To Paradise

The driver knew where I was going that night, and I was able to lean my head against the window and sleep for half an hour before I heard him announce our arrival at the center.

The center is on an island that, half a century ago, was a nature preserve for endangered birds: terns, loons, ospreys. By ’55, the terns were extinct, and the next year, another crematorium had been erected on the southern shore. But then the island flooded in the storm, and sat abandoned until ’68, when the state started quietly rebuilding it, constructing artificial sand beds and concrete barrier walls.

The walls are meant to protect the island from future floods, but they’re also a necessary obfuscation. It was never the intention, but this center has ended up serving mostly children. There was a debate over whether we should allow parents in or not. I argued that we should—the majority of them were immune. But the psychologists on the Committee argued we shouldn’t—the problem was, they said, that they would never recover from what they saw there, and this trauma, on such a mass scale, could lead to social instability. Finally, a dormitory was built for the parents on the north side of the island, but then there was that incident in March, and now no parents at all are allowed. So instead, the parents have built a shantytown—the richer people have actually erected tiny houses from brick, the poorer from cardboard—on the coast in New Rochelle, though all they can see from there is the wall that surrounds the island, and the helicopters lowering themselves from the sky.

There had been, as you recall, a good deal of debate about where we should locate this center. Most of the Committee had argued for one of the former refugee camps: Fire Island, Block Island, Shelter Island. But I had fought for this island: far enough north from Manhattan so there’d be few unexpected visitors; not too far for the helicopters and boats, which could easily float downriver to the crematorium now that the waterways have been reopened.

But though I never said so, the reason I really chose this place was because of its name: Davids Island. Not singular—David’s—but many, as if this land were inhabited not by an ever-changing population of (mostly) children, but by Davids. My son, in duplicate, at all different ages, doing all the things my son had liked to do at various points in his life. Building bombs, yes. But also reading, and playing basketball, and running about like a crazed puppy to make me and Nathaniel laugh, and spinning his daughter around, and climbing into bed next to me when it was thundering and he was frightened. The older Davids would be parents to the younger Davids, and when one finally died—though that wouldn’t be for a very long time, as the oldest inhabitants were still only thirty, the age my David would have been, had he lived—he would be replaced by another, so that the population of Davids always would remain the same: never increasing, never diminishing. There would be no misunderstandings, no concerns that the younger Davids might be somehow different, somehow strange, because the older Davids would understand them. There would be no loneliness, because these Davids would not have ever known parents, or classmates, or strangers, or people who wouldn’t play with them: They would only know one another, which is to say themselves, and their happiness would be complete, because they would never know the agony of wanting to be someone else, for there was no one else to admire, no one else to envy.