by Elvia Wilk
The investors’ children were chasing each other maniacally through the foyer, screaming and knocking into things. The girl banged into a plinth Anja was standing next to, rattling the contents of the vitrine balanced on top of it. Anja reached out to steady it and felt a hand on her arm. It was the kids’ mother, who had come bounding over to make sure everything inside the vitrine was undisturbed.
“It’s past their fucking bedtime,” the mother said to Anja. “They’re not usually allowed downstairs at all.” She wrapped her arms around the vitrine and inspected its contents anxiously. Anja peered into the vitrine too.
Sunken onto three shiny purple cushions were three tiny, shriveled, brittle heads. A fine powder had been shaken loose from the one on the left. Anja shook her head, unsure what they were. Objets d’art? Artifacts?
“Just look how he’s been rattled,” the mother said, jabbing her finger onto the Plexiglas. “Gerald. My favorite! His skin is flaking off!” The woman’s hands were shaking, she looked like she was on the verge.
One of the kids flew by again, and she grabbed him expertly by the wrist and dragged him toward the stairs. “Stay there!” she shouted at Anja. “Make sure no one touches the glass!” Smacking her child on the top of the head, she rasped, “Wir haben Respekt vor Schrumpfköpfen,” and headed up the spiral staircase.
Others were watching now and backing away. Anja was left alone next to the scene of the crime, unsure if she was really supposed to obey or whether this was a task meant to humiliate her in lieu of humiliating this mess of a family. Before she could make a move to escape, someone joined her at the plinth, someone whose name she had heard but couldn’t remember. She’d seen him earlier strutting around the backyard so confidently she could barely stand it.
“Making friends?” he asked. She was uncertain whether he was talking about the investors or the heads in the vitrine.
She tapped the glass with a finger. “Whose are they?”
He raised his eyebrows, evaluating her. “The investors own them. The people whose house we’re at.”
“No, I mean whose heads did they used to be.”
He laughed. “You don’t know?”
She shrugged. “I’m not in the business.”
“Two overdoses and a suicide,” he said, rapping his knuckles loudly on the glass. “Nobody wants to be supported by these people anymore. They’re obviously bad luck.” He took a step back from the case, almost as if he regretted touching it.
“Bad luck?”
“Three deaths in the last ten years. Why take the chance?” He shrugged. “It’s either bad luck or something worse.”
She’d heard of this somewhere. The heads, she guessed, were consultants who’d died before their terms of contract had ended and whose heads had been all the investors had left to collect. It was hideous, but it wasn’t outrageous. It followed the logic of a system where a person’s whole life was part of someone else’s investment portfolio. She wrinkled her nose at the thought. “So how do they shrink them?”
“They send them to Jay. He’s here somewhere. You should ask him. Want to meet him?” Each sentence he dropped was a smooth pellet of social capital.
“Not really. I have my own shrink.” He laughed again, but she kept her expression straight. It hadn’t been a good joke. “Don’t they collect anything else besides these?” She looked around the foyer. Other than the vitrine on the plinth, the space was completely empty.
“Of course. They’ve still got five or ten living investments. And there’s a vault of art objects in the basement, but they never pull them out. Really spooky down there.”
She ducked out of the conversation as soon as she could, leaving him and the helpless little heads together in the foyer, and stepped out the side entrance toward the pool. There were four or five other plinths dotting the dining room she walked through, but no more heads. Just little remnants from performances by consultants. Pathetic souvenirs. These were relatively young investors—so on-trend with the immaterial thing. The older ones, the smarter ones who’d weathered more than one boom-bust cycle, they still had beautiful objects around, not just flaking skulls in a jar.
She sat on the edge of the pool, took her shoes off, and put her feet in the water. She waved at three topless women swimming by, but didn’t start up a conversation. Her phone buzzed. Dam was held up, he was so sorry, he couldn’t make it after all. Of course.
“Not going to swim?” She didn’t look up. Him again, following her.
“I’m not the type.”
“What type are you?”
“I stay on land.”
“Me too,” he said. She waited, still not looking up at him, to see if he would sit down. He did. He took off his Tevas, rolled up his seersucker pants, and tested the water. He wasn’t looking at her. The women across the pool called out to him and he consented to a casual wave in their direction. Then he looked at her, in order to show that he was not staring at the topless women. This was a clear signal. She glanced back at him.
“Done babysitting the heads?” she asked.
“I never want to see them again. It’s like the worst possible version of my future. I don’t need to see it displayed in a glass coffin.”
He was under thirty, she guessed. Not yet consigned to the crypt. “You’ve got investors already, though?”
“Yeah. But things would have to get pretty desperate for me to sign my head away at this point.”
“Have you been given the option?”
“Of what?”
“Of signing away your head.”
“Sure, it’s always an option. But it makes you look desperate if you do it too soon.”
She swirled her feet in the water, toes puckering from the excess chlorine. “What about that artist who sold her bones to a museum so they could make her into a diamond after she died? She was young when she did it. She got famous.”
