Delirium: The Complete Collection (29 page)

And I say: “That’s all I want. Just you and me. Always.”

I mean it too. I’m not even afraid. Now that I know I’ll have him—that we have each other—I feel as though I’ll never be afraid of anything ever again.

We decide to leave Portland in a week, exactly nine days before my scheduled procedure. I’m nervous about delaying our departure so long—I’m halfway tempted to make a straight run for the border fence and try to barge my way through in broad daylight—but as usual, Alex calms me down and explains the importance of waiting.

In the past few years he has made the crossing only a handful of times. It’s too dangerous to go back and forth more often than that. But in the next week, Alex will cross twice before we make our final escape—an almost suicidal risk, but he convinces me it’s necessary. Once he leaves with me and starts missing work and class, he’ll be invalidated too—even though, technically, his identity was never really valid in the first place, since it was created by the resistance.

And once we’re both invalidated, we’ll be erased from the system. Gone.
Blip!
It will be as though we’ve never existed. At least we can count on the fact that we won’t be pursued into the Wilds. There won’t be any raiding parties. No one will come looking for us. If they wanted to hunt us down, they’d have to admit that we’d made it out of Portland, that it was possible, that the Invalids exist.

We’ll be nothing more than ghosts, traces, memories—and soon, as the cureds keep their eyes firmly focused on the future, and the long procession of days to march through—we won’t even be that.

Since Alex won’t be able to cross into Portland any longer, we need to bring over as much food as we can, plus clothes for the winter and anything else we can’t do without. Invalids in the settlements are pretty good about sharing supplies. Still, autumn and winter in the Wilds are always hard, and after years of living in Portland, Alex isn’t exactly a master hunter-gatherer.

We agree to meet at the house at midnight to continue planning. I’ll bring him the first collection of belongings I want to take with me: my photo album, a sheath of notes Hana and I passed back and forth sophomore year in math class, and whatever food I can smuggle from the storeroom at the Stop-N-Save.

It’s almost three o’clock by the time Alex and I split up and I head home. The clouds have mostly broken up, and between them the sky is interwoven, a pale blue, like faded and tattered silk. The air is warm but the wind is edged with an autumn smell of cold and smoke. Soon all the lush greens of the landscape will burn away into fierce reds and oranges; and then those, too, will burn away, into the stark black brittleness of winter. And I’ll be gone—out there somewhere among the skinny, shivering trees, encased in snow. But Alex will be with me, and we’ll be safe. We’ll walk together holding hands, and kiss in broad daylight, and love each other as much as we want to, and no one will ever try to keep us apart.

Despite everything that happened today, I feel calmer than I’ve ever been, as though the words Alex and I said to each other today have wrapped me up in a protective haze.

I haven’t been running regularly for over a month. It has been too hot, and until recently Carol has forbidden it. But as soon as I get home I call Hana and ask her to meet me at the tracks, our regular starting point, and she only laughs.

“I was about to call and ask you the same thing,” she says.

“Great minds,” I say, her laughter getting lost for a second in the fuzz that blasts through the receiver, as a censor somewhere deep in Portland tunes into our conversation momentarily. The old revolving eye, ever-turning, ever-vigilant. Anger worms through me for a second, but it disappears quickly. Soon I’ll be off the map completely and forever.

I was hoping to get out of the house without seeing Carol, but she intersects me on my way out the door. As always, she’s been in the kitchen, endlessly repeating her cycle of cooking and cleaning.

“Where have you been all day?” she asks.

“With Hana,” I answer automatically.

“And you’re going out again?”

“Just for a run.” Earlier I thought if I ever saw her again I would tear at her face, or kill her. But now, looking at her, I feel completely numb, like she’s a painted billboard or a stranger passing on a bus.

“Dinner’s at seven thirty,” she says. “I’d like you to be home to set the table.”

“I’ll be home,” I say. It occurs to me that this numbness, this feeling of separation, must be what she and every cured experiences all the time: as though there is a thick, muffling pane of glass between you and everybody else. Hardly anything penetrates. Hardly anything matters. They say the cure is about happiness, but I understand now that it isn’t, and it never was. It’s about fear: fear of pain, fear of hurt, fear, fear, fear—a blind animal existence, bumping between walls, shuffling between ever-narrowing hallways, terrified and dull and stupid.

For the first time in my life I actually feel sorry for Carol. I’m only seventeen years old, and I already know something she doesn’t know: I know that life isn’t life if you just float through it. I know that the whole point—the only point—is to find the things that matter, and hold on to them, and fight for them, and refuse to let them go.

