by Elvia Wilk
“It does kind of seem like you guys aren’t doing a great. . . um, job of it.”
Anja tried to match her memory with the recording. Maybe they had been at fault for not following the rules. Maybe they could have tried harder. Maybe some of the blame was on them. But hadn’t Howard admitted it was all a bunch of mismanagement?
She shook her head and sighed into the phone. The truth of the Before wouldn’t really matter to anyone else. The only thing that would matter from now on was the representation, the way it was all depicted in this carefully edited home video.
“Where did you get this link?” asked Laura.
“I found it.” Laura passed her judgment through the phone. “Okay, I found it in Louis’s email. I have his tablet.”
“Nice. So I guess he knows about this already.”
“Looks like I’m the only one who didn’t know.”
“You didn’t know there were cameras all over your house?”
“Of course . . . just in case of malfunction . . .”
She’d read every sentence of their contract. It had been clear that the video was for posterity—a dead end, a cul-de-sac, feeding itself straight into the bowels of some unhackable server. Maybe this had been true, for a time. But, like all bytes, it was retrievable. She should have known. The membrane between private and public was so slight. She should have known. She hung up.
Spare room, living room, office. All cameras were definitely off, but she severed the cords anyway with nail clippers. The kitchen was harder—she had to climb up on the counter and reach around into the back of the cabinet to find the wires.
While she was up there she surveyed the room and wondered if she was imagining it or whether, since the day before, it had become even more overgrown. The vines reaching through the wall extended far across it now, almost grazing the basin of the sink. Some particularly hearty weeds were pushing themselves up from the disposal, reaching up to meet the tips of the vines.
The forgotten experiment lay on the island. She and Michel hadn’t even bothered to document the little miracle mushroom they’d grown together. Might as well take a picture while it existed.
She hopped down and approached the box where the thing was nestled, raising the tablet to the glass, spreading her fingers to zoom in for the photo.
She stopped. Spread her fingers wider and closer on the screen. Zoom out, zoom in. Look again. Something different. The mushroom. Larger, taller—no, it wasn’t like a mushroom at all anymore, not rounded where it should have been, angular instead. Light was glinting off its roof, which had become a flat surface. A hallucination, an overgrown memory.
She put the tablet down and stepped closer to the box. The pink thing in the dish, which had been the roof resting on two columns, had expanded to be much broader and flattened out into two planes, slightly smaller than the circumference of her hand with fingers spread. Where it had been creased in the center, reaching up in an arch on either side of a valley, it was now peaked, as if the crease had exactly inverted itself to become a ridge. Yes, it had peaked in a long line down the middle of the roof and flattened on either side: no longer the roof of a mouth. It was now like the roof of a house.
When she crouched and peered into the box sideways, she could see that a second horizontal plane had webbed itself beneath the roof, about midway between roof and ground, dividing the empty interior into two sections on top of each other: two stories. And this plane was supported by two more newly sprouted columns, so there was now a post on each side of the two-level structure. The whole thing had risen a few centimeters above the agar, now resting on a dense-looking foundation of its own making. It was all still a translucent pink, the color more noticeable in areas of greater density. The makings of a cartilage house. Anja frowned. But you were only supposed to be a roof.
She stood again and closed her eyes. There was something familiar about this new shape, the gently angled slopes of the flattened roof, the fact that the columns were placed on the sides of the planes rather than at the corners—it was counterintuitive, not how you would imagine building a Lego house yourself. She leaned back on the kitchen counter, which felt grimy on her forearms, and considered the meaning of “counterintuitive.” Intuition was supposed to be a natural, instinctual feeling or desire, but there was really no such thing as instinct. Even what seemed like the deepest inclination was conditioned to some extent by the outside world. Genotype does not determine phenotype. For the physical expression of traits, one has to look to the environment, to circumstance. Nurture determines how nature behaves.
So if there were no such thing as pure intuition, what was counterintuition? The deliberate realization that nothing you took for granted as real had been true in the first place? Howard had told her once he thought she had good intuition, which she had taken as a compliment, but maybe she should have been cultivating counterintuition all along.
She looked back at the roof in the box, which was now much more like a house in a box. She pictured Howard in the kitchen, showing her and Louis around their new house, opening cabinets and turning on the faucet, halfway between proud parent and real estate agent. “This is one of four main vertical beams,” he’d said, slapping the wall above the sink. “It’s hollow so it can double as a rainwater collector.”
Four shafts on the four sides of the house for water collection and ventilation. Of course, she’d seen plenty of diagrams of how it worked. She recoiled from the tiny house in the box, wondering if this were some accident of biomimicry—if it could mimic the house she was in. But really, there was no way this was improvisational; if it were copying its environment, it would be copying skin, not bones, and so far it was all pink interior. It wasn’t improvising. It knew what it was doing.
In the back of her mind she must have believed a deviation from the simulation of some kind might happen—why else had she suggested reconstructing the experiment with Michel at all? But the reality of it was too much. If she acknowledged that the little house was mutating without warning, she would feel the whole history of the house—and her life in the house—mutate retroactively. This constituted a betrayal of some sort. Not a surface betrayal, but deep down on the cellular level. A mutation that was a feature, not a bug.
