by Elvia Wilk
“What else did Claudette say?”
“Well, she said I should be thankful for the salary, treat it like a drawn-out severance package, and start looking for a job asap for when our contract expires in a year. Ha!” The snort again. He kicked the stump lightly with a Birkenstock. “Claudette got offered a consultancy position too, you know. Same time period as ours, but way more cash.”
Anja didn’t know. She hadn’t been in touch with anyone from work. It made sense that Claudette had been promoted, though—she was surely more qualified, having been a lab HR supervisor for years, meaning that she was already basically a bureaucrat. She hadn’t touched any equipment in a long time, spending her days in meetings, watching PowerPoints, looking at graphs, arguing about the allocation of funds and writing performance reviews. Claudette had been a kind of academic prodigy at one point, Anja remembered hearing, but any intellectual curiosity had long since been bled dry.
“It makes sense for her,” said Anja. “Not for us. I don’t have any experience with the kind of stuff in the manual. Do you?”
“No, of course not. They should have just hired us on as research consultants, not management consultants. We could have essentially kept doing the research we were already doing, but freelance, and they could have paid us less.”
“This has nothing to do with budget, though. Like you said, it’s obvious, they don’t want us to finish our project. The jobs are like—like a bribe to get us out of the lab.”
They started moving again and arrived in the main dome. Above them, beyond the glass, a puckered stratocumulus huffed quickly across the sky, its gray shadow incongruous with the heat inside. Enormous palm trees reached up toward the apex of the structure, forever aspiring beyond its confines.
They found a pair of wrought-iron stools to sit on. “What happened to the interns?” Anja asked.
“Fired.”
“Have you heard of any changes in other departments?”
“Two other departments are merging, I think.”
She fingered a dry fern leaning over her shoulder. A bird whistled from the canopy above. She hadn’t known there were animals in here besides the fish. She scratched her forearm instinctively, thinking of mosquitoes. She found her thoughts moving from English to German. She could switch with Michel, if she wanted—he was another mongrel polyglot, having grown up in one of those regions of Switzerland where you had to speak four languages just to go to school—but English had always been their default, because they had to speak it in the lab. Once she’d heard him curse in Swiss-German and the lab’s ceiling camera had beeped twice. Michel had glared at it and repeated the curse in English.
“There’s only one thing we can do,” she said suddenly.
She listened to herself as if at a distance from her voice. It was happening again. Some part of her she was not familiar with, dictating her speech. Where was the speech arising? She searched her reflexes, and felt the same existential vertigo as when trying to imagine the hormones and chemicals governing her brain’s circuitry, or when trying to imagine the scale of the universe in deep time. Her thoughts stuttered.
Michel was waiting for an answer. “Why would we do something?” he repeated.
“Think about it for a sec,” she said, buying time while she waited for her brain to articulate what it was thinking. They both thought about it for some secs.
“Nope, no clue,” he said.
“They cut us off on the exact day of the trial run. That can’t be a coincidence.” She knew she was right. That day had been the juncture between the Before and the After, the precipice between the simulation and the reality. She saw it now. “So we have to do exactly what they don’t want us to do.” She was nodding. “We have to finish the experiment.”
“Cell culturing? Why? We’ve already watched it a thousand times.”
“No, we haven’t. We’ve watched a simulation of it. We know it’s 99.99999 percent probable that it will happen as planned, but not with certainty.”
“Those are pretty good odds.”
“But we need to find out how it happens in real life. We need to follow through.”
Michel smiled. “Listen to you, drawing divisions between the virtual and the actual. Ha! Haven’t you read your object-oriented philosophy?”
“Sure, sure, everything’s a real object.” She waved him off. “But you know, if there was ever really evidence that reality might be different than the simulation, it’s the fact that we got fired between the two.”
He considered this, tensing and releasing his forehead slightly, just sitting there being Michel, a smart, like-minded individual, a male colleague. She had watched him sit there and consider a proposition like this countless times: she proposed an idea, he worked through the various options by flexing his lobes, and then he came out either in the same place as her or somewhere very different. She’d enjoyed proposing ridiculous things sometimes just to watch him take them seriously.
“Correct,” he said in a robotic voice after a long wait. “The specific timing of our firing is highly suspicious.” He shook his head. “However. We didn’t just watch that simulation, we input that simulation, and we went through it a thousand times. It would have to be magic if it didn’t—I mean, the probability is too low, it’s too much—there’s—it’s pointless. I know we did the simulation right.”
Magic. Yes, it would have to be magic. Or proof they were shit scientists. There was no other option.
“Fine,” she said, and smiled a bit. “You’re right.”
It was fine to have tried this on him. He was a safe space, free from judgment. She could communicate with little calculation; her internal monologue softened around him. Of course, Michel’s softness also repelled her. She needed to stay acute.
Michel stood up and stepped across the path, pointing at a plaque at the base of a gruff little pine tree. “Lebendes Fossil,” he read out loud. “It says this species is two hundred million years old.”
After a short look at the orchids in a pavilion on the other side of the dome, they left through the main entrance. He walked with her toward where she had left her bike, at the western exit, but before they got to the edge of the park, he said, “Hold on. Want to see my favorite part?”
