pandemonium 3 страница

I can barely breathe as Sarah and I make our way slowly through the grass, which is damp and almost knee-high in places. It is a ruined-world, a nonsense-place. Doors that open nowhere; a rusted truck, wheel-less, sitting in the middle of a stretch of pale green grass, with a tree growing straight through its center; bits of glittering, twisted metal everywhere, melted and bent into unrecognizable shapes.

Sarah walks next to me, practically skipping, excitement bubbling out of her now that we’re outside. She easily dodges the stones and the metal detritus littering the grass, while I have to keep my eyes constantly on the ground. It is slow going, and tiring.

“This used to be a town, ” Sarah says. “This was probably the main street. The trees are still young in a lot of places around here, but there aren’t hardly any buildings left at all. That’s how you know where the houses were. Wood burns a lot easier. Obviously. ” She drops her voice to a hush, eyes growing wide. “It wasn’t even the bombs that did the worst damage, you know. It was the fires that came after. ”

I manage to nod.

“This was a school. ” She gestures to another enormous area of low growth, roughly the shape of a rectangle. The trees around its perimeter are marked from the fire: seared white, and practically leafless, they remind me of tall, spindly ghosts. “Some of the lockers were just sitting there, hanging open. Some of them had clothes in them and stuff. ” She looks momentarily guilty, and then it hits me—the clothing in the storage room, the pants and shirt I am wearing—all of those clothes must have come from somewhere, must have been scavenged.

“Stop for a second. ” I’m feeling out of breath, and so we stand for a moment in front of the old school while I rest. We’re in a patch of sunshine, and I’m grateful for the warmth. Birds twitter and zip overhead, small, quick shadows against the sky. Distantly I can make out sounds of good-natured shouting and laughter, Invalids tromping through the woods. The air is full of whirling, floating golden-green leaves.

A squirrel sits back on its haunches, working a nut quickly between its paws, on the top step of what must have been an entrance to the school. Now the stairs run aground, into soft earth and a covering of wildflowers. I think of all the feet that must have stepped right there, where the squirrel is. I think of all the small, warm hands spinning out locker combinations, all the voices, the rush and patter of movement. I think of what it must have been like during the blitz—the panic, the screaming, the running, the fire.

In school we always learned that the blitz, the cleansing, was quick. We saw footage of pilots waving from their cockpits as bombs dropped on a distant carpet of green, trees so small they looked like toys, narrow plumes of smoke rising, featherlike, from the growth. No mess, no pain, no sounds of screaming. Just a whole population—the people who had resisted and stayed, who refused to move into the approved and bordered places, the nonbelievers and the contaminated—deleted all at once, quick as the stroke of a keyboard, turned into a dream.

But of course it wouldn’t really have been like that. It couldn’t have been. The lockers were still full: of course. The children wouldn’t have had time to do anything but fight and claw for the exits.

Some of them—very few—may have escaped and made their home in the Wilds, but most of them died. Our teachers told us the truth, at least, about that. I close my eyes, feel myself swaying on my feet.

“Are you okay? ” Sarah asks. She puts her hand on my back. “We can turn around. ”

“I’m okay. ” I open my eyes. We’ve only gone a few hundred feet. Most of the old main street still stretches in front of us, and I’m determined to see all of it.

We walk even slower now, as Sarah points out the empty spaces and broken foundations where buildings must once have existed: a restaurant (“a pizza restaurant—that’s where we got the stove”); a deli (“you can still see the sign—see? Kind of buried over there? ‘Sandwiches made to order’”); a grocery store.

The grocery store seems to depress Sarah. Here the ground is churned up, the grass even newer than everywhere else; the site of years and years of digging. “For a long time we kept finding things to eat, buried all around here. Cans of food, you know, and even some packaged stuff that made it through the fires. ” She sighs, looks wistful. “It’s all gone now, though. ”

We walk on. Another restaurant, marked by an enormous metal counter, and two metal-backed chairs sitting side by side in a solid square of sunlight; a hardware store (“saved our lives plenty of times”). Next to the hardware store is an old bank: here, too, there are stairs that disappear into the earth, a yawning mouth cut into the ground. The dark-haired boy—the glarer—is just emerging into the sunshine. He has a rifle slung casually over one shoulder.