Notice the thought. Acknowledge its presence. Let it pass. Something she’d read on a grief forum. How ridiculous: thoughts never passed on their own. She’d have to do the heavy lifting. So she forced the panic, centimeter by centimeter, from the frontal lobe, off the cliff and down into the depths. There were reasonable actions to take if she could suppress the impulse to freak out.
Michel was right: the paperwork in the binders had massed into solid chunks after weeks of moisture and heat. She found the right red binder with the Berg contract and tried chipping off the first page with a fingernail. The paper flaked in her hand. She needed something to lever each page open with. A search through the pantry and the bathroom cabinet yielded dental floss.
Floss didn’t make it easy, but possible. She guessed that the last quarter of the block of paperwork was where the section in question could be found, and she painstakingly seesawed the waxy thread between leaves, nudging them apart one by one, hunched over the binder on the floor by the bookshelf. It was a tedious job. When she had found and separated the right sheets, which were albeit stained, warped, and torn, she needed another twenty minutes to scan them for the clause in question. She knew she’d read this before at some point, alone in the garden house, highlighting passages that had seemed important or confused her.
She had not highlighted the passage about video recording, deeming it irrelevant or too unlikely a scenario to really consider. She cursed Anja of the Before.
Forcefully adjusting her reading mode to that of parsing legal jargon, she read each sentence out loud, slowly, to make the meaning stick.
§ 26 Documentation of Living Arrangement
(1) The undersigned inhabitant(s) consent to unbroken visual and audio recording at any and all times in a
ll 6 rooms of object, excluding toilet room, for purposes of quality control and safety monitoring. The Recorded Content [RC] is continuously machine monitored according to latest vision algorithm (ICU.7.1 as of date of signing) to check for major anomaly, i.e., flood. Upon special request and agreement of all parties, particular sections of RC may be reviewed by Berg Asset Establishment [BAE] stakeholders and Finster Corp. Relevant Interested Management [RIM] for quality assurance and/or post-facto evidence to determine fault in case of major anomaly, etc. RIM for given situation is to be determined on a case-by-case basis by BAE according to stipulations listed in § 22 (7). RC is considered confidential (for strictly internal use, internal being defined as BAE and RIM) pending special circumstances, being:
(a) As deemed beneficial for the other residents of Berg community or similar communities in development (“similar” as defined by § 42 (4))
(b) As deemed educational for the general public
She wiped at the page, which was stained at this section, and brought it close to her face to make out the words.
Distribution of RC beyond internal communication requires written permission of signatory. In the case of multiple inhabitation of object (multiple signatories), any form of release of RC beyond BAE stakeholders and RIM depends on permission of one (1) signatory inhabitant.
She dropped the binder and went to the kitchen. She felt around in a bowl she had filled with plums and found a nice big one to drive her teeth into. She glanced at the house in the box, which in the interim had grown stairs, a bathroom, and some kind of fringe around the roof, which she guessed would become gutters and eaves. She sucked on the plum pit. The house was growing without stopping. The house didn’t need food; it didn’t need a consultant. It didn’t need anyone.
21
NOTHING ELSE FROM HOWARD IN LOUIS’S INBOX BESIDES A FEW bland scheduling emails. No trail. Meaning the episode, whatever it was, must have been rolled out behind closed doors, face-to-face. Howard’s face to Louis’s face. Louis was the one (1) signatory inhabitant needed to release the footage for the education of the general public.
It was raining for the first time in weeks, and the mountain was drenched in a lukewarm torrent. The ceiling dripped in the kitchen, the bedroom. Anja ignored the plinking sounds of water hitting furniture and took a pail from the utility closet and a big bowl from the kitchen cabinet and left them outside on the patio to collect water. The raindrops were thick and even. She closed her eyes and wiped her face, bunched her hair, rubbed her fingers around her skull; she was reminded by the weight of her head that her entire reality was created inside it and was subject to change. She took off her shirt, wrung it out. Feeling her forearms against her stomach, she was startled by the smoothness of the skin where for so long it had been irritated.
When she was mostly dry she pulled a stool up to the kitchen island to check on the house, wishing she had the computer simulation to look at and compare to the physical developments. But it wouldn’t have mattered. The simulation was designed to time out after the expected physical completion, clipping off the future from its fulfillment. She stared down at what had emerged from the petri dish, having transcended its dish terrain and grown into what was undeniably a house with the shape of the house she was in. She could locate her exact position on the 3D model. Second floor, kitchen. She narrowed her eyes at the spot where she was sitting, willing a replica of herself to grow there. Instead she found a barely perceptible movement in another area, a little stirring in the bathroom. Plumbing.
The real house, on the other hand, was no longer plumbed. The water that came out of the tap upstairs was mucus-like; the tap in the kitchen produced nothing. Certain daily tasks required running water. Obviously, she reminded herself, she could leave. But why? What was waiting for her down below?
