To Paradise

PART VIII

Summer, twenty years earlier

Dearest Peter, June 17, 2074

Thank you for your lovely, kind note, and apologies for this late reply. I wanted to write earlier, because I knew you’d be anxious, but I hadn’t found a new courier I can trust completely until now.

Of course I’m not angry with you. Of course not. You did everything you could. It was my fault—I should have let you get me out when I (and you) had the chance. Again and again, I think: If I had asked you just five years ago, we would be in New Britain now. It wouldn’t have been easy, but it at least would’ve been possible. Then, invariably, my thoughts grow more dangerous and more despairing: If we had left, would Charlie still have gotten sick? If she hadn’t gotten sick, would she be happier now? Would I?

Then I think that maybe this, her no-longer-new way of thinking, of being, has perhaps better equipped her for the realities of this country after all. Maybe her affectlessness is a kind of stolidity, one that will see her through whatever this world becomes. Maybe the qualities whose loss I mourned on her behalf—an emotional complexity, a demonstrativeness, even a rebelliousness—are actually ones about whose disappearance I should feel relief. In more hopeful moments, I can almost imagine that she’s somehow evolved and become the sort of person who’s better-suited for our time and our place. She isn’t sad about who she is.

But then the old cycle replays itself: If she hadn’t gotten sick. If she hadn’t taken Xychor. If she had grown up in a country where tenderness, vulnerability, romance were still, if not encouraged, then at least tolerated. Who would she be? Who would I be, without this guilt, this sorrow, and the sorrow about the guilt?

Don’t worry about us. Or, rather, do worry, but not any more than you would. They don’t know I tried to escape. And as I know I keep reminding the both of us, they still need me. As long as there’s disease, there’ll be me.

With thanks and love. (As always.) Charles

Dear Peter, July 21, 2075

I’m writing this to you in haste, because I want to make sure I catch the courier before he leaves. I nearly called you today and might still, even though it’s been harder and harder to get a secure line. But if I figure out a way in the next few days, I will.

I think I mentioned that at the start of the summer, I began letting Charlie go out on brief walks by herself. And when I say brief, I mean brief: She can walk one block north to the Mews, and then east to University, and then south to Washington Square North, and then west to home. I had been reluctant, but one of her tutors encouraged it—she’ll be eleven in September, she reminded me; I had to let her out in the world, just a little.

So I did. For the first three weeks, I had security follow her, just to make sure. But she did exactly as I’d told her, and I watched from the second-floor window as she climbed the stairs to the house.

I hadn’t wanted her to know how nervous I had been, and so I waited until dinner to talk to her about it. “How was your walk, little cat?” I asked.

She looked up at me. “Good,” she said.

“What did you see?” I asked.

She thought. “Trees,” she said.

“That’s nice,” I said. “What else?”

Another silence. “Buildings,” she said.

“Tell me about the buildings,” I said. “Did you see anyone in any of the windows? What color were the buildings? Did any of them have flower boxes outside? What color were their doors?” It helps her, these exercises, but they also make me feel like I’m coaching a spy: Did you see anyone suspicious? What were they doing? What were they wearing? Can you identify them from these pictures I’m showing you?

She tries so hard to give me what she thinks I want. But all I want is for her to one day come home and tell me that she saw something funny or beautiful or exciting or scary—all I want for her is the ability to tell herself a story. She looks at me occasionally as she talks, and I nod or smile to show her I approve, and whenever I do, there’s that awful squeezing in my chest, that sensation only she is capable of causing.

In late June, I began letting her go alone. When I’m not home, her nanny is to wait for her arrival; it only takes her seven minutes to make the loop, and that’s allowing her plenty of time to stop and look at things as she goes. She’s never been curious to go any farther, and it’s too hot, besides. But then, at the beginning of the month, she asked if she could walk into the Square.

Part of me thrilled to this: My little Charlie, who never asks for anything or to go anywhere, who seems at times devoid of appetites and desires and preferences at all. Though that isn’t true—she knows the difference between sweet and salty, for example, and she prefers the salty. She knows the difference between a pretty shirt and an ugly one, and she prefers the pretty. She knows when someone’s laughter is mean and when it’s joyful. She can’t articulate why, but she knows. I remind her constantly: It’s fine to ask for what she wants; it’s fine to like someone, or something, or someplace, more than another. It’s fine to dislike, too. “All you have to do is say,” I tell her, “all you have to do is ask. Do you understand me, little cat?”

She looks at me, and I can’t tell what she’s thinking. “Yes,” she says. But I don’t know if she does.

I wouldn’t have allowed her into the Square at all six months ago. But now that the state has taken over, you can only enter it if you’re a resident of Zone Eight—there are guards posted at each of the entrances to check people’s papers. I had been worried, after last year’s conversion of the rest of Central Park, that they were going to repurpose all the parks as research facilities, even though that hadn’t been the original plan. But in a rare alliance, the health and justice ministers partnered to persuade the rest of the Committee that a lack of public gathering spaces would increase treasonous activity, and force potential insurgent groups underground, where we’d be less able to monitor them. So we won this round, but barely, though it now seems that Union Square will eventually go the way of Madison Square and become, if not a research facility, then an all-purpose, state-run staging site: one month a makeshift morgue, the next a makeshift prison.

Washington Square, however, is a different matter. It’s a small park, in a residential zone, and therefore has been of no great concern to the state. Over the years, the shantytowns were built, and then destroyed, and then rebuilt, and then re-destroyed: Even from my vantage at the upstairs window, I could sense something rote about their destruction, a halfheartedness in the way the young soldier by the northern gate twirled his baton by its loop, the way the bulldozer operator leaned back her head and yawned, one hand on the controls, the other dangling out the window.

Four months ago, though, I woke to the sound of something large falling with a dull crash, and looked outside to see that the bulldozer had returned, but this time to unearth the trees on the western side of the Square. Two bulldozers worked for two days, and when they were finished, the transplant team arrived and bound up the fallen trees’ roots in great tangles of burlap and clods of soil, and then they too disappeared, presumably to Zone Fourteen, where they’re relocating many of the mature trees.

Now the Square sits empty, denuded of trees except for a strip that extends from the northeast corner to the southeast corner. Here, there are still benches, still paths, still a few remnants of the playground. But this, I have to imagine, is temporary; in the rest of the park, workers spend the day pouring cement across areas that had once been covered with grass. One of my colleagues in the Home Ministry said the space will be converted into some kind of outdoor bazaar, with vendors who will compensate for the loss of stores.

So it was here, to this final remaining section of green, that I let Charlie venture. She was to confine herself only to this area, and she was to talk to no one, and if anyone approached her, she was to go straight home. For the first two weeks, I watched her—I had set up a camera in one of the upstairs windows, and as I sat in the lab, I could see her on the screen, walking briskly to the southern end of the park, never stopping to look around her, and then resting for a few seconds before marching back. Soon she was home again, and the second camera showed her walking inside, locking the front door behind her, and going to the kitchen for a glass of water.

She usually walks late in the afternoon, when the sun’s lower in the sky, and as I talk or write, I can still see her movements, a stripe on the screen moving farther away from the camera and then closer, her round little body and round little face receding from view and then returning.

Then came this past Thursday. I was on a Committee call. The topic was the cooling suit, which will likely be introduced next year, and differs from your version because ours comes with a full hard-shell helmet with a pollutant-filtering shield. Have you tried one yet? You don’t walk so much as waddle, and the helmet is so heavy that the manufacturer is incorporating a neck brace into the design. But they’re truly effective. A group of us tested them out one evening, and for the first time in years, I didn’t reenter the lab and immediately begin coughing and wheezing and sweating. They’re going to be expensive, though, and the state is investigating whether we can reduce the price from astronomical to extraordinary.

Anyway, I was half listening to the call, half watching Charlie begin her walk through the park. I went to the bathroom, got some tea, returned to my desk. One of the interior ministers was droning on, still in the midst of his presentation about the difficulties of producing the suits on a mass scale, and so I looked back at my screen—only to see that Charlie was missing.

I stood, as if that would help matters. After reaching the southern end of the park, she usually sits on one of the benches. If she has a snack with her, she eats her snack. And then she stands and begins moving north. But now there was nothing: just a state employee sweeping the sidewalk, and, in the background, a soldier, facing south.

I accessed the camera and swiveled it to the right, but there were only the soldiers in their navy-blue uniforms, an engineer corps, it seemed, taking measurements of the Square. Then I swiveled the camera to the left, as far as I could.

For a while, there was nothing. Just the sweeper and the soldier and, on the northeast corner, another soldier, rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet: one of those casual, carefree gestures that startle me more than anything else—that, even with everything that’s changed, people still rock on their feet, they still pick their noses, they still scratch their behinds and belch.

But then, at the very edge of the southeast corner, I saw something, a movement. I magnified the image as much as I could. There were two boys—young teenagers, I thought—both standing with their backs to the camera, talking to someone else who was facing the camera. I could only see this person’s feet, their white sneakers.

Oh, I thought. Oh, please.

And then the boys moved, and I saw that the third person was Charlie, in her white sneakers and red T-shirt dress, and she was following those boys, who didn’t even look around them, as they began walking east on Washington Square South.

“Officer!” I shouted at the screen, uselessly. “Charlie!”

But of course no one stopped, and I sat and watched as all three of them vanished from sight, strolling offscreen. One of the boys had his arm draped loosely around her neck; she was so short that the top of her head fit just beneath his armpit.

I told my secretary to have a security unit deployed, and then I ran downstairs to my car, calling and re-calling the nanny as we drove south. When she finally picked up, I yelled at her. “But, Dr. Griffith,” she said, quaveringly, “Charlie’s right here. She just got home from her walk.”

“Give her to me,” I snapped, and when Charlie’s face appeared on the screen, her expression the same as always, I nearly sobbed. “Charlie,” I said to her. “Little cat. Are you all right?”

“Yes, Grandfather,” she said.

“Don’t leave,” I told her. “Stay right there. I’m coming home.”

“All right,” she said.

At home, I dismissed the nanny (leaving it intentionally unclear whether that dismissal was for the day or forever) and went upstairs to Charlie’s room, where she was sitting on her bed, holding the cat. I had been fearing torn clothes, bruises, tears, but she looked the same as she always did—a little flushed, maybe, but that could have been the heat.

I sat down next to her, trying to calm myself. “Little cat,” I said, “I saw you in the Square today.” She didn’t turn from me. “On the camera,” I told her, but she remained silent. “Who were those boys?” I asked, and, when she still didn’t speak, “I’m not angry, Charlie. I just want to know who they are.”

She was silent. After four years, I’ve grown used to her silences. She isn’t being insubordinate or stubborn—she’s just trying to think of how to answer, and it takes time. Finally, she said, “I met them.”

“All right,” I said. “When did you meet them? And where?”

She frowned, concentrating. “A week ago,” she said. “On University Place.”

“Near the Mews?” I asked, and she nodded. “What are their names?” I asked, but she shook her head, and I knew she was getting upset—that she didn’t know, or didn’t remember. It was one of the things I was always reminding her: Ask people’s names. And if you forget, ask them again. You can always ask—you have every right. “It’s okay,” I told her. “Have you seen them every day since you met them?” Again, a shake of her head.

Finally, she said, in a small voice, “They told me to meet them in the park today.”

“And what did you do?” I asked.

“They said we should go on a walk,” she said. “But then—” And here she stopped, and pressed her face into Little Cat’s back. She began to rock herself, which she does when she’s upset, and I rubbed her back as she did. “They said they were my friends,” she said, at last, and she hugged the cat so tightly that he yelped. “They said they wanted to be friends,” she repeated, almost in a moan, and I pulled her close to me, and she didn’t resist.

