To Paradise (55 page)

We sat in silence for a while. He shifted in his seat. We never talked much over dinner, but at least we were doing an activity together when we sat down to eat. But now it was like we were in two glass boxes that had been placed next to each other, and although other people could see us, we couldn’t see or hear anything outside our own boxes, and had no idea of how close we were to each other.

He shifted in his seat again. He turned the page and then turned
it back, rereading what he’d already looked at. He looked up at the clock, and so did I. It was 19:14. “Damnit,” he said. “I wonder where he is?” He looked at me. “There hadn’t been a note, had there?”

“No,” I said, and he shook his head and looked down at his book again.

Five minutes later, he looked up. “What time was he supposed to be here?” he asked.

“Nineteen hundred,” I said, and he shook his head once more.

A few minutes later, he closed his book entirely, and we both sat there, staring at the clock, its blank, round face.

Suddenly my husband stood. “I have to go,” he said, “I have to leave.” It was 19:33. “I—I have to be somewhere. I’m already late.” He looked at me. “Cobra—if he comes, can you handle this on your own?”

I knew that he wanted me to be able to handle things on my own, and all at once I felt scared, as if I really were facing the prospect of talking to the building manager by myself, without my husband here; it was almost like I had forgotten that the manager wasn’t coming at all, that this entire incident was something I’d invented in order to do something that should have been much scarier: following my husband on his free night.

“Yes,” I said. “I can handle it.”

He smiled then, one of his rare smiles. “You’re going to be fine,” he said. “You’ve met the manager before; he’s a nice man. And I’ll come home early tonight, while you’re still awake, all right?”

“All right,” I agreed.

“Don’t be nervous,” he said. “You know how to do this.” This was something that Grandfather used to say to me as well:
You know how to do this, little cat. There’s nothing to be afraid of.
And then he took his anorak from the hook. “Good night,” he said, as the door closed.

“Good night,” I said to the closed door.

I waited just twenty seconds after my husband closed the door before I too left the apartment. I had already packed a bag with some things
I thought I might need, including one of the small flashlights, and a notebook and pencil, and a thermos of water in case I got thirsty, and my anorak in case I got cold, though that was unlikely.

Outside, it was dark and warm, but not hot, and there were more people than usual, walking around the Square, walking home from the store. I spotted my husband immediately: He was heading briskly north on Fifth Avenue, and I followed him as he turned west on Ninth Street. It was the same route we both took every morning, at separate times, to the shuttle stop, and for a second, I wondered whether he was going to wait for the shuttle again and go back up to work. But he kept walking, crossing Sixth Avenue and through the area we called Little Eight, for its complex of high-rise apartment towers that made it feel like its own zone within Zone Eight, and then across Seventh Avenue as well, and still he kept going.

This was much farther west than I typically had reason to go. Zone Eight extended from New First Street at its southernmost point to Twenty-third Street in its north, and from Broadway on its east over to Eighth Avenue, and the river, on its west. Technically, the zone had extended farther still, but ten years ago, most of the territory beyond Eighth Avenue had been flooded during the last great storm, which meant that the people who had chosen to remain in river flats were residents of Zone Eight as well. But with every year, more and more of them were relocated, because strange things were being discovered in the river, and it was unclear how safe it was to live there.

Zone Eight was Zone Eight, and there was meant to be no hierarchy within it, no area that was considered better than any other. That was what the state told us. But if you
lived
in Zone Eight, you knew that there were in fact places—like where my husband and I lived—that were more desirable than others. There were no grocery stores west of Sixth Avenue, for example, or washing or hygiene centers except for the one that was only accessible to people who lived in Little Eight, which also maintained something called a Pantry, where you could buy nonperishable items, like grains and powdered food, but nothing that would spoil.

