Oval

by Elvia Wilk

  This was more or less the situation in Louis and Anja’s six-household eco-settlement, or eco-colony, or colonoscopy, an assortment of experimental architecture clustered a thousand meters up the side of the Berg. The no-waste principle, according to which all inhabitants were responsible for monitoring the internal ecosystems and microclimates of their homes, was enforced by an internalized pressure based on imaginary rules rather than any actual supervision from Finster Corp. above. The tiny red lights of the cameras blinking in every room were a sort of mental reminder of Finster’s presence—of the abstract idea of monitoring—but Anja was sure nobody was actually watching. The contract was clear: the only spying being done was by a machine-vision algorithm whose job was to spot anomalies and flag worst-case scenarios. Tornadoes. Fire.

  This lack of explicit instruction had led to some conundrums. When they had first moved in, Anja would hike up the mountain each evening with a backpack full of biodegradables and other trash she had accrued throughout the day, in order to dump them down the disposal and enter her total net waste into the recycling system. It was her waste, wherever she produced it, and she was going to be honest about it. But the surplus of wrappers and crusts and tissues had started to clog the drain unit and overflow the toilet; Anja was wasting way more matter than the house could make go away.

  “Couldn’t you throw this stuff away somewhere else?” Louis asked her, scooping chunks of foul-smelling paper pulp from the kitchen drain. He pulled out a long, thick strip of blue-and-brown paper. “What is this, a shopping bag from the mall?”

  “I just used it to carry my other trash in. Jesus, it’s not like I was shopping at the mall.”

  He stared at her, dangling the wet strip. “You brought home a random bag from a fast-fashion store, which you only used to carry your other trash in, and you put it down our drain.”

  “Yes, that’s what I did. I used the bag. Ergo, it’s part of my waste output.”

  He frowned. “I think the waste thing only applies when you’re at home on the mountain.”

  “No, I don’t think it’s spatial. It’s about what you waste in your whole life, as a human consumer. The whole point is to cancel us out completely.” She realized she was clasping her hands earnestly. Without meaning to, she glanced up toward where she knew the camera was, nestled above the cabinets.

  “Right, that’s what it says on the website. But everyone knows we’re just supposed to be making it seem like the house works. We’re trying to prove that it’s possible to live sustainably and not be such a freak about it. Which means not carrying your trash around everywhere.”

  Anja unclasped her hands and then reclasped them. “But throwing waste away in other places is cheating,” she said. “If the house can’t handle all my waste, then the designers didn’t do a good job, and they should fix it.”

  “They obviously did not do a good job, Anja. Nothing in this fucking house works. I’m not going to drag all my trash home every day. It’s just not realistic—you want me to save the packaging from my lunch? Where does it stop? Am I supposed to wait to shit until I get home?”

  “Wait, why are you eating lunch with disposable packaging? I bought you a lunch box!”

  Eventually Louis’s practicality had won out, as it tended to. He was right: Anja couldn’t wait to shit until she got home, and she couldn’t keep track of everything she used; trying to do so had led to an ontological breakdown on the microlevel of her daily life. Were eyelashes and skin cells on par with hair ties and coffee cups? Were paper coffee cups on par with a mug that had to be rewashed using graywater from the house, which cost energy to pump? She couldn’t bring herself to ask the neighbors how they were handling things, convinced that everyone else automatically understood the rules. To reveal her confusion would be to reveal all, including her doubts.

  That had been only a few months ago, but lately, as more elements of the system were getting clogged or bogged down, the two of them had started to perform exactly the opposite of what Anja had originally done: they carried their trash down the mountain and disposed of it clandestinely in orange trash canisters on the street. At first Anja felt ashamed marching down the slope with a backpack loaded with a bundle of trash flattened against her laptop, but Louis reassured her that they were just doing what was expected of them: putting a good, clean face on sustainability. Eventually, bringing trash off the mountain seemed just as responsible as bringing trash onto it once had.

