We’ve been here at Frear for two months now. Nine weeks, actually, come tomorrow. Many years ago, when Nathaniel and I first moved to the city, this had been a ward for adult cancer patients. Then, in ’56, they converted it to an infectious-disease wing, and then last winter, to a pediatric infectious-disease wing. The rest of the patients are in what used to be the burn unit, and the burn patients have been dispatched to other hospitals. In the early days of the infection, before it was announced to the public, I would hurry past this hospital, never looking up at its bulk, because I knew that this was the place best-equipped to care for the children who would get sick, and because I felt that if I never looked at the outside of it, I would never see the inside of it.
The ward is on the tenth floor and faces east to the river, and therefore to the crematoriums, whose fires have burned without pause since March. In the early days, when I was visiting as an observer, not as a guest—or a “loved one,” as the hospital calls us—you could look outside and see the vans full of corpses being unloaded onto the boats. The bodies were so small that they could stack them four or five to a stretcher. After the first six weeks, the state had a fence built on the eastern edge of the river, because parents were jumping into the water as the boats pulled away, screaming for their children, trying to paddle toward the other shore. The fence prevented that, but it didn’t prevent the people on the tenth floor （the parents, largely, as most of the children were insensate） from looking outside for distraction and instead encountering, in the cruelest of ironies, the place where most of their children would go next, as if Frear were simply a layover before their final destination. So then the hospital covered up all the eastern-facing windows, on this floor and all the others, and hired art students to paint on them. But as the months dragged by, the scenes the students had drawn—of Fifth Avenue, lined with palm trees and happy children walking down the sidewalk; of the Central Park peacocks being fed bread by happy children—also began to seem cruel, and eventually they were covered with white paint.
The ward is meant to accommodate a hundred and twenty patients but now holds around two hundred. Charlie is its longest-term resident. Over the past nine weeks, various other children have come and gone. Most remain for just ninety-six hours, though there was a little boy who was probably a year older than Charlie—he looked seven, maybe eight—who had been admitted three days before she was and who died last week. He was the second-longest-term resident. Everyone here is related to someone who works for the state, or related to someone to whom the state owes a favor, a favor big enough to keep them out of a relocation center. For the first seven weeks, we had a private room, and although I had been assured we would always have it, for as long as we needed, there came a point where I could no longer morally justify it to myself. So now Charlie has two roommates, in a space that could sleep three more. The other parents and I nod at one another—everyone is wearing so much protective clothing that we can only see one another’s eyes—but otherwise we all pretend that the others don’t exist. Only our children exist.
I’ve seen what you’re doing over there, but here, each child’s bed is surrounded by walls of transparent plastic sheeting, like the one Ezra and Hiram had lived behind; the parents sit outside and stick their hands through the gloves built into one of the walls so we can at least offer some semblance of touch. The few parents who for whatever reason had never been exposed to the earlier virus, the one that’s cross-reactive to the current one, aren’t allowed to enter Frear at all—they’re just as vulnerable as the children, and should really be in isolation themselves. But they’re not, of course. Instead, they stand outside the hospital, even in the heat, which has been almost unbearable these past few months, and look up at its windows. Years ago, when I was a child, I saw an old video of a crowd of people waiting beneath a Paris hotel for a pop singer to emerge from his room onto his balcony. The crowd here is as big, but whereas that other gathering had been restive, on the verge of hysteria, this one is quiet, eerily so, as if making any noise might upset their chances of getting inside to see their children. Though they have no hope at all of doing so, not while they’re still contagious or capable of spreading contagion. The lucky ones can at least watch a livestream of their children lying, unresponsive, in bed; the unlucky ones, not even that.
The children enter Frear as distinct people, but within two weeks of being treated with Xychor, they look more alike than different. You know what it looks like, too: the shrunken faces, the softened teeth, the hair loss, the boil-covered extremities. I read the report from Beijing, but here, the fatality rate is highest among those ten and younger; adolescents are much more likely to survive, though even those rates of survival—depending on whose reports you’re seeing—are grim.
What we don’t know yet, and won’t know for another decade or so at least, is Xychor’s long-term consequences. It wasn’t made for children, and it certainly shouldn’t be administered to them in the doses it is. One thing we do know, as of last week, is that its toxicity alters—we don’t know how—pubertal development, which means there’s a strong possibility that Charlie will be sterile. After I heard this in one of the Committee meetings I managed to attend, I barely made it to the bathroom before I started crying. I had kept her safe for so many months. If I had been able to keep her safe for just nine more, we’d have a vaccine. But I couldn’t.
I knew from reports that she would be changed, and she is, though among the many things I don’t yet know is how much. “There will be damage,” I read in the latest report, which then outlined, in vague terms, what that damage might be: Cognitive differences. Slowed physical reflexes. Stunted growth. Sterility. Scarring. The first is the most terrifying, because “cognitive differences” is so meaningless a phrase. Her new quiet, where she’d once chattered away—is that a cognitive difference? Her sudden affectlessness—is that a cognitive difference? Her new formality—“Who am I, Charlie?” I asked her, the first day she regained consciousness. “Do you know me?” “Yes,” she said, after studying me, “you’re my grandfather.” “Yes,” I said, and I was beaming, smiling so hard my cheeks hurt, but she was only staring at me, silent and inexpressive. “It’s me. Your Papa, who loves you.” “Grandfather,” she repeated, but that was all, and then she closed her eyes again—is that a cognitive difference? Her halting conversation, her new humorlessness, the way she studies my face, her expression composed but slightly puzzled, as if I were another species and she were trying to interpret me—is that a cognitive difference? Last night I read her a story she had loved, about a pair of talking rabbits, and when I was finished, where she would have normally chimed “Again!,” she instead looked at me, her eyes blank. “Rabbits can’t speak,” she said, finally. “That’s true, sweetheart,” I said, “but it’s a story.” And then, when she said nothing in response, only continued to stare at me, her face unreadable, I added, “It’s make-believe.”