Delirium: The Complete Collection (79 page)

And no one would choose the girl with the record.

It was at the corner of Linden and Adams that I saw him. Ran into him, actually—saw him step out in front of me, hands up, shouting, “Wait!” Tried to dodge, lost my footing, stumbled directly into his arms. I was so close, I could see the snow caught in his lashes, smell the damp wool of his coat and the sharpness of aftershave, see where he’d missed the stubble on his jaw. So close that the procedural scar on his neck looked like a tiny white starburst.

I’d never been that close to a boy before.

The soldiers behind me were still shouting—“Stop!” and “Hold her!” and “Don’t let her get away!” I’ll never forget the way he looked at me—curiously, almost amused, as though I were a strange species of animal in a zoo.

Then: He let me go.

T
he dagger pin is all I have left. It is comfort and pain, both, because it reminds me of all I’ve had, held, and had taken from me.

It is my pen, too. With it, I write my story, again and again, in the walls. So I don’t forget. So it becomes real.

I think of: Conrad’s hands; Rachel’s dark hair; Lena’s rosebud mouth; how, when she was an infant, I used to sneak into her bedroom and hold her while she slept. Rachel never let me—from birth, she screamed, kicked, would have woken the household and the street.

But Lena lay still and warm in my arms, submerged in some secret dreamland.

And she was my secret: those nighttime hours, that twin heartbeat space, the darkness, the joy.

All of this, I write.

And so truth shall set me free.

My room is full of holes. Holes where the stone grows porous, eaten away by mold and moisture. Holes where the mice make their homes. Holes of memory, where people and things get lost.

There is a hole in the bottom of my mattress.

And in the wall behind my bed, another hole, growing bigger by the day.

On the fourth Friday of every month, Thomas brings me a change of linens for the cot. Laundry day is my favorite. It helps me keep track of the days. And for the first few nights, before the new sheet is soiled with sweat and the sediment of dust that sifts down on me continuously, like snow, I feel almost human again. I can close my eyes, imagine I am back in the warmth of the old house, with the wood and the sun, the smell of detergent, an illegal song piping softly from the ancient record player.

And, of course, laundry day is when I get my messages.

Today I’m up just before the sun. My cell is windowless, and for years I couldn’t tell night from day, morning from evening: a colorless existence, a time without aging or end. In the first year of my imprisonment, I did nothing but dream of the outdoors—the sun on Lena’s hair, warm wooden steps, the smell of the beach at low tide, swollen-belly rain clouds.

Over time even my dreams became gray and textureless.

Those were the years I wanted to die.

When I first broke through the wall, after three years of digging, twisting, carving the soft stone away with a bit of metal no larger than a child’s finger—when that last bit of rock crumbled away and went spinning, tumbling into the river below—my first thought wasn’t even of escape but of air, sun, breath. I slept for two nights on the floor just so I could feel the wind, so I could inhale the smell of snow.

Today I have stripped my cot of its single sheet and the coarse blanket—wool in winter, cotton in summer—that is standard issue in Ward Six. No pillows. I once heard the warden say that a prisoner had tried to suffocate himself here, and ever since, pillows have been forbidden. It seems unlikely but then again: Two years ago a prisoner managed to get hold of a guard’s broken shoelaces and choked himself to death on the metal frame of his cot.

I am at the end of the row, so as always, I get to listen to the rest of the ritual: the doors creaking open, the occasional cry or moan, the squeak of Thomas’s sneakers and then the heavy thud, the click, of the cell doors closing again. This is my only excitement, my only pleasure: waiting for the clean linens, holding the filthy sheet balled in my lap, heart fluttering like a moth in my throat, thinking,
Maybe, maybe this time …

Amazing, how hope lives. Without air or water, with hardly anything at all to nurture it.