“Okay.” Carol stands there, kind of awkwardly, like she always does when she wants to say something meaningful but can’t quite remember how to do it. “Two weeks until your cure,” she says finally.

“Sixteen days,” I say, but in my head I’m counting: Seven days. Seven days until I’m free, and away from all these people and their sliding, superficial lives, brushing past one another, gliding, gliding, gliding, from life to death. For them, there’s hardly a change between the two.

“It’s okay to be nervous,” she says. This is the difficult thing she has been trying to say, the words of comfort it has cost her so much effort to remember. Poor Aunt Carol: a life of dishes and dented cans of green beans and days that bleed forever into one another. It occurs to me, then, how old she looks. Her face is deeply lined, and her hair has patches of gray. It’s only her eyes that have convinced me she is ageless: those staring, filmy eyes that all cureds share, as though they’re always looking off into some vast distance. She must have been pretty when she was young, before she was cured—as tall as my mother at least, and probably just as thin—and a mental image flashes of two teenage girls, both slender black parentheses separated by a span of silver ocean, kicking water at each other, laughing. These are the things you do not give up.

“Oh, I’m not nervous,” I tell her. “Trust me. I can’t wait.”

Only seven more days.

Chapter Twenty-Four

What is beauty? Beauty is no more than a trick; a delusion; the influence of
excited particles and electrons colliding in your eyes, jostling in your brain
like a bunch of overeager schoolchildren, about to be released on break. Will
you let yourself be deluded? Will you let yourself be deceived?

—“On Beauty and Falsehood,”
The New Philosophy
, by Ellen Dorpshire

H
ana’s already there when I arrive, leaning up against the chain-link fence that encircles the track, head tilted back and eyes closed against the sun. Her hair is loose and spilling down her back, nearly white in the sun. I pause when I’m fifteen feet away from her, wishing I could memorize her exactly like that, hold that precise image in my mind forever.

Then she opens her eyes and sees me. “We haven’t even started to run yet,” she says, pushing off the fence and making a big show of checking her watch, “and you’re already coming in second.”

“Is that a challenge?” I say, closing the last ten feet between us.

“Just a fact,” she says, grinning. Her smile flickers a little as I get closer. “You look different.”

“I’m tired,” I say. It feels strange to greet each other with no hug or anything, even though this is how things have always been between us, how things have always
had
to be. It feels strange that I’ve never told her how much she means to me. “Long day.”

“You want to talk about it?” She squints at me. The summer has made her tan. The sun-freckles on her nose bunch up like a constellation of stars collapsing. I really think she might be the most beautiful girl in Portland, maybe in the whole world, and I feel a sharp pain behind my ribs, thinking of how she’ll grow older and forget me. Someday she’ll hardly think of all the time we spent together—when she does, it will seem distant and faintly ridiculous, like the memory of a dream whose details have already started to ebb away.

“After we run, maybe,” I say, the only thing I can
think
to say. You have to go forward: It’s the only way. You have to go forward no matter what happens. This is the universal law.

“After you eat dirt, you mean,” she says, bending forward to stretch out her hamstrings.

“You talk a big game for someone who’s been lying on her ass all summer.”

“You’re one to talk.” She tilts her head up to wink at me. “I don’t think what you and Alex have been doing really counts as exercise.”

“Shhh.”

“Relax, relax. No one’s around. I checked.”

It all seems so normal—so deliciously, wonderfully
normal—that I’m filled from head to toe with a joy that makes me dizzy. The streets are striped with golden sun and shadow, and the air smells like salt and the odor of frying things and, faintly, seaweed washed up onto the beaches. I want to hold this moment inside of me forever, keep it safe, like a shadow-heart: my old life, my secret.

“Tag,” I say to Hana, giving her a tap on the shoulder. “You’re it.”

And then I’m off and she’s yelping and leaping to catch up, and we’re rounding the track and heading down to the piers without hesitating or debating our route. My legs feel strong, steady; the bite I got on the night of the raids has healed well and completely, leaving just a thin red mark along the back of my calf, like a smile. The cool air pumps in and out of my lungs, aching, but it’s the good kind of pain: the pain that reminds you how amazing it is to breathe, to ache, to be able to feel at all. Salt stings my eyes and I blink rapidly, not sure whether I’m sweating or crying.

It’s not the fastest run we’ve ever been on, but I think it might be one of our best. We keep up the same exact rhythm, running almost shoulder to shoulder, drawing a loop from the old harbor all the way out to Eastern Prom.

