Oval

by Elvia Wilk

  Seeing that Laura was heating up, Dam cut in, “Can you invite us to the app?”

  Eric looked haughtily down at all of them. “You can’t ask to be invited. You have to be picked. Otherwise where would the trust come from?”

  Dam looked back and forth between Eric and Laura, who were becoming less compatible by the second, weighed his options, and made a choice based entirely on his crotch.

  “Oh, Laura,” he said. “You’re just bitter because you’ve blown all your cash, and you know your cultural capital can’t help you now.” He watched Anja for her reaction.

  Anja reacted dutifully. She was grateful for the shift of gear. The app wasn’t worth arguing about. She wished she could get herself to feel as strongly about things as Laura could—Laura argued for argument’s sake: there was something admirable in that. “What happened?” she asked. Laura shrugged and drank.

  “She’s developed a little gambling habit recently,” said Dam. “Four thousand euros down the toilet at once.”

  “It’s not gambling,” said Laura coolly. “It’s like fantasy sports. It’s harmless.”

  Anja remembered how upset Laura had been after watching The Bachelor the week before. “Shit. What shows are you betting on?”

  “Only The Bachelor. It’s just an experiment.”

  “Sure, it’s an experiment in figuring out how we’re going to pay rent,” said Dam, sneaking a look at Eric, who was staring off into the distance.

  “I’ve been doing really well until this week,” said Laura. “I never lost before now.”

  “That’s what people who are addicted to gambling say,” said Dam.

  “So you’re part of a reality TV betting ring,” Anja said, putting her arm around Laura. “That’s not the worst thing in the world.” Laura glared at her. “I’m not being sarcastic,” Anja said. “I think you’ve got your finger on the pulse. I was worried you’d been wasting your talent.”

  “Don’t encourage her,” said Dam.

  Laura composed herself. “Next week is the grand finale, and I have solid intel on the winner of the Final Rose. I just wasn’t sure of the order the others would get kicked off. But now I have everything under control.”

  Eric tapped the table excitedly, apparently paying attention again. “You know what, this could be a really good addition to the app. Insider TV knowledge. I’m going to run this by the founders and see what they say.”

  Laura face-palmed. The conversation didn’t pick up again after that. Eric finished his beer in a heroic swig and took off, alluding to an important tech party he had to get to. Dam watched him leave, stricken at the thought of having to endure a whole other social event with Eric in order to get him into bed. Laura retreated home to “check some stats.” Dam volunteered to walk Anja to the foot of the mountain.

  As they pushed open the door, leaving the Kneipe, they ran into the man who sold roses in the neighborhood, rearranging his bundle of unripe buds, which he raised in greeting. They recognized each other by now, or at least Anja and Dam recognized him. He probably saw too many faces every night. He was familiar and easy to talk to, always lifting the flowers in a perfunctory gesture but never pressuring anyone to buy. Anja was sure she had bought one, once, but it had been a long time ago. Now the question of purchase seemed beside the point; they met each other as acquaintances, which was nicer than a transaction, wasn’t it? Or would he really have preferred Anja and Dam cut the crap and just buy a flower?

  They said hello to him and asked after his family. “All good,” he said. “The smallest one is teething, so I’m not too sad to be out of the house.” He stepped over the threshold into the bar. “But it’s so cold tonight.”

  They agreed, zipping their jackets against an icy wind. The air bit their faces the way it could only bite in Berlin. Anja wrapped her scarf around her face and realized she was clenching all her muscles in an automatic brace against the cold walk ahead. She should have been wearing long underwear—but how could you know what to put on, when the weather was always changing so fast?

  “He’s right, do you feel this?” Dam said to Anja as they headed south. “I mean really feel it?”

  “Are you walking me home as an excuse to try some new weather theory on me?”

  “No, but just hear me out for one second. Does this look like rain to you?” The cobblestones were running with an icy slush.

  “Well, it’s not snow either,” said Anja.

