Oval

by Elvia Wilk

  Below them, Anja explained, the vectors of history also tunneled all the way into the earth. The Albertina had recently opened a whole new viewing hall in a sub-subbasement, beneath which were even more sub-sub-subbasements, climate-controlled halls of storage. Wedged between untouchable historic buildings on either side and unwilling to stop acquiring objects, the Albertina had opted to dig down. The museum a spaceship, a crypt. Anja’s family owned a whole chunk of real estate down there—she didn’t mention that.

  “Come visit,” Papa was saying into the phone. “We’ll be in Vienna almost the whole month.”

  “I’m busy, actually. I have a new job. And anyway I shouldn’t travel, I’m sick or something. I’m all patchy.” She checked her foot again, the one with the freckles. Under the green film the red rash was still firmly printed.

  “What kind of patchy?”

  “A rash.”

  “What kind of rash?”

  “I don’t know. A red one.”

  “Your commune has lice?”

  “I know. You told me so.”

  “I did tell you so, but we all have to make our own mistakes. When I was your age I lived in a farming cooperative in Copenhagen, growing my own beets and radishes.”

  “I know, you’ve told me that, too.”

  “That was when I developed my psoriasis, from all the stress of living together and the lack of hygiene. What does your rash look like?”

  “Papa, it’s not psoriasis.”

  “Psoriasis can easily spread and inflame the joints if you don’t catch it in time.”

  “It’s not psoriasis.”

  “Why don’t you take a picture with your camera phone and send me a multimedia message? I’ll tell you if it looks like psoriasis.”

  “What difference would it make? There’s no cure for psoriasis.”

  “Maybe not today, but soon! By the time you’re my age they’ll have a cure for all these things. Cancer, obviously—heart disease, a thing of the past. You and Eva will live forever.”

  “Everyone wants to think their kids will live forever.”

  “But think of what’s happened in just the last fifty years, the science is enormous! Compared to the sixties—have I ever told you about my waking tonsillectomy?”

  “Yes.”

  “See, there’s reason to hope. The future—but hold on—” She heard mumbling, her mother’s voice in the background. “Sorry, love,” he said, “we’ve really got to board now.”

  “All right, well.”

  “You sound down, darling. Do you need anything?”

  “I’m fine, just—” The speaker scratched as Mom grabbed the phone. “No,” Anja said, “I don’t need to talk to—”

  “Anja,” Mom yelled into the mouthpiece, fumbling with the device and breathing hard. Airports had started giving her migraines; she was particularly unpleasant when she was inside them, which was frequently. She seemed to think she could counteract the process of aging by accelerating air travel to the point that it was nonstop. Turn endless movement into a state of constancy and voilá, you’d be stable. A rat in formaldehyde, endless suspension.

  “Is it our American friend? Has he deserted?”

  “Not exactly,” Anja said. “Remember about his mom, though. I told you.”

  “Jesus, I’d forgotten. What a tragedy—but hold on, your—we’ve really got to run—”

  “Okay. We’ll talk later.”

  “Why! What’s he done?”

  “Who?”

  “Your . . . boyfriend.”

  Anja was tempted to press her into saying his name, but she resisted. “Louis,” she reminded. “Louis hasn’t done anything. He’s grieving, Mom.”

  “You can’t let him walk all over you, Anja. Take some control. You don’t need him.”

  Time passed differently for Mom. She lived inside her own schedule, forgetting the existence of anyone not standing directly in front of her. But when you did cross her field of vision she latched on hard, flipping from absent to overbearing in a second. There was no third mode. Eva had long since learned to avoid speaking to her mother on the phone. Both she and Anja had generally learned to use her father as the go-between, but Anja still gave in, in moments of weakness, reaching out to make sure her mother was still alive.

  “Where did you get this idea that everyone is trying to take advantage of me?”

  Anja knew the answer. It was because her mother had been born in America, and so had been born ready to sue anyone, legally or emotionally, at any moment.