We’re slower than we were at the start of the summer, that’s for sure. At about the three-mile mark both of us are starting to lag, and by silent agreement we both cut down the sloping lawn onto the beach, flinging ourselves onto the sand, starting to laugh.

“Two minutes,” Hana says, gasping. “I just need two minutes.”

“Pathetic,” I say, even though I’m just as grateful for the pause.

“Right back at you,” she says, lobbing a handful of sand in my direction. Both of us flop onto our backs, arms and legs flung apart like we’re about to make snow angels. The sand is surprisingly cool on my skin, and a little damp. It must have rained earlier after all, maybe when Alex and I were in the Crypts. Thinking again of that tiny cell and the words drilled straight through the wall, sun revolving through the
O
as though beamed through a telescope, makes that thing constrict in my chest again. Even now, this second, my mother is out there somewhere—moving, breathing, being.

Well, soon I’ll be out there too.

There are only a few people on the beach, mostly families walking, and one old man, plodding slowly by the water, staking his cane into the sand. The sun is sinking farther beyond the clouds, and the bay is a hard gray, just barely tinged with green.

“I can’t believe in only a few weeks we won’t have to worry about curfew anymore,” Hana says, then swivels her head to look at me. “Less than three weeks, for you. Sixteen days, right?”

“Yeah.” I don’t like to lie to Hana so I sit up, wrapping my arms around my knees.

“I think on my first night cured I’m going to stay out all night. Just because I can.” Hana props herself up on her elbows. “We can make a plan to do it together—you and me.” There’s a pleading note in her voice. I know I should just say,
Yeah, sure
, or
That sounds great
. I know it would make her feel better—it would make me feel better—to pretend that life will go on as usual.

But I can’t force the words out. Instead I start blotting bits of sand from my thighs with a thumb. “Listen, Hana. I have to tell you something. About the procedure . . .”

“What about it?” She squints at me. She’s heard some note of seriousness in my voice, and it has worried her.

“Promise you won’t be mad, okay? I won’t be able to—” I stop myself before I can say,
I won’t be able to leave if you’re mad at me
. I’m getting ahead of myself.

Hana sits up completely, holding up a hand, forcing a laugh. “Let me guess. You’re jumping ship with Alex, making a run for it, going all rogue and Invalid on me.” She says it jokingly but there’s an edge to her voice, an undercurrent of neediness. She wants me to contradict her.

I don’t say anything, though. For a minute we just stare at each other, and all the light and energy drains from her face at once.

“You’re not serious,” she says finally. “You can’t be serious.”

“I have to, Hana,” I tell her quietly.

“When?” She bites her lip and looks away.

“We decided today. This morning.”

“No. I mean—
when
. When are you going?”

I hesitate for only a second. After this morning, I feel like I don’t know very much about the world or anything in it. But I do know that Hana would never, ever betray me—not now, at least, not until they stick needles into her brain and pick her apart, tease her into pieces. I realize now that that’s what the cure does, after all: It fractures people, cuts them off from themselves.

But by then—by the time they get to her—it will be too late. “Friday,” I say. “A week from now.”

She breathes out sharply, the air whistling between her teeth. “You can’t be serious,” she repeats.

“There’s nothing for me here,” I say.

She looks back at me then. Her eyes are enormous, and I can tell I’ve hurt her. “
I’m
here.”

Suddenly the solution comes to me—simple, ridiculously simple. I almost laugh out loud. “Come with us,” I burst out. Hana scans the beach anxiously, but everyone has dispersed: The old man has plodded on, halfway down the beach by now and out of earshot. “I’m serious, Hana. You could come with us. You’d love it in the Wilds. It’s incredible. There are whole settlements there—”

“You’ve been?” she cuts in sharply.

I blush, realizing I’d never told her about my night with Alex in the Wilds. I know she’ll see this, too, as a betrayal. I used to tell her everything. “Just once,” I say. “And only for a couple of hours. It’s amazing, Hana. It’s not like we imagined it at all. And the crossing . . . The fact that you can cross at all . . . So much is different from what we’ve been told. They’ve been
lying
to us, Hana.”

I stop, temporarily overwhelmed. Hana looks down, picking at the seam of her running shorts.

“We could do it,” I say, more gently. “The three of us together.”

For a long time Hana doesn’t say anything. She looks out at the ocean, squinting. Finally she shakes her head, an almost imperceptible movement, shooting me a sad smile. “I’ll miss you, Lena,” she says, and my heart sinks.

“Hana—” I start to say, but she cuts me off.

“Or maybe I won’t miss you.” She heaves herself to her feet, slapping the sand off her shorts. “That’s one of the promises of the cure, right? No pain. Not that kind of pain, anyway.”

