Delirium: The Complete Collection (22 page)

I fish my clock out from my bag and set the alarm for eleven thirty. It’s going to be a long night. Then I stretch out on the bumpy couch, balling my backpack underneath my head. It’s not the world’s most comfortable pillow, but it will do.

I close my eyes and let the sounds of the mice scrabbling, and the low groans and mysterious tickings of the walls, lull me to sleep.

I wake up in the darkness from a nightmare about my mother. I sit up straight, and for one panicked second don’t know where I am. The faulty springs squeal underneath me and then I remember: 37 Brooks. I fumble for my alarm clock and see that it’s already 11:20. I know I should get up but I still feel groggy from the heat and the dream, and for a few more moments I just sit there, taking deep breaths. I’m sweating; the hair is sticking to the back of my neck.

My dream was the one I usually have but this time reversed: I was floating in the ocean, treading water, watching my mother perched on a crumbling ledge hundreds and hundreds of feet above me—so far I couldn’t make out any of her features, just the blurry lines of her silhouette, framed against the sun. I was trying to call out a warning to her, trying to lift my arms and wave at her to go back, away from the edge, but the more I struggled the more the water seemed to drag at me and hold me back, the consistency of glue, suctioning my arms in place and oozing in my throat to freeze the words there. And all the time sand was drifting around me like snow, and I knew at any second she would fall and smash her head on the jagged rocks, which poked up through the water like sharpened fingernails.

Then she was falling, flailing, a black spot growing bigger and bigger against the blazing sun, and I was trying to scream but I couldn’t, and as the figure grew larger I realized it wasn’t my mother headed for the rocks.

It was Alex.

That’s when I woke up.

I finally stand, slightly dizzy, trying to ignore a feeling of dread. I go slowly, gropingly, to the window, and am relieved once I’m outside, even though I’m in more danger on the streets. But at least there’s a bit of a breeze. The atmosphere in the house was stifling.

Alex is already waiting for me when I arrive at Back Cove, crouching in the shadows cast by a group of trees that stand near the old parking lot. He is so perfectly concealed that I almost trip over him. He reaches up and draws me down into a crouch. In the moonlight his eyes seem to glow, like a cat’s.

He gestures silently across Back Cove, to the line of twinkling lights just before the border: the guard huts. From a distance they look like a line of bright white lanterns strung up for a nighttime picnic—cheerful, almost. Twenty feet beyond the security points is the actual fence, and beyond the fence, the Wilds. They’ve never looked quite so strange to me as they do now, dancing and swaying in the wind. I’m glad Alex and I agreed not to speak until we crossed over. The lump in my throat is making it difficult to breathe, much less say anything.

We’ll be crossing over at the tip of Tukey’s Bridge, on the northeast point of the cove: if we were swimming, a direct diagonal from our meet-up point. Alex pumps my hand three times. That’s our signal to move.

I follow him as we skirt the perimeter of the cove, being careful to avoid the marshland; it looks deceptively like grass, especially in the dark, but you can get sucked down almost knee deep before you realize the difference. Alex darts from shadow to shadow, moving noiselessly on the grass. In places he seems to vanish completely before my eyes, to melt into darkness.

As we loop around to the north side of the cove, the guard stations begin to outline themselves more clearly—becoming actual buildings, one-room huts made of concrete and bulletproof glass.

Sweat pricks up on my palms and the lump in my throat seems to quadruple in size, until I feel like I’m being strangled. I suddenly see how stupid our plan is. A hundred—a thousand!—things could go wrong. The guard in number twenty-one might not have had his coffee yet—or he might have had it, but not enough to knock him out—or the Valium might not have kicked in. And even if he is asleep, Alex could have been wrong about the parts of the fence that aren’t electrified; or the city might have pumped on the power, just for the night.

I’m so scared I feel like I might faint. I want to get Alex’s attention and scream that we have to turn around, call the whole thing off, but he’s still moving swiftly up ahead of me, and screaming anything or making any noise at all will bring the guards down on us for sure. And guards make the regulators look like little kids playing cops and robbers. Regulators and raiders have nightsticks and dogs; guards have rifles and tear gas.

We finally reach the northern arm of the cove. Alex drops down behind one of the larger trees and waits for me to catch up. I go into a crouch next to him. This is my last opportunity to tell him I want to go back. But I can’t speak, and when I try to shake my head no, nothing happens. I feel like I’m back in my dream, getting slurped into the dark, floundering like an insect stuck in a bowl of honey.

