Julian looks up. There is a screen behind him on which his image is projected, blowing up his face by a power of fifteen. His eyes are a swirl of blue and green and gold, like the surface of the ocean on a sunny day, and behind the flatness, the practiced calm, I think I see something flashing there—an expression that is gone before I can find a name for it.
“I’ve had three operations since the first one,” he says. “They have removed the tumor four times, and three times it has regrown, as sicknesses will, unless they are removed swiftly and completely.” He pauses to let the significance of the statement sink in. “I have now been cancer free for two years.” There is a smattering of applause. Julian holds up a hand and the room once again goes silent.
Julian smiles, and the enormous Julian behind him smiles also: a pixelated version, a blur. “The doctors have told me that further surgeries may endanger my life. Too much tissue has been removed already, too many excisions performed; if I am cured, I might lose the ability to regulate my emotions at all. I might lose the ability to speak, to see, to move.” He shifts at the podium. “It is possible that my brain will shut down entirely.”
I can’t help it; I am holding my breath too, along with everybody else. Only Thomas Fineman looks relaxed; I wonder how often he has heard this speech.
Julian leans forward another inch toward the microphone, and suddenly it is like he is addressing each and every one of us individually: His voice is low and urgent, a secret whispered in our ears.
“They have refused to cure me for this reason. For more than a year we have been fighting for a procedure date, and finally we have arranged one. On March twenty-third, the day of our rally, I will be cured.”
Another smattering of applause, but Julian pushes through it. He is not done yet.
“It will be a historic day, even though it may prove to be my last. Don’t think I don’t understand the risks, because I do.” He straightens up, and his voice becomes louder, thunderous. The eyes on the screen are flashing now, dazzling, full of light. “But there is no choice, just as there wasn’t when I was nine. We must excise the sickness. We must cut it out, no matter what the risks. Otherwise it will only grow. It will spread like the very worst cancer and put all of us—every single person born into this vast and wonderful country—at risk. So I say to you: We will—we must—cut away the sickness, wherever it is. Thank you.”
There; that’s it. He has done it. He has tipped us over, all of us in our teetering expectancy, and now we are pouring toward him, coursing on a wave of sound, of roaring shouts and applause. Lena claps along with everybody else until her palms burn; she keeps clapping until they go numb. Half the audience stands, cheering. Someone starts a chant of “DFA! DFA!” and soon we are all chanting: It is earsplitting, a deafening roar. At a certain point Thomas joins his son onstage again and they stand solemnly, side by side—one fair, one dark, like the two sides of the moon—watching over us as we keep clapping, keep chanting, keep roaring our approval. They are the moon; we are a tide, their tide, and under their direction we will wipe clean all the sickness and blight from the world.
then
Someone is always sick in the Wilds. As soon as I am strong enough to move out of the sickroom and onto a mattress on the floor, Squirrel has to move in; and after Squirrel’s turn, it is Grandpa’s. At night, the homestead echoes with the sounds of coughing, heaving, feverish chatter: noises of disease, which run through the walls and fill us all with dread. The problem is the space and the closeness. We live on top of one another, breathe and sneeze on one another, share everything. And nothing and no one is ever really clean.
Hunger gnaws at us, makes tempers run short. After my first exploration of the homestead, I retreated underground, like an animal scrabbling back into the safety of its lair. One day passes, then two. The supplies have yet to come. Each morning different people go out to check for messages; I gather that they have found some way to communicate with the sympathizers and resisters on the other side. That is all there is for me to do: listen, watch, stay quiet.
In the afternoons I sleep, and when I can’t sleep, I close my eyes and imagine being back in the abandoned house at 37 Brooks with Alex lying next to me. I try to feel my way through the curtain; I imagine if I can somehow pull apart the days that have passed since the escape, can mend the tear in time, I can have him back.
But whenever I open my eyes I am still here, on a mattress on the floor, and still hungry.
After another four days, everyone is moving slowly, as though we’re all underwater. The pots are impossible for me to lift. When I try to stand too quickly I get dizzy. I have to spend more time in bed, and when I’m not in bed I think that everyone is glaring at me, can feel the Invalids’ resentment, hard-edged, like a wall. Maybe I’m just imagining it, but this is, after all, my fault.
The catch, too, has been poor. Roach traps a few rabbits and there is general excitement; but the meat is tough and full of gristle, and when everything is dished up there is barely enough to go around.
Then one day I am in the storeroom, sweeping—Raven insists we go through the motions, insists on keeping everything clean—when I hear shouts from aboveground, laughter and running. Feet pound down the stairs. Hunter comes swinging into the kitchen, followed by an older woman, Miyako. I have not seen them—or anyone—so energetic in days.
“Where’s Raven?” Hunter demands breathlessly.
I shrug. “I don’t know.”
Miyako lets out an exasperated sound, and both she and Hunter spin around, prepared to dart up the stairs again.
“What’s going on?” I ask.
