Delirium dt-1

by Lauren Oliver

  Brian is looking at me, finally, with an expression I can’t identify at first.

  Then I realize: pity. He feels sorry for me. He starts speaking all in a rush.

  “Listen, I probably shouldn’t tell you this, but before my procedure I was like you.” His eyes click back to the street. The wheezing has stopped. He speaks clearly, but low, so Carol and his mom can’t hear through the open window. “I didn’t—I wasn’t ready.” He licks his lips, drops his voice to a whisper. “There was a girl I used to see sometimes at the park. She babysat for her cousins, used to bring them to the playground there. I was captain of the fencing team in high school—that’s where we practiced.”

  You would be captain of the frigging fencing team, I think. But I don’t say this out loud; I can tell he’s trying to be nice.

  “Anyway, we used to talk sometimes. Nothing happened,” he qualifies quickly. “Just a few conversations, here and there. She had a pretty smile. And I felt…” He trails off.

  Wonder and fear sweep through me. He’s trying to tell me that we’re alike.

  He somehow knows about Alex—not about Alex specifically, but about someone. “Wait a second.” My mind is churning. “Are you trying to say that before the procedure you were… you got sick?”

  “I’m just saying I understand.” His eyes flick to mine for barely a fraction of a second, but that’s all I need. I’m positive now. He knows I’ve been infected.

  I’m both relieved and terrified—if he can see it, other people will see it too.

  “My point is only that the cure works.” He places extra emphasis on the last word. I know, now, that he’s trying to be kind. “I’m much happier now. You will be too, I promise.”

  Something inside of me fractures when he says that, and I feel like I could cry again. His voice is so reassuring. There’s nothing I want more in that moment than to believe him. Safety, happiness, stability: what I’ve wanted my whole life.

  And for that moment I think maybe the past few weeks really have just been some long, strange delirium. Maybe after the procedure I’ll wake up as from a high fever, with only a vague recollection of my dreams and a sense of overwhelming relief.

  “Friends?” Brian says, offering me his hand to shake, and this time I don’t flinch when he touches me. I even let him hold my hand an extra few seconds.

  He’s still facing the street, and as we’re standing there a frown flickers temporarily across his face. “What does he want?” he mutters, and then calls out, “It’s okay. She’s my pair.”

  I turn around just in time to see a flash of burnt golden-brown hair—the color of leaves in autumn—disappear around the corner. Alex. I wrench my hand away from Brian’s, but it’s too late. He’s gone.

  “Must have been a regulator,” Brian says. “He was just standing there, staring.”

  The feeling of calm and reassurance I’d had only a minute earlier vanishes in a rush. Alex saw me—he saw us, holding hands, heard Brian say I was his pair.

  And I was supposed to have met him an hour ago. He doesn’t know that I couldn’t get out of the house, couldn’t get a message to him. I can’t imagine what he must be thinking about me right now. Or actually, I can imagine.

  “Are you okay?” Brian’s eyes are so pale they’re almost gray. A sickly color, not like sky at all—like mold or rot. I can’t believe I thought he could be attractive for even a second. “You don’t look too good.”

  “I’m fine.” I try to take a step toward the house and stumble. Brian reaches out to steady me, but I twist away from him. “I’m fine,” I repeat, even though everything around me is breaking, fracturing.

  “It’s hot out here,” he says. I can’t stand to look at him. “Let’s go inside.”

  He puts a hand on my elbow and propels me up the stairs, through the door, and into the living room, where Carol and Mrs. Scharff are waiting for us, smiling.

  Chapter Twenty

  Ex rememdium salus.

  “From the cure, salvation.”

  — Printed on all American currency

  By some miracle, I must make a good enough impression on Brian and Mrs.

