Chapter Nineteen
First taste of cold air, and I felt as though I hadn’t taken a breath in a year.
Outside of Hive’s quarters, life revealed its face of sublime animation.
Everything was moving. Everything was passing.
In the raw, painful daylight, time had meaning again.
It was October, and the city wore the melancholy gray of freshly rained concrete.
In glaring disbelief, I watched as the drab squat of buildings stretched out above me to alien heights.
Had the buildings always been so tall? Had the city always been a subject of such daunting dimensions?
I couldn’t remember. I wasn’t entirely sure that I’d lived here before.
Hive did not allow any visitors, so he had agreed to meet me out here.
Theo Fraser. His mere name was a capsule of memories.
College. Lyndon & Smith. All the nights we’d spent at his apartment, eating cold takeout and scrolling through our phones.
Conversations about things we’d seen on the internet.
Glasses of wine and misused tablets of diphenhydramine.
But also the good old days. The first birthday party he threw for me at his dorm room.
The dinners at his dad’s. The Saturday mornings we’d spent standing in line at that overheated coffee shop he liked so much.
And in bed, his avaricious appetite, greater than all my boundaries and austerity, the beautiful force of his body in the faint lamplight of the bedroom.
Real life.
“Fucking hell, Ann,” he groaned now, conquering the last bit of distance between us with his quick, wide step, as ribbons of mist wreathed around his long trench coat.
I’d forgotten how tall he was. I’d forgotten the blue of his eyes, the gold of his hair, the cut of his face. When he reached me, flushed and heaving from having walked in the cold, I felt like I was being confronted by a stranger.
The last time we’d seen each other, I’d broken up with him.
I had treated him like an item on a long list of things I had needed to get done before joining the Program.
Just remembering that night now, all his justifiable anger and disbelief and refusal to let go of me made me shiver in my raincoat, cold sweat breaking under the collar of my shirt.
“I’m sorry they had to call you,” I croaked, feeling claustrophobic and at the same time like I was barely there.
Like half of me, the best of me, was still at the cottage with Kai, while I was left with all the worst, most sordid parts of myself with no idea how to make a decent person out of them. “I don’t have anyone else, so—”
“Just come here,” Theo cut me off, pulling me to him with an arm around my shoulders.
As it turned out, all the things I’d forgotten, my body remembered still, and through sheer force of habit, I tucked my face in the divot between his collarbones, barely visible over the neckline of his sweater.
He smelled the same. And even the shape and feel of him was the same.
His arms and chest and the way he rested his chin atop my head.
If I ever saw Kai again and we embraced like this, would it feel the same as well?
Could the physical things we’d shared in that unphysical world ever be subjected to the mysterious relation between touch and memory?
Or was it all like an untold dream, doomed from the moment of its conception to slowly vanish into nothingness?
For several moments, Theo and I stood there in the quiet of our breathing, holding onto each other in more ways than one, while faceless strangers kept on streaming past us.
I felt like crying again. Like screaming and cursing and tearing through my hair.
Like starting an argument with God just to make him strike me.
As if sensing the stirring in me, Theo brought his other arm around my waist and pressed me harder to his chest, so much that it hurt. And I liked that it hurt. I wanted it to hurt.
“Are you alright?” he murmured against my temple. “They didn’t do some kind of fucked-up experiment on you, did they?”
“No,” I rasped. “They’re pretty decent for what they are.”
Pulling back a little, he seized the underside of my jaw and tipped it up, giving me no choice but to face the blade of his hurt and confusion. The hurt and confusion I had caused him.
“You should have told me,” he said. “I thought you were vacationing somewhere, for fuck’s sake.”
I gave him a feeble, hollow smile. “Well, technically, I was.”
I’d been too embarrassed to tell him the truth back then.
And in a way I still was. I felt sick just thinking of the mess I’d made of myself, all of my failures and mistakes and self-inflicted losses.
My whole life, it seemed, was composed of regrets: leaving the Public Defender’s Office, lying to my therapist that I was feeling better when I wasn’t, not admitting to Theo how badly I hated the people we were becoming, going to Hive for help.
