Matched (7 page)

“All right,” he told me. He sat next to me on the edge. Even back then, when he was younger and stronger, I remember thinking how old he looked compared to my friends’ grandparents. My grandparents were one of the last couples who chose to be Matched later in life. They were thirty-five when they Matched. My father, their one child, wasn’t born until four years later. Now, no one is allowed to have a child after they turn thirty-one.

The sun shone right through his silver hair and made me see each strand even when I wasn’t looking for such detail. It made me sad, even though he made me angry. “
This
is exciting,” he said, kicking his feet in the water. “I can see how you’d never want to do anything but sit.” I heard the teasing in his voice and turned away.

Then he stood up and walked toward the diving board. “Sir,” said the waterguard in charge of the pool. “Sir?”

“I have a recreational pass,” Grandfather told her, not stopping. “I’m in excellent health.” Then he climbed up the ladder to the diving board, looking stronger and stronger the higher he climbed.

He didn’t look over at me before he jumped; he went right in, and before he broke through the surface of the water I was on my feet, walking across the hot wet cement to the high-dive ladder, the soles of my feet and my pride both on fire.

And I jumped.

“You’re thinking of the pool, aren’t you?” he asks me now.

“Yes,” I say, laughing a little. “You didn’t keep me safe then. You practically dared me to leap to my death,” and then I cringe, because I didn’t mean to say that word. I don’t know why I’m afraid of it. Grandfather isn’t. The Society isn’t. I shouldn’t be.

Grandfather doesn’t seem to notice. “You were ready to jump,” he says. “You just weren’t sure of it yet.”

We both fall silent, remembering. I try not to look at the timepiece on the wall. I have to leave soon so I can make curfew, but I don’t want Grandfather to think that I am marking the minutes. Marking time until our visit is over. Marking time until his life is over. Although, if you think about it, I am marking time for my own life, too. Every minute you spend with someone gives them a part of your life and takes part of theirs.

Grandfather senses my distraction and asks me what is on my mind. I tell him, because I won’t have many more chances to do so, and he reaches out and grips my hand. “I’m glad to give you part of my life,” he says, and it is such a nice thing to say and he says it so kindly that I say it back. Even though he is almost eighty, even though his body seemed frail earlier, his grip feels strong, and again I feel sad.

“There’s something else I wanted to tell you,” I say to Grandfather. “I signed up for hiking as my summer leisure activity.”

He looks pleased. “They’ve brought that back?” Grandfather used to hike as one of his leisure activities years ago, and he’s talked about it ever since.

“It’s new this summer. I’ve never seen it offered before.”

“I wonder who the instructor is,” he says, thoughtfully. Then he looks out the window. “I wonder where they’ll take you to hike.” I follow his gaze again. There isn’t much wildness out there, though we have plenty of greenspace—parks and recreation fields. “Maybe to one of the larger recreation areas,” I say.

“Maybe to the Hill,” he says, the light returning to his eyes.

The Hill is the last place in the City that has been left forested and wild. I can see it now, its prickly green back rising out of the Arboretum where my mother works. It was once mostly used for Army training, but since most of the Army has been moved to the Outer Provinces, there isn’t as much need for it anymore.

“Do you think so?” I ask, excited. “I’ve never been there before. I mean, I’ve been to the Arboretum lots of times, of course, but I’ve never had permission to go on the Hill.”

“You’ll love it if they let you hike the Hill,” Grandfather says, his face animated. “There’s something about climbing to the highest point you can see, and there’s no one clearing a path for you, no simulator. Everything’s real—”

“Do you really think they’ll let us hike there?” I ask. His enthusiasm is contagious.

“I hope so.” Grandfather gazes out the window in the direction of the Arboretum, and I wonder if the reason he spends so much time looking out lately is because he likes to remember what he carries within.

It is as though he can read my mind. “I’m nothing but an old man sitting here thinking about his memories, aren’t I?”

