Lauren Oliver - Delirium (12 page)

But they don't sing.

I remember that she brought me trays of buttered toast when I was sick and kissed my bruises when I fell, and I remember once when she lifted me to my feet after I fell off my bike and began to rock me in her arms, a woman gasped and said to her, "You should be ashamed of yourself," and I didn't understand why, which made me cry harder. After that she comforted me only in private. In public she would just frown and say, "You're okay, Lena. Get up."

We used to have dance parties too. My mother called them "sock jams," because we would roll up the carpets in the living room and put on our thickest socks, and slip and slide along the wooden hallways. Even Rachel joined in, though she always claimed to be too old for baby games. My mom would draw the curtains and wedge pillows under the front and back doors and turn up the music. We laughed so hard I always went to bed with a stomachache.

Eventually, I understood that on our sock-jam nights she'd closed the curtains to prevent us from being seen by passing patrols, that she'd stopped up the doors with pillows so that the neighbors would not report us for playing music and laughing too much, both potential warning signs of the deliria. I understood that she used to tuck my father's military pin--a silver dagger he had inherited from his own father, which she wore every day on a chain around her neck--beneath the collar of her shirt whenever we left the house, so no one would see it and become suspicious. I understood that all the happiest moments of my childhood were a lie. They were wrong and unsafe and illegal. They were freakish. My mother was freakish, and I'd probably inherited the freakishness from her.

For the first time, really, I wonder what she must have been feeling, thinking, the night she walked out to the cliffs and kept walking, feet pedaling the air. I wonder whether she was scared. I wonder whether she thought of me or Rachel. I wonder whether she was sorry for leaving us behind.

I start thinking about my father, too. I don't remember him at all, though I have some dim, ancient impression of two warm, rough hands and a large looming face floating above mine, but I think that's just because my mother kept a framed portrait in her bedroom of my father and me. I was only a few months old and he was holding me, smiling, looking at the camera. But there's no way I'm remembering for real real. I wasn't even a year old when he died. Cancer.

The heat is horrible, thick, clotting on the walls. Jenny is rolled over on her back, arms and legs flung open on top of her comforter, breathing silently with her mouth gaping open. Even Grace is fast asleep, murmuring soundlessly into her pillow. The whole room smells like a wet exhalation, skin and tongues and warm milk.

I ease out of bed, already dressed in black jeans and a T-shirt. I didn't even bother to change into my pajamas. I knew I would never be able to sleep tonight. And earlier in the evening, I'd come to a decision. I was sitting at the dinner table with Carol and Uncle William and Jenny and Grace, while everyone chewed and swallowed in silence, staring blankly at one another, feeling as though the air was weighing down on me, constricting my breath, like two fists squeezing tighter and tighter around a water balloon, when I realized something.

Hana said I didn't have it in me, but she was wrong.

My heart is beating so loudly I can hear it, and I'm positive that everyone else will too--that it will make my aunt sit bolt upright in her bed, ready to catch me and accuse me of trying to sneak out. Which is, of course, exactly what I am trying to do. I didn't even know a heart could beat so loudly, and it reminds me of an Edgar Allan Poe story we had to read in one of our social studies classes, about this guy who kills this other guy and then gives himself up to the police because he's convinced he can hear the dead guy's heart beating up from beneath his floorboards. It's supposed to be a story about guilt and the dangers of civil disobedience, but when I first read it I thought it seemed kind of lame and melodramatic. Now I get it, though. Poe must have snuck out a lot when he was young.

I ease open the bedroom door, holding my breath, praying it doesn't squeak. At one point Jenny lets out a shout and my heart freezes. But then she rolls over, flinging one arm across her pillow, and I exhale slowly, realizing she's just fussing in her sleep.

