I am concerned about how Charlie will react. She knows it happened; I went up to visit her at school a few weeks ago, and when I asked if she had any questions, she shook her head. I’m trying to make it easy for her, as easy as I can. For example, there aren’t a huge number of paint colors to choose from these days, but I told her she could pick whichever she liked, and perhaps we could even draw a pattern on the bedroom wall, even though neither of us is very good at drawing. “Whatever you want,” I tell her. “This is your apartment.” Sometimes she nods and says, “I know,” but other times, she shakes her head. “It’s not mine,” she says, “it’s ours. Yours and mine, Grandfather,” and then I know that, despite her best efforts, she’s been thinking of her future, and that it scares her. I change the subject then, and we speak of something else.
C. had always been convinced that there were more of us working at high levels in the state than we even knew, which he said made things more dangerous for us, not less, as those people would seek to make examples out of anyone who flagrantly disobeyed the laws in order to protect themselves, as happens in the irrational logic of the vulnerable. He had argued that the Marriage Act could never have passed without a plurality of us on the Committee and beyond, and that our internalized shame and guilt at being unable to reproduce had led to a dangerous kind of compensatory patriotism, the kind that drove us to create laws that ultimately endangered us. “But,” he had said, “no matter how bad it gets, there will always be loopholes for us, as long as we follow the rules in public.” This was shortly before he was disappeared. A year later, as you know, I began going to one of the safe houses he’d told me about, and which still endure, intact, while so many other things have been destroyed or co-opted or reinvented. With Charlie away at college, I go more and more frequently, and now that the house has been converted, I suspect I’ll go still more.
The changes have also made me think about Aubrey and Norris. It’s been years since I’ve thought of them, but recently, I’ve found myself talking aloud to Aubrey in particular. This house still feels like his, even for as long as I’ve lived in it—now almost as long as Aubrey himself. In my conversations with him, he’s angry, angry but trying to conceal it. But eventually, he no longer can. “What have you fucking done, Charles?” he asks me, in a way he never would have in life. “What have you done to my house?” And although I tell myself I’ve never cared about Aubrey’s opinion, I never have anything to say in response.
“What have you done, Charles?” he keeps asking, again and again. “What have you done?” But every time I open my mouth to answer, nothing comes out.
Love to you and O.—Charles
Dear Peter, July 12, 2084
Last night I dreamed of Hawai‘i. The night before, I had been in my favored house of ill repute, sleeping alongside A., when the sirens began to wail.
“Jesus, Jesus,” said A., scrabbling for his clothes, his shoes. “It’s a raid.”
Men began crowding in doorways, buttoning their shirts and buckling their belts as they did, their faces blank or terrified. It was safer to be silent in these raids, and yet someone—a young man who does something in Justice—kept repeating, “What we’re doing isn’t illegal; what we’re doing isn’t illegal,” until someone else hissed at him to shut up, that we already knew that.
We stood there, waiting, about thirty of us across four floors. Whoever they were trying to find wasn’t guilty of homosexuality—the person might be under suspicion for smuggling, or forgery, or theft—and although they couldn’t charge us for who we are, they could humiliate us for it. Why else, then, would they arrest this person when they knew he was here, instead of quietly, at his residence? It was for the spectacle of leading us, single file, out of the house, our hands raised above our heads like criminals, for the mortifying pleasure of tying our hands and having us kneel on the curb, for the sadism of asking us to repeat our names—Louder, please, I didn’t hear you—and shouting it to their colleague to run through the database: Charles Griffith. Thirteen Washington Square North. Says he’s a scientist at RU. Age: Eighty in October. （And then a smirk: Eighty? You’re still doing this at eighty? As if it were absurd, obscene, that someone so old should still want to be touched, when really, it is the sensation you come to crave the most.） And then there was the discomfort of the hours spent in a crouch in the street, your head bent as if in shame, the suspect long since removed, waiting for the theater to end, for one of them to get bored and release us, the sound of his fellow soldiers’ laughter as they climbed back into their cars. They were never physically abusive with us, they never called us names—they couldn’t; too many of us had too much power—but it was clear they disdained us, and when we finally stood and turned for the house, you could see the street darkening again, the neighbors who had watched us through their windows, never saying a word, returning to bed now that the show had concluded. “I wish they’d just make us illegal,” someone, a young man, had grumbled after the last raid, and a number of people had begun shouting at him, asking him how he could be so ignorant and stupid, but I understood what he was trying to express: If we were illegal, we would know our position. As it was, we were nothing—we were known but not named, tolerated but not recognized. We lived in a constant state of uncertainty, waiting for the day we would be declared enemies, waiting for the night when what we did would, in the space of an hour, a single signed document, be transformed from regrettable to criminal. The very word for what we were had somehow, at some point, disappeared from the vernacular—to us, we were only “people like us”： “Do you know Charles? He’s one of us.” Even we had become euphemistic, unable to say what we are.
They almost never raided the inside—as I said, too many of us had too much power, and it was like they knew that the amount of contraband they’d find inside would entail so much processing that they’d be able to do little else for the following week—but there were chutes in each room that you could toss your possessions down, and the first place we went after going back indoors was the safe box in the basement, where we’d retrieve our books and wallets and devices and whatever else we had dropped, and then we would leave, probably without even saying goodbye to the person we’d been with, and the next time we came, neither of us would mention it, we would pretend it had never happened.
Two nights ago, we had been waiting three minutes for the bang on the door, for the loudspeaker announcing one of our names, when we realized that the sirens weren’t for us after all. Again, there was a soundless exchange of glances—the people on the first and second floors looking up to us on the third and fourth, all of us wondering—when, finally, a young man on the first floor cautiously unlocked the door and then, after a pause, dramatically flung it open, standing in the center of the frame.
He shouted, and we came rushing downstairs to see that Bank Street had become a river, the water racing east. “The Hudson River’s flooded,” I heard someone say, in a quiet, awestruck voice, and then, right after, someone else said, “The safe box!” and there was a hustle down to the basement, which was already filling with water. A chain was formed to move the books and equipment we’d stored there to the attic, and after, we stood at the first-floor windows, watching the water rise. A. had a communication device, a kind I had never seen before, one different from my own—I never asked what he did, and he never told me—and he spoke into it, a few terse words, and ten minutes later, a flotilla of plastic dinghies appeared.