I know Garren had been planning to become a lawyer in the U.N.A.—the kind who would concentrate on helping the illegals and the Cursed. It would be tricky for him to do something like that now, considering our status, and I ask him what he wants to do in the present.
“I haven’t had much of a chance to think about it,” he says. “I think I have to really get to know the times firsthand before I make up my mind. If I was older and knew what the directors were plotting I probably would’ve wanted to get involved and help them rewrite history.” He scoops rice into his mouth, chews and swallows. “What they want to do to us is wrong but I respect their larger aims. The West has done too much damage to the planet. If we can change it, I think we have a responsibility to try.”
I do too and I ask, “So what would you do to us if you were them?”
“I don’t know. But I wouldn’t be able to wipe someone’s memory knowing that the process could mutilate their mind. I couldn’t be that ruthless.” Garren pauses. “But I shot at those guys today. Potentially I could’ve killed someone. So maybe I’m wrong and I do have it in me.” Garren sets down his fork and stares at me, his face long. “I would’ve killed them if that’s what it took to keep them from taking you.”
The thought seems to make him unhappy and I stop eating and remember my feeling at the shopping mall railing, how I couldn’t stand the thought of them capturing him and considered throwing myself over both to save him and to die as the person I am now rather than letting myself be butchered.
“What is it?” Garren asks.
“I shouldn’t have put you in that position.”
“You didn’t,” he says. “You told me not to come.”
“But if you’d listened, they would have taken me.”
Garren drops his gaze and rakes his fork through his rice. “Then I’m glad I was there. If it wasn’t for you I’d still be living a lie.”
It wasn’t a lie exactly and he’d have been safe that way. But I think Garren’s like me and given the choice would’ve picked the hard truth. He wouldn’t want to forget his sister or his other mother any more than I’d want to forget Latham.
It’s not remotely the right time for this but I can’t control myself. The things I imagined I felt about him in the past, when I didn’t know him well enough to really feel much at all, and the more genuine feelings that have evolved over the last few days are floating to the surface and I stare at my plate and confess, “I used to watch you sometimes … back then. Did you know?”
Garren releases his fork and leans across the table, lowering his head so that I can’t avoid his eyes. “You did?”
“Yeah.” My voice is almost a whisper. “In the halls at school. You knew that, right?”
He’s quiet, thinking. Then he says, “Maybe … a little.”
“I knew it. I knew you knew.”
“Not really.” He shakes his head. “I don’t know what I thought.” He draws one of his fingers over his lips, blinking slowly. “Maybe you should tell me what to think.”
Earlier today I told him “but still” because I thought it would make things easier but I’m already wondering if I was wrong. I don’t know what to say. I’m not sure what I want him to think.
Garren hesitates, opens his mouth and closes it again before asking, “So, knowing who you really are, what do you want to do with your life now? You never said.”
That’s easier to talk about and I reply, “I used to think I wanted to be a tree doctor, or something like that. Help nature thrive.” After what we’d done to it, nature needed all the help we could give it. When and where we’re from, the list of recently extinct species is depressingly long. With the gravity of our own situation I hadn’t really thought about those animals until this moment but the wonder of knowing that so many of them are still out there makes me light-headed. I think of British Columbia, where we’re heading, and how the whales and dolphins are swimming off its coast this very second.
No one has seen a great whale, other than those kept in captivity, since 2034 and awe seeps into my words as I say, “I want to see the whales. We should be able to when we make it to British Columbia. They’re still in the ocean now. And then, sometime, I want to go to Africa. On safari, you know? See elephants, giraffes, rhinos, all those things. They seem like mythical creatures almost. I want to see them with my own eyes, not in a zoo but in their natural habitat, just living their lives like they should be.”
“That would be incredible,” Garren says, sounding awed too.
“So maybe you can come with me,” I say lightly.
Garren’s cheeks swell with the beginnings of a smile. “I’d like that.”
I don’t know exactly what it is we’re agreeing to in saying these things but the music playing in the background is so celebratory that I imagine I know what the singer’s feeling even though I don’t speak Hindi.
Garren and I begin to talk about what it would be like to see present-day New York City. Before they built the flood barriers, before the Twin Towers were bombed even. Or San Francisco, with its steep hills and cable cars, before everyone left. In the future, no one lives in the southwest anymore. The droughts drove away those who could move and killed those who couldn’t. It’s a wasteland. Was a wasteland. Not now.
I imagine walking across the Golden Gate Bridge, the Pacific Ocean on one side and the San Francisco Bay on the other. An architectural marvel framed by blue. I wish we could see it in person but the United States is too dangerous for us, according to what the director told me. Since the U.N.A.’s political operation in the U.S. is more important than the civilian one up here, their security force would be better, harder to evade.
All the same, the thought that the Golden Gate Bridge is teeming with activity makes me want to dance—that and Garren telling me he’d like to come with me to see the animals. “I feel like I’m drunk on food,” I say. “Is that possible?”
“When you’ve eaten as much as we have.”
I sip my water. “I wish we didn’t have to leave here.”