The hall is totally dark. The room my aunt and uncle share is dark too, and the only sound comes from the whispering of the trees outside and the low ticks and groans from the walls, the usual old-house arthritic noises. I finally work up the courage to slip out into the hall and slide the bedroom door shut behind me. I go so slowly that it almost feels like I'm not moving at all, feeling my way by the bumps and ripples in the wallpaper over to the stairs, then sliding my hand inch by inch over the banister, walking on my very tiptoes. Even so, it seems like the house is fighting me, like it's just screaming for me to be caught. Every step seems to creak, or shriek, or moan. Every single floorboard quivers and shudders under my feet, and I start mentally bargaining with the house: If I make it to the front door without waking up Aunt Carol, I swear to God I'll never slam another door. I'll never call you "an old piece of turd" again, not even in my head, and I'll never curse the basement when it floods, and I will never, ever, ever kick the bedroom wall when I'm annoyed at Jenny.

Maybe the house hears me, because, miraculously, I do make it to the front door. I pause for a second longer, listening for the sounds of footsteps upstairs, whispered voices, anything--but other than my heart, which is still going strong and loud, it's silent. Even the house seems to hesitate and take a breath, because the front door swings open with barely a whisper, and in the last second before I slip out into the night the rooms behind me are as dark and still as a grave.

Outside, I hesitate on the front stoop. The fireworks stopped an hour ago--I heard the last stuttering explosions, like distant gunfire, just as I was getting ready for bed--and now the streets are strangely silent, and totally empty. It's a little after eleven o'clock. Some cureds must be lingering at the Eastern Prom. Everyone else is home by now. Not a single light is burning on the street. All the streetlamps were disabled years ago, except in the richest parts of Portland, and they look to me like blinded eyes. Thank God the moon is so bright.

I strain to detect the sounds of passing patrols or groups of regulators--I almost hope I do, because then I'll have to go back inside, to my bed, to safety, and already the panic is starting to drill through me again. But everything is perfectly still and quiet, almost like it's frozen. Everything rational, right, and good is screaming for me to turn around and go upstairs, but some stubborn inner center keeps me moving forward.

I go down the walk and unchain my bike from the gate. My bike rattles a little bit, particularly when you first start pedaling, so I walk it a ways down the street. The wheels tick reassuringly over the pavement. I've never been out this late on my own in my life. I've never broken curfew. But alongside the fear--which is always there, of course, that constant crushing weight--is a small, flickering feeling of excitement that works its way up and underneath the fear, pushing it back some. Like, It's okay, I'm all right, I can do this . I'm just a girl--an in-between girl, five- two, nothing special--but I can do this, and all the curfews and the patrols in the world aren't stopping me. It's amazing how much comfort this thought gives me. It's amazing how it breaks up the fear, like a tiny candle lit in the middle of the night, lighting up the shapes of things, burning away the dark.

When I reach the end of my street I hop up on my bike, feeling the gears shudder into place. The breeze feels good as I start pedaling, careful not to go too quickly, staying alert in case there are regulators nearby. Fortunately, Stroudwater, and Roaring Brook Farms, are in the exact opposite direction from the Fourth of July celebrations at Eastern Prom. Once I get to the broad swath of farmland that surrounds Portland like a belt, I should be okay. The farms and slaughterhouses rarely get patrolled. But first I have to make it through the West End, where rich people like Hana live, through Libbytown, and over the Fore River at the Congress Street Bridge. Thankfully, each street I turn down is empty.

Stroudwater is a good thirty minutes away, even if I'm biking quickly. As I get off-peninsula--moving away from the buildings and businesses of downtown Portland and onto the more suburban mainland-- the houses get smaller and farther apart, set back on weedy, patchy yards. This isn't rural Portland yet, but there are signs of the countryside creeping in: plants poking up through half-rotted porches, an owl hooting mournfully in the dark, a black scythe of bats cutting suddenly across the sky. Almost all these houses have cars in front of them--just like the richer houses in West End--but these have obviously been salvaged from the junkyards. They're mounted on cinder blocks and covered in rust. I pass one that has a tree growing straight through its sunroof, like the car has just dropped out of the sky and been impaled there, and another one, hood open, missing its engine. As I go past, a cat startles up out of its black cavity, meowing, blinking at me.

After I cross the Fore River the houses fall away altogether, and it's just field after field and farm after farm, with names like MeadowLane and Sheepsbay and Willow Creek, which make them sound all homey and nice: places where someone might be baking muffins and skimming fresh cream for butter. But most of the farms are owned by big corporations, packed with livestock and often staffed by orphans.

