by Elvia Wilk
“Why is it so much cooler up here?” Michel asked when they reached the top. He was panting slightly. It did seem even colder. They stepped silently across the back patio of her house, circling the pair of bamboo recliners where she and Louis had spent so many Sunday mornings. The green seat cushions had a white frosting of some kind on them—mold or dust. Louis always forgot to take the cushions inside.
The door was unlocked, but it was jammed shut; after engorging with humidity the wood had dried out without deflating. Michel hunched over and levered it with the side of his body until it wedged open with a dry creak.
They were met with a smell of decay, but not an entirely unpleasant one. There was, strangely, a note of fresh grass on top of the compost bouquet—slightly sweet. Michel sneezed. “It smells like pot in here.” He looked around the living room, taking it in. He was stunned.
She scratched her stomach, maybe a Pavlovian response to the rash she now associated with the place, and scanned the creeping green-brown fuzz dotting the floors. It was much warmer inside. The windows were gently sweating. A remarkable amount of dirt and leaves had collected in the corners. Were those—yes, weeds were growing up through the floor by the sofa.
“Was it like this when you left?” He knelt and patted the concrete composite floor. Its top layer was disintegrating into graham cracker crumbs. “Living here must have been kind of like camping.”
“No—it wasn’t working so well, but it wasn’t like this.”
“But it wasn’t great.”
“Not after the first few months.”
“Why’d you ever move here?”
“When we first saw it, the house was—” She stopped and shrugged.
The way it looked the first day they saw it had thrilled her. It had been staged with model furniture, a few pieces of which they had decided to buy, and the rooms felt clean and airy. Everything smelled so new—the polar opposite of the garden house. Louis’s excitement about the place was impossible not to adopt. They had almost no belongings, and so he ordered them a new mattress, plates and wineglasses, a woven carpet, a bath mat. Those things you don’t invest in until you’re “serious” about someplace, someone. They hauled boxes up the hill together, laughing at the inconvenience. Moving in had been fun, hilarious at times. Think about it, Louis said, in a city where everyone’s counting their square meters and hiding from their neighbors, we have a giant house in the middle of the forest to ourselves.
The Berg had proven their specialness, which they’d suspected all along. Learning the ins and outs of the house had been like a game at first. The first month or two, when the waste system was still sort of cooperating and she was earnestly cooperating too, there had been minor frustrations, but no real worry. The cable car will be installed any day now. We’ll get our own post code soon. The wireless will get hooked up this week. Everything had seemed possible.
“Mama mia!” came from the other room. She found Michel standing in the office, in front of the Bureaucracy Bookshelf, which was loaded with three-ring binders labeled and sorted by year.
“This is no joke,” he said. “You’ve got a lot of binders. What’s in all of these?”
She ran a finger over the binders on one shelf and it came away covered in dust. “Blue is for taxes. White is for insurance. Gray is for Louis’s visa paperwork . . .”
“What’s red?” he pointed to the bottom shelf.
“Red’s all the Berg stuff. Our contract, manuals, insurance . . . all the NDAs.”
“So I shouldn’t even know of their existence.”
She smiled. “Correct.”
“I’ve never seen someone so organized.”
“Runs in the family.” She paused. “Actually, no, that’s a lie. It’s just me.”
“I have this little handheld scanner you could use . . .”
“Real Germans don’t digitize.”
“I thought you were Austrian.” He approached the bookshelf, slid out a red binder.
“Same thing when it comes to hard copies.” She regarded her collection, so curated it might have been empty decor in an office supply store. “They’re the closest I’ll ever get to having a pet. Even when I lived in the garden house, I kept them all stacked in the bedroom.”
“A garden house, huh.” He was struggling to separate the pages threaded onto the rings of the binder he had pulled off the shelf and was holding open. “I hate to break this to you, but I think your hard copies have been made obsolete.” He tried to pull the pages apart with two hands, but the clump held fast to itself, a dimpled, brittle plate of paperwork.
She broke into a laugh. “A month ago I would have been heartbroken about that.” The records seemed arbitrary now, just fossils. She was detached from whatever they had signified.
“You must have backups somewhere.”
“These are the backups. The Berg contract, for one, has a clause saying we aren’t allowed to keep any digital copies of our contracts for security reasons.”
“You have no way of checking what your actual contract says if the hard copies get lost?”
“Guess not.”
He closed the binder and sat on the floor, then crossed his legs in front of him and took off his suede jacket, the one he wore every day. She’d grown to like it. He laid the jacket across the binder and looked up at her. He seemed comfortable, like he wanted to stay sitting there.
“Should we get started?” she said.
She led him to the kitchen. “Let’s put the stuff down in here,” she said, testing a light switch. No click; no light. The mechanism was only decorative now. Cute, even.
“It’s pretty bright in here,” she said, gesturing to the windows, “but we’re going to need something brighter. I’ll go find some flashlights.”
There were plenty in the utility closet. Big and small—they’d stocked up at a certain point when it became clear that the experimental aspect of their lifestyle was outweighing the sustainable one.
