To Paradise (58 page)

The next week, a large group of us were waiting for the storyteller to reappear, and we waited and waited, until, finally, another of the storytellers came over and said that she was very sorry to report that her colleague was suffering from a terrible migraine, and that he wouldn’t be coming to the Square today.

“Will he be back next week?” someone called out.

“I don’t know,” the woman admitted, and even I could tell she was scared, and worried. “But we have three other excellent storytellers here with us today, and you’re all welcome to come listen to them.”

About half the crowd did join the circles of those other storytellers, but the rest of us, including Grandfather and I, did not. Instead, we walked away, Grandfather looking at the ground, and when we reached our home, he went into the bedroom and lay down facing the wall, which he did when he wanted privacy, and I stayed in the other room and listened to the radio.

For the next few weeks, Grandfather and I went back again and again to the Square, but the storyteller, the one who had been a famous writer, never appeared again. The strange thing was how upset Grandfather had been; after every trip to the Square, he would walk more slowly than usual back home.

Finally, after about a month of looking and waiting for the storyteller, I asked Grandfather what he thought had happened to him. He looked at me for a long time before he answered. “He was rehabilitated,” he said, at last. “But sometimes rehabilitations are temporary.”

I didn’t really understand what he was saying, but I somehow knew not to ask more questions. Shortly after that, the storytellers disappeared entirely, and when they finally reappeared, about eight years ago, Grandfather hadn’t wanted to go any longer, and I hadn’t wanted to go without Grandfather. But then Grandfather died, and I made myself start going, just a few times a year or so. But even all these years later, I still found myself wondering what had happened to the man who was going to California: Had he done so after all? Had his beloved been waiting for him? Was he in fact betrayed? Or had we all been wrong: Had they been reunited and become happy? Maybe they were in California together and happy still. I knew it was foolish, because they weren’t even real people, but I thought about them often. I wanted to know what had become of them.

None of the storytellers I had seen in the years since that time with Grandfather were as good as the old man had been, but most of them were fine. And most of the stories were much happier. There was one storyteller in particular who told stories about animals who did silly things and played pranks and got into mischief, but in the end, they always apologized and everything worked out fine.

This storyteller wasn’t here today, but I recognized another I liked, who told funny stories about a married couple who were always getting into mishaps: There was one in which the husband couldn’t remember if it was his turn or his wife’s turn to do the grocery shopping, and as it was their anniversary, he didn’t want to ask her, because he didn’t want her to be disappointed, and so he went
to the store and bought the tofu himself. Meanwhile, the wife also couldn’t remember if it was her turn or her husband’s to go to the store, and because it was their anniversary,
she
didn’t want to ask
him,
and so she also went to the grocery and bought some tofu. The story ended up with them both laughing over how much tofu they had bought, and making it into all kinds of delicious stews, which they ate together. Of course, this story was unrealistic: From where were they getting all these protein coupons? Wouldn’t they have fought after realizing they’d wasted so many of them? Who forgot whose turn it was to go to the store? And yet that wasn’t part of the story. The teller mimicked their voices—the man’s high and worrying, the woman’s low and dithering—and the audience laughed, not because it was true but because it was a problem that wasn’t actually a problem yet was being treated like it was.

As I crouched in the back row, I felt someone sit next to me. Not too close, but close enough so that I could feel their presence. But I didn’t look up, and they didn’t look over. This story was about the same married couple, both of whom thought they had misplaced a dairy coupon. It wasn’t as good as the tofu story, but it was good enough, and when the collectors came around, I put a coupon into the bucket so I could stay for the next half hour.

The storyteller announced there would be a short intermission, and some people brought out little tins of snacks and began to eat. I wished I had thought to bring a snack as well, but I hadn’t. But as I was thinking that, the person next to me spoke.

“Do you want one?” he asked.

I turned and saw that he was holding out a small paper bag of precracked walnuts, and I shook my head: It was unwise to take food from strangers—no one had enough food to just offer it to someone they didn’t know, and so if they did, it generally meant that something was potentially suspicious. “Thank you, though,” I said, and as I did, I looked at him and realized it was the man I had seen at the shuttle stop, the one with the long curls. I was so surprised that I just stared at him, but he didn’t seem offended, and even smiled. “I’ve seen you before,” he said, and when I still didn’t say anything,
he tilted his head to one side, still smiling. “In the mornings,” he said, “at the shuttle stop.”

“Oh,” I said, as if I hadn’t recognized him immediately. “Oh, yes. Right.”