I've always liked it out here, but it's kind of freaky in the dark, open and totally empty, and I can't help but think that if I did come across a patrol there would be no place to hide, no alley to turn down. Across the fields I see the low, dark silhouettes of barns and silos, some of them brand-new, some of them barely standing, clinging to the earth like teeth digging into something. The air smells slightly sweet, like growing things and manure.

Roaring Brook Farms is right next to the southwestern border. It's been abandoned for years, since half the main building and both grain silos were destroyed in a fire. About five minutes before I get there, I think I can make out a rhythm drumming almost imperceptibly under the throaty song of the crickets, but for a while I'm not sure if I'm just imagining it or only hearing my heart, which has started pounding again. Farther on, though, and I'm sure. Even before I reach the little dirt road that leads down to the barn--or at least, the portion of the barn that's still standing--strains of music spring up, crystallizing in the night air like rain turning suddenly to snow, drifting to earth.

Now I'm scared again. All I can think is: wrong, wrong, wrong, a word that drums in my head. Aunt Carol would kill me if she knew what I was doing. Kill me, or have me thrown into the Crypts or taken to the labs for an early procedure, Willow Marks�style.

I hop off my bike when I see the turnoff to Roaring Brook, and the big metal sign staked in the ground that reads PROPERTY OF PORTLAND, NO TRESPASSING. I wheel my bike a little ways into the woods at the side of the road. The actual farmhouse and the old barn are still five or six hundred feet down the road, but I don't want to bring my bike any farther. I don't lock it up, though. I don't even want to think about what would happen if there was a raid, but if there is, I'm not going to want to be fumbling with a lock in the half dark. I'll need speed.

I step around the NO TRESPASSING sign. I'm getting to be quite the expert at ignoring them, I realize, remembering how Hana and I hopped the gate at the labs. It's the first time I've thought about that afternoon in a while, and right then a vision of Alex rises up in front of me, a memory of seeing him on the observation deck, head tilted back and laughing.

I have to focus on the land around me, the brightness of the moon, the wildflowers on the road. It helps me beat back the feeling that I'm going to be sick at any second. I don't really know what compelled me out of the house, why I felt like I had to prove Hana wrong about something, and I'm trying to ignore the idea--way more disturbing than anything else--that my argument with Hana was just an excuse.

That maybe, deep down, I was just curious.

I'm not feeling curious now. I'm feeling scared. And very, very stupid.

The farmhouse and the old barn are positioned in a dip of land between two hills, a mini valley, like the buildings are sitting right in the middle of somebody's pursed lips. Because of the way the land slopes I can't see the farmhouse yet, but as I get closer to the top of the hill the music gets clearer, louder. It's like nothing I've ever heard before. It's definitely not like the authorized music you can download off LAMM, prim and harmonious and structured, the kind of music that gets played in the band shell in Deering Oaks Park during official summer concerts.

Someone is singing: a beautiful voice as thick and heavy as warm honey, spilling up and down a scale so quickly I feel dizzy just listening. The music that's playing underneath the voice is strange and clashing and wild--but nothing like the wailing and scratching that I heard Hana playing on her computer earlier today, though I recognize certain similarities, certain patterns of melody and rhythm. That music was metallic and awful, fuzzy through the speakers. This music ebbs and flows, irregular, sad. It reminds me, weirdly, of watching the ocean during a bad storm, the lashing, crashing waves and the spray of sea foam against the docks; the way it takes your breath away, the power and the hugeness of it.

That's exactly what happens as I listen to the music, as I come up over the final crest of hill, and the half-ruined barn and collapsing farmhouse fan out in front of me, just as the music swells, a wave about to break: The breath leaves my body all at once, and I'm struck dumb by the beauty of it. For a second it seems to me like I really am looking down at the ocean--a sea of people, writhing and dancing in the light spilling down from the barn like shadows twisting up around a flame.

The barn is completely gutted: split open and blackened by the fire, exposed to the elements. Only half of it is left standing--fragments of three walls, a portion of the roof, part of an elevated platform that must once have been used to store hay. That's where the band is playing. Thin, stalky trees have begun pushing up in the fields. Older trees, seared completely white from the fire and totally bald of branches and leaves, point like ghostly fingers to the sky.