The Long List Anthology Volume 4

by David Steffen

  The Wet City project hits miraculously few snags, but once or twice Amir catches a design flaw that makes Mani give him a deep, reckoning look.

  “I’m just doing some calculations in Impulse,” Amir says. “The Beirut-3 east wing might not come out inwardly reflective the way we want, with the new bug-in-amber angled like that?” Bug-in-amber is their shorthand for the art pieces they’ll embed in each translucent wing, one of Amir’s favorite streams of the project. He taps across his calculations.

  “Whizkid,” is all Mani says, and Amir almost asks if she wants to grab dinner with him after work. He doesn’t. He gets better at finding flaws, though. There are times when flaws are all he sees.

  • • • •

  Post-water-crisis Beirut is mesmerizing, boisterous street markets by day and elaborate street parties by night.

  Amir and Joud meet every couple of weeks to trawl the artisans’ quarter in Nouveau Centre-Ville, Amir on the lookout for sustainable art references for the much larger bug-in-amber pieces to come, Joud hoping to enrich their collection of silk and brocade Lebanese abayas. They are especially taken by androgynous styles that combine an embroidered abaya tunic with a shirwal bottom. They stroke the parchment packets, their fingers lingering on the teardrop calligraphy of the artisan’s sigil. The two of them often return to Amir’s apartment with towering ice cream cones, and Joud tells him what they’ve learned about tonight’s artisan on Impulse, and they have the sort of voracious, aching sex that comes after absence.

  “How is Mani?” Joud asks tonight, nestled against the hollow of Amir’s chest. Joud frequently asks about Mani. They know, but their affection for Amir is so confident, so stable, that the question can come right after intimacy and carry no trace of malice or envy.

  “Today she proposed a walkway up the side of the sea-facing wings for a view of the sunset,” Amir says. “And yesterday she gave a site tour to a delegation that arrived two days early from Singapore.”

  Joud hums in appreciation. They always do. Joud loves expansively, navigating a multitude of relationships with a grace and wholeheartedness that makes Amir feel he’s never absorbed a moment of personal growth.

  “You don’t have to indulge me, you know,” Amir says. He presses three fingertips against the place where Joud’s temple meets soft brown hair, scratches them there tenderly. “You and I have been in each other’s lives two years and I’ve never been—I mean, Mani’s always been—”

  Joud stills his lips with their cheek. “It doesn’t bother me, darling. What I figure is some people stand beside each other, and some people end up locked together,” Joud laces their own hands tight, to the knuckles. “And I don’t think the latter is better.”

  “You’re right, love,” Amir says to Joud, who smells like green branches and clay and sex. In that moment the appellation feels miraculous and genuine on his tongue. “In many ways it’s worse.”

  • • • •

  There are times when hitting the forecasted Wet City launch date seems like a pipe dream, but as more and more pieces slot into place, it starts to become attainable, and then an unavoidable reality. Twenty hyper-efficient months after Hanne’s distracted aside in the conservatory, the first wings come online; the engineers begin their final stress tests; the notion of a citywide festival around the launch begins to coalesce. And then, with three and a half months to the launch date, Mesilla calls Amir into her office.

  Two of their artists won’t have their bugs-in-amber finished by the festival and Amir’s been heading up the effort to ensure their temporary prototypes are materially similar enough for the engineers to work with; he assumes this is what Mesilla wants to talk about. Instead he’s greeted by a stranger. “Amir,” Mesilla says, “I wanted you to meet one of my oldest colleagues: Adah Bertonneau.”

  Adah Bertonneau is even taller than Amir, with impressive cheekbones and two-hand-clasp handshake. “A pleasure to finally meet you,” Adah says, their accent a rich, rolling thing Amir can’t quite place.

  Amir smiles, puzzled. “Finally?”

  “Read your Crowdgrow grant application five years ago now,” says Adah. “Told myself I’d make Mesilla introduce us if I ever made it to this part of the globe. And here I am.”

