by Elvia Wilk
She’d been speaking English since she could speak; not learning it had not been an option. Her papa was technically Austrian, but her mom was truly American, and the “international” of the international schools Anja had hopped between really meant “American” too. The English words arrived effortlessly, most of the time, without the need to home in on the construction—the English world arrived in whole scenes rather than sentences. Before Louis, there’d been hiccups to her colloquialisms, but English was completely common territory for them now, her mouth matching his.
Louis was staring intently at the back of the waitress, who was punching in their orders by the bar. “It’s so weird,” he said. “Pat used to have that haircut.”
Anja froze. She looked at the waitress, waiting for her to turn around. The waitress’s blond hair was bobbed. From this angle she bore absolutely no resemblance to Pat. Not that Anja had ever met Pat in person, but according to what she’d seen on screens, the comparison was off.
“I thought Pat had dark hair,” she said gingerly.
“It’s something about the shape,” he said. “I don’t know.” He sipped his spritz blankly and gave her nothing else.
Was it a provocation or was he oblivious? If he truly recognized Pat in random waitresses, clearly she was haunting him constantly, but he just went on as if everything were the same. Here was his chance to say I miss her or Here is the spot on my body where the needle of death has entered my bones. Instead, a cliché: that person looks like the dead person I miss.
For someone so resistant to culturally received plans of action, Louis still did not seem to understand that his silence on the topic of his emotions accorded with clichés about male behavior. It wasn’t that he’d ever been overly expressive of his feelings, but he’d always acknowledged them without shame, treating them as subjects for analysis. His fascination with human behavior had included his own, which had always required a certain introspection. Maybe now he was playing the masculine role because, for once, he thought going through the typical motions might help move him along. Maybe he was so submerged in pain that he could imagine no other recourse for action. But it was also possible that grief had turned him into a one-dimensional male person, blind to his own motives, unable to articulate his feelings, waving around blunt instruments of communication like she looks like my mom.
Anja tried to formulate a way of saying all this—of asking how he felt, asking whether he was all right, asking if he missed Pat, anything—but she had let the break in conversation extend too long, and Louis closed the gap. Either her chance to say something had passed or she hadn’t had a chance at all. He started talking about the feminists again, those aging losers who couldn’t update their OS. She nodded without really listening to the content of the words. From the tone of his voice it was clear he was saying things he knew to be clever. He was so insightful, she thought again, and yet so unable to reflect it, to apply it, onto himself.
When the food came she knew she’d made the wrong choice. The fish was huge and threatening, eyeballing her with its flat jelly-eye and smelling like what it was: a dead thing.
Louis had already finished half his goulash, eating without pause, shoveling signifier into signified, when he noticed she had only picked at her side salad.
He paused, spoon to mouth. “You don’t like the fish?”
“I just don’t know how . . . to approach it. It’s full of bones.”
“Don’t panic. I got this.” He reached across the table, sleeves skimming goulash, and grinned sweetly at her while expertly slicing the fish laterally and flipping it open. Greasy, translucent skeleton was drawn out of flesh, positioned elegantly on the small extra plate. Animal graciously relieved of its spine. She looked at the fish and looked at Louis and didn’t make any moves to interact with either of them. Her eyes wobbled, filled with jelly, her vision slipped, Louis became blurry, momentarily disappeared.
He was alarmed, and took her hand. “That was sudden,” he said. “What’s wrong?”
“I don’t like this fish at all,” she said. She wiped her eyes with the back of her sleeve. She heard herself make a conciliatory laugh. Had she known she was going to laugh? Had she known she was going to cry?
With the unoccupied fingers of the hand Louis wasn’t holding she plucked a thin, decorative lemon slice from her plate and sucked on it. “Sorry,” she said, “I don’t know what just happened,” and replaced the lemon slice on the plate, its rind half-mooned with a perfect ring of pink lipstick. Usually she didn’t wear lipstick because it was an impediment to kissing, but that afternoon she had put it on instinctively. A symbol of self-protection. If that’s what it was, it hadn’t worked. He was comforting her now, instead of the other way around.
She’d known she was going to cry and hadn’t known she’d known it. She was no better than him. They were both utterly blind to themselves.
The restaurant had filled up. All the other tables on the small stage had couples sitting at them now. Anja wondered if anybody had noticed her short outburst of tears. She side-eyed the table next to them, a long glance at the couple sitting there across from each other, who were leaning toward each other and speaking their own private language.
Just cut me some fucking slack, Anja thought, toward the couple at the other table. I’m trying my best here.
Louis had withdrawn his hand and was back to eating his goulash.
8
Management Discussion and Analysis (MD&A):
An MD&A report is a clear narrative explanation, through the eyes of management, of how your company performed during the period covered by the strategic innovation plan, and of your company’s condition and future prospects with regard to speed of innovation. MD&A complements and supplements your innovation status report but does not constitute part of your innovation status report.
