He looked at me. “Where’s he from?” he asked.
“Little Eight,” I said. “But before that, Prefecture Five.”
My husband pressed his napkin to his mouth and then leaned back in his chair, looking up at the ceiling. He seemed to be struggling to speak. Then he said, “What do you do together?”
I shrugged. “We go to the storyteller’s,” I began, though we had not been to the storyteller in at least a month. “We walk around the Square. He tells me about growing up in Prefecture Five.”
“And what do you tell him?”
“Nothing,” I said, and as I said it, I realized it was true. I had nothing to tell—not to David, not to my husband.
My husband sighed, and passed his hand before his eyes, as he did when he was tired. “Cobra,” he said, “I want you to be careful. I’m glad you have a friend, I am. But you—you barely know this person. I just want you to be vigilant.” His voice was gentle, the same as it always was, but he was looking directly at me, and finally I looked away. “Have you considered that he might be from the state?”
I didn’t say anything. Something was building inside of me. “Cobra?” my husband asked, gently.
“Because no one would want to be my friend, is that what you mean?” I asked. I had never raised my voice to my husband, had never been angry with him, and now he looked surprised, and his mouth opened a bit.
“No,” he said. “That’s not what I mean. I just,” he started. Then he began again. “I promised your grandfather I’d always take care of you,” he said.
For a moment, I sat there. Then I got up and left the table and went to our room and closed the door and lay down on my bed. There was a silence, and I heard my husband’s chair scrape back, and the sounds of him washing the dishes, and the sound of the radio, and then him coming into our room, where I was pretending to be asleep. I heard him sit on his bed; I thought he might speak to me. But he didn’t, and soon I could hear from his breathing that he was asleep.
Naturally, it had in fact occurred to me that David might be an informant for the state. But if he was, he was a very poor one, as informants were quiet and invisible, and he was neither quiet nor invisible. Though I had also wondered whether that too was intentional: that his unsuitability as an informant increased the likelihood that he was one. The curious thing about the informants was that they were so quiet and invisible that you were usually able to tell who they were. Not immediately, perhaps, but eventually; there was a quality about them, what Grandfather had called a bloodlessness, that distinguished them. In the end, though, what convinced me that David was not an informant was me. Who would be interested in me? What secrets did I have? Everyone knew who Grandfather and my father had been; everyone knew how they had died; everyone knew what they had been convicted of and, in Grandfather’s case, how that conviction had been overturned, albeit too late. The only thing I had done wrong was those nights I had followed my husband, but that was hardly an offense for which one was assigned an informant.
But if it was impossible that David was an informant, then why was he spending time with me? I had never been someone people wanted to be around. After I had recovered from the sickness, Grandfather had taken me to activities, classes with children my own age. The parents sat in chairs arranged around the room, and the children played. But after a few sessions, we stopped going. It was all right, though, because I always had Grandfather to play with and talk to and spend time with—until the day I didn’t.
As I lay there that night, listening to my husband’s breathing and thinking about what he had said, I wondered if it was possible that I was actually not who I thought I was. I knew I was dull, and unexciting, and that I often didn’t understand people. But maybe I had changed, somehow, without even knowing it. Maybe I wasn’t who I knew I was.
I got up and went to the bathroom. There was a small mirror above the sink, which you could angle so you could see your entire body. I took off my clothes and looked at myself, and as I did, I realized I had not changed after all. I was still the same person, with the same thick legs and thin hair and small eyes. Nothing was any different; I was as I already knew myself to be.
I got dressed and turned off the light and returned to our bedroom. Then I felt very bad, because my husband was right—there was something strange about David talking to me. I was nobody, and he was not.
You’re not nobody, little cat, Grandfather would have said. You’re mine.
But this is the stranger thing: I didn’t care why David wanted to be friends with me. I just wanted him to keep being friends with me. And I decided that, whatever his reason was, it wouldn’t make a difference. I also realized that the sooner I went to sleep, the sooner it would be Sunday, and then Monday, and Tuesday, and with each day that passed, I would be that much closer to seeing him once more. And it was this understanding that made me close my eyes and, finally, fall asleep.
* * *
I haven’t spoken for some time about what was happening at the lab.
The truth is that my friendship with David had so preoccupied me that I had less time and inclination to eavesdrop on the Ph.D.s. On the other hand, there was also less of a need for stealth, because something was clearly happening, and the scientists had begun to discuss it openly, even though they weren’t supposed to. Of course, it was difficult for me to learn the details—and I wouldn’t have been able to understand them even if I had—but it seemed likely that there was another disease, and that it was projected to be highly deadly. But this was all I knew. I knew it had been discovered somewhere in South America, and I knew that most of the scientists suspected it was an airborne virus, and that it was probably hemorrhagic in nature, and spread by fluids as well, which was the worst kind of illness of all, and one we were less equipped to combat because so much research and money and prevention had gone toward respiratory illnesses. But I didn’t know anything else, because I don’t think the scientists knew anything else: They didn’t know how infectious it was, or how long its incubation was, or what the death rate was. I don’t even think they knew how many people had died from it, not yet. The fact that it had begun in South America was unfortunate, because South America was historically the least forthcoming about their research and infections, and in the last flare-up, Beijing had had to threaten them with severe sanctions to make them cooperate.
It may sound surprising to hear that despite this the mood at the laboratory was pleasant. The scientists liked having something to focus on, and the initial worry had changed to excitement. This would be most of the young scientists’ first major illness; many of the Ph.D.s were around my age, and like me, they would have barely remembered the events of ’70, and since the travel prohibition, there were fewer illnesses in general. Outwardly, everyone said they hoped that it was just an isolated incident, and that it could quickly be localized, but later, I would hear them whispering, and sometimes I would see them smiling, just a bit, and I knew it was because they were always being told by the older scientists that they were spoiled because they hadn’t actually experienced a pandemic from a professional perspective, and now they might.