Delirium: The Complete Collection (27 page)

Alex told me a long time ago that his dad had died, but he’d refused to give any details. “He never knew he had a son”: That’s the only thing Alex had said, and I figured it meant that his dad was dead before Alex was born.

Ahead of me, Alex’s shoulders rise and fall: a small sigh. “He is,” he says, and makes an abrupt right turn down a short hallway that ends at a heavy iron door. This is marked with another printed sign. It says
LIFERS
. Underneath the word, someone has written in pen,
HA HA
.

“What are you—” I’m more confused than ever, but I don’t have time to finish formulating my question. Alex pushes his way out the door and the smell that greets us—of wind and grass and fresh things—is so unexpected and welcome that I stop speaking, taking long, grateful gulps of air. Without realizing it, I’ve been breathing through my mouth.

We’re in a tiny courtyard, surrounded on all sides by the stained gray sides of the Crypts. The grass here is amazingly lush, reaching practically to my knees. A single tree twists upward to our left, and a bird is twittering in its branches. It’s surprisingly nice out here, peaceful and pretty—strange to be standing in the middle of a little garden while enclosed by the massive stone walls of the prison, like being at the exact center of a hurricane, and finding peace and silence in the middle of so much shrieking damage.

Alex has moved several paces away. He is standing, head bowed, with his eyes on the ground. He must have a sense too of the peacefulness here, the stillness that seems to hang in the air like a veil, covering everything in softness and rest. The sky above us is darker than it was when we first entered the Crypts: Against all the grayness and shadow, the grass stands vivid and electric, as though it is lit up from inside. It will rain at any second. It has to. I have the sensation of the world holding its breath before a giant exhale, balancing, teetering, about to let go.

“Here.” Alex’s voice rings out, surprisingly loud, and it startles me. “Right here.” He points to a shard of rock sticking up crookedly from the ground. “That’s where my father is.”

The grass is broken up by dozens of these rocks, which at first glance appeared to be naturally, haphazardly arranged. Then I realize that they’ve been deliberately tamped down into the earth. Some of them are covered in fading black markings, mostly illegible, although on one stone I recognize the word
RICHARD
and on another
DIED
.

Tombstones, I realize, as the purpose of the courtyard dawns on me. We’re standing in the middle of a graveyard.

Alex is staring down at a large chunk of concrete, as flat as a tablet, pressed down into the earth in front of his feet. All the writing is visible here, the words neatly printed in what looks like black marker, their edges slightly blurred as though someone has been continuously retracing them over a long period of time. It says
WARREN SHEATHES, R.I.P.

“Warren Sheathes,” I say. I want to reach out and slip my hand into Alex’s, but I don’t think we’re safe. There are a few windows surrounding the courtyard on the ground floor, and even though they are thickly coated in grime, someone could walk by at any moment, look out, and see us. “Your father?”

Alex nods, then shakes his shoulders, a sudden movement as though trying to jerk himself away from sleep. “Yeah.”

“He was here?”

One side of Alex’s mouth quirks up into a smile, but the rest of his face remains stony. “For fourteen years.” He draws a slow circle in the dirt with his toe, the first physical sign of discomfort or distraction he has given since we arrived. In that moment I am in awe of him: Since I’ve known him he has done nothing but support me and give me comfort and listen to me, and all this time he has been carrying the weight of his own secrets too.

“What happened?” I ask quietly. “I mean, what did he . . . ?” I trail off. I don’t want to push the issue.

Alex glances at me quickly and looks away. “What did he do?” he says. The hardness has returned to his voice. “I don’t know. What all the people who end up in Ward Six do. He thought for himself. Stood up for what he believed in. Refused to give in.”

“Ward Six?”

Alex avoids my eyes carefully. “The dead ward,” he says quietly. “For political prisoners, mostly. They’re kept in solitary confinement. And no one ever gets released.” He gestures around him, to the other shards of stone poking up through the grass, dozens of makeshift graves. “Ever,” he repeats, and I think of the sign on the door:
LIFERS, HA HA
.

“I’m so sorry, Alex.” I would give anything to touch him, but the best I can do is inch closer to him so that our skin is separated by only a few inches.

