Oval

by Elvia Wilk

  In spite of herself, she said it: “I’m sorry too.”

  “It’s fine.”

  “You still should have told me what you were doing.”

  “Yeah, and you should have been more supportive.” She wiped her streaming nose. “I wouldn’t have had to get Howard involved at all if you’d wanted to invest in O yourself.”

  She sniffed in snot loudly. “What? You wanted me to invest?”

  “You could have, if you wanted to. That’s what everyone is saying now. Even Howard thought it was weird you didn’t offer.”

  He was invoking the authority of the dysfunctional social scene, of the masses, of the culture at large, even of Howard, to override the private contract of their relationship. Public consensus reigned, the proclamation was in, and she was the traitor. She remembered again their last climb up the mountain together. His hating everyone, his superiority. Yet he was ready to invoke their wisdom now, when it suited him.

  She felt her language giving way, the right words not readily accessible. Whatever she said, she knew she’d realize later it was the wrong thing. She hung up.

  When the rain stopped in the early evening she put on a T-shirt, shorts, and rain boots and went for a walk. Her route up the mountain was random; she ignored the path and zigzagged recklessly through the wet mud. A thorn tore at her leg and she bent down to inspect its source: a bramble patch thick with berries. One of the berries had oozed onto the skin of her calf, leaving a purplish smear.

  Not concentrating on the ground, she stepped carelessly into a hole of eroded muck, stumbling and landing ungracefully on her butt. The mud on the slope continued to shift until it collided with a rocky outcrop a meter or so below her and prompted the rocks loose. Mud and a smatter of stones slid down the hill below her feet in a miniature landslide. She scrambled up away from the action and, picking her steps more carefully, continued to climb.

  Reaching a break in the greenery, she peered out at what she could see of the city below. She was surprised to pick up the sound of a steady beat. The sort of music you’d hear at the Baron, a stammering, high-pitched bleating atop heart-seizing bass, which she felt in her chest as much as heard with her ears. The bass was what reached her so high up.

  She found a tall, mossy stump and pulled herself onto it with her hands, using all her forearm strength. When standing on the stump, which was a bit slippery, she could see what looked like a huge open-air festival on Hermannplatz. One of those endless festivals, an excuse for day-drinking and overdosing before dark. There was what looked like a rigged stage and, surrounding it, a ton of tiny sparks of light visible in the quickly falling dusk—probably phone screens raised to capture the DJ making the sounds. Judging by how far the little lights spread from the center of the action, the crowd must have been enormous. She couldn’t remember having seen a gathering so big on Hermannplatz since a protest Laura had taken her to years ago.

  Things were happening on land that she wasn’t part of, that she knew nothing about. But they were just new iterations of the same. You were always missing something and you were never missing anything. The mass of social life would be swirling predictably, justifying its own presence with petty dramas. Careers were rising and falling, friends and lovers coming together and splitting up. Everyone was clinging to their individual life experiences, so invested in their existence on ground level that they never saw it from above.

  Sara was down there somewhere, still locked in her endless struggle with Mahatma, questing so hard for god knows what. Michel was down there somewhere, brooding and working hard to forget her. He’d eventually find some grown-up woman who wore slacks and turtlenecks and owned a car and who wanted to reproduce with him. Laura and Dam were down there—possibly worried about her, she thought with a pang—but they had their own things to deal with too. And they’d be leaving soon anyway. Better not to bother them, burden them, any more than she already had.

  Howard was down there, waiting for her to call him back so he could give her some miserable explanation. She resolved not to call him. She didn’t need his explanations. Anyway, it couldn’t be more than a day or two until the inevitable press release surfaced.

  She noticed a burst of orange appear in the sea of people surrounding the stage. She frowned and squinted into the distance. It looked like a little spurt of flame with a puff of smoke rising above it. The flame briefly illuminated the crowd, which forced itself back away from the fire in a circle, and she could see just how thick the Platz was with bodies—so many people back-to-front. There was a communal shouting loud enough to rise momentarily above the music as the crowd shifted. She stared down, intently, feet slipping on the stump. It was hard to tell what was going on, but in less than five minutes the fire disappeared. The music lowered in volume, perhaps in response to the emergency. A few minutes later there were sirens.

  On her way back to the house, the oddness of the scene struck her. A crowd so packed. It was like a twilight vigil. And a fire—since when did anyone light fires during an open-air concert?

  Before going to sleep she double-checked all devices to make sure they were off, conserving every morsel of battery power. She checked the camera in the living room one more time too, knowing full well she’d cut the wires but needing reassurance.

  Surprisingly, sleep came easily as soon as she reclined on the sofa, as if her bodily rhythm was tuning itself to the cycle of day and night unadulterated by electricity. Her dreams were furious.

  In the morning she had only to refresh her feed to find it. The press release came not in the form of an announcement from Finster, but as a sponsored critique on the front page of The Guardian.

