“David!” Nathaniel called out, anguished.
“Fuck you,” said the baby, clearly, looking at me, vibrating with passion. “Fuck you.” He wheeled, then, on Nathaniel. “And fuck you, too,” he said. “You know I’m right. We’ve talked about this, how he’s working for the state. And now you won’t even back me up.” And before any of us could do anything, he was running to the door, opening it; the decontamination chamber made a loud sucking noise as he left.
“David!” Nathaniel yelled, and was running to the door himself when Aubrey—who had been sitting with Norris on the sofa watching us, their eyes flicking between us, gripping each other’s hands as if they were at the theater and we were actors in some particularly charged play—stood. “Nathaniel,” he said. “Don’t worry. He won’t go far. Our security guys will watch him.” （This is another phenomenon here: people hiring security guards, in full protective gear, to patrol their property all night and all day.）
“I don’t know if he brought his papers,” Nathaniel continued, distressed—we had reminded David again and again and again that he had to have his identity card and health certificate on him whenever he left the apartment, but he kept forgetting.
“It’s okay,” Aubrey said. “I promise you. He won’t get far, and the team will watch him. I’ll go call them now,” and he left for his study.
And then there were only the three of us. “We should go,” I said. “Let’s get David, and we’ll go,” but Norris put his hand on my arm. “I wouldn’t wait for him,” he said, gently. “Let him stay here tonight, Charles. Security will bring him in and we’ll take care of him. We’ll have one of them take him home tomorrow.” I looked at Nathaniel, who gave me a small nod, and so I nodded, too.
Aubrey returned, and there were apologies and thanks, but only in a muted sort of way. As we walked out, I turned and saw Norris, who looked back at me with an expression I couldn’t understand. Then the door closed and we were out in the night, the air hot and humid and still. We switched on our masks’ dehumidifiers.
“David!” we called. “David!”
But no one answered.
“Do we leave?” I asked Nathaniel, even after Aubrey called to tell us that David was in the security team’s little stone hut that they’d appended to the back of their house, safe with one of the guards.
He sighed and shrugged. “I suppose,” he said, tiredly. “He won’t come home with us, anyway. Not tonight.”
We both looked south, toward the Square. For a while, neither of us spoke. There was a bulldozer, the operator’s way lit by a single bright light, pushing the remains of the latest shantytown into a hill of plastic and plywood. “Do you remember the first time we came to New York?” I asked him. “We were staying in that shitty hotel up near Lincoln Center, and we walked all the way down to TriBeCa. We stopped in this park and had ice cream. There was that piano that someone had set up under the arch, and you sat down and played—”
“Charles,” Nathaniel said, in that same gentle voice. “I don’t really want to talk now. I just want to go home.”
For some reason, this was the most upsetting thing I’d experienced all night. Not Aubrey and Norris’s diminished state; not how clear it was that David hated me. It would have been better if Nathaniel had been mad at me, had blamed me, had confronted me. Then I could fight back. We had always fought well. But this resignation, this tiredness—I didn’t know what to do with it.
We’d parked on University, and now we began to walk. There was no one in the streets, of course. I remembered a night about, oh, ten years ago, when I was still accepting that Aubrey and Norris were going to be part of our lives, because they were a part of Nathaniel’s. They had had a dinner party, and we had left David—only seven, really just a baby—with a sitter and had taken the subway south. The party was all Aubrey and Norris’s rich friends, but a couple of them had boyfriends or husbands around our age, and even I had had a good time, and after we left, we had decided that we would walk home. It had been a long walk, but it had been March, and so it had been perfect weather, not too hot, and we had both been a little drunk, and at 23rd Street, we had stopped at Madison Park and made out on a bench, among other people also making out on other benches. Nathaniel had been happy that night because he thought we’d made a bunch of new friends. This was when we were both still pretending that we’d only be in New York for a few years.
Now we walked in silence, and as I was unlocking the car, Nathaniel stopped me, turning me toward him. This evening was the first time in months that he had touched me so much, so deliberately. “Charles,” he said, “were you?”
“Was I what?” I asked him.
He took a breath. His helmet’s dehumidifier filter needed cleaning, and as he breathed, his face disappeared and appeared as the screen fogged over and then cleared itself. “Were you involved in setting up those camps?” he asked. He looked away, looked back at me. “Are you still involved with them?”
I didn’t know what to say. I had seen the reports myself, of course—the ones published in the paper and shown on television, as well as the other reports, the ones you’ve seen, too. I had been in a Committee meeting the day they screened the footage that had come out of Rohwer, and someone in the room, one of the lawyers from Justice, had gasped when she saw what had happened in the babies’ quarters, and shortly after had left the room. I hadn’t been able to sleep that night, either. Of course I wished that we hadn’t had a need for the camps at all. But we did, and I couldn’t change that. All I could do was try to protect us. I couldn’t apologize for that; I couldn’t explain it. I had volunteered for this job. I couldn’t now disavow it because things were happening that I wish hadn’t.
But how to explain any of this to Nathaniel? He wouldn’t understand; he would never understand. And so I just stood there, my mouth open, suspended between speech and silence, between apologizing and lying.
“I think you should stay at the lab tonight,” he said at last, still in that same soft voice.
“Oh,” I said, “all right,” and as I did, he took a step backward, as if I had slugged him in the chest. I don’t know: Maybe he had expected me to fight with him, to plead with him, to deny everything, to lie to him. But it was as if, by acquiescing, I was also confirming everything he hadn’t wanted to believe. He looked at me again, but his face screen was getting foggier and foggier, and finally, he got in the car and drove north.
I walked. At 14th Street, I stopped to let a tank pass me, and then a brigade of foot soldiers, all in protective gear, the new military-issue uniforms in which the face screen is a one-way mirror, so that when you talk to anyone wearing one, all you see is yourself staring back. On and on I walked, past the barricade at 23rd Street, where a soldier directed me east to avoid Madison Park, which had been contained beneath an air-conditioned geodesic dome, and where the corpses were stored until they could be taken by one of the crematoriums. Above each corner of the park, a drone camera twirled, its strobes briefly illuminating outlines of the cardboard coffins, stacked four high in precise rows. As I crossed Park Avenue, I approached a man crossing from the other side; as he neared me, he lowered his eyes. Have you encountered this too, this general unwillingness to make eye contact, as if the illness is spread not by breath but by looking each other in the face?