The Long List Anthology Volume 4

by David Steffen

  At one point, Amir is walking sandwiched between the two of them, face craned up to ogle the dazzling phyllotactic archway they’re underneath. Rafa reaches down to twine his fingers with Amir’s, and, after a moment that might be hesitation, on the other side Mani reaches down and does the same. Amir can feel his own heartbeat in his palms and he’s sure Mani and Rafa must be able to as well, but neither of them says a thing.

  • • • •

  Afterward, they make promises about staying in better contact. There’s a conference in Mogadishu, only six months out; it’s not a perfect fit for his research, but maybe Amir can swing an invite. It’s ridiculous, really, that Amir hasn’t yet seen Mani’s new city, Mani’s new life. Mani’s so busy—they’re all so busy, but they can message more, at least. Maybe even holochat, sometimes. They work in related fields, after all; it’s their responsibility to foster international communication and collaboration. Plus, they miss each other. There’s no reason to fall so out of touch.

  They say all this, and mean it. But, well. Life.

  3: EACH BRICK LAID THOUSANDS OF TIMES OVER

  The lab at Beirut Grid successfully demonstrates at-quantity ecoboosting in model organisms two weeks before Amir turns twenty-eight, which is a pretty good early birthday present, as far as he’s concerned. To celebrate, Mesilla takes Amir to the botanical garden in Rmeil to evaluate options for the Crowdgrow pilot; Hanne from New Projects tags along.

  The conservatory curator herself gives them a guided tour. She leads them down dense green walkways, extolls the growth patterns of crawler vines and Chouf evergreens, both commendably hardy species, survivors of the worst of the water scarcity. Mesilla seems invested—she examines a potted evergreen the curator’s handed her, sinks a finger in the soil—but Hanne is paying zero attention, cleaning up her notifications on Impulse or something. Then, out of nowhere Hanne blurts,

  “Oh, Mesilla. They just announced funds for a world-first Wet City implementation.”

  The crinkly cellophane of the potted evergreen goes still. The curator says, “Anything else I can show you?” into the silence; Amir babbles about high-altitude crawler vines. They move on to another greenhouse.

  In line for lunch, after, Amir waits for Mesilla to pick his brain. He’s all but decided he wants to try ecoboosting crawler vines, but wouldn’t mind talking it through.

  “So,” Mesilla says as soon as they’ve found a sunny patch of grass on Achrafieh green for a picnic, “There’s a Wet City funding opportunity? When’s the deadline?”

  “One month,” says Hanne. “Not much time to put together a proposal.”

  Amir puffs out his breath, struggling to rearrange his thoughts. “Has anyone proven the water reclamation wings would work at that scale? Wasn’t that the sticking point in Colson and Smith’s paper?”

  Hanne jabs the chunk of carrot on the end of her fork at Amir. “Right. But the All People funds were greenlit on the back of a rebuttal slash instruction manual by—” Hanne’s eyes blink away as she navigates Impulse. “By Sameen Jaladi at IUH Mogadishu.” The name of Mani’s school fills Amir with a mixture of possessiveness and pride.

  Amir can think of twenty reasons to be wary: the technical challenge of large-scale moisture collection, yes, but also overheating the built habitat, uncontrollable wet seasons, mold and mosquitos and respiratory conditions. That’s not to mention his immediate questions around clean-powering the wings and purging waste bays. He puts his sandwich in its basket, turns to Mesilla.

  “It’s a lot of resources toward an unproven concept. We’d have to divert money and energy we could spend in demonstrably useful directions,” he says. Like on Crowdgrow, he doesn’t say.

  “But in theory,” Mesilla says. “Every metropolis a little green oasis. Latticed condensation wings, clean water from the air. Theoretically, no shortages ever again.”

  She unwraps a bit more sandwich in a studied way: bean protein fillet in minted yogurt sauce, her usual. “Can someone get me the Jaladi paper and the bid guidelines?”

  Amir’s already poring through Impulse. He taps the documents over to Mesilla with two hard blinks. “They’re with you.”

