“Answer the question.”
He shrugs. “Like you said, capital and labor dictate our lives. I wanted a say in that.”
“You do know money isn’t real, right?” she quips.
Aleksandr stares at her. “I beg your pardon.”
“It’s all a social construct,” Lili says, sipping her wine.
“I can assure you it’s a social construct with heft.”
She waves her free hand, dismissive. “Anyway, so you wanted to play Monopoly on a big-boy board—that’s it? Push aside the government, crush the proletariat, let the free market expand evermore, rule over it all?”
“Yes, I believe government should leave us alone to compete in an unrestricted free market,” Aleksandr replies, with a smirk like he’s intentionally irritating her.
“Don’t you ever, I don’t know—want to know something will catch you?” Lili asks, grasping for a new approach; they’ve broached this topic before. She settles against his side, glass in hand. She feels nestled in this cloister, with him. “It’s all theoretical, sure, but to know that there were systems, support, that would take care of you, if you fell.”
“For someone so loath to depend on others, you’re very set on interconnected responsibility,” he muses. His arm comes to rest on the back of the banquette behind her.
“I’m notloathto depend on others.”
“No?” he says, lifting his hand to brush her hair over her bare shoulder.
“I know how it feels,” she returns. “To feel like you’re always about to fall.”
“Yes, so do I. That precarity, that fear of failure—it drives you to achieve.” Slowly, he starts to skim his fingers over the line of her collarbone. Between bare skin and fabric, his fingers toy with the thin strap of her dress. “The sense that things are guaranteed makes us lazy. Mediocrity—comfort, security—it’s not what got us to where we are.”
“And where are we, genuinely, Aleksandr?” she asks, irritated but also impassioned with this sense of agreeing on an experience, then diverging so drastically in the solution. “An age of GoFundMe healthcare? Privatized everything, millions of people dragged down into poverty, the grand neoliberal project realized?”
Aleksandr shrugs. “Survival of the fittest.”
Lili clenches her jaw, laying her hand flat on the table. “As human beings, we’re owed some modicum of dignity—some ability to meet our basic needs!”
“The world owes us nothing.”
She frowns, taken aback by his cold tone. It’s striking how he shifts from mild amusement to these moments of cold, clear assertion; the sense of his beliefs rather than thoughts, convictions rather than theories.
“The world—our country—shouldn’t actively harm us,” she counters. “That’s not too much to ask.”
“If it takes away from my freedom, yes, it is.”
She shakes her head, at a loss. “I don’t get it, Aleksandr. What do you want, power or freedom?”
“They’re one and the same.”
It’s hard, but she pushes back on the knee-jerk instinct to argue; wanting instead to understand this; to understand him. “How do you reconcile that?” she asks.
“The power to define your own life, live as you see fit, on the basis of your own abilities? That’s freedom. No one can make my choices for me. I know what it’s like to have nothing, no control. I’ve fought for this—that power—and no one will take that away from me.”
“Is that your biggest fear then? Being powerless?”
“Yes,” Aleksandr says, simply. “Poverty—powerlessness—terrifies me. The idea that I can’t control what’s happening, can’t take care of myself and mine. It’s—that’s hell. The insecurity, the lack of safety. I lived in that for too long.”
Moments like this, when he’s honest—vulnerable even—but calm: They make Lili feel like the exposed one, along with her own small, disconcerting sense of agreement with his confessed fear. “So, shouldn’t we help one another, as a society?” she pushes. “Keep each other safe from that insecurity, that hell?”
Aleksandr sighs. “I want to believe that. I do. But I’ve never seen it happen. I’ve only ever seen people protect what’s theirs, betray each other for gain. It’s neither good nor evil, it just is.”
“Isn’t that—well, isn’t that rather ruthless?” she says, wrinkling her nose with distaste.
