If Only I Could

They named me Joy as if it would matter.

“Ancient tradition,” I was informed upon asking. “A feminine name of Latin origin. Joy: an intense feeling of delight and happiness.”

Unfortunately, I can’t relate. And the ironic thing is, neither can they.

I only ever knew one Outsider, and of course, he constantly wanted to know, “What is it like? What does it feel like?”

“Nothing,” I responded, puzzled. “This is what life is for me. I don’t know any different.”

“But you must feel something,” James insisted, little face scrunched up in confusion. We were eight and sprawled on the floor of my plain bedroom, just one time out of hundreds.

I rolled onto my stomach to face him. “No, James, don’t be silly. We don’t feel emotions. We can’t.”

“How?”

“They fix us here,” I said, tapping the skin behind my ear. “A little machine stops us from feeling too much, so we don’t get hurt.”

“It’s in your brain?”

“Yep, ever since I was a baby.” I showed off the thin metal cuff clamped around my left wrist. “And this is how we know if something is wrong and we’re sick. It beeps.”

I had two surgeries and countless medical exams due to that little cuff. It wasn’t supposed to beep. Ever. And yet it did, not once, or twice, or even three times, but six. I heard the whispers behind closed doors,] that my emotion regulator would break permanently, that the sickness would get me, that I was out of control.

I was on the verge of feeling something in a world where emotions kill.

So they took James, took him and threw him back outside our city, “where he belongs”, “where he won’t endanger you again”. They took the orphan from our home in the night, from the place he had called home since we were asked to take him in six years ago.

Tears raced down his cheeks, and he called out for me as he was taken away. Our eyes met through the doorway. “I love you,” he told me.

I kept quiet. I didn’t even know what love was supposed to feel like. Later, perhaps, I would recognize the sensation of betrayal. Because I believed them when they told me James was making me sick. I believed them that he knew what he was doing. I believed all of their lies. And I vowed never to be tempted to feel again.

James crossed my mind from time to time. At first, it manifested in hot, sharp bursts of anger, or sudden waves of loneliness I couldn’t fully interpret. I was always able to hide it. I covered my cuff as it flashed on particularly nostalgic late-night sky train rides, and muffled the sound as I lay in bed at night, nauseous and fevered and all alone. With time, it passed. I grew up, suppressed, learned to forget and push the deadly emotions aside.

My 6,197th day (1,817th day since James, not that anyone’s counting) dawns the same as always. I wake with the sun, dress in my tidy school uniform, and pin up my medium-length brown hair. The city comes to life around me as I grab breakfast and jog through the twisting walkways and balconies that rise up from the ground below. Studies at school are average length and work goes late, forcing me to forgo my walk and take the train home. The city becomes quiet once more, twinkling with midnight wonder and the gentle cascade of silvery waterfalls pouring from the Sky Gardens. I pass only a few others on the walk from the train stop to my building and no one as the lift shoots me up to the 80th floor. When my door automatically unlocks and slides open at my arrival, the apartment is cool and dark. Nothing is amiss, perhaps apart from the branch of apple blossoms lying on the kitchen counter, tainting the air faintly with memory. I freeze.

Apple blossoms on my pillow, in my hair, thrown from the garden bridge.

“Joy?” The voice is soft, haunting.

I don’t turn around, even as he emerges from a dark bedroom and hesitantly approaches me from behind. For a moment, I can’t even speak, and when I do, my words taste unbelievably bitter. “What are you doing here?”

“I lived here too, once, or don’t you remember?”

Silence hangs between us.

“Look at me, Joy,” he begs, voice raw.

Slowly, so slowly, I turn and gaze at James, at those curls, those green eyes, that little boy who’s all grown up and yet just the same as ever. Five years. It’s been five years, and yet oh, how quickly I become twelve, eight, six years old again looking at him.

“Why are you here?” I manage.

“I’m here for you, to rescue you from this.”

“I don’t need to be—”

“You don’t understand—”

“I don’t need emotions,” I interrupt, before he can say it. “I don’t want them.”

“How do you know what you want—”

“This fight never changes, you haven’t changed—”

“I’m not trying to force emotions on you, I’m trying to tell you that—”

“But—”

“Can’t you let me explain?”

I am unused to hearing exasperation. I shut my mouth.

He plants his hands on my shoulders, and I recognize the urgency in his voice, his eyes. “Look, I lied. I’m not just here for you. But I couldn’t come back here and not see you.”

“Wh-what…”

“I need your help,” he blurts out. A slamming door somewhere on the floor makes him flinch and cross to yank the shades down.

I stare at him. “What could you possibly need my help with? What are you even doing here?” I follow him as he enters the conservatory and slips out onto the outdoor patio to glance around suspiciously before reentering the apartment.

“I met these people,” he finally whispers. “Outside. They think there’s hope for your people. They think you can live without the regulators and still be okay, that there’s ways to stay alive and feel.”

