My father grunts.
"So terrible for the fam--" My mother stops abruptly, turning to me. "Are you all right, Hana?"
"I--I think I swallowed the wrong way," I gasp. I stand up and reach for a glass of water. My fingers are shaking.
Sarah Sterling. She must have been caught on her way back from the party, and for a second I have the worst, most selfish thought: Thank God it wasn't me. I take long, slow sips of water, willing my heart to stop pounding. I want to ask what happened to Sarah--what will happen--but I don't trust myself to speak. Besides, these stories always end the same way.
"She'll be cured, of course," my mother finishes, as though reading my mind.
"She's too young," I blurt out. "There's no way it'll work right."
My mother turns to me calmly. "If you're old enough to catch the disease, you're old enough to be cured," she says.
My father laughs. "Soon you'll be volunteering for the DFA. Why not operate on infants, too?"
"Why not?" My mother shrugs.
I stand up, bracing myself against the kitchen table as a rush of blackness sweeps through my head, clouding my vision. My father takes the remote and turns the volume up on the television again. Now it is Fred's father, Mayor Hargrove, whose image comes into focus.
"I repeat, there is no danger of a so-called 'resistance movement,' or any significant spread of the diseasef w the di," he is saying. I walk quickly out into the hall. My mom calls something to me, but I'm too focused on the drone of Hargrove's voice--"Now, as ever, we declare a zero-tolerance policy for disruptions and dissidence"--to hear what she says. I take the stairs two at a time and shut myself into my room, wishing more than ever that my door had a lock.
But privacy breeds secrecy, and secrecy breeds sickness.
My palms are sweating as I pull out my phone and dial Angelica's number. I'm desperate to talk to someone about what happened to Sarah Sterling--I need Angelica to tell me it's okay, and we're safe, and also that the underground won't be disrupted--but we'll have to speak carefully, in codes. All our phone calls are regulated and recorded, periodically, by the city.
Angelica's cell phone goes straight to voice mail. I dial her house number, which rings and rings. I have a flash of panic: For a second, I worry she must have been caught too. Maybe even now, she's being dragged down to the labs, strapped down for her procedure.
But no. She lives a few doors down from me. If Angelica had been caught, I would have heard about it.
The urge is there, sudden and overwhelming: I need to see Lena. I need to talk with her, to spill everything, to tell her about Fred Hargrove, who has already had and given up one match, and his mother's obsessive weeding, and Steve Hilt, and the Devil's Kiss, and Sarah Sterling. She will make me feel better. She will know what I should do--what I should feel.
This time, when I go downstairs, I make sure to tiptoe; I don't want to have to answer my parents' questions about where I'm heading. I get my bike from the garage, where I stashed it after riding home last night. A purple scrunchie is looped around its left handle. Lena and I have the same bike, and a few months ago we started using the scrunchies to differentiate them. After our fight I pulled the scrunchie off and shoved it in the bottom of my sock drawer. But the handlebars looked sad and naked, and so I had to replace it.
It is just after eleven, and the air is full of shimmering, wet heat. Even the seagulls seem to be moving more slowly; they drift across the cloudless sky, practically motionless, as though they are suspended in liquid blue. Once I make it out of the West End and its protective shelter of ancient oaks and shaded, narrow streets, the sun is practically unbearable, high and unforgiving, as though a vast glass lens has been centered over Portland.
I make a point of detouring past the Governor, the old statue that stands in the middle of a cobblestone square near the University of Portland, which Lena will attend in the fall. We used to run together past the Governor regularly, and made a habit of reaching up and slapping his outstretched hand. I always made a wish simultaneously, and now, although I don't stop to slap his hand, I reach out with a toe and skim the base of the statue for good luck as I ride past. I wish, I think, but don't get any further. I don't know exactly what to wish for: to be safe or to be unsafe, for things to change or for things to stay the same.