The doctor has said there won’t be any permanent damage: minor tearing, minor abrasions, some bleeding. She suggested a psychologist, and I agreed, not telling her that Charlie already sees one, along with an occupational therapist and a behavioral therapist. Then I turned the video over to Interior and ordered a full search—they found the boys, fourteen-year-olds, both residents of Zone Eight, sons of research fellows at Memorial, one white, the other Asian, within three hours. One of their parents is a friend of a friend of Wesley’s, and he sent a note asking for mercy for his son, which Wesley hand-delivered to the house yesterday, his face expressionless. “It doesn’t matter to me, Charles,” he said, and when I crumpled the note and handed it back to him, he just nodded, and wished me good night, and left.

Tonight, as I have for the past three nights, I’ll sit near Charlie’s bed. On Thursday, about thirty minutes after she had fallen asleep, she began to make a low growling noise deep in her throat, twitching her shoulders and head. But then she stopped, and after watching her for another hour or so, I finally went to bed myself. I wished, as I often did, for Nathaniel. I also wished, as I rarely did, for Eden. I suppose, though, that what I was really wishing was for someone to be responsible for Charlie alongside me.

I can’t say that what happened was my greatest fear for her—my greatest fear is that she’ll die—but it was close. I had tried to talk to her about her body, about how it was hers only, about how she didn’t have to do anything she didn’t want to. No, that’s not accurate. I hadn’t tried—I had. I knew she was vulnerable; I knew something like this could happen. Not even that—I knew it would happen. And I knew we were lucky—that, as bad as it was, it could have been worse.

When I was an undergraduate, a professor of mine had said there were two types of people: those who wept for the world, and those who wept for themselves. Weeping for your family, he said, was a form of weeping for yourself. “Those who congratulate themselves on their sacrifices for their families aren’t actually sacrificing at all,” he said, “because their family is an extension of their selves, and therefore a manifestation of the ego.” True selflessness, he said, meant giving of yourself to a stranger, someone whose life would never be entangled with your own.

But hadn’t I tried to do that? I had tried to make things better for people I didn’t know, and it had cost me my family, and therefore my self. And yet the improvements I had attempted are now in dispute. I cannot do anything else to help the world—I can only try to help Charlie.

Now I am very tired. I’m crying, of course, I suppose selfishly. I don’t know, though, of anyone who doesn’t cry for themselves these days—sickness makes the self indivisible from strangers, and so, even if you’re thinking of them, those millions of people with whom you navigate the city, you are by definition wondering when their lives might brush against yours, each encounter an infection, each touch a potential death. It’s selfishness, but there seems to be no other way—not now.

My love to you and Olivier—Charles

My dear Peter, December 3, 2076

Years ago, when I was traveling through Ashgabat, I met a man in a café. This was in the ’20s, when the Turkmen Republic was still known as Turkmenistan, and still under authoritarian rule.

I had been in university then, and this man had engaged me in conversation: What brought me to Ashgabat, and what did I think of it? Now I realize he was likely a spy of one sort or another, but then, being callow and stupid, as well as lonely, I was eager to share my thoughts about the inhumanity of an autocratic state, and how, although I wasn’t arguing for democracy, there was a difference between a constitutional monarchy of the sort I lived in and the dystopia he lived in.

He listened patiently as I bloviated, and then, when I was finished, said, “Come with me.” We walked to one of the open windows. The café was on the second floor of a building on a narrow tributary, a shortcut to the Russian Market, one of the last streets in the city not to be razed and rebuilt in glass and steel. “Look outside,” the man said. “Does this look like a dystopia to you?”

I looked. One of the great dissonances of Ashgabat was watching people who were dressed for the 19th century navigate a city that had been built for the 22nd. Below me, I saw women in bright-patterned head scarves and dresses hefting bulging plastic bags, and men zipping by on motorized handcarts, and schoolchildren shouting to one another. It was a sunny, crisp day, and even now, even as it’s no longer possible to remember the feeling of winter, I can still recall cold by visualizing the scenery of it: a gaggle of teenage girls’ cheeks stippled with scarlet; an elderly man tossing a just-roasted potato from hand to hand, the steam shimmering before his face; a woman’s wool scarf fluttering around her forehead.

It had not been the cold that the man had wanted me to see, though, but the life being lived in it. The middle-aged women, bags stuffed with groceries, gossiping in front of a blue-painted doorway, the group of boys playing soccer, the two girls walking down the street eating meat buns, their arms linked—as they passed beneath us, one of them said something to the other and they both began giggling, covering their mouths with their hands. There was a soldier, but he was leaning against the side of a building, his head resting against the brick, his eyes closed, a cigarette balanced on his lower lip, relaxing in the pale sun.

“So you see,” my companion said.

I think about that exchange often these days, as well as its underlying question: Does this place look dystopic? I ask it often about this city, where, in the absence of shops, there is still commerce, conducted now in the Square, but still populated by the same kinds of people—strolling couples, children wailing because they’ve been denied a treat, a strident woman haggling with a truculent vendor over the price of a copper pan—as before. In the absence of theaters, there are still people gathering for concerts at the community centers they’re establishing in every zone. In the absence of the number of children and young people that there should be, there is more care, more love, lavished on the ones who remain, although I know firsthand that that care can resemble something more dictatorial than loving. The answer, implicit in the man’s question, was that a dystopia doesn’t look like anything; indeed, that it can look like anywhere else.

And yet it also does look like something. The things I have described are elements of the sanctioned life, the life that can be lived aboveground. But out of the corner of our eyes, there is another life, one we see in glimpses, in movements. There is no television, for example, there is no internet, and yet messages are still relayed, and the dissidents are still able to telegraph their reports. I sometimes read of them in our daily briefings, and while it typically takes only a week or so to discover them—a surprising, or perhaps unsurprising, number of them are related to state employees—there are always those who elude us. There is no foreign travel, and yet every month there are reports of attempted defections, of dinghies capsizing off the coast of Maine or South Carolina or Massachusetts or Florida. There are no more refugee camps, and yet there are still reports—fewer, admittedly—of escapees from even worse countries than this, found and packed into a poorly made boat and sent back out to sea under armed guard. To live in a place like this means to be aware that that little movement, that twitching, that faint, mosquito-like buzzing, is not your imagination but proof of another existence, the country you once knew and you know must still exist, beating onward just beyond the range of your senses.

Data, investigation, analysis, news, rumor: A dystopia flattens those terms into one. There is what the state says, and then there is everything else, and that everything else falls into one category: information. People in a young dystopia crave information—they are starved for it, they will kill for it. But over time, that craving diminishes, and within a few years, you forget what it tasted like, you forget the thrill of knowing something first, of sharing it with others, of getting to keep secrets and asking others to do the same. You become freed of the burden of knowledge; you learn, if not to trust the state, then to surrender to it.

And we try to make the process of forgetting, of unlearning, as easy as we can. It is why all dystopias seem so generic in their systems and appearance; there is the removal of the vehicles of information (the press, the television, the internet, books—even though I think we should have kept television, which can easily be made useful), and an emphasis instead on the elemental—the things gathered or made by hand. Eventually, the two worlds, the primitive and the technological, are united in endeavors such as the Farm, which looks like an agrarian project but will be powered by the most sophisticated irrigation and climatic systems the state can afford. Eventually, you hope, the people working there will forget how that technology was once applied, and what it was once capable of doing, and how many ways we once depended on it, and what information it could provide.

I look at you, and what you’re doing over there, Peter, and I know we’re doomed. Of course I do. But what can I do now? Where can I go? Last week they changed my profession on all my state papers from “scientist” to “senior administrator.” “A promotion,” said the interior minister, “congratulations.” And while it is, it also isn’t. If I were still classified as a scientist, I’d in theory be able to attend foreign symposiums and conferences, not that the invitations have exactly been flooding in. But as a state administrator, there is no reason, no need, for me to ever leave here. I am a powerful man in a country I cannot leave, which by definition makes me a prisoner.

Which is why I’m sending you this. I don’t think I’ll ever be stripped of my possessions. But it’s valuable, and I suppose I think that if the day comes when Charlie and I are able to leave, we won’t be able to take our money or our things. We might not be able to take anything at all. So I’m asking you to keep this safe for us. Maybe someday I’ll be able to reclaim it from you, or have you sell it so we can use the money to settle elsewhere. I understand how naïve this all sounds. But I also know that you, being kind, aren’t laughing at me. I know you’re worried for me. I wish I could tell you not to be. For now, I know you’ll protect this for me.

Love, Charles

My dear Peter, October 29, 2077

Sorry I’ve been so quiet, and, yes, I will send you regular updates, if only to say, “I’m here and alive.” You’re kind to want to hear them. And thank you for the new courier—much safer, I think, to have the person be from your side rather than ours, especially now.

Everyone is still astonished that you’re ceasing relations with us. I’m not saying this in an accusatory way, not that it would make a difference—but it just seemed like one of those threats that would never be realized. The bigger fear is not so much your lack of recognition, however, but that you might inspire other places to do the same.

Yet we also understand perfectly why it’s happened. When the Marriage Act was first discussed, six years ago, it had seemed not just impossible but silly. There had been that study from the University of Kandahar about how rising rates of unrest in three different countries were linked to the percentage of unmarried men over the age of twenty-five. The study failed to take into account other socially destabilizing effects, such as poverty, illiteracy, illness, and climatic disaster, and was eventually discredited.

But I guess it had had more of an effect on certain members of the Committee than I (and perhaps they) had realized, though when the proposal was revived and re-presented this past summer, it was framed differently: Marriage would be a way to encourage repopulation, and to do so within a state-supported institution. The proposal was coauthored by a deputy minister from Interior and another from Health, and was thorough and almost troublingly rational, as if the entire point of marriage was not an expression of devotion but an acquiescence to the needs of the society. Which it perhaps is. The deputy ministers explained the system of rewards and incentives for marriage, which could be used, they argued, as a way to ease the population into the concept of a comprehensive welfare state. There would be housing allowances, and what they’re calling “procreation incentives,” which essentially means that people would be rewarded, in either benefits or cash, for having children.

“I never thought I’d see the day when free Black people would be celebrated for making more free Black people,” said one of the justice ministers, dryly, and everyone stiffened.

“The society needs all people, of all kinds, to contribute to its rebuilding,” said the deputy interior minister.

“I guess desperate times call for desperate measures,” the justice minister responded, quietly, and there was a strained silence.

“Well, then,” said the deputy interior minister, finally, in a conclusive way.

There was another silence, this one unhappy as well, but also anticipatory, as if we were all actors in a play and at a particularly charged moment, one of us had forgotten his lines.

Finally, someone spoke. “Ah, what is the definition of marriage here?” he asked.

Everyone in the room either looked down at the table or up at the ceiling. The man who had asked the question was a deputy in the Pharmacology Ministry, newly arrived from the private sector. I knew little else about him except that he was white, and probably in his early fifties, and that both of his children and his husband had died in ’70.

“Well,” said the deputy interior minister, at last, and then she too fell silent, looking around the room almost beseechingly, as if someone might answer for her. But no one did. “We will of course honor all preexisting marital contracts,” she said, after a pause.

“But,” she continued, “the Marriage Act is meant to encourage procreation, and therefore”—again, a cast about the room for help; again, no takers—“the benefits will be given only to unions between biological males and biological females. This is not to say,” she added, quickly, before the pharmacology minister could speak, “that we are proposing any moral…penalty upon those who do not fit this definition, only that such couples will not be eligible for state incentives.”

