But though I say this, the truth is that I don’t actually know what my husband does. I think this is what he does—the planting and tending and harvesting—but I don’t know for certain, just as he doesn’t know for certain what I do.
This morning, as always, I looked out the shuttle window very hard, but, as always, there was nothing to see. The entire Farm is surrounded by a twelve-foot-high stone wall, and atop the wall, spaced a foot apart, are sensors, so that even if you were able to scale it, your presence would be detected almost immediately, and then you would be captured. Most of the Farm is beneath an enormous biodome, but there are a few feet near the southern wall that aren’t protected, and just beyond that wall are two rows of acacia trees that stretch along the entire border, from Farm Avenue West to Fifth Avenue. There were trees all over the city, of course, but you almost never saw them with leaves, which people picked—to boil for tea or broth—as soon as they appeared. Picking leaves was against the law, naturally, but everyone did it anyway. But no one dared to touch the leaves inside or around the Farm, and whenever the shuttle rounded the corner and turned east onto Farm Avenue South, you would see them, clouds of bright green, and although I saw them five days a week, I was always surprised when I did.
After stopping at the Farm, the shuttle continued toward Madison Avenue, and then turned north, and then turned right again at Sixty-eighth Street, and then south on York Avenue, where it stopped in front of Rockefeller University, which is on Sixty-fifth Street. This is where I got off, as well as the other people who work either at Rockefeller or at the Sloan Kettering Research Facility, which is a block west. Everyone going into RU split into two lines: the scientists stood in one, the lab techs and support staff in another. We had to have our fingerprints checked and our bags searched and our bodies scanned before we entered the campus, and then again before we entered our buildings. Last week, my supervisor announced that, because of an incident, they were going to be initiating retinal scans as well. Everyone had been upset about this, because there’s no canopy to stand under when it rains, not like at the Farm, and although the campus itself is beneath a biodome, the security area is not, which means we could be waiting for thirty minutes in the heat. My supervisor told us that they were going to set up cooling units in case the wait was excessive, but so far they haven’t arrived. But they did start staggering our arrival and departure times, so we wouldn’t all be waiting at once.
“What was the incident?” asked one of the techs from another lab, a man I didn’t know, but the supervisor didn’t answer, and no one had expected him to.
I work in the Larsson Center, which was constructed in the 2030s and is a building but also has a bridge that connects the main campus with a much smaller campus extension on a man-made island in the East River. There are nine labs in Larsson, and they all specialize in various kinds of influenza. One lab studies the descendants of the 2046 flu, which has proven to be evolutionarily aggressive; another studies descendants of the 2056 flu, which, according to Dr. Morgan, wasn’t actually a flu at all. My lab, which is run by Dr. Wesley, specializes in predictive influenza, which means we try to anticipate the next unknown flu, which might be altogether different from the other two. Ours is one of the biggest labs in the institution: Aside from Dr. Wesley, who’s the principal investigator, or lab chief, there are also twenty-four postdoctoral students—like Dr. Morgan—which means they have their Ph.D.s and are trying to discover something important so they can someday get their own lab; nine graduate students, who are called the Ph.D.s; and ten technical and support staff, of which I am one.
I work with the mice. At any given time, we have at least four hundred, which is significantly more than either of the other two labs have. I sometimes overhear my counterparts in those other labs discussing how their chiefs complain about how much money Dr. Wesley has, money he spends on “fishing expeditions,” which is a term Grandfather taught me and means they think that he doesn’t have any real evidence or information, that he’s just looking for something he can’t even identify. I repeated this once to Dr. Morgan, who frowned and said that it was inappropriate for them to be talking that way, and anyway, they were just lab techs. Then he asked me their names, but I pretended they had been temporary help and I hadn’t known, and he looked at me for a long time and made me promise I would tell him if I ever heard such discussions again, and I said I would, but I haven’t.
I am responsible for the mouse embryos. What happens is that the mice—already one week pregnant—are delivered in crates from the supply company. I get a list from the scientists telling me how old they need the embryos to be: usually ten days but sometimes a little older. Then I exterminate the mice and harvest their fetuses, which I prepare either in tubes or in dishes, depending, and then I shelve them in the refrigerator by age. My job is to make sure there’s always mice when the scientists need them.
This all takes a lot of time, especially if you’re careful, but there are still moments when I find myself with nothing to do. Then I ask for permission to use one of my two twenty-minute breaks. Sometimes I spend it taking a walk. All of the buildings at RU are connected by underground tunnels, so you never have to go outside. During the ’56 epidemic, they built a series of storage rooms and safe rooms, but I’ve never seen them. Everyone says that beneath these tunnels are two more stories of rooms: operating rooms and laboratories and cold-storage units. But Grandfather always told me not to trust what I couldn’t prove. “Nothing is true to a scientist until he proves it so,” he used to say. And even though I am not a scientist, I remind myself of this whenever I walk through the tunnels and suddenly get scared, when I become certain that the air has grown colder and that I can hear, as if from very far away, the scrabbly sounds of mice far beneath me, and of groans and whispers. The first time it happened, I couldn’t move, and when I did, I woke up in a corner of the corridor, near one of the staircase doorways, and I was yelling for Grandfather. I don’t remember this, but later, Dr. Morgan told me that they’d found me and I’d urinated on myself, and I had had to sit in the reception room with a tech from another lab whom I didn’t know until my husband came to pick me up.
That was shortly after we had been married, shortly after Grandfather had died, and when I woke, it was night and I was confused until I realized that I was in my bed, in our apartment. And then I looked over and saw someone sitting on the other bed and staring at me: my husband.
“Are you all right?” he’d asked.
I was feeling strange, sleepy, and I couldn’t quite form the words I needed. He hadn’t turned any of the lights on, but then the spotlight swept past the windows, and I could see his face.
I tried to say something, but my mouth was too dry, and my husband handed me a cup, and I drank and drank, and when the water was gone, too soon, he took the cup from me and left the room, and I could hear him remove the lid from the stone water-container in the kitchen, and the wooden dipper knocking against the inside, and the slish of liquid as he refilled the cup.
“I don’t remember what happened,” I said, after I’d drunk some more.