The ride to Lena's house takes me longer than usual. A garbage truck has broken down on Congress Street, and the police are redirecting people up ChestnIle up Cut and around on Cumberland. By the time I get to Lena's street, I'm sweating, and I stop when I'm still a few blocks away from her house to drink from a water fountain and blot my face. Next to the fountain is a bus stop, with a sign warning of curfew restrictions--SUNDAY TO THURSDAY, 9 P.M.; SATURDAY AND SUNDAY, 9:30 P.M.--and as I go to chain my bike up, I notice the smudgy glass waiting area is papered with flyers. They are all identical, and feature the crest of Portland above bolded black type.
The Safety of One Is the Duty of All
Keep Your Eyes and Ears Open
Report All Suspicious Activity to the Department of
Sanitation and Security
If You See Something, Say Something
**$500 reward for reports of illicit or unapproved activity
I stand for a minute, scanning the words over and over, as though they will suddenly mean something different. People have always reported suspicious behavior, of course, but it has never come with a financial reward. This will make it harder, much harder, for me, for Steve, for all of us. Five hundred dollars is a lot of money to most people these days--the kind of money most people don't make in a week.
A door slams and I jump, almost knocking over my bike. I notice, for the first time, that the whole street is papered with flyers. They are posted on gates and mailboxes, taped to disabled streetlamps and metal garbage cans.
There is movement on Lena's porch. Suddenly she appears, wearing an oversized T-shirt from her uncle's deli. She must be going to work. She pauses, scanning the street--I think her eyes land on me, and I lift my hand in a hesitant wave, but her eyes keep tracking, drifting over my head, and then sweeping off in the other direction.
I'm about to call out to her when her cousin Grace comes flying down the cement porch steps. Lena laughs and reaches out to slow Grace down. Lena looks happy, untroubled. I'm seized by sudden doubt: It occurs to me that Lena might not miss me at all. Maybe she hasn't been thinking of me; maybe she's perfectly happy not speaking to me.
After all, it's not like she's tried to call.
As Lena starts making her way down the street, with Grace bobbing beside her, I turn around quickly and remount my bike. Now I'm desperate to get out of here. I don't want her to spot me. The wind kicks up, rustling all those flyers, the exhortations of safety. The flyers lift and sigh in unison, like a thousand people waving white handkerchiefs, a thousand people waving good-bye.
four
The flmonoyers are just the beginning. I notice that there are more regulators on the streets than usual, and there are rumors--neither confirmed nor denied by Mrs. Hargrove, who comes over to deliver a scarf that my mother left--that there will soon be a raid. Mayor Hargrove is insistent--both on television and when we once again dine with his family, this time at their golf club--that there is no resurgence of the disease and no reason to worry. But the regulators, and the offers of rewards, and the rumors of a possible raid, tell a different story.
For days there is not even a whisper of another underground gathering. Every morning I rub concealer into the Devil's Kiss on my neck, until at last it disperses and breaks apart, leaving me both relieved and saddened. I haven't seen Steve Hilt anywhere--not at the beach, not at Back Cove or by the Old Port--and Angelica has been distant and guarded, although she manages to slip me a note explaining that her parents have been watching her more closely since the news of Sarah Sterling's exposure to deliria.
Fred takes me golfing. I don't play, so instead I trail behind him on the course as he shoots a near-perfect game. He
is charming and courteous and does a semi-decent job of pretending to be interested in what I have to say. People turn to look at us as we pass. Everyone knows Fred. The men greet him heartily, ask after his father, congratulate him on getting paired, although no one breathes a word about his first wife. The women stare at me with frank and unconcealed resentment.
I am lucky.
I am suffocating.
The regulators crowd the streets.
Lena still doesn't call.
Then one hot evening at the end of July, there she is: She barrels past me on the street, her eyes trained deliberately on the pavement, and I have to call her name three times before she will turn around. She stops a little way up the hill, her face blank--unreadable--and makes no effort to come toward me. I have to jog uphill to her.
"So what?" I say as I get closer, panting a little. "You're just going to walk by me now?" I meant for the question to come out as a joke, but instead it sounds like an accusation.