People began shouting questions at once. Of the thirty-two people in that room, at least nine of us—including, I was fairly certain, one of the authors of the proposal, a rabbity little woman—would not be eligible for state benefits if this act passes. If there had been only two or three of us, I would be more worried—in such situations, people tend to vote against their own interests because they think it offers them greater personal protection. But in this case, there are too many of us for such a proposal to be realized, not to mention the fact that there are too many unanswerables: Would this mean that barren couples’ marriages would become ineligible for state benefits? What about same-sex parents who had biological children, or have means to have more? What would happen to widows and widowers, of whom there were now historic numbers? Were we actually, really talking about paying citizens for having children? What if they had children and the children died—would they keep their benefits? Was this effectively eliminating a fertile person’s right to choose to have children or not? What if the fertile person was physically or mentally unfit—would we still be encouraging them to have children? What about divorce? Wouldn’t this be encouraging women to stay in abusive marriages? Would a sterile person be allowed to marry a fertile person? What if a person had transitioned to another gender—would this legislation not leave them in an irresolvable legal gray area? From where was the money coming to support this plan, especially as two of our primary trading partners were expected to cease relations with us? If procreation is so essential to the country’s survival, would it not make more sense to pardon state traitors and encourage them to have children, even in a controlled environment? Why wouldn’t we just adopt some of the refugees’ children, now orphans, or import children from climatically ravaged countries, and thus divorce the idea of parenthood from biology? Were the authors really suggesting that we exploit a national and existential trauma, the disappearance of a generation of children, to advance a moralistic agenda? By the end of the session, both of the proposal’s authors seemed about to cry, and the meeting disbanded with everyone in a foul temper.

I was walking to my car when I heard someone call my name, and turned and saw it was the pharmacology minister. “It’s not going to happen,” he said, so firmly that I almost smiled: He was so young, and so certain. Then I remembered that he had lost his entire family, and that he deserved my respect for that alone.

“I hope you’re right,” I said, and he nodded. “I have no doubt,” he said, and then bowed and walked off toward his car.

We shall see. Over the years, I’ve been astonished at and dismayed by and fearful of how acquiescent the public has proven to be: Fear of disease, the human instinct to stay healthy, has eclipsed almost every other desire and value they once treasured, as well as many of the freedoms they had thought inalienable. That fear was yeast to the state, and now the state generates its own fear when they feel the population’s is flagging. Monday begins the third consecutive week of debates about the Marriage Act, and it looks like we may be able to stop this after all—your condemnation helped, certainly. I don’t see how this proceeds without alienating us completely from Old Europe, but of course I’ve been wrong before.

Keep your fingers crossed for all of us. I’ll write more next week. Send my love to Olivier. And save some for yourself.

Charles

February 3, 2078

Dear Peter—the act passed. It’ll be announced tomorrow. I don’t know what else to say. More soon. Charles

Dear Peter, April 15, 2079

It’s very early, just dawn, and I can’t sleep. I haven’t been sleeping at all, it seems, these past few months. I’ve been trying to go to bed earlier, closer to eleven instead of past midnight, and then I lie there. Sometimes I don’t so much fall as slip into a liminal state between wakefulness and slumber, one in which I’m acutely aware of both the mattress beneath me and the sound of the fan wicking away above me. In these hours, I relive the events of the day, yet in this replay, I’m sometimes participant and sometimes witness, and I never know at which moment the camera might swing on its dolly and my perspective will shift.

Last night I saw C. again. He’s not exactly my type, and I can’t imagine I’m his. But we both have the same security clearance and rank, which means that he can come to my house or I can go to his and we can have our respective cars wait outside to drive us home afterward without any questions or difficulties.

You forget, sometimes, how much you need to be touched. It’s not food or water or light or heat—you can go for years without it. The body doesn’t remember the sensation; it does you the kindness of allowing you to forget. The first two times, we had sex quickly, almost brutally, as if we might never have the opportunity again, but the past three instances have been more leisurely. He lives in a state-appointed townhouse in Zone Fourteen, bare of anything but the essentials, one mostly empty room opening into another.

Afterward, we pretend the listening devices don’t exist—we have that privilege, too—and talk. He’s fifty-two, twenty-three years younger than I am, only twelve years older than David would have been. He speaks, sometimes, about his sons, the younger of whom would have been sixteen this year, just a year older than Charlie will be this September, and his husband, who had been in the marketing department of the pharmaceutical company where he’d once worked. C. had considered killing himself after they had died, all within six months, but in the end, he hadn’t, and now, he said, he couldn’t remember why.

“I can’t remember why I didn’t, either,” I said, though as soon as I spoke, I realized that was a lie.

“Your granddaughter,” he said, and I nodded.

“You’re lucky,” he said.

You’ll recall it had been C. who’d been so certain that the Marriage Act would fail. Even now, even as we were meeting in semisecret, he continued to argue that it’d be overturned imminently. “What’s the point of having marriage for people who aren’t going to have children?” he asked. “If the point is to raise more children in general, why not use some of us as child-carers, or assign us other supportive roles? Isn’t the whole point to try to get maximum advantage out of all our citizens?” When I once suggested the inevitable conclusion—that, despite the Committee’s promises, the Marriage Act will only lead to the eventual criminalization of gayness on moral grounds—he contradicted me with such fury that I had no choice but to gather my things and leave. “What’s the point of that?” he asked me, again and again, and when I said that the point was the same wherever and whenever homosexuality was criminalized—to create a useful scapegoat on whom the fortunes of a faltering state could be blamed—he accused me of being bitter and cynical. “I believe in this state,” he said, and when I said I had, once, too, he had told me to get out, that we were too distant from each other philosophically. For weeks, there was silence. But then need drew us back together, the source of our reunion the same thing we could no longer discuss.

Afterward, he walks me to the door; we embrace, rather than kiss, confirm our next encounter. At Committee meetings, we’re cordial. Not too distant, not too friendly. I imagine no one can tell anything different. At our last encounter, he told me that safe houses have started cropping up, mostly at the far western edges of Zone Eight, for people who can’t meet as we do in a private house. “They’re not brothels,” he clarified. “They’re more like gathering places.”

“What do people do there?” I asked.

“The same things we do here,” he said. “But not just sex.”

“No?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “They also talk. They go there and talk.”

“About what?” I asked.

He shrugged. “The things people talk about,” he said, and as he did, I realized: I no longer knew what people talk about. If you were to listen to us on the Committee, you would think that all people talk about is how to overthrow the state, how to escape the country, how to cause mayhem. And yet what else is there to discuss? There are no movies, no television, no internet. You can’t, as we once had, spend an evening debating an article or a novel or bragging about a vacation to someplace far away. You can’t discuss the person you’ve just had sex with, or how you were interviewing for a new job, or how much you wanted to buy a new car or apartment or pair of sunglasses. You can’t do these things because none of those things are possible any longer, at least not openly, and with their elimination has also disappeared hours’, days’ worth of conversations. The world we live in now is about survival, and survival is always present tense. The past is no longer relevant; the future has failed to materialize. Survival allows for hope—it is, indeed, predicated on hope—but it does not allow for pleasure, and as a topic, it is dull. Talk, touch: the things C. and I kept reuniting to find—somewhere downtown, in a house by the river, there were other people like us, talking to each other just to hear the sound of someone responding to them, proof that the self they remembered still existed after all.

Later, I went home. I had a female guard from Security sit downstairs on the nights I knew I’d be out, and after I had dismissed her, I climbed up to Charlie’s room and sat on the edge of her bed, staring at her. She’s one of those children who look like neither their mother nor their father. Her nose resembles Eden’s perhaps, and I suppose she has David’s long, thin mouth, but somehow nothing in her face reminds me of either of them, and I am grateful for that. She is her own creature, one unfreighted by history. She was wearing a pair of short-sleeved pajamas, and I ran my fingers over her arms, which are pocked by little craters left behind by the scars. Next to her wheezed Little Cat, a sore on his right foreleg oozing pus, and I knew that I would soon have to take him to the clinic, have him injected with poison, come up with a lie to tell Charlie.

In bed, I thought about Nathaniel. If I’m lucky, I can conjure him as a source not of shame or self-flagellation but of neutrality. When I’m with C., I can sometimes close my eyes and pretend he’s Nathaniel at fifty-two. C. looks and smells and sounds and tastes entirely different than Nathaniel did, but skin is skin. I dare not admit this to anyone but you (not that there’s anyone else left to tell), but increasingly I have these dreams in which I revisit scenes and moments from my life with Nathaniel but in which David—and later, Eden, and later still, even Charlie—are missing, as if they never existed. These dreams are often banal: Nathaniel and I, getting older and older, arguing about whether we should plant sunflowers or not, or, once, trying to chase a raccoon out of our attic. We seem to live in a cottage by the sea in Massachusetts, and although I never see the outside of the structure, I have a sense of what it looks like anyway.

In the daytime, I sometimes speak aloud to Nathaniel. Out of respect, I rarely discuss work, for that would upset him too much. Instead, I ask him about Charlie. After that first incident with those boys, I had told her about sex, and sexual threats, in a much more complete way than I had told her before. “Do you have any questions?” I had asked her, and after a silence, she had shaken her head. “No,” she’d said. She still doesn’t like to be touched by anyone, and while I sometimes mourn for her, I envy her, too: To live a life without desire (not to mention imagination) would once have been something to pity, but now it might ensure her survival—or at least increase her chances. Yet her distaste has not stopped her from wandering off again, and after the second incident, I sat down with her again. “Little cat,” I began, and then I didn’t know what else to say. How could I tell her that those boys weren’t attracted to her, that they saw her only as something to use and toss aside? I couldn’t, I couldn’t—I felt traitorous even thinking the words. In those moments, I wished that someone felt lust for her, that even if that lust was muddied with cruelty, it would at least be passion, or a form of it—it would mean that someone saw her as lovely and special and desirable; it would mean that someone might one day love her as deeply as I do, but differently, too.

More and more frequently these days, I think about how, of all the horrors the illnesses wreaked, one of the least-discussed is the brisk brutality with which it sorted us into categories. The first, most obvious one was the living and the dead. Then there was the sick and the well, the bereaved and the relieved, the cured and the incurable, the insured and the uninsured. We kept track of these statistics; we wrote them all down. But then there were the other divisions, the kind that didn’t appear to warrant recording: The people who lived with other people, and the people who lived alone. The people who had money, and the people who didn’t. The people who had connections, and the people who didn’t. The people who had somewhere else to go, and the people who didn’t.

In the end, it hadn’t made as much of a difference as we thought it would. The rich died anyway, maybe more slowly than they should have; some of the poor survived. After the first round of the virus had whipped through the city, scooping up all the easiest prey—the indigent and the infirm and the young—it had returned for seconds, and thirds, and fourths, until it was only the luckiest who remained. And yet no one was truly lucky: Is Charlie’s life lucky? Perhaps it is—she is here, after all, she can talk and walk and learn, she is able-bodied and lucid, she is loved and, I know, capable of loving. But she is not who she might have been, because none of us are—the illness took something from all of us, and so our definition of luck is a matter of relativity, as luck always is, its parameters designated by others. The disease clarified everything about who we are; it revealed the fictions we’d all constructed about our lives. It revealed that progress, that tolerance, does not necessarily beget more progress or tolerance. It revealed that kindness does not beget more kindness. It revealed how brittle the poetry of our lives truly is—it exposed friendship as something flimsy and conditional; partnership as contextual and circumstantial. No law, no arrangement, no amount of love was stronger than our own need to survive, or, for the more generous among us, our need for our people, whoever they were, to survive. I sometimes sense a faint mutual embarrassment among those of us who lived—who had sought to deprive someone else, maybe even someone else we knew, or a relative of someone we knew, of medication or hospitalization or food if it meant we could save ourselves? Who had reported someone they knew, perhaps even liked—a neighbor, an acquaintance, a colleague—to the Health Ministry, and who had turned up the volume on their headphones to muffle the sounds of them begging for help as they were led away to the waiting van, shouting all the while that someone had been misinformed, that the rash that had spread across their daughter’s arm was only eczema, that the sore on their son’s forehead was only a pimple?

