Freedom
is a word said through cupped hands and whispered voices.
The
society has already decided my destiny. Our lives are written in the sky. No,
our lives are stored in a small datapod, like recorded files- can be edited at
times- but if not needed, obliterated forever. When the officials say that we
are supposed to die right now, it will happen. When they don’t want us to
remember, they erase our memories. And when they want us to live, we live but
with their full control. I am one of the people who are desperately holding on
to the frail line. I’ve seen worse in this world. My heart is tired from
running away. But what’s the sense of running if it won’t take us to the right
path?
I can’t think.
My chest is pounding from running thousand miles. I am not certain if I am at
the right place. There’s no right place in the world anyway. But I have to get
off to the streets. Or I need a shadowy place to hide. I am leaving smears of
blood in the snowy road. My body can’t take anymore torture. But I must run.
That’s all I have to do. I pass towering trees in the forest, smelling fresh
air as my blood stains the tranquility of nature. I hear sticks and twigs
crunch and crack under my feet. I veer to another direction every time I hear
something moves. I hit my head on a sinewy branch of a tree and I drop to the
ground along comes the gunshot, not so far away in this place.
Hovercrafts
flood the vast sky above, emitting skimming lights kissing the grounds. I duck
myself under the thick snow and put dead leaves all over me. I taste dust and
snow and mud. My heart is hammering and my head is cleaving in half. When the
crafts change direction, failing of finding me, I don’t waste a minute. I run
again. Still, I keep to the shadows.
How long should I run? At least until
someone finds me in the woods.
Or
until the marshals get here.
I
choke back the thought, swallowing every word inside me. My world is spinning;
I can’t be unconscious at this moment. I get tired of running. I walk and I
feel my muscles pulling and stretching painfully. I lean against one of the
trees, feeling so sick and exhausted. Breathing heavily, I extend my legs to
the grassless floor and feel how the wintry air goes down my stomach. I peel
back my sleeve, hissing as the cloth pulls away from dried blood. The wound is
worse than what I imagined. I can still feel the sharp edge of the blade that I
used to take out the tracker in my arm. They have this kind of tracker that can
penetrate the body through injecting it straight to our veins. But it was a
failure to me. They decided to implant a small tracker in my arm.
My
flesh is screaming of pain and blood ceaselessly flowing out of me. Food. I
need food, and sleep, and a plan. I also need medical attention but I don’t
even have access to that from now on. Probably, clothes…
I
tear my other sleeve and press it gently on my arm. I grit my teeth. My face
crumples as the pain from the fleshy cut transcends to my brain. I catch my
breath. My vision becomes foggy. I hobble my way through the center of the
forest, with no exact place in my mind. The detention center is million miles
away from civilization. I keep walking and running and running and walking. But
it seems that I m not advancing. The snow, the mountains, the trees and the
stagnant air are all the same, not changing even if I already moved to the
higher planes.
Visions
and pictures of what had brought me in this situation flash through my eyes. I
couldn’t slow the images spinning in my mind enough to make sense of them. I
escaped from prison. I ran away from the marshals. I was loitering around the
detention center, trying to make use of myself for the officials. I was sorting
out the unnaturally blooming flowers in the garden, pretending to be innocent
and helpless. Then, the marshal in blue accidentally dropped his card while
making his round. I didn’t waste such opportunity. I sneaked out and got out of
the gate before they could find out about me. Then, they came running for me.
And
I run. I run as if I already crossed half the city. I can’t remember how many
days I’ve been running from them. I’ve been running even before they dragged me
in the center. I am a lost little girl who ran away from home. No, I didn’t run
away. I needed to run away. I have no
place to live in. Home is a word that circumstances took away in my life a
hundred times. I wandered around without an exact place in my mind. I am an
orphan for days that I cannot count. I traveled from place to place without
certainty that somebody would find me.
After
Sofia’s death,
my mother, I entirely detached myself from the planet, thinking that there is
no future for me. Liberation and death are two likely things to me. But I know
I was wrong.
