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...
It was well-known that there was an office of state employees at every biological research institution in the country. It was necessary, so they could watch over us. But although we all knew there was an office at RU, no one knew where it was or how many people worked there. Some people said it was fewer than ten people. But others said it was more, many more, maybe as many as a hundred, two for almost every principal investigator here. There were rumors that their office was many layers underground, even beneath the supposed additional labs with the supposed additional mice, and the supposed operating rooms, and that these underground offices connected to special tunnels, where there were special trains that could take them back to their ministries, or even all the way down to Municipality One.
But other people said that they were just in a small set of rooms in one of the lesser-used buildings, which was probably the truth, though RU wasn’t so large a campus that you didn’t cross everyone at some point or another, and yet I had never seen these state employees, though I had recognized them the moment I did.
Their presence here was actually a relatively recent development. When Grandfather had begun working at Rockefeller, for example, it was just a research facility. The labs received funding from the state, and they sometimes worked with various ministries, especially the Health and Interior Ministries, but the state had no jurisdiction over any of their work. After ’56, though, that changed, and in ’62, when the state was established, it was given oversight of all the country’s research facilities. The following year, the forty-five states were divided into eleven prefectures, and in ’72, the year after the zones were established, the state was one of ninety-two countries that signed a treaty with Beijing, allowing them full access to all scientific institutions in return for funding and other resources, including food and water and medicines and other humanitarian supplies. This meant that, while every federal project was monitored by the state, only the state employees who oversaw institutions such as RU ultimately reported back to Beijing—Beijing didn’t care about other domestic enterprises, only the ones that worked with illnesses and illness prevention, as we did.
Along with the people who were visibly members of the state, you also had to assume that there were a number of scientists and other researchers who worked for both the institute and the state. This didn’t mean they were informants—the institute would be informed of their dual responsibilities. Grandfather had been one of those people: He had begun as a scientist, but eventually he had also worked with the state. When I was born, he had been very powerful. But then his power had diminished, and when the insurgents briefly took control of the country the second time, he had been killed for his association with the state, and for what he had done to try to stop the spread of disease.
The point is that it was strange to see these state officers moving about the campus so openly and behaving so strangely. So I suppose it wasn’t that surprising that, about a week or so later, I returned from eating my lunch on the roof to find five of the Ph.D.s excitedly whispering in one corner of the break room about an announcement that had just come down from the Health Ministry that all the containment centers in our prefecture were to be closed, effective immediately.
“What do you think it means?” asked one of the Ph.D.s, who always began these conversations with the same question, and whom I would sometimes later hear repeating the answers he’d heard to other people.
“It’s obvious,” said another, who was large and tall, and whose uncle was rumored to be one of the interior minister’s deputies, “it means this new thing is not only real but projected to be highly deadly, and easy to spread.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because. If it were easy to treat, or to contain, then the old system would still be fine: Someone gets sick, you hold them for a week or two and see if they get better, and then, if they don’t, they get transferred to a relocation center. It’s worked perfectly fine for the past, what, twenty-five years, right?”
“Actually,” said another of the Ph.D.s, who rolled his eyes when the interior minister’s deputy’s nephew said anything, “I’ve never thought the system that effective. Too much of a margin for error.”
“Yes, the system has its flaws,” said the interior minister’s deputy’s nephew, irritated at being contradicted. “But let’s not forget what the containment centers accomplished.” I had heard the interior minister’s deputy’s nephew defend the containment centers before; he would always remind people that the centers gave scientists the opportunity to conduct real-time human research, and to identify subjects among their residents for drug trials. “Now they’re guessing that, whatever this is, they either won’t have time for the stopgap of the containment center, or there’ll be no point because the morbidity rate will be so high, and so fast, that it’s best and most efficient to just send all cases straight to the relocation centers and to get them off the island as soon as possible.”
He sounded very excited about this. They all did. A big new disease was definitely coming, and now it was their time to witness it, to try to solve it. None of them seemed scared; none of them seemed worried that they might get sick themselves. Maybe they were right not to be scared. Maybe this disease wouldn’t affect them—they knew more about it than I did, so I couldn’t say that they were wrong.
On the shuttle ride home, I thought of the man I had seen two years ago, the one who had tried to escape the containment center and had been stopped by the guards. Ever since, I had looked out the window whenever we passed the center. I don’t know why I did—the center no longer existed, and anyway the facade was completely mirrored, so you couldn’t see inside at all. But I still continued to look, as if, one day, the same man might appear again, this time walking out of the center in his regular clothes because he had been cured, and he was going home to wherever he had lived before he had gotten sick.
The next few weeks at the lab were extremely busy for everyone, including me. This made it more difficult to eavesdrop, because there were far more meetings among the scientists, many of them led by Dr. Wesley, and therefore far less time for the Ph.D.s to gather and discuss what had happened in those meetings, and less time for me to try to listen to them.
It took me several days to understand that even the older scientists were taken aback by what was happening. Many of them had been Ph.D.s or postdocs themselves during the ’70 illness, but the state was much stronger now than it had been then, and they were made confused and even anxious by the constant and multiplying presence of state employees: the three people I’d seen on the roof, but dozens of others as well, from many different ministries. They would be organizing the response to the illness, and they would be taking over not only our lab but all of RU’s labs.
The new disease was not yet named, but all of us were under strict orders to discuss it with no one. If we did, we could be charged with treason. For the first time, I was happy that David and I were no longer speaking, as I had never had to keep a secret from a friend and so was unsure how good I’d be at it. But now that was no longer a problem.
Since I had stopped seeing David, I had renewed my Thursday-night monitoring of my husband. There was no more to see than there had been—just him approaching the door of the house on Bethune Street, knocking his special knock, saying something I couldn’t hear into the opening, and then disappearing inside—and yet I continued to watch him, standing beneath the stairwell of the house across the street. Once, the door opened slightly wider than usual, and I saw the person inside, a white man about my husband’s age with light-brown hair, poke his head out and quickly look left and right before pulling the door shut again. After the door closed, I would stand there for a few minutes longer, waiting to see if anything more happened, but it never did. Then I would go home.