To Paradise (56 page)

Now everyone was silent, frowning and listening to the radio. I placed the tray of petri dishes with the new pinkies on the side of the counter, and one of the Ph.D.s flapped his hand at me, impatiently, signaling me to go away; the rest didn’t even look up from their notepads, where they were scribbling words, stopping and pausing to listen, and then writing more.

I went back to the room with my mice and watched the scientists through the window. The entire lab had gone still. Even Dr. Wesley, shut in his office, was listening, frowning at his computer.

After twenty or so minutes, the broadcast must have ended, because everyone yanked off their headsets and then hurried into Dr. Wesley’s office—even the Ph.D. students, who were normally excluded from such meetings. As I saw them turn off the radio, I went over to the Ph.D.s’ area and began stacking empty petri dishes on a tray, which wasn’t my job. But as I did, I heard one of them say to another, “Do you think it’s true?” and the other reply, “Fuck, I hope not.”

Then they were in the office, and I couldn’t hear anything more. But I could see Dr. Wesley speaking, and the rest of them nodding, and everyone looking very grave. I was scared then, because normally when something bad happened—when, say, a new virus got discovered—the scientists weren’t scared but excited.

But now they were frightened, and serious, and when I went to the bathroom on my break, I passed the other labs on the floor, and in those, too, the only people I saw were the techs and support staff moving around, cleaning and organizing like we always did, because the scientists were all gathered in their respective principal investigators’ offices, talking among themselves with the doors closed.

I waited and waited, but everyone remained in Dr. Wesley’s office, talking. The glass was soundproof, so I couldn’t hear. Finally, I was going to miss my shuttle and so I had to leave, though I wrote a note to Dr. Morgan explaining that I’d gone, and placed it on his desk, just in case he was looking for me.

It took me another week to discover some of what the scientists had overheard on the radio, and the intervening days were very strange ones. Normally, I’m able to find out information fairly quickly. The scientists are discouraged from gossiping and speculating out loud, but they all do so anyway, albeit in whispers. Besides their lack of discretion, however, the other thing that benefits me is that they rarely seem to notice when I’m around. Sometimes, that bothers me. But most of the time, I can use it to my advantage.

I have learned many things simply by listening. I learned, for
instance, that Roosevelt Island, in the East River, was one of the city’s first relocation centers, during the ’50 pandemic, and later a prison camp, and finally, after it had become overrun with rodents carrying an infection, the state had moved the camp to Governor’s Island, in the south, which had previously been a refugee camp, and had scattered thousands of poisoned food pellets that killed all the rodents, and no one had been to Roosevelt Island since except the crematorium workers. I learned that Dr. Wesley regularly traveled to the Western Colonies, where the state had built a large research facility where they kept an underground vault storing a sample of every known microbe in the world. I learned that the state was predicting a severe drought in the next five years, and that there was a team of scientists elsewhere in the country who were trying to figure out how to generate rain on a mass scale.

Aside from all of that information, I learned other things from eavesdropping on the Ph.D.s as well. Most of them were married, and sometimes they discussed romance, things that had happened with their husbands or wives. But here, they often spoke in silences, not details. They said things like “You know what happened next,” and the other person would say, “I do,” and I sometimes felt like saying, “What happened next? What are you talking about?” Because I didn’t know, and I wanted to know. Though of course I knew not to ask.

But in the week after the radio conference, they were all unusually quiet, quiet and serious, and everyone was working much harder, though what they were working on exactly I couldn’t say, and I wouldn’t have understood besides. I just knew that there was something different about their behavior, and that something in the lab had changed.

Before I was to discover what that was, however, I followed my husband again. I don’t know why. I suppose I wanted to know if that was what he did every Thursday, because then it would at least be something else I knew about him.

