Delirium: The Complete Collection (8 page)

Then another thought nearly stops me, hitting me straight like a fist: He won’t be there. I’ll be too late and he’ll leave. Or this will turn out to be a big joke, or a trick.

I wrap one arm around my stomach, willing the ravioli to stay put, and pick up speed again.

I’m so busy circling one foot after the other—left, right, left, right—and doing a mental tug-of-war with my digestive tract, that I don’t hear the regulators coming.

I’m about to speed through the long-defunct traffic light at Baxter when I am suddenly dazzled by a wall of zipping, bouncing light: the beams of a dozen flashlights directed into my eyes, so I have to skid abruptly to a halt, lifting a hand to my face and nearly flipping over the handlebars—which would be a real disaster, since in my rush to get out of the house I forgot to bring my helmet.

“Stop,” the voice of one of the regulators barks out—the leader in charge of the patrol, I guess. “Identity check.”

Groups of regulators—both volunteer citizens and the actual regulators employed by the government—patrol the streets every night, looking for uncureds breaking curfew, checking the streets and (if the curtains are open) houses for unapproved activity, like two uncureds touching each other, or walking together after dark—or even two cureds engaging in “activity that might signal the re-emergence of the
deliria
after the procedure,” like too much hugging and kissing. This rarely happens, but it
does
happen.

Regulators report directly to the government and work closely with the scientists at the labs. Regulators were responsible for sending my mother off for her third procedure; a passing patrol saw her crying over a photograph one night right after her second failed treatment. She was looking at a picture of my father, and she’d forgotten to close the curtains all the way. Within days, she was back at the labs.

Normally it’s easy to avoid the regulators. You can practically hear them from a mile away. They carry walkie-talkies to coordinate with other patrolling groups, and the static interference of the radios going on and off makes it sound like a giant buzzing den of hornets is heading your way. I just wasn’t paying attention. Mentally cursing myself for being so stupid, I fish my wallet out of my back pocket. At least I remembered to grab
that
. It’s illegal to go without ID in Portland. The last thing anybody wants is to spend the night in jail while the powers that be try to verify your validity.

“Magdalena Ella Haloway,” I say, trying to keep my voice steady, as I pass my ID to the regulator in charge. I can hardly make him out behind his flashlight, which he keeps trained on my face, forcing me to squint. He’s big; that’s all I know. Tall, thin, angular.

“Magdalena Ella Haloway,” he repeats. He flips my ID over between his long fingers and looks at my identity code, a number assigned to every citizen of the USA. The first three digits identify your state, the next three your city, the next three your family group, the next four your identity. “And what are you doing, Magdalena? Curfew’s in less than forty minutes.”

Less than forty minutes. That must mean it’s almost eight thirty. I shift on my feet, trying hard not to betray impatience. A lot of the regulators—especially the volunteer ones—are poorly paid city techs: window washers or gas-meter readers or security guards.

I take a deep breath and say as innocently as possible, “I wanted to take a quick ride down to Back Cove.” I do my best to smile and look kind of stupid. “I was feeling bloaty after dinner.” No point in lying any more than that. I’ll just get myself in trouble.

The lead regulator continues to examine me, the flashlight directed glaringly at my face, my ID card in his hand. For a second he seems to waver, and I’m sure he’s going to let me go, but then he passes my ID to another regulator. “Run it through with SVS, will you? Make sure it’s valid.”

My heart plummets. SVS is the Secure Validation System, a computer network where all the valid citizenships, for every single person in the entire country, are stored. It can take twenty to thirty minutes for the computer system to match codes, depending on how many other people are calling into the system. He can’t really think I’ve forged an identity card, but he’s going to waste my time while someone checks.

And then, miraculously, a voice pipes up from the back of the group. “She’s valid, Gerry. I recognize her. She comes into the store. Lives at 172 Cumberland.”

Gerry swings around, lowering his flashlight in the process. I blink away the floating dots in my vision. I recognize a few faces vaguely—a woman who works in the local dry cleaners and spends her afternoons leaning in the doorway, chewing gum and occasionally spitting out into the street; the traffic officer who works downtown near Franklin Arterial, one of the few areas of Portland that has enough car traffic to justify one; one of the guys who collects our garbage—and there, in the back, Dev Howard, who owns the Quikmart down the street from my house.

