River: A Novel (15 page)

 Dan made me
swear to him that I would get some sleep and quit drinking coffee for the
night. I couldn’t break my promise after all he was doing for me: risking his
life, believing me, protecting me, covering for me—it was a long list. I had no
idea what would’ve happened if I hadn’t run into him, but I’m sure it would
have been extremely unpleasant. Probably would’ve involved various tortures, including
the medieval device that held my wrists and head between two wooden blocks
while an angry mob of townsfolk threw rotten tomatoes at my face. So without
coffee, the weariness and exhaustion I had been suppressing took over my body,
forcing me to throw on the pajamas Danny had found and climb under a fluffy comforter
with pink trim.

 Sleep took
me immediately. It was enjoyably dreamless for a while, until I found myself
alone in an open concrete parking lot with a large brick building to the east. The
structure looked dilapidated and abandoned. A swirling, icy wind forced me to
huddle into myself while searching for shelter. In front of me was a tall
barbed wire fence and behind stretched early winter woods. The cold in my dream
was surprising. I could usually control the temperature, or it at least didn’t
affect me as much. Standing out in the open was not an option, and I forced my
legs to move toward the building, seeing that it was boarded up and there were
no openings in the brick. I turned in a half circle and checked if there was
anything in my surroundings that I could find some warmth in, like a feather-soft
comforter. The chill was making me shiver just as I saw distant lights across a
huge canyon, beyond the fence. Maybe that was my way home.

 Crossing
the concrete took longer than it should have, and my breathing was labored by
the time I reached the fence. Peering through the chain links, I saw that the
canyon was deep with black, churning water, and chunky a-symmetrical boulders
below the steep rock face.
A  quarry?
I looked back. The brick building
was no longer visible, only endless concrete. To either side of me, the fence
extended for miles. I would have to follow it to an opening or try to climb
over the barbed wire. Not a daredevil, even in dreams, I moved forward. My hand
grazed the metal of the fence, making a light clinking sound.

  Time
passed. I looked behind me for something else to see besides flat concrete,
cliffs, and steel wire. The dimming light stirred a hint of danger into the
atmosphere. Suddenly, from behind, I was startled to glimpse what appeared to
be flashlights in the distance. They made no sound, but I could tell there were
many and coming up fast. I gasped in surprise when panic sank through my limbs,
and then began to really run, my toes springing off the ground. No end was in
sight. No breaks in the fence. No way out of the nightmare. Whoever chased me
was a mystery, but I knew instinctively that I could not be caught. Death would
be a better alternative.

 The flashlights
gained. Running was not getting me away from them fast enough, so I decided to
jump over the fence. Annoyed at my lack of gracefulness and anxiously trying to
get a low, sinister laugh out of my ears, I scrambled up, feeling cumbersome. My
feet caught in the holes of fencing and slowed me down, but I made it to the
top. The barbed wire scraped and scratched, clung to my clothing, and made my
hands bleed. When swinging a leg over the edge, my pant hem hooked on the sharp
barbs. Using my weight to yank at it, I pulled too hard and threw myself off
balance. The kinetic gravitational pull had me spinning and plummeting through
the air faster than I could make sense of what was happening. I grappled at the
rock face, my nails only grazing the surface before I went over the cliff. Rocky
waters met my body and jerked it back, but I felt no impact.

 My eyelids
were stuck. Something heavy weighed on them. Was there a hand over my eyes? Danny
and his pranks. Maybe he had cleaned the apartment and was trying to surprise
me. That
would
be cause for celebration. Feeling for my legs, I
determined I was lying down, not vertical. Why would someone hold me down and
blindfold me? Trying to talk, to get free, I choked. There was something in my
throat. I struggled to get it out, hating anything being stuck in my throat as
much as the next person, but my arms were in a vice. There was no feeling to my
legs at all; they were completely numb. Maybe not even there, I considered in
horror. My heart raced with a high musical note I could almost hear out of my
left ear. Then a rhythmic beat of blood threatened to drown out my pulse— 

