We sat there a while longer. It had been a long, long time—years—since I had held the baby like this. Finally, he spoke. “Don’t tell him,” he said.
“Daddy?” I asked. “I have to tell him, David, you know that.”
He seemed resigned to this, and stood up to leave. But one thing had been troubling me. “David,” I said, “where did you get the syringe?”
I thought I might get some evasive answer, like “some kids” or “I dunno” or “I found it.” But instead he said, “I ordered it.”
“Show me,” I said.
And so he walked me over to the study, where I watched him log on to my computer—bypassing the retinal scan by tapping in my password with a deftness that proved this wasn’t the first time he’d done so—and then onto a site so illegal that I would be forced to file a report explaining what had happened and requesting a new laptop. He stood back from my chair and dropped his hand by his side, and for a while we both stared at the screen, on which a graphic of an atom whirred. Every few revolutions, the atom would halt, and a new category of offerings would appear above it: “Viral Agents.” “Needles and Syringes.” “Antibodies.” “Toxins and Antitoxins.”
You can imagine how I felt. But my first questions were practical ones: How had he known about such a site? How had he breached the security walls in order to access it? How had he known what to order? Who had given him the idea?
Was this normal for a child his age?
Was there something wrong with him?
Who was my child?
I looked at him. “David,” I began, though I had no idea what I was going to say next.
He wouldn’t look up, not even when I repeated his name. “David,” I said, for a third time, “I’m not angry”—which wasn’t exactly true, but what I was, I couldn’t identify—“I just need you to look at me,” and when he finally did, I saw from his face that he was scared.
And then—I don’t know why, I don’t—I hit him: with the flat of my palm, across his face. He yelped and fell backward, and I jerked him upright and hit him again, this time on his left cheek, and he burst into tears. It relieved me, somehow, that he was still capable of being frightened, of being frightened by me; it reminded me that he was still a child after all, that there was hope for him, that he wasn’t wrong or bad or evil. But I would only be able to articulate this to myself later—in that moment, I was only scared: scared for him, and also scared of him. I was about to hit him again when, suddenly, there was Nathaniel, pulling me off of him and shouting. “What the fuck are you doing, Charles?” he yelled at me. “You fucking asshole, you psycho, what the fuck are you doing?” He pushed me, hard, and I fell and hit my face on the floor, and then he took the baby, now sobbing, into his arms, consoling him. “Shh,” he murmured. “It’s okay, David, it’s okay, sweetheart, I’m here, I’m here, I’m here.”
“He’s hurting people,” I said, quietly, but my nose was bleeding so badly that my speech was garbled. “He was trying to hurt people.”
But Nathaniel didn’t answer me. He took off his shirt and pressed it against the baby’s own bleeding nose, and then they stood and left, Nathaniel’s arm around our son’s shoulders. He never looked back at me.
All of this is a long way of saying: I’m in our new apartment. I’m writing you from the study, where I have been banished for the foreseeable future. Nathaniel still hasn’t said a word to me, and neither has the baby. Yesterday I delivered my laptop to the head of technological security and explained what had happened—he seemed less shocked than I had anticipated, which made me think that there was less of a reason to be worried than I had feared. But as he was issuing me a new computer, he asked, “How old is your son, again?”
“Almost ten,” I said.
He shook his head. “And you’re foreign nationals, am I correct?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Dr. Griffith, I know you know this, but—you have to be careful,” he said. “If your son had accessed that site and you hadn’t had the security clearances that you do—”
“I know,” I said.
“No,” he said, looking at me, “you don’t. Be careful, Dr. Griffith. There’s only so much the institute could do to protect your son if this happens again.”
Suddenly I wanted to be far away from him. And not just him but all of it: Rockefeller, my lab, New York, America, even Nathaniel and David. I wanted to be back home, on my grandparents’ farm, as miserable as I had been there, long before any of this—all of this—had ever happened. But I can never go home again. My grandparents and I don’t speak, the farm is flooded, and this is my life now. I have to make the best of it. And I will.
But sometimes, I worry that I won’t.
I love you—Charles
PART III
Winter 2094
One nice memory I have is of Grandfather brushing my hair. I liked to sit in the corner of his study and watch him work; I could stay there for hours, drawing or playing, and rarely make a sound. Once, one of Grandfather’s research assistants had come in and had seen me there, and I could see he was surprised. “I can take her away if she’s bothering you,” said the research assistant, quietly. Then it was Grandfather who was surprised. “My little one?” he asked. “She’s no bother to anyone, especially to me.” Hearing that, I had felt proud, like I had done something correct.
I had a cushion I sat on while Grandfather read or typed or wrote, and when I wasn’t watching him, I had a set of wooden blocks I would play with. The wooden blocks were all painted white, and I was careful not to stack them too high, so they wouldn’t topple over and make a noise.
But sometimes, Grandfather would stop what he was doing and turn around in his chair. “Come here, little one,” he’d say, and I’d take my cushion and put it on the floor between his knees, and he’d take the big, flat-backed brush from his drawer and start stroking my hair with it. “What beautiful hair you have,” he’d say. “Who gave you this beautiful hair?” But that was what is called a rhetorical question, which means I didn’t have to answer it, and I didn’t. In fact, I didn’t have to say anything at all. I always waited for those times when Grandfather would brush my hair. It felt so good, so relaxing, like I was falling slowly down a long, cool tunnel.
After my illness, though, I no longer had beautiful hair. None of us who survived it do. It was because of the drugs we had to take: First all our hair fell out, and when it grew back, it was wispy and thin and dust-colored, and you couldn’t grow it past your chin or it would break off. Most people cut it very short, so that it just covered the scalp. The same thing had happened to many of the survivors of the sicknesses of ’50 and ’56, but it was more severe for us survivors of ’70. For a while, that was how you could tell who had survived the illness, but then a variation of the same drug was prescribed for the illness of ’72, and then it got harder to tell, and having short hair was just more practical: It was less hot, and it took less water and soap to clean. So now lots of people have short hair—you need money if you want to keep it long. That’s one way you can tell who lives in Zone Fourteen; all of them have long hair, because everyone knows that Zone Fourteen gets three times as much water as the second-highest water allotment zone, which is our zone, Zone Eight.