This is the October pick for the Exeter Dystopian novels book club.
Prologue
The key thing, we reminded ourselves, was never to stop, to always keep going, even when the past called us back to a time and place we still leaned toward, stilll sang of, in quieter moments.
The whole time, I had been half waiting for myself to turn, to become fevered like everyone else. Nothing happened. I waited and waited. I still wait.
Chapter 1
The future is more exponentially exploding rents. The future is more condo buildings, more luxury housing bought by shell companies of the global wealthy elite. The future is more Whole Foods, aisles of refrigerated cut fruit packaged in plastic containers. The future is more Urban Outfitters, more Sephoras, more Chipotles. The future just wants more consumers. The future is more newly arrived college grads and tourists in some fruitless search for authenticity. The future is more overpriced Pabsts at dive-bar simulacrums.
I opened up my personal care kit on the spot. There were two sets of N95 face masks and latex gloves, each imprinted with the Spectra logo. There were some New Age–looking herbal tinctures. I opened up the brochure. It detailed an expanded insurance plan. Last, at the bottom of the box, lay a cache of nutrition bars from a health company for which we’d produced a cookbook that contained recipes for transforming nutrition bars into desserts.
The gemstone granules are tearing up their lungs. That’s why it’s a particularly urgent matter.
A silence at the other end of the line.
I mean, they’re dying, I clarified. The supplier is putting all its contract jobs on hold. Hello?
Finally she spoke, slowly and stiffly. I don’t want to sound like we don’t care, because obviously we do, but this is disappointing news.
Chapter 6
The worm is very greedy, Balthasar said darkly. He eats all the food and doesn’t share. What lesson does that teach children? To eat with no—he paused, searching for the word—no conscience?
Chapter 8
Where? The cab driver asked.
Is there a good neighbourhood for walking?
Shopping? He smiled knowingly. Ah! I know the place.
Chapter 14
It’s not like Bibles, where you work on the exact same thing over and over again.
Chapter 15
So passed my first night in the Facility.
Chapter 16
Thus passed their first night in America.
It was this house in which Ruifang hosted numerous CCCC Bible study groups and dinner parties, in which she entertained her sisters and other Chinese relatives when they visited, in which she prayed at the dining table every day, in which she heard the news of her husband’s fatal hit-and-run, in which her health quickly declined after his death.
Chapter 22
How do we know, one skeptical reader wrote, that you’re not fevered yourself?
Chapter 23
Lately, I have been reading The Arabian Nights, in which the narrator of the tale, Scheherazade, keeps herself alive by telling King Shahryar tales night after night, withholding the ending of each story until the next night.
Chapter 24
At the mouth was a billboard for New York Life, some insurance company, that greeted all traffic entering the city. It showed a picture of a grandfather hugging two grandsons, next to the slogan LIFE IS KNOWING WHAT YOU LIVE FOR.
Chapter 25
Come with me! I scream at her. She recoils as I get closer, ducks back inside, as I furiously pound my feet toward the exit, where I slam against the doors—maybe I hear them after me or maybe it’s the bark of the push bar—and bound out into the parking lot.
Chapter 26
The first place you live alone, away from your family, he said, is the first place you become a person, the first place you become yourself.
To live in a city is to live the life that it was built for, to adapt to its schedule and rhythms, to move within the transit layout made for you during the morning and evening rush, winding through the crowds of fellow commuters. To live in a city is to consume its offerings. To eat at its restaurants. To drink at its bars. To shop at its stores. To pay its sales taxes. To give a dollar to its homeless.
To live in a city is to take part in and to propagate its impossible systems. To wake up. To go to work in the morning. It is also to take pleasure in those systems because, otherwise, who could repeat the same routines, year in, year out?