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.Ihad 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?