And now the illness is under control, and we are back to considering the incidentals of life once more: whether we might be able to find chicken rather than tofu at the grocery; or whether our children might be admitted into this college versus that one; or whether we might be lucky in this year’s housing lottery, and move from Zone Seventeen to Zone Eight, or Zone Eight to Zone Fourteen.

But behind all these concerns and minor anxieties is something deeper: the truth of who we are, our essential selves, the thing that emerges when everything else has been burned away. We have learned to accommodate that person as much as we can, to ignore who we know ourselves to be. Most of the time, we’re successful. We must be: Pretending is the cost of sanity. But we all know who we really are. If we have lived, it is because we are worse than we ever believed ourselves to be, not better. Indeed, it feels at times as if all who remain are those who were wily or tenacious or scheming enough to survive. I know that this belief is its own kind of romance, but in my more fanciful moments, it makes perfect sense—we are the left-behind, the dregs, the rats fighting for bits of rotten food, the people who chose to stay on earth, while those better and smarter than we are have left for some other realm we can only dream of, the door to which we’re too frightened to open, even to peek inside.

Charles

Dear Peter, September 15, 2081

Thank you, as always, for Charlie’s birthday gifts, which are especially welcome this year. The rationing has been so severe that it’s been fourteen months since she’s had any new clothes, much less a dress. Thank you too for letting me take credit for them with her. I wished, as I often do, that I could tell her about you, that I could tell her that somebody else, somebody far away, cares about her as well. But I know it’s not safe to do so.

Today I went in to speak with the dean at her school. Last year, when she was in eleventh grade, I started getting suspicious that the school would discourage her from attending university, despite the fact that all her teachers have been supportive, and even if they hadn’t, Charlie’s math and physics scores would guarantee her acceptance to a technical college at the very least.

I’ve been trying for years to articulate to myself the scope of Charlie’s deficiencies. As you know, there still remains so little research on the long-term effects of Xychor on those children who received the drug in ’70, in part because, obviously, there are relatively few survivors, and in part because the guardians and parents of those who have survived have been reluctant to subject their children to further research and testing. (I myself am one of those selfish people who are inhibiting greater scientific understanding by withholding permission for my child to be studied.) But the papers that have been published, from here and various institutes in Old Europe, which are better funded, have been unhelpful, and I’ve yet to see my Charlie reflected in any of the descriptions I’ve read. I want to clarify, though, that I haven’t sought an explanation because I feel I need to understand her any better than I do in order to love her more. But some part of me is always hoping that, if there are others like her, then she will someday see someone she recognizes, someone who feels like home. She has never had a friend. I don’t know how deeply she feels loneliness, or even if—unlike her poor father—she has the capacity to recognize it. But my dearest wish is that someone will someday take that loneliness from her, preferably before she’s able to identify the sensation for what it is.

So far, though, there’s been no one. I still can’t tell how much she comprehends about what she doesn’t comprehend, if you know what I mean. Sometimes I fear that I’ve been fooling myself, that I’m searching for a humanity within her that’s been wiped out entirely. Then she’ll say something astonishingly perceptive, so insightful that I become horrified that she might have sensed I ever doubted her humanness. Once, she asked me if I had liked her better before she got sick, and I felt as if someone had socked me in my solar plexus, and had to grab her and hold her to me so she couldn’t see my expression. “No,” I told her. “I have always loved you just the same since the day you were born. I wouldn’t want my little cat any other way.” What I couldn’t say, because it would confuse her, or sound too much like an insult, is that I loved her now more than I had; that my love for her was terrible because it was more ferocious, that it was something dark and seething, a misshapen mass of energy.

At the school, the dean reviewed with me a list of three math-and-sciences colleges she thought might be appropriate for Charlie: all within two hours of the city, all small and well-defended. All three guaranteed their graduates employment in a Grade Three or higher facility. The most expensive of these colleges was for females only, and this was the one I chose for Charlie.

The dean made a note. Then she paused. “Most Grade One state employees opt for twenty-four-hour security for their children,” she said. “Would you like to use the college’s service, or continue your own?”

“I’ll continue with my own,” I said. The state, at least, would pay for that.

We discussed a few more details, and then the dean stood. “Charlie will be finished with her last class,” she said. “Shall I get her and you two can go home together?” I told her I’d like that, and she left her office to tell her assistant.

As she did, I stood and looked at the photographs of her students which hung on her wall. There are four all-girl private schools left in the city; this one is the smallest, and attracts what the school calls “studious” girls, though the word is a euphemism, as not all of them are especially academically gifted. Rather, the word is meant to convey their charges’ fundamental shyness, their “delayed sociability,” as the school calls it.

The dean returned with Charlie, and we said goodbye and walked out. “Home?” I asked, once we were in the car, “Or a treat?”

She thought. “Home,” she said. On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, she has an additional life-skills tutorial class, where she works with a psychologist on verbal and nonverbal communication. This always leaves her tired, and she leaned her head against the seat and closed her eyes, both because she was genuinely depleted and, I think, because she wanted to avoid the questions she knew I’d ask and which she would struggle to answer: What happened in school today? How was music class? What did you listen to? How did the music make you feel? What do you think the musician was trying to say? What was your favorite part of the composition, and why?

“Grandfather,” she’d say, frustrated, “I don’t know how to answer you.”

“You do know, little cat,” I’d say. “And you’re doing so well.”

More and more, I wonder what her adulthood will be like. For the first three years after she recovered from the illness, my only concern was keeping her alive: I monitored how much she ate, how much she slept, the whites of her eyes, the pink of her tongue. Then, after the first incident with the boys, I thought mostly of protecting her, though that surveillance was more complicated, since it relied as much on my oversight as it did on hoping she understood whom she could trust, and whom she couldn’t. Obedience would ensure her survival, but had I trained her to be too obedient?

Then, after the second incident, I began to think about how she would continue through her life—how I could defend her from people who tried to take advantage of her; how she might live after I die. I had always assumed that she would be with me for her entire life, even as I always knew as well that it wouldn’t be the entirety of her life that she would be with me but the entirety of mine. Now I am nearly seventy-seven, and she is seventeen, and even if I live another ten years—if I don’t die myself, or if I’m not disappeared, like C.—I’ll still leave her with decades of her own to contend with.

But on the one hand, maybe the society that is coming will be easier for her in certain aspects. There are marriage brokers (all state-licensed) opening up offices, promising they can find a spouse for anyone. Wesley will guarantee her a job, and the points system will guarantee that she will always have food, always have shelter. I would prefer to stay alive to watch over her as she enters middle age, but I only need to stay alive to make sure I can settle her with someone who will take care of her, that I can secure her a position someplace where I know she’ll be well-treated. This knowledge makes doing the work I do easier. I had long ago stopped believing I was doing anything to help science, or humanity, or this country or city, but knowing that I’m doing it to help her, to safeguard her, makes life bearable.

Or at least that’s what I’m able to believe—some days more than others.

Love to you and Olivier. Charles

My dear Peter, December 1, 2083

Happy birthday! Seventy-five. Practically a baby, still. I wish I had something to send you, but instead, you’re the one sending me presents, if a picture of you and Olivier on vacation can really be considered a present. And thank you for the beautiful shawl, which I’m going to give Charlie when she comes home for the holidays in two weeks. The new courier’s working out wonderfully, by the way—even more discreet than the last one, and a lot faster, too.

The house is almost fully converted. Although there have now been two speeches in Committee meetings about my generosity, it wasn’t as if I really had a choice—when the military asks to commission a private house, they’re not asking: They’re ordering. Anyway, I was lucky to hold on to it as long as I did, especially in wartime. I did ask for the unit of my choice, which they granted: They’ve carved out eight apartments, and ours is on the third floor, facing north, consisting of what used to be Charlie’s bedroom and playroom, which is now the living room. I’m sleeping in the bedroom until she gets home, after which I’ll move to the living room. As the house was in her name to begin with, she’ll keep the apartment once she marries, and I’ll be relocated to another flat in the zone, which was also part of the compromise.

Despite the fact that I’m now living in what is, technically, military barracks, there are no attractive soldiers strutting about. The other apartments have instead been given to various operations technicians, beetley men who look away when I pass them on the staircase, and from whose apartments I sometimes hear the shrill of distorted radio-wave messages.

You mentioned in your last letter that I sounded sanguine about the whole situation. I think the better word is probably “resigned”: The proud part of me was appeased by the fact that I was among the last three people on the Committee to have his house commissioned, and the practical part knew that, with Charlie off in college, I didn’t need this large a residence anyway. Also, the house was never truly mine: It was Aubrey and Norris’s, and then it was Nathaniel’s. But I—like Aubrey’s collection, the final pieces of which I donated one by one to the Metropolitan and then, when the museum was closed down, to various private organizations—could only be said to have occupied the place, never to have possessed it. Over the years, this house, which had once been so symbolic to me—a repository of my resentments; a projection of my fears—had become, finally, just a house: a shelter, not a metaphor.

I am concerned about how Charlie will react. She knows it happened; I went up to visit her at school a few weeks ago, and when I asked if she had any questions, she shook her head. I’m trying to make it easy for her, as easy as I can. For example, there aren’t a huge number of paint colors to choose from these days, but I told her she could pick whichever she liked, and perhaps we could even draw a pattern on the bedroom wall, even though neither of us is very good at drawing. “Whatever you want,” I tell her. “This is your apartment.” Sometimes she nods and says, “I know,” but other times, she shakes her head. “It’s not mine,” she says, “it’s ours. Yours and mine, Grandfather,” and then I know that, despite her best efforts, she’s been thinking of her future, and that it scares her. I change the subject then, and we speak of something else.

C. had always been convinced that there were more of us working at high levels in the state than we even knew, which he said made things more dangerous for us, not less, as those people would seek to make examples out of anyone who flagrantly disobeyed the laws in order to protect themselves, as happens in the irrational logic of the vulnerable. He had argued that the Marriage Act could never have passed without a plurality of us on the Committee and beyond, and that our internalized shame and guilt at being unable to reproduce had led to a dangerous kind of compensatory patriotism, the kind that drove us to create laws that ultimately endangered us. “But,” he had said, “no matter how bad it gets, there will always be loopholes for us, as long as we follow the rules in public.” This was shortly before he was disappeared. A year later, as you know, I began going to one of the safe houses he’d told me about, and which still endure, intact, while so many other things have been destroyed or co-opted or reinvented. With Charlie away at college, I go more and more frequently, and now that the house has been converted, I suspect I’ll go still more.

The changes have also made me think about Aubrey and Norris. It’s been years since I’ve thought of them, but recently, I’ve found myself talking aloud to Aubrey in particular. This house still feels like his, even for as long as I’ve lived in it—now almost as long as Aubrey himself. In my conversations with him, he’s angry, angry but trying to conceal it. But eventually, he no longer can. “What have you fucking done, Charles?” he asks me, in a way he never would have in life. “What have you done to my house?” And although I tell myself I’ve never cared about Aubrey’s opinion, I never have anything to say in response.

“What have you done, Charles?” he keeps asking, again and again. “What have you done?” But every time I open my mouth to answer, nothing comes out.

Love to you and O.—Charles

Dear Peter, July 12, 2084

Last night I dreamed of Hawai‘i. The night before, I had been in my favored house of ill repute, sleeping alongside A., when the sirens began to wail.

“Jesus, Jesus,” said A., scrabbling for his clothes, his shoes. “It’s a raid.”

