The Wallcreeper

by Nell Zink

  It was pitch dark and foggy. I don’t know why that surprised me. The year had gotten away from me. Indian summer had fooled me into thinking six o’clock was already time to grab my boots and binoculars and run out before it was too late.

  Stubbornly, it stayed dark. Whenever the bike stopped moving, the dynamo stopped turning and the light vanished, leaving me blinded from its former glare on the fog. I stood at the spot where the dike had been relocated (the sign by the road allowed no doubts) and saw that everything around me was black. Everything. But I could hear birds: geese grumbling and complaining like couples fighting over blankets, lapwings elbowing each other, a curlew begging God for blessed sleep. Something big passed over my head in near silence, just a whoosh of feathers. There were no songbirds, just the crypto-human voices of avian insomniacs, and I started to sob uncontrollably.

  For the first time in years—or perhaps since infancy, when I hadn’t known other people existed—I was certain I was alone, and my prompt gut reaction was to abandon all hope.

  Now, in town, you never know whether the neighbors are home. Even in the backcountry of Yosemite, there are those other people with a pass. Nearly anywhere you go, someone might hear or see you. But not on a levee by the Elbe two miles from the nearest town in dense fog at six o’clock on a Sunday morning in September. They say in space no one can hear you scream, but why would a person with a sense of dignity scream anywhere else?

  Much later, reading a map, I noticed that the ninety-degree bend in the river—the reason they had moved the dike—had an old traditional name: “The Evil Place.”

  Fifth wheels always cry! one might protest. But at the time, Stephen’s affair with Birke seemed perfectly fair to me. I hadn’t forgotten about Elvis. My relationship with Stephen was contractual. By coming along to Lenzen, I had signed on the wrong dotted line. It was my responsibility to face the consequences.

  The first rays of the sun brought hope, if only that I might soon see something.

  The second set of rays, after a brief glimpse of something horizon-like, lit the fog from behind, and the abyss-slash-void became a gray wall. I rode back to a place where there had been less fog, an island of semi-transparent air where it was warmer, and sat down next to the bicycle, waiting for the first trees to appear. They appeared. But sunrise was still a long way away. I gave up and rode back.

  At breakfast Stephen wanted to know where I had spent the night.

  “Don’t you remember?” I said. “We talked in the bar to those communication designers and then I went to bed? You are so on drugs.”

  Birke’s talk was a triumph. The time was ripe for Wasserkraft Nein Danke. She could be as grandiose and radical as the day is long. She was not accountable. The privilege of youth. Men three times her age swore to borrow her idea and take the lead in implementing it. They had waited too long to make the dangers of hydroelectric power clear. Young people (why exactly twenty-somethings are considered so vital to protest movements, I never figured out, seeing as how they never vote and have no money) would follow the call, power companies would bend the knee, Birke would get free banner ads on everybody’s website.

  Stephen and Birke held court at their information table, handing out exquisite pamphlets on visibly recycled paper (not the white kind), framed by the apocalyptic blue of a very large Wasserkraft Nein Danke poster. Behind them, water plunged from a spillway. That’s all the poster showed: water in a state of collapse—the real, existing state of collapse that every dam represents, the collapse of a river and its ecosystem. And posing in front of it, Stephen and Birke, ready to be swept away.

  As I stood there drinking apple juice from the buffet and watching them, Olaf touched my arm.

  We sat next to each other on the back porch and looked out and down at the walled gardens. He told me how much he enjoyed visiting the green ribbon, where nothing much had ever been built. He loved the stillness, the emptiness. It was something worth fighting for.

  I had seen the emptiness, and I wasn’t sure I liked it. Or maybe it wasn’t all that empty where he was. I asked him whether he had children.

  He claimed partial responsibility for a herd of rare sheep and explained that you need sheep to maintain the emptiness.

  “What about the stillness?” I asked. “Don’t they wear bells and bleat?”

  He admitted that even birds, tempting as it may be to stylize their presence as stillness, are actually pretty loud.