She followed him back across the lawn to a little fenced-in garden. The apothecary plots, he explained as they kneeled between rows, were laid out in the shape of a human body, with the medicinal plants grown in the areas corresponding to the body part they were supposed to heal.
There was something kind of morbid about it, she thought. This corpse planted in the ground, roots tangling in the wet soil. “What body part are we in now?” she asked.
He leaned forward. “Looks like milk thistle.” He reached out to feel a jagged leaf. “Probably liver. Or spleen.”
“What’s this herb hobby of yours? I had no idea you were such an expert.”
He pulled the leaf until it snapped off, then stood. “Oh, you know.” He smiled in a gently self-mocking way. “Just trying to avoid the medical-industrial complex.”
“Are you a witch?”
“I wouldn’t tell you if I were.”
She stood up too and they walked in silence to the gate of the gardens. Exiting the park dissolved their breach of nondisclosure. They shook hands at the street corner, smiling businesslike, lips sealed.
Eva was in Dubai. Anja learned this from scrolling on her phone. Eva was posed in front of the Palm Jumeira hotel wearing a sarong and thousand-euro sunglasses; Eva was clinking glasses with a bloated, goateed man. Eva was beautiful, really beautiful. She would never have made sense in Berlin, she was too perfect. Hers was the kind of beauty that paired well with money, was buffed and shined by money, was brought to bloom by money. She would make no sense in the gray gloom of this city, much less in a cave of a place like the Baron, in the filth that came with being a “creative.” Anja was pretty, yes, but less straightforwardly so; she was the same height and rough outline as Eva, but compressed. Anja
’s features were more sharply angled and her limbs more bone than flesh. She moved gracelessly. She looked best in cut and mangled clothes, fabric wrapped around her in unorthodox ways. Anja hypothesized that the reason she and Eva inhabited such different social worlds was traceable to this basic physical differentiation. Their bodies lent them to certain crowds.
Anja considered writing to Eva, but what was the point? What would she ask—What are you doing in Dubai? Are you wearing sunscreen? Don’t you know it’s offensive to show so much skin in the Emirates? How’s the oil crisis? Have you caught sight of the slave laborers who built your hotel? Eva was so, so disengaged from the painful realities of the planet. But maybe Eva was right, maybe it was all a lost cause—might as well enjoy the widening of the ozone hole to get a better tan. Maybe engaging with the ongoing disaster of the planet was pointless, unhealthy. In her own way, Anja avoided engaging with it too, down in the lab with the cells, never asking where all those numbers she generated would end up.
They might have both inherited that slight remove from the world from their parents, whose notion of political engagement was limited to a series of rote procedures: meetings, receptions, speeches for other people just like them. They were busy, which gave them a good excuse for being so remote from their daughters most of the time. Long periods of absence, punctuated by random moments of grand intrusion when they showed up and poked around in Anja’s life. You need decent furniture, you need some art on the walls, wouldn’t you like to live in the London flat for a few months? Maybe get into science policy? Your sister’s so adventurous, don’t you feel stuck in Berlin? Anja only knew her side of it, but they probably did the same to Eva: You can’t live in hotels for the rest of your life, why not get a real degree like your sister?
Anja was without doubt the responsible one. This meant that she would be the one to handle the inheritance someday. Mom in particular purported to believe it was caring and responsible to regularly bring up the issue of inheritance—who would get what and when—but to Anja it seemed a transparent desire to induce closeness by invoking death. The desire for connection was always couched in practicality, which was the only vocabulary Mom had access to. Anja knew the strategy worked on her. Mom had had difficulty sounding sympathetic when Anja called to tell her about Pat’s death; Anja was sure all her mother was thinking about in that moment was her own. But then, so was Anja.
Louis had been there to see her parents arrive and depart from Berlin. Dinner at the steak house, brunch at the hotel. He was a steady wingman throughout and helped her dissect the experiences afterward. Narcissa and Narcissus, he’d called them, after waving goodbye.
But things didn’t go in the other direction. Pat never came to visit. His Sunday phone calls to Indiana were unremarkable, composed of diligent small talk, but pleasant and natural-sounding. The only reason she knew the calls were important to him was that he always stuck to the phone appointment, week after week, regardless of hangover. In all that time, Anja had spoken to Pat only once. Louis had been out in the garden and she’d answered his phone without thinking.
“I thought you’d have an accent!” Pat laughed. “But don’t you sound perfectly American!”
Pat had been through a war; she had lost her legs. A bomb had blown them off. It was all Anja could think about when she heard her voice.
9
THE GYM WAS CROWDED, SO CROWDED THERE WAS A LINE FORMING at the showers, so many white bodies so close to each other, so close to touching. There was something as sinister as sisterly about all those bodies lined up in the tiled room, bodies with the same attributes in different variations, two of these, two of these, one of these. The gym was already a sort of selector for the healthy and the able, and so the variations were minor, unremarkable until unclothed and paraded all around in one damp space. Darker nipple, lighter nipple. Puffy nipple, flat nipple. Nipples, all of them.