“You don’t have to go through with it.” I scramble to my feet. “Come to the Wilds.”

She lets out a hollow laugh. “And leave all this behind?” She gestures around her. I can tell she’s half joking, but only half. In the end, despite all her talk, and the underground parties and forbidden music, Hana doesn’t want to give up this life, this place: the only home we’ve ever known. Of course, she
has
a life here: family, a future, a good match. I have nothing.

The corners of Hana’s mouth are trembling and she drops her head, kicking at the sand. I want to make her feel better but can’t think of anything to say. There’s a frantic aching in my chest. It seems like as we stand there I’m watching my whole life with Hana, our entire friendship, fall away: sleepover parties with forbidden midnight bowls of popcorn; all the times we rehearsed for Evaluation Day, when Hana would steal a pair of her father’s old glasses, and bang on her desk with a ruler whenever I got an answer wrong, and we always started choking with laughter halfway through; the time she put a fist, hard, in Jillian Dawson’s face because Jillian said my blood was diseased; eating ice cream on the pier and dreaming of being paired and living in identical houses, side by side. All of it is being sucked into nothing, like sand getting swept up by a current.

“You know it’s not about you,” I say. I have to force the words out, past a lump in my throat. “You and Grace are the only people who matter to me here. Nothing else—” I break off. “Everything else is nothing.”

“I know,” she says, but she still won’t look at me.

“They—they took my mother, Hana.” I wasn’t planning to tell her, initially. I didn’t want to talk about it. But the words rush out.

She glances up at me sharply. “What are you talking about?”

I tell her the story of the Crypts then. Amazingly, I keep it together. I just tell her about everything in detail. Ward Six and the escape, the cell, the words. Hana listens in frozen silence. I’ve never seen her so still and serious.

When I’m finished speaking, Hana’s face is white. She looks exactly like she did when we were little and used to stay up at night, trying to freak each other out by telling ghost stories. In a way, I guess my mother’s story
is
a ghost story. “I’m sorry, Lena,” she says, her voice barely a whisper. “I don’t know what else to say. I’m so sorry.”

I nod, staring out at the ocean. I wonder whether what we learned about the other parts of the world—the uncured parts—is accurate, whether they’re really as wild and ravaged and savage and full of pain as everyone has always said. I’m pretty sure this, too, is a lie. Easier, in many ways, to imagine a place like Portland—a place with its own walls and barriers and half-truths, a place where love still flickers into existence but imperfectly.

“You see why I have to leave,” I say. It’s not really a question, but she nods.

“Yeah.” Hana gives her shoulders a tiny shake, as though trying to rouse herself from a dream. Then she turns to me. Even though her eyes are sad, she manages a smile. “You, Lena Haloway,” she says, “are a legend.”

“Yeah, right.” I roll my eyes. But I feel better. She has called me by my mother’s name, so I know she understands. “A cautionary tale, maybe.”

“I’m serious.” She brushes her hair out of her face, staring at me intently. “I was wrong, you know. Remember what I said at the beginning of the summer? I thought you were afraid. I thought you were too scared to take any chances.” The sad smile tugs at her lips again. “Turns out you’re braver than I am.”

“Hana—”

“That’s okay.” She waves a hand, cutting me off. “You deserve it. You deserve
more
.”

I don’t really know what to say to that. I want to hug her, but instead I wrap my arms around my waist, squeezing. The wind coming off the water is biting.

“I’ll miss you, Hana,” I say after a minute.

She walks a couple of steps toward the water, kicks sand in an arc with the toe of her shoe. It seems to hang in the air for a fraction of a second before scattering. “Well, you know where I’ll be.”

We stand there for a while, listening to the tide sucking on the shore, the water heaving and tumbling with bits of rock: stone whittled to sand over thousands and thousands of years. Someday maybe this will all be water. Someday maybe it will all get sucked into dust.

Then Hana spins around and says, “Come on. Race you back to the track,” and takes off, running, before I can say,
Okay
.

“No fair!” I call after her. But I don’t try very hard to catch up. I let her stay a few feet ahead of me and try to memorize her exactly as she is: running, laughing, tan and happy and beautiful and mine; blond hair flashing in the last rays of sun like a torch, like a beacon of good things to come, and better days ahead for us both.

Love, the deadliest of all deadly things: It kills you both when you have it and when you don’t.

But that isn’t it, exactly.

The condemner and the condemned. The executioner; the blade; the last-minute reprieve; the gasping breath and the rolling sky above you and the
thank you, thank you, thank you, God
.