Normally my uncle brings home most of our groceries—canned goods and pasta and sliced meats, for the most part—from his combo deli and convenience store, Stop-N-Save, all the way over on Munjoy Hill, but occasionally, if we’re desperate for toilet paper or milk, I’ll run out to the Quikmart. Mr. Howard has always creeped me out. He’s super-skinny and has hooded black eyes that remind me of a rat’s. But tonight I feel like I could hug him. I didn’t even think he knew my name. He’s never said a word to me except, “Will that be all today?” after he has rung up my purchases, glowering at me from underneath the heavy shade of his eyelids. I make a mental note to thank him the next time I see him.

Gerry hesitates for a fraction of a second longer, but I can see that the other regulators are starting to get restless, shifting from foot to foot, eager to continue the patrol and find someone to bust.

Gerry must sense it too, because he jerks his head abruptly in my direction. “Let her have the ID.”

Relief makes me feel like laughing, and I have to struggle to look serious as I take my ID and tuck it into place. My hands are shaking ever so slightly. It’s strange how being around the regulators will do that to you. Even when they’re being relatively nice, you can’t help but think of all the bad stories you’ve heard—the raids and the beatings and the ambushes.

“Just be careful, Magdalena,” Gerry says, as I straighten up. “Make sure you’re home before curfew.” He tilts his flashlight into my eyes again. I lift my arm to my eyes, squinting against the dazzle. “You wouldn’t want to get into any trouble.”

He says it lightly, but for a moment I think I hear something hard running under his words, a current of anger or aggression. But then I tell myself I’m just being paranoid. No matter what the regulators do, they exist for our protection, for our own good.

The regulators sweep away in a group around me, so for a few seconds I’m caught up in a tide of rough shoulders and cotton jackets, unfamiliar cologne and sweat-smells. Walkie-talkies sputter to life and fade away again around me. I catch snippets of words and broadcasts:
Market Street, a girl and a boy, possibly infected, unapproved music on St. Lawrence, someone appears to be dancing . . .
I get bumped side to side against arms and chests and elbows, until finally the group passes and I’m spit out again, left alone on the street as the regulators’ footsteps grow more distant behind me. I wait until I can no longer hear the fuzz of their radio chatter or their boots hitting the pavement.

Then I take off, feeling again a lifting sensation in my chest, that same sense of happiness and freedom. I can’t believe how easy it was to get out of the house. I never knew I could lie to my aunt—I never knew I could lie, period—and when I think about how narrowly I escaped getting grilled by the regulators for hours, it makes me want to jump up and down and pump my fist in the air. Tonight the whole world is on my side. And I’m only a few minutes from Back Cove. My heart picks up its rhythm as I think about skidding down the sloping hill of grass, seeing Alex framed against the last, dazzling rays of sun—as I think about that single word breathed into my ear.
Gray
.

I tear down Baxter, which loops around the last mile down to Back Cove. And then I stop short. The buildings have fallen away behind me, giving way to ramshackle sheds, sparsely situated on either side of the cracked and run-down road. Beyond that, a short strip of tall, weedy grass slants down toward the cove. The water is an enormous mirror, tipped with pink and gold from the sky. In that single, blazing moment as I come around the bend, the sun—curved over the dip of the horizon like a solid gold archway—lets out its final winking rays of light, shattering the darkness of the water, turning everything white for a fraction of a second, and then falls away, sinking, dragging the pink and the red and the purple out of the sky with it, all the color bleeding away instantly and leaving only dark.

Alex was right. It was gorgeous—one of the best I’ve ever seen.

For a moment I can’t move or do anything but stand there, breathing hard, staring. Then a numbness creeps over me. I’m too late. The regulators must have been wrong about the time. It must be after eight thirty now. Even if Alex decides to wait for me somewhere along the long loop of the cove, I don’t have a prayer of finding him and making it home before curfew.

My eyes sting and the world in front of me goes watery, colors and shapes sloshing together. For a second I think I must be crying, and I’m so startled I forget everything—forget about my disappointment and frustration, forget about Alex standing on the beach, the thought of his hair catching the dying rays of sun, flashing copper. I can’t remember the last time I cried. It’s been years. I wipe my eyes with the back of my hand, and my vision sharpens again. It’s just sweat, I realize, relieved; I’m sweating, it’s getting in my eyes. Still, the sick, leaden feeling won’t work its way out of my stomach.

