Requiem
Page 30
“Julian!” I start toward him. Julian keeps his eyes locked on Alex.
“I’m okay, Lena,” he says. His voice sounds muffled and strange. When I place a hand on his chest, he gently removes it. He smells faintly of alcohol.
I whirl around to face Alex. “What the hell did you do?”
His eyes flick to mine for just a second. “It was an accident,” he says neutrally. “I swung too high.”
“Bullshit,” I spit out. I turn back to Julian. “Come on,” I say in a low voice. “Let’s go inside. We’ll clean you up.”
He takes his hand away from his nose, then brings his shirt to his face, wiping the remaining blood off his lip. Now his shirt is coated with dark streaks, glistening almost black in the night. “No way,” he says, still without looking at me. “We were just getting started. Weren’t we, Alex?”
“Julian—” I start to plead. Alex cuts me off.
“Lena’s right,” he says, his tone deliberately light. “It’s late. We can barely see anything out here. We can pick up again tomorrow.”
Julian’s voice is also light—but beneath it I can hear a hard edge of anger, a bitterness I don’t recognize. “No time like the present.”
The silence stretches between them, electric and dangerous.
“Please, Julian.” I reach for his wrist and he shakes me off. I turn once again to Alex, willing him to look at me, to break eye contact with Julian. The tension between them is cresting, peaking, like something black and murderous rising underneath the surface of the air. “Alex.”
Alex looks at me finally, and for a second I see a look of surprise cross his face—as though he hadn’t realized I was there, or as though he is only just seeing me. It’s followed quickly by an expression of regret, and just like that the tension ebbs away and I can breathe.
“Not tonight,” Alex says shortly. Then he turns around and goes to push back into the woods.
In an instant, before I can react or cry out, Julian charges and tackles him from behind. He brings Alex tumbling to the concrete, and all of a sudden they are spitting and grunting, rolling over each other, wrestling each other into the ground. Then I do scream—both their names, and stop, and please.
Julian is on top of Alex. He draws his fist up; I hear the heavy thud as he swings it down against Alex’s cheek. Alex spits at him, gets a hand on Julian’s jaw, forcing his head back, pushing Julian up and off. Distantly, I think I hear shouting, but I can’t focus on it, can’t do anything but scream until my throat is sore. There are lights, too, flashing in my peripheral vision, as though I’m the one getting hit, as though my vision is exploding with bursts of color.
Alex manages to gain the advantage and presses Julian back against the ground. He swings twice, hard, and I hear a horrible crack. Blood is flowing freely across Julian’s face now.
“Alex, please!” I’m crying now. I want to pull him off Julian, but fear has frozen me in place, rooted me to the ground.
But either Alex doesn’t hear me or he chooses to ignore me. I’ve never seen him look like this: his face lit up with anger, transfigured in the moonlight to something raw and harsh and terrifying. I can’t even scream anymore, can’t do anything but cry convulsively, feel nausea build in my throat. Everything is surreal, slow-motion.
Then Tack and Raven burst through the trees on a blaze of sudden light—sweating, out of breath, carrying lanterns—and Raven is shouting and gripping me by the shoulders, and Tack pulls Alex off Julian—“What the fuck are you doing?”—and everything begins moving at normal speed again. Julian coughs once and lies back against the ground. I break away from Raven and run toward him, dropping to my knees. I know immediately that his nose is broken. His face is dark with blood, and his eyes are two bare slits as he struggles to sit up.
“Hey.” I put a hand on his chest, swallowing back the spasms in my throat. “Hey, take it easy.”
Julian relaxes again. I feel his heart beating up into my palm.
“What happened?” Tack is shouting.
Alex is standing a little ways away from where Julian is lying. All his anger is gone; instead he looks shocked, his hands limp at his sides. He’s staring at Julian, looking puzzled, as though he doesn’t know how Julian got there.
I stand up and move toward him, feeling the anger crawl into my fingers. I wish I could wrap them around his neck, choke him.