“Hey, Tack, ” Sarah says shyly.

He ruffles her hair as he passes. “Boys only, ” he says. “You know that. ”

“I know, I know. ” She rolls her eyes. “I’m just showing Lena around. That’s where the boys sleep, ” Sarah explains to me.

So even the Invalids have not entirely done away with segregation. This small piece of normalcy—of familiarity—is a relief.

Tack’s eyes click to me, and he frowns.

“Hi. ” My voice comes out as a squeak. I try, unsuccessfully, to smile. He’s very tall and, like everyone else in the Wilds, thin; but his forearms are roped with muscle, and his jaw is square and strong. He, too, has a procedural mark, a three-pronged scar behind his left ear. I wonder if it is a fake, like Alex’s was; or whether, perhaps, the cure didn’t work on him.

“Just stay out of the vaults. ” The words are directed at Sarah, but he keeps his eyes locked on me. They are cold, appraising.

“We will, ” Sarah says. As he stalks away, she whispers to me, “He’s like that with everyone. ”

“I can see what Raven means about the attitude problem. ”

“Don’t feel bad, though. I mean, you can’t take it personally. ”

“I won’t, ” I say, but the truth is that the brief encounter has shaken me. Everything is wrong here, upside down and inverted: the door frames that open into air, invisible structures—buildings, signposts, streets, still casting the shadow of the past over everything. I can feel them, can hear the rush of hundreds of feet, can hear old laughter running underneath the birdsong: a place built of memory and echo.

I am suddenly exhausted. We have made it only halfway down the old street, but my earlier resolution to walk the whole area now seems absurd. The brightness of the sun, the air and space around me—all of it feels disorienting. I turn around—too quickly, clumsily—and trip over a slab of limestone spattered in bird shit; for one second I am in free fall and then I’m landing, hard, facedown in the dirt.

“Lena! ” Sarah is next to me in a second, helping to pull me to my feet. I’ve bitten down on my tongue and my mouth tastes like metal. “Are you okay? ”

“Just give me a second, ” I say, gasping a little. I sit back on the limestone. Something occurs to me: I don’t even know what day it is, what month. “What’s today’s date? ” I ask Sarah.

“August twenty-seventh, ” she answers, still looking at me with her face all creased up, worried. But she’s keeping her distance.

August 27. I left Portland on August 21. I’ve lost almost a week in the Wilds, in this upside-down place.

This is not my world. My world is unfolding miles away: a world of doors that lead to rooms, and clean white walls, and the quiet hum of refrigerators; a world of carefully plotted streets, and pavement that is not full of fissures. Another pang shoots through me. In less than a month, Hana will have her procedure.

Alex was the one who understood things here. He could have built up this collapsed street for me, turned it into a place of sense and order. He was going to lead me through the wilderness. With him, I would have been okay.

“Can I get you anything? ” Sarah’s voice is uncertain.

“I’ll be all right. ” I can barely force the words out, past the pain. “It’s just the food. Not used to it. ”

I’m going to be sick again. I duck my head between my knees, coughing to force down the sob that shudders through me.

Sarah must know, though, because she says, in the quietest voice, “You get used to it after a while. ” I get the sense she’s talking about more than the breakfast.

After that there is nothing to do but make our way back: down the bombed-out road, through the shards, metal glittering in the high grass like snakes lying in wait.

Grief is like sinking, like being buried. I am in water the tawny color of kicked-up dirt. Every breath is full of choking. There is nothing to hold on to, no sides, no way to claw myself up. There is nothing to do but let go.

Let go. Feel the weight all around you, feel the squeezing of your lungs, the slow, low pressure. Let yourself go deeper. There is nothing but bottom. There is nothing but the taste of metal, and the echoes of old things, and days that look like darkness.

now

That is the girl I was then: stumbling, sinking, lost in brightness and space. My past had been wiped clean, bleached a stark and spotless white.

But you can build a future out of anything. A scrap, a flicker. The desire to go forward, slowly, one foot at a time. You can build an airy city out of ruins.

