We decide to leave Portland in a week, exactly nine days before my scheduled procedure. I’m nervous about delaying our departure so long—I’m halfway tempted to make a straight run for the border fence and try to barge my way through in broad daylight—but as usual, Alex calms me down and explains the importance of waiting.
In the past few years he has made the crossing only a handful of times. It’s too dangerous to go back and forth more often than that. But in the next week, Alex will cross twice before we make our final escape—an almost suicidal risk, but he convinces me it’s necessary. Once he leaves with me and starts missing work and class, he’ll be invalidated too—even though, technically, his identity was never really valid in the first place, since it was created by the resistance.
And once we’re both invalidated, we’ll be erased from the system. Gone. Blip! It will be as though we’ve never existed. At least we can count on the fact that we won’t be pursued into the Wilds. There won’t be any raiding parties. No one will come looking for us. If they wanted to hunt us down, they’d have to admit that we’d made it out of Portland, that it was possible, that the Invalids exist.
We’ll be nothing more than ghosts, traces, memories—and soon, as the cureds keep their eyes firmly focused on the future, and the long procession of days to march through—we won’t even be that.
Since Alex won’t be able to cross into Portland any longer, we need to bring over as much food as we can, plus clothes for the winter and anything else we can’t do without. Invalids in the settlements are pretty good about sharing supplies. Still, autumn and winter in the Wilds are always hard, and after years of living in Portland, Alex isn’t exactly a master hunter-gatherer.
We agree to meet at the house at midnight to continue planning. I’ll bring him the first collection of belongings I want to take with me: my photo album, a sheath of notes Hana and I passed back and forth sophomore year in math class, and whatever food I can smuggle from the storeroom at the Stop-N-Save.
It’s almost three o’clock by the time Alex and I split up and I head home. The clouds have mostly broken up, and between them the sky is interwoven, a pale blue, like faded and tattered silk. The air is warm but the wind is edged with an autumn smell of cold and smoke. Soon all the lush greens of the landscape will burn away into fierce reds and oranges; and then those, too, will burn away, into the stark black brittleness of winter. And I’ll be gone—out there somewhere among the skinny, shivering trees, encased in snow. But Alex will be with me, and we’ll be safe. We’ll walk together holding hands, and kiss in broad daylight, and love each other as much as we want to, and no one will ever try to keep us apart.
Despite everything that happened today, I feel calmer than I’ve ever been, as though the words Alex and I said to each other today have wrapped me up in a protective haze.
I haven’t been running regularly for over a month. It has been too hot, and until recently Carol has forbidden it. But as soon as I get home I call Hana and ask her to meet me at the tracks, our regular starting point, and she only laughs.
“I was about to call and ask you the same thing,” she says.
“Great minds,” I say, her laughter getting lost for a second in the fuzz that blasts through the receiver, as a censor somewhere deep in Portland tunes into our conversation momentarily. The old revolving eye, ever-turning, ever-vigilant. Anger worms through me for a second, but it disappears quickly. Soon I’ll be off the map completely and forever.
I was hoping to get out of the house without seeing Carol, but she intersects me on my way out the door. As always, she’s been in the kitchen, endlessly repeating her cycle of cooking and cleaning.
“Where have you been all day?” she asks.
“With Hana,” I answer automatically.
“And you’re going out again?”
“Just for a run.” Earlier I thought if I ever saw her again I would tear at her face, or kill her. But now, looking at her, I feel completely numb, like she’s a painted billboard or a stranger passing on a bus.
“Dinner’s at seven thirty,” she says. “I’d like you to be home to set the table.”
“I’ll be home,” I say. It occurs to me that this numbness, this feeling of separation, must be what she and every cured experiences all the time: as though there is a thick, muffling pane of glass between you and everybody else. Hardly anything penetrates. Hardly anything matters. They say the cure is about happiness, but I understand now that it isn’t, and it never was. It’s about fear: fear of pain, fear of hurt, fear, fear, fear—a blind animal existence, bumping between walls, shuffling between ever-narrowing hallways, terrified and dull and stupid.