Dear Peter, October 30, 2059
Thank you for the belated birthday message; I’d completely forgotten. Fifty-five. Separated. Hated by my own son and much of the rest of the Western world （what I do, if not me precisely）。 Somehow fully transitioned from once-promising scientist into shadowy government operative. What else is there to say? Not much, I guess.
There was a rather wan celebration at Aubrey’s house, where Nathaniel and the baby are now living full-time. I know I haven’t mentioned this, and I suppose it’s because it just happened, without either Nate or me really being aware of it. First he and David began spending more time downtown to keep Aubrey company in the weeks following Norris’s death. He’d text me when this was happening, so I’d know I could go back to our apartment and stay there for a night. I’d wander the rooms, opening the baby’s desk drawers and rooting around; looking through Nathaniel’s sock drawer. I wasn’t searching for anything in particular—I knew that Nathaniel had no secrets, and that David would have taken his with him. I was just looking. I refolded some of David’s shirts; I stood over Nathaniel’s underwear, inhaling their scent.
Eventually, I began noticing that things were disappearing—David’s sneakers, the books on Nathaniel’s bedside table. One night, I arrived home and the ficus tree was gone. It was almost like something in a cartoon; I left during the day and all these objects scurried out while I wasn’t looking. But, of course, they were being moved down to Washington Square. After about five months of this slow-drip departure, Nathaniel texted me that I could move back in, into our home, if I wanted, and although I had been planning to refuse him on principle—every few weeks, we briefly discussed the possibility of him buying me out of the apartment so I could find my own, while being fully aware that he had no money to do so and neither did I—I was too weary by then, and so back in I moved. They didn’t take everything down to Aubrey’s, though, and in my more self-pitying moments, I am able to see the symbolism in this. The baby’s old picture books, a few jackets of Nathaniel’s it’s now far too hot to wear, a pot permanently singed by years of burned meals—and me: all the detritus of Nathaniel’s and David’s lives; all the stuff they didn’t want.
Nathaniel and I have been making an effort to speak once a week. Sometimes these interactions go well. Other times, not. We don’t fight, exactly, but every conversation, no matter how pleasant, is a brittle sheet of ice, and just beneath is a dark, freezing pool of water: decades of resentment, of blame. Much of that blame involves David, but so does much of our affinity. We both worry about him, though Nathaniel is more sympathetic to him than I am. He’ll be twenty next month, and we don’t know what to do with or for him—he has no high-school degree, no intention of attending college, no intention of getting a job. Every day, Nathaniel tells me, he disappears for hours, and only returns for dinner and a game of chess with Aubrey before disappearing again. At least, Nathaniel says, he’s still tender with Aubrey; with us, he rolls his eyes and snorts when we ask him about finding a job, about finishing his degree, but he listens patiently to Aubrey’s occasional mild lectures; before he leaves at night, he helps Aubrey climb the stairs to his bedroom.
Tonight, we were having cake when the decontam chamber slapped close, and David appeared. I never know what kind of mood the baby will be in when he sees me: Will he be scornful, rolling his eyes at whatever I say? Will he be sarcastic, asking me how many people I’ve been responsible for killing this week? Will he be, unexpectedly, shy, almost puppyish, bashfully shrugging when I give him a compliment, when I tell him how much I miss him? Every time, I tell him I miss him; every time, I tell him I love him. But I don’t ask for his forgiveness, which I know he wants, because there is nothing for him to forgive.
“Hello, David,” I said to him, and watched an uncertain expression cross his face: It occurred to me that he could as little predict his reaction to seeing me as I could.
He settled on sarcasm. “I didn’t know we were having international war criminals over for dinner tonight,” he said.
“David,” said Nathaniel, wearily. “Stop. I told you—it’s your father’s birthday today.”
Then, before he could say anything more, Aubrey added, gently, “Come sit, David, come spend some time with us.” And then, when David still hesitated, “There’s lots of extra food.”
He sat, and Edmund brought him a plate, and the three of us watched for a while as he swiftly demolished it, leaned back, and belched.
“David,” Nathaniel and I said as one, and the baby suddenly grinned, looking at us in turn, which made Nathaniel and me look at each other as well, and for a moment, all of us were smiling together.
“Can’t help yourselves, can you?” asked David, almost fondly, addressing Nathaniel and me as a unit, and we smiled again: at him, at each other. Across from us, the baby forked into his carrot cake. “How old are you, Pops?” he asked.
“Fifty-five,” I said, ignoring the “Pops” provocation, which I hated, and which he knew I hated. But it had been years since he had called me “Papa,” and then another period of years in which he had called me nothing at all.
“Jesus,” said the baby, but with genuine excitement. “Fifty-five! That’s so old!”
“Ancient,” I agreed, smiling, and next to David, Aubrey laughed. “An infant,” he corrected. “A baby.”
This would have been the perfect time for David to begin one of his rants—about the average age of the children removed to the camps, about the death rate among nonwhite children, about how the government was using this illness as an opportunity to kill off Black and Native American people, which was why all the recent diseases had been allowed to spread unchecked in the first place—but he didn’t, just rolled his eyes, but good-naturedly, and cut himself another slice of cake. Before he began eating it, though, he untied the bandanna around his neck, and as he did, I saw that the entire right side of his neck was covered by an enormous tattoo.
“Jesus!” I said, and Nathaniel, understanding what I’d seen, spoke my name, warningly. I had already been given a list of the many topics I wasn’t allowed to mention to David or inquire about, among them his degree, his plans, his future, how he spent his day, his politics, his ambitions, and his friends. But he hadn’t mentioned huge disfiguring tattoos, and I rushed to the other side of the table, as if it might disappear if I didn’t examine it in the next five seconds. I pulled down the neck of David’s T-shirt and looked at it: It was an eye, about six inches wide, large and menacing, and radiating from it were rays of light; written in Gothic script beneath it were the words “Ex Obscuris Lux.”
I let go of his shirt and stepped back. David was smirking. “Did you join the American Academy of Ophthalmology?” I asked him.
He stopped smiling and looked confused. “Huh?” he asked.
“？‘Ex obscuris lux,’？” I said. “？‘From darkness, light.’ That’s their motto.”
For a moment, he looked confused again. Then he recovered himself. “No,” he said, tersely, and I could tell he was embarrassed, and then angry because he was embarrassed.