“True, but that was decades ago. The first time that sort of thing happens it’s always a big deal. But the next hundred times—it’s imitation, not innovation. You have to innovate faster than the imitators.”
“You need the imitators to get famous, though. The imitation proves the innovation.”
“I’ve thought about that a lot,” he said, warming. She noticed a slight lisp had emerged in his speech, the corners of the words softening. She thanked the shadow. “The copy reinforces the importance of the original, as they say.”
“That sounds like something you’ve said before.”
“Maybe on a panel discussion or two,” he said, laughing to let her know this was a joke that was also true.
“I guess you’re just reinforcing the power of the first time you said it each time you repeat yourself.”
There was enough for them to go on to continue like this, he looking at the side of her face while she looked across the pool, and then she looking at him while he looked across the pool, swapping vectors of vision, occasionally overlapping. She was startled when they were interrupted by a group of people who showed up and crowded around him, one of them kneeing his shoulders to get his attention. “Be right back,” he said, and stood up to chat.
On another night she would have retreated, embarrassed to be exposed alone like that for too long, but she waited calmly with her feet in the water, still secreted in the safety of the shadow. It was awfully confident to sit there assuming he’d be back. But she did, and he would. The group moved on, and he took his place beside her again, not any closer, just comfortably angled in her direction. Months later, he would tell her this was the exact moment love hit him on the head like a hammer.
He apologized, gesturing in the general direction of the crowd behind them. “Networking. I have to pay my dues.”
This was meant to be a compliment—it meant talking to her was not networking, it was the opposite, a choice—but at the same time he was pointing out that she wasn’t worth networking with.
“It’s fine. I’m not on the job like you. I’m happily useless.”
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“I doubt you’re useless.”
“Really. I have nothing to gain or give. This is just a party for me.”
“Do you mean—are you a genuine member of the public?” He mimed a gasp.
“I’m a real layperson.”
She didn’t tell him then that she’d made it through almost a year at art school before calling it quits. It was too long ago to count for anything. All it had given her was a lot of anxiety—taught her she was meant to be a watcher, not watched.
“How did you possibly end up here?”
She turned her palms up and shrugged. “My friend begged me to be his wingman, then didn’t show up.”
He asked what she did, and was astonished to hear she was a scientist. “You have practical skills,” he said. “I’m the useless one.”
About this and all things he self-deprecated in a way that she might normally have found tiresome—would have found tiresome an hour before. And yet from his lips, just then, it sounded genuine, less like humble-bragging and more like he was coping rather well with the burden of being a very impressive person. He also readily deprecated the party, as if his being present were a necessary evil. Paying his dues.
He was from middle-of-nowhere America. He talked about the architecture there. Apparently there were a lot of modernist buildings. His name, he explained hesitantly, was a bastardized version of Loos, the Austrian modernist.
“I don’t usually tell people about that,” he said. “It’s pretty embarrassing.”
By way of explanation, he said his mom had always had high-culture aspirations but had never made it to Europe. “She keeps saying she’s going to visit me, but she never does. I think the idea of Europe has inflated too much in her mind.”
After this Anja was surprised that he took up asking her questions. This was not a characteristic she expected from men, much less one like him. She talked freely about her work, telling him about cartilage and its applications: coral reef balls, city substructures, whole self-generating satellites launched into space. He listened and occasionally made a remark indicating he had understood. He knew something about everything. And yet his knowledge always came out in the form of another question. He seemed, she could not deny, interested.
They left together without much discussion, and without walking back out through the crowd to say goodbye to anyone, just stepping through the thick row of hedges separating the sanctum from the street. He told her there was an S-Bahn fifteen minutes away and they walked slowly in the right direction, not touching. The shadow veil quavered but didn’t lift.
When she woke up it was gone, and her eyes stung in the raw light of day and the raw shape of Louis.
She had woken up in a slightly different dimension: a dimension with Louis in it, a dimension with a bed with Louis in it. Light bent differently in this dimension, words bent differently. Her eyelids strained to open wide enough to take in the human anomaly beside her, and she saw the air warp around him. A haze, the sheen of an oil spill, a skidded frame. She felt his hand encircling her ankle. The hand was curious, but it was also confident. It asked a question already knowing the answer.
smooth clouds with a chance of secrets / rough winds / 19º
The audience sat on collapsible stool-like things made of folded recyclable cardboard that existed for no reason other than to not be normal chairs. To subvert “the chair.” The institution was critical of institutions: this was the message they were supposed to get from the wobbly stools.
The panel discussion was preceded by a performance with two feminist artists in their seventies who were legendary if you were into that sort of thing. One of them was wearing a sailor outfit. During the performance she kept saying “cunt” in a way that was meant to be shocking. She said “slimy cunt, with ooze and pus.” She said “patri-capitalism” and “fuck me, daddy.” In case you hadn’t gotten the message, she said, “We are the only transgressors left.”
Anja put her forehead in her hands. “This is making me really sad,” she whispered. Louis whispered back, asking whether she had ever actually seen something good at this particular institution. Anja said she had not. She said they must be suckers for coming back again and again. Louis said they’d better head to the bar.
