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...
According to the Ph.D.s whose conversations I listened to, there were a few of these buildings close to the river that had once been divided into apartments, the same as our building, but had over the years become places where nobody lived. Instead, you went to these buildings to—well, I did not know what you went to the buildings to do, only that it was illegal, and that when the Ph.D.s talked about them, they laughed and said things like “You’d know all about that, wouldn’t you, Foxley?” This is how I surmised that these were dangerous but also exciting places that the Ph.D.s pretended they knew about but would never actually be bold enough to visit.
By this time, I was very near the river, on a street called Bethune. When I was a child, the state had tried to relabel all the named streets with numbers instead, which mostly affected Zones Seven, Eight, Seventeen, Eighteen, and Twenty-one. But it hadn’t worked, and people continued to call them by their twentieth-century names. All this time, my husband hadn’t looked behind him once. It had grown very dark, and I was lucky he was wearing a light-gray anorak, one I could easily follow. He had clearly walked this route many times before—at one point, he abruptly stepped down from the sidewalk to the street, and when I looked at the sidewalk, I saw there was an enormous gouge in it, and he had known to avoid it.
Bethune was one of the streets people thought was haunted, even though it wasn’t near one of the former entrances to the underground tunnels. But it still had all its trees, even though they were mostly bare, and I suppose that was what made it look so old-fashioned and gloomy. It was also one of the streets that hadn’t been flooded, and therefore extended all the way west to Washington Street. Here, my husband walked to the middle of the block and then he stopped, and looked about him.
There was no one on the street but me, and I quickly moved behind one of the trees. I wasn’t concerned about him seeing me: I was wearing black clothes and black shoes, and my skin is fairly dark—I knew I wouldn’t be visible. In fact, my husband’s coloring is similar to mine, and it was by that point so dark that, had I not known to look for his anorak, I might not have seen him myself.
“Hello?” my husband called. “Is anyone there?”
I know this will sound foolish, but in that moment, I wanted to respond. “I’m here,” I would have said, and stepped onto the sidewalk. “I just want to know where you go,” I would have said. “I want to be with you.” But I couldn’t think of what he would say in response.
So I said nothing, just hid behind the tree. But I did think of how calm my husband sounded, how calm and how determined.
Then he was moving again, and I came out from behind the tree and followed him, this time with a little more distance between us. Finally, he reached number 27, one of the final houses on the block, an old-fashioned building somewhat like the one we lived in, and he looked around again before climbing the stone steps and rapping a complicated knock on the door: tap-ta-taptap-tap-tap-tap-ta-tap-taptap. Then a little window slid open in the door, and my husband’s face was illuminated by a rectangle of light. Someone must have asked him something, because he said something back, something I couldn’t hear, and then the window shut and the door opened just wide enough for my husband to slip inside. “You’re late tonight,” I heard someone, a man, say before the door closed once more.
And then he was gone. I stood outside the building, staring up at it. From the street, it looked unoccupied. There was no light, there was no sound. After I had waited five minutes, I climbed the steps myself and pressed my ear against the door, which was covered in peeling black paint. I listened and listened. But there was nothing. It was as if my husband had disappeared—not into a house but into another world altogether.
It wasn’t until the next day, when I was back in the safety of my room at the lab, that I comprehended fully the riskiness of the previous night’s activities. What if my husband had seen me? What if someone had seen me following him and had suspected me of illegal activities?
But then I had to remind myself that my husband had not seen me. No one had seen me. And if by chance I had been recorded by some stray Fly that was patrolling the area, I would simply tell the police that my husband had forgotten his glasses when he went on his nightly walk, and that I was taking them to him.
After I returned to the apartment, I had gone to bed early, so that when my husband came home I was already pretending to be asleep. I had left him a note in the bathroom saying that the leak had been fixed, and I heard him push back the curtain to examine the showerhead. I couldn’t tell if he had in fact returned earlier than he normally did, as there was no clock in the bedroom. I could tell he thought I was asleep, because he was very quiet, undressing and dressing in the dark.
I had been so distracted that day that it took me some time to realize that there was something amiss in the lab, and it was only when I brought over a fresh batch of pinkies to the Ph.D. cluster that I noticed that the reason they were so quiet was that they all had their headsets on and were all listening to the radio.
There were two radios in the lab. One was a normal radio, of the sort everyone had. The second was a radio that only broadcast to sanctioned research facilities around the world, so that different scientists could announce any pertinent findings and give lectures or updates. Typically, of course, such research would be shared in papers that could only be accessed by accredited scientists on highly secure computers. But when there was something urgent, it would be shared on this special radio, which broadcast a soundscreen of noise atop the person speaking; this meant that, unless you had the proper headphones to cancel the soundscreen, you would hear only a randomized, meaningless sound, like crickets chirping or a fire burning. Each person who was authorized to listen to this radio had a sequence of numbers that they had to enter first, and each sequence was registered to a different user, so the state could monitor who was listening at any time. The headphones, too, were only activated once you entered your code, and before leaving the lab for the night, the scientists locked their sets in a safe that was arranged as a series of small boxes; they each had to enter another code for their box door to open.
Now everyone was silent, frowning and listening to the radio. I placed the tray of petri dishes with the new pinkies on the side of the counter, and one of the Ph.D.s flapped his hand at me, impatiently, signaling me to go away; the rest didn’t even look up from their notepads, where they were scribbling words, stopping and pausing to listen, and then writing more.
I went back to the room with my mice and watched the scientists through the window. The entire lab had gone still. Even Dr. Wesley, shut in his office, was listening, frowning at his computer.
After twenty or so minutes, the broadcast must have ended, because everyone yanked off their headsets and then hurried into Dr. Wesley’s office—even the Ph.D. students, who were normally excluded from such meetings. As I saw them turn off the radio, I went over to the Ph.D.s’ area and began stacking empty petri dishes on a tray, which wasn’t my job. But as I did, I heard one of them say to another, “Do you think it’s true?” and the other reply, “Fuck, I hope not.”
Then they were in the office, and I couldn’t hear anything more. But I could see Dr. Wesley speaking, and the rest of them nodding, and everyone looking very grave. I was scared then, because normally when something bad happened—when, say, a new virus got discovered—the scientists weren’t scared but excited.