Pandemonium (12 page)

One night, I work up the courage to approach him. He is in a rare good mood. Bram brought four rabbits from the traps today, and for once we have all eaten until we were completely full.

After dinner, Tack sits next to the fire, rolling a cigarette. He doesn’t look up as I approach.

“What?” he asks, abrupt as ever, but his voice has none of its usual edge.

I suck in a deep breath and blurt out, “I want to be one of the scouts.” I’ve been agonizing all week about what to say to Tack—I’ve written whole speeches in my head—but at the last second these eight words are all that come.

“No,” Tack says shortly. And just like that, all my worrying and planning and strategizing have come to nothing.

I’m torn between disappointment and anger. “I’m fast,” I say. “I’m strong.”

“Not strong enough.”

“I want to help,” I press, conscious of the whine that is creeping into my voice, conscious of the fact that I sound like Blue when she is throwing one of her rare tantrums.

Tack runs his tongue along the rolling paper and then twists the cigarette closed with a few expert turns of his fingers. He looks up at me then, and in that second I realize Tack hardly ever looks at me. His eyes are shrewd, appraising, filled with messages I don’t understand.

“Later,” he says, and with that, he stands and pushes his way past me and up the stairs.

T
he morning of the rally is unseasonably warm. What little snow has remained on the ground and the roofs runs in rivulets through the gutters, and drips from streetlamps and tree branches. It is dazzlingly sunny. The puddles in the street look like polished metal, perfectly reflective.

Raven and Tack are joining me at the demonstration, although they’ve informed me that they won’t actually stay with me. My job is to keep close to the stage. I’m to watch Julian before he heads uptown to Columbia Memorial, where he will be cured.

“Don’t take your eyes off him, no matter what,” Raven has instructed me. “No matter what, okay?”

“Why?” I ask, knowing my question will go unanswered. Despite the fact that I am officially part of the resistance, I know hardly anything about how it works, and what we’re supposed to be doing.

“Because,” she says, “I said so.”

I mouth the last part along with her, keeping my back turned so she won’t see.

Uncharacteristically, there are long lines at the bus stops. Two different regulators are distributing numbers to the waiting passengers; Raven, Tack, and I will be on bus 5, whenever that arrives. The city has quadrupled the quantity of buses and drivers today. Twenty-five thousand people are expected to show up at the demonstration; about five thousand members of the DFA, and thousands of spectators and onlookers.

Many of the groups that oppose the DFA, and the idea of early procedure, will also be there. This includes much of the scientific community. The procedure is just not yet safe for children, they say, and will lead to tremendous social defects: a nation of idiots and freaks. The DFA claims the opposition is overly cautious. The benefits, they say, far outweigh the risks.

And if need be, we will just make our prisons larger, and stick the damaged ones there, out of sight.

“Move up, move up.” The regulator at the front of the line directs us onto the bus. We shuffle forward, showing our identity cards and swiping them, again, as we board, and I am reminded of a bunch of herd animals, heads down, trundling ahead.

Raven and Tack have not been speaking; they must be fighting again. I can sense it between them, a tight electricity, and it’s not helping my anxiety. Raven finds an empty two-seater in the back, but Tack, surprisingly, slides in next to me.

“What are you doing?” Raven demands, leaning forward. She has to be careful to keep her voice down. Cureds don’t really fight. That is one of the benefits of the procedure.

“I want to make sure Lena’s okay,” Tack mutters back. He reaches out and grabs my hand, a quick pulse. A woman seated across the aisle looks at us curiously. “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” I say, but my voice sounds strangled. I wasn’t nervous at all earlier in the morning. Tack and Raven have made me jumpy. They’re obviously worried about something, and I think I know what it is: They must believe the rumors of the Scavengers are true. They must believe the Scavengers are going to stage an upset, try to disturb the demonstration in some way.

Even crossing the Brooklyn Bridge doesn’t have its usual calming effect. The bridge is, for the first time ever, clogged with traffic: private cars, and buses transporting people to the demonstration.

As we approach Times Square, my anxiety increases. I’ve never seen so many people in my life. We have to get out at 34th Street because buses cannot progress any farther. The streets are swarming with people: a massive blur of faces, a river of colors. There are regulators, too—volunteer and official—wearing spotless uniforms; then there are members of the armed guard, standing stiffly in rows, staring fixedly straight ahead, like toy soldiers lined up, about to march. Except these soldiers, these real ones, carry enormous guns, barrels gleaming in the sunlight.

As soon as I descend into the crowd I’m pushed and jostled from all sides, and even though Raven and Tack are behind me, I manage to lose sight of them a few times as people flow between us. Now I see why they’ve given me my instructions early. There’s no way I’ll be able to keep sight of them.

It is shatteringly loud. The regulators are blowing their whistles, directing foot traffic, and in the distance I can hear drumbeats and chanting. The demonstration doesn’t officially start for another two hours, but even now I think I can make out the rhythm of the DFA’s chant:
In numbers there is safety and for nothing let us want…

We move north slowly, penned in on all sides, in the endless, deep chasms between the buildings. People have gathered on some of the balconies to watch. I see hundreds and hundreds of waving white banners, signs of support for the DFA—and just a few emerald-colored ones, signs of opposition.

“Lena!” I turn around. Tack shoves his way through the mass of people, presses an umbrella into my hand. “It’s supposed to rain later.”

The sky is a perfect pale blue and streaked with the thinnest clouds, like bare white tendrils of hair. “I don’t think—,” I start to say, but he interrupts me.