This is the girl I am right now: knees pressed together, hands on my thighs. Silk blouse pulling tight against my neck, skirt with a woolen waistband, standard issue, bearing the Quincy Edwards High School crest. It’s itchy; I wish I could scratch, but I won’t. She would take that as a sign of nerves, and I am not nervous, will never be nervous again in my life.

She blinks. I don’t. She is Mrs. Tulle, the principal, with a face like a fish pressed to glass; eyes so large they appear distorted.

“Is everything okay at home, Magdalena? ”

It’s strange to hear her use my full name. Everyone has always called me Lena.

“Fine, ” I say.

She shuffles the papers on her desk. Everything in her office is ordered, all the edges lined up correctly. Even the water glass on her desk is centered perfectly on its coaster. The cureds have always liked order: straightening, aligning, making adjustments. Cleanliness Is Next to Godliness, and Order Is Ascension. It gives them something to do, I guess—tasks to fill those long, empty hours.

“You live with your sister and her husband, is that correct? ”

I nod, repeat the story of my new life: “My mother and father were killed in one of the Incidents. ”

This, at least, is not so much of a lie. The old Lena, too, was an orphan; as good as one, anyway.

I do not have to clarify the reference to the Incidents. Everyone has heard about them by now: last fall, the resistance coordinated its first major, violent, visible strikes. In a handful of cities, members of the resistance—helped by sympathizers, and in some cases, young uncureds—caused simultaneous explosions in important municipal buildings.

In Portland, the resistance chose to explode a portion of the Crypts. In the ensuing chaos, two dozen civilians were killed. The police and regulators were able to restore order, but not before several hundred prisoners had escaped.

It’s ironic. My mother spent ten years tunneling her way out of that place, when she might have just waited another few months and strolled free.

Mrs. Tulle winces.

“Yes, I saw that in your records. ” Behind her, a humidifier whirs quietly. Still, the air is dry. Her office smells like paper and, faintly, of hairspray. A trickle of sweat rolls down my back. The skirt is hot.

“We’re concerned that you seem to be having trouble adjusting, ” she says, watching me with those fish eyes. “You’ve been eating lunch by yourself. ” It’s an accusation.

Even this new Lena feels slightly embarrassed; the only thing worse than having no friends is being pitied for having no friends. “To be honest, I’m having some trouble with the girls, ” new Lena says. “I’m finding them a little bit … immature. ” As I speak, I angle my head away slightly, so she can see the triangular scar just behind my left ear: the mark of the procedure, the mark of being cured.

Instantly, her expression softens. “Well, yes, of course. Many of them are younger than you, after all. Not yet eighteen, uncured. ”

I spread my hands as if to say, Of course.

But Mrs. Tulle isn’t done with me, although her voice has lost its edge. “Mrs. Fierstein says you fell asleep in class again. We’re worried, Lena. Do you feel the workload is too much for you? Are you having trouble sleeping at night? ”

“I have been a little stressed, ” I admit. “It’s all this DFA stuff. ”

Mrs. Tulle raises her eyebrows. “I didn’t realize you were in the DFA. ”

“Division A, ” I say. “We’re having a big rally next Friday. Actually, there’s a planning meeting this afternoon in Manhattan. I don’t want to be late. ”

“Of course, of course. I know all about the rally. ” Mrs. Tulle lifts her papers, jogs them against the desk to make sure their edges are aligned, and slides them into a drawer. I can tell I’m off the hook. The DFA is the magic word: Deliria-Free America. Open sesame. She is all kindness now. “It’s very impressive that you’re trying to balance your extracurricular involvements with your schoolwork, Lena. And we support the work the DFA is doing. Just be sure you can find a balance. I don’t want your board scores to suffer because of your social work, however important it is. ”

“I understand. ” I duck my head and look penitent. The new Lena is a good actress.

Mrs. Tulle smiles at me. “Now go on. We don’t want you to be late to your meeting. ”

I stand up, shoulder my tote bag. “Thanks. ”

She inclines her head toward the door, a signal that I can leave.