  They walk back to the Beirut Grid offices talking about Amir’s birthday plans—Joud’s taking him on an overnight bullet to Damascus; their first trip together as a couple—but the lunch conversation is still humming under his skin.

  Two days later, when Mesilla pulls Amir and Hanne aside and asks them to put together a Wet City bid, it doesn’t surprise him.

  • • • •

  It’s a hot day with a really crappy clean air index. Everyone’s been permitted to stay home but a few of them are in, including Amir, because his apartment was so hot he feared he might melt into his armchair. The heat reminds him of sitting in a seabed café with Mani, which of course reminds him of the Future Good conference with Mani, which takes Amir’s thoughts nowhere helpful at all.

  The Impulse note arrives from Mesilla in two parts. The first, short, buzzes at his wrist and pings urgently in his display. It’s to Amir and Hanne, two words: We won!

  He expects excitement but feels only bone-tiredness.

  The second part of Mesilla’s note is a travel itinerary on wider distribution. The subject line makes Amir’s body do weird things: Academics from IUH Mogadishu. He taps it open on his wrist, as if he needs to see this in physical space, and sure enough:

  Jaladi, Sameen

  Proctor, Trevor

  Gupta, Jan-Helga

  Rizk, Mani

  “Shit,” he croaks. His side of the office is empty. He can hear the descending xylophone of the bullet zipping along its girders through the open window, and nearer, a heat-oppressed bird call that sounds more tired than he does.

  He blinks up his conversation thread with Mani. Their last exchange: Happy new year! from her to him, half a year ago; Happy new year!! from him to her a couple hours later, and since then, nothing. He winces.

  Beirut???? he taps over.

  Mani’s response is almost instant. Leave in a week.

  !!! Amir sends. His belly is one big knot.

  Took the effusive punctuation straight out of my mouth, she replies.

  • • • •

  Amir wrangles his way into airport chaperone duty for the IUH academics. At Future Good, running into Mani had been a sudden shock; the week he waits for her plane to arrive his nerves are like a leaky faucet. He can’t eat properly but finds himself stocking his pantry with everything he remembers Mani loving: carob molasses, salted pili nuts, a Bekaa Valley Merlot, cashew feta cheese. Joud tries to season a stew with the good cinnamon sticks Amir picked up at al-Raouché market for spiced tea and Amir won’t let them.

  “I’m saving those,” Amir says, guiltily filing away that there should be a Joud-him-Mani dinner involving cinnamon sticks. He doesn’t know what’s wrong with him. The plane from Mogadishu, oblivious and probably flying over Independent Greenland on other business, is killing him.

  Then he’s at the airport and his Impulse tells him the flight from Mogadishu’s arrived safely. Mani has sent him her Impulse geo, which means he can tell exactly when she’s walking through customs and toward the public area.

  He distracts himself by trying to calculate how long it’s been since they’ve seen each other using mental math. His Impulse helper picks up on his saccades. You seem to be working something out. Can I help? Amir moans and blinks it away. He finishes the calculation—1,513 days—but now he can barely breathe. And then the arrivals door pistons up and a column of passengers is behind it. He sees Mani in the throng, and she sees him back.

  It’s not the moment he’s been imagining. Mani’s engrossed in conversation with her colleagues. She weaves them toward Amir and he wants to hug her but the fact that he’s on official duty—that there are three field-pioneering academics he’s never met studying him—plants him to his spot.

  “Hi,” Mani says.

  “Hi,” Amir says. Not wow, you and me in Beirut,
like when we were seventeen. Which is what he’s thinking.

  “Sameen, Trevor, Helga, Amir,” Mani says, and then there’s a blur and they’re all on the bullet in the private compartment Amir booked and everyone is staring out the window at this city they’ve missed or never seen before and the conversation turns to how wonderfully Beirut will function as a Wet City.

  He tries not to catch Mani’s eye too much, but when he does she gives him a conspiratorial smile he remembers. He thinks of the wine and the cheese. They’ll get loads of time together later.

  Except, the next day Mesilla kicks off the Wet City stuff in earnest. And Amir and Mani start to argue. A lot.

