“Are you ill?” he asked me. He was washing the dinner dishes.
“No,” I said. “I just don’t feel like going out.”
“Do you want to go out on Wednesday instead?” he asked.
“No,” I said. “This will be my free night. I just won’t go out.”
“Oh,” he said. He placed the last plate on the drying rack. Then he asked, “Which would you like, the main room or the bedroom?”
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“Well,” he said, “I want to give you your privacy. So which would you rather have, the main room or the bedroom?”
“Oh,” I said. “The bedroom, I guess.” I thought about this. Was this the right answer? “Is that all right?”
“Of course,” he said. “It’s your night.”
And so I went to the bedroom, where I changed into my nightclothes and then lay down on the bed. After a few minutes, there was a soft knock on the door, and when my husband entered, he was carrying the radio. “I thought you might want to listen to some music,” he said, and plugged it in and turned it on and left, closing the door behind him.
I lay there listening to the radio for a long while. Finally, I went to use the toilet and brush my teeth and clean my face and body with hygiene wipes, and as I did, I looked into the main room, where my husband was sitting on the sofa, reading. He has a higher clearance than I do and so is allowed to read certain books, those that relate to his field, which he borrows from work and then returns. This one was a book about the care and cultivation of tropical water-grown edible plants, and even though I am not interested in tropical water-grown edible plants, I was suddenly jealous of him. My husband could sit and read for hours, and I looked at him and wished for Grandfather, who would know just what to say to make me feel better. But instead, I got ready for bed and returned to our room, and finally, after what felt like many hours, I heard my husband sigh and turn off the light in the main room, and go to the bathroom himself, and then, finally, come quietly into our room, where he changed clothes as well and got into his bed.
Ever since then, I have spent my free nights indoors. Every once in a while, if I’m feeling very restless, I’ll take a walk: maybe around the Square, maybe up to the center. But usually, I go to our bedroom, where my husband has always set up the radio. I change, I turn off the lights, I get into bed, and I wait: for the sound of him sitting down on the sofa, for the sound of him cracking his knuckles as he reads, and, at last, for the sound of him shutting the book and switching off the lamp. Every Thursday for the past six and a half years, I have waited for my husband to come home from his free night, which he begins directly after work. Every Tuesday, I lie in my bed in our bedroom, waiting for my free night to be over, waiting for my husband to come back to me, even if he doesn’t say a word.
* * *
I had gotten the idea about following my husband on his free night from the lab. This happened on a Friday. It was January 1, 2094, and Dr. Wesley, who was interested in Western history and only celebrated the new year according to the traditional calendar, assembled everyone who worked in the lab for a glass of grape juice. Everyone got some, even me. “Six more years until the twenty-second century!” he announced, and we all clapped. The juice was a dark, cloudy purple, and so sweet that it made my throat hurt. But it had been a long time since I had had juice, and I wondered if this was something that was interesting enough to tell my husband, because it was at least different from what usually happened at work, yet also not classified material.
On my way back to my part of the lab, I took a break and went to the bathroom, and as I sat there on the toilet, I heard two people come in and begin washing their hands. They were women, neither of whose voices I recognized, and they were both Ph.D.s, I think, because they sounded young and they were talking about an article in a journal they had both read.
They discussed the article—which was about some kind of new antiviral that was being engineered out of a real virus whose genetics had somehow been altered—and then one of them said, very fast, “So, I thought Percy was cheating on me.”
“Really?” asked the other. “Why?”
“Well,” said the first, “he’d been acting really strange, you know? Late coming home from work, and really forgetful—he even forgot to meet me for my six-month checkup. And he started leaving the house really early in the morning, saying he had a lot of work and had to get it done, and then he started acting strangely around my father when we went over to my parents’ for Saturday lunch, kind of avoiding his gaze. So one day, after he left for work, I waited a few minutes, and then I followed him.”
“Belle! You didn’t!”
“I did! I was rehearsing what I was going to say to him, and what I’d say to my parents, and what I was going to do, when I realized that he was going into the Housing Development Unit. And I called out his name, and he was really surprised. But then he told me that he was trying to get us a better unit in a better part of the zone for when the baby comes, and that he and my father had been working on it together as a surprise.”
“Oh, Belle—that’s amazing!”
“I know. I felt so guilty for hating him, even if it was just a few weeks.”
She laughed, and so did her friend. “Well, Percy can take a little hatred if it’s from you,” said the second woman.
“Yes,” the first woman said, and laughed again. “He knows who’s in charge.”
They left the bathroom, and then I flushed and washed my hands and left too, and as I did, I passed the two women, still talking, but now in the hallway. They were both very pretty, and they both had shiny dark hair that they wore in neat buns at the base of their skulls, and little gold earrings shaped like planets. They were both wearing lab coats, of course, but beneath their hems I could see they were wearing colorful silk skirts and leather shoes with low heels. One of them, the prettier one, was pregnant; as she spoke to her friend, she rubbed her stomach in a slow circular movement.
I went back to my area, where I had a new batch of pinkies to move into individual petri dishes, which I had to fill with saline. As I worked, I thought of those notes my husband had kept. And then I thought of the woman in the bathroom, who had thought her husband might be seeing someone else, someone who wasn’t her. But her husband hadn’t been doing anything wrong after all: He had only been trying to find her a bigger unit to live in, because she was pretty and educated and pregnant, and there would be no reason to find someone else, someone better, because there wouldn’t be someone better. I could tell by her hair that she must live in Zone Fourteen, and if she was a Ph.D., it meant that her parents probably lived in Zone Fourteen too, and had paid for her to go to school, and then paid more for her to live nearby. I found myself thinking of what they all ate for Saturday lunch—I had once heard that in Zone Fourteen there were stores where you could buy any kind of meat that you wanted, and as much as you wanted. You could have ice cream every day there, or chocolate or juice or even wine. You could buy candy or fruit or milk. You could go home and take a shower every day. I was thinking about this, and growing more and more agitated, when I dropped one of the pinkies. It was so tender that it turned into a smear of jelly upon impact, and I let out a cry: I was so careful. I never dropped pinkies. But now I had.