pandemonium 14 страница

Coin is standing above us again. She has refilled the jug of water. Julian utters a little cry as he is shaking himself into awareness. Then he sits up quickly, embarrassed. He runs his hands through his hair so it sticks up at crazy angles, every which way; I have an overwhelming urge to reach out and smooth it down.

“Can you walk? ” Coin asks me. I nod. “I’ll have someone take you to the surface, then. ” Again, she says surface as though it’s a dirty word, or a curse.

“Thank you. ” The words seem thin and insufficient. “You didn’t need to—I mean, we really appreciate it. We’d probably be dead if it weren’t for you and … your friends. ” I almost say your people, but I catch myself at the last minute. I remember how angry I’ve been with Julian for saying the same thing.

She stares at me for a moment without smiling, and I wonder if, somehow, I’ve offended her. “Like I said, you don’t belong down here, ” she says. And then, her voice swelling, rising to a high pitch: “There’s a place for everything and everyone, you know. That is the mistake they make above. They think that only certain people have a place. Only certain kinds of people belong. The rest is waste. But even waste must have a place. Otherwise it will clog and clot, and rot and fester. ”

A small tremor passes through her body; her right hand tugs convulsively at the folds of her dirty dress.

“I’ll find someone to guide you, ” she says abruptly, as though ashamed of her outburst, and turns away from us.

Rat-man is the one who comes for us, and seeing him brings back a sense of vertigo and nausea, even though this time he is alone. The rats have gone back to their holes and hiding places.

“Coin said you want to go up, ” he says, the longest sentence I have heard from him yet. Julian and I are already standing. Julian has taken the backpack, and though I’ve told him I’m okay to stand, he insists on keeping a hand on my arm. Just in case, he said, and I think of how different he is from the boy I saw onstage in the Javits Center, the cool floating screen image—unimaginable that they should be the same person. I wonder whether that boy is the real Julian, or this boy is the real one, or whether it’s even possible to know.

Then it hits me: I’m not even sure who the real Lena is anymore.

“We’re ready, ” Julian says.

We pick our way around the piles of junk and the makeshift shelters that clutter the platform. Everywhere we go, we are watched. Figures crouch in the shadows. They’ve been forced down here, the way we have been forced into the Wilds: all for a society of order and regularity.

For a society to be healthy, not a single one of its members can be sick. The DFA’s philosophy runs deeper—much deeper—than I’d believed. The dangerous are not just the uncured: They are also the different, the deformed, the abnormal. They must also be eradicated. I wonder if Julian realizes this, or whether he’s known it all along.

Irregularity must be regulated; dirt must be cleansed; the laws of physics teach us that systems tend increasingly toward chaos, and so the chaos must be constantly pushed back. The rules of expurgation are even written into The Book of Shhh.

At the end of the platform, the rat-man swings down into the tracks. He is walking well now. If he was injured during the scuffle with the Scavengers, he, too, has been mended and bandaged. Julian follows, and then helps me down, reaching up and putting his hands around my waist as I maneuver clumsily off the platform. Even though I feel better than I did earlier, I’m still not moving very well. I’ve been too long without enough food and water, and my head still throbs. My left ankle wobbles as I hit the ground, and for a minute I stumble against Julian, bumping my chin on his chest, and his arms tighten around me.

“You okay? ” he says. I’m ultra-conscious of the closeness of our bodies, and the encircling warmth of his arms.

I step away from him, my heart climbing into my mouth. “I’m fine, ” I say.

Then it’s time to go into the darkness again. I hang back, and Rat-man must think I’m scared. He turns and says, “The Intruders don’t come this far. Don’t worry. ” He’s without a flashlight or a torch. I wonder if the fire was just meant to intimidate the Scavengers. The mouth of the tunnel is pitch-black, but he seems perfectly able to see.

“Let’s go, ” Julian says, and I turn with him and follow the rat-man, and the dim beam of the flashlight, into the dark.