  “Oh.” Amir resists the inclination to try to look up Adah on Impulse—he’s still not very good at interfacing with it discreetly. “Well, unfortunately, we haven’t had the opportunity to prove out the research, but I hope that one day—”

  “Mx Tarabi,” interrupts Adah. “That is, of course, precisely why I’m here to talk to you.”

  Adah Bertonneau, it turns out, works at the Nantes Center for Naturalist Studies. The Center is neither large nor prestigious (Amir gives up and looks it up on Impulse), but their work seems well-respected enough, and a few of their recent papers have appeared in journals Amir would have once given his eyeteeth to be published in. Adah’s lab is new, getting off the ground with an extremely generous grant from France Centrale, and it seems, more or less, that they’re looking for ways to spend it.

  “One must make a splash early,” says Adah, peering at Amir seriously over the rim of their teacup. “We’re frontloading, trying to get several programs up and running right out the door. Not all of them will work out in the long term, of course, but I’d guarantee funding for the full two-year period you requested, regardless of the findings. Between you and me, though? I have this . . . call it a premonition, that what you’ve proposed is going to work.”

  Of course it’s a dream come true. And of course the timing couldn’t be worse.

  “I wish I could tell you to take your time making a decision,” continues Adah, “but the start date’s in a month, and I’m afraid it’s not flexible.” They want to do the study with a particular crawler vine, Adah explains, whose cuttings are most viable in the fall. One week, and they’ll need a yes or no, “else there won’t be enough time to get the paperwork in order, you understand.” Amir understands. Hands are shaken. Mesilla walks Amir out.

  “Take the rest of the day,” she says. “I—well, I don’t know whether to say I’m sorry or congratulations. I know it’s a lot at once.”

  Amir very nearly just asks her to tell him what to do, but she seems to read this on his face. “We can talk it over tomorrow, if you need. But sleep on it. Before you start cataloging opinions.”

  Amir nods. It’s smart. Mesilla’s always smart. He goes to his office, gathers his things, does his best to slip out unnoticed.

  Except he runs into Mani waiting for the elevator.

  “Hey,” she says, smiling a little awkwardly, that try-hard friendliness. Then she spots his messenger bag. “Headed out?”

  It’s not even ten in the morning. Amir hits the down button again—the Grid’s elevators are vintage, which is a cute way of saying unbearably slow. The doors are mirrored; Amir read somewhere that mirroring elevator doors reduced complaints about wait times, because people got carried away admiring themselves. He wonders if it’s true. He hopes it’s not. He thinks it probably is.

  “Mani,” he says, “I’m quitting.”

  Mani’s reflection stares at him.

  The doors bing open.

  Amir steps into the elevator; Mani takes an extra second to step in after him.

  “Explain,” Mani says. “Now? Are you serious?”

  Amir is serious. He only knew it as he said the words aloud. “Skive off today?” he asks Mani, pretending he doesn’t hear the note of pleading in his own voice. “I could really use a drink.”

  They end up going back to his. They take the bullet train in silence—it’s mostly empty at this odd hour of the morning, but the tunnel-rush of wind makes holding a conversation difficult. The ride’s only five minutes, but it’s long enough to put Amir on edge. He stares down at his interlaced fingers, bracketed by his knees. There’s an empty seat between him and Mani, because there was space to spread out, and why would they not? After all, these days, it’s not like they’re—well. It’s barel
y like they’re friends.

  Mani has never been to Amir’s apartment. He realizes this as he keys into the front door; they’ve tried, a few times, vague agreements about dinner that fell through at the last moment, meetings that wound up getting moved to workspaces with excuses of better bullet access. It should make him nervous, he thinks. He should be worrying about the fact that none of his coffee mugs match, or whether he left toothpaste flecks on the bathroom mirror that morning. But he isn’t nervous. Mani knows all the worst parts of him already.

  The Bekaa Valley Merlot is still at the back of the cupboard, because Amir’s life is a joke. He uncorks it and pours them both generous glasses, and settles himself next to her at the small kitchen table. “There’s a research institute in Nantes,” he says. “They want to fund a Crowdgrow roll-out.”

  Mani looks stunned, just for a second, then raises her wineglass. “This is now a toast,” she says. “To the long overdue recognition of my brilliant friend Amir Tarabi.”