  We walked down into the lower garden and sat on a bench. He looked into the pond and remarked favorably on the lack of goldfish. I thought of all the spawn-guzzling carp I had admired in the past and felt abashed. I shrank at the vulgarity of raptures over beauty, nature’s most irrelevant and unnecessary quality.

  That is, I couldn’t quite approve of the way the harmless man looked, but I was ready to follow him around like a puppy. He was that reassuring.

  I stood up to escape back into the hotel. He remained seated. As we shook hands I couldn’t help noticing how close his wedding ring (Germans wear them on their right hands) was to what Allen Ginsberg called the center of the flesh, and I realized I had a problem.

  After Global Rivers Alliance’s successful Nature Protection Days, Birke proceeded to Berlin. She vanished into her accustomed social milieu, whatever that was. Her internship in the environmental movement was about to end, and Berlin was where she was in school, studying media design. She had to visit old friends and see about a sublet.

  Stephen and I returned to Berne without her. He looked spent and weary.

  When Birke reappeared in Berne to pack her things, he cheered up, but her going-away party may have included some kind of unpleasant scene. Perhaps their parting.

  A week later, he went to visit her and cheered up again for several minutes. I mean the minutes between when his taxi arrived from the airport early Monday morning and when the alarm went off so he could go to work. He was down.

  The posters went up in three languages in bus shelters all the way to Rotterdam. Birke gave interviews to curious reporters. A magazine devoted to social entrepreneurship and social investment labeled her one to watch.

  “Social entrepreneur” meant something different in old books than it does now. The new definition didn’t fit Birke. There was nothing capitalistic about Global Rivers Alliance. The impact investment community would sponsor a project if you promised them thirty percent, and pat themselves on the back for not actually drinking your blood. They couldn’t get their head around rivers.

  But they liked Birke. She gave great interviews, effervescing with ideas. In person she was pretty enough to surprise people who had only seen the publicity photos. She became known.

  Stephen didn’t become known. He was the pale figure with pale hair in the background, barely distinguishable from the wall. Stephen and I had about twenty fights, all including the following exchanges:

  “You’re going to work for your girlfriend.”

  “No, she’s working for me. I’m the executive director.”

  “Geschäftsführer is an administrative post. She calls the shots, and it’s George’s money.”

  “I’m the one investing. My labor is worth more than George’s money.” (I had to hand it to him for that one.)

  “You’re throwing away your life to move to a town with dubstep [tone of contempt].”

  Baleful glare, followed by allusions to migratory waterfowl.

  “Why not wait for your transfer to come through?”

  “How long do you think I’ve been waiting already?”

  Our fights had a strange new quality: earnestness. Regular contact with the environmental movement had turned Stephen into a man who spoke his mind clearly and purposefully.

  Before Stephen turned earnest, we never had fights.

  Berne, my beloved Berne, was looking to the earnest Stephen more and more like a cobblestone prison yard. He began saying the stent was antiquated and that his coworkers were intellectual midgets now that all the good people had been tr
ansferred to Topeka or Berlin. And all the while the Rhine climbed higher, rolling and writhing in its corset of stone, moaning to be free. Ships bobbed through its lifeless locks, electric power flowed from its bloodstained turbines, the river had been dead for eighty years and there wasn’t a goddamn thing anyone could do about it, except work day and night and see Birke on weekends. She was more than willing to marry him. Her political persuasions admitted of no other stance. “No human being is illegal!” she would insist, as though she had picked up Stephen in a camp in Chad. She thought marriage would solve all their problems. He could live with her, collect welfare, and save the world.

  The fights went on until he got a scholarship to study chemistry. George could supposedly only afford to pay him six hundred euros a month. That’s plenty to retire on in Berlin, Birke had assured him, but it’s illegal to be that poor unless you’re a German or married to one. Stephen had staged fights with me to ease the pain of deep-sixing his career. After the letter from the Technical University arrived, he remarked that taking a few years off to get a master’s would be a gap on his résumé, but not nearly as bad as working for Global Rivers Alliance.

