by Paula Guran
She gets on the tram, der 71er. She has longed for the tram for a long time, the creaking comfort of it. She remembers when the 71 trams threaded between ruined blocks. There really isn’t anyone left from that story in this story. There’s just—
“I can’t . . . I can’t open my Blu-ray player for the training video,” her supervisor says. She is a young, striving American woman, with a flat accent from the prairie. Freia, with this body, is slightly younger than her. Neither of them wants to be seen as incompetent, but they express it in completely different ways. Freia is supposed to be (she checks the bilingual business card on her desk) a digital strategist at this outpost of an American ad agency in Central Europe, the latest among twenty outposts or so in a network, like the trading zones of the old colonial powers. It’s not clear what she’s supposed to sell or strategize. Her office building, which used to be an imperial artillery college, also overlooks the Danube, but much more closely to the riverbank than her apartment. She’s upriver. She can see boats, mostly courier speedboats, cut through the sleet. The Viennese say that the Danube only looks blue if you’re in love. This is no time of love.
“Fuck,” her supervisor says. “Fuck it. Argh. Sorry.” She really is. Her name is Agatha. She’s tall, and awkwardly bends over the desk. Her blond ponytail keeps flopping into her eyes.
“Let me try something,” Freia says.
“This Blu-ray in there is the training video,” she says. “But it’s not loading properly.”
“Yes, got it,” Freia says. “Got it.”
She finds the needle from her messenger bag and manages not to bloodlet again with it.
As she inserts the needle into the tiny “eject” indentation, Agatha watches breathlessly and rather too close. Freia realizes that the office has the feel of a tryst that has just started, yet at the same time has gone on too long. Though the Viennese outpost been open less than four months, desperation is written on all employees’ faces. When she first came into the office in the early morning, Freia opened the bottom drawer of her desk and found a tangle of VR headsets from about two years ago—from sleek masks to the smartphone mounts made of heavy cardboard or plastic. She gasped and closed it quickly, as if the drawer contained cobras or bombs. Their main clients back in America are various packaged snack brands from the Midwest—which doesn’t appear to her like a “good fit” with Vienna and its magical tortes. But who is she to say. She actually knows nothing about advertising. She doesn’t feel like she’s really good at convincing others to do what she wants.
The Blu-ray finally chokes and whirls and the disc slides out with difficulty. Fuck you fuck you it seems to be saying to her—
“There! Aha!” Agatha says, clapping her hands. She grabs the disc and hands it back to her. “Uh, be sure to watch this. I guess . . . I guess you have to reinsert it?”
“I’ll . . . try restarting,” Freia says. She holds the needle between her fingers and sets her hair with it, to get it out of her eyes. She’s always restarting.
Every time she dies in Vienna, she goes back to the magnanery, and she’s given more cocoons to boil. And every time the magnanery looks different. The décor never matches the time period. Several hundred years ago, right after the big siege by the Ottomans, the magnanery was a sterile laboratory and she wore clean suits, the kind used for making microchips. When she died during the February Uprising in ’34, rounded up after a street battle and shot in the head by a Heimwehr teenager, the silk-makers all wore medieval dresses of coarse wool. Woden has never stayed in one place or time. After one of her escapades in the worst year of the Great War, he chained her by the neck and left her in a corner in the magnanery for five years to wash the raw silk with soap and water. He gave no pretense of rehabilitation. That was when she figured out the trick with her own blood, loosening an edge of her quartz washbasin and sharpening it for a year in secret.
This time, she doesn’t want to die here, she refuses to—she will refuse to die here. She watches the training video, which has glitched horribly, and makes this vow to herself. Because she doesn’t want to make thread again, to stand at the spindle in close proximity to her ex again. Each of those cocoons in the boiling water has a soul inside of it, and there are millions of them, and they die in the cocoons. They evaporate. That’s Freia’s job, to make sure that the dead die again. The others see it as embarrassing punishment to be sent down as a mortal, but she lives for nothing else. She wants the prick of the thumb, the gush. And she knows it will come. Because she always bleeds eventually.
