And then it ended, just there on “says that he.” I tried flicking past the screen, to see if there might be a second page, but there wasn’t. When I looked up at the principal and the teacher, they were both studying me with serious expressions.
“Well,” said the principal. “You can see the issue here. Or, rather, issues.”
But I couldn’t. “Like what?” I asked.
They both sat straighter in their chairs. “Well, for one, he had help writing this,” said the principal.
“That’s not a crime,” I said. “Anyway, how do you know? It’s not even that sophisticated.”
“No,” he admitted, “but, given David’s difficulty with writing, it’s clear he had a lot of help, help that goes beyond just proofreading or editing.” A pause, and then, with some triumph: “He already confessed, Dr. Griffith. He’s been paying a college student he met online to write his papers.”
“Then he’s been wasting his money,” I said, but neither of them answered. “It’s not even complete.”
“Dr. Griffith,” said the English teacher, in a surprisingly soft and melodic voice, “we take cheating very seriously here. But we both know that the bigger problem is that it’s not—it’s not safe for David to be writing such things.”
“Maybe not, if he were a government functionary,” I said. “But he’s not. He’s a fourteen-year-old boy whose entire extended family died before he even got to say goodbye to them, and he’s a student in a private school to which my husband and I pay a great deal of money to protect and instruct him.”
They sat up again. “I resent the implication that we’d ever—” the principal began, but the teacher stopped him, laying a hand on his arm. “Dr. Griffith, we would never turn David in,” she said, “but he needs to be careful. Do you monitor who his friends are, who he’s talking to, what he’s saying at home, what he’s doing online?”
“Of course,” I said, because I did, but as I spoke, I felt myself flushing, as if they knew that I knew that I hadn’t been watching him closely enough, and also that they knew why—I didn’t want to discover that David was drifting further from us; I didn’t want to have to face the fact of more misbehavior; I didn’t want more evidence that I didn’t understand my own son, that for years he had been becoming increasingly unknowable to me, that for years I had felt it was my fault.
I got out of there soon after with a promise to talk to David about being careful with what he said and wrote about the government, and to remind him about the anti-state language statutes that had been implemented shortly after the riots, and that we were still living under martial law.
But I didn’t talk to him. I walked through the Park, I saw the bear, I came home, I took a nap. And then, before Nathaniel or David came home, I hurriedly left for the lab, where I’m sitting at midnight and writing you this letter.
I never thought we would have lived here for almost eleven years, Peter. I never meant for David to have to spend his childhood in this city, in this country. “When we’re back home,” we always said to him, until we didn’t. And now there is no home to return to; this is home, except it has never felt like it, and still doesn’t. From my office window, I have a direct view of the crematorium they built on Roosevelt Island. The president of RU vigorously protested it—the ash clouds would, he said, drift westward toward the university—but the city built it anyway, with the argument that if everything went as planned, the crematorium would only be used for a few years. Which has turned out to be true: Three times a day for three years, we would watch black smoke trail from its chimneys, vanishing into the sky. But now the burnings have been reduced to once a month, and the skies are clear again.
Nathaniel is texting me. I’m not answering.
But the thing I keep thinking about is the final lines of David’s essay. He had written them himself—I could tell. I could see his face as he typed them out, that look of bafflement and disdain I sometimes catch him giving me. He doesn’t understand why I’ve made the decisions I’ve had to make, but he doesn’t have to—he’s a child. So why do I feel this overwhelming guilt, this sense of apology, when all I’ve done is what needed to be done in order to stop the spread of illness? “My other father says”： What? What is Nathaniel saying about me? We fought, terribly, loudly, the day I told him I had decided to work with the government on the containment measures. The baby hadn’t been there—he had been downtown, with Aubrey and Norris—but I wonder if Nathaniel said something to him; I wonder what they talked about while I was away. How was that final sentence going to end? “My other father says that my father is trying to do what’s right in order to protect us”？ “My other father says that my father is doing the best that he can”？
Or was it, as I fear, something else entirely? “My other father says that my father has become someone we can’t respect”？ “My other father says that my father is a bad person”？ “My other father says that it’s my father’s fault we’re here, alone, with no one to save us”？
Which one, Peter? How was it going to end?
Charles
Dearest Peter, October 22, 2054
I have to start by thanking you for talking to me about David last week—you made me feel a little better. There’s more to say, but I’ll say it in another email. And we can also discuss Olivier—I have some thoughts.
I’m afraid that I don’t know any more about the reports coming out of Argentina than you do, only that they look potentially troubling. I talked to a friend at NIAID, who said that the next three weeks will be critical; if it hasn’t spread by then, we should be fine. The Argentine government, as I understand it, is being surprisingly cooperative—meek, even. They suspended all access in and out of Bariloche, but I suspect you already know this. You’re going to have to give me an update—I know a little about the epidemiological aspect of it, but my understanding is mainly limited to virology, and I doubt would be very illuminating considering what you already know.
Now some updates of my own. As I mentioned, our request for a car was finally approved, and on Sunday, one was delivered. It’s a standard-issue government model, navy-blue, very basic. But with the subway system still so hampered, it made sense—it takes Nathaniel almost two hours to get to Cobble Hill in the mornings. And I was able to make a persuasive case that I needed to make regular trips to Governor’s Island and Bethesda, and that getting a car would ultimately be cheaper than biweekly plane or train tickets.
The plan was that the car would be mostly Nathaniel’s to use, but as it happened, I was called down to NIAID on Monday （a bureaucratic checkin as part of this new cross-institutional effort, unrelated to Bariloche）， so I took the car and spent the night there and drove up from Maryland on Tuesday. As I was crossing the bridge, though, I got a text from the Holsons, the family whose sons Nathaniel tutors: Nathaniel had fainted. I tried calling them, but as usual these days, there was no reception, and so I turned and sped into Brooklyn.