“And did you see that story today?” asked the baby, more animated than I’d witnessed him in a while. “About that woman and her child?”
“No, what happened?”
“This woman from Queens has a baby, and the baby tests positive. She knows the hospital authorities are gonna send her to a camp, so she says she has to go to the bathroom, and then she flees back to her apartment. She’s there for two days, and then there’s a banging on her door, and the soldiers burst in. She’s screaming and the baby’s screaming, and they say she can either let them take the baby, or she can come with her. So she decides to go with her.
“They load her onto a truck with a lot of other sick people. Everyone’s jammed in. Everyone’s coughing and crying. The kids are peeing. The truck drives and drives, and then they stop at one of the camps in Arkansas, and they’re all herded out. They sort them into groups: people who’re at the beginning, middle, or end stage of the illness. The woman’s baby is diagnosed to be at the middle stage. So they’re taken to this big building and given a single cot that they have to share. They don’t give medicine to people in the middle stage, just those in the first stage. They wait two days to see if you get sicker, and everyone does, because they don’t have any medication. And once you get sicker, they move you to the end-stage building. So the woman, who’s now sick herself, moves with her baby, and they both get sicker, because there’s no medicine, there’s no food, there’s no water. And forty-eight hours later, they’re dead, and someone comes through every night and moves all the dead bodies outside and burns them.”
He was becoming excited telling this story, and I looked at my son and thought how beautiful he was, how beautiful and how credulous, and I was scared for him. His passion, his anger, his need for something I couldn’t identify and couldn’t give him; the fights he had with other students at his school, with teachers, the rage he carried everywhere: If we had stayed in Hawai‘i, would he be like this? Had I made him what he was?
And yet—even as I was thinking this, I could feel myself opening my mouth, could feel the words floating from me as if I had no control over them, could feel myself raising my voice above their exclamations of horror and righteousness, their declaring to themselves what monsters the state had become, how the woman’s civil liberties had been violated, how there was a price to be paid for the control of these illnesses, but it couldn’t be the price of our collective humanity. Soon they would be trading the same stories that were always traded by people like this in conversations like these: The fact that different races were sent to different camps, with Blacks going to one camp and whites to another, and the rest of us, presumably, to a third. The fact that women were being offered up to five million dollars to donate their healthy babies to be experimented on. The fact that the government was giving people the sickness （through the plumbing, through baby formula, through aspirin） in order to eliminate them later. The fact that the disease wasn’t an accident at all but something engineered in a lab.
“That story isn’t true,” I said.
They went quiet, immediately. “Charles,” Nathaniel began, warningly, but David sat up, instantly ready to fight. “What do you mean?” he asked.
“It’s not true,” I said. “That’s not what’s happening at those camps.”
“How do you know?”
“Because. Even if the government were capable of that, they wouldn’t be able to keep things like that hidden from the public for long.”
“You’re so fucking na?ve!”
“David!” This was Nathaniel. “Don’t talk to your father like that!”
For the briefest of moments, I was happy: How long had it been since Nathaniel had defended me so unthinkingly, so passionately? It felt like a declaration of love. But, no, I barreled on. “Think about it, David,” I said, hating myself even as I did. “Why would we stop giving people medicine? This isn’t like how it was six years ago—there’s plenty of medicine available. And why even have the stopgap of—what did you call it, a ‘middle-stage’ building? Why not just send everyone straight to the end-stage building?”
“But—”
“What you’re describing is a death camp, and we don’t have death camps here.”
“Your faith in this country is touching,” said Aubrey, quietly, and for a moment, I was almost dizzy with rage. He was patronizing me, someone whose house was stuffed full of stolen goods from my country? “Charles,” said Nathaniel, standing abruptly, “we should go,” at the same time that Norris put his hand on Aubrey’s. “Aubrey,” he said, “that’s not fair.”
But I didn’t turn on Aubrey. I didn’t. I instead spoke only to David. “And, David, if that story were true, then you’d have identified the wrong villain. The enemy here isn’t the administration, or the army, or the Health Ministry—it’s the woman herself. Yes: a woman who knew her baby was sick, who bothers to take her into the hospital, and then, instead of letting her get treated, steals her away. And she goes where? Back on the subway or the bus; back to her apartment building. How many streets does she walk down along the way? How many people does she jostle past? How many people does her baby breathe on, how many spores does she spread? How many units are in her building? How many people live there? How many of those people have comorbidities? How many are children, or sick, or disabled?
“How many of them does she tell: ‘My baby’s sick; I think she has the infection; you should keep away’？ Does she call the health department, report that there’s an illness in the household? Does she think of anyone else? Or does she think only of herself, only of her own family? Of course, you could say that that’s what a parent does. But it’s because of that, because of that understandable selfishness, that the government has to involve itself, don’t you see? It’s to keep all the people around her safe, all the people she herself didn’t give a damn about, all the people who’ll lose their children because of her, that they’ve had to intervene.”
The baby had been very still and silent throughout my speech, but now he shrank, as if I’d smacked him. “You said ‘we,’？” he said, and something, some quality in the room, shifted.
“What?” I asked.
“You said ‘that we’ve had to intervene.’？”
“No, I didn’t. I said ‘that they’ve had to intervene.’？”
“No. You said ‘we.’ Holy shit. Holy shit. You’re in on this, aren’t you? Holy shit. You helped plan these camps, didn’t you?” And then, to Nathaniel, “Dad. Dad. Do you hear this? Do you hear this? He’s involved! He’s behind this!”
We both looked at Nathaniel, who was sitting there, slightly openmouthed, looking back and forth between us. He blinked. “David,” he began.
But now David was standing, as tall and skinny as Nathaniel is, pointing at me. “You’re one of them,” he said, his voice high and excited. “I know you are. I always knew you were a collaborator. I always knew you were behind these camps. I knew it.”