Men began crowding in doorways, buttoning their shirts and buckling their belts as they did, their faces blank or terrified. It was safer to be silent in these raids, and yet someone—a young man who does something in Justice—kept repeating, “What we’re doing isn’t illegal; what we’re doing isn’t illegal,” until someone else hissed at him to shut up, that we already knew that.

We stood there, waiting, about thirty of us across four floors. Whoever they were trying to find wasn’t guilty of homosexuality—the person might be under suspicion for smuggling, or forgery, or theft—and although they couldn’t charge us for who we are, they could humiliate us for it. Why else, then, would they arrest this person when they knew he was here, instead of quietly, at his residence? It was for the spectacle of leading us, single file, out of the house, our hands raised above our heads like criminals, for the mortifying pleasure of tying our hands and having us kneel on the curb, for the sadism of asking us to repeat our names—Louder, please, I didn’t hear you—and shouting it to their colleague to run through the database: Charles Griffith. Thirteen Washington Square North. Says he’s a scientist at RU. Age: Eighty in October. (And then a smirk: Eighty? You’re still doing this at eighty? As if it were absurd, obscene, that someone so old should still want to be touched, when really, it is the sensation you come to crave the most.) And then there was the discomfort of the hours spent in a crouch in the street, your head bent as if in shame, the suspect long since removed, waiting for the theater to end, for one of them to get bored and release us, the sound of his fellow soldiers’ laughter as they climbed back into their cars. They were never physically abusive with us, they never called us names—they couldn’t; too many of us had too much power—but it was clear they disdained us, and when we finally stood and turned for the house, you could see the street darkening again, the neighbors who had watched us through their windows, never saying a word, returning to bed now that the show had concluded. “I wish they’d just make us illegal,” someone, a young man, had grumbled after the last raid, and a number of people had begun shouting at him, asking him how he could be so ignorant and stupid, but I understood what he was trying to express: If we were illegal, we would know our position. As it was, we were nothing—we were known but not named, tolerated but not recognized. We lived in a constant state of uncertainty, waiting for the day we would be declared enemies, waiting for the night when what we did would, in the space of an hour, a single signed document, be transformed from regrettable to criminal. The very word for what we were had somehow, at some point, disappeared from the vernacular—to us, we were only “people like us”: “Do you know Charles? He’s one of us.” Even we had become euphemistic, unable to say what we are.

They almost never raided the inside—as I said, too many of us had too much power, and it was like they knew that the amount of contraband they’d find inside would entail so much processing that they’d be able to do little else for the following week—but there were chutes in each room that you could toss your possessions down, and the first place we went after going back indoors was the safe box in the basement, where we’d retrieve our books and wallets and devices and whatever else we had dropped, and then we would leave, probably without even saying goodbye to the person we’d been with, and the next time we came, neither of us would mention it, we would pretend it had never happened.

Two nights ago, we had been waiting three minutes for the bang on the door, for the loudspeaker announcing one of our names, when we realized that the sirens weren’t for us after all. Again, there was a soundless exchange of glances—the people on the first and second floors looking up to us on the third and fourth, all of us wondering—when, finally, a young man on the first floor cautiously unlocked the door and then, after a pause, dramatically flung it open, standing in the center of the frame.

He shouted, and we came rushing downstairs to see that Bank Street had become a river, the water racing east. “The Hudson River’s flooded,” I heard someone say, in a quiet, awestruck voice, and then, right after, someone else said, “The safe box!” and there was a hustle down to the basement, which was already filling with water. A chain was formed to move the books and equipment we’d stored there to the attic, and after, we stood at the first-floor windows, watching the water rise. A. had a communication device, a kind I had never seen before, one different from my own—I never asked what he did, and he never told me—and he spoke into it, a few terse words, and ten minutes later, a flotilla of plastic dinghies appeared.

“Get out,” said A., whom I had known only to be passive and somewhat whiny, but who had suddenly transformed into someone declarative and stern: his work persona, I assumed. “Everyone, queue up for the boats.” The water was now lapping up the front steps.

“What about the house?” someone asked, and we all knew he was asking about the books in the attic.

“I’ll handle them,” said a youngish man, whom I had never met, but who I knew to be the house’s owner, or manager, or keeper—it was never clear which, but I knew he was responsible. “Go.”

So we did. This time, whether because of who A. was, or because of the equalizing nature of the crisis, there were no jokes from the soldiers, no sneers: They held out their hands, and we grabbed them and were lowered into the rafts, and the whole exchange was so matter-of-fact, so collegial—we needed saving, and they were here to save us—that you could almost believe that their disgust for us was an act, that they respected us as much as they did anyone. Behind us, another fleet of boats was arriving, and now there was a loudspeaker announcement: “Residents of Zone Eight! Evacuate your units! Descend to your front doors and wait for help!”

By now the water was rising so rapidly that the boat was actually bobbing on the water, as if atop a wave, and the puny motor was becoming choked with leaves and twigs. A block east, on Greenwich Street, we were joined by other motorized rafts moving east, from Jane and West 12th Streets, all of us making our slow way to Hudson Street, where corps of soldiers were stacking sandbags, trying to hold the river back.

Here there were emergency vehicles, and ambulances, but I climbed out of the raft and left, walking east, never looking behind me: It was best not to get involved where you didn’t need to; there was no honor, no use in it. I hadn’t gotten too wet, but my socks squished as I walked, and I was glad I hadn’t worn my cooling suit, despite the heat. At West 10th and Sixth Avenue, a platoon of soldiers jogged by me, groups of four each holding aloft a plastic raft. They looked weary, I thought, and why wouldn’t they be? Two months ago, the fires; last month, the rains; this month, the floods. When I finally got home, everything was quiet, though whether that was because of the hour or because some of the inhabitants had been conscripted to help with the efforts, I didn’t know.

The next day—Tuesday: yesterday—I went to work and did little but listen to radio reports of the flood, which had consumed a significant part of Zone Eight and all of Zones Seven and Twenty-one, from what had been the highway all the way east to, in some instances, Hudson Street. The Bank Street house had, presumably, been ruined; someone will let me know for sure one way or another. Two people had died: An elderly lady had fallen down the stairs of her house on West 11th Street trying to reach the boat and had broken her neck; a man on Perry Street had refused to vacate his basement apartment and had drowned. Two streets had been somewhat spared, purely from happenstance: The army had felled three massive, diseased trees on Bethune and Washington early Monday morning, which had mitigated the flooding there. And on Gansevoort, the army had been digging a trench on Greenwich to reroute a deteriorating sanitation pipe, and this too had minimized the damage. Whereas, a few years ago, I would have been outraged by the flood—its inevitability the result of years of governmental inaction and arrogance—I found that this time I could summon little of anything. Indeed, I felt nothing but a kind of weariness, and even that I experienced not as a sensation but as an absence of one. I listened to the radio and yawned and yawned, staring out my office window at the East River, which David had always said looked like chocolate milk, watching a small vessel inch its way north: maybe to Davids Island, maybe not.

But if I could not find it in myself to feel anything about the flood, there would be others who would: the protestors who gathered each day in the Square and were removed each night. I had expected a surfeit of them when I returned home—they had long ago discovered who among us were on the Committee, and they had an unerring sense of when we’d arrive home each night. It didn’t matter how often we changed drivers, or how much we tried to upend our schedules—the car would approach home, and there they’d be, with their signs and slogans. They’re allowed to do this; they cannot congregate outside state buildings, but they can outside of ours, which I suppose is more apt—it’s the architects they hate even more than what we’ve built.

Last evening, though, there was no one, just the Square with its vendors and people shopping its stalls. This meant that the floods had given the state a reason to conduct a roundup of the protestors, and for a moment, I dawdled in the street despite the heat, watching regular people doing regular things, before going into the house and up to the apartment.

That night, I dreamed of when I was a teenager at my grandparents’ farm in Lā‘ie. It was the year of the first tsunami, and although we had been (just) far enough inland to not be directly hit, they had always said that they wish we had been, for then we could have collected the insurance money and begun anew, or not at all. As it was, the farm was too intact to be forsaken, but also too damaged ever to be productive again. The hill that had provided shade for my grandmother’s herb garden had been destroyed, and the irrigation channels were filled with seawater—you would pump it away and then it would return, for months. Salt had affixed itself to every surface: The trees, the animals, the vegetables, the sides of the house were all streaky with white. The salt made the air sticky, and when the trees fruited that spring, the mangoes, the lychees, the papayas all tasted of salt.

They had never been happy people, my grandparents: They had bought the farm in a rare romantic moment, but romance is ephemeral. Yet they kept working at it long past the point when it ceased to be enjoyable, partly because they were too proud to admit they’d failed, and partly because they had limited imaginations, and couldn’t think of what else they might want to do. They had wanted to live as their own grandparents had dreamed of living, before Restoration, and yet doing anything because your ancestors wanted to do it—fulfilling someone else’s ambition—is a poor motivation. They had berated my mother for not being Hawaiian enough, and then she left, and they had had to raise me. They had berated me for not being Hawaiian enough, too, while at the same time assuring me I never would be, and yet when I left as well—for why would I stay someplace I had been told I would never belong?—they resented that just as much.

But the dream was not so much about them as it was a story my grandmother had told me when I was a child, about a hungry lizard. All day, the lizard would stalk across the land, grazing. He ate fruit and grass, insects and fish. When the moon rose, the lizard would go to sleep and dream of eating. Then the moon would set and the lizard would wake and begin eating again. The lizard’s curse was that he would never be full, although the lizard didn’t know this was a curse: He wasn’t that intelligent.

One day, after many thousands of years had passed, the lizard woke, as usual, and began looking for food, as usual. But something was wrong. Then the lizard realized: There was nothing left for him to eat. There were no more plants, no more birds, no more grasses or flowers or flies. He had eaten everything; he had eaten the stones, the mountains, the sand, and the soil. (Here my grandmother would sing a lyric from an old Hawaiian protest song: Ua lawa mākou i ka pōhaku / I ka ʻai kamahaʻo o ka ‘āina.) All that was left was a thin layer of ash, and beneath that ash—the lizard knew—was the core of the earth, which was fire, and although the lizard could eat many things, he could not eat that.

So the lizard did the only thing he could. He lay in the sun and waited, dozing and saving his strength. And that night, as the moon was rising, he drew himself up on his tail and swallowed the moon.

For a moment, he felt wonderful. He’d had no water all day, and the moon was so cool and smooth in his stomach, as if he’d swallowed an enormous egg. But as he was relishing the feeling, something changed: The moon was rising still, trying to escape him so it could continue its path in the sky.

This must not happen, the lizard thought, and he quickly dug a hole, narrow but deep, or as deep as he could before he reached the fire at the earth’s center, and stuck his entire snout inside of it. This will keep the moon from going anywhere, he thought.

But he was wrong. For just as it was the lizard’s nature to eat, it was the moon’s nature to rise, and no matter how tightly the lizard clamped its mouth, the moon rose still. But so tight was the hole in the earth where the lizard had stuck its snout that the moon was unable to exit his mouth.

And so the lizard exploded, and the moon burst forth from the earth and continued its path.

For many thousands of years after that, nothing happened. Well, I say nothing happened, but in those years, everything that the lizard had eaten returned. Back came the stones and the soil. Back came the grasses and the flowers and the plants and the trees; back came the birds and the insects and the fish and the lakes. Overseeing it all was the moon, which rose and sank each night.

That was the end of the story. I had always assumed it was a Hawaiian folktale, but it wasn’t, and when I asked her who had told her that fable, she would say, “My grandmother.” When I was in college, and taking an ethnography class, I asked her to write it down for me. She scoffed. “Why?” she asked. “You already know it.” Yes, I told her, but it was important for me to hear it as she would tell it, not as I remembered it. But she never did, and I was too proud to ask her again, and then the class ended.

