“I didn’t know what to say. I could feel Norris just behind me, gripping my arm. Finally, I said, ‘I need to talk to Norris,’ and Wolf nodded and retreated behind the poplar again, as if to give us privacy, and Norris and I walked back up the path. He looked at me, and I looked at him, and neither of us said anything. We didn’t need to—we knew what we would do. I had my wallet with me, and I took out everything I had—a little more than five hundred dollars. And then we walked again toward the tree, and Wolf reappeared.
“？‘Wolf,’ I said, ‘I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. But we can’t. Norris is vulnerable, you know that. We can’t, we just can’t. I’m so sorry.’ I invoked you, Charles. I said, ‘A friend of ours has connections in the administration; he can get you help, he can get you into a better center.’ I wasn’t sure if there was such a thing, even, as a ‘better center,’ but I promised it. Then I put the money down, about a foot away from us. ‘I can get you more, if you need it,’ I said.
“He didn’t say anything. He just stood there, panting, looking down at the money, swaying slightly on his feet. And then I grabbed Norris’s hand, and we hurried back to the house—by the last hundred feet, we were running, running as if Wolf had the strength to pursue us, as if he’d suddenly soar into the air like a witch and block the doorway. Once inside, we bolted the door and then went about the house checking every window and every lock, as if Wolf would suddenly charge through one of them and fill the house with his disease.
“But do you know what the worst part was? How angry Norris and I were. We were angry that Wolf had gotten sick, that he had come to us, that he had asked for our help, that he had put us in such a position. That was what we said to ourselves that night as we gorged ourselves, all the window shades drawn, all the security systems armed, the pool house—as if he might even now go there—padlocked shut: How dare he. How dare he make us feel that way, how dare he make us say no to him. That was what we thought. A friend was helpless and afraid, and that was how we reacted.
“Things were never quite the same between us after that. Oh, I know everything always looked fine. But something changed. It was as if our connection was no longer founded in love but in shame, in this terrible secret we had, in this terrible, inhumane thing we had done together. And I blame Wolf for that as well. Every day, we stayed indoors, scanning the property with binoculars. We offered the security team double pay to come back, but they said no, and so we prepared ourselves for a siege, a one-man siege. We kept all the shades drawn, the shutters closed. We lived as if we were in a horror film, like at any moment we might hear a thump against one of the windows and draw the shade to find Wolf plastered against it. We were able to convince the local police to monitor the death tolls for the area, but when the word came two weeks later that Wolf had been found alongside the highway, dead for apparently several days, we still weren’t able to give up our watch: We stopped answering our phones, we stopped checking our messages, we stopped making ourselves available to anyone, because if we weren’t in contact with the outside world, then nothing would be asked of us, and we would be safe.
“After we were given the all-clear, we returned to Washington Square. But we never went back to Water Mill. Nathaniel, you asked once why we never went out to Frog’s Pond Way. This is why. We also never spoke of Wolf again. It wasn’t something we had to agree on; we just both knew not to. Over the years, we tried to make reparations for our guilt. We gave to charities that helped the sick; we gave to hospitals; we gave to activist groups fighting against the camps. But when Norris was diagnosed with leukemia, the first thing he said after the doctor had left the room was ‘It’s punishment for Wolf.’ I know he believed it. In his final days, when he was delirious from the drugs, it wasn’t my name he repeated, but Wolf’s. And even though I’m telling you this story like I don’t, I believe it, too. That one day—one day, Wolf will come for me, too.”
We were all quiet. Even the baby, who was consistent in his moral absolutism, was somber and silent. Nathaniel sighed. “Aubrey,” he began, but Aubrey interrupted him.
“I had to confess to someone,” he said, “which is part of why I’m telling you. But the other reason I’m telling you is because—David, I know you have a lot of resentment toward your father, and I understand it. But fear makes many of us do things that we regret, things we never thought we were capable of doing. You’re so young; you’ve spent almost your entire life living alongside death and the possibility of death—you’ve become inured to it, which is heartbreaking. So you won’t quite understand what I mean.
“But when you’re older, you do anything you can to try to stay alive. Sometimes you’re not even aware you’re doing it. Something, some instinct, some worse self, takes over—you lose who you are. Not everyone does. But many of us do.
“I suppose what I’m trying to say is—you should forgive your father.” He looked at me. “I forgive you, Charles. For—for whatever it is you’ve done with—with the camps. I wanted to tell you that. Norris never blamed you like I did, so he had nothing to forgive, and no forgiveness to ask. But I do.”
I realized I was supposed to say something. “Thank you, Aubrey,” I said, to a man who had hung the most valuable and sacred objects from my country on his walls like they were posters in a college dorm room and just two years earlier accused me of being a stooge of the American government. “I appreciate that.”
He sighed, and so did Nathaniel, as if I had somehow failed to play my part. Across the room, David sat with his face turned from us, so that I couldn’t see his expression. He loved Aubrey. He respected him. I could imagine what he was thinking, and I felt for him.
I wasn’t so selfish that I intended to actually ask him for his forgiveness right then. But even before I could stop myself, I was dreaming of our reunion: I’d move back in, and Nathaniel would love me again, and the baby would stop being so angry with me, and we would be a family once more.
I didn’t say anything, however. I just got up and said goodbye to everyone and went to our apartment as I’d planned, and then back to the dormitory.
I have heard—we both have heard—many terrible stories about what humans did to other humans over the past two years. Aubrey’s was not the worst, not even close to the worst. Over those months, there were reports of parents abandoning their children on subways, of a man who shot his parents in the back of their heads as they sat in their yard, of a woman who wheeled her dying husband of forty years to the scrapyard near the Lincoln Tunnel and left him there. But I guess what struck me the most about Aubrey’s story wasn’t even the story itself but, rather, how small his and Norris’s life had become. I saw them clearly: The two of them in that house I used to so resent and envy, every shutter closed to blot out the light, huddling in a corner together to make themselves small, hoping that, if they did, then the great eye of illness would fail to see them, would leave them be, as if they could elude capture altogether.
Love, C.