“Trust me,” Dwight said, “this is it.”
The hallway was walled with last names. I found Rooiakker.
There was no doorman, but the elevator went right up into their apartment if you punched in a code that Ingrid gave us over the intercom. Dwight and I stood in silence inside the elevator, which was slow and rumbly. Gradually we heard the sound of shrieking from above.
“Those are the twins,” Dwight said. It annoyed me that he was acting like a tour guide, as if this were his thang and not mine.
“I know, I met them before.”
The doors opened onto a jumble of shoes and coats, a fleet of scooters, swimming goggles on pegs, and miniature backpacks. Ingrid later asked me not to post any pictures of the children or the inside of their home on the Internet and to delete the ones I had already posted, but you can see all their interiors in magazine articles that have been published online anyway.
Their dog was a miniature thing, a black shih-tzu with hair hanging like a banana peel over its face. It jumped with all its paws at once, lifting itself off the ground and sliding backwards on its needle claws as it tried to get at us.
“JJ, no!” Thom came skidding around the corner. “This is JJ,” he said, picking it up and holding the scrabbling paws to his bare chest, then holding it out towards us. “He’s very friendly if you like dogs.”
“She doesn’t,” Dwight said before I could lie.
“I like JJ,” I protested.
“His real name isn’t actually JJ,” Thom said.
“No?” Dwight was doing that annoying voice adults use to play along with kids.
“Nope.”
“What’s his real name? How come you changed it?” I asked.
“It was a mouthful.”
I jumped. The voice was not Thom’s and came from behind me.
“Robin!” Dwight said, slapping him on the shoulder.
Robin did not slap back, but stood with his hands deep in his pockets. He wore unseasonal heavy denim, boots, and a black cotton T-shirt, tucked in and belted. His shape had a kind of boyishness made bulky, thickening towards the ground, like Play-Doh slowly drooping, giving some features a pinched, pointy look and others a more settled thickness. His hair, Dwight had told me, was dyed. You could tell because it was jet-black, whereas he had little tufts of silver hair which fought their way out of his nostrils and earlobes and laced the eyebrows above his ratlike eyes.
“JJ used to be Janus,” he continued. Something about him was familiar. As he spoke, the feeling was intensified by an elaborately English accent. I couldn’t tell whether it was an affectation. “I thought Janus was appropriate.” I realised he was pronouncing it the Latin way, with a soft J. I understood now, from his voice, why Nat thought he was condescending, but it reminded me of certain professors at university, and it instantly made me want to impress him. “Since one can’t always distinguish his face from his anus. So you don’t know whether he’s coming or going.”
Dwight laughed way too much, given that I knew he didn’t know who Janus was. I wanted to show somehow that I did. That I got the real joke—I wasn’t simply laughing at the word anus, I knew the names of Roman gods.
“No, the real answer,” Robin said when Dwight had calmed down, “is that we saw a picture of JJ advertised on a noticeboard round here—a classics professor was leaving the city for some reason and couldn’t take the dog with him. He wanted to give him to a good home. But the kids wanted to give him a new name, so we called him JJ as a compromise, so he’d still know who he was and answer to it.”
Dwight bent down to interact with JJ. “Hey, poochy,” he said, once, then forty or fifty times more. “Hey, poochy, hey, poochy, I know who you are—yes I do, yes I do, yes I do. I know you gotta poop and pee every three hours.” He switched back and forth between dog register and human register. “I love him!” he said to Robin, then back to JJ: “You wanna play?” Again he repeated the words forty or fifty times very fast. “You wanna play you wanna play you wanna play?” Then he started to get mixed up between human and dog voice. “They’re manageable?” he asked, but Robin had moved off towards the kitchen. “Hey hey hey hey,” Dwight said to JJ, “oh, he’s smooth, he’s smooth.”
I followed Robin into a large space lit by four windows overlooking Sakura Park, the tall trees beyond that, which, now in full leaf, concealed the river, and an enormous skylight.
“Wow,” I said.
