And now more people were learning of it as well. There had been no official announcement in the various zones’ newsletters, no radio bulletin, yet everyone knew that something was happening. One day at the end of September, I walked outside to discover that the Square was completely empty. Gone were the vendors, their tents, even the fire that constantly burned. And it was not just empty but clean: There were no wood shavings on the ground, no bits of metal, no snippets of thread blowing through the air. It had all vanished, and yet I had heard nothing during the night, no sound of bulldozers, no industrial scrubbers or sweepers. The cooling stations were gone as well, and the gates to each of the four entrances, which had been removed long ago, had been replaced, and locked.
The mood on the shuttle that morning was very tense, less of a silence than a complete absence of sound. There was no recognizable protocol for disease preparedness, because the state had changed so much since ’70, but it was as if everyone already knew what was happening, and no one wanted to hear their suspicions confirmed.
At work, there was a note waiting for me beneath one of the mouse cages, the first since David and I had begun meeting at the storyteller’s. “Rooftop greenhouse, 13:00,” it said, and at 13:00, I went to the roof. There was no one there but a gardener in his green cotton suit, watering the specimens, and before I could wonder how I was going to search for David’s next note in the greenhouse if the gardener wouldn’t leave, he turned and I saw it was David.
He quickly raised his finger to his mouth, gesturing me to be silent, but I was already weeping. “Who are you?” I asked. “Who are you?”
“Charlie, quiet,” he said, and came over and sat down next to where I had fallen to the ground, and put his arm around my shoulder. “It’s all right, Charlie,” he said. “It’s all right.” He held me and rocked me, and eventually I was quiet. “I disabled the cameras and microphones, and we have until 13:30 before the Flies return,” he said. “You saw what happened today,” he continued, and I nodded. “The illness is all over Prefecture Four now, and it’ll be here soon as well. The worse it gets, the harder it’s going to be for us to leave,” he said. “So the date’s been moved up: October 2. The state will make an official announcement the next day; testing and evacuations to the relocation centers will begin that evening. They’ll instate a curfew the following day. It’s cutting it too close for my taste, but there was so much rearranging that this was the best I could do. Do you understand me, Charlie? You have to be ready to leave on October 2.”
“But that’s this Saturday!” I said.
“Yes, and I apologize,” he said. “I miscalculated—I was told the state wouldn’t announce until October 20 at the earliest. But I was wrong.” He took a breath. “Charlie,” he said, “have you talked to your husband?” And, when I didn’t say anything, he turned me by my shoulders to look at him. “Listen to me, Charlie,” he said, his voice stern. “You must tell him. Tonight. If you don’t, I’ll assume you’re going to leave without him.”
“I can’t leave without him,” I said, and I began crying again. “I won’t.”
“Then you must tell him,” said David. Then he looked at his watch. “We have to leave,” he said. “You go first.”
“What about you?” I asked.
“Don’t worry about me,” he said.
“How did you get in here?” I asked.
“Charlie,” he said, impatiently, “I’ll tell you later. Now go. And talk to your husband. Promise me.”
“I promise,” I said.
But I didn’t. The next day, there was another note waiting for me: Did you? But I crushed it into a ball and burned it in a Bunsen burner.
That was Tuesday. On Wednesday, the same thing happened. Then it was Thursday, three days before we were to leave, my husband’s free night.
And that night, my husband didn’t come home.
* * *
Now, if I was asked, I could not say why I decided to trust David. The truth was that I did not in fact trust him, or at least not completely. This David was different from the David I had known: He was more serious, less surprising, scarier. Yet the other David had been scary, too; he had been so reckless, so unusual. In some ways, this David was easier for me to accept, even as I felt that with each day I knew him less. Sometimes I would hold Grandfather’s ring and think of all David knew about me, and tell myself that David was someone I could believe in, that he was someone who would protect me, that he had been sent by someone Grandfather had trusted. Other times, I examined the ring, holding the flashlight beneath the covers as my husband slept, wondering if it was Grandfather’s after all. Hadn’t his been bigger? Had the gold been dented on the right side? Was it real, or a copy? And what if he hadn’t sent it to this friend after all? What if it had been stolen from him? Then I would think: It wasn’t worth his lying—I wasn’t worth kidnapping. No ransom would be paid for me; no one would miss me. There was no reason for David to want to take me.
And yet there was no reason for him to want to save me, either. If I was not worth taking, I was also not worth saving.
And so I cannot say why I decided to go, or even that I had really decided. It seemed too far off, so unlikely, like a make-believe story. All I knew was that I was going somewhere better, somewhere Grandfather wanted me to go. But I knew nothing about New Britain, other than it was a country, and it had once had a queen, and then a king, and that they spoke English there, too, and that the state had ceased relations with them back in the late ’70s. I suppose it seemed a bit like a game, like the kind I had played with Grandfather in which we pretended to have conversations—this was a pretend conversation, too, and my leaving would be pretend as well. At our last meeting, I had argued with David again about leaving the extra chits behind, for what if I needed them later, when I returned, when David interrupted me. “Charlie, you’re never coming back,” he said. “Once you leave this place, you will never return. Do you understand me?”
“What if I want to?” I said.
“I don’t think you will,” he said, slowly. “But at any rate, you can’t. You would be captured and killed in a Ceremony if you tried, Charlie.”
I said I understood, and I thought I did, but maybe I didn’t. One Saturday, I had asked David what would happen to the pinkies, and he had said I couldn’t think about the pinkies, and that they would be fine: Another tech would take care of them. And then I got upset, because although I knew I wasn’t the only one who could handle the pinkies, I sometimes liked to pretend I was. I liked to pretend that I was the best at preparing them, the most careful, the most thorough, that no one else could be as good as I was. “You’re right, Charlie, you’re right,” he’d said, and after a while, I calmed down.
That Thursday, as I waited for my husband, I thought about the pinkies. They were such an important part of my life here, and I decided that when I went in to work tomorrow, on what David had reminded me would be my last day at Rockefeller University, ever, I should steal a petri dish of them. Just one dish, with just a few pinkies in just a little saline. David had said I should bring only what was personally meaningful to me, and the pinkies were meaningful.