  • • • •

  In some ways it’s not new. They’d argued as kids, the minutiae of pan-humanist theory over hot black tea: whether animals deserved more pronounced protection than plants, whether population control was ever justified, whether power should in all cases decentralize in the direction of local communities.

  But now the stakes are different. They’re different. The worst of the arguments take place during project meetings, in front of Hanne and Caveg and the rest of the team. Amir leaves meeting after meeting feeling battered. The way Mani seems to have a reassuring study on hand to refute each of his worries makes him clench his jaw in a very uncivic way. He’s so embarrassed by the incessant jaw clenching he grows his beard out to hide it.

  They avoid casual conversation for the better part of two weeks. Amir starts to hate going to work, which has never happened before. Then, one Monday, Mani stops at Amir’s station, gets close to see if he’s working in Impulse, and he can smell her perfume, mineral and saline and only the slightest bit sweet.

  “Help me draft an advisory? If you’re not busy?” she asks. She lifts a satchel. “I brought us tea from kiosk auntie downstairs.”

  “Advisory?” Amir’s immediately on edge. “Do you need planning language in it? Can Caveg help?”

  Mani’s eyebrows come down. “I don’t really need planning language in it. I just miss doing things together. I thought there’d be a lot more of that.”

  “Yeah,” Amir says, and stands to follow. He remembers following her that first time, in the misting rooms. He doesn’t understand himself. He’s been waiting to have Mani back for a decade—not a vague wistfulness, but an active full-body sort of waiting, if he’s really examining it. And now she’s right here, and he can’t bring himself to speak to her without getting upset. The funny thing is that he’s not even angry at her. It’s something more like bedazzlement. She’s a sun that blasts his vision into afterimages.

  “Or,” Amir says in the corridor, “we could go to our old café? It won’t be too busy right now.”

  Mani nods decisively. “Let’s go. Sameen will happily take the kiosk auntie tea.”

  The bullet ride is mainly Mani pointing out new art installations and green spaces and Amir telling her what year they were built and why. He’s good at this. He does almost all of them without Impulse, but confesses when he has to look one up. Mani gives him grief for not knowing them all by heart.

  “Everyone told me, oh, Amir, Beirut Grid’s own whizkid. A sort of city-planning savant. I guess I expected more,” she teases.

  “No one said that,” Amir says. “And even if they did, IUH has given you impossible expectations.”

  “Pan-humanism is all about realizing a civilizational system that game theory would say is impossible, right?”

  “Right,” says Amir. “But there’s plain old pan-humanist theory impossible and then there’s IUH Mogadishu impossible.”

  The bullet slows and stops beside their old café. They go down the boardwalk to their usual table, tap across an order of tea, and settle into their respective chairs. “Wow,” says Amir.

  “Swap adult clothes for swim knickers and shave the beard and it could be a decade ago.”

  Amir lifts their order of tea off a tray bot. “Were we that familiar with each other? Hard to believe.”

  Mani takes her glass from him. “Oh yeah. We were ridiculous. Like one person in two bodies, back then.”

  Amir startles in a way that melts him into himself, like his chest is swallowing the rest of him, swallowing his words. Mani’s always been the forthright one, but they both know he’s more sentimental, and he’s afraid that if he says anything now it will be too much.

  “You don’t like the beard?” he manages.

  Mani reaches across and strokes his cheek against the grain. “I don’t not like it,” she says.

  Amir shakes his head at her. She withdraws her hand. He’d forgotten how transparent they were to each other. Are, to each other.

  “How’s Rafa?” Mani says, stirring her tea.

  “We broke up last year.” He doesn’t bother waving it off. Mani will know it was a big deal.

  Mani’s silent a bit, then: “I just ordered you a glass of ʿarak.”

  Amir laughs and puts his head on his arms. “It’s two PM But thank you.” Seagulls croon from the frames of the yellow beach umbrellas. “This Wet City thing, Mani,” he starts. Doesn’t know how to finish.

  “You don’t believe in it,” says Mani.

  Amir grimaces. “That obvious?”