This time, I went directly from the shuttle stop to the far west end of Bethune Street, and waited. There was a house right across
from the one my husband had entered, and, like all the houses that had been built back then, it had a main entrance, which was up a flight of stairs, and a second entrance that was hidden beneath the stairs. Grandfather had told me that in the old days, this door would have been protected by an iron gate, but the gate had been removed long ago to be smelted for military use, which meant I was able to stand just beneath the stairway and have a good view of the opposite side of the street.

There hadn’t been much traffic that day, so I was in my hiding place by 18:42. I looked at the house, which was as abandoned-looking as it had been the previous Thursday. It was already dark, it being January, but not as dark as it had been the previous week, and I could see that the windows had been covered with black paper or black paint, something that obscured views both in and out. I could also see that, although the building was shabby, it was in decent structural repair: the staircase was old, but except for a missing piece of stone in the second step, the rest of it was solid. The compost compactor was neat and clean, and there were no gnats buzzing overhead.

Three minutes or so later, I saw someone coming west down the street, and I withdrew beneath the staircase, thinking it was my husband. But it wasn’t. It was a man around my husband’s and my age, but white, and wearing a button-down shirt and a pair of lightweight pants. He was walking briskly, as my husband had, and when he reached the house opposite me, he climbed the steps without checking the number first, and tapped the same rhythmic knock that my husband had the previous week. Then the same thing happened: the window sliding open, the rectangle of light, the question and answer, the door opening just enough to let the man inside.

For a while, I couldn’t believe I’d actually seen this all happen. It was as if I’d willed it into existence. I had been so busy watching the event of the man’s arrival that I hadn’t even registered any useful details about him. “With every person you see, you should try to notice five things,” Grandfather would say when I was struggling to describe someone. “What race are they? Are they tall or short?
Are they fat or thin? Do they move quickly or slowly? Do they look down or straight ahead? These will tell you a lot of what you need to know about them.”

“How?” I had asked. I hadn’t understood.

“Well, for example, let’s say they’re hurrying down the street or through the halls,” Grandfather said. “Are they looking behind them? Maybe they’re running from something, or someone. So that would tell you that they’re frightened, maybe. Or maybe they’re muttering to themselves, and checking their watch, which would let you know that they’re late to something. Or let’s say they’re walking slowly, and looking down at the ground as they do. That might tell you that they’re deep in thought, or that they’re just daydreaming. But in either case, you’ll know that their attention is elsewhere, and that they should—depending on the context—perhaps not be bothered. Or maybe that they
need
to be bothered, that you need to alert them to something that’s about to happen.”

Recalling this, I tried to describe the man to myself. He was white, as I have said, and he had been moving quickly, but not looking behind him. He had walked like the postdocs walked through the halls of the lab: looking neither left nor right, and never behind themselves. Other than that, the man was difficult to analyze. He was neither fat nor thin, young nor old, tall nor short. He was just a man on Bethune Street who had entered the house my husband had entered last week.

As I was thinking this, I heard another set of footsteps, and when I looked up, I saw that it was my husband. Once again, it was as if I had dreamed him into being, as if he wasn’t quite real. He was carrying his nylon bag and was wearing his street clothes, which meant he would have changed out of his jumpsuit at the Farm. This time, he didn’t look around him, didn’t suspect he was being watched; he climbed the stairs and knocked on the door and was admitted.

And then everything was quiet. I waited for another twenty minutes to see if someone else might come, but no one else did, and finally, I turned and walked home. On the way, I passed a few other people—a woman, walking by herself; two men, who were discussing electrical repairs they’d made in one of the schools; a single man
with bristly dark eyebrows—and with each of them, I wondered: Were they too going to the house on Bethune Street? Would they be climbing those stairs, knocking on that door, saying some secret code, and being allowed inside? And once inside, what would they do? What did they talk about? Did they know my husband? Was one of them the person who had been sending him those notes?

How long had he been going there?

