already have been at work at the Farm.

And yet I had been so sure I had seen him, even though it was impossible. For the first time, I felt a kind of fear about everything that was happening—the illness, how little I knew, what was going to happen next. I was not afraid of getting sick myself; I wasn’t sure why. But that day on the shuttle, I had the strange sensation that the world was truly being split, and that in one world, I was riding the shuttle to my job taking care of the pinkies, while in another, David was going somewhere completely different, somewhere I had never seen or heard of, as if Zone Eight were actually much bigger than I knew it to be, and within it were places that everyone else knew about, but that I somehow did not.

I was always thinking of Grandfather, and yet there were two days on which I thought about him especially hard. The first was September 20, the day he was killed. The second was August 14, the day he was taken from me, the last day I ever spent with him, and though I know this will sound strange, this date was even more difficult for me than the actual day of his death.

I had been with him that afternoon. It was a Saturday, and he had come to meet me at what had been our apartment but was now my husband’s and my apartment. My husband and I had only been married since June 4, and of all the things that were strange and difficult for me about being married, the strangest and most difficult was not seeing Grandfather every day. He had been resettled into a very tiny flat near the eastern edge of the zone, and for the first two weeks of my marriage, I had gone over to his building every day after work and waited in the street, sometimes for several hours, until he came home. Each day, he would smile but also shake his head. “Little cat,” he would say, patting my hair, “it’ll never get easier if you keep coming over here every night. Besides, your husband will worry.”

“No, he won’t,” I would say. “I told him I was coming to see you.”

Then Grandfather would sigh. “Come up,” he would say, and I would go upstairs with him and he would put down his briefcase and give me a glass of water, and then he would walk me home. On the way, he would ask me questions about how work was, and how my husband was, and whether we were comfortable in our apartment.

“I still don’t understand why you had to leave,” I would say.

“I told you already, little cat,” Grandfather would say, but gently. “Because it’s your apartment. And because you’re married now—you don’t want to hang around your old grandfather forever.”

At least Grandfather and I still spent every weekend together. Every Friday, my husband and I invited him over for dinner, and he and my husband would talk about complicated scientific matters I couldn’t understand past the first ten minutes of conversation. Then, on Saturday and Sunday, it would be just the two of us. Things were very hard for Grandfather at work then—the capital had fallen to the insurgents six weeks earlier, and the insurgents had held enormous rallies, promising to reinstate technology to all citizens and to punish the leading members of the regime. I was worried, hearing that, because Grandfather was part of the regime. I didn’t know if he was a leading member, but I knew he was important. But so far, nothing had happened, except that the new government had instituted a 23:00 curfew. Everything else, though, seemed exactly the same as it had been. I was beginning to think that nothing would change in the end, because in reality, nothing had. It didn’t matter to me who was in charge of the state: I was just a citizen, and would be either way, and it wasn’t my place to worry about such things.

That Saturday, August 14, was a typical day. It was very hot, and so Grandfather and I met at 14:00 at the center and listened to a string quartet. Then he bought us some iced milk, and we sat at one of the tables, eating the milk with little spoons. He asked how work was, and if I liked Dr. Wesley, who had once worked for Grandfather, many years ago. I said I liked work, and that Dr. Wesley was fine, both of which were true, and he nodded. “Good, little cat,” he said. “I’m glad to hear it.”

For a while, we lingered in the air-conditioning, and then Grandfather said that the worst of the heat would have broken, and we could go look at the vendors’ offerings in the Square, which we sometimes did, before I went home.

We were only three blocks from the northern entrance when the van pulled alongside us, and three men in black got out. “Dr. Griffith,” one of them said to Grandfather, and Grandfather, who had stopped to watch as the van approached, standing next to me with his hand on my shoulder, now took my hand and squeezed it, and turned me to face him.

“I have to go with these men, little cat,” he said, calmly.

I didn’t understand. I felt like I was going to collapse. “No,” I said. “No, Grandfather.”

He patted my hand. “Don’t worry, little cat,” he said. “I’m going to be fine. I promise you.”

“Get in,” said another of the men, but Grandfather ignored him. “Go home,” he whispered to me. “You’re only three blocks away. Go home, and tell your husband I was taken, and don’t worry, all right? I’ll be back with you soon.”

“No,” I said, and Grandfather winked at me and climbed into the back of the van. “No, Grandfather,” I said. “No, no.”