She frowns. "I didn't see you," she says.
I want to believe her. I look away, biting my lip. I feel like I could burst into tears--right there in the shimmering, late-afternoon heat, with the city spread out like a mirage beyond Munjoy Hill. I want to ask her where she's been, and tell her I miss her, and say that I need her help.
But instead what comes out is: "Why didn't you call me back?"
She blurts out at the same time: "I got my matches."
I'm momentarily taken aback. I can't believe that after days of abrupt and unexplained silence, this is what she would say to me first. I swallow back all the things I was going to say to her and make my tone polite, disinterested.
"Did you accept yet?" I say.
"You called?" she says. Again, we both speak at the same time.
She seems genuinely surprised. On the other hand, Lena has always been hard to read. Most of her thoughts, most of her true feelings, are buried deep.
"I left you, like, three messages," I say, watching her face closely.
"I never got any messages," Lena says quickly. I don't know whether she is telling the truth. Lena, after all, always insisted that after the cure we wouldn't be friends--our lives would be too different, our social circles too remote. Maybe she has decided that already the differences between us are too great.
I flash back to how she looked at me at the party at Roaring Brook Farms--the way she jerked away when I tried to reach out to her, lips curling back. Suddenly I feel as though I am only dreaming. I am dreaming of a too-colored, too-vivid day, while images pass soundlessly in front of me--Lena is moving her mouth, two men are loading buckets into a truck, a little girl wearing a too-big swimsuit is scowling at us from a doorway--and I am speaking too, responding, even smiling, while my words are sucked into silence, into the bright white light of a sun-drenched dream. Then we are walking. I am walking with her toward her house, except I am only drifting, floating, skating above the pavement.
Lena speaks; I answer. The words are only drifting too--they are a nonsense-language, a dream-babble.
Tonight I will attend another party in Deering Highlands with Angelica. Steve will be there. The coast is once again clear. Lena looks at me, repulsed and fearful, when I tell her this.
It doesn't matter. None of it matters anymore. We are sledding once again--into whiteness, into a blanket of quiet.
But I am going to keep going. I am going to soar, and soar, and break away--up, up, up into the thundering noise and the wind, like a bird being sucked into the sky.
We pause at the beginning of her block, where I stood just the other day, watching her move happily and unself-consciously down the sidewalk with Grace. The flyers still paper the street, although today there is no wind. They hang perfectly, corners aligned, the emblazoned governmental seal running like a typographical error hundreds of times along the two sides of the street. Lena's other cousin, Jenny, is playing soccer with some kids at the end of the block.
I hang back. I don't want to be spotted. Jenny knows me, and she's smart. She'll ask me why I don't come around anymore, she'll stare at me with her hard, laughing eyes, and she'll know--she'll sense--that Lena and I are no longer friends, that Hana Trent is evaporating, like water in the noon sun.
"You know where to find me," Lena is saying, gesturing casually down the street. You know where to find me. Like that, I am dismissed. And suddenly I no longer feel as though I am dreaming, or floating. A dead weight fills me, dragging me back into reality, back into the sun and the smell of garbage and the shrill cries of the kids playing soccer in the street, and Lena's face, composed, neutral, as though she has already been cured, as though we have Chouthe ki never meant a thing to each other in our lives.
The weight is rising through my chest, and I know that at any second, I'm going to begin crying.
"Okay, then. See you around," I say quickly, concealing the break in my voice with a cough and a wave. I turn around and start walking quickly, as the world begins to spiral together into a wash of color, like liquid being spun down a drain. I jam my sunglasses down onto my nose.
"Okay. See you," Lena says.
The tide is pushing from my chest to my throat now, carrying with it the urge to turn around and call out to her, to tell her I miss her. My mouth is full of the sour taste that rises up with those old, deep words, and I can feel the muscles in my throat flexing, trying to press them back and down. But the urge becomes unbearable, and without intending to, I find that I am spinning around, calling her name.