“That’s impossible.”

“But we’re living proof! Me and the others, everyone outside of all your containment cities. We’re just as human as any of you, yet we aren’t killed by the disease when we feel things.”

“You’re different,” I insist. “You’re the minority; you’re special.”

He shakes his head and glances at his watch. “I need to go. I have things to do—to prove it. Our scientists need some research from your labs, and since I lived here, they sent me. But I don’t have a lot of time.”

“What am I supposed to help with?”

“Your work ID… to get in.”

In some distant corner of my mind, I’ve always been aware that the scientists are working for a cure—have been for generations. Medicine, technology, anything to help. But the thing is, we’re fine. We create. We learn. We raise more humans to be like us: efficient, talented, unburdened.

Those who don’t have the disease—the Outsiders—don’t understand.

“You’re wrong, you know,” I tell James. “If you want me to get you in there, I will, but only so you can finally understand that we can’t feel emotions. And no matter what you try, it’ll never be worth it for any of us to die trying to feel.”

“Oh, Joy,” he says with a sad smile. Then he draws in a breath and tosses me his backpack. Inside, I find strange clothes—a baggy white shirt stamped with foreign images, short blue shorts, and white canvas shoes. He senses my lack of understanding. “They don’t care so much about anyone Outside—it’s their precious citizens they’d throw a fit over if they caught you. Trust me, you’re better off disguising yourself and looking like one of us.”

I put on his clothes without protest. He locks the front door and takes us back out to the patio. I realize quickly that he expects us to climb the ladders. There’s a walkway level two stories above or three below, each connecting various buildings. James chooses to go down and then follow the walkway until we reach more stairs. If his route didn’t seem so purposeful, I would question whether he actually knows how to reach the lab.

We reach a sky train stop and James boards. They run all night, but there’s no one inside, making me feel like I’m breaking some kind of law.

We exit in the science district and keep climbing down until we’re practically on ground level. It feels darker down here, like the shadows are thicker. Water drips, and the lights up above seem harsh and cold. It’s a remnant of a different world, and I swallow, glancing around. James takes my hand in his. He’s smiling at me, and I don’t know why.

“Let’s keep moving,” he whispers, and we splash through puddles and dart from shadow to shadow down the street. Occasionally, I see other dark figures moving, but nobody approaches.

I’m cold and tired by the time James pauses at an iron door. He gestures at an ancient, grime-covered ID sensor that I reluctantly touch my finger to. The door clicks open, revealing a dim hallway with a floor made of equally grimy checkerboarded tiles.

“What are we doing all the way down here?” I ask as we quietly move inside.

“The research is done down here. You know, where all the ‘high priority’ projects get shoved to.” His eyes are unreadable.

He starts in a few offices and storage rooms, digging through desks and filing cabinets for physical papers, and clearly already knowing what he’s looking for. I have to enter my ID again at the lab door, which James makes me wait at as he snoops around. I watch as he carefully packs away several vials, syringes, and microscope slides. He only asks for help once, to log into a computer. The technology is ancient, not even fingerprint activated. I’m forced to riffle through my pockets to find my physical identification card and type in the code.

As soon as I do, a blaring alarm goes off.

I jump, and James curses. He loads a file and begins copying it.

“Let’s go,” I tell him.

“Hold on…” he says, finishing up. “Okay, go!”

We race for the door again, flying out just as a security group clambers down the stairs. “Stop!” they cry. “Thieves!”

Thief. I feel a sharp pang of something deep in my chest and shiver.

I doubt my heart has ever beat so hard in my life as it does as I sprint after James, guards hot on our feet. We wind between old alleys and, at one point, dart through an abandoned building. James takes one hall and I take the other, and when I reach the other side, I don’t see him. I continue running, following a rickety metal staircase up a level and pausing on a stone bridge linking two sides of the street. A canal flows beneath, dark and murky. I press myself up against the railing, searching below for James.

Without warning, light flashes and I’m hit with a pain so excruciating, so all-consuming, my entire body freezes. I can’t even stop myself from tumbling straight from the bridge into the water below.

I hear one scream. “Joy!”

And then I am in the water, too weak even to fight. Even as I realize I want to.

I must float, tumble, hurt for years, until I am too cold to remember my own name, too weighed down to ever get up. When I’m pulled up out of the water, I can’t tell if it’s into life or death.

“Joy.” His face is fuzzy, but I would know James, know that he’s life, anywhere. He makes me drink something that burns and yet releases my body from the effects of the weapon. Warm lips touch my frozen cheek for an instant, and a sensation rises in me, blossoming and then fading into an indistinct fuzz too quickly to comprehend. He picks me and carries me for a while, but all too soon, he sets me down, glancing anxiously around. “Can you walk? We need to move faster.”

I think I nod. I lean against him and we keep moving.

