Chapter 7 #2
“Oh, I’m so sorry to hear that,” Betty cried into the receiver. “Do get better soon, alright? We miss you terribly here.”
She paused for a moment, the fax machine shrilling on her end. “So… are we going to talk about the fact that Kai officially knows more things about you than I do?”
Frowning at my door, I readjusted my hold on the phone. “What are you talking about?”
“Well, I stopped by your desk first thing in the morning, and he said that you have a cold or something. That was before you called in.”
“Oh, we just happened to be together when I got sick,” I explained, only to realize a second later the kind of gossip this would spark around the office.
And indeed, “Goodness!” Betty exclaimed. I could even picture her nodding her pretty head like an impressed and, at the same time, horrified grandmother. “You are a wild woman, Anya. A wild woman.”
Days passed, and life, without any explanation or closure, regained its original shape.
Only no, not really. Because the hollowness of this shape had been revealed to me now.
All my rituals and rules had been dismantled and left to totter meaninglessly around, and how could I ever give them back their stability or meaning?
And yet, for every anxious morning I spent trying to uncover something about my situation, there was a slow and reassuring night because at night, Kai called.
And, oh, how I liked that he called. I liked how comfortable he was with calling me.
I liked listening to him talk. I liked how sequential and reliable his process of thought was compared to the widening rift of mine.
And I also liked that he never asked to hang out.
He never suggested that I should invite him over or that I should go meet him somewhere.
I liked this because it meant that the friendship we were nurturing was genuine and important in itself and by itself, not just a prelude to something else, something I didn’t have the mental capacity to even think about right now.
Yes, I did find Kai attractive. More than that, I found him intelligent and funny and irrepressibly magnetic.
But during this one year I could remember, I had never even kissed someone, let alone fully engaged in a romantic relationship.
If I’d done so in the past, it didn’t really matter.
I was inexperienced by default, which put me in a singularly vulnerable position and landed Kai in the middle of a very odd, very complex moral dilemma.
So friends we were going to be, just as we’d agreed, for the good of his moral integrity and my already precarious mental stability.
“I just don’t understand why you’re doing this to yourself,” he was saying now. It was Sunday evening, and he was leaving tomorrow. “You’re still planning on going to your appointment, right?”
“Yes.”
“Then why are you torturing yourself with waiting? Why not go right now? I’ll drive you.”
“I’m just trying to see what I can find out by myself first,” I explained as I slipped into bed, the phone hot and vibrating in my hand after an hour of conversation.
“Why?”
So they can’t lie to me.
So I have some proof that what they did to me was wrong, whether I asked for it or not.
Terrible, unfaithful words. Words I could never say aloud, especially not to him. Just recalling his passionate speech about the Inside and our way of living gave me an uncomfortable, heart-dropping feeling.
“Because,” was all I muttered, burying my face into the pillow.
Kai groaned humorously. I imagined him leaning back on his couch in tranquil surrender, his neck bent over the edge, the muscles of his throat stretching.
I could hear the drone of the radiator through the line, so he was probably dressed lightly or even just in sleep shorts, his arms and chest and stomach bare, touchable—waiting to be touched.
My cheeks grew warm, my forehead damp. I kicked the covers off me and stumbled out of bed again.
“I swear you just like making me worry,” I heard him sigh as I held the phone between my ear and shoulder so I could work the balcony door open.
A ripple of wind whipped into the room, crisp and smelling of chestnuts and rain. With eyes shut, I leaned on the cool metal frame of the sliding door and asked him, “Are you really worried about me, Kai?”
“Of course, I’m worried. I don’t think you realize how out of it you were that night. I’ve never seen anything like it. You were so…”
“What?”
“Scared, I guess.”
“Of the Center?”
He paused once again, and I felt myself become still, unready for the answer. Then a whisper, a secret: “I think you were scared of what you’d find there.”
The wind rose, more fiercely this time, a flurry of sycamore leaves scattering across the balcony. Shivering, I shut the door and crawled back into bed. “Kai?” I asked, keeping my voice low and measured. Another secret. “Do you think it’s possible I came from Outside?”
I couldn’t help the thought. I couldn’t stop any of the absurd scenarios that kept emerging from this dark spot inside my head, a place as remote and unrecognizable as my past. And for some reason all of these scenarios were sinister and life-altering, teetering on the line between terror and truth.
The things I wanted to know about myself but couldn’t bear the ugliness of them.
“That’s impossible. You’d have an immigrant’s ID—” Kai began, only for an abrupt yawn of silence to swallow his next words.
“Kai? What is it?”
Tentatively, he continued, “Now that I’m thinking about it, I don’t know anyone who’s come from the Outside. I don’t know anyone who’s left the Inside either.”