  Scharff to satisfy Carol, even though I barely speak during the remainder of their visit (or maybe because I barely speak). It’s midafternoon by the time they leave, and although Carol insists I help out with a few more chores and she makes me stick around for dinner—every minute that I can’t run to Alex an agony, sixty seconds of pure, driving torture—she promises me I can go for a walk when I’m done eating, before curfew. I inhale my baked beans and frozen fish sticks so fast I almost puke, and practically sit bouncing in my chair until she releases me. She even lets me out of dishwashing duty, but I’m too angry at her for cooping me up in the first place to feel grateful.

  I go to 37 Brooks first. I don’t really think he’ll be there waiting for me, but I’m hoping for it anyway. But the rooms are empty, the garden, too. I must be half-delirious by that point because I check behind the trees and bushes, as though he might suddenly pop out, like he used to do a few weeks ago when he and Hana and I would play our epic games of hide-and-seek. Just thinking about it brings a sharp pain to my chest. Less than a month ago all of August still stretched before us—long and golden and reassuring, like an endless period of delicious sleep.

  Well, now I’ve woken up.

  I make my way back through the house. Seeing all our stuff scattered in the living room—blankets, a few magazines and books, a box of crackers and some cans of soda, old board games, including a half-completed game of Scrabble, abandoned when Alex began making up words like quozz and yregg—makes me overwhelmingly sad, and reminds me of that single house that survived the blitz, and that cracked and bombed-out street: a place where everybody went on stupidly doing everyday things, right up until the moment of disaster, and afterward everyone said, “How could they not have known what was coming?”

  Stupid, stupid—to be so careless with our time, to believe we had so much of it left.

  I head into the streets, frantic and desperate now, but unsure of what to do next. He mentioned to me once that he lived on Forsyth—a long row of gray slab buildings owned by the university—so I go that way. But all the buildings look identical. There must be dozens of them, hundreds of individual apartments. I’m tempted to tear through each and every one until I find him, but that would be suicide. After a couple of students give me suspicious glances—I’m sure I look like a disaster, red-faced and wild-eyed and close to hysterical—I duck into a side street. To calm myself I start reciting the elemental prayers: “H is for hydrogen, a weight of one; when fission’s split, as brightly lit, as hot as any sun…”

  I’m so distracted walking home that I get lost in the tangle of streets leading away from the UP campus. I end up on a narrow one-way street I’ve never seen before and have to backtrack to Monument Square. The Governor is standing there as always, his empty palm outstretched, looking sad and forlorn in the fading evening light, as though he’s a beggar, forever condemned to ask for alms.

  But seeing him gives me an idea. I dig in the bottom of my bag for a scrap of paper and a pen, and scrawl out, Let me explain, please. Midnight at the house.

  8/17. Then, after checking to make sure that no one is watching me from the few remaining lit windows that overlook the square, I hop up onto the statue’s base and stuff the note into the little cavity in the Governor’s fist. The chance that Alex will think to check there is a million to one. But still, there’s a chance.

  That night, as I’m slipping out of the bedroom, I hear rustling behind me.

  When I turn around, Gracie’s sitting up in bed again, blinking at me, her eyes as reflective as an animal’s. I touch my finger to my lips. She does the same, an unconscious mimic, and I slip out the door.

  When I’m on the street I look up once toward the window. For a second I think I see Gracie looking down at me, her face as pale as a moon. But maybe it’s just a trick of the shadows skating silently over the
side of the house. When I look again, she’s gone.

  The house at 37 Brooks is all dark when I push my way in through the window, and totally silent. He’s not here, I think. He didn’t come—but a piece of me refuses to believe it. He must have come.

  I’ve brought a flashlight with me, and I begin a sweep of the house, my second of the day, refusing for superstitious reasons to call out for him. Somehow I can’t stand it. If he doesn’t answer, I’ll be forced, finally, to accept that he never received my note—or, even worse, did receive it but has decided not to come.

  In the living room I stop short.

  All our things—the blankets, the games, the books—are gone. The warped wooden floor lies bare and exposed under the beam of my flashlight. The furniture sits cold and silent, stripped of all our personal touches, the discarded sweatshirts and half-used bottles of sunscreen. It has been a long time since I’ve been afraid of the house or frightened of walking into its rooms at night, but now a sense of the cavernous empty spaces around me comes back—room after room of tumbling-down things, rotting things, rodents blinking at you from dark spaces—and a deep chill runs through me. Alex must have been here after all, to clean up our stuff.

