by Elvia Wilk
He put the jacket on one arm, then the other. He shrugged to straighten it across his shoulders. “Ouch,” he said.
“I know. That’s what I’m saying. I don’t want to treat you like a Band-Aid.”
His gestures of moving and stacking things had been for show. In the end he didn’t bother to gather the instruments on the table, just shoved his laptop into his backpack.
Before leaving, he said, without making eye contact, “You have no idea what’s good for you.”
20
ANJA HAD ONCE READ THAT DOLPHINS COULD SURFACE TO breathe and birds could keep flying while half-asleep. Evolution had gifted some species with the ability to shut down one hemisphere of the brain at a time. Some animals, like ducks, kept one eye open on the awake side of the head to watch for predators or monitor offspring. Hemispheric sleep was efficient, managerial: tasks could be delegated to one side while the other side rested.
Humans never learned this skill. The hemispheres were too codependent to cleave; the optic nerves didn’t like to work alone. Human half-sleep was entirely unsatisfying, with neither half of the brain enjoying a real rest—instead, the whole brain was left just sitting there, simmering below the surface of consciousness, unable to sink.
Home again on the Berg, Anja involuntarily became the first land mammal to develop the skill. The eye nearest her phone was always open, even when closed, and she held entire conversations with people who weren’t there, using her still-active language-processing centers.
No one called. After Michel left, the house was silent. She quickly got used to the smell and the humidity, but the silence pressed in on her as she lay on the floor of the living room, not caring about whatever fungi or creatures crawled across her. There was deep regret, there was a new sense of loss, but she’d had no choice—she couldn’t do it. He’d gone and ruined the sense of safety between them, broken the seal. The experiment was over.
Half-asleep, she drew her knees to her chest and waited, hoping to enter full hibernation. If only she could stop her system altogether, no more metabolizing or processing—like a bear halting its digestion before a long winter sleep.
Her thoughts turned to Howard. He was always there, waiting. She could call. He’d be mad that she’d come up here, but she could frame herself as desperate or helpless and he’d arrive like he always did. She considered it and then she tucked it away. She slid her phone under the sofa and let one half of her brain rest while the other kept on whirring.
Right eye pulling left brain awake before dawn, she felt around instinctively for the phone again, panicked when she couldn’t find it right away. Panicked again when she realized how low her battery was and where she was—cut off, no one but Michel knowing her location. Her first thought, of course, was to leave the mountain, but she jerked against this possibility. The house was filling with golden streaks of light; she could wait a few hours.
In the kitchen above the sink she noticed a vine creeping through the wall. The wall was crumbling where the vine poked through, but not giving way. She went outside and around the house to see where it was coming from: a whole nest of thick vines was suctioned, octopus-like, onto the corner of the building. From their bright green offshoots she found a cluster of plump round fruits, like small yellow plums. She plucked one and turned it over in her palm. Its skin gave slightly with a squeeze and bounced back like a collagen implant. Without thinking, she bit into it. Sour, but not bad.
On the back terrace, growth was also accelerating. Sprouts were shoving themselves up between the tessellated stones, which had buckled in one corner, and a swarm of gnats concentrated itself over the wet muck that had collected in a crevice in the split surface. Surveying the edge of the clearing, she found an odd mix of growth and decay, like the mountain was eating itself and spitting new things out.
All her life she’d found satisfaction in the cycles of consumption, the pleasure of bringing full containers home and taking empty things out. All those normal entrances and exits: lightbulbs, wine bottles, toilet paper. Bring them in, unpack them, put them where they need to go. When they’re done, remove their shells, take them away, put them in the right goodbye containers. But the Berg house had swallowed it all, a hungry, angry child that ate everything and then vomited most of it up.
Bracing herself for heavy nostalgia, she went inside and up to the bedroom. The bed was unmade, of course; clothes dotted the floor, a towel was slung over the door to the bathroom. After inspecting the toilet she decided it was safe to pee. While peeing she inspected her forearms. She’d slathered them with the whole bottle of burdock root after Michel took off. The irritation was faded to the faint imprint of a continent on a sun-spotted map.
She lay down on the bed and spread her limbs, feeling the memory foam give way in a familiar pattern. It would be so easy to take a nap. Her hand hit upon something under the pillow: Louis’s tablet. She sat upright, hardly believing he’d left it here for so long, after seeming so attached to it when he got home. Hadn’t he been using it at the studio? She looked carefully around the room again. She couldn’t remember how it had looked the day she left. But his side of the closet was mostly empty. Had he come home to get more of his stuff without telling her?
Hesitantly, she pressed the tablet’s button and was surprised to find it still holding a charge. She held it close to her face, checking for a data connection, which was low but functional.
A little red button hovered atop the inbox icon. It said 36. She felt the weight of the machine, so heavy, a thick slab of flesh. There was no doubt that Louis had outsourced his grief to the machine. She remembered the way it had felt when one day, while they were riding the subway together, he had pressed the tablet against the side of her shoulder to steady it as he composed a message. She could feel each of his taps through the screen, so clearly articulated. She didn’t notice when he had removed the tablet and was really tapping her shoulder, trying to tell her they’d reached their stop.
