So I said nothing, just hid behind the tree. But I did think of how calm my husband sounded, how calm and how determined.
Then he was moving again, and I came out from behind the tree and followed him, this time with a little more distance between us. Finally, he reached number 27, one of the final houses on the block, an old-fashioned building somewhat like the one we lived in, and he looked around again before climbing the stone steps and rapping a complicated knock on the door: tap-ta-taptap-tap-tap-tap-ta-tap-taptap. Then a little window slid open in the door, and my husband’s face was illuminated by a rectangle of light. Someone must have asked him something, because he said something back, something I couldn’t hear, and then the window shut and the door opened just wide enough for my husband to slip inside. “You’re late tonight,” I heard someone, a man, say before the door closed once more.
And then he was gone. I stood outside the building, staring up at it. From the street, it looked unoccupied. There was no light, there was no sound. After I had waited five minutes, I climbed the steps myself and pressed my ear against the door, which was covered in peeling black paint. I listened and listened. But there was nothing. It was as if my husband had disappeared—not into a house but into another world altogether.
* * *
It wasn’t until the next day, when I was back in the safety of my room at the lab, that I comprehended fully the riskiness of the previous night’s activities. What if my husband had seen me? What if someone had seen me following him and had suspected me of illegal activities?
But then I had to remind myself that my husband had not seen me. No one had seen me. And if by chance I had been recorded by some stray Fly that was patrolling the area, I would simply tell the police that my husband had forgotten his glasses when he went on his nightly walk, and that I was taking them to him.
After I returned to the apartment, I had gone to bed early, so that when my husband came home I was already pretending to be asleep. I had left him a note in the bathroom saying that the leak had been fixed, and I heard him push back the curtain to examine the showerhead. I couldn’t tell if he had in fact returned earlier than he normally did, as there was no clock in the bedroom. I could tell he thought I was asleep, because he was very quiet, undressing and dressing in the dark.
I had been so distracted that day that it took me some time to realize that there was something amiss in the lab, and it was only when I brought over a fresh batch of pinkies to the Ph.D. cluster that I noticed that the reason they were so quiet was that they all had their headsets on and were all listening to the radio.
There were two radios in the lab. One was a normal radio, of the sort everyone had. The second was a radio that only broadcast to sanctioned research facilities around the world, so that different scientists could announce any pertinent findings and give lectures or updates. Typically, of course, such research would be shared in papers that could only be accessed by accredited scientists on highly secure computers. But when there was something urgent, it would be shared on this special radio, which broadcast a soundscreen of noise atop the person speaking; this meant that, unless you had the proper headphones to cancel the soundscreen, you would hear only a randomized, meaningless sound, like crickets chirping or a fire burning. Each person who was authorized to listen to this radio had a sequence of numbers that they had to enter first, and each sequence was registered to a different user, so the state could monitor who was listening at any time. The headphones, too, were only activated once you entered your code, and before leaving the lab for the night, the scientists locked their sets in a safe that was arranged as a series of small boxes; they each had to enter another code for their box door to open.
Now everyone was silent, frowning and listening to the radio. I placed the tray of petri dishes with the new pinkies on the side of the counter, and one of the Ph.D.s flapped his hand at me, impatiently, signaling me to go away; the rest didn’t even look up from their notepads, where they were scribbling words, stopping and pausing to listen, and then writing more.
I went back to the room with my mice and watched the scientists through the window. The entire lab had gone still. Even Dr. Wesley, shut in his office, was listening, frowning at his computer.
After twenty or so minutes, the broadcast must have ended, because everyone yanked off their headsets and then hurried into Dr. Wesley’s office—even the Ph.D. students, who were normally excluded from such meetings. As I saw them turn off the radio, I went over to the Ph.D.s’ area and began stacking empty petri dishes on a tray, which wasn’t my job. But as I did, I heard one of them say to another, “Do you think it’s true?” and the other reply, “Fuck, I hope not.”
Then they were in the office, and I couldn’t hear anything more. But I could see Dr. Wesley speaking, and the rest of them nodding, and everyone looking very grave. I was scared then, because normally when something bad happened—when, say, a new virus got discovered—the scientists weren’t scared but excited.
But now they were frightened, and serious, and when I went to the bathroom on my break, I passed the other labs on the floor, and in those, too, the only people I saw were the techs and support staff moving around, cleaning and organizing like we always did, because the scientists were all gathered in their respective principal investigators’ offices, talking among themselves with the doors closed.
I waited and waited, but everyone remained in Dr. Wesley’s office, talking. The glass was soundproof, so I couldn’t hear. Finally, I was going to miss my shuttle and so I had to leave, though I wrote a note to Dr. Morgan explaining that I’d gone, and placed it on his desk, just in case he was looking for me.
* * *
It took me another week to discover some of what the scientists had overheard on the radio, and the intervening days were very strange ones. Normally, I’m able to find out information fairly quickly. The scientists are discouraged from gossiping and speculating out loud, but they all do so anyway, albeit in whispers. Besides their lack of discretion, however, the other thing that benefits me is that they rarely seem to notice when I’m around. Sometimes, that bothers me. But most of the time, I can use it to my advantage.
I have learned many things simply by listening. I learned, for instance, that Roosevelt Island, in the East River, was one of the city’s first relocation centers, during the ’50 pandemic, and later a prison camp, and finally, after it had become overrun with rodents carrying an infection, the state had moved the camp to Governor’s Island, in the south, which had previously been a refugee camp, and had scattered thousands of poisoned food pellets that killed all the rodents, and no one had been to Roosevelt Island since except the crematorium workers. I learned that Dr. Wesley regularly traveled to the Western Colonies, where the state had built a large research facility where they kept an underground vault storing a sample of every known microbe in the world. I learned that the state was predicting a severe drought in the next five years, and that there was a team of scientists elsewhere in the country who were trying to figure out how to generate rain on a mass scale.
Aside from all of that information, I learned other things from eavesdropping on the Ph.D.s as well. Most of them were married, and sometimes they discussed romance, things that had happened with their husbands or wives. But here, they often spoke in silences, not details. They said things like “You know what happened next,” and the other person would say, “I do,” and I sometimes felt like saying, “What happened next? What are you talking about?” Because I didn’t know, and I wanted to know. Though of course I knew not to ask.