  The message is as clear to me as any note. He’s done with me.

  For a moment I even forget to breathe. And then the Coldness comes, a surge of it so strong it hits me in the chest like a physical force, like walking straight into the breakers at the beach. My knees buckle and I go into a crouch, shivering uncontrollably.

  He’s gone. A strangled sound works its way out of my throat and breaks the silence around me all at once. Suddenly I’m sobbing loudly into the dark, letting the flashlight fall to the ground and blink out. I fantasize that I’ll cry so much I’ll fill the house and drown, or be carried away on a river of tears to some distant place.

  Then I feel a warm hand on the back of my neck, working through a tangle of my hair.

  “Lena.”

  I turn around and Alex is there, bending over me. I can’t really make out his expression, but in the limited light it looks hard to me, hard and immobile, as though it’s made out of stone. For a second I’m worried that I’m only dreaming him, but then he touches me again and his hand is solid and warm and rough.

  “Lena,” he says again, but he doesn’t seem to know what else to say. I scramble to my feet, wiping my face on my forearm.

  “You got my note.” I’m trying to gulp back the tears but just succeed in hiccuping several times.

  “Note?” Alex repeats.

  I wish I was still holding the flashlight so I could see his face more clearly.

  At the same time, I’m terrified of it, and of the distance I might find there. “I left you a note at the Governor,” I said. “I wanted you to meet me here.”

  “I didn’t get it,” he says. I think I hear a coldness in his voice. “I just came to—”

  “Stop.” I can’t let him finish. I can’t let him say that he came to pack up, that he doesn’t want to see me again. It will kill me. Love, the deadliest of all deadly things. “Listen,” I say, hiccuping through the words. “Listen, about today… It wasn’t my idea. Carol said I had to meet him, and I couldn’t get a message to you. And then we were standing there and I was thinking about you, and the Wilds, and how everything is so changed and how there’s no time, there’s no more time for us, and for a second—a single second—I wished I could go back to how things were before.” I’m not really making any sense, and I know it. The explanation I’d reviewed so many times in my head is getting all screwed up, words leapfrogging over one another. The excuses seem irrelevant: As I’m speaking I realize there’s only a single thing that really matters. Alex and I are out of time. “But I swear I didn’t really wish it. I would never have—if I’d never met you I could never have—I didn’t know what anything meant before you, not really…”

  Alex pulls me toward him and wraps his arms around me. I bury my face in his chest. I seem to fit so precisely, just exactly as though our bodies had been built for each other.

  “Shhh,” he whispers into my hair. He’s squeezing me so tightly it hurts a little, but I don’t mind. It feels good, like if I wanted to I could lift my feet off the ground and stop trying at all and he’d still be holding me up. “I’m not mad at you, Lena.”

  I pull back just a fraction. I know that even in the dark I probably look horrible. My eyes are swelling up and my hair is sticking to my face. Thankfully, he keeps his arms around me. “But you—” I swallow hard, take deep breaths in and out. “You took everything away. All our stuff.”

  He looks away for a second. His whole face is swallowed in shadow. When he speaks his voice is over-loud, as though he can only say the words by forcing them out. “We always knew this would happen. We knew that we didn’t have much time.”

  “But—but—” I don’t have to say that we’ve been pretending. We’ve been acting as if things would never change.

  He places a hand on either side of my face, wipes the tears away with his thumbs. “Don’t cry, okay? No more crying.” He kisses the tip of my nose lightly, then takes one of my hands. “I want to show you something.” There’s a small break in his voice, and I think of things coming unhinged, falling apart.

  He leads me to the staircase. Far above us, the ceiling is rotted away in patches, so the stairs are outlined in silvery light. The staircase must have been magnificent at some point, sweeping upward majestically before splitting in two, leading to landings on either side.