“Just take it,” he says. “Trust me.”

“Thanks.” I try to sound grateful. It’s rare for Tack to be this thoughtful.

He hesitates, chewing on the corner of his lip. I’ve seen him do that when he’s working on a puzzle at the apartment and can’t quite get all the pieces aligned. I think he’s about to say something else—give me advice—but at the last second he just says, “I need to catch up with Rebecca.” He stutters, just barely, over Raven’s official name.

“Okay.” We’ve already lost sight of her. I go to wrestle the umbrella into my backpack—getting dirty looks from the people around me, since there’s barely room to breathe, much less maneuver the bag from my back—when it suddenly occurs to me that we haven’t made a plan for after the demonstration. I don’t know where I’m supposed to meet Raven and Tack.

“Hey—” I look up, but Tack has already gone. All the faces around me are unfamiliar; I’m entirely surrounded by strangers. I turn a full circle and feel a sharp jab in the ribs. A regulator has reached out and is prodding me forward with his nightstick.

“You’re holding everybody up,” he says flatly. “Move it.”

My chest is full of butterflies. I tell myself to breathe. There’s nothing to worry about. It’s just like going to a DFA meeting, but bigger.

At 38th Street we pass the barricades, where we have to wait in line and get patted down and searched by police officers carrying wands. They check our necks, too—the uncureds will be in their own special segregated section of the demonstration—and scan our IDs, though fortunately, they don’t call everything into SVS, the Secure Validation System. Even so, it takes me an hour to make it through. Beyond the security barricades, volunteers are distributing antibacterial wipes: small white packages printed with the DFA’s logo.

CLEANLINESS IS NEXT TO GODLINESS. SECURITY IS IN THE DETAILS. HAPPINESS IS IN THE METHOD
.

I allow a silver-haired woman to press a package into my hand.

And then, finally, I’ve arrived. The drums are furiously loud here, and the chanting a rolling constant, like the sound of waves crashing on the shore.

Once I saw a photo of Times Square: before the cure, before all the borders were closed off. Tack found it near Salvage, a homestead in New Jersey, just across the river from New York. We took refuge there while we were waiting for our forged papers to arrive. One day Tack found a whole photo album, perfectly intact, buried under a pile of limestone and charred timber. In the evenings, I would flip through it and pretend that these photographs—this life of friends and boyfriends and squinting, laughing sunshine shots—were mine.

Times Square looks very different now than it did then. As I move forward in the crowd, my breath catches in my throat.

A towering raised platform, a dais, has been built at one end of the enormous open plaza, underneath a billboard larger than any I have seen in my life. It is plastered all over with signs for the DFA: red and white squares, fluttering lightly in the wind.

The Unified Church of Religion and Science has colonized one billboard and marked it huge with its primary symbol: a giant hand cupping a molecule of hydrogen. The other signs—and there are dozens of them, gigantic, bleached-white walls—are all faded to illegibility, so it’s impossible to tell what they once advertised. On one of them I think I can make out the ghostly imprint of a smile.

And of course, all the lights are dead.

The photograph I saw of Times Square was taken at night, but it could have been high noon: I’ve never seen so many lights in my life, could never even have imagined them. Lights blazing, glittering, lit up in crazy colors that made me think of those spots that float across your vision after you’ve accidentally looked directly at the sun.

The lightbulbs are still here, but they’re dark. On many of them, pigeons are perching, roosting between the blacked-out bulbs. New York and its sister cities have mandatory controls on electricity, just like Portland did—and although there are a greater number of cars and buses, the blackouts are stricter and more frequent. There are just too many people, and not enough juice for all of them.

The dais is wired with microphones and equipped with chairs; behind it is an enormous video screen, like the kind the DFA uses at its meetings. Uniformed men are making last-minute adjustments to the setup. That’s where Julian will be; somehow, I’ll have to get closer.

I start to push my way slowly, painstakingly, through the crowd. I have to fight and elbow and say “Excuse me” every time I try to squeeze by someone. Even being five foot two isn’t helping. There simply isn’t enough space between bodies—there are no cracks to slip through.

That’s when I start to panic again. If the Scavengers do come—or if anything goes wrong—there will be no place to run. We’ll be caught here like animals in a pen. People will trample one another trying to get out. A stampede.

But the Scavengers won’t come. They wouldn’t dare. It’s too dangerous. There are too many police, too many regulators, too many guns.

I squeeze my way past a series of bleachers, all roped off, where members of the DFA Youth Guard are sitting: girls and boys on separate bleachers, of course, all of them careful not to look at one another.

At last I make it to the foot of the dais. The platform must be ten or twelve feet in the air. A series of steep wooden steps gives the speakers access from the ground. At the foot of the stairs, a group of people has gathered. I make out Thomas and Julian Fineman behind a blur of bodyguards and police officers.

Julian and his father are dressed identically. Julian’s hair is slicked back, and curls just behind his ears. He’s shifting from foot to foot, obviously trying to conceal his nervousness.

I wonder what’s so important about him—why Tack and Raven told me to keep an eye on him. He has become symbolic of the DFA, of course—sacrifice in the name of public safety—but I wonder whether he presents some kind of additional danger.

I think back to what he said at the rally:
I was nine when I was told I was dying
.

I wonder what it feels like to die slowly.

I wonder what it feels like to die quickly.

I squeeze my nails into my palms, to keep the memories back.