He bent over another walnut, splitting it in half with his thumb and breaking off the remaining bits of its shell in neat shards. As he did, I was able to study him; he was wearing a cap again, but I couldn’t see any hair under it, and beneath it he wore a gray nylon shirt and gray pants, of the sort my husband also wore. “Do you come to hear this storyteller often?” he asked.

It took a moment for me to realize he was talking to me, and when I did, I didn’t know what to say. No one talked to me unless they had to: the grocer, asking me if I wanted nutria or dog or tempeh; the Ph.D.s, telling me they needed more pinkies; the dispenser at the center, holding out her machine and asking for my fingerprint to confirm I’d received the correct number of coupons for the month. And yet here was this person, a stranger, asking me a question, and not only asking me but smiling, smiling like he really wanted to know the answer. The last person who had smiled at me and asked me questions was, of course, Grandfather, and, remembering that, I became very upset, and started to rock in place, just a little, but when I caught myself and looked up again, he was still looking at me, still smiling, as if I were just another person.

“Yes,” I said, but that wasn’t really true. “No,” I corrected myself. “I mean, sometimes. Sometimes I do.”

“Me too,” he replied, in that same voice, as if I were no different from anyone else, as if I were the kind of person who had conversations all the time.

Then it was my turn to say something, but I couldn’t think of anything, and once again, the man saved me. “Have you lived in Zone Eight for long?” he asked.

This should have been an easy question, but I hesitated. In truth, I had lived in Zone Eight for my entire life. When I was born, however, there were no zones; this was simply an area, and you could move all around the island as you wanted, and you could live in
whatever district you preferred, assuming you had enough money to afford it. Then, when I was seven, the zones were established, but as Grandfather and I already lived in what was now called Zone Eight, it wasn’t as if we had to move, or be reassigned.

But all that seemed like too much to say, so I just said I had.

“I just moved here,” said the man, after I had forgotten to ask him if he had lived in the zone for very long. (“A good thing to remember in a conversation is reciprocity,” Grandfather had said. “That means that you should ask the person what they just asked you. So, if they say to you, ‘How are you?,’ then you should reply and then ask, ‘And how are you?’ ”) “I used to live in Zone Seventeen, but this is much nicer.” He smiled again. “I live in Little Eight,” he added.

“Oh,” I said. “Little Eight’s nice,” I said.

“It is,” he said. “I live in Building Six.”

“Oh,” I said again. Building Six was the biggest building in Little Eight, and you could only live there if you were unmarried, had worked for at least three years for one of the state projects, and were under the age of thirty-five. You had to enter a special lottery to live in Building Six, and no one lived there for longer than two years at most, because one of the benefits of living there was that the state helped arrange your marriage. This was the kind of task that had once fallen to your parents, but fewer adults had parents these days. People called it “Building Sex.”

It was unusual but not unheard-of to be transferred from Zone Seventeen into Zone Eight, and specifically into Building Six. It was more common if you were a scientist or a statistician or an engineer, someone learned, but I already knew from the jumpsuit he had been wearing at the shuttle stop that this man was a tech, maybe a higher-grade tech than I was, but still not someone with top clearance. Still, perhaps he had performed some exceptional service: For example, there were sometimes reports of how a botany tech at the Farm had quickly moved all the seedlings in his care to another laboratory when his own lab’s generator failed; or, in a more extreme case, how an animal tech had thrown himself in front of his fetus jars to save them from gunfire when his convoy was set upon by insurgents.
(That person had died, but was given a posthumous promotion and commendation.)

I was wondering what the man had done to merit his move when the storyteller returned and started talking again. The new story was about the man and woman planning an anniversary present for each other. The man asked his supervisor for time off and entered the lottery for orchestra tickets. Meanwhile, the woman had also asked her supervisor for time off and had also entered a lottery, for a concert of folk music. But in their attempts to keep their plans a surprise, they had forgotten to coordinate their dates, and had gotten the tickets for the same night. In the end, though, it had all worked out, because the man’s colleague had offered to trade his own orchestra tickets for a later date, so the man and the woman got to have two celebrations, and both were pleased that their spouse had been so thoughtful.

Everyone clapped and began gathering their things, but I remained seated. I was wondering what the man in the story did on his free nights, and what the woman did on hers.

Then I heard someone speak to me. “Hey,” the person said, and I looked up, and the man with the long hair was standing next to me, holding out his hand. For a moment I was confused, and then I realized he was offering me help to stand, though I got up on my own, dusting off my pants as I did.

I was worried I had been rude to reject him, but when I looked at him again, he was still smiling. “That was nice,” he said.

