This was much farther west than I typically had reason to go. Zone Eight extended from New First Street at its southernmost point to Twenty-third Street in its north, and from Broadway on its east over to Eighth Avenue, and the river, on its west. Technically, the zone had extended farther still, but ten years ago, most of the territory beyond Eighth Avenue had been flooded during the last great storm, which meant that the people who had chosen to remain in river flats were residents of Zone Eight as well. But with every year, more and more of them were relocated, because strange things were being discovered in the river, and it was unclear how safe it was to live there.
Zone Eight was Zone Eight, and there was meant to be no hierarchy within it, no area that was considered better than any other. That was what the state told us. But if you lived in Zone Eight, you knew that there were in fact places—like where my husband and I lived—that were more desirable than others. There were no grocery stores west of Sixth Avenue, for example, or washing or hygiene centers except for the one that was only accessible to people who lived in Little Eight, which also maintained something called a Pantry, where you could buy nonperishable items, like grains and powdered food, but nothing that would spoil.
As I have said, Zone Eight was one of the safest districts on the island, if not in the entire municipality. Still, there were rumors about what happened near the river, just as there were rumors about what happened in Zone Seventeen, which ran along Zone Eight’s north and south axes but then extended all the way to the riverbanks on First Avenue, on the eastern shore. One rumor is that the far western part of Zone Eight was haunted. I had asked Grandfather about that once, and he had taken me over to Eighth Avenue to show me that there were no ghosts there. He said that story had begun before I was born, when there had been a series of underground tunnels that ran beneath the streets, and had extended all the way to the relocation centers, although back then they weren’t centers, they were districts, like Zone Eight, where people lived and worked. Then, after the pandemic of ’70, they were closed, and people began telling stories that the state had used these tunnels as isolation centers for the affected, who by that point numbered in the hundreds of thousands, and then had sealed them up with cement, and everyone in them had died.
“Is that true?” I asked Grandfather. We were standing near the river by then, and speaking very softly, for it was treasonous to even discuss this. I always felt scared when Grandfather and I talked about illegal topics, but also good, because I knew that he knew that I could keep secrets, and that I would never betray him.
“No,” Grandfather said. “Those stories are apocryphal.”
“What does that mean?” I asked him.
“It means untrue,” he said.
I thought about this. “If it’s not true, why do people tell them?” I asked him, and he looked away, into the distance, to the factories on the other side of the river.
“Sometimes, when people tell stories like that, what they’re really trying to express is their fear, or their anger. The state did a lot of horrible things back then,” he said, slowly, and I felt that same thrill, hearing someone talking about the state that way, and that that someone was my grandfather. “Many horrible things,” he repeated, after a pause. “But that was not one of them.” He looked at me. “Do you believe me?”
“Yes,” I said. “I believe everything you say, Grandfather.”
He looked away from me again, and I worried I had said something wrong, but he only put his palm on the back of my head, and said nothing.
What remained true is that the tunnels had been sealed up long ago, and it was said that if you went close to the river late at night, you would hear the sobs and moans of the people who had been left to die within them.
The other thing that people said about the far western edge of Zone Eight is that there were buildings there that looked like buildings, but in which nobody lived. It took me a few years of eavesdropping on the Ph.D.s to understand what they meant by that.
Much of Zone Eight had been built centuries ago, in the eighteen hundreds and early nineteen hundreds, but a good deal of it had been demolished shortly before I was born and replaced with towers, which had doubled as clinics. Before then, the population had been very high, and people came to the municipality from all over the world. But then the illness of ’50 had stopped almost all immigration, and then the illnesses of ’56 and ’70 had solved the problem of overcrowding, which meant that, while Zone Eight was still a high-density district, no one lived here illegally now. However, some of the zone’s original buildings had been spared, especially those close to Fifth Avenue and the Square, and those close to Eighth Avenue. Here, the buildings resembled the one my husband and I lived in; they were made from red brick and were rarely more than four stories high. Some of them were even smaller, and held only four units.
According to the Ph.D.s whose conversations I listened to, there were a few of these buildings close to the river that had once been divided into apartments, the same as our building, but had over the years become places where nobody lived. Instead, you went to these buildings to—well, I did not know what you went to the buildings to do, only that it was illegal, and that when the Ph.D.s talked about them, they laughed and said things like “You’d know all about that, wouldn’t you, Foxley?” This is how I surmised that these were dangerous but also exciting places that the Ph.D.s pretended they knew about but would never actually be bold enough to visit.
By this time, I was very near the river, on a street called Bethune. When I was a child, the state had tried to relabel all the named streets with numbers instead, which mostly affected Zones Seven, Eight, Seventeen, Eighteen, and Twenty-one. But it hadn’t worked, and people continued to call them by their twentieth-century names. All this time, my husband hadn’t looked behind him once. It had grown very dark, and I was lucky he was wearing a light-gray anorak, one I could easily follow. He had clearly walked this route many times before—at one point, he abruptly stepped down from the sidewalk to the street, and when I looked at the sidewalk, I saw there was an enormous gouge in it, and he had known to avoid it.
Bethune was one of the streets people thought was haunted, even though it wasn’t near one of the former entrances to the underground tunnels. But it still had all its trees, even though they were mostly bare, and I suppose that was what made it look so old-fashioned and gloomy. It was also one of the streets that hadn’t been flooded, and therefore extended all the way west to Washington Street. Here, my husband walked to the middle of the block and then he stopped, and looked about him.
There was no one on the street but me, and I quickly moved behind one of the trees. I wasn’t concerned about him seeing me: I was wearing black clothes and black shoes, and my skin is fairly dark—I knew I wouldn’t be visible. In fact, my husband’s coloring is similar to mine, and it was by that point so dark that, had I not known to look for his anorak, I might not have seen him myself.
“Hello?” my husband called. “Is anyone there?”
I know this will sound foolish, but in that moment, I wanted to respond. “I’m here,” I would have said, and stepped onto the sidewalk. “I just want to know where you go,” I would have said. “I want to be with you.” But I couldn’t think of what he would say in response.