He looks at me then, shooting me a sad smile. “He and my mom were only sixteen when they met. Can you believe that? She was only eighteen when she had me.” He drops into a squat and traces his father’s name with his thumb. I suddenly understand that the reason he comes here so often is to continue darkening the letters as they fade, to keep some record of his father. “They wanted to run away together, but he was caught before they could finalize a plan. I never knew he’d been taken into custody. I just thought he was dead. My mom thought it would be better for me, and nobody in the Wilds knew enough to correct her. I think for my mom it was easier to believe he
had
really died. She didn’t want to think of him rotting in this place.” He continues looping a finger over the letters, back and forth. “My aunt and uncle told me the truth when I turned fifteen. They wanted me to know. I came here to meet him, but . . .” I think I see Alex shudder, a sudden stiffening movement of his shoulders and back. “Anyway, it was too late. He was dead, had been dead for a few months, and buried here, where his remains wouldn’t
contaminate
anything.”

I feel sick. The walls appear to be pressing closer around us, growing taller and narrower, too, so the sky feels more and more remote, an ever-diminishing point.
We’ll never get out
, I think, and then take a deep breath, trying to stay calm.

Alex straightens up. “Ready?” he asks me, for the second time this morning. I nod, even though I’m not sure that I am. He allows himself the brief flicker of a smile, and I see, for a second, a bit of warmth spark up in his eyes. Then he’s all business again.

I take one last look at the tombstone before we go in. I try to think of a prayer or something appropriate to say, but nothing comes to me. The lessons of the scientists aren’t really clear about what happens when you die: Supposedly you dissipate into the heavenly matter that is God, and get absorbed by him, although they also tell us that the cured go to heaven and live forever in perfect harmony and order.

“Your name.” I spin around to face Alex. He has already moved past me, headed back for the door. “Alex Warren.”

He gives an almost imperceptible shake of his head. “Assigned to me,” he says.

“Your real name is Alex Sheathes,” I say, and he nods. He has a secret name, just like me. We stand there for one more moment, looking at each other, and in that instant I feel our connection so strongly it’s as though it achieves physical existence, becomes a hand all around us, cupping us together, protecting us.
This
is what people are always talking about when they talk about God: this feeling, of being held and understood and protected. Feeling this way seems about as close to saying a prayer as you could get, so I follow Alex back inside, holding my breath as we again encounter that awful stink.

I follow Alex down a series of serpentine hallways. The sensation of stillness and peace I had in the courtyard is replaced almost immediately by fear so sharp it is like a blade going straight into the core of me, driving down and deep, until I can hardly breathe or keep going. At points the wailing grows louder, almost to a fever pitch, and I have to cover my ears; then it ebbs away again. Once we pass a man wearing a long white lab coat, stained with what looks like blood; he is leading a patient on a leash. Neither one looks at us as we pass.

We make so many twists and turns I’m beginning to wonder if Alex is lost, especially as the hallways grow dirtier, and the lights above us become fewer in number, so that eventually we are walking through murk and obscurity, with a single functioning bulb to light up twenty feet of blackened stone corridor. At intervals various glowing neon signs appear in the darkness, as though they are rising out of the air itself:
WARD ONE
,
WARD TWO
,
WARD THREE
,
WARD FOUR
. Alex keeps going, though, and when we pass the hallway that leads to Ward Five I call out to him, convinced he has gotten confused or lost his way.

“Alex,” I say, but even as I say the word it strangles me, because just then we come up to a heavy set of double doors marked with a small sign, barely illuminated, so faint I can hardly read it. And yet it seems to burn as brightly as a thousand suns.

Alex turns around, and to my surprise his face isn’t composed at all. His jaw is working and his eyes are full of pain, and I can tell he hates himself for being there, for being the one to say it, for being the one to show me.

“I’m sorry, Lena,” he says. Above him the sign smolders in the darkness:
WARD SIX
.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Humans, unregulated, are cruel and capricious; violent and selfish;
miserable and quarrelsome. It is only after their instincts and basic emotions
have been controlled that they can be happy, generous, and good.