She assessed the situation. There was nothing to eat besides some dry granola in the pantry—she didn’t dare open the fridge to see what it held—plus the plums and a few cucumbers. She’d found the cucumbers peering in through the foggy living room window at her: oblong finger-size green curls bumping up against the glass. Only five were big enough to eat, but they were crisp and sweet. When plucking them outside in the leftover drizzle, she noticed new anthills dotting the patio. A metallic slug slimed toward one anthill, leaving a wet trail across the wrecked stones. She waved to the slug and checked her water buckets, which were full enough.
There was a backup battery charger in the utility closet that she could use for a few more hours. She plugged her phone in and let it reach 20 percent charge before disconnecting, not wanting to exhaust the charger just yet. When she powered the phone on, she was acutely aware of the low-battery bar on the screen.
She scrolled through her missed calls and messages. Skipped over tons from Dam and Laura, who could probably wait. One from Howard, who could definitely wait.
And Louis. Louis had finally called in the singular moment of white noise when she was unreachable.
In the living room the rain was washing in under the doorframe, pooling in places and sinking into the crumbling floor in others. She thought of sopping it up, but the plants sprouting inside wouldn’t mind the moisture, and neither did she, really. She sank her bare feet into a puddle and wiggled her toes in the warm rainwater. She readjusted her stance, gulped in air, and called back. After five leaden rings, he answered.
The curtains opened: How are you, good. How are you, good. Couldn’t Americans think of any other way to open an encounter? How are you how are you good good good how are you good good into eternity. You’d have to pack so much nuance into the good to make it mean anything that it wasn’t worth the effort to draw it out at all—better to get it over with as fast as possible. Hwryugd. Gd.
“What have you been up to?” she asked.
He cleared his throat. “A few product trials. Expanding on our beta test last weekend.”
“I see. Approaching the alpha.”
“Yep. Hope so.”
“Anything else?”
“What do you mean.”
“I mean, have you been up to anything else?”
“Anything like what?”
“Oh, anything at all.”
“Like what?”
She closed her eyes. She was going to have to wrench it from him. “I heard you’ve been spending some time with Howard.”
He cleared his throat again but didn’t speak. She imagined where he might have been standing, near the sun-following desk, or maybe the wall-window, looking out at the parking lot where the receptionist retreated to smoke cigarettes. Maybe he was watching people go in and out of the yoga studio next door, rolled mats in hand.
“I also heard that you signed off on a web series about our life, without telling me,” she said.
“Oh. Who told you?”
“That’s not really the point, is it.”
“Well. I didn’t have a choice.” He sounded like a teenager begging off a chore. He wasn’t even interested enough to make excuses.
She stepped from one puddle to another. “Please clarify.”
“It was the only way.”
This was like pulling teeth. “Go on.”
“It turned out getting Basquiatt to sign off on O wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be,” he said. “In the end I had to make a trade.”
With the phone still pressed to her ear, she walked back into the kitchen, circling the glass vitrine, the little house staring up at her like a tiny head. Her stomach rumbled. She picked up a cucumber from the pile she’d made of them on the table, studied it, and took a bite. A trade. One for one. She remembered: someone had told her that Finster now owned Basquiatt, just like Finster owned everything. Meaning Howard owned everything. All roads led to Oz.
“Howard pushed O through for you, in exchange for your signature,” she said at last.
Someone’s voice came through in the background on his end. Louis paused to listen, muffled the phone, and asked whoever it was to wait just a minute. “Sometimes
you have to make sacrifices,” he said into the phone.
She thought of Pat. Pat, who always invaded. Pat, who had sacrificed her own body for a misplaced notion of duty, of obligation to a greater cause.
“Sacrifices. Like me?”
“It wasn’t about you.”
“Right.” She recalled the idea she’d had near the start of their relationship: Louis was able to make plans but not promises. In retrospect, she could see what she had not been able to admit to herself back then. She should have really insisted on some kind of promise.
“Hey, I’m sorry.” The apology was flat, like the cap had been left off the bottle overnight. “But if you were paying attention to anything at all, you’d see it was worth it. This is all so much bigger than us.”
“Shouldn’t I get a say in that?”
“You can’t always control everything. Sometimes history runs its course.”
“Your history. Your story. Not mine.”
“This is just as tough on me as you. It’s embarrassing for both of us to be on that website.”
“What’s the point of embarrassing us, then?”
“You should talk to Howard about that.”
She took a long breath in and out, chewing the cucumber. Acknowledge the thought. Dismiss the thought. “What the fuck is wrong with you?” she said. “Why the fuck didn’t you just ask me first?”
He didn’t raise his voice in return, just stated, as if the relationship between cause and effect were clear: “That’s why. See how you can’t even have a normal conversation? You’re always suspicious. You assume I’m doing everything in bad faith.”
“What did I—?”
“Maybe you shouldn’t have brought Pat into things.”
Anja was blown aback. She shouldn’t have brought Pat into “things”? She, Anja, was the one to bring Pat in?
She remembered how she’d inspected him for signs of change in this very kitchen, morning after morning. How she’d repeatedly asked him if he was okay. How she’d been so worried about him that he ended up comforting her. How he’d started avoiding her just so he wouldn’t have to worry about her worrying about him. How angry she’d gotten with him on their last hike up the mountain as he struggled to deal with his emotions. How incredibly angry she had been with him. How unfair she had been.
