by Elvia Wilk
The exposure of the gym floor as an arbitrary construction was jarring. Until then she’d thought of its layout as a natural landscape. Previously the gym had allowed a renunciation of her relationship to dimensional space—a way to move without moving anywhere—but now, randomly configured, the machines asserted themselves as dimensional objects with tangents and coordinates, setting up new and strange relations between one another and the bodies touching them. They were no longer machines for forgetting. They were forklifts for moving soft goods.
Below the gym there was a hardware store, a massive four-level warehouse. Everything from fine-grained sandpaper to Swarovski-encrusted toilet brushes. Gilded picture frames and fluorescent lights, sawhorses and stacks of linoleum. Anja wondered if the new flooring being laid across the gym floor had been brought up from the store, loaded piece by piece into the service elevator, and installed under cover of night. How pointed, to keep the gym open throughout its renovation. We don’t take a day off from our self-improvement—how could you?
Instead of waiting for a free machine, she gave up on body renovations for the day, sat down in the mini-café, and ordered a kale smoothie. She spotted two electricians in blue coveralls squatting nearby, fiddling with an outlet. They looked like they were doing a good job. They looked like they were working hard.
The workers hired by Finster had been categorically unavailable since the start, and nobody she tried to hire on her own would agree to hike up the mountain. The materiality of the Berg seemed incompatible with just about any service or bureaucracy. There had been the insurance companies, the various delivery services who refused to deliver, the Bürgeramt, which didn’t know how to register the address, and of course the bank, which still refused to go paperless. In order to activate her credit card, she had to first receive a series of special codes, hidden inside an envelope behind a magnetized strip. The envelope could only be delivered to her home address, therefore it couldn’t be delivered, therefore no credit card.
Customer service stories were so universal and so useless to repeat: the second you started telling one, people’s eyes would glaze over. Everyone knew the gist, and nobody really cared about the details. To give in to the urge to tell a customer service story was like an admission of defeat. This is really so important to you? You don’t have any more interesting content to impart? Have you really become an adult, a parent of your own life, whose entanglements with infrastructure are now central enough to share?
It was best to limit the telling of customer service stories to your partner, if you had one. That was part of the agreed-upon division of labor between Anja and Louis: she dealt with the bureaucracy, so he had to listen to her complain about it. “I’m going on Human Strike,” she’d announce, waving her phone while dialing yet another hotline number. “You can’t make me do all the reproductive labor just because you don’t speak German.” But they both knew how it went when he tried to handle it.
Overall, the labor evened out. Louis did the laundry. Louis did the dishes. Louis initiated sex. And Louis provided an audience for stories about logistics.
She was, she knew, the kind of person who took care of things, and there was an inertia to that identity. Louis—everyone—praised her “natural” skill at dealing with the regime of bureaupower surrounding them. There was a modicum of pride in this. She sometimes felt an animal satisfaction running her hands over the binders of hole-punched and sorted paperwork in the house.
But the expectation of competence was also oppressive. Truthfully, she didn’t have any more or less “skill” at dealing with the overwhelming amount of problems, she was just more diligent. A safe realm to exercise the control she didn’t have over most areas of life. Naturalizing it made sure that she was the one who had to do it. The more everyone depended on her, the less possible it was to denaturalize the activity.
Thinking about customer service usually made her agitated, but she remained cool sitting there at the gym café with her green smoothie and a view of the exercise floor, watching the horde of exercisers slotted into their machines. And she continued to stay cool, even after going to fetch her things from the locker room and realizing her key card had stopped working and then waiting twenty minutes for a bulked-up gym person to come open her locker with a master key. She stayed cool, even after the gym person tried to blame her for somehow breaking the lock mechanism. Cool, even after the elevator to the ground floor was full of weight lifters who eyed her a little too lustily when she squeezed in between them. Cool, even after it took two full cycles of the traffic light to get across the intersection and enter the train station. Even after her train was delayed by twelve minutes. Even as she considered how Louis, the person she had loved the most violently in her life, was shedding his skin and becoming an unknown creature. She stayed very cool. She played Candy Crush for eight minutes. The train came.
