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...
Mrs. Bishop laughed. There was no bitterness in that laugh, no falsity: It was a sound of pure merriment. “Oh, I’m afraid not,” she said. “I’m the only Hawaiian, not my husband.” My mother looked blank, and Mrs. Bishop smiled again. “It was quite a shock for Luke, a haole boy from a small town in Texas whose father was a construction worker, to understand that, here, his last name made him something special.”
“I see,” said my mother, quietly. “So is your husband in construction as well?”
“He could be.” Again, the smile. “But we just don’t know, do we, Edward?” Then, to my mother, “He left long ago, when Edward was a baby—I haven’t seen him since.”
I can’t say, of course, that men didn’t leave their families all the time in the early fifties. But I can say—and this was true even decades later—that to have your husband or father leave was something shameful, as if the responsible party was the abandoned, the wife and children. If people spoke about it, they did so in whispers. But not the Bishops. Mr. Bishop had left, but they weren’t the losers—he was.
It was one of those rare moments in which my mother and I were united in our discomfiture. Before the Bishops left, we learned that Sunday was Mrs. Bishop’s day off; the other six days, she worked as a waitress at a busy diner a few blocks from their house called Mizumoto’s, which my mother hadn’t heard of but Jane and Matthew had, and that she was from Honoka‘a, a tiny town, a village, really, on the Big Island.
“What an extraordinary woman,” my mother said, watching as mother and son turned right at the end of our driveway and walked out of sight toward the bus stop. I could tell she didn’t quite mean it as a compliment.
I agreed with her—she was extraordinary. They both were. I had never encountered two people who seemed less abashed by the circumstances of their lives. But whereas that lack of apology manifested itself in Mrs. Bishop as an irrepressible buoyancy, the kind of cheer that exists only in the rare people who have never felt embarrassed for who they are, they were realized in Edward as a defiance, one that in later years curdled into anger.
I see this now, of course. But it took me a long time. And by that point, I had already given up my life, and therefore your life, for his. Not because I shared his anger—but because I craved his certainty, this strange and wondrous notion that there really was a single answer, and that, by believing in it, I would cease to believe everything that had bothered me about myself for so long.
And now, Kawika, I will skip forward a number of years. First, though, I want to tell you about something that happened to me yesterday.
I was lying in bed as usual. It was the afternoon, and hot. Earlier in the day they had opened the windows and turned on the fan, but now the breeze had died, and no one had returned to switch on the air-conditioning. This occasionally happened, and then someone would enter the room, exclaiming at how hot it was, scolding me a bit, as if I had the ability to call out for them and had simply refused to do so out of stubbornness. Once, they had forgotten to turn on the air-conditioning at all and my mother had made a surprise visit. I had heard her voice, and her feet marching in, and then I heard her march back out again, and return a few seconds later with an orderly, who was apologizing again and again as my mother rebuked him: “Do you know how much I pay for my son to be looked after? Get me the manager on duty. This is unacceptable.” I was humiliated hearing this, being so old and still in my mother’s care, but also comforted, and I fell asleep to the sound of her anger.
Normally, the heat didn’t bother me so much, but yesterday, it was oppressive, and I could feel my face and hair becoming damp; I could feel sweat trickling into my diaper. Why won’t someone come help me? I thought. I tried to make a sound, but I of course couldn’t.
And then something very strange happened. I stood. I cannot explain how this happened—I have not stood for years, not since I was rescued from Lipo-wao-nahele. But now I was not only standing, I was trying to walk, trying to move toward where I knew the air-conditioning unit was. As I realized this, however, I fell, and after a few minutes, someone came into the room and started making a fuss, asking me why I was on the floor, and if I’d rolled out of bed. For a minute I worried she might strap me down, as has happened before, but she didn’t, just buzzed for help, and then another person came in and they returned me to bed and then, thank goodness, switched on the air conditioner.
The point, though, is that I had stood; I had been standing. It felt both foreign and also familiar to be upright again, even if I trembled for a long time afterward because my limbs were so wasted. Last night, after I had been fed and washed and the space was dark and silent, I began to think. It had been luck that no one had seen me standing, because if they had, there would have been questions, and my mother would have been called, and there would have been tests, the sorts I had had when I first came here: Why would I not walk? Why would I not speak? Why would I not see? “You’re asking the wrong questions,” my mother had snapped to someone, a doctor. “You should be asking why he can’t do those things.” “No, Mrs. Bingham,” the doctor replied, and I could hear an edge in his voice. “I am asking exactly the right questions. It’s not that your son can’t do these things—it’s that he won’t,” and my mother had been silent.
Now, however, I realized: What if I could learn how to walk again? What if every day I practiced standing? What would happen? The thought scared me, but it was exciting as well. What if I was getting better after all?
But I meant to continue my story. Throughout the remainder of fifth grade, Edward and I saw a lot of each other. Occasionally, he came to my house, but more often, I went to his, where we would play checkers or cards. When he came to my house, he’d want to play outside, as his yard was too small to toss a ball in, but he soon realized I wasn’t much of an athlete. The strange thing, though, was that we never seemed to grow closer in any meaningful way. Boys that age may not exchange intimacies or secrets, but they do become more physical with each other: I remember you at that age, how you would tussle on the grass with your friends like little animals, how much of the fun you had with them was getting dirty together. But Edward and I weren’t like that—I was too fastidious, and he was too composed. I sensed, early on, that he would never be someone I could relax around, and I didn’t mind that.
Then came summer. Edward went to the Big Island to stay with his grandparents; my mother and I went to Hāna, where we at the time had a house that had been in my father’s family since before annexation. And by the time school had resumed, something had shifted. Friendships at that age are so fragile, because who you are—not just the physical dimensions of you but the emotional ones, too—change so dramatically from month to month. Edward joined the baseball team and swim team and made new friends; I reverted to my solitude. I now suppose I must have been sad about this, but, curiously, I remember no feelings of sorrow, no feelings of anger—it was like the previous year had been a mistake, and I had known that things would at some point return to normal. Also, it wasn’t as if there was any animosity—we had only drifted, not split, and when we saw each other across campus or in the hallways, we would both nod or wave, gestures you’d make across a wide sea, where you knew your voice couldn’t carry. When we reunited more than a decade later, it felt somehow inevitable, as if we had both drifted for so long that we were bound to find each other again.