When
she died, the marshals came crashing our door, hauling mom’s body, like what
they always do when someone dies. I was
crying over her death but they took her away from me the moment her soul
departed. It was time to burn her. I didn’t want to see her body turns to ash
like anybody else who died. But it never
ended there. I was locked away in the detention center along with boys and
girls of my age to help the officials. They said detention center, a center for
troubled youth, homeless neglected children, a home for psychologically
disturbed persons. I am not crazy. But I am homeless. They told me that I
should be serving the government instead of brooding over her death. Service is
the work of every citizen of Dicentra but not mine. I knew what service means
there. And it’s a filthy word said under whispered voices.
The
marshals are hunting me. There’s no guarantee if they would ever give up. But
the only way to survive is to run away. I am not sure until when. I will run
whenever I have to. I am running away all of my life and the chains are still
clung to me.
My
head starts to turn and my bloody arm is taking all my strength away. My
bruised knees are trembling, as if I’m about to fall down anytime. I push
myself a little more, just to make sure that nobody can catch the gap that I
made. I see a break in the clearing. I try to look what waits below, dark and
frosted river. I look sideways to find a cavern where I can hide. There is
none, instead just an old oak tree. I duck under the sad living tree, which
seemed dying at the same moment and curl myself into a ball. The realization of
something worse to happen slaps me on both cheeks. The marshals might not find
me here. They could even forget about a fugitive after some time. But the
chilling frost and the wild animals can sentence me to death.
I
strip off fabric from the hem of my shirt and twist it around my arm like a
bandage. I grit my teeth. I bite my inner cheek until it bleeds. I am trained
to survive. I can adapt to the cold. But I am getting weaker and weaker as days
go by. I am ready to face my grim. No one’s looking for me anyway, not my dead
mother or my twin brother, just the pack of Courthouse pets. We all come to a
point in life that we think we want to disappear. But all we really need is to
be found.
As
I am about to close my eyes, I hear footsteps coming. My system begins to panic and I fight back the
nausea. All the way here, I’ve heard pounding footsteps following me. I didn’t
dare to turn and look back. Maybe, some of them were secretly tracking me to
find the right time and attack me. Perhaps, they could be the marshals who hit
my head on the floor and whipped me, leaving long red marks all over my body.
I
curl myself into smaller ball and wait for them to come. I see frames of two
people in the sinister, one smaller than the other. My heart wants to explode
from panic and pressure and pain. I swallow hard, and my eyes shut every time I
try to clear my vision. My lips are stiffened. My hands are freezing. I am like
as dead.
“There!”
I hear a voice and the shadow points to my direction.
You must get up! You must get up!
My
own voice shoots through my mind. I can’t even open my mouth. My eyes are
swelling badly.
Then,
I can feel them moving closer. I can see them through their shadows. With all
my driving force to survive, I get up and release a blow. I don’t care who I
hit from them. I swear I hit someone. But as I throw my punch, I am the one
hitting the ground, dizzy and freezing up. I cock my eyes and I see the figures
clearer. A man and a boy, probably of my age are standing before me. I am sure
they are not one of the marshals.
“Child,
are you alright?” asks the man, pressing his warm hand on my frozen forehead. I
want to say no, I am not okay but words couldn’t form in my mouth. There is no
difference between me and the air I breathe, that I’m mostly dead. Instead of
answering, I just look at them.
“You’re
feverish! Let’s get you home,” he says. In my mind, I have no home. I am
wrecked. The marshals are searching for my head, possibly. All I need is to be alone, or so I thought.
Then, the young boy draws himself closer to me. His icy blue eyes that are as
cold as the snow seemed like a glimmer of hope in the dead wintry night. I think I know him. His one eye looks
awkwardly smaller than the other and discoloration starts to form around it. I
feel guilty. I feel like hurting myself too. But I already am dead. Like as
not, the marshals might declare me criminal or dead even at my young age.
“Let’s
go,” he says in an urgent tone. Then, I find myself on his back, stealing glances
on his face. The boy carries me and I can feel the warmth of his body. It feels
comfortable lying on his shoulders. “She’s cold, dad. I don’t want to carry a
corpse on my back.”