But she also knows, when she is alive in Vienna, Woden hunts her. Or he hires creatures to hunt her. He always hunts her down and brings her back.
After the workday, Agatha asks her if she wants to go to karaoke with a few other people from the office. This makes her happy. She agrees. The sleet has stopped. There’s four or five others going, who she hasn’t really talked to, because they seem to have their shit together. It’s supposed to be a short walk to the karaoke place, near die Uni, but Agatha can’t quite seem to find it as they cut through Josefstadt, but it’s great, she insists, and Freia believes her. How did endearing Agatha become a supervisor? Soon enough the other coworkers concoct excuses to leave so there are only the two of them left.
“Ooh, spiced wine,” Agatha says, coming into one of the small, open squares—this one off Piaristengasse—that are everywhere in the central districts of Wien. “Uh, I mean, glühwein. I’m trying to get better with my German. Do you want to get some?” The air smells like cloves.
Freia smiles. “Sure,” she says. Glowing wine. A little late in the season for it, but on the other hand it really is fucking cold for March. The wine-seller is just off the steps of the Piarist church, and the two sit on the steps holding their hot paper cups.
“I . . . just love this city,” Agatha says. “There’s so much history. Layers and layers of it.”
“Yeah,” Freia says, taking a gulp, letting the star anise and cinnamon and citrus drain into her.
“Shit. I probably sound like a stupid American to you,” she says to Freia, her head down. “Jesus, Agatha. ‘Layers of history.’ Of course there is.”
“No, no, it’s . . . sweet,” Freia says, turning to look at Agatha.
“Okay, that’s not the answer I was expecting,” Agatha says. “But . . . I kind of like it?”
Freia laughs. “Good, good. Where are you from then?”
“Um, a small town in Wisconsin you’ve never heard of. I moved away as soon as I could. Where I grew up was—” She shudders. “Awful. Just awful for—well.” She pauses, holding back words. “Never mind. And you?”
“Me?” Freia stares straight ahead, at the two bare trees on the platz, and she swears she can see the writhing of hundreds of hungry worms on the twigs. “I’ve been kind of everywhere? But Vienna has been . . . home for a long time.”
“I wish this place could be home,” Agatha says, swigging the last of her wine. “But I don’t really have a home. The company back in the States sent me here to their worst-performing office to figure out what to do with me. Probably figuring out a way to ‘let me go.’”
“Fuck them,” Freia says, and she wishes more than anything she had a cigarette.
“I don’t know if I have that luxury,” Agatha says.
They sit in silence for a couple minutes, except that Freia can hear voices echo off the cobblestones.
He’s looking for you he’s looking he’s looking—
“This might be a strange thing to say,” Agatha says slowly, “and maybe it’s the wine talking. But even though I’m your boss, when I first saw you come in the office I got—really really scared of you.”
You should be, she thinks. This is a natural and healthy response. Instead she says: “Are you still scared of me?”
“A little?” Agatha says in a quiet voice.
Freia leans over and bumps shoulders with her. “Well, just this once, I’ll promise not to bite.”
Agatha blushes.<
br />
Sometimes, when she’s strong—or at least feels the ghost of the strength she used to possess—she thinks: Start anew and triumphant and leave the magnanery, leave Vienna, leave everything, become mortal, even though you’ll die, you’ll be free. She supposes that it would be possible to forsake her self. But she can’t bear to think of herself as one of the hungry insensate worms on the golden tree of death and becoming an anonymous commodity for Woden before having her boiled remains sloughed off as wastewater. And she could never do what all the other goddesses, all of them, have done—renounce their names and pledge themselves to Woden in exchange for the dull freedom of not giving a fuck anymore. Not the good kind of not giving a fuck. It would be easier for Freia to give up, like all the others, and let Woden be the last of their kind. But she refuses. She is stubborn, like a human being.