In the kitchen they rigged up the largest flashlight by taping it to an overturned Tupperware container so that it was pointing directly at the work area. The items were spread out across the kitchen island: a stack of petri dishes each coated with a thin layer of agar, a little toolbox holding various pincers and scoops, a small box of transparent slides to squeeze samples between, a few metal clamps, and the crown jewel, the activator, the soft machine: sixty-four cells of self-replicating engineered cartilage, in the tiniest of the petris, packed in ice inside a tiny cooler.
She stood back and surveyed the small collection. Laid out, it didn’t look like much, just a fraction of what you’d think you needed to do a real, cutting-edge science experiment. It looked more like the setup for a high school science fair.
Michel brought out and unfolded the shelter, a microwave-sized Plexi box, which had an airlock gadget on one end for them to poke things through. A simulated lab: a microhermetic environment. He handed an empty dish whose interior was coated with agar and the dish with the precious sample, both still lidded, to Anja, who pinched them with tongs and slid them, one at a time, through the airlock onto the floor of the Plexi chamber.
They were quiet during this process. It was a solemn affair. Both an illicit and a holy operation.
“Good thing I have full charge,” Michel said, powering on his laptop once they were set up. “Maybe I intuitively guessed you wouldn’t have electricity up here.”
“What’s the game plan?”
“Basically we have to let the sample defrost halfway inside the box and then move it to the agar. You know the rest—I’ll run the simulation at the same time so we can watch to make sure it’s happening on schedule. Remember, it’s probably going to go at hyperspeed, because it’s so warm in here.” He checked the room temperature again by holding his phone up, did a quick calculation, and set a timer: twelve minutes to half-defrost. He pressed start.
“Hard to believe how warm it is in here,” he said, staring at the timer. Weather talk.
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��Must be all the composting going on. It’s like we’re in a giant kombucha jar.”
He looked up at the box and then back at the timer. “So—were you really at the Baron last night?”
“No.”
“Where’s your . . . Louis these days?”
“I don’t know.”
“Okay,” he said.
“I’m still half in the water, half out.”
“We were all amphibians once. It’s just a stage in evolution.”
They were quiet, a full, wet silence. It was cut when the timer beeped.
Michel stood up straight, ran his finger over the mouse pad on his laptop to wake it up, and she stationed herself by the box. “Ready?” he said.
She sent a pair of long pincers through the airlock and clasped a little lip at the edge of the empty dish, then wiggled it until the lid eased off. She did the same with the dish holding the sample, then quickly pulled out the pincers and sent in another instrument. A gimlet scoop, a long tube that flattened out at one tip, like one of those plastic smoothie straws flattened to a sort of spoon at the end that always cuts your tongue. She scooped the area of the dish that was circled with sharpie where the cells were planted, still half-asleep, waiting to wake up and meet one another. She dug under the cells and scraped the whole chunk out.
Then she shoveled the small clump onto the waiting dish, tapping it down into the thick agar layer, and quickly pulled out the gimlet scoop. She nodded okay to Michel, who tapped a key on his laptop to start the simulation.
She’d been surprised when he agreed without protest to do the experiment on the Berg. The idea had simply occurred to her at some point and inflated in her mind to blot out all other possibilities. He had always been curious about the place, he said. As good a place as any. She didn’t point out how unhygienic it was.
Friday, Michel had announced that everything was ready. He had acquired the necessary wetware and hardware. After consulting with some orthopedic experts in Paris who were working on growing outerwear from living tissue, he’d filed an internal request for cartilage cells and equipment for novel progress in the growth of unique, self-sustaining footwear out of tensile, responsive tissue analog, essential to the productivity of the ambulatory laboratory human resource. He filed the request under his own name, misspelled by one letter. It was approved by the next morning.
Smuggling it all out of the lab, Anja was sure, should have posed a problem, but Michel was confident they could just walk out. “I mentioned at the bottom of the request that we’ll need to do field trials. Don’t worry about it. Our smokescreen is intact. We just need to act confident.”
“What smokescreen?”
“For me, the shoe thing. For you, being disgruntled.”
They sat at the kitchen island together, looking back and forth between the computer simulation, which was proceeding slowly, as it should, and the cells in the box, which still appeared entirely inert to the naked eye. Anja hardly had to watch the simulation to see what it was doing. Before constructing itself, the roof had to build its own support system. Two little columns rising from the dish, inscribing themselves on the empty space, making emptiness into somethingness. They’d fill themselves in as they grew into solid posts, thin and slightly brittle—to be snapped off later when whoever was living under the roof built something else to support it. Theoretically, anyway.
“Good thing I put everything on a flash drive ages ago, right?”
“What?”
“How did you think I got these data sets for the simulation?”
“Preemptive? Before we even got fired?”
“You never know when you’ll need a backup.” He smiled.
“Impressive.”
With his eyes fixed on the screen, he reached into his pocket and pulled out a small vial. “During my stealing rampage I also nicked some burdock root.”
