“What are some of your favorite books?”
“Love, War, and Interference, by Christopher Malley,” I answer automatically. “Border, by Philippa Harolde.” It’s no use trying to keep the images away: They are rising now, a flood. That one word keeps scripting itself on my brain, as though it is being seared there. Pain. They wanted to make my mother submit to a fourth procedure. They were coming for her on the night she died, coming to bring her to the labs. But instead she had fled into the dark, winged her way into the air. Instead she had woken me with those words—I love you. Remember. They cannot take it.—which the wind seemed to carry back to me long after she had vanished, repeated on the dry trees, on the leaves coughing and whispering in the cold gray dawn. “And Romeo and Juliet, by William Shakespeare.”
The evaluators nod, make notes. Romeo and Juliet is required reading in every freshman-year health class.
“And why is that?” Evaluator Three asks.
It’s frightening: That’s what I’m supposed to say. It’s a cautionary tale, a warning about the dangers of the old world, before the cure. But my throat seems to have grown swollen and tender. There is no room to squeeze the words out; they are stuck there like the burrs that cling to our clothing when we jog through the farms. And in that moment it’s like I can hear the low growl of the ocean, can hear its distant, insistent murmur, can imagine its weight closing around my mother, water as heavy as stone. And what comes out is: “It’s beautiful.”
Instantly all four faces jerk up to look at me, like puppets connected to the same string.
“Beautiful?” Evaluator One wrinkles her nose. There’s a zinging, frigid tension in the air, and I realize I’ve made a big, big mistake.
The evaluator with the glasses leans forward. “That’s an interesting word to use. Very interesting.” This time when he shows his teeth they remind me of the curved white canines of a dog. “Perhaps you find suffering beautiful? Perhaps you enjoy violence?”
“No. No, that’s not it.” I’m trying to think straight, but my head is full of the ocean’s wordless roaring. It is growing louder and louder by the second. And now, faintly, it’s as though I can hear screaming as well—like my mother’s scream is reaching me from across the span of a decade. “I just mean . . . there’s something so sad about it. . . .” I’m struggling, floundering, feeling like I’m drowning now, in the white light and the roaring. Sacrifice. I want to say something about sacrifice, but the word doesn’t come.
“Let’s move on.” Evaluator One, who sounded so sweet when she offered me the water, has lost all pretense of friendliness. She is all business now. “Tell us something simple. Like your favorite color, for example.”
Part of my brain—the rational, educated part, the logical me part—screams, Blue! Say blue! But this other, older thing inside of me is riding across the waves of sound, surging up with the rising noise. “Gray,” I blurt out.
“Gray?” Evaluator Four splutters back.
My heart is spiraling down to my stomach. I know I’ve done it, I’m tanking, can practically see my numbers flipping backward. But it’s too late. I’m finished—it’s the roaring in my ears, growing louder and louder, a stampede that makes thinking impossible. I quickly stammer out an explanation. “Not gray, exactly. Right before the sun rises there’s a moment when the whole sky goes this pale nothing color—not really gray but sort of, or sort of white, and I’ve always really liked it because it reminds me of waiting for something good to happen.”
But they’ve stopped listening. All of them are staring beyond me, heads cocked, expressions confused, as though trying to make out familiar words in a foreign language. And then suddenly the roaring and the screaming surge and I realize I haven’t been imagining them all this time. People really are screaming, and there’s a tumbling, rolling, drumming sound, like a thousand feet moving together. There’s a third sound too, running under both of those: a wordless bellowing that doesn’t sound human.
In my confusion everything seems disconnected, the way it does in dreams. Evaluator One half rises from her chair, saying, “What the hell . . . ?”
At the same time, Glasses says, “Sit down, Helen. I’ll go see what’s wrong.”
But at that second the blue door bursts open and a streaming blur of cows—actual, real, live, sweating, mooing cows—come thundering into the lab.
Definitely a stampede, I think, and for one weird, detached second feel proud of myself for correctly identifying the noise.