“Told you,” Dwight said, bounding up behind us. He’d come, he kept reminding Robin, to the Rooiakkers’ for a drinks party with Walter when RQ + Partners first won the contract to design the incubator.
I noticed Rosa sitting across the room. She was barely credible as Thom’s twin; she looked a lot older. She was sitting on the sofa holding an iPad with an expression of intense concentration and did not look up as we entered. She was wearing a T-shirt that bore a rhinestone skull.
“Ro-sa!” Thom called to her as if she were in another room, though all three of us stood before her. “They’re here.”
Rosa put on a pair of red headphones without looking at us, folded the iPad support so that it sat upright, and sank behind it.
“Poured concrete,” Dwight said, circling the toe of his boot appreciatively on the floor.
“Say what you see,” Rosa muttered.
Evidently she could hear us and the headphones were a prop.
On one side of the space were four large plan chests, black ones with very shallow drawers, which were stacked and doubled as a long desk as a long wooden board had been placed over them. This, like an altar, had two Mac desktops placed back to back in mirror image of each other. On the other side, with the same clean lines, was a kitchen with a marble island that mirrored the desk. In between, where we stood, was a long, narrow table made of one piece of wood. There was sheepskin, I suddenly noticed, everywhere. It was thrown over chairs, nestling in their laps like pubic hair, or flat on the smooth floor like patches of mould. Framed black-and-white photographs of Ingrid with a bulging alien pregnancy bump seemed to be everywhere I looked.
“Robin took those,” Dwight whispered.
Rosa emerged above her device. “You’re adopted, right?”
“Yes.”
“Is that why you’re so tan?”
“I guess.”
“Hi, Dwight. Alice. Welcome.”
Ingrid, as I’d noted on the tour of Roosevelt Island, had the proprietorial gait of a hotel manager. Now barefoot, with enameled toes, she moved over to Rosa and yanked the headphones from the tiny blond head. Rosa looked exactly like her but in every way more terrifying, because Ingrid’s expressions did not look right on a child. She was bone-thin, her skin even paler than her mother’s, and commanding despite her diminutive size.
“Como estas hola,” she said without inflection.
“Hola, cómo estás?” Robin said.
In the time I stayed there, I came to notice that Robin had things he had to do, as I once had, which no one else seemed to understand. For example, he removed all labels from food items, and he tore down cardboard packaging to the level to which its contents had been consumed. “It’s his system,” Ingrid explained wearily. He fanned magazines on coffee tables at exact intervals. He respected rules, it seemed, as much as I once had, before I went native. When Ingrid misused a word in a sentence he would call her out on it, no matter who was there to hear, and ask her to define it, which reminded me of how I’d behaved with Dwight.
Robin showed me around the only private bits of the open-plan apartment, which Dwight continued to call the penthouse. I had never been anywhere like it before. Every towel I have ever felt since feels rough compared to the Rooiakker towels. The silky softness of everything left me feeling light-headed, as if I had stood up too quickly. I asked to use the bathroom and sat, recovering, on the edge of a marble bath on a dais—the kind Greek husbands are slain in. There was only one thing I stole. From the bathroom. A decadent scented candle, white-wicked, from the back of one of the
mirrored cabinets. It was in a heavy gold container bearing the word ORIENTALIST. I gave it to Mizuko.
When I admired a series of photographs leaning against a wall, Robin halted the tour. “Why do we have those pictures still, Ingrid?” he called. “I thought we agreed.”
No reply.
“They’re completely impersonal. I’ve never been to that bar—is it in Havana?” He waited. Ingrid sounded as if she were on the phone. “It makes our home look like a hotel chain.”
My room was next to the twins’, a kind of playroom equipped with a softball, a keyboard, paintings, potato prints, and an empty guinea pig cage. The poster above my bed said, “From Constructivism to Kinetic Art,” an exhibition from two decades ago.
I pointed to a green plastic bowl full of water. “What’s that?”
“We’re growing a starfish,” Thom said.
“You’ll probably have lots of company in here, I’m afraid,” Robin said.
