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...
The ward is meant to accommodate a hundred and twenty patients but now holds around two hundred. Charlie is its longest-term resident. Over the past nine weeks, various other children have come and gone. Most remain for just ninety-six hours, though there was a little boy who was probably a year older than Charlie—he looked seven, maybe eight—who had been admitted three days before she was and who died last week. He was the second-longest-term resident. Everyone here is related to someone who works for the state, or related to someone to whom the state owes a favor, a favor big enough to keep them out of a relocation center. For the first seven weeks, we had a private room, and although I had been assured we would always have it, for as long as we needed, there came a point where I could no longer morally justify it to myself. So now Charlie has two roommates, in a space that could sleep three more. The other parents and I nod at one another—everyone is wearing so much protective clothing that we can only see one another’s eyes—but otherwise we all pretend that the others don’t exist. Only our children exist.
I’ve seen what you’re doing over there, but here, each child’s bed is surrounded by walls of transparent plastic sheeting, like the one Ezra and Hiram had lived behind; the parents sit outside and stick their hands through the gloves built into one of the walls so we can at least offer some semblance of touch. The few parents who for whatever reason had never been exposed to the earlier virus, the one that’s cross-reactive to the current one, aren’t allowed to enter Frear at all—they’re just as vulnerable as the children, and should really be in isolation themselves. But they’re not, of course. Instead, they stand outside the hospital, even in the heat, which has been almost unbearable these past few months, and look up at its windows. Years ago, when I was a child, I saw an old video of a crowd of people waiting beneath a Paris hotel for a pop singer to emerge from his room onto his balcony. The crowd here is as big, but whereas that other gathering had been restive, on the verge of hysteria, this one is quiet, eerily so, as if making any noise might upset their chances of getting inside to see their children. Though they have no hope at all of doing so, not while they’re still contagious or capable of spreading contagion. The lucky ones can at least watch a livestream of their children lying, unresponsive, in bed; the unlucky ones, not even that.
The children enter Frear as distinct people, but within two weeks of being treated with Xychor, they look more alike than different. You know what it looks like, too: the shrunken faces, the softened teeth, the hair loss, the boil-covered extremities. I read the report from Beijing, but here, the fatality rate is highest among those ten and younger; adolescents are much more likely to survive, though even those rates of survival—depending on whose reports you’re seeing—are grim.
What we don’t know yet, and won’t know for another decade or so at least, is Xychor’s long-term consequences. It wasn’t made for children, and it certainly shouldn’t be administered to them in the doses it is. One thing we do know, as of last week, is that its toxicity alters—we don’t know how—pubertal development, which means there’s a strong possibility that Charlie will be sterile. After I heard this in one of the Committee meetings I managed to attend, I barely made it to the bathroom before I started crying. I had kept her safe for so many months. If I had been able to keep her safe for just nine more, we’d have a vaccine. But I couldn’t.
I knew from reports that she would be changed, and she is, though among the many things I don’t yet know is how much. “There will be damage,” I read in the latest report, which then outlined, in vague terms, what that damage might be: Cognitive differences. Slowed physical reflexes. Stunted growth. Sterility. Scarring. The first is the most terrifying, because “cognitive differences” is so meaningless a phrase. Her new quiet, where she’d once chattered away—is that a cognitive difference? Her sudden affectlessness—is that a cognitive difference? Her new formality—“Who am I, Charlie?” I asked her, the first day she regained consciousness. “Do you know me?” “Yes,” she said, after studying me, “you’re my grandfather.” “Yes,” I said, and I was beaming, smiling so hard my cheeks hurt, but she was only staring at me, silent and inexpressive. “It’s me. Your Papa, who loves you.” “Grandfather,” she repeated, but that was all, and then she closed her eyes again—is that a cognitive difference? Her halting conversation, her new humorlessness, the way she studies my face, her expression composed but slightly puzzled, as if I were another species and she were trying to interpret me—is that a cognitive difference? Last night I read her a story she had loved, about a pair of talking rabbits, and when I was finished, where she would have normally chimed “Again!,” she instead looked at me, her eyes blank. “Rabbits can’t speak,” she said, finally. “That’s true, sweetheart,” I said, “but it’s a story.” And then, when she said nothing in response, only continued to stare at me, her face unreadable, I added, “It’s make-believe.”
Read it again, Papa! Do the voices better this time!
“Oh,” she said at last.
Is that a cognitive difference?
Or is her new seriousness—her use of “Grandfather” makes her sound slightly disapproving, like she’s aware that the title is grander than I deserve—an inevitable result of all the death she’s seen? Even though I’ve been careful not to discuss it with her, the severity of her illness, the now hundreds of thousands of children who have died, she must have intuited it anyway, mustn’t she? Already her roommates have been replaced seven times in two weeks, the children turned in a single exhalation to corpses and hurried out of the room beneath a tent of muslin so Charlie, asleep anyway, wouldn’t witness their departure—there have been some of these kindnesses, even now.
I stroked her scalp, which is stubbly with scabs and the first fine bristles of new hair. I thought again of the sentence from the report that I now repeat to myself multiple times a day: These findings remain speculative until we have a larger sample set of survivors to study, as does the duration of these effects. “Go to sleep, little Charlie,” I told her, and whereas, before, she would whine a bit, plead for another story, she instead closed her eyes immediately, an act of submission that made me shiver.
Last Friday, I watched her sleep until about eleven p.m. (or 23:00, as the state would now have it), until I finally made myself leave. Outside, the streets were empty. For the first month, they made a curfew exception for the parents who wait on the street, and who would sleep on the pavement on blankets they brought from home; typically, the other parent, if there was one, would relieve the sleeper at dawn, bringing them food and taking their place on the sidewalk. But then the state became afraid of riots and banned overnight gatherings, even though the only thing those people wanted was what was inside the hospital. Naturally, I was in favor of this dispersal, if only from an epidemiological perspective, but what I hadn’t realized until everyone left is that the small, human sounds of this gathering, the sighs and snores and murmurs, the sharp flick of someone flipping the page of a book, the glug of water being swigged from a bottle, somehow balanced the other noise: the refrigerated trucks idling at the docks, the cottony thud of sheet-wrapped bodies being stacked atop one another, the boats chugging to and fro. Everyone who worked on the island had been trained to do so in silence, out of respect, but sometimes you heard one of them exclaim, or swear, or occasionally cry out, and you couldn’t know whether it was because they had dropped a body, or because a shroud had come loose, revealing a face, or because they were simply overwhelmed by the work of burning so many bodies, bodies of children.