“What the hell is the matter with you?” My voice is low. I have to push the words out past the hard lump of anger in my throat.
“I—I’m sorry,” Alex whispers. He shakes his head. “I didn’t mean . . . I don’t know what happened. I’m sorry, Lena.”
If he keeps looking at me like that—pleading, willing me to understand—I know I’ll start to forgive him.
“Lena.” He takes a step toward me, and I take a step back. For a moment we stand there; I can feel the pressure of his eyes on me, and the pressure, too, of his guilt. But I won’t look at him. I can’t.
“I’m sorry,” he repeats again, too low for Raven and Tack to hear. “I’m sorry for everything.”
Then he turns and pushes back into the woods, and he’s gone.
Hana
Out of the shifting liquid of my sleep, the dream rises and takes shape:
Lena’s face.
Lena’s face, floating out of the shadow. No. Not shadow. She is pushing up from the ash, from a deep drift of cinders and char. Her mouth is open. Her eyes are closed.
She is screaming.
Hana. She is screaming for me. The ash is tumbling like sand into her open mouth, and I know she will soon be buried again, forced into silence, back into the dark. And I know, too, that I have no chance of reaching her—no hope of saving her at all.
Hana, she screams, while I stand motionless.
Forgive me, I say.
Hana, help.
Forgive me, Lena.
“Hana!”
My mother is standing in the doorway. I sit up, bewildered and terrified, Lena’s voice echoing in my mind. I dreamed. I am not supposed to dream.
“What’s wrong?” She’s silhouetted in the doorway; behind her, I can just make out the small night-light outside my bathroom. “Are you sick?”
“I’m fine.” I pass a hand across my forehead. It comes away wet. I’m sweating.
“Are you sure?” She moves as though to come into the room, but at the last second remains in the doorway. “You cried out.”
“I’m sure,” I say. And then, because she seems to be expecting more: “Nerves, I guess, about the wedding.”
“There’s nothing at all to be nervous about,” she says, sounding annoyed. “Everything’s under control. It will all work beautifully.”
I know she is talking about more than the ceremony itself. She means the marriage in general: It has been tabulated and coordinated—made to work beautifully, engineered for efficiency and perfection.
My mother sighs. “Try and get some sleep,” she says. “We’re going to a church at the labs with the Hargroves at nine thirty. The final dress fitting’s at eleven. And there’s the interview for House and Home.”
“Good night, Mom,” I say, and she withdraws without closing the door. Privacy means less to us than it once did: another unanticipated benefit, or side effect, of the cure. Fewer secrets.
At least, fewer secrets in most cases.
I go to the bathroom and splash water on my face. Although the fan is on, I still feel overheated. For a second, when I look into the mirror, I can almost see Lena’s face staring at me from behind my eyes—a memory, a vision of a buried past.
Blink.
She’s gone.
Lena
Alex is not back when Raven, Tack, Julian, and I return to the safe house. Julian has revived and has insisted he is fine to walk, but Tack keeps an arm around his shoulders anyway. Julian is unsteady on his feet and still bleeding freely. As soon as we reach the safe house, Bram and Hunter babble excitedly about what happened until I give them the dirtiest look I can. Coral comes to the doorway, blinking sleepily, one arm around her stomach.
Alex is not back by the time we’ve cleaned Julian off—“Broken,” he says with a wince, in a thick voice, when Raven skates a finger over the bridge of his nose—and he is not back by the time we all, finally, lie down in our cots with our thin blankets, and even Julian manages to sleep, breathing noisily through his mouth.
By the time we wake up, Alex has already come and gone. His belongings are missing, as well as a jug of water and one of the knives.
He has left nothing except for a note, which I find neatly folded under one of my sneakers.
The Story of Solomon is the only way I know how to explain.
And then, in smaller letters:
Forgive me.
Hana
Thirteen days until the wedding. The presents have already begun to trickle in: soup bowls and salad tongs, crystal vases, mountains of white linen, monogrammed towels, and things I’ve had no name for before now: ramekins; zesters; pestles. This is the language of married, adult life, and it is completely foreign to me.
