by Elvia Wilk
One purpose of the walk up the mountain was to not be in the house, where the question of sex would inevitably arise. The house was too hot, something smelled rank in the bathroom, and neither of them wanted to rub sweaty bodies together in the bedroom, but they didn’t want to acknowledge the estrangement. Laura had told Anja that her cousin had “gone through some really weird sexual phases” after his dad died—apparently that was a common aspect of the grief process—but nothing really weird had happened to Louis’s libido that couldn’t be chalked up to the house and their schedule. He still seemed physically affectionate and capable.
Another purpose of the walk was for Louis to circle around his feelings in long rants, sometimes getting closer, sometimes further away. After her miniature crying jag at the restaurant, she had resolved not to worry about any of his behavior anymore and resigned herself to simply wait. It would all break eventually. She couldn’t blame him for how he was acting. He wasn’t himself.
Lately Louis had taken to venting about the superficiality of their social world, his job, their lives in general. The consultants, the false friends, the bottom-feeders, the assistants, the interns, the long lines to get into the clubs. Everyone except Anja, though he never exactly said she was exempt.
“The only real difference between the people working in the creative industry and the people working at the airline counter is that the creatives are rude,” he said. “Everyone we know assumes they’re intellectually and morally superior to normal people, but our friends are just as normal, just as conservative and boring as anyone else. The main difference is that they’re rude all the time. And they pan that rudeness off as authenticity.”
They were holding gloved hands and taking long strides up through the frozen mud. Anja was silent, letting him carry on. He was more vehement than usual.
“And the ones at Basquiatt are the worst—they really think they have the moral high ground. Most of my interns would be better off working at EasyJet than pretending they care about the world. At least then they’d be honest about their complicity—might as well be fielding lost luggage instead of antiretroviral injection shipments—it’s all the same skill set, nothing more glamorous than knowing how to use a computer. And if they just admitted they were in customer service they wouldn’t be so goddamn rude!”
“The people working at EasyJet don’t exactly have the best manners either—”
“Normal people might be boring, but at least they aren’t trying to subvert societal norms by being outright shits to each other. They’re not proving their superiority by ‘subverting’ the rules of conduct.”
“Um. Who thinks they’re subverting the rules of conduct?”
“Everyone! They think they’re being subversive, but they’re just fucking rude. We need new friends—the whole economy has made our scene corrupt, like a sick tower crumbling from within, like an ethical Ponzi scheme—”
She cut him off. “Did something happen today at work?”
“No, no. It’s just the general rudeness of everyone. They need to learn to empathize. Nobody thinks about anybody else’s feelings. Nobody knows how to treat me anymore. After all this happened”—by “all this” she supposed he was referring to the sudden death of his only parent—“after all this, I finally found out who’s a good person, not just an opportunist. People who seemed like idiots to me before turn out to be really nice. They don’t care how meaningless politeness is, they’re just polite. And it helps.”
“You’re upset because you want people to be nicer to you, even though you think niceties are meaningless?”
“They might be meaningless in content, but they mean everything in form. It’s just the form, the act of saying them.”
Louis was judgmental—oh, was he judgmental—but he had a way of bending his judgment to suit his needs. And in general, his judgment had always been much more lighthearted than this, more like a bonding mechanism with the person he was talking to than true shit-talking. It never prevented him from befriending the object of his earlier criticism. Until now she’d understood this as generosity, not hypocrisy.
But at that moment Anja could feel him verging on the kind of vehemence that prevents you from going back on what you said. If he trashed everyone to this extent, it would take a lot of justifying to reverse course.
“Babe,” she said, “you’ve been acting so normal that no one would know you needed any . . . special treatment right now. Usually you hate chitchat. People probably think you’d be embarrassed if they offered you their condolences, or whatever it is that these supposedly polite people are telling you.”
“No, I wouldn’t hate it. Why can’t anyone understand the difference between politeness and banality?”
She stopped walking. They were almost at the peak, and the wind was picking up. “All right. What is the difference, in your opinion, between politeness and banality? Because in my opinion, the only difference is your opinion. It really sounds like you’re theorizing around the fact that your feelings are hurt. Someone must have upset you.”
There was simply no rubric for processing grief in their social world. Life and death: there was no space for these at the club, the studio, anywhere.
“I’m not talking about any one person,” he said.
“Is it me?”
“What?”
“Is it me? Have I not offered my condolences enough?”
“It’s not you—”
“Because I would have really liked to offer some condolences. But you wouldn’t even give me the address of your house in Indiana so I could send flowers for the funeral . . .”
“I told you, we didn’t need any more flowers.”
She threw her hands up. “It wasn’t about you needing them. Politeness isn’t about need. It’s about form. That’s what you just said.” Of course, in a way it had been about need—her need to feel like she was doing something. She shook her head. “I think the problem isn’t lack of condolences,” she said, “it’s that no amount of condolences is going to help.”
