“Hello,” I said.
His name was David. He had told me that the first time we met. “Oh,” I had said, “my father’s name was David.”
“Oh, really?” he had asked. “So was mine.”
“Oh,” I’d said. It seemed like there was something else I should say, and finally I said, “That’s a lot of Davids,” and then he smiled, very wide, and even laughed a little. “That’s true,” he said, “that is a lot of Davids. You’re funny, aren’t you, Charlie?”—which was one of those questions I knew wasn’t really a question, and besides, wasn’t even true. No one had ever told me I was funny before.
This time, I had brought some tofu skin that I had skimmed and dried myself and cut into triangles, and a container of nutritional yeast to dip them into. As the storyteller was settling into his folding chair, I held out the bag to David. “You can have some,” I said, and then I was worried I sounded too gruff, too unfriendly, when really I was just nervous. “If you want,” I added.
He looked into the bag, and I was afraid he’d laugh at me and my snack. But he just took out a chip, and dipped it into the yeast, and crunched it. “Thanks,” he whispered, as the storyteller began, “these are good.”
In that day’s story, the husband and wife and their two children wake one morning to discover a bird in their apartment. This wasn’t very realistic either, as birds were rare, but the storyteller did a good job of describing how the bird kept frustrating their attempts to catch it, and how father and son and mother and daughter kept crashing into one another as they ran about the house with a pillowcase. Finally, the bird is caught, and the son suggests they eat it, but the daughter knows better, and the whole family takes the bird to the local animal center, just as they’re supposed to, and later they’re rewarded with three extra protein coupons, which the mother uses to buy some protein patties.
After the story was over, we walked to the northern end of the Square. “What did you think?” David asked, and I didn’t say anything, because I was embarrassed to admit that I had felt betrayed by the story. I had thought that the husband and wife were just husband and wife, like my husband and me, and yet suddenly they had two children, a boy and a girl, which meant they weren’t like my husband and me after all. They weren’t just a man and a woman: They were a father and a mother.
But it was silly to say any of this, so instead I said, “It was okay.”
“I thought it was dumb,” David said, and I looked up at him. “Whose apartment is that big that they can run around in it? Who’s such a goody-goody that they’d actually take the bird into the center?”
This was thrilling to hear, but also alarming. I looked down at my shoes. “But it’s the law.”
“Of course it’s the law, but he’s a storyteller,” David said. “Does he really expect us to believe that, if a big, plump, juicy pigeon flew into any of our windows, we wouldn’t just kill it, pluck it, and put it straight into the oven?” I looked up then, and saw that he was looking back at me with a crooked little smile.
I didn’t know what to say. “Well, it’s just a story,” I said.
“That’s exactly my point,” he said, like I had agreed with him, and then he gave me a little salute. “Bye, Charlie. Thanks for the snack and company.” And then he left, walking westward, back to Little Eight.
He hadn’t said he would see me next week, but when I returned the following Saturday, there he was again, standing outside the storyteller’s tent, and again, I got that same strange feeling in my stomach.
“I thought we’d take a walk instead, if that’s okay,” he said, even though it was very hot, so hot I’d had to wear my cooling suit. He, however, was in his same gray shirt and pants, his same gray cap, and didn’t look hot at all. He spoke as if we had made plans to meet here, as if we had an arrangement that he was now changing.
As we walked, I remembered to ask him the question I’d been wondering about all week. “I don’t see you at the shuttle stop anymore,” I said.
“That’s true,” he said. “My shift changed. I catch the 07:30 now.”
“Oh,” I said. Then I said, “My husband catches the 07:30, too.”
“Really,” David said. “Where does he work?”
“The Pond,” I said.
“Ah,” said David. “I work at the Farm.”
It wasn’t worth asking if they knew each other, because the Farm was the biggest state project in the prefecture, with dozens of scientists and hundreds of techs, and what’s more, Pond employees stayed isolated in the Pond, and rarely had any reason to encounter anyone who worked in the larger enterprise.
“I’m a bromeliad specialist,” said David, although I hadn’t asked, because asking someone what they did wasn’t done. “That’s what it’s called, but really, I’m just a gardener.” This was unusual, too: both to describe your work but also to make it sound less important than it was. “I help crossbreed the specimens we have, but mostly, I’m just there to take care of the plants.” His voice was cheerful as he said this, matter-of-fact, but I suddenly felt the need to defend his own job to him.
“That’s important work,” I said. “We need all the research from the Farm we can get.”
“I suppose,” he said. “Not that I’m doing any of the actual research myself. But I do love the plants, as silly as that sounds.”
“I love the pinkies, too,” I said, and as I did, I realized that it was true. I did love the pinkies. They were so fragile and their lives had been so short; they were poor, unformed things, and had been created only to die and be pulled apart and examined, and then they were incinerated and forgotten.
“The pinkies?” he asked. “What are those?”
So I explained a little about what I did, and how I prepared them, and how the scientists got impatient when I didn’t deliver them on time, which made him laugh, and his laughter made me flustered, because I didn’t want him to think I was complaining about the scientists, or making fun of them, because they did essential work, and I said so. “No, I don’t think that you’re disparaging them,” he said. “It’s just—they’re such important people, but really, they’re people, you know? They get impatient and in bad moods, just like the rest of us.” I had never thought about the scientists like that before, as people, and so I didn’t say anything.
“How long have you been married?” David asked.
This was a very forward question, and for a moment, I didn’t know what to say. “Maybe I shouldn’t have asked,” he said, looking at me. “You have to forgive me. Where I come from, people talk much more openly.”
“Oh,” I said. “Where are you from?”
He was from Prefecture Five, one of the southern prefectures, but he didn’t have an accent. Sometimes people transferred prefectures, but they usually did so only when they had unusual or in-demand skills. This made me wonder whether David was actually more important than he was saying; it would explain why he was here, not only in Prefecture Two but in Zone Eight.