Your objective when preparing the MD&A should be to improve your sector’s overall transparency of innovation by giving a balanced yet honest discussion of the sector’s results of innovative operations and innovation condition, including, without limitation, such considerations as liquidity and illiquidity, personnel and ill personnel, openly reporting bad eggs as well as good. Your MD&A should:
•Help current and prospective investors understand what innovation statements show and do not show.
•Transmit material information that may not be fully reflected in innovation status reports, such as contingent liabilities, human resource debt, off-balance knowledge investment, or other unfulfilled contractual obligations.
•Discuss important trends and risks that have affected the innovation statements, and trends and risks that are reasonably likely to affect them in the future.
•Provide information about the quality and potential variability of your sector’s current knowledge capital and information flow, to assist investors in affirming that past innovation performance is indicative of future performance.
Anja slid the open folder across the table toward Howard. He was sipping coffee. They were back in the kitchen, squared off on either side of the teak table.
“I went to grad school for biology,” she said, “not accounting.”
“Who says you’re an accountant?” He picked up the packet of information she’d been sent from human resources after signing her new contract and opened it to the page she had been reading from.
“What you’re looking at,” she said, “is a lightly paraphrased version from a manual on tax auditing committees that was written in 2002. I found the whole PDF online. Finster replaced words like finance with innovation, but all that does is make it sound even more like bullshit than it originally did.”
Howard giggled. “It really doesn’t make any sense, does it,” he said, flipping pages.
“No, Howard, it doesn’t.”
He looked up at her, arched his eyebrows, and closed the folder slowly. He slid it back across the table toward her. The table was sticky and so it skidded a bit on the way.
“Don’t
shoot the messenger,” he said, raising his hands in a gesture of disarmament.
“You’re not just the messenger! You’re Public Relations. You know everything that goes on at Finster. How can you pretend you’re as in the dark as I am?”
“I knew I shouldn’t have told you about the job. Should have let you hear it from HR. You’ve been upset with me ever since. Admit it.”
“Of course I’m upset about the job. It’s not a real job. It’s a bullshit job. Do you know what a bullshit job is?”
“I can guess.”
“A bullshit job is a job that should have been made obsolete by technology but that has instead been created to turn the human worker into a bureaucratic functionary. That way the human worker doesn’t have time to do any interesting thinking that may involve questioning the order of things. A bullshit job is a distractor designed to waste a person’s life with things like”—she flipped open the folder again—“Management Discussion & Analysis.”
Howard smoothed out his forehead with his fingers, reminding himself not to engrave the worry lines. “If you want my help, dear, this is the wrong way to get it.”
“Oh. I see. You’re saying you can help, but that I have to flatter you into doing it.”
She knew she was misdirecting her anger—but by gaslighting her now he was justifying it. If he hadn’t been guilty of something when she walked into the kitchen, he was now.
“Your problem is that you don’t know how to do PR on the microlevel,” she said. “You can manage a campaign, but you have no idea how to manage a relationship. You just try to apply the same tactics on the human scale as you do on the company level.”
He was taken aback. “Hey. I’m sorry.” She looked down, then at the sink, dishless. “I know this has been a hectic few weeks for you. You’re going through some stuff that can’t be easy.”
Against her better judgment she let herself feel subdued. Then she did an inventory of her insides for any evidence that she was planning to cry without her own knowledge. No. All stable. She could let herself be coddled a bit.
“How’s stuff with Louis?”
She sighed, eyes still cast toward the sink, then the counter. Then down to her hands. “Not great.”
“Is it that bad?”
“He just—he’s different, but he can’t see it, or doesn’t want to admit it.”
“Different how?”
She told him about how Pat had appeared in conversation at dinner, and how she’d come up again the next day, and the day after that. “It’s all the time now. He says her name and then he changes the subject. He wants to talk about it but he doesn’t know how.”
“And you don’t ask him?”
“I want to ask him, but I don’t think he wants to talk about it. Everything’s fine. I don’t want to be the one to ruin it.”
Howard thought for a moment. “Maybe he should see someone.”
“Like a therapist?” She laughed. “He’d never go for that.”
“Why not? There are lots of people trained to deal with grief. You’re not.”
“You mean I’m not enough.”
“Come on. That’s not what I’m saying. Just that you can’t do everything, and maybe he needs someone else who isn’t so—involved.”
She considered this. She was certain that it would be a mistake to mention a therapist to Louis. But what a relief it would be to invoke an authority. An authority who would side with her.
“I’m surprised he hasn’t gone to see someone already,” said Howard. “It’s the first thing a lot of people would do.”
“Louis doesn’t just do what everyone else does,” she said with an eye roll. Applying sarcasm to Louis felt rich and yucky, like junk food she’d regret having eaten.
Appeased, Howard eventually promised to sniff around at RANDI for her. “I really don’t think there’s anything I can do about the job situation, but I’ll see what I can find out.”
“Any news about the Berg coup?” she asked. “Those rogue architects?”