All of it. Except him. Kai. The one thing I did right.
The only reason I could also feel hope now.
Because that was what love did for us. The sheer act of it, the faith it required, the surrender, the kindness were all products of the same human hope.
Regathering me in his arms, Theo exhaled, the breath of his body turning into fog between us. “Ann,” he sighed, indignantly, “there’s nothing to be embarrassed about. I’m kind of intrigued myself, to be honest.”
A flurry of laughter jerked my attention away from him and across the street, where a group of teenagers were waiting at the crossing in their neat school uniforms. Touchscreens in their arms. Self-conscious smiles on their plump faces.
Had I ever been this young?
Once, yes. Running through an empty field, the limitless blue sky opening up above me. I feel so young, I had told Kai. Probably younger than I’d ever felt in this life.
But now here I was, in the real world, where I had no choice but to face the dull trivialities of adult life. Like the fact that both my electricity and water accounts were on pause, which meant that at this very moment, my apartment was unlivable.
“Hey, Theo,” I began, feeling no less uncertain of myself than those schoolgirls crossing the street now. “I hate to ask you this, but could I, um, stay with you tonight?”
Valiantly, smiling at last, Theo took the bag from my hand and draped an arm over my shoulders. “Come on,” he said, guiding me down the busy sidewalk. “Let’s go home.”
◆◆◆
Same car. Same apartment. Same passcode.
It was as though life had kept perfectly still in my absence, which was ironic considering how strange everything seemed to me.
Not just aesthetically speaking—the sterile, digitalized landscape of the city—but everything.
The quality of the air, the sounds, the smells, the people. Even the way I felt in my own body.
But the first sense of true derealization I experienced was only after Theo and I hung our coats in the built-in wardrobe by the hallway and entered the living room.
It shocked me how broad, how open, how undecorated and white the apartment was.
Everything looked disproportionate and daunting: the expansive floor-to-ceiling windowpane overlooking the city, the pale glimmer of the elaborate ceiling lights, the alien giant screen floating against the wall, and the way it lit up on its own and welcomed us with the time, today’s temperature, and various pieces of world news.
Something about a scientist across the sea working out the problem of short-term memory. Cameras for eyes we would have soon.
I couldn’t help but think of my cozy little apartment on Arcade Street and my tiny, impossibly heavy TV.
The way I would play around with its silver antenna, the countless black and white dots buzzing like flies inside the screen until the image would shift, color, sound, and motion bleeding through, and I would leap up to my feet, excited by this simplest of achievements.
What an odd life I’d lived in there. Odd and warm and more familiar than anything out here.
Feeling the burn of Theo’s eyes on the back of my skull, I turned to find him by the kitchen island, preparing a glass of water for me.
“You can sit down, you know,” he said, trying to sound pleasant and bracing, although the waver in his voice betrayed him.
“Do you want some tea? Or maybe you’re hungry? I can order something.”
Carefully, noiselessly, I sat down at the edge of the black leather sofa.
How many times had he and I made love on this very sofa?
How many times had we made love? In college, in his dorm room, all the nights he had held me in his arms and asked me how I wanted it.
But, of course, back then, I couldn’t tell him what I wanted.
It was months and months within the relationship before I learned it was acceptable for me to express my own desires, and two whole years before I was able to tell him about my parents, about my all-consuming and at times irrational fear of him hurting me if I didn’t do all he wanted.
Now, unburdened by my childhood memories, I could only wonder, grim and infuriated, why I would ever be afraid of anything, let alone my own boyfriend.
The difference they made in a person. Memories.
“No, thank you,” I replied, clearing the rasp from my throat. “Water is fine.”
Theo handed me the chilled glass and settled down on the other side of the sofa. The silence of the house was almost as strange as the glaring unfamiliarity between us. As if the one year we’d spent apart had erased all the ones we’d spent together.
“So…” he ventured at last. “What exactly did you do in there?”
“I worked for a fashion magazine,” I announced flatly.
Theo blinked, once, twice. Then, to my absolute surprise,
he burst out laughing—laughing so hard that his shoulders shook and his face turned bright red.