  “Exactly. It’s an ambiguous substance that is not liquid water but not frozen snowflakes. It’s undefinable, it doesn’t fit into normal app categories, there’s no little phone icon for porridge falling from the sky. Isn’t that convenient?”

  “Convenient for who? I mean for whom?”

  “You think I know English better than you? Never mind.”

  “Come on. Tell me the current theory on the block.”

  He shoved his hands deeper into his jacket pockets and squinted at her. “Have you ever heard of Operation Popeye?”

  She laughed, then clamped her mouth shut. Her teeth chattered. “No. Tell me.”

  “During the Vietnam War, the U.S. government had a secret program called Operation Popeye. Their job was to try to fuck with the weather over Southeast Asia to beat the Vietnamese and win the war. Mainly they tried to make it rain, to extend the monsoon season so it would never stop raining and there would be flooding and landslides that would make fighting impossible.”

  She rubbed her jaw to calm its chattering. “Is that real?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Like did this really happen or is it an internet story?”

  “It definitely happened. They released all the classified papers a long time ago.”

  “How does someone make it rain on purpose?”

  “Basically you shoot chemicals like silver iodide into a cloud until it explodes into water droplets. It’s called cloud seeding.”

  They paused so a bus could go by before crossing the street. The streets were almost empty otherwise, no traffic and only a few people hurrying home from bars with their faces angled against the wind. “So you think someone is seeding clouds over Berlin and making it rain,” said Anja.

  “Not just seeding clouds. That’s just the best-known kind of environmental warfare, the only kind that’s been made public. There are tons of others. Earthquake warfare, wind warfare.”

  “Or maybe it’s just climate change.”

  The wind picked up, as if for emphasis. A siren blared in the distance.

  “Climate change would explain seasons with extreme heat or extreme cold. Or even a few really hot or really cold decades, extra long seasons. There was a little ice age in Europe in the 1600s when it was freezing for like fifty years—even that would make sense. But that’s not what’s happening now. We don’t have consistent seasons at all. It’s different every single day.”

  She nodded. This much was true. The four discrete sections of the year had entirely fractured at some point, first into months and then into weeks and then into days and maybe now into minutes. There was no steady expanse of time when you could expect to be able to wear the same outfit. No continuity. No semblance of a cycle. The last real summer had been a few years ago, although she couldn’t remember exactly how many years—maybe, she realized, because there was no such thing as a year anymore. If the clock hands don’t go clockwise, you can’t tell time.

  “I don’t have all the answers,” said Dam. “I just know this isn’t real.”

  Anja looped her arm through his and pulled him close for warmth, but also to signal camaraderie. “Have you noticed your tendency toward conspiracy gets stronger when you’re worried about money?” she asked.

  Dam thought a moment, sucking in cold, dry air. “That’s plausible.”

  “How are you going to pay Laura’s half of the rent?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe Laura can suck it up and get an actual job. I’m so sick of her whole thing about the evils of taxable labor. She’s just lazy.”


  Anja didn’t point out that Dam’s weather blog wasn’t the highest-grossing way he could be spending his time. Instead she said, “Want a present?”

  Dam was in the inner sanctum, so she was allowed to occasionally offer him money without offending him, though he usually rejected it. In times like these she wished he and Laura would just let her give them cash; it would be so much easier and less slippery than always buying them dinners and paying for cabs. In cash she could get it done in a fell swoop instead of leaking money to them in uncalculated sums late at night. Get rid of the constant unexpressed expectation that she would cover them in indirect ways.

  “Danke, but no danke. You can just get dinner next time,” he said.

  A homeless woman emerged suddenly from her crouching place in a doorway a few meters ahead. She shuffled toward them. Small puffs of steam rose up from the ground around her feet.

  “No,” said Dam. “I can’t handle this right now.” He grabbed Anja’s elbow and steered her across the street toward the opposite sidewalk.