  “No.” This should be reassuring, but Mani’s turning her teacup in slow circles, not meeting Amir’s eyes. “Amir-with-his-heart-not-in-it works with more passion than most humans on their best days. But I can tell.”

  This should also be reassuring. Instead Amir feels irritation spiking in his chest. “I’ve spent every moment of my workday for the past six days chasing down permitting documentation for an experimental metallofoam that’s going to be used in less than two percent of the load-bearings struts of the wing structure,” he says. “It’s not exactly how I envisioned my career path. But I’m doing it. It’s not fair to call me out for lack of enthusiasm.”

  “I wasn’t calling you out,” says Mani. “I think you’re doing good work.”

  “Yeah,” says Amir. The ʿarak comes. He plucks it off the tray bot and sets it next to his teacup, aligning them carefully side by side. He can tell Mani is waiting for him to say something else. He shouldn’t. He should try to steer the conversation back toward safety. “Do you remember,” he says, “the Crowdgrow project I told you about during the Future Good conference?”

  “You were really excited about it,” Mani says. “It seemed promising.”

  “It was. The closed-room tests showed a fifteen percent improvement in air quality, and we had almost a thousand households signed up as testers. And we’ve applied for continuation funding every open cycle since. Not a lot—just enough for a pilot study. Less than we spend in administrative overhead on the Wet City project every week.”

  “But no luck?” asks Mani.

  “But no luck,” agrees Amir.

  “Amir,” says Mani, but there’s too much pity in the way she says his name.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” Amir says. “That it would be a waste. That Wet City is a better use of resources.”

  “Yes,” says Mani. “I do think that.” The way she says this could have been kind, but it isn’t.

  “You’re always so sure of yourself,” says Amir. The way he says this could have been a compliment, but it isn’t. “Is it ego?”

  “Is it jealousy?” Mani shoots back.

  Amir feels that familiar muscle in his jaw tic. He takes a careful, measured sip of ʿarak, as if that will hide it. “If this goes wrong—” he begins, once he’s sure his voice will come out steady.

  “Oh, please,” interrupts Mani. “You’re going to tell me to be afraid of trying something really big, really innovative, because there’s a chance we’ll end up looking like fools? Now that’s ego.”

  “It’s not about personal reputation,” Amir says. “It’s about the wasted money, the time, the emotional investment—do you know how demoralizing a project like this can be for a community if it fails—”

  “It won’t fail.”

  “You
can’t know that.”

  “We’ve done all the tests and simulations and proof-of-concept models we can, Amir. The only way to be any more sure is to let someone else go first, and I’m not willing to do that.”

  “Ego,” says Amir.

  “So what,” Mani snaps, sounding genuinely angry now, “we’d all be better off staying in our backyards planting mutant daisies? Grow up, Amir. You have the chance to work on something that really, actually matters here, and you’re too scared to take it.”

  If it were Amir, he would regret such harsh words immediately, start falling all over himself to apologize before the sting had a chance to land.

  But it’s Mani. And Mani always says what she means.

  Amir looks down at the now-empty glass cradled in his fingers. “It’s getting late,” he says. “We should probably be getting back.”

  Mani stands, the legs of her chair protesting loudly against the concrete. “We get this chance—” she stops. “I can’t understand why you’re making it so hard.”

  He should argue. Instead, he orders another ʿarak, and doesn’t let himself watch her walk to the bullet station.

  4: THAT EACH OF US INVESTS THE LABOR

  It’s not that Amir and Mani stay angry a whole year and a half. Something that dire would’ve spurred Amir to action, forced him to have the trembly, awkward conversation that showed them the way back to exchanges of essay clippings and meandering debates and maybe even limb-jumble lie-downs after a gigantic dinner cooked together.

  They are not angry: they are too intelligent for anger, Amir thinks, or too proud. They’re just hardened to each other. Their words bounce, too few absorbing. Their lunches together have one too many silences that call for a new conversation thread, and when congratulations are due—as when the first wing is drone-dropped into place at Martyrs’ Square and measurements show promising vapor transfer into the condensation bays at the base—their hugs are guarded and bodiless.