The Loneliness of Distant Beings

Chapter Eighteen

I don't want to go to the cinema with Ezra; it's always been my place. I even used to go by myself sometimes when Dad or Pan or Em or someone didn't want to go. It was always something I loved to do: escape for a while; get out of here. I've never been with Dom. I guess once I knew him I stopped wanting to escape.

The thing with the movies here is that there's no choice – they just play what they play – and though I can't prove it I have a significant hunch that it's all been cherry-picked to match up to whatever they're wanting you to feel about life, in a version of propaganda that isn't even particularly subtle if you ask me. Like if everyone's really down on on-board life and wishing they were never born they start playing something really feel-good or they pick something that's really pessimistic about life on Earth so that you end up thinking the Ventura isn't so bad. If I had to guess I would imagine that tonight it's going to be something Christmas-related since they're always pretty hot on getting everyone in the mood for it when it rolls around, every arbitrary 365-day cycle, which it will do in about a month.

Anyway, Ezra is getting popcorn and eying me since even though I am thinking all of this, and thinking a lot of things, I am not actually saying anything, and then, waiting for the popcorn still, he says, 'Do you have a favourite film?'

When I feel like this, I am not good at pretending that I'm not. I struggle to even get words out, so I am stuck for a while, not actually able to form sounds, until I say, 'Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.'

He leans back, looking relieved that I've said something, anything, but after a little while of looking off to the side, thinking, I guess, he says, 'I don't know that one. What's it about?'

While I'm thinking about it, while I'm figuring out which words I can be bothered to say, he is turning around and getting handed the popcorn by the girl who works the counter, giving her one of these awful half winks he does when he is flirting, and the way she looks back at him makes me feel even more like I wish I wasn't there so I am walking away by the time he catches up with me.

'Where are you going? Tell me about the film. Your favourite film? Tell me.' He throws a handful of popcorn in his mouth and smiles, holding the little plastic bucket of it out towards me and I shake my head.

'It's about a guy, who breaks up with a girl, and she gets her memory wiped, just basically because she doesn't want to think about him any more – she can't bear to spend every single minute thinking about him because it hurts too much.'

He stops munching then, watches me, watches me watching him, nods. 'OK, and then what happens?'

'She . . . I guess she . . . ' But in the end I can't keep pretending I want to talk to him about it so I say, 'Are we going in or not?'

It turns out I'm wrong about it being a Christmas movie because it's not, and in fact it's one I've seen before and it always used to make me yearn for its sunsets and lakes and long grass and summer and ducks and clapboard houses, but this time I can barely watch it, can barely stay focused on the screen. Instead of losing myself, all I feel is stuck in my itchy uncomfortable seat in the cold, in the dark, in the horrible reverberation through the floor because down here we're close to the engine rooms.

So when it ends I go to the toilet to cry, and maybe that's why when he asks me afterwards I agree to go to View because, somehow, going back to the place I last saw Dom is the closest thing I have to actually being with him, and that seems like the only thing that'll make me feel any better.

There's a few people on View now, unlike the last time I was here, but still not that many. Back when the recons were happening there was so much laughter and buzz in the air; now it's almost like the few people that are here are just going through the motions, or maybe that's just me. Anyway, Ezra's steering me back to a couple of seats in the third row when I see him, right up front but to the right of the main window. Dom. Where we were that night, right in the exact place I last saw him, as if he never left it, but next to him, just finishing off laughing, is Annelise.