To Paradise

They sat up again. “I resent the implication that we’d ever—” the principal began, but the teacher stopped him, laying a hand on his arm. “Dr. Griffith, we would never turn David in,” she said, “but he needs to be careful. Do you monitor who his friends are, who he’s talking to, what he’s saying at home, what he’s doing online?”

“Of course,” I said, because I did, but as I spoke, I felt myself flushing, as if they knew that I knew that I hadn’t been watching him closely enough, and also that they knew why—I didn’t want to discover that David was drifting further from us; I didn’t want to have to face the fact of more misbehavior; I didn’t want more evidence that I didn’t understand my own son, that for years he had been becoming increasingly unknowable to me, that for years I had felt it was my fault.

I got out of there soon after with a promise to talk to David about being careful with what he said and wrote about the government, and to remind him about the anti-state language statutes that had been implemented shortly after the riots, and that we were still living under martial law.

But I didn’t talk to him. I walked through the Park, I saw the bear, I came home, I took a nap. And then, before Nathaniel or David came home, I hurriedly left for the lab, where I’m sitting at midnight and writing you this letter.

I never thought we would have lived here for almost eleven years, Peter. I never meant for David to have to spend his childhood in this city, in this country. “When we’re back home,” we always said to him, until we didn’t. And now there is no home to return to; this is home, except it has never felt like it, and still doesn’t. From my office window, I have a direct view of the crematorium they built on Roosevelt Island. The president of RU vigorously protested it—the ash clouds would, he said, drift westward toward the university—but the city built it anyway, with the argument that if everything went as planned, the crematorium would only be used for a few years. Which has turned out to be true: Three times a day for three years, we would watch black smoke trail from its chimneys, vanishing into the sky. But now the burnings have been reduced to once a month, and the skies are clear again.

Nathaniel is texting me. I’m not answering.

But the thing I keep thinking about is the final lines of David’s essay. He had written them himself—I could tell. I could see his face as he typed them out, that look of bafflement and disdain I sometimes catch him giving me. He doesn’t understand why I’ve made the decisions I’ve had to make, but he doesn’t have to—he’s a child. So why do I feel this overwhelming guilt, this sense of apology, when all I’ve done is what needed to be done in order to stop the spread of illness? “My other father says”: What? What is Nathaniel saying about me? We fought, terribly, loudly, the day I told him I had decided to work with the government on the containment measures. The baby hadn’t been there—he had been downtown, with Aubrey and Norris—but I wonder if Nathaniel said something to him; I wonder what they talked about while I was away. How was that final sentence going to end? “My other father says that my father is trying to do what’s right in order to protect us”? “My other father says that my father is doing the best that he can”?

Or was it, as I fear, something else entirely? “My other father says that my father has become someone we can’t respect”? “My other father says that my father is a bad person”? “My other father says that it’s my father’s fault we’re here, alone, with no one to save us”?

Which one, Peter? How was it going to end?

Charles