by Elvia Wilk
“Am I being insensitive about this?” Howard asked. “You seem sort of subdued.”
“I’ll have to think about it.”
“Don’t be such a girl.” He smiled. “Man up. Take what’s yours.”
“I love it when men tell me to man up.”
“Just trying to boost your confidence. But take your time. Someone will email you a draft of the contract to look over. That’s all I know.”
“Thanks.” She tried to sound grateful. Guilt, gratitude: they were always twins. It was time to steer the conversation elsewhere. When Howard chose to play dumb there was no piercing the shell.
“Do you think they’ll let me consult on my own house?” she asked. “The Berg could use a scientist.”
Howard laughed. “I doubt it. The Berg is a whole beast of its own. How are things at home? I guess that’s what you actually came to talk about.”
She realized that, actually, she didn’t have a very good reason for having come here, any more than Howard had a good reason for being the one to fire and rehire her. Neither the technical malfunction in her home nor her job officially had anything to do with him. What she had really come here for was Howard himself: his signature blend of affection, approval, and authority. He would, as he always did, oblige her complaints in exchange for feeling depended upon. He liked to be needed; she offered an assortment of needs.
“I was just wondering if you have any sort of . . . overview about what’s going on with the mountain,” she said. “The temperature and everything is totally erratic. All the doors are swollen shut. People must be complaining.”
“Not as much as you guys,” he said, smiling. “Have you been talking to the neighbors?”
“A few.”
This was a lie. Anja and Louis never talked to the neighbors. At the start, Anja had spent a few afternoons with a middle-aged couple of Danish consultants who had befriended her, but they’d left for vacation months earlier and had never come back. Come to think of it, at least three of the houses were empty most of the time. One of them was used intermittently as a studio for photo shoots of some sort.
“I know you guys don’t like the whole community vibe, but you could be a little more outgoing.”
Her phone vibrated in her pocket and she checked it under the table. Louis: flowers on my desk this morning, for mourning. a touching bribe :)
She wedged the phone between her legs and looked up. “Neither of us signed up to live in a commune.”
“True. I’m just saying that it’s easier to handle if you all talk to each other. Everyone up there is figuring out how to deal with the same issues. Renewable energy isn’t foolproof; you can’t depend on it like clockwork. You know that. All the risks are in your contract.”
“I know. Sorry for freaking out. It’s just that”—a moment on the edge, wavering—“we’re kind of stressed right now.” With the “we” she’d let Louis into the conversation, and the real reason for her being here rose to the surface. She was handing the need to Howard on a platter.
At least she had a punch line, a shoe to drop: the death of Louis’s mom, how awful it sounded, how unarguable.
But Howard was already nodding in anticipation, “I didn’t want to intrude,” he said, “but I heard about Louis’s mother, and I’m so sorry. It’s really awful.”
This was the worst shock of the morning—an intrusive, many-layered shock. She’d thought the death was hers to tell. Only now that she’d been robbed of it did she realize how tightly she’d been clutching the news to herself. She’d thought many times already of how to deliver the news to Howard, somberly, using “passed away” instead of “dead,” blinking back tears. She remembered the dark thrill of saying the words to her own parents and his friends who “deserved to know,” the assuredness that she was the one entrusted to disseminate the privileged information.
Knowing before anyone else, knowing first, had been proof of something. The thinness of the proof, now disintegrated, revealed the pettiness of the need.
“How did you hear?” she asked, knowing before she had said it that the question was dumb. Louis had been out of town for two weeks. Nothing like this was ever a secret. Death unfolded private pain into the open.
“I was over at Basquiatt last week doing some consulting,” he said. “I’m sorry. I wanted to send my condolences earlier, but like I said, I didn’t want to intrude.” But of course he wanted to intrude. “How is he?”
“I don’t know. He’s fine.”
“It must be tough.”
“I don’t know what he wants me to do.”
“You just have to be there for him.”
“That’s what everyone keeps saying. But where am I supposed to be being? Where is there?”
“You know what it means. It means being present and attentive. He probably just wants to get back to normal.”
“That seems fucked up on some level, though.” She shook her head. “Normalcy seems cruel in this situation.”
“Maybe he needs to repress.”
“Everyone wants to repress! That doesn’t mean it’s a good idea.”
“You can’t expect a person to suffer all the time. He has to compartmentalize if he’s going to survive a death.”
“Survive a death,” she repeated, remembering that Howard’s dad was gone, had died a long time ago. They’d never really talked about it. She contemplated flipping the conversation around on him. It wouldn’t work.
“There’s no predicting what’s going to happen or what he’s going to need,” Howard said in his reassuring voice. “Just be patient. Trauma works in mysterious ways.”
“But aren’t there also universal things? It’s just categorically bad when a parent dies. Even if you’re ambivalent about them, or you hate them, it’s just overall bad when they die.”
“Maybe it’s not that bad for everyone.”
“If my parents died I would want everyone to act insane, burning shit and ruining everything.”