We walk in silence, although the rat-man occasionally stops, making clicking motions with his tongue, like a man calling a dog. Once he crouches, and pulls bits of crushed crackers from the pockets of his coat, scattering them on the ground between the wooden slats of the tracks. From the corners of the tunnel the rats emerge, sniffing his fingers, fighting over the crumbs, hopping up into his cupped palms and running up over his arms and shoulders. It is terrible to watch, but I can’t look away.

“How long have you been here? ” Julian asks, after the ratman has straightened up again. Now all around us we hear the chittering of tiny teeth and nails, and the flashlight lights up quick-moving, writhing shadows. I have a sudden terror that the rats are all around me, even on the ceilings.

“Don’t know, ” the rat-man says. “Lost count. ”

Unlike the other people who have made their home on the platform, he has no noticeable physical deformities except for his single milk-white eye. I can’t help but blurt out, “Why? ”

He turns abruptly back to me. For a minute Rat-man doesn’t say anything, and the three of us stand there in the stifling dark. My breath is coming quickly, rasping in my throat.

“I didn’t want to be cured, ” he says at last, and the words are so normal—a vocabulary from my world, a debate from above—that relief breaks in my chest. He’s not crazy after all.

“Why not? ” That’s Julian.

Another pause. “I was already sick, ” the rat-man says, and although I can’t see his face, I can hear that he is smiling just a little bit. I wonder if Julian is as surprised as I am.

It occurs to me, then, that people themselves are full of tunnels: winding, dark spaces and caverns; impossible to know all the places inside of them. Impossible even to imagine.

“What happened? ” Julian persists.

“She was cured, ” the rat-man says shortly, and turns his back to us, resuming the walk. “And I chose … this. Here. ”

“Wait, wait. ” Julian tugs me along—we have to jog a little to catch up. “I don’t understand. You were infected together, and then she was cured? ”

“Yes. ”

“And you chose this instead? ” Julian shakes his head. “You must have seen… I mean, it would have taken away the pain. ” There’s a question in Julian’s words, and I know then that he is struggling, still clinging to his old beliefs, the ideas that have comforted him for so long.

“I didn’t see. ” The rat-man has increased his pace. He must have the tunnel’s twists and dips memorized. Julian and I can barely keep up. “I didn’t see her at all after that. ”

“I don’t understand, ” Julian says, and for a second my heart aches for him. He is my age, but there is so much he doesn’t know.

The rat-man stops. He doesn’t look at us, but I see his shoulders rise and fall: an inaudible sigh. “They’d already taken her from me once, ” he says quietly. “I didn’t want to lose her again. ”

I have the urge to lay my hand on his shoulder and say, I understand. But the words seem stupid. We can never understand. We can only try, fumbling our way through the tunneled places, reaching for light.

But then he says, “We’re here, ” and steps to the side, so the flashlight’s beam falls on a rusted metal ladder; and before I can think of anything else to say, he has hopped onto its lowest rung and started climbing toward the surface.

Soon the rat-man is fiddling with a metal cover in the ceiling. As he slides it open, the light is so dazzling and unexpected I cry out for a second, and have to turn away, blinking, while spots of color revolve in my vision.

The rat-man heaves himself up and out through the hole, then reaches down to help me. Julian follows last.

We’ve emerged onto a large, open-air platform. There is a train track below us, torn up, a thicket of mangled iron and wood. At some point, it must descend into the underground tunnels. The platform is streaked with bird shit. Pigeons are roosting everywhere, on the peeled-paint benches, in the old trash bins, between the tracks. A sun-faded and wind-battered sign must at one point have listed the station name; it is illegible now, but for a few letters: H, O, B, K. Old tags stain the walls: MY LIFE, MY CHOICE, says one. Another reads, KEEP AMERICA SAFE. Old slogans, old signs of the fight between the believers and the nonbelievers.

“What is this place? ” I say to Rat-man. He’s crouching by the black mouth of the hole that leads below. He has flipped his hood up to shield his eyes from the sun, and he seems desperate to leap back into the darkness. This is the first time I’ve had a chance to really look at him, and I see now he is much younger than I’d imagined. Other than faint, crisscrossed lines at the corners of his eyes, his face is smooth and unlined. His skin is so pale it has the blue tint of milk, and his eyes are fuzzy and unfocused, unused to so much light.

