“I’ll send you one for every day I’m there,” he promised.
Across from us, the Center’s billboard shone as white and tender as a cloud against the clear blue sky, its message unchanging and eternal. It did not matter how far away we were from each other, physically or mentally. As long as we were here, we would always be connected.
Chapter Seven
That morning I woke up groggy and fever-warm after the longest nap of my life. For a long while I lay in bed, sipping bitter coffee and smoking with the window open, dressed in nothing but a t-shirt and my underwear. I was thirsty and hungry and in desperate need of a shower, but I was too numb to form coherent thoughts just yet, much less move.
It was well into the morning that I managed to get out of bed and make myself feel human again. After I showered, dressed, and made some lunch, I called work and asked for a few days off, evading all of their concern-riddled questions by claiming that I was coming down with something and that I’d hopefully be back in the office after Monday’s assessment.
Then my investigation began.
I rummaged through every drawer, cupboard, and cabinet of the apartment, going through stray notes, grocery lists, bills, the dates on those bills, and the dates I paid those bills. I checked the back of the bookshelves and between the pages of my books. I searched under the couch and under the bed and even lifted the mattress and found what I had expected to find all along. Nothing.
There was no photograph I could not remember taking, no secret journal or phone number I’d forgotten all about. No totems or sentimental postcards from a parent or a relative, nothing to evoke a memory or strike the slightest sense of nostalgia from me.
I could go to the Center and ask for my birth certificate, but that didn’t feel like a real option. It felt like walking into a trap. So I decided to go on a different route. I called my landlord and asked him when exactly I had moved into this apartment. He was, of course, alarmed by this question, and after nearly fifteen minutes of him fussing over me, he gave me the date, which was the same as my assessment.
Evidently, I had moved into this apartment early in the morning, and then later in the afternoon I’d gone down to the Center, and my life as I knew it had begun. Had he been the one to show me the apartment? No, he said. He was represented by a real estate agency. So I called the agency and asked for the name and phone number of the realtor. This was sensitive information, they said. They couldn’t give it to me unless I went by the office with my citizen ID. But this proved to be a dead end as well, for once I got there, no one seemed to know anything about an apartment on Arcade Street. Whoever had shown me the place must not be with the agency anymore, they collectively decided, returning to their phone calls and conversations as if this was something normal, a mere daily occurrence.
And this I found to be the most sinister, the most questionable thing of all, for what were the chances, really now, that the only person who’d had an interaction with me before that day had vanished into thin air?
Then it dawned on me: what if they weren’t the only person? What if the city was filled with people who knew me long before I came to know myself?
Heartened by that thought, I scuttled to Mr. Leonard’s, my face and hands prickling from the sharp autumn chill, while the streets around me glittered in fragments under the escaping sunlight.
Thankfully, the bookshop was warm and quiet save for a group of giggling schoolgirls bent over the romance section, which was set up right up front.
Mr. Leonard smiled at me the way he always did, looking up from his desk while pushing his spectacles up his long nose, his warm, intelligent eyes filling with delight and a hint of curiosity.
“I need your help,” I explained.
“Well,” he replied good-naturedly, “I’m mostly practiced in providing stories. But for you, my dear, I’ll see what I can do.”
He let me sit down next to him on the low stool behind his desk and listened to me go on and on about things I barely understood myself before he asked in his infinitely gentle manner, “And you don’t remember asking for the procedure?”
“No. I can’t remember what happened during my assessment at all. That’s why I wanted to ask if you can remember the first time I came here. I mean,Iremember the first time. But what if this wasn’t the first time and was in fact my fourth, or tenth, or hundredth time, and I’d just forgotten all about it?”
“I see,” he said, nodding solemnly. “Well, let me think.”
So I let him, breathlessly watching his expression turn from contemplative to bright with recollection. “Oh yes,” he exclaimed. “It was eleven, no, twelve months ago. You got a copy ofSummer Affairand asked what time we usually close. And then you came back the next day and picked up two more books.”
And, of course, this was exactly what I remembered as well. It was right after I finished my assessment and before I returned to the apartment, an apartment that was brand-new although it hadn’t felt like it at the moment. It had felt like home. It had felt like I’d lived there my entire life. The day after that, I started working at RAM. I met Betty and Kai, and my life slowly but steadily gained its current, recognizable shape.
“Oh, Anya, dear,” Mr. Leonard groaned apologetically. “I just can’t stand to see you so despondent.”
From the small plexiglass bowl at the front of his desk, he grabbed one of the magnetic bookmarks and pushed it into my palm as if it were a piece of candy. “Here,” he said. “On me.”
The bookmark was small, heart-shaped, and pink, and for some reason it made me want to cry, because this, I imagined, was something you’d offer to a child, and in that moment, I wished I were a child. I wished I could scream and cry and ask irrational questions and be given proper, easily digestible answers. I wished I could exchange my self-awareness and self-preservation for the blind faith that children sometimes had. Because if I had faith, then maybe I could go to the Center right now, tell someone what was happening to me, and be given an actual solution, or at least be told that everything was going to be alright.
“Thank you, Mr. Leonard,” I rasped, barely holding back tears.
“Would you like a cup of tea?” Mr. Leonard offered kindly. “Or I can run to the cafe next door and get you one of those fancy coffee beverages everyone seems to like these days.”
Touched, I smiled a little, shaking my head. “Thank you, but I should get going.”
“Ah,” he sighed, his eyes soft behind his spectacles. “You young people never stay still.”
With a heavy heart, I made my way through the shop, the glossy colorful covers leaving me unmoved for once, the beauty of this place dissolving into the disorder of my life.