As I thaw out, it becomes easier to continue going. I don’t know our destination until buildings thin out around us and I realize how close we are to the Outside. Time and movement have made me feel better, and I’m able to clamber over a chain link fence when we come to it. We drop into a meadow on the other side just as the sun begins to rise.

The light spills over the meadow, turning the tall grass gold. We wade through it until the fence disappears behind the hills and the city is gone. James drops to his knees and digs through his backpack.

“I did it,” he says, quietly, proudly. “I have it—everything we need. We’ll just need to test it.”

I clear my throat. “Which one is the cure?”

“That one and that one,” he says, already reaching for them. “I still have to figure out the dosage.”

I ignore that last bit. “Like this?” I ask, taking them from him.

“Yes.” He laughs nervously. “What are you doing?”

“You said it needs to be tested.”

Alarm flits in and out of his features. “I didn’t mean on you. I can’t guarantee that it’s safe. Give that back.”

Before I can reconsider, I stab the needle into my shoulder.

“No!”

“Too late.” I toss it aside.

His face has become very pale.

“It’s not going to work, anyway,” I tell him. “It doesn’t matter.”

Still, the next ten minutes are agony for us both. I watch the sun creep higher and eventually realize nothing has happened. I feel a tiny twinge of disappointment.

I did it to prove him wrong.

And yet… I was also desperate to know. What it would be like. What it would feel like.

How idiotic.

“See?” I say. “It didn’t work.”

“That doesn’t mean it won’t, with time and research.”

“Just give it up, James. I don’t feel emotions. I can’t.”

“You can,” he insists. “You do.”

“No!”

“See? Aren’t you angry?”

“I’m using a tone of voice that will naturally express my urgency to you.”

“This is so stupid! Listen to yourself.” Without warning, he captures my face in his hands, thumbs brushing my skin tenderly. His voice sounds ready to break. “How can you not feel it? How can you not know that I love you, that I always have? Don’t you love me at all?”

I break away. “I can’t—”

“Stop telling me what you can’t do!” he yells. “You can do anything!”

“Why don’t you understand?” I cry. I shove him away, blinking hard, my chest tight. “I don’t feel emotion! I don’t—I—I would love you with my whole heart if I only could, I’m sure of it, I just—” My eyes begin to sting.

“Joy—” he starts.

“Why can’t you leave me alone?” I scream.

And then

then

He laughs.

“You—you’re crying. You’re screaming. It’s… you’re angry.”

“I’m—I’m—” I heave. “I’m angry.”

My eyes. They’re tears.

I tilt my face up to the sun, and he’s there, wiping away the tears, and the world comes flooding in. And some part of me wonders if it was even the cure at all, or if I simply burnt out my suppressor just like they always said I would, but I’m too excited to care.

“I feel—I feel—I can feel that I love you,” I gasp, “like a fire, like a tornado, like I’m being crushed and suffocated and freed…”

“Yes,” he says, “yes.”

And I reach up, to this beautiful, beautiful boy who taught me to feel, and I press my lips to his, and I get it. I kiss him, and I explode. His hands tangle in my hair, my stomach feels like it’s floating away, and shivers run throughout my body. I kiss him, trace his jaw, press my body to his. Overwhelmed. Ecstatic.

I am suddenly on my knees, and he is drawing away, looking confused. Frightened.

“Joy…?”

I gasp, trying to find breath, and double over.

“Hey, hey, it’s okay. You’re not used to this—you’re being overloaded, that’s all.”

“Does love—” I gasp out “—feel like acid in your veins? Like fire coursing through your body?”

“No…?” He rubs my back, supports my body. “We’ll just—take it slow, okay? You’ll get used to it, I promise.”

It’s too much, all at once, and I cough, choke, hyperventilate, thrash to free myself and stumble away, only I think I’m on the ground, and I think my eyes are closed.

“This isn’t—I’m not—you need a doctor!” His voice pitches strangely, as if the pain has filled my ears with water. He’s holding me, close to his chest, and I finally see him through a haze of white. He jabs at my metal bracelet, cries out for help though no one can hear us. His lips are at my ear.

“I’m sorry. I love you. Please don’t go. We’ll fix this.”

I manage to touch his lips with a fingertip. “I feel—I feel love. It’s like piano keys and cold water and gasping for breath. And I never knew—”

“I was—I was wrong,” he chokes. “I thought you’d be okay. I thought—”

“I was wrong,” I whisper faintly. “I didn’t know… it could be worth this.”

“Darling…”

“I feel like the ocean tide…” My voice is a rasp and I cough feebly. “Coming… leaving…”

“Please, no—” he sobs, looking upward.

“James…”

His tears fall onto my face when he looks down at me again. “I will never stop trying,” he whispers. “Never.”

I believe him.

My eyes flutter shut again, and I feel. “I feel like I’m floating…”

I think I say it. Or perhaps I’m just floating away.