“Oh, you don’t have to do that,” I reassured him, searching for his eyes.
But he was not going to look back this time. Perhaps because he didn’t want to; perhaps because he couldn’t. Didn’t trust himself to do so.
Outside my building, I stood on the steps while he remained on the sidewalk. His hair was damp, his face stippled with droplets, his gaze turned up to me, soft and revealing. And if my life wasn’t constituted by a mere handful of months, I would say that this was the kind of thing I’d been reading and secretly dreaming aboutmy whole life.
“Tomorrow,” he said in a surprisingly firm tone, “call me after your assessment. I’ll leave with the night train. Just in case something happens.”
My breath turned into a thick film of fog as I exhaled, “Thank you, Kai.”
He lowered his eyes a bit, and even from this distance I was able to see the column of his throat narrowing. “Get some sleep, alright?”
We said our goodnights, and I went back upstairs to find the apartment warm and watery with light from outside.
I took off my clothes and makeup, and for an hour or two I lay in bed with eyes wide open. I could not close them. I could not sleep. I was full of words from another world. I was full of loneliness I no longer wanted.
Chapter Nine
Standing there, before the white concrete mass of the Center, it felt as though I’d parachuted into a different world. Most of the buildings here were old and colorful, and so the Center’s dome, with its sturdy structure and pristine facade of pale hexagons, stood out like a beacon: bright, serene, impenetrable against the heavy autumn sky.
The outside was encompassed by neat clusters of cypresses, pretty metal benches, and soft patches of grass interrupted by cobblestone paths leading to each of the building’s entrances, the glass doors revolving into cylinders of light.
I had a five o’clock appointment, but I got there a bit earlier, so I had enough time to relax and go through the list of questions I’d prepared yesterday. I would be calm, I told myself. I would show no signs of fear or distress. I would not raise any alarms because I didn’t know how the Center dealt with distressed citizens. I didn’t know how the Center dealt with any kind of abnormality, and despite James’s reassurances, I still felt like I was an exception in a world of rules, a droplet of chaos in a universe of order.
So I would be careful. I would go through my assessment, get my answers, and leave this place as fast as possible. And then…
Then I had no idea what I was going to do.
Part of me wanted to fall back to my old rhythms. I missed going to work. I missed the ease and comfort of my routine. But at the same time the mere idea of it sickened me. My every thought, my every feeling had become bifurcated. I wanted my life back, but I also wanted to escape it. I wanted to regain my faith in the Center and the Inside, but I also had this profound need to reject it, to start questioning everything. Their definition of well-being, their motives, the stones upon which this whole world was built.
Yes, we were happy. Yes, we were safe. But at what cost? There were no high walls to separate the Inside from the Outside. There was no army, no evil force to prohibit us from leaving, to dictate how our lives should be lived. And yet, there were words we did not know, and histories we never learned, and trauma we were told to bury instead of heal.
And maybe I was sick for thinking all of this. Maybe I was focusing on the shadows instead of the bright golden sun that was casting them, but I could not stop myself from feeling this way, as much as I could not stop from going to where my every instinct was telling me not to. There was something predetermined about the whole thing, it seemed, something originally wired into my brain: the need to seek help from the people who had caused me to need help in the first place.
The inside of the building was as one would expect. A sleek serenity-land, orderly and reassuring. There were no liminal spaces and no waiting rooms. Everything was open and transparent, with exposed overhead lights and a fresh, clean fragrance wreathing through the air.
After I gave my name to one smiling, soft-eyed receptionist, I was escorted by yet another smiling, soft-eyed woman in a pale pink uniform to one of the indoor gardens, where I was told to sit on a perfectly comfortable ergonomic chair and was given a glass of crisp mint water, an informational brochure, and a form to fill out, while ambient tunes and chirping birds I could not see lulled me into a trance.
After I filled the form, I read through the brochure, which for the most part boasted heartfelt patient stories—stories of people who’d gone through procedures that seemed as much alien as harrowing to me. Memory deletion, memory alteration, genetic therapy to enhance resilience to stress, genetic therapy to improve cognitive function, virtual reality exposure to eliminate social anxiety, and neural interface therapy, which, to my horror, involved some kind of implant that modulated your entire brain chemistry.Your desired state of being, a touch away.
There was no hurt, no phobia, no trauma the Center could not extract from you. This was what made the Inside the utopia it was. We eradicated the suffering and the results of that suffering from the root. We were not just healthy. We were new. Here, you could become anyone you wanted, and if a painful memory or a bothersome insecurity was holding you back from being your greatest, healthiest, most functioning self, then all you had to do was come to the Center and start anew.
First came the physical examination, which was so thorough I was left dazed and exhausted afterwards, with a strange pressure building in the space between my eyes and my brain.
Doctor after doctor came into the overwarm, floodlit exam room to check me for one thing or another, while steady, affectless voices sounded through the intercom at regular intervals, proclaiming over and over how elated, how determined, how grateful the Center was to serve the citizens of the Inside.
By the end of it, I felt as though I’d been trapped inside these sterile rooms for years now, going through endless rounds of pointless, mind-numbing examinations, the borders of reality getting a bit more smudged every time I was told to look into a pinpoint of light, until there were no borders at all.
Then it was time for the psychological evaluation, which was both the reason I’d returned here and the reason I wanted to fling the door open and run as far away from this place as I possibly could.
I was given another form to fill and was led to another room, a similar albeit cozier space, decorated with plants and floor lamps and a plush sofa facing an equally plush armchair, two matching blotches of pink on the white canvas of the room.
For a while, I stood by the door, feeling sick, lightheaded, and barely able to listen to my own thoughts, just the ringing from my growing headache and the echoes from the intercom, until a small-framed, middle-aged woman came in with a clipboard and a smile.Mrs. Lauren, the name tag on her pink lab coat informed me.
She had a sweet, round face, almost like a little girl’s, but her blue eyes were x-ray sharp and intelligent. “Please, Ms. Anya, sit down,” she said in a pleasant but professional manner.
Reluctantly, I unglued myself from the spot by the door and took a seat, only for the most irrational and overwhelming sense of regret to steal over me.I shouldn’t have come, the thought rocketed through my mind, my composure peeling off me layer by layer until I was left bare of defenses, of voice and coherency.
Behind her, there was a white poster, inside a white frame, hanging horizontally on the sterling white wall.Here we are all connected, it read in pale pink letters. Words that had appeased and reassured me countless times before. But not now. Now they were a giant hand on the back of my neck. Heavy. Oppressive.
