Delirium (Delirium #1)(98)
We agree to meet at the house at midnight to continue planning. I’ll bring him the first collection of belongings I want to take with me: my photo album, a sheath of notes Hana and I passed back and forth sophomore year in math class, and whatever food I can smuggle from the storeroom at the Stop-N-Save.
It’s almost three o’clock by the time Alex and I split up and I head home. The clouds have mostly broken up, and between them the sky is interwoven, a pale blue, like faded and tattered silk. The air is warm but the wind is edged with an autumn smell of cold and smoke. Soon all the lush greens of the landscape will burn away into fierce reds and oranges; and then those, too, will burn away, into the stark black brittleness of winter. And I’ll be gone—out there somewhere among the skinny, shivering trees, encased in snow. But Alex will be with me, and we’ll be safe. We’ll walk together holding hands, and kiss in broad daylight, and love each other as much as we want to, and no one will ever try to keep us apart.
Despite everything that happened today, I feel calmer than I’ve ever been, as though the words Alex and I said to each other today have wrapped me up in a protective haze.
I haven’t been running regularly for over a month. It has been too hot, and until recently Carol has forbidden it. But as soon as I get home I call Hana and ask her to meet me at the tracks, our regular starting point, and she only laughs.
“I was about to call and ask you the same thing,” she says.
“Great minds,” I say, her laughter getting lost for a second in the fuzz that blasts through the receiver, as a censor somewhere deep in Portland tunes into our conversation momentarily. The old revolving eye, ever-turning, ever-vigilant. Anger worms through me for a second, but it disappears quickly. Soon I’ll be off the map completely and forever.
I was hoping to get out of the house without seeing Carol, but she intersects me on my way out the door. As always, she’s been in the kitchen, endlessly repeating her cycle of cooking and cleaning.
“Where have you been all day?” she asks.
“With Hana,” I answer automatically.
“And you’re going out again?”
“Just for a run.” Earlier I thought if I ever saw her again I would tear at her face, or kill her. But now, looking at her, I feel completely numb, like she’s a painted billboard or a stranger passing on a bus.
“Dinner’s at seven thirty,” she says. “I’d like you to be home to set the table.”
“I’ll be home,” I say. It occurs to me that this numbness, this feeling of separation, must be what she and every cured experiences all the time: as though there is a thick, muffling pane of glass between you and everybody else. Hardly anything penetrates. Hardly anything matters. They say the cure is about happiness, but I understand now that it isn’t, and it never was. It’s about fear: fear of pain, fear of hurt, fear, fear, fear—a blind animal existence, bumping between walls, shuffling between ever-narrowing hallways, terrified and dull and stupid.
For the first time in my life I actually feel sorry for Carol. I’m only seventeen years old, and I already know something she doesn’t know: I know that life isn’t life if you just float through it. I know that the whole point—the only point—is to find the things that matter, and hold on to them, and fight for them, and refuse to let them go.
“Okay.” Carol stands there, kind of awkwardly, like she always does when she wants to say something meaningful but can’t quite remember how to do it. “Two weeks until your cure,” she says finally.
“Sixteen days,” I say, but in my head I’m counting: Seven days. Seven days until I’m free, and away from all these people and their sliding, superficial lives, brushing past one another, gliding, gliding, gliding, from life to death. For them, there’s hardly a change between the two.
“It’s okay to be nervous,” she says. This is the difficult thing she has been trying to say, the words of comfort it has cost her so much effort to remember. Poor Aunt Carol: a life of dishes and dented cans of green beans and days that bleed forever into one another. It occurs to me, then, how old she looks. Her face is deeply lined, and her hair has patches of gray. It’s only her eyes that have convinced me she is ageless: those staring, filmy eyes that all cureds share, as though they’re always looking off into some vast distance. She must have been pretty when she was young, before she was cured—as tall as my mother at least, and probably just as thin—and a mental image flashes of two teenage girls, both slender black parentheses separated by a span of silver ocean, kicking water at each other, laughing. These are the things you do not give up.
“Oh, I’m not nervous,” I tell her. “Trust me. I can’t wait.”
Only seven more days.
Chapter Twenty-Four
What is beauty? Beauty is no more than a trick; a delusion; the influence of
excited particles and electrons colliding in your eyes, jostling in your brain
like a bunch of overeager schoolchildren, about to be released on break. Will
you let yourself be deluded? Will you let yourself be deceived?
—“On Beauty and Falsehood,”The New Philosophy, by Ellen Dorpshire
Hana’s already there when I arrive, leaning up against the chain-link fence that encircles the track, head tilted back and eyes closed against the sun. Her hair is loose and spilling down her back, nearly white in the sun. I pause when I’m fifteen feet away from her, wishing I could memorize her exactly like that, hold that precise image in my mind forever.