Twelve days.
I sit and write thank-you cards in front of the television. My father leaves at least one TV on practically all the time now. I wonder if this is partly because he wants to prove that we can afford to waste electricity.
For what seems like the tenth time today, Fred steps onto the screen. His face is tinged orange with foundation. The sound is muted, but I know what he is saying. The news has been broadcasting and rebroadcasting the announcement about the Department of Energy and Power, and Fred’s plans for Black Night.
On the night of our wedding, one-third of the families in Portland—anyone suspected of sympathizing or resisting—will be plunged into darkness.
The lights burn bright for those who obey; the others will live in shadow all the days of their lives (The Book of Shhh, Psalm 17). Fred used that quote in his speech.
Thank you for the lace-edged linen napkins. They are exactly what I would have chosen for myself.
Thank you for the crystal sugar bowl. It will look perfect on the dining room table.
The doorbell rings. I hear my mother head to the door, and the murmur of muffled voices. A moment later, she comes into the room, red-faced, agitated.
“Fred,” she says as he steps into the room behind her.
“Thank you, Evelyn,” he says in a clipped voice, and she takes it as a cue to leave us. She closes the door behind her.
“Hi.” I climb to my feet, wishing I were wearing something other than an old T-shirt and ratty shorts. Fred is dressed in dark jeans and a white button-down, sleeves rolled to the elbows. I feel his eyes sweep over me, absorbing my messy hair, the rip in the hem of my shorts, the fact that I am wearing no makeup. “I wasn’t expecting you.”
He doesn’t say anything. There are two Freds looking at me now, screen-Fred and the real thing. Screen-Fred is smiling, leaning forward, easy and relaxed. The real Fred stands stiffly, glaring at me.
“Is—is something wrong?” I say after the silence has extended several seconds. I cross the room to the TV and turn it off, partly so I don’t have to watch Fred watching me, and partly because I can’t stand the double vision.
“I’m okay, Lena,” he says. His voice sounds muffled and strange. When I place a hand on his chest, he gently removes it. He smells faintly of alcohol.
I whirl around to face Alex. “What the hell did you do?”
His eyes flick to mine for just a second. “It was an accident,” he says neutrally. “I swung too high.”
“Bullshit,” I spit out. I turn back to Julian. “Come on,” I say in a low voice. “Let’s go inside. We’ll clean you up.”
He takes his hand away from his nose, then brings his shirt to his face, wiping the remaining blood off his lip. Now his shirt is coated with dark streaks, glistening almost black in the night. “No way,” he says, still without looking at me. “We were just getting started. Weren’t we, Alex?”
“Julian—” I start to plead. Alex cuts me off.
“Lena’s right,” he says, his tone deliberately light. “It’s late. We can barely see anything out here. We can pick up again tomorrow.”
Julian’s voice is also light—but beneath it I can hear a hard edge of anger, a bitterness I don’t recognize. “No time like the present.”
The silence stretches between them, electric and dangerous.
“Please, Julian.” I reach for his wrist and he shakes me off. I turn once again to Alex, willing him to look at me, to break eye contact with Julian. The tension between them is cresting, peaking, like something black and murderous rising underneath the surface of the air. “Alex.”
Alex looks at me finally, and for a second I see a look of surprise cross his face—as though he hadn’t realized I was there, or as though he is only just seeing me. It’s followed quickly by an expression of regret, and just like that the tension ebbs away and I can breathe.
“Not tonight,” Alex says shortly. Then he turns around and goes to push back into the woods.
In an instant, before I can react or cry out, Julian charges and tackles him from behind. He brings Alex tumbling to the concrete, and all of a sudden they are spitting and grunting, rolling over each other, wrestling each other into the ground. Then I do scream—both their names, and stop, and please.
