Oval

by Elvia Wilk

  He came out of the house and sat on the green cushion of the bamboo recliner on the patio in a Thinker’s pose. She enjoyed the moment of voyeurism: Howard without any audience. His bald head gleamed in the sunlight, which illuminated the wrinkles creasing his forehead. She remembered a conversation they’d had once about Botox: he said he was against it. But he’d said he was against a lot of things.

  After he gave up and left, she waited for a long time among the trees to make sure he was really gone before creeping out. The house felt slightly tainted now; it would take her some time to inhabit her aloneness again.

  In the kitchen, on top of the Plexi box, she found a handwritten note beside a brown paper bag. The note said, Everything happens for a reason. Don’t worry, it will blow over. In the bag was a deluxe sushi combo. She forced the plastic box of sushi, through the thick weeds, down the mouth of the kitchen garbage disposal.

  She inspected the experiment’s box to make sure he hadn’t touched anything. It didn’t appear that he had. The house in the box was visibly crumbling, though. It was perishing in hypertime, before her eyes. She pulled up the stool again to watch.

  It was happening fast. Witnessing the decay was like watching a time-lapse tape. The kitchen wall sagged, the doorway collapsed. Some kind of powder colonized the corners of the structure and what looked like a fine fur of pink mold arose from the rim of the Petri dish. Maybe, she thought, some of the rot from the air in the real house had found its way inside the Plexiglas. Maybe the box was being invaded by its surroundings. The box should have been airtight, but it was always possible for sturdy germs and spores to force themselves inside. Contamination loves a vacuum.

  And yet, looking closer, as she always did, it didn’t really look like the decay was the random result of foreign influence. The fur wasn’t mold—it was just more of the same pink biomass in a shape resembling mold. And it was molding in the exact same places the real house was molding. The wonky angle of the staircase in the box was the same as the real one. The way the window frames were separating from the walls, leaving gaps like open lips, was the same in both houses. Just as the completed house in the box had matched the shape of the real house at its zenith, now its pattern of degradation mirrored the real house in its current dilapidating state. The reason this had been so hard to recognize was that, while in the human-size house the colors were varied realistically—brown mushrooms, white and orange mold—the tiny house was monochrome.

  This suggested that the realistic colors in the real house were an additive. There had been food coloring added to the simulation.

  Circling the kitchen island, she noticed from one angle that the whole tiny house was sinking into its foundation. She ran outside, past the patio, to take in the elevation of the plot. Sure enough, the actual house—she reminded herself that this was the actual one—was also sinking. It must have been ten or fifteen centimeters below ground level already. Sagging and sinking, as if the day’s hot air were pressing down on it, rupturing its seams. The downward movement was imperceptible from inside the house, but from outside it was clear as day.

  She sat on the same recliner where Howard had sat, feeling the rough lichen on the cushion scratch against her bare legs.

  On her left leg, a yellow-bodied beetle crawled up her thigh. She pinched it between two fingers, and instead of trying to wriggle away it seemed to power down and enter sleep mode, its thorax curling under and its legs moving slowly in perfect sync with one another. She pinched it between two fingers, drew it close to her face, and for a second thought she could see it stuttering like a windup toy.

  There was no chance that this horned creature was native to Berlin soil. There was no chance that this creature was native to nature. Its wings slowly clicked and purred with the same lightly perceptible tone as the electronics drawer in their long-suffering kitchen. She recognized the fractal base pattern of the symmetrical, malleable-looking brown antlers fused to its tiny head, the elegant-but-too-smooth cartilage bending at the joints of its forelegs. The joints between the segments were a magnified version, like a blown-up diagram, of the cellular structure of the engineered cartilage she’d spent so much of her life watching grow on a screen. The only differences were the scale and the color. The prototype was forever a pale pink. Maybe the purpose of its monochrome was exactly to make the full-spectrum reality hard to recognize.

