To Paradise (73 page)

Read it again, Papa! Do the voices better this time!

“Oh,” she said at last.

Is
that
a cognitive difference?

Or is her new seriousness—her use of “Grandfather” makes her sound slightly disapproving, like she’s aware that the title is grander than I deserve—an inevitable result of all the death she’s seen? Even though I’ve been careful not to discuss it with her, the severity of her illness, the now hundreds of thousands of children who have died, she must have intuited it anyway, mustn’t she? Already her roommates have been replaced seven times in two weeks, the children turned in a single exhalation to corpses and hurried out of the room beneath a tent of muslin so Charlie, asleep anyway, wouldn’t witness their departure—there have been some of these kindnesses, even now.

I stroked her scalp, which is stubbly with scabs and the first fine bristles of new hair. I thought again of the sentence from the report that I now repeat to myself multiple times a day:
These findings remain speculative until we have a larger sample set of survivors to study, as does the duration of these effects.
“Go to sleep, little Charlie,” I told her, and whereas, before, she would whine a bit, plead for another story, she instead closed her eyes immediately, an act of submission that made me shiver.

Last Friday, I watched her sleep until about eleven p.m. (or 23:00, as the state would now have it), until I finally made myself leave. Outside, the streets were empty. For the first month, they made a curfew exception for the parents who wait on the street, and who would sleep on the pavement on blankets they brought from home; typically, the other parent, if there was one, would relieve the sleeper at dawn, bringing them food and taking their place on the sidewalk. But then the state became afraid of riots and banned overnight gatherings, even though the only thing those people wanted was what was inside the hospital. Naturally, I was in favor of this dispersal, if only from an epidemiological perspective, but what I hadn’t realized until everyone left is that the small, human sounds of this gathering, the sighs and snores and murmurs, the sharp flick of someone flipping the page of a book, the glug of water being swigged from a bottle, somehow balanced the other noise: the refrigerated trucks
idling at the docks, the cottony thud of sheet-wrapped bodies being stacked atop one another, the boats chugging to and fro. Everyone who worked on the island had been trained to do so in silence, out of respect, but sometimes you heard one of them exclaim, or swear, or occasionally cry out, and you couldn’t know whether it was because they had dropped a body, or because a shroud had come loose, revealing a face, or because they were simply overwhelmed by the work of burning so many bodies, bodies of children.

The driver knew where I was going that night, and I was able to lean my head against the window and sleep for half an hour before I heard him announce our arrival at the center.

The center is on an island that, half a century ago, was a nature preserve for endangered birds: terns, loons, ospreys. By ’55, the terns were extinct, and the next year, another crematorium had been erected on the southern shore. But then the island flooded in the storm, and sat abandoned until ’68, when the state started quietly rebuilding it, constructing artificial sand beds and concrete barrier walls.

The walls are meant to protect the island from future floods, but they’re also a necessary obfuscation. It was never the intention, but this center has ended up serving mostly children. There was a debate over whether we should allow parents in or not. I argued that we should—the majority of them were immune. But the psychologists on the Committee argued we shouldn’t—the problem was, they said, that they would never recover from what they saw there, and this trauma, on such a mass scale, could lead to social instability. Finally, a dormitory was built for the parents on the north side of the island, but then there was that incident in March, and now no parents at all are allowed. So instead, the parents have built a shantytown—the richer people have actually erected tiny houses from brick, the poorer from cardboard—on the coast in New Rochelle, though all they can see from there is the wall that surrounds the island, and the helicopters lowering themselves from the sky.

There had been, as you recall, a good deal of debate about where we should locate this center. Most of the Committee had argued for one of the former refugee camps: Fire Island, Block Island,
Shelter Island. But I had fought for this island: far enough north from Manhattan so there’d be few unexpected visitors; not too far for the helicopters and boats, which could easily float downriver to the crematorium now that the waterways have been reopened.

