To Paradise

Nathaniel introduced them as Ezra and Hiram, and they waved at me with their small, limp, salamander-like hands. “I’ll be back tomorrow,” he told them, and although I knew it already, I could tell from his tone that he liked these boys, that he cared about them.

“What’s wrong, Nathaniel?” asked one of them, Ezra or Hiram, in a tiny, breathy voice, and Nathaniel stroked the boy’s head, his hair lifting and floating from the static caused by Nathaniel’s gloves. “I’m just feeling a little tired,” he said.

“Do you have the sickness?” the other one asked, and Nathaniel winced, just a bit, before smiling at him. “No,” he said. “Nothing like that. I’ll be back tomorrow. I promise.”

Downstairs, Frances was waiting, and she handed us our masks, made me promise to take care of Nathaniel. “I will,” I said, and she nodded. She was pretty, but between her eyes there were two deep grooves; I wondered if she had always had them, or if she had acquired them over the past four years.

Back at our apartment, I put Nathaniel to bed and texted David to warn him to be quiet and let his father sleep, and then I went to the lab. On my way there, I thought about David, about how lucky we were that he was safe, safe and healthy. Protect him, I would say to myself, unclear whom I was addressing, as I walked to work, or washed the dishes, or showered. Protect him, protect him. Protect my son. It was irrational. But it had worked so far.

Later, while I was eating dinner at my desk, I thought about the two boys, Ezra and Hiram. It was like something out of a fairy tale: the quiet house with its gentle light, Frances Holson and Nathaniel the parents, me the skulking guest, and those elfin creatures—half human and half pharmaceuticals—whose realm it was. One of the reasons I never became a clinician is because I was never convinced that life—its saving, its extension, its return—was definitively the best outcome. In order to be a good doctor, you have to think that, you have to fundamentally believe that living is superior to dying, you have to believe that the point of life is more life. I didn’t administer therapies to those infected by NiVid-50; I didn’t have a role in developing the drugs. I didn’t think about what the survivors’ lives might be like—that wasn’t my job. But in the past few years, now that the disease has been contained, I find myself confronted with the facts of their lives almost daily. Some, like the teacher at David’s school, who was already an adult, and probably healthy, when she contracted the illness, have been able to return to a version of their lives before.

But those boys will never have a normal life. They will never be able to go outside; they will never be able to be touched by the bare hands of anyone but their mother. It’s a life; it’s their life. They’re too young to remember anything else. Though maybe the people I was pitying wasn’t them but their parents—their worried mother, their absent father. What must it have been like, to watch your children come so close to death and then, in saving them, realize that you’ve transported them to a place that you can leave but they never can? Not death, not life, but existence, their entire world in one house, your hopes of everything they’d be and see and experience buried in the backyard, never to be unearthed. How could you encourage them to dream of anything else? How could you live with the sorrow and guilt that you had condemned them to a life stripped of all that’s pleasurable: movement; touch; the sun on your face? How could you live at all?

With love, Charles