To Paradise (72 page)

Then a strange look came over his face, and he said, “So it’s fortunate—if I may use that word in this horrible situation—that your ex-husband had specified in his will that his house and all his property would bypass your son and go directly to your granddaughter.”

I was so dazed by what he had just said about David’s censure that
I couldn’t understand what he was trying to communicate to me. “No,” I said, “no, that’s not true. It was all to go to David.”

“No,” said the minister, and he drew something from the pocket of his uniform, which he handed me. “I believe you’re mistaken, Dr. Griffith. It reads quite clearly in his will that his entire estate is to be left to your granddaughter, with you as its executor.”

I unfolded the sheaf of papers, and there it was, as if I had not been witness to the creation and signing of this will just a year ago: There was to be a trust established for Charlie, but David would inherit the house, with the provision that he must leave it to Charlie upon his death. But now here was a document, signed by Nathaniel and by me, watermarked and stamped with all three of our name seals—the lawyer’s, Nathaniel’s, and mine—attesting to what the minister had said. And something else: Charlie’s official name on the document was listed not as “Charlie Bingham-Griffith,” but as simply “Charlie Griffith”—her father’s name, Nathaniel’s name, edited out of existence. I looked up, and the minister looked back at me, a long, unreadable stare, before standing. “I’ll leave you that copy for your records, Dr. Griffith,” he said, and then he left. It wasn’t until I got home that night that I held it to the light, looking at how perfect the signatures were, at how exact the seals were. And then I was suddenly frightened, and convinced the paper itself was somehow bugged, although that technology is a decade off, at least.

Since then, I have tried to find the original will, even though doing so would be both pointless and, even, perilous. I’ve removed all the documents Nathaniel kept from the safe, and every night I go through a few of them, watching life present itself in reverse: papers assigning Nathaniel formal, legal guardianship of Charlie, signed three weeks before the attack; papers signed by Eden forfeiting any legal claims to her daughter; Charlie’s birth certificate; the deed to the house; Aubrey’s will; our divorce papers.

And then I begin to wander. I tell myself I’m looking for the will, but I don’t suppose I really am, because the places I look are nowhere Nathaniel would have put it in the first place, and if he
had
kept a copy in the house, it had been removed long ago,
without us noticing. There was no point in looking, just as there had been no point in calling our lawyer and listening to him claim that, no, I had been mistaken, that the will as I described it had never existed. “You’re under a lot of strain, Charles,” he said. “Grief can make people”—he paused—“misremember.” Then I became scared again, and told him I was certain he was correct, and hung up.

I am lucky, I know. Much worse has happened to relatives of insurgents, to people associated with far less deadly attacks than David has been. I am still too useful to the state. You don’t need to worry about me, Peter. Not yet. I’m in no immediate danger.

But sometimes I wonder if what I’m really searching for is not the will but evidence of the person I was before this all began. How far would I have to go back? Before the state was established? Before I answered that first call from the ministry, asking if I wanted to be an “architect of the solution”? Before the illness of ’56? Before the one of ’50? Earlier? Before I joined Rockefeller?

How far back do I have to go? How many decisions must I regret? Sometimes I think that somewhere in this house is hidden a piece of paper with the answers, and that if I hope hard enough, I’ll wake up in the month or year when I first began to go astray, only this time, I’ll do the opposite of what I did. Even if it hurts. Even if it feels wrong.

Love, Charles

Dear Peter,
August 21, 2067

Hello from the lab on a Sunday afternoon. I’m just here catching up on some things and reading some of the reports from Beijing—what did you make of Friday’s? We haven’t discussed it, but I doubt you’re surprised, either. Christ: to learn, definitively, that not only those stupid decontam chambers but also the helmets are completely useless is going to spark riots. People went bankrupt installing them,
maintaining them, replacing them for fifteen years, and now we’re telling everyone that, oops, it was a mistake, get rid of them? That announcement is scheduled for a week from Monday, and it’s going to be bad.

But the next five days will be the hardest. On Tuesday they’ll announce that the internet will be “suspended” for an indefinite period of time. On Thursday they’ll announce that all international travel, to and from other countries, including Canada, Mexico, the Western Federation, and Texas, will also be suspended.

