In bed, I thought about Nathaniel. If I’m lucky, I can conjure him as a source not of shame or self-flagellation but of neutrality. When I’m with C., I can sometimes close my eyes and pretend he’s Nathaniel at fifty-two. C. looks and smells and sounds and tastes entirely different than Nathaniel did, but skin is skin. I dare not admit this to anyone but you （not that there’s anyone else left to tell）， but increasingly I have these dreams in which I revisit scenes and moments from my life with Nathaniel but in which David—and later, Eden, and later still, even Charlie—are missing, as if they never existed. These dreams are often banal: Nathaniel and I, getting older and older, arguing about whether we should plant sunflowers or not, or, once, trying to chase a raccoon out of our attic. We seem to live in a cottage by the sea in Massachusetts, and although I never see the outside of the structure, I have a sense of what it looks like anyway.
In the daytime, I sometimes speak aloud to Nathaniel. Out of respect, I rarely discuss work, for that would upset him too much. Instead, I ask him about Charlie. After that first incident with those boys, I had told her about sex, and sexual threats, in a much more complete way than I had told her before. “Do you have any questions?” I had asked her, and after a silence, she had shaken her head. “No,” she’d said. She still doesn’t like to be touched by anyone, and while I sometimes mourn for her, I envy her, too: To live a life without desire （not to mention imagination） would once have been something to pity, but now it might ensure her survival—or at least increase her chances. Yet her distaste has not stopped her from wandering off again, and after the second incident, I sat down with her again. “Little cat,” I began, and then I didn’t know what else to say. How could I tell her that those boys weren’t attracted to her, that they saw her only as something to use and toss aside? I couldn’t, I couldn’t—I felt traitorous even thinking the words. In those moments, I wished that someone felt lust for her, that even if that lust was muddied with cruelty, it would at least be passion, or a form of it—it would mean that someone saw her as lovely and special and desirable; it would mean that someone might one day love her as deeply as I do, but differently, too.
More and more frequently these days, I think about how, of all the horrors the illnesses wreaked, one of the least-discussed is the brisk brutality with which it sorted us into categories. The first, most obvious one was the living and the dead. Then there was the sick and the well, the bereaved and the relieved, the cured and the incurable, the insured and the uninsured. We kept track of these statistics; we wrote them all down. But then there were the other divisions, the kind that didn’t appear to warrant recording: The people who lived with other people, and the people who lived alone. The people who had money, and the people who didn’t. The people who had connections, and the people who didn’t. The people who had somewhere else to go, and the people who didn’t.
In the end, it hadn’t made as much of a difference as we thought it would. The rich died anyway, maybe more slowly than they should have; some of the poor survived. After the first round of the virus had whipped through the city, scooping up all the easiest prey—the indigent and the infirm and the young—it had returned for seconds, and thirds, and fourths, until it was only the luckiest who remained. And yet no one was truly lucky: Is Charlie’s life lucky? Perhaps it is—she is here, after all, she can talk and walk and learn, she is able-bodied and lucid, she is loved and, I know, capable of loving. But she is not who she might have been, because none of us are—the illness took something from all of us, and so our definition of luck is a matter of relativity, as luck always is, its parameters designated by others. The disease clarified everything about who we are; it revealed the fictions we’d all constructed about our lives. It revealed that progress, that tolerance, does not necessarily beget more progress or tolerance. It revealed that kindness does not beget more kindness. It revealed how brittle the poetry of our lives truly is—it exposed friendship as something flimsy and conditional; partnership as contextual and circumstantial. No law, no arrangement, no amount of love was stronger than our own need to survive, or, for the more generous among us, our need for our people, whoever they were, to survive. I sometimes sense a faint mutual embarrassment among those of us who lived—who had sought to deprive someone else, maybe even someone else we knew, or a relative of someone we knew, of medication or hospitalization or food if it meant we could save ourselves? Who had reported someone they knew, perhaps even liked—a neighbor, an acquaintance, a colleague—to the Health Ministry, and who had turned up the volume on their headphones to muffle the sounds of them begging for help as they were led away to the waiting van, shouting all the while that someone had been misinformed, that the rash that had spread across their daughter’s arm was only eczema, that the sore on their son’s forehead was only a pimple?
And now the illness is under control, and we are back to considering the incidentals of life once more: whether we might be able to find chicken rather than tofu at the grocery; or whether our children might be admitted into this college versus that one; or whether we might be lucky in this year’s housing lottery, and move from Zone Seventeen to Zone Eight, or Zone Eight to Zone Fourteen.
But behind all these concerns and minor anxieties is something deeper: the truth of who we are, our essential selves, the thing that emerges when everything else has been burned away. We have learned to accommodate that person as much as we can, to ignore who we know ourselves to be. Most of the time, we’re successful. We must be: Pretending is the cost of sanity. But we all know who we really are. If we have lived, it is because we are worse than we ever believed ourselves to be, not better. Indeed, it feels at times as if all who remain are those who were wily or tenacious or scheming enough to survive. I know that this belief is its own kind of romance, but in my more fanciful moments, it makes perfect sense—we are the left-behind, the dregs, the rats fighting for bits of rotten food, the people who chose to stay on earth, while those better and smarter than we are have left for some other realm we can only dream of, the door to which we’re too frightened to open, even to peek inside.
Charles
Dear Peter, September 15, 2081
Thank you, as always, for Charlie’s birthday gifts, which are especially welcome this year. The rationing has been so severe that it’s been fourteen months since she’s had any new clothes, much less a dress. Thank you too for letting me take credit for them with her. I wished, as I often do, that I could tell her about you, that I could tell her that somebody else, somebody far away, cares about her as well. But I know it’s not safe to do so.
Today I went in to speak with the dean at her school. Last year, when she was in eleventh grade, I started getting suspicious that the school would discourage her from attending university, despite the fact that all her teachers have been supportive, and even if they hadn’t, Charlie’s math and physics scores would guarantee her acceptance to a technical college at the very least.
I’ve been trying for years to articulate to myself the scope of Charlie’s deficiencies. As you know, there still remains so little research on the long-term effects of Xychor on those children who received the drug in ’70, in part because, obviously, there are relatively few survivors, and in part because the guardians and parents of those who have survived have been reluctant to subject their children to further research and testing. （I myself am one of those selfish people who are inhibiting greater scientific understanding by withholding permission for my child to be studied.） But the papers that have been published, from here and various institutes in Old Europe, which are better funded, have been unhelpful, and I’ve yet to see my Charlie reflected in any of the descriptions I’ve read. I want to clarify, though, that I haven’t sought an explanation because I feel I need to understand her any better than I do in order to love her more. But some part of me is always hoping that, if there are others like her, then she will someday see someone she recognizes, someone who feels like home. She has never had a friend. I don’t know how deeply she feels loneliness, or even if—unlike her poor father—she has the capacity to recognize it. But my dearest wish is that someone will someday take that loneliness from her, preferably before she’s able to identify the sensation for what it is.