“This is the landfill, ” he says, pointing. About a hundred yards off, in the direction he indicates, is a tall chain-link fence, beyond which we can see a mound of glittering trash and metal. “Manhattan is across the river. ”

“The landfill, ” I repeat slowly. Of course: The underground people must have a way to gather supplies. The landfill would be perfect: heaps and heaps of discarded food, supplies, wiring, and furniture. I feel a jolt of recognition. I scramble to my feet. “I know where we are, ” I say. “There’s a homestead nearby. ”

“A what? ” Julian squints up at me, but I’m too excited. I jog down the platform, my breath steaming in front of me, lifting my arm to shield my eyes from the sun. The landfill is enormous—several miles square, Tack told me, to service all of Manhattan and its sister cities—but we must be at its northern end. There’s a gravel road that winds away from its gates, through the ruins of old, bombed-out buildings. This trash pit was once a city itself. And less than a mile away is a homestead. Raven, Tack, and I lived here for a month while we were waiting for papers and our final instructions from the resistance about relocation and reabsorption. At the homestead there will be food, and water, and clothing. There will be a way to contact Raven and Tack, too. When we lived there we used radio signals, and, when those got too dangerous, different-colored cloths, which we raised on the flagpole just outside of a burned-out local school.

“This is where I leave you, ” Rat-man says. He has swung his lower body back into the hole. I can tell he’s desperate to get out of the sun and go back to safety.

“Thank you, ” I say. The words seem stupidly insufficient, but I can’t think of any others.

The rat-man nods and is about to swing himself down the ladder when Julian stops him.

“We didn’t get your name, ” Julian says.

The rat-man’s lips twitch into a smile. “I don’t have one, ” he says.

Julian looks startled. “Everyone has a name, ” he says.

“Not anymore, ” the rat-man says with that twitchy smile. “Names don’t mean a thing anymore. The past is dead. ”

The past is dead. Raven’s refrain. It makes my throat go dry. I am not so different from these underground people after all.

“Be careful, ” the rat-man says, and his eyes go unfocused again. “They’re always watching. ”

Then he drops down into the hole. A second later the iron cover slides into place.

For a moment, Julian and I stand in silence, staring at each other.

“We did it, ” Julian says finally, smiling at me. He is standing a little ways down the platform, the sun streaking his hair with white and gold. A bird darts across the sky behind him, a fast-moving shadow against the blue. There are small white flowers pushing up between the cracks in the platform.

Suddenly I find that I am crying. I am sobbing with gratitude and relief. We made it out, and the sun is still shining, and the world still exists.

“Hey. ” Julian comes over to me. He hesitates for a second, then reaches out and rubs my back, moving his hand in slow circles. “Hey, it’s okay. It’s okay, Lena. ”

I shake my head. I want to tell him that I know, and that’s why I’m crying, but I can’t speak. He pulls me into him and I cry into his T-shirt and we stand there like that, in the sun, in the outside world, where these things are illegal. And all around us there is silence, except for the occasional twittering of birds, and the rustle of pigeons around the empty platform.

Finally I pull away. For a second I think I see movement behind him, in the shadows beyond one of the station’s old stairwells, but then I’m sure I’ve only imagined it. The light is unrelenting. I can’t imagine what I must look like right now. Despite the fact that the underground people have cleaned and treated Julian’s wounds, his face is still patterned with bruises, a multicolored patchwork. I’m sure I look just as bad, if not worse.

Belowground, we’ve been allies; friends. Aboveground, I’m not sure what we are, and I feel uneasy.

Thankfully, he breaks the tension. “So you know where we are? ” he says.

I nod. “I know where we can get help from—from my people. ”

To his credit, he doesn’t flinch. “Let’s go, then, ” he says.

He follows me down into the tracks. We startle the pigeons from their roost, and they whirl up around us, a blurry, feathered hurricane. We pick our way over the train tracks and onto the high grass beyond it, bleached pale from the sun and still sheathed in frost. The ground is hard and webbed with ice, although here, too, there is evidence of spring growth: small, curled buds of green, a few early flowers scattered among the dirt.