Then, several years later—we were barely communicating by then, pulled apart by mutual lack of interest and disappointment—she sent me an email, and in the email was the story. This was during my Wanderjahr, and I remember getting it while I was at a café in Kamakura with friends, although it wasn’t until the next week, when I was on Jeju, that I read it. There it was, the familiar old inexplicable story, just as I’d remembered it. The lizard died, as he always did; the earth restored itself, as it always did; the moon glowed in the sky, as it always would. But this time, there was a difference: After everything had grown back, my grandmother wrote, the lizard returned, although this time he was not a lizard, but he mea helekū—a thing that goes upright. And this creature behaved in exactly the same way as his long-deceased ancestor had: He ate and ate and ate, until one day he looked about him and realized there was nothing left, and he too was forced to swallow the moon.

You know of course what I’m thinking. For a long time, I assumed that it would be a virus that would destroy us all in the end, that humans would be felled by something both greater and much smaller than ourselves. Now I realize that that is not the case. We are the lizard, but we are also the moon. Some of us will die, but others of us will keep doing what we always have, continuing on our own oblivious way, doing what our nature compels us to, silent and unknowable and unstoppable in our rhythms.

Love, Charles

Dear P, April 2, 2085

Thanks for your note, and for the information. Let’s hope it’s true. I have everything ready just in case. Thinking about it makes me squirrelly, and so I won’t discuss it here. I know you said not to say thank you, but I’m saying it just the same. But I really do need it to happen, more than before, which I’ll explain.

Charlie’s been fine, or at least as fine as can be expected. I explained the Enemies Act to her, and while I know she understands it, I don’t know that she fully comprehends the effect it will have on her life. She just knows that it’s the reason she’s been expelled from college, three months before she was to have graduated, and why we had to visit the zone registrar to have her identity document stamped. But she doesn’t seem particularly troubled or shaken or depressed, for which I’m relieved. “I’m sorry, little cat, I’m sorry,” I kept telling her, and she shook her head. “It isn’t your fault, Grandfather,” she said, and I wanted to cry. She’s being punished for parents she never knew—isn’t that punishment enough? How much more must she endure? It’s also ludicrous—this act won’t stop the insurgents. Nothing will. In the meantime, there are Charlie and her new tribe of the extralegal: the children and brothers and sisters of enemies of the state, most of them long since dead or disappeared. In the last Committee meeting, we were told that if the insurgents can’t be quelled, or at least controlled, then “more severe restrictions” will have to be implemented. No one clarified what that meant.

As you can probably see, I’ve been in a far worse state than she has. I keep turning her future, which has at times—as I don’t need to tell you—filled me with dread, over and over in my head. She had been doing well at school—she had even enjoyed it. I had dreamed of her earning her master’s, maybe even her doctorate, of her finding a position in a small lab somewhere: nowhere fancy, nowhere flashy, nowhere prestigious. She could go to a research facility in a smaller municipality, have a good, quiet life.

But now she is prohibited from ever earning her degree. I had immediately gone to my acquaintance at Interior, whom I begged for an exception. “Come on, Mark,” I told him. He had met Charlie once, years ago; after she’d come home from the hospital, he had brought her a stuffed rabbit. His own son had died. “Enough of this. Let her have another chance.”

He had sighed. “If the mood were different, I would, Charles, I promise you,” he said. “But my hands are tied—even for you.” Then he said that Charlie was “one of the lucky ones,” that he’d already “pulled some strings” for her. What that means, I don’t know, and I suddenly didn’t want to know. But what is clear is that I’m being pushed aside. I’ve known it for a while, but this was proof. It won’t happen immediately, but it will happen. I’ve seen it before. You don’t lose your influence at once—you lose it by degrees, over months and years. If you’re lucky, you just become insignificant, assigned a meaningless job where you can do no harm. If you’re unlucky, you become a scapegoat, and although it sounds like a perverse sort of bragging, I know that, given what I’ve implemented, what I’ve planned, what I’ve overseen, I am a candidate for some kind of public disavowal.

So I have to act quickly, just in case. The first thing is that I have to find her a job at a state institution. It’ll be difficult to do, but she would be safe, and she would have it for life. I’ll go to Wesley, who won’t dare say no to me, even now. And then, as absurd as it sounds, I have to find her a husband. I don’t know how long I have—I want to make sure I’ve placed her in a good situation, and if it’s not, I want to be able to fix it for her. That at least I can do.

I’ll wait to hear from you.

Love to you and Olivier, C.

My dear Peter, January 15, 2086

Yesterday we had a bit of relief from the heat wave, which is expected to move north tomorrow. The past few days have been agony: more deaths, and then I had to use some of my coupons to replace the air conditioner. I’d been saving them to buy Charlie something nice, something to wear for our appointments. You know I don’t like asking you for these things, but would you mind sending me something for her? A dress, or a blouse and a skirt? The drought means there’s very little fabric coming into the city, and when it does, it’s prohibitive. I’m attaching a picture of her here, and her sizes. Normally, of course, I’d have the money, but I’m trying to save as much as I can to give to her when she gets married, especially as I’m still getting paid in gold.

Certain expenses, however, can’t be avoided. It was A. who introduced me to this new marriage broker, the same person he used to arrange his own marriage, to a widowed lesbian. If I needed proof of how diminished my reputation is, it’s that I couldn’t immediately get an appointment with this broker, although he’s known to help anyone who’s affiliated with a state ministry at a senior level. Yet it took A., whom I rarely see anymore, to secure a meeting with him.

I hadn’t liked him from the start. He was tall and bony and unable to make eye contact, and he made it clear in every way he could that he was seeing me as a favor.

“Where do you live?” he asked, although I knew he already knew the basic information of my life.

“Zone Eight,” I said, playing along.

“I usually only see applicants from Zone Fourteen,” he said, which I also already knew, for he had told me this by letter before we even met.

“Yes, and I’m very grateful,” I said, as blandly as I could. For a moment, there was silence. I said nothing. He said nothing. But finally, he sighed—what more could he do, really?—and took out his pad of paper to begin our interview. It was stiflingly hot in his office, even with the air-conditioning. I asked for a glass of water, and he looked affronted, as if I’d asked for something impossible, like brandy or scotch, and then called for his secretary to fetch me some.

And then the real humiliation began. Age? Occupation? What rank? Where exactly did I live in Zone Eight? Assets? Ethnicity? Where had I been born? When had I been naturalized? How long had I been at RU? Was I married? Had I ever been married? To whom? When did he die? How? How many children had we had? Was he my biological child? What had been his father’s ethnicity? His mother’s? Was my son living? When did he die? How? I was here on behalf of my granddaughter, was that correct? Who was her mother? Why, where was she? Was she living? Was my granddaughter my son’s biological child? Had she or my son had any health problems or conditions? With each answer, I could feel the air around me change and change and change, getting dimmer and dimmer and dimmer, the years crashing and colliding into one another.

Then came the questions about Charlie, although he had already seen her papers, the scarlet “Enemy Relation” stamp x-ed across her face: How old was she? How much education had she had? What was her height and weight? What were her interests? When had she become sterile, and how? For how long had she taken Xychor? And, finally, what was she like?

It had been a long time since I had had to describe so precisely what Charlie was and wasn’t, what she could and couldn’t do, what she excelled at and what she struggled with: I think I last had to do this when I was trying to secure her a place at her high school. But after I told him the fundamentals, as best I could, I found myself still talking—about how attentive she had been to Little Cat, how, when he was dying, she would follow him from room to room until she had understood that he didn’t want to be followed, that he wanted to be alone; about how, when she slept, her forehead furrowed in a way that made her look not angry but inquisitive and thoughtful; about how, although she could not give me a hug or kiss, she knew, always, when I was sad or worried, and would bring me a cup of water or, when we’d had it, a cup of tea; about how, as a child, just home from the hospital, she would sometimes slump against me after her seizures and let me stroke her head, her hair light and thin and as soft as down; about how the one thing that remained from her pre-sickness life was her scent, something warm and animal, like hot, clean fur after it’s been in the sun; about how she could be resourceful in ways you wouldn’t expect—she was rarely defeated, she would always try. After a while, some part of me realized that the broker had stopped taking notes, that the room was quiet except for my voice, and yet still I talked, even though it felt with every sentence like I was ripping my heart from my chest and then replacing it, again and again—that terrible, awful pain, that overwhelming joy and sorrow I felt whenever I spoke about Charlie.

Finally, I stopped, and into the silence, which was now so complete it vibrated, he said, “And what does she want in a husband?” And here again, I felt that anguish, because the very fact that it was I having this appointment, I and not her, was really all the broker needed to know: Everything else I said about Charlie, everything else she was, would be eclipsed by this fact.

But I told him. Someone kind, I said. Someone protective, someone decent, someone patient. Someone wise. He didn’t have to be rich, or educated, or clever, or good-looking. He just had to promise me that he would protect her forever.

“What do you have to offer him in return?” the broker asked. A dowry, he meant. I had been told that, given Charlie’s “condition,” I would likely have to offer a dowry.

I told him my offer with as much confidence as I could, and his pen paused over the paper, and then he wrote it down.

“I’ll need to meet her,” he said, at last, “and then I’ll know how to direct my search.”

And so, yesterday, we went back. I had debated about whether I should try to coach Charlie, and then had decided not to, because it would be both pointless and anxious-making for her. Consequently, I was much more nervous than she was.

She did well, as well as she could. I have lived with her, and loved her, for so long that it sometimes takes me aback when I watch other people meeting her, when I understand anew that they don’t see her as I do. I know this, of course, but I allow myself the luxury of incomprehension. And then I look at their faces, and there it is again: my heart being ripped from its veins and arteries; my heart being replaced, sucking back into my chest.

The broker told her that he and I were going to talk and that she could wait in the reception area, and I had smiled and nodded at her before following him inside, almost shuffling, as if I were back in school again and had been summoned by the headmaster for causing trouble. I had wished I might faint, or tumble to the floor, something to upset the moment, to garner some sympathy, some sign of humanity. But my body, as always, performed as it ought to, and I sat and stared at this man who could secure my child’s safety.

For a moment, there was silence, each of us staring at the other, before I broke it: I was tired of this theatricality, of how this man understood our vulnerability and how he seemed to enjoy it. I didn’t want to hear him say what I knew he would, but I also wanted him to say it, because then this moment would be over, would be becoming the past. “Do you have anyone in mind?” I asked him.

Another silence. “Dr. Griffith,” he said, “I’m sorry, but I don’t think I’m the broker for you.”

Another heart rip. “Why not?” I asked, even as I didn’t want to ask, because I didn’t want to hear the answer. Say it, I thought. I dare you to say it.

“With respect, Doctor,” he said, next, though there was no respect in his voice, “with respect—I think you have to be realistic.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked.

“Doctor, forgive me,” he said, “but your granddaughter is—”

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

He paused. I could see him recognizing how angry I was; I could see him realizing I wanted to have a reason to fight with him; I could see him preparing to be careful.

“Special,” he said.

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

I must have sounded as livid as I was, because his voice, until then devoid of compassion, changed somewhat. “I want to show you something,” he said, and tugged a thin envelope from the bottom of a stack on his desk. “Here are the matches I found for your granddaughter,” he said.

I opened it. Inside were three cards, of the sort that you have to give to a broker. Stiff pieces of paper, about seven inches square, with the applicant’s photo on one side and their data on the other.