I walk through the scrubbed linoleum halls: more white walls, more quiet. All the other students have gone home by now.

Then it’s out through the double doors, into the dazzling white landscape: an unexpected March snow, hard, bright light, trees encased in thick black sheaths of ice. I pull my jacket tighter and stomp my way out of the iron gates, onto Eighth Avenue.

This is the girl I am now. My future is here, in this city, full of icicles dangling like daggers getting ready to drop.

There’s more traffic in the sister cities than I’ve ever seen in my life. Hardly anyone had working cars in Portland; in New York, people are richer and can afford the gas. When I first came to Brooklyn, I used to go to Times Square just to watch them, sometimes a dozen at a time, one right after the other.

My bus gets stuck on 31st Street behind a garbage truck that has backed into a soot-colored snowbank, and by the time I get to the Javits Center, the DFA meeting has already begun. The steps are empty, as is the enormous entrance hall, and I can hear the distant, booming feed from a microphone, applause that sounds like a roar. I hurry to the metal detector and unload my bag, then stand with arms and legs splayed while a man sweeps impassively with the wand over my breasts and between my legs. I have long since outgrown being embarrassed by these procedures. Then it’s over to the folding table set just in front of two enormous double doors; behind them, I can hear another smattering of applause, and more microphone-voice, amplified, thunderous, passionate. The words are inaudible.

“Identity card, please, ” drones the woman behind the table, a volunteer. I wait while she scans my ID; then she waves me on with a jerk of her head.

The auditorium is enormous. It must fit at least two thousand people and is, as always, almost entirely full. There are a few empty seats off to the very left, close to the stage, and I skirt the periphery of the room, trying to slip into a chair as inconspicuously as possible. I don’t have to worry. Everyone in the room is transfixed by the man behind the podium. The air is charged; I have the sense of thousands and thousands of droplets, suspended, waiting to fall.

“… is not sufficient to ensure our safety, ” the man is saying. His voice booms through the room. Under the high fluorescent lights, his hair shines a brilliant black, like a helmet. This is Thomas Fineman, the founder of the DFA. “They talk to us of risk and harm, damages and side effects. But what risk will there be to us as a people, as a society, if we do not act? If we do not insist on protecting the whole, what good is the health of a mere portion? ”

A smattering of applause. Thomas adjusts his cuffs, leans closer to the microphone. “This must be our single, unified purpose. This is the point of our demonstration. We ask that our government, our scientists, our agencies, protect us. We ask that they keep faith with their people, keep faith with God and his Order. Did God himself not reject, over thousands of years, millions of species that were faulty or flawed in some way, on his way to a perfect creation? Do we not learn that it is sometimes necessary to purge the weak, and the diseased, in order to evolve to a better society? ”

The applause swells, cresting. I clap as well. Lena Morgan Jones claps.

This is my mission, the job that I have been given by Raven: Watch the DFA. Observe. Blend.

They have told me nothing else.

“Finally, we ask the government to stand behind the promise of The Book of Shhh: to ensure the Safety, Health, and Happiness of our cities and our people. ”

I observe:

Rows of high lights.

Rows of half-moon faces, pale, bloated, fearful, and grateful—the faces of the cured.

Gray carpet, rubbed bare by the pressure of so many feet.

A fat man to my right, wheezing, pants belted high over his paunch.

A small area cordoned off next to the stage, three chairs, only one of them occupied.

A boy.

Of all the things I see, the boy is the most interesting. The other things—the carpet, the faces—are the same at every meeting of the DFA. Even the fat man. Sometimes he is fat, sometimes he is thin, sometimes it is a woman instead. But it is all the same—they are always all the same.

The boy’s eyes are dark blue, a stormy color. His hair is caramel blond and wavy, and hangs to his mid-jawline. He is wearing a collared red polo shirt, short-sleeved despite the weather, and pressed dark jeans. His loafers are new, and he also wears a shiny silver watch around one wrist. Everything about him says rich. His hands are folded in his lap. Everything about him says right, too. Even his unblinking expression as he watches his father onstage is perfection and practice, the embodiment of a cured’s controlled detachment.