She turned and pushed up the path without waiting for a response, weaving up through the trees, all the way to the small viewing platform topping the bald scalp of the mountain. She sat on the wooden bench overlooking the city, where no tourist had ever sat. The muddy climb was still deemed too unstable for visitors, and the perimeter of the whole mountain was encircled by a net of drones, which tended to intimidate curious explorers who might have tried to sneak up. Anja had caught sight of the drones only a few times, but she was sure they were there, hermetically sealing their total aloneness on the Berg. She and Louis might as well have been living under a giant glass dome.
Louis sat next to her on the bench. They both looked out and down at the view. The TV tower blinked to the left of her field of vision. In front of her, blue-white streetlights lit the western half of the city, while yellow-white lights lit the right half, a remnant from when the city had been divided and the lamps had been electric on one side and gas on the other. Radiating out from the Berg, now, was a dimmer greenish stretch of lights, where the old lamps had begun to be replaced with solar-powered ones. A taste test for the city, a sample of the sustainable color all of Berlin would soon be. With the green lights, the formerly double-sided urban space was transformed into a new ratio with a third variable, a new possibility expanding from its core, the old bisection being eaten away by the green future descending from the mountain. The city extended out as far as Anja could see, ring upon ring of new growth.
“I’m sorry,” said Louis quietly. “I’m discombobulated. I’ve been having bad dreams.”
“I know. I hear you making noises in your sleep.”
“I’m sorry,” he repeated.
She looked away from the expanse and toward him, long focus to short focus—zoom, swing, tilt, shift. She felt suddenly, horrifically guilty for losing her temper. Berating him wasn’t part of the plan.
“I’d ask what your bad dreams are about, but I don’t know how dreams fit i
nto your current rubric of politeness and banality.” That still sounded meaner than she wanted it to, but she couldn’t imagine how to dial down the emotional valence of the situation.
He looked back out to the city. “I’ve been dreaming about my mom,” he said. “I have this dream where she’s in the house with me.” He paused, squinted into the distance as if he were trying to make out a particular landmark. “I dream that I’m sleeping in our bed, and then she wakes me up by touching me on the forehead.” He reached a hand up and lightly patted his own head, the gesture itself impossibly childish. Anja put her arm around him. “She wakes me up and when I open my eyes I see that she’s all torn up.”
“What do you mean?”
“She’s all bloody. Her legs have bones sticking out of them.” Anja breathed in sharply. “Then I notice that the whole room is bombed out. We’re in a giant crater.”
“What’s a crater?” A word escaped her, for once.
“A huge hole—like we’re in a war zone.”
“Oh.”
“Then I look down and I see that my legs are gone too, and I feel better.”
“Why would you feel better?”
“I don’t know. Maybe because we match.”
“What else happens?”
“I just lie there. Sometimes she stays until I wake up. Sometimes she goes.”
“Shit, I’m really sorry.”
He patted her arm. “It’s okay. It’s not that bad.”
“I mean, it sounds extremely bad.” The whole point of this dream was badness. It was the real reason he didn’t want to be in the house at night. The house had become the scene of a crime.
“No, you don’t get it. She’s there with me in the dream. But then I wake up and she’s not in the room anymore.” He touched his forehead again, once. “That’s the bad part.”
Anja pictured the two of them waking up in the morning. Anja, scrolling on her phone, reading the news, waiting for him to wake up. Louis, shifting on his pillow, groggy, rolling back and forth, opening his eyes to see her beside him. She now saw what he saw when he woke up. He didn’t see her at all: he saw someone who wasn’t Pat.
“I get it” was all she could say.
“Can I ask you something, and you promise not to get mad?”
“Of course,” she said, knowing that she had zero choice, no matter what followed. Unexpected pain bloomed in her gut and then tightened as she repressed it. She hadn’t eaten anything for dinner.
“Would you hate me if I stayed at the studio for a few nights? There’s the pullout couch, and I could use a solid sleep. I think it might be the humidity and the temperature in the house causing me to have the dreams, actually. And I have this big project going on. It would be great to just wake up and get going.”
There was no arguing. He was going to leave her alone in the crater.
“Of course. Anything you need.”
“You should come by and see me there, though. I want to show you the project.” He was always dropping hints about this new thing he was working on without fleshing out any details.
But then, there were so many details that were missing at this point. So many things she should be able to ask him but couldn’t. The ghost of Pat. The late nights at the studio. That email from Howard in his inbox. She was afraid he would refuse to explain if she asked—but she was afraid of the explanation.
“Of course I’ll come visit,” she said.
Going back home after this seemed unbearable, but they did. They got in bed. Anja was big spoon. Despite all, Louis fell asleep instantly, and Anja lay there around him, imitating his shape, and waited for him to enter dream state. She waited with her eyes wide open in the darkness, staring at the tiny red light of the ceiling camera blinking like a slow, regular heartbeat. She waited for Pat to show up.
10
DAM HAD AN ACUTE PHOBIA OF BEDBUGS AFTER THAT ONE SUMMER he’d lived in New York.
“You can stay here as long as you want,” he’d told Anja over the phone, “but you have to disinfect yourself first.”
When she rang the buzzer at 128, his voice said: “Take your clothes off in the hall.”
“Seriously?”
No answer from the metal grate.