“The restaurant?” Garren casually scans the room. “You’re easily impressed.”
I smile and knock one of my knees against his under the table. “It doesn’t feel like we’re in trouble now. It feels like as long as we stay here we’ll be fine.”
Garren narrows his eyes. “Why? What do you see?”
“Nothing, absolutely nothing.” But it’s easier to pretend we’re average people while out at dinner than it is in our hotel room.
“Maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe it means there’s nothing major to worry about.” Garren digs into what’s left of his curry.
“Maybe so.” I’m spending too much time staring at him again and I plant my elbow on the table, lean into my palm and look away.
Garren asks the waiter for more water, providing us with an excuse to stay a few minutes longer but eventually we make our way back to the hotel room. Garren gives me the keys so I can go first. I sit inside our room waiting for him to knock and feel the same relief I experienced at the traffic lights earlier when I hear him rap at the door.
With the two of us safely inside I go into the bathroom to brush my teeth and change into jogging pants and a T-shirt. Then I climb into bed and wait for him to finish getting ready and turn out the lights. I’m scared to sleep but not as scared as before we went to the restaurant and tiredness quickly overwhelms me.
When I open my eyes again it’s dark and I know I’m not dreaming because everything’s just as it was before I went to sleep except that Garren’s shouting. Not words exactly but anguished cries. I sit up in bed and say his name. “Wake up,” I add. “Garren. Garren. Wake up.”
I’m nearly as loud as he is. I have to be if I want him to hear me over his own noise. If there’s anyone in the room next to us they must be cursing him.
I get out of bed and step closer to his form in the moonlight. “Garren.” I touch him high on his shoulder, careful to avoid his gunshot wound. “Garren, you’re
dreaming.”
He opens his eyes and stares at me like he doesn’t remember where he is or who I am. I can literally see it all begin to come back to him, weighing down his conscious self.
“You were dreaming,” I explain. “Yelling in your sleep. I was scared it could wake the people in the next room.”
Garren rubs his eyes, his pupils sharpening their focus on me in the bright moonlight. “Sorry,” he murmurs.
“If it wasn’t you it’d probably be me. Maybe we’ll just keep taking turns having nightmares from now on.”
“Let’s make a point of not doing that,” Garren says.
“We can try. What were you dreaming?”
He exhales audibly as he sits up. “Nothing good.”
“I dreamt about Latham earlier,” I confess, stepping back to sit on the side of my bed. “That’s what I was dreaming when you woke me up—that he was here and was going to kill me.”
Garren presses his lips grimly together. “Kinnari was violent like the rest of them when they came for her. I can’t imagine what it must be like in the U.N.A. now.”
So many dead, I don’t want to imagine. “Maybe your mother and my father eventually will be sent back here too.”
“We’ll never know it, but I hope so. Although that would probably mean things were even worse. A point of no return.”
I’m still sitting on the side of my bed, listening to his voice in the moonlight and fighting the pull I feel towards him because he already matters too much. But it’s like fighting the impulse to breathe. A person can only hold her breath for so long.
“Can we turn the radio on low?” I ask. “I don’t want to go back to sleep with all these dark thoughts in my head.” The clock radio’s perched on the slim nightstand between our beds and Garren reaches for it and switches it on. Howard Jones is singing “Things Can Only Get Better” and I chuckle drily. It should be our theme song.
Garren echoes my laughter and I tell myself to lie back, pull the covers over me and wait for tomorrow but what if there is no tomorrow, only tonight? Our luck could run out at any time. The director and his men almost had us at the Eaton Centre. If the bullet had hit Garren in the head instead of the arm, we wouldn’t be here together now. A second can change everything, sending life down a different path.
There’s a lump in my throat and my voice is hushed as I say, “Garren?”
“Yeah?” His voice is quiet too, like there’s a third person in the room who we don’t want to hear us.
“Can I get in there with you?” I can’t imagine him telling me no but my heart’s beating fast, as though it fears that possibility.
“Come here.” He sounds so warm that I almost forget all the bad things in my head. They shrink as I walk towards him and feel him wrap his arms around me.
He feels warm too, warmer than me, and when I sink down onto the bed with him and tell him that, he presses his lips into my forehead and says, “You feel warm to me. Just as warm as I do.”
“No, you’re warmer,” I argue. Then I drop my lips to his, open my mouth and kiss him like this is just the beginning.
His kiss is sweet and hungry at the same time. He pulls me on top of him and slips his fingers into my hair. “I keep forgetting you cut it,” he murmurs. “Every time I look at you, it’s new.”
I run my hand softly over his short brown hair. “For me too.”
He slides his mouth down my neck, one of his hands on the hip of my jogging pants. “Mine’s not that different, is it?”
Not to someone who hasn’t spent as much time staring at him as I have, maybe.
Our mouths collide again and again. We’re on fire. Saying each other’s names in tones we’ve never used before. Drinking each other in with our hands. “I can’t stop thinking about you like this,” I whisper, my fingers on his T-shirt, riding up under it to feel the heat from his skin.