I’ve been very anxious, and Charlie can sense it. She crawls into my lap and pats my face. “Are you sad?” she asks me, and I tell her I am. “Why?” she asks, and I tell her it’s because people in this country are fighting, and we have to try to make them stop fighting. “Oh,” she says. “Don’t be sad, Papa,” she says. “I’m never sad with you,” I tell her, although I am—sad that this is the world she lives in. But maybe I should tell her the truth after all: that I
am
sad, all the time, and that it’s all right to be sad. But she’s such a happy baby, and it seems immoral to do so.

The Justice Ministry and the Interior Ministry seem certain they can quash the protests in three months. The military is ready to deploy, but as I know you saw in the last report, the number of infiltrators in the ranks has become alarming. The army says they need time to “test the loyalties” of its members (god knows what that means); Justice and Interior say that they can’t spare any time. The most recent report claims that large numbers of “historically disadvantaged groups of citizens” are helping the insurgency efforts, but there’s been no talk of special punishment, and thank goodness—I know I’m protected, I know I’m an exception, yet it makes me nervous all the same.

Don’t worry about me, Peter. I know you do, but try not to. They can’t get rid of me yet.
My
digital access isn’t being curtailed, of course—for one, I need it to communicate with Beijing—and although all our communication is encrypted, I may start sending you letters through our mutual friend just as a precaution. This means they’ll likely be less frequent (lucky you) but also lengthier
(unlucky you). Let’s see how it goes. Though you know how to reach me in an emergency.

Love to you and Olivier, C.

My dear Peter,
September 6, 2070

It’s very early in the morning, and I’m writing you from the lab. Thank you and Olivier for the books and presents, by the way—I meant to write you last week, when they arrived, but I forgot. I’d hoped Charlie would be discharged in time to spend her birthday at home, but she had another grand mal seizure on Tuesday, and so they decided to keep her for a few more days; if she remains stable over the weekend, they’ll let her leave on Monday.

I’ve obviously been spending every day with her, and most of the nights. The Committee’s been almost too humane about it. It’s as if they knew that one of us would have a child or grandchild who’d get infected—the odds were too great for that not to be the case—and they’re relieved that it was my grandchild, not theirs. Their relief makes them guilty, and their guilt makes them generous: Charlie’s hospital room is filled with more toys than she’ll ever play with, as if the toys were a kind of sacrifice, and she a minor god, and by appeasing her, they’ll protect their own.

We’ve been here at Frear for two months now. Nine weeks, actually, come tomorrow. Many years ago, when Nathaniel and I first moved to the city, this had been a ward for adult cancer patients. Then, in ’56, they converted it to an infectious-disease wing, and then last winter, to a pediatric infectious-disease wing. The rest of the patients are in what used to be the burn unit, and the burn patients have been dispatched to other hospitals. In the early days of the infection, before it was announced to the public, I would hurry past this hospital, never looking up at its bulk, because I knew that this was the place best-equipped to care for the children who would
get sick, and because I felt that if I never looked at the outside of it, I would never see the inside of it.

The ward is on the tenth floor and faces east to the river, and therefore to the crematoriums, whose fires have burned without pause since March. In the early days, when I was visiting as an observer, not as a guest—or a “loved one,” as the hospital calls us—you could look outside and see the vans full of corpses being unloaded onto the boats. The bodies were so small that they could stack them four or five to a stretcher. After the first six weeks, the state had a fence built on the eastern edge of the river, because parents were jumping into the water as the boats pulled away, screaming for their children, trying to paddle toward the other shore. The fence prevented that, but it didn’t prevent the people on the tenth floor (the parents, largely, as most of the children were insensate) from looking outside for distraction and instead encountering, in the cruelest of ironies, the place where most of their children would go next, as if Frear were simply a layover before their final destination. So then the hospital covered up all the eastern-facing windows, on this floor and all the others, and hired art students to paint on them. But as the months dragged by, the scenes the students had drawn—of Fifth Avenue, lined with palm trees and happy children walking down the sidewalk; of the Central Park peacocks being fed bread by happy children—also began to seem cruel, and eventually they were covered with white paint.

