Oval

by Elvia Wilk

  She looked down at her body and saw that she had been scratching her elbow so hard while listening to the tale of Eric that the skin had split. She interrupted Dam. “Do you think that app could get me a fancy doctor’s appointment?”

  “Of course,” he said. “If Eric can get a letter from a vet, a human doctor can’t be that hard.”

  “Ask him for me.”

  “No way he’ll help you. He likes to lord this sort of stuff over me. If there’s no direct benefit for him, he’s not going to do me any favors. I’m telling you, he’s absolutely shameless.”

  It was no use suggesting to Dam that pursuing Eric was a bad choice. She’d watched Dam do this time and again, and there was no rerouting him from his course of pursuing men whom he despised in order to be abused by them and therefore confirm his assumptions about the world. He was like Sara and Sascha in that way: so sentimental and so in need of care, and yet so incapable of seeking love from a person who could provide it. Unlike Sara and Sascha, though, he was perfectly aware of his own hypocrisy. By seeking compassion in the wrong places, he tried to dull his needs by proving to himself that they were impossible to meet. The satisfaction of rejection was the only kind he seemed to know how to feel.

  “You don’t need to tell me,” Dam said, preemptively defensive. “I know there are a few red flags with Eric.”

  It occurred to Anja that her relationship might also look unhealthy to people on the outside who didn’t understand it. No, she thought, nobody should judge a relationship except for the people in it. Only the participants could understand what existed between them. And after it was formed, the relationship became a fully autonomous, uncontrollable being. People liked to think they were having a relationship with each other, but really they were having a relationship with the relationship itself.

  calm cloudless sailor moon / ?º

  She jerked awake around noon with a nasty headache and a furious itch on her thigh. Laura was back from her two-day trip to Barcelona and was in the kitchen making coffee.

  “You slept late,” Laura said, back turned.

  “I know. Lots of gin yesterday. Wait—is that my phone ringing?” Anja flailed, tossing magazines off the table. “Do you hear it?”

  “Phantom,” Laura said flatly. She was right, the phone was dead; the imaginary sound was an echo of desperation. Anja had dreamed about Louis all night. She went to find her charger and when she came back Laura said: “Did Dam tell you?”

  “Tell me what?” She plugged her phone into the floor socket and jabbed at the power button.

  Laura sighed. “Lazy shit. He’s so afraid of conflict that he winds up causing conflict. Every damn time.” Anja waited. “He just doesn’t want to upset you,” Laura said, glancing over her shoulder.

  “I’m not that fragile.”

  “That’s what I told him.” Laura doled out spoonfuls of sugar, which she used in huge quantities. Sugar, salt, fried things. The more she watched TV, the worse her diet got.

  “Well?”

  “Fine. I’ll do the dirty work.” She licked the sugar spoon before putting it back in the dish. “The big news is that our little piece of Neubau here is about to get an upgrade. We’ll be priced out next month.”

  Anja realized she’d been expecting some awful rumor about Louis, which was absurd. She snapped to attention.

  “Seriously?”

  “Seriously.”

  Anja diligently went through the requisite questioning. She assembled the story from Laura’s short, recalcitrant yesses and nos.

  What had changed? The building had been sold. Who had bought the building? Finster, of course, which now owned every building on the street. What was the justification? It fell far short of the recommended standards for environmental sustainability and it needed, said Finster, new organic insulation, efficient lighting, solar panels, water filtration. A long list of efficiency improvements that would cost a few million euros to implement, and naturally as a result the rents would triple. Everyone knew the improvements were a scam—for one, these old buildings were pretty well insulated already.

  “How is no one protesting?” Anja demanded.

  “It’s useless. People are bored of this story by now. Even I’m tired of it. It’s happening everywhere. You can’t argue with sustainability.”

  Laura used to take part in every protest she could. She used to shame Anja for her lack of participation, until one day Anja accompanied her to a Refugees Welcome rally and they’d watched in horror while two of the guys they’d been marching alongside attacked a man carrying a Palestinian flag. “Anti-Semite!” they’d screamed as they kicked him to the ground. Anja had started crying and Laura had stopped pestering her to join after that. Laura’s participation had also waned until it was largely theoretical.