I looked at them. All of them were sterile, of course, the red “S” debossed across their foreheads. The first man was in his fifties, thrice widowed, and the old illogical part of me—the part that remembered those Gothic television shows about men murdering their wives, disposing of their bodies, and eluding the law for decades—recoiled, and I turned his card facedown, rejecting him before I could read the rest of his data, which probably revealed that his wives had all died of the illness, not by his hand (and yet what kind of bad luck was that, to have three wives die, but a bad luck that bordered on criminality?). The second was a man in, I guessed, his late twenties, but with an expression so furious—his mouth a mean seam, his eyes astonished and bulging—that I had a vision, again from those old television shows I still sometimes watch late at night in the office, of him hitting Charlie, of him hurting her, as if I could read his potential for violence in his face. The third was a man in his early thirties, with a plain, placid face, but when I studied his information, I saw that he had been listed as “MI”: mentally incompetent. This is a broad designation, one that comprises all kinds of deficiencies of the sort that had once been known as mental disease, but also mental disability. Charlie does not have this designation. I had been willing to ask you to send money to bribe anyone I had to in order to prevent this, but I hadn’t needed to in the end—she had passed their tests; she had saved herself.

“What are these?” I asked, my voice shrill in the quiet.

“These are the three applicants I could find who would consider your granddaughter,” he said.

“Why were you looking for applicants before you even met her?” I asked, and as I did, I realized that he had determined who Charlie was from her files well before he had met her, probably well before he had even met me. Meeting her hadn’t changed his mind—it had confirmed the idea of her he’d already had.

“I think you should try someone else,” he repeated, and handed me another piece of paper, on which was typed three other brokers’ names, and I understood that he had known from even before this meeting that he wasn’t going to help me. “These people will have candidates that are more…in keeping with your needs.”

Thank god he didn’t smile, or I’d’ve done something stupid and male and animal: swung at him, spit at him, swept everything off his desk—the kind of things someone on one of those old television shows would have done. But now there was no one to perform for, no camera but the tiny blinking one I knew was secreted in the ceiling panels somewhere, dispassionately recording the scene below: two men, one elderly, one middle-aged, handing pieces of paper to each other.

I recomposed my face and left with Charlie. I held her as close to me as she’d allow. I told her I’d find someone for her, although something inside me was crumbling: What if no one wanted my little cat? Surely someone would see how dear she is, how much she’s loved, how brave she is? She survived, and yet she is being punished for surviving. She wasn’t like those applicants—leftovers, dregs, the unwanted. I thought this even as I also understood that to someone, they too weren’t leftovers or unwanted, even—the heart ripping out again—that their someones might be looking at Charlie’s card and thinking, “This is what they expect him to settle for? Surely there’s someone better. Surely there’s someone more.”

What world is this? What world has she lived for? Tell me it’ll be okay, Peter. Tell me and I’ll believe you, this one last time.

Love, Charles

Oh, dear Peter, March 21, 2087

How I wish we could speak on the phone. I wish that often, but I wish it desperately tonight, so much so that before I sat down to write you, I spent the past half hour talking aloud to you, whispering under my breath so I wouldn’t wake Charlie, asleep in the other room.

I haven’t written about Charlie’s marriage prospects as much as I might have because I wanted to wait until I had something happier to say. But about a month ago, I found a new broker, Timothy, who was known to specialize in what a colleague of mine called “unusual cases.” He had used Timothy to find someone for his son after his son was declared MI. It had taken almost four years, but Timothy had found him a match.

With each broker I’d met, I had tried to act more confident than I’d felt. I’d admit I’d seen a few of their colleagues, but never specified just how many. Depending on the person, I would try to make Charlie sound choosy, mysterious, brilliant, aloof. But every relationship would end the same way, sometimes even before I had a chance to bring Charlie in to meet them; the same kinds of candidates would be presented to me, sometimes candidates I’d seen before. That pale and placid young man marked MI had been shown to me three times since I first was given his card, and each time I saw his face, I felt a mix of sorrow and relief: sorrow that he too was still unmatched; relief that it wasn’t just Charlie. I thought of her card, now foxed on the edges, being shown and reshown, of clients or their parents flicking it to the side. “Not her,” I imagined them saying, “we’ve seen her before.” And then, at night, to one another, “That poor girl, still on the market. At least our son isn’t that desperate.”

But this time, I was honest. I detailed exactly which brokers I’d seen. I told him about all the candidates I’d been presented or met with, on whom I’d taken notes. I was as honest as I could bear to be without crying or being disloyal to Charlie. And when Timothy said, “But beauty isn’t everything. Is she charming?” I waited until I was sure I could control my voice before I said she wasn’t.

At our second meeting, I was given five cards, none of which I’d seen before. Something unsettled me about each of the first four. But then there was the final card. He was a young man, only two years older than Charlie, with large dark eyes and a strong nose, looking straight into the camera. There was something inarguable about him—his handsomeness, for one, but also his steadiness, as if someone had tried to convince him to be ashamed of himself and he had chosen not to be. Over his picture were two stamps: one that declared him sterile, the other that declared him an enemy relation.

I looked up at Timothy, who was looking back at me. “What’s wrong with him?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Nothing,” he said. He paused. “He chose sterilization,” he added, and I shuddered a bit, as I always did when I learned that about someone: It meant that fertility hadn’t been taken from him by disease or medicine; it meant that he had chosen to be sterilized in order to keep from being sent to a reeducation center. You chose your body or your mind, and he had chosen his mind.

“Well, I’d like to arrange a meeting,” I said, and Timothy nodded, though as I was leaving he called me back.

“He’s a fine person,” he said, a strange turn of phrase these days. I had investigated Timothy before I made my first appointment—in his previous life, he had been a social worker. “Just have an open mind, all right?” I didn’t know what this meant, but I agreed, though having an open mind was also an anachronism, another concept of long ago.

The day of our meeting arrived and I was nervous again, uncommonly so. I had come to sense that, although Charlie was still young, she was nearing the end of her options. After this, I would have to expand my search beyond this municipality, beyond this prefecture. I would have to hope Wesley would grant me one more favor, after the previous favor he’d granted me, in which he’d given Charlie a job, a job she liked. I would have to wrest her from that job, and I would have to resettle her elsewhere, and then I would have to find a way to follow, and I would need Wesley’s help. I would do it, naturally, but it would be difficult.

The candidate was already there when I arrived, sitting in the small, unadorned room that all brokers’ offices maintained for such meetings, and as I entered, he stood and we bowed. I looked at him as he settled back into his chair, and I into mine. I had assumed that Timothy’s entreaty meant that he would look significantly different, worse, than his photo, but this was not the case: He looked like his image, a trim, attractive young man, the same vivid dark eyes, the same unfrightened gaze. His father had been West African and Southern European; his mother had been South and East Asian—he resembled my son, just a bit, and I had to look away.

I knew the facts of him from his card, and yet I asked the same questions anyway: where he had grown up, what he had studied, what he did now. I knew his parents and sister had been declared enemies; I knew it had cost him the final years of his doctoral studies; I knew he was appealing the decision now that the Forgiveness Act had passed; I knew he had had a professor, a well-known microbiologist, who was helping support his case; I knew that if he agreed to the match, he wanted to delay the marriage by up to two years so he could try to finish his degree. He confirmed all this information; his account did not differ from what I knew.

I asked about his parents. He had no immediate living family. Most relatives of state enemies, when asked about their relations, became either angry or ashamed; you could see them swallowing something back, some surplus of feeling, you could see them practicing what they’d learned about keeping their emotions small.

But he was neither angry nor ashamed. “My father was a physicist; my mother was a political scientist,” he said. He named the university where they had taught, a once-prestigious place before it had been subsumed by the state. His sister had been an English-literature professor. They had all joined the insurgents, but he had not. I asked him why, and for the first time, he looked troubled, though I couldn’t tell whether it was because he was thinking about the camera hidden in the ceiling or about his family. “I said it was because I wanted to be a scientist,” he said, after a pause, “because I thought—I thought that I could do more by becoming a scientist, by trying to help that way. But in the end—” And here he stopped again, and this time, I knew it was because of the camera and recorder.

“But in the end, you were wrong,” I finished for him, and he looked at me and then to the door, quickly, like it was about to be broken down by a squad of officers, ready to drag us off to a Ceremony. “It’s all right,” I said, “I’m old enough to say what I want,” even though I knew that wasn’t true. He knew, too, but he didn’t correct me.

We kept talking, now about his aborted dissertation, about the job he hoped to secure at the Pond as he appealed his case. We talked about Charlie, about who she was, about what she needed. I was—I didn’t know why, at the time—honest with him, more honest even than I’d been with Timothy. But nothing seemed to surprise him; it was as if he had already met her; it was as if he already knew her. “You must always take care of her,” I heard myself saying, again and again, and he nodded back to me, and as he did, I understood that he was agreeing to the marriage, that I had found someone for her after all. And at some point, somehow, I had another realization. I realized what it was that Timothy had tried to communicate to me about him; I realized what it was I recognized in him—I realized why he would be willing to marry Charlie. It was obvious, once I knew—I had known it since before I met him.

I interrupted him as he was mid-sentence. “I know who you are,” I said, and when he didn’t react, I said, “I know what you are,” and then his mouth opened, just slightly, and there was a silence.

“Is it obvious?” he asked, quietly.

“No,” I said. “I only know because I’m one, too,” and now he sat back in his seat, and I could see something in his gaze change, could see him look at me again, differently.

“Can I ask you to stop?” I asked, and he looked at me, that determined, defiant, brave, foolish boy. “No,” he said, softly. “I promise you I’ll always take care of her. But I cannot stop.” There was a silence.

“Promise me you’ll never do anything that will get her in trouble,” I said, and he nodded. “I won’t,” he said. “I know how to be discreet.” Discreet—what a depressing word to hear used by someone so young. It was a word from before my grandfather’s time, not a word that should have had to make a reappearance in our lexicon.

My disgust must have shown on my face, for his own became worried. “Sir?” he asked.

“Nothing,” I said. Then I asked, “Where do you go?”

He was quiet. “Go?” he echoed.

“Yes,” I said, and I’m afraid I sounded impatient. “Where do you go?”

“I don’t understand,” he said.

“Yes, you do,” I said. “Jane Street? Horatio? Perry? Bethune? Barrow? Gansevoort? Which one?” He swallowed. “I’m going to find out anyway,” I reminded him.

“Bethune,” he said.

“Ah,” I said. That made sense. Bethune attracted a more bookish sort. The man who ran it, Harry, a fussy queen who was very high up in Health, had dedicated two of the floors to libraries that looked like they were from an old-fashioned drawing-room comedy; the bedrooms were above. There were also rumors of a dungeon, but frankly, I think those were begun by Harry himself, to make the whole operation sound more exciting than it was. I had begun frequenting Jane Street, which was much more businesslike: You came in, you had your fun, you left. Anyway, it was a relief—I did not relish the thought of looking up only to see my granddaughter’s husband peering down at me.

“Do you have someone?” I asked.

Another swallow. “Yes,” he said, quietly.

“Do you love him?”

This time, there was no hesitation. He looked directly at me. “Yes,” he said, and his voice was steady.

Suddenly I was very sad. My poor granddaughter, whom I was marrying to a man who would protect her but would never love her, at least not in the way we all need to be loved; this poor boy, who would never be able to have the life he should. He was only twenty-four, and when you’re twenty-four, your body is for pleasure and you’re constantly in love. I saw, suddenly, Nathaniel’s face when I had first met him, his rich dark skin, his open mouth, and I turned away, because I feared I might cry.

“Sir?” I heard him ask, his voice soft. “Dr. Griffith?” This was the voice he would use to speak to Charlie, I thought, and I made myself smile and turned back to him.

We came to terms that afternoon. He didn’t seem to care much about the dowry, and after we’d signed the papers of intention, we walked downstairs together, his marriage card in my briefcase.

On the sidewalk, we bowed again. “I’m looking forward to meeting Charlie,” he said, and I said I was sure Charlie would be excited to meet him, too.