  2

  ANJA SKIDDED DOWN THE SLOPE, WHICH WAS BECOMING MUDDY from overuse by feet. It still hadn’t been paved or even scattered with gravel, since Finster didn’t want to admit that the state of the pathway could no longer reasonably be called temporary. Rather than upgrade the provisional solution to make it slightly more functional in the interminable interim, it was ignored, as a signal that something better, something great—the best possible path—was coming.

  Louis likened this situation to a general societal problem. The refusal to improve a nonsolution with a makeshift solution, he said, was the attitude that left most of the world a muddy slope in need of repair. Making exactly this argument had in fact consumed a lot of his time in his first year at Basquiatt, the NGO where he worked, which he believed was overrun by an ideological insistence on grand solutions that would be forever unattainable instead of small-scale, implementable compromises. “Let’s be realistic” was his self-parody catchphrase. “What can we do right now to make things better?”

  “Why do you think refugee camps are never outfitted with proper infrastructure?” he’d asked Anja just a few days before he’d been yanked back to the U.S. They were hiking up the mountainside in the rain toward their apartment, torsos harshly angled against the incline, sneakers slipping in the mud, dragging grocery bags; it was pathetic.

  “Muddy scenes of neglect,” he shouted downhill at her, intent for some reason on having this discussion right at that moment. The worse things had gotten in the house, the more he’d taken to ranting. “The mud is meant as a message that the bad situation isn’t going to last forever, no matter how long it’s already lasted. They want you to think the camp is just temporary, so nobody actually has to take responsibility for it.” His voice rose as she lagged farther behind him. “The quality of the now,” he yelled over his shoulder, “is sacrificed for the ideal. Know what I’m saying?”

  Of course she knew what he was saying. “But you realize you’re comparing the Berg to a refugee camp, right?” That had ended the discussion.

  Today she was carrying only a few avocado peelings in the pockets of her vinyl windbreaker. The whole apartment was a hot, puffy bruise; she didn’t dare force anything down the drain. She waved to a group of electricians in blue coveralls, who were standing, bored, around a post that was supposed to be supporting one of the vine-cables of the cable car. They had raised the car onto a stack of wooden pallets. One of the workers dropped a cigarette butt onto the exposed end of a vine-cable half-buried in mud, and it let off a sorry spark.

  Unhitching her bike from a post at the bottom of the slope, she saw that Louis’s racer was still locked to a tree. He must have taken the train. She plugged her phone into the charger between her handlebars, checking it for messages. Dam had already sent out his first weather blast of the day: dry 35º / lavender / wet west gust.

  She checked her phone’s weather app for comparison. High of 24 degrees, calm, clear. The gap between the official version and Dam’s version—the real version—shouldn’t have still bothered her, but it did. She slotted an earbud in each ear and began the long ride up to Prenzlauer Berg, to Howard’s. It would normally take half an hour, the length of one podcast, but she was lumbering on the pedals today, swinging from side to side with each push. She was exhausted, and, true to Dam’s forecast, there was a hot wind coming from the west. The sky was purplish with stratified layers of clouds, each like identical, faded copies of one another. Add a layer. Add a layer. Duplicate this layer. Flatten visible.

  She listened to t
he podcast with one part of her brain, thinking with another part about what must have been happening in the lab at that very moment. She was mildly anxious to be missing the morning there. She probably should have asked Howard to meet in the evening after work instead.

  The week before, the simulation she and Michel had been hard-coding for weeks had finally authorized cell culturing; today would be the first day in at least two months that they’d be liberated from their screens, finally doing tiny things with their actual hands in an actual polystyrene dish. It was strange to look forward to an action while knowing already without a doubt how it would unfold. They had seen the routine perform itself again and again in high-definition render; the airtight predictability of the chain of events was the only reason they were allowed to make it happen in a dish at all.

  She saw the animation in her mind. One cell membrane swelling to accommodate a new blot on its periphery—for one freak moment an egg with two yolks—then, the new blot forcing itself outward to the splitting point, when the edge of the cell would erupt from its boundary to become a whole new edge, scooping remarkably away and burping into its own self-contained shape—from impossible to possible. “Plop,” said Michel each time they watched the duplication unfold on-screen. “Plop-plop-plop.”

