Pandemonium (19 page)

I read once about a kind of fungus that grows in trees. The fungus begins to encroach on the systems that carry water and nutrients up from the roots to the branches. It disables them one by one—it crowds them out. Soon, the fungus—and only the fungus—is carrying the water, and the chemicals, and everything else the tree needs to survive. At the same time it is decaying the tree slowly from within, turning it minute by minute to rot.

That is what hatred is. It will feed you and at the same time turn you to rot.

It is hard and deep and angular, a system of blockades. It is everything and total.

Hatred is a high tower. In the Wilds, I start to build, and to climb.

I
am awakened by a voice barking, “Tray!” I sit up, and see that Julian has gone to the door. He is crouching on his hands and knees, as I did yesterday, trying to get a look at our captor.

“Bucket!” is the next sharp command, and I feel both relieved and sorry when Julian picks up the tin bucket in the corner, which is making the room stink sharply of urine. Yesterday we took turns with it. Julian made me promise I would keep my back turned and my ears covered and, additionally, hum. When it was my turn I only asked him to turn around—but he covered his ears and sang anyway. He has a terrible voice, totally off-key, but he sang loudly and cheerfully, like he didn’t know or didn’t care—a song I hadn’t heard in forever, one that used to be part of a kids’ game.

A new tray comes through, followed by a clean bucket. Then the flap door clangs shut, the footsteps recede, and Julian stands.

“Did you see anything?” I ask, although I know the answer will be no. My throat is hoarse, and I feel weirdly awkward. I shared too much last night. We both did.

Julian is having trouble looking at me again. “Nothing,” he says.

We share the meal—this time, a small bowl filled with nuts, and another large piece of bread—in silence. Under the bright light of the ceiling bulb, it feels strange to sit on the floor, so close together, so I eat while pacing the room. There is a tension in the room that did not exist before. Unreasonably, I resent Julian for it. He made me speak last night, and he shouldn’t have. At the same time, I was the one who reached for his hand. This seems unimaginable now.

“Are you going to do that all day?” Julian says. His voice is strained, and I can tell he is feeling the tension too.

“If you don’t like it, don’t watch,” I snap back.

More moments of silence. Then he says, “My father will get me out of here. He’s bound to pay soon.”

Hatred for him blooms again inside of me. He must know that there is no one in the world who will spring me. He must know that when our captors—whoever they are—realize this, I will either be killed or left here to rot.

But I don’t say anything. I climb the steep, smooth walls of the tower. I enclose myself deep inside its casements; I build stone between us.

The hours here are flat and round, disks of gray layered one on top of the other. They smell sour and musky, like the breath of someone who is starving. They move slowly, at a grind, until it seems as though they are not moving at all. They are just pressing down, endlessly down.

And then, without warning, the light clicks off and plunges us once again into darkness. I feel a sense of relief so strong it borders on joy: I’ve made it through another day. With the darkness, some of my unease begins to dissipate. In the daylight Julian and I are edges, set awkwardly and at odds with each other. But in the dark, I’m happy when I hear him settle on his cot, and know that we’re separated by only a few feet of space. There’s comfort in his presence.

Even the silence feels different now—more forgiving.

After a while, Julian says, “Are you asleep?”

“Not yet.”

I hear him roll over to face me. “You want to hear another story?” he asks.

I nod, even though he can’t see me, and he takes my silence for assent.

“There once was a really bad tornado.” Julian pauses. “This is a made-up story, by the way.”

“I got it,” I say, and close my eyes. I think of being back in the Wilds, my eyes stinging from campfire smoke, and Raven’s voice coming through the haze.

“And there was this girl, Dorothy, and she fell asleep in her house. And the whole house was lifted off the ground by the tornado and went spinning into the sky. And when she woke up, she was in a strange land filled with little people, and her house had landed on this evil witch. Flattened her. So all the little people—the Munchkins—were really grateful, and they gave Dorothy a pair of magical slippers.” He lapses into silence.

“So?” I say. “What comes next?”

“I don’t know,” he says.

“What do you mean, you don’t know?” I say.

Rustling, as he shifts on his cot. “That’s as far as I got,” he says. “I never read the rest.”

I suddenly feel very alert. “You didn’t make it up, then?”

He hesitates for a second. Then: “No.”

I keep my voice calm. “I’ve never heard that story before,” I say. “I don’t remember it from the curriculum.” Very few stories get approved for Use and Propagation; at most two to three per year, and sometimes none. If I haven’t heard it, chances are that’s because it was never approved.

Julian coughs. “It wasn’t. On the curriculum, I mean.” He pauses. “It was forbidden.”

My skin gets a prickly feeling. “Where did you find a forbidden story?”

“My father knows a lot of important people in the DFA. Government people, priests, and scientists. So he has access to things … confidential documents and things that date from the time before. The days of sickness.”

I stay quiet. I can hear him swallow before he goes on.

“When I was little, my dad had this study—he had two studies, actually. A normal study, where he did most of his work for the DFA. My brother and I would sit and help him fold pamphlets all night long. It’s funny. To this day, midnight always smells like paper to me.”

I’m startled by the reference to a brother; I’ve never heard one mentioned before, never seen his image on DFA materials or in the
Word
, the country’s newspaper. But I don’t want to interrupt him.

“His other study was always locked. No one was allowed inside, and my father kept the key hidden. Except…” More rustling. “Except one day I saw where he put it. It was late. I was supposed to be asleep. I came out of my room for a glass of water, and I saw him from the landing. He went to a bookcase in the living room. On the uppermost shelf he kept a little porcelain statue of a rooster. I watched him lift the neck away from the body and put the key inside.