“Yes,” I said.

“Are you going to come next week?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Well,” he said, shifting his bag on his shoulder, “I am.” He paused. “Maybe I’ll see you again.”

“All right,” I said.

He smiled again and turned to leave. But after he had walked a few steps, he stopped and turned back around. “I never asked you your name,” he said.

He made it sound as if this were unusual, as if everyone I met or
worked with knew my name, as if it were rude or extraordinary to not know. I cannot say that other people were not asked for their names; I cannot say that it was unsafe to tell someone your name. I thought of the two young women scientists at work, and how people must ask their names all the time. I thought of my husband in the house on Bethune Street, the familiar way that the man at the door had said, “You’re late tonight,” and how, in that house, everyone would know his name. I thought of the person sending him notes, and how that person too would know his name. I thought of the postdocs and scientists and Ph.D.s at work, all of whose names I knew—they knew my name, too, though not because it was mine; they knew it because they knew what it represented, they knew that my name explained why I was there at all.

But when was the last time someone had asked me my name simply because they wanted to know? Not because they needed it for a form or for a sample or to check my records—but because they wanted something to call me, because they were curious, because someone had thought to give it to me and they wanted to know what it was.

It had been years; it had been since I met my husband seven years ago in that marriage broker’s office in Zone Nine. I had told him my name, and he had told me his, and then we had talked. One year later, we were married. Three months after that, Grandfather was dead. It felt like no one had asked me since then.

So I turned to the man in gray, who was still standing there, waiting for me to answer.

“Charlie,” I told him. “My name is Charlie.”

“I’m pleased to meet you, Charlie,” he said.

Dearest P,
February 3, 2054

Something strange happened to me today.

It was about two p.m., and I was about to catch the eastbound crosstown bus on 96th Street when, at the last minute, I decided to walk home instead. It’s been raining for weeks, so much that the East River flooded again, and they had to sandbag the entire eastern part of campus, and this was the first clear day. Not sunny, but not rainy, and warm, almost hot.

It had been a long time since I had walked through the Park, and after a few minutes, I found myself wandering north. It occurred to me as I did that I hadn’t been to this part of the Park—the Ravine, as it’s called, which is the wildest part, a large patch of simulated nature—since I was visiting New York as a university student, and how exotic it had seemed to me back then, exotic and beautiful. It had been December, when December was still cold, and although I had seen enough of East Coast and New England foliage by then, I had still been mesmerized by how brown it had been, brown and black and chill, dazzling in its starkness. I remember I had been impressed by how noisy winter was. The fallen leaves, the fallen twigs, the thin layer of ice that had accumulated on the paths: You stepped on them and they crunched and cracked beneath you, and above you the branches rustled in the wind, and around you there was the sound of melting ice dripping onto stone. I was used to being in jungles, where the plants are silent because they never
lose their moisture. Instead of shriveling, they sag, and when they fall to the ground, they become not husks but paste. A jungle is silent.

Now, of course, the Ravine looks very different. It sounds different, too. Those trees—elms, poplars, maples—are long gone, withered to death by the heat, and replaced with trees and ferns that I remember from growing up, things that still look out of place here. But they’ve done well in New York—arguably, better than I have. Around 98th Street, I walked through a large copse of green bamboo, one that stretched north for at least five blocks. It created a tunnel of cool, green-scented air, something enchanted and lovely, and for a while I stood in it, inhaling, before finally exiting around 102nd Street, near the Loch, which is a man-made river that runs from 106th to 102nd Street. That picture I sent you, years ago, of David and Nathaniel wearing those scarves you gave to us? That was taken here, on one of his school field trips. I hadn’t been there.

Anyway, it was as I was leaving the bamboo tunnel, distracted, oxygen-dizzy, that I heard a sound, a splashing, coming from the Loch to my right. I turned, expecting to see a bird, perhaps, one of the flock of flamingos that flew north last year and then never left, when I saw it: a bear. A black bear, an adult by the looks of it. He was sitting, almost humanlike, on one of the large flat rocks on the riverbed, and leaning forward, resting his weight on his left paw as, with his right, he scooped the water, letting it run through his claws. As he did, he made a low sound, a growling. He wasn’t angry, I felt, but frantic—there was something intense and focused about his searching; he looked almost like a prospector from an old Western movie panning for gold.

I stood there, unable to move, trying to remember what you were supposed to do when you encountered a bear (Make yourself big? Or make yourself small? Make noise? Or run?), but he didn’t even turn toward me. But then the wind must have changed, and he must have smelled me, for he suddenly looked up, and as I took a first, tentative step away from him, he drew himself up on his hind legs and roared.

