I followed him, though I wasn’t aware that I had until I found myself in the room, and all of the men within it staring at me. There were six, though I was unable to register any of their faces, only the room itself, which was decorated like the room upstairs but grander, the furnishings fancier, the fabrics richer. Then I noticed that everything was frayed: the edge of the carpet, the seams on the sofa, the spines of the books. Here, too, there was a television, though it was also silent, just a black screen. Here, too, the walls had been removed, transforming what could have been a one-bedroom apartment into a single large space.
Then the men were gathering near the doorway, and one of them was holding the blond man against him. “Fritz, I know someone who can help,” he was saying, “let me tell him,” but the blond man shook his head. “I can’t do that to you,” he said. “You’ll be hanged or stoned for sure, and so will your friend,” and the other man, as if admitting he was correct, nodded and stepped away from him.
I was looking at them when I felt someone watching me, and I turned to the left and saw one of the Ph.D.s, the one who always rolled his eyes at the interior minister’s deputy’s nephew.
He stepped closer to me. “Charlie, right?” he asked, quietly, and I nodded. He looked toward the foyer, where the two men were still holding my husband upright, surrounded by other men. “Edward’s your husband?” he asked.
I nodded. I could not speak, could barely even nod, could barely even breathe. “What’s wrong with him?” I asked.
He shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said, and he looked worried. “I don’t know. It seems like heart failure to me. But I know it’s not—it’s not the illness.”
“How do you know?” I asked.
“We’ve seen some of the affected,” he said. “And it’s not that—I know it. He’d be oozing blood from his nose and mouth if it were. But, Charlie: Don’t take him to the hospital, whatever you do.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“Because. They’ll assume it’s the illness—they don’t know as much as we do—and he’ll be sent straight to one of the containment centers.”
“There are no more containment centers,” I reminded him.
But he shook his head again. “There are,” he said. “They just don’t call them that anymore. But it’s where they’re taking early cases, to—to study them.” He looked back at my husband, and then at me once more. “Take him home,” he said. “Let him die at home.”
“Die?” I asked. “He’s going to die?”
But then the blond man was approaching me again, this time with both his and my husband’s bags slung over his shoulder. “Charlie, we have to go,” he said, and I followed him, again without my knowing it.
Some of the men kissed the blond man on the cheek; others kissed my husband. “Goodbye, Edward,” one said, and then they all said it: “Goodbye, Edward—goodbye.” “We love you, Edward.” “Goodbye, Edward.” And then the door opened, and the three of us stepped into the night.
* * *
We walked east. The blond man was on my husband’s right, I on his left. My husband’s arms were looped around our necks, and we each had an arm around his waist. He could barely walk, and his feet dragged behind him much of the time. He wasn’t heavy, but because the blond man and I were both shorter than he was, he was difficult to guide.
At Hudson Street, the blond man looked around us. “We’ll cut across Christopher, and then go past Little Eight and east on Ninth Street before turning south on Fifth,” he said. “If we’re stopped, we’ll say he’s your husband and I’m his friend and he—he got drunk, all right?” It was illegal to be publicly drunk, but I knew that, in this circumstance, it was better to say my husband was drunk than sick.
“All right,” I said.
We were silent as we walked east on Christopher Street. The streets were so empty and dark that I could barely see where we were going, but the blond man moved quickly and surely, and I tried to keep up. Eventually, we reached Waverly Place, which formed the westernmost border of Little Eight, which was well-lit with spotlights, and we flattened ourselves against a nearby building to avoid being seen.
The blond man looked at me. “Just a little longer,” he said to me, and then again, softly, to my husband, who coughed and groaned. “I know, Edward,” he said to my husband. “Almost there, I promise—we’re almost there.”
We moved as quickly as we could. To my left, I could see the towers of Little Eight, their windows now mostly black. I wondered what time it was. Ahead of us, I could see the large building that had been built several centuries ago as a prison. Then it became a library. Then it became a prison again. Now it was an apartment building. Behind it was a cement playground, but it was usually too hot for the children to use.
It was just as we were approaching this building that we were stopped. “Halt,” we heard, and we did, abruptly, almost dropping my husband. A guard, dressed all in black, which meant he was a municipal officer, not a soldier, had stepped in front of us, holding his weapon at our faces. “Where are you going at this time of night?”
“Officer, I have my papers,” the blond man began, reaching for his bag, and the guard snapped, “I didn’t ask for your papers. I asked where you were going.”
“Back to her apartment,” said the blond man. I could tell he was afraid but trying not to be. “Her husband—her husband had a little too much to drink, and—”
“Where?” asked the officer, and I thought he sounded eager. Officers got extra points for arresting people for quality-of-life crimes.
But before we could answer, we heard another voice, one saying, “There you are!” as if he were greeting someone, a friend who was late to meet him for a concert or a walk, and the blond man and the officer and I turned and saw David. He was approaching us from the west, not in his gray jumpsuit but in a blue cotton shirt and pants, similar to what the blond man was wearing, and although he was moving quickly, he also wasn’t hurrying, and he was smiling and shaking his head. In one hand he carried a thermos, in the other, a small leather case. “I told you to stay put—I’ve been looking all over the complex for you,” he said, still smiling, to the blond man, who had opened his mouth in surprise but now shut it and nodded.
“I’m sorry, officer,” David said to the man in black. “This is my foolish big brother, and his wife, and our friend”—he nodded at the blond man—“and I’m afraid my brother had a little too much fun tonight. I went to get him some water from our flat, and when I came back, these three”—he smiled at us, fondly—“decided to take off without me.” And here he smiled at the officer, and shook his head a little, and rolled his eyes upward. “Here, I have all three of our papers,” he said, and handed the case to the officer, who had still not lowered his weapon, and who had been looking at each of us in turn as David spoke, but who accepted the case and unzipped it. As the officer pulled out the cards, I saw a flash of silver.