Once I was back in our apartment, I opened the box in the closet again and looked at the notes. I thought there might be a new one, but there wasn’t. As I was rereading them, I realized they didn’t say anything that interesting—they were just everyday words. And yet I somehow knew that they were never the sort of notes that my husband would write me or that I would write him. I knew this, but I couldn’t explain how they were different. I looked at them again, and then I put them all away and lay down on my bed. I realized that I wished I had never followed my husband, because what I had learned hadn’t helped me at all. In fact, all I had learned was that my husband was probably going to the same place on every one of his free nights, although this was just a theory, and I couldn’t prove it unless I followed him every free night from now on. But the detail that had upset me most was how, after my husband had answered the person on the other side of the door, he had laughed. I couldn’t remember the last time I had heard my husband laugh, or indeed, if I ever had—he had a nice laugh. He was in another house, laughing, and I was at home, waiting for him to return.

The next day, I went to RU, as always, where the mood in the lab was still strange, the postdocs still quiet and busy, the Ph.D.s still anxious and excited. I moved among them, distributing the new pinkies, removing the old ones, lingering near the Ph.D.s I knew were naturally talkative, the ones who liked to gossip. This time, however, there was only silence.

But I was patient, which Grandfather always said was an underrated virtue, and I knew that the Ph.D.s tended to relax around 15:00 through 15:30, when most of them took a break to drink tea. They weren’t supposed to drink tea around their work spaces, of course, but most of them did, especially as the postdocs were in
another room then, having their daily meeting. And so I waited until a few minutes past 15:00 before I went to pick up the old embryos from the Ph.D.s’ area.

For a few moments, there was just the sipping of tea, which wasn’t actually tea but a nutrient-rich powder that was supposed to taste like tea and had been developed at the Farm. It always made me think of Grandfather. I was ten when tea was declared a restricted asset, but Grandfather had a small supply of smoked black tea that he had saved, and for a year, we drank that. He would measure it so carefully—just a few shreds of it per pot—but the leaves were so powerful that that was all you needed. After we finally ran out, he got the powder, but he never drank it himself.

Then, though, one of the Ph.D.s said, “Do you think it’s true?”

“They’re acting like it,” said another.

“Yeah, but how do we know this isn’t just another false positive?” asked a third.

“The genomic sequencing is different here,” said a fourth, and then the conversation became too technical for me to follow, though I stayed and listened anyway. I couldn’t comprehend much, but what I did understand was that there had been another new disease diagnosed, and that it was very bad, potentially disastrous.

New diseases were often being discovered at RU, and not just at RU but in other laboratories around the world as well. Every Monday, Beijing would send the principal investigators at every accredited research organization a status report listing the previous week’s tally of fatalities and new diagnoses of the three to five most severe ongoing pandemics, as well as new developments they were tracking. The tallies were broken down by continent, and then by country, and then, if need be, by prefecture and municipality. Then, every Friday, Beijing would compile and send out the latest research findings—whether clinical or epidemiological—reported by the member nations. The goal, Dr. Wesley once said, was not to eradicate the diseases, because that would be impossible—it was to contain them, preferably within the regions where they were discovered. “Epidemics, not pandemics,” Dr. Wesley said. “Our goal is to discover them before they disseminate.”

I have worked at RU, and in Dr. Wesley’s lab, for seven years, and at least once a year there was at least one scare, when there was an emergency radio announcement, as there had been the week before, and everyone in the institute grew frightened and excited, because it seemed that we were at risk of experiencing the next great pandemic, one as bad as the illnesses of ’56 and ’70, both of which Dr. Wesley said had “remapped the world.” But in the end, every one of those threats had been contained. In fact, none of them had even affected the island; there had been no quarantine or isolation mobilization, no special bulletins, no coordination with the National Pharmacology Unit. Still, the pattern was to remain alert in the first thirty days after the discovery of a new disease, because that was the typical incubation period of most of these illnesses—even though, as everyone would admit in private, just because that had
been
the pattern of these diseases, it didn’t mean that the successive diseases would behave the same way. That was why what the scientists in our lab did was so important—they tried to predict the next mutation, the next illness that would endanger us all.