That day, we walked back downhill, our shoes squelching in the mud, David between us holding on to one of each of our hands. Nathaniel had cut enough maile so that we could each wear a length of it around our necks, but David had wanted to wear his wound around his head like a crown. Nathaniel helped him, tying the vine around itself and settling it on his forehead.
“I’m a king!” David had said, and we had laughed back at him. “Yes, David,” we’d said, “you’re a king—King David.”
“King David,” he said. “That’s my name now.” And then he turned serious. “Don’t forget,” he said. “You have to call me that, okay? Do you promise?”
“Okay,” we said. “We won’t forget. We will.” It was a promise.
But we never did.
Charles
PART IX
Autumn 2094
Over the following weeks, David and I discussed our plan. Or, rather, it was his plan, and it was being shared with me.
On October 12, I would leave Zone Eight. He wouldn’t tell me how, exactly, until just before. Until then, I was to do nothing out of the ordinary. I was to maintain all my daily rhythms: I was to go to work, I was to go to the grocery, I was to take the occasional walk. We would continue to meet every Saturday at the storyteller’s, and if David needed to communicate with me between those meetings, he would find a way to send me word. But if I didn’t hear from him, I wasn’t to worry. I was to prepare nothing, and pack nothing beyond what I could carry in my tote bag. I would not need to bring clothes, or food, or even my papers: New ones would be issued to me once I was in New Britain.
“I have a lot of extra chits I’ve saved up over the years,” I told David. “I could exchange them for coupons for extra water or even sugar—I could bring those.”
“You won’t need those, Charlie,” David said. “Bring only things that mean something to you.”
At the end of our first meeting after our talk on the benches, when I had begun to believe him, I had asked David what would happen to my husband. “Of course your husband can come,” he said. “We’ve prepared for him as well. But, Charlie—he may not want to.”
“Why not?” I had asked, but David hadn’t answered. “He loves to read,” I said. On that walk on the track, I had asked David lots of questions about New Britain, but he had said that he would tell me more about it on our travels—that it was too dangerous to share too much now. But one thing he had said was that in New Britain you could read whatever you wanted, as much as you wanted. I thought of my husband, how he made himself read slowly, because you could only borrow one book every two weeks, and he had to make each one last. I thought of him sitting at our table, resting his right cheek in his right hand, completely still, a small smile on his face, even when the book was about the care and feeding of tropical water-grown edible plants.
“Yes,” David said, slowly, “but, Charlie—are you sure he’d want to leave?”
“Yes,” I said, although I wasn’t sure at all. “He could read any book he wanted, over there. Even the illegal ones.”
“That’s true,” said David. “But there might be other reasons he’d want to stay here, in the end.”
I considered this, but I couldn’t think of any. My husband had no family here except for me. There would be no other reason for him to stay. And yet, like David, I also somehow wasn’t confident that he would want to leave. “What do you mean?” I asked, but David didn’t answer.
At our next meeting, before the storyteller began, David asked me if I’d like his help in talking to my husband. “No,” I said. “I can do it myself.”
“Your husband knows how to be discreet,” David said, and I didn’t ask how he knew this. “So I know he’d be smart about this.” There seemed to be something else that he wanted to say, but he didn’t.
After the storyteller’s session, we walked. I had assumed our meetings would be complicated, full of information for me to memorize, but they were not. Mostly, they seemed to be opportunities for David to make sure I was remaining calm, that I was doing nothing, that I trusted him, although he never asked if I did.
“You know, Charlie,” he said, suddenly, “homosexuality is completely legal in New Britain.”
“Oh,” I said. I didn’t know what else I could say.
“Yes,” he said. Once again, he seemed to want to say something else, but once again, he didn’t.
That night, I thought about how much David already knew about me. In some ways, it was disturbing, even frightening. But it was also relaxing, even comforting. He knew me the way Grandfather knew me, and that knowledge had of course come from Grandfather himself. David had not met Grandfather, but his employer had, and so in a small way it felt as if Grandfather were actually alive and with me still.
Yet there were certain things I did not want David to know. I had come to realize that he understood that my husband did not love me, and would never love me, not the way a husband is supposed to love his wife, and not the way that I had hoped I would be loved. It made me ashamed, because while loving someone is not shameful, it is shameful not to be loved at all.
I knew I would need to ask my husband if he wanted to come with me. But the days passed and I did not. “Did you ask him?” David asked at our next meeting, and I shook my head. “Charlie,” he said, not meanly but not gently, either, “I need to know if he’s going to come. It affects things. Do you want me to help you?”
“No, thank you,” I said. My husband may not have loved me, but he was still my husband, and it was my responsibility to talk to him.
“Then do you promise you’ll ask him tonight? We only have four weeks left.”
“Yes,” I said. “I know.”
But I didn’t ask him. That night, as I lay in bed, I clenched Grandfather’s ring, which I kept under my pillow, where I knew it’d be safe. In the other bed, my husband slept. He had been tired again, tired and breathless, and on his way to the kitchen with our dishes, he had stumbled, although he caught himself on the table before he dropped anything. “It’s nothing,” he’d said to me. “Just a long day.” I had told him to go to bed, that I would do the dishes, and he had argued with me a little, but then had left.
All I had to do was say his name, and he would wake, and I would ask him. But what if I asked him, and his answer was no? What if he said he wanted to stay here instead? “He will always take care of you,” Grandfather had said. But if I left, it would be the end of always, and then I would be alone, all alone, with no one but David to protect me, and no one who remembered me, and who I was, and where I had once lived, and who I had been. It was safer not to ask at all—if I didn’t ask, I was both here, in Zone Eight, and also not, and as October 12 drew closer and closer, that seemed like the best place to be. It was like being a child, when all I had to do was follow directions, and I never had to think about what might happen next, because I knew that Grandfather had already thought of everything for me.
* * *
For many weeks, I had been keeping two things secret: The first was knowledge of the new illness. The second was knowledge of my departure. But while only one other person knew the second thing, many people—all of the people in my lab; many of the people at RU; various employees of the state; generals and colonels; unseen people in Beijing and Municipality One whose faces I couldn’t even imagine—knew the first.