I
want to scowl but he is right. I can be dead anytime. I feel dead anyway. But I
am grateful, somehow. My whole body becomes numb. I am passing out but I try to
memorize his footsteps. I don’t know how they will react when they find out
that I was a prisoner of the Courthouse. I can’t let them know that. I must
blend in. and maybe in time, the marshals will forget about me. And there is
just one way to do it. I’m just not sure if I can do it. Perhaps, I’ll just
wait for the odds to come my way. I’ll wait until my destiny transforms into
something bigger than me and to somehow change my life.
-----
This
house is different from the others, even from the one that I used to live in,
neither from the one where the officials sent me. The sound of the whispering
wind slides down my body. Everything about the house tells a story of the endless
life that encircles the world. The walls… ceilings… the floors… they are all
foreign to me but I feel somehow, at ease. The strangest thing about the house
of hundred stories, there are no locks on every door. Yes, there is none; not
even the front door. The owner trusts all the people around him. And I want to
negate and contradict his belief but I know he is a man of his words. Besides,
I just got here and I can’t even kiss the thousand ideas in my head and form
them into words. It’s better to keep my silence than to speak of worthless
words.
It’s been thousand hours since the night Mr.
Wilbur Ray and his son found me freezing on the ice cold winter. They dress me
up and introduce me to things I’ve never seen before. I taste foods that aren’t
familiar in my tongue. They let me use one of the rooms in this big house. If
there’s one thing that I can complain about, that would be the boy’s
earsplitting words and self-admiration. Someday, somehow, I can get used to
him; his words, his stories, his poems and his voice. Any minute now, he might
appear to that defenseless door and tease me. That’s what he always does.
“Hey
Anika!”
The
voice of the boy who rescued me breaks the stillness of the night. I hear hundreds of footsteps approaching and
he comes, almost breaking the door. I am right. He is standing with a pile of
papers bound in unfinished oak and leather. It looks odd and strange and odd
and strange.
I
look away and peek through the window, avoiding to see the healing mark on his
face.
“Seriously, Marcus?” I ask, even if I already
knew the answer. “If you came here to make fun of me again, just leave.”
I
stay seated on the soft comfy bed, ashamed of what I just said. I want to be
alone. I don’t want to be alone. I can’t look at him or say another word
because my mouth is zipped and doesn’t want to open up. It’s hard to form words
out of letters just as hard as to create a house in the middle of the
wastelands.
He
plants himself beside me and covers us both with the blanket, putting my
injured arm on his lap. I think we’ve known each other as if no one else does.
It feels good having someone to share yourself with even if there is nothing
left to give.
“Dad
said you don’t want to leave your room again,” says Marcus, opening the old
thing. I don’t want to move. I don’t want to get out. I don’t want to eat
anything. I just need to spoil myself inside this room.
Marcus
starts to turn the pages of the filthy creature and out of curiosity I say
words that I am not meant to ask.
“What’s
that? It’s old,” I say, wrinkling my face. I hear the paper rustles and it
tickles my nose.
“It’s
called a book,” he answers.
“I’ve
never seen one before. Not even in school,” I say. We use this device called
datapod which stores everything that we need. This book might be one of those prehistoric relics that existed many
years ago. I turn its pages and it is older than it appears.
“Of
course! Books are kept in the history department. But we own the only bookstore
in the city,” he says blithely. All the accounts, books and everything that the
government recovered after the war are kept and preserved. No ordinary people
can put their paws on these artifacts, not even the Grandees. I wonder how
Marcus gets a hold of this book when we are not allowed to see one. Great, I
almost forgot. After graduating from the Secondary school, Marcus works at the
History Department. I just don’t know what he does there. Maybe, he is one of
the minorities who have such authority to take these records.
He
continues turning pages and says, “But only few of these are allowed to be sold
and distributed. There are limited copies for each manuscript. ”
I
nod and look over the book again. I can’t help but to ask questions. The word curiosity is written in my mind like it
will never be erased at all. I cock my head and ask, “What if they found out
about this?”
