To Paradise (57 page)

I know this will be a surprising thing to hear, but many scientists can be very superstitious. I say this because, over the last few years, the alarm about these reports has grown; I think everyone believes that the upcoming plague—whatever it will be—is overdue. There had been fourteen years between the illness of ’56 and the illness of ’70; now it was ’94, and nothing catastrophic had happened. Of course, as Dr. Morgan likes to say, we are in a much better position now than they were in ’70, and this is true. Our labs are more sophisticated; there’s more scientific cooperation. It’s much more difficult to spread misinformation and therefore breed panic; you can’t just get on a plane and unknowingly infect people in other countries; you can’t just share your theories of whatever’s happening on the internet with whomever you want, whenever you want; there are systems in place to segregate and humanely treat the affected. So things are better.

I was not superstitious. I may not have been a scientist, but I knew that things don’t happen according to patterns, even if it may look like it. This is why I was confident that this was just another minor
incident, just as the others had been, one that would excite for a few weeks longer and then vanish, another disease not even worthy of a name.

Every Lunar New Year, there was a limited amount of pig meat available at the grocery. Typically, the National Nutritional Unit would know by December how much pig they would be able to make available for chosen zones, and by the end of the month, a sign would go up in the grocery telling you how many half-kilo portions would be available, and how many extra protein coupons you would need to spend to purchase them. Then you had to sign up for the lottery, which was drawn on the last Sunday of January, unless the New Year came early, in which case the lottery was drawn ten days before the holiday, so you would have plenty of time to rearrange your plans if you didn’t win.

I had only won the pig lottery once, the second year my husband and I were married. After that, there had been bad weather in the prefectures and colonies where the pigs were grown, and there had been very little meat. But 2093 had been a good year, with no significant climatic events, and well-controlled outbreaks, and I was hopeful that this time, we would have pig for the holiday.

I was very excited when my number was among the chosen. It had been a long time since I had had pig, and I loved the taste of it—my husband liked it, too. I had been worried that the New Year celebration would fall on a Thursday, as it had two years ago, and I would be alone, but instead it was on a Monday, and my husband and I spent the day cooking. This is something that—two years ago aside—we had done every lunar holiday since we got married, and because of that, it was the day I looked forward to most.

I had been very smart about saving our coupons for the past four months so we could have a real feast, and along with the pig, I had also accumulated enough coupons so we could make dough: Half of the dough would be set aside for dumplings, and the other for an orange-flavored loaf. But mostly, I was excited about the pig. Every
year or so, the state tried to introduce a new substitute for pig and other kinds of animal meat, and while some were very successful, the pig- and cow-protein replacements never were. There was something wrong with the flavor, no matter how hard they tried. Eventually, though, they would stop trying, because those of us who still remembered what cow and pig tasted like would forget, and at some point, there would be children born who would never know in the first place.

We spent the morning cooking, and then ate an early dinner at 16:00. There was enough food so that we were each able to have eight dumplings, as well as rice and mustard greens my husband had stewed in some sesame oil that we had saved up to buy, and we each had a slice of cake. This was the one day every year when conversation with my husband was easy, because we were able to talk about the food. Sometimes, we even talked about food we had eaten when we were young, between the periods of severe rationing, but that was always dangerous, because it made you start thinking about a lot of other things from when you were young.

Now my husband said, “My father used to make the best shredded pig.” It didn’t seem like I needed to reply, because it was a statement, not a question, and, indeed, he continued speaking. “We had it at least twice a year, even after the rationing, and he would slow-cook it for hours, and you only needed to touch it with your fork and it would fall apart on the plate. We’d have it with runner beans and macaroni, and if there were leftovers, my mother would make it into sandwiches. My sister and I used to—” And then he stopped talking abruptly, and put down his chopsticks, and looked at the wall for a moment before picking them up again. “Anyway,” he said, “I’m glad we were able to have this tonight.”

“As am I,” I said.

