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...
But now they were frightened, and serious, and when I went to the bathroom on my break, I passed the other labs on the floor, and in those, too, the only people I saw were the techs and support staff moving around, cleaning and organizing like we always did, because the scientists were all gathered in their respective principal investigators’ offices, talking among themselves with the doors closed.
I waited and waited, but everyone remained in Dr. Wesley’s office, talking. The glass was soundproof, so I couldn’t hear. Finally, I was going to miss my shuttle and so I had to leave, though I wrote a note to Dr. Morgan explaining that I’d gone, and placed it on his desk, just in case he was looking for me.
It took me another week to discover some of what the scientists had overheard on the radio, and the intervening days were very strange ones. Normally, I’m able to find out information fairly quickly. The scientists are discouraged from gossiping and speculating out loud, but they all do so anyway, albeit in whispers. Besides their lack of discretion, however, the other thing that benefits me is that they rarely seem to notice when I’m around. Sometimes, that bothers me. But most of the time, I can use it to my advantage.
I have learned many things simply by listening. I learned, for instance, that Roosevelt Island, in the East River, was one of the city’s first relocation centers, during the ’50 pandemic, and later a prison camp, and finally, after it had become overrun with rodents carrying an infection, the state had moved the camp to Governor’s Island, in the south, which had previously been a refugee camp, and had scattered thousands of poisoned food pellets that killed all the rodents, and no one had been to Roosevelt Island since except the crematorium workers. I learned that Dr. Wesley regularly traveled to the Western Colonies, where the state had built a large research facility where they kept an underground vault storing a sample of every known microbe in the world. I learned that the state was predicting a severe drought in the next five years, and that there was a team of scientists elsewhere in the country who were trying to figure out how to generate rain on a mass scale.
Aside from all of that information, I learned other things from eavesdropping on the Ph.D.s as well. Most of them were married, and sometimes they discussed romance, things that had happened with their husbands or wives. But here, they often spoke in silences, not details. They said things like “You know what happened next,” and the other person would say, “I do,” and I sometimes felt like saying, “What happened next? What are you talking about?” Because I didn’t know, and I wanted to know. Though of course I knew not to ask.
But in the week after the radio conference, they were all unusually quiet, quiet and serious, and everyone was working much harder, though what they were working on exactly I couldn’t say, and I wouldn’t have understood besides. I just knew that there was something different about their behavior, and that something in the lab had changed.
Before I was to discover what that was, however, I followed my husband again. I don’t know why. I suppose I wanted to know if that was what he did every Thursday, because then it would at least be something else I knew about him.
This time, I went directly from the shuttle stop to the far west end of Bethune Street, and waited. There was a house right across from the one my husband had entered, and, like all the houses that had been built back then, it had a main entrance, which was up a flight of stairs, and a second entrance that was hidden beneath the stairs. Grandfather had told me that in the old days, this door would have been protected by an iron gate, but the gate had been removed long ago to be smelted for military use, which meant I was able to stand just beneath the stairway and have a good view of the opposite side of the street.
There hadn’t been much traffic that day, so I was in my hiding place by 18:42. I looked at the house, which was as abandoned-looking as it had been the previous Thursday. It was already dark, it being January, but not as dark as it had been the previous week, and I could see that the windows had been covered with black paper or black paint, something that obscured views both in and out. I could also see that, although the building was shabby, it was in decent structural repair: the staircase was old, but except for a missing piece of stone in the second step, the rest of it was solid. The compost compactor was neat and clean, and there were no gnats buzzing overhead.
Three minutes or so later, I saw someone coming west down the street, and I withdrew beneath the staircase, thinking it was my husband. But it wasn’t. It was a man around my husband’s and my age, but white, and wearing a button-down shirt and a pair of lightweight pants. He was walking briskly, as my husband had, and when he reached the house opposite me, he climbed the steps without checking the number first, and tapped the same rhythmic knock that my husband had the previous week. Then the same thing happened: the window sliding open, the rectangle of light, the question and answer, the door opening just enough to let the man inside.
For a while, I couldn’t believe I’d actually seen this all happen. It was as if I’d willed it into existence. I had been so busy watching the event of the man’s arrival that I hadn’t even registered any useful details about him. “With every person you see, you should try to notice five things,” Grandfather would say when I was struggling to describe someone. “What race are they? Are they tall or short? Are they fat or thin? Do they move quickly or slowly? Do they look down or straight ahead? These will tell you a lot of what you need to know about them.”
“How?” I had asked. I hadn’t understood.
“Well, for example, let’s say they’re hurrying down the street or through the halls,” Grandfather said. “Are they looking behind them? Maybe they’re running from something, or someone. So that would tell you that they’re frightened, maybe. Or maybe they’re muttering to themselves, and checking their watch, which would let you know that they’re late to something. Or let’s say they’re walking slowly, and looking down at the ground as they do. That might tell you that they’re deep in thought, or that they’re just daydreaming. But in either case, you’ll know that their attention is elsewhere, and that they should—depending on the context—perhaps not be bothered. Or maybe that they need to be bothered, that you need to alert them to something that’s about to happen.”
Recalling this, I tried to describe the man to myself. He was white, as I have said, and he had been moving quickly, but not looking behind him. He had walked like the postdocs walked through the halls of the lab: looking neither left nor right, and never behind themselves. Other than that, the man was difficult to analyze. He was neither fat nor thin, young nor old, tall nor short. He was just a man on Bethune Street who had entered the house my husband had entered last week.
As I was thinking this, I heard another set of footsteps, and when I looked up, I saw that it was my husband. Once again, it was as if I had dreamed him into being, as if he wasn’t quite real. He was carrying his nylon bag and was wearing his street clothes, which meant he would have changed out of his jumpsuit at the Farm. This time, he didn’t look around him, didn’t suspect he was being watched; he climbed the stairs and knocked on the door and was admitted.
And then everything was quiet. I waited for another twenty minutes to see if someone else might come, but no one else did, and finally, I turned and walked home. On the way, I passed a few other people—a woman, walking by herself; two men, who were discussing electrical repairs they’d made in one of the schools; a single man with bristly dark eyebrows—and with each of them, I wondered: Were they too going to the house on Bethune Street? Would they be climbing those stairs, knocking on that door, saying some secret code, and being allowed inside? And once inside, what would they do? What did they talk about? Did they know my husband? Was one of them the person who had been sending him those notes?