“Do you real y think they’l let us hike there?” I ask. His enthusiasm is contagious.
“I hope so.” Grandfather gazes out the window in the direction of the Arboretum, and I wonder if the reason he spends so much time looking out lately is because he likes to remember what he carries within.
It is as though he can read my mind. “I’m nothing but an old man sitting here thinking about his memories, aren’t I?”
I smile. “There’s nothing wrong with doing that.” In fact, at the end of a life, it’s encouraged.
“That’s not exactly what I’m doing,” Grandfather said.
“Oh?”
“I’m thinking.” Again, he knows my thoughts. “It’s not the same as remembering. Remembering is part of thinking, but not al of it.”
“What are you thinking about?”
“Many things. A poem. An idea. Your grandmother.” My grandmother died early of one of the last kinds of cancer when she was sixty-two. I never knew her. The compact was hers before it was mine—a gift from her mother-in-law, Grandfather’s mother.
“What do you think she would say about my Match?” I ask him. “About what happened today?”
He’s quiet, and I wait. “I think,” he says final y, “she would ask you if you wondered.”
I want to ask him what he means, but I hear the bel ringing, announcing that the final air train for the Boroughs wil be coming through soon. I have to go.
“Cassia?” Grandfather says as I stand up. “You stil have the compact I gave you, don’t you?”
“Yes,” I say, surprised that he would ask. It’s the most valuable thing I own. The most valuable thing I wil ever own.
“Wil you bring it to my Final Banquet tomorrow?” he asks.
Tears wel in my eyes. He must want to see it again to remember my grandmother, and his mother. “Of course I wil , Grandfather.”
“Thank you.”
My tears threaten to spil over onto his cheek as I bend down to kiss him. I hold them back; I don’t cry. I wonder when I can. It won’t be tomorrow night at the Final Banquet. People wil be watching then. To see how Grandfather handles leaving, and to see how we manage being left.
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?
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.