The storyteller announced there would be a short intermission, and some people brought out little tins of snacks and began to eat. I wished I had thought to bring a snack as well, but I hadn’t. But as I was thinking that, the person next to me spoke.
“Do you want one?” he asked.
I turned and saw that he was holding out a small paper bag of precracked walnuts, and I shook my head: It was unwise to take food from strangers—no one had enough food to just offer it to someone they didn’t know, and so if they did, it generally meant that something was potentially suspicious. “Thank you, though,” I said, and as I did, I looked at him and realized it was the man I had seen at the shuttle stop, the one with the long curls. I was so surprised that I just stared at him, but he didn’t seem offended, and even smiled. “I’ve seen you before,” he said, and when I still didn’t say anything, he tilted his head to one side, still smiling. “In the mornings,” he said, “at the shuttle stop.”
“Oh,” I said, as if I hadn’t recognized him immediately. “Oh, yes. Right.”
He bent over another walnut, splitting it in half with his thumb and breaking off the remaining bits of its shell in neat shards. As he did, I was able to study him; he was wearing a cap again, but I couldn’t see any hair under it, and beneath it he wore a gray nylon shirt and gray pants, of the sort my husband also wore. “Do you come to hear this storyteller often?” he asked.
It took a moment for me to realize he was talking to me, and when I did, I didn’t know what to say. No one talked to me unless they had to: the grocer, asking me if I wanted nutria or dog or tempeh; the Ph.D.s, telling me they needed more pinkies; the dispenser at the center, holding out her machine and asking for my fingerprint to confirm I’d received the correct number of coupons for the month. And yet here was this person, a stranger, asking me a question, and not only asking me but smiling, smiling like he really wanted to know the answer. The last person who had smiled at me and asked me questions was, of course, Grandfather, and, remembering that, I became very upset, and started to rock in place, just a little, but when I caught myself and looked up again, he was still looking at me, still smiling, as if I were just another person.
“Yes,” I said, but that wasn’t really true. “No,” I corrected myself. “I mean, sometimes. Sometimes I do.”
“Me too,” he replied, in that same voice, as if I were no different from anyone else, as if I were the kind of person who had conversations all the time.
Then it was my turn to say something, but I couldn’t think of anything, and once again, the man saved me. “Have you lived in Zone Eight for long?” he asked.
This should have been an easy question, but I hesitated. In truth, I had lived in Zone Eight for my entire life. When I was born, however, there were no zones; this was simply an area, and you could move all around the island as you wanted, and you could live in whatever district you preferred, assuming you had enough money to afford it. Then, when I was seven, the zones were established, but as Grandfather and I already lived in what was now called Zone Eight, it wasn’t as if we had to move, or be reassigned.
But all that seemed like too much to say, so I just said I had.
“I just moved here,” said the man, after I had forgotten to ask him if he had lived in the zone for very long. （“A good thing to remember in a conversation is reciprocity,” Grandfather had said. “That means that you should ask the person what they just asked you. So, if they say to you, ‘How are you?,’ then you should reply and then ask, ‘And how are you?’？”） “I used to live in Zone Seventeen, but this is much nicer.” He smiled again. “I live in Little Eight,” he added.
“Oh,” I said. “Little Eight’s nice,” I said.
“It is,” he said. “I live in Building Six.”
“Oh,” I said again. Building Six was the biggest building in Little Eight, and you could only live there if you were unmarried, had worked for at least three years for one of the state projects, and were under the age of thirty-five. You had to enter a special lottery to live in Building Six, and no one lived there for longer than two years at most, because one of the benefits of living there was that the state helped arrange your marriage. This was the kind of task that had once fallen to your parents, but fewer adults had parents these days. People called it “Building Sex.”
It was unusual but not unheard-of to be transferred from Zone Seventeen into Zone Eight, and specifically into Building Six. It was more common if you were a scientist or a statistician or an engineer, someone learned, but I already knew from the jumpsuit he had been wearing at the shuttle stop that this man was a tech, maybe a higher-grade tech than I was, but still not someone with top clearance. Still, perhaps he had performed some exceptional service: For example, there were sometimes reports of how a botany tech at the Farm had quickly moved all the seedlings in his care to another laboratory when his own lab’s generator failed; or, in a more extreme case, how an animal tech had thrown himself in front of his fetus jars to save them from gunfire when his convoy was set upon by insurgents. （That person had died, but was given a posthumous promotion and commendation.）
I was wondering what the man had done to merit his move when the storyteller returned and started talking again. The new story was about the man and woman planning an anniversary present for each other. The man asked his supervisor for time off and entered the lottery for orchestra tickets. Meanwhile, the woman had also asked her supervisor for time off and had also entered a lottery, for a concert of folk music. But in their attempts to keep their plans a surprise, they had forgotten to coordinate their dates, and had gotten the tickets for the same night. In the end, though, it had all worked out, because the man’s colleague had offered to trade his own orchestra tickets for a later date, so the man and the woman got to have two celebrations, and both were pleased that their spouse had been so thoughtful.
Everyone clapped and began gathering their things, but I remained seated. I was wondering what the man in the story did on his free nights, and what the woman did on hers.
Then I heard someone speak to me. “Hey,” the person said, and I looked up, and the man with the long hair was standing next to me, holding out his hand. For a moment I was confused, and then I realized he was offering me help to stand, though I got up on my own, dusting off my pants as I did.
I was worried I had been rude to reject him, but when I looked at him again, he was still smiling. “That was nice,” he said.
“Yes,” I said.
“Are you going to come next week?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Well,” he said, shifting his bag on his shoulder, “I am.” He paused. “Maybe I’ll see you again.”
“All right,” I said.
He smiled again and turned to leave. But after he had walked a few steps, he stopped and turned back around. “I never asked you your name,” he said.
He made it sound as if this were unusual, as if everyone I met or worked with knew my name, as if it were rude or extraordinary to not know. I cannot say that other people were not asked for their names; I cannot say that it was unsafe to tell someone your name. I thought of the two young women scientists at work, and how people must ask their names all the time. I thought of my husband in the house on Bethune Street, the familiar way that the man at the door had said, “You’re late tonight,” and how, in that house, everyone would know his name. I thought of the person sending him notes, and how that person too would know his name. I thought of the postdocs and scientists and Ph.D.s at work, all of whose names I knew—they knew my name, too, though not because it was mine; they knew it because they knew what it represented, they knew that my name explained why I was there at all.