Maybe Alex can tell how frightened I am. He leans forward and fumbles for a moment, trying to find my ear. His mouth bumps once on my neck and grazes my cheek lightly—which despite my panic makes me shiver with pleasure—and then skims my earlobe. “It’s going to be okay,” he whispers, and I feel slightly better. Nothing bad will happen when I’m with Alex.

Then we’re up again. We dart forward at intervals, sprinting silently from one tree to the next and then pausing while Alex listens and makes sure there has been no change, no shouts or sounds of approaching footsteps. The moments of exposure—of dashing from cover to cover—grow longer as the trees begin to thin out, and the whole time we’re getting closer and closer to the line where the fringe of grass and growth disappears altogether and we will have to move out in the open, completely vulnerable. It is a distance of only about fifty feet from the last bush to the fence, but as far as I’m concerned it might as well be a lake of burning fire.

Beyond the torn-up remains of a road that existed before Portland was enclosed is the fence itself: looming, silver, in the moonlight, like some enormous spiderweb. A place where things stick, get caught, are eaten. Alex has told me to take my time, to focus; when I pick my way over the barbed wire at the top, but I can’t help but picture myself impaled on all of those sharp, spiny barbs.

And then, suddenly, we are out—past the limited protection offered by the trees, moving quickly over the loose gravel and shale of the old road. Alex moves ahead of me, bent nearly double, and I stoop as low as I can, but it doesn’t make me feel any less exposed. Fear screams, slams into me from all sides at once; I have never known anything like it. I’m not sure whether the wind picks up at that second or whether it’s just the terror cutting through me, but my whole body feels like ice.

The darkness seems to come alive on all sides of us, full of darting shadows and malicious, looming shapes, ready to turn into a guard any second, and I picture the silence suddenly punctuated by screams, sighs, horns, bullets. I picture blooming pain, and bright lights. The world seems to transform into a series of disconnected images: a bright white circle of light surrounding guard hut twenty-one, which expands ever outward, as though hungry and ready to swallow us; inside, a guard slumped backward in his chair, mouth open, sleeping; Alex turning to me, smiling—is it possible he’s
smiling
?—stones dancing underneath my feet. Everything feels far away, as unreal and insubstantial as a shadow cast by a flame. Even
I
don’t feel real, can’t feel myself breathing or moving, though I must be doing both.

And then just like that we’re at the fence. Alex springs into the air, and for a second he pauses there. I want to scream
Stop! Stop!
I picture the crack and sizzle as his body connects with fifty thousand volts of electricity, but then he lands on the fence and the fence sways silently: dead and cold, just like he said.

I should be climbing up after him, but I can’t. Not immediately. A feeling of wonder creeps over me, slowly pushing out the fear. I’ve been terrified of the border fence since I was a baby. I’ve never gotten within five feet of the fence. We’ve been warned not to, had it drilled into us. They told us we would fry; told us it would make our hearts go haywire, kill us instantly. Now I reach out and lace my hand through the chain-link, run my fingers over it. Dead and cold and harmless, the same kind of fence the city uses for playgrounds and schoolyards. In that second it really hits me how deep and complex the lies are, how they run through Portland like sewers, backing up into everything, filling the city with stench: the whole city built and constructed within a perimeter of lies.

Alex is a fast climber; he’s made it halfway up the fence. He looks over his shoulder and sees that I’m still standing there like an idiot, not moving. He jerks his head at me like,
What are you doing?

I put my hand out to the fence again and then immediately jerk it back again: A shock runs through me all at once, but it has nothing to do with the voltage that should be pumping there. Something has just occurred to me.

They’ve lied about everything—about the fence, and the existence of the Invalids, about a million other things besides. They told us the raids were carried out for our own protection. They told us the regulators were only interested in keeping the peace.

They told us that love was a disease. They told us it would kill us in the end.

For the very first time I realize that this, too, might be a lie.

Alex rocks carefully back and forth on the fence so that it sways a little. I glance up, and he gestures to me again. We’re not safe. It’s time to move. I reach up and hoist myself onto the fence and start climbing. Being on the fence is even worse, in some ways, than being out in the open on the gravel. At least there we had more control—we could have seen if a guard was patrolling, could have hurried back to the cove and hoped to lose him in the darkness and the trees. A small hope, but hope nonetheless. Here we have our backs turned to the guard huts, and I feel like I’m a gigantic moving target with a big sign on my back saying
SHOOT ME
.