Julian is on top of Alex. He draws his fist up; I hear the heavy thud as he swings it down against Alex’s cheek. Alex spits at him, gets a hand on Julian’s jaw, forcing his head back, pushing Julian up and off. Distantly, I think I hear shouting, but I can’t focus on it, can’t do anything but scream until my throat is sore. There are lights, too, flashing in my peripheral vision, as though I’m the one getting hit, as though my vision is exploding with bursts of color.
Alex manages to gain the advantage and presses Julian back against the ground. He swings twice, hard, and I hear a horrible crack. Blood is flowing freely across Julian’s face now.
“Alex, please!” I’m crying now. I want to pull him off Julian, but fear has frozen me in place, rooted me to the ground.
But either Alex doesn’t hear me or he chooses to ignore me. I’ve never seen him look like this: his face lit up with anger, transfigured in the moonlight to something raw and harsh and terrifying. I can’t even scream anymore, can’t do anything but cry convulsively, feel nausea build in my throat. Everything is surreal, slow-motion.
Then Tack and Raven burst through the trees on a blaze of sudden light—sweating, out of breath, carrying lanterns—and Raven is shouting and gripping me by the shoulders, and Tack pulls Alex off Julian—“What the fuck are you doing?”—and everything begins moving at normal speed again. Julian coughs once and lies back against the ground. I break away from Raven and run toward him, dropping to my knees. I know immediately that his nose is broken. His face is dark with blood, and his eyes are two bare slits as he struggles to sit up.
“Hey.” I put a hand on his chest, swallowing back the spasms in my throat. “Hey, take it easy.”
Julian relaxes again. I feel his heart beating up into my palm.
“What happened?” Tack is shouting.
Alex is standing a little ways away from where Julian is lying. All his anger is gone; instead he looks shocked, his hands limp at his sides. He’s staring at Julian, looking puzzled, as though he doesn’t know how Julian got there.
I stand up and move toward him, feeling the anger crawl into my fingers. I wish I could wrap them around his neck, choke him.
“What the hell is the matter with you?” My voice is low. I have to push the words out past the hard lump of anger in my throat.
“I—I’m sorry,” Alex whispers. He shakes his head. “I didn’t mean . . . I don’t know what happened. I’m sorry, Lena.”
If he keeps looking at me like that—pleading, willing me to understand—I know I’ll start to forgive him.
“Lena.” He takes a step toward me, and I take a step back. For a moment we stand there; I can feel the pressure of his eyes on me, and the pressure, too, of his guilt. But I won’t look at him. I can’t.
“I’m sorry,” he repeats again, too low for Raven and Tack to hear. “I’m sorry for everything.”
Then he turns and pushes back into the woods, and he’s gone.
Hana
Out of the shifting liquid of my sleep, the dream rises and takes shape:
Lena’s face.
Lena’s face, floating out of the shadow. No. Not shadow. She is pushing up from the ash, from a deep drift of cinders and char. Her mouth is open. Her eyes are closed.
She is screaming.
Hana. She is screaming for me. The ash is tumbling like sand into her open mouth, and I know she will soon be buried again, forced into silence, back into the dark. And I know, too, that I have no chance of reaching her—no hope of saving her at all.
Hana, she screams, while I stand motionless.
Forgive me, I say.
Hana, help.
Forgive me, Lena.
“Hana!”
My mother is standing in the doorway. I sit up, bewildered and terrified, Lena’s voice echoing in my mind. I dreamed. I am not supposed to dream.
“What’s wrong?” She’s silhouetted in the doorway; behind her, I can just make out the small night-light outside my bathroom. “Are you sick?”
“I’m fine.” I pass a hand across my forehead. It comes away wet. I’m sweating.
“Are you sure?” She moves as though to come into the room, but at the last second remains in the doorway. “You cried out.”
“I’m sure,” I say. And then, because she seems to be expecting more: “Nerves, I guess, about the wedding.”
“There’s nothing at all to be nervous about,” she says, sounding annoyed. “Everything’s under control. It will all work beautifully.”