I stay there for a few minutes, straddling my bike, squeezing the handlebars hard until I’m a little bit calmer. Part of me wants to say, screw it, to shove off, both legs extended, and go flying down the hill toward the water with the wind whipping up my hair—screw curfew, screw the regulators, screw everyone. But I can’t; I couldn’t; I could never. I have no choice. I have to get home.

I maneuver my bike around in a clumsy circle and start back up the street. Now that the adrenaline and excitement have faded, my legs feel like they’re made out of iron, and I’m panting before I’ve gone a quarter of a mile. This time I’m careful to stay alert for regulators and police and patrols.

On the way home I tell myself that it’s probably for the best. I must be crazy, zooming around in the half dark just to meet up with some guy on the beach. Besides, everything has been explained: He works at the labs, probably just snuck in on evaluation day for some completely innocent reason—to use the bathroom, or refill his water bottle.

And I remind myself that I probably imagined the whole thing—the message, the meeting up. He’s probably sitting in his apartment somewhere, doing course work for his classes. He’s probably already forgotten about the two girls he met at the lab complex today. He was probably just being nice earlier, making casual conversation.

It’s for the best.
But no matter how many times I repeat it, the strange, hollow feeling in my stomach doesn’t go away. And ridiculous as it is, I can’t shake the persistent, needling feeling that I’ve forgotten something, or missed something, or lost something forever.

Chapter Seven

I
was named after Mary Magdalene, who was nearly killed from love: “So infected with
deliria
and in violation of the pacts of society, she fell in love with men who would not have her or could not keep her.” (Book of Lamentations, Mary 13:1).

We learned all about it in Biblical Science. First there was John, then Matthew, then Jeremiah and Peter and Judas, and many other nameless men in-between.

Her last love, they say, was the greatest: a man named Joseph, a bachelor all his life, who found her on the street, bruised and broken and half-crazy from
deliria.
There’s some debate about what kind of man Joseph was—whether he was righteous or not, whether he ever succumbed to the disease—but in any case, he took good care of her. He nursed her to health and tried to bring her peace.

By this time, however, it was too late. She was tormented by her past, haunted by the loves lost and damaged and ruined, by the evils she had inflicted on others and that others had inflicted on her. She could hardly eat; she wept all day; she clung to Joseph and begged him never to leave her, but couldn’t find comfort in his goodness.

And then one morning, she woke and Joseph was gone—without a word or an explanation. This final abandonment broke her at last and she fell to the ground, begging God to put her out of her misery.

He heard her prayers, and in his infinite compassion he instead removed from her the curse of
deliria
, with which all humans had been burdened as punishment for the original sin of Eve and Adam. In a sense, Mary Magdalene was the very first cured.

“And so after years of tribulation and pain, she walked in righteousness and peace until the end of her days” (Book of Lamentations, Mary 13:1).

I always thought it was strange that my mother named me Magdalena. She didn’t even believe in the cure. That was her whole problem. And the Book of Lamentations is all about the dangers of
deliria
. I’ve done a lot of thinking about it, and in the end I guess I’ve figured out that despite everything, my mother knew that she was wrong: that the cure, and the procedure, were for the best. I think even then she knew what she was going to do—she knew what would happen. I guess my name was her final gift to me, in a way. It was a message.

I think she was trying to say,
Forgive me
. I think she was trying to say,
Someday, even this pain will be taken away
.

You see? No matter what everyone says, and despite everything, I know she wasn’t all bad.

The next two weeks are the busiest of my life. Summer explodes into Portland. In early June the heat was there but not the color—the greens were still pale and tentative, the mornings had a biting coolness—but by the last week of school everything is Technicolor and splash, outrageous blue skies and purple thunderstorms and ink-black night skies and red flowers as bright as spots of blood. Every day after school there’s an assembly, or ceremony, or graduation party to go to. Hana gets invited to all of them; I get invited to most, which surprises me.