But though I never said so, the reason I really chose this place was because of its name: Davids Island. Not singular—David’s—but many, as if this land were inhabited not by an ever-changing population of (mostly) children, but by Davids. My son, in duplicate, at all different ages, doing all the things my son had liked to do at various points in his life. Building bombs, yes. But also reading, and playing basketball, and running about like a crazed puppy to make me and Nathaniel laugh, and spinning his daughter around, and climbing into bed next to me when it was thundering and he was frightened. The older Davids would be parents to the younger Davids, and when one finally died—though that wouldn’t be for a very long time, as the oldest inhabitants were still only thirty, the age my David would have been, had he lived—he would be replaced by another, so that the population of Davids always would remain the same: never increasing, never diminishing. There would be no misunderstandings, no concerns that the younger Davids might be somehow different, somehow strange, because the older Davids would understand them. There would be no loneliness, because these Davids would not have ever known parents, or classmates, or strangers, or people who wouldn’t play with them: They would only know one another, which is to say themselves, and their happiness would be complete, because they would never know the agony of wanting to be someone else, for there was no one else to admire, no one else to envy.

I come here sometimes, late, when even the residents of the shantytown have gone to sleep, and sit at the edge of the blackish, brackish water and look out onto the island, which is always lit, and think about what my Davids might be doing now: Maybe the older ones are having a beer. Maybe some of the teenagers are playing volleyball under those bright white lights, the ones that never switch off and transform the water around the island into a shimmer of oil. Maybe the younger ones are reading comic books under their covers with
a flashlight—or whatever it is kids do these days when they’re goofing off. (
Do
they still goof off? They must, mustn’t they?) Maybe they’re cleaning up after dinner, because the young Davids have been taught to be helpful, they have been taught to be good people, to be kind to one another; maybe there’s a pile of them flopped on a bed many yards wide, in which they all sleep in a jumble, one’s breath hot against the back of another’s head, one’s hand stretching out to scratch his thigh and scratching his neighbor’s instead. But it won’t matter: They’ll both feel it anyway.

“David,” I say to the water, quietly, so as not to wake the parents who sleep behind me. “Can you hear me?” And then I listen.

But no one ever answers.

Love—Charles

My dear Peter,
September 5, 2071

Today was Charlie’s seventh birthday party, which we weren’t able to have on Thursday, as we’d planned, because she wasn’t feeling well. I didn’t get to mention it when we talked, but for the past month she’s been having petit mal seizures: They only last eight to eleven seconds, but she’s been experiencing them more frequently than I had realized. She had one at the neurologist’s office, in fact, but I hadn’t noticed it until the doctor pointed it out to me—a long, silent stare, her mouth slightly open. “That’s what you have to look for,” her doctor said, but I was too ashamed to admit that she often looked like that, that I had seen her wear that expression before and had thought it simply part of who she now was, not a sign of any neurological condition. An aftereffect of Xychor, again, especially for children who were given the drug before puberty. The doctor thought she’d grow out of them without medication—I couldn’t bear to put her on another, especially one that might further deaden her—but isn’t certain “what the developmental damages will be.”

After these seizures, she’s limp, acquiescent. Since coming home,
she’s been so wooden; when I reach out a hand to her, she teeters backward with a kind of stiff-limbed rigidity that would be comical if it weren’t so dismaying. Now I know just to pick her up and hold her next to me, and when she begins to squirm—she no longer likes being held—I know she’s recovered.

I try to make things as easy for her as I can. The Rockefeller Child and Family Center has closed for lack of students, and so I enrolled her in a small, expensive primary school near Union Square, where each student has her own teacher, and where they agreed she could begin in late September, once she gains a little more weight and grows a little more hair. I, of course, don’t care whether she has hair or not, but it’s the one aspect of her appearance that seems to make her self-conscious. Anyway, I was happy to keep her at home with me for a while longer. The school’s dean suggested I get her an animal, to give her something to interact with, and so on Monday I got her a cat, a small gray thing, and presented her with it when she woke up. She didn’t exactly smile—she rarely smiles these days—but she did immediately express an interest in it, taking it in her arms and looking into its face.

“What’s his name, Charlie?” I asked her. Before the sickness, she had named everything: people she saw on the street, the plants in their pots, the dolls on her bed, the two sofas downstairs that she claimed resembled hippos. Now she looked up at me with her newly disquieting gaze, in which you can see either profundity or nothingness.