The sun is warm on our necks, but the wind is icy. I wish I had something warmer than a sweatshirt. The cold reaches right through the cotton, grabs on to my insides, and pulls.

Finally the landscape becomes familiar. The sun draws stark shadows on the ground—towering, splintered shapes of bombed-out buildings. We pass an old street sign, doubled over, that once pointed the way to Columbia Avenue. Columbia Avenue is now nothing more than broken slabs of concrete, and frozen grass, and a carpet of minuscule shards of glass, shattered into a reflective dust.

“Here it is, ” I say. “Right up here. ” I start jogging. The entrance to the homestead is no more than twenty yards away, beyond a twist in the road.

And yet, there’s another feeling drilling through me: some inner alarm sounding quietly. Convenient. That’s the word that keeps floating through my mind. Convenient that we ended up so close to the homestead; convenient that the tunnels led us here. Too convenient to be a coincidence.

I push away the thought.

We turn the corner and there it is. Just like that, all my concerns get whipped away on a surge of joy. Julian stops, but I go straight up to the door, recharged, full of energy. Most homesteads—at least the ones I’ve seen—have been built out of hidden places: basements and cellars and bomb shelters and bank vaults that remained intact during the blitz. We have populated them like insects reclaiming the land.

But this homestead was built long after the blitz was over. Raven told me it was one of the very first homesteads, and the headquarters of the first ragtag group of resisters, who scavenged for materials and built a quasi-house, a weird patchwork structure made from timber, concrete, stone, and metal. The whole place has a junky look, a Frankenstein facade, like it shouldn’t possibly be standing.

But stand it does.

“So? ” I say, turning back to Julian. “You coming or what? ”

“I’ve never… It’s not possible. ” Julian shakes his head, as though trying to rouse himself from a dream. “This isn’t at all what I used to imagine. ”

“We can build something out of almost anything—out of scrap, ” I say, and I remember, then, when Raven said almost the exact same thing to me after my escape, when I was sick and weak and unsure whether I wanted to live or die. That was a half a year and a lifetime ago. For a second I feel a rush of sadness: for the horizons that vanish behind us, for the people we leave behind, the tiny-doll selves that get stored away and ultimately buried.

Julian’s eyes are electric now, a mirror of the sky, and he turns to me. “Up until two years ago, I thought it was all a fairy tale. The Wilds, the Invalids. ” He takes two steps and suddenly we are standing very close. “You. I—I never would have believed it. ”

We are still separated by several inches, but I feel as though we are touching. There is an electricity between us that collapses the space between our bodies.

“I’m real, ” I say, and the electricity is an itch, a nervous jumping under my skin. I feel too exposed. It is too bright, and too quiet.

Julian says, “I don’t think—I’m not sure I can go back. ” His eyes are full of watery depth. I want to look away, but I can’t. I feel as though I am falling.

“I don’t know what you’re saying. ” I force the words out.

“I mean, I—”

There is a loud bang from our right, as though someone has kicked something over. Julian breaks off, and I see his body tense. Instinctively, I push him behind me, toward the door, and wrestle the handgun from my backpack. I scan the area: all shrapnel and stone, dips and depressions, plenty of places to hide. The hair is standing up on my neck, and my whole body is an alarm now. They are always watching.

We stand in agonizing silence. The wind lifts a plastic bag across the brittle ground. It makes three slow revolutions, then settles at the base of a long-disabled streetlamp.

Suddenly there is a flicker of movement to my left. I turn around with a cry, gripping the gun, as a cat darts out from behind a mound of cinder block. Julian exhales, and I loosen my hold on the gun, letting the tension flow out of my body. The cat—skinny and wide-eyed—pauses, turning its head in our direction. It meows piteously.

Julian touches my shoulders lightly, with both hands, and I jerk away quickly, instinctively.

“Come on, ” I say. I can tell I’ve hurt his feelings.

“I was about to say something, ” Julian says. I can feel him searching for my eyes, willing me to look at him, but I am already at the door, fiddling with the rusty handle.

“You can tell me later, ” I say as I lean in against the door. It gives, finally, and Julian has no choice but to follow me inside.