Alex reaches the top before me, and I watch him pick his way slowly, painstakingly, around the loops of barbed wire. He makes it over and lowers himself carefully down the other side, climbing backward a few feet and pausing to wait for me. I follow his motions exactly. I’m shaking by this point, from fear and exertion, but I manage to pass over the top of the fence and then I’m climbing down the other side. My feet hit the ground. Alex takes my hand and pulls me quickly into the woods, away from the border.

Into the Wilds.

Chapter Eighteen

Mary bring out your umbrella—
The sun shines down on this fine, fine day
But the ashes raining down forever
Are going to turn your hair to gray.
Mary keep your oars a-steady
Sail away on the rising flood
Keep your candle at the ready
Red tides can’t be told from blood.

—“Miss Mary” (a common child’s clapping game,
dating from the time of the blitz), from
Pattycake and Beyond: A History of Play

T
he lights from the guard hut get suctioned away all at once like they’ve been sealed back behind a vault. Trees close in around us, leaves and bushes press on me from all sides, brushing my face and shins and shoulders like thousands of dark hands, and from all around me a strange cacophony starts up, of fluttering things and owls hooting and animals scrabbling in the underbrush. The air smells so thickly of flowers and life it feels textured, like a curtain you could pull apart. It’s pitch-black. I can’t even see Alex in front of me now, can just feel his hand in mine, pulling.

I think I might be even more frightened now than I was making the crossing, and I tug on Alex’s hand, willing him to understand me and stop.

“A little farther,” comes his voice, from the darkness ahead of me. He tugs me on. We go slowly, though, and I hear twigs snapping and the rustle of tree branches, and I know that Alex is feeling his way, trying to clear a path for us. It seems that we move forward by inches, but it’s amazing how quickly we’ve lost sight of the border and everything on the other side of it, as though they’ve never existed at all. Behind me is blackness. It’s like being underground.

“Alex—” I start to say. My voice comes out strange and strangled-sounding.

“Stop,” he says. “Wait.” He lets go of my hand, and I let out a little shriek without meaning to. Then his hands are fumbling on my arms, and his mouth bumps against my nose as he kisses me.

“It’s okay,” he says. He’s speaking almost at a normal volume now, so I guess we’re safe. “I’m not going anywhere. I just have to find this damn flashlight, okay?”

“Yeah, okay.” I struggle to breathe normally, feeling stupid. I wonder if Alex regrets bringing me. I haven’t exactly been Miss Courageous.

As though he can read my mind, Alex gives me a second small peck, this time near the corner of my lips. I guess his eyes haven’t adjusted to the dark either. “You’re doing great,” he says.

Then I hear him rustling in the branches all around us, muttering little curses under his breath, a monologue I don’t quite follow. A minute later he lets out a quick, excited yelp, and a second after that a broad beam of light cuts upward, illuminating the densely packed trees and growth all around us.

“Found it,” Alex says, grinning, showing off the flashlight to me. He directs the light down to a rusty toolbox half-buried in the ground. “We leave it there, for the crossers,” he explains. “Ready?”

I nod. I feel much better now that we can see where we’re going. The branches above us form a canopy that reminds me of the vaulted ceiling of St. Paul’s Cathedral, where I used to sit in Sunday school to hear lectures about atoms and probabilities and God’s order. The leaves rustle and shake all around us, a constantly shifting pattern of greens and blacks, set dancing as countless unseen things hurry and skip from branch to branch. Every so often Alex’s flashlight is reflected for a brief second in a pair of bright wide blinking eyes, which watch us solemnly from within the mass of foliage before vanishing once again into the dark. It’s incredible. I’ve never seen anything like it—all this life pushing everywhere, growing, as though at every second it’s expanding and thrusting upward, and I can’t really explain it but it makes me feel small and kind of silly, like I’m trespassing on property owned by someone way older and more important than myself.

Alex walks more surely now, occasionally sweeping a branch out of the way so I can pass underneath it, or swatting at the branches blocking our way, but we’re not following any path that I can see, and after fifteen minutes I begin to fear that we’re just turning in circles, or going deeper and deeper into the woods without any real destination. I’m about to ask him how he knows where we’re going when I notice that every so often he hesitates and sweeps his flashlight over the tree trunks that surround us like tall, ghostly silhouettes. Some of them, I see, are marked with a swath of blue paint.