“Cat,” she said, finally.

“How about something more—descriptive?” I asked her. (“Make her describe things to you,” her psychologist said. “Make her keep talking. You won’t necessarily be able to reawaken her imagination, but you can remind her that it’s there for her to use.”)

She was quiet for so long, staring at the kitten and stroking its fur, that I thought she’d had another seizure. Then she spoke again. “Little Cat,” she said.

“Yes,” I said, and my eyes grew hot. I felt, as I often do when watching her, a deep ache, one that radiates from my heart to every part of my body. “He
is
little, isn’t he?”

“Yes,” she agreed.

She’s so different now. Before the illness, I would watch her from the doorway of her bedroom, unwilling to interrupt her play by speaking, listening to her talk to her stuffed animals, using one pitch of voice to command them and another to inhabit each one, and feel something inside me swell. When I was in med school, I remember a woman, the mother of a child with Down syndrome, had come to talk to us about the manner in which the doctors and geneticists had discussed her daughter’s postnatal diagnosis with her, which ranged from heartless to clueless. But then, she said, on the day she and her baby were being discharged, the attending resident had come to say goodbye to them. “Enjoy her,” he had said to this woman.
Enjoy her:
No one had ever told her that she might delight in her baby, that her baby might be a source not of troubles but of pleasure.

And in the same way, I had always enjoyed Charlie. I always knew I did—that enjoyment, that pleasure I took in the fact of her, was inextricable from my love for her. Now, though, that enjoyment is gone, replaced by some other sensation, one deeper and more painful. It’s as if I cannot see her without experiencing her in triplicate: the shadow of who she once was, the reality of who she is, the projection of who she might become. I mourn one, am bewildered by the next, and fear for the third. I had never realized just how much I had assumed about her future until she emerged from her coma so changed. I knew I wouldn’t be able to predict what New York, this country, the world might look like then—but I always knew that she’d be able to meet her future bravely and forthrightly, that she had the self-possession and charm and intuition to survive.

But now I fear for her constantly. How will she live in this world? Who will she be? That image I hadn’t even realized I had, of her banging into the house, a teenager, after visiting a friend, me lecturing her for being late—will that still happen? Will she be able to walk through the Village—sorry, Zone Eight—alone? Will she have friends? What will become of her? My love for her at times feels terrible, huge, dark: a wave so towering and silent that there is no fighting, no hope against it—you can only stand and wait for it to smother you.

I understand that this dreadful love is being compounded by a growing awareness of how the world that we live in—a world that, yes, I helped create—is not one that will be tolerant of people who are fragile or different or damaged. I have always wondered how people knew it was time to leave a place, whether that place was Phnom Penh or Saigon or Vienna. What had to happen for you to abandon everything, for you to lose hope that things would ever improve, for you to run toward a life you couldn’t begin to imagine? I had always imagined that that awareness happened slowly, slowly but steadily, so the changes, though each terrifying on its own, became inoculated by their frequency, as if the warnings were normalized by how many there were.

And then, suddenly, it’s too late. All the while, as you were sleeping, as you were working, as you were eating dinner or reading to your children or talking with your friends, the gates were being locked, the roads were being barricaded, the train tracks were being dismantled, the ships were being moored, the planes were being rerouted. One day, something happens, maybe something minor, even, like chocolate disappears from the stores, or you realize there are no more toy shops in the entire city, or you watch the playground across the street from you be destroyed, the metal jungle gym disassembled and loaded into a truck, and you understand, suddenly, that you’re in danger: That TV is never returning. That the internet is never returning. That, even though the worst of the pandemic is over, the camps are still being built. That when someone said, in the last Committee meeting, that “certain people’s chronic procreation was welcome for once in history,” and no one reacted, not even you, that everything you had suspected about this country—that America was not for everyone; that it was not for people like me, or people like you; that America is a country with sin at its heart—was true. That when the Cessation and Prevention of Terrorism Act was passed, allowing convicted domestic insurgents the choice between internment and sterilization, it was inevitable that Justice would eventually find a way to extend that punishment to first the children and then the siblings of those convicted insurgents.