Tonight, as I have for the past three nights, I’ll sit near Charlie’s bed. On Thursday, about thirty minutes after she had fallen asleep, she began to make a low growling noise deep in her throat, twitching her shoulders and head. But then she stopped, and after watching her for another hour or so, I finally went to bed myself. I wished, as I often did, for Nathaniel. I also wished, as I rarely did, for Eden. I suppose, though, that what I was really wishing was for someone to be responsible for Charlie alongside me.
I can’t say that what happened was my greatest fear for her—my greatest fear is that she’ll die—but it was close. I had tried to talk to her about her body, about how it was hers only, about how she didn’t have to do anything she didn’t want to. No, that’s not accurate. I hadn’t tried—I had. I knew she was vulnerable; I knew something like this could happen. Not even that—I knew it would happen. And I knew we were lucky—that, as bad as it was, it could have been worse.
When I was an undergraduate, a professor of mine had said there were two types of people: those who wept for the world, and those who wept for themselves. Weeping for your family, he said, was a form of weeping for yourself. “Those who congratulate themselves on their sacrifices for their families aren’t actually sacrificing at all,” he said, “because their family is an extension of their selves, and therefore a manifestation of the ego.” True selflessness, he said, meant giving of yourself to a stranger, someone whose life would never be entangled with your own.
But hadn’t I tried to do that? I had tried to make things better for people I didn’t know, and it had cost me my family, and therefore my self. And yet the improvements I had attempted are now in dispute. I cannot do anything else to help the world—I can only try to help Charlie.
Now I am very tired. I’m crying, of course, I suppose selfishly. I don’t know, though, of anyone who doesn’t cry for themselves these days—sickness makes the self indivisible from strangers, and so, even if you’re thinking of them, those millions of people with whom you navigate the city, you are by definition wondering when their lives might brush against yours, each encounter an infection, each touch a potential death. It’s selfishness, but there seems to be no other way—not now.
My love to you and Olivier—Charles
My dear Peter, December 3, 2076
Years ago, when I was traveling through Ashgabat, I met a man in a café. This was in the ’20s, when the Turkmen Republic was still known as Turkmenistan, and still under authoritarian rule.
I had been in university then, and this man had engaged me in conversation: What brought me to Ashgabat, and what did I think of it? Now I realize he was likely a spy of one sort or another, but then, being callow and stupid, as well as lonely, I was eager to share my thoughts about the inhumanity of an autocratic state, and how, although I wasn’t arguing for democracy, there was a difference between a constitutional monarchy of the sort I lived in and the dystopia he lived in.
He listened patiently as I bloviated, and then, when I was finished, said, “Come with me.” We walked to one of the open windows. The café was on the second floor of a building on a narrow tributary, a shortcut to the Russian Market, one of the last streets in the city not to be razed and rebuilt in glass and steel. “Look outside,” the man said. “Does this look like a dystopia to you?”
I looked. One of the great dissonances of Ashgabat was watching people who were dressed for the 19th century navigate a city that had been built for the 22nd. Below me, I saw women in bright-patterned head scarves and dresses hefting bulging plastic bags, and men zipping by on motorized handcarts, and schoolchildren shouting to one another. It was a sunny, crisp day, and even now, even as it’s no longer possible to remember the feeling of winter, I can still recall cold by visualizing the scenery of it: a gaggle of teenage girls’ cheeks stippled with scarlet; an elderly man tossing a just-roasted potato from hand to hand, the steam shimmering before his face; a woman’s wool scarf fluttering around her forehead.
It had not been the cold that the man had wanted me to see, though, but the life being lived in it. The middle-aged women, bags stuffed with groceries, gossiping in front of a blue-painted doorway, the group of boys playing soccer, the two girls walking down the street eating meat buns, their arms linked—as they passed beneath us, one of them said something to the other and they both began giggling, covering their mouths with their hands. There was a soldier, but he was leaning against the side of a building, his head resting against the brick, his eyes closed, a cigarette balanced on his lower lip, relaxing in the pale sun.
“So you see,” my companion said.
I think about that exchange often these days, as well as its underlying question: Does this place look dystopic? I ask it often about this city, where, in the absence of shops, there is still commerce, conducted now in the Square, but still populated by the same kinds of people—strolling couples, children wailing because they’ve been denied a treat, a strident woman haggling with a truculent vendor over the price of a copper pan—as before. In the absence of theaters, there are still people gathering for concerts at the community centers they’re establishing in every zone. In the absence of the number of children and young people that there should be, there is more care, more love, lavished on the ones who remain, although I know firsthand that that care can resemble something more dictatorial than loving. The answer, implicit in the man’s question, was that a dystopia doesn’t look like anything; indeed, that it can look like anywhere else.
And yet it also does look like something. The things I have described are elements of the sanctioned life, the life that can be lived aboveground. But out of the corner of our eyes, there is another life, one we see in glimpses, in movements. There is no television, for example, there is no internet, and yet messages are still relayed, and the dissidents are still able to telegraph their reports. I sometimes read of them in our daily briefings, and while it typically takes only a week or so to discover them—a surprising, or perhaps unsurprising, number of them are related to state employees—there are always those who elude us. There is no foreign travel, and yet every month there are reports of attempted defections, of dinghies capsizing off the coast of Maine or South Carolina or Massachusetts or Florida. There are no more refugee camps, and yet there are still reports—fewer, admittedly—of escapees from even worse countries than this, found and packed into a poorly made boat and sent back out to sea under armed guard. To live in a place like this means to be aware that that little movement, that twitching, that faint, mosquito-like buzzing, is not your imagination but proof of another existence, the country you once knew and you know must still exist, beating onward just beyond the range of your senses.
Data, investigation, analysis, news, rumor: A dystopia flattens those terms into one. There is what the state says, and then there is everything else, and that everything else falls into one category: information. People in a young dystopia crave information—they are starved for it, they will kill for it. But over time, that craving diminishes, and within a few years, you forget what it tasted like, you forget the thrill of knowing something first, of sharing it with others, of getting to keep secrets and asking others to do the same. You become freed of the burden of knowledge; you learn, if not to trust the state, then to surrender to it.