I was walking to my car when I heard someone call my name, and turned and saw it was the pharmacology minister. “It’s not going to happen,” he said, so firmly that I almost smiled: He was so young, and so certain. Then I remembered that he had lost his entire family, and that he deserved my respect for that alone.
“I hope you’re right,” I said, and he nodded. “I have no doubt,” he said, and then bowed and walked off toward his car.
We shall see. Over the years, I’ve been astonished at and dismayed by and fearful of how acquiescent the public has proven to be: Fear of disease, the human instinct to stay healthy, has eclipsed almost every other desire and value they once treasured, as well as many of the freedoms they had thought inalienable. That fear was yeast to the state, and now the state generates its own fear when they feel the population’s is flagging. Monday begins the third consecutive week of debates about the Marriage Act, and it looks like we may be able to stop this after all—your condemnation helped, certainly. I don’t see how this proceeds without alienating us completely from Old Europe, but of course I’ve been wrong before.
Keep your fingers crossed for all of us. I’ll write more next week. Send my love to Olivier. And save some for yourself.
Charles
February 3, 2078
Dear Peter—the act passed. It’ll be announced tomorrow. I don’t know what else to say. More soon. Charles
Dear Peter, April 15, 2079
It’s very early, just dawn, and I can’t sleep. I haven’t been sleeping at all, it seems, these past few months. I’ve been trying to go to bed earlier, closer to eleven instead of past midnight, and then I lie there. Sometimes I don’t so much fall as slip into a liminal state between wakefulness and slumber, one in which I’m acutely aware of both the mattress beneath me and the sound of the fan wicking away above me. In these hours, I relive the events of the day, yet in this replay, I’m sometimes participant and sometimes witness, and I never know at which moment the camera might swing on its dolly and my perspective will shift.
Last night I saw C. again. He’s not exactly my type, and I can’t imagine I’m his. But we both have the same security clearance and rank, which means that he can come to my house or I can go to his and we can have our respective cars wait outside to drive us home afterward without any questions or difficulties.
You forget, sometimes, how much you need to be touched. It’s not food or water or light or heat—you can go for years without it. The body doesn’t remember the sensation; it does you the kindness of allowing you to forget. The first two times, we had sex quickly, almost brutally, as if we might never have the opportunity again, but the past three instances have been more leisurely. He lives in a state-appointed townhouse in Zone Fourteen, bare of anything but the essentials, one mostly empty room opening into another.
Afterward, we pretend the listening devices don’t exist—we have that privilege, too—and talk. He’s fifty-two, twenty-three years younger than I am, only twelve years older than David would have been. He speaks, sometimes, about his sons, the younger of whom would have been sixteen this year, just a year older than Charlie will be this September, and his husband, who had been in the marketing department of the pharmaceutical company where he’d once worked. C. had considered killing himself after they had died, all within six months, but in the end, he hadn’t, and now, he said, he couldn’t remember why.
“I can’t remember why I didn’t, either,” I said, though as soon as I spoke, I realized that was a lie.
“Your granddaughter,” he said, and I nodded.
“You’re lucky,” he said.
You’ll recall it had been C. who’d been so certain that the Marriage Act would fail. Even now, even as we were meeting in semisecret, he continued to argue that it’d be overturned imminently. “What’s the point of having marriage for people who aren’t going to have children?” he asked. “If the point is to raise more children in general, why not use some of us as child-carers, or assign us other supportive roles? Isn’t the whole point to try to get maximum advantage out of all our citizens?” When I once suggested the inevitable conclusion—that, despite the Committee’s promises, the Marriage Act will only lead to the eventual criminalization of gayness on moral grounds—he contradicted me with such fury that I had no choice but to gather my things and leave. “What’s the point of that?” he asked me, again and again, and when I said that the point was the same wherever and whenever homosexuality was criminalized—to create a useful scapegoat on whom the fortunes of a faltering state could be blamed—he accused me of being bitter and cynical. “I believe in this state,” he said, and when I said I had, once, too, he had told me to get out, that we were too distant from each other philosophically. For weeks, there was silence. But then need drew us back together, the source of our reunion the same thing we could no longer discuss.
Afterward, he walks me to the door; we embrace, rather than kiss, confirm our next encounter. At Committee meetings, we’re cordial. Not too distant, not too friendly. I imagine no one can tell anything different. At our last encounter, he told me that safe houses have started cropping up, mostly at the far western edges of Zone Eight, for people who can’t meet as we do in a private house. “They’re not brothels,” he clarified. “They’re more like gathering places.”
“What do people do there?” I asked.
“The same things we do here,” he said. “But not just sex.”
“No?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “They also talk. They go there and talk.”
“About what?” I asked.
He shrugged. “The things people talk about,” he said, and as he did, I realized: I no longer knew what people talk about. If you were to listen to us on the Committee, you would think that all people talk about is how to overthrow the state, how to escape the country, how to cause mayhem. And yet what else is there to discuss? There are no movies, no television, no internet. You can’t, as we once had, spend an evening debating an article or a novel or bragging about a vacation to someplace far away. You can’t discuss the person you’ve just had sex with, or how you were interviewing for a new job, or how much you wanted to buy a new car or apartment or pair of sunglasses. You can’t do these things because none of those things are possible any longer, at least not openly, and with their elimination has also disappeared hours’， days’ worth of conversations. The world we live in now is about survival, and survival is always present tense. The past is no longer relevant; the future has failed to materialize. Survival allows for hope—it is, indeed, predicated on hope—but it does not allow for pleasure, and as a topic, it is dull. Talk, touch: the things C. and I kept reuniting to find—somewhere downtown, in a house by the river, there were other people like us, talking to each other just to hear the sound of someone responding to them, proof that the self they remembered still existed after all.
Later, I went home. I had a female guard from Security sit downstairs on the nights I knew I’d be out, and after I had dismissed her, I climbed up to Charlie’s room and sat on the edge of her bed, staring at her. She’s one of those children who look like neither their mother nor their father. Her nose resembles Eden’s perhaps, and I suppose she has David’s long, thin mouth, but somehow nothing in her face reminds me of either of them, and I am grateful for that. She is her own creature, one unfreighted by history. She was wearing a pair of short-sleeved pajamas, and I ran my fingers over her arms, which are pocked by little craters left behind by the scars. Next to her wheezed Little Cat, a sore on his right foreleg oozing pus, and I knew that I would soon have to take him to the clinic, have him injected with poison, come up with a lie to tell Charlie.