To Paradise (46 page)

I work with the mice. At any given time, we have at least four hundred, which is significantly more than either of the other two labs have. I sometimes overhear my counterparts in those other labs discussing how their chiefs complain about how much money Dr. Wesley has, money he spends on “fishing expeditions,” which is a term Grandfather taught me and means they think that he doesn’t have any real evidence or information, that he’s just looking for something he can’t even identify. I repeated this once to Dr.
Morgan, who frowned and said that it was inappropriate for them to be talking that way, and anyway, they were just lab techs. Then he asked me their names, but I pretended they had been temporary help and I hadn’t known, and he looked at me for a long time and made me promise I would tell him if I ever heard such discussions again, and I said I would, but I haven’t.

I am responsible for the mouse embryos. What happens is that the mice—already one week pregnant—are delivered in crates from the supply company. I get a list from the scientists telling me how old they need the embryos to be: usually ten days but sometimes a little older. Then I exterminate the mice and harvest their fetuses, which I prepare either in tubes or in dishes, depending, and then I shelve them in the refrigerator by age. My job is to make sure there’s always mice when the scientists need them.

This all takes a lot of time, especially if you’re careful, but there are still moments when I find myself with nothing to do. Then I ask for permission to use one of my two twenty-minute breaks. Sometimes I spend it taking a walk. All of the buildings at RU are connected by underground tunnels, so you never have to go outside. During the ’56 epidemic, they built a series of storage rooms and safe rooms, but I’ve never seen them. Everyone says that beneath these tunnels are two more stories of rooms: operating rooms and laboratories and cold-storage units. But Grandfather always told me not to trust what I couldn’t prove. “Nothing is true to a scientist until he proves it so,” he used to say. And even though I am not a scientist, I remind myself of this whenever I walk through the tunnels and suddenly get scared, when I become certain that the air has grown colder and that I can hear, as if from very far away, the scrabbly sounds of mice far beneath me, and of groans and whispers. The first time it happened, I couldn’t move, and when I did, I woke up in a corner of the corridor, near one of the staircase doorways, and I was yelling for Grandfather. I don’t remember this, but later, Dr. Morgan told me that they’d found me and I’d urinated on myself, and I had had to sit in the reception room with a tech from another lab whom I didn’t know until my husband came to pick me up.

That was shortly after we had been married, shortly after
Grandfather had died, and when I woke, it was night and I was confused until I realized that I was in my bed, in our apartment. And then I looked over and saw someone sitting on the other bed and staring at me: my husband.

“Are you all right?” he’d asked.

I was feeling strange, sleepy, and I couldn’t quite form the words I needed. He hadn’t turned any of the lights on, but then the spotlight swept past the windows, and I could see his face.

I tried to say something, but my mouth was too dry, and my husband handed me a cup, and I drank and drank, and when the water was gone, too soon, he took the cup from me and left the room, and I could hear him remove the lid from the stone water-container in the kitchen, and the wooden dipper knocking against the inside, and the slish of liquid as he refilled the cup.

“I don’t remember what happened,” I said, after I’d drunk some more.

“You fainted,” he said. “At work. They called me and I came to get you and brought you home.”

“Oh,” I said. Then I remembered, but only somewhat, as if it were a story that Grandfather had told me long ago. “I’m sorry,” I said.

“Don’t worry,” my husband said. “I’m glad you’re better.”

He stood, then, and came toward me, and for a second, I thought he was going to touch me, maybe even kiss me, and I didn’t know how I felt about that, but he only looked down into my face, and put his palm briefly on my forehead: His hand was cool and dry, and I suddenly wanted to grab his fingers, but I didn’t, because we don’t touch each other like that.

And then he left the room, closing the door behind him. I lay awake for a long time, listening for his footfall, or the sound of the main-room lamp turning on. But I heard nothing. He spent the night in the main room, in the dark, not doing anything, not going anywhere, but not in the same room as I was.

