I didn’t know, at first, that the cure hadn’t worked.
Installed in my old bedroom at my parents’ house, forbidden from seeing my friends, from leaving the house without permission and without Carol as an escort, I was as good as dead. Shuffling from the bed to the shower, watching the same news on TV, listening to the same music piping from the radio. This was what being cured was like: like being in a fishbowl, circling always inside the same glass.
I did what I was told, helped my parents with the chores, reapplied to college, since my admission had been rescinded once the facts of my time in Boston became public. I wrote letters of apology: to countless committees, to public officials, to my neighbors, to faceless bureaucrats with long, meaningless titles.
Slowly I earned back certain freedoms. I could go to the store by myself. I could go to the beach, too. I was able to see old friends, although most of them were forbidden from seeing me. And all that time, my heart was like a dull hammer in my chest.
It was a full six months before the Portland Evaluation Committee, as it was called then, decided I was ready to be paired. The Marriage Stability Act had just been passed, and the system was still in its infancy. I remember that my mother and I had to go down to CORE, the Center for Organization, Research, and Education, to receive my results, and for the first time since I’d returned to Portland, I was filled with something like excitement. Except it was the bad kind, the kind that turns your stomach and makes your own spit taste a little like throw-up.
Dread.
I don’t remember receiving the slender folder containing my results, but I know we were outside, in the car, before I could bring myself to open it. Carol was with us, in the backseat. “Who’d you get?” she kept saying. But I couldn’t read the names, couldn’t make the words stand still on the page. The letters kept floating, drifting off the margins, and every picture looked like a collection of abstract shapes. For a minute, I thought I was losing my mind.
Until I reached my eighth recommended pair: Conrad Haloway. Then I knew I was losing my mind.
The picture was the same one he had used for his government ID—which I still kept, tucked at the bottom of my underwear drawer, concealed within a sock. Next to the picture were the basic facts of his life: where he was born, what school he’d attended, his various scores, his work history, details about his family, and a psychological and social stability rank.
I felt a sudden surge, like my insides had been powered off, dusty and useless, for the past six months. Now they came online all at once: my heart beating up into my mouth, chest tight, lungs squeezing, squeezing.
“This one,” I said, trying to keep my voice steady. I pointed, placed a finger directly on his forehead between his eyes. The picture was black-and-white, but I remembered them perfectly: light brown, like hazelnut skins.
My mother leaned over me to look. “He’s a bit old, isn’t he?”
“He’s only just moved to Portland,” I said. “He’s been in service to the engineering corps. Working on the walls. See? It says so.”
My mother smiled tightly. “Well, it’s your choice, of course.” She reached over and patted me awkwardly on the knee. Even before her cure, she had never been affectionate; no one had ever touched in my family, unless it was my father taking a swing at my mom when he was drunk. “I’m proud of you.”
Carol leaned forward into the front seat. “He doesn’t look like an engineer,” was all she said.
I turned my face to the window. On the drive home, I repeated his name to myself like a private rhythm: Conrad, Conrad, Conrad. My secret music. My husband. I felt something loosen inside my chest. His name warmed me. It spread through my mind, through my whole body, until I could feel the syllables in my fingertips, and all the way down to my toes. Conrad.
That’s when I knew, without a doubt, that the cure hadn’t worked at all.
now
The light goes out, and the nighttime noises begin on the ward: the murmurs and moans and screams.
I remember other noises—the sounds of outside: frogs singing, throaty and mournful; crickets humming an accompaniment. Lena as a young girl, her palms cupped carefully to contain a firefly, shrieking with laughter.
Will I recognize the world outside? Would I recognize Lena, if I saw her?
Thomas said he would give me the signal. But at least an hour passes with nothing—no sign, no further word. My mouth is dry as dust.
I am not ready. Not yet. Not tonight. My heartbeat is wild and erratic. I’m sweating already and shaking, too.
I can barely stand.
How will I run?
A jolt goes through me as the alarm system kicks on without warning: a shrill, continuous howl from downstairs, muffled through layers of stone and cement. Doors slam; voices cry out. Thomas must have tripped one of the alarms in a lower ward. The guards will go rushing for it, suspecting an attempted breakout or maybe a homicide.