Chapter 3
Chapter Three
Back at the apartment, in my familiar, moon-drenched solitude, the thousand unnamed feelings in my chest gave way to exhaustion, and after I showered and polished off a bowl of instant noodles, I slumped facedown on the bed and fell asleep almost immediately.
It was an hour, maybe two, later that the ringing began.
With my brain shut off, I propped up on my elbows and gazed around, trying to place the sound in the room. I felt strangely disoriented, as if the direction of the bed had changed, but after another hazy, slow-blinking moment, I realized it was the telephone.
In my half-asleep effort to untangle myself from the duvet, I toppled to the floor and ended up crawling to the little table next to the TV, where the telephone sat atop a stack of old RAM issues.
Stretching the spiraling cord as far as it could go, I lay down on the rug and pressed the receiver to my ear. “Hello?”
Nothing. Yet the ringing persisted with a shrill urgency.
At last, it occurred to me that it was my mobile phone, which I rarely used and sometimes forgot its existence altogether.
Growling, I stumbled my way to the hall where I had left my work bag and patted around for it in the velveteen dim.
Flipping the phone open, I mumbled again, “Hello?”
“Is this Anya?” It was a male voice, low and muffled by the clamor of chatter and music.
“Um, yes?”
“Are you sure? You don’t sound very confident about it.”
“What?”
Rustle of laughter, the line crackling. “I’m just messing with you.”
I pulled the phone from my ear and stared at it as if expecting the tiny screen to reveal the man’s face to me. “Kai?” I realized. “How on earth did you get my phone number?”
“I have my sources,” he said, sounding rather pleased with himself, or perhaps with the extent of my bewilderment.
“Well, it’s late and you woke me up,” I grumbled.
“What are you talking about? It’s barely nine,” he protested.
Grudgingly, I muttered, “Beauty sleep.”
Kai paused to gauge the validity of this information, and when he spoke again I could practically hear the worried frown in his voice. “Are you sure you’re not sick or something?”
“I’m fine,” I sighed, returning to the comfort of the floor, my hand coming to rest atop my stomach.
“Okay. I just wanted to make sure you weren’t—” A sudden flurry of laughter made the line all fuzzy with sound distortion again. “For fuck’s sake, will you keep it down?” I heard Kai yell good-naturedly at several someones only to entice yet another roar of activity.
“Where are you?” I asked, some of my grogginess giving way to curiosity.
“Sullivan’s.”
“The bar?”
“Yeah.”
The long, awkward silence that followed felt like we were stuck in one of those dreadful elevator rides, the phone growing hot and almost vibrating in my hand with every slow-passing second.
Clearing his throat, he clarified, “I’m just having a beer with the guys from the office. I’m sorry I didn’t invite you—”
“It’s okay,” I reassured him quickly. Too quickly, perhaps. “It’s not like we’re friends or anything.”
“Ouch.”
“Well, we’re not.”
Another stretch of tense silence came between us. If only I had a drop of his social graces, I caught myself thinking, although, deep down, I didn’t regret speaking my mind.
I admired Kai but didn’t envy him. I didn’t want to be him.
I didn’t want to be tied down by social obligations or assume a persona that would please the most amount of people possible.
I had enough friends to always have someone to call when I wanted to go out for a drink or try a new restaurant or catch the latest show, and at the same time enough freedom to enjoy my solitude without having anyone to complain to me about it.
That was what I truly wanted. To live comfortably within the peace and familiarity of my own company.
A book and a cup of tea on the nightstand, and the radio playing for me all night long.
Suddenly, Kai’s voice sounded clearer, louder, as though he’d gone somewhere more private. “What are you doing right now?” he asked.
I groaned at the ceiling. “Are you kidding me?”
“Right, right. Sleeping like a grandmother.”
“Okay, I’m hanging up.”
“Wait,” he called out, half-laughing into the receiver in a way that felt strangely intimate. “Do you want to come here?”
“Come where?” I asked stupidly.
“Sullivan’s.”
“But… why?”
“Oh, I don’t know, Anya,” he sighed. “Why do people do anything?” The noise of wheels rolling down the tramway track sounded from his end of the line.
Then some laughter again, a bit of music, the door of the bar opening and closing, probably.
“Look, I’m bored to death here, and I really feel like talking to you tonight. Is that a good enough reason for you?”
A kind of startled exhilaration washed over me as I combed back the layers of this remark. My heart had never beaten louder. I could feel it jumping just beneath the surface of my chest. And yet my voice came out small and wary when I asked, “Can’t you talk to your friends, Kai?”
“I don’t know,” he answered just as carefully. “Can you talk to yours?”
I said nothing, which I believed was a confession equal to his.
Confession and validation. He was not alone in his strangeness.