“The paint . . . ,” I say.

Alex shoots me a look over his shoulder. “Our road map,” he says, pressing on, and then adds, “you don’t want to get lost in here, trust me.”

And then, abruptly, the trees just peter out. One second we’re in the middle of the forest, penned in on all sides, and the next we’re stepping out onto a paved road, a ribbon of concrete lit silver by the moonlight like a ribbed tongue.

The road is filled with holes, and cracked and buckled in places, so we have to step around enormous piles of concrete rubble. It winds up a long, low hill, and then disappears over the hill’s crest, where another black fringe of trees begins.

“Give me your hand,” Alex says. He’s whispering again and without knowing why, I’m glad of it. For some reason, I feel as though I’ve just entered a cemetery. On either side of the road are gigantic clearings, covered in waist-high grasses that sing and whisper against one another, and some thin, young trees, which look frail and exposed in the middle of all of that openness. There seem to be some beams, too—enormous beams of timber piled on top of one another, and twists of things that look metallic, gleaming and glinting in the grass.

“What is this?” I whisper to Alex, but just after I ask the question a little scream builds in my throat and I see, and I know.

In the middle of one of the fields of whispering grass is a large blue truck, perfectly intact, like someone might have driven up just to have a picnic.

“This
was
a street,” Alex says. His voice has turned tense. “Destroyed during the blitz. There are thousands and thousands of them, all across the country. Bombed out, totally destroyed.”

I shiver. No wonder I felt like I was walking through a graveyard. I am, in a way. The blitz was a yearlong campaign that happened long before my birth, when my mom was still a baby. It was supposed to have gotten rid of all the Invalids, and any resisters who didn’t want to leave their homes and move into an approved community. My mother once said that her earliest memories were all clouded by the sound of bombs and the smell of smoke. She said for years the smell of fire continued to drift over the city, and every time the wind blew it would bring with it a covering of ash.

We go on walking. I feel like I could cry. Being here, seeing this, it’s nothing like what I was taught in my history classes: smiling pilots giving the thumbs-up, people cheering at the borders because we were at last safe, houses incinerated neatly, with no mess, as though they were just blipped off a computer screen. In the history books there were no people, really, who lived in these houses; they were shadows, wraiths, unreal. But as Alex and I walk hand in hand down the bombed-out road, I understand that it wasn’t like that at all. There was mess and stink and blood and the smell of skin burning. There were people: people standing and eating, talking on the phone, frying eggs or singing in the shower. I’m overwhelmed with sadness for everything that was lost, and filled with anger toward the people who took it away. My people—or at least, my
old
people. I don’t know who I am anymore, or where I belong.

That’s not totally true. Alex. I know I belong with Alex.

A little farther up the hill we come across a trim white house standing in the middle of a field. Somehow it escaped the blitz unscathed, and other than a shutter that has become detached and is now hanging at a crazy angle, tapping lightly in the wind, it could be any house in Portland. It looks so strange standing there in the middle of all of that emptiness, surrounded by the shrapnel of disintegrated neighbors. It looks tiny all on its own, like a single lamb that has gotten lost in the wrong pasture.

“Does anyone stay there now?” I ask Alex.

“Sometimes people squat, when it’s rainy or freezing. Only the roamers, though—the Invalids who always move around.” Again he pauses for a fraction of a second before he says
Invalids
, grimacing like the word tastes bad in his mouth. “We pretty much stay away from here. People say the bombers might come back and finish off the job. But mostly it’s just superstition. People think the house is bad luck.” He gives me a tight smile. “It’s been totally cleaned out, though. Beds, blankets, clothes—everything. I got my dishes there.”

Earlier, Alex told me he had his own special place in the Wilds, but when I pressed him for details he clammed up and told me I’d have to wait and see. It’s still weird to think of people living out here, in the middle of all this vastness, needing dishes and blankets and normal things like that.

“This way.”

Alex pulls me off the road and draws me toward the woods again. I’m actually happy to be back in the trees. There was a heaviness to that strange, open space, with its single house and rusting truck and splintered buildings, a gash cut in the surface of the world.