She felt sorry, for a moment, that he didn’t have it now. His appendage, which contained his loss. The thing was a part of him, all he had left of Pat, maybe.
Oh well. She tapped open the inbox. The thirty-six unread messages stared her in the face like glittering pebbles. Her pupils dilated, her pulse bounced. She was high on the breach.
Impulsively, she scanned for Sara’s name, apparently still in search of the other woman to pin everything on. She knew that, just as it had done to Louis, pain was twisting her toward the cliché: the mainstreaming of emotion. Wasn’t there any fucking original way to experience heartbreak?
Be methodical, she told herself. Start from the top. Read the recently opened ones first.
The first batch she scanned was mostly logistical chatter. Louis was a brilliant email writer—she had watched over his shoulder as he constructed messages sometimes, and had asked him to draft hers when she had to handle something particularly delicate. The art of the email was an English skill, or maybe just a human skill, that she’d never fully mastered. It was at its heart the skill of knowing how to ask for things without sounding like you really needed them. Louis knew how to be firm without forcing, to be funny without being unprofessional. In his elegant sentences he was clear and calm; he never pointed fingers, but he never shouldered the blame. He inflected the right amount of humor and familiarity to remind the reader that, while he was responsible, he was a creative, not a cog.
She was surprised at his curtness in several of the exchanges she glossed over. He reprimanded a colleague for “hierarchical” behavior in a meeting. He insisted the receptionist triple-check a delivery was coming on time because of its “vital importance.” The events themselves were unremarkable, except that they were things Anja didn’t know about, because she was not speaking with Louis on a daily basis anymore. Mundane ticks on the daily meter that she should have heard about over breakfast smoothies, but which were now really none of her business. And yet these normal happenings still had the aura of Louis around them: th
ey weren’t normal nothing-mails, because they were his.
On cue, Sara’s name popped up in a message from two days before. Anja shuddered and pulled the comforter up around her on the bed.
hay lou
still on for tonight @barowned? I got the *special delivery* you sent and am gonna find a way to stash it before we go in. is anyone else coming with?
also just wanted to say I’m so sorry abt anja, I know you tried ur best but sometimes things just aren’t meant to be . . . we are gonna take ur mind off it w dancing ja?? if you need anything at all just lmk
I’m always here to talk etc
sending xoxoxsss!!
She looked down at the tablet with disgust. At least it was clear there had been no hooking up. She could tell by the pandering tone of the message.
Knowing that he wasn’t sleeping with Sara should have made her feel better, but it didn’t. There was no other concrete reason for Louis’s inner disjuncture, no one for her to blame except mortality—except Louis. She realized that the name of the disjuncture—Idealism? Grief? Self-righteousness?—was becoming harder and harder for her to describe. And its occurrence was becoming harder and harder to locate in time. Just like Laura had said, maybe it wasn’t there at all. Maybe Louis had been continuous all along. Maybe the disjuncture had happened in her.
The rest was obvious. Sara was in the loop, number one O sidekick, since Anja, the would-be distributor, was now out of the picture.
Louis had responded.
can’t wait for ur grand entrance :) I’m gonna get there early around 11, just to czech out the scene, so msg me when you get there and I’ll seek u out. snowhite’s going on at 4 btw.
x L x
Was it worse or better that he hadn’t mentioned Anja at all in his response? Respecting their privacy or just more denial?
She scanned further down the list in the inbox. She clicked through a few emails from Prinz without subject lines. Links and jokes, links and jokes. She found one that Louis had apparently sent to himself.
Loos: “The homeless need meaning in their existence and they need beauty. The only way to give this back to them is to reinvent an authentic, craft-based art.”
This almost made her laugh. The return of the forsaken namesake. She clicked the next button.
Glaring up at her like a blue evil eye was HOWARD.
Hi Louis,
Hope all is well with you, congrats on the launch this week!
As promised here’s a secure link to the rough cut (expires tmw) of the first episode. Let me know what you think, we’re on a bit of a crunch schedule-wise but happy to pass on any feedback as we finish the final edit.
Again: can’t thanku enough for the last-minute part you’ve played in all this. It’s really going to make a difference.
Cheers,
H.
She placed a hand on her sternum to repress a wave of nausea.
She clicked through the link and ended up on a long scrolling page. It had a perpetually repeating forest pattern as wallpaper. The repeating image was slightly pixelated: a complex Photoshop effect made to look like it was pushing against visual technology limitations now long since irrelevant.
Times New Roman italic scrolling across the top and bottom of the page announced: FERN GULLY, Episode 1.
A video embed was nestled in the forest.
Video playback was automatic. She turned the volume up on the tablet.
A time code flashed across the screen: 9:00 A.M.
Bedroom, aerial view. Dresser, bed with pin-striped sheets, stack of books in the corner. Yoga mat unfurled at the foot of the bed.
She sat up. Her eyes shot around the room. Dresser, bed, books. Yes, these were the same elements, the exact same elements, but in slightly different states. The yoga mat in the room she was in was flopped over itself in the corner. Fewer books were in the stack. The sheets she lay on were flowered, not striped—a different IKEA pattern. An orchid on the windowsill that was still alive in the room on the screen was very dead in the real.