The ward is meant to accommodate a hundred and twenty patients but now holds around two hundred. Charlie is its longest-term resident. Over the past nine weeks, various other children have come and gone. Most remain for just ninety-six hours, though there was a little boy who was probably a year older than Charlie—he looked seven, maybe eight—who had been admitted three days before she was and who died last week. He was the second-longest-term resident. Everyone here is related to someone who works for the state, or related to someone to whom the state owes a favor, a favor big enough to keep them out of a relocation center. For the first seven weeks, we had a private room, and although I had been assured we
would always have it, for as long as we needed, there came a point where I could no longer morally justify it to myself. So now Charlie has two roommates, in a space that could sleep three more. The other parents and I nod at one another—everyone is wearing so much protective clothing that we can only see one another’s eyes—but otherwise we all pretend that the others don’t exist. Only our children exist.

I’ve seen what you’re doing over there, but here, each child’s bed is surrounded by walls of transparent plastic sheeting, like the one Ezra and Hiram had lived behind; the parents sit outside and stick their hands through the gloves built into one of the walls so we can at least offer some semblance of touch. The few parents who for whatever reason had never been exposed to the earlier virus, the one that’s cross-reactive to the current one, aren’t allowed to enter Frear at all—they’re just as vulnerable as the children, and should really be in isolation themselves. But they’re not, of course. Instead, they stand outside the hospital, even in the heat, which has been almost unbearable these past few months, and look up at its windows. Years ago, when I was a child, I saw an old video of a crowd of people waiting beneath a Paris hotel for a pop singer to emerge from his room onto his balcony. The crowd here is as big, but whereas that other gathering had been restive, on the verge of hysteria, this one is quiet, eerily so, as if making any noise might upset their chances of getting inside to see their children. Though they have no hope at all of doing so, not while they’re still contagious or capable of spreading contagion. The lucky ones can at least watch a livestream of their children lying, unresponsive, in bed; the unlucky ones, not even that.

The children enter Frear as distinct people, but within two weeks of being treated with Xychor, they look more alike than different. You know what it looks like, too: the shrunken faces, the softened teeth, the hair loss, the boil-covered extremities. I read the report from Beijing, but here, the fatality rate is highest among those ten and younger; adolescents are much more likely to survive, though even those rates of survival—depending on whose reports you’re seeing—are grim.

What we don’t know yet, and won’t know for another decade or so at least, is Xychor’s long-term consequences. It wasn’t made for children, and it certainly shouldn’t be administered to them in the doses it is. One thing we
do
know, as of last week, is that its toxicity alters—we don’t know how—pubertal development, which means there’s a strong possibility that Charlie will be sterile. After I heard this in one of the Committee meetings I managed to attend, I barely made it to the bathroom before I started crying. I had kept her safe for so many months. If I had been able to keep her safe for just nine more, we’d have a vaccine. But I couldn’t.

I knew from reports that she would be changed, and she is, though among the many things I don’t yet know is how much. “There will be damage,” I read in the latest report, which then outlined, in vague terms, what that damage might be: Cognitive differences. Slowed physical reflexes. Stunted growth. Sterility. Scarring. The first is the most terrifying, because “cognitive differences” is so meaningless a phrase. Her new quiet, where she’d once chattered away—is that a cognitive difference? Her sudden affectlessness—is that a cognitive difference? Her new formality—“Who am I, Charlie?” I asked her, the first day she regained consciousness. “Do you know me?” “Yes,” she said, after studying me, “you’re my grandfather.” “Yes,” I said, and I was beaming, smiling so hard my cheeks hurt, but she was only staring at me, silent and inexpressive. “It’s me. Your Papa, who loves you.” “Grandfather,” she repeated, but that was all, and then she closed her eyes again—is
that
a cognitive difference? Her halting conversation, her new humorlessness, the way she studies my face, her expression composed but slightly puzzled, as if I were another species and she were trying to interpret me—is that a cognitive difference? Last night I read her a story she had loved, about a pair of talking rabbits, and when I was finished, where she would have normally chimed “Again!,” she instead looked at me, her eyes blank. “Rabbits can’t speak,” she said, finally. “That’s true, sweetheart,” I said, “but it’s a story.” And then, when she said nothing in response, only continued to stare at me, her face unreadable, I added, “It’s make-believe.”