I smile. “There’s nothing wrong with doing that.” In fact, at the end of a life, it’s encouraged.

“That’s not exactly what I’m doing,” Grandfather said.

“Oh?”

“I’m
thinking
.” Again, he knows my thoughts. “It’s not the same as remembering. Remembering is part of thinking, but not all of it.”

“What are you thinking about?”

“Many things. A poem. An idea. Your grandmother.” My grandmother died early of one of the last kinds of cancer when she was sixty-two. I never knew her. The compact was hers before it was mine—a gift from her mother-in-law, Grandfather’s mother.

“What do you think she would say about my Match?” I ask him. “About what happened today?”

He’s quiet, and I wait. “I think,” he says finally, “she would ask you if you wondered.”

I want to ask him what he means, but I hear the bell ringing, announcing that the final air train for the Boroughs will be coming through soon. I have to go.

“Cassia?” Grandfather says as I stand up. “You still have the compact I gave you, don’t you?”

“Yes,” I say, surprised that he would ask. It’s the most valuable thing I own. The most valuable thing I will ever own.

“Will you bring it to my Final Banquet tomorrow?” he asks.

Tears well in my eyes. He must want to see it again to remember my grandmother, and his mother. “Of course I will, Grandfather.”

“Thank you.”

My tears threaten to spill over onto his cheek as I bend down to kiss him. I hold them back; I don’t cry. I wonder when I can. It won’t be tomorrow night at the Final Banquet. People will be watching then. To see how Grandfather handles leaving, and to see how we manage being left.

As I walk down the hall, I hear other residents talking to themselves or to visitors behind their closed doors, and the sound of ports turned up loud because many of the elderly cannot hear well. Some rooms are silent. Perhaps some are like Grandfather, sitting in front of open windows and thinking about people who are no longer here.

I step into the elevator and push the button, feeling sad and strange and confused. What did he mean?

I
know
Grandfather’s time is running out. I have known this for a long time. But why, as the elevator doors slide shut, do I suddenly feel that mine is running out as well?

My grandmother would want to know if I wondered if it wasn’t a mistake after all. If Ky were meant to be my Match
.

For a moment, I did. When I saw Ky’s face flash in front of me so quick I couldn’t even see the color of his eyes, only the dark of them as they looked back at me, I wondered,
Is it you?

T
oday is Sunday. It is Grandfather’s eightieth birthday, so tonight he will die.

People used to wake up and wonder, “Will today be the end?” or lie down to sleep, not knowing if they would come back out of the dark. Now, we know which day will be the end of the light and which night will be the long, last one. The Final Banquet is a luxury. A triumph of planning, of the Society, of human life and the quality of it.

All the studies show that the best age to die is eighty. It’s long enough that we can have a complete life experience, but not so long that we feel useless. That’s one of the worst feelings the elderly can have. In societies before ours, they could get terrible diseases, like depression, because they didn’t feel needed anymore. And there is a limit to what the Society can do, too. We can’t hold off all the indignities of aging much past eighty. Matching for healthy genes can only take us so far.

Things didn’t used to be this fair. In the old days, not everyone died at the same age and there were all kinds of problems and uncertainty. You could die anywhere—on the street, in a medical center as my grandmother did, even on an air train. You could die alone.

No one should die alone.

The hour is very early, faint blue and pale pink, as we arrive on the almost-empty air train and walk along the cement pathway toward the door of Grandfather’s building. I want to step off the path and take off my shoes and walk with my bare feet on the cool, sharp grass, but today is not a day to deviate from what is planned. My parents and Bram and I are all quiet, thinking. None of us have work or leisure hours. Today is for Grandfather. Tomorrow, things go back to normal again and we will move on and he will be gone.

It’s expected. It’s fair. I remind myself of this as we climb into the elevator to go to his apartment. “You can push the button,” I tell Bram, trying to joke with him. Bram and I used to fight over who got to push the buttons when we came to visit. Bram smiles and presses the 10.
For the last time
, I think to myself. After today, there will be no Grandfather to visit. We will have no reason to come back.