She has already made it back to her house. She pauses with her hand on the gate. She doesn't say a word; she just stares at me blankly, as though in the time it has taken her to walk the twenty feet, she has already forgotten who I am.
"Never mind," I call out, and this time when I turn around, I do not hesitate or look back.
The note from Steve arrived earlier this morning inside a rolled-up advertisement for Underground Pizza--Grand Opening TONIGHT!, which had been wedged into one of the narrow iron scrolls on our front gate. The note was only three words--Please be there--and included only his initials, presumably so in case it had been discovered by my parents or a regulator instead, neither of us would be implicated. On the back of the advertisement was a crudely drawn map showing only a single street name: Tanglewild Lane, also in Deering Highlands.
This time, there is no need to sneak out. My parents have gone to a fund-raiser tonight; the Portland Conservation Society is having their annual dinner-dance. Angelica's parents are attending too. This makes things far easier. Rather than sneak through the streets after curfew, Angelica and I meet in the Highlands early. She has brought a half bottle of wine and some bread and cheese, and she is red-faced and excited. We sit on the porch of a now-shuttered mansion and eat our dinner while the sun breaks into waves of red and pink beyond the tree line, and finally ebbs away altogether.
Then, at half past nine, we make our way toward Tanglewild.
Neither of us has the exact address, but it doesn't take us long to locate the house. Tanglewild is only a two-block street, mostly wooded, with a few peaked roofs rising up--just barely visible, silhouetted against the deepening purple sky--indicating houses set back behind the trees. The night is remarkably still, and it is easy to pick out the drumbeat thrumming underneath the noise of the crickets. We turn down a long, narrow drive, its pavement full of fissures, which the moss and the grass have begun to colonize. Angelica takes her hair down, then places it in a ponytail, then once again shakes it loose. I feel a deep flash of pity for her, followed by a squeeze of fear.
Angelica's cure is scheduled for next week.
As C"jujustiwe get close to the house, the rhythm of the drum gets louder, although it is still muffled; all the windows have been boarded up, I notice, and the door is closed tightly and stuffed around with insulation. The second we open the door, the music becomes a roar: a rush of banging and screeching guitar, vibrating through the floorboards and walls. For a second I stand, disoriented, blinking in the br
ight kitchen light. The music seems to get my head in a vise--it squeezes, it presses out all other thoughts.
"I said, close the door." Someone--a girl with flame-red hair--launches past us practically shouting, and slams the door behind us, keeping the sound in. She shoots me a dirty look as she goes back across the kitchen to the guy she has been talking to, who is tall and blond and skinny, all elbows and kneecaps. Young. Fourteen at most. His T-shirt reads PORTLAND NAVAL CONSERVATORY.
I think of Sarah Sterling and feel a spasm of nausea. I close my eyes and concentrate on the music, feeling it vibrate up through the floor and into my bones. My heart adjusts to its rhythm, beating hard and fast in my chest. Until recently I had never heard music like this, only the stately, measured songs that get played endlessly on Radio One. This is one of my favorite things about the underground: the crashing of the cymbals, the screeching guitar riffs, music that moves into the blood and makes you feel hot and wild and alive.
"Let's go downstairs," Angelica says. "I want to be closer to the music." She's scanning the crowd, obviously looking for someone. I wonder if it's the same someone she went off with at the last party. It's amazing that despite all the things we've shared this summer, there's still so much that we don't and can't talk about.
I think of Lena and our strained conversation in the street. The now-familiar ache grips my throat. If only she had listened to me and tried to understand. If she could see the beauty of this underground world, and appreciate what it means: the music, the dancing, the feeling of fingertips and lips, like a moment of flight after a lifetime of crawling . . .
I push the thought of Lena away.
The stairs leading down to the basement are rough-hewn concrete. Except for a few thick pillar candles, pooled in wax and placed directly on the steps, they are swallowed in dark. As we descend, the music swells to a roar, and the air becomes hot and sticky with vibration, as though the sound is gaining physical shape, an invisible body pulsing, breathing, sweating.
Hana: A Delirium Short Story Page 3