 Twitching
awake, I was drenched in sweat and didn’t even have any covers. My arm was
asleep, totally dead weight. I gingerly picked it up and repositioned it to get
the blood moving. A warm gush trickled through my cold veins. Uncomfortable and
slightly nauseous, I shifted to I sit up. I was on the linoleum in River Elodie’s
kitchen. Jumping up at a knock on the door, I began shivering immediately. My
teeth were even chattering. After shaking out the needles in my arm, I tip-toed
to the door and thought about not answering. What if it was someone I was
supposed to know? I would be found out for sure,
made
as the undercover community
would say. But if I didn’t answer, whoever it was could assume something was
wrong and call authorities. Without Danny as a buffer, I would be made for
sure—sent to the gallows
for sure.

 The
repetitive rapping jolted me further awake. At this rate, I wasn’t going to die
from being tortured to death in this town, but from an anxiety attack.

 D-A-N

 The second
I translated, I fell on the doorknob in relief. Only able to half-smile at
Danny, my teeth were still chattering, pajamas were stuck to my sweaty body,
and my feet were bare blocks of ice. It was painful and not pretty, yet I
ignored it all because I was so glad that it was Dan at my door, until I saw
the expression on his face.

 Are you all right? 
 

 He signed furiously
as he barreled into the room, and I almost didn’t comprehend the question. Clearly
terrified and angry, he swept through the space as if expecting danger. I
surveyed the hallway for a second before closing the door. 

 “I’m fine,
I guess,” I whispered with a five a.m. rasp. While grabbing a blanket off the
sofa and wrapping it around my shoulders, I wished I could conjure slippers for
my feet. “What’s up?” Trying to sound blasé, I watched his wild movements with
worry. He was out of breath, as though he’d sprinted here.

 I
received a message from you thirty minutes ago.
He signed very slowly this time, detecting my confusion. I didn’t have my
glasses on when he handed me his coder and had to squint closer to the screen in
order to translate.

 Help -me
–Dan- I- am- trapped- here –help- me- I -have –to- get- out

 “Sorry, Dan,
I must’ve been sleepwalking again.”

 After
handing his coder back, I turned away before he could see doubt in my eyes. I
didn’t even believe myself that time. Starting the coffee, I ignored the twisting
sense of dread in my gut. I’d never used the coder and was hardly able to decipher
the tiny dots and dashes filling the screen without my glasses. How could I
have sent him a message while asleep?

 When moving
around in the kitchen, I stepped on something that made me yelp before I could cover
my mouth. It was the coder Dan had given me last night. He’d showed me how to
check for messages, but I’d forgotten about it. Now I was staring at it on the
floor, rubbing my foot, in the spot where I’d woken up a few minutes before. After
picking up the evidence, I glanced at Dan. Strange coincidence did not even cut
it. 

 Danny just
shook his head with the puzzled expression that was permanently etched upon his
face. I turned and continued to go through the motions of making coffee. A
thousand thoughts slid in and out of my still sluggish brain. Was I River
Elodie and had experienced some kind of mental breakdown? Was I really strapped
to a hospital bed and this was all a crazy dream?
Crazy
. Maybe it was a
one-word explanation. I shook my head to snap out of the delusion of delusions.
Could I really have burned my tongue with hot liquid the way I just did if truly
asleep? Could dreams be this tactile? Dan took a vial of anti-Lull out of his
jacket pocket and splashed some into both our mugs. I held mine out for a
double-shot, taking advantage of any defense I could get.

 It was when
my hand reached out that I noticed almost healed scratches on one side of my
index finger, blending in with the lines of my palm.

Pancakes
made, coffee consumed, a hot shower and change of clothing later; the dreams,
the coder drama, and the new scars that seemed to be highlighted on my skin
were nearly forgotten. I couldn’t fathom how I’d overlooked them, especially
with all the signing. Maybe my mind was keeping certain things in the dark until
it knew I could handle them. I tried not to think about it and pushed signing
practice to the forefront of my agenda, still feeling like an amateur. 

