But sometimes I wanted to know that they existed, that all those countries that Grandfather had been to, all those streets he had walked on, were still there. Sometimes I even wanted to pretend that he wasn’t dead at all, that I hadn’t seen him be killed with my own eyes, but that, when he dropped through the platform hole, he had instead landed in one of the cities he had traveled to when he was young: Sydney or Copenhagen or Shanghai or Lagos. Maybe he was there, and thinking of me, and although I would miss him just as much, it would be enough for me to know he was still alive, remembering me as he sat in a place I couldn’t even begin to know how to imagine.
* * *
Over the next weeks, things began to change. Not in any immediately obvious way—it wasn’t as if you saw lines of transport trucks or military mobilizations—and yet it was becoming clear that something was happening.
They did most of the work at night, so it was when I was on the shuttle, heading north to RU, that I began noticing the differences. One morning, for example, we lingered longer at the checkpoint than usual; another, there was a soldier who scanned our foreheads before we boarded with a new kind of temperature wand I’d never seen. “Move it along,” said the soldier, but not meanly, and then, though none of us had asked, “Just some new equipment the state is testing.” The next day, he was gone, but in his place was a different soldier, standing and watching us, one hand on his weapon, as we boarded the shuttle. He said nothing, and did nothing, but his eyes moved back and forth across us, and when the man in front of me was stepping up, the soldier held out his hand. “Halt,” he said. “What’s that?” and pointed to a splotch the color of smashed grapes on the man’s face. “Birthmark,” said the man, who didn’t sound scared at all, and the soldier took a device out of his pocket and beamed a light at the man’s cheek, and then read what the device said and nodded, waving the man onto the shuttle with the tip of his weapon.
I cannot say what other people on my shuttle route did or didn’t notice. On the one hand, so little changed in Zone Eight that it was impossible not to recognize things that had. On the other hand, most people weren’t looking for changes. But I have to assume that most of us knew, or suspected, what was happening: Every one of us worked for state-run research institutions, after all; those of us who worked for places that studied biological sciences perhaps knew more than those who worked at the Pond or the Farm. Still, none of us said anything. It was easy to believe nothing was happening if you tried.
One day, I was in my usual seat on the shuttle, looking out the window, when I suddenly saw David. He was in his gray jumpsuit and he was walking down Sixth Avenue. This was just before we had to stop for the Fourteenth Street checkpoint, and as we waited our turn in the queue, I saw him turn right on Twelfth Street, heading west and disappearing from sight.
The shuttle inched forward, and I turned back around in my seat. I realized that it couldn’t have been David after all; it was an hour past his usual shuttle time—he would already have been at work at the Farm.
And yet I had been so sure I had seen him, even though it was impossible. For the first time, I felt a kind of fear about everything that was happening—the illness, how little I knew, what was going to happen next. I was not afraid of getting sick myself; I wasn’t sure why. But that day on the shuttle, I had the strange sensation that the world was truly being split, and that in one world, I was riding the shuttle to my job taking care of the pinkies, while in another, David was going somewhere completely different, somewhere I had never seen or heard of, as if Zone Eight were actually much bigger than I knew it to be, and within it were places that everyone else knew about, but that I somehow did not.
* * *
I was always thinking of Grandfather, and yet there were two days on which I thought about him especially hard. The first was September 20, the day he was killed. The second was August 14, the day he was taken from me, the last day I ever spent with him, and though I know this will sound strange, this date was even more difficult for me than the actual day of his death.
I had been with him that afternoon. It was a Saturday, and he had come to meet me at what had been our apartment but was now my husband’s and my apartment. My husband and I had only been married since June 4, and of all the things that were strange and difficult for me about being married, the strangest and most difficult was not seeing Grandfather every day. He had been resettled into a very tiny flat near the eastern edge of the zone, and for the first two weeks of my marriage, I had gone over to his building every day after work and waited in the street, sometimes for several hours, until he came home. Each day, he would smile but also shake his head. “Little cat,” he would say, patting my hair, “it’ll never get easier if you keep coming over here every night. Besides, your husband will worry.”
“No, he won’t,” I would say. “I told him I was coming to see you.”
Then Grandfather would sigh. “Come up,” he would say, and I would go upstairs with him and he would put down his briefcase and give me a glass of water, and then he would walk me home. On the way, he would ask me questions about how work was, and how my husband was, and whether we were comfortable in our apartment.
“I still don’t understand why you had to leave,” I would say.
“I told you already, little cat,” Grandfather would say, but gently. “Because it’s your apartment. And because you’re married now—you don’t want to hang around your old grandfather forever.”
At least Grandfather and I still spent every weekend together. Every Friday, my husband and I invited him over for dinner, and he and my husband would talk about complicated scientific matters I couldn’t understand past the first ten minutes of conversation. Then, on Saturday and Sunday, it would be just the two of us. Things were very hard for Grandfather at work then—the capital had fallen to the insurgents six weeks earlier, and the insurgents had held enormous rallies, promising to reinstate technology to all citizens and to punish the leading members of the regime. I was worried, hearing that, because Grandfather was part of the regime. I didn’t know if he was a leading member, but I knew he was important. But so far, nothing had happened, except that the new government had instituted a 23:00 curfew. Everything else, though, seemed exactly the same as it had been. I was beginning to think that nothing would change in the end, because in reality, nothing had. It didn’t matter to me who was in charge of the state: I was just a citizen, and would be either way, and it wasn’t my place to worry about such things.
That Saturday, August 14, was a typical day. It was very hot, and so Grandfather and I met at 14:00 at the center and listened to a string quartet. Then he bought us some iced milk, and we sat at one of the tables, eating the milk with little spoons. He asked how work was, and if I liked Dr. Wesley, who had once worked for Grandfather, many years ago. I said I liked work, and that Dr. Wesley was fine, both of which were true, and he nodded. “Good, little cat,” he said. “I’m glad to hear it.”
For a while, we lingered in the air-conditioning, and then Grandfather said that the worst of the heat would have broken, and we could go look at the vendors’ offerings in the Square, which we sometimes did, before I went home.