I am scared about what Julian has to say, and what he will choose, and where he will go. But I am terrified by what I want: for him, and worst of all, from him.

Because I do want. I’m not even sure what, exactly, but the want is there, just like the hate and anger were there before. But this is not a tower. It is an endless, tunneling pit; it drives deep, and opens a hole inside me.

then

Tack and Hunter weren’t able to salvage many supplies from the Rochester homestead. The bombs and ensuing fires did their job. But they did find a few things miraculously preserved among the smoking rubble: cans of beans, some additional weapons, traps, and, weirdly, one whole, entirely unmelted chocolate bar. Tack insists that it remain uneaten. He straps it to his backpack, like a good luck charm. Sarah eyes it as we walk.

It does seem like the chocolate brings good luck—or maybe it’s just having Tack and Hunter back, and the way it changes Raven’s mood. The weather holds. It’s still cold, but we’re all grateful for the sun.

The beans are enough to give us energy to move on, and only a half day after we’ve left the last encampment we stumble upon a single house, entirely preserved, in the middle of the woods. It must have been miles from any major road when it was built, and it looks like a mushroom sprouting up from the ground: Its walls are covered in brown ivy, thick as fur, and its roof is low and round, pulled down like a hat. This would have been a hermit’s house, back before the blitz—far away from everyone else. No wonder it survived intact. The bombers would have missed it, and even the fires might not have spread this far.

Four Invalids have made it their home. They invite us to camp on their grounds. There are two men and two women, as well as five children, none of whom seems to belong to either couple in particular. They all act as one family, they tell us over dinner, and have inhabited the house for a decade. They are nice enough to share what they have: canned eggplant and summer squash, bitingly sour with garlic and vinegar; strips of dried venison from earlier in the fall; and various other kinds of smoked meat and fowl: rabbit, pheasant, squirrel.

Hunter and Tack spend the evening retracing our steps and slicing patterns in the trees, so next year when we migrate—if we migrate again—we will be able to locate the mushroom house.

In the morning, one of the children runs out as we are getting ready to leave. He is barefoot, despite the snow.

“Here, ” he says, and presses a kitchen towel into my hand. Inside are hard, flat loaves of bread—made, I overheard one of the women say, from acorns and not flour—and more dried meat.

“Thank you, ” I say, but he is already running back, bounding toward the house, laughing. For a moment I am jealous: He has grown up here, fearless, happy. Perhaps he will never even know about the world on the other side of the fence, the real world. For him there will be no such thing.

But there will also be no medicine for him when he is sick, and never enough food to go around, and winters so cold the mornings are like a punch to the gut. And someday—unless the resistance succeeds and takes the country back—the planes and the fires will find him. Someday the eye will turn in this direction, like a laser beam, consuming everything in its path. Someday all the Wilds will be razed, and we will be left with a concrete landscape, a land of pretty houses and trim gardens and planned parks and forests, and a world that works as smoothly as a clock, neatly wound: a world of metal and gears, and people going tick-tick-tick to their deaths.

We ration carefully, and at last, after another three days’ walking, we come to the bridge that marks the final thirty miles. It is enormous and narrow, made of vast ropes of steel, all slicked with ice and blackened by weather. It looks to me like a gigantic insect, straddling the river, plunging its jointed legs into the water. Barricaded years ago, it has been so long out of use, except as a passage for traveling Invalids, that the clumsily erected wooden boards at its entrance have all but rotted away.

A large green sign, detached from its metal supports on one side, now hangs so that its words run vertically. I read as we pass: TAPPAN ZEE BRIDGE. It sways in the wind—a brutal wind; exposed as we are, it drives right through us, bringing tears to our eyes—and fills the air with ghostly moaning.

Below us, the water is the color of concrete, and capped with waves. The height is dizzying. I read once that jumping into water from this height would feel just like a plunge into stone. I remember the news story of the uncured who killed herself by jumping from the roof of the labs on the day of her procedure, and the memory brings with it a feeling of guilt.

But this is what Alex would have wanted for me: the scar on my neck, miraculously well-healed, just like a real procedural scar; the ropy muscles, the sense of purpose. He believed in the resistance, and now I will believe in it for him.