  She consoled herself with the fact that today wouldn’t really be the most important day. It would be tomorrow, when a surface visible to the naked eye would begin to form from all those slow plops. The plops were designed to perform very slowly—growing into a skein of tangible matter. The surface would be translucent at first, shaping itself over the hours into a perfectly symmetrical double wave, like the contour of the roof of a mouth, but impossibly smooth. And so small, conformed perfectly to its given constraints, the shallow dish only 88 millimeters in diameter, the simulated site map of the simulated shelter, the architecture’s designated terrain. By the end of the second day the duplicating cells would have built a delicate little home, rising layer upon parametric layer until it was exactly right, a perfectly circular double-arched roof. Then it would stop. Cartilage in its first official architectural application. A perfect, growable, reproducible, scalable, durable roof, which Finster could send anywhere in the world as a tiny bundle of cells that would sprout on demand. Cells that would be first grown in their lab at RANDI.

  She could already see Michel struggling to repress his excitement. She’d mock him, call him Dr. Evil, but they’d both give in to self-congratulation for a few minutes when the thing was finished growing. This week would offer a release valve from the tedious months plugging variables into a giant data sheet and pretending not to give any fucks about their jobs. (On the other hand, they would have to admit to each other with a few uncomfortable glances, the success was a turning point, it made them responsible for what they were doing at RANDI. Until now, the eye rolling and the sarcasm had masked the unease, but soon they’d have to pretend even harder not to care, work even harder not to know where this was all headed. She’d think about that next week, once they had accomplished this small exercise in form, a proof of concept that was surely just a small step in a process that would take years before implementation.)

  The stoplight at Jannowitzbrücke gave pause to the pedaling and the imaginary cell growth. A swarm of teenagers in red caps crossed the street, briefly enveloping her. A trio of girls wearing their caps backward—oh, pitiful resistance!—followed closely behind one another. It was easy to spot the popular girl at the front of the pack right away, simply from the geometry of the flock in motion. What was it about the girl, Anja wondered, the homely girl preoccupied with her phone, that made her the focal point, the yolk at the center of attention? What was the factor upon which the self-replicating algorithm turned, that remarkably consistent geometry of popularity? How had Anja still not figured out the answer, the hidden parametric logic to social arrangements, even after all these years, even as an adult scientist?

  The light turned yellow, and the group hurried by, ushered forth by a red-shirted chaperone. At the same time, according to the podcast she now zoned back into, jellyfish were taking over the oceans as other species died out in the too-warm water and made way for them to proliferate, spreading across the surface in a thick quilt, clogging the gears of power plants and blocking the flow of oxygen to the depths of the sea.

  Howard made her wait two minutes, almost long enough to ring him again, before he buzzed her into the front door of his building. She knew he could see her through the little camera above the buzzer and wondered if he had taken the time to inspect her before pressing the button. She hauled her sticky body up to the top floor, pausing on the landing to wipe the area under her eyes with a tissue from her pocket. A lot of her supposedly waterproof mascara had melted below the lashes. Sweating burns calories, her sister would say.

  Howard opened the door and gave each hot cheek a kiss. She noticed a mist on the top of his head—the head was sweating, which she’d somehow never incorporated into the realm of possibility. But, of course, a bald head sweats, just like any other head. She remembered not to stare—men didn’t like that—but then, this was Howard; he was secure. He’d been bald for so long that he wore his skull without the anxiety of a man who it happens to later in life, and so he didn’t associate it with waning virility or whatever else.

  He wore most of his distinguishing traits in that way, as incidental and entirely unremarkable. Such as the fact that he was the only Black person in Finster’s upper echelons in Germany, which he never, ever spoke about. He was technically in PR at Finster, but Anja had come to understand that the kind of soft power he’d acquired over the years was much more substantial than his official title accounted for. He would never move back to London, that was clear. He was firmly planted here. His German was impeccable, it sliced you like a paper cut.