As Agatha sings karaoke Bob Seger, Freia sits in the black booth, leans back and closes her eyes, imagining an America she has never known. Agatha, it has to be said, is in her element with karaoke, with a raspy baritone that’s somewhere between Stevie Nicks and Ringo Starr, and a fierceness in her green eyes that surprises her. She watches Freia the entire time she’s up there. Freia has a song coming up but she isn’t sure whether she wants to sing it, what this particular voice of hers will sound like inside of a microphone. The bar is nearly deserted. All the décor is black. On the other side of the bar two men and one woman all wear long black sleeveless T-shirts and study calculus. They have heathen tattoos on their arms: stags and Woden’s names. The names are in a made-up runic script the younger man downloaded from the Internet, but she can still read it.
“You’re up,” Agatha says, sitting down next to her and squeezing her shoulder. She has found that she was just clapping seconds ago. She feels a bit off. The table of neopagans—of whatever sort—now stare at her, with an intensity that concerns her.
As she starts to sing the Yeah Yeah Yeahs (what else? It’s either that or Billy Joel) she doesn’t know whether they know who she is, whether they would worship her or try to murder her, or murder someone else as a sacrifice, probably an immigrant, because they’d think it would please her, even though nothing could be further from the truth. Or Agatha. They eye Agatha too.
Veneration? Just as bad. She doesn’t want to be tied down by supplications. They each have knives in their belts, consecrated for sure. And heavy bronze pendants, masks of Woden’s face peering out behind a tangle of woods. Agatha stares at her in the dark-dim with milky eyes as she warbles, awful and sad.
Agatha has no idea how much danger she’s in, just by living and breathing. If they were to leave together out of the club and a bus slammed into them, Agatha would die, and come into life again as a worm on an undying tree and Freia would find herself again in the magnanery, and after few hours, when the cocoon had been spun, Freia would quite possibly hold her former boss’s soul inside boiling water to get at the threads inside. Her voice is hoarse at the chorus, and when she’s done there are a few stammered claps.
“That was great,” her boss says, as if she’s giving her a performance review. She continues to clap. She is more confident, or tipsy, or both. “Well done.” She takes another swig of Stiegl. “Well fucking done.”
“Thanks,” Freia says. She eyes the three at the table again. “We should leave.”
“Really?” Agatha says, unaware of the bad aura from the neopagans. “Where do you want to—”
“My place,” Freia says, getting Agatha’s coat. “Definitely my place.”
When she’s licking the base of Agatha’s girlcock in her apartment in Simmering, blanketed in a moonlit nest of quilts on her bed, Freia realizes she has no idea how to make her cum.
“How can I make you cum?” she says, leaning her cheek against Agatha’s thigh and looking up at her.
“Oh my god,” Agatha says, finding it hard to breathe. “Oh my god. Uh . . . do you have a vibrator?”
“Kind of,” Freia says.
“Okay, well—if you put it the tip of it right on my, uh, perineum—the taint—and . . . press down there.”
“Like this?”
“Yes. How the fuck are how are you doing that?”
“Shhh,” Freia says. “A magician never reveals her secrets.”
After Agatha orgasms twice, Freia makes her hand stop vibrating and curls up behind Agatha, putting her chin up against her neck and breathing deeply. The body is a lonely hunter, but occasionally it finds its quarry.
A tight knot loosens in Freia’s shoulder blades.
They fall asleep.
“Are you safe here?” Freia whispers to Agatha an hour before dawn.
“Mhm what?” Agatha says, eyes closed, still slick, shifting deeper into Freia’s arms.
“Are you safe in this city as . . . you know . . .”
Now it is Agatha’s turn to shush her. “That doesn’t matter now,” she says, as if in a dream. “I’m safe now.”
And Freia, this once, allows herself to believe this and dozes off as the Imperishable City thrums around her.
She wakes up to sunlight stabbing her eyes and looks up. Agatha is splayed on the high ceiling, still naked, her mouth stuffed with a neoprene ball. She’s paralyzed and can’t speak or move, but her eyes are wide. She can see everything.
“I thought I’d let you sleep in a bit,” Woden says, sitting in a high-backed chair at the foot of the bed.