  “You’re too good for him—he’s from the Midwest, for god’s sake. There are more fish. You’re still young. I have to go now, we’re already on the tunnel to the plane, what’s it called, the tunnel thing?”

  “A jet bridge.”

  “No, that’s not it. Anyway, your father will get you a plane ticket to come to Vienna for a few days. You’ll feel better once you get home. You can see Doctor What’s-his-name.”

  Papa’s voice entered the phone for a moment, but she couldn’t tell what he was saying. The line cut out.

  Howard answered immediately. “Finally.”

  She sat up and leaned against the bathtub, pulling the bath mat up over her legs, which were shivering. “It’s only been like three days since we talked,” she said. “What’s up?”

  “Where are you?”

  “I’m at—wait, why?”

  “Everyone else is at the Best Western.”

  She laughed. “Who’s everyone?”

  “Everyone from the Berg, the whole community. This morning we relocated all of you, except you two.”

  “Come on, half of the houses have been empty for weeks.”

  He turned on his official voice. “Everyone who was still living on the Berg is now here. At the hotel.”

  “So you finally realized it’s unlivable up there.”

  “They can’t fix the system with everyone on site. This is just a temporary vacation for you while they solve the last little issues.”

  “That means they decided on the way to go? How natural our lifestyles should be?”

  “All buttoned up.”

  “And?”

  “You’ll be getting all the luxuries you deserve.”

  “Heat and running water.”

  “For starters.”

  “And what are you telling the press about having emptied us from the biome we are supposed to be a part of?”

  “Nothing. That’s why you should probably be over at the hotel.”

  “Yikes, Howard. This must be a nasty PR situation.” She checked the wine level in the bottle beside her. “A little out of your depth, maybe?”

  “Watch it.” He sounded less in control than usual, not absorbing the jabs. “Wash your mouth out with soap and get over here. I mean it.”

  She stood to look in the mirror and inspect the burgundy skid mark on her tongue. “Hold on, you’re right.” She rubbed her tongue with a white bar of soap next to the sink, which tasted like lavender, then sipped water from the tap, gargled, and coughed into the basin.

  “It’s the Best Western in Mitte,” he said. “Do you need the address?”

  “Chill for a second. I have to go home and pick up some stuff before I can do anything. I didn’t bring enough clothes.”

  “We’ve got things cordoned off, so no, you can’t go back. If you had just picked up your phone—”

  “I have another job now, remember? I’m a very busy con-sul-tant.”

  “You’re at work?”

  “No. I’m working on myself.”

  She heard another phone ring in the background on his end. Howard put his hand over the microphone and said something muffled in German. She realized they had been speaking English together on this call, which sometimes made their interactions more antagonistic. He abruptly returned to the speaker. “Remember the NDA you guys signed,” he said loudly. “It covers this exact potential scenario. You really can’t be talking about it with anyone.”

  “Really, this ex
act scenario? This very exact particular one?”

  “It covers all potential scenarios, one of which has become an actual scenario. That’s how legal contracts work. They account for multiple universes, and this is the universe we happen to find ourselves in.”

  He sounded manic. Artificially induced. Mom had, conversely, sounded sedated. Maybe it was time Anja met everyone else on their level: heavily medicated.

  “It’s not possible to write an NDA that covers every possible reality,” she said.

  She could imagine Howard’s blood pressure rising, his veins opening, the click in his brain that told him to switch the focus back to her. “What’s going on with you?”

  “I have a rash. It flares up in the afternoon.”

  She reached across the floor to dig around in the hamper of treatments she’d assembled from Laura and Dam’s cabinets. Vitamin B12 sublingual capsules, colloidal silver nasal spray, valerian root extract, quick-dissolving mineral salts, homeopathic nothing-tablets, teal ceramic neti pot with an Om symbol engraved on the side. She found the calamine lotion and squirted out a thin pink worm on her thigh, then rubbed the elbow of the arm holding the phone into the goo.

  “I’m sorry to hear that. I could find you a doctor to meet you at the hotel?”

