Tell me a story.”
“What?” Julian’s voice startles me. He’s been sitting in silence for hours. I’ve been pacing again, thinking about Raven and Tack. Did they escape the demonstration? Will they think I’ve been hurt, or killed? Will they come looking for me?
“I said, tell me a story.” He’s sitting on his cot, legs crossed. I’ve noticed he can sit like that for hours, eyes half-closed, like he’s meditating. His calm has started to irritate me. “It’ll make the time go faster,” he adds.
Another day, more dragging hours. The light is on again, and breakfast (more bread, more jerky, more water) came again this morning. This time I pressed myself close to the floor and caught a glimpse of dark trousers and heavy boots. A barking male voice directed me to pass the old tray through the flap door, which I did.
“I don’t know any stories,” I say. Julian is comfortable looking at me now—too comfortable, actually. I can feel his eyes on me as I walk, like a light touch on my shoulder.
“Tell me about your life, then,” Julian says. “It doesn’t have to be a good story.”
I sigh, running through the life Raven helped me construct for Lena Morgan Jones. “I was born in Queens. I attended Unity through fifth grade, then transferred to Our Lady of the Doctrine. Last year I came to Brooklyn and enrolled at Quincy Edwards for my final year.” Julian is still watching me, as though he expects more. I make a quick, impatient gesture with my hand and add, “I was cured in November. I’ll take my evaluation later on this semester, though, with everyone else. I don’t have a match yet.” I run out of things to say. Lena Morgan Jones, like all cureds, is pretty boring.
“Those are facts,” Julian says. “That’s not a story.”
“Fine.” I go and sit on my cot, bringing my legs underneath me, and turn to him. “If you’re such an expert, why don’t you tell me a story?”
I’m expecting him to be flustered, but he just tilts his head back, thinking, blowing air out of his cheeks. The cut on his lip looks even worse today, bruised and swollen. Shades of yellow and green have begun to spread across his jawline. He hasn’t complained, though, either about that or the ragged cut on his cheek.
He says finally, “One time, when I was really little, I saw two people kissing in public.”
“You mean, like, at a marriage ceremony? To seal it?”
He shakes his head. “No. On the street. They were protesters, you know? It was right in front of the DFA. I don’t know if they weren’t cured or the procedure didn’t take or what. I was only, like, six. They were—” At the last second Julian falters.
“What?”
“They were using their tongues.” He looks at me for just a second, then clicks his eyes away. Tongue-kissing is even worse than illegal nowadays. It’s considered dirty, disgusting, a symptom of disease taken root.
“What did you do?” I lean forward in spite of myself. I’m amazed, both by the story and by the fact that Julian is sharing it with me.
Julian cracks a smile. “Want to hear something funny? At first I thought he was eating her.”
I can’t help it: I let out a short bark of laughter. And once I start laughing I can’t stop. All the tension from the past fortyeight hours breaks in my chest, and I laugh so hard I start to tear up. The whole world has been turned inside out and upside down. We are living in a funhouse.
Julian starts to laugh too, then winces, touching his bruised lip. “Ow,” he says, and this makes me laugh even harder, which makes him laugh, which makes him say “Ow” again. Pretty soon we’re both cracking up. Julian has a surprisingly nice laugh, low and musical.
“Okay, your turn,” he finally gasps, as the laughter runs out.
I’m still struggling for breath. “Wait—wait. What happened after that?”
Julian looks at me, still smiling. He has a dimple in his right cheek; a line has appeared between his eyebrows. “What do you mean?”
“What happened to the couple? The ones who were kissing?”
The line between his eyebrows deepens, and he shakes his head confusedly. “The police came,” he says, like it should be obvious. “They were taken into quarantine at Rikers. For all I know, they’re still there.”
And just like that, the remaining laughter is driven out of me, like a sharp blow to the chest. I remember that Julian is one of Them; the zombies, the enemies. The people who took Alex from me.
Suddenly I feel sick. I have just been laughing with him. We’ve shared something. He’s looking at me like we’re friends, like we’re the same.
I could throw up.
“So,” he says. “Now you go.”
“I don’t have any stories,” I say. My voice comes out harshly, a bark.
“Everyone has—,” Julian starts to say.
I cut him off. “Not me,” I say, and climb off the cot again. My body is full of itching; I try to walk it out.