“Don’t,” he advises, his hands in my hair again. “I can’t stop thinking about you either. Even in my sleep.”
We already have so many things to worry about, like staying alive, and when I pull away a bit to look at him, I see Garren absorb the confusion in my face.
“Hey.” He reaches for my hand, lacing his fingers through mine so that our two hands feel like a single entity. “Shouldn’t we get to have something good in all this? Why can’t we have this?”
Because it will make me even more scared to lose him. But I don’t say that either. I tug his hand to my lips and kiss it. We will have this. I’m done fighting myself. What’s the point of being here if I’m too afraid to have the things I want because it means I might lose them someday?
We lie in Garren’s bed exchanging wet kisses and touching each other until he has to stop and swallow more aspirin for his arm. We both know things can’t go any further, that without the Bio-net it’s not safe, but for now just being together is enough. We can figure out the rest later.
When Garren comes back to bed I hook both my legs around one of his and nestle into his shoulder. He kisses my hair and says, “You asked me what I was dreaming before. I was dreaming they were taking you and that I couldn’t stop them. I never want to feel like that again.”
“I can’t handle the thought of them taking you either.” I drape my hand across the dip of Garren’s waist. “I’m not letting them get near you. We won’t let them take us.”
“We’ll be each other’s own best defense system,” Garren says, like it’s a promise.
We will. We’ll have this and protect it. No one will be allowed to stand in our way. We’ll make it out to Vancouver and live our lives on our own terms. See the whales and, from a distance, watch the people who would try to hurt us attempt to save the planet. I hope they can do it and that the world will become a different place than I knew. I hope that more for the people who come after me than for myself. Garren and I can have a lot of good years here either way. We have time.
I fall asleep with my hand resting on his chest and as far as I know, I don’t dream, but I remember thinking, just before I slip away from consciousness, that Latham and Kinnari would be happy for us. If they can’t be together like they should’ve been, it might as well be us.
TWENTY-THREE
We’re happy when we wake up in his bed together, happy when Garren checks out of the hotel for us and meets me at the traffic lights. We’ve stuffed the gun inside the pair of socks Garren had around his arm yesterday and slide the socks into a plastic Woolco bag, which we tie at the top before dipping down a side street and tossing the bag into a large Dumpster behind a tall apartment building.
Then we go into a cheap deli, buy sandwiches and sit at a red Formica table staring at each other with infinite grins as we swallow bits of white bread. I wish I could tell Christine how the part of my story involving the déjà vu guy I’d never met turned out. Nobody but Garren will ever know the entire story. We’re the ultimate secret.
“We should go get the bus tickets,” Garren says, his hand on my knee.
I lean in close and kiss him. I love his mouth. I love that he’s the kind of person who has always wanted to help make the world a better place.
Garren holds my face in his hands and peers into my eyes. I never want to stop looking at him, never want him to stop looking at me. If we let ourselves, we could get trapped in this moment and miss the bus to Parry Sound.
I whisper in Garren’s ear and make him smile. We get up from the table and sling our backpacks onto our spines. I can hear the radio spilling music out from behind the deli counter. Everywhere in 1985 there’s music. Like a party that never stops.
“Ninety-nine dreams I have had. In every one a red balloon.”
Garren impulsively grabs my hand and twirls me around.
I laugh as I spin and as I swivel back towards him something outside catches my eye. Across the street a guy with a buzz cut and sunglasses is stepping into a black car. He’s wearing a nondescript gray coat and could be anyone but I know better—I know it’s one of the men who came to He
nry’s house to take us away. I’d recognize him anywhere.
“Sit down,” I say urgently. “One of them is out there right now. I don’t think he saw us.”
Garren deposits himself in the nearest chair, every ounce of joy draining from his face.
I sit too and watch the black car merge into traffic. It’s heading east and I glance at Garren across the table and say, “He’s going—he’s driving off.”
“Fuck.” Garren plunks his good arm down on the table. “They’ve trailed us from Toronto. There’s no way we can risk going to the bus station now. We’ll have to steal a car.”
I turn away from the window and clear my mind. How many of them are out there searching for us? Where’s our path to safety?
A series of conflicting images flicker inside my head. Us walking to the bus station. Almost there. But so are they. We run. Garren crumples to the ground, his head bleeding.
Us in front of the deli, only steps away from where we sit right now. A black car veers into the parking lot. Garren charges at the man with the buzz cut. Garren crumples. I struggle with the man, grab his gun. It goes off against his chest.
Us inside a car, peeling off down the road. A stranger’s body lying lifeless in the street behind us.
I’ve never had concurrent visions before. I don’t know which images to trust. My arms grip my sides as I press my eyelids together and concentrate harder. It doesn’t help. The same images play over and over, as if on a loop.
“Tell me what’s in your head,” Garren says.
Him dead. Him alive. I can’t lose him. I can’t make the wrong choice.
“What?” Garren’s face creases in alarm. “What do you see?”
“A lot of different things at the same time. Most of them bad.” I’m crippled by fear but keep my voice strong. “Just, don’t do anything yet. Give me some time.”
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