“The next day I pretended to be sick so I wouldn’t have to go to school. And after my mom and dad had left for work and my brother had gone to get the bus, I snuck downstairs, got the key, and unlocked my dad’s second study.” He gives a short laugh. “I don’t think I’ve ever been so scared in my life. My hands were shaking so bad I dropped the key three times before I could even fit it in the lock. I had no idea what I would find inside. I don’t know what I was imagining—dead bodies, maybe, or locked-up Invalids.”

I stiffen, as always, when I hear the word, then relax, let it skate by me.

He laughs again. “I was pissed when I finally got the door open and saw all those books. What a letdown. But then I saw they weren’t regular books. They weren’t anything like the books we saw in school and read in church. That’s when I realized it was—they must be forbidden.”

I can’t help it: A memory blooms now, long buried; stepping into Alex’s trailer for the first time and seeing dozens and dozens of strange titles, moldering spines glowing in the candlelight, learning the word
poetry
for the first time. In approved places, every story serves a purpose. But forbidden books are so much more. Some of them are webs; you can feel your way along their threads, but just barely, into strange and dark corners. Some of them are balloons bobbing up through the sky: totally self-contained, and unreachable, but beautiful to watch.

And some of them—the best ones—are doors.

“After that I used to sneak down to the study every time I was home alone. I knew it was wrong, but I couldn’t stop. There was music, too, totally different from the approved stuff on LAMM. You wouldn’t believe it, Lena. Full of bad words, all about the
deliria
… but not all of them bad or hopeless at all. Everyone was supposed to be unhappy in the time before, right? Everyone was supposed to be sick. But some of the music…” He breaks off and sings, quietly, “All you need is love…”

A shiver runs through me. It’s strange to hear that word pronounced out loud. Julian falls into silence for a bit. Then he continues, even more quietly, “Can you believe it? All you need…” His voice withdraws, as though he has realized how close we were lying and has moved away. In the dark he is barely an outline. “Anyway, my dad caught me eventually. I was just a little ways into that story I was telling you about—
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
, it was called. I’ve never seen him so angry in my life. He’s pretty calm most of the time, you know, thanks to the cure. But that day he dragged me into the living room and beat me so hard I blacked out.” Julian tells me this flatly, without feeling, and my stomach tightens with hatred toward his father, toward everyone like his father. They preach solidarity and sanctity, and in their homes and in their hearts they pound, and pound, and pound.

“He said that would teach me what forbidden books could do,” Julian says, and then, almost musingly, “The next day I had my first seizure.”

“I’m sorry,” I whisper.

“I don’t blame him or anything,” Julian says quickly. “The doctors said the seizure might have saved my life, actually. That’s how they discovered the tumor. Besides, he was only trying to help me. Keep me safe, you know.”

My heart breaks for him in that second, and rather than be carried away on the tide of it, I think of those smooth walls of hatred, and I think of climbing a set of stairs and taking aim at Julian’s father from my tower, and watching him burn.

After a while Julian says, “Do you think I’m a bad person?”

“No,” I say, squeezing the word past the rock in my throat.

For a few minutes we breathe together, in tandem. I wonder if Julian notices.

“I never figured out why the book was banned,” Julian says after a bit. “That part must have come later, after the witch, and the shoes. I’ve been wondering about it ever since. Funny how certain things stay with you.”

“Do you remember any of the other stories you read?” I ask.

“No. None of the songs, either. Just that one line… ‘All you need is love.’” He sings the notes again.

We lie in silence for a bit, and I begin to float in and out of consciousness. I am walking the shimmering silver ribbon of a river winding through the forest, wearing shoes that sparkle in the sun as though they are made out of coins…

I am passing under a branch and there is a tangle of leaves in my hair. I reach up and feel a warm hand—fingers…

I startle into awareness again. Julian’s hand is hovering an inch above my head. He has rolled over to the very edge of his cot. I can feel the warmth from his body.

“What are you doing?” My heart is beating very fast. I can feel his hand trembling ever so slightly by my right ear.

“I’m sorry,” he whispers, but doesn’t move his hand. “I …”

I can’t see his face. He is a long, curved shadow, frozen, like something made of polished wood. “You have nice hair,” he says finally.

My chest feels like it is being squeezed. The room seems hotter than ever.

“Can I?” he asks, so quietly I barely hear him, and I nod because I can’t speak. My throat, too, is being squeezed.

Softly, gently, he lowers his hand that final inch. For a moment he leaves it there and again I hear that quick exhale, a release of some kind, and everything in my whole body goes still and white and hot, a starburst, a silent explosion. Then he runs his fingers through my hair and I relax, and the squeezing goes away, and I’m breathing and alive and it’s all fine and everything will be okay. Julian keeps running his hand through my hair—twisting it around his fingers, curling it up and over his wrist and letting it drop onto the pillow again—and this time when I close my eyes and see the shining silver river I walk straight into it, and let it carry me down and away.

In the morning I wake up to blue: Julian’s eyes, staring at me. He turns away quickly but not quickly enough. He has been watching me sleep. I feel embarrassed and angry and flattered at the same time. I wonder if I’ve said anything. I used to call Alex’s name sometimes, and I’m pretty sure he was in my dreams last night. I don’t remember any of them, but I woke up with that Alex-feeling, like a hollow carved in the center of my chest.