With my blood churning in my wrists, I whispered into the phone, “Don’t you think that’s strange?”
This wasn’t fair to him, I knew. He loved the Inside.
His whole life, all his happiest memories, his family, his friends, his work were the Inside.
To answer this question honestly, he had to challenge the very system upon which everything he held dear was built.
And yet, I couldn’t help the question. Who else did I have to talk to about this but him?
“I think the structure of our world is a bit rigid,” he finally replied. “But I wouldn’t call it strange. Perhaps the right word is necessary.”
“For our well-being, you mean.”
“Yes.”
“If everything here is so perfect, then why do we have procedures that can delete someone’s memories?” I wondered.
To my surprise, Kai countered, “I don’t think the Inside is perfect.
Nowhere can be perfect so long as humans are there.
We’re inherently flawed beings. We make mistakes, and sometimes bad things happen.
But no matter how often or how severely life falls out of shape, it always manages to regain it.
That’s what the Center does, I think. It doesn’t sculpt us into perfection.
It just helps us regain the shape of our lives. ”
Listening to his thoughts, my own quietened; my heart calmed. I closed my eyes and washed myself clean in the tide of his voice. “You know,” I told him, “talking to you is an exercise in hope.”
I could tell that he was smiling now, although I wasn’t sure how. Sometimes I felt like I knew him better than I knew myself.
“At least it’s not an exercise in tolerance,” he sighed.
“Oh, don’t you worry,” I drawled. “You’re a very tolerable person.”
He laughed under his breath, the sound soft and indulgent. “Yeah, right back at you.”
Yawning, too sleepy to keep my eyes open but not ready to say goodnight just yet, I murmured, “Hey, Kai?”
“Yes, Anya?”
“Thank you for calling.”
“I had to. You would have never called.”
“You don’t know that,” I halfheartedly protested.
“Yes, I do,” he argued. But his tone was gentle. Affectionate. “I know you don’t like asking for help.”
This was the principle of my life, wasn’t it?
To need other people as little as possible.
But was my inability to rely on others truly so glaring, so severe?
And was this the proof I’d been looking for, after all?
The behavior of a person in pain. A person who’d rather delete their own memories than ask for help.
But I didn’t want to think about that right now. What I wanted was for him to keep talking to me, keep making me feel better even if this feeling was superficial.
Clumsily, I maneuvered the conversation. “Do you have plans for tonight?”
“Oh, yeah. Grand plans, in fact,” he proclaimed. “I’m going to make dinner, vacuum the floors, and do the laundry. Might even fix myself a strong cup of tea in the process.”
“Okay, go easy now,” I teased him, loving that we had somehow grown into two people who could tease each other like that. “But seriously, why aren’t you going out with James and the others?”
“I don’t know,” he exhaled into the phone. “I’m just so tired of everything.”
“Of me?”
“No,” he said. “Not of you.”
Smiling into my pillow, I wondered how it was possible for a person to feel so many different emotions at once.
“You’re smiling now, aren’t you?” he asked.
“Maybe,” I chuckled.
“I like that,” he murmured, almost as if to himself. “I like thinking of you smiling.”
Biting the corner of my lip, restless suddenly, I turned on my back. “Do you think of me often, Kai?”
A tense, meaningful silence came between us, and just thinking of him tempted by me made my whole body flush. His touch, I imagined, and pressed the back of my hand over my mouth to suppress the sound that wanted to escape me.
Kai muttered something too—a curse, perhaps. Then with a sharp exhalation he added, “This is not a very friendly question, Anya.”
“Well, I did promise to be a terrible friend,” I said as a joke. But it didn’t sound like a joke. It sounded like a plea for irresponsibility.
“You also promised to make it easy for me,” he reminded me, his voice darker now, commanding.
Girlishly, selfishly, I asked, “Am I not making it easy?”
“I think we both know that you’re not,” he rasped.
Behaving myself, I hummed peaceably, “Alright. Make me a friendly question then.”
Several seconds slipped past us before he was able to speak again, and even then his voice sounded strained, his breath unsteady. “Did you have dinner?”
“Yeah,” I replied, clearing my own want from my throat. “I had some toast.”
“Again?”
“I know, I know. I need to go to the store.”
Another pause, another indecipherable process of thought. Then, “Get dressed.”
Something stirred in my chest, a rush of wakefulness stealing over me. “What? Why?”
“I’m taking you out for a proper meal,” he decided, and that was the Kai I knew from work. The confident, charming, slightly dominant side of him. The side I liked to conjure in my most private moments.
“You don’t have to do that,” I reassured him.
Crackle of activity, the sound of his steps on the hardwood floor. “Good thing I want to then.”