As I have said, Zone Eight was one of the safest districts on the
island, if not in the entire municipality. Still, there were rumors about what happened near the river, just as there were rumors about what happened in Zone Seventeen, which ran along Zone Eight’s north and south axes but then extended all the way to the riverbanks on First Avenue, on the eastern shore. One rumor is that the far western part of Zone Eight was haunted. I had asked Grandfather about that once, and he had taken me over to Eighth Avenue to show me that there were no ghosts there. He said that story had begun before I was born, when there had been a series of underground tunnels that ran beneath the streets, and had extended all the way to the relocation centers, although back then they weren’t centers, they were districts, like Zone Eight, where people lived and worked. Then, after the pandemic of ’70, they were closed, and people began telling stories that the state had used these tunnels as isolation centers for the affected, who by that point numbered in the hundreds of thousands, and then had sealed them up with cement, and everyone in them had died.

“Is that true?” I asked Grandfather. We were standing near the river by then, and speaking very softly, for it was treasonous to even discuss this. I always felt scared when Grandfather and I talked about illegal topics, but also good, because I knew that he knew that I could keep secrets, and that I would never betray him.

“No,” Grandfather said. “Those stories are apocryphal.”

“What does that mean?” I asked him.

“It means untrue,” he said.

I thought about this. “If it’s not true, why do people tell them?” I asked him, and he looked away, into the distance, to the factories on the other side of the river.

“Sometimes, when people tell stories like that, what they’re really trying to express is their fear, or their anger. The state did a lot of horrible things back then,” he said, slowly, and I felt that same thrill, hearing someone talking about the state that way, and that that someone was my grandfather. “Many horrible things,” he repeated, after a pause. “But that was not one of them.” He looked at me. “Do you believe me?”

“Yes,” I said. “I believe everything you say, Grandfather.”

He looked away from me again, and I worried I had said something wrong, but he only put his palm on the back of my head, and said nothing.

What remained true is that the tunnels had been sealed up long ago, and it was said that if you went close to the river late at night, you would hear the sobs and moans of the people who had been left to die within them.

The other thing that people said about the far western edge of Zone Eight is that there were buildings there that
looked
like buildings, but in which nobody lived. It took me a few years of eavesdropping on the Ph.D.s to understand what they meant by that.

Much of Zone Eight had been built centuries ago, in the eighteen hundreds and early nineteen hundreds, but a good deal of it had been demolished shortly before I was born and replaced with towers, which had doubled as clinics. Before then, the population had been very high, and people came to the municipality from all over the world. But then the illness of ’50 had stopped almost all immigration, and then the illnesses of ’56 and ’70 had solved the problem of overcrowding, which meant that, while Zone Eight was still a high-density district, no one lived here illegally now. However, some of the zone’s original buildings had been spared, especially those close to Fifth Avenue and the Square, and those close to Eighth Avenue. Here, the buildings resembled the one my husband and I lived in; they were made from red brick and were rarely more than four stories high. Some of them were even smaller, and held only four units.

According to the Ph.D.s whose conversations I listened to, there were a few of these buildings close to the river that had once been divided into apartments, the same as our building, but had over the years become places where nobody lived. Instead, you went to these buildings to—well, I did not know what you went to the buildings to do, only that it was illegal, and that when the Ph.D.s talked about them, they laughed and said things like “You’d know all about that, wouldn’t you, Foxley?” This is how I surmised that these were dangerous but also exciting places that the Ph.D.s pretended they knew about but would never actually be bold enough to visit.

By this time, I was very near the river, on a street called Bethune. When I was a child, the state had tried to relabel all the named streets with numbers instead, which mostly affected Zones Seven, Eight, Seventeen, Eighteen, and Twenty-one. But it hadn’t worked, and people continued to call them by their twentieth-century names. All this time, my husband hadn’t looked behind him once. It had grown very dark, and I was lucky he was wearing a light-gray anorak, one I could easily follow. He had clearly walked this route many times before—at one point, he abruptly stepped down from the sidewalk to the street, and when I looked at the sidewalk, I saw there was an enormous gouge in it, and he had known to avoid it.