“But it didn’t happen to you. It happened to him.”
She sucked air in, then opened up all the way. “I know I’m not supposed to map my own feelings onto him, but I don’t want to be waiting around, unsuspecting, when he snaps.”
“He might never snap. Life is just easier for some people.”
“Do you seriously think that? That’s privilege speaking.”
He circled his face with his finger. Look at me. A minority.
“Oh, come on. You know about privilege.” She circled the air more widely, mimicking his gesture, indicating the renovated Altbau kitchen, with its blue ceramic sink and stainless-steel dishwasher.
“All I’m saying is, Louis is in some ways an uncomplicated person.” The not-so-subtle digs at Louis were piling up. She ignored them. She had asked for advice; she had to take what came with it. “You tend to get overly involved in the lives of people you care about,” he said, “which is very endearing and commendable, but doesn’t always serve you. Put on your own oxygen mask first.”
“All right. That’s enough paternal advice for the day.”
“It’s just the accent that makes me seem condescending.”
“You always say that.” They smiled at each other, and then she asked: “And how are your—things? Do you have any of your own issues?” The classic false overture. They both knew their dynamic. It was off-kilter, but it was stable. His knowing her was what she knew about him.
He leaned forward slightly, a barely perceptible shift that wouldn’t have been possible to construe as anything meaningful by anyone watching, but which transmitted a message all the more intimate precisely because it was so stunted.
“Since you ask, we are having a bit of a PR crisis at the moment,” he said.
“Oh?”
“Just between us.”
“Okay.”
“Not even for Louis.”
“I get it.”
“To be perfectly candid,” he said, placing all his fingertips on the table, creating little
tents with his palms, “some of the problems with the Berg aren’t just tech issues.” She looked at him blankly, worried for a moment that he knew about their cheating with the trash. No one was watching, she reminded herself. Just the silent, rotating lens of the cameras. “There’s been some infighting among the consulting architects, the engineers, even PR. Things are stalled because of the disagreement.”
“Disagreement about what?”
“They never officially agreed on how much tech should actually be on the mountain. Some of the architects don’t think you guys should be so comfy. Some of them don’t believe it’s really authentic for you to have climate control, for instance.”
“But the climate-control system is independent of the central grid. It’s a thousand percent carbon neutral. It’s not doing any harm to the environment.”
“Obviously. I’m on your side. It’s always an arbitrary decision, what you call natural and what you call artificial. Those choices are all symbolic, and they each represent a political position.”
“But if someone decides that our heating and cooling are unnatural, what’s next? Then someone will decide that clean water is fake, and then someone will decide that LEDs are fake, and then someone will say we can’t eat anything we don’t grow ourselves. Who actually decides these things?”
“That’s sort of the other problem. A group of the architects have quit. They’re upset that their plans were treated like suggestions and not blueprints.”
“And nobody knows about this.”
“Thus the PR element. It’s a lot of work for me to keep a lid on this. We don’t want to freak people out.”
“You don’t seem worried about freaking me out.”
“I think you can handle it.”
“I can handle it. But what are we supposed to do? We can’t wait forever in that place. You got us into this, you know.”
“Oh, be patient. As soon as they make some executive decisions, the solutions are simple. To fix the heating, I think they just have to reconnect some severed wires to the beating heart, or whatever they’re calling it, the CPU thing.”
“You really don’t know anything about the tech.”
“Not even a little. I stick to politics. I mean PR.”
Her sister was the one who had convinced Anja to stop seeing Howard. “He’s projecting an imaginary fantasy onto you,” Eva had said. “How old is he, forty-five? He wants someone permanently young. He thinks you’re fine with being a piece on the side. He’ll never commit.”
Anja hadn’t been looking for Howard to commit—actually, that was exactly what she hadn’t wanted—but the idea of being a “piece on the side” (on the side of what?) in the eyes of anyone else was bad enough to convince her to end it. Somehow unable to cut things off, she managed to trick herself into feeling rejected by him, leading herself down a tunnel of body dysmorphia. She convinced herself that Howard was looking for some ideal of girlish perfection that any lump would disqualify her from. It couldn’t be that she was maybe not that interested in him romantically; no, that was not an option; he was a powerful person; the only option was that she was inadequate.
She let herself be consumed by self-doubt, shielding her arms, her calves, her breasts in his presence, becoming volatile and causing increasingly embarrassing scenes. At the low point, she accused him of grabbing the fattiest parts of her body during sex. He’d said, “Obviously, I like them best,” and that was the end of that.
Of Louis, Eva approved. “I found his picture online,” she said. “He’s hot. See, it only took you a month to find someone better. You should think more highly of yourself.”
Anja decided not to listen to Eva on these topics anymore. She’d decided that before and always relapsed, but with Louis she finally managed to stop feeding Eva details; Louis was going to stay a sacred space, free from probing. “You must be serious about him,” Eva had said. “I never hear a peep. Is he taking advantage of you? I just read an article online about this thing called mansplaining.”
