And then you realize: I can’t stay here. I can’t raise my granddaughter here. So you reach out to some contacts. You make some discreet inquiries. You reach out to your best, your oldest friend, your former lover, and you ask him to help get you out. But he can’t. No one can. You are told by your government that your presence is essential. You are told that you’d be allowed to travel on a limited-term passport, but that a passport cannot be issued for your granddaughter. You know that they know that you would never leave without her—you know that she is the reason you have to leave; you know she is how they will ensure that you never will.
You lie awake at night; you think of your dead husband, your dead son, the bill being proposed that would make a family like the one you once had illegal. You think of how proud you once were: how you once bragged about being a young lab chief; how you volunteered to help build the systems you now want to escape. You think of how your safety is guaranteed only by your ongoing participation. You want nothing more than to scroll back through time. It is your dearest dream and wish.
But you can’t. You can only try to keep your granddaughter safe. You are not a brave man—you know that. But, as much of a coward as you are, you will never abandon her, even as she has become someone you can’t access and don’t understand.
You ask every night for forgiveness.
You know you’ll never receive it.
Love, Charles
PART VII
Summer 2094
I was nervous on the day I met my husband for the first time. This was in the spring of 2087; I was twenty-two. The morning I was to meet him, I woke earlier than usual and put on the dress that Grandfather had gotten for me somewhere—it was green, like bamboo. There was a sash around the middle that I tied in a bow, and long sleeves, which hid the scars I had from the sickness.
At the marriage broker’s office, which was in Zone Nine, I was taken to a plain white room. I had asked Grandfather if he would be there for the meeting with me, but he had said that I should meet with the candidate alone, and he would be right outside, in the waiting room.
After a few minutes, the candidate entered. He was nice-looking, as nice-looking as he was in his picture, and I felt unhappy, because I knew I wasn’t nice-looking myself, and his attractiveness would make me less so. I thought he might laugh at me, or look away from me, or turn around and leave.
But he did none of those things. He bowed to me, deeply, and I bowed back, and we introduced ourselves. Then he sat, and I sat, too. There was a pot of powdered tea and two cups, and a little dish with four cookies. He asked if I wanted some tea, and I said I did, and he poured me some.
I was anxious, but he tried to make the conversation easy. We already knew all the important things about each other: I knew that his parents and sister had been declared guilty of treason and had been sent to labor camps, and had later been executed. I knew that he had been a graduate student in biology, and that he had been studying for his doctorate before he was expelled for having traitorous relatives. He knew who Grandfather was, and who my father was. He knew the disease had left me sterile; I knew that he had chosen to be sterilized rather than be sent to the rehabilitation camps. I knew he had been a promising student. I knew he was very smart.
He asked me what I liked to eat, what kind of music I liked, if I was enjoying my job at Rockefeller, if I had any hobbies. Meetings between relatives of state traitors were usually recorded, even meetings such as these, so we were both careful. I liked that he was careful, and that he hadn’t asked me any questions that I wouldn’t be able to answer; I liked his voice, which was soft and gentle.
But I still hadn’t known if I wanted to marry him. I knew I had to be married someday. But getting married would mean it would no longer be just me and Grandfather, and I wanted to delay that for as long as I could.
Finally, though, I decided I would. The next day, Grandfather visited the broker to finalize the arrangements, and soon, a year had passed, and it was the night before my marriage ceremony. We had a celebratory dinner, for which Grandfather had found apple juice, which we drank from our favorite teacups, and oranges, which were dry and sour but which we dipped in artificial honey for sweetness. The next day I would again see the man who would be my husband; he had failed in his attempt to appeal his expulsion, but Grandfather had found him a job at the Pond, which he would begin the following week.
As we were finishing our meal, Grandfather said, “Little cat, I want to tell you something about your future husband.”
He had been serious, and quiet, all through dinner, but when I asked him if he was angry at me, he had only smiled and shaken his head. “No, not angry,” he said. “But this is a bittersweet moment. My little cat, all grown up and getting married.” Now he continued: “I have debated whether to tell you this or not. But I think—I think I must, for reasons I will explain.”
He got up to turn on the radio, and then he sat down again. For a long time, he was silent. Then he said, “Little cat, your future husband is like I am. Do you understand what I mean by this?”
“He’s a scientist,” I said, though I already knew that. Or he was an aspiring scientist, at least. That was a good thing.
“No,” Grandfather said. “Well, yes. But that’s not what I’m trying to say. I’m trying to say that he is like—he is like me, but also like your other grandfather is. Was.” He was quiet, then, until he saw I understood what he was trying to say.
“He’s a homosexual,” I said.
“Yes,” Grandfather said.
I knew a little about homosexuality. I knew what it was; I knew Grandfather was one, and I knew it had once been legal. Now it was neither legal nor illegal. You could be a homosexual. You could have homosexual intercourse, even though it was discouraged. But you could never get married to someone of your same sex. Technically, all adults could reside with another person to whom they weren’t related, which meant you could be two men or two women and live together, but very few people chose to do that—if you were two people living together and weren’t married, you would receive food coupons and water and electricity tokens for only one person. There were only three kinds of dwellings: dwellings for single people, dwellings for married couples （no children）， and dwellings for families （one for families with one child; one for families with two or more children）。 Until you were thirty-five, you could live in a single-person residence. But then, according to the 2078 Marriage Act, you had to get married. If you were married and got divorced or were widowed, you had four years to get remarried and were eligible for a state-sponsored re-partnering within two years. There were a few exceptions made, of course, for people like Grandfather. The state also honored all preexisting legal homosexual unions, but only for twenty years after the law’s passage. The point is that it was illogical to choose to live with someone to whom you weren’t married; it was almost impossible for two people to survive on a single person’s benefits. A society was more stable and healthier when its citizens were married, which was why the state tried to dissuade people from alternative arrangements.
Other countries had banned homosexuality for religious reasons, but that was not the case here. Here, it had been discouraged because it was the duty of adults to produce children, as the country’s birth rate had fallen to catastrophic levels, and because so many children had died in the illnesses of ’70 and ’76, and so many of the survivors had been left sterile. Moreover, the way the children had died had been so horrific that many parents and former parents had been reluctant to have more children, because they were certain that those, too, would die in an equally horrific manner. But the other reason homosexuals had been targeted was because so many of them had joined the ’67 rebellion; they had sided with the insurgents, and the state had had to punish them and, moreover, keep them under control. Grandfather had once told me that many members of racial minority groups had also joined the rebellion, but punishing them in the same way was counterproductive, as the state needed everyone they could to replenish the population.