by Elvia Wilk
“Sure. Yeah, just give a thumbs-up or something.”
“Lots of emojis today.”
“What did my dad say?”
“Something about the docteur.”
“Just say I’ll call him later.”
“In French?”
“Doesn’t matter.”
“Okay.” He tapped away faster than she ever could have. “That all?”
“For now. Thank you.”
“Kiss your secretary on the cheek.”
She did, then leaned back into the red faux-velvet seat. Instead of following Dam’s gaze toward the logical point of attention at the front of the theater, she stared at his profile, then turned to look at Laura’s. The two of them were so alike from this side angle, bookending her. She was safe here between their matching faces—or she had been. Where now? They would always have each other as defaults; she wouldn’t have anyone by default without Louis.
She cast about in her mind for a node. The only person she could think of was her sister, which would have been logical except that Eva was such a horrible bitch. Money had ruined her—seeing this was what had polarized Anja into hating and hiding it. While Eva wasted herself, Anja’s guilt complex grew until she’d reached total paralysis during the years finishing her master’s and then living in the garden house. In that time she’d indulged in the shame of privilege, obsessed herself with growing her own food, recycling, borrowing, trading. Living sustainably for her in those days was a flimsy cover-up. In retrospect it was an embarrassing overcompensation, but the basic premise still held: inherited wealth was inherently unfair, and if she wasn’t capable of doing something good with it, then she’d better clam up and never spend it, lest she become like Eva. Eva, who was permanently unattached to anything or anyone. Eva, who was possibly unlovable. According to the internet, Eva was in Australia now, learning to surf.
Laura seized the opportunity of the bus ride home to rant about the movie. She wanted to know why anyone would agree to star in an all-white Hollywood movie as a token hot-dumb female character.
“You just wish you looked like her,” said Dam, referring to the actress in question.
“No, I don’t. I actually don’t. It would be such a burden.” They were standing on the rubber accordion-like part of the bus that allowed it to bend around corners. All three lurched when the bus made a turn.
“You look great,” said Anja. She’d been with Laura to the sauna and to the FKK side of the lake. Laura had a nice shape naked, but her whole sense of style was based around trying to desexualize herself, maybe hiding her body the same way that Anja hid her bank account. Her frizzed-out hair was chopped bluntly into the shape of a triangle around her head. Sometimes she bleached it, then dyed it back; this was as far as she went toward altering her given appearance. It dawned on Anja that Laura hadn’t dated anyone, man or woman, in at least a year.
Laura rolled her eyes. “My brother’s prettier than me.” Dam batted his eyelashes and said something to her in Spanish that Anja didn’t catch. Laura turned sharply to Anja. “Don’t you feel burdened?”
“Me?”
“Come on. You know you’re hot.”
“Stop it.”
“No,” said Dam, “you can’t argue with that. Plus you get extra points for anorexia right now. And you have money. Total package.”
“You don’t feel objectified, just by being you?” said Laura.
“Of course I do, all women do.”
“Isn’t it worse for you?”
Anja steadied herself as the bus took another turn. “How would I know? I’m me.”
“Don’t worry,” said Dam kindly. “We love having a hot friend.”
“Admit you like it,” said Laura.
“Being thin, white, and straight? Yeah, it’s great.”
“Good. As long as you admit it. Then you’re allowed to have problems.”
“Tell us your problems,” said Dam.
“Yeah, tell us. We have no idea what’s going on with you lately.”
Anja sighed. The mild attack had been leading up to a display of concern. “I can’t tell you anything,” she said. “I’ve signed too many NDAs.”
“What was Louis texting you about?” asked Dam. “Something on Friday?”
“He just wants to go out together. Some party.”
“So you guys are fine?”