  It was the same modified, bastardized cartilage that was supposed to have stopped after becoming a roof, but had kept going to become a whole little house, before reversing course and following its own independent trajectory of disintegration. The tiny house: a miniature version of a giant house that had been malfunctioning, on purpose, the whole time she’d lived in it. Their lives on the mountain, she realized, had been just one episode in a long story of planned obsolescence. And then she understood that the symbiotic system of the Berg was not a failure. It was built to fail.

  22

  AFTER A FEW MORE TRIPS WITH THE LAUNDRY HAMPER DOWN TO the Danish house, she sorted what she’d found. She’d stumbled into a trove of leafy spinach-like greens behind their house, which tasted edible. Maybe it really was spinach—she thought she remembered a neighbor doing some gardening down there. She boiled the leaves with canned vegetables in a tureen on top of Louis’s barbecue, a big black dish like a UFO on spindly silver legs. She ate directly from the pot and listened to the sounds around her, anticipating another visitor slithering through the forest, a Howard or a snake as thick as her arm and as long as her leg, but the twilight hour was silent.

  Before darkness fell, she spent some time with the plants. She chose the specimen that was growing the fastest, the plum vine, and studied its leaves and stems with the magnifying glass. The joints were exquisite, the shape of each structure perfectly symmetrical. But this method was laughable if she wanted to learn anything. She needed to look closer. She found a pencil and sketched out a plan for a rudimentary microscope.

  In the morning she assembled the parts: a lens from Louis’s old analog camera, a lens from a video camera she’d found in the neighbors’ study, aluminum piping jutting out of the external wall where the drainage system used to be. She painstakingly sawed the pipe to the right size with a serrated knife. She bit off pieces of duct tape and dental floss to wind around it.

  She worked until her body clock ticked lunchtime, then ate the remains of the stew. For dessert, berries from the bramble patch where she’d hooked her leg earlier. They were perfectly ripe. She spent the afternoon adjusting the rigged microscope until she could focus an image through it. It was finicky, but it worked.

  The day passed easily as she absorbed herself with the temperamental contraption and sketched what she saw through it. Drawing the outlines of the plant’s microcomponents brought her back to the best days of grad school. She felt the same relief that had overtaken her when she first entered a lab after struggling through two semesters of art school’s relentless critiques. The only reason she’d thought art was a good idea in the first place was because she’d been good at looking. She dropped out, tail between her legs, having learned nothing of use besides the fact that vision had nothing to do with being an artist. Switching to science had been a rare piece of helpful advice from Eva.

  She spent mornings gathering food, afternoons absorbed in seeing and sketching, evenings hiking up to the observation stump. She dragged a desk from the neighbors’ house all the way to the patio, where she placed it so it could get the best light. The generator, which was fully charged, stayed there beside her unused, like an unwanted machine at the gym. It gave her a feeling of security to have it, but she couldn’t think of a reason to use it besides torturing herself in Louis’s inbox. And there were better things to do, like crush berries into jam.

  Venturing again to the Danish couple’s former garden plot, she found several recognizable species. Other plants, invasive weeds and succulents with deep roots that riddled the soil, appeared to be endemic to the mountain: too perfect in structure to hav
e occurred through the random mutation of natural evolution. And they were too deliberate in their behavior. They had a purpose. Their purpose was to digest the mountain. Watching the behavior of an individual plant, she could trace the trajectory of programmed growth and decay. Roots advanced at warp speed a few centimeters under the ground’s surface, bursting through and disrupting the others as they spread. The weeds grew to knee height and then quickly withered into compost that gave off an ammoniac scent strong enough to make her pinch her nose. The compost ate away at whatever was below it, decomposing other greenery and leaving the earth below yellow and fallow.