  “I didn’t know we were running away from homeless people now,” she said when they had landed on the other side.

  “What else are we supposed to do? I can’t give them anything and I can’t deal with the guilt of saying no. It’s like the precarious are expected to support the downtrodden in this city. Have you noticed how many bums are around lately?”

  “I don’t think you’re supposed to call them bums.”

  “What are you supposed to call them? They’re everywhere.”

  “Homeless?”

  “But if the only thing separating me from them is a home—I don’t know. It’s not a wide enough gap.”

  “There’s obviously more than that separating you.”

  “Such as?”

  She stopped walking and reached her arms out in a gesture of exasperation. “Seriously. I’m here. I know we have some unspoken taboo against charity, but I don’t have anything else I’d rather spend money on than you guys. Plus, if I sign this consulting contract—”

  “Abend,” a voice cracked. They glanced back and saw that the homeless woman had followed them. She coughed wretchedly at them. “Bitte,” she mumbled. “Etwas warmes zu essen.” Anja reached into her purse and produced ten euros. The woman reached out to snatch it, not making eye contact, and hurried back across the street.

  “Now we’re both exonerated for the evening,” said Anja. “Maybe you should take a different route home, though, or she’ll catch you again on the way back.”

  Dam left her by the orange trash can at the base of the Berg. She paused before heading up, texting Louis first, just in case the reception in the house wasn’t good that night. She felt her gut drop as she sent the message, knowing he wouldn’t be home for a while. He was out eating meat somewhere with Prinz, schnitzel with ketchup, hamburgers, Korean hot pot. He hadn’t been home before midnight in a full week. And he’d stopped apologizing for being absent; whatever he was working on or doing must have been justifiable, important enough in his mind, or maybe he had just forgotten, forgotten the private zones of morning and evening. She waited for him to respond to her message, trying not to stare at the screen in her hand, trying not to seem desperate to herself.

  She peered up at the mountain. The whole mound seemed to disappear as it rose in the dim haze, the path receding entirely into the bush after only a few meters. This fat stack of dirt had been dumped here before she’d ever met Louis. Their whole relationship had existed in a world where the Berg was already real. Louis’s whole Berlin, in fact, had been a post-Berg one. He’d never set foot on Tempelhof airfield; all he knew of this giant swath of the city was a harsh climb upward, all vertical, no horizontal.

  Years ago, that had been one of her favorite things to do at this time of night: a slow, horizontal walk around the landing strip in a prescribed oval under the low sky. The city always a receding shore on the other side of the expanse. The smell of grass, unextinguished barbecues, weed, dog shit. Flat, flat ground: a perfectly unplanted plot. Sentimentality crept in like bushes on either side of her line of vision. Louis would never see it. You couldn’t undo a mountain.

  7

  LOUIS MATERIALIZED IN THE WORLD AT A PARTY. A PARTY, THE place where new people materialized. After you met them, you always realized you’d seen them somewhere on the internet already. But you still had to go to parties to get them: new friends, new people to have sex with. Anja had heard of people meeting each other on the subway or standing in line for coffee, but this had never happened to her. It seemed improbable.

  The party that invented Louis was an after-party at an investor’s house. It was the after-party for the final show of a famous consultant finishing her term at a consumer electronics conglomerate. The consultant was now most definitely on the downhill slide of her career. She’d been “emerging” forever, up into her forties, but instead of making the transition to “mid-career” that should have happened by this time, she’d veered off course. She hadn’t been rehired by her company and she hadn’t been hired anywhere else.

  Both the event and its after-party had a melancholy tinge. The consultant was obviously not allowed to act like she had ended up at a celebration of her own failure, but everyone else was allowed to act like that.

  Anja was annoyed while watching the final performance, both because the performance was hard to watch and because Dam hadn’t shown up to meet her as he was supposed to (she had only agreed to go after succumbing to his pleading). So she watched alone, standing uncomfortably as a solo agent in a crowded space with a glass of white wine as her only protection from prying eyes.

