“Well,” he said, and he shifted a bit, “I wouldn’t be opposed to that.” He paused. “We’re not getting back together, you know.”
“I know,” I said. I wasn’t even offended.
“We’re not having sex, either.”
“We’ll see,” I said.
He rolled his eyes. “We’re really not, Charles.”
“Okay,” I said. “Maybe we will, maybe we won’t.” But I was just teasing him. I wasn’t interested in having sex with him, either.
Anyway, just an update. I’m sure you’ll have questions, and please ask away. I’ll see you in a few days, anyway. Maybe you can help me move? （A joke.）
Love, Charles
Dear Peter, September 3, 2065
Thanks so much to you and Olivier for the toys: They came right on time, and Charlie loves them, by which I mean she immediately stuffed the cat into her mouth and started chomping away, which I think is a pretty inarguable indication of affection.
I don’t have a lot of experience with first-birthday parties, but this one was small: Just me and Nathaniel and even David. And Charlie, of course. You may have heard the latest conspiracy theory, which is that the government invented last month’s illness （to do what and to what ends are never discussed, as logic does tend to get in the way of these theories）， but David seems to have bought it and tried to talk to me as little as possible over the course of the afternoon.
I was holding Charlie when he came in, looking bedraggled and unshaven, but no more so than usual, and after taking off his suit and cleaning his hands, he walked over and simply lifted her from my lap, like I was a receptacle, nothing more, and lay down with her on the carpet.
You remember David as a baby—he was so skinny and silent, and when he wasn’t silent, he was crying. When I was eight, my mother, shortly before she left, told me that a parent decides what she thinks about her child in the first six weeks （or was it months?） of its life, and although I tried hard not to remember those words, they came to me, unbidden, at unwelcome moments during David’s infancy. Even now, I wonder if, somewhere deep inside me, I had never liked him, and if, somewhere deep inside him, he knows that.
That memory is partly why Charlie is such a joy—and not just a joy but a relief. She’s so easy to love, to cuddle, to hold. David used to arch and buck out of my arms （and Nathaniel’s too, to be fair） when I tried to hug him, but Charlie presses into you, and when you—I—smile at her, she smiles back. Around her, we’re all softer, kinder, as if we’ve mutually agreed to hide from her the truth of who we are, as if she’d disapprove if she knew, as if she’d get up and walk out the door and leave us forever. Her pet names all involve meat. “Pork loin,” we call her; “lamb chop”; “short rib”—all things that we haven’t eaten in months now, ever since the rationing began. Sometimes we pretend to gnaw on her leg, making growling doglike sounds as we do. “I’m gonna eat you up,” Nathaniel says, gumming her thigh as she giggles and gasps. “I’m gonna eat you right up!” （Yes, I know this is all a little disturbing if you think about it too hard.）
Nathaniel had splurged and baked a lemon cake, which all of us ate except for Charlie, because Nathaniel doesn’t let her eat sugar yet, and it’s probably for the best, as who knows how much sugar will be left when she’s our age. “C’mon, Dad, just a bit,” David said, holding a crumb out to her, like she was a dog, but Nathaniel shook his head. “Absolutely not,” he said, and David smiled and sighed, almost proudly, as if he were the grandparent and was tutting over his son’s unreasonably strict ways. “What can I say, Charlie?” he asked his daughter. “I tried.” And then the inevitable moment came in which Charlie had to be put to bed, after which David rejoined us in the parlor and launched into one of his canned rants about the government, the refugee camps （which he’s convinced are still operating）， the relocation centers （which he insists on calling “internment camps”）， the ineffectiveness of the decontamination chambers and helmets （with which I secretly agree）， the effectiveness of herbal medications （with which I do not）， and various conspiracies about how the CDC, as well as “other state-funded research institutes” （i.e., Rockefeller）， are spending their time trying not to cure diseases but to manufacture them. He thinks that the state is run by a vast conspiracy, dozens of somber, gray-haired white men in military uniforms sitting in padded-wall bunkers with holograms and listening devices—the truth would be crushing in its banality.
It was the same speech, with a few variations, that I’d been listening to for the past six years. And yet it no longer upset me—or at least, it no longer upset me for the same reasons. This time, as I had the time before, I looked over at my son, still so passionate, speaking so quickly and so loudly that he had to keep wiping saliva away from his mouth, leaning toward Nathaniel, who was nodding at him tiredly, and felt a perverse sorrow. I knew he believed in what The Light represented, but I also knew that he had in part joined it to try to find a place where he belonged, a place where he might at last feel he had found his own.
And yet, for all his devotion to The Light, it did not seem devoted to him. As you know, The Light has a quasi-military power structure, with members adding tattoos of stars to the insides of their right arms as they’re promoted by committee through its ranks. Eden had had three when we met her; she had added a fourth when Nathaniel had last seen her. But David’s wrist was decorated with a single lonely star. He was an eternal foot soldier, relegated to （I know from your reports） scut work: procuring the bits and pieces of material that the engineers would wire into bombs, never thanked by name in the fulsome speeches from headquarters that followed each successful attack. He was a nobody, an unnamed, a forgotten. Of course, I was glad for this, for his irrelevance, for his being overlooked—it kept him safe, it kept him uninvolved. But I also realized that I had come to loathe The Light not just for what it propagated but for how it refused to recognize my son’s efforts. He had joined it looking for home, and it had ended up treating him the same as everyone else had. As I say, I know this is perverse—would I have been happier if his arm had been aswim with blue stars? No, of course not. But it would be a different kind of unhappiness, an unhappiness mingled with, perhaps, a distorted pride, a relief that if Nathaniel and I were not his family, he had found one after all, no matter how dangerous or wrong. Aside from Eden, he had never brought anyone home to meet us, he spoke of no friends, he never grabbed his phone in the middle of our dinners because he was getting so many messages that he had to answer them, grinning at the screen as he tapped out a reply. Although I had never seen him in action, as it were, I had a persistent image of him on the edges of groups, of listening to conversations but never being asked to join one. I cannot prove this, naturally, but I think this friendlessness was in part what kept him from spending more time with his daughter—it was as if he feared he might infect her with his loneliness, as if she too might come to see him as someone of little consequence.
It made me ache for him. I thought again, as I often did—far too often, given that he is now twenty-five, a grown man, a father, even—of him as a small boy on the playground in Hawai‘i, how the other children had run from him, how he had known even then that there was something not right about him, something that repelled people, something that would set him apart and aside for the rest of his life.