 I asked Dan
to sift through River Elodie’s mostly white and pink wardrobe to find something
else for me. The clothes I’d been wearing for the last five days were ready for
the laundry, and I still couldn’t justify picking through a stranger’s belongings.
Dan didn’t seem to have my moral dilemma. To him, I was just Elodie, a different
version of the same girl. He cared for both of us; however, he admitted to me that
he secretly hoped I was here to stay. 

 I just
smiled at him and sighed, responding, “I hope I can take you home.” 

 We both knew
I meant New York. I wanted badly for him to be free. He was too good a person,
too good a friend to live this closely under some malevolent fascist regime. Though
he would probably be better off without me around, I still wanted him in a world
where he could thrive.

 As the day
wore on, I drank more coffee than I was supposed to and practiced vigorously. 
Signing was becoming a little less daunting, unless I was just getting used to
the disorder in my brain and could navigate through it with the ease of a
practiced mental patient. Danny couldn’t believe my progress and noted that the
way I had taken to signing increased the probability of his ongoing theory. Forever
the scientist, he had mapped out several episodic conclusions to my dilemma. My
waking up with a completely different view of the world we lived in and knowing
who I was, who he and Nanette were, as well as Petra, gave him the impression
that I had been through some sort of traumatic event. It had to have been an
act so insidious or violent that it had wiped certain things from my memory, causing
me to perceive my past in a way that made remembering the event unbearable. 

 I shuddered
at the thought that I had been through a horrific experience and repressed it. It
was something one would see on a talk show, or read about in a psychiatrist’s
waiting room. Danny had even written down his different imagined versions of my
life last night. He had been too hyper to sleep when I’d allegedly coded him my
pleas for help. In his analysis, the one part I could understand was his
analogy that the brain was just a computer—only one made of muscle, veins, and
nerves instead of plastic and wires. I had obviously short-circuited one of my
hard-drives and, personally, did not anticipate it healing to the point where I
could remember anything of a past in River. 

 One hole in
Dan’s theory, besides my very real memories of us in another life, was my
voice. I still had one, to my intense relief and guilt, but how and why? Could
it have been the fault of Marcus, the Doctor of Disappearing Voices? How could
he have left my vocal cords intact and removed the rest of the newborns, and
live with it? Another fact was that babies cry. Even if Marcus had left my, or
rather, River Elodie’s voice alone, there was no possible way to control a
baby’s cry. This fact just solidified my own memories and gave me hope that
there was a way out of this. Plus, if anyone found out Marcus had saved his own
daughter’s voice while destroying hundreds of others, I do believe
mob-mentality would take over.

 I could
understand, to a small degree, why the citizens had become desensitized to the
procedure. If they knew the Speakers would return their baby healthy, as
opposed to the alternative (Dan didn’t write anything when I asked what
happened if a parent tried to prevent the muting), how could they fight? The
Speakers controlled their world. My blood pressure rose as a loose plan formed
in the fringes of my mind. We had anti-Lull. Even if there was nowhere to go
past the boundaries of River, people could fight and end this madness. I stared
at the little vial on the kitchen table. We had a weapon.

 By keeping these
thoughts to myself, my fears were also kept in check. I’d seen enough world
news to know that people needed organization and direction during a rebellion to
be successful at all. I also knew Dan was smart enough to integrate a solid
plan of action; I just had to come up with a way to present it so as not to
scare him off with my plans of upheaval. It would definitely be dangerous. My
thoughts sifted through ways to bring it up during the signing drills Dan had
designed. Similar to flash cards, they were always different, and he kept me on
my toes. 

 It was well
past midnight when I started to tire out. Sneaking to the kitchen for a snack,
I heated up some cold coffee from the pot, throwing in milk and chugging it
down before Dan could smell it. Disapproving, he shook his head while rolling
his eyes for more effect. I grinned sheepishly, lucky to have gotten away with
my fix. Then, I clapped my hands together and rubbed them, assuming a mock fighting
stance reminiscent of all those Kung–fu movies he used to drag me to. He just
looked at me quizzically, as if I were spontaneously making up yet another
language.