Anja shrugged. She wasn’t going to give them the whole story. It wasn’t the right time to bring up Oval. Laura would only make fun of it. Dam would want to try it. But mostly she just didn’t want to hear herself say the words out loud. He wants to drug people into kindness. He thinks he’s making the ultimate artwork. It just wouldn’t sound so good coming from her mouth. Plus there was still a chance it would blow over. Maybe she’d never have to mention it, until it was just an inside joke receding on the horizon.
dry sahara / scheherazade skies / 35º
She wasn’t sleeping well on the sofa. The living room had no curtains and it was always bright and noisy, windows facing the street below. She was up three hours before she had to leave the house on Monday morning, jittery. From the way her jaw felt, she must have been grinding her teeth in her sleep. And she had been sweating; she could smell herself. Stretched out with the blanket bunched near her feet, she recalled being visited in her dream by Hans, her first boyfriend. She hadn’t thought of Hans in ages. Hans’s memory didn’t demand much attention. When she knew him he’d been so eager and unassuming, with that soft-hard becoming-body of late-teenage. They’d been together for two years, long distance for most of the time as she got carted around by her parents, until he left Vienna to do economics at Oxford and they’d eventually lost touch. She saw him online every few months when the algorithm of her feed decided to show him, noted that he was coupled up now with someone equally bland. Beach vacations, a four-bedroom in Notting Hill. Baby? She couldn’t remember.
His dream presence had been an affectionate one, not exactly sexual, just physically reassuring. Arms around arms: you’re safe. She felt a minor thrill from dreaming about someone who was not Louis, but then her face got hot as she imagined Louis dreaming about someone else too, how he looked at other women sometimes, how he might describe her to Prinz . . . This could go on and on, so she launched herself off the sofa and across the room to the cabinet where Dam’s rotating circus of bottles was kept, letting her hand roam around and find something to disinfect her thoughts. She’d be sober enough again by the time she had to leave the house at nine a.m.
Michel was waiting for her outside RANDI in the shade under the lone tree on the block. They were both tense, which made them embarrassed. Michel also seemed to have retreated inside his own brain, thinking hard, working through something.
Anja held out the folder of nonsense information they’d both received.
“Forgot mine,” he said.
“Great. Now I look too enthusiastic.”
Instead of taking the elevator down to the subterranean levels of labs as usual, they headed up to the fourth floor. An intern showed them down the hall. On the way Anja noticed a tall, thin plinth in a corner of the reception room with a tiny head mounted inside the glass case on top. She hadn’t seen one of those in a long time.
The intern led them into a conference room, which had two treadmill desks pushed against one wall and a giant screen mounted on the other.
“Don’t worry, you don’t have to work out during your presentation,” the intern said, gesturing to the treadmills with a smile. “I’ll grab you some chairs.”
She left the room and Anja raised her eyebrows high at Michel. “Our presentation?” she mouthed. The intern returned with two brown metal folding chairs banging together in her arms and handed one to each of them.
Anja touched the woman lightly on the arm when she turned to leave. “What did you mean about the treadmills?”
The intern laughed. “Oh, you really don’t have to use them. No one does. They’ve been sitting there forever.”
“But you said we didn’t have to use them during our presentation. We thought we were supposed to be getting a presentation, not giving one.”
The intern frowned, pulled out her phone from a back pocket, then flipped it around to show Anja the meeting label: new consultants x2 innovation pres. “I just assumed you were the one doing the pres,” she said. “Must be my mistake.” She looked them over without attempting to hide the appraisal. “You guys are new?”
“Not really, we’ve been at RANDI for like—a few years?”
“Oh?”
Michel nodded and Anja pointed down to the basement. “Biodegradables. Then Cartilage.”
“Ah.” She nodded slowly. “Gotcha. You’re the ones.” As she left she said over her shoulder, “Welcome upstairs.”
They set up their folding chairs in the empty center of the room, facing each other awkwardly at a 45-degree angle, as if around an invisible table. Before sitting down, Michel took off his brown suede jacket. Underneath was a gray turtleneck, probably cashmere. Slim-fitting, dark-wash jeans. Clean black Adidas. He dressed like men in other cities—real cities—men who commuted to work in cars, men who were on the market for marriage and reproduction. He dressed like an adult. Timeless, or something. She pictured herself sitting beside him. They didn’t match at all.