Grandfather looked out at me and smiled and began to say something, but then the man who had told him to get in slammed the doors shut, and then all three men got into the front seat and the van drove away.

By this point, I was shouting, and although some people stopped to look at me, most did not. Too late, I began to run after the van, which was driving south, but then it turned west, and it was so hot, and I was so slow, that I tripped and fell, and for a while I remained on the sidewalk, rocking myself.

Finally, I stood. I walked into our building and up to our apartment. My husband was there, and when he saw me, he opened his mouth, but before he could speak, I told him what had happened, and he went immediately to the closet and took out the box with our papers, and removed some. Then he went to the drawer beneath my bed and took out some of our gold coins. He put them all in a bag, and then he scooped some water into a mug for me. “I have to go see if I can help your grandfather,” he said. “I’ll be back as soon as I can, all right?” I nodded.

I waited all night for my husband to return, sitting on the couch in my cooling suit, the blood from the scrapes on my forehead drying in place and making my skin itch. Finally, very late, just before the curfew began, he returned, and when I asked, “Where is Grandfather?,” he looked down.

“I’m sorry, Cobra,” he said. “They wouldn’t let him out. I’m going to keep trying.”

I began moaning then, moaning and rocking, and my husband finally got my pillow from my bed so I could moan into it, and sat on the floor by my side. “I’m going to keep trying, Cobra,” he repeated. “I’m going to keep trying.” Which he did, but then, on September 15, I was notified that Grandfather had lost his trial and was to be executed, and five days later, he was killed.

Today was the six-year anniversary of the day Grandfather was taken, which my husband and I always commemorated with a bottle of grape-flavored juice we bought at the store. My husband would pour us each a glass, and we would both say Grandfather’s name aloud, and then we would drink.

I always spent the day alone. Every August 13 for the past five years, my husband would ask, “Do you want to be alone tomorrow?” and I would say “Yes,” though in the last year or so, I began to wonder whether that was actually true, or whether I was saying yes only because it was easier for us both. If my husband instead had asked, “Do you want company tomorrow?,” would I not also have said “Yes”? But there was no way I would ever know this for sure, because last night, he had asked as usual if I wanted to be alone, and as usual, I said I did.

I always slept as late as I could on that day, because that meant there was less of it to use up. When I finally rose, around 11:00, my husband was gone, his bed as neatly made as ever, a bowl of porridge left for me in the oven, a second bowl inverted over it so the surface wouldn’t dry out. Everything was the same.

As I was walking toward our bathroom after I had washed out my bowl, however, I noticed there was a piece of paper on the ground near our front door. For a few moments I stared at it, because I was for some reason afraid to pick it up. I wished my husband were here to help me. Then I realized that perhaps it was a note to my husband from the person he loved, and this made me even more afraid—it was as if, by touching it, I would be proving that this other person existed, that he had somehow gotten into our building, and climbed the stairs, and left a note. And then I was angry, because although I knew my husband didn’t love me, how could he care for me so little that he wouldn’t tell this person that this was the worst day of my life, that every year on this date all I thought about was what I had once had, and how it had been taken from me? It was that anger, finally, that made me stoop and snatch the note from the ground.

But then my anger disappeared, because the note wasn’t for my husband. It was for me.

Charlie—meet me at our usual storyteller today.

It wasn’t signed, but it could only be from David. Now I was confused, and I began to walk in a circle, deliberating aloud about what I should do next. I was too embarrassed to see him: I had misinterpreted his feelings for me, and I had behaved stupidly. When I thought of him, I remembered the look on his face before I had pulled away from him, and how it had been not mean, but worse—it had been kind, even sad, and that was more shameful than if he had pushed at me, or made fun of me, or laughed at me.

But I also missed him. I wanted to see him. I wanted to feel as I had when I was with him, the way only Grandfather had ever made me feel, as if I were special, as if I were a person of interest.

I paced for a long time. Once again, I wished there were something to clean in the apartment, something to organize, something to do. But there wasn’t. The hours passed slowly, so slowly that I almost went to the center for a distraction, but I didn’t want to put on my cooling suit, and I didn’t want to leave the apartment, either—I don’t know why.