That night, as we lay in our beds, I wondered what my husband had been like before we met. I thought about this more the longer we were married, especially as I didn’t know that much about him. I knew that he was from Prefecture One, and that both of his parents had been professors at a big university, and that at some point both of them had been arrested and taken to rehabilitative camps, and
that he had an older sister, who had also been removed to the camps, and that because his immediate family members had been declared enemies of the state, he had been expelled from the university where he had been a graduate student. We both had been officially forgiven under the 2087 Forgiveness Act and given good jobs, but we would never be allowed to reenroll in a university. Unlike my husband, I had no desire to return—I was satisfied being a lab tech. But my husband had wanted to be a scientist, and yet he never would. Grandfather had told me this. “I can only do so much, little cat,” he had said, but he never explained what he meant by that.

After Lunar New Year came Honor Day, which was always on a Friday. The state had instituted it in ’71. All businesses and institutes were closed on that day, and you were supposed to spend it quietly, thinking of people who had died, not just in ’70 but from any of the illnesses. The motto for Honor Day was “Not all who died were innocent, but all who died are forgiven.”

Couples usually spent Honor Day together, but my husband and I did not. He went to the center, where the state sponsored a concert of orchestral music, and lectures about grieving, and I took a walk around the Square. But now I wondered if he had in fact gone to Bethune Street.

Mostly, though, I thought of Grandfather, who had not died of an illness but was dead nonetheless. We had spent every Honor Day together, and Grandfather would show me pictures of my father, who had died in ’66, when I was two. He hadn’t died of disease, either, but it wasn’t until later that I learned that. That was also when my other grandfather had died—they had died at the same time, in the same place. It was this other grandfather to whom I was genetically related, although I can’t say I missed him, because I didn’t remember him at all. But Grandfather always said that he had loved me very much, and I liked hearing that, even though I didn’t remember him.

I can remember almost nothing of my father as well, because I have only a few memories of my life before the illness. Sometimes I had the sense that I had been a different person altogether, someone who didn’t have such a difficult time understanding other people
and what they were really trying to say beneath the thing they were actually saying. One time, I asked Grandfather if he had liked me more before I got sick, and he turned his head away for a moment and then grabbed me and held me to him, even though he knew I didn’t like that. “No,” Grandfather said, in a funny, smothered voice, “I have always loved you just the same since the day you were born. I wouldn’t want my little cat any other way,” which was nice to hear and made me feel good, like I did when it was cool enough outside to wear long sleeves and I could walk and walk and never get overheated.

But one of the reasons I suspected that I might have been different was because, in the most vivid memory I have of my father, he is laughing and twirling a little girl around by her hands, spinning her so fast that she is soaring, her feet sweeping through the air. The little girl is wearing a pale-pink dress and has a black ponytail that sails behind her, and she is laughing, too. One of the only things I remember about being sick is this image, and after I got better, I had asked Grandfather who that little girl was, and he got a strange expression on his face. “That was you, little cat,” he said. “You and your father. He would spin you around like that until you both got dizzy.” At the time, I had thought this was impossible, because I was bald and couldn’t imagine having so much hair. But then, as I got older, I thought: Suppose that
was
me, with all that hair? What else had I had that I couldn’t remember? I thought of the little girl laughing, her mouth wide open, her father laughing with her. I could never make anyone laugh, not even Grandfather, and no one could make me laugh. But once I had. It was like being told I had once known how to fly.

Grandfather had always said that Honor Day was to honor me, because I had lived. “You have two birthdays in one year, little cat,” he said. “The day you were born, and the day you came back to me.” This is why I always thought of Honor Day as my day, though I would never say that aloud, because I knew it was selfish and, moreover, was impolite, because it disregarded all those who had died. The other thing I would never say aloud was that I had liked to hear Grandfather tell me about when I was sick; how I had lain in a
hospital bed for months, and for weeks my fever had been so high that I couldn’t even talk; how almost all of my fellow patients on the ward had died; how I had one day opened my eyes and asked for Grandfather. I felt cozy hearing those stories, hearing Grandfather say how worried he had been, how he had sat by my bed every night, how he had read to me every day, how he had described to me the kinds of cakes he would get for me if I got better, cakes made with real strawberries swirled into the batter, or topped with sheets of chocolate that had been stamped to look like tree bark, or sprinkled with toasted sesame seeds. Grandfather said I had loved all sweets, especially cake, when I was a little girl, but after the illness, I had lost most of my taste for them, which was just as well, since by that point sugar had also been declared a restricted asset.

