One day about a year ago, I was riding the shuttle to work when I did see something I had never seen before in Zone Eight. We were moving up Sixth Avenue, as usual, and crossing Fourteenth Street, when a man suddenly ran into the intersection. I had been sitting in the middle of the shuttle, on the left, and so I hadn’t seen where the man had come from, but I could see that he didn’t have a shirt on, and that he was wearing the gauzy white pants that people in the containment centers wore before they were sent to the relocation centers. The man was clearly saying something, but the windows on the shuttle, along with being bulletproof, were also soundproof, so I couldn’t hear him, but I could still see he was shouting: His arms were stretched out in front of him, and I could see the muscles in his neck, so stiff and hard that for a minute he looked like he was carved out of stone. On his chest were about a dozen places where he had tried to hide signs of the illness, which people often did, burning the lesions with a match and leaving behind dull black scars that resembled leeches. I never understood why they did this, because even though everyone knew what the lesions meant, everyone knew what the scars meant as well, so it was really just exchanging one mark for another. This man was young, in his twenties probably, and white, and even though he was gaunt and his hair had almost disappeared, as happened in the second stage of the disease, I could tell he had once been nice-looking, and now he was standing in the street in his bare feet and yelling and yelling. And then two attendants came running toward him in their silver biohazard suits with the reflective screens over their faces, so that, when you looked into one, all you could see was your own face staring back at you, and one of them leapt at the man to try to tackle him to the ground.
But the man was surprisingly quick, and he darted out of the attendant’s way and ran instead toward our shuttle, and everyone on board, who had been silent and watching, gasped, as a single great intake of breath, and the driver, who had had to stop the shuttle so he didn’t hit the attendants, honked his horn, as if that might scare the man away. And then the man jumped up toward my window, and for just a moment, I saw his eye, the iris so large and glittering blue that I was very frightened, and I could finally hear what he was yelling, even through the window: Help me. And then there was a bang, and the man’s head kicked backward, and he fell out of my sight, and I could see the attendants running toward him; one of them had his weapon still held aloft.
After that, the shuttle started moving again, quite fast, as if driving faster could erase what had happened, and everyone became silent again, and I felt as if everyone were looking at me, as if they thought it was my fault, as if I had asked the man to try to communicate with me. People rarely spoke on the shuttle, but I heard a man announce, in a low voice, “He shouldn’t still have been on the island,” and although no one responded, you could feel that people agreed with him, and even I could sense that they were frightened, and that they were frightened because they were confused. But although people were often frightened about things they couldn’t understand, this time I agreed with them—someone that sick should have been sent away by now.
That day at work had been slow, which was unfortunate, because my mind kept returning to what had happened. But what I thought about most was not the man himself, or his bright eye, but about how, when he fell, he had made almost no noise at all, he was so light and soft. A few months after that, it was announced that the containment centers in Zones Eight and Nine were being relocated, and although there were stories about what that meant, we of course never knew for sure.
Since that day, there had been no further strange incidents in Zone Eight, and on this morning, I looked out the window and everything was the same, so predictable that it felt, as it sometimes did, less as if we were moving through it and more as if the city were a series of sets and performers moving past us on a track. Here came the buildings where people lived, and then the chain of children holding one another’s hands, and then Zone Nine, the two large hospitals now empty, and here the clinic, and here, just before the Farm, the row of ministries.
This was the sign that you were crossing into Zone Ten, the most important zone. No one lived in Zone Ten. Aside from some of the ministries, the district was dominated by the Farm, which had once been an enormous park that had bisected the island. It had been so big, this park, that it had accounted for a significant percent of the island’s acreage. I didn’t remember it as a park, but Grandfather had, and he used to tell me stories of how it had been crisscrossed with paths, both cement and dirt, and how people would run through it, and bicycle and walk, and have picnics there. There had been a zoo, where people would pay just to go look at strange, useless animals, who were expected to do nothing but sit and eat the food they were provided, and a lake, on which people would row small boats, and in the spring, people would gather to look at colored birds that had flown up from below the equator, and to find mushrooms and look at flowers. At various points there had been sculptures made of iron in whimsical forms that were meant to entertain children. A long time ago, it had even snowed, and people would come to the park and strap long, thin planks to their feet and shuffle across the low icy hills, which Grandfather said were slick and could make you fall, but not in a bad way—in a way that made people want to do it again and again. I know it’s now difficult to understand what this park had been meant for, but Grandfather said it hadn’t been for anything: It was simply for people to spend time in and enjoy. Even the lake was meant only for enjoyment—you went to float paper boats on it, or walk around it, or just sit and look at it.
The shuttle stopped at the main entrance of the Farm, and people got off and began queuing for the entrance. Only the two thousand or so people who were certified to work at the Farm could get in, and even before you joined the queue, you had to have a retinal scan to prove you had the right to enter, and there were always guards waiting with weapons in case someone tried to dash inside, which people occasionally did. You heard rumors about the Farm: that they were breeding new kinds of animals there—cows with two sets of udders, to produce double the amount of milk; brainless, legless chickens that could be packed, fat and square, into cages and would be fed by tubes; sheep that had been engineered to eat only waste, so that you wouldn’t have to use land and resources to grow grass. But none of these rumors had ever been confirmed, and if there were in fact new animals being made, we never saw them.
There are many other projects being worked on in the Farm as well. There are the greenhouses, where all sorts of new plants are being grown, both to eat and as possible medicines, and the Forest, where new kinds of trees are being raised, and the Lab, where scientists are working on creating new kinds of biofuels, and the Pond, where my husband works. The Pond is split into two parts: the animal-cultivating half and the plant-cultivating half. Ichthyologists and geneticists work in the first part, botanists and chemists work in the second. My husband works in the second, though he isn’t a scientist because he hadn’t been able to finish his graduate degree. He’s an aquatic gardener, which means that he plants the specimens that the botanists have approved or engineered—different algae, mostly—and then oversees the specimens’ growth and harvesting. Some of those plants will be developed as medicines, and some will be made into food, and the plants that can be used as neither will be turned into compost.