To Paradise (59 page)

My father is the scientist who did early work on the disease. He didn’t discover it, someone else did that, but he was the one who found out it was a mutation of an earlier diagnosed disease called a Nipah virus. My father works for Rockefeller University and is very important. He supports the quarantines, as well as the camps. He says that sometimes you just have to hold your nose and do these things. He says that a disease has no better friend than a democracy. My other father says that he

And then it ended, just there on “says that he.” I tried flicking past the screen, to see if there might be a second page, but there wasn’t. When I looked up at the principal and the teacher, they were both studying me with serious expressions.

“Well,” said the principal. “You can see the issue here. Or, rather, issues.”

But I couldn’t. “Like what?” I asked.

They both sat straighter in their chairs. “Well, for one, he had help writing this,” said the principal.

“That’s not a crime,” I said. “Anyway, how do you know? It’s not even that sophisticated.”

“No,” he admitted, “but, given David’s difficulty with writing, it’s clear he had a
lot
of help, help that goes beyond just proofreading or editing.” A pause, and then, with some triumph: “He already confessed, Dr. Griffith. He’s been paying a college student he met online to write his papers.”

“Then he’s been wasting his money,” I said, but neither of them answered. “It’s not even complete.”

“Dr. Griffith,” said the English teacher, in a surprisingly soft and melodic voice, “we take cheating very seriously here. But we both know that the bigger problem is that it’s not—it’s not safe for David to be writing such things.”

“Maybe not, if he were a government functionary,” I said. “But he’s not. He’s a fourteen-year-old boy whose entire extended family
died before he even got to say goodbye to them, and he’s a student in a private school to which my husband and I pay a great deal of money to protect and instruct him.”

They sat up again. “I resent the implication that we’d ever—” the principal began, but the teacher stopped him, laying a hand on his arm. “Dr. Griffith, we would never turn David in,” she said, “but he needs to be careful. Do you monitor who his friends are, who he’s talking to, what he’s saying at home, what he’s doing online?”

“Of course,” I said, because I did, but as I spoke, I felt myself flushing, as if they knew that I knew that I hadn’t been watching him closely enough, and also that they knew why—I didn’t want to discover that David was drifting further from us; I didn’t want to have to face the fact of more misbehavior; I didn’t want more evidence that I didn’t understand my own son, that for years he had been becoming increasingly unknowable to me, that for years I had felt it was my fault.

I got out of there soon after with a promise to talk to David about being careful with what he said and wrote about the government, and to remind him about the anti-state language statutes that had been implemented shortly after the riots, and that we were still living under martial law.

But I didn’t talk to him. I walked through the Park, I saw the bear, I came home, I took a nap. And then, before Nathaniel or David came home, I hurriedly left for the lab, where I’m sitting at midnight and writing you this letter.

I never thought we would have lived here for almost eleven years, Peter. I never meant for David to have to spend his childhood in this city, in this country. “When we’re back home,” we always said to him, until we didn’t. And now there is no home to return to;
this
is home, except it has never felt like it, and still doesn’t. From my office window, I have a direct view of the crematorium they built on Roosevelt Island. The president of RU vigorously protested it—the ash clouds would, he said, drift westward toward the university—but the city built it anyway, with the argument that if everything went as planned, the crematorium would only be used for a few years. Which has turned out to be true: Three times a day for three years,
we would watch black smoke trail from its chimneys, vanishing into the sky. But now the burnings have been reduced to once a month, and the skies are clear again.

Nathaniel is texting me. I’m not answering.

But the thing I keep thinking about is the final lines of David’s essay. He had written them himself—I could tell. I could see his face as he typed them out, that look of bafflement and disdain I sometimes catch him giving me. He doesn’t understand why I’ve made the decisions I’ve had to make, but he doesn’t have to—he’s a child. So why do I feel this overwhelming guilt, this sense of apology, when all I’ve done is what needed to be done in order to stop the spread of illness? “My other father says”: What? What is Nathaniel saying about me? We fought, terribly, loudly, the day I told him I had decided to work with the government on the containment measures. The baby hadn’t been there—he had been downtown, with Aubrey and Norris—but I wonder if Nathaniel said something to him; I wonder what they talked about while I was away. How was that final sentence going to end? “My other father says that my father is trying to do what’s right in order to protect us”? “My other father says that my father is doing the best that he can”?