  “Show me the letter,” Anja said, meaning the letter from Finster. There was always a letter.

  Laura leaned over the desk in the corner and dug around. Anja averted her eyes from the pitiful digging. Her friends’ disorganization pained her. It was pathetic. Every time they got a scary letter in German they buried it instead of dealing with it, so the scary letters multiplied, referring to one another, building an impenetrable web, piling up in a crumpled mass on the desk.

  If you’d just paid this fine when you got the first letter, Anja would say, anguished, you wouldn’t have had this problem! If you had just brought the first letter to me! If you had just called the number on the letter and asked them to explain! Laura would swear, defiant, that they’d never gotten the original letter, and yet after a half hour peeling coffee-stained paperwork from the stash on the desk Anja would find it, dated eight months back and labeled MAHNUNG. This is a final notice! You’re being sued! Why can’t you get a fucking file folder!

  It wasn’t so much their dependence on her for dealing with these things that upset her, it was the very shape of the paperwork on the desk, the random mess of it all. You have to accept that you live in Germany, she’d say, I don’t care if it doesn’t make any sense to you! It comes with the territory!

  The letter that Laura produced this time, without too much digging, was a short one. It explained the newish provision of the city code whereby environmental upgrades overrode rent caps, so apparently there was no recourse to appeal. There was a phone number in the letterhead.

  “I’ll give them a call,” Anja said.

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  “It’s worth a shot.”

  “Really, it’s not.”

  She took a photo of the letter, resolving to call later. “Do you have a plan?”

  Laura poured the coffee grounds into the sink. Anja wondered if it would stop up the drain, reminded briefly of her own kitchen sink and its stubborn disposal.

  “That’s the thing Dam doesn’t want to tell you,” said Laura.

  Anja looked at her blankly, and then remembered where Laura had just been. “No! Laura, you hate Spain!”

  “I don’t hate the price of living there.”

  “You hate it!”

  Laura stared blankly out the window for a moment. “Berlin has changed since we moved here,” she said finally. “None of the reasons we came apply anymore. It was freedom—now it’s a trap.”

  “You honestly think things are going to be better anywhere else?”

  “Don’t get me wrong. I’m sad about it. We just don’t really have any options left. We’d have to move to Spandau if we wanted to find a new place in this city.”

  Anja was incredulous. It was unimaginable, Berlin without Laura and Dam. The whole city would drop out from under her. It was Dam whom she had met first and whom she called her best friend, but over the past five years she’d spent more time with Laura. Laura, without whom she had become unable to make decisions, to sort out her thoughts. Laura, the brilliant and the bitchy. Laura, the least likely candidate for a best female friend. Against all odds she’d managed to win Laura’s friendship—even though she was apolitical, even though she was rich, even tho
ugh she was shy. She’d won Laura and now she would lose her.

  Anja narrowed her eyes. “Be honest. Is this about the Bachelor thing?”

  “What? No. Let it go. I won that money back already. I told you I had the Final Rose in the bag. But even if I keep winning, it’s not sustainable for us. We can’t stay forever.”

  Anja stood up and leaned against her chair. “I can’t believe you’re so chill about this.”

  “Everyone is chill about all this.” Laura shrugged. “The entire last decade in Berlin has been everyone sitting around and asking each other, how can you be so chill about all this? and then going on being chill. Everyone is chill because everyone else is chill, and it never ends.”

  “But that’s the point of Berlin. It’s the only chill place left.”

  “Yeah, but it’s over. How can you not see that? These were our Weimar years, and we spent them doing nothing.”

  “We do things.”

  “No. We get fucked up, we spend our time in dark rooms, we don’t make anything. Protests are basically street parties. When we see the news we watch it through a filter, because none of it’s real to us—we cry about it sometimes, but it doesn’t really touch us, it’s not real, we feel safe. We drink it off and then the badness of our hangovers gives us a good excuse not to do anything the next day. And the whole time things are getting more and more expensive, and people are leaving, and each time we think, how sad, another person has left, but actually it’s an exodus now. There’s no reason to stay any longer, now that it looks just like the rest of the world. Have you even read about what’s been happening on the outside?”