  “Is the Best Western seriously the best you could do in this situation?”

  “It’s four stars.”

  “I have to rinse off this algae, it’s really stinging again. I’ll get back to you.”

  “Where’s Louis? Is he with you?”

  “I’ll get back to you.”

  After rinsing and inspecting her blotchy patches, which had flattened into faint pink outlines but not stopped itching, she put Dam’s kimono back on and got into his bed. She stared at her phone in preparation and dialed Louis.

  He was bright and loud when he answered. The room he was in sounded noisy. He asked about her rash in a concerned tone.

  “I’ll be fine. Probably just some kind of allergy.”

  “I feel so much better after getting out of the house. I’m sure you will too.”

  “Good for you.” She knew she sounded sour. She wanted to sound sour. He was supposed to ask her to come stay with him. He was supposed to ask if she wanted to get a hotel room, a new apartment, to move forward or go back in time.

  “What?” he said defensively. “Are you annoyed I’m staying here?”

  “No. But we could stay somewhere together.”

  “The pullout sofa here isn’t big enough for two people.”

  “I know, you’ve said that.”

  “Hey, come see for yourself. Come by here and look at the sofa, you can decide if you want to sleep on it with me.”

  “We could go stay at the Best Western with everyone else.”

  “Best Western?”

  “Howard says everyone from the Berg was relocated. They want us to go there right away.”

  He laughed. “The Best Western was the best they could do?”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “Sounds like a terrible idea. Have you ever been inside a Best Western? Your rash would probably get worse.”

  “Hasn’t Howard called you like a hundred times today?”

  “I’m not taking calls besides yours right now. We’re in full brainstorming mode over here. Innovation is going down, babe.”

  She laughed, but then wondered if she hadn’t been supposed to laugh. Maybe he was serious? Innovation? Going down?

  “Just come see me,” he said. “I miss you.”

  It was a neon fishhook in the dark, which she bit down upon slowly, feeling it pierce the roof of her mouth.

  “We’ll see us tomorrow,” she said, deliberately inserting the common German error into her English, something he’d once thought was funny.

  The calamine lotion wasn’t working to dull the itch and her elbow was urgently prickling, inflamed and demanding scratching. After she ended the call, she recklessly hacked away at the skin with her bitten fingernails, wondering yet again whether she was the cause of this new and odd state of affairs between them, or whether he was the cause, or whether the relationship was an organism independent of either of their intentions that would always morph in ways useless to try to control.

  12

  LOUIS WAS PHOTOGRAPHING THE VIEW FROM THE WINDOWS OF his studio with his tablet when Anja came in. He smiled over his shoulder. It was slobbering wet / bright rays / strawberry outside, and the light was filtering in through the southwest windows of the building, of which he had an entire floor sandwiched between West Africa below and Digital Development above. An eighteenth-century sanitation factory had been knocked down a few years ago and rebuilt anew exactly the same, down to the fixtures, but with one entire south-facing façade replaced by a sheet of triple-enforced glass. This was Basquiatt HQ.

  Louis’s desk rolled itself around the room to follow the sunlight, performing asanas, but everyone in the room except Louis was down at the darker end of the space, cast in shadow. There were five or so of them huddled around a large monitor on a regular stationary table. Anja waved, but they didn’t seem to notice, too engrossed in whatever they were looking at. She moved up behind Louis and laid her cheek flat on his back, wrapping her arms around his chest between scratchy wool sweater and soft cotton shirt, smelling the familiar detergent they had at home, which was supposed to be unscented.

  “Gimme a wet one,” he said, turning to wrap around her.

  They sat together on the white leather IKEA two-seater in the sunniest corner. Anja tried to position herself in a confident recline, imagining she was one of those gym women whose bodies knew what to do without conscious instruction. Louis said how excited he was to see her, she reciprocated, they made physical contact easily, it was all natural. Just like that, they were together again. Who had decided it would be this way? No one: it just was.