—
The Book of Shhh

I
have a sudden dread of going any farther. That thing in the pit of my stomach squeezes up like a fist, making it hard to breathe. I can’t go on. I don’t want to know.

“Maybe we shouldn’t,” I say. “He said—he said we weren’t allowed.”

Alex reaches out for me like he’s thinking of touching me, then remembers where we are and forces his arms to his sides. “Don’t worry,” he says. “I have friends here.”

“It’s probably not even her.” My voice is rising a little, and I’m worried I might have a meltdown. I lick my lips, trying to keep it together. “It was probably just a big mistake. We shouldn’t have come in the first place. I want to go home.” I know I must sound like a toddler throwing a tantrum, but I can’t help it. Walking through those double doors seems absolutely impossible.

“Lena, come on. You have to trust me.” Then he does reach out, for just a second, skating one finger across my forearm. “Okay? Trust me.”

“I do trust you, it’s just . . .” The air, the stench, the darkness and the sensation of rot all around me: It makes me want to run. “If she
isn’t
here . . . Well, that’s bad. But if she
is
 . . . I think—I think it might be even worse.”

Alex watches me closely for a second. “You have to know, Lena,” he says finally, firmly, and he’s right. I nod. He gives me the barest flicker of a smile, then reaches forward and heaves open the doors to Ward Six.

We step into a vestibule that looks exactly like what I imagine a cell in the Crypts might be like: The walls and floor are concrete, and whatever color they might once have been painted has now faded to a dingy, mossy gray. A single bulb is set high in the ceiling, and barely delivers enough light to illuminate the tiny space. There is a stool in the corner, occupied by a guard. This guard is actually normal-sized—skinny, even, with acne pockmarks and hair that reminds me of overcooked spaghetti. As soon as Alex and I step through the door, the guard makes a small, reflexive adjustment to his gun, drawing it closer toward his body and swiveling the barrel ever so slightly in our direction.

Alex stiffens beside me. All of a sudden, I feel very alert.

“Can’t be in here,” the guard says. “Restricted area.”

For the first time since entering the Crypts, Alex appears uncomfortable. He fiddles nervously with his badge. “I—I thought Thomas would be here.”

The guard gets to his feet. Amazingly, he’s not much taller than I am—he’s certainly shorter than Alex—but of all the guards I’ve seen today, he frightens me the most. There’s something strange about his eyes, a flatness and hardness that reminds me of a snake. I’ve never had a gun pointed at me before, and staring into the long black tunnel of its barrel makes me feel like I’m going to faint.

“Oh, he’s here, all right. He’s
always
here, nowadays.” The guard smiles humorlessly, and his fingers dance against the trigger. When he speaks his lips curl upward, revealing a mouth full of crooked yellow teeth. “What do you know about Thomas?”

The room takes on the stillness and charge of the air outside, and reminds me of waiting for thunder to crack. Alex allows himself one small indication of nervousness: He curls and flexes his fingers against his thighs. I can almost see him thinking, trying to figure out what to say next. He must know that mentioning Thomas was a bad decision—even I heard the contempt and suspicion in the guard’s voice as he pronounced the name.

After what seems like a terribly long time—but is probably only a few seconds—the blank, official look sweeps down over his face again.

“We heard there was some kind of problem, that’s all.” The statement is sufficiently vague, and a decent assumption. Alex twirls his security badge idly between two fingers. The guard flicks his eyes to it, and I can tell he relaxes. Fortunately, he doesn’t try to look at it more closely. Alex has only Level One security clearance in the labs, which means he barely has the right to visit the janitor’s closet, much less parade around restricted areas, there or anywhere else in Portland, as though he owns them.

“Took you long enough,” the guard says flatly. “Thomas has been out for months. All the better for CID, I guess. It’s not the kind of thing we wanted to publicize.” The CID is the Controlled Information Department (or, if you’re cynical like Hana, the Corrupt Idiots Department or the Censorship Implementation Department), and goose bumps prick up on my arms. Something went very wrong in Ward Six if the CID got involved.

“You know how it is,” Alex says. He has recovered from his temporary slip-up; the confidence and ease return to his voice. “Impossible to get a straight answer from anyone over there.” Another vague statement, but the guard just nods.

