Pained just at the thought, I jerked out of Theo’s hold, knocking the back of my head against the wall behind me. “I’m sorry,” I panted. “I can’t. I… I don’t want to.”
Theo caved into me, his forehead dropping on my bare shoulder, his breath echoing as labored as mine. “Ah, fuck,” he sighed, and then even more quietly he asked, “Was he even real? That man you met in there.”
Heart pulsing in my throat, I whispered, “He was real to me.”
“Did he make you happy?”
“Don’t,” I pleaded, shaking my head. “Don’t torture yourself like this.”
He straightened over me, his hands dropping from my hipbones. “I just want to know. Did he make you smile? Because I know I never did.”
“That’s not true—”
“No,” he cut me off, his voice louder, harsher. “For once, let us be honest with each other.”
It was what I’d always wanted from our relationship, wasn’t it? The strength and dignity to always be honest with each other. And yet, something inside me clutched in anguish as I forced myself to utter, “He gave me peace. He gave me compassion and understanding and hope.” The postcard, I recalled, the memory of it fluttering behind my eyelids, tender as a sparrow. That tiny love letter that I would never get to read. The future it had promised. “Hope most of all.”
“It could have been the simulation that made you feel like this,” Theo argued, desperate to understand something I wasn’t sure could be understood at all. At least not with any kind of cold, sterile logic.
“No,” I croaked. “It was him. I wanted to leave. I wanted to wake up. My mind was constantly trying to shock me out of that place. The only reason I stayed for as long as I did was to be with him.”
Stepping back, alarmed almost, Theo looked at me. “Ann,” he pronounced sharply, “you don’t even know who this man is. He could be anyone. He could be a fucking psychopath.”
“But it’s not only about him.”
Indignant now, he flung his arms at his sides, voice rising again, “Then what is it? What is it about?”
“It’s knowing that love can feel like this, Theo,” I snapped, memory yanking through me. “That I deserve to be loved like this, tolivelike this. I don’t want to be your problem anymore. I don’t want to wreck your life. I just want to fix mine.”
Panting almost, he ran his hands through his hair, then roughly down his face. “So what happens now? You’re going to return to the firm, and we’re going to see each other every day and do what? Pretend that we’re friends?”
Hearing these words—what happens now?—not just as a cruel device of my thoughts but as an actual question in desperate need of answering, was like being plunged in cold water. I was washed in a tide of clarity, desires and decisions, dream and reality converging at last.
Steadily, certainly, I told him, “I won’t be returning to the firm, Theo.”
For a while he only stared at me, dumbfounded, mouth opening and closing, unable to produce any sounds, let alone words. Then with an incredulous, bitter laugh, he scoffed, “You cannot be serious.”
“I want to go back to the Public Defender’s Office. And in the meantime I can do some pro bono work for the Legal Aid Program—”
“Ann,” he urged, clutching my shoulders and shaking me as if to wake me out of a terrible nightmare. “Come on.”
“What?”
“You have to come back to L&S. You werethisclose to becoming a partner. You can’t just throw all your good work away.”
Pushing him off, I strode down the hallway, needing the air, the space, the perspective. “We don’t dogood work,Theo. We lie and make money, or rather ensure companies built on nothing but exploitation keep their money.”
Our steps were silent on the sleek marble floor, but I could feel him coming after me, the heat of his body drawing nearer. With a hand around my elbow, he stopped me. “It’s not our fault the world works the way it does, Anya. It’s not as if having some harmless little job and living month to month in a crappy apartment will make a difference. You’re just one person.”
“I don’t want to make a difference,” I hissed, wrenching myself free. “I just don’t want to be a part of the problem anymore. And why are these the only two options anyway? Why do I either have to be some kind of martyr or a component of all this misery? Why can’t I just exist kindly and respectfully? Help people who are less privileged than I am, consume less, create more, do the best that I can do for myself and my community. Not affecting thousands of lives but just the few people around me, so maybe then they can show this basic kindness to their people, and they to theirs. Why is this so fucking unrealistic? Why is being an averagely decent human being romantic somehow?”
Another flurry of memories, another stir of emotion in my sternum: October night on a rooftop, Kai talking to me about fate, about accountability, about life as something to be experienced, not something to be conquered.You’re a very romantic person, Kai,I’d told him then, and now I was being the romantic one, standing here wondering if any of the things I had loved about him—the things that had affected me and made me rethink my entire life—existed in reality.
The worst thing about the Programs was that they really did have the potential to help people. To offer them perspective. To expose them to different ways of living. To show them how good they could be to themselves and to others.
But what was the point of doing all this work just to wipe it away afterwards? Were they really deleting our memories to protect us, or were they deleting them so we would never get any better?
People were leaving Hive feeling rejuvenated and restored, and then, as they slowly reintegrated into the real world without the memories of the things they’d experienced in the Programs, they reverted to their old patterns of behavior until all they could think about was returning to Hive for another restorative experience, growing more and more addicted not to improving the real world but to escaping it.