Harlowe Davis—who lives with Hana in the West End, and whose father does something for the government—invites me to come over for a “casual good-bye thing.” I didn’t even think she knew my name—whenever she’s talking to Hana her eyes have always skated past me, like I’m not worth focusing on. I go anyway. I’ve always been curious about her house, and it turns out to be as spectacular as I imagined. Her family has a car, too, and electric appliances everywhere that obviously get used every day, washers and dryers and huge chandeliers filled with dozens and dozens of lightbulbs. Harlowe has invited most of the graduating class—there are sixty-seven of us in total and probably fifty at the party—which makes me feel less special, but it’s still fun. We sit in the backyard while the housekeeper runs in and out of the house with plates and plates of food—coleslaw and potato salad and other barbecue stuff—and her father turns out spare ribs and hamburgers on the enormous smoking grill. I eat until I feel like I’m about to burst and have to roll backward onto the blanket I’m sharing with Hana. We stay there until almost curfew, when the stars are peeking through a curtain of dark blue and the mosquitoes rise up all at once and we all go shrieking and laughing back into the house, slapping them away. Afterward I think it’s one of the nicest days I’ve had in a long time.

Even girls I don’t really like—like Shelly Pierson, who has hated me since sixth grade, when I won the science fair and she took second place—start being nice. I guess it’s because we all know the end is close. Most of us won’t see one another after graduation, and even if we do it will be different.
We’ll
be different. We’ll be adults—cured, tagged and labeled and paired and identified and placed neatly on our life path, perfectly round marbles set to roll down even, well-defined slopes.

Theresa Grass turns eighteen before school ends and gets cured; so does Morgan Dell. They’re absent for a few days and come back to school just before graduation. The change is amazing. They seem peaceful now, mature and somehow remote, like they’re encased in a thin layer of ice. Only two weeks ago Theresa’s nickname was Theresa Gross, and everyone made fun of her for slouching and chewing on the ends of her hair and generally being a mess, but now she walks straight and tall with her eyes fixed straight in front of her, her lips barely curled in a smile, and everyone shifts a little in the halls so she can pass easily. Same thing goes for Morgan. It’s like all their anxiety and self-consciousness has been removed along with the disease. Even Morgan’s legs have stopped trembling. Whenever she used to have to speak in class, the trembling would get so bad it would rock the desk. But after the procedure, just like that—
whoosh!
The shaking stops. Of course they’re not the first girls in our class to get cured—Eleanor Rana and Annie Hahn were both cured way back in the fall, and half a dozen other girls have had the procedure this past semester—but in them the difference is somehow more pronounced.

I keep going with my countdown. Eighty-one days, then eighty, then seventy-nine.

Willow Marks never comes back to school. Rumors filter back to us—that she had her procedure and it turned out fine; that she had her procedure and now her brain is going haywire, and they’re talking about committing her to the Crypts, Portland’s combo prison-and-mental-ward; that she ran away to the Wilds. Only one thing is for sure: The whole Marks family is under constant surveillance now. The regulators are blaming Mr. and Mrs. Marks—and the whole extended
family—for not instilling in her a proper education, and only a few days after she was supposedly found in Deering Oaks Park, I overhear my aunt and uncle whispering that both of Willow’s parents have been fired from their jobs. A week later we hear that they’ve had to move in with a distant relative. Apparently people kept throwing rocks at their windows, and a whole side of their house was written over with a single word:
SYMPATHIZERS
. It makes no sense, because Mr. and Mrs. Marks were on record insisting that their daughter have the procedure early, despite the risks, but as my aunt says, people get like that when they’re scared. Everyone is terrified that the
deliria
will somehow find its way into Portland on a large scale. Everyone wants to prevent an epidemic.

I feel bad for the Marks family, of course, but that’s the way things are. It’s like the regulators: You may not like the patrols and the identity checks, but since you know it’s all done for your protection, it’s impossible
not
to cooperate. And it may sound awful, but I don’t think about Willow’s family for long. There’s just too much end-of-high-school paperwork to file, and nervous energy, and lockers to clean out and final exams to take and people to say good-bye to.

Hana and I can barely find time to run together. When we do, we stick to our old routes by silent agreement. She never mentions the afternoon at the labs again, to my surprise. But Hana’s mind has a tendency to skip around, and her new obsession is a collapse at the northern end of the border that people are saying might have been caused by Invalids. I don’t even consider going down to the labs again, not for one single solitary second. I focus on everything and anything besides my lingering questions about Alex—which isn’t too hard, considering that I now can’t believe I spent an evening biking up and down the streets of Portland, lying to Carol and the regulators, just to meet up with him. The very next day it felt like a dream, or a delusion. I tell myself I must have gone temporarily insane: brain scramble, from running in the heat.