  Leaked Footage Exposes Cracks in the Foundation of Pioneer Sustainable Community

  An unauthored website titled Fern Gully has leaked fly-on-the-wall video footage from inside a house in Berlin’s new eco-community for sustainable living on the city’s “Berg” mountain constructed by the Finster Corporation. The footage suggests that the community inhabitants themselves may have been partially responsible for the settlement’s endemic problems, which have only recently come to light.

  While the degree of success of the multi-million-euro, carbon-neutral living experiment has been largely shielded from the public until now, a press release issued in response to the video this morning from Finster reveals that all inhabitants have in fact been recently relocated due to difficulties with the extensive demands of rigorous sustainability.

  “This grand experiment,” states the press release, “is a testament to Finster’s investment in sustainable futures. Though the initial hopes for human/nature coexistence were higher, we are proud to have gained this essential knowledge about human limitations through our approach to Indefinite Research. Progress sometimes requires taking small steps backward.”

  The source of the leak is as yet unclear. The video consists of 20 minutes of compiled footage of the lives of two inhabitants, a young couple whose names are being withheld. The video is telling in its banality. From earnest arguments about how much effort they should expend on things like recycling properly, to blatant mockery of rules such as not smoking (which has been proven to damage the tissue of architecture meant to self-regenerate), the video is a portrait of innate human resistance to micro-governance. Unfortunately, it seems that is precisely the type of self-regulation that would be required for life on the Berg.

  The Berg, an urban development proposal by Finster to “re-nature” Berlin, won the bid for the open tender seven years ago for the controversial development of Tempelhof Airfield, which was previously the largest undeveloped public space in any European metropolis. While all other bids included various mixes of private real estate and retail outlets, Finster made a compelling case for instead increasing the city’s green space with a “vertical nature park” that would over time become populated by those willing to live a completely zero-waste lifestyle. After years of vehement resistance to any kind of private development on the airfield, city residents
finally agreed on a path forward and voted for Finster’s plan.

  From the press release recently issued, Finster seems to be considering a temporary halt to the Berg project as well as other flagship eco-communities, two of which are currently under development in Copenhagen and Milan.

  The press statement’s last lines read: “The greatest lesson from this adventure may well be that, unlike our ancestors, we are no longer capable of living closely with nature. As stewards of our children’s future, we cannot simply leave the planet to people anymore. Individuals cannot be left to shoulder the burden of the Anthropocene.”

  Finster is known as a notorious “greenwasher” of urban areas such as Berlin—that is, renovating buildings to meet sustainability standards and evicting tenants in the process. Finster and others have persistently argued that this is a necessary step in order to halt or slow climate change, despite the toll it takes on residents.

  The letdown of the Berg forces us to ask whether alternate methods for large-scale upgrading of city sustainability are really possible—or whether the square meterage of Tempelhof might be better used for a typical carbon-saving (if not carbon-neutral) commercial housing development.

  Given that Finster won the bid for developing Tempelhof based on this scheme, it would not be surprising if the city granted permission in the near future for the mountain to be rethought and, instead, used to make space for commercial real estate in a city with such a strong demand in the housing market.

  Responsibility for the Berg’s breakdown ultimately falls on many shoulders. On a larger scale, it could be that the urban planning commission did not exercise sufficient oversight during the planning and construction process. On a smaller scale, one gets the sense that Finster’s vetting process for participants in this much-anticipated eco-experiment may not have been airtight. But while the two participants whose lives have been exposed in this leak may be especially (even comically) incapable of following basic rules, one also feels sympathy for the conundrums they face, and imagining oneself in their shoes, wonders if one would fare much better.

  She turned off the tablet. The stupid object had never been anything but bad news.

  Sunlight was blinding in the living room and the house was too warm for her to consider trying to go back to sleep. Outside, who knew what time it was; the sky was doing that purple haze thing again and any moisture from the day before had entirely evaporated. The air was desert-like and the sounds of the city below were muted. Silence. It was orange down by the horizon, but in a uniform way, not like the glow of the sunrise. The sun was impossible to locate in the haze; light was coming from all around and nowhere.

  She wished for a fan as she checked the mini-house slowly cooking in the kitchen. No movement now; it was certainly in its final stage. The ducts, the disposal system, all of it: pipes had even threaded themselves down into the foundation, leading to a holding tank in the ground that, she knew, was supposed to ferment waste and feed energy back up through a charged mesh of wires, which were too tiny to see on the replica. The whole circuitry of the house had emerged last, making itself visible in translucent incarnation. Veins and organs under the skin. It had grown past embryonic and fetal to become a creepy little house baby now, fully viable on its own.

  A hot wind snaked through the kitchen, and she turned around to find the source. The windowpanes were sagging low enough to have separated at the seams from the ceiling, bringing their frames down with them. She could hear a gentle creaking, and wondered absently whether the ceiling was preparing to collapse.

  She took a magnifying lens to the living room to take a closer look at some of the vines that had pushed up from under the sofa during the night. The foliage was getting so thick in the room that if she lay with her head against the wall, looking up, the leafy vines almost looked like a field extending into the distance. Or the forest backdrop of the Fern Gully site.