  Anja felt herself flush; she wasn’t up on the news at all. She had been entirely absorbed by herself.

  Laura wiped her upper lip, which was lined with a light brown fuzz. “We’ve been so ahead, and so behind. But it’s ending. Can’t avoid it any longer.”

  Anja pictured those green lights spreading out from the base of the Berg. The fluctuating weather, snowflakes, sunburns. The tinge of sickness, dysfunction. The humidity in her bedroom, the waste disposal unit spitting out bits of plastic.

  “The city isn’t postwar, post-Wall anymore—it’s pre–something else,” said Laura. “You’re right that there’s no place left. But this place isn’t left either.”

  Anja ran her hands through her hair, tugging on it. “If every place is ruined, why not just sit it out here? Spain will be even worse.”

  “Better to be somewhere where the apocalypse has already happened than sit through another one.” Laura sipped her coffee. “Dystopia takes some time to set in.”

  Anja responded by holding up her forearms. Laura understood. She leaned in and inspected Anja’s rash, feeling it with her fingertips. She said she’d go pick up something from the health-food place. Then she asked about the house, about Louis. But Anja felt even less like opening up than she had with Dam. She had woken up planning to replay every event and conversation for Laura to analyze, to flip over and see from another angle, but she restrained herself. She didn’t want a rational opinion. She wanted to think and say irrational things that she would regret.

  11

  LOUIS SAT ON THE EDGE OF THE BATHTUB. HE DIPPED HIS PINKY in the filmy green water and took a lick.

  She opened her eyes: there was no Louis. She was alone in the bathtub in Dam and Laura’s beige-tiled bathroom. She closed her eyes again and blotted out his absence, concentrating on the little eukaryotes of algae fastening and unfastening from her skin.

  Instead of medicine, Laura had brought home a packet of green powder and a jug of filthy water from the canal. “I read about it online,” she said. “The powder causes the algae from the canal water to multiply and take off a layer of skin. It’s good for eczema and rashes and things.”

  Why would you think canal water is safe to bathe in? would have been the proper response. Or, how much skin does it take off, exactly? But Anja just said thanks and retreated to the bathroom. She ran half a tub of scalding water and then dumped the jug and the powder in before thinking to read the instructions on the back of the packet.

  Half a packet sufficient for one bath, it said. Combine with six tablespoons of fresh pond water. Test pH level using enclosed blotter paper before making contact with skin.

  Anja uncorked the half-empty bottle of Bordeaux Laura had given her along with the bath ingredients and took a swig. Then she sank her foot into the frothing water. It was way too hot, but it felt fine otherwise. She wondered what Michel would say about this particular medicinal plant. Maybe she’d ask him. Algae hadn’t been in that section of the garden, the section in the shape of a body. It was more like the shape of a gingerbread man. Or a swollen corpse. She hadn’t liked the concept of the thing as much as Michel had seemed to.

  She was chest-deep in the mush for twenty minutes before the creases of her elbows and knees started to sting—the places where the thin skin was the thinnest and was being sloughed off by the algae quickest. She lifted a foot out of the water to check whether the rash was improving, but it was hard to say because the whole foot was so red from the heat. She breathed deeply, focusing on the stinging to keep Louis out of her mind, and with each breath she saw her nipples poking up through the green surface, causing tiny ripples. She checked her foot again. That pair of freckles near its bony apex—was something different about them? The freckles, she was sure, were closer together than they had been before.

  “Why would your freckles be moving?” Louis smiled from his perch on the edge of the tub.

  “I don’t know, maybe I’m evolving.”

  “Maybe you’re devolving and becoming a swamp creature.”

  She heard his friendly laugh again, a laugh that could cover anything up, even the most cutting comment—you wouldn’t even realize it had cut you until you replayed the conversation in your head again late at night. How many times had she heard him mask the things he said with that laugh?