She couldn’t blame Eva’s bad advice when she and Louis hit a breaking point after only a few months of dating. It was the fault of their living situation—which was Anja’s fault. They were deadlocked about where to go after the impending loss of the garden house, which they were living in illegally and which was on the verge of demolition. The whole age-old Schrebergarten was going to be flattened for an apartment block as soon as a final piece of paper got stamped somewhere deep inside the Ordungsamt. You could complain about losing history and heritage, but you could complain louder about the lack of affordable housing, and so the development had moved forward with very little protest.
Their garden allotment was just inside the S-Ring, which demarcated the limit of the conveniently livable part of the city. Once upon a time, the thousands of subdivided gardens had been built as urban escapes, chunks of nature scattered across the city where hearty children could be set loose. But when food was suddenly in short supply during the first war, the little gardens were quickly converted into urban farms, amounting to an ur-sustainable-living movement. Later, when the war ended and the embargoes were lifted and the bombed-out city was temporarily left to its own devices, displaced people set up camp in the gardens. Sheds became homes. Temporary visitation became habitation. But before anyone could get too comfortable, the next war emptied the gardens again and the spaces were left to grow wild, reverting to real nature for the first time in maybe a thousand years.
In the next postwar phase, the period of grand division, some gardens were sliced down the middle and became portals for smuggling among the overgrowth. Eventually, Wall came down, or rather Wall was torn down in bits by thousands of hands and machines; city was once again an enormous expanse of empty real estate; gardens were once again parceled and converted into weekend leisure destinations; and the forebears of urbanites like Anja and Louis started to show up. One by one each tiny garden and all its historical baggage became a sliver of private vacation property. The whole thing, meaning the whole city, was going in circles, history looping and tangling itself like hairs clogging a drain.
By the time Anja arrived in the city, when rents everywhere inside the S-Ring were at an all-time high, the central Schrebergarten had all been renovated and taken over, not overdeveloped like most city blocks but rather their miniature charm canonized into tiny overpriced rentals for urban getaway “experiences.” Only a few of the far-flung gardens beyond the periphery were still neglected and unregulated. Anja had discovered hers on a long weekend walk due south. Far from any train station, she came upon the fenced-in cluster of twelve little houses separated by scraggly hedges, which all together occupied only two city blocks. Most of them were squatted, but three were empty, and one of those had a decent roof. After coming back a few times and sniffing around, she’d found the woman who seemed to be improvising administration and paid her in cash for six months upfront.
After the six months were up, by which time Louis had moved into the garden with her, they couldn’t decide what to do. They agreed that the house was unlivable for much longer, the roof becoming less decent by the day, but finding and paying for a real apartment seemed impossible. Anja was making ridiculously little money at the time, still technically a RANDI intern, and she neither wanted to tap into her trust fund to contribute half the rent for a new apartment nor allow Louis to pay for the majority himself. Louis didn’t care if he had to pay (he could easily cover the rent for a new place with his ballooning Basquiatt salary), he just wanted to get out of the wet, crumbling, doomed garden house. And yet Anja was adamant that letting him pay would create an unhealthy dependency. They couldn’t agree on how to move forward; they were teetering on the edge of a breakup.
Out of nowhere, the six-page formal invitation letter to join the new socio-environmental living experiment had arrived at their post office box. It was written in complex bureaucratic German, which Louis had tried to plug into Google Translate before Anja got home, which caused him to panic, thinking i
t was a notice saying they were about to be evicted. Scanning the first page, Anja immediately understood who was responsible.
(Howard was well aware of the garden house’s ramshackle condition, having slept there a few times himself in the pre-Louis days. Its shabbiness appealed to him, as it offered tangible proof that he was having sex with a twenty-six-year-old. Being with her on the floor mattress made him feel open-minded.)
The letter was an ostentatious display of magnanimity, whose scale alone—the number of social and professional levers Howard must have had to push and pull to accomplish the feat—practically billboarded his history with Anja, while boasting the extent of his influence. She understood the submessage easily. Howard was a mature adult who did not hold grudges. He had not only bestowed on her a free place to live, loaded with cultural and ethical capital, but a place for both of them to live: Anja plus Louis, the guy who had replaced him. Had she expected petty jealousy or vindictiveness?
She’d hesitated to take the offer, but Louis was firm. The eco-village was too good to pass up, no matter how it had come about. Jealousy was not an issue for him, which, overall, she decided she was grateful for.
3
LOUIS HAD NEVER BEEN GOOD ON THE PHONE. HE WAS IMPERSONAL and distracted, always as though he were speaking from a room where he didn’t want anyone to overhear him. It was typically mannish and not the worst thing. The only reason it still bothered Anja was because it reminded her obliquely of her parents’ inability to telecommunicate. Weeks without checking in, unreachable in a jumble of time zones, and then suddenly a slew of intrusive voice messages: Are you ok??? Answer us??? And then, just as quickly, going dark again.