In the basement of the complex, which had once been a church and then a military hospital and then a civilian hospital and was now a warehouse for artworks with nowhere else to go and an event space for artists who’d never adjusted to lending their lives to companies, who instead spent all their energy sucking the last remaining government resources dry, Anja and Louis sat at a small round table upon what had once been some kind of stage, a raised platform for priests and, later, surgeons.
“This whole place is the pits,” said Anja.
“Why do we keep coming here?” said Louis. He laughed.
She thought for a moment. “I’m nostalgic for institutional art, and you’re trying to find meaningful political engagement.”
“Maybe. I think it’s more that I’m looking for some evidence of transgression. Or looking to see if transgression is possible anymore.”
“It probably isn’t. The whole idea is outdated.”
“I know! But I can’t stop thinking that if I were really a creative, good person, I’d find a way.”
She laughed. “Everyone has a reason for not transgressing. For me, I’m too shy.”
“Maybe your shyness is transgressive.”
She frowned. “No, it’s debilitating.”
People thought of shyness as a choice or affectation rather than a real personality trait, which was why people, mainly women, thought it was okay to pretend to be shy. They thought it was cute. Anja knew the truth: timidity was a terrible disease.
“Sometimes you flip in public,” he said. “Just like that, you decide not to be shy for a while. Or something comes over you and it goes away.” She knew he was thinking of the shadow. She’d never explained it to him.
“I don’t decide to be shy or not to be shy. I can’t help it.” She waved at a server who had emerged from behind the bar and was actively not looking in their direction.
“I used to be shy too, when I was really young,” said Louis, also waving at the server. “Pat taught me to be outgoing in high school. She forced me to do sports and go to church camp. I made myself act like an extrovert just to impress her.”
Anja got stuck, dropping her train of thought. They had been going along in a comfortable pattern, and now Pat suddenly appeared in the room between them, rising up uninvited like one of those inflatable waving balloon people. Louis hadn’t lapsed even once since coming home; he’d insisted with every word and action that he was not thinking of Pat. Weeks without a mention or even a gesture toward the lack, toward any sort of grief process, as if he had successfully repressed it and was just going to move on. And now he introduced her as a casual memory, without emotion, without context. As if Pat were not dead. As if mentioning her would not conjure her death, would not require acknowledgment that death was on his mind. Was this a sign he wanted to talk about it, or a sign that he didn’t want to talk about it? Was it an invitation or was it bait? Or was it a total red herring?
At a loss for how to react, Anja resolved to carry on the conversation until another sign presented itself. “So, for you,” she said slowly, “it was possible to just decide to be an extrovert.”
“I guess so.” He was unfazed. Good, so moving forward had been the right choice. “I did it on purpose. I thought I had to just to survive. But then here you are, being shy and walking around, doing things and being loved, and I realize I could have stayed the way I was. You’re evidence shyness works.”
That’s nice, she thought. I’m being loved, apparently. “Maybe being outgoing is like learning a language,” she said. “You have to learn it while you’re still young.”
A waitress finally emerged, came over, took their orders for Aperol spritzes, offered them menus.
“I didn’t know they had food here,” said
Anja. “Should we eat?” Louis nodded. She was not even slightly hungry, her stomach wasn’t behaving these days, but she nodded back.
He pointed at the menu, and when the waitress came back Anja ordered for both of them in German. Trout for her, goulash for him.
“Groß oder Klein?” the waitress asked Anja, nodding toward Louis as if he were a child.
“Big bowl or small bowl?” she asked Louis.
“Groß,” he said to the waitress, his ß a gentle lisp, the O a flat vowel not found in German.
“Brot dazu?” the waitress responded. Louis looked at Anja.
“Bread?” she mouthed at him.
“Gerrrne,” he said to the waitress.
“What?” the waitress said in English.
“Yes,” said Anja, “he wants bread.” Louis gave the waitress a winning smile.
Even if Americans learned the technicalities of a foreign language, most of them couldn’t handle making the actual mouth movements necessary to be intelligible. They could memorize the words, but they came out in the shape of American sounds. Anja saw this as a cultural inability to recognize phonemes as anything but literal; it was like Newspeak but for pronunciation. Americans believed that letters should act like what they looked like to the American eye, nothing more and nothing less, signifier swallowing signified down its wide open gullet, the vertical relationship between the sign and its referent rendered entirely irrelevant because the lips and tongue just didn’t think it mattered whether the vowel sounds were melted properly. Once, in Prague, Anja had seen a sign outside a bakery advertising Kwassah. She’d sent a photo to Louis.
Louis was apologetic in a socially necessary way—“So American, I know”—but nobody really expected him to learn German; he had more interesting things to do. He let Anja order for him in restaurants. She liked it, mostly. It was a nice sort of caring labor. She got to be his interface with the German-speaking world. Translating for him was a way of staying indispensable, and keeping him out of German preserved the English-language arena of their private life. The same way she handled the map when they traveled. There was intimacy in dependence. Also, infantilization.