“You’re telling me.” Then he jerks his head in my direction. “Who’s she?”

I can feel him staring at the unmarred skin on my neck, noticing that I have no procedural mark. Like many people, he unconsciously recoils—just a few inches, but enough so that the old feeling of humiliation, the feeling of being somehow
wrong
, creeps over me. I turn my eyes to the ground.

“She’s nobody,” Alex says, and even though I know he
has
to say it, it makes my chest ache dully. “I’m supposed to be showing her the Crypts, that’s all. A re-educational process, if you know what I mean.”

I hold my breath, certain that at any second he’ll boot us out, almost wishing he would. And yet . . . Just beyond the guard’s stool is a single door made out of a heavy, thick metal, and protected by an electronic keypad. It reminds me of the bank vault at Central Savings downtown. Through it I can just make out distant sounds—human sounds, I think, though it’s hard to tell.

My mother could be beyond that door. She could be
in
there. Alex was right. I do have to know.

For the first time, I begin to understand, fully, what Alex told me last night: All this time, my mother might have been alive. While I was breathing; she was breathing too. While I was sleeping, she was sleeping elsewhere. When I was awake thinking of her, she might have been thinking of me, too. It’s overwhelming, both miraculous and fiercely painful.

Alex and the guard eye each other for a minute. Alex continues spinning his badge around one finger, winding and unwinding the chain. It seems to put the guard at ease.

“I can’t let you back there,” he says, but this time he sounds apologetic. He lowers his gun and sits down on the stool again. I exhale quickly; I’ve been holding my breath without meaning to.

“You’re just doing your job,” Alex says, keeping his voice neutral. “So you’re Thomas’s replacement?”

“That’s right.” The guard flicks his eyes to me and again I can feel his gaze lingering on my unmarked neck. I have to stop myself from covering my skin with a hand. But he must decide that we aren’t going to be trouble, because he looks back to Alex and says, “Frank Dorset. Got reassigned from Three in February—after the incident.”

Something about the way he says
incident
sends chills up my spine.

“Tough breaks, huh?” Alex leans up against a wall, the picture of casualness. Only I can detect the edge in his voice. He’s stalling. He doesn’t know what to do from here, or how to get us inside.

Frank shrugs. “Quieter up here, that’s for sure. Nobody in or out. At least,
almost
nobody.” He smiles again, showing off those awful teeth, but his eyes maintain their strange flatness, as though there’s a curtain drawn over them. I wonder if this, for him, was a side effect of the cure, or whether he was always like that.

He tilts his head back, peering at Alex through narrowed eyes, and his resemblance to a snake grows even stronger. “So how’d you hear about Thomas?”

Alex keeps up the unconcerned act, smiling, twirling the badge. “Rumors floating here and there,” he says, shrugging. “You know how it is.”

“I know how it is,” Frank says. “But the CID wasn’t too happy about it. Had us on lock for a few months. What exactly did you hear, anyway?”

I can tell the question is an important one, some kind of test.
Be careful
, I think in Alex’s direction, as though he might somehow hear me.

Alex hesitates for only a second before saying, “Heard he might have sympathies on the other side.”

Suddenly, it all makes sense: the fact that Alex said, “I have friends here,” the fact that he has seemingly had access to Ward Six in the past. One of the guards must have been a sympathizer, maybe an active part of the resistance. Alex’s constant refrain plays in my head:
There are more of us than you think.

Frank relaxes visibly. Apparently that was the right answer. He seems to decide that Alex is, after all, trustworthy. He strokes the barrel of his gun—which has been resting casually between his knees—as though it is a pet. “That’s right. Came as a total shock to me. ’Course I hardly knew him—saw him sometimes in the break room, once or twice in the shitter, that’s about it. Kept to himself, mostly. I guess it makes sense. Must have been getting chatty with the Invalids.”

This is the first time I’ve heard anyone in an official capacity acknowledge the existence of the people in the Wilds, and I suck in a sharp breath. I know it must be painful for Alex to stand there, talking dismissively about a friend who has been caught for being a sympathizer. The punishment must have been swift and severe, especially since he was on the government payroll. Most likely he was hanged or shot or electrocuted, or thrown into one of the cells to rot—if the courts were merciful and decided against a verdict of death by torture. If he even
had
a trial.