  She pulled the foot with the freckles closer and grabbed hold of it, mushing the skin with her thumb to see if it felt at all mutable, putty-like, but it just felt like a hot, raw foot. She touched the freckles lightly. No, at closer range they were certainly normal, no movement.

  But of course. She was confusing her freckles with Louis’s freckles, the two on his arm that formed the handle of the Big Dipper. That was his body, not hers. She’d appropriated them. Funny, this had only ever happened before with Eva: the mistaking of one body for another. Of course it made sense with Eva—their bodies were made of essentially the same stuff in different tinctures. They were both women who came from the same woman. The uncanny sight of Eva’s legs, so similar to her own, had jolted Anja out of her own body more than once.

  There was that time she and Eva had gotten terrible poison ivy at day camp during their year in Connecticut. Their mother had picked them up, swung them back to the rental home, and forced them both into an oatmeal bath. They were too old to be bathing together, and Anja remembered the unwelcome feeling of their legs bumping in the oatmeal mush, her sister’s leg’s already smooth shaven, Anja’s still softly frosted in kid hair. It was a repulsive feeling, leg against leg in oatmeal water.

  A quarter bottle of Bordeaux in, she decided the stinging had gotten intense enough. She pulled the drain plug and, blood pounding in her temples, stumbled naked, red-faced, and covered in green scum into Laura’s room, where this time she was sure she could hear her phone ringing. Three missed calls: Papa, Howard, Louis. She took her phone back to the bathroom, lay down on the bath mat, and started dialing from the top.

  Papa’s phone rang endlessly. She dialed again. Algae was crusting into a variegated topography on her stomach; she decided not to wash it off, to let it settle. A green stain was spreading around her onto the beige bath mat.

  His voice arrived unexpectedly. “Darling! We’re just about to board.” (French.)

  “Oh, where?” (German.)

  “Schiphol.”

  “To where?” (German.)

&nb
sp; “Frankfurt.”

  “Until?” (German.)

  “Sunday. Then back to Vienna, finally.” (French.)

  Vienna was the landing pad. Technically it had been Anja’s permanent home during the growing-up process, but she’d spent very little time there altogether, just stints between different postings: always a new school in the fall, a new camp in the summer. The familiar questioning refrain of one international school kid to another: Celebrity, Diplomat, Oil? Double Dip, that was Anja’s stock answer. Both parents.

  Anja had taken Louis to the Vienna apartment the winter before. The house was empty—Anja had chosen those dates because it would be. Shining parquet boasted across all seven rooms; southeast-facing windows let in sunlight in glorious strips across the vast floors; crown molding iced the ten-foot ceilings; Talavera tiles floored the bathroom and Delft tiles framed the kitchen. Louis fawned over the orange tree, so ambitiously branching toward the bay window in the sitting room.

  In fact, Louis was enthusiastic about all of it. How honest this old Viennese grandeur, compared to Berlin’s new money! How figurative the buildings! How casually the assets displayed themselves! She was surprised that the city appealed to him so much, but of course, she reminded herself, it was all new to him. Waking up beside him in the four-poster bed, she tried to imagine the house he’d grown up in, that little brown square of a roof she’d located after searching on Google Maps. Wall-to-wall pile carpets? Recliners? A TV in the kitchen? (Fast-forward and scratch that: no TV.) She had been born into a world of private schools—he had ended up beside her in this vast antique bed entirely on merit, on the merit of being so brilliant he was lovable. He’d achieved his achievements. She’d never be able to say that of herself.

  Venturing beyond the apartment, though, Louis had to admit that the architecture could be over-the-top. Column after column after balustrade. Grimaces leering from every corner. Gargoyles on gargoyles. Leaning against the scalloped railing of the raised entrance to the Albertina Museum, he expressed a kind of historical vertigo while trying to make geometrical sense of the view: three eras of intensely ornamented façades converging at odd angles to one another, like railway tracks merging unsuccessfully.