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.
I didn’t really want to walk around the Square, first, because it was very hot, even hotter than usual for late October, and second, because walking around the Square could be frightening. But I also couldn’t sit much longer in the apartment, with nothing to do and no one to look at, and so, finally, I put on some sunscreen and my hat and a long-sleeved shirt and walked downstairs and outside and across the street, and then I was in the Square.
You could get whatever you needed in the Square. In the northwest corner were the metalworkers, who could make you anything from a lock to a pan, and who would also buy any old metal you had. They would weigh it, and tell you what it was, whether it was cobalt mixed with aluminum or iron mixed with nickel, and give you gold or food or water coupons, whichever you wanted, and then they would smelt it and make it into something else. South of them were the cloth merchants, who weren’t just merchants but also tailors and seamstresses, and who would also buy any clothes or fabrics that you didn’t need anymore, or could remake old clothes into new clothes. In the northeast corner were the moneylenders, and next to them were the herbalists, and south of them were the carpenters, who could make or repair anything out of wood. There were also rubber repairmen and rope-makers and plastic merchants, who would buy or trade you anything made of plastic, and could also make you something new.
Not all of them were licensed to be in the Square, and every few months or so there’d be a raid, and everyone, even the vendors who had permits, would disappear for a week, and then they’d return. People—not all people, not people like the scientists and ministers, but most other people—depended on the vendors. Up in Zone Fourteen, there were stores you could go to and buy things, I don’t know what, but except for the grocery, there were no stores in Zone Eight, and so instead we had the Square. Anyway, the officials didn’t really care about the cloth merchants and carpenters and metalworkers: The ones they cared about were the people who moved among the vendors. These people didn’t have fixed positions in the Square, like the vendors did—a wooden table, with a tarp stretched above to protect them from the sun or the rain. At most, these other people usually would have only a stool and an umbrella, and they would sit in a different spot every day. Sometimes they didn’t even have that, and would just wander through the Square, walking between the stalls. Yet everyone, all the other vendors and regular shoppers, knew who they were and where to find them, though no one ever used their actual names. There were people who could help reset a bone or give you stitches, and who could help you get out of the prefecture, and who could help procure anything you wanted, from illegal books to sugar to even a specific person. There were people who could find you a child, and people who could take one away. There were people who could get someone into a good containment center, and people who could get someone out of one. There were even people who claimed they could cure you of the illnesses, and they were the ones that the authorities looked for the hardest, but it was said that they could disappear at will, and they could never be caught. This was illogical, of course: People can’t disappear. And yet there were rumors about them, about how they could elude the authorities again and again.
In the center of the Square was a large, shallow cement pit in the shape of a ring, and in the middle of the pit, on an elevated pedestal, was a fire that was never extinguished, not even in the hottest weather, except during the raids, and surrounding the fire were more vendors. There were twenty to thirty of them, depending on the day, and they sat in the ring, and on the raised lip of the ring they each unrolled a plastic tarp, and on the tarps they displayed different cuts of meat. Sometimes you could tell what kind of animal the meat was from, and sometimes you couldn’t. Each vendor had his own sharp knife and a pair of long metal tongs and a set of long metal skewers and a fan made from woven plastic that they would wave over the meat to keep the flies away. The vendors accepted gold or coupons, and they would either cut the meat for you and wrap it in a piece of paper so you could take it home, or they would stab a skewer through it and cook it for you right there in the fire, whichever you wanted. Around the fire were metal trays that collected the fat that dripped from the meat, and if you couldn’t afford the meat, you could buy just the fat, and take that home and use it to cook. The strange thing was that all the vendors who worked in the pit were very skinny, and you never saw them eat. People always said that was because they would never dare eat the meat they sold, and every few months there were rumors that the meat was actually human, and had been procured from one of the camps. But that didn’t stop people from buying it, from tearing the meat off the skewers with their teeth, sucking the metal clean and bright before handing it back to the vendor.