Finally, it was 15:30, and although it would take me just five minutes, less, to reach the storyteller’s tarp, I left anyway. It was only on the walk over that it occurred to me to wonder how David had known where I lived, and how he had gotten into our building, which you needed two keys to access, as well as a fingerprint scan, and suddenly I stopped, and almost turned around—what if my husband was right, and David was an informant? But then I reminded myself, again, that I knew nothing, and was nobody, and I had nothing to hide and nothing to say, and anyway, there were other explanations: He could have seen me go home one day. He could have handed the note to one of the neighbors who was entering the building, and asked them to slide it beneath my door. It would have been unusual to do so, but David was unusual. Yet this reasoning led to another unpleasant thought: Why did he want to see me after all this time? And if he did know where I lived, why had he not tried to communicate with me earlier?

I was so consumed by my thoughts that it wasn’t until I became aware of someone speaking to me that I realized I had been standing at the edge of the storyteller’s tarp, not moving. “Are you coming in, miss?” asked the storyteller’s assistant, and I nodded, and spread my piece of cloth on the ground, near the back.

I was arranging my bag at my side when I felt someone standing near me, and when I looked up, it was David.

“Hello, Charlie,” he said, and sat down next to me.

My heart was beating very fast. “Hello,” I said.

But then neither of us could say anything more, because the storyteller had begun to speak.

I cannot say what the story was that day, because I was unable to concentrate—all I could do was think about my questions and my doubts—and so it was with surprise that I heard the audience applaud, and then David say to me, “Let’s go to the benches.”

The benches were not really benches, but a line of cement blockades that had been used years ago for crowd control. After the insurgents were defeated, the state had left a row of them in front of a building on the east side of the Square, and sometimes people, especially old people, sat there and watched as the pack that circumnavigated the Square walked past. The benefit of the benches was that they were private, even though they were in the open, and you could stop there and rest. The drawback was that they were very hot, and in the summertime, you could feel the heat rising from the stone even through your cooling suit.

David picked one of the benches at the southern end, and for a few moments, neither of us spoke. We both had our helmets on, but when I reached up to unstrap mine, he stopped me. “No,” he said. “Leave it on. Leave it on and look straight ahead, and don’t react to what I’m going to say.” And so I did.

“Charlie,” he said, and then he stopped. “Charlie, I’m going to tell you something,” he said.

His voice sounded different, more serious, and once again, I was scared. “Are you mad at me?” I asked him.

“No,” he said. “No, not at all. I just need you to listen, all right?” And he turned his head toward me, just slightly, and I nodded, just slightly as well, to show I understood.

“Charlie, I’m not from here,” he said.

“I know that,” I said. “You’re from Prefecture Five.”

“No,” he said. “I’m not. I’m from—I’m from New Britain.” He looked at me again, quickly, but I kept my face blank, and he continued, “I know this is going to sound…strange,” he said. “But I was sent here, by my employer.”

“Why?” I whispered.

Now he did look at me. “For you,” he said. “To find you. And to watch over you, until it was safe.” And then, when I didn’t speak, he continued, “You know that there’s a new illness coming.”

For a moment, I was so shocked that I couldn’t speak. How did David know about the illness? “It’s real?” I said.

“Yes,” he said. “It’s real, and it will be very, very bad. As bad as ’70—worse. But that’s not why we need to leave immediately, though it certainly complicates matters.”

“What?” I asked. “Leave?”

“Charlie, eyes front,” he whispered, quickly, and I repositioned myself. It was unwise to display anger or alarm. “No bad emotions,” he reminded me, and I nodded, and we were silent once again.

“I work for a man who was great friends with your grandfather,” he said. “His dearest friend. Before your grandfather died, he asked my employer to help get you out of this country, and for six years, we’ve been trying to do that. Earlier this year, it finally looked like it might be possible, like we might have found a solution. And now we have. Now we can get you out of here, and take you somewhere safe.”

“But I’m safe here,” I said, when I could speak, and once again, I felt his head move, just a bit, in my direction.

“No, Charlie,” he said. “You’re not safe. You will never be safe here. And besides,” and here he shifted on the block, “don’t you want another kind of life for yourself, Charlie? Someplace where you can be free?”

“I’m free here,” I said, but he kept talking.

“Somewhere you can—I don’t know, read books or travel or go where you want? Somewhere you can—you can make friends?”

I couldn’t speak. “I have friends here,” I said, and when he didn’t answer, I added, “Every country is the same.”

