As I walk down the hal , I hear other residents talking to themselves or to visitors behind their closed doors, and the sound of ports turned up loud because many of the elderly cannot hear wel . Some rooms are silent. Perhaps some are like Grandfather, sitting in front of open windows and thinking about people who are no longer here.
She would ask you if you wondered.
I step into the elevator and push the button, feeling sad and strange and confused. What did he mean?
I know Grandfather’s time is running out. I have known this for a long time. But why, as the elevator doors slide shut, do I suddenly feel that mine is running out as wel ?
My grandmother would want to know if I wondered if it wasn’t a mistake after all. If Ky were meant to be my Match.
For a moment, I did. When I saw Ky’s face flash in front of me so quick I couldn’t even see the color of his eyes, only the dark of them as they looked back at me, I wondered, Is it you?
CHAPTER 7
Today is Sunday. It is Grandfather’s eightieth birthday, so tonight he wil die.
People used to wake up and wonder, “Wil today be the end?” or lie down to sleep, not knowing if they would come back out of the dark. Now, we know which day wil be the end of the light and which night wil be the long, last one. The Final Banquet is a luxury. A triumph of planning, of the Society, of human life and the quality of it.
Al the studies show that the best age to die is eighty. It’s long enough that we can have a complete life experience, but not so long that we feel useless. That’s one of the worst feelings the elderly can have. In societies before ours, they could get terrible diseases, like depression, because they didn’t feel needed anymore. And there is a limit to what the Society can do, too. We can’t hold off al the indignities of aging much past eighty.
Matching for healthy genes can only take us so far.
Things didn’t used to be this fair. In the old days, not everyone died at the same age and there were al kinds of problems and uncertainty. You could die anywhere—on the street, in a medical center as my grandmother did, even on an air train. You could die alone.
No one should die alone.
The hour is very early, faint blue and pale pink, as we arrive on the almost-empty air train and walk along the cement pathway toward the door of Grandfather’s building. I want to step off the path and take off my shoes and walk with my bare feet on the cool, sharp grass, but today is not a day to deviate from what is planned. My parents and Bram and I are al quiet, thinking. None of us have work or leisure hours. Today is for Grandfather.
Tomorrow, things go back to normal again and we wil move on and he wil be gone.
It’s expected. It’s fair. I remind myself of this as we climb into the elevator to go to his apartment. “You can push the button,” I tel Bram, trying to joke with him. Bram and I used to fight over who got to push the buttons when we came to visit. Bram smiles and presses the 10. For the last time, I think to myself. After today, there wil be no Grandfather to visit. We wil have no reason to come back.
Most people don’t know their grandparents this wel . The kind of relationship I have with my other grandparents in the Farmlands is much more common. We communicate via port every few months and visit every few years. Many grandchildren watch the Final Banquet on the portscreens, too, one step removed from what’s happening. I have never envied those other children; I’ve pitied them. Even today, I feel that way.
“How long do we have before the Committee shows up?” Bram asks my father.
“About half an hour,” my father answers. “Does everyone have their gifts?”
We nod. Each of us has brought something to give Grandfather. I’m not sure what my parents chose for him, but I know Bram went to the Arboretum to get a rock from a spot as near to the Hil as possible.
Bram catches me looking at him, and he opens his palm to show me the rock again. It is round and brown and stil a bit dirty. It looks a little like an egg, and when he brought it back yesterday, he told me that he’d found it under a tree in a pile of soft green pine needles that looked like a nest.
“He’s going to love it,” I say to Bram.
“He’l love your gift, too.” Bram closes his fist around the rock again. The doors slide open and we step out into the hal .
I’ve made Grandfather a letter for my gift. I got up early this morning and spent time cutting and pasting and copying sentiments on the letter-making program on the port. Before I printed the letter, I found a poem from the decade in which he was born and included it as wel . Not many people care about poetry after they finish school, but Grandfather always has. He’s read al of the Hundred Poems many times.
One of the doors along the hal opens and an old woman peeks her head out. “You’re going to the Banquet for Mr. Reyes?” she asks, and she doesn’t even wait for us to answer. “It’s private, isn’t it?”
“It is,” my father says, stopping politely to speak with her, even though I know he is eager to see his father. He can’t keep himself from glancing down the hal at Grandfather’s closed door.
The woman grumbles a little. “I wish it were public. I’d like to go so I can get ideas. Mine’s in less than two months. You can bet it’s going to be public.” She laughs a little, a short, harsh sound, and then she asks, “Can you come and tel me about it afterward?” My mother comes to the rescue, as she and my father always do for each other. “Perhaps,” Mama says, smiling, and she takes my father’s hand and turns her back on the woman.
We hear a disappointed sigh and then a click behind us as the woman closes her door. The nameplate on her door says Mrs. Nash, and I remember that Grandpa has talked about her before. Nosy, he said.
“Can’t she wait for her own turn to come, instead of talking about it on Grandfather’s day?” Bram mutters, pushing open the door to Grandfather’s residence.
It already feels like a different place. More hushed. A little lonelier. I think that is because Grandfather is not sitting at the window anymore. Today, he rests in a bed in the living room as his body shuts down. Right on time.
“Could you move me over to the window?” Grandfather asks, after saying hel o to al of us.
“Certainly.” My father reaches for the edge of the bed and pul s it smoothly toward the early morning light. “Remember when you did this for me?
When I had al those inoculations as a child?”