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...
She looks at me, and I can’t tell what she’s thinking. “Yes,” she says. But I don’t know if she does.
I wouldn’t have allowed her into the Square at all six months ago. But now that the state has taken over, you can only enter it if you’re a resident of Zone Eight—there are guards posted at each of the entrances to check people’s papers. I had been worried, after last year’s conversion of the rest of Central Park, that they were going to repurpose all the parks as research facilities, even though that hadn’t been the original plan. But in a rare alliance, the health and justice ministers partnered to persuade the rest of the Committee that a lack of public gathering spaces would increase treasonous activity, and force potential insurgent groups underground, where we’d be less able to monitor them. So we won this round, but barely, though it now seems that Union Square will eventually go the way of Madison Square and become, if not a research facility, then an all-purpose, state-run staging site: one month a makeshift morgue, the next a makeshift prison.
Washington Square, however, is a different matter. It’s a small park, in a residential zone, and therefore has been of no great concern to the state. Over the years, the shantytowns were built, and then destroyed, and then rebuilt, and then re-destroyed: Even from my vantage at the upstairs window, I could sense something rote about their destruction, a halfheartedness in the way the young soldier by the northern gate twirled his baton by its loop, the way the bulldozer operator leaned back her head and yawned, one hand on the controls, the other dangling out the window.
Four months ago, though, I woke to the sound of something large falling with a dull crash, and looked outside to see that the bulldozer had returned, but this time to unearth the trees on the western side of the Square. Two bulldozers worked for two days, and when they were finished, the transplant team arrived and bound up the fallen trees’ roots in great tangles of burlap and clods of soil, and then they too disappeared, presumably to Zone Fourteen, where they’re relocating many of the mature trees.
Now the Square sits empty, denuded of trees except for a strip that extends from the northeast corner to the southeast corner. Here, there are still benches, still paths, still a few remnants of the playground. But this, I have to imagine, is temporary; in the rest of the park, workers spend the day pouring cement across areas that had once been covered with grass. One of my colleagues in the Home Ministry said the space will be converted into some kind of outdoor bazaar, with vendors who will compensate for the loss of stores.
So it was here, to this final remaining section of green, that I let Charlie venture. She was to confine herself only to this area, and she was to talk to no one, and if anyone approached her, she was to go straight home. For the first two weeks, I watched her—I had set up a camera in one of the upstairs windows, and as I sat in the lab, I could see her on the screen, walking briskly to the southern end of the park, never stopping to look around her, and then resting for a few seconds before marching back. Soon she was home again, and the second camera showed her walking inside, locking the front door behind her, and going to the kitchen for a glass of water.
She usually walks late in the afternoon, when the sun’s lower in the sky, and as I talk or write, I can still see her movements, a stripe on the screen moving farther away from the camera and then closer, her round little body and round little face receding from view and then returning.
Then came this past Thursday. I was on a Committee call. The topic was the cooling suit, which will likely be introduced next year, and differs from your version because ours comes with a full hard-shell helmet with a pollutant-filtering shield. Have you tried one yet? You don’t walk so much as waddle, and the helmet is so heavy that the manufacturer is incorporating a neck brace into the design. But they’re truly effective. A group of us tested them out one evening, and for the first time in years, I didn’t reenter the lab and immediately begin coughing and wheezing and sweating. They’re going to be expensive, though, and the state is investigating whether we can reduce the price from astronomical to extraordinary.
Anyway, I was half listening to the call, half watching Charlie begin her walk through the park. I went to the bathroom, got some tea, returned to my desk. One of the interior ministers was droning on, still in the midst of his presentation about the difficulties of producing the suits on a mass scale, and so I looked back at my screen—only to see that Charlie was missing.
I stood, as if that would help matters. After reaching the southern end of the park, she usually sits on one of the benches. If she has a snack with her, she eats her snack. And then she stands and begins moving north. But now there was nothing: just a state employee sweeping the sidewalk, and, in the background, a soldier, facing south.
I accessed the camera and swiveled it to the right, but there were only the soldiers in their navy-blue uniforms, an engineer corps, it seemed, taking measurements of the Square. Then I swiveled the camera to the left, as far as I could.
For a while, there was nothing. Just the sweeper and the soldier and, on the northeast corner, another soldier, rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet: one of those casual, carefree gestures that startle me more than anything else—that, even with everything that’s changed, people still rock on their feet, they still pick their noses, they still scratch their behinds and belch.
But then, at the very edge of the southeast corner, I saw something, a movement. I magnified the image as much as I could. There were two boys—young teenagers, I thought—both standing with their backs to the camera, talking to someone else who was facing the camera. I could only see this person’s feet, their white sneakers.
Oh, I thought. Oh, please.
And then the boys moved, and I saw that the third person was Charlie, in her white sneakers and red T-shirt dress, and she was following those boys, who didn’t even look around them, as they began walking east on Washington Square South.
“Officer!” I shouted at the screen, uselessly. “Charlie!”
But of course no one stopped, and I sat and watched as all three of them vanished from sight, strolling offscreen. One of the boys had his arm draped loosely around her neck; she was so short that the top of her head fit just beneath his armpit.
I told my secretary to have a security unit deployed, and then I ran downstairs to my car, calling and re-calling the nanny as we drove south. When she finally picked up, I yelled at her. “But, Dr. Griffith,” she said, quaveringly, “Charlie’s right here. She just got home from her walk.”
“Give her to me,” I snapped, and when Charlie’s face appeared on the screen, her expression the same as always, I nearly sobbed. “Charlie,” I said to her. “Little cat. Are you all right?”
“Yes, Grandfather,” she said.
“Don’t leave,” I told her. “Stay right there. I’m coming home.”
“All right,” she said.
At home, I dismissed the nanny (leaving it intentionally unclear whether that dismissal was for the day or forever) and went upstairs to Charlie’s room, where she was sitting on her bed, holding the cat. I had been fearing torn clothes, bruises, tears, but she looked the same as she always did—a little flushed, maybe, but that could have been the heat.