He was going to run at me. I knew it before I knew it, and I opened my mouth too, to scream, but before I could, there was a swift popping noise and the bear tumbled backward, all seven feet of him falling into the stream with a loud splash, and I saw the water staining itself red.

Then a man was by my side, another jogging toward the bear. “That was close,” said the man nearest me. “Sir? You okay? Sir?”

He was a ranger, but I wasn’t able to speak, and he unzipped a pocket on his vest, handed me a plastic sleeve of liquid. “You’re in shock,” he said. “Drink it—there’s sugar in it.” But my fingers wouldn’t work, and he had to open it for me, and help me detach my mask so I could drink. Next to me, I heard a second gunshot, and flinched. The man spoke into his radio: “We got him, sir. Yeah. The Loch. No—one passerby. No apparent fatalities.”

Finally, I was able to speak. “That was a bear,” I said, stupidly.

“Yes, sir,” said the ranger, patiently (I saw then that he was very young). “We’ve been hunting this one for a while.”

“
This
one?” I asked. “So there’ve been others?”

“Six over the past twelve months or so,” he said, and then, seeing my face, “We’ve kept it quiet. No fatalities, no attacks. This was the last of a clan we’ve been tracking. He’s the alpha.”

They had to take me back through the bamboo forest to their wagon to interrogate me about my encounter, and then they let me go. “Probably best not to be in this area of the Park anymore,” said the senior ranger. “Word is, the city’s going to shut it down in a couple of months anyway. The state’s commandeered it, going to use it as some facility.”

“The whole Park?” I asked.

“Not yet,” he said, “but likely north of Ninety-sixth Street. You take care, now.”

They drove away, and I stood there on the path for a few minutes. Next to me was a bench, and I stripped off my gloves and unbuckled my mask and sat there inhaling and exhaling, smelling the air, and running my hands over the wood, which was worn smooth and glossy from years of people sitting on it and touching it. It registered that I was lucky; to be saved, of course, and that my
saviors were city rangers and not soldiers, who would surely have removed me to an interrogation center for questioning, because questioning is what soldiers do. Then I got up and walked quickly toward Fifth Avenue, and from there I caught a bus the rest of the way east.

No one was in the apartment when I got home. It was only about half past three by then, but I was too jumpy to return to the lab. I texted Nathaniel and David, put my mask and gloves in the sanitizer, washed my hands and face, took a pill so I could relax, and lay down in bed. I thought of the bear, the last of his clan, about how, when he stood, I could see that, despite his size, he was skinny, gaunt even, and that his fur had fallen out in patches. It was only now, now that I was away from him, that I could understand that what had terrified me most about him was not how large he was, or the bear-ness of him, but how I had intuited his panic, the kind of panic that resulted only from extreme hunger, the kind of hunger that drove you crazy, that drove you south, along highways and through streets, into a place you knew instinctively never to go, where you would be surrounded by creatures who only meant you harm, where you would be going toward your own inevitable death. You knew that, and yet you went anyway, because hunger, stopping that hunger, is more important than self-protection; it is more important than life. I saw, again and again, his huge red mouth opened wide, his front incisor rotted away, his black eyes bright with terror.

I slept. When I woke, it was dark—I was still alone. The baby was seeing his therapist; Nathaniel would be working late. I knew I should do something useful, get up and make dinner, go down to the lobby and ask the super if he needed help changing the filter on the decontamination pod. But I didn’t. I just lay there in the dark, looking at the sky and watching night approach.

Now comes the part I’ve been avoiding.

I suppose, if you’ve read this far, you’re wondering why I was walking across the Park in the first place. And you’ve probably guessed that it relates to the baby, because everything I have done wrong seems to relate to him in some way.

As you know, this is the baby’s third school in three years, and it’s been made clear to me by the principal that this is his last chance. How can it be his last chance when he’s not even fifteen? I’d asked, and the principal, a sour little man, frowned at me. “I mean you’re out of good options,” he said, and although I wanted to punch him, I didn’t, in part because I knew he was right: This is David’s last chance. He has to make this one work.