  She saw through the magnifying glass that the leaf membranes were perfectly regular. Green surfaces edged in purple. The mass of them rustled together on the wall, the orchestrated, infinitely soft sounds giving her pleasant chills.

  Outside, she found that the plum vine was naked; she needed to eat. The closest neighbor was only thirty meters down the hill. Nobody else was in any of the houses now—she was sure of it. Why had she stayed moored to her own house like a recluse for so many days? She pulled herself up, put on a shirt and rain boots, not bothering with pants, and took a bucket in case she found anything worth collecting.

  She was shocked to find the other house even more overgrown than her own. Not a single window was left unbroken by the aggressive vines overtaking its façade. The decay seemed accelerated, years beyond normal decomposition. She approached the house, where the Danish couple had lived with their secret dog, and stepped tentatively through the doorway. The door was nearly rotted off its hinges, dangling at an unpleasant angle like a broken limb.

  The remains of a proud display of designer taste eroded before her. Two plump Soriana lounge chairs pouted at each other over a glass table with complex steel undergirding. The glass bowl of a chandelier had fallen to the floor, somehow without shattering, the long gold chain from which it had hung coiled on top of it. A towering bookshelf boasted expensive knowledge, now moldering; a teak cabinet packed with vinyl records was in the throes of collapse; a hand-knotted carpet sprouted fungus.

  No luck with the light switches. But the pantry was full of canned vegetables, tinned sardines, smoked oysters, pâté, flour, sugar. A rancid smell emanated from the fridge, rimmed by orange mold at its edge. There was a secret supply of bottled water under the sink. She smiled. She and Louis hadn’t been the only ones cheating. She cracked open a sealed jar of sugar cookies and ate three, placing a whole one in her mouth and letting it saturate with saliva before chewing.

  The stairs didn’t look so sturdy, so she took the steps slowly, one by one. At the top stair she stopped and gasped. A large, wrist-wide snakeskin was draped over the step. She considered retrieving something sharp from the kitchen, but quickly dismissed the thought. She was going to stab a snake? She thought back to freshman biology. Snakes were most active in darkness, not daylight; she’d be fine.

  In the bedroom, which must have once been ruthlessly tidy but was now scattered in dust and fallen ceiling debris, she found herself hit by the melancholy of the simulacrum. While the layout of each Berg house was slightly different in order to give a semblance of uniqueness, the bedrooms were all essentially the same shape and size. She turned around the room, running her finger over surfaces. She admired the placement of the bed, the wall sconces, the carpet, wondering why she and Louis had never tried other arrangements.

  The tap in the bathroom wasn’t working and the shower was overtaken by an assortment of fungi. The floor of the hallway was riddled with what looked like roots. The utility closet yielded the best booty: a backup solar-powered generator. She tipped it onto its wheels and hauled it down the stairs and over the uneven floor. She piled a bucket full of pilfered food and carried it, along with the generator, up the hill toward her house. She imagined she would set up the generator on her back patio to let it suck in the rays.

  Nearing the house with the generator and bucket in tow, she stopped short. She knelt quietly in the tall grass and laid all the objects down beside her, then crawled, low to the ground, toward the trees.

  Working hard to control her breathing, she peered out from behind the skinny birch where she squatted. Howard was circling the near side of the building.

  The shock was not only in seeing Howard, but in seeing any human at all. She’d grown accustomed to the silence. The sound of someone else brushing through the grass was jarring and invasive. He had punctured her privacy. He absolutely did not belong here.

  He called her name. She narrowed her eyes and shielded herself as much as possible behind the tree.

  As far as she knew, Howard hadn’t been to the house since the week she and Louis came to visit it before moving in.
Any awkward tension between him and Louis had lifted that day—or so it had seemed—along with the official handoff of the house and, she supposed, of her.

  He stalked back and forth through the grass. He was holding some sort of package. He scanned the tree line, then pivoted at the patio and strode directly toward her hiding spot. She was sure he would see her; she cursed herself for not wearing pants. He would find her pantless, cowering behind a tree.

  But when he was a few meters away he turned and continued to troll the clearing rather than heading in her direction. He was either blind or not really looking—not really expecting to see her. The house behind him was so overgrown, maybe he doubted she was really there. Maybe this was a long shot. Or maybe—she realized with a heart stammer—maybe he’d traced her location. She’d been checking Louis’s email from the tablet—he could have found out. No, she decided. The simpler scenario was more likely. The bouncer must have told him.

  Frustrated, he steered himself into the house. She heard him curse as he banged on something crossing the threshold. She changed her position slightly, moving a few trees down, in the hope of seeing him as he came out without presenting herself at a head-on angle. Now he would surely notice evidence of her inhabitation. The plum pits lined up on the counter. The buckets of rainwater. And—she realized with rage—the remains of the tiny house in the box. He had no right to see the experiment.

  She was tempted to run in after him, confront him, yell, argue, swat his hands away from touching anything in there, but her body resisted. She blamed the hesitation on her half-nakedness, and yet she knew she wouldn’t have run to him even wearing a snowsuit.