  The consultant’s main material in her work was her own body. Her consulting strategy since she was very young had been to urge office productivity by exposing her naked self to the gaze of the office workers whenever productivity waned. It was oddly effective in those early years to have a beautiful, unclothed woman showing up at strange hours in the office, dead-seriously glaring at everyone and beating her chest. She had hit on something counterintuitive: men (of whom the employees mostly consisted) were disturbed (shamed?) rather than titillated by the intrusion, and their desire to avoid the recurring spectacle was enough to keep them fulfilling their ever-rising quotas.

  But as her body had aged, she had also aged out of the original premise of her project. Now she was middle-aged, and as a woman, she was no longer the same protagonist. No one looked at her when she came into the office now, there was no intimidation factor, and in the interim the company had been forced to meet a new kind of quota by filling half the lower-level positions with women employees, who reacted in various unpredictable ways, including an anti-exploitation campaign. Anja suspected there was potential somewhere for the consultant to flip the whole approach on its head, but instead she kept performing the same tired provocation, relying on the assumption that she was still the default subject of seeing rather than figuring out how to make herself be seen.

  After the consultant’s final performance for a bored audience, a repeat of what she’d always been doing and seemed doomed into doing forever—Anja considered the idea that the repetition was in fact a pointed refusal to alter her method rather than an inability to evolve, but then rejected that hypothesis—clumps of selected guests piled into taxis to head to the after-party at the investor’s house. Anja found herself chatting with someone in a clump and was quickly absorbed into the group.

  Squished against the window in a taxi of people she didn’t know, Anja watched the dark city hiss past. They traveled for over a half hour to a suburb she’d never seen before—she couldn’t even figure out which direction they were exiting the city. Dam wasn’t texting her back and she was growing anxious that he wouldn’t show. She wasn’t sure she could fend for herself at a party in the suburbs where there was no easy escape. The person next to her chatted on, clearly mistaking Anja for someone else. When they arrived she was first to leap out of the car, unable to keep up the charade for a second longer.
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br />   The social choreography of the evening was orchestrated enough that she was relieved of improvisation for the first hour. A flying buffet in the backyard under a huge tent canopy, like a prom party or a small wedding celebration. Tiny burgers of venison meat, tall champagne flutes with red berries floating in the liquid, drugs circulating on silver platters through the crowd, an ice cream vendor parked outside the canopy with a monkey on his shoulder. A llama and a small goat in a pen nearby for petting. It was absurd and people seemed slightly hysterical, completely intimidated but pretending to be casual about the excess. Anja found a cluster of people whose names she knew and joined their group, leaning against a tall, unstable, hourglass-shaped table with a drink in each of her hands. She noticed she was imitating the precise pose of the woman next to her, down to the angle of her elbow. The same way she often copied someone’s dance moves without realizing it until they were totally in sync. She consciously tried to alter her position and sloshed wine over her wrist.

  Out of nowhere, the shadow fell across her face. The shadow was rare and blessed and she could not control its arrival. It offered social protection. When it fell, harsh looks and judgmental remarks didn’t land. It wasn’t a mask, just a shadow, which cooled and calmed her. The calmness freed her up to act without anxiety, to take risks. The only proof she had that the shadow state was not only internally felt but also externally manifest was the way men responded to her while she was in it.

  She tucked her phone into her bag and stopped checking for a response from Dam. She let herself be led into the house by the group she was standing with, remembering to put her drinks down first. The only risk of the shadow state was the possibility of getting teeth-crunchingly drunk if she took the invincibility for granted.

  The house splayed itself out obscenely: marble walls, a spiral staircase with golden banisters, floor-to-ceiling windows. A pastiche of wealth signifiers no less effective than old money would have been. Money was money was money. Anja and the people around her nodded at each of the features nonchalantly—yes, yes, we feel comfortable here, nothing to remark upon.