  Birke had no chance against me. By staying at home—as I had done from the beginning (I seldom slept with Elvis anywhere else!)—I had made plain to Stephen that I was the type who stays at home, come what may. Better, worse, sickness, health, all the various combinations that can go either way depending on who’s pushing harder. If you believe in marriage as an institution the way Stephen did, one thing you definitely don’t want is to try it more than once. If Stephen married Birke, the marriage would end, because for her it was one option among many. Whereas if he stuck with me and saw her on weekends, he and I would one day share a headstone. Game, set, and match Tiffany.

  But Stephen didn’t give notice. He kept holding out for a transfer.

  In November, he refused a transfer to Topeka. When I suggested he call Omar and ask what Topeka is like, he laughed. In return for his refusal, the company issued him a C-class Mercedes and a little tiny handheld computer. He had been tested for gumption and not found wanting. Or maybe it was a bribe.

  He sold the Volkswagen without telling me. It was weeks before I knew where the Mercedes was parked. I was never allowed to touch the computer.

  I was desperately unhappy. I remembered the cranes and even the fog on the levee as though remembering the land of lost content. The Housman heaven: I see it shining plain, the happy one-way highways. And the Bialik heaven (as per T. Carmi): the distant islands, the lofty worlds we saw in dreams that evict us to dwell under the open sky (as absolute vagrants, seeking always those sunny days with a light fresh wind) and make our lives a hell.

  Stephen looked haggard. Mentally, he was unrecognizable. “Birds are quantum,” he would say blandly. “If you can even figure out where they’re hiding, it’s too late to see them as they truly are. There’s no such thing as birdwatching. It’s an illusion for stupid people.”

  During the week, he worked full time and then some. He had to clock as many hours as colleagues who spent Saturday afternoons at the lab, all while running Global Rivers Alliance in his spare time. Most nights he went straight to bed before eleven and thrashed around while he slept. On weekends he flew to Berlin. The round-trip by train would have eaten up twenty hours. My pin money was going down, down, down.

  On weekends I was alone. I tried snowshoeing. It was too loud, too raucous, too much hilarity, too much money, plus Stephen said I might accidentally squish grouse. The Bat Society (I tried them next) was on winter hiatus, its bats snoozing away in cellars and caves. The women in hand-knit mohair sweaters and silk scarves assured me that bats are soft and clean with wings like kid gloves and that I need not fear them. The astronomy club seemed more promising. I spent an evening standing next to a goon huffing steam in the cold and saw the red spot on Jupiter, which looked just like on TV.

  My misery was firm and unshakable. The old city of Berne was my natural habitat. It was where I felt at home, where I wanted to be. I didn’t want to leave. Berne was where I could become most completely myself—possessive, shrewish, lonely. There was nothing to retard my self-actualization.

  George’s new intern was very good-looking and a fine media designer, but not much to talk to. She knew nothing about environmental issues and cared less.

  Consequently, Stephen was physically revolted by her. As if her failure to notice what was going wrong with the planet was linked to a black, spongy degeneration of her brain that might be contagious.

  Even my own desire to improve my moral standing repelled him. “What’s that got to do with the price of tea in China?” he would snarl. “Breaking up with Elvis is not the same as being a decent person. It’s utterly irrelevant to anything and everything. It’s a matter of absolute ethical indifference whether you screw around. The world is not a better or worse place because you do or don’t screw around.”

  The poster campaign hadn’t cost Stephen any real heartache. But once the money ran out, Global Rivers Alliance’s self-promotion migrated online, and to his sorrow, every single person who toyed with the idea of wiring two dollars to George first felt compelled to debate the merits of Wasserkraft Nein Danke with him. Most were themselves running tiny organizations that had arisen by spontaneous generation or mitosis. No one had supporters. Stephen spent hours writing closely argued defenses of himself and his aims. Each one unique, because you can’t copy anything anymore without getting caught. Rushed, because anyone who didn’t get an answer within fourteen hours would write again with more questions.