On graduation day Hana sits three rows ahead of me at the commencement ceremony. As she files past me to take her seat she reaches out for my hand—two long pumps, two short ones—and when she sits down she tilts her head back so I can see that she has taken a marker and scrawled on the top of her graduation cap:
THANK GOD!
I stifle a laugh, and she turns around and makes a pretend-stern face at me. All of us are giddy, and I’ve never felt closer to the St. Anne’s girls than that day—all of us sweating under the sun, which beams down on us like an exaggerated smile, fanning ourselves with the commencement brochures, trying not to yawn or roll our eyes while Principal McIntosh drones on about “adulthood” and “our entrance into the community order,” nudging one another and tugging on the collars of our scratchy graduation gowns to try to let some air down our necks.

Family members sit in white plastic folding chairs, under a cream white tarp fluttering with flags: the school flag, the city flag, the state flag, the American flag. They applaud politely as each graduate goes up to receive her diploma. When it’s my turn I scan the audience, looking for my aunt and my sister, but I’m so nervous about tripping and falling as I take my place on the stage and reach for the diploma in Principal McIntosh’s hand, I can’t see anything but color—green, blue, white, a mess of pink and brown faces—or make out any individual sounds beyond the
shush
of clapping hands. Only Hana’s voice, loud and clear as a bell: “Hallelujah, Halena!” That’s our special pump-you-up chant that we used to do before track meets and tests, a combination of both of our names.

Afterward we line up to take individual portraits with our diplomas. An official photographer has been hired, and a royal blue backdrop set up in the middle of the soccer field, where we all stand and pose. We’re too excited to take the pictures seriously, though. People keep doubling over laughing in their pictures, so all you can see is the crown of their heads.

When it’s my turn for a picture, at the very last second Hana jumps in and throws one arm around my shoulders, and the photographer is so startled he presses down on the shutter anyway.
Click!
There we are: I’m turning to Hana, mouth open, surprised, about to laugh. She’s a full head taller than me, has her eyes shut and her mouth open. I really do think there was something special about that day, something golden and maybe even magic, because even though my face was all red and my hair looked sticky on my forehead, it’s like Hana rubbed off on me a little bit—because despite everything, and just in that one picture, I look pretty. More than pretty. Beautiful, even.

The school band keeps playing, mostly in tune, and the music floats across the field and is echoed by the birds wheeling in the sky. It’s like something lifts in that moment, some huge pressure or divide, and before I know what’s happening all my classmates are crushing together in a huge hug, jumping up and down and screaming, “We did it! We did it! We did it!” And none of the parents or teachers try to separate us. As we start to break away I see them encircling us, watching with patient expressions, hands folded. I catch my aunt’s gaze and my stomach does a weird twist and I know that she, like everyone else, is giving us this moment—our last moment together, before things change for good and forever.

And things will change—
are
changing, even at that second. As the group dissolves into clumps of students, and the clumps dissolve into individuals, I notice Theresa Grass and Morgan Dell already starting across the lawn toward the street. They are each walking with their families, heads down, without once
looking back. They haven’t been celebrating with us, I realize, and it occurs to me I haven’t seen Eleanor Rana or Annie Hahn or the other cureds either. They must have already gone home. A curious ache throbs in the back of my throat, even though of course this is how things are: Everything ends, people move on, they don’t look back. It’s how they
should
be.

I catch sight of Rachel through the crowd and go running up to her, suddenly eager to be next to her, wishing she would reach down and ruffle my hair like she used to when I was very little, and say, “Good job, Loony,” her old nickname for me.

“Rachel!” I’m breathless for no reason, and I have trouble squeezing the words out. I’m so happy to see her I feel like I could burst into tears. I don’t though, obviously. “You came.”

“Of course I came.” She smiles at me. “You’re my only sister, remember?” She passes me a bouquet of daisies she has brought with her, loosely wrapped in brown paper. “Congratulations, Lena.”

I stick my face in the flowers and inhale, trying to fight down the urge to reach out and hug her. For a second we just stand there, blinking at each other, and then she reaches out to me. I’m sure she’s going to put her arms around me for old times’ sake, or at the very least give me a one-armed squeeze.