  Amir tilts his glass toward hers. “Thing is,” he says, “I’d have to start basically immediately. A few weeks. I wouldn’t be here to close out Wet City. I wouldn’t be able to make the launch festival.”

  “. . . oh,” says Mani. She lowers her glass. “Damn.”

  “Right.” Amir lowers his glass, too. He’s not quite sure how to look at Mani, so he focuses on the wineglass, turning it in careful circles, watching the light refract. “I mean, it’s not the end of the world,” he says. “I’ll need to pass some stuff off sort of hastily, but let’s be honest, I’m no longer really essential personnel. And I don’t care about the festival. It’s just . . .”

  Amir stops, looks up. He doesn’t know how to read Mani’s expression. Complicated, sad. A little like how she looks when she’s working her way through a thorny problem. She reaches forward, finding his fingers with her own, carefully unlacing them from the stem of the wineglass. She holds his hand there in the warm cradle of her palms, running her thumb in a discovering sort of way across the ridgeline below his knuckles, as if she were going to read his fortune.

  “It would have been nice,” says Mani, “to have had more time.”

  “Mani,” says Amir, helplessly. She looks up, looks at him. He feels on display, as if she’s taking inventory of him, all the things that are different, all the things that are the same. He swallows. “I want—” he says.

  Mani reaches up, running her fingertips through the scruff of his beard, bracing her thumb against his cheekbone. “Come here,” she says. He goes, letting her guide him forward until she finds his mouth with hers, and kisses him.

  His mind goes blank. He’s a teenager again, unsure what to do with his hands. He loves her so much he thinks he might fly into a million separate parts.

  She undresses him first, won’t let him help, won’t let him touch, torturous slowness as she undoes every button, every hook. She runs her fingertips over all the planes and angles of him, presses teasing thumbs into the hollows by his hipbones and kisses him until he feels drunk with it. Then she lets him do the same to her, and she takes his hands and shows him where to touch, and he thinks this might be the most beautiful thing he’s ever done.

  Afterward, they lie tangled together, exhausted, belly-to-flank, Amir’s cheek pressed against the top of Mani’s head. The warm reality of her, the slow swell-and-recede of her body against his, is almost too much to stand.

  “I’m going to miss you,” Amir says. “I’m going to miss you so much. It wasn’t enough time.”

  He feels her pause, then twist to look at him. “I shouldn’t have said that, earlier,” she says, very serious. “We can’t think that way. We have to say to ourselves, this was right. This was exactly enough.”

  Amir shuts his eyes, tips his head forward to rest against hers, and tries to believe it.

  He keeps his eyes closed until they both fall asleep.

  5: THE BEAM COMES ON, ILLUMINATING US ALL

  Amir arrives in France just after dawn on a foggy fall day. His out-breaths add frills of fog to Nantes’ thick cloak of it. He keeps his Impulse off after landing. Sounds muffled, skin damp, his first impression of his new home is of being underwater.

  He explores the city on foot, stopping for croissants then brioches then tartines. At sunset, he sits on the lawn of the Château des Ducs de Bretagne and tosses a bag of soy chips to two mallards and their ducklings paddling in the castle’s moat. Impulse would help him form a mental map, but he knows if he turns it on he’s going to look for a message from Mani, and if there’s none he’s going to be heartsick. And if there is one he’s going to be heartsick.

  Three things cycle through Amir’s mind: first, how to make the most of this opportunity; second, how desperately he needs to recenter himself in personal growth practice; third, the problem he’s had for most of his life, which is that he can’t stop thinking about Mani.

  • • • •

  Amir wakes up with the sun on his first morning in his Nantes apartment and he takes creaking steps that raise dust motes along the woodgrain floorboards. At the window he turns Impulse on and his heart rattles the split-second before his unreads appear.

  Nothing from Mani.

  Amir starts to compose a message. “Hi! Nantes is beautiful. There’s a duckling in the castle moat who has learned to swim alongside—” then he closes his eyes, hard, and deletes. When he opens them the weathervane across from his window has flipped 180 degrees and the sun is a blur of honey.

