Delirium

Chapter Two

The smell of oranges has always reminded me of funerals. On the morning of my evaluation it is the smell that wakes me up. I look at the clock on the bedside table. It’s six o’clock.

The light is gray, the sunlight just strengthening along the walls of the bedroom I share with both of my cousin Marcia’s children. Grace, the younger one, is crouched on her twin bed, already dressed, watching me. She has a whole orange in one hand. She is trying to gnaw on it, like an apple, with her little-kid teeth. My stomach twists, and I have to close my eyes again to keep from remembering the hot, scratchy dress I was forced to wear when my mother died; to keep from remembering the murmur of voices, a large, rough hand passing me orange after orange to suck on, so I would stay quiet. At the funeral I ate four oranges, section by section, and when I was left with only a pile of peelings heaped on my lap I began to suck on those, the bitter taste of the pith helping to keep the tears away.

I open my eyes and Grace leans forward, the orange cupped in her outstretched palm.

“No, Gracie.” I push off my covers and stand up. My stomach is clenching and unclenching like a fist. “And you’re not supposed to eat the peel, you know.”

She continues blinking up at me with her big gray eyes, not saying anything. I sigh and sit down next to her. “Here,” I say, and show her how to peel the orange using her nail, unwinding bright orange curls and dropping them in her lap, the whole time trying to hold my breath against the smell. She watches me in silence. When I’m finished she holds the orange, now unpeeled, in both hands, as though it’s a glass ball and she’s worried about breaking it.

I nudge her. “Go ahead. Eat now.” She just stares at it and I sigh and begin separating the sections for her, one by one. As I do I whisper, as gently as possible, “You know, the others would be nicer to you if you would speak once in a while.”

She doesn’t respond. Not that I really expect her to. My aunt Carol hasn’t heard her say a word in the whole six years and three months of Grace’s life—not a single syllable. Carol thinks there’s something wrong with her brain, but so far the doctors haven’t found it. “She’s as dumb as a rock,” Carol said matter-of-factly just the other day, watching Grace turn a bright-colored block over and over in her hands, as though it was beautiful and miraculous, as though she expected it to turn suddenly into something else.

I stand up and go toward the window, moving away from Grace and her big, staring eyes and thin, quick fingers. I feel sorry for her.

Marcia, Grace’s mother, is dead now. She always said she never wanted children in the first place. That’s one of the downsides of the procedure; in the absence of deliria nervosa, some people find parenting distasteful. Thankfully, cases of full-blown detachment—where a mother or father is unable to bond normally, dutifully, and responsibly with his or her children, and winds up drowning them or sitting on their windpipes or beating them to death when they cry—are few.

But two was the number of children the evaluators decided on for Marcia. At the time it seemed like a good choice. Her family had earned high stabilization marks in the annual review. Her husband, a scientist, was well respected. They lived in an enormous house on Winter Street. Marcia cooked every meal from scratch, and taught piano lessons in her spare time, to keep busy.

But, of course, when Marcia’s husband was suspected of being a sympathizer, everything changed. Marcia and her children, Jenny and Grace, had to move back with Marcia’s mother, my aunt Carol, and people whispered and pointed at them everywhere they went. Grace wouldn’t remember that, of course; I’d be surprised if she has any memories of her parents at all.

Marcia’s husband disappeared before his trial could begin. It’s probably a good thing he did. The trials are mostly for show. Sympathizers are almost always executed. If not, they’re locked away in the Crypts to serve three life sentences, back-to-back. Marcia knew that, of course. Aunt Carol thinks that’s the reason her heart gave out only a few months after her husband’s disappearance, when she was indicted in his place. A day after she got served the papers she was walking down the street and—bam! Heart attack.

Hearts are fragile things. That’s why you have to be so careful.

It will be hot today, I can tell. It’s already hot in the bedroom, and when I crack the window to sweep out the smell of orange, the air outside feels as thick and heavy as a tongue. I suck in deeply, inhaling the clean smell of seaweed and damp wood, listening to the distant cries of the seagulls as they circle endlessly, somewhere beyond the low, gray, sloping buildings, over the bay. Outside, a car engine guns to life. The sound startles me, and I jump.

“Nervous about your evaluation?”

I turn around. My aunt Carol is standing in the doorway, her hands folded.