We go the rest of the day without exchanging a word. A few times, Julian seems about to speak, and so eventually I go to the cot and stretch out, closing my eyes and pretending to sleep. But I do not sleep.
The same words are whirling again and again in my mind: There must be a way out. There must be a way out.
Real sleep does not come until much later, after the electric light once again clicks off. Real sleep is like sinking slowly, like drowning in a mist. All too soon I am awake again. I sit up, heart pounding.
Julian is shouting in his sleep on the cot next to me, muttering gibberish words. The only one I can make out is no.
I wait for a bit, to see whether he will wake himself up. He kicks out, thrashing. The metal bed frame rattles.
“Hey,” I say. His urgent mutterings continue, and I sit up and say a little louder, “Hey, Julian.”
Still no response. I reach over, fumbling for his arm in the dark. His chest is damp with sweat. I find his shoulder and shake him gently.
“Wake up, Julian.”
Finally he wakes, gasping, and jerks away from my touch. He sits up. I can hear the rustle of the mattress as his weight shifts, and I can just make out his shape, a heavy blackness, the curve of his spine. For a moment we sit in silence. He is breathing hard. A rasping sound comes from his throat. I lie down again and listen to his breathing in the dark, waiting for it to slow.
“More nightmares?” I ask.
“Yes,” he says after a beat.
I hesitate. Part of me is inclined to roll over and go to sleep. But I’m awake now too, and the darkness is oppressive.
“Want to talk about it?” I say.
There’s a long minute of silence. Then Julian begins speaking in a rush.
“I was in a lab complex,” he says. “And outside there was this big fence. But there were all these… I can’t really explain it, but it wasn’t a real fence. It was made of bodies. Corpses. The air was black with flies.”
“Go on,” I say in a whisper, when Julian pauses again.
He swallows hard. “When it was time for my procedure, they strapped me down to a table and asked me to open my mouth. Two scientists wrenched open my jaw, and my dad—he was there too—picked up this huge vat of concrete, and I knew that he was going to pour it down my throat. And I was screaming and trying to fight him off, and he kept saying it would feel fine, it would all be better, and then the concrete started filling my mouth and I couldn’t breathe…”
Julian trails off. There’s a squeezing in my chest. For one wild second I feel like hugging him—but that would be horrible, and wrong on about a thousand levels. Julian must feel better too, after relating the dream to me, because he lies down again.
“I have nightmares too,” I say, and then quickly correct myself. “Used to, I mean.”
Even in the dark, I can feel Julian staring at me.
“Want to talk about it?” He echoes my words back to me.
I think of the nightmares I used to have about my mother: dreams in which I would watch, helpless, as she walked off a cliff. I have never told anyone about them. Not even Alex. The dreams stopped after I found out she’d been alive, in the Crypts, for all the years I thought she was dead. But now my nightmares have taken new shape. Now they are full of burning, and Alex, and thorns that become chains and drag me into the earth.
“I used to have nightmares about my mom,” I say. I choke a little on the word mom, and hope he doesn’t notice. “She died when I was six.” This may as well be true. I will never see her again.
There is rustling from Julian’s cot, and when he speaks I can tell he has turned toward me. “Tell me about her,” he says softly.
I stare up into the darkness, which seems to be full of swirling patterns. “She liked to experiment in the kitchen,” I say slowly. I can’t tell him too much. I can’t say anything that will make him suspicious. This is no longer the story of Lena Morgan Jones. But speaking into the darkness feels like a relief, so I let myself go on: “I used to sit on the counter and watch her messing around. Most of what she made went in the trash. But it was always funny, and it made me laugh.” I pause. “I remember one time she made hot pepper pancakes. Those weren’t bad.”
Julian is quiet. The rhythm of his breathing has grown steady.
“She used to play games with me too,” I say.
“She did?” Julian’s voice has a touch of awe in it.
“Yeah. Real games, too, not just the development stuff they advocate in The Book of Shhh. She used to pretend…” I stop, biting my lip, worried I’ve gone too far.
“Pretend what?”