I was right here, another pulsing soul in this universe, feeling exactly as he felt—thrilled to have someone to admit this to and, at the same time, horrified because of what it implied about us as people, both of our lives exposed as the hollow shells that they actually were.
Yes, I loved my solitude and the freedom that came with it. But, sometimes, I couldn’t help but wonder: did I choose it, or did I succumb to it? Was I simply romanticizing a life I could not escape, a life I didn’t have the option of escaping?
“So, do you want to come here?” he asked when he realized I wasn’t going to admit any of this aloud. “Or I can come to pick you up? Whatever feels more comfortable to you.”
Well, imagine that, I thought darkly. Kai, coming over from the bar, flushed from having walked in the cold and the anticipation of physical contact, maybe a little drunk, maybe a little careless, with a mixed fragrance of tobacco and rain on his long, dark overcoat.
Without so much as a hello, he would walk through the door, put his hands on my waist, and with all the wonderful brute force of his body, press me back against the wall.
I thought you wanted to talk, I would say.
And he would only smile, boyishly and irrepressibly, then lean down and kiss me on the mouth.
A taste of alcohol and the pressure of his thigh between my knees.
No questions asked. No discussion needed. Just a mutual taking and giving.
I wished I were someone capable of enjoying something like that.
Only for a night to feel desired by this man, who I also found desirable, and then, with no sense of attachment at all, treat these moments as an entirely separate experience from the rest of my life.
Did everything in a person’s life have to be related anyway?
Did everything have to connect or have a specific meaning?
That was the problem with me. Everything I felt, I felt deeply. And wasn’t this the most frightening thing to know about yourself? To know your own vulnerability so well you were left with no choice but to shield yourself from everything and everyone.
Because here I was, hurt already, wondering if this was why Kai was so popular with the girls at work, if this was all it took for him. A late-night phone call, a false confession, a private invitation. The feeling of being chosen—inflicted and exploited all at once.
“I don’t want to sleep with you, Kai,” I blurted out before I could stop myself.
This time the flutter of laughter came straight from him, which caused the line to shrill once more.
“Will you stop that?” I huffed, pulling the receiver from my ear.
“Anya,” he sighed magnanimously. It took me aback a little. I’d never heard my name spoken so softly before. “I’m a very straightforward man. If I wanted to sleep with you tonight, I would have just said so.”
I let out an incredulous hum. “So you don’t want to sleep with me.”
“Well…” he drawled.
“Okay, I’m definitely hanging up now,” I said, although we both knew I wouldn’t.
I had to admit, there was a particular pleasure in knowing he was thinking about me in that way, wanting me even if that wanting was fleeting.
Just the idea that I could inspire any amount of desire in him brought something terrible out of me.
Something worse than a flattered vanity.
Not a need to be desired but a need to be desired by him.
“Are you still there?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I exhaled, and out of sheer self-inflicted conditioning, it seemed, I hid myself within the familiar darkness of my armor. “Look, I’m really tired tonight. So maybe another time, okay?”
“Okay,” echoed Kai in a steady, gentle voice, as if to reassure me that there were no hard feelings, that what others would have perceived as a rejection he didn’t bother with perceiving at all.
“Goodnight,” I murmured.
“Take care of yourself, alright?” he said, serious now, and before I could respond, the line went silent with a low, almost subliminal beep.
I lay there on the floor for a moment longer, observing the flicker of the neon lights from outside as they changed the depth of the room. Red. White. Red. White.
It was a workday, and the building was quiet. The leaky faucet and the continuous hum of the refrigerator were the only noises in the apartment.
Letting the phone drop from my hand, I felt myself submerge into a kind of trance, my mind falling empty of thoughts, my chest bare of feelings. There was only the steady drip, drip, drip and the alternating lights.
Red. White. Red. White.
Then, all at once, blue.
Staggering to my feet, I ran to the window, my eyes tugging wide, my breath hitching, my whole body clutching in an intense, unnamable feeling.
Blue.
With shaking hands, I drew back the curtains, pushed the sliding door open, and stumbled barefoot onto the balcony, cold tile biting into my skin.
I wasn’t sure what I’d expected to find. The whole world altered? The whole world falling apart? There was nothing. Just the same old billboards, one posted on top of the other. Red and white.
The street below was lamppost-yellow and busy with people returning home.
A woman around my age was hopping off her bicycle, her red scarf blowing in the wind as she turned her gaze skyward.
The moon was unreal, huge, and bleary with swirls of gray clouds.
It didn’t even look like a moon but a giant balloon that was about to slip out of night’s hands and float out of sight and into the dark, never to be seen again.
The woman’s eyes darted my way, and with a giant smile, she waved at me. I had never met her before. But that didn’t matter here. Here, we were all connected.
When I went back inside, there was only one thing I felt like doing. I picked up my phone, flipped it open, and called Kai back.
He answered after the third ringback. “Anya?”
“Don’t go anywhere. I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”