PART VIII
Summer, twenty years earlier
Dearest Peter, June 17, 2074
Thank you for your lovely, kind note, and apologies for this late reply. I wanted to write earlier, because I knew you’d be anxious, but I hadn’t found a new courier I can trust completely until now.
Of course I’m not angry with you. Of course not. You did everything you could. It was my fault—I should have let you get me out when I （and you） had the chance. Again and again, I think: If I had asked you just five years ago, we would be in New Britain now. It wouldn’t have been easy, but it at least would’ve been possible. Then, invariably, my thoughts grow more dangerous and more despairing: If we had left, would Charlie still have gotten sick? If she hadn’t gotten sick, would she be happier now? Would I?
Then I think that maybe this, her no-longer-new way of thinking, of being, has perhaps better equipped her for the realities of this country after all. Maybe her affectlessness is a kind of stolidity, one that will see her through whatever this world becomes. Maybe the qualities whose loss I mourned on her behalf—an emotional complexity, a demonstrativeness, even a rebelliousness—are actually ones about whose disappearance I should feel relief. In more hopeful moments, I can almost imagine that she’s somehow evolved and become the sort of person who’s better-suited for our time and our place. She isn’t sad about who she is.
But then the old cycle replays itself: If she hadn’t gotten sick. If she hadn’t taken Xychor. If she had grown up in a country where tenderness, vulnerability, romance were still, if not encouraged, then at least tolerated. Who would she be? Who would I be, without this guilt, this sorrow, and the sorrow about the guilt?
Don’t worry about us. Or, rather, do worry, but not any more than you would. They don’t know I tried to escape. And as I know I keep reminding the both of us, they still need me. As long as there’s disease, there’ll be me.
With thanks and love. （As always.） Charles
Dear Peter, July 21, 2075
I’m writing this to you in haste, because I want to make sure I catch the courier before he leaves. I nearly called you today and might still, even though it’s been harder and harder to get a secure line. But if I figure out a way in the next few days, I will.
I think I mentioned that at the start of the summer, I began letting Charlie go out on brief walks by herself. And when I say brief, I mean brief: She can walk one block north to the Mews, and then east to University, and then south to Washington Square North, and then west to home. I had been reluctant, but one of her tutors encouraged it—she’ll be eleven in September, she reminded me; I had to let her out in the world, just a little.
So I did. For the first three weeks, I had security follow her, just to make sure. But she did exactly as I’d told her, and I watched from the second-floor window as she climbed the stairs to the house.
I hadn’t wanted her to know how nervous I had been, and so I waited until dinner to talk to her about it. “How was your walk, little cat?” I asked.
She looked up at me. “Good,” she said.
“What did you see?” I asked.
She thought. “Trees,” she said.
“That’s nice,” I said. “What else?”
Another silence. “Buildings,” she said.
“Tell me about the buildings,” I said. “Did you see anyone in any of the windows? What color were the buildings? Did any of them have flower boxes outside? What color were their doors?” It helps her, these exercises, but they also make me feel like I’m coaching a spy: Did you see anyone suspicious? What were they doing? What were they wearing? Can you identify them from these pictures I’m showing you?
She tries so hard to give me what she thinks I want. But all I want is for her to one day come home and tell me that she saw something funny or beautiful or exciting or scary—all I want for her is the ability to tell herself a story. She looks at me occasionally as she talks, and I nod or smile to show her I approve, and whenever I do, there’s that awful squeezing in my chest, that sensation only she is capable of causing.
In late June, I began letting her go alone. When I’m not home, her nanny is to wait for her arrival; it only takes her seven minutes to make the loop, and that’s allowing her plenty of time to stop and look at things as she goes. She’s never been curious to go any farther, and it’s too hot, besides. But then, at the beginning of the month, she asked if she could walk into the Square.
Part of me thrilled to this: My little Charlie, who never asks for anything or to go anywhere, who seems at times devoid of appetites and desires and preferences at all. Though that isn’t true—she knows the difference between sweet and salty, for example, and she prefers the salty. She knows the difference between a pretty shirt and an ugly one, and she prefers the pretty. She knows when someone’s laughter is mean and when it’s joyful. She can’t articulate why, but she knows. I remind her constantly: It’s fine to ask for what she wants; it’s fine to like someone, or something, or someplace, more than another. It’s fine to dislike, too. “All you have to do is say,” I tell her, “all you have to do is ask. Do you understand me, little cat?”
She looks at me, and I can’t tell what she’s thinking. “Yes,” she says. But I don’t know if she does.
I wouldn’t have allowed her into the Square at all six months ago. But now that the state has taken over, you can only enter it if you’re a resident of Zone Eight—there are guards posted at each of the entrances to check people’s papers. I had been worried, after last year’s conversion of the rest of Central Park, that they were going to repurpose all the parks as research facilities, even though that hadn’t been the original plan. But in a rare alliance, the health and justice ministers partnered to persuade the rest of the Committee that a lack of public gathering spaces would increase treasonous activity, and force potential insurgent groups underground, where we’d be less able to monitor them. So we won this round, but barely, though it now seems that Union Square will eventually go the way of Madison Square and become, if not a research facility, then an all-purpose, state-run staging site: one month a makeshift morgue, the next a makeshift prison.
Washington Square, however, is a different matter. It’s a small park, in a residential zone, and therefore has been of no great concern to the state. Over the years, the shantytowns were built, and then destroyed, and then rebuilt, and then re-destroyed: Even from my vantage at the upstairs window, I could sense something rote about their destruction, a halfheartedness in the way the young soldier by the northern gate twirled his baton by its loop, the way the bulldozer operator leaned back her head and yawned, one hand on the controls, the other dangling out the window.
Four months ago, though, I woke to the sound of something large falling with a dull crash, and looked outside to see that the bulldozer had returned, but this time to unearth the trees on the western side of the Square. Two bulldozers worked for two days, and when they were finished, the transplant team arrived and bound up the fallen trees’ roots in great tangles of burlap and clods of soil, and then they too disappeared, presumably to Zone Fourteen, where they’re relocating many of the mature trees.