“Seems like they should put some other furniture in here if they don’t use the treadmills anymore,” said Michel, leaning forward in the empty space and resting his elbows on his knees.
They were left alone for fifteen minutes, long enough to make Anja nervous. She was considering getting up to look for the intern again when two white guys finally sauntered in. Both of them were wearing different washes of low-slung jeans with white Calvin waistbands rising up beneath, blazers, branded T-shirts, and some kind of advanced high-tops. One had a string of prayer beads circling his wrist. The other had a tattoo of a lion peeping up from his shirt collar.
She shuddered: Mitte. Germans who clumsily aspired to look like Americans. Germans who picked and replicated with absurd precision the cultural markers they wanted to appropriate, without understanding that some of those signifiers were politically charged and therefore unsuitable for random adoption and recombination. And Eva always asked why Anja tried so hard to act American. Because this was what you got when you fell short of the mark.
(On the other hand, she reminded herself, Americans invariably did the same thing when they got to Berlin. In a matter of weeks they decorated themselves indiscriminately with whatever cultural ornaments appealed to them—blue construction-worker coveralls, Soviet-era furs, East German leftovers from paisley polyester to fake Levi’s. Even Louis listened to Turkish rap.)
Michel was grinning at Prayer Beads and Lion Tattoo, clearly thinking something similar. They were carrying brown folding chairs under their arms, which they set up ceremoniously, angling them to complete the square at the center of the room, before introducing themselves.
“Daniel, pleasure,” the one with the tattoo said, smiling in a practiced way. He leaned in to shake her hand and she was struck by the perfection of the little brown mustache sculpted above his chapsticked lips, which were parted to reveal a row of gleaming teeth as staged and unified under a common cause as the characters in a Nativity scene. Anja preferred Louis’s slightly curved and pointed incisors, but she could appreciate a religious set like his. What she couldn’t appreciate was that four teeth in Daniel’s bottom row were gold.
They were face-to-face, it seemed, with Finster’s middle management.
“So!” announced Daniel, after introducing his colleague—she didn’t catch the other’s name, momentarily mesmerized by Daniel’s mouth region—“Srilled to haffe you on poard.” He slapped his thighs to transmit enthusiasm, and Michel barked out a laugh, which he tried to cover up by slapping his thighs in return.
“We are also thrilled,” said Michel, straining against his own smile. Anja glared at him and felt her armpits prickle with sweat. She adjusted herself in the chair, which creaked softly.
“Deutsch?” she asked. There was no way Michel was going to survive more than five minutes with Daniel and his Bavarian accent.
Daniel mechanically shook his head, pointing at the ceiling. “Monitoring is auf Englisch.” Anja nodded. No reason to think it would be any different up here than in the labs. Language policing was probably more intense the higher up you were.
Michel smiled more widely. “No problem.”
“Gut! So. Down to pissness. We are looking forfard to what you can contripute. Innoffasion levels are down across the poard this quarter and we are in need of fresh perspectiffs.”
“Yes, thank you for this opportunity,” said Anja. She had resolved not to argue until she had the chance to sniff around the lab and see what she could find out about her own firing. There was no option, really—Howard hadn’t delivered on his partial promise of finding her another lab position—and she wasn’t going to go jobless. She knew she could have spent the last week searching for new jobs in other labs, but she’d spent it wallowing, drinking, and watching reality shows. And now she was here, a consultant being consulted. It was apparent that she and Michel were expected to say something, to justify their presence in a cursory way, even though they had never asked for these unjustifiable positions.
“Will you need a screen?” Daniel nodded to the end of the room, which was sheeted with an enormous LCD screen.