Most people don’t know their grandparents this well. The kind of relationship I have with my other grandparents in the Farmlands is much more common. We communicate via port every few months and visit every few years. Many grandchildren watch the Final Banquet on the portscreens, too, one step removed from what’s happening. I have never envied those other children; I’ve pitied them. Even today, I feel that way.

“How long do we have before the Committee shows up?” Bram asks my father.

“About half an hour,” my father answers. “Does everyone have their gifts?”

We nod. Each of us has brought something to give Grandfather. I’m not sure what my parents chose for him, but I know Bram went to the Arboretum to get a rock from a spot as near to the Hill as possible.

Bram catches me looking at him, and he opens his palm to show me the rock again. It is round and brown and still a bit dirty. It looks a little like an egg, and when he brought it back yesterday, he told me that he’d found it under a tree in a pile of soft green pine needles that looked like a nest.

“He’s going to love it,” I say to Bram.

“He’ll love your gift, too.” Bram closes his fist around the rock again. The doors slide open and we step out into the hall.

I’ve made Grandfather a letter for my gift. I got up early this morning and spent time cutting and pasting and copying sentiments on the letter-making program on the port. Before I printed the letter, I found a poem from the decade in which he was born and included it as well. Not many people care about poetry after they finish school, but Grandfather always has. He’s read all of the Hundred Poems many times.

One of the doors along the hall opens and an old woman peeks her head out. “You’re going to the Banquet for Mr. Reyes?” she asks, and she doesn’t even wait for us to answer. “It’s private, isn’t it?”

“It is,” my father says, stopping politely to speak with her, even though I know he is eager to see his father. He can’t keep himself from glancing down the hall at Grandfather’s closed door.

The woman grumbles a little. “I wish it were public. I’d like to go so I can get ideas. Mine’s in less than two months. You can bet it’s going to be public.” She laughs a little, a short, harsh sound, and then she asks, “Can you come and tell me about it afterward?”

My mother comes to the rescue, as she and my father always do for each other. “Perhaps,” Mama says, smiling, and she takes my father’s hand and turns her back on the woman.

We hear a disappointed sigh and then a click behind us as the woman closes her door. The nameplate on her door says Mrs. Nash, and I remember that Grandpa has talked about her before. Nosy, he said.

“Can’t she wait for her own turn to come, instead of talking about it on Grandfather’s day?” Bram mutters, pushing open the door to Grandfather’s residence.

It already feels like a different place. More hushed. A little lonelier. I think that is because Grandfather is not sitting at the window anymore. Today, he rests in a bed in the living room as his body shuts down. Right on time.

 

“Could you move me over to the window?” Grandfather asks, after saying hello to all of us.

“Certainly.” My father reaches for the edge of the bed and pulls it smoothly toward the early morning light. “Remember when you did this for me? When I had all those inoculations as a child?”

Grandfather smiles. “That was a different house.”

“And a different view,” my father agrees. “All I could see from that window was the neighbor’s yard and an air-train track if I looked high enough.”

“But beyond that there was sky,” Grandfather says softly. “You can almost always see the sky. And what’s beyond that, I wonder? And after this?”

Bram and I exchange glances. Grandfather must be wandering a little today, which is to be expected. On the day the elderly turn eighty, the decline always accelerates. Not everyone dies at exactly the same time, but it is always before midnight.

“I’ve invited my friends to come immediately after the Committee visits,” Grandfather says. “And then after they leave I’d like to spend some one-on-one time with each of you. Starting with you, Abran.”

My father nods. “Of course.”

 

The Committee does not take long. They arrive, three men and three women in their long white lab coats, and they bring things with them, too. The Banquet clothes that Grandfather will wear. Equipment for tissue preservation. A microcard with a history of his life so he can watch it on the port.

With the exception of maybe the microcard, I think Grandfather will like our gifts better.