“Don’t
worry about that… I have ways,” he answers. He’s not smiling but his eyes do.
For the short period of time that I am here, I’ve never seen Marcus lose
control of him. He is as calm as his voice and as freezing warm as his eyes.
“I’m gonna read a beautiful verse for you tonight.”
I
turn my head into the nothingness and stare blankly into the vast strange
space. I am not used to this kind of treatment. Back then, there was no one who
gave me attention and talk to me like Marcus does. I never talked to anyone
this much. And I like how it feels. I like how my thoughts are turning into
sound forming words. It is discovering his world as I learn mine.
“Can
I?” he asks. I give my attention back to him and nod.
“Now
sleeps the crimson petal, now the white,” Marcus begins. I listen to him word
for word. There is something in his voice that makes me want to hear him speak
again. There are moments that I even close my eyes to brood over the words
resonating in my head. I keep listening
and reading the old words in my mind. I listen. I read. I listen and read. I
interrupt him when I encounter a word, capitalized in the text.
“Earth?”
I ask, raising my brow. Even though almost half of the terms used in the verse
are strange to me, the short text caught my interest. Words, languages,
colloquium and jargons are sorted out by the Courthouse during the
reestablishment of the world. There are only limited words in our lexicon. And
this is the first time I encounter the word.
Hmmm. Marcus is thinking and smiling and
thinking and smiling at me. “Earth. It is the old world. People called it
Earth.”
“Ah…”
I say not even sure if he’s telling the truth. How could they call Dicentra in
such way? It’s very amusing. Finding satisfaction in his answer, he continues
reading again. I won’t dare to ask him again. So, I listen. I listen until the
very end of the verse.
“So
fold thyself, my dearest, thou and slip into my bosom and be lost in me.”
Then,
we find ourselves inhaling deeply as if we are pleased by the old poem.
Suddenly, questions keep boggling my head and ask, “What does it mean?”
I
simply don’t understand the aged verse. The words are too old and its creator
seemed to be too smart. I wish for an answer because I want to understand. I
wait. I am waiting. Marcus smiles at me but he doesn’t have a word for me. My
brows find their way to crease. Maybe, he doesn’t understand either.
“Who
wrote that?” I ask.
His
head cranes over the old pieces of paper and say, “Alfred Lord Ten--”
He
stops reading because the part of the paper where the name was written has been
torn apart. It’s disappointing. My lips turn awkwardly into its sides and my
eyes roll into the horizon of agitation.
“Look!”
he crows. “It says that the Alfred, man, lived in 1809 to 1892.”
I
read the part where he is pointing with and fascination creeps in my system.
“It’s
older than I thought,” I say. It is true. The man lived hundreds of years ago
before us.
“Do
you want me to read another one?” asks Marcus. I shrug and slide my back to the
bed. Honestly, I want to sleep and sleep for the rest of my life. But he is
still here with me so I can’t do it.
“I
want to sleep, Marcus,” I say, faking a yawn.
He
shrugs, almost imperceptive. My eyes feel heavy and my ears are indulging his
voice that I don’t want for him to stop.
“Be
near me when my light is--”
“I
don’t care!” I stop him before he can speak another word. “I hate books
anyway.”
But
he continues anyway. I cover my head with a pillow but I made sure that I can still
hear him. Though, I am certain that I don’t like books. Yes, I hate books even
if I only saw them once. They can be torn apart and can’t be fixed, just like
humans. When a single page is missing, the story inside it can no longer be
completed- much worse when the most important part of it has been torn apart,
it loses its meaning. In human’s life, when someone slips away, they take
something from us- much worse when they leave, they take everything with them,
leaving us with nothing but sad memories.
I
hear Marcus’ voice creating words into the evening. I close my eyes and let go
of myself from a lifetime imprisonment. I run away. I never have to hide. I let
go in my thoughts, where I am free to dream and free to speak.
He reads the verse beautifully that I keep
repeating them inside my head. Words that best explain the thoughts I keep in
my heart. Be near me when I fade away…