“Actually,” said Anja, smiling, “what Michel was going to say is that we haven’t prepared anything formal for today. That’s because we don’t—we don’t believe in a formulaic approach with quantitative measurement when it comes to things like . . . innovation. We aren’t into special effects, or what you may call quantitative devices. We don’t believe it’s appropriate to apply numbers to human dynamics . . .”
“Or really to help in any quantitative way at all,” said Michel.
Anja cleared her throat. “He means we’re into quality, not quantity. Interpersonal interactions are at the core of our—of our innovation management philosophy. So our way of working is, we need to get a . . . lay of the land first, to understand how people work, and what they need . . .” She cast about for some Basquiatt formula phrases she’d heard Louis regurgitate at the dinner table. “We do problem solving according to projected future problems instead of existing problems. We have to find and foresee the problems before they exist.” Michel snorted. “That’s what innovation is, anticipation of future . . . things. Futurities, futurations that haven’t happened yet.”
She watched Daniel’s expression carefully. Louis had a theory about the importance of first impressions that she wasn’t sure she believed, but that she did feel superstitious about. He said first impressions could never be rewritten or pasted over, no matter how many years went by. You’d always be that first projection, an indelible mark on the other person’s subconscious. To trust or not to trust.
Daniel squinted at her. “Exactly,” he said after a long moment. “Innoffation is a time machine.”
Anja opened her mouth to conjure more managementese, but before she could get a word out Daniel raised a finger in the air and stared directly at her. “In sat case, what ancient zone will you pe inspecting first?”
She responded without looking at Michel. “Downstairs. Progress starts from the bottom up.”
O, the heavens cry! *SHOWERS WITH A CHANCE OF BATH*
She smelled him before she saw him, but didn’t trust the first sense until it was corroborated by the second. She swiveled to affirm his presence. Howard didn’t belong in the lab. He never came belowground. And yet there he was, sight agreed, in the doorway, his face etched in fluorescent light.
“I thought you’d been let loose from the lab,” he said. He wasn’t smiling. “Yet here you are.”
She’d been scrolling on her phone, trying to find a picture of Daniel with the gold teeth. Michel was at the desk next to her, purportedly doing research. Both of their faces were red from laughing—for
the last few days they’d been cracking up like kids in the back of class. All they had to do was look at each other and repeat a bit from the meeting—innovation, time machine—and it was over.
Anja straightened her face. “Howard, have you met Michel?” Howard nodded. Michel nodded back.
“Oh yes,” said Howard. “I sit in on the annual performance reviews.” There was a dead beat.
“Well, welcome to where the magic happens,” said Michel, stupidly.
Howard made his face agreeable. “What sort of magic are you doing, then?”
“We’re just sussing out the situation in the lower levels,” Anja said. “We’re sussing out the human resource performance, the workflow amenities, you know. Whatever our contracts say we’re doing.”
“Progress starts with our bottoms up,” said Michel, glancing at Anja to see if she’d crack a laugh.
“I see,” said Howard. “And where are all the other human resources you purport to study?”
“Around. Or at lunch?” said Michel. “It’s hard to keep track of everything, being so new at this side of the job. It would help if we had some interns.”
“You’d probably have to fill out a request form for that. Explaining what you’re doing and what you need them for. What’s your end goal this month, Michel?” Howard’s eyes were fixed on Anja, who was checking her phone.
Michel raised his tablet, displaying an image search result for UGGs. “Isometric analysis of lower-limb effects on productivity. That’s my project this month.”
Anja looked up. “He means he’s trying to justify open-toed shoes in the lab.”
Michel nodded solemnly. “So far the data’s on my side.”
“Sounds like a wonderful use of your time,” said Howard. “I hate to interrupt.” He inclined his head slightly and gestured at Anja to follow him.
In the hall he handed her a brown bag. “I thought you might want some lunch,” he said. She looked inside. Sushi. “It was meant to be a peace offering. But maybe it just makes me seem parental.”
“No—it’s nice. Thanks.”