“We got a message from the other side,” Hunter says. That’s what people here call the bordered communities: the other side, when they’re feeling generous; Zombieland, when they aren’t. “Supplies are coming in today. We need help taking delivery.”
“Can you help?” Miyako asks, sizing me up. She is broad through the shoulders, and very tall—if she had enough to eat, she would be an Amazon. As it is she is all muscle and sinew.
I shake my head. “I—I’m not strong enough.”
Hunter and Miyako exchange a look.
“The others will help,” Hunter says in a low voice. Then they pound up the stairs again, leaving me alone.
Later that afternoon they come back, ten of them, bearing heavy-duty garbage bags. The bags have been placed in half-full wooden crates in the Cocheco River at the border, and the crates have floated down to us. Even Raven can’t maintain order, or control her excitement. Everyone rips the bags to shreds, shouting and whooping as supplies tumble onto the floor: cans of beans, tuna, chicken, soup; bags of rice, flour, lentils, and more beans; dried jerky, sacks of nuts and cereal; hard-boiled eggs, nestled in a bin of towels; Band-Aids, Vaseline, tubes of ChapStick, medical supplies; even a new pack of underwear, a bundle of clothes, bottles of soap and shampoo. Sarah hugs the jerky to her chest, and Raven puts her nose in a package of soap, inhaling. It’s like a birthday party but better: ours to share, and just for that moment I feel a rush of happiness. Just for that moment, I feel as though I belong here.
Our luck has turned. A few hours later, Tack takes down a deer.
That night we have our first proper meal since I’ve arrived. We dish up enormous plates of brown rice, topped with meat braised and softened with crushed tomatoes and dried herbs. It’s so good I could cry, and Sarah actually does cry, sitting and sobbing in front of her plate. Miyako puts her arm around her and murmurs into Sarah’s hair. The gesture makes me think of my mother; a few days ago I asked Raven about her, with no luck.
What does she look like? Raven had asked, and I had to confess I didn’t know. When I was younger she had long, soft auburn hair, and a full-moon face. But after over ten years in Portland’s prison, the Crypts—where she had been my whole life, while I believed her dead—I doubt she resembles the woman from my hazy childhood memories.
Her name is Annabel, I told her, but Raven was already shaking her head.
“Eat, eat,” Miyako urges Sarah, and she does. We all do, ravenously: scooping up rice with our hands, lifting our plates to lick them clean. Someone from the other side has even thought to include a bottle of whiskey, wrapped carefully in a sweatshirt, and everyone cheers when that makes the rounds as well. I had alcohol only once or twice when I lived in Portland, and never understood its appeal, but I take a sip from the bottle when it makes its way to me. It burns hard going down, and I start coughing. Hunter grins and claps me on the back. Tack nearly tears the bottle out of my hands and says, curtly, “Don’t drink it if you’re just going to spit it up.”
“You get used to it,” Hunter leans in to whisper, almost an identical refrain to Sarah’s remark a week ago. I’m not sure whether he’s talking about the whiskey or Tack’s attitude. But already there’s a warm glow spreading through my stomach. When the bottle comes around again I take a slightly larger sip, and another, and the warmth spreads to my head.
Later: I’m seeing everything in pieces and fractions, like a series of photographs shuffled randomly together. Miyako and Lu in the corner, arms interlinked, dancing, while everyone claps; Blue sleeping curled up on a bench, and then borne out of the room, still asleep, by Squirrel; Raven standing on one of the benches, making a speech about freedom. She is laughing, too, her dark hair a shimmering curtain, and then Tack is helping her down: brown hands around her waist, a moment of suspension when she pauses, airborne, in his arms. I think of birds and flying away. I think of Alex.
One day Raven turns to me and says abruptly, “If you want to stay, you have to work.”
“I work,” I say.
“You clean,” she counters. “You boil the water. The rest of us haul water, look for food, scout for messages. Even Grandma hauls water—a mile and a half, with heavy buckets. And she’s sixty years old.”
“I—” Of course she’s right, and I know it. The guilt has been with me every day, as heavy as the thickness of the air. I heard Tack say to Raven that I’m a waste of a good bed. I had to squat in the storeroom for almost half an hour afterward with my arms wrapped around my knees until I stopped shaking. Hunter’s the only one of the homesteaders who’s nice to me, and he’s nice to everybody.
“I’m not ready. I’m not strong enough.”
She watches me for a second, and lets the silence stretch uncomfortably between us so I can feel the absurdity of the words. If I’m not strong by now, that’s my fault too. “We’re moving soon. Relocation starts in a few weeks. We’ll need all the help we can get.”
“Moving?” I repeat.
“Going south.” She turns away, starts retreating down the hallway. “Shutting up the homestead for the winter. And if you want to come, you’re going to help.”
Then she pauses. “You’re welcome to stay here, of course,” she says, turning around and raising an eyebrow. “Although winters are deadly. When the river freezes, we can’t get any supplies. But maybe that’s what you want?”