I slept. When I woke, it was dark—I was still alone. The baby was seeing his therapist; Nathaniel would be working late. I knew I should do something useful, get up and make dinner, go down to the lobby and ask the super if he needed help changing the filter on the decontamination pod. But I didn’t. I just lay there in the dark, looking at the sky and watching night approach.
Now comes the part I’ve been avoiding.
I suppose, if you’ve read this far, you’re wondering why I was walking across the Park in the first place. And you’ve probably guessed that it relates to the baby, because everything I have done wrong seems to relate to him in some way.
As you know, this is the baby’s third school in three years, and it’s been made clear to me by the principal that this is his last chance. How can it be his last chance when he’s not even fifteen? I’d asked, and the principal, a sour little man, frowned at me. “I mean you’re out of good options,” he said, and although I wanted to punch him, I didn’t, in part because I knew he was right: This is David’s last chance. He has to make this one work.
The school is across the Park, on 94th just west of Columbus, in what was once a grand apartment building and had been purchased by the school’s founder back in the ’20s, at the height of the charter-school craze. Then it got converted into a private school for boys with “behavioral difficulties.” They have small classes, and every student gets after-school therapy if he or his parents request it. It was emphasized to me and Nathaniel many times that David was very, very lucky to be admitted, as they have many, many more applicants than the school can accommodate, more than in the school’s history in fact, and it was only because of our special connections—the RU president knows one of the trustees and wrote a letter, in part I think out of guilt that David had been expelled from the RU school, thus leading to this three-year-long shuffle—that he was there at all. （Later, I thought about the improbability of this statement: Statistically, the number of boys under the age of eighteen had decreased significantly in the last four years. So how was it that admissions had become more difficult than ever? Had they adjusted the size of the student body accordingly? That night, I asked Nathaniel what he thought about this, and he only groaned and said he was just grateful that I had known not to ask the principal that.）
Since the school year began in October—as I told you earlier, they moved it back a month after what turned out to be a localized flare-up of the virus in late August, source still unknown—the baby has been in trouble twice. The first time was for talking back to his math teacher. The second time was for skipping two of his behavioral-therapy sessions （unlike the after-school sessions, which are one-on-one and voluntary, these are conducted in small groups and are mandatory）。 And then, yesterday, we were called again, about a paper David had written for his English class.
“You’re going to have to go,” Nathaniel said last night, tiredly, as we read the email from the principal. He didn’t need to say it—I had had to go to the last two conferences myself as well. Another detail I didn’t mention is that the school is fiendishly expensive; after his school shut down last year, Nathaniel was finally able to find a job tutoring a set of six-year-old twins in Cobble Hill. Their parents haven’t let them out of the house since ’50, and Nathaniel and another tutor spend all day with them—it’s impossible for him to come back to the city before evening.
Upon arriving at the school, I was led to the principal’s office, where a young woman, the English teacher, was waiting as well. She was nervous, fluttery, and when I looked at her, she turned away, her hand flitting about her cheek. Later, I saw that she had tried to hide the pockmarks on her jawline with makeup, and that her wig was cheap and probably itchy, and I felt a tenderness for her, despite the fact that she had reported my son: She was a survivor.
“Dr. Griffith,” said the principal. “Thank you for coming in. We wanted to talk to you about David’s paper for English class. Do you know about this paper?”
“Yes,” I said. It had been his assignment last week: Write about a significant anniversary in your life. It can be about the first time you went somewhere or experienced something or met someone now important to you. Be creative! Just don’t write about your birthday, because that’s too easy. Five hundred words. Make sure to give your paper a title! Due next Monday.
“Did you read what he wrote?”
“Yes?” I said. But I hadn’t. I had asked David if he needed help, and he had said no, and then I had forgotten to ask what he ended up writing.
The principal looked at me. “No,” I admitted. “I know I should have, I’ve just been so busy, and my husband has a new job, and—”
He raised his hand. “I have the paper here,” he said, and handed me his screen. “Why don’t you read it now.” It wasn’t a request. （I have cleaned up the misspellings and grammatical errors within.）
“four years.” an anniversary.
by david bingham-griffith
This year is the fourth anniversary of the discovery of NiVid-50, more commonly known as Lombok syndrome, and the most serious pandemic in history since AIDS in the last century. It has killed 88,895 people in New York City alone. It is also the fourth anniversary of the death of civil rights and the beginning of a fascist state spreading misinformation to people who want to believe anything they’re told by the government.
Take, for example, the common name of the disease, which supposedly originated in Lombok, an island in Indonesia. The disease is a zoonosis, which means it is a disease that began in an animal and then got transferred into the human population. Zoonoses have been increasing in incidence every year for the past eighty years, and the reason is because more and more wild land has been developed, and animals have lost their habitats and have been forced to come into closer contact with humans than they were ever meant to. In this case, the disease was in bats, which were later eaten by civet cats, and then those civet cats infected the livestock, which infected humans. The problem is that Lombok doesn’t have the land to sustain cattle, and as Muslims, they don’t eat pork. So how can the illness really have originated there? Isn’t this another case of blaming Asian countries for global diseases? We did it in ’30, and in ’35, and in ’47, and now we are doing it again.
Various governments worked quickly to try to contain the virus, while also blaming Indonesia for being dishonest, but the American government is hardly honest itself. Everyone thought this was all good, but then all immigration to America ceased, and families were torn apart, and thousands of people either drowned at sea or were turned away to die on boats. My homeland, the Kingdom of Hawai‘i, completely isolated themselves, but it didn’t make a difference, and now I can never return to the place where I was born. Here in America, martial law was declared, and large camps for sick people and desperate refugees were opened on Roosevelt and Governor’s Islands in New York, and in many other places, too. The American government needs to be overthrown.
My father is the scientist who did early work on the disease. He didn’t discover it, someone else did that, but he was the one who found out it was a mutation of an earlier diagnosed disease called a Nipah virus. My father works for Rockefeller University and is very important. He supports the quarantines, as well as the camps. He says that sometimes you just have to hold your nose and do these things. He says that a disease has no better friend than a democracy. My other father says that he