Or was it, as I fear, something else entirely? “My other father says that my father has become someone we can’t respect”? “My other father says that my father is a bad person”? “My other father says that it’s my father’s fault we’re here, alone, with no one to save us”?

Which one, Peter? How was it going to end?

Charles

Dearest Peter,
October 22, 2054

I have to start by thanking you for talking to me about David last week—you made me feel a little better. There’s more to say, but I’ll say it in another email. And we can also discuss Olivier—I have some thoughts.

I’m afraid that I don’t know any more about the reports coming out of Argentina than you do, only that they look potentially troubling. I talked to a friend at NIAID, who said that the next three weeks will be critical; if it hasn’t spread by then, we should be fine. The Argentine government, as I understand it, is being surprisingly cooperative—meek, even. They suspended all access in and out of Bariloche, but I suspect you already know this. You’re going to have to give me an update—I know a little about the epidemiological aspect of it, but my understanding is mainly limited to virology, and I doubt would be very illuminating considering what you already know.

Now some updates of my own. As I mentioned, our request for a car was finally approved, and on Sunday, one was delivered. It’s a standard-issue government model, navy-blue, very basic. But with the subway system still so hampered, it made sense—it takes Nathaniel almost two hours to get to Cobble Hill in the mornings.
And
I was able to make a persuasive case that I needed to make regular trips to Governor’s Island and Bethesda, and that getting a car would ultimately be cheaper than biweekly plane or train tickets.

The plan was that the car would be mostly Nathaniel’s to use, but as it happened, I was called down to NIAID on Monday (a bureaucratic check-in as part of this new cross-institutional effort, unrelated to Bariloche), so I took the car and spent the night there and drove up from Maryland on Tuesday. As I was crossing the bridge, though, I got a text from the Holsons, the family whose sons Nathaniel tutors: Nathaniel had fainted. I tried calling them, but as usual these days, there was no reception, and so I turned and sped into Brooklyn.

Nathaniel has worked for this family for more than a year, but we speak about them very little. Mr. Holson, who brokers corporate mergers, spends most of his time in the Gulf. Mrs. Holson was a corporate lawyer but quit to stay home with her sons when they were diagnosed.

The Holsons live in a beautiful brownstone, two hundred years or more old, renovated with money and taste; the steps leading to the front door had been rebuilt so that the landing could be extended and
the decontamination pod could be sealed within a small stone chamber of its own, as if it had always been there—once it hissed open, so too did the front door, which was painted a glossy black. Inside, the house was dim, the blinds were all drawn, and the floors were painted the same shiny dark as the door. A woman—white, small, black-haired—approached me. She took my mask and handed it to a maid, and we bowed; she gave me a pair of latex gloves to wear. “Dr. Griffith,” she said, “I’m Frances Holson. He’s come around, but I thought I should call you anyway, have you take him home.”

“Thank you,” I said, and I followed her up the staircase, where she led me to what was clearly a spare bedroom, where Nathaniel was lying on the bed. He smiled when he saw me.

“Don’t sit up,” I said, but he already was. “What happened, Natey?”

He said he’d just had a head rush, maybe because he hadn’t eaten today, but I knew it was because he was exhausted, though I made a show of putting my hand on his forehead, feeling for fever, and then looking into his mouth and eyes for spots.

“Let’s go home,” I told him. “I have the car.”

I expected him to argue, but he didn’t. “All right,” he said. “I just want to say goodbye to the boys first.”

We walked across the landing and toward a room at the end of the hall. The door was ajar, but he tapped on it, lightly, before we entered.

