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...
Everything, in fact, had returned to how it had been before I had met David, and yet things were also different, because I had felt like somebody else when I had had David as a friend, and now that I no longer did, it was difficult to remember who I actually was.
One night, about six weeks after I had last met up with David, my husband and I were eating dinner when he said, “Cobra, are you all right?”
“Yes,” I said. “Thank you,” I remembered to say.
“How is David?” he asked, after a silence, and I looked up.
“Why are you asking?” I said.
He lifted one shoulder and let it fall. “I just thought I would,” he said. “It’s so hot now—are you two still walking, or are you spending more time at the center?”
“We aren’t friends anymore,” I said, and across from me, my husband was silent.
“I’m sorry, Cobra,” he said, and now I shrugged. Suddenly I was mad: I was mad that my husband wasn’t jealous of David or of my friendship with him; I was mad that he wasn’t relieved that David and I were no longer friends; I was mad that he was so unsurprised.
“Where do you go on your free nights?” I asked him, and I was pleased to see him look startled, and lean back in his seat.
“I go to see friends,” he said, after a silence.
“What do you do with them?” I asked, and he was silent again.
“We talk,” he said, at last. “We play chess.”
Then we were both silent. I was still angry; I still wanted to ask him questions. But I had so many that I didn’t know where to begin, and besides, I was scared: What if he told me something I didn’t want to hear? What if he got angry at me and shouted? What if he ran out of the apartment? Then I’d be alone, and I wouldn’t know what to do.
Finally, he stood and began gathering the dishes. We had had horse that night, but neither of us had finished our servings; I knew my husband would wrap the leftovers in paper so we could use the bones to flavor our porridge.
It was Tuesday, and my free night, but as I began walking toward our bedroom and my husband set down the dishes to bring me the radio, I stopped him. “I don’t want to listen to the radio,” I said. “I want to go to sleep.”
“Cobra,” my husband said, stepping close to me, “are you sure you’re all right?”
“Yes,” I said.
“But you’re crying,” my husband said, even though I didn’t think I was. “Did—did David hurt you in some way, Cobra?”
“No,” I said. “No, he didn’t hurt me. I’m just very tired and would like to be left alone, please.”
He moved away from me, and I went to the bathroom and then to my bed. A few hours later, my husband came in. It was unusual for him to go to bed this early, but we had both been working long hours, and he was very tired, as was I. Yesterday there had been an early-morning raid that had woken us both. But although we were both tired, only he fell asleep quickly, while I stayed awake, watching the searchlight move across the ceiling. I imagined my husband at Bethune Street playing chess with somebody else, but as hard as I tried, I could only envision the inside of the house looking like our own apartment, and the only other person I could see playing with my husband was not the man who had opened the door for him, but David.
By mid-July, I felt like I was living in two worlds. The lab had been transformed: The rooftop of Larsson had been made into an office for a team of epidemiologists from the Health Ministry, and a section of the largest of the basement passageways was converted into an office for some employees of the Interior Ministry. The scientists hurried about looking worried, and even the Ph.D.s were silent. All I knew was that whatever had been found was very dangerous, so dangerous that it had overshadowed even the excitement surrounding its discovery.
But outside of RU, everything continued as it always did. The shuttle picked me up; the shuttle dropped me off. There were groceries at the store, and there was one week when horse was even discounted, as it occasionally was when there was a surplus of meat from the factories out west. The radio played music when it was supposed to and bulletins when it was supposed to. You saw nothing of the preparations that I knew from school had happened in advance of the ’70 illness: There was no increase in military personnel, no requisitioning of buildings, no reinstatement of the curfew. On the weekends, the Square filled with people, as usual, and although David had stopped waiting for me, I still stood at the front door and looked out its window every Saturday at the same time we had once met, looking for him as he had looked for me. But I never saw him. A few times, I wondered if I should have bought the powder from the vendor and slipped it into David’s drink, as she had said, before remembering that it hadn’t been David who had chosen to stop seeing me—I had been the one who had chosen to stop seeing him. I would wonder then whether I should go to the Square and let that woman find me again—not for the powder that would make David fall in love with me but for a different powder, a powder that would make me believe that someone could love me at all.
The one thing that was different outside of work, I suppose, was that my husband was home more than usual, often sleeping in his bed or napping on the sofa. He even came home earlier on his free nights, and when he did, I could hear that he moved slowly, even heavily. Normally, he walked lightly, but now his walk was different, and when he climbed into bed, he groaned, quietly, as if he were in pain, and his face often looked puffy. He had been working extra hours at the Pond, just as I had been working extra hours at the lab, but I didn’t know if he knew what I knew, which wasn’t very much, anyway. People who worked at the Pond and the Farm did vital jobs, but just as I didn’t know what they were actually doing in those jobs, they often didn’t, either. It could be that he was staying late, for example, because a lab—maybe even a lab at RU—had urgently requested a certain kind of material from a certain kind of plant, but just as I didn’t know why I was preparing the mice, he wouldn’t know why he was preparing a sample. He would just be told to do it, and he would. The difference was that I wasn’t curious about why I was told to do anything; it was enough for me to know that my work was necessary, that it was useful, and that it had to be done. But my husband had been two years away from completing his doctorate when he was declared an enemy of the state and expelled from his university—he would want to know why he was asked to do things. He would even, perhaps, want to contribute an opinion. And yet he never would.
I remember that, once, I had been very upset after one of my lessons with Grandfather about the sort of questions I should ask people. I was often frustrated after our sessions, because I was reminded of how difficult it was for me to do and say and think things that seemed to be so easy for other people. “I don’t know how to ask the right questions,” I said to Grandfather, even though that wasn’t exactly what I wanted to say, even though I didn’t know how to say what I really wanted to say.
Grandfather had been quiet for a moment. “Sometimes not asking questions is a good thing, little cat,” he said. “Not asking questions can keep you safe.” Then he looked at me, really looked at me, as if he were memorizing my face and might never see it again. “But sometimes you need to ask, even if it’s dangerous.” He stopped again. “Will you remember that, little cat?”
“Yes,” I said.
The next day at work, I went to see Dr. Morgan. Dr. Morgan was the most senior postdoc at the lab, and he oversaw all the techs. But even though he was the most senior, the Ph.D.s didn’t want to be like him. “God help me if I turn out like Morgan,” I sometimes heard one of them say to the others. This was because Dr. Morgan didn’t have a lab of his own and was still working for Dr. Wesley, seven years after he’d begun. In fact, Dr. Morgan and I had joined Dr. Wesley’s lab in the same year. Grandfather had told me that every lab would have at least one postdoc who never left, who stayed on and on, but I should never mention that fact to them, or remind them of how long they’d been there, or ask them why they hadn’t gone somewhere else.