On the second-floor landing he was waiting for her with a black plastic trash bag and a towel. “Hand everything over,” he said.
“What am I going to wear if you take all my stuff?” she said, holding up her giant tote stuffed with clothes, makeup, laptop.
“Gimme that.” He reached out a blue-gloved hand, snatched her bag, and held it far away from his body. He handed her the trash bag. He was wearing a blue checked apron and a matching bandana wrapped around his forehead. “Go on, strip!”
She dutifully pulled off her sweatsuit. “That’s right,” he said. “All of it.” Each item she placed in the trash bag. “Your skin isn’t as bad as you made it sound, but you look thin as death. Let mama put some meat on those bones.” He held out his uncontaminated arm and she took the towel from him, wrapping herself and following him inside. “These go in the incinerator,” he said, holding up the bags, “and you, direkt to ze shower!”
She was relieved to be among humans again. Louis had absconded days ago with a duffel of shirts and underwear, enough to last a month if you were a guy, and, faced with the prospect of his interminable absence, she had gotten into bed. Her work contract didn’t start for another week and she had plenty of TV shows to catch up on, doled out by Laura like assignments.
Her bedroom was as sticky as always, and at some point during her tenth or twelfth episode, she’d realized parts of her body weren’t just sweaty but really fucking itchy. The litter of pink bumps trailing across her forearms and up one side of her neck, which she’d taken for a sun allergy, had gelled into a raised rash, intensely itchy and unattractive.
A hurried Google Image search for bedbug bites and fleabites and scabies ensued, but it was clear that the bumps were not bites; there was no prick at the top, no target-like pattern. It was a rash. A cellular protest that had gained a critical mass of participants and become a crowd. Her body was protesting being left alone. Or maybe it was just reacting to the mold that had taken over the bathroom.
Dam was rooting around in the cabinet full of crusty liquor bottles when she got out of the shower. “You can wear my kimono,” he said, pointing to the blue silk laid out on the sofa. “I put your clothes in the washer and disinfected your laptop. It’s drying on the balcony.”
“Drying?”
“Relax, it’s not like I washed it with a sponge.” He knocked over a bottle, arm-deep in the cabinet. “What kind of day is today? Martini? Pernod?”
“Let’s make gin and tonics.”
“There’s no tonic.”
“Let’s make gin.”
“Good point.” He found two large bottles with a finger or two of liquid left in them and emptied them into champagne flutes. “So shut up and tell me what’s going on. Is your house being fumigated? I could practically smell your bug spray through the phone when you called.”
“I told you, it’s not bedbugs. I don’t know what it is.”
“How do you know?”
“The internet.”
“Right. The internet.” He swirled the champagne flutes. “What about Louis?”
“He’s totally fine.”
“He’s at home alone?”
“No, he left a few days ago. He’s at the studio.”
“So it’s just you. With the skin thing.” He scanned her skeptically while popping heart-shaped ice from a red rubber tray into two cups.
“Don’t you dare tell me this is psychosomatic.” She turned her head to show off the blotchiest part of her neck. “Does this look imaginary to you?”
“Psychosomatic illness is the realest of the real, honey. Nothing fake about it.” He handed her a glass and they toasted. Dam was no stranger to undiagnosed disease. Neither the source of his famous allergies nor a cure had ever been identified. Always a n
ew acupuncturist, a new bottle of homeopathic droplets. “What’s going on at la Casa de Malos Sueños, then? Anyone from Finster show up and try to fix things?”
“I got a ton of emails from Howard yesterday, but I just can’t be bothered.”
“Good. He’s a jealous son of a bitch. Keep him out of things.”
“Actually, he’s trying to help, but I don’t know how much he can do. There’s some kind of problem with the architects.”
“That place has been bad news from the start.”
She changed the subject to Eric. She was not in the mood to open the floodgates. Dam was happy to talk about Eric anyway, or rather to complain about him. Eric, he told her, was so shameless in instrumentalizing people to get what he wanted, so transparent in his self-serving motives, that everyone just fell at his feet. There was an honesty to his way of operating that sliced through all the usual pretenses of networking, and strangely, people loved it. They loved the transparency. Dam was in awe. He’d followed Eric to a party the night before, where Eric had gotten soullessly drunk, and even in his blind belligerence seduced three consultants into some kind of creative collaboration on an ad campaign. The next morning he was already emailing them.
“What does Eric actually do for a living?” Anja asked. She sipped her gin, imagining it as antiseptic.
“Nothing. He just climbs. He calls himself a promoter, but I don’t know what that means.”
“I guess he has that app, though. The one he was telling us about. He probably gets everything through there.”
Dam told her a lengthy story about a multiple trade Eric had recently made involving a license to travel with a dog, which was apparently very hard to acquire without a “vet connection”; a building permit; a publishing deal; and a consulting gig. What Eric got out of it, after all that, was nothing more than an invitation to an exclusive dinner. The dinner, Dam insisted.
It was impossible to think about the app and not scan your life for unmet needs and potential offers. The app couldn’t fix a relationship, but maybe it could help with all those other tangibles that held up a relationship. A decent, unsustainable apartment. A dog.