Bethune was one of the streets people thought was haunted, even though it wasn’t near one of the former entrances to the underground tunnels. But it still had all its trees, even though they were mostly bare, and I suppose that was what made it look so old-fashioned and gloomy. It was also one of the streets that hadn’t been flooded, and therefore extended all the way west to Washington Street. Here, my husband walked to the middle of the block and then he stopped, and looked about him.

There was no one on the street but me, and I quickly moved behind one of the trees. I wasn’t concerned about him seeing me: I was wearing black clothes and black shoes, and my skin is fairly dark—I knew I wouldn’t be visible. In fact, my husband’s coloring is similar to mine, and it was by that point so dark that, had I not known to look for his anorak, I might not have seen him myself.

“Hello?” my husband called. “Is anyone there?”

I know this will sound foolish, but in that moment, I wanted to respond. “I’m here,” I would have said, and stepped onto the sidewalk. “I just want to know where you go,” I would have said. “I want to be with you.” But I couldn’t think of what he would say in response.

So I said nothing, just hid behind the tree. But I did think of how calm my husband sounded, how calm and how determined.

Then he was moving again, and I came out from behind the tree and followed him, this time with a little more distance between us.
Finally, he reached number 27, one of the final houses on the block, an old-fashioned building somewhat like the one we lived in, and he looked around again before climbing the stone steps and rapping a complicated knock on the door:
tap-ta-taptap-tap-tap-tap-ta-tap-taptap.
Then a little window slid open in the door, and my husband’s face was illuminated by a rectangle of light. Someone must have asked him something, because he said something back, something I couldn’t hear, and then the window shut and the door opened just wide enough for my husband to slip inside. “You’re late tonight,” I heard someone, a man, say before the door closed once more.

And then he was gone. I stood outside the building, staring up at it. From the street, it looked unoccupied. There was no light, there was no sound. After I had waited five minutes, I climbed the steps myself and pressed my ear against the door, which was covered in peeling black paint. I listened and listened. But there was nothing. It was as if my husband had disappeared—not into a house but into another world altogether.

It wasn’t until the next day, when I was back in the safety of my room at the lab, that I comprehended fully the riskiness of the previous night’s activities. What if my husband had seen me? What if someone had seen me following him and had suspected me of illegal activities?

But then I had to remind myself that my husband had not seen me. No one had seen me. And if by chance I had been recorded by some stray Fly that was patrolling the area, I would simply tell the police that my husband had forgotten his glasses when he went on his nightly walk, and that I was taking them to him.

After I returned to the apartment, I had gone to bed early, so that when my husband came home I was already pretending to be asleep. I had left him a note in the bathroom saying that the leak had been fixed, and I heard him push back the curtain to examine the showerhead. I couldn’t tell if he had in fact returned earlier than
he normally did, as there was no clock in the bedroom. I
could
tell he thought I was asleep, because he was very quiet, undressing and dressing in the dark.

I had been so distracted that day that it took me some time to realize that there was something amiss in the lab, and it was only when I brought over a fresh batch of pinkies to the Ph.D. cluster that I noticed that the reason they were so quiet was that they all had their headsets on and were all listening to the radio.

There were two radios in the lab. One was a normal radio, of the sort everyone had. The second was a radio that only broadcast to sanctioned research facilities around the world, so that different scientists could announce any pertinent findings and give lectures or updates. Typically, of course, such research would be shared in papers that could only be accessed by accredited scientists on highly secure computers. But when there was something urgent, it would be shared on this special radio, which broadcast a soundscreen of noise atop the person speaking; this meant that, unless you had the proper headphones to cancel the soundscreen, you would hear only a randomized, meaningless sound, like crickets chirping or a fire burning. Each person who was authorized to listen to this radio had a sequence of numbers that they had to enter first, and each sequence was registered to a different user, so the state could monitor who was listening at any time. The headphones, too, were only activated once you entered your code, and before leaving the lab for the night, the scientists locked their sets in a safe that was arranged as a series of small boxes; they each had to enter another code for their box door to open.