The car was full of white people, except for one elderly black man. The seats on either side of him were empty, maybe because they were those hinged seats that you have to push down in order to get them horizontal; no one liked those. A finger scratched in Anja’s brain: sit next to him. In solidarity—against what? Was she appropriating something again?
Another finger scratched in her brain. The voice of a woman who had just entered the car. She was clutching a transparent file folder in which was wedged an outdated issue of a monthly magazine the homeless were given to sell by prostrating themselves before a subway audience. Holding the monthly was how they proved that they were homeless, just a signifier, a badge. Nobody bought it. A monologue was streaming out of the woman’s mouth as if it had broken off mid-sentence in the previous train car and was simply picking up where it had left off, like a half-finished video that starts playing immediately, unbeckoned, when you open your laptop. . . . kein Dach kein Job . . . was zu Essen ein Bißchen Geld Kleingeld zwanzig Cent dreizig Cent ein Cent vielleicht . . . nichts zu essen nichts entschuldigen Sie bitte die kurze Störung . . .
The Störung—the interruption—was an interruption, an interruption of the private thoughts of each person in the car, whose expressions had become pitying or grim or defiant in response to said interruption. Except the two adolescent girls loudly gossiping behind their hands, unshaken by empathy or culpability or anger or disgust because the only thing stronger than those feelings is the social pressure of high school . . . können Sie ein Bißchen Kleingeld vielleicht . . . The woman scooted down the car, her litany echoing from a subterranean, ancient place, like a shaman channeling a dead spirit, so glazed over was her expression and so unanimated her gestures. There was more cadence to a voice you’d hear on the other end of the insurance company hotline, more human specificity even in the repeated Was kann ich für Sie tun? of the customer service representative.
The Störung was an interruption not because it was commanding or harassing, but because it was so benign yet so unignorable. It fell into the uncanny valley of empathic response. As Louis might say, there was no “specificity” to the struggle, no “human story” compelling you to act. How would Louis react if he were in the subway with her? Had he solved the problem of how to puncture the banal wretchedness of these encounters? Wasn’t his solution, Oval, ultimately just an amplified version of tossing change into a cup? It didn’t really change the binary nature of the encounter, didn’t provide a new option outside the fixed choices: to give or not to give. Oval just compelled you to give more. It didn’t resolve the paradox wherein ignoring another’s suffering was impossible (that would be inhuman) but fully letting in the awfulness of it was also impossible (because then how could you go on living your ridiculous privileged life?) and so you either plunked some change in the bucket or you averted your eyes just like everyone else as the source of the Störung approached.
. . . Danke, danke für Ihre Aufmerksamkeit . . . The lack of originality in the woman’s performance extended to the halting movements, the downturned chin, the flinching expression. Universal physical effects of marginalization, p
ain, poverty? Or learned behaviors? How had the woman discovered this litany she was now producing? Had she subconsciously internalized the words years before, as a comfortable, seated subway passenger, listening to someone else sing them and memorizing them, until a calamity suddenly befell her and she ended up on the other side of the valley, only to find that she could recite the whole speech with innate ease? (The finger scratched in Anja’s brain: she’d never have to recite these words; she was immunized by wealth. She thought of her parents.)
Because no amount of spare change would matter, and because she was not Louis and could not think of anything more creative to do, Anja decided not to donate today to the society of predictable, memorizable ills. The woman was slowing in front of her anyway, stopping now very close to her; her labored breathing came into focus, her filthy jeans, her sour smell; Anja felt panicked, stared down at her lap . . . Danke vielen Dank schönen Tag . . . Anja was being thanked, for some reason, though she had shrunken fully into herself, gutted by the thought of Louis watching her, and yet driven to be even more belligerently ungenerous by the same thought. The woman moved on and Anja looked up to see the man next to her arching his body up to slip his wallet back into the pocket of his slacks. He had produced an offering. The muscles of everyone sitting around them seemed to relax; they had been absolved of responsibility for the time being. He’d taken care of it.
