I wasn’t scared, either; my daily life remained just as it had been. The lab would always need the pinkies, whether the illness turned out to be something big or not.
But the other reason I was so calm was because I had a friend. About a decade ago, the state had instituted a law that ordered people to register their friends’ names at their local center, but it had been quickly repealed. Even Grandfather had said it was a ridiculous notion. “I understand what they’re trying to do,” he had said, “but people are less idle, and therefore less troublesome, when they’re allowed to have friends.” Now even I had come to realize that this was true. I found myself gathering observations, things to tell David. I would never tell him what was happening at the lab, of course, but I sometimes tried to imagine the kinds of conversations we’d have if I did. At first this was difficult, because I couldn’t understand how he thought. Then I realized that he would usually say the opposite of what a typical person would say. So, if I were to say, “They’re worried about some new disease at the lab,” then a regular person would say, “Is it very bad?” But David would say something different, maybe something very different, such as “How do you know they’re worried?,” and then I would really have to think about the answer: How did I know they were worried? In this way, it was like talking to him on days I didn’t see him.
Some observations, though, I could tell him, and I did. Riding home on the shuttle, for example, I saw one of the police dogs, which were normally silent and disciplined, jump and bark and wag its tail as a butterfly flew in front of it. Or when Belle, the Ph.D., gave birth to her daughter, she sent dozens of boxes of cookies made with real lemons and real sugar to all the labs on our floor, and everyone got one, even me. Or when I discovered the pinky with two heads and six legs. Before, I would have saved these items to tell my husband over dinner. But now I thought only of what David would say, so that, even as I was observing something, part of me was thinking of the future and what his face would look like as he listened to me.
The next Saturday we met it was almost too hot to walk, even with our cooling suits. “You know what we should do?” asked David, as we moved slowly west. “We should meet instead at the center—we could listen to a concert.”
I thought about this. “But then we won’t be able to talk,” I said.
“Well, that’s true,” he said. “Not during the concert. But we could talk afterward, on the track.” There was an indoor track at the center, where you could walk in a loop in the air-conditioning.
I didn’t say anything to this, and he looked at me. “Do you go to the center often?”
“Yes,” I said, although that was a lie. But I didn’t want to say the truth—that I had been too scared to go inside. “My grandfather always said I should go more often,” I said, “that I might enjoy it.”
“You’ve mentioned your grandfather before,” David said. “What was he like?”
“He was nice,” I said, after a silence, although this hardly seemed like an adequate way to describe Grandfather. “He loved me,” I said, finally. “He took care of me. We used to play games together.”
“Like what?”
I was about to answer when it occurred to me that the games Grandfather and I played—like the one in which we pretended to have a conversation, or in which I gave him observations of someone we had passed on the street—wouldn’t seem much like a game to anyone but ourselves, and that calling them games would make me seem odd: odd because I would think they were games, and odd because I would need to play them. So instead I said, “Ball, and cards, things like that,” because I knew those were regular games, and I felt pleased with myself for thinking of the answer.
“That sounds nice,” said David, and we walked a little more. “Was your grandfather a lab tech, like you?” he asked.
This wasn’t as strange a question as it sounds. If I had had a child, he would probably become a lab tech as well, or have an equivalent rank, unless he was exceptionally bright and therefore tracked at an early age to become, say, a scientist. But back in Grandfather’s day, you could choose to become whatever you wanted, and then you went and did it.
It was also then that I realized that David didn’t know who Grandfather was. There was a time in which everyone had known who he was, but now, I suppose, only people in the government and in science knew his name. But I hadn’t told David my last name. To him, my grandfather was only my grandfather, and nothing else.
“Yes,” I said. “He was a lab tech, too.”
“Did he work at Rockefeller as well?”
“Yes,” I said, because that was true.
“What did he look like?” he asked.
It sounds strange to say, but although I spent a great deal of time thinking about Grandfather, I could remember less and less what he looked like. What I remembered more was the sound of his voice, the way he smelled, the way he made me feel when he put his arm around me. The way I saw him most frequently in my mind was the day he was being marched to the platform, when he was looking for me in the crowd, his eyes moving across the hundreds of people who had gathered to watch and yell at him, calling my name before the executioner lowered the black hood over his head.
But of course I couldn’t say that. “He was tall,” I began. “And skinny. His skin was darker than mine. He had gray hair, short, and—” And here I faltered, because I really didn’t know what else I could say.
“Did he wear fancy clothes?” David asked. “My maternal grandfather liked to wear fancy clothes.”
“No,” I said, though as I did, I remembered a ring that Grandfather had worn when I was little. It was very old, and gold, and on one side it had a pearl, and if you pressed the little latches on the sides of the setting, the pearl hinged open and there was a tiny compartment. Grandfather had worn it on his left pinkie, and had always turned the pearl inward, toward his palm. Then, one day, he had stopped wearing it, and when I had asked him why, he had praised me for being so observant. “But where is it?” I had demanded, and he had smiled. “I had to give it to the fairy as payment,” he said. “What fairy?” I had asked. “Why, the fairy who looked over you while you were sick,” he said. “I told her I would give her anything she wanted if she took care of you, and she said she would, but I needed to give her my ring in exchange.” By this point, I had been well for several years, and I also knew that fairies didn’t exist, but whenever I asked Grandfather about it, he had only smiled and repeated the same story, and eventually, I stopped asking.
But, again, this wasn’t the kind of story I could tell David, and anyway, he had begun talking about his other grandfather, who had been a farmer in Prefecture Five before it was called Prefecture Five. He had raised pigs and cows and goats, and had had a hundred peach trees, and David told me about being young and visiting his grandfather and eating as many peaches as he wanted. “I’m ashamed to admit this, but I hated peaches when I was a kid,” he said. “There were just so many of them: My grandmother baked them into pies, and cakes, and bread, and she made them into jam, and leather—oh, that’s when you dry slices of them in the sun until they become tough, like jerky—and ice cream. And this is after she’d canned as many as we and our neighbors needed to get us through the rest of the year.” But then the farm had become state property, and his grandfather had gone from owning it to working on it, and the peach trees were cut down to make room for soybean fields, which were more nutritious than peaches and therefore a more efficient crop. It was unwise to talk as freely about the past as David did, much less about governmental claims, but he did so in the same light, easy, matter-of-fact tone that he had used to discuss the peaches. Grandfather had once told me that discussing the past was discouraged because it made many people angry or sad, but David sounded neither angry nor sad. It was as if what he was describing had happened not to him but to someone else, someone he barely knew.