  First, she figured, the plants would break down most of the other life on the mountain and make the soil infertile. They would do the same to the houses, invading the constructions and speeding their rate of collapse. The second stage was mold; the rot prepared the ideal condition for fungal spores to take hold, which would sprout and eat through what was left. Then, in an orgy of apoptosis, the plants and fungi would delete themselves along with what they had eaten. Dust to dust. The houses at the bottom of the settlement were in more advanced stages of the process. One had become a barely recognizable, lumpy miniature mountain taken over by a forest of brown mushrooms and white fuzz.

  The neighbors’ garden was barely recognizable as such, plants mingling and strangling one another in some places. She took to weeding and digging trenches between the plots to create a semblance of order through segregation. The engineered plants were growing so fast that it took only a few days to see the fruits—or vegetables—of her labor. One plentiful evening harvest left her with far too much to eat before it spoiled; she tried brining some of the cucumbers in jars, and they puckered quickly into sour pickles.

  While she was screwing a lid onto a pickle jar one evening, it hit her: she hadn’t thought of Louis once that day. An entire day without the dread of her own thoughts or the guilt or the replaying of scenes. The relief was outweighed by the sorrow of forgetting. When you’re sleepy, you don’t want to feel less tired—you want to go to bed. When you lose a person, you don’t want to forget the person, you want the person back. But she had to admit: forgetting was easiest. Life was just easier for people who could forget.

  The peculiarities of the forest became so familiar on her regular hikes that she could easily note its daily changes. Erosion led to mud pits and small landslides with increasing frequency. She always returned to the slippery stump. It gave her a good enough view. She didn’t want to climb all the way to the top of the mountain, for the same reason she hadn’t gone back into the bedroom since the first day. She was afraid of the memories it would conjure and the loss it would exacerbate. She slept on the sofa or on the recliner outside.

  From the stump she watched as the gatherings on Hermannplatz and elsewhere around the city continued, even seemed to pick up. Endless, undying parties, day and night. FOMO incarnate. But she searched herself for an urge to join in, and found none. Her remove from that world felt, at times, absolute. She was becoming a self-contained organism, unwilling or unable to be subsumed by the mass.

  Light did not wake her, but smoke. A gray, acrid tint to the air. The house, she thought—it’s finally ready to collapse. But rushing around the rooms, she saw nothing had changed. From the outside, it looked to have sunk to its fullest extent for the time being, roof continuing to sag into the curve of a smile, but frame still holding without any major crashes. A disaster without any disaster. The house inside the box in the kitchen, on the other hand, was disintegrated into nothing more than a flat scrim.

  Her abdomen clenched, uterus worrying over the egg that was fixing to release. She groaned, having forgotten about her body’s autonomous movements. Trying to clock her last period, she wondered how much time had passed since she’d come up the mountain with Michel.

  She considered the possibility that the smoke had been part of her dream, but she could still smell it on the breeze. She filled a glass bottle with water collected from her scattered receptacles and headed outside, up the slope. The time of day wasn’t obvious. It could have been early morning or late afternoon. The sun was shrouded in thick cloud cover and the ominous light was further scattered by the trees between her and the sky, illuminating the forest around her in patches.

  She had never seen the dirt this dry, dry to the point of crumbling underfoot and scattering in chunks down the hill after each step. The tall bamboo-like stalks near where the path used to be appeared to have died suddenly. Their bases were brown but their tips were still faintly green: power supply cut off before they could completely decay. The collapse she had seen lower down the slope was advancing quickly. Attuning her nostrils to changes in the air, she decided that the scent of smoke was thinning as she rose higher.

  She climbed atop the viewing stump and raised one hand to form a visor for her eyes, rubbing her lower stomach with the other. A tilted cone of smoke rose from the west of the map. A south wind was blowing the smoke momentarily away from the mountain, which explained the receding smell. If you didn’t trace the smoke back to its source, where it was thickest, the receding haze could almost be a normal cloud sunken from its post. But the gray puffs were moving too fast in directional wisps to be anything but traces of fire. She strained to see where smoke was clotted thickest above the burn, but too much city surface was obscured by the dark churning to make out where it was originating.