Two images, screen-shallow and room-deep, like a blueprint next to a photograph. Which was which? Her perspective swung around to match the screen view—there: the camera near the ceiling. A small white ovoid shell with the tiniest of apertures. She stared into its glareless lens.
There was a stool by the window, which she dragged to the wall below the seeing eye. She reached up to rip out its cords, but, of course, it was already off. No power, no blinking light. She yanked the cords out of its backside anyway.
The tablet was still playing the video, making noises from its spot on the bed.
She looked down at the screen and saw her head. The back of her head, then the front of her head, the part of her head with her face. She’d never seen herself from that angle before—her face from above, with features foreshortened. A towel was wrapped around her body, which was also foreshortened. She saw herself lift one leg up on the bed and then turn to look over her shoulder into the bathroom. When video Anja turned, so did real Anja, expecting for a second to see someone there. But no one was behind the real bathroom door.
Video Anja had company. She was joined by video Louis, in his underwear. He kissed her and said something; the sound of his voice was muffled. Tiny subtitles popped up at the bottom of the frame to clarify. The bubbles said: I can’t tell your mood of the day since there’s no hot water to steam up the shower. Video Anja laughed and said, loudly enough that subtitles were unnecessary: What mood do you think I’m in after a cold shower?
She tapped the video to pause, and stood, triangulating the objects in the room. A page in the back of a magazine: What’s the difference between these two cartoons?
The book pile in the video room was double the height it was in the real room, and she recognized the book on the top of the taller pile from its yellow cover, a giant behemoth of a science fiction book Louis had been reading. Reading because of something at work. Something about parachutes. The parachute project. Not so long after they’d moved in. The video image was nearly a year past its expiration date. Since then, their relationship had congealed around an event, then dissolved—and now she was back at the house, in its shell.
When all those terrorist beheading videos had come out, she hadn’t been able to bring herself to watch them, but she didn’t want to be the only one who hadn’t seen them. Caught between horror and curiosity, she’d called Laura, who was inured to televised suffering, and asked her to narrate them while she watched.
“Pleading victim,” Laura had said without affect. “Knife is not very long. Seems kind of like a steak knife. Hard to believe it will do the job. But—oh—oh, yeah, damn, it’s doing the job. Wait, you can’t see the knife because of all the blood. The head is coming away . . .”
Faced with watching the demise of her relationship on candid camera, Anja dialed Laura’s number from the tablet.
“Louis?” Laura answered warily.
“No, it’s me,” Anja said.
“What? Where are you? Are you with him?”
“No, I’m alone. I’m totally fine.”
“Are you—”
“Just listen, can you please watch something for me? Don’t ask more right now. I’ll send you a link.”
While she waited for Laura to find her computer and open the page, Anja glimpsed Louis’s inbox again. Twenty-eight unread messages, down from thirty-six. He must have been looking through it at this very moment. She closed the window reflexively, as if he could see her in there looking.
“Okay,” said Laura. “Ready.” Anja waited. She heard the shadow of her own voice, from the video on Laura’s laptop, through Louis’s tablet.
“What the hell?” Laura said after a little too long. “Is this your house?”
“Yeah. You can fast-forward if you want. I already watched the first four minutes.”
“No, I want to watch from the beginning.”
Anja opened the inbox again, despite herself. Twenty-one unread messages. She scrolle
d down through the subject lines of the recently read.
“Okay . . . here you are in the kitchen,” said Laura after the bedroom scene had ended. “You’re complaining. About Michel. You’re saying how annoying he’s been lately . . . Louis says . . . Michel’s a nice guy . . . but kind of a square.” Anja gritted her teeth and massaged her forehead with her temples, imagining Michel watching the video. “Okay,” said Laura, “you’re getting your food ready . . . you’re making a smoothie. Okay. This part is pretty boring.”
“Keep going.”
“You’re asking Louis about his stuffed nose . . . You just asked if he remembered to pick up his nasal spray from the pharmacy . . . no, it looks like he forgot his nasal spray. But he’s not going to get it today, he doesn’t have time. He’s late. Oh, the drama!” Laura snorted. “He has to go to work now . . . you’re giving him the trash to take with him . . . hold on . . . okay, you’re arguing about whether it’s okay to take the trash down instead of putting it in the disposal . . . he’s going to take the trash anyway. He is leaving with the trash now. Okay, end of scene. Long pause . . . waiting . . .” She was silent during the apparent pause in action. “Okay. New scene. Now it says it’s seven p.m., and we are . . . back in the kitchen. How exciting. You’re trying to put something down the disposal . . . you’re yelling at it. Whoa, strong language! Okay . . . you’re taking stuff out of the fridge . . .”
After the twenty-minute episode finished, Laura agreed with Anja: the only identifiable throughline was Anja and Louis’s incompetence when it came to the house. A particularly shameful scene had them sharing a cigarette out the window, laughing about the smoking ban.
“They must have sifted through months of recordings to find the worst parts,” said Anja, rubbing her forehead. The scenes had been stitched together from several different days, spaced weeks apart.