That night I thought of Grandfather. I thought about him often, but that night I thought about him especially hard: I repeated to myself all the nice things he had said to me that I could remember,
and I thought of how, when I had done something good, he would grab me and squeeze me, and although I hadn’t liked it, I had liked it, too. I thought of how he called me his little cat, and how, when I was scared, I would go to him and he would take me back to my bed and sit there next to me, holding my hand, until I fell asleep again. I tried not to think of the last time I saw him, when he was being led away, and he turned back and I saw his eyes scanning the crowd, looking for me, and how I had tried to scream out to him but hadn’t been able to, I was so frightened, and how I had just stood there, my husband, whom I had just married, beside me, watching Grandfather’s eyes track back and forth, back and forth, until, finally, as he was being led up the stairs to the stage, he had called out, “I love you, little cat,” and I still wasn’t able to say anything.

“Do you hear me, little cat?” he shouted, and he was still looking for me, but he wasn’t looking in the right direction, he was shouting to the mass of people, and they were jeering at him, and the man on the stage was stepping forward with the black cloth in his hands. “I love you, little cat, never forget that. No matter what.”

I lay in bed and rocked myself and talked to Grandfather. “I won’t forget,” I said aloud. “I won’t forget.” But although I hadn’t forgotten, I
had
forgotten what being loved felt like: Once, I had understood it, and now I no longer did.

A few weeks after the raid, I was listening to the morning broadcast and learned that the air-conditioning system at RU had malfunctioned and everyone was being told not to come to work that day.

There were four daily morning bulletins—one at 05:00, one at 06:00, one at 07:00, and one at 08:00—and you had to listen to one of them, because they might have information that you needed. Sometimes, for example, the shuttle would be rerouted because of an incident, and the man or woman would tell you which areas were affected and where you should wait instead. Sometimes there was an announcement about the air quality, and you knew you should wear your mask, or about the sun index, and then you would wear
your shroud, or the heat index, so you knew to wear your cooling suit. Sometimes there was news about a Ceremony or a trial, and you’d know to adjust your schedule accordingly. If you worked for one of the big state projects or institutions, like my husband and I did, there would also be information about any closures or strange circumstances affecting them. Last year, for example, there had been another hurricane, and while RU had been closed completely, my husband and other technical staff had still had to go to the Farm to feed and clean up after the animals and double-check the measurements of the water salinity in the classified tanks and do all the things the computers couldn’t. A special shuttle, one that wound through all the zones, instead of just certain ones, came and picked my husband up and then dropped him off again, right in front of our building, just as the skies turned black.

When I began working at RU, six years ago, there were never air-conditioning malfunctions. But in the past year, there had been four. The buildings were never completely without power, of course: There were five large generators that were programmed to compensate for any loss of electricity almost immediately. But after the last blackout, in May, we were told not to come in if there was another, because the generators were running at full capacity just to keep the refrigerators at the proper temperature, and our collective body heat would tax the system further.

Even though I didn’t have to go to work that day, I did everything I normally did. I had my oatmeal, I brushed my teeth, I cleaned myself with some hygiene wipes, I made my bed. Then I was done with everything I could do: I could only go to the grocery store during my allotted hours, and even if I had wanted to do the laundry, I could only do that on our extra-water day, which wasn’t until next week. Finally, I got the broom out of the closet and swept the apartment, which I usually do on Wednesdays and Sundays. This didn’t take up very much time, as it was Thursday and I had just swept the day before and the floors were still clean. Then I reread the monthly Zone Eight bulletin, which was distributed to every household and listed any upcoming repairs to streets in our area, as well as updates about the new trees that were being planted on Fifth and
Sixth Avenues, and new items that the grocery store would likely be stocking, and when they’d arrive and how many coupons each would cost. The bulletin also always featured a recipe from a Zone Eight resident, which I usually tried to make. This time, the recipe was for broiled raccoon with lovage and grits, which was especially interesting because I disliked cooking with raccoon and was always trying to find ways to improve the flavor. I cut this one out and put it in a kitchen drawer. Every few months or so, I submitted a recipe that I had invented, but mine were never chosen for publication.