  Eventually he tried one of those services that limit your communication to a hundred and something characters, and it saved him. He began pouring his energy into aperçus and bon mots. That was better. His task now was to strike a jaunty pose from which to launch scathing witticisms about the energy industry. Instead of preaching to the converted, he would sit on the couch with them watching the news and make snide remarks. But they still wanted clever new aphorisms every day.

  The Rhine Conference was not open to the public like Nature Protection Days. It was for professionals. Stephen and Birke worked hard every weekend to prepare. Sworn to present their work to an audience of experts, they had to figure out what it was. They had goals, partners, approaches, and a campaign—all the things you can have without actually having done anything—but they needed projects. Wasserkraft Nein Danke was not a project. It was a negation. The project to end all projects. When he got back, he made it sound as though he’d had five minutes to get ready and been dragged there by his hair. “Never again,” he said.

  “Who was there?”

  “The usual suspects. The BMVBS, the WWF.”

  I waited for more information and finally said, “Were they not nice to you?”

  “They paid no attention to me. It’s like they can smell that I know nothing about ecology or hydrology or engineering. Maybe if you’re actually legit, you emit this pheromone and they can smell it.”

  “Maybe you need scientist outfits, like functional microfiber outerwear.”

  “God, Tiff,” he said. “You are so ignorant.”

  “I was kidding,” I said.

  “Yeah, right. So at the conference I keep asking these bright, intelligent questions, like I think an inquisitive amateur is what the world needs now. And they answer me with patience and fortitude like I’m a fucking four-year-old. Believe me, my suits are not the problem.”

  “But you’re an activist running a media campaign. They know that.”

  “I know I’m a self-styled activist promoting a slogan. You don’t have to remind me.” He looked down at his hands as if checking for dirt.

  He was silent for three minutes, as long as the minutes of silence that pepper the conversations in Women in Love by D.H. Lawrence, and finally said: “The laws are all in place. The people are sovereign, telling the politicians what to do, which is to maximize economic growth without losing any copyrightable DNA. The politicians are
doing their job. So it’s the investors you need to lobby, not the bureaucrats who are trying like hell to slow development down. And these are the guys who can sense that my experience is in inflatable stents. They can tell I’m on this delusion-of-grandeur mission to teach and inform them why they haven’t saved the rivers yet. To them, I’m the ultimate smartass, like some asshole from McKinsey. They hate me. The only thing they think laymen are good for is to supply emotional arguments that might make somebody put up with nature. But they know it won’t work. Because if you have a plant you don’t like the looks of on your lawn, or a bug that looks weird, you’re going to kill it, unless you’re a total sap. So all the nature lovers get this training and these jobs and make out like they’re master technicians of the ecosphere, but they’re just saps. Because nobody knows how the ecosphere works. It just wants to be left alone. Life is what happens when you leave it alone. It’s circular! But nobody wants to leave it alone. They want to love it. Love of nature is a contradiction in terms. It’s the thing everybody says nobody has enough of, and it’s this totally nonexistent personality trait. The myth of biophilia. Loving living things at your own expense, being happy that they’re out there somewhere, living their lives, where you never see them. Give me a break. What a fucking joke.”

  “Like in the ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner,’” I said.

  “What’s that got to do with anything? You never listen to me.”

  “I mean about loving living things. It’s like when he says, O happy living things no tongue, their beauty might declare, and the albatross falls off his neck into the sea.”

  “Albatross on his neck? Why doesn’t it fly away?”

  “It’s dead. He shot it with a crossbow. That’s why the ship was under a curse. They tied it around his neck.”

  “How did they tie it on? With the wingtips in front, like a cape?”

  “They tied it on a string, I’m pretty sure. I know it’s a huge bird, like a turkey, but I mean, this is the British navy. They had punishments like keelhauling and confinement to the bowsprit. The albatross is nothing.”