Anja looked down and saw that a very small dog was trailing the woman. She smiled at the dog in a way she had not smiled—would never smile—at its owner. If the dog had begged her for something, how easily she would have given it. The dog was white with a light brown spot on its flank and a dark brown spot on the top of its head. The dog and its owner were now stationed in front of the doors at the other end of the car, waiting for them to open, after which the dog would obediently rise and follow its owner out onto the platform and ostensibly repeat this humiliating process again and again into perpetuity. Only maybe it was not humiliating at all, maybe that was an unfair assumption. The dog, for one, was not humiliated. It was as happy with the homeless woman as it would have been running circles in the backyard of the house of the Danish couple on the Berg. The dog loved the owner, was now clinging to the flaccid denim rag that had become of her jeans. Keeping in step with her gray Skechers.
Woman and dog exited the train, and at the other end of the car, another pair entered: a homeless man and a pit bull wearing a spiked collar. Anja looked to her left, at the man next to her. Would he give again? Would she? What would Louis do? The eternal question: What would Louis do?
Once, while stroking his hair, Anja had said to Louis: “I’m petting you like a dog.” He had told her: “No, people pet dogs like they should pet people.” Beloved Louis, the funnel through which all the anguish of life leaked. He revealed and then healed through the revelation. He was the only problem and he was the only solution. He was the plague and the pox and the salve and the salvation.
14
POTSDAMER PLATZ WAS BURIED IN SAND DUNES. HEAT LAMPS dangled all the way down from the ceiling on spindly chains, emanating a red glow. The flamboyant spike pointing straight down from the center of the domed arcade seemed more menacing than usual, hardly restrained by the BabyBjörn of steel cables holding it fast to the ceiling. Children were playing and digging around in the sandy mess beneath the spike. The sand was a tossed salad of scattered ticket stubs and jumbo plastic cups and dog shit.
Anja could remember every season having been staged beneath the canopy over time, as if the decorators were reminding people what time of year it was supposed to be. There had been fake snow at one point, with a miniature white Berg for kids to roll down; once, real dried leaves had been imported from somewhere. She’d read that an upscale department store near this same spot had posed similar spectacles in the 1920s, marking all the seasonal holidays with extravagant store-window displays. Online, there were plenty of photos of what the Platz had looked like in Grand Old Europe, before it was completely blasted and then eventually bifurcated and then reconstructed in some ambivalent combination of past references and future imaginaries—the same story repeated everywhere across the city: disintegration, division, reunification, squatting, then sale to Finster and clad in glass, with plaques explaining how the new design referenced the original architecture or paid tribute to the lives lost in one of the disasters on the spot. Every once in a while something would instead be reconstructed exactly as the old photos depicted it—like the Prussian palace the government was erecting in the city center—in order to retain the touch of empire that they believed tourists wanted to experience. But most places ended up something like this commercial arcade at Potsdamer Platz, which had reached its historical terminus in the form of a cluster of chain restaurants and movie theaters huddled under a canopy of lights and wires held taught by a central vertical spike.
Louis loved Potsdamer Platz. Anja half expected to see his blond head poking up from the crowd of tables outside the chain restaurants, his throat reddish from the cold, teasingly vulnerable. The vulnerability planned, but also real.
She forced herself not to look for him. He wouldn’t be there, he was working, whatever that meant. He’d been texting her from the studio, enthusiastically planning their “trial run” at a point “very soon.” He seemed to think they were on the same track. Or he was trying to skip straight to dessert without eating his vegetables.