And maybe someday I will see him again. Maybe there really is a heaven after death. And maybe it’s open to everyone, not just the cured.

But for now, the future, like the past, means nothing. For now, there is only a homestead built of trash and scraps, at the edge of a broken city, just beyond a towering city dump; and our arrival—hungry, and half-frozen, to a place of food and water, and walls that keep out the brutal winds. This, for us, is heaven.

now

Heaven is hot water. Heaven is soap.

Salvage—which is what we always called this homestead—consists of four rooms. There is a kitchen; a large storage space, almost the size of the whole rest of the house; and a cramped sleeping room (filled with rickety and clumsily constructed bunk beds).

The last room is for bathing. Various metal tubs are sitting on a raised platform fitted with a large grate; beneath it, there is an area of flat stone, and bits of charred wood, remnants of the fires we kept burning through the winter, to heat the room and the water at once.

After I’ve fumbled through the darkness and found a battery-operated lantern, I light a fire, using the wood piled high in one corner of the storage shed, while Julian wanders with a glass lantern through the other parts of the house, exploring. Then I crank water from the well. I’m weak, and I can only fill half of one tub before my arms are shaking. But it’s enough.

I take a bar of soap from storage, and I even find a real towel. My skin is itching, crawling with dirt. I can feel it everywhere, in my eyelids, even.

Before I begin undressing, I call out, “Julian? ”

“Yes? ” His voice is muffled. From the sound of it, he is in the sleeping space.

“Stay where you are, okay? ”

There is no door on the bathing room. It is unnecessary, and things that are unnecessary in the Wilds do not get built, made, or used.

There is a slight pause. “Okay, ” he says. I wonder what he is thinking. His voice sounds high, strained, although that might be the effect of distortion through the tin and plywood walls.

I place the gun on the floor, then strip out of my clothes, enjoying the heavy thud of my jeans on the ground. For a moment my body looks alien, even to myself. There was a time when I was a little bit round everywhere, despite the muscles in my thighs and calves from running. My stomach had swell to it, my breasts were full and heavy.

Now I am all carved inward—wire and rope. My breasts are two small, hard peaks; my skin is crisscrossed with bruises. I wonder if Alex would still find me beautiful. I wonder if Julian thinks I am ugly.

I push away both thoughts. Unnecessary; irrelevant.

I scrub every last inch of my body: under my fingernails, behind my ears, inside my ears—between my toes, and between my legs. I lather my hair and let soap run into my eyes, burning. When I finally stand up, still slippery with soap, like a fish, the tub is ringed with dirt. I’m once again grateful that we have no mirrors here; my reflection is darkly indistinct on the surface of the water, a shadow-self. I don’t want to see more clearly what I look like.

I dry myself and put on clean clothes: sweatpants, heavy socks, and a large sweatshirt. My bath has rejuvenated me, and I feel strong enough to draw more water from the well and fill another tub for Julian.

I find him in the storage room. He is squatting in front of a low shelf. Someone has left a dozen books, all of them banned long ago. He is leafing through one of them.

“Your turn, ” I say, and he jerks, slamming the book shut. He straightens up, and when he turns to me his face is guilty. Then his eyes shift, an expression I can’t identify.

“It’s okay, ” I tell him. “You can read what you like here. ”

“I—” He starts to speak, then breaks off, shaking his head. He is still watching me with that strange look on his face. My skin feels hot. The bath must have been too warm. “I remember this book, ” he says finally, but I get the sense that is not what he was going to say originally. “It was in my father’s study. His second study. The one I told you about. ”

I nod. He holds up the book. It’s a copy of Great Expectations by Charles Dickens.

“I haven’t read it yet, ” I confess. “Tack always said it was one of his favorites—” I suck in a quick breath. I shouldn’t have said Tack’s name. I’ve been trusting Julian, letting him in. But he is still Julian Fineman, and the resistance’s strength depends on its secrets.

Fortunately, he doesn’t comment on it. “My brother—” He coughs and begins again. “I found this book with his things. After he died. I don’t know why; I don’t know what I was looking for. ”