Amazingly, Alex’s voice doesn’t falter. “What was the tip-off?”

Frank keeps massaging his gun, and something about the motion—gentle, almost, like he’s willing it to life—makes me feel sick. “No tip-off, exactly.” He sweeps his hair off his face, revealing a splotchy red forehead, shiny with sweat. It’s much hotter here than it was in the other wards. The air must get trapped in these walls, rotting and festering like everything else in this place. “It figures he must have known something about the escape. He was in charge of cell inspections. And the tunnel didn’t just sprout up overnight.”

“The escape?” The words fly out of my mouth before I can help it. My heart starts jolting painfully in my chest. Nobody has ever escaped the Crypts, not ever.

For a moment Frank’s hand pauses on the gun, his fingers once again performing a dance on the trigger. “Sure,” he says, keeping his eyes on Alex, as though I’m not even there. “You must have heard about it.”

Alex shrugs. “A little of this, a little of that. Nothing confirmed.”

Frank laughs. It’s a terrible sound. It reminds me of the time I saw two seagulls fighting in midair over a scrap of food, screeching as they tumbled toward the ocean. “Oh, it’s confirmed,” he says. “Happened back in February. We got the alarm from Thomas, as a matter of fact. ’Course if he was in on it, she might have had a lead time of six, seven hours.”

When he says the word
she
the walls seem to collapse around me. I take a quick step backward, bumping up against a wall.
It could be her
, I think, and for one horrible, guilty second I’m disappointed. Then I remind myself that she might not be here at all—and in any case, it could have been anyone who escaped, any female sympathizer or agitator. Still, the dizziness does not subside. I’m filled with anxiety and fear and a desperate craving, all at once.

“What’s wrong with her?” Frank asks. His voice sounds distant.

“Air,” I manage to force out. “It’s the air in here.”

Frank laughs again, that unpleasant cackling sound. “You think it’s bad out here,” he says. “It’s paradise compared to the cells.” He seems to take pleasure in this, and it reminds me of a debate I had a few weeks ago with Alex, when he was arguing against the usefulness of the cure. I said that without love, there could also be no hate: without hate, no violence.
Hate isn’t the most dangerous thing,
he’d said.
Indifference is.

Alex starts talking. His voice is low and still casual, but there’s an undertone of force to it: the kind of voice street peddlers lapse into when they are trying to get you to buy a carton of bruised berries or a broken toy.
It’s okay, I’ll give you a deal, no problem, trust me.
“Listen, just let us in for a minute. That’s all it will take: a minute. You can tell she’s already scared out of her mind. I had to come all the way out here for this, day off and everything, I was going to go to the pier, maybe try out some fishing. Point is, if I bring her home and she’s not straightened out . . . well, you know, chances are I’ll just have to haul out here again. And I only have a couple days off, and summer’s almost over. . . .”

“Why all the trouble?” Frank says, jerking his head in my direction. “If she’s causing problems, there’s an easy way to fix her up.”

Alex smiles tightly. “Her father’s Steven Jones, commissioner at the labs. He doesn’t want to do an early procedure, no trouble, no violence or mess. Looks bad, you know.”

It’s a bold lie. Frank could easily ask to see my ID card, and then Alex and I are screwed. I’m not sure what the punishment would be for infiltrating the Crypts under false pretenses, but it can’t be good.

Frank appears interested in me for the first time. He looks me up and down like I’m a grapefruit he’s evaluating in the supermarket for ripeness, and for a moment he doesn’t say anything.

Then, finally, he stands, slipping the gun onto his shoulder. “Come on,” he says. “Five minutes.”

As he’s fiddling with the keypad, which requires both that he type a code and scan his hand on some kind of fingerprint-matching screen, Alex reaches out and takes my elbow.

“Let’s go,” he says, making his voice gruff, like my little fit has left him impatient. But his touch is gentle, and his hand warm and reassuring. I wish he could keep it there, but after only a second he lets me go again. I can read a plea, loud and clear, in his eyes:
Be strong. We’re almost there. Be strong for just a little while longer.