Anja bought tickets and 3D glasses for Dam and Laura and the three of them descended into the pit where the twelve theaters lay, deep underground beneath the spike. She and Dam waited in line for popcorn while Laura went to find seats.
“Are you mad I didn’t tell you about our apartment?” Dam said, wiping his endlessly running nose on the back of his sleeve. “Don’t be mad.”
“I’m not mad,” Anja said. His sleeve was caked with dried snot. “You should take an allergy pill.”
“I knew you were going to be mad. That’s why I didn’t want to tell you.” He sniffed and picked at the edge of his nostril.
“I’m not mad.”
“It’s not like I want this to be happening. I’m in denial. You know I can’t deal with real-life stuff like this.”
It was so like him to label himself as someone who could or couldn’t or did or didn’t do certain things. I’m not a jealous person, he would say, as if that negated his obvious jealousy. I don’t drink coffee in the afternoon, he’d say, in order to explain why the coffee he was drinking at three p.m. was a bad idea. He deviated constantly from his list of self-defined traits and behaviors, but no amount of deviation prompted him to change the list. I’m not that type of person, therefore my actions can’t be interpreted as such, ergo I’m not that type of person. A tautology of personality. Anja ran this through her head, standing beside him in line. In her teens, before she’d had real friends, she’d imagined that real friendship meant you didn’t have an interior monologue running constantly about your friends—but maybe the interior monologue just got more accurate.
They’d reached the front of the line and were expected to indicate what they wanted to buy for twenty euros. Dam put his arm around her. “Libation of choice?” He pandered to her, speaking her thesaurus words.
“Whatever you want to buy me.”
He asked for two big beers and a giant popcorn, which he pushed in her direction. “You need to eat. You’ve got nothing left to hold on to.”
She shrugged. Her stomach acids curdled at the sight of food. She knew she had become even more spindly; she was fine with it. It showed solidarity with the grief Louis was supposed to be experiencing (though she couldn’t help noticing he had in fact put on a few kilos) and indicted him for the way he was acting. I feel his pain plus just look at what he’s doing to me.
It occurred to her that Laura might have been wrong. Maybe grief was contagious.
They found Laura in the very middle of the second row of the theater. “You want to give us a stroke?” said Dam. Laura nodded and slipped on her 3D glasse
s and put her feet up on the seat in front of her.
“Hey D,” said Anja once they were deep in the red velvet seats, “can you write some messages for me?”
“There’s no signal in here.”
“They’ll send automatically when we leave.”
“Will you forgive me if I do this for you?”
“Yes.” She handed him her phone. She hated typing on tiny screens. Her fingers weren’t good at it—some innate incompatibility with the object. “Find Howard first.” If only she could outsource all communication like this.
“Where . . . Okay, here he is. Howard says: WHERE ARE YOU. All caps. A little aggressive, no?”
“Definitely. Write back in all caps. Say: AT THE MOVIES. Caps.”
“Passive-aggressive. I like it.” He typed quickly. “Sent.” He raised his voice over the surround sound, which had just picked up, and glanced at the screen. “The trailers are starting.”
“Find Louis. He sent me something earlier.”
“Here’s Louis: Are we on for Friday? My oval heart beats for you. Heart emoji.”
“Something noncommittal.”
“Dolphin?”
“Good.”
He pressed send with a flourish. “What else?” He raised his 3D glasses from his nose to get a glimpse of what was happening on-screen.
“Who else wrote me?”
He lowered the glasses to the tip of his nose again. “One from Sara, one from Michel, and one from your dad.” He opened the top one. “Sara wants to know: Wie gehts dir und lou? Lang nichts mehr von euch gehört, alles okay?” Dam frowned. “Why is this person even messaging you? Are you actually friends with her?”
“Not really. She gets a dolphin too.”
“Okay.” He glanced at the movie screen, then back down. “Michel wants to know if you’ll meet him Monday morning before heading—quote—into the belly of the beast—unquote.”