Bliss

25 - Sky

On the drive back home, in the ambulance which they used to drop me off, I thought profoundly of Dr. Rich's son. A boy that wants to run away, no matter what it takes. And he got me thinking, now, on the floor with my wheelchair at my feet, laying on my back and staring up at the ceiling blankly. I'm wondering if other people feel the same way I do.

I want to run away as well.

I don't want to stay in Oceania forever; I've accepted it, I think I understand it, but I will not die in it, and who knows how much time I have before that chooses to happen. Really, I have no reason to. I can marry Miles--or whoever--and I will be assigned a home, promised safety, and whether I am happy or not, I will receive a child for which I will care for until they turn eighteen years old. The thing is, though, it probably won't go that way at all. I don't have much time for anything.

It's early morning, a week from the day that I came home. Ingrid eats her breakfast in the kitchen while I sit outside in my wheelchair. I skim the grass with my toes and dig them into the dirt and wait to feel something, but I don't. The grass in itself doesn't feel right. It's too perfect, too fake, cut too short and too plain to hold any source of life except itself. Nothing except the man-altered trees can grow in its soil. Everything in it, growing from it, is literally dead, and the food that the trees create we cannot eat because of the poisons stuffed in their veins, and it suddenly starts to sicken me.

The sky is pink as dawn floods and the clouds finally spread, the blanket torn apart by streams of light and the visible moon and the stars that aren't ready to hide yet, and I take a deep breath but nothing fills my lungs except artificial air, artificial molecules and atoms and chemical reactions and fake life.

I remember the doctor patting his hand over his heart, and I wondered if he knew what his son felt like, if it hurt him, if he accepted it. What battle was he fighting on the inside? Letting his son go? But it wasn't even his son. He wasn't his birth father. Why would he be so concerned?

Even the families are fake--fake, fake, fake, fake, fake. Fake this, fake that, and it's not like I'm just noticing it--it's been there my whole life. Maybe it's the closeness of my death that has suddenly made me question everything, or maybe it was Harry.

----

Goodbye was all Ingrid said before she left for work. Maya left the house to meet up with some of her friends at the center. She, like Ingrid, is oddly quiet as well, but I think it might be for different reasons. Lily is at home with me, watching television and pretending to listen to Siena's instructions on how to knit. Siena gets bored of Lily quickly and ends up playing in the front yard instead, doing cartwheels and talking with the neighbors that haven't left for work and talking to herself as she roamed around, humming some of the classical pieces we have all gotten so used to hearing they are now stuck in our heads.

I am in the kitchen, drawing in my sketchpad--not even drawing, really, just shading in some parts of Harry's face, which I already feel weird about drawing earlier--when the door opens. I expect Maya, but instead of her, it's a man in a black suit and a clipboard, a nonexistent smile, a hard voice. "Roll call."

"The soldiers aren't here," I say.

"I'm not asking for the soldiers," he says.

I frown, and Lily, who reaches over to turn the television off with the remote, does too. She stands and walks over to my side, holding the wheelchair firmly. She bends over and whispers, "Who is this man?"

I shrug, even though I do remember him from somewhere--from the day when the soldiers were stationed.

"I need all permanent residents of this household to step outside," the man orders.