“What’s that?”
“Witchcraft.”
“Oh?”
“No—science.” He smiled. “It’s a natural antihistamine they’ve been messing with in Health Trials.” He traced his own jawbone and glanced at hers. “I noticed your rash was coming back.”
She took the little bottle and opened it, sniffing, slightly embarrassed. “Thanks.” She tipped a drop of the liquid onto her finger and wiped it down her cheek. It didn’t smell or feel like anything. “My friend says this rash is psychosomatic, though.”
“Doesn’t make it any less real.”
“I guess.”
“The power of the subconscious.”
“But if my subconscious is doing this to me, it really seems like my conscious should be able to override it.”
“Bodies don’t have a manual override.”
“I know. I have this feeling lately like my body and the world are locked into a pattern I don’t understand.”
“Sounds like the eternal human condition.”
“I used to think free will was a thing.”
He gestured to the box in between them. “You’ve got genotype and phenotype. Environment matters.”
“What about self-actualization? Or plastic surgery?”
“Some people might say the urge to change yourself is just another aspect of your innate personality, as conditioned by your shitty cultural environment.”
She laughed. He glanced at her and back at the screen, fidgeting. “We should really be seeing something in there already.” The set of columns should have been complete, their tips fanning into little trestles to uphold the roof.
“Already?”
“Yeah, it should go like twenty times as fast.”
“Maybe it’s dead. I wouldn’t be surprised if the sample didn’t survive the trip.”
“I know. This is a hack job.”
But they continued to stare intently, and twenty-one minutes after Michel’s calculated schedule, Anja tapped the glass. “There she is.”
Two baby mushrooms of translucent pinkish material had appeared, blooming from nothing, beyond all reason, in the center of the dish, right where she’d planted them.
“Ha!” Michel threw his arms up. “Ha, ha!”
She realized what it was about his laugh that had been bothering her. His laugh was onomatopoeic, in that each utterance really sounded like he was saying “Ha.” Michel was always Michel, a literal, fixed version of himself. Louis, of course, was never quite Louis. The shape that didn’t match its outline—the skidded frame.
They watched the performance in rapture.
First the sinewy columns, then the trestles close behind. A stretching and a winnowing. Then the real triumph: the bridging, when the two sides of the roof extended themselves across the expanse between the columns in two arches, meeting in the center like old friends. As the double-wave shape solidified it also crept out in all directions until it was a perfect round blot from above. From straight on, it looked like a wedding arbor.
Anja wiped her nose print from the glass and then put her nose right back against the surface. Time passed in exquisite growth. She was ecstatic, forgetting herself in the movement.
In just over an hour the real roof had been born, matching its blueprint in the simulation: the screen and the petri dish displaying the same complete image. Reality had converged with calculation: world had met abstraction. Anja felt drawn into a moment of literal peace, as in the peace of literalness. This was what it felt like to be exactly yourself.
Then she remembered where they were, what they were doing, why they were doing it. She looked back and forth between the sketch and the structure and let out a ragged sigh.
Michel leaned back, clearly as dejected as she felt. “I know. Shit. I didn’t realize until now how much I wanted it to do something else.”
“I really thought . . . I don’t know what I thought. But I did think.”
He leaned in to squint into the box again, frowning hard. “So I guess there’s no conspiracy.” He forced a Ha. “We’re just consultants.”
“Just doing our bullshit jobs.�
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They looked at each other. She was unbearably embarrassed. He leaned across the table.
In the brief moment before his mouth reached hers, curving toward her like one side of the roof pushing itself through the air to meet its other half, Anja consciously experienced three emotions: fear, despair, resignation. When the mouth landed at its destination, it met an immobile counterpart. She could neither conjure the reflex to jerk away nor to kiss back.
The kiss ended as abruptly as it had begun and Michel leaned back and looked away. He made a dejected huffing sound. He shook his head and then he huffed again.
“I don’t get it,” he said. This was true. He obviously didn’t get it, any of it.
“I wasn’t expecting that.”
“Come on.”
“I wasn’t.”
“You’re saying I was imagining it?”
She shook her head. Had she known? Had she been imagining things? Had she imagined that she could relax in the presence of a Y chromosome socialized as straight male? Had she imagined that their obvious incompatibility would cut off the possibility of Michel constructing his own fantasy of what they were?
He looked as embarrassed as she felt. “Why did you bring me here, then?”
“To do the experiment.” She shook her head. “I thought we were friends.”
He stood up and started fussing with the things on the table, stacking some petris and shifting them around. There was something pitiful in his movements. It occurred to her that he was pouting.
“We were friends,” he said.
The comment stung, but it also seemed pathetic. She noticed a minuscule brown stain on the lip of the collar of his turtleneck. “I’m sorry, but I’m just not capable right now. I’m still half underwater.”
He picked up his jacket and shook it out, unnecessarily. “Hey,” she said, reaching out a hand. “Really, I’m sorry. But I’d only be doing it out of loneliness.”
