So far, though, there’s been no one. I still can’t tell how much she comprehends about what she doesn’t comprehend, if you know what I mean. Sometimes I fear that I’ve been fooling myself, that I’m searching for a humanity within her that’s been wiped out entirely. Then she’ll say something astonishingly perceptive, so insightful that I become horrified that she might have sensed I ever doubted her humanness. Once, she asked me if I had liked her better before she got sick, and I felt as if someone had socked me in my solar plexus, and had to grab her and hold her to me so she couldn’t see my expression. “No,” I told her. “I have always loved you just the same since the day you were born. I wouldn’t want my little cat any other way.” What I couldn’t say, because it would confuse her, or sound too much like an insult, is that I loved her now more than I had; that my love for her was terrible because it was more ferocious, that it was something dark and seething, a misshapen mass of energy.
At the school, the dean reviewed with me a list of three math-and-sciences colleges she thought might be appropriate for Charlie: all within two hours of the city, all small and well-defended. All three guaranteed their graduates employment in a Grade Three or higher facility. The most expensive of these colleges was for females only, and this was the one I chose for Charlie.
The dean made a note. Then she paused. “Most Grade One state employees opt for twenty-four-hour security for their children,” she said. “Would you like to use the college’s service, or continue your own?”
“I’ll continue with my own,” I said. The state, at least, would pay for that.
We discussed a few more details, and then the dean stood. “Charlie will be finished with her last class,” she said. “Shall I get her and you two can go home together?” I told her I’d like that, and she left her office to tell her assistant.
As she did, I stood and looked at the photographs of her students which hung on her wall. There are four all-girl private schools left in the city; this one is the smallest, and attracts what the school calls “studious” girls, though the word is a euphemism, as not all of them are especially academically gifted. Rather, the word is meant to convey their charges’ fundamental shyness, their “delayed sociability,” as the school calls it.
The dean returned with Charlie, and we said goodbye and walked out. “Home?” I asked, once we were in the car, “Or a treat?”
She thought. “Home,” she said. On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, she has an additional life-skills tutorial class, where she works with a psychologist on verbal and nonverbal communication. This always leaves her tired, and she leaned her head against the seat and closed her eyes, both because she was genuinely depleted and, I think, because she wanted to avoid the questions she knew I’d ask and which she would struggle to answer: What happened in school today? How was music class? What did you listen to? How did the music make you feel? What do you think the musician was trying to say? What was your favorite part of the composition, and why?
“Grandfather,” she’d say, frustrated, “I don’t know how to answer you.”
“You do know, little cat,” I’d say. “And you’re doing so well.”
More and more, I wonder what her adulthood will be like. For the first three years after she recovered from the illness, my only concern was keeping her alive: I monitored how much she ate, how much she slept, the whites of her eyes, the pink of her tongue. Then, after the first incident with the boys, I thought mostly of protecting her, though that surveillance was more complicated, since it relied as much on my oversight as it did on hoping she understood whom she could trust, and whom she couldn’t. Obedience would ensure her survival, but had I trained her to be too obedient?
Then, after the second incident, I began to think about how she would continue through her life—how I could defend her from people who tried to take advantage of her; how she might live after I die. I had always assumed that she would be with me for her entire life, even as I always knew as well that it wouldn’t be the entirety of her life that she would be with me but the entirety of mine. Now I am nearly seventy-seven, and she is seventeen, and even if I live another ten years—if I don’t die myself, or if I’m not disappeared, like C.—I’ll still leave her with decades of her own to contend with.
But on the one hand, maybe the society that is coming will be easier for her in certain aspects. There are marriage brokers （all state-licensed） opening up offices, promising they can find a spouse for anyone. Wesley will guarantee her a job, and the points system will guarantee that she will always have food, always have shelter. I would prefer to stay alive to watch over her as she enters middle age, but I only need to stay alive to make sure I can settle her with someone who will take care of her, that I can secure her a position someplace where I know she’ll be well-treated. This knowledge makes doing the work I do easier. I had long ago stopped believing I was doing anything to help science, or humanity, or this country or city, but knowing that I’m doing it to help her, to safeguard her, makes life bearable.
Or at least that’s what I’m able to believe—some days more than others.
Love to you and Olivier. Charles
My dear Peter, December 1, 2083
Happy birthday! Seventy-five. Practically a baby, still. I wish I had something to send you, but instead, you’re the one sending me presents, if a picture of you and Olivier on vacation can really be considered a present. And thank you for the beautiful shawl, which I’m going to give Charlie when she comes home for the holidays in two weeks. The new courier’s working out wonderfully, by the way—even more discreet than the last one, and a lot faster, too.
The house is almost fully converted. Although there have now been two speeches in Committee meetings about my generosity, it wasn’t as if I really had a choice—when the military asks to commission a private house, they’re not asking: They’re ordering. Anyway, I was lucky to hold on to it as long as I did, especially in wartime. I did ask for the unit of my choice, which they granted: They’ve carved out eight apartments, and ours is on the third floor, facing north, consisting of what used to be Charlie’s bedroom and playroom, which is now the living room. I’m sleeping in the bedroom until she gets home, after which I’ll move to the living room. As the house was in her name to begin with, she’ll keep the apartment once she marries, and I’ll be relocated to another flat in the zone, which was also part of the compromise.
Despite the fact that I’m now living in what is, technically, military barracks, there are no attractive soldiers strutting about. The other apartments have instead been given to various operations technicians, beetley men who look away when I pass them on the staircase, and from whose apartments I sometimes hear the shrill of distorted radio-wave messages.
You mentioned in your last letter that I sounded sanguine about the whole situation. I think the better word is probably “resigned”： The proud part of me was appeased by the fact that I was among the last three people on the Committee to have his house commissioned, and the practical part knew that, with Charlie off in college, I didn’t need this large a residence anyway. Also, the house was never truly mine: It was Aubrey and Norris’s, and then it was Nathaniel’s. But I—like Aubrey’s collection, the final pieces of which I donated one by one to the Metropolitan and then, when the museum was closed down, to various private organizations—could only be said to have occupied the place, never to have possessed it. Over the years, this house, which had once been so symbolic to me—a repository of my resentments; a projection of my fears—had become, finally, just a house: a shelter, not a metaphor.