  One of the people from the clump at the other end of the room had broken off and was creeping along the wall toward the sofa, looking privately thrilled.

  “Hey, Belinda,” called Louis. He and Belinda were grinning at each other, Belinda more giddily so. She giggled as she inched closer. Anja started to reach out a hand to introduce herself, but Belinda leaped upon Anja and wrapped her arms around Anja’s head. She gave Anja a kiss on the side of her face.

  “A real wet one,” said Anja, wiping her cheek.

  Belinda fell across the sofa, stretching herself over their laps. She swung one arm upward until it was a few centimeters in front of Louis’s face. The hand held a USB stick shaped like a pink breast-cancer-awareness ribbon. “What’s this?” asked Louis.

  “The final vector files. Signed sealed and delivered!” She was American, maybe Canadian.

  “Thank you!” Louis plucked the USB stick from her hand and Belinda beamed up at him from his lap. “Belinda’s a graphic designer,” he said to Anja. “She’s consulting on this project I want to show you.”

  Belinda sat up and shifted so she was curled around Anja, resting her head against Anja’s shoulder with the kind of unabashed intimacy that Anja associated with bathtubs in the basements of clubs. Belinda slithered a hand onto Anja’s thigh, and Anja reflexively slapped it away. Belinda didn’t seem bothered. She rolled her face back in Louis’s direction and said, “We decided to give you the mock-ups for free. No need to reimburse us. After all, how often do we get to serve a higher purpose?” She closed her eyes serenely and signed off: “With very best wishes.”

  “Of course we’ll pay you, Belinda.” Louis laughed. “We couldn’t cancel your contract even if we tried.”

  Belinda waggled a finger in the air. “That’s the problem with everything,” she slurred. “They don’t let you give anything away for free.” She jolted awake and then appeared to drift off again.

  Anja shook her head. “I want the opposite of whatever she’s taking,” she said.

  Louis frowned. “Really? That’s your first reaction?”

  “What are these mock-ups for?”
>
  “Well, her, basically,” he said, looking at Belinda. “Here”—he waved the USB stick—“I’ll show you.” He jiggled his knee and Belinda gently rolled off their laps, giggling, then slunk over to the far side of the office again.

  They stood together at his desk while Louis maneuvered the unwieldy cancer ribbon into the USB socket of his computer. The stick’s plastic appendage blocked the other ports, so he had to unplug his power cable to get it in. “Not sure why we’re still using USBs here,” he muttered. “This place is so behind.”

  He downloaded a file called “Relinquish_Super_Ego” onto his desktop, unzipped it, and opened a 3D rendering. He rotated the rendering so she could see all sides of the object. It was an oblong, light purple capsule, with a groove etched on one side, following its contour. Two concentric ovals.

  She squinted. “It’s a pill?”

  “Designer drug, literally.” He pointed at the group at the far end of the room, ostensibly a whole squadron of designers. “It doesn’t look too perfect, though, right? They tried to undesign it after they designed it. We don’t want it to look corporate.” Then he jumped. “Oh god, I forgot. Don’t hate me. Can you sign a waiver?”

  “An NDA?”

  “I just—” He pointed at the nearest ceiling camera.

  “Whatever. These don’t seem to mean much anymore.”

  Louis handed her his tablet and she signed the screen sloppily with a finger. He kissed her cheek. “Now I can show you.” He pulled up another folder from the drive labeled “ChariteX” and opened a slew of files.

  There were TIFFs of molecular structures, peptide bonds, brain scans, the eyeballs of mice and apes under the influence. PDFs of biology papers. A science collage. He clicked through photos, animations, renderings. “This is the mood board,” he said, “just to give you an idea.”

  She took in the mood uneasily. “Maybe give me the elevator pitch.”

  “Right.” They paused to look over at Belinda, who was saying something not quite intelligible from her position on the floor nearby, on her knees with arms stretched out before her in an approximation of a child’s pose. Louis looked like he wanted to call out to her, but shook his head and turned back to Anja.