  The Crowdgrow pilot takes place along two residential streets in Nantes-2, just north of the Gare de Nantes. Amir hand-delivers cuttings of ecoboosted crawler vine to each of the experiment’s participants.

  “Je vous attends toute la matinée,” says one girl when Amir puts the little red planter pot in her hands. Her tight cornrows have been braided into an orchid-shaped bun on top of her head. She takes him round to the back garden, shows him the sheltered hole in the soil she’s dug. There is so much care in her actions that Amir’s belief in—dedication to—Crowdgrow redoubles just like that.

  “Mes mamans disent que le ciel sera plein d’oiseaux,” she says.

  “Yes,” Amir replies through Impulse. “As many birds as the sky can handle.”

  • • • •

  Nantes is on a clean air travel vector with Beirut, so Joud comes to visit the week before Amir presents the results of the pilot to a delegation from Nantes’ municipality. They go to Nantes’ shipyard island, go on mech-AI safari. They feed the giant hydraulic elephants from a tray of silicon peanuts, and the elephants regurgitate silicon caricatures of Amir and Joud. Joud’s is great: an impossibly vertical cone of hair, small ears rendered as notches. Amir’s own caricature makes him feel every year as old as his thirty-two, and older.

  He wraps their portraits up and tucks them in his bag, presses Joud close. Arm in arm, they survey nearby menus on Impulse until Amir finds one that does a much-lauded synth-protein steak with cassava frites. They wash it down with crisp, sweet Breton cider.

  “To new avenues,” Joud says.

  “To the companions who walk our lives with us,” Amir says. The words are from a passage Mani once clipped from a poem. He clinks the neck of his bottle against Joud’s.

  • • • •

  The first results come back from Crowdgrow in Nantes-2. The air quality in that sector has improved a modest part per billion, but what’s really encouraging is that all the crawler vines have survived. Many have gained a meter or more in length. The pilot expands to a citywide project, Adah’s grant money matched by government funds.

  Amir comes home late one evening from overseeing a plant-in at a primary school, a little dazed from hours of sun and excitable schoolchildren, but in good spirits. He’s dirt all over, ground into the new callouses on his palms and spilling from the hems of his trousers. The soil here is still toxic, and he should probably wash it off before doing anything else, but his diminutive wrought-iron balcony gets an excellent view of the sunset, and he can’t
help but peel off his shoes and socks and sit down at the wooden folding table to watch it. The last flash of sunlight is winking out on the windows of the Cathédrale Saint-Pierre et Saint-Paul when his Impulse pings with a call from Mani.

  He answers without thinking—or, he answers before he can let himself think about it. “Mani?” he says, a question, like it could be anyone else.

  “Hi,” says definitely-Mani. “Are you—”

  “Free,” says Amir, straightening a little, though she hasn’t initiated holo. “I mean, I just got home from work. I was just—” He stumbles. Watching the sunset feels too corny. “Relaxing,” he finishes.

  “Good,” says Mani. “I saw on the Beirut Grid announcement stream that your project won that funding extension from the city. Wanted to say congratulations. So, well.” She laughs a little. “Congratulations.”

  Amir sinks back into his chair. “Thanks,” he says. “You too. I watched your speech at the launch ceremony. It was really beautiful.”

  “Thank you,” says Mani. “I read your message to the team.”

  He’d figured she had, even when she didn’t respond. He’s not sure what to say to this.

  “You should have been there,” Mani says.

  The morning of the Wet City launch festival in Beirut, they’d gotten the first full bloom on a crawler vine in Nantes-2, a pale blue flower veined with green, nearly the size of Amir’s head. The stem wasn’t robust yet; the smallest breeze set the blossom trembling, like any moment it would come free and drop to the earth. Amir had spent most of the morning crouched in the dewy garden, waiting to see if it would last. “That’s kind of you,” says Amir, “but you were fine without me.”

  The connection goes so silent Amir has to check Impulse for the activity blip.

  “It’s been harder,” says Mani, “than I thought it would be.”