The bolts slide back. A second later, the door grinds open and Thomas appears, carrying a folded sheet. I haven’t seen my reflection in eleven years—since I arrived and sat in the medical wing while a female warden cut off my hair and shaved my head with a razor, telling me it was for my own good—so the lice would stay out.

My monthly shower takes place in a windowless, mirrorless room, a stone box with several rusted showerheads and no hot water, and now when my head needs shaving, the warden comes to me, and I am bound and locked to a heavy metal ring on the door while she works. It is by watching Thomas, by seeing the way the years have made his skin puff and sag, carved wrinkles into the corners of his eyes, thinned his hair, that I can estimate what they have done to me.

He passes me the new sheet and removes my soiled one. He says nothing. He never does, not out loud. It’s too risky. But for a second, his eyes meet mine, and some communication passes between us.

Then it’s over. He turns and leaves. The door shuts and the bolt clicks into place.

I stand and move to the cot. My hands are shaking as I unfold the sheet. Inside it is a pillowcase, carefully concealed, no doubt smuggled up from one of the other wards.

Time is really just a test of patience. This is how it works, how it has worked for years: a pillowcase one month, occasionally an extra sheet. Linens that go missing and aren’t looked for, linens that can be torn, twisted, braided together.

I reach into the pillowcase. At the very bottom is a small piece of paper, also carefully folded, containing Thomas’s sole instructions:
Not yet.

My disappointment is physical: a bitter rush of taste, a liquid feeling in my stomach. Another month to wait. I know I should be relieved—the rope I’ve been making is still too short, and will leave me with a ten-foot drop to the Presumpscot River. More chances to slip, twist or break something, cry out.

And I absolutely cannot cry out.

To keep from thinking too much about the wait ahead of me, another thirty days in this airless, dark place—another thirty days closer to death—I get down on my hands and knees and maneuver under the cot, feeling for the hole in the mattress, as big as a fist. Over the course of a year, I’ve been pulling out handfuls of foam and filler, all of it disposed in the metal chamber pot where I piss and shit and, when the flu makes the rounds, get sick. I wrap my hand around a coil of cotton and pull; inch by inch, all those stolen linens are revealed, torn and braided, made strong to hold my weight. By now, the rope is nearly forty feet long.

I spend the rest of the evening making careful tears, using the edge of the dagger pin, now blunted nearly useless, to poke and tear holes in the fabric. No point in moving quickly.

There is nowhere to go, nothing else to do.

By the time I receive my daily dinner ration, I’ve finished working. I stuff the rope back in its hiding place, pushing, working it through the opening: a reverse birth. When I’m finished, I eat the food without tasting it, which is probably a blessing. Then I lie on my cot until the lights go off abruptly. The whimpering begins, the muttering and the occasional scream of someone gripped in a nightmare or, perhaps, waking from a pleasant dream only to discover he is still here. Strangely, I’ve learned to find the nighttime sounds almost comforting.

Eventually, my mind brings me memories of Lena, and then visions of the sea; at last, I sleep.

T
here was no resistance back then; there was no consciousness, yet, that we needed to resist. There were promises of peace and happiness, a relief from instability and confusion. A path and a place for all. A way to know, always, that your road was the right one. People were flocking to get cured the way they had once flocked to churches. The streets were papered with signs pointing the way to a better future. A central bank; jobs and marriages designed to fit like gloves.

And a life designed to slowly strangle.

But there was an underground: Brain Shops, someone who knew someone who could get you a fake ID for the right price; another person who could hook up an intercity bus ticket; someone else who rented basement space to anyone who wanted to disappear.

In Boston I stayed in the basement apartment of an older couple named Wallace. They weren’t cured; they missed the age cutoff even when the procedure became mandatory, and were allowed to die in peace, in love. Or would have been allowed to—I heard several years later that they had been busted for harboring runaways, people who were dodging the cure, and spent the last few years of their lives in jail.

A path and a place for everyone, and for the people who disagree, a hole.