The twins were supposed to have their own rooms. Ingrid had read a lot of books about raising twins. This was originally Thom’s, but Thom insisted on sleeping with Rosa, so now his room was just for play. It had two single beds end-to-end along one wall, so that whenever I lay on one I felt shrunken inside a normal-length bed. Each had an extra bed that pulled out from inside the base for when the twins had school friends to stay. There were little chairs they had outgrown, which now had animal toys sitting in them.
“I don’t want her sleeping in here!”
Robin held his hand up to say, Enough.
Rosa glared at me.
“This isn’t even your room, Rosa,” Thom pointed out.
Rosa sat on the bed and folded her arms.
A photo of their class was taped to the wall. I pointed to it and said in a friendly way, “Is that your class, Rosa?”
“Yes,” she said, her voice sly. “There are only two black children out of fourteen.” She indicated the two children. “One is from Africa and the other was adopted, like you.”
Robin exited the room.
The adopted kid with the Afro was doing double thumbs up with an exaggerated smile. Two girl children stood back to back, posing with their hands like guns in the centre. Only when I saw Thom’s face in the photo could I detect that he and Rosa were related. In person, he was so much gentler that he looked completely different.
Dinner to welcome “the guest,” as Robin referred to me, was Japanese takeaway. I was nervous, almost as much as I later was the first time I met Mizuko, self-conscious about how the fleshy salmon kept slipping from my sticks. I took too much horseradish and it stung my nostrils. Dwight stayed, and Nat came over too. Dwight was insufferably entertaining. He pulled out his own bottle of wine from somewhere, and so the bottle of wine I had arrived with was put in a white, handleless cupboard in the kitchen and to my knowledge never drunk.
When we came to discussing Silvia, I realised I had perhaps had too much to drink.
“I’m surprised she still has the will to live,” Ingrid said, and I became teary, and Robin made a strange laugh—not at me, I realised, but at his wife. I felt guilty for allowing myself to sit at their long table while Silvia was in the Amsterdam home all alone.
Robin turned to me. “I was sorry to hear about your grandmother. It’s very, very lucky you were there. I’m sure she wouldn’t be alive without you. I bet she’s glad you came.”
“I’m still digging for a Dutch ancestor,” Nat said, to no one in particular.
Ingrid rolled her eyes at the other end of the table. They seemed to despise each other, with a kind of loyalty.
“I’ve been helping the twins with a school project—”
Ingrid cut in. “That was last fall. The project ended a while ago.”
“Okay, so now I have started my own project.”
“How are you looking?” Dwight asked, dabbing at his mouth with a napkin.
“Oh, you know, I have some scraps, some things my parents left me. Not much.” She shot a look at her daughter, who made a face as if to say this was quite the understatement. “And Alice helped me set up an account on one of those genealogy websites.”
I nodded, sensing that this was the wrong thing to have done in Ingrid’s eyes.
“But nothing turned up. Did it, Alice?”
“Nope.”
“Oh. Okay,” Dwight said. He was getting that look he got when he spotted an opportunity. “Family-tree stuff is low tech, but it’s the original tool of connection, a very human tool. Two parents merge in the creation of a child, and on and on in an endless chain, and we can map it with—”
“Obviously,” I interrupted. “Obviously a family tree does that. You’re using all these words and you’re not saying anything.”
Dwight’s face suggested that I had gone too native. He continued, undeterred by my outburst, telling us about various companies he had met with in California the previous week. One was some kind of ancestry project, a “stable storage medium” which ran like a social network, could run itself for ten thousand years and record an entire family lineage. Nat craned across Rosa to hear everything he was saying, which took ages because she kept interrupting him to ask what certain terms meant. He also described a company that took DNA samples. It was mainly, he said, to do with health and finding out about any latent genetic diseases you had, but a popular product they offered was finding out which other users of the service you might be related to. He was trying to convince them to market it that way, anyway.
“The tubes,” he explained, “are sent to users in their homes, then sent back to Silicon Valley containing each user’s secret history encoded in twenty-three pairs of chromosomes—hair, eyes, skin, tastes they like and dislike, and then—”
“Could we get one of them? The spitting things?” Nat asked.