After that, I sat on the sofa and listened to the radio. They played music between 08:30 and 17:00, when there would be three evening bulletins, and more music between 18:30 and 23:59. Then the station stopped broadcasting until 04:00, both so it could air encrypted messages for military personnel, which we heard as a long, low buzzing noise, and to encourage everyone to sleep, because the state wanted us to live healthily, which is also why the electricity grids halved their capacity during those same hours. I didn’t know the name of the music, but it was nice, and it made me feel calm, and as I listened, I thought of the mouse embryos drifting in their saline pools, with their paws that hadn’t yet developed completely and still looked like very tiny human hands. They didn’t have tails yet, either, just slight elongations of the spine, and if you hadn’t known what they were, you wouldn’t be able to tell they were mouse embryos at all. They could be cats, or dogs, or monkeys, or humans. The scientists called them pinkies.

I worried about the embryos, though that was silly; the generators would keep them cold, and anyway, they were dead. What they were was what they would remain—they would never transform into anything else, they would never get bigger, their eyes would never open, and they would never grow white fur. And yet the embryos were why the air-conditioning was broken. This was because there were different groups of people who didn’t like RU. Some people thought that the scientists there weren’t working hard enough—that if they worked faster, then the sicknesses would be cured and things would become better, and maybe even go back to how they had been, back when Grandfather was my age. Some people thought
that the scientists were working on the wrong solutions. Then there were some people who thought the scientists were creating the sicknesses in our labs, because they wanted to eliminate certain kinds of people or because they wanted to help the state maintain control of the country, and those were the most dangerous people of all.

The primary thing the second two groups tried to do was starve the scientists of the pinkies: If they didn’t have the pinkies, they couldn’t inject them with viruses, and if they couldn’t do that, they would have to stop their work, or they would have to change how they did their work. That was what these groups thought. Along with the blackouts, there had been rumors of armored transport trucks of lab animals being attacked by insurgent groups on their way from the buildings where they were bred, out on Long Island. After the ’88 incident, every truck driver was armed, and every truck was accompanied by three soldiers. But two years ago, something had happened anyway: A truck was successfully stopped by an insurgent group, and everyone on it was killed, and for the first time in the university’s history, the specimens hadn’t arrived. It was around then that there was the first attack on the electrical system. Back then, RU had only two generators, and it hadn’t been enough, and the Delacroix wing had lost power altogether, and hundreds of specimens had spoiled, and months of work had been destroyed, and after that, the president of the university had gone to the state and appealed for more security, and more generators, and harsher punishments against the insurgents, and all of this was granted.

Of course, no one told me any of these things. I had to figure them out from eavesdropping on the scientists, who gathered in corners of the lab and whispered, and as I delivered the embryos and took others away, I lingered, not long enough to be noticed, and tried to overhear what they said. None of the scientists paid any attention to me as I came and went, even though everyone knew who I was, because of Grandfather. I always knew when the new postdocs or Ph.D.s learned who I was, because I would enter the room and they would stare at me, and then they would thank me when I gave them their new batch of mice, and thank me for taking away the old batch. But eventually they would get used to me,
and they would stop thanking me, and they would forget I was even there, and that was fine.

I listened to the music for what felt like a long time, even though when I looked at the clock, I could see it had only been twenty minutes, and it was still just 09:20, which meant I had nothing to do until my grocery hours began at 17:30, which was a long way away. And so it was then that I decided that I would take a walk around the Square.

My husband’s and my apartment is on the north side of the Square, on the eastern corner of Fifth Avenue. When I was a child, the building had been a house, and only Grandfather and I had lived there, along with a cook and two servants. But during the ’83 uprising, the state divided it into eight apartments, two per floor, and let us choose which one we wanted. Then, when I was married, my husband and I remained in our apartment and Grandfather moved out. One unit on each floor faces the Square, and the other unit faces north. Our apartment faces north, which is quieter and therefore better, and is on the third floor. These units overlook what used to be the area where the family who built this house more than two hundred years ago kept its horses, which they kept not to eat but to pull them around the city.