There has been significant debate in the scientific community about whether desire is a symptom of a system infected with amor deliria nervosa, or a precondition of the disease itself. It is unanimously agreed, however, that love and desire enjoy a symbiotic relationship, meaning that one cannot exist without the other. Desire is enemy to contentment; desire is illness, a feverish brain. Who can be considered healthy who wants? The very word want suggests a lack, an impoverishment, and that is what desire is: an impoverishment of the brain, a flaw, a mistake. Fortunately, that can now be corrected.
—From The Roots and Repercussions of Amor Deliria Nervosa on Cognitive Functioning, 4th edition, by Dr. Phillip Berryman
August makes itself comfortable in Portland, breathes its hot and stinking breath over everything. The streets are unbearable during the day, the sun unrelenting, and people rush the parks and beaches, desperate for shade or breeze. It gets harder to see Alex. East End Beach—normally unpopular—is packed most of the time, even in the evenings after I get off work. Twice I show up to meet him and it’s too dangerous for us to talk or make a sign to each other, except for the quick nod that might pass between two strangers. Instead we lay out beach towels fifteen feet apart on the sand. He slips on his headphones and I pretend to read. Whenever our eyes meet my whole body lights up like he’s lying right next to me, rubbing his hand on my back, and even though he keeps a straight face, I can tell by his eyes that he’s smiling. Nothing has ever been so painful or delicious as being so close to him and being unable to do anything about it: like eating ice cream so fast on a hot day you get a splitting headache. I start to understand what Alex said about his “aunt” and “uncle”—about how they even missed the pain after their procedures. Somehow, the pain only makes it better, more intense, more worth it.
Since the beaches are out, we stick to 37 Brooks. The garden is suffering from the heat. It hasn’t rained in more than a week, and the sunlight filtering through the trees—which in July fell softly, like the lightest footstep—now slices daggerlike through the canopy of trees, turning the grass brown. Even the bees seem drunk in the heat, circling slowly, colliding, hitting up against the withering flowers before thudding to the ground, then starting dazedly back into the air.
One afternoon Alex and I are lying on the blanket. I’m on my back; the sky above me seems to break apart into shifting patterns of blue and green and white. Alex is lying on his stomach and seems nervous about something. He keeps lighting matches, watching them flare, and blowing them out only when they’re almost at his fingertips. I think about what he told me that time in the shed: his anger about coming to Portland, the fact that he used to burn things.
There is so much about him I don’t know—so much past and history buried somewhere inside of him. He has had to learn to hide it, even more than most of us. Somewhere, I think, there is a center to him. It glows like a coal being slowly crushed into diamond, weighed down by layers and layers of surface.
So much I haven’t asked him, and so much we never talk about. Yet in other ways I feel like I do know him, and have always known him, without having to be told anything at all.
“It must be nice to be in the Wilds right now,” I blurt out, just for something to say. Alex turns to look at me, and I stammer quickly, “I mean—it must be cooler there. Because of all the trees and shade.”
“It is.” He props himself up on one elbow. I close my eyes and see spots of color and light dancing behind my lids. For a second Alex doesn’t say anything, but I can feel him watching me. “We could go there,” he says at last.
I think he must be joking, so I start to laugh. He stays quiet, though, and when I open my eyes I see his face is totally composed.
“You’re not serious,” I say, but already a deep well of fear has opened inside of me and I know that he is. Somehow I know, too, that this is why he’s been acting strange all day: He misses the Wilds.
“We could go if you want to.” He looks at me for a beat longer and then rolls onto his back. “We could go tomorrow. After your shift.”
“But how would we—” I start to say. He cuts me off.
“Leave that to me.” For a moment his eyes look deeper and darker than I’ve ever seen them, like tunnels. “Do you want to?”
It feels wrong to talk about it so casually, lying on the blanket, so I sit up. Crossing the border is a capital offense, punishable by death. And even though I know that Alex still does it sometimes, the enormity of the risk hasn’t really hit me until now. “There’s no way,” I say, almost in a whisper. “It’s impossible. The fence—and the guards—and the guns . . .”
