“Hey, Anya,” Mr. Leonard called, excitedly enough that even the girls spared us a mildly interested look. “What happened with that word? Nostalgia, wasn’t it? Did it resonate with you?”
“Not yet,” I said, for what else was there to say?
Vaguely, he waved his hand, his cotton-candy hair glinting pure silver under the overhead lights. “Oh, I wouldn’t worry about it. When you get old, all you’ll ever feel is nostalgia.”
???
On my way home I stopped by the convenience store and asked the owner, Mrs. Kim, the same thing I’d asked Mr. Leonard, only to receive the same answer as well.Eleven, no, twelve months ago.
You’d think I’d popped into existence that very day. As though I’d been manufactured. As though I were some kind of advanced piece of machinery that’d come from the Outside. I knew this was a bizarre thing to think about, but it was still easier to picture me as something unreal than to believe I’d actually gone and done this to myself.
“It has happened before,” James reassured me when I called him during his lunch break on the number Kai had given me yesterday. “People get these procedures, and then something doesn’t click right in their brains, and they completely forget about them. My buddy Alex went through memory alteration a couple of years ago. It helped him a lot, you know, with his confidence and stuff. Anyway. One day, out of nowhere, he wakes up, and he’s like his old self again. Anxious, paranoid, fucking miserable, I’m telling you. I drove him down to the Center, and guess what? All it took was one recalibration, and now he’s better than ever.”
None of that made the slightest sense to me, although one thing became glaringly clear: the Center was the reason I had no memories, and the more evident and irrefutable this fact became, the more I wanted to rebel against it. My fear of them, of the things they could do to us, was growing into something visceral, but then again, so was my need to know what had been done to me exactly. But also,howhad they done it to me? With what resources? What kind of technology? And most importantly, what had happened to me to make me request such a procedure in the first place?
I knew the right thing to do was call the front desk and ask for an emergency appointment, although I wasn’t even sure if there was such an option. Inside nothing was urgent. Nothing was grave enough to require immediate attention, yet I was certain that if I called now, they would see me right away.
And I tried to call. I honestly tried, but every time I flipped open the phone, every time I attempted to dial the number, my whole body seized up in dread.
I thought of calling Kai instead just to grant myself a moment of peace, but right when I was about to, the phone rang, and I was surprised to hear Betty’s voice, merry as a jingle, through the line. “Pumpkin, what is this I’m hearing? Are you sick?”
“Um, a bit, yes,” I lied, forcing myself into a dramatic coughing fit as I climbed the stairs up to my apartment.
“Oh, I’m so sorry to hear that,” Betty cried into the receiver. “Do get better soon, alright? We miss you terribly here.”
She paused for a moment, the fax machine shrilling on her end. “So… are we going to talk about the fact that Kai officially knows more things about you than I do?”
Frowning at my door, I readjusted my hold on the phone. “What are you talking about?”
“Well, I stopped by your desk first thing in the morning, and he said that you have a cold or something. That was before you called in.”
“Oh, we just happened to be together when I got sick,” I explained, only to realize a second later the kind of gossip this would spark around the office.
And indeed, “Goodness!” Betty exclaimed. I could even picture her nodding her pretty head like an impressed and, at the same time, horrified grandmother. “You are a wild woman, Anya. A wild woman.”
Days passed, and life, without any explanation or closure, regained its original shape. Only no, not really. Because the hollowness of this shape had been revealed to me now. All my rituals and rules had been dismantled and left to totter meaninglessly around, and how could I ever give them back their stability or meaning?
And yet, for every anxious morning I spent trying to uncover something about my situation, there was a slow and reassuring night because at night, Kai called. And, oh, how I liked that he called. I liked how comfortable he was with calling me. I liked listening to him talk. I liked how sequential and reliable his process of thought was compared to the widening rift of mine. And I also liked that he never asked to hang out. He never suggested that I should invite him over or that I should go meet him somewhere. I liked this because it meant that the friendship we were nurturing was genuine and important in itself and by itself, not just a prelude to something else, something I didn’t have the mental capacity to even think about right now.
Yes, I did find Kai attractive. More than that, I found him intelligent and funny and irrepressibly magnetic. But during this one year I could remember, I had never even kissed someone, let alone fully engaged in a romantic relationship. If I’d done so in the past, it didn’t really matter. I was inexperienced by default, which put me in a singularly vulnerable position and landed Kai in the middle of a very odd, very complex moral dilemma.
So friends we were going to be, just as we’d agreed, for the good of his moral integrity and my already precarious mental stability.
“I just don’t understand why you’re doing this to yourself,” he was saying now. It was Sunday evening, and he was leaving tomorrow. “You’re still planning on going to your appointment, right?”
“Yes.”
“Then why are you torturing yourself with waiting? Why not go right now? I’ll drive you.”
“I’m just trying to see what I can find out by myself first,” I explained as I slipped into bed, the phone hot and vibrating in my hand after an hour of conversation.
“Why?”
So they can’t lie to me.So I have some proof that what they did to me was wrong, whether I asked for it or not.
Terrible, unfaithful words. Words I could never say aloud, especially not to him. Just recalling his passionate speech about the Inside and our way of living gave me an uncomfortable, heart-dropping feeling.
“Because,” was all I muttered, burying my face into the pillow.
