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...
So I never had. But Dr. Morgan had always been nice to me, and, unlike many of the other scientists in the lab, he always said hello to me if he saw me in the hallway. Still, I rarely sought him out except to ask for permission to leave early or come in late, and as I didn’t know the best way to approach him, I spent about five minutes waiting near his station while most of the lab was away eating lunch, not knowing what to do and hoping he would eventually look up from his work.
Finally, he did. “Someone’s watching me,” he announced, and turned around. “Charlie,” he said. “What are you doing, just standing there?”
“I’m sorry, Dr. Morgan,” I said.
“Is something wrong?” he asked.
“No,” I said. Then I couldn’t think of what else to say. “Dr. Morgan,” I said, quickly, before I lost my nerve, “will you tell me what’s happening?”
Dr. Morgan looked at me, and I looked back at him. There had always been something about Dr. Morgan that reminded me of Grandfather, though for a while, I couldn’t figure out why: He was much younger than Grandfather, just a few years older than I am. He was a different race. And, unlike Grandfather, he wasn’t acclaimed or influential. But then I realized it was because he always answered me when I asked a question—other people in the lab, even if I asked them, would tell me I wouldn’t understand, but Dr. Morgan never said that.
“It’s a zoonosis, and definitively a hemorrhagic fever,” he finally said. “And it’s spread by both respiratory aerosols and droplets as well as by bodily fluids, which makes it profoundly contagious. We don’t yet have a clear sense of its incubation period, or of how long the period is between diagnosis and death. It was identified in Brazil. The first case in this country was found about a month ago, in Prefecture Six.” He didn’t need to say that this was a lucky thing, as Prefecture Six was the most sparsely populated of the prefectures. “But since then, we know it’s been spreading—we don’t yet know how fast. And that’s all I can say.”
I didn’t ask whether that was because Dr. Morgan didn’t know more or because he couldn’t tell me more. I just thanked him and returned to my area, so I could think about what he had told me.
I know that the first thing someone might wonder is how this disease got here in the first place. One of the reasons there hadn’t been a pandemic in almost twenty-four years is because, as I’ve said, the state closed down all the borders, as well as banned all international travel. Many countries did the same. In fact, there were only seventeen countries in total—New Britain, a cluster in Old Europe, and a second cluster in Southeast Asia—with reciprocal movement rights for their citizens.
But although no one was allowed to come in and no one was allowed to go out, it didn’t actually mean that no one came in and no one went out. Four years ago, for example, there was a rumor that a stowaway from India had been found in a shipping container at one of the ports in Prefecture Three. And as Grandfather always said, a microbe can travel in anyone’s throat: a person’s, of course, but also a bat’s or a snake’s or a flea’s. (This is a figure of speech, as snakes and fleas don’t have throats.) As Dr. Wesley always said, all it took was one.
Then there was another theory, one I would never repeat—though other people did—that the state invented the diseases themselves, that half of every research institute, even RU, was dedicated to making new illnesses, and the other half was dedicated to figuring out how to destroy them, and that whenever the state thought it needed to, it deployed one of the new diseases. Don’t ask me how I know that people thought this way, because I couldn’t say—I just do. I can say that my father thought this way, and it was one of the reasons he was declared an enemy of the state.
But though I had heard these theories before, I didn’t believe them myself. If that had been true, then why wouldn’t the state have deployed an illness in ’83 or ’88, during the uprisings? Then Grandfather would still be alive, and I would still have him to talk to.
I would also never say this, but sometimes I wished there would be another disease from far away. Not because I wanted people to die but because it would be proof. I wanted to know for certain that there were other places, and other countries, with people living in them and riding their own shuttles and working in their own labs and making their own nutria patties for dinner. I knew I would never be able to visit these places—I didn’t even want to be able to visit them.
But sometimes I wanted to know that they existed, that all those countries that Grandfather had been to, all those streets he had walked on, were still there. Sometimes I even wanted to pretend that he wasn’t dead at all, that I hadn’t seen him be killed with my own eyes, but that, when he dropped through the platform hole, he had instead landed in one of the cities he had traveled to when he was young: Sydney or Copenhagen or Shanghai or Lagos. Maybe he was there, and thinking of me, and although I would miss him just as much, it would be enough for me to know he was still alive, remembering me as he sat in a place I couldn’t even begin to know how to imagine.
Over the next weeks, things began to change. Not in any immediately obvious way—it wasn’t as if you saw lines of transport trucks or military mobilizations—and yet it was becoming clear that something was happening.
They did most of the work at night, so it was when I was on the shuttle, heading north to RU, that I began noticing the differences. One morning, for example, we lingered longer at the checkpoint than usual; another, there was a soldier who scanned our foreheads before we boarded with a new kind of temperature wand I’d never seen. “Move it along,” said the soldier, but not meanly, and then, though none of us had asked, “Just some new equipment the state is testing.” The next day, he was gone, but in his place was a different soldier, standing and watching us, one hand on his weapon, as we boarded the shuttle. He said nothing, and did nothing, but his eyes moved back and forth across us, and when the man in front of me was stepping up, the soldier held out his hand. “Halt,” he said. “What’s that?” and pointed to a splotch the color of smashed grapes on the man’s face. “Birthmark,” said the man, who didn’t sound scared at all, and the soldier took a device out of his pocket and beamed a light at the man’s cheek, and then read what the device said and nodded, waving the man onto the shuttle with the tip of his weapon.
I cannot say what other people on my shuttle route did or didn’t notice. On the one hand, so little changed in Zone Eight that it was impossible not to recognize things that had. On the other hand, most people weren’t looking for changes. But I have to assume that most of us knew, or suspected, what was happening: Every one of us worked for state-run research institutions, after all; those of us who worked for places that studied biological sciences perhaps knew more than those who worked at the Pond or the Farm. Still, none of us said anything. It was easy to believe nothing was happening if you tried.
One day, I was in my usual seat on the shuttle, looking out the window, when I suddenly saw David. He was in his gray jumpsuit and he was walking down Sixth Avenue. This was just before we had to stop for the Fourteenth Street checkpoint, and as we waited our turn in the queue, I saw him turn right on Twelfth Street, heading west and disappearing from sight.