The school is across the Park, on 94th just west of Columbus, in what was once a grand apartment building and had been purchased by the school’s founder back in the ’20s, at the height of the charter-school craze. Then it got converted into a private school for boys with “behavioral difficulties.” They have small classes, and every student gets after-school therapy if he or his parents request it. It was emphasized to me and Nathaniel many times that David was very,
very
lucky to be admitted, as they have many,
many
more applicants than the school can accommodate, more than in the school’s history in fact, and it was only because of our
special connections
—the RU president knows one of the trustees and wrote a letter, in part I think out of guilt that David had been expelled from the RU school, thus leading to this three-year-long shuffle—that he was there at all. (Later, I thought about the improbability of this statement: Statistically, the number of boys under the age of eighteen had decreased significantly in the last four years. So how was it that admissions had become more difficult than ever? Had they adjusted the size of the student body accordingly? That night, I asked Nathaniel what he thought about this, and he only groaned and said he was just grateful that I had known not to ask the principal that.)

Since the school year began in October—as I told you earlier, they moved it back a month after what turned out to be a localized flare-up of the virus in late August, source still unknown—the baby has been in trouble twice. The first time was for talking back to his math teacher. The second time was for skipping two of his behavioral-therapy sessions (unlike the after-school sessions, which are one-on-one and voluntary, these are conducted in small groups
and are mandatory). And then, yesterday, we were called again, about a paper David had written for his English class.

“You’re going to have to go,” Nathaniel said last night, tiredly, as we read the email from the principal. He didn’t need to say it—I had had to go to the last two conferences myself as well. Another detail I didn’t mention is that the school is fiendishly expensive; after his school shut down last year, Nathaniel was finally able to find a job tutoring a set of six-year-old twins in Cobble Hill. Their parents haven’t let them out of the house since ’50, and Nathaniel and another tutor spend all day with them—it’s impossible for him to come back to the city before evening.

Upon arriving at the school, I was led to the principal’s office, where a young woman, the English teacher, was waiting as well. She was nervous, fluttery, and when I looked at her, she turned away, her hand flitting about her cheek. Later, I saw that she had tried to hide the pockmarks on her jawline with makeup, and that her wig was cheap and probably itchy, and I felt a tenderness for her, despite the fact that she had reported my son: She was a survivor.

“Dr. Griffith,” said the principal. “Thank you for coming in. We wanted to talk to you about David’s paper for English class. Do you know about this paper?”

“Yes,” I said. It had been his assignment last week:
Write about a significant anniversary in your life. It can be about the first time you went somewhere or experienced something or met someone now important to you. Be creative! Just don’t write about your birthday, because that’s too easy. Five hundred words. Make sure to give your paper a title! Due next Monday.

“Did you read what he wrote?”

“Yes?” I said. But I hadn’t. I had asked David if he needed help, and he had said no, and then I had forgotten to ask what he ended up writing.

The principal looked at me. “No,” I admitted. “I know I should have, I’ve just been so busy, and my husband has a new job, and—”

He raised his hand. “I have the paper here,” he said, and handed me his screen. “Why don’t you read it now.” It wasn’t a request. (I have cleaned up the misspellings and grammatical errors within.)

“four years.” an anniversary.
by david bingham-griffith

This year is the fourth anniversary of the discovery of NiVid-50, more commonly known as Lombok syndrome, and the most serious pandemic in history since AIDS in the last century. It has killed 88,895 people in New York City alone. It is also the fourth anniversary of the death of civil rights and the beginning of a fascist state spreading misinformation to people who want to believe anything they’re told by the government.

Take, for example, the common name of the disease, which supposedly originated in Lombok, an island in Indonesia. The disease is a zoonosis, which means it is a disease that began in an animal and then got transferred into the human population. Zoonoses have been increasing in incidence every year for the past eighty years, and the reason is because more and more wild land has been developed, and animals have lost their habitats and have been forced to come into closer contact with humans than they were ever meant to. In this case, the disease was in bats, which were later eaten by civet cats, and then those civet cats infected the livestock, which infected humans. The problem is that Lombok doesn’t have the land to sustain cattle, and as Muslims, they don’t eat pork. So how can the illness really have originated there? Isn’t this another case of blaming Asian countries for global diseases? We did it in ’30, and in ’35, and in ’47, and now we are doing it again.

Various governments worked quickly to try to contain the virus, while also blaming Indonesia for being dishonest, but the American government is hardly honest itself. Everyone thought this was all good, but then all immigration to America ceased, and families were torn apart, and thousands of people either drowned at sea or were turned away to die on boats. My homeland, the Kingdom of Hawai
‘
i, completely isolated themselves, but it didn’t make a difference, and now I can never return to the place where I was born. Here in America, martial law was declared, and large camps for sick people and
desperate refugees were opened on Roosevelt and Governor’s Islands in New York, and in many other places, too. The American government needs to be overthrown.