Read it again, Papa! Do the voices better this time!
“Oh,” she said at last.
Is that a cognitive difference?
Or is her new seriousness—her use of “Grandfather” makes her sound slightly disapproving, like she’s aware that the title is grander than I deserve—an inevitable result of all the death she’s seen? Even though I’ve been careful not to discuss it with her, the severity of her illness, the now hundreds of thousands of children who have died, she must have intuited it anyway, mustn’t she? Already her roommates have been replaced seven times in two weeks, the children turned in a single exhalation to corpses and hurried out of the room beneath a tent of muslin so Charlie, asleep anyway, wouldn’t witness their departure—there have been some of these kindnesses, even now.
I stroked her scalp, which is stubbly with scabs and the first fine bristles of new hair. I thought again of the sentence from the report that I now repeat to myself multiple times a day: These findings remain speculative until we have a larger sample set of survivors to study, as does the duration of these effects. “Go to sleep, little Charlie,” I told her, and whereas, before, she would whine a bit, plead for another story, she instead closed her eyes immediately, an act of submission that made me shiver.
Last Friday, I watched her sleep until about eleven p.m. （or 23:00, as the state would now have it）， until I finally made myself leave. Outside, the streets were empty. For the first month, they made a curfew exception for the parents who wait on the street, and who would sleep on the pavement on blankets they brought from home; typically, the other parent, if there was one, would relieve the sleeper at dawn, bringing them food and taking their place on the sidewalk. But then the state became afraid of riots and banned overnight gatherings, even though the only thing those people wanted was what was inside the hospital. Naturally, I was in favor of this dispersal, if only from an epidemiological perspective, but what I hadn’t realized until everyone left is that the small, human sounds of this gathering, the sighs and snores and murmurs, the sharp flick of someone flipping the page of a book, the glug of water being swigged from a bottle, somehow balanced the other noise: the refrigerated trucks idling at the docks, the cottony thud of sheet-wrapped bodies being stacked atop one another, the boats chugging to and fro. Everyone who worked on the island had been trained to do so in silence, out of respect, but sometimes you heard one of them exclaim, or swear, or occasionally cry out, and you couldn’t know whether it was because they had dropped a body, or because a shroud had come loose, revealing a face, or because they were simply overwhelmed by the work of burning so many bodies, bodies of children.
The driver knew where I was going that night, and I was able to lean my head against the window and sleep for half an hour before I heard him announce our arrival at the center.
The center is on an island that, half a century ago, was a nature preserve for endangered birds: terns, loons, ospreys. By ’55, the terns were extinct, and the next year, another crematorium had been erected on the southern shore. But then the island flooded in the storm, and sat abandoned until ’68, when the state started quietly rebuilding it, constructing artificial sand beds and concrete barrier walls.
The walls are meant to protect the island from future floods, but they’re also a necessary obfuscation. It was never the intention, but this center has ended up serving mostly children. There was a debate over whether we should allow parents in or not. I argued that we should—the majority of them were immune. But the psychologists on the Committee argued we shouldn’t—the problem was, they said, that they would never recover from what they saw there, and this trauma, on such a mass scale, could lead to social instability. Finally, a dormitory was built for the parents on the north side of the island, but then there was that incident in March, and now no parents at all are allowed. So instead, the parents have built a shantytown—the richer people have actually erected tiny houses from brick, the poorer from cardboard—on the coast in New Rochelle, though all they can see from there is the wall that surrounds the island, and the helicopters lowering themselves from the sky.
There had been, as you recall, a good deal of debate about where we should locate this center. Most of the Committee had argued for one of the former refugee camps: Fire Island, Block Island, Shelter Island. But I had fought for this island: far enough north from Manhattan so there’d be few unexpected visitors; not too far for the helicopters and boats, which could easily float downriver to the crematorium now that the waterways have been reopened.
But though I never said so, the reason I really chose this place was because of its name: Davids Island. Not singular—David’s—but many, as if this land were inhabited not by an ever-changing population of （mostly） children, but by Davids. My son, in duplicate, at all different ages, doing all the things my son had liked to do at various points in his life. Building bombs, yes. But also reading, and playing basketball, and running about like a crazed puppy to make me and Nathaniel laugh, and spinning his daughter around, and climbing into bed next to me when it was thundering and he was frightened. The older Davids would be parents to the younger Davids, and when one finally died—though that wouldn’t be for a very long time, as the oldest inhabitants were still only thirty, the age my David would have been, had he lived—he would be replaced by another, so that the population of Davids always would remain the same: never increasing, never diminishing. There would be no misunderstandings, no concerns that the younger Davids might be somehow different, somehow strange, because the older Davids would understand them. There would be no loneliness, because these Davids would not have ever known parents, or classmates, or strangers, or people who wouldn’t play with them: They would only know one another, which is to say themselves, and their happiness would be complete, because they would never know the agony of wanting to be someone else, for there was no one else to admire, no one else to envy.
I come here sometimes, late, when even the residents of the shantytown have gone to sleep, and sit at the edge of the blackish, brackish water and look out onto the island, which is always lit, and think about what my Davids might be doing now: Maybe the older ones are having a beer. Maybe some of the teenagers are playing volleyball under those bright white lights, the ones that never switch off and transform the water around the island into a shimmer of oil. Maybe the younger ones are reading comic books under their covers with a flashlight—or whatever it is kids do these days when they’re goofing off. （Do they still goof off? They must, mustn’t they?） Maybe they’re cleaning up after dinner, because the young Davids have been taught to be helpful, they have been taught to be good people, to be kind to one another; maybe there’s a pile of them flopped on a bed many yards wide, in which they all sleep in a jumble, one’s breath hot against the back of another’s head, one’s hand stretching out to scratch his thigh and scratching his neighbor’s instead. But it won’t matter: They’ll both feel it anyway.
“David,” I say to the water, quietly, so as not to wake the parents who sleep behind me. “Can you hear me?” And then I listen.