To Paradise

“Well, I’d like to arrange a meeting,” I said, and Timothy nodded, though as I was leaving he called me back.

“He’s a fine person,” he said, a strange turn of phrase these days. I had investigated Timothy before I made my first appointment—in his previous life, he had been a social worker. “Just have an open mind, all right?” I didn’t know what this meant, but I agreed, though having an open mind was also an anachronism, another concept of long ago.

The day of our meeting arrived and I was nervous again, uncommonly so. I had come to sense that, although Charlie was still young, she was nearing the end of her options. After this, I would have to expand my search beyond this municipality, beyond this prefecture. I would have to hope Wesley would grant me one more favor, after the previous favor he’d granted me, in which he’d given Charlie a job, a job she liked. I would have to wrest her from that job, and I would have to resettle her elsewhere, and then I would have to find a way to follow, and I would need Wesley’s help. I would do it, naturally, but it would be difficult.

The candidate was already there when I arrived, sitting in the small, unadorned room that all brokers’ offices maintained for such meetings, and as I entered, he stood and we bowed. I looked at him as he settled back into his chair, and I into mine. I had assumed that Timothy’s entreaty meant that he would look significantly different, worse, than his photo, but this was not the case: He looked like his image, a trim, attractive young man, the same vivid dark eyes, the same unfrightened gaze. His father had been West African and Southern European; his mother had been South and East Asian—he resembled my son, just a bit, and I had to look away.

I knew the facts of him from his card, and yet I asked the same questions anyway: where he had grown up, what he had studied, what he did now. I knew his parents and sister had been declared enemies; I knew it had cost him the final years of his doctoral studies; I knew he was appealing the decision now that the Forgiveness Act had passed; I knew he had had a professor, a well-known microbiologist, who was helping support his case; I knew that if he agreed to the match, he wanted to delay the marriage by up to two years so he could try to finish his degree. He confirmed all this information; his account did not differ from what I knew.

I asked about his parents. He had no immediate living family. Most relatives of state enemies, when asked about their relations, became either angry or ashamed; you could see them swallowing something back, some surplus of feeling, you could see them practicing what they’d learned about keeping their emotions small.

But he was neither angry nor ashamed. “My father was a physicist; my mother was a political scientist,” he said. He named the university where they had taught, a once-prestigious place before it had been subsumed by the state. His sister had been an English-literature professor. They had all joined the insurgents, but he had not. I asked him why, and for the first time, he looked troubled, though I couldn’t tell whether it was because he was thinking about the camera hidden in the ceiling or about his family. “I said it was because I wanted to be a scientist,” he said, after a pause, “because I thought—I thought that I could do more by becoming a scientist, by trying to help that way. But in the end—” And here he stopped again, and this time, I knew it was because of the camera and recorder.

“But in the end, you were wrong,” I finished for him, and he looked at me and then to the door, quickly, like it was about to be broken down by a squad of officers, ready to drag us off to a Ceremony. “It’s all right,” I said, “I’m old enough to say what I want,” even though I knew that wasn’t true. He knew, too, but he didn’t correct me.

We kept talking, now about his aborted dissertation, about the job he hoped to secure at the Pond as he appealed his case. We talked about Charlie, about who she was, about what she needed. I was—I didn’t know why, at the time—honest with him, more honest even than I’d been with Timothy. But nothing seemed to surprise him; it was as if he had already met her; it was as if he already knew her. “You must always take care of her,” I heard myself saying, again and again, and he nodded back to me, and as he did, I understood that he was agreeing to the marriage, that I had found someone for her after all. And at some point, somehow, I had another realization. I realized what it was that Timothy had tried to communicate to me about him; I realized what it was I recognized in him—I realized why he would be willing to marry Charlie. It was obvious, once I knew—I had known it since before I met him.

I interrupted him as he was mid-sentence. “I know who you are,” I said, and when he didn’t react, I said, “I know what you are,” and then his mouth opened, just slightly, and there was a silence.

“Is it obvious?” he asked, quietly.

“No,” I said. “I only know because I’m one, too,” and now he sat back in his seat, and I could see something in his gaze change, could see him look at me again, differently.