I should never have stolen his wallet. But that’s the problem with love—it acts on you, works through you, resists your attempts to control. That’s what made it so frightening to the lawmakers: Love obeys no laws other than its own.

That’s what has always made it frightening.

The basement was accessible only through a narrow alleyway that ran between the Wallaces’ house and their neighbor’s; the door was concealed behind a pile of junk that had to be carefully navigated each time we entered or left. Down a steep flight of stairs was a large, unfinished room: mattresses on the floor, a wild jumble of clothing, and a small toilet and sink, made semiprivate behind a folding screen. The ceiling was crisscrossed with metal pipes and plastic tubes and wiring, so it looked like someone’s intestines tacked above us. It was ugly, freezing, and smelled like dirty feet, and I loved it. In my short time there, I made two good friends: Misha, who hooked me up with Rawls and was trying to get me fake papers, too; and Steff, who taught me how to pick pockets and showed me all the best places to do it.

That is how I knew the name of the man I would someday marry: I stole his wallet. The slight touch, my hands across his chest, the momentary contact—it was long enough to feel for it in his jacket, slip it into my pocket, and run.

I should have dumped the wallet and kept the cash, as Steff had taught me to do. But even then love was working on me, making me stupid and curious and careless. Instead I took the wallet back to the crash pad with me and spread out its contents carefully, greedily, on my mattress, like a jeweler bending over her diamonds. One government ID card, pristine, printed with the name
CONRAD HALOWAY
. One credit card, gold, issued by the National Bank. One loyalty card at Boston Bean, stamped three times. A copy of his medical certification; he’d been cured exactly six months earlier. Forty-three dollars, which was a fortune to me.

And, tucked into one of the empty credit card flaps, distorting the leather slightly: one silver dagger pin, the size of a child’s finger.

T
hree days after Thomas brings me the note telling me to wait, he comes again. This time he is carrying nothing. He merely slides open the door, enters my cell, cuffs me, and hauls me to my feet.

“Let’s go,” he says.

“Go where?” I ask.

“Don’t ask questions.” He speaks loudly, no doubt so that the other prisoners will hear. He shoves me roughly toward the door, out into the narrow corridor that runs between the cells. Above us, the cameras set in the stone ceiling blink like small red eyes.

Thomas grabs my wrists and propels me forward. My shoulders burn. I have a momentary flash of fear: I’m so weak. How will I make it on my own, in the Wilds?

“What did I do?” I ask him.

“Breathe,” he answers. He puts on a good show. “Didn’t I tell you not to ask questions?” At one end of the corridor is the exit to the other wards; at the opposite end is the Tank. The Tank is only a cell, unused, but much smaller than the others, and fitted with nothing but a rusted metal ring hanging from the ceiling. If the residents of Ward Six are too loud, if they give trouble, they are strapped to the ring and whipped or hosed, or simply thrown in here to sit for days in darkness, soiling themselves when they need to go. But the hose is the worst: icy water, emerging with such force it takes your breath away, leaves you blackened and bruised.

Thomas does everything exactly as he should. He cuffs me to the ceiling, and for a moment, as he reaches above my head, we’re so close that I can smell the coffee on his breath.

I feel a deep ache in my stomach, a sudden, wrenching pain; Thomas, for all the risks he is taking, still belongs to the other-world, of bus stops and convenience stores and dawn breaking over the horizon; of summer days and driving rains and wood fires in the winter.

For a moment, I hate him.

Once he locks the door, he turns to me.

“We don’t have much time, so listen carefully,” he says. And just like that, my hatred evaporates, is replaced by a rush of feeling. Skinny Thomas, the boy I used to see sometimes hanging around the house, careful to pretend to be reading. How did he become this pudgy, hard-faced man, with hair gelled over a pink scalp, with lines etched deep into his face?

That’s what time does: We stand stubbornly like rocks while it flows all around us, believing that we are immutable—and all the time we’re being carved, and shaped, and whittled away.