Chapter Fifteen #2
He looked at me, serious then, his handsome face silhouetted against the orange luminescence of the fire. “You could do a lot of things to me, Anya. Disappointing me isn’t one of them.”
And then, back in our bed, in the faint lamplight and the cool sheets, talking until it was really late and all we had the energy to do was lie half-awake in each other’s arms.
“We should get some rest,” he would murmur.
“We should,” I would agree, eyes closed already.
But we wouldn’t. Not for another hour at least. Life together was too precious to waste it on sleep.
◆◆◆
The last day at the cottage, I woke up with this terrible, oppressive feeling in my chest, as though my heart was being pressed down by a giant tombstone.
I could sense every hour, minute, second slipping by me really fast while I was unable to do anything to stop them.
And no matter how much I tried to distract myself with sweet recollections of my time here with Kai, my mind could not help but return to that one ever-hovering question: How do I keep living like this?
How do I accept a personhood that I deep down believe to be broken?
Factory-new, yes, but faulty. Should I simply surrender myself to love, his love and affection, and have faith that it would one day heal me?
And what about the love I owed to myself?
Did I owe myself anything at all, or was it some kind of universal law that love was meant to be shared and not kept internal and individualized? The thing humans owed to each other.
Now, the house stood candlelit and delicious-smelling because Kai had cooked once again, and I was transferring the plates to the table while he was messing with the radio.
“I can’t believe this is our last dinner here,” I told him as I filled our glasses with wine. Because we could drink wine now. Because now we trusted each other with everything.
Kai came up behind me, wound his arms around my waist, and, without speaking, kissed the back of my neck.
Leaning on him with eyes shut, I allowed myself to feel the full, wrenching spectrum of my emotions.
My desire and love for him. My fear of the future.
My perhaps childish hope to create new memories instead of regaining my old ones.
All while the trapped girl inside my head thrashed and screamed that this life would never be enough, that it was nothing short of delusional to believe that I could go on like this forever.
“We’ll come back,” I heard Kai say over the abrading rushing of my thoughts. “Won’t we?”
“Kai,” I croaked, shaking all over.
Quickly, realizing my distress, he spun me around, his hands squeezing my shoulders. “Hey, what is it?”
Looking up at him, feeling tears I could no longer hold streaming down my face, I confessed, “I don’t want to go back.”
Kai used the sleeve of his sweater to wipe the corners of my eyes, his expression wavering between confusion and concern. “What do you mean?”
My breath stuttered, my heart pounded, my eye sockets burned, and before I could stop myself, everything I’d had trouble articulating for so long spilled out of me all at once.
“I mean, what is even the point of returning to that life? The Inside. Pretending all is perfect, smiling when we’re not feeling like it, being friends with people we hardly even know, getting our brains wiped clean at every inconvenience, feeling nothing, knowing nothing.
Missing words, while the world Outside burns.
Or maybe it doesn’t. How should we know?
We’re treated like children, sheltered from everything, only that no one ever tells us what we need sheltering from. ”
Taking a step back, careful, he asked again, “What are you saying, Anya?”
“I’m saying I want out.”
“Out,” he echoed. Controlled. Steady. Everything I wasn’t.
With a loud, almost painful release of breath, I admitted, “I want to go Outside.”
For a moment, I was seized with immense, cathartic relief just from having said these words aloud. But then I noticed his face, his shadowed eyes and clenched jaw, and even heard the shift of emotion in his voice. “Anya—”
“No,” I said, allowing my voice to rise, allowing all this tension to finally break through the siphon of my throat. “Don’t you dare take that tone with me.”
“What tone?”
“You know what tone. This gentle condescension of yours.”
Wincing to himself, looking almost stunned by his inability to anticipate this conversation, Kai reached for my hand. “Anya, please. I’m not trying to be condescending. You’re clearly upset, and I guess I’m hoping to calm you down.”
“I thought you liked that about me. That I feel things, express things.”
“I do.”
“Then don’t ask me to calm down! Ask yourself why you are not mad!”
“I don’t want to be mad.”
“Because they took it from you—”
“No one took anything from me, damn it!” he snapped, clutching the front of his shirt as if his chest was hurting him.
“I chose it. I did it. I’m the one to blame.
Just because you can’t accept that you did this to yourself—” He broke off with a little gasp, shutting his eyes.
When he opened them again, they were red and glassy, like he was struggling to hold back tears.
“I’m sorry. Anya, please, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that. ”
“Yes, you did,” I said, and now I was the steady one, the one standing tall and giving language to my most inward, almost unrealized thoughts.
“And you are right,” I told him. “I am scared. I am self-distracting. I am avoiding the consequences of my actions. But you cannot convince me that there is nothing wrong with this place. They find us at our most vulnerable, and they give us magic. And we’re supposed to do what?
Find the strength to say no to it? When you’re hurting and someone offers you a way out, is there really a choice?
Is there anyone out there who’s going to say, No please, let me suffer?
I quite like it actually. Don’t you see it?
That’s why they do the assessments first. To see if we’re okay.
And if we’re not, they slip us a flyer. New innovative method.
Successful patient stories. Here we can make you new.
We can take it all away. It’s fucking immoral, Kai, that’s what it is! ”
“How?” he demanded, desperate to understand and be understood in return. “How is it immoral when they get nothing out of it?”
“They get control,” I seethed. “They get power over us.”
“And what’s the alternative? To keep this technology to themselves and let us walk around hurting each other without ever taking accountability for our actions? Is this the moral thing to do?”
“At least it’s honest,” I clipped, my face hot, everything hot and ruined.
“Well, unfortunately, Anya, a society can’t sustain itself on honesty alone.”
A pang went through me, a sharp, stabbing sensation in the middle of my chest, and I heard my voice cracking, “And how exactly am I supposed to know that, Kai? Everything I knew, they took it from me. My understanding of this world, of you, of myself, comes from mere instinct. There’s no logic to it.
There’s no logic to any of it. And now what?
I’m supposed to go back to work like nothing happened? ”
Surging forward, breathless, Kai took both of my hands in his and pressed them to his sternum. “Then let’s go to the Center and get your memories back. Or at least find out what happened to you. No matter what it is, we’ll go through it together. I’ll be there. I will not leave you.”
Wrenching myself free, I shouted at him, “Stop saying that! Stop treating me like I’m some lost puppy that desperately needs you to survive!”
For a long, heartrending moment Kai only looked at me, eyes wide and darting. Then, very quietly, almost as if talking to himself, he said, “That is not how I see you.”
Something softened inside me, guilt stirring in my blood. “Then how do you see me?” I asked.
He laughed under his breath, a curt, bitter sound I’d never heard from him before. “Oh, I don’t know, Anya. Maybe as the woman I love. The woman I’m hoping to spend my life with.”
It seemed to be such a simple thing. The feeling between us.
So why was it so hard to hold on to it? If this was the single most indisputable truth of my life, shouldn’t it be absolute?
Was truth absolute in itself, or was it only in theory, by definition?
Was the truth of what was happening here something challengeable once brought into reality?
Because in real life, there was his truth and there was my truth, and although both seemed to be right individually, they became wrong once they were forced to coexist.
I was seized by such anger then, a deep, personal need to rage at the world, because why did it have to be like this? Why did everything have to become so warped and debased? His beliefs, mine, the impassable territory between us.
Then I said the words without even hearing myself, without even understanding what I was saying, “If you love me, you’ll come with me.”