Pure evil was the smile he gave me then. “Someone’s being uncharacteristically polite tonight.”
“I’m always polite,” I claimed.
“Not to me you aren’t,” he argued, leaning closer to take his cigarettes and matches out of the inside pocket of his coat, careful not to touch me in the process. “It’s weird seeing you like this actually. All nervous and docile.”
“I amnotdocile,” I scoffed.
He gave me a permissive, knowing look, threading the cigarette between the lush line of his mouth. “In general, no.”
“Fine,” I relented. “Do you want me to be mean to you then?”
His eyes lowered a fragment, his voice dropping to a near whisper, “No, Anya. I don’t want you to be mean. In fact, I want you to be very, very nice to me.”
Caught glancing between his eyes and mouth, I asked just as privately, “And why is that?”
“Because maybe then I can stop feeling so pathetic,” he said.
I didn’t ask him why he was feeling so pathetic. I knew. He wanted me to know, and Kai always got what he wanted.
Flustered, with my heart beating a most hazardous rhythm, I watched him light the cigarette with a match, the tiny orange flame bobbing in the wind.
“Oh, I have a lighter,” I offered, patting around my bag only to realize that I’d left both my lighter and cigarettes back home.
“It’s okay,” he said, releasing a thin cloud of smoke. “This is going to sound so pretentious, but I actually like the smell of them.”
“Of the matches?”
Another quick inhale, another white film of breath. “Yeah, don’t they give off a kind of bonfire smell? Especially when the weather is like this? It’s very nostalgic to me. It reminds me of going camping with my dad.”
The word was a clean, sharp blow in the center of my chest.Nostalgic.
At once, a dark, fainting feeling stole over me, and I heard myself gasp, “You know that word.”
“Lots of people know that word.”
“I didn’t,” I muttered under my breath, veering so we were both standing shoulder to shoulder and gazing out below.
From this distance the city looked liquid, the web of roads river-like, and the people minuscule, their existence as fragile and meandering as the smoldering end of Kai’s cigarette.
“That’s alright,” he said in a surprisingly gentle tone. “I’ve only recently discovered the worddystopia. I read it in a book from the Outside.”
“Dystopia,” I whispered to myself, tasting the bitter unfamiliarity of it on my tongue. “Sounds like utopia.”
“I know, right? But it turns out it means the opposite.”
The opposite.
I tried to imagine a world opposite to ours, the daily horrors and adversities it would entail, but I found it impossible, the mere concept slipping away from me every time I got close to comprehending it.
“Do you think the Outside is the opposite of here?” I asked Kai very quietly, having the irrational and uncomfortable sense that we were talking about something forbidden, something no one had ever talked about before.
Kai pinched the cigarette between two fingers, his handsome face darkening with contemplation. “I’m not sure if it’s the exact opposite. I just know that it’s worse.”
I felt myself pressing closer, my pulse quickening from a restless, sonorous feeling. “Why do you say that?”
“Well, look at this place.” For a moment, we both paused to take in the full-moon night, the flurries of leaves lifting in the misted air, and the mountains, dark and sloping in the indistinct horizon. Then the city below, all activity and light, billboards and signs floating up as though on their own. A phantasmagoria of endless possibility.
“I mean,” Kai continued in a firm but evocative manner, “just from reading about it, we know their technology is much more advanced than ours, perhaps a lot more exciting too. But can you imagine living in a world where you have to connect to the internet to feel connected at all? Where society has become so disfigured that people have grown more intimate with algorithms than with each other? Where you have to work as efficiently as a highly intelligent machine or absorb information faster than your brain’s ability to process it just to obtain the tiniest sense of relevance? And for what? Toward what end? Death? Is this really progress? Is this the end goal of human development? What is the point of being born on a planet with so much beauty and diversity only to end up as a homogenized lump of muscles that does nothing but stare at screens all day? It’s dehumanizing. Having to substitute living with screen time. But here?” He smiled a little, his face daydreaming. “Here you can just…live. The sheer elasticity with which we navigate our day-to-day lives has to render our way of existing the superior one. Yes, we are limited, information-wise. But sometimes, I wonder, is it really a limit, or is it a safety net? Because, here, at least, we are allowed to be human. There’s no pressure to constantly achieve more, learn more, earn more. Ambition is our choice, not the measure by which we value each other.” He glanced at me from the corner of his eye, a self-conscious ribbon of redness wrapping around his cheekbones. “Sorry. I’m being a little sentimental, aren’t I?”