“No,” I say, though this is a lie.

She smiles, just barely, a brief, flitting thing. “Don’t worry. You’ll be fine. Take your shower and then I’ll help you with your hair. We can review your answers on the way.”

“Okay.” My aunt continues to stare at me. I squirm, digging my nails into the windowsill behind me. I’ve always hated being looked at. Of course, I’ll have to get used to it. During the exam there will be four evaluators staring at me for close to two hours. I’ll be wearing a flimsy plastic gown, semitranslucent, like the kind you get in hospitals, so that they can see my body.

“A seven or an eight, I would say,” my aunt says, puckering her lips. It’s a decent score and I’d be happy with it. “Though you won’t get more than a six if you don’t get cleaned up.”

Senior year is almost over, and the evaluation is the final test I will take. For the past four months I’ve had all my various board exams—math, science, oral and written proficiency, sociology and psychology and photography (a specialty elective)—and I should be getting my scores sometime in the next few weeks. I’m pretty sure I did well enough to get assigned to a college. I’ve always been a decent student. The academic assessors will analyze my strengths and weaknesses, and then assign me to a school and a major.

The evaluation is the last step, so I can get paired. In the coming months the evaluators will send me a list of four or five approved matches. One of them will become my husband after I graduate college (assuming I pass all my boards. Girls who don’t pass get paired and married right out of high school). The evaluators will do their best to match me with people who received a similar score in the evaluations. As much as possible they try to avoid any huge disparities in intelligence, temperament, social background, and age. Of course you do hear occasional horror stories: cases where a poor eighteen-year-old girl is given to a wealthy eighty-year-old man.

The stairs let out their awful moaning, and Grace’s sister, Jenny, appears. She is nine and tall for her age, but very thin: all angles and elbows, her chest caving in like a warped sheet pan. It’s terrible to say, but I don’t like her very much. She has the same pinched look as her mother did.

She joins my aunt in the doorway and stares at me. I am only five-two and Jenny is, amazingly, just a few inches shorter than I am now. It’s silly to feel self-conscious in front of my aunt and cousins, but a hot, crawling itch begins to work its way up my arms. I know they’re all worried about my performance at the evaluation. It’s critical that I get paired with someone good. Jenny and Grace are years away from their procedures. If I marry well, in a few years it will mean extra money for the family. It might also make the whispers go away, singsong snatches that four years after the scandal still seem to follow us wherever we go, like the sound of rustling leaves carried on the wind: Sympathizer. Sympathizer. Sympathizer.

It’s only slightly better than the other word that followed me for years after my mom’s death, a snakelike hiss, undulating, leaving its trail of poison: Suicide. A sideways word, a word that people whisper and mutter and cough: a word that must be squeezed out behind cupped palms or murmured behind closed doors. It was only in my dreams that I heard the word shouted, screamed.

I take a deep breath, then duck down to pull the plastic bin from under my bed so that my aunt won’t see I’m shaking.

“Is Lena getting married today?” Jenny asks my aunt. Her voice has always reminded me of bees droning flatly in the heat.

“Don’t be stupid,” my aunt says, but without irritation. “You know she can’t marry until she’s cured.”

I take my towel from the bin and straighten up. That word—marry—makes my mouth go dry. Everyone marries as soon as they are done with their education. It’s the way things are. “Marriage is Order and Stability, the mark of a Healthy society.” (See The Book of Shhh, “Fundamentals of Society,” p. 114). But the thought of it still makes my heart flutter frantically, like an insect behind glass. I’ve never touched a boy, of course—physical contact between uncureds of opposite sex is forbidden. Honestly, I’ve never even talked to a boy for longer than five minutes, unless you count my cousins and uncle and Andrew Marcus, who helps my uncle at the Stop-N-Save and is always picking his nose and wiping his snot on the underside of the canned vegetables.

And if I don’t pass my boards—please God, please God, let me pass them—I’ll have my wedding as soon as I’m cured, in less than three months. Which means I’ll have my wedding night.

The smell of oranges is still strong, and my stomach does another swoop. I bury my face in my towel and inhale, willing myself not to be sick.

From downstairs there is the clatter of dishes. My aunt sighs and checks her watch.

“We have to leave in less than an hour,” she says. “You’d better get moving.”