Chapter 5
Chapter Five
Consciousness returned to me in small, easily digestible increments.
The feeling of lying upon something hard and leathery.
The monotonous drone of a radiator. A sliding door leading to a balcony.
Outside, it was day and blue, and on the drying rack, crisp white sheets were swelling with wind.
Then a face. His face. The overwhelming radiance of his beauty and the liquid warmth of his eyes.
“Kai?” My voice sounded hoarse, sandpaper-dry. I could taste blood in the back of my throat.
Quickly, in claustrophobic panic, Kai bent over me and brushed the hair from my forehead. “Hey, how are you feeling?”
I didn’t know how to answer. I was numb and at the same time throbbing with pain. My limbs were leaden. My vision was tilted. The inside of my skull felt inflamed, my thoughts rushing through my brain devoid of coherence.
“Where are we?” I croaked.
The room—the apartment—was similar to my own, an open space divided by furniture only, although significantly more worn, more lived in than mine.
There was a wide hallway, a designated bedroom area, and a kitchenette nestled in the far corner.
But these were not my sheer white curtains, and these were not my soft throw pillows.
And on top of the TV, there was no stack of unread books but an untidy heap of CDs with a silver walkman balancing precariously atop it.
“My place,” explained Kai, the line of his mouth tight, as though he was holding himself back from saying more.
The feeling that seized me then was so new to my body that I had trouble processing it. I could hear the blood striking in my temples and the air hissing as I pulled it into my lungs. Terror. For the first time in my life, I was filled with terror.
It was with metaphysical difficulty that I managed to push the words out, “Why… Kai, why did you bring me here? What happened last night?”
Kai reached for my shoulders, but I jerked back, recoiling against the cushions of the sofa. “Don’t,” I choked out. “Don’t touch me.”
“Anya,” he gasped, the expression on his face breaking into pieces of different emotions.
Shock and worry. Confusion and horror. “I’m sorry.
I just didn’t know what else to do. We were talking, and then out of nowhere you started shaking, and I wanted to get you to the Center, but you kept screaming that you didn’t want to go there, and since I don’t know where you live, I thought—”
“Wait. Hold on,” I groaned, pressing the heels of my palms into my eyes right up against the pinpoints of pain. “I was awake this whole time?”
For a long while, Kai only looked at me, stock-still and pale as a ghost. Then quietly, steadily, he asked, “You don’t remember?”
“I don’t remember anything,” I whispered.
There were no words capable of describing the simultaneous chaos and void coexisting inside me, except maybe that right in the middle between everything and nothing there was a wound, a cerebral hemorrhage, but instead of blood, my brain was leaking memories.
Memories that were as vital to the self as blood was to the body.
Who was I if not my memories?
No one.
Nothing.
History was the one most important thing a human could possess.
It explained the past, it defined the present, it predicted the future.
To be without history was to be marked as unreal.
But then again, even fantastical people had a past. Characters in movies and books and video games.
They all had a backstory, a point of beginning.
I had nothing, which made me even less than that.
I was not only unreal. I was nonexistent.
“Hey…” I heard Kai murmur something I was unable to register in its entirety.
Only when I felt his fingers on my face, his warm palms sliding over my cheeks, did I realize that I’d begun to cry, violently and inconsolably.
My chest was shaking. Air was escaping me in loud, erratic bursts.
“It’s okay,” he hummed in my ear, making soothing sounds deep in his throat. “It’s alright. I’m sorry I scared you.”
Exhausted, I dropped my forehead on his shoulder and tried to replace the sobs with breaths.
He brought a hand to my waist, careful, gentle, his other slipping over the back of my neck.
No one I could remember had ever touched me like this, and it was an experience I found both imperative and devastating.
“Kai,” I heaved, my fingers twisting in his shirt. “I don’t remember anything.”
He pulled back a little, using the hand holding my nape to tilt up my head. His eyes were focused now, his brows determined. “What do you mean?”
“The first memory I have of myself, of the world, is last year’s assessment.
I remember leaving the Center, perfectly fine, and then starting work the next day.
But there is nothing before that. Nothing.
And I never even realized it before you started talking about your own childhood.
How could I have not realized it? I—I’ve lived an entire year without knowing who I am.
How is this possible? Kai, am I even real? ”
Firmly, Kai gripped my arms. “Of course you are real.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“I’m touching you. I’m holding you. So you are real. You are real to me.”
I shook my head, feeling hot and furious, fresh tears stinging in my eyes. “How can I be real to you when I’m not even real to myself?”
“Anya,” he pressed, squeezing me a little. “There are many people here who don’t remember their past.”
Uncomprehending, I slipped from his hold and sank back on the sofa. “What?”
“Just at RAM there are at least six people who no longer have childhood or even some of their adult memories. You know my friend James from accounting? He also went through memory deletion a couple of years ago.”
I knew these words were meant to reassure me. Here it was, the undeniable proof that I was not an anomaly. How could I be when even in the micro-society of RAM there were people as blank and wiped clean as I was?