Inside, two boys were sitting at a child-size table, assembling a puzzle. I knew they were seven, but they looked four. I had read the research about juvenile survivors, and these children were in some ways instantly recognizable to me: They both wore tinted glasses, even in this low light, to protect their eyes, and they were both very pale, their limbs soft and thin, their rib cages blocky and wide, their cheeks and hands pitted with scars. They had both regrown their hair, but it was thin and fine, like an infant’s, and the drugs that helped generate hair growth were also responsible for the fuzz of fur that grew across their chins and foreheads, and along the sides and backs of their necks. Each of them had a slim tracheal tube that attached to a small ventilator pack that clipped to his waistband.

Nathaniel introduced them as Ezra and Hiram, and they waved
at me with their small, limp, salamander-like hands. “I’ll be back tomorrow,” he told them, and although I knew it already, I could tell from his tone that he liked these boys, that he cared about them.

“What’s wrong, Nathaniel?” asked one of them, Ezra or Hiram, in a tiny, breathy voice, and Nathaniel stroked the boy’s head, his hair lifting and floating from the static caused by Nathaniel’s gloves. “I’m just feeling a little tired,” he said.

“Do you have the sickness?” the other one asked, and Nathaniel winced, just a bit, before smiling at him. “No,” he said. “Nothing like that. I’ll be back tomorrow. I promise.”

Downstairs, Frances was waiting, and she handed us our masks, made me promise to take care of Nathaniel. “I will,” I said, and she nodded. She was pretty, but between her eyes there were two deep grooves; I wondered if she had always had them, or if she had acquired them over the past four years.

Back at our apartment, I put Nathaniel to bed and texted David to warn him to be quiet and let his father sleep, and then I went to the lab. On my way there, I thought about David, about how lucky we were that he was safe, safe and healthy.
Protect him,
I would say to myself, unclear whom I was addressing, as I walked to work, or washed the dishes, or showered.
Protect him, protect him. Protect my son.
It was irrational. But it had worked so far.

Later, while I was eating dinner at my desk, I thought about the two boys, Ezra and Hiram. It was like something out of a fairy tale: the quiet house with its gentle light, Frances Holson and Nathaniel the parents, me the skulking guest, and those elfin creatures—half human and half pharmaceuticals—whose realm it was. One of the reasons I never became a clinician is because I was never convinced that life—its saving, its extension, its return—was definitively the best outcome. In order to be a good doctor, you
have
to think that, you have to fundamentally believe that living is superior to dying, you have to believe that the point of life is more life. I didn’t administer therapies to those infected by NiVid-50; I didn’t have a role in developing the drugs. I didn’t think about what the survivors’ lives might be like—that wasn’t my job. But in the past few years, now that the disease has been contained, I find myself confronted with
the facts of their lives almost daily. Some, like the teacher at David’s school, who was already an adult, and probably healthy, when she contracted the illness, have been able to return to a version of their lives before.

But those boys will never have a normal life. They will never be able to go outside; they will never be able to be touched by the bare hands of anyone but their mother. It’s a life; it’s their life. They’re too young to remember anything else. Though maybe the people I was pitying wasn’t them but their parents—their worried mother, their absent father. What must it have been like, to watch your children come so close to death and then, in saving them, realize that you’ve transported them to a place that
you
can leave but they never can? Not death, not life, but existence, their entire world in one house, your hopes of everything they’d be and see and experience buried in the backyard, never to be unearthed. How could you encourage them to dream of anything else? How could you live with the sorrow and guilt that you had condemned them to a life stripped of all that’s pleasurable: movement; touch; the sun on your face? How could you live at all?

With love, Charles

August 7, 2055

Dear P, please forgive this very rushed response, but I’m racing here (for obvious reasons). All I can say is that it certainly seems to be the case. I read the same report you did, but I also got another, this one from a colleague, and I can’t interpret the findings any other way. There’s a multi-institute team that leaves for Manila, and from there to Boracay, tomorrow. I was asked if I could go, because this new one looks very similar to the ’50 strain. But I can’t—things are so bad with David now that I just can’t do it. Not going feels like a dereliction of duty, but leaving would as well.