And now he did turn to me, and through the tint of his face screen, I could see his eyes, which were big and dark, like my husband’s, and were looking straight at me. “No, Charlie,” he said, gently, “they’re not.”

I got up then. I was feeling strange—things were happening too fast, and I didn’t like it. “I have to go,” I said. “I don’t know why you’re telling me these things, David. I don’t know why, but what you’re saying is treason. Making up stories like this is treasonous.” I could feel my eyes turn hot, my nose begin to drip. “I don’t know why you’re doing this,” I said, and I could hear my voice becoming louder and panicky. “I don’t know why, I don’t know why,” and David swiftly stood and did something extraordinary: He pulled me to him and held me and said nothing, and after a while, I held him back, and although at first I was self-conscious, imagining that people must be looking at us, after some more time I didn’t think about them at all.

“Charlie,” said David, somewhere above my head, “I know this is a great shock for you. I know you don’t believe me. I know all this. And I’m sorry. I wish I could have made it easier for you.” And then I felt him slip something into my cooling suit’s pocket, something small and hard. “I want you to open this only when you’re back at home, and alone,” he said. “Do you understand me? Only when you’re absolutely certain you’re not being watched—not even by your husband.” I nodded against his chest. “Okay,” he said. “Now we’re going to separate, and I’m going to walk west, and you’re going to walk north and go up to your apartment, and then I’m going to send you a message about where our next meeting will be, all right?”

“How?” I asked.

“Don’t worry about that,” he said. “Just know I will. And if what’s in your pocket now doesn’t convince you, then you just won’t show up. Though, Charlie”—and here he inhaled; I could feel his stomach retracting—“I hope you do. I’ve promised my employer I won’t return to New Britain without you.”

And then he abruptly dropped his arms and left, walking west: not too fast, not too slow, as if he were just another shopper in the Square.

I remained standing there for a few seconds. I had the odd sensation that what had happened had been a dream, and that I was dreaming still. But I wasn’t. Above me, the sun was hot and white, and I could feel sweat trickling down my side.

I turned the cooling suit up to its maximum level and did as David had told me. Once I was in my apartment, though, with the front door safely locked behind me and my helmet removed, I felt like I was going to faint, and I sat down, right on the floor, resting my back against the door and inhaling big gulps of air until I felt better.

Finally, I stood. I checked the locks on the door again, and then I called my husband’s name, even though it was clear he wasn’t at home. Yet I still checked every room: the kitchen, the main room, our bedroom, the bathroom. I even checked the closets. After that, I returned to the main room. I drew the blinds on the windows, one of which looked onto the back of another building, the other of which looked into an air shaft. And only then did I sit on the sofa and reach into my pocket.

It was a package about the size of a walnut shell, of brown paper wrapped around something hard. The paper had been secured with tape, and after peeling it off, I found that beneath the first layer of paper was a second, and then a layer of thin white tissue, which I also tore away. And then I was left with a small black pouch made of a soft, dense fabric and pulled tight with a drawstring. I loosened the drawstring and held out my palm and shook the bag, and into my hand fell Grandfather’s ring.

I hadn’t known what to expect, and only afterward did I realize that I should have been scared, that I could have been carrying anything: an explosive, a vial of viruses, a Fly.

But in certain ways, the ring was worse. I cannot quite say why, but I’ll try. It was as if I was learning that something I had known to be one way was actually another. Of course, that had already happened: David had told me he was not who he said he was. But I had been able to disbelieve him until I saw the ring. I had had what Grandfather had once called “plausible deniability,” which means you can pretend to not know something while knowing it as well. And so, if David was telling me the truth about himself, then were the other things he said also true? How did he know about the disease? Had he really been sent to find me?

Were other countries not like this one after all?

Who was David?

I looked at the ring, which was as heavy as I remembered, its pearl lid still smooth and shiny. “It’s called nacre,” Grandfather had explained. “It’s a kind of calcium carbonate that a mollusk produces, building layers and layers of it around an irritant—like a speck of sand—in its mantle. You can see it’s very strong.”

“Can humans make nacre?” I had asked, and Grandfather had smiled.

“No,” he said. “Humans have to protect themselves in other ways.”