Since Grandfather had died, however, no one remembered that I had once been sick, or that someone had wanted me to get better so badly that he had come to visit me every night.

That year, Honor Day was particularly lonely. The building was silent. The day after the lunar holiday, our next-door neighbors had been taken in a raid, and although they had never been loud, it turned out that they had made more noise than I had thought, because our apartment was deeply quiet without them next to us. The day before, I had checked the envelope that contained my husband’s notes, and had found a new one, written in the same hand, on another scrap of paper. “I’ll wait for you,” it said, and that was it.

I wished, as I often did, that Grandfather were alive, or that I at least had a recent picture of him, something I could look at and talk to. But I didn’t, and I never would, and thinking about that made me so upset that I got up and began pacing, and suddenly the apartment seemed so small that I was unable to breathe, and I took my keys and ran downstairs and out onto the street.

Outside, the Square was as busy as always, as if it wasn’t actually Honor Day, and I joined the group of people who walked around and around it, feeling myself becoming calmer as I did. I felt less alone being with them, even though the reason we were all together was because we were all alone.

I used to come to the Square with Grandfather when he was alive.
Back then, there had been a cluster of storytellers who would congregate in the northeastern corner of the Square, which had been Grandfather’s favorite place to come read outdoors when he had been younger. He once told me a story about how he had been sitting on one of the wooden benches that had then snaked all along the Square, and had been eating a pig-and-egg sandwich when a squirrel leapt on his shoulder and grabbed the sandwich out of his hands and ran away with it.

I had been able to tell from Grandfather’s expression that this was a funny story, and yet I hadn’t found it funny. He had looked at me and had added, quickly, “This was before,” meaning before the epidemic of ’52, which had originated in squirrels before being transferred to humans, and had resulted in the eradication of all North American squirrels.

Anyway, when Grandfather and I had gone to the Square, it mostly had been to listen to the storytellers. They usually assembled on weekends and on occasional weekday evenings, so people could come hear them after work, and they worked in what Grandfather called a guild, meaning that they split their earnings among themselves, and arranged their own schedules so that there would never be more than three there at the same time. You came at a certain hour—say, 19:00 on the weekdays and 16:00 on the weekends—and paid either in chits or in coins. You paid in half-hour increments, so every thirty minutes, one of the storytellers’ helpers went around the audience with a bucket, and if you wanted to stay for longer, you gave him more payment, and if you wanted to leave, you left.

Different storytellers told different kinds of stories. You went to one person if you liked romances, and another if you liked fables, and another if you liked stories about animals, and another if you liked history. The storytellers were considered gray vendors. This meant that they were licensed by the state, same as the carpenters and plastic makers, but they were also much more heavily monitored. All of their stories had to be submitted to the Information Unit for approval, but there were always Flies at their sessions, and certain storytellers were known to be more dangerous than others. I remember once going to a session with Grandfather, and when
he saw who the storyteller was, he had gasped. “What is it?” I had asked. “The storyteller,” he whispered in my ear. “When I was young, he was a very famous writer. I can’t believe he’s still alive.” He had looked up at the man, who was old and had a limp and was settling onto his stool; we took our places on the ground around him, sitting on pieces of cloth or plastic bags we had brought from home. “I barely recognize him,” Grandfather murmured, and, indeed, there was something wrong with the storyteller’s face, as if the entire left-hand side of his jaw had been removed; every few sentences, he brought a handkerchief to his mouth and blotted at the saliva that was dribbling down his chin. But once I got used to his speech, the story he told—about a man who had lived here, on this very island, on this very Square, two hundred years ago, and who had forsaken great riches from his family to follow the person he loved all the way to California, a person who his family was certain would betray him—was so absorbing that I even stopped hearing the drone of the Flies that hovered above us, so absorbing that even the money collectors forgot to circulate, and it wasn’t until an entire hour had passed that the storyteller had sat back and said, “And next week, I’ll tell you what happened to the man,” and everyone, even Grandfather, had groaned with disappointment.