But I did not find any of this reassuring. In my muddled, throbbing mind, this was not proof of my ordinariness but the magnifying glass under which the strangeness of this world was clarified for me.
“Memory deletion?” I echoed, breathing so fast I felt faint, my mind dwindling back into darkness. “What are you talking about? Why is this happening to us?”
“It’s not happening to you,” explained Kai in a measured, patient tone of voice. “It’s probably something you requested and then, for some reason, forgot about.”
Trembling all over, dumbfounded, I demanded, “What do you mean I requested it?”
“It’s one of the procedures you can get done during your assessment.
If you have any memories you don’t like, you can choose to delete them, so your mind is free to create new ones.
It helps some people unburden. You know how information can be overstimulating at times?
Well, maybe you needed a clean slate, or maybe you—” Something in my expression must have revealed the magnitude of my horror, for he stopped himself abruptly and leapt from the sofa.
“Listen, speculating will only make things worse. You’ve been through enough as it is.
Let’s just go to the Center and get some answers. ”
Part of me knew he was right. But for some unfathomable reason the mere thought of going back to the Center appalled me, physically repulsed me, my muscles ossifying with resistance.
“Kai,” I choked out, “don’t you think it’s strange that I don’t remember asking for this procedure?”
“I do think it’s strange,” he agreed. “That’s why we need to go—”
“No.”
“Please, listen to me—”
“I don’t want to go there.”
“Anya—”
“You cannot make me!” I shouted, my voice like a bell, struck and resounding.
A beat passed. Then another. Kai’s lips parted and shut, his eyes flashing. “Fuck, Anya,” he sighed. “Of course I won’t make you.”
I felt so solid then. Solid and eroded. Ancient piece of stone pulled up from the earth.
Something without a name. Something too disfigured by the passage of time to ever have a name again.
I could not understand what was happening to me.
I couldn’t make sense of all the ugly feelings in my chest. The anger, the fear, the guilt.
Where had these things come from? From what unholy grave were they unburied?
Was this who I really was deep in my soul?
I squeezed my eyes shut, choking down yet another sob. “Kai,” I whispered, “am I going insane?”
“No,” was his immediate, irrefutable answer.
“Do you promise?”
“I promise.”
Through the liquid darkness of my closed eyelids, I sensed him stir closer, calling to me even before he uttered the words. “Anya, will you look at me for a moment?”
Slowly, laboriously, I lifted my head and let him see me as I was. An open wound of a person.
His eyes were soft, but his voice was sharp like the edge of a knife as he asked, “Do you think they did this to you without your consent?”
Frightened, shrinking at the mere thought, I whispered, “I don’t know.”
“Do you want me to go to the Center and find out?”
“No,” I gasped. “Don’t go there.”
He ran his hands down his face before letting them drop resignedly at his sides. “What can I do?”
But there was nothing either of us could do but reach out to the people of the Center. They were the ones with all the answers. They were our point of connection. To reject them was to become disconnected. To reject them was to not be at all.
With a shudder, I murmured, “I want to go home. Will you give me a ride?”
Kai nodded, releasing another quiet sigh between his lips. “Yes, of course.”
And despite everything, all the dark inward terror, all the questions left unanswered, all this unbearable tension building between us, he still managed to affect me with his collectedness, his solidness, his strong physical presence.
It was a superficial soothing, I knew, like throwing a blanket over an unmade bed and calling it tidy, but I could not resist its influence.
I did not want to resist it.
“Thank you,” I exhaled.
For a moment longer he hovered over me with indecisive hands. “Can you stand? I can carry you to the car if you want.”
“No, I’m fine,” I claimed, but my knees wobbled the second I stood from the sofa.
Kai reeled forward, his arms catching me low around the waist. My palms found the ridges of his stomach, my face the crook of his neck.
“Sorry,” I murmured.
“It’s alright. I got you,” he said.
So close we stood, I almost felt the bob of his throat with my lips and could even feel the heat rising from his shoulders. I could smell last night on him too. The misted air and the cherry-flavored cigarettes we’d smoked.
With a soft, searching look, Kai took my jaw between his fingers. “Feeling dizzy?”
“A little, yes.”
“Anything else? Nausea or—”
“No, I think I just stood up too quickly.”
“Yeah,” he agreed. “You think you can put your arm around my waist?”
Slowly, struggling for coordination, I did as he asked, and he hugged me around the shoulders, allowing me to lean on him as we made our way out of the apartment.
“That’s it,” he murmured inches from my temple. I could feel his breath on my skin. Hot. Unsteady. “That’s it. Good girl.”
By the time we were out of the building, I felt sturdy enough to walk on my own and could even breathe normally.
But my mind, device of mystery that it was, remained unanchored, drifting past the ongoing moment and lapsing into a sequence of seemingly arbitrary ones, collecting pieces of things that had no meaning unless put together.
The book from the Outside. The unprovided sentiment of nostalgia.
The memories I was missing. I studied these separate, yet somehow tied, discoveries until they were stripped down to their bones, a mere chant now, a litany of words playing through my head.
Acquiescence. Nostalgia. Void.
Void.
Void.