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...
“But,” she continued, “the Marriage Act is meant to encourage procreation, and therefore”—again, a cast about the room for help; again, no takers—“the benefits will be given only to unions between biological males and biological females. This is not to say,” she added, quickly, before the pharmacology minister could speak, “that we are proposing any moral…penalty upon those who do not fit this definition, only that such couples will not be eligible for state incentives.”
People began shouting questions at once. Of the thirty-two people in that room, at least nine of us—including, I was fairly certain, one of the authors of the proposal, a rabbity little woman—would not be eligible for state benefits if this act passes. If there had been only two or three of us, I would be more worried—in such situations, people tend to vote against their own interests because they think it offers them greater personal protection. But in this case, there are too many of us for such a proposal to be realized, not to mention the fact that there are too many unanswerables: Would this mean that barren couples’ marriages would become ineligible for state benefits? What about same-sex parents who had biological children, or have means to have more? What would happen to widows and widowers, of whom there were now historic numbers? Were we actually, really talking about paying citizens for having children? What if they had children and the children died—would they keep their benefits? Was this effectively eliminating a fertile person’s right to choose to have children or not? What if the fertile person was physically or mentally unfit—would we still be encouraging them to have children? What about divorce? Wouldn’t this be encouraging women to stay in abusive marriages? Would a sterile person be allowed to marry a fertile person? What if a person had transitioned to another gender—would this legislation not leave them in an irresolvable legal gray area? From where was the money coming to support this plan, especially as two of our primary trading partners were expected to cease relations with us? If procreation is so essential to the country’s survival, would it not make more sense to pardon state traitors and encourage them to have children, even in a controlled environment? Why wouldn’t we just adopt some of the refugees’ children, now orphans, or import children from climatically ravaged countries, and thus divorce the idea of parenthood from biology? Were the authors really suggesting that we exploit a national and existential trauma, the disappearance of a generation of children, to advance a moralistic agenda? By the end of the session, both of the proposal’s authors seemed about to cry, and the meeting disbanded with everyone in a foul temper.
I was walking to my car when I heard someone call my name, and turned and saw it was the pharmacology minister. “It’s not going to happen,” he said, so firmly that I almost smiled: He was so young, and so certain. Then I remembered that he had lost his entire family, and that he deserved my respect for that alone.
“I hope you’re right,” I said, and he nodded. “I have no doubt,” he said, and then bowed and walked off toward his car.
We shall see. Over the years, I’ve been astonished at and dismayed by and fearful of how acquiescent the public has proven to be: Fear of disease, the human instinct to stay healthy, has eclipsed almost every other desire and value they once treasured, as well as many of the freedoms they had thought inalienable. That fear was yeast to the state, and now the state generates its own fear when they feel the population’s is flagging. Monday begins the third consecutive week of debates about the Marriage Act, and it looks like we may be able to stop this after all—your condemnation helped, certainly. I don’t see how this proceeds without alienating us completely from Old Europe, but of course I’ve been wrong before.
Keep your fingers crossed for all of us. I’ll write more next week. Send my love to Olivier. And save some for yourself.
Charles
February 3, 2078
Dear Peter—the act passed. It’ll be announced tomorrow. I don’t know what else to say. More soon. Charles
Dear Peter, April 15, 2079
It’s very early, just dawn, and I can’t sleep. I haven’t been sleeping at all, it seems, these past few months. I’ve been trying to go to bed earlier, closer to eleven instead of past midnight, and then I lie there. Sometimes I don’t so much fall as slip into a liminal state between wakefulness and slumber, one in which I’m acutely aware of both the mattress beneath me and the sound of the fan wicking away above me. In these hours, I relive the events of the day, yet in this replay, I’m sometimes participant and sometimes witness, and I never know at which moment the camera might swing on its dolly and my perspective will shift.
Last night I saw C. again. He’s not exactly my type, and I can’t imagine I’m his. But we both have the same security clearance and rank, which means that he can come to my house or I can go to his and we can have our respective cars wait outside to drive us home afterward without any questions or difficulties.
You forget, sometimes, how much you need to be touched. It’s not food or water or light or heat—you can go for years without it. The body doesn’t remember the sensation; it does you the kindness of allowing you to forget. The first two times, we had sex quickly, almost brutally, as if we might never have the opportunity again, but the past three instances have been more leisurely. He lives in a state-appointed townhouse in Zone Fourteen, bare of anything but the essentials, one mostly empty room opening into another.
Afterward, we pretend the listening devices don’t exist—we have that privilege, too—and talk. He’s fifty-two, twenty-three years younger than I am, only twelve years older than David would have been. He speaks, sometimes, about his sons, the younger of whom would have been sixteen this year, just a year older than Charlie will be this September, and his husband, who had been in the marketing department of the pharmaceutical company where he’d once worked. C. had considered killing himself after they had died, all within six months, but in the end, he hadn’t, and now, he said, he couldn’t remember why.
“I can’t remember why I didn’t, either,” I said, though as soon as I spoke, I realized that was a lie.
“Your granddaughter,” he said, and I nodded.
“You’re lucky,” he said.
You’ll recall it had been C. who’d been so certain that the Marriage Act would fail. Even now, even as we were meeting in semisecret, he continued to argue that it’d be overturned imminently. “What’s the point of having marriage for people who aren’t going to have children?” he asked. “If the point is to raise more children in general, why not use some of us as child-carers, or assign us other supportive roles? Isn’t the whole point to try to get maximum advantage out of all our citizens?” When I once suggested the inevitable conclusion—that, despite the Committee’s promises, the Marriage Act will only lead to the eventual criminalization of gayness on moral grounds—he contradicted me with such fury that I had no choice but to gather my things and leave. “What’s the point of that?” he asked me, again and again, and when I said that the point was the same wherever and whenever homosexuality was criminalized—to create a useful scapegoat on whom the fortunes of a faltering state could be blamed—he accused me of being bitter and cynical. “I believe in this state,” he said, and when I said I had, once, too, he had told me to get out, that we were too distant from each other philosophically. For weeks, there was silence. But then need drew us back together, the source of our reunion the same thing we could no longer discuss.
Afterward, he walks me to the door; we embrace, rather than kiss, confirm our next encounter. At Committee meetings, we’re cordial. Not too distant, not too friendly. I imagine no one can tell anything different. At our last encounter, he told me that safe houses have started cropping up, mostly at the far western edges of Zone Eight, for people who can’t meet as we do in a private house. “They’re not brothels,” he clarified. “They’re more like gathering places.”