“Ah,” she said, and her face relaxed. “I understand. And you want him to fall in love with you.”
For a moment, I was unable to speak. Was that what I wanted? Was that why I had come here? But that would be impossible—I knew I would never be loved, not in the way people talked about love. I knew I would never love, either. It was not for me. It was so difficult for me to know what I felt. Other people were able to say, “I am happy,” or “I am sad,” or “I miss you,” or “I love you,” but I never knew how. “I love you, little cat,” Grandfather would say, but I could only rarely say it back to him, because I didn’t know what it meant. The feelings I had—what words did I have for them? The feeling I had reading the notes written to my husband; the feeling I had watching him enter the house on Bethune Street; the feeling I had listening to him return late on a Thursday night; the feeling I had lying in bed, wondering if he might someday touch me, or kiss me, and knowing he never would—what were those feelings? What were they called? And with David: The feeling I had when I stood at the north of the Square, watching him wave as he came toward me; the feeling I had when I watched him walk away from me at the end of one of our days together; the feeling I got on Friday night, knowing that I would see him the next day; the feeling I had when I had tried to embrace him, and the feeling I had when I had seen his face, the confusion on it, the way he had pulled away from me—what were those feelings? Were they all the same? Were they all love? Was I able to feel it after all? Was what I had always assumed was impossible for me something I had known all along?
Suddenly I was frightened. I had behaved rashly, dangerously, by coming here. I had lost my common sense. “I have to go,” I said, standing. “I’m sorry. Goodbye.”
“Wait,” the woman called out to me. “There’s something I can give you: a powder. You slip it into a drink, and in five days—”
But I was already leaving, I was walking out of the tarp, quickly, so that I wouldn’t be able to hear what else she said, so I wouldn’t be tempted to return, but not so quickly that I would attract the attention of a Fly.
I exited the Square at the eastern entrance. I had only a few hundred yards to go and then I would be back in my apartment, safe, and once I was there, I could pretend all of this had never happened; I could pretend I had never met David. I would be once again who I was, a married woman, a lab tech, a person who accepted the way the world was, who understood that to wish for anything else was useless, because there was nothing I could do, and so it was best not even to try.
PART VI
Spring, thirty years earlier
Dearest Peter, March 2, 2064
Before I launch right in: Congratulations. A very well-deserved promotion, though I suppose it’s telling that the higher you go, the less grand and more opaque the title gets. And the less you get publicly acknowledged. Not that that matters. I know we’ve spoken about this before, but do you feel as much of a phantom as I do these days? Able to pass through doors （if not walls） that are closed to most, but never seen: An object of horror and fright, rarely encountered but known to exist. An abstraction rather than an actual human being. I know some people relish this kind of spectral existence. I did too, once.
Anyway. Yes, thank you for asking, today was indeed the final signing of the paperwork, after which Aubrey’s house became, officially, Nathaniel’s house. Nathaniel will at some point pass the house on to David, and David eventually will pass the house on to someone else, which I’ll tell you about in a bit.
Although Nathaniel had been living there for a few years now, he had never referred to it, never thought of it, as his. It was always “Aubrey and Norris’s,” and then it was “Aubrey’s.” Even at Aubrey’s funeral, he was telling people to “come back to Aubrey’s for a reception,” until I finally reminded him it wasn’t Aubrey’s house but his. He had given me one of his looks, but later I heard him refer to it as “the house.” Not Aubrey’s, not his, not anyone’s, just a house that had agreed to accommodate us.
I had been spending much more time at the house （see? I do it too） this past year or so. First, there was Aubrey’s death. There was a stateliness to his dying, I always thought: He looked fairly well, by which I mean that although he was wasted, he had been spared so many indignities we’d both seen afflict the dying in the past decade—no weeping sores, no pus, no drooling, no blood. Then there was his funeral, and the sorting through of his papers, and then of course I had to go away on business for a while, and by the time I’d returned, the staff had been dismissed （each with a severance specified in Aubrey’s will） and Nathaniel was trying to conceive of himself as the owner of an enormous home on Washington Square.
I was surprised, stepping into the place today, by how changed it was. There was nothing Nathaniel could do about the bricked-up parlor-floor windows or the bars on the windows of the upper floors, but the overall effect was airier, brighter. The walls were still hung with a few key pieces of Hawaiian art—the rest had gone to the Metropolitan, which now also sheltered most of the important works once owned by the royal family, things they had meant to keep safe and someday return, but which are now permanently theirs—but he had changed the lighting and painted the walls a deep gray, which made the space feel perversely sunnier. It was still full of Aubrey and Norris, and yet their presence had been vanished.
We walked around and looked at the works. Now that Nathaniel was their owner—a Hawaiian man with Hawaiian objects—I was able to appreciate them more; it was less as if they were being displayed and more as if they were being shown off, if that makes sense. Nathaniel talked about each textile, each bowl, each necklace: where it had come from, how it had been made. As he did, I studied him. For so long, he had wanted a beautiful house, with beautiful things, and now he had them. Even though Aubrey’s estate was much smaller than either of us had imagined—the money having been squandered on security services and junk-science disease preventatives and, yes, given away in large quantities to charities—there was enough left so that Nathaniel could, finally, feel secure. Around New Year’s, the baby, in one of his more hateful moods, had told me that Nathaniel was seeing someone, some lawyer in the Justice Ministry—“Yeah, he’s a pretty cool guy”： I didn’t say that if he worked in Justice, he was by definition complicit in maintaining the quarantine camps—but Nathaniel didn’t mention it, and I of course didn’t ask.
After the tour, we returned to the parlor, and Nathaniel said he had something for me, something from Aubrey. One of my final visits to Aubrey had coincided with one of his more lucid moments, and during it, he asked if I wanted anything from his collection. But I had said no. I had grown to accept Aubrey, even to like him, but beneath that acceptance and affection was a knot of resentment: not, in the end, for the objects he’d collected and for the fact that he possessed more of Hawai‘i than I do, but for the fact that he and my husband and child had become a family, and I had been cast out. Nathaniel had met Aubrey and Norris, and everything had started ending, so slowly that I at first couldn’t tell it was even happening, and then so thoroughly that I couldn’t have hoped to stop it.