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...
Since then, I have tried to find the original will, even though doing so would be both pointless and, even, perilous. I’ve removed all the documents Nathaniel kept from the safe, and every night I go through a few of them, watching life present itself in reverse: papers assigning Nathaniel formal, legal guardianship of Charlie, signed three weeks before the attack; papers signed by Eden forfeiting any legal claims to her daughter; Charlie’s birth certificate; the deed to the house; Aubrey’s will; our divorce papers.
And then I begin to wander. I tell myself I’m looking for the will, but I don’t suppose I really am, because the places I look are nowhere Nathaniel would have put it in the first place, and if he had kept a copy in the house, it had been removed long ago, without us noticing. There was no point in looking, just as there had been no point in calling our lawyer and listening to him claim that, no, I had been mistaken, that the will as I described it had never existed. “You’re under a lot of strain, Charles,” he said. “Grief can make people”—he paused—“misremember.” Then I became scared again, and told him I was certain he was correct, and hung up.
I am lucky, I know. Much worse has happened to relatives of insurgents, to people associated with far less deadly attacks than David has been. I am still too useful to the state. You don’t need to worry about me, Peter. Not yet. I’m in no immediate danger.
But sometimes I wonder if what I’m really searching for is not the will but evidence of the person I was before this all began. How far would I have to go back? Before the state was established? Before I answered that first call from the ministry, asking if I wanted to be an “architect of the solution”? Before the illness of ’56? Before the one of ’50? Earlier? Before I joined Rockefeller?
How far back do I have to go? How many decisions must I regret? Sometimes I think that somewhere in this house is hidden a piece of paper with the answers, and that if I hope hard enough, I’ll wake up in the month or year when I first began to go astray, only this time, I’ll do the opposite of what I did. Even if it hurts. Even if it feels wrong.
Love, Charles
Dear Peter, August 21, 2067
Hello from the lab on a Sunday afternoon. I’m just here catching up on some things and reading some of the reports from Beijing—what did you make of Friday’s? We haven’t discussed it, but I doubt you’re surprised, either. Christ: to learn, definitively, that not only those stupid decontam chambers but also the helmets are completely useless is going to spark riots. People went bankrupt installing them, maintaining them, replacing them for fifteen years, and now we’re telling everyone that, oops, it was a mistake, get rid of them? That announcement is scheduled for a week from Monday, and it’s going to be bad.
But the next five days will be the hardest. On Tuesday they’ll announce that the internet will be “suspended” for an indefinite period of time. On Thursday they’ll announce that all international travel, to and from other countries, including Canada, Mexico, the Western Federation, and Texas, will also be suspended.
I’ve been very anxious, and Charlie can sense it. She crawls into my lap and pats my face. “Are you sad?” she asks me, and I tell her I am. “Why?” she asks, and I tell her it’s because people in this country are fighting, and we have to try to make them stop fighting. “Oh,” she says. “Don’t be sad, Papa,” she says. “I’m never sad with you,” I tell her, although I am—sad that this is the world she lives in. But maybe I should tell her the truth after alclass="underline" that I am sad, all the time, and that it’s all right to be sad. But she’s such a happy baby, and it seems immoral to do so.
The Justice Ministry and the Interior Ministry seem certain they can quash the protests in three months. The military is ready to deploy, but as I know you saw in the last report, the number of infiltrators in the ranks has become alarming. The army says they need time to “test the loyalties” of its members (god knows what that means); Justice and Interior say that they can’t spare any time. The most recent report claims that large numbers of “historically disadvantaged groups of citizens” are helping the insurgency efforts, but there’s been no talk of special punishment, and thank goodness—I know I’m protected, I know I’m an exception, yet it makes me nervous all the same.
Don’t worry about me, Peter. I know you do, but try not to. They can’t get rid of me yet. My digital access isn’t being curtailed, of course—for one, I need it to communicate with Beijing—and although all our communication is encrypted, I may start sending you letters through our mutual friend just as a precaution. This means they’ll likely be less frequent (lucky you) but also lengthier (unlucky you). Let’s see how it goes. Though you know how to reach me in an emergency.
Love to you and Olivier, C.
My dear Peter, September 6, 2070
It’s very early in the morning, and I’m writing you from the lab. Thank you and Olivier for the books and presents, by the way—I meant to write you last week, when they arrived, but I forgot. I’d hoped Charlie would be discharged in time to spend her birthday at home, but she had another grand mal seizure on Tuesday, and so they decided to keep her for a few more days; if she remains stable over the weekend, they’ll let her leave on Monday.
I’ve obviously been spending every day with her, and most of the nights. The Committee’s been almost too humane about it. It’s as if they knew that one of us would have a child or grandchild who’d get infected—the odds were too great for that not to be the case—and they’re relieved that it was my grandchild, not theirs. Their relief makes them guilty, and their guilt makes them generous: Charlie’s hospital room is filled with more toys than she’ll ever play with, as if the toys were a kind of sacrifice, and she a minor god, and by appeasing her, they’ll protect their own.
We’ve been here at Frear for two months now. Nine weeks, actually, come tomorrow. Many years ago, when Nathaniel and I first moved to the city, this had been a ward for adult cancer patients. Then, in ’56, they converted it to an infectious-disease wing, and then last winter, to a pediatric infectious-disease wing. The rest of the patients are in what used to be the burn unit, and the burn patients have been dispatched to other hospitals. In the early days of the infection, before it was announced to the public, I would hurry past this hospital, never looking up at its bulk, because I knew that this was the place best-equipped to care for the children who would get sick, and because I felt that if I never looked at the outside of it, I would never see the inside of it.
The ward is on the tenth floor and faces east to the river, and therefore to the crematoriums, whose fires have burned without pause since March. In the early days, when I was visiting as an observer, not as a guest—or a “loved one,” as the hospital calls us—you could look outside and see the vans full of corpses being unloaded onto the boats. The bodies were so small that they could stack them four or five to a stretcher. After the first six weeks, the state had a fence built on the eastern edge of the river, because parents were jumping into the water as the boats pulled away, screaming for their children, trying to paddle toward the other shore. The fence prevented that, but it didn’t prevent the people on the tenth floor (the parents, largely, as most of the children were insensate) from looking outside for distraction and instead encountering, in the cruelest of ironies, the place where most of their children would go next, as if Frear were simply a layover before their final destination. So then the hospital covered up all the eastern-facing windows, on this floor and all the others, and hired art students to paint on them. But as the months dragged by, the scenes the students had drawn—of Fifth Avenue, lined with palm trees and happy children walking down the sidewalk; of the Central Park peacocks being fed bread by happy children—also began to seem cruel, and eventually they were covered with white paint.