In the sauna, where Anja went to wait for the shower line to diminish, she was surrounded by bodies still, but bodies that were being still, elbows folded in against sweaty sides, breasts flattened unthreateningly upon reclining rib cages. She knew she was an alien. There they were, inhabiting their bodies, and here she was, rocking around inside hers. They knew what their bodies looked like, and they knew what their attitudes toward their bodies looked like—sanctioned variations on confidence and insecurity: this one likes her legs but worries about her lopsided shoulder; this one hunches because she’s too tall; this one defies anyone to call her thighs too big and so wears very tight pants; this one is warm and round and doesn’t self-criticize, but she does work her upper body extra hard on Tuesdays.
Anja didn’t know how to classify her body, she only knew that whatever it was, it wasn’t her fault. She was naturally thin, and that was supposed to be good. But she had gotten even thinner than usual in the last weeks, which was supposed to be not good. She had noticed some weird bumps on one of her forearms, which was definitely not good. Disease was easy to pinpoint as objectively bad. But the fact that being thin was supposed to be good seemed irrelevant, since in past eras it would have been better to be plump. It was hard to rest on any single aspect for reassurance, knowing it to be simply an accident of being born in a century that aligned its aesthetic ideals with her genes. Could the goodness of a body transcend time? The question was null. Her body was never the same body. It never looked the same. It was swollen in one spot and limp in another. Parts of it seemed older than other parts. The whole thing would be old soon. It got used and it responded to the various uses, sighing to good treatment, prickling to bad. But then, it also sometimes responded well to very bad treatment.
The sauna women knew their bodies’ singular worth. They had been children, and they had been teenagers, and so they had experienced the paranoia that comes with physical change. Now they were adults, meaning they were fixed entities—unlike Anja, who was technically grown up but still waiting for a solid shape. They had achieved a sort of continuity that she had not. Many of them had probably given birth. Many of them had probably dieted to extremes. Maybe some of them had hurt themselves badly, or suffered through long illnesses. But now they all looked stable, as if they had achieved equilibrium, stasis.
In the reddish light cast by the hot stove in the sauna, all she could see in the other bodies was her own shape thrown into relief. Do my ankles look like hers, or like hers? She mentally pieced together her own shape from parts of theirs. Then she tried to see the parts of their bodies as beloved shapes for the circling hand or puckering mouth of the people who loved them. She saw them and she envisioned the way their lovers saw them. She saw them and she saw, reflexively, how she might be seen, as a recipient for a hand or a mouth, as Louis must have seen her—as too soft here and too gaunt here and too pallid around the corners here, but nonetheless the ideal arrangement of positive and negative spaces for his positive and negative spaces to fit around. He had never said she was perfect, but it was clear he thought her perfectly formed for him. His complementary match. Things she had never considered laudatory, like the smooth complexion of the skin of her back, the high arches of her feet, he noted and treated with reverence. He had called her arches aristocratic.
The line for the showers dwindled and she left the sauna, found her flip-flops, and chose a stall in the back where she could rinse without being confronted by other bodies. Maybe Germany just isn’t a nice place for communal showers, she thought, and shut the water off.
Fumbling around in the inconveniently shaped locker to find her underwear, she realized she was gripping her rented towel too tightly, and that she ought to exercise a more casual relationship to the towel and therefore to her nakedness. She ought to demonstrate that she was not afraid of all that dumb vigorousness around her, ladies with towels draped around their shoulders and trailing between their feet. One woman’s tampon string was hanging freely between her legs as she bent, back straight, to root through her bag. Anja drew the thin towel together and tied it in a knot around her chest.
Its bottom edge skimmed the bottom edge of her bottom. This was as far as she would go today in claiming herself as a native creature in this place. This place, where they all went together, women and men, to put their bodies into machines, to move in time with music coming from other machines in their ears, to drink water that they had carried all the way here in little plastic bottles that had been manufactured and shipped from other countries inside machines. They were here to scrunch their muscle groups into painful knots and then to retreat to a dark and hot room where they could mingle their sweat, putting their naked bodies as close to one another as possible without quite touching: no, this place was not a natural place.
She’d been shown the machines and locker rooms when she signed up, but nobody had ever given her a tour and said: this is the little cubby where you will place your toiletries while you shower, but you will have to open your eyes filled with soap while you are reaching for them lest you graze knuckles with the woman using the shower next to you; this is the row of lockers that you should never choose, because opening one of these lockers will require kneeling under some other woman’s damp crotch; this is the mirror before which you will stand to dry your hair and stare at all the women lined up next to you, who are all standing there with elbows raised, using a wind-making device invented for the sole purpose of removing the water from their hairs—an activity that all of them likely spend ten to twenty minutes on every day, just waving a machine around to blow on the hairs to speed up the evaporation process—women who are all doing the same thing and watching you do it too, but who are somehow less curious about you than you are about them. This is the place you will learn not to stare.
ice ice bb 0º0º0º hats on today
A new ritual took shape. Louis wasn’t coming home any earlier, but each night Anja waited for him, and when he showed up she’d strap on her boots and they’d head out the door together right away.
