To Paradise

Certain expenses, however, can’t be avoided. It was A. who introduced me to this new marriage broker, the same person he used to arrange his own marriage, to a widowed lesbian. If I needed proof of how diminished my reputation is, it’s that I couldn’t immediately get an appointment with this broker, although he’s known to help anyone who’s affiliated with a state ministry at a senior level. Yet it took A., whom I rarely see anymore, to secure a meeting with him.

I hadn’t liked him from the start. He was tall and bony and unable to make eye contact, and he made it clear in every way he could that he was seeing me as a favor.

“Where do you live?” he asked, although I knew he already knew the basic information of my life.

“Zone Eight,” I said, playing along.

“I usually only see applicants from Zone Fourteen,” he said, which I also already knew, for he had told me this by letter before we even met.

“Yes, and I’m very grateful,” I said, as blandly as I could. For a moment, there was silence. I said nothing. He said nothing. But finally, he sighed—what more could he do, really?—and took out his pad of paper to begin our interview. It was stiflingly hot in his office, even with the air-conditioning. I asked for a glass of water, and he looked affronted, as if I’d asked for something impossible, like brandy or scotch, and then called for his secretary to fetch me some.

And then the real humiliation began. Age? Occupation? What rank? Where exactly did I live in Zone Eight? Assets? Ethnicity? Where had I been born? When had I been naturalized? How long had I been at RU? Was I married? Had I ever been married? To whom? When did he die? How? How many children had we had? Was he my biological child? What had been his father’s ethnicity? His mother’s? Was my son living? When did he die? How? I was here on behalf of my granddaughter, was that correct? Who was her mother? Why, where was she? Was she living? Was my granddaughter my son’s biological child? Had she or my son had any health problems or conditions? With each answer, I could feel the air around me change and change and change, getting dimmer and dimmer and dimmer, the years crashing and colliding into one another.

Then came the questions about Charlie, although he had already seen her papers, the scarlet “Enemy Relation” stamp x-ed across her face: How old was she? How much education had she had? What was her height and weight? What were her interests? When had she become sterile, and how? For how long had she taken Xychor? And, finally, what was she like?

It had been a long time since I had had to describe so precisely what Charlie was and wasn’t, what she could and couldn’t do, what she excelled at and what she struggled with: I think I last had to do this when I was trying to secure her a place at her high school. But after I told him the fundamentals, as best I could, I found myself still talking—about how attentive she had been to Little Cat, how, when he was dying, she would follow him from room to room until she had understood that he didn’t want to be followed, that he wanted to be alone; about how, when she slept, her forehead furrowed in a way that made her look not angry but inquisitive and thoughtful; about how, although she could not give me a hug or kiss, she knew, always, when I was sad or worried, and would bring me a cup of water or, when we’d had it, a cup of tea; about how, as a child, just home from the hospital, she would sometimes slump against me after her seizures and let me stroke her head, her hair light and thin and as soft as down; about how the one thing that remained from her pre-sickness life was her scent, something warm and animal, like hot, clean fur after it’s been in the sun; about how she could be resourceful in ways you wouldn’t expect—she was rarely defeated, she would always try. After a while, some part of me realized that the broker had stopped taking notes, that the room was quiet except for my voice, and yet still I talked, even though it felt with every sentence like I was ripping my heart from my chest and then replacing it, again and again—that terrible, awful pain, that overwhelming joy and sorrow I felt whenever I spoke about Charlie.