He sounded very excited about this. They all did. A big new disease was definitely coming, and now it was their time to witness it, to try to solve it. None of them seemed scared; none of them seemed worried that they might get sick themselves. Maybe they were right not to be scared. Maybe this disease wouldn’t affect them—they knew more about it than I did, so I couldn’t say that they were wrong.
On the shuttle ride home, I thought of the man I had seen two years ago, the one who had tried to escape the containment center and had been stopped by the guards. Ever since, I had looked out the window whenever we passed the center. I don’t know why I did—the center no longer existed, and anyway the facade was completely mirrored, so you couldn’t see inside at all. But I still continued to look, as if, one day, the same man might appear again, this time walking out of the center in his regular clothes because he had been cured, and he was going home to wherever he had lived before he had gotten sick.
* * *
The next few weeks at the lab were extremely busy for everyone, including me. This made it more difficult to eavesdrop, because there were far more meetings among the scientists, many of them led by Dr. Wesley, and therefore far less time for the Ph.D.s to gather and discuss what had happened in those meetings, and less time for me to try to listen to them.
It took me several days to understand that even the older scientists were taken aback by what was happening. Many of them had been Ph.D.s or postdocs themselves during the ’70 illness, but the state was much stronger now than it had been then, and they were made confused and even anxious by the constant and multiplying presence of state employees: the three people I’d seen on the roof, but dozens of others as well, from many different ministries. They would be organizing the response to the illness, and they would be taking over not only our lab but all of RU’s labs.
The new disease was not yet named, but all of us were under strict orders to discuss it with no one. If we did, we could be charged with treason. For the first time, I was happy that David and I were no longer speaking, as I had never had to keep a secret from a friend and so was unsure how good I’d be at it. But now that was no longer a problem.
Since I had stopped seeing David, I had renewed my Thursday-night monitoring of my husband. There was no more to see than there had been—just him approaching the door of the house on Bethune Street, knocking his special knock, saying something I couldn’t hear into the opening, and then disappearing inside—and yet I continued to watch him, standing beneath the stairwell of the house across the street. Once, the door opened slightly wider than usual, and I saw the person inside, a white man about my husband’s age with light-brown hair, poke his head out and quickly look left and right before pulling the door shut again. After the door closed, I would stand there for a few minutes longer, waiting to see if anything more happened, but it never did. Then I would go home.
Everything, in fact, had returned to how it had been before I had met David, and yet things were also different, because I had felt like somebody else when I had had David as a friend, and now that I no longer did, it was difficult to remember who I actually was.
One night, about six weeks after I had last met up with David, my husband and I were eating dinner when he said, “Cobra, are you all right?”
“Yes,” I said. “Thank you,” I remembered to say.
“How is David?” he asked, after a silence, and I looked up.
“Why are you asking?” I said.
He lifted one shoulder and let it fall. “I just thought I would,” he said. “It’s so hot now—are you two still walking, or are you spending more time at the center?”
“We aren’t friends anymore,” I said, and across from me, my husband was silent.
“I’m sorry, Cobra,” he said, and now I shrugged. Suddenly I was mad: I was mad that my husband wasn’t jealous of David or of my friendship with him; I was mad that he wasn’t relieved that David and I were no longer friends; I was mad that he was so unsurprised.
“Where do you go on your free nights?” I asked him, and I was pleased to see him look startled, and lean back in his seat.
“I go to see friends,” he said, after a silence.
“What do you do with them?” I asked, and he was silent again.
“We talk,” he said, at last. “We play chess.”
Then we were both silent. I was still angry; I still wanted to ask him questions. But I had so many that I didn’t know where to begin, and besides, I was scared: What if he told me something I didn’t want to hear? What if he got angry at me and shouted? What if he ran out of the apartment? Then I’d be alone, and I wouldn’t know what to do.
Finally, he stood and began gathering the dishes. We had had horse that night, but neither of us had finished our servings; I knew my husband would wrap the leftovers in paper so we could use the bones to flavor our porridge.
It was Tuesday, and my free night, but as I began walking toward our bedroom and my husband set down the dishes to bring me the radio, I stopped him. “I don’t want to listen to the radio,” I said. “I want to go to sleep.”
“Cobra,” my husband said, stepping close to me, “are you sure you’re all right?”
“Yes,” I said.
“But you’re crying,” my husband said, even though I didn’t think I was. “Did—did David hurt you in some way, Cobra?”
“No,” I said. “No, he didn’t hurt me. I’m just very tired and would like to be left alone, please.”
He moved away from me, and I went to the bathroom and then to my bed. A few hours later, my husband came in. It was unusual for him to go to bed this early, but we had both been working long hours, and he was very tired, as was I. Yesterday there had been an early-morning raid that had woken us both. But although we were both tired, only he fell asleep quickly, while I stayed awake, watching the searchlight move across the ceiling. I imagined my husband at Bethune Street playing chess with somebody else, but as hard as I tried, I could only envision the inside of the house looking like our own apartment, and the only other person I could see playing with my husband was not the man who had opened the door for him, but David.
* * *
By mid-July, I felt like I was living in two worlds. The lab had been transformed: The rooftop of Larsson had been made into an office for a team of epidemiologists from the Health Ministry, and a section of the largest of the basement passageways was converted into an office for some employees of the Interior Ministry. The scientists hurried about looking worried, and even the Ph.D.s were silent. All I knew was that whatever had been found was very dangerous, so dangerous that it had overshadowed even the excitement surrounding its discovery.
But outside of RU, everything continued as it always did. The shuttle picked me up; the shuttle dropped me off. There were groceries at the store, and there was one week when horse was even discounted, as it occasionally was when there was a surplus of meat from the factories out west. The radio played music when it was supposed to and bulletins when it was supposed to. You saw nothing of the preparations that I knew from school had happened in advance of the ’70 illness: There was no increase in military personnel, no requisitioning of buildings, no reinstatement of the curfew. On the weekends, the Square filled with people, as usual, and although David had stopped waiting for me, I still stood at the front door and looked out its window every Saturday at the same time we had once met, looking for him as he had looked for me. But I never saw him. A few times, I wondered if I should have bought the powder from the vendor and slipped it into David’s drink, as she had said, before remembering that it hadn’t been David who had chosen to stop seeing me—I had been the one who had chosen to stop seeing him. I would wonder then whether I should go to the Square and let that woman find me again—not for the powder that would make David fall in love with me but for a different powder, a powder that would make me believe that someone could love me at all.