  The thickness of the smoke down below, compared with its clarity where she was standing, exaggerated the height of the mountain, drawing her ever higher above the splayed city, slamming her with vertigo. Her estrangement from the city was compounded by the silence on the mountaintop. She strained to hear sirens, shouting, anything from below, but only became more aware of the sighing of the trees and her own breath.

  Her thoughts turned automatically to her parents. If this were a real disaster, they’d have seen something, and it would have reminded them that she existed. Mom must have been calling her frantically.

  Her legs led her back down. She arched against the angle of the slope, leaning back to counter her weight. Reaching the shrinking clearing, she was struck by the spectacular mess of her house; it was thriving, growing, and dying all at once, cannibalizing itself in programmed splendor. She was filled with respect for whoever had designed the species converting this smattering of civilization into a ruin.

  She was standing there ogling her house when they came crashing up through the thicket. The silence was split. Twigs snapped and dust rose through the rustle of bushes.

  Dam came through first, panting.

  “Is she up there?” called Laura from behind him.

  “I see her!” said Dam.

  “I’m here,” said Anja.

  They’d pried her whereabouts from Michel, who Laura emphasized had been bitter and unhelpful. Anja was disoriented when they asked how she’d survived for almost an entire month. A month? She’d spoken to Louis only a few days ago. Or had it been a week? Two weeks? The days had crushed together, contracting around the workings of the house and the house inside it.

  “You look good,” said Laura, reaching out to feel Anja’s long, ungroomed hair. Anja looked down at herself and saw a tan, strong pair of legs. Laura and Dam were pallid and strung out in comparison.

  Prompted to play host, she remembered the liquor cabinet above the sink. She must have been sober for the longest stretch in her adult life—maybe that was why time was working so unpredictably. She took down a few bottles, wondering where the urge to drink had gone, and uncorked a red someone had given Louis for his birthday.

  “Honey, how’re you still alive?” said Dam when she came back, sliding an entire cucumber from her stash into his mouth before crunching down on it. “You’ve been eating animal food.” His speech was thick with Spanish, knocked loose by worry. He looked stricken.

  Laura was on edge too. They sat together on the living room floor, passing the bottle, and Anja tried to figure out where to begin. As she searched for links to chain the
events into an intelligible narrative, she realized Dam and Laura were the ones itching to explain.

  “You saw the smoke?” asked Dam. His eyes were ringed with dark circles. She nodded and sniffed. She could smell it in the house again.

  He glanced at Laura. It occurred to Anja that their presence might be as much a flight from whatever was happening below as a friendly visit.

  Things had changed in her absence, they tried to explain in a rush together. Across the city, a palpable transition, coming from everywhere and nowhere. An uptick in partying, all day and all night. Clubbers sleeping on the subway tracks; homeless people making their way into clubs. Rampant displays of generosity, followed by comedowns full of hostility. Of course they knew the reason. But the effect seemed so outsized.

  An open-air party had been raging down the block from Dam and Laura’s for two straight weeks. Anja realized it must have been one of the parties she’d been observing from her perch. Pounding music, barbecues, beer—everyone welcome, the dividing lines between groups blurred. It had the flavor of a protest, but with no common cause. Everyone was there for a reason, some reason, but once they got there, no one was sober enough to try to figure out what it was. The gatherings amounted to charity carnivals where no funds were being raised. Funds were, rather, being extinguished. People threw change across counters in abandonment. It was blind expenditure ramped up to eleven, the pleasure drive cloaked in righteousness, every excess validated. Those who could afford to give nothing but couldn’t resist the urge quickly dug themselves into holes of debt. What should have felt like liberating social disintegration instead felt like another kind of regime. Nothing was solved, only accelerated. Like beating an intricate knot with a hammer instead of untangling it. Dam put his forehead in his hands, trying to describe what he’d seen.