“I told you. Leave that to me.” He sits up too, reaches out and cups my face quickly, smiling. “Anything’s possible, Lena,” he says, one of his favorite expressions. The fear recedes. I feel so safe with him. I can’t believe that anything bad can happen when we’re together. “A few hours,” he says. “Just to see.”
I look away. “I don’t know.” My throat feels parched; the words tear at my throat as they come out.
Alex leans forward, gives me a quick kiss on the shoulder, and lies down again. “No big deal,” he says, throwing one arm over his eyes to shield them from the sun. “I just thought you might be curious, that’s all.”
“I am curious. But . . .”
“Lena, it’s fine if you don’t want to go. Seriously. It was just an idea.”
I nod. Even though my legs are sticky with sweat, I hug them to my chest. I feel incredibly relieved but also disappointed. I have a sudden memory of the time Rachel dared me to do a back dive off the pier at Willard Beach and I stood trembling at its edge, too scared to jump. Eventually she let me off the hook, bending down to whisper, “It’s okay, Lena-Loo. You’re not ready.” All I’d wanted was to get away from the edge of the pier, but as we walked back onto the beach I felt sick and ashamed.
That’s when I realize: “I do want to go,” I burst out.
Alex removes his arm. “For real?”
I nod, too afraid to say the words again. I’m worried if I open my mouth I’ll take it back.
Alex sits up slowly. I thought he’d be more excited, but he doesn’t smile. He just chews on the inside of his lip and looks away. “It means breaking curfew.”
“It means breaking a lot of rules.”
He looks at me then, and his face is so full of concern it makes something ache deep inside of me. “Listen, Lena.” He looks down and rearranges the pile of matches he has made, placing them neatly side by side. “Maybe it’s not such a good idea. If we get caught—I mean, if you got caught—” He sucks in a deep breath. “I mean, if anything ever happened to you, I could never forgive myself.”
“I trust you,” I say, and mean it 150 percent.
He still won’t look at me. “Yeah, but . . . the penalty for crossing over . . .” He takes another deep breath. “The penalty for crossing over is . . .” At the last second he can’t say death.
“Hey.” I nudge him gently. It’s an incredible thing, how you can feel so taken care of by someone and yet feel, also, like you would die or do anything just for the chance to protect him back. “I know the rules. I’ve been living here longer than you have.”
He cracks a smile then. He nudges me back. “Hardly.”
“Born and raised. You’re a transplant.” I nudge him again, a little harder, and he laughs and tries to catch hold of my arm. I squirm away, giggling, and he stretches out to tickle my stomach. “Country bumpkin!” I squeal, as he grabs out and wrestles me back onto the blanket, laughing.
“City slicker,” he says, rolling over on top of me, and then kisses me. Everything dissolves: heat, explosions of color, floating.
We agree to meet at Back Cove the next evening, a Wednesday; since I won’t be working again until Saturday, it should be relatively easy to get Carol to allow me to sleep over at Hana’s. Alex walks me through some of the major points of the plan. Crossing over isn’t impossible, but hardly anyone risks it. I guess the whole punishable-by-death thing isn’t really a big attraction.
I don’t see how we’ll ever make it past the electrified fence, but Alex explains that only certain portions of it are actually electrified. Pumping electricity through miles and miles of fence is too expensive, so relatively few stretches of the fence are actually “online”: the remainder of the fence is no more dangerous than the one that encircles the playground at Deering Oaks Park. But as long as everyone believes that the whole thing is juiced up with enough kilowattage to fry a person like an egg in a pan, the fence is serving its purpose just fine.
“Smoke and mirrors, all of it,” Alex says, waving his hand vaguely. I assume he means Portland, the laws, maybe all of the USA. When he gets serious a little crease forms between his eyebrows, a tiny comma, and it’s the cutest thing I’ve ever seen. I try to stay focused.
“I still don’t see how you know all this,” I say. “I mean, how did you guys figure it out? Did you just keep running people at the fence, to see whether they got fried in certain places?”
Alex cracks a tiny smile. “Trade secrets. But I can tell you there were some observational experiments involving wild animals.” He raises his eyebrows. “Ever eaten fried beaver?”
