But mostly, Peter, I was so, so sorry to hear that Alice is one of the dead. I know how close you two were, and how long you’d worked together, and I can only imagine what you and your colleagues must be feeling right now.
Nathaniel and the baby join me in sending you love. Olivier is taking good care of you, I know, but text or just call me if you want to talk.
I love you. C.
Dearest Peter, March 14, 2049
I’m writing you from our new apartment. Yes, the rumors are true: We’ve moved. Not far, and not really up—the new place, a two-bedroom, is on 70th and Second, on the fourth floor of a 1980s-era building—but we had to, for Nathaniel’s happiness and therefore my sanity. It was, however, fairly cheap, and this is only because there are reports that the East River will finally flood the dams sometime between next year and never. （Of course, this is also why we should’ve stayed in RU housing, which is even more likely to be flooded than this new place, and therefore even less expensive, but Nathaniel had had it and there was no arguing with him.）
There’s nothing much to say about the new neighborhood, because it’s the same as the old neighborhood, more or less. The difference is that, here, the living-room windows look down onto a sanitation center across the street. You don’t have those yet, do you? You will. They’re abandoned storefronts （this one had been—irony of ironies—an ice-cream parlor） that the government’s taken over and fitted out with industrial-grade air-conditioning, as well as, typically, ten to twenty air showers, which is a new technology they’re testing out: You take off your clothes and go into the stall, which resembles an upright tubular coffin, and press a button and get blasted by powerful bursts of air. The concept is that you don’t need to use water, because the force of the air will blast away the grime. It sort of works, I guess. At any rate, it’s better than nothing. Anyway, they’re opening these centers all over the city, and the idea is that you pay a monthly fee and can use them whenever you want; the really expensive ones, which are still federally regulated but privately owned, allow you to stay all day in the air-conditioning, and offer unlimited air shower time, and there are also work spaces and beds for people who need to spend the night because their building’s had a blackout. The one across the street from us, however, is an emergency center, which means that it’s for people whose buildings have lost water or electricity for an extended period （meaning more than ninety-six hours）， or whose neighborhoods don’t have enough generators to go around. So, all day long, you have these miserable people, hundreds of them—lots of children, lots of old people, none of them white—standing in the sweltering heat for literally hours, waiting to get in. And because of last month’s scare, you’re not allowed to enter if you have a cough, and even if you don’t, you still have to submit to a temperature check, which is ridiculous because by that point you’ve been standing in the heat for so long that your body temperature will be naturally elevated. The city officials claim that the guards can tell the difference between a fever from infection and simple overheating, but I seriously doubt that. And to further complicate matters, you now also have to show your identity papers at the door: only U.S. citizens and permanent residents accepted.
One day last month, Nathaniel and I took over some of baby’s old clothes and toys to donate, standing for a few minutes in a separate, much shorter queue, and though I’m not shocked by much anymore in this shit-ass city, I was shocked by that center: There were probably a hundred adults and fifty kids in a space meant for maybe sixty people, and the stench—of vomit, of feces, of unwashed hair and skin—was so overpowering that you could almost see it, coloring the room a dull mustard. But the thing that really struck us was how quiet it was: Except for one baby, who cried and cried in a thin, helpless way, there was no sound. Everyone was standing mutely in lines for one of the seven air showers, and when one person exited, the next would silently enter the shower space and draw the curtain closed.
We navigated through the crowds, which parted, wordlessly, to let us pass, and headed toward the back, where there was a plastic table, behind which stood a middle-aged woman. On the table was an enormous metal cauldron, and in front of the table was another queue of people, all holding ceramic mugs. When they reached the front of the line, they held out their cups, and the woman dipped a ladle into the pot and poured them a drink of cold water. Next to her were two more pots, their sides perspiring, and behind those pots was a guard, his arms crossed, a holster with a gun at his hip. We told the woman we’d brought some clothes for donation, and she told us we could put them in one of the bins beneath the windows, which we did. As we were leaving, she thanked us, and asked if we might have any liquid antibiotics at home, or diaper cream, or nutritional drinks. We had to say we didn’t, that our son had long outgrown all of these things, and she nodded again, wearily. “Thanks anyway,” she said.
We walked back across the street—the heat so thick and stunning it felt as if the air had been knitted from wool—and up to our apartment in silence, and once we were inside, Nathaniel turned to me and we put our arms around each other. It had been a long, long time since we’d held each other like that, and even though I knew he was clinging to me out of sorrow and fear more than affection, I was glad for it.
“Those poor people,” he said into my shoulder, and I sighed back. Then he pulled away from me, angry. “This is New York,” he said. “It’s 2049! Jesus Christ!” Yes, I wanted to say, it’s New York. It’s 2049. That’s exactly the problem. But I didn’t.
We took a long shower then, which was a grotesque thing to do, given what we’d just seen, but there was something delicious about it, and defiant, too—a way of telling ourselves that we could get clean whenever we wanted, that we weren’t those people, that we never would be. Or at least that’s what I said as we lay there in bed, after. “Tell me that won’t happen to us,” Nathaniel said. “That will never happen to us,” I said. “Promise me,” he said. “I promise you,” I told him. Though I couldn’t promise. But what else was I going to say? Then we lay there for a while, listening to the purr of the air conditioner, and then he left to pick the baby up from swimming lessons.
I know I mentioned this briefly in my last communiqué, but aside from finances, the baby is the other reason we had to stay in this neighborhood, because we’re trying to keep things as normal as possible for him. I told you about that incident on the basketball court last year, and two days ago, there was another: They called me at the lab （Nathaniel was upstate with his students on a field trip） and I had to hurry over to the school, where I found the baby sitting in the principal’s office. He had clearly been crying but was pretending he hadn’t, and I was so overcome—angry and afraid and helpless—that I think I probably just stood there for a moment, stupidly staring at him, before I ordered him out, and he left, feigning a kick toward the doorframe as he left.
What I should have done, though, is hugged him and told him everything was going to be okay. Increasingly, all of my human interactions seem to follow this pattern—I see a problem, I get overwhelmed, I don’t offer compassion when I should, and the other person storms off.