Of course he isn’t cured, not yet. This is Julian Fineman, Thomas Fineman’s son, and although he is eighteen, he has not yet had the procedure. The scientists have so far refused to treat him. Next Friday, the same day as the big planned DFA rally in Times Square, that will change. He will have his procedure, and he will be cured.

Possibly. It is also possible he will die, or that his mental functioning will be so severely damaged, he might as well be dead. But he will still have the procedure. His father insists on it. Julian insists on it.

I have never seen him in person before, although I have seen his face on posters and in the back of pamphlets. Julian is famous. He is a martyr to the cause, a hero to the DFA, and president of the organization’s youth division.

He is taller than I expected. And better-looking, too. The photos have not done justice to the angle of his jaw, or the broadness of his shoulders: a swimmer’s build.

Onstage, Thomas Fineman is wrapping up his portion of the speech. “We do not deny the dangers of insisting that the cure be administered earlier, ” he is saying, “but we assert that the dangers of delaying the cure are even worse. We are willing to accept the consequences. We are brave enough to sacrifice a few for the good of the whole. ” He pauses while again the auditorium is filled with applause, tilting his head appreciatively until the roar fades away. The light winks off his watch: He and his son have identical models.

“Now, I’d like to introduce you to an individual who embodies all the values of the DFA. This young man understands better than anyone the importance of insisting on a cure, even for those who are young, even for those who might be endangered by its administration. He understands that in order for the United States to prosper, in order for all of us to live happily and in safety, it is necessary to occasionally sacrifice the needs of the individual. Sacrifice is safety, and health is only in the whole. Members of the DFA, please welcome to the stage my son, Julian Fineman. ”

Clap, clap, clap goes Lena, along with the rest of the crowd. Thomas leaves the stage as Julian takes it. They pass each other on the stairs, give each other a brief nod. They do not touch.

Julian has brought notes, which he sets on the podium in front of him. For a moment, the auditorium is filled with the amplified sounds of rustling paper. Julian’s eyes scan the crowd, and for a second they land on me. He half opens his mouth and my heart stops: It is as though he has just recognized me. Then his eyes continue to sweep, and my heart comes hammering back against my ribs. I’m just being paranoid.

Julian fumbles with the microphone to adjust it to his height. He is even taller than his father. It’s funny that they look so different: Thomas, tall and dark and fierce-looking, a hawk; his son, tall and broad and fair, with those improbably blue eyes. Only the hard angle of their jaws is the same.

He runs a hand through his hair, and I wonder whether he is nervous. But when he begins speaking, his voice is full and steady.

“I was nine when I was told I was dying, ” he says plainly, and again I feel that expectation hanging in the air, shimmering droplets, as though everyone has just leaned forward a fraction of an inch. “That’s when the seizures began. The first one was so bad I nearly bit off my tongue; during the second seizure, I cracked my head against the fireplace. My parents were concerned. ”

Something wrenches in my stomach—deep inside, underneath the layers I’ve built over the past six months, past the fake Lena with her shell and her ID cards and the three-pointed scar behind her ear. This is the world we live in, a world of safety and happiness and order, a world without love.

A world where children crack their heads on stone fireplaces and nearly gnaw off their tongues and the parents are concerned. Not heartbroken, frantic, desperate. Concerned, as they are when you fail mathematics, as they are when they are late to pay their taxes.

“The doctors told me a tumor was growing in my brain and causing the seizures. The operation to remove it would be life-threatening. They doubted I would make it. But if they did not operate—if they let the tumor grow and expand—I had no chance at all. ”

Julian pauses, and I think I see him shoot a momentary glance in his father’s direction. Thomas Fineman has taken the seat his son vacated, and is sitting, legs crossed, face expressionless.

“No chance at all, ” Julian repeats. “And so the sick thing, the growth, had to be excised. It had to be lifted away from the clean tissue. Otherwise, it would only spread, turning the remaining healthy tissue sick. ”

Julian shuffles his notes and keeps his eyes locked to the pages in front of him as he reads out, “The first operation was a success, and for a while, the seizures stopped. Then, when I was twelve, they returned. The cancer was back, this time pressing at the base of my brain stem. ”

His hands tighten on the sides of the podium and release. For a moment, there is silence. Someone in the audience coughs. Droplets, droplets: We are all identical drips and drops of people, hovering, waiting to be tipped, waiting for someone to show us the way, to pour us down a path.