Dwight made the same face he made when he came particularly hard: an expression like the stoned Scream mask. “Of course. I’ll hook you up, no problem.”
I shot him a look: Back off.
“Or Alice can. I’ll send Alice a link to order them.”
He took out his phone to send it to me. The table went quiet.
Ingrid looked dubious. She was massaging her hair. She examined her nails.
“They’re raw diamond and gold—stacking rings,” she said when she spotted me admiring them. They made her wedding band invisible. I turned to Robin, who looked at his mother-in-law. Nat was gazing raptly at Dwight. Between them, Rosa sat stroking her loom-banded arm, a spoon protruding from her mouth. She was eating a chia-seed dessert, very slowly. She made a sucking noise on the spoon, then removed it.
“Can I spit too?”
“Of course, honey,” Nat said.
“I don’t think so,” Robin interrupted. “Don’t these things cost five hundred dollars and you find out all sorts about how you’re going to get diabetes and when you’re going to die?”
“I’ll pay for it,” Nat said, dismissing him with a wave of her hand. “I’ll pay for us all to do it.”
Ingrid looked unconvinced. Sensing this, Dwight added, “Walter’s worked with them on something before—he says they’re a really interesting company. All former Google. It’s just a different kind of search.”
“A body search,” Robin said, folding his arms.
Ingrid shrugged politely. “I guess there’s no harm.”
Nat beamed.
Though I was now living only a stone’s throw away from Silvia, my visits to her dwindled. My routines were replaced with the Rooiakkers’ routines, primarily the twins’: their snacks and their small friends. Thom’s toothless friend Anatole, his only friend that wasn’t his sister, and Rosa’s sardonic first best friend, Brontë, who always had her fingers in a paper fortune-teller. Brontë made one for me: four dots coloured blue, red, purple, green; numbers 1 through 8; then eight locations (subway, log cabin, fairground, coffee shop, art gallery, Japanese restaurant, Barneys, a truck). When they played the game on me, I got Japanese restaurant.
“What do
es that mean?” I asked, worried. I’d never played this as a child.
“That you’ll meet your boyfriend in a Japanese restaurant!” Rosa cried, shrieking with laughter.
“I’ve already got a boyfriend,” I said defensively. It felt like I was being bullied.
The girls became hysterical.
When Ingrid wasn’t on site, at Walter’s office, or at various council meetings around the city, she worked from home. Her routine involved yoga in the apartment—a special kind influenced by Tantra that involved chanting—which Rosa and I were allowed to join in with, strange food rituals, and brushing with a natural-bristle body brush at certain times. I went shopping for her with lists she gave me. These read like spells. She made her own almond milk, soaking the almonds overnight, then, together with the twins, pinching the skins off one by one, grinding, liquidating, then straining using organic, unbleached cheesecloth. Her bathroom had an array of brown pill bottles, which would sometimes fill me with guilt about Silvia. But whenever I felt guilt about abandoning her and my old routine, I would tell myself that it was really Silvia’s fault for not owning a cell phone. That would be a normal way to keep in touch and, as Ingrid put it, diarise. In the first two weeks that I stayed at the Rooiakers’, I visited her only a handful of times.
Ingrid had chosen the twins’ school—a Steiner school across the park—because it tried to limit pupils’ usage of technology and balance it out with plenty of pinecones, shells, rocks, and woodworking. I inwardly noted the contradiction between Ingrid’s obsession with organic things and natural childhood and how much time she spent on her device. She was a very active Pinterest and Instagram user and had a huge following on both. She had two phones, one iPad, and two laptops. All these little machines, I later thought, when Mizuko read to me from the dreaded book, melting the icecaps. I remembered reading about the butterfly effect, the flap of the wing that travelled through the earth, then the water, then the air. Ingrid could have diarised and architected an earthquake-tsunami-nuclear disaster, no problem. She could have done it with the touch of a button. Robin, on the other hand, seemed disengaged whenever I asked him about the project for Cornell Tech.
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