He was leaving when I called out his name, and he turned and walked back to me. For a while, I didn’t know how to begin. “Tell me,” I began, and then I paused. Then I knew what I wanted to say. “You’re a young man,” I said. “You’re handsome. You’re bright.” I lowered my voice. “You’re in love. Why are you doing this now, so young? Don’t mistake me—I’m glad you are,” I added, quickly, although his face hadn’t changed. “For Charlie’s sake. But why?”

He stepped closer to me. He was tall, but I was taller still, and for a second, I thought, ridiculously, that he might kiss me, that I would feel the brush of his lips against mine, and I closed my eyes, just for a moment, as if doing so would make it happen. “I want to be safe, too, Dr. Griffith,” he said, just louder than a whisper. He stepped back then. “I have to keep myself safe,” he said. “I don’t know what I’ll do otherwise.”

It wasn’t until I got home that I cried. Charlie was still at work, thank goodness, and so I was alone. I cried for Charlie, for how much I loved her, and for how I hoped she would know that I did what I thought best for her, how I had chosen her safety over her fulfillment. I cried for her perhaps-husband, for his need to protect himself, for how limited this country had made his life. I cried for the man he loved, who would never be able to make a life with him. I cried for the men in the cards I’d seen and rejected on Charlie’s behalf. I cried for Nathaniel, and David, and even Eden, all of them long disappeared, none of whom Charlie remembered. I cried for my grandparents and for Aubrey and Norris and for Hawai‘i. But mostly, I cried for myself, for my loneliness, and for this world I’d helped make, and for all these years: all the dead, all the lost, all the vanished.

I don’t often cry, and I had forgotten how, beneath the physical discomfort, there was something exhilarating about it as well, every part of the body participating, the machinery of its various systems lurching into movement, plumping the ducts with liquids, pumping the lungs with air, the eyes growing shiny, the skin thickening with blood. I found myself thinking that this was the end of my life, that if Charlie accepted this boy, I would have discharged my final duty—I had protected her from harm, I had seen her to adulthood, I had found her a job and a companion. There was nothing else I could do, nothing else I could hope to do. Any life I had beyond this point would be welcome, but unnecessary.

Not too many years ago, Peter, I thought for certain that I’d be able to see you again. We’d have lunch together, you and me and Charlie and Olivier, and then maybe the two of them would go somewhere, to a museum or a play (we’d be in London, of course, not here), and then you and I would spend the afternoon together, doing something you did every day but which had become exotic to me—a trip to a bookstore, for example, or a café, or a boutique, where I’d buy something frivolous for Charlie: a necklace, maybe, or a pair of sandals. As the afternoon grew long, we’d go back to your house, the one I will never see with my own eyes, where Olivier and Charlie would be making dinner, and where I’d have to explain some of the ingredients to her: This is shrimp; this is sea urchin; these are figs. For dessert, there’d be chocolate cake, and the three of us would watch her eat it for the first time, watch as an expression I hadn’t seen since before she got sick bloomed across her face as we laughed and applauded, as if she’d done something marvelous. We’d have our own rooms, but she’d come into mine because she would be unable to sleep that night, so overwhelmed would she be by all she’d seen and heard and smelled and tasted, and I’d hold her as I had when she was a little girl, feel her body twitch with electricity. And the next day we’d get up and do it again, and then the next, and the next, and although much of her new life would eventually become familiar to her—I falling back into it within days, the old memories reasserting themselves—she would never lose her new expression of awe, she would look about her with her mouth always slightly open, her face pitched to the sky. We would smile to see it; anyone would. “Charlie!” we’d call, when she got into one of her trances, to wake her up, to remind her of where and who she was. “Charlie! All of this is yours.”

Love, C.

My dearest Peter, June 5, 2088

Well, it’s official. My little cat is married. It was, as you can imagine, an emotionally complicated day: As I stood and watched the two of them, I experienced an unusually vivid bout of one of those time jumps I’ve been having more and more frequently—I was back in Hawai‘i, I was holding hands with Nathaniel, we were looking toward the sea, in front of which Matthew and John had positioned that bamboo chuppah. I must have looked strange, because at some point my now grandson-in-law glanced over at me and asked if anything was wrong. “Just old age,” I said, which he accepted; to the young, anything unpleasant can be blamed on or attributed to old age. Outside, we heard troops marching by, the shouts of the insurgents in the distance. After they had signed their papers, we returned together to what is now their home and had some cake made with real honey that I had bought them as a special treat. None of us had had cake in months, and although I had feared conversation might be stilted, I needn’t have worried, because all of us were so focused on eating that there was little need to speak at all.

The insurgents have now taken the Square, and although the apartment faces north, we could still hear them chanting, and then the loudspeakers blaring above them, reminding everyone of the 23:00 curfew, warning that anyone who failed to obey the order would be arrested immediately. That was my cue to go home to my new apartment, a single room in an old building on 10th and University, just four blocks from Charlie: I moved in last week. She had wanted me to stay with them, just for another week, but I had reminded her that she’s an adult now, a married adult, and that I would come see her and her husband for dinner the next day, as we’d agreed. “Oh,” she had said, and for a moment, I thought she might cry, my brave Charlie who never cries, and I had almost changed my mind.

It’s been many years since I’ve slept in a place alone. As I lay there, I thought of Charlie, her first night as a spouse. For now, there’s only a single, narrow bed, the one Charlie slept on, and the sofa in the living room. I don’t know what they’ll do, if they’ll get a double bed, or if he’ll want to simply sleep apart—I couldn’t bring myself to ask. I instead tried to concentrate on the image of the two of them standing at the open door of their apartment, waving at me as I walked down the stairs. I had at one point looked up and had seen him put his hand on Charlie’s shoulder, just lightly, so lightly that she might not even have felt it. I had talked to her beforehand; I had told her what to expect—or, rather, what not to expect. But would this be enough of an explanation for her? Would she still hope her husband might come to love her in a different way? Would she hope to be touched? Would she blame herself when she was not? Had I made the wrong decision for her? I had spared her pain, but had I also denied her ecstasy?

But—I have to remind myself—at least she will have someone. I don’t only mean someone to look after her, to stand in front of her against the world, to explain things that to her are indecipherable. I mean that she is now part of a unit, the way she and I were once a unit, the way that Nathaniel and David and I were. This is not a society made for the single and unattached—not that the old society was, either, as much as we all pretended otherwise.

When I was Charlie’s age, I scoffed at marriage, thinking it an oppressive construction; I didn’t believe in a relationship legislated by the state. I had always thought that I didn’t view an unpaired life as a lesser one.

And then, one day, I realized that it was. This was during the third quarantine of ’50, and in retrospect, I can see that that was one of the happiest times of my life. Yes, it was anxious, and dangerous, and, yes, everyone was frightened. But it was the last time we were all together, as a family. Outside was the virus, and the containment centers, and people dying; inside was Nathaniel and David and I. For forty days, and then eighty days, and then a hundred and twenty days, we never left the apartment. In those months, David became softer, and we were able to become close again. He was eleven, and I can look back now and understand that he was trying to make a choice about the person he would become: Would he choose to be someone who once more tried to have the kind of life his parents led, the kind of life we expected he would lead? Or would he choose to become someone else, finding another template for who and how he could be? Who would he be? The boy of the year before, the one who threatened his classmates with a syringe—or a boy who might one day use a syringe in a different way, in the way a syringe is meant to be used, in a laboratory or hospital? In later years, I would think: If only we had had a few more weeks with him close to our side, away from the world; if only we could have convinced him that safety was valuable, and that we could be the ones to provide it to him. But we hadn’t had a few more weeks, and we hadn’t been able to convince him.

It was in the middle of the second forty days that I got an email from a long-ago friend from medical school, a woman named Rosemary who had moved to California for her postdoc when I had returned to Hawai‘i. Rosemary was brilliant and funny and had been single for as long as I had known her. We began a correspondence, our messages part workaday matters and part sweeping updates from the past twenty years. Two members of her staff had gotten sick, she wrote; her parents and closest friend had died. I told her about my life, about Nathaniel and David, about how we were together in our small apartment. I realized, I wrote her, that it had been almost eighty days since I had seen another person, and although that realization had been astonishing, what had been more so is that I had yearned for no one. David and Nathaniel were the only people I wanted to see.

She responded the next day. Wasn’t there anyone I really missed, she asked; wasn’t there anyone I couldn’t wait to see when the strictures had been lifted? No, I wrote back, there wasn’t. I meant it.

She never wrote again. Two years later, I heard from a mutual acquaintance that she’d died the year before, during one of the illness’s rebounds.

I have thought about her often since then. I came to understand that she was lonely. And although I cannot have been the only person she attempted to find who was as lonely as she was—we had spoken so infrequently that she must have tried a dozen others before she reached out to me—I wished that I had lied to her: I wished I had told her that I did miss my friends, that my family wasn’t enough. I wished I had thought to find her before she was driven to find me. I wished I hadn’t, subsequent to her death, been so grateful that I hadn’t had to live her life, that I had my husband and my son, that I would never be that alone. Thank goodness, I had thought, thank goodness that isn’t me. That pretty fiction we told ourselves when we were younger, that our friends were our family, as good as our spouses and children, was revealed in that first pandemic to be a lie: The people you loved the most were in fact the people you had chosen to live with—friends were an indulgence, a luxury, and if discarding them meant you might better protect your family, then you discarded them quickly. In the end, you chose, and you never chose your friends, not if you had a partner or a child. You moved on, and you forgot them, and your life was no poorer for it. As Charlie got older, I’m ashamed to say I thought of Rosemary more still. I would spare her that fate, I told myself—I would make sure she wasn’t pitied as I had come to pity Rosemary.

And now I have. I know that loneliness cannot be fully eradicated by the presence of another; but I also know that a companion is a shield, and without another person, loneliness steals in, a phantom seeping through the windows and down your throat, filling you with a sorrow nothing can answer. I cannot promise that my granddaughter won’t be lonely, but I have prevented her from being alone. I have made certain her life will have a witness.

Before we left for the courthouse yesterday, I had looked at her birth certificate, which we had to bring as proof of her identity. This was the new birth certificate, the one issued to me by the interior minister in ’66, the one that disavowed her father—it had protected her for a while, and then no longer.

When Charlie’s parentage had been erased, so too had her name: Charlie Keonaonamaile Bingham-Griffith, a beautiful name, bestowed with love and diminished by the state to Charlie Griffith. It was a reduction of who she was, because in this world, the world I had helped make, there was no intentional excess of beauty. The beauty that remained was incidental, accidental, the things that nothing could vanquish: the color of the sky before it rained, the first green leaves on the acacia tree on Fifth Avenue before they were picked.

It had been Nathaniel’s mother’s name: Keonaonamaile, the fragrant maile. I gave some to you once—a vine whose leaves smelled of pepper and lemons. We wore leis of them for our wedding—the day before, we had hiked into the mountains, David between us, the air around us wet, and had cut a rope of it that was growing between two koa trees. It was a lei you wore for weddings, but also for graduations and anniversaries: a special-occasion plant, back when there were so many plants that some were considered special and some were not, and you could just take them from the tree, and then the next day you would throw them away.

That day, we walked back downhill, our shoes squelching in the mud, David between us holding on to one of each of our hands. Nathaniel had cut enough maile so that we could each wear a length of it around our necks, but David had wanted to wear his wound around his head like a crown. Nathaniel helped him, tying the vine around itself and settling it on his forehead.

“I’m a king!” David had said, and we had laughed back at him. “Yes, David,” we’d said, “you’re a king—King David.”

“King David,” he said. “That’s my name now.” And then he turned serious. “Don’t forget,” he said. “You have to call me that, okay? Do you promise?”

“Okay,” we said. “We won’t forget. We will.” It was a promise.

But we never did.

Charles