  Howard led Anja down the corridor past the living room, a mid-century forest of teak and mahogany, to the narrow kitchen where they always sat. Very far from the bed.

  “Just water, thanks,” she said to his offer of a mug.

  “Detox?”

  “A bit jittery. I don’t need caffeine.”

  “Busy in the lab lately?”

  “Yes, actually. Or we’re about to be. This week is a big one.” She scare-quoted “big one.”

  Without asking, he tipped a packet of electrolytes into the glass of water he’d filled and passed it to her with a spoon to stir.

  “This is good timing, then. I have big news.” He scare-quoted “big news” in turn. “You probably know this already, but Finster is restructuring some departments at RANDI.” She was silent, then capitulated to admitting she didn’t know, shaking her head slightly. “Oh,” he said. “Well, now you know. They aren’t cutting the whole sector or anything, but they’re consolidating a lot of the subsectors. Most of Alloys is merging into General Futures. And Cartilage is merging back into Biodegradables, where it probably should have stayed in the first place.”

  She got a split-second heart palpitation. “Back to Biodegradables? I used to be in that sector, remember, but then we all decided Cartilage should split off, because we were doing construction, not degradation.”

  “Right. Your special mission, which you’ve bemoaned so much. But now your mission is complete. Voilá.”

  She chewed the inside of her cheek and fingered the earbuds in her pocket. Ear buds, she thought. Small lumps of cartilage from which ears will sprout.

  “It’s not technically finished, though,” she said slowly. “We still haven’t actually grown the thing in the lab that we were supposed to be making.”

  “I don’t know anything about the science,” he said, and laughed, “but think of this as a big high five from the top. Apparently, they think you accomplished what you set out to do.”

  “So we’re going back from whence we came. Compost.”

  “Nope. That’s the thing. I don’t know about the other guy who you were working with, but they’ve set you free.”

  “Free? Am I fi
red?”

  “Why do you always expect the worst?” He paused for drama. “In fact, you’re promoted straight to consultant. Laboratory Knowledge Management Consultant, I think they’re calling it.”

  She shook her head. It didn’t make any sense. “No, Howard. I’m just a lab tech. I haven’t done anything they could consult me on.” Consultant was not a title she’d ever associated with her present or future. Louis was the consultant, not her.

  He seemed to be following her thoughts. “Oh, and Louis has? You know you don’t need to have any consulting experience to become a consultant.”

  She bit back. “Louis is highly qualified for his job, actually.”

  Howard raised his hands in mock defense. “I didn’t mean he wasn’t. I’m just saying that the qualification is not what you think it is. The qualification is just that they decide you can do it.”

  She chewed her cheek, hard. “What does a knowledge manager do?”

  “Whatever you want. You get a pay raise and go around telling people what to do. Threaten them if they don’t work fast enough. Do audits, interviews, suggest some restructuring where you think it’s needed. You know the drill.”

  “How long?”

  “I don’t know how long your first term is. Probably a year.”

  “But why would they want to fire me from my job and hire me back to do nothing for more money?”

  He raised his hands. “That’s how companies run. You do the time and you move up the ladder, if you’re lucky. Why all the questions?”

  She swirled her glass of electrolytes without taking a sip. “Here’s a question. Since when did you become my boss? HR should be telling me this.”

  He shrugged innocently. “I was on the phone with HR this morning, mentioned you were coming by, and they said I should go ahead and tell you myself. Call over if you don’t believe me.”

  Howard had, of course, been involved marginally in her job at RANDI, her house—everything—for a long time. Finster was involved in all of it, and at some point Howard had become her main interface with Finster’s back end. Howard knew stuff, Howard was the cloud, that was the point of Howard. In that regard, his giving her this information was not surprising. Nothing was changing between them, not really. But she couldn’t ignore the feeling that this news he was bestowing upon her was more intrusive than some of the other ways he’d elbowed into her life.