“Ew.”
“Or fried skunk?”
“Now you’re just trying to gross me out.”
There are more of us than you think: That’s another one of Alex’s favorite expressions, his constant refrain. Sympathizers everywhere, uncured and cured, positioned as regulators, police officers, government officials, scientists. That’s how we’ll get past the guard huts, he tells me. One of the most active sympathizers in Portland is matched with the guard who works the night shift at the northern tip of Tukey’s Bridge, right where we’ll be crossing. She and Alex have developed a sign. On nights he wants to cross over, he leaves a certain flyer in her mailbox, the stupid photocopied kind that takeout delis and dry cleaners give out. This one advertises for a free eye exam with Dr. Swild (which seems pretty obvious to me, but Alex says that resisters and sympathizers live with so much stress they need to be allowed their little private jokes) and whenever she finds it she makes sure to put an extra-large dose of Valium in the coffee she makes for her husband to drink during his shift.
“Poor guy,” Alex says, grinning. “No matter how much coffee he drinks, he just can’t seem to stay awake.” I can tell how much the resistance means to him, and how proud he is of the fact that it is there, healthy, thriving, shooting its arms through Portland. I try to smile, but my cheeks feel stiff. It still blows my mind that everything I’ve been taught is so wrong, and it’s still hard for me to think of the sympathizers and resisters as allies and not enemies.
But sneaking over the border will make me one of them beyond a shadow of a doubt. At the same time, I can’t seriously consider backing out now. I want to go; and if I’m honest with myself, I became a sympathizer a long time ago, when Alex asked me whether I wanted to meet him at Back Cove and I said yes. I seem to have only hazy memories of the girl I was before then—the girl who always did what she was told and never lied and counted the days until her procedure with feelings of excitement, not horror and dread. The girl who was afraid of everyone and everything. The girl who was afraid of herself.
When I get home from the store the next day, I make a big point of asking Carol if I can borrow her cell phone. Then I text Hana: Sleepover 2nite w A? This has been our code recently whenever I need her to cover for me. We’ve told Carol we’ve been spending a lot of time with Allison Doveney, who recently graduated with us. The Doveneys are even richer than Hana’s family, and Allison is a stuck-up bitch. Hana originally protested against using her as the mysterious “A,” on the grounds that she didn’t even like to think about pretend hanging out with her, but I convinced her in the end. Carol would never call the Doveneys to check up on me. She’d be too intimidated, and probably embarrassed—my family is impure, tainted by Marcia’s husband’s defection and, of course, by my mother, and Mr. Doveney is the president and founder of the Portland chapter of the DFA, Deliria-Free America. Allison Doveney could hardly stand to look at me when we were in school together, and way back in elementary school, after my mother died, she asked to switch desks to be farther away from me, telling the teacher that I smelled like something dying.
Hana’s response comes almost immediately. U got it. C u tonight.
I wonder what Allison would think if she knew I’d been using her as cover for my boyfriend. She would freak out for sure, and the thought makes me smile.
A little before eight o’clock I come downstairs with my overnight bag slung conspicuously over my shoulder. I’ve even let a little bit of my pajamas poke out. I’ve packed the whole bag exactly as I would have if I were really going to Hana’s. When Carol gives me a flitting smile and tells me to have a good time, I feel a brief pang of guilt. I lie so often and so easily now.
But it’s not enough to stop me. Once outside I head toward the West End, just in case Jenny or Carol is watching from the windows. Only after I reach Spring Street do I double back toward Deering Avenue and head for 37 Brooks. The walk is long, and I make it to Deering Highlands just as the last of the light is swirling out of the sky. As always, the streets here are deserted. I push through the rusted metal gate that surrounds the property, slide aside the loose slats covering one ground-floor window, and hoist myself into the house.
The darkness surprises me, and for a moment I stand there, blinking, until my eyes adjust to the low light. The air feels sticky, and stale, and the house smells like mildew. Various shapes begin to emerge, and I make my way into the living room, and to the mold-spotted couch. Its springs are busted and half of its stuffing has been torn out, probably by mice, but you can tell that once it must have been pretty—elegant, even.
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.