To Paradise
- Автор: Yanagihara Hanya
- Год: 2022
- Язык: английский
- Год: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
- Жанр: Современная русская и зарубежная проза
Электронная книга - «To Paradise». Краткое содержание книги:
In an alternate version of 1893 America, New York is part of the Free States, where people may live and love whomever they please (or so it seems). The fragile young scion of a distinguished family resists betrothal to a worthy suitor, drawn to a charming music teacher of no means. In a 1993 Manhattan besieged by the AIDS epidemic, a young Hawaiian man lives with his much older, wealthier partner, hiding his troubled childhood and the fate of his father. And in 2093, in a world riven by plagues and governed by totalitarian rule, a powerful scientist's damaged granddaughter tries to navigate life without him--and solve the mystery of her husband's disappearances.
These three sections are joined in an enthralling and...
He shifted in his seat again. He turned the page and then turned it back, rereading what he’d already looked at. He looked up at the clock, and so did I. It was 19:14. “Damnit,” he said. “I wonder where he is?” He looked at me. “There hadn’t been a note, had there?”
“No,” I said, and he shook his head and looked down at his book again.
Five minutes later, he looked up. “What time was he supposed to be here?” he asked.
“Nineteen hundred,” I said, and he shook his head once more.
A few minutes later, he closed his book entirely, and we both sat there, staring at the clock, its blank, round face.
Suddenly my husband stood. “I have to go,” he said, “I have to leave.” It was 19:33. “I—I have to be somewhere. I’m already late.” He looked at me. “Cobra—if he comes, can you handle this on your own?”
I knew that he wanted me to be able to handle things on my own, and all at once I felt scared, as if I really were facing the prospect of talking to the building manager by myself, without my husband here; it was almost like I had forgotten that the manager wasn’t coming at all, that this entire incident was something I’d invented in order to do something that should have been much scarier: following my husband on his free night.
“Yes,” I said. “I can handle it.”
He smiled then, one of his rare smiles. “You’re going to be fine,” he said. “You’ve met the manager before; he’s a nice man. And I’ll come home early tonight, while you’re still awake, all right?”
“All right,” I agreed.
“Don’t be nervous,” he said. “You know how to do this.” This was something that Grandfather used to say to me as welclass="underline" You know how to do this, little cat. There’s nothing to be afraid of. And then he took his anorak from the hook. “Good night,” he said, as the door closed.
“Good night,” I said to the closed door.
I waited just twenty seconds after my husband closed the door before I too left the apartment. I had already packed a bag with some things I thought I might need, including one of the small flashlights, and a notebook and pencil, and a thermos of water in case I got thirsty, and my anorak in case I got cold, though that was unlikely.
Outside, it was dark and warm, but not hot, and there were more people than usual, walking around the Square, walking home from the store. I spotted my husband immediately: He was heading briskly north on Fifth Avenue, and I followed him as he turned west on Ninth Street. It was the same route we both took every morning, at separate times, to the shuttle stop, and for a second, I wondered whether he was going to wait for the shuttle again and go back up to work. But he kept walking, crossing Sixth Avenue and through the area we called Little Eight, for its complex of high-rise apartment towers that made it feel like its own zone within Zone Eight, and then across Seventh Avenue as well, and still he kept going.
This was much farther west than I typically had reason to go. Zone Eight extended from New First Street at its southernmost point to Twenty-third Street in its north, and from Broadway on its east over to Eighth Avenue, and the river, on its west. Technically, the zone had extended farther still, but ten years ago, most of the territory beyond Eighth Avenue had been flooded during the last great storm, which meant that the people who had chosen to remain in river flats were residents of Zone Eight as well. But with every year, more and more of them were relocated, because strange things were being discovered in the river, and it was unclear how safe it was to live there.
Zone Eight was Zone Eight, and there was meant to be no hierarchy within it, no area that was considered better than any other. That was what the state told us. But if you lived in Zone Eight, you knew that there were in fact places—like where my husband and I lived—that were more desirable than others. There were no grocery stores west of Sixth Avenue, for example, or washing or hygiene centers except for the one that was only accessible to people who lived in Little Eight, which also maintained something called a Pantry, where you could buy nonperishable items, like grains and powdered food, but nothing that would spoil.
As I have said, Zone Eight was one of the safest districts on the island, if not in the entire municipality. Still, there were rumors about what happened near the river, just as there were rumors about what happened in Zone Seventeen, which ran along Zone Eight’s north and south axes but then extended all the way to the riverbanks on First Avenue, on the eastern shore. One rumor is that the far western part of Zone Eight was haunted. I had asked Grandfather about that once, and he had taken me over to Eighth Avenue to show me that there were no ghosts there. He said that story had begun before I was born, when there had been a series of underground tunnels that ran beneath the streets, and had extended all the way to the relocation centers, although back then they weren’t centers, they were districts, like Zone Eight, where people lived and worked. Then, after the pandemic of ’70, they were closed, and people began telling stories that the state had used these tunnels as isolation centers for the affected, who by that point numbered in the hundreds of thousands, and then had sealed them up with cement, and everyone in them had died.
“Is that true?” I asked Grandfather. We were standing near the river by then, and speaking very softly, for it was treasonous to even discuss this. I always felt scared when Grandfather and I talked about illegal topics, but also good, because I knew that he knew that I could keep secrets, and that I would never betray him.
“No,” Grandfather said. “Those stories are apocryphal.”
“What does that mean?” I asked him.
“It means untrue,” he said.
I thought about this. “If it’s not true, why do people tell them?” I asked him, and he looked away, into the distance, to the factories on the other side of the river.
“Sometimes, when people tell stories like that, what they’re really trying to express is their fear, or their anger. The state did a lot of horrible things back then,” he said, slowly, and I felt that same thrill, hearing someone talking about the state that way, and that that someone was my grandfather. “Many horrible things,” he repeated, after a pause. “But that was not one of them.” He looked at me. “Do you believe me?”
“Yes,” I said. “I believe everything you say, Grandfather.”
He looked away from me again, and I worried I had said something wrong, but he only put his palm on the back of my head, and said nothing.
What remained true is that the tunnels had been sealed up long ago, and it was said that if you went close to the river late at night, you would hear the sobs and moans of the people who had been left to die within them.
The other thing that people said about the far western edge of Zone Eight is that there were buildings there that looked like buildings, but in which nobody lived. It took me a few years of eavesdropping on the Ph.D.s to understand what they meant by that.
Much of Zone Eight had been built centuries ago, in the eighteen hundreds and early nineteen hundreds, but a good deal of it had been demolished shortly before I was born and replaced with towers, which had doubled as clinics. Before then, the population had been very high, and people came to the municipality from all over the world. But then the illness of ’50 had stopped almost all immigration, and then the illnesses of ’56 and ’70 had solved the problem of overcrowding, which meant that, while Zone Eight was still a high-density district, no one lived here illegally now. However, some of the zone’s original buildings had been spared, especially those close to Fifth Avenue and the Square, and those close to Eighth Avenue. Here, the buildings resembled the one my husband and I lived in; they were made from red brick and were rarely more than four stories high. Some of them were even smaller, and held only four units.