There’s a crazy pressure building in my chest, and now all of it is coming back, my real life, my old life—the rickety house in Portland and the sound of the water and the smell of the bay; the blackened walls of the Crypts and the emerald-green diamond patterns of the sun slanting through the trees in the Wilds; all these other selves, stacked one on top of another and buried, so that no one will ever find them. And suddenly I feel I have to keep talking; if I don’t, I will explode. “She had a key she pretended would unlock doors to other worlds. It was just a regular key—I don’t know where she got it, some garage sale, probably—but she kept it in a red box and only brought it out on special occasions. And when she did, we would pretend to go traveling through all these different dimensions. In one world, animals kept humans as pets; in another, we could go riding on the tails of shooting stars. There was an underwater world, and one where people slept all day and danced all night. My sister played too.”
“What was her name?”
“Grace,” I say. My throat is squeezing up, and now I’m combining selves and places, combining lives. My mom disappeared before Grace was even born; besides, Grace was my cousin. But strangely, I can picture it: my mother lifting Grace, swooping her around in an enormous circle while music piped from the fuzzy speakers; the three of us galloping down the long wooden hallways, pretending to be catching a star. I open my mouth to say more, but find I can’t. I am on the verge of crying, and have to swallow back the feeling, hard, while my throat spasms.
Julian is quiet for a minute. Then he says, “I used to pretend things too.”
“Yeah?” I turn my face into my pillow so the trembling in my voice will be muffled.
“Yeah. In the hospitals, mostly, and the labs.” Another beat. “I used to pretend that I was back at home. I’d change the noises into other things, you know? Like the beeping of the heart monitors—that was actually just the ‘beep-beep-beep’ of the coffee machine. And when I heard footsteps I would pretend they were my parents’, even though they never were; and I would pretend the smell—you know how hospitals always smell like bleach, and just a little bit like flowers?—was because my mother was washing the sheets.”
The clenching in my throat has subsided, and I can breathe more easily now. I’m grateful to Julian; for not saying that my mother’s behavior seems unregulated, for not being suspicious or asking too many questions. “Funerals smell like that too,” I say. “Like bleach. Like flowers, too.”
“I don’t like that smell,” Julian says quietly. If he were less well trained, and less careful, he would say hate. But he can’t say it; it is too close to passion, and passion is too close to love, and love is amor deliria nervosa, the deadliest of all deadly things: It is the reason for the games of pretend, for the secret selves, for the spasms in the throat. He says, “I used to pretend to be an explorer, too. I used to think about what it would be like to go to … other places.”
I think of finding him after the DFA meeting: sitting alone in the dark, staring up at those dizzying images of mountains and woods.
“Like where?” I ask, my heart speeding up a bit.
He hesitates. “Just around,” he says finally. “Like to other cities in the USA.”
Something tells me he’s lying again; I wonder if he was really talking about the Wilds, or other places in the world—the unbordered places, where love still exists, where it was supposed to have consumed everyone by now.
Maybe Julian senses that I don’t believe him, because he rushes on. “It was just kid stuff. The kind of stuff I did on overnights to the labs, when I had tests and procedures and things like that. So I wouldn’t be scared.”
In the silence, I can feel the weight of the earth above our heads: layers and layers of it, airless and heavy. I try to fight off the feeling that comes to me: We will be buried here forever. “Are you scared now?” I ask.
He pauses for just a fraction of a second. “I’d be more scared if I were alone,” he says.
“Me too,” I say. Again, I feel a rush of sympathy for him. “Julian?”
“Yeah?”
“Reach out your hand.” I’m not sure what makes me say it—maybe it’s the fact that I can’t see him. It feels easier with him in the dark.
“For what?”
“Just do it,” I say, and I can hear him shifting; he is already moving, stretching his hand across the space between our cots. I reach out and find his hand, which is cool and large and dry, and he jerks a bit as our skin comes into contact.
“Do you think we’re safe?” he asks. His voice is hoarse.
I’m not sure whether he is referring to the deliria, or whether he is asking about the fact that we are trapped here, but he lets me lace my fingers through his. He has never held hands with someone before, I can tell. It takes him a moment of fumbling to understand how to do it.
“We’ll be okay,” I say. I don’t know whether I believe it or not. He gives my hand a quick squeeze, surprising me—there are some things, I guess, that come naturally, even if you’ve never done them before. We hold hands across the dark, and after a while I hear his breathing slow and deepen, and I close my eyes and think of waves pulling slowly on a shore. After a little while I am asleep too, and dream of being on a carousel with Grace, and watching, laughing, as all the wooden horses slowly break from their positions and begin galloping up into the air.