I know she is talking about more than the ceremony itself. She means the marriage in general: It has been tabulated and coordinated—made to work beautifully, engineered for efficiency and perfection.
My mother sighs. “Try and get some sleep,” she says. “We’re going to a church at the labs with the Hargroves at nine thirty. The final dress fitting’s at eleven. And there’s the interview for House and Home.”
“Good night, Mom,” I say, and she withdraws without closing the door. Privacy means less to us than it once did: another unanticipated benefit, or side effect, of the cure. Fewer secrets.
At least, fewer secrets in most cases.
I go to the bathroom and splash water on my face. Although the fan is on, I still feel overheated. For a second, when I look into the mirror, I can almost see Lena’s face staring at me from behind my eyes—a memory, a vision of a buried past.
Blink.
She’s gone.
Lena
Alex is not back when Raven, Tack, Julian, and I return to the safe house. Julian has revived and has insisted he is fine to walk, but Tack keeps an arm around his shoulders anyway. Julian is unsteady on his feet and still bleeding freely. As soon as we reach the safe house, Bram and Hunter babble excitedly about what happened until I give them the dirtiest look I can. Coral comes to the doorway, blinking sleepily, one arm around her stomach.
Alex is not back by the time we’ve cleaned Julian off—“Broken,” he says with a wince, in a thick voice, when Raven skates a finger over the bridge of his nose—and he is not back by the time we all, finally, lie down in our cots with our thin blankets, and even Julian manages to sleep, breathing noisily through his mouth.
By the time we wake up, Alex has already come and gone. His belongings are missing, as well as a jug of water and one of the knives.
He has left nothing except for a note, which I find neatly folded under one of my sneakers.
The Story of Solomon is the only way I know how to explain.
And then, in smaller letters:
Forgive me.
Hana
Thirteen days until the wedding. The presents have already begun to trickle in: soup bowls and salad tongs, crystal vases, mountains of white linen, monogrammed towels, and things I’ve had no name for before now: ramekins; zesters; pestles. This is the language of married, adult life, and it is completely foreign to me.
Twelve days.
I sit and write thank-you cards in front of the television. My father leaves at least one TV on practically all the time now. I wonder if this is partly because he wants to prove that we can afford to waste electricity.
For what seems like the tenth time today, Fred steps onto the screen. His face is tinged orange with foundation. The sound is muted, but I know what he is saying. The news has been broadcasting and rebroadcasting the announcement about the Department of Energy and Power, and Fred’s plans for Black Night.
On the night of our wedding, one-third of the families in Portland—anyone suspected of sympathizing or resisting—will be plunged into darkness.
The lights burn bright for those who obey; the others will live in shadow all the days of their lives (The Book of Shhh, Psalm 17). Fred used that quote in his speech.
Thank you for the lace-edged linen napkins. They are exactly what I would have chosen for myself.
Thank you for the crystal sugar bowl. It will look perfect on the dining room table.
The doorbell rings. I hear my mother head to the door, and the murmur of muffled voices. A moment later, she comes into the room, red-faced, agitated.
“Fred,” she says as he steps into the room behind her.
“Thank you, Evelyn,” he says in a clipped voice, and she takes it as a cue to leave us. She closes the door behind her.
“Hi.” I climb to my feet, wishing I were wearing something other than an old T-shirt and ratty shorts. Fred is dressed in dark jeans and a white button-down, sleeves rolled to the elbows. I feel his eyes sweep over me, absorbing my messy hair, the rip in the hem of my shorts, the fact that I am wearing no makeup. “I wasn’t expecting you.”
He doesn’t say anything. There are two Freds looking at me now, screen-Fred and the real thing. Screen-Fred is smiling, leaning forward, easy and relaxed. The real Fred stands stiffly, glaring at me.
“Is—is something wrong?” I say after the silence has extended several seconds. I cross the room to the TV and turn it off, partly so I don’t have to watch Fred watching me, and partly because I can’t stand the double vision.