  I haven’t been upstairs since the first time Alex brought me here with Hana, when we made it a point to explore every room of the house. I didn’t even think to check the second floor earlier this afternoon. Here it’s even darker than downstairs, if possible, and hotter too, a black and drifting mist.

  Alex starts shuffling down the hall, past a row of identical wooden doors.

  “This way.”

  Above us, a frantic sound of fluttering: bats, disturbed by the sound of his voice. I let out a little squeak of fear. Mice? Fine. Flying mice? Not so fine.

  That’s another reason I’ve been sticking to the ground floor. During our initial exploration we came into what must have been the master bedroom—an enormous room, with the half-collapsed beams of a four-poster bed still standing in the middle of it—and looked up into the gloom, and saw dozens and dozens of dark, silent shapes massed along the wooden beams, like horrible black buds dangling along a flower stem, ready to drop. When we moved, several of them opened their eyes and seemed to wink at me. The floor was streaked with bat shit; it smelled sickly sweet.

  “In here,” he says, and though I can’t be positive, I think he stops at the door to the master bedroom. I shiver. I have zero desire to see the inside of the Bat Room again. But Alex is emphatic, so I let him open the door and I pass inside in front of him.

  As soon as we walk into the room I gasp and stop so suddenly he bumps into me. The room is incredible; it’s transformed.

  “Well?” There’s a note of anxiety in Alex’s voice. “What do you think?”

  I can’t answer him immediately. Alex has shoved the old bed out of the way, into one of the corners, and swept the floor perfectly clean. The windows—or what windows remain—are flung open, so the air smells like gardenias and night-blooming jasmine, their scents drifting in on the wind from outside. He has arranged our blanket and books in the center of the room and unraveled a sleeping bag there too, surrounding the whole area with dozens and dozens of candles stuck in funny makeshift canisters, like old cups and mugs or discarded Coca-Cola cans, just like they were at his house in the Wilds.

  But the best part is the ceiling: or rather, the lack of ceiling. He must have broken through the rotted wood to the roof, and now an enormous patch of sky is once again stretched above our heads. There are fewer stars visible in Portland than on the other side of the border, but it’s still beautiful. Even better, the batsdisturbed from their roost—have gone. Far above us, outside, I see sever
al dark shapes looping back and forth across the moon, but as long as they stay in the open air, they don’t bother me.

  All of a sudden it hits me: He did this for me. Even after what happened today, he came and did this for me. Gratitude overwhelms me, and another feeling too, bringing with it a twinge of pain. I don’t deserve it. I don’t deserve him. I turn back to him and can’t even speak; his face is lit up with flame and he seems to be glowing, transforming into fire. He is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.

  “Alex—” I start to say, but can’t finish. Suddenly I’m almost frightened of him, terrified of his absolute and utter perfection.

  He leans forward and kisses me. And when he’s pressed so close to me, with the softness of his T-shirt brushing my face and the smell of suntan lotion and grass coming off his skin, he feels less frightening.

  “It’s too dangerous to go back to the Wilds.” His voice is hoarse, as though he’s been yelling for a very long time, and a muscle is working furiously in his jaw. “So I brought the Wilds here. I thought you would like it.”

  “I do. I–I love it.” I press my hands against my chest, wishing I could somehow be even closer to him. I hate skin; I hate bones and bodies. I want to curl up inside of him and be carried there forever.

  “Lena.” Different expressions are passing over his face so quickly I can barely catch them all, and his jaw keeps twitching back and forth. “I know we don’t have much time, like you said. We hardly have any time at all…”

  “No.” I bury my face in his chest, wrap my arms around him and squeeze.

  Unimaginable, incomprehensible: a life lived without him. The idea breaks methe fact that he’s almost crying breaks me—the fact that he did this for me, the fact that he believes I’m worth it—kills me. He is my world and my world is him and without him there is no world. “I won’t do it. I won’t go through with it. I can’t. I want to be with you. I need to be with you.”