This time we follow a fairly well-worn path. The trees are still splattered with blue paint at intervals, but it doesn’t seem as though Alex needs to consult them. We go quickly, single file. The trees have been shoved away here, and much of the underbrush has been cleared so the walk is much easier. Beneath my feet the dirt has been tamped down over time by the pressure of dozens of feet. My heart starts thumping heavily against my ribs. I can tell we’re getting close.

Alex turns around to face me, so abruptly I almost slam into him. He clicks the flashlight off, and in the sudden darkness strange shapes seem to rise up, take form, swirl away.

“Close your eyes,” he says, and I can tell he’s smiling.

“Why bother? I can’t see anything.”

I can practically hear him roll his eyes. “Come on, Lena.”

“Fine.” I close my eyes and he takes my hands in both of his. Then he pulls me forward another twenty feet, murmuring things like, “Step up. There’s a rock,” or “A little to the left.” The whole time a fluttery, nervous feeling builds inside of me. We stop, finally, and Alex drops my hands.

“We’re here,” he says. I can hear the excitement in his voice. “Open up.”

I do, and for a moment can’t speak. I open my mouth several times and have to shut it again after all that emerges is a high-pitched squeak.

“Well?” Alex fidgets next to me. “What do you think?”

Finally I stutter out, “It’s—it’s
real
.”

Alex snorts. “Of course it’s real.”

“I mean, it’s amazing.” I take a few steps forward. Now that I’m here I’m not sure what, exactly, I was imagining the Wilds would be like—but whatever it was, it wasn’t this. A long, broad clearing cuts through the woods, although in places the trees have begun to crowd in again, pushing slender stalks toward the sky, which stretches above us, a vast and glittering canopy, the moon sitting bright and huge and swollen at its center. Wild roses encircle a dented sign, faded nearly to illegibility. I can just make out the words
CREST VILLAGE MOBILE PARK
. The clearing is full of dozens of trailers, as well as more creative residences: tarps stretched between trees, with blankets and shower curtains to serve as front doors; rusting trucks with tents pitched in the back of their cabs; old vans with fabric stretched over their windows for privacy. The clearing is pitted with holes where campfires have been lit over the course of the day—now, well past midnight, they are smoldering still, letting up ribbons of smoke and the smell of charred wood.

“See?” Alex grins and spreads his arms. “The blitz didn’t get everything.”

“You didn’t tell me.” I start walking forward down the center of the clearing, stepping around a series of logs that have been arranged in a circle, like an outdoor living room. “You didn’t tell me it was like this.”

He shrugs, trotting next to me like a happy dog. “It’s the kind of thing you need to see for yourself.” He toes a bit of dirt over a dying campfire. “Looks like we came too late for the party tonight.”

As we progress through the clearing, Alex points out every “house” and tells me a little bit about the people who live there, speaking all the time in a whisper, so we won’t wake anybody. Some stories I’ve heard before; others are totally new. I’m not even fully concentrating, but I’m grateful for the sound of his voice, low and steady and familiar and reassuring. Even though the settlement isn’t that big—maybe an eighth of a mile long—I feel as though the world has suddenly split open, revealing layers and depths I could never have imagined.

No walls. No walls anywhere. Portland, by comparison, seems tiny, a blip.

Alex stops in front of a dingy gray trailer. Its windows are missing and have been replaced by squares of multicolored fabric, pulled taut.

“And, um, this is me.” Alex gestures awkwardly. It’s the first time he has seemed nervous all night, which makes me nervous. I swallow back the sudden and totally inappropriate urge to laugh hysterically.

“Wow. It’s—it’s—”

“It’s not much, from the outside,” Alex jumps in. He looks away, chewing on a corner of his lip. “Do you want to, um, come in?”

I nod, pretty sure that if I tried to speak right now I would only squeak again. I’ve been alone with him countless times, but this feels different. Here there are no eyes waiting to catch us, no voices waiting to shout at us, no hands ready to tear us apart—just miles and miles of space. It’s exciting and terrifying at the same time. Anything could happen here, and when he bends down to kiss me it’s as though the weight of the velvety darkness around us, the soft flutters of the trees, the pitter-patter of the unseen animals, come beating into my chest, making me feel as though I’m dissolving and expanding into the night. When he pulls away it takes me a few seconds to catch my breath.

“Come on,” he says. He leans a shoulder against the door of the trailer until it pops open.