Side Life by Steve Toutonghi

Author:Steve Toutonghi
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Literary Fiction
Publisher: Soho Press
Published: 2018-03-13T19:02:56+00:00

Chapter 11

Settling Down

Their new home rested on a foundation of mystery, its security reliant on a willingness to dampen their curiosity and accept that what lay below them shouldn’t play a further role in who they became.

Since Mona had told them that the worlds in the crèche were real, Vin had been thinking about how his hosts had felt his presence. Had he been a voice in their heads, a current of desire, an inclination, an obsessive focus? And how much of him was exposed? The ideas made him feel porous, as if influences with undetectable agendas might transit through him and change him, as if awareness might be a colloidal presence, shifting in interactions with a boundless expanse of mind.

“I don’t think we can use it anymore,” Kim said one evening, interrupting his reverie. “We shouldn’t even log in. I want our lives to mean things that make sense. And that thing isn’t right. I don’t want to think about it any more than we have to, to take care of Mona.”

“No,” Vin agreed, realizing that his experience with the crèche and the reality of having Kim in his life had made him a different person. He felt indebted to Nerdean, and strengthened his commitment to maintaining her secret. Rather than start a company, he found a good job as a software developer, one that allowed him to work almost entirely from home. The people he knew all seemed unchanged from the people he remembered and he didn’t notice anything different about the world itself, but that didn’t quite make sense. He assumed there must be differences he hadn’t discovered or couldn’t detect.

He tried to enjoy planning a future with Kim, but a persistent feeling of looseness in the linkage between events baffled him. How could he fully embrace this life when he was not entirely sure how it came to be? There were stretches when it felt like time was passing so quickly that it became a blur, a roar in his ears, and others—often at night—when he lay in the sleepless and broken reality of a passionate desire just to see an hour end, and in the whiplash between those two he wondered what he had landed in, and what he truly was.

After her internship, Kim took a job as an event planner at a small game company. She captured how he felt one evening after a late dinner. “It’s like I’m a skipping stone,” she said. “I’m completely there, and then I lift off and skip to the next thing so fast it feels as though nothing happened. Big changes happen, are happening, but I only make a choice and then move.”

They converted the basement into an apartment with a separate entrance. He negotiated time to remodel before starting his job so he and Kim could do sensitive work themselves. The plumbing and electricity were already in place.

They put walkie-talkies in the apartment and their master bedroom, and stocked the apartment with canned and boxed food. Vin never told Kim that Mona had warned him about herself.

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