To Paradise

I had been nervous to see my husband after our encounter, but it seemed it would be a meal like any other. I didn’t know where my husband went on Saturdays, except he usually wasn’t gone all day. He did the grocery shopping in the mornings, and on Sundays, we did our chores together: laundry, if it was our turn, and cleaning, and then we both went to the community garden to work our shifts, though not at the same time.

Dinner that night was leftover tofu, which I had made into a cold stew, and as we were eating, my husband said, not lifting his head, “I was glad to meet David today.”

“Oh,” I said. “Yes, it was nice.”

“How did you meet him?”

“At one of the storyteller sessions. He sat next to me.”

“When?”

“About seven weeks ago.”

He nodded. “Where does he work?”

“The Farm,” I said. “He’s a plant tech.”

He looked at me. “Where’s he from?” he asked.

“Little Eight,” I said. “But before that, Prefecture Five.”

My husband pressed his napkin to his mouth and then leaned back in his chair, looking up at the ceiling. He seemed to be struggling to speak. Then he said, “What do you do together?”

I shrugged. “We go to the storyteller’s,” I began, though we had not been to the storyteller in at least a month. “We walk around the Square. He tells me about growing up in Prefecture Five.”

“And what do you tell him?”

“Nothing,” I said, and as I said it, I realized it was true. I had nothing to tell—not to David, not to my husband.

My husband sighed, and passed his hand before his eyes, as he did when he was tired. “Cobra,” he said, “I want you to be careful. I’m glad you have a friend, I am. But you—you barely know this person. I just want you to be vigilant.” His voice was gentle, the same as it always was, but he was looking directly at me, and finally I looked away. “Have you considered that he might be from the state?”

I didn’t say anything. Something was building inside of me. “Cobra?” my husband asked, gently.

“Because no one would want to be my friend, is that what you mean?” I asked. I had never raised my voice to my husband, had never been angry with him, and now he looked surprised, and his mouth opened a bit.

“No,” he said. “That’s not what I mean. I just,” he started. Then he began again. “I promised your grandfather I’d always take care of you,” he said.

For a moment, I sat there. Then I got up and left the table and went to our room and closed the door and lay down on my bed. There was a silence, and I heard my husband’s chair scrape back, and the sounds of him washing the dishes, and the sound of the radio, and then him coming into our room, where I was pretending to be asleep. I heard him sit on his bed; I thought he might speak to me. But he didn’t, and soon I could hear from his breathing that he was asleep.

Naturally, it had in fact occurred to me that David might be an informant for the state. But if he was, he was a very poor one, as informants were quiet and invisible, and he was neither quiet nor invisible. Though I had also wondered whether that too was intentionaclass="underline" that his unsuitability as an informant increased the likelihood that he was one. The curious thing about the informants was that they were so quiet and invisible that you were usually able to tell who they were. Not immediately, perhaps, but eventually; there was a quality about them, what Grandfather had called a bloodlessness, that distinguished them. In the end, though, what convinced me that David was not an informant was me. Who would be interested in me? What secrets did I have? Everyone knew who Grandfather and my father had been; everyone knew how they had died; everyone knew what they had been convicted of and, in Grandfather’s case, how that conviction had been overturned, albeit too late. The only thing I had done wrong was those nights I had followed my husband, but that was hardly an offense for which one was assigned an informant.

But if it was impossible that David was an informant, then why was he spending time with me? I had never been someone people wanted to be around. After I had recovered from the sickness, Grandfather had taken me to activities, classes with children my own age. The parents sat in chairs arranged around the room, and the children played. But after a few sessions, we stopped going. It was all right, though, because I always had Grandfather to play with and talk to and spend time with—until the day I didn’t.

As I lay there that night, listening to my husband’s breathing and thinking about what he had said, I wondered if it was possible that I was actually not who I thought I was. I knew I was dull, and unexciting, and that I often didn’t understand people. But maybe I had changed, somehow, without even knowing it. Maybe I wasn’t who I knew I was.

I got up and went to the bathroom. There was a small mirror above the sink, which you could angle so you could see your entire body. I took off my clothes and looked at myself, and as I did, I realized I had not changed after all. I was still the same person, with the same thick legs and thin hair and small eyes. Nothing was any different; I was as I already knew myself to be.

I got dressed and turned off the light and returned to our bedroom. Then I felt very bad, because my husband was right—there was something strange about David talking to me. I was nobody, and he was not.