Freia leaps out bed and jumps onto the ceiling to try to bring Agatha down, but Woden snaps his fingers and Freia thuds back onto the bed.
“Come on,” he says. “This is embarrassing, Freia. Get some clothes on.”
Woden, lord of the gods, the allfather, the shining eye, the war-merry one, the racist piece of shit, wears a black suit. His shoulder-length hair is tied back and he wears heavy ruby rings on three of his fingers. He looks at Freia with pity.
“Put on some clothes in my house,” he commands, turning away his chin ever so slightly.
Freia looks up at Agatha, and she goes to the dresser drawer where she finds several changes of clothes, mostly variations of the same pencil skirt and light sweater.
She doesn’t want him to see her this vulnerable, so she puts on one of these outfits and sits back on the bed, trying to take deep breaths.
“That’s better,” he says. “I can’t say the same thing for your boyfriend up here.”
“She’s not—” Freia begins, but she knows that Woden is only trying to goad her, not that he doesn’t believe that Agatha is mentally sick and unworthy of attention, much less love and care. She closes her eyes and mostly feels shame that she had assured Agatha of her safety, that she could be safe with her. Something that he had said earlier stuck with her.
“Wait, what do you mean your house?” she says.
He smiles. “I own the high-rise.” He snorts. “How do you think you ended up here?”
“So . . . what, you’re a landlord now?”
“It’s a little more complicated than that. I help expedite capital to move from the periphery of Europe into safe and lucrative opportunities in Austria. You always come a bit short, Freia, with your imagination.”
“That sounds like an elaborate way to say: ‘money launderer for white nationalists.’”
He grimaces. She doesn’t want him to get inside her head.
“It’s just extending a little of my hard-won expertise,” he says. “I’m just trying to give a safe landing towards my people mired in a sea of filth. The filth of cucks, cultural Marxists—”
“Your people,” she snorts.
“How many people do you have?” he says, smiling. “Him?” He points up at the ceiling. “Don’t make me laugh. My people are attuned to what I need. Like keeping an eye on you.”
She thinks of the trio at the karaoke bar, and in a sense, he is right—he does have people everywhere. She hates it. Neo-Nazi wolves in the Nationalrat, in the Catholic priesthood with their secret blots, in the Bundespolizei. Fathers, mothers, upstanding citizens wi
th their Facebook groups set to private.
“Speaking of him,” he says.
“Her, you fuck,” she says. “Her.”
“Stop indulging his delusions, sister. Or I’ll cut off his cock and stuff it into his mouth.”
Freia shuts her eyes hard and opens them again, looking up at Agatha. She is sick with herself, but those emotions will not save Agatha.
“All I want to know is why?” he says. “When you came down to Wien, why did you waste your time with this creature?”
She chooses her words very carefully. “I like women.”
“No, you like pussy. Not this . . . thing.”
“Don’t tell me what I want and don’t want.”
He snickers. “Even your degeneracy is degenerate.”
“I am the Consort of Blood. I am the Animal Bride, the Lady of the Slain—”
“Well, you were,” he says. “Past tense. Never forget that. But—I am feeling generous for some reason. Maybe it will be a way to teach you a lesson. I’ll give you a month’s leave in the city before you go back to work—gently monitored of course. You won’t even notice.”
“And Agatha,” she says angrily, not wanting to put it in the form of a question, to make it seem like she is pleading with him.
“Why should you care? Why should you care how I murder him?” At that Freia looks at Agatha and she doesn’t hesitate, even though she knows the words are almost impossible to say. “I exchange my life for hers, then. After I return, I will never leave the magnanery again, and I vow never to return to Vienna again, until the end of time. In exchange, you will leave Agatha alone. She will be returned safely. And everyone you know will leave her be.”
“Freia—” he begins to say.
“You’re right that I’m not what I used to be. You’ve seen to that. But I am still the Consort of Blood, and you cannot deny me a blood oath.”
He begins laughing. “You would give up Vienna? You will work in the magnanery forever? No escaping it?”