I reach into the pillowcase. At the very bottom is a small piece of paper, also carefully folded, containing Thomas’s sole instructions: Not yet.
My disappointment is physical: a bitter rush of taste, a liquid feeling in my stomach. Another month to wait. I know I should be relieved—the rope I’ve been making is still too short, and will leave me with a ten-foot drop to the Presumpscot River. More chances to slip, twist or break something, cry out.
And I absolutely cannot cry out.
To keep from thinking too much about the wait ahead of me, another thirty days in this airless, dark place—another thirty days closer to death—I get down on my hands and knees and maneuver under the cot, feeling for the hole in the mattress, as big as a fist. Over the course of a year, I’ve been pulling out handfuls of foam and filler, all of it disposed in the metal chamber pot where I piss and shit and, when the flu makes the rounds, get sick. I wrap my hand around a coil of cotton and pull; inch by inch, all those stolen linens are revealed, torn and braided, made strong to hold my weight. By now, the rope is nearly forty feet long.
I spend the rest of the evening making careful tears, using the edge of the dagger pin, now blunted nearly useless, to poke and tear holes in the fabric. No point in moving quickly.
There is nowhere to go, nothing else to do.
By the time I receive my daily dinner ration, I’ve finished working. I stuff the rope back in its hiding place, pushing, working it through the opening: a reverse birth. When I’m finished, I eat the food without tasting it, which is probably a blessing. Then I lie on my cot until the lights go off abruptly. The whimpering begins, the muttering and the occasional scream of someone gripped in a nightmare or, perhaps, waking from a pleasant dream only to discover he is still here. Strangely, I’ve learned to find the nighttime sounds almost comforting.
Eventually, my mind brings me memories of Lena, and then visions of the sea; at last, I sleep.
then
There was no resistance back then; there was no consciousness, yet, that we needed to resist. There were promises of peace and happiness, a relief from instability and confusion. A path and a place for all. A way to know, always, that your road was the right one. People were flocking to get cured the way they had once flocked to churches. The streets were papered with signs pointing the way to a better future. A central bank; jobs and marriages designed to fit like gloves.
And a life designed to slowly strangle.
But there was an underground: Brain Shops, someone who knew someone who could get you a fake ID for the right price; another person who could hook up an intercity bus ticket; someone else who rented basement space to anyone who wanted to disappear.
In Boston I stayed in the basement apartment of an older couple named Wallace. They weren’t cured; they missed the age cutoff even when the procedure became mandatory, and were allowed to die in peace, in love. Or would have been allowed to—I heard several years later that they had been busted for harboring runaways, people who were dodging the cure, and spent the last few years of their lives in jail.
A path and a place for everyone, and for the people who disagree, a hole.
I should never have stolen his wallet. But that’s the problem with love—it acts on you, works through you, resists your attempts to control. That’s what made it so frightening to the lawmakers: Love obeys no laws other than its own.
That’s what has always made it frightening.
The basement was accessible only through a narrow alleyway that ran between the Wallaces’ house and their neighbor’s; the door was concealed behind a pile of junk that had to be carefully navigated each time we entered or left. Down a steep flight of stairs was a large, unfinished room: mattresses on the floor, a wild jumble of clothing, and a small toilet and sink, made semiprivate behind a folding screen. The ceiling was crisscrossed with metal pipes and plastic tubes and wiring, so it looked like someone’s intestines tacked above us. It was ugly, freezing, and smelled like dirty feet, and I loved it. In my short time there, I made two good friends: Misha, who hooked me up with Rawls and was trying to get me fake papers, too; and Steff, who taught me how to pick pockets and showed me all the best places to do it.