Until, finally, I broke. “Kai?”
He turned on his side so he could look at me better, his face pale and lustrous in the dim radiance of the room. “Yes?”
“Nothing,” I murmured, tucking my hand under the pillow. “I just wanted to see if you were asleep.”
“Oh,” he said, hesitant. “Are you sure you don’t want me to move to the sofa?”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. You seem a bit tense.”
“I’m just thinking.”
“What about?”
“So many things,” I sighed. “My mind won’t stay quiet.”
He hummed deep in his throat. “Yeah, I know the feeling.”
Another pause, another inch conquered between our bodies. Then, warily, he rasped, “I have a confession to make.”
I drew back a little, uncertain what to make of this. “Okay,” I whispered.
He let out a nervous exhalation, and quietly, he began, “So, a little over a year ago, before we met, I was having a really hard time. I started having all these negative feelings. Doubts and fears and an absolutely unjustified need to rage at the world. And the more I tried to suppress them, the more intense they became. I felt like my life was something I needed to escape from but couldn’t. Like I was trapped within it, imprisoned in my own body. So during my assessment, I decided to try the genetic therapy the Center offers. And I’m still not sure how it worked, but it did.”
He stopped and looked at me, guilty and anxious for my reaction, because a confession was almost always also a dare. A dare to reveal something of yourself in return. But I had no grand reaction in me. Nothing, but a vague sense of relief, for Kai was finally clarified to me as the person he was behind the gloss of his charisma. “Kai—”
“I know. I know,” he breathed, taut as a bowstring. “I should have told you sooner. I was just… I was so ashamed, Anya.”
Ashamed, he said, and something convulsed in my chest, a pain unlike anything I’d ever felt before. “Why?” I asked. “Do you think it’s shameful that I deleted my memories?”
In the faint semidarkness I felt rather than saw his hand move over my temple, brushing back my hair before cupping the side of my face. “Of course not,” he told me, his voice cracking a little. “You just have this image of me. Of this really positive person who slides through life and doesn’t take himself too seriously, but the truth is I wouldn’t have been who I am today without the procedure. Without the Center. The reason I’m telling you this now is because I want you to know that you’re not alone. Everyone has things inside them they want to bury. Everyone struggles. We’re just doing it very quietly here.”
Yes, this was the point of the Inside. To suffer as quietly and inconspicuously as possible as to not disturb the delicate intricacies of its order. A surface order. A slate of water that could break apart by a single droplet of chaos. And so every year we were assessed, evaluated, and recalibrated to perfection. Because perfection was not our natural state. Because to enjoy peace we first had to wage war on the most erratic parts of humanity. All the anxieties and fears and self-preserving violences were wiped clean from us. And if it so happened that someone’s mind rejected all this supreme scintillating cleanliness? Then it shut down, the way mine did. Or perhaps not. Perhaps Kai was right and they did do something to me, something my mind was now trying to erase.
But then again, if the people at the Center had something to hide, why let me go? I was right there. They had me. If I was not the mastermind of my condition, then why did I feel so responsible for it?
That was why Kai felt ashamed, I realized. Because he’d done this to himself. Because he’d been given two choices: to suffer through the long and excruciating process of understanding and healing himself, or to be made happy and new in the span of a single afternoon, and he had made the wrong one.
And so now we would both forever live in the shadows of the people we could have been. A small price to pay, one would think, for all this sparkling wellness.
With a painful rushing in my throat, I asked, “Do you ever wonder who you would have become without the procedure?”
Kai lowered his eyes, the skin above them flashing silver in the moonlight. “No one good, I think.”
Slowly, I reached for his hand under the rumpled cover, and he responded by threading our fingers together, which felt more intimate than anything else we could have done on this bed tonight. Just to lie here next to him with not only our fingers intertwined but also our thoughts, our experiences, our complete understanding of each other was more meaningful than any other physical act.
“I don’t think goodness is synonymous with happiness, Kai,” I said. “You might not have been as happy with your life as you are now, but you would have still been a good man. Because that’s who you are.”
He shifted a little, using our laced fingers to bring me closer to him, his face hovering mere inches from mine. “Don’t you think sadness has a way of robbing you of your kindness?” he wondered.
“Perhaps,” I murmured. “But how can we be called humans without it? Without the pain. What are we?”
“Better,” he said.
Better, which we were, here in our well-connected, well-reformed serenity-land with our refined living and calibrated minds, only knowing what was necessary for our survival.
Better, but not true. Not real.