“Not yet. Everyone is lawyering up right now. It’s going to take some time.”
“Starting to seem like the whole thing was just show business all along.”
“Nonsense.” He smiled. “It’s an honest effort to see if people can live sustainably together.”
There wasn’t much more to say to each other. He’d diffused her anger in a matter of minutes, a process in which she was once again complicit. She didn’t trust a word he said, but still. But still.
On the way downstairs she finally texted Michel, her long-lost lab partner. It had been days since his last message asking her to meet up, and she still hadn’t responded, feeling too embarrassed about how upset she was, suspecting that extending a work relationship outside its terms of contract would be to admit that their work, and therefore their friendship, had ever been something more than a contract job.
sorry I’ve been MIA. u survive the recession? she typed.
He wrote back immediately. meet up @plants?
She biked all the way to the botanical gardens. She couldn’t think of a reason why Michel had asked to meet there, deep in Dahlem, besides the fact that it was far away from everything else. She had been to the gardens only once before, with Louis, to walk around in the North American section of the expansive outdoor landscape, which was segregated into simulacra of territories in the northern hemisphere. It was deep autumn then, and acorns and hickory nuts were falling from the trees with hard thumps, scattering the dry mulch and the reddened leaves crunching under their feet. It smells like fall in Indiana! Posing against a maple tree with his arms across his chest. This is just like my senior photo! He was the picture of wholesomeness.
In the northeastern part of the gardens was the greenhouse, a proud, voluminous glass dome with two chains of long glass pavilions extending from its sides, forming two hugging arms around a central courtyard. The central dome, the Großes Tropenhaus, was large enough to hold tall old trees, their tips forever lightly pruned so as to stay just shy of the building’s crown. From the outside, the arching steel frames of the dome and the pavilions shone silver or white depending on the light—from inside, they read as green, reflecting the color of the plants. Anja imagined the dome as a zeppelin, a lost technological artifact inflated by misplaced hopes and colonial fantasy. Most of the species in the greenhouse had been first imported by nineteenth-century European plant-lovers racing each other across Africa, scraping and plucking specimens to carry home and show off in their capital cities. The elegant Art Nouveau of the greenhouse had been chosen specially to boast the material rewards of occupation, of Enlightenment taxonomies reaching like so many steel arches across the biomes of the globe.
Michel was in the cactus room, kneeling on the pathway and gently stroking a small furry plant. When she found him he stood up, kissed her on both cheeks. His familiar smell reminded her of the lab. They toured the cacti together, pointing out species in scientific-sounding language, making up fake Latin names.
“Expecto cactonus,” Michel said, jabbing at a saguaro with a forefinger. He barely missed spiking himself.
They clambered across a small bridge straddling a carp pond and entered the next room, South Africa, where the air was instantly more humid. A new simulated topography. The insides of the glass ran with droplets of condensation. The air was thick with soil, a sweet wetness.
They agreed to disregard their NDAs as long as they were in the greenhouse.
“Don’t worry, the plants will encrypt us,” said Michel. “They cleanse the air.” He pointed to the next room. “Those ones are carnivorous.”
She learned that he’d received the same abrupt severance as her, the same job offer and contract, the same useless packet of information detailing his new duties. He was reluctant to tell her his new salary, nervous it would be higher than hers. It was, but only slightly.
“It’s not your fault you’re a guy,” she said, mentally adding this to the list of Howard-related grievances.
>
Michel was usually all energy, too much energy, but he seemed calm and steady here. Maybe this was what he was like outside the lab, away from RANDI. When was the last time she’d seen him somewhere else? He never came to performances or product launches or clubs. He seemed categorically immune to the lures of that world and its churning gossip, which she relayed to him sometimes and at which he rolled his eyes, amused at her investment but not at all enticed by it. He was living proof that it was possible to just opt out of the whole thing. Sometimes he mentioned friends of his, people he knew whom she’d never heard of, suggesting that there were more like him who just didn’t care to participate in the scene. This was hard to believe, but there it was.
“The thing I don’t understand,” he said, pausing beside a rotting stump, “is the blatantness of it all. It’s so obvious that something went wrong with our sector. Or our experiment. And it’s so obvious that they hastily scraped together our contracts as an excuse to get us out of the lab.”
“I know, these jobs are so obviously bullshit.”
“They are definitely bullshit. Ha!” He snorted. “But hey, at least I’ll be allowed to wear open-toed shoes now.” He pointed down to his Birkenstocks. The toenail he’d lost last year after dropping a case of hard drives on his foot was slowly growing back into a little yellow stub. After the incident, open-toed shoes had been explicitly banned in all the labs, which was not something anyone had thought necessary before. This was a favorite subject for jokes—who the fuck wears sandals to work in a lab? (Michel: What’s the issue? I do my best work when I’m comfortable.)
She leaned down to look at the baby toenail. “So you signed the contract already.”
“Yeah.”
“Me too.”
“I thought of trying to negotiate, but Claudette in HR told me just to take it.”