Julian looks up. There is a screen behind him on which his image is projected, blowing up his face by a power of fifteen. His eyes are a swirl of blue and green and gold, like the surface of the ocean on a sunny day, and behind the flatness, the practiced calm, I think I see something flashing there—an expression that is gone before I can find a name for it.

“I’ve had three operations since the first one, ” he says. “They have removed the tumor four times, and three times it has regrown, as sicknesses will, unless they are removed swiftly and completely. ” He pauses to let the significance of the statement sink in. “I have now been cancer free for two years. ” There is a smattering of applause. Julian holds up a hand and the room once again goes silent.

Julian smiles, and the enormous Julian behind him smiles also: a pixelated version, a blur. “The doctors have told me that further surgeries may endanger my life. Too much tissue has been removed already, too many excisions performed; if I am cured, I might lose the ability to regulate my emotions at all. I might lose the ability to speak, to see, to move. ” He shifts at the podium. “It is possible that my brain will shut down entirely. ”

I can’t help it; I am holding my breath too, along with everybody else. Only Thomas Fineman looks relaxed; I wonder how often he has heard this speech.

Julian leans forward another inch toward the microphone, and suddenly it is like he is addressing each and every one of us individually: His voice is low and urgent, a secret whispered in our ears.

“They have refused to cure me for this reason. For more than a year we have been fighting for a procedure date, and finally we have arranged one. On March twenty-third, the day of our rally, I will be cured. ”

Another smattering of applause, but Julian pushes through it. He is not done yet.

“It will be a historic day, even though it may prove to be my last. Don’t think I don’t understand the risks, because I do. ” He straightens up, and his voice becomes louder, thunderous. The eyes on the screen are flashing now, dazzling, full of light. “But there is no choice, just as there wasn’t when I was nine. We must excise the sickness. We must cut it out, no matter what the risks. Otherwise it will only grow. It will spread like the very worst cancer and put all of us—every single person born into this vast and wonderful country—at risk. So I say to you: We will—we must—cut away the sickness, wherever it is. Thank you. ”

There; that’s it. He has done it. He has tipped us over, all of us in our teetering expectancy, and now we are pouring toward him, coursing on a wave of sound, of roaring shouts and applause. Lena claps along with everybody else until her palms burn; she keeps clapping until they go numb. Half the audience stands, cheering. Someone starts a chant of “DFA! DFA! ” and soon we are all chanting: It is earsplitting, a deafening roar. At a certain point Thomas joins his son onstage again and they stand solemnly, side by side—one fair, one dark, like the two sides of the moon—watching over us as we keep clapping, keep chanting, keep roaring our approval. They are the moon; we are a tide, their tide, and under their direction we will wipe clean all the sickness and blight from the world.

then

Someone is always sick in the Wilds. As soon as I am strong enough to move out of the sickroom and onto a mattress on the floor, Squirrel has to move in; and after Squirrel’s turn, it is Grandpa’s. At night, the homestead echoes with the sounds of coughing, heaving, feverish chatter: noises of disease, which run through the walls and fill us all with dread. The problem is the space and the closeness. We live on top of one another, breathe and sneeze on one another, share everything. And nothing and no one is ever really clean.

Hunger gnaws at us, makes tempers run short. After my first exploration of the homestead, I retreated underground, like an animal scrabbling back into the safety of its lair. One day passes, then two. The supplies have yet to come. Each morning different people go out to check for messages; I gather that they have found some way to communicate with the sympathizers and resisters on the other side. That is all there is for me to do: listen, watch, stay quiet.

In the afternoons I sleep, and when I can’t sleep, I close my eyes and imagine being back in the abandoned house at 37 Brooks with Alex lying next to me. I try to feel my way through the curtain; I imagine if I can somehow pull apart the days that have passed since the escape, can mend the tear in time, I can have him back.