It had been almost twenty years since I had seen the ring, and now I clenched it in my fist: It was warm and solid. I had to give it to the fairy, Grandfather had said. The fairy who looked over you while you were sick. And although I had always known he was teasing, and although I knew there were no such thing as fairies, I think this is what made me saddest of all: That Grandfather hadn’t had to pay a price for me returning to him after all. That I had just come back to him anyway, and that, one day, he had sent the ring someplace else, to someone else, and now that it had been returned to me, I no longer knew what it meant, or where it had been, or what it had once stood for.

We met again the following Thursday. That morning at work, I had gone to the bathroom, and when I returned to my desk, there was a small folded piece of paper tucked beneath one of the boxes of saline, and I grabbed at it, looking around to see if anyone was watching me, although of course no one was: It was only me and the pinkies.

When I reached the center at 19:00, he was already there, standing outside, and held up his hand to me. “I thought we’d walk around the track,” he said, and I nodded. Inside, he bought us both fruit juices, and then we began to walk, slowly but not too slowly, at our regular pace. “Keep your helmet on,” he’d said, and so I did, opening the little slot around the mouth when I wanted to take a sip. It was cool inside the center, but some people kept their helmets on anyway, just out of laziness, and so this raised no suspicions. “I’m glad to see you,” David said, in a low voice. “Your husband’s on his free night,” he added, and it was not a question but a statement, and as I turned toward him, he shook his head, just slightly. “No amazement, no anger, no alarm,” he reminded me, and I redirected my gaze.

“How do you know about our free nights?” I asked, trying to stay calm.

“Your grandfather told my employer,” he said.

It may seem odd that David had not asked to meet in my apartment, or in his. But aside from the fact that I would not want him in my apartment, and would not be willing to go to his, the reason is that it was simply safer to meet in public. In the year of the uprisings, before the state’s return to power, it was widely assumed that most private spaces were being monitored, and even now, you had to deeply trust someone before visiting his or her apartment.

For a while, neither of us said anything. “Do you have any questions for me?” he asked, in that same quiet voice, which sounded so unlike the David I knew. But, then again, I had to remind myself, the David I knew did not exist. Or maybe he did, but he was not who I was talking to now.

I had many questions, of course, so many that it was impossible to know where to begin: What to say, what to ask.

“Don’t people in New Britain sound different?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said. “We do.”

“But you sound like you’re from here,” I said.

“I’m pretending,” he said. “If we were somewhere safe, I would use my regular voice, and I would sound different to you.”

“Oh,” I said. For a while we were silent. Then I asked him something I’d been wondering for a long time. “Your hair,” I said, “it’s long.” He looked at me, surprised, and I was proud of myself for having surprised him. “Some of it fell out of your cap that first day I saw you in the shuttle queue,” I said, and he nodded.

“It’s true, I had long hair,” he said. “But I cut it, months ago.”

“To fit in?” I asked him, and he nodded again.

“Yes,” he said, “to fit in. You’re very observant, Charlie,” and I smiled, just a bit, pleased that David thought I was observant, and pleased because I knew Grandfather would be proud of me for noticing something that perhaps some other people would not have.

“Do people in New Britain have long hair?” I asked.

“Some do,” he said. “Some don’t. People wear their hair how they like.”

“Even men?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said, “even men.”

I thought about this, a place where you could wear your hair long if you wanted—if you were able to grow it long, that is. Then I asked, “Did you ever meet my grandfather?”

“No,” he said. “I was never so lucky.”

“I miss him,” I said.

“I know, Charlie,” he said. “I know you do.”

“Were you really sent here to get me?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said. “It’s the only reason I’m here.”

Then I didn’t know what to say again. I know this will sound vain, and I am not a vain person, but hearing that David had come just for me, just to find me, made me feel light inside. I wished I could hear it again and again; I wished I could tell everyone. Someone had come here to find me: I was his only reason. No one would believe it—I didn’t believe it myself.

“I don’t know what else to ask,” I finally said, and once again, I could feel him looking at me, just a bit.

“Well,” he said, “why don’t I begin by telling you the plan,” and he looked at me again, and I nodded, and he began to talk. Around and around the track we went, sometimes passing other walkers, sometimes being passed by them. We were neither the fastest nor the slowest there, neither the youngest nor the oldest—and if you were watching us all from above, you wouldn’t have been able to tell who was talking about something safe, and who was, at that moment, discussing something so dangerous, so impossible, that you wouldn’t have thought they could still be alive at all.