Oval

by Elvia Wilk

  At first, generosity had overridden animosity; who complains about such togetherness, much less free stuff? But over time, as gestures became more outrageous—Laura assured Anja that tipping beer into the canal or giving smartphones away paled in comparison—arguments erupted, not only between those who considered themselves to be the givers and those who had been identified as the takers, but among the givers themselves. Jealousy. Competition. Disagreements about the best ways to do things. Tactics to become the best giver. Tactics to undermine one another’s charity. Tactics to preserve the class of takers so that the class of givers could continue to give.

  The weird thing was that mutual exchange, as in trading objects of equal value, did not trigger the response that O had promised. Giving and receiving at the same time canceled each other out. The person who gave more felt better.

  If unlocking generosity via chemical reward was O’s primary function, and if the reward could be repeatedly incited by this one-way act, maybe even in a cumulative process, it followed that the reward, the feeling, the high, would become the basis for addiction—not the act itself. The user would do anything to feel like generosity had been achieved.

  Of course circular pay-it-forward systems quickly emerged: I give to you, and you give to the next person, who gives to the next. Nobody in the chain required the gift; the receipt was a favor. The point of charitable donation was not to fulfil a need on the side of the recipient but to fulfil a need on the part of the giver. If Louis had succeeded, he had succeeded in replicating the stucture of worldwide aid on a microscale.

  Then, they told her, there had been the wave of break-ins everywhere. Dam described everything from petty pickpocketing to full-on looting. Apparently one had to steal to continue the process if one had run out of things to give. Counterintution, Anja thought again.

  “You can imagine,” said Laura. “You’ve tried O.”

  Anja shook her head hard. “It wasn’t like that.”

  “You only tried it once,” said Dam. “Imagine taking it every day for weeks.”

  To Anja’s surprise, Laura and even Dam said they had resisted trying it the whole time. Dam claimed to not even have been tempted, after seeing what happened to Eric. He didn’t go into any details about that.

  “All this generosity has really brought out the dark side in humanity,” he said softly.

  “I can’t believe how fast it happened,” said Laura.

  The fire had started, of all places, in their building, ripping down the street in the early morning. They’d grabbed their laptops and passports and run straight to the mountain.

  Tears streaked Dam’s eye makeup. He sniffed. “We were going to have to leave anyway.” He wiped his nose with his wrist, a familiar gesture. He was making the same guilty yet defiant face he always made when he knew he had behaved badly. He looked older than he used to, Anja thought.

  Laura shot him a look. “It’s not like we’re going to get any insurance money out of this.”

  “It was an accident,” he said. “Don’t be mad.”

  By dark the smoke had stopped gusting and had become a general haze outside the house. They stayed inside, eating pâté and crackers from the neighbors’ stash.

  Dam and Laura had been scrolling through their phones until service suddenly cut out. Even text messages were bouncing back now. Dam had sent his last blast out just in time. ***EVAQ8 EVAQ8 NOT A DRILLL***

  “The cucumbers gave me a tummy ache,” he complained, refreshing his screen, unwilling to believe he was cut off. His top lip was wine-stained in a perfect semicircle. “What should we do?” he asked.

  “The news told everyone to evacuate west,” said Laura. “Maybe we should head down there.”

  “The news I read said to go east,” said Dam.

  None of the news had been particularly helpful. A lot of it had been blatantly inaccurate, according to Laura and Dam’s account. One source said the blaze began during an altercation in a kebab shop. Another said that it had been deliberately set off by protestors—protesting what? Another said fireworks. While listening to the two of them call out tidbits from their feeds as they scrolled, Anja had been struck by how the distinction between news and rumor had become so thin it was practically nonexistent. Starting with the weather, everything had now been reduced to gossip. Maybe Dam’s weather service really was, as he insisted, the future of news.

  Anja patted Dam on the back. “There’s still too much smoke for us to go anywhere now. Let’s wait here until it clears.”

  “She’s right,” said Laura. “We don’t know if the fire’s still spreading.”

  He threw his hands in the air. “How do we know the fire won’t come up here? We’d be trapped if it did.”

  Anja shook her head. “It doesn’t seem like it’s going to.”

  “What if it does?”

  “We’ll wait at the top for someone to come find us. It’s the most visible spot in the city.”

  “I wish this mountain was still an airport,” he said. “We could just take off.”

  The airport took over their thoughts for a long, round moment. A stroll at twilight on the tarmac. A cigarette, a beer. Too dark to see all the way across the expanse. A lone skater struggling against the wind. A cold note to the air, the arrival of a new season, one section of months shifting clearly to another. And between each season the feeling of stretching, of adolescence.

  Without the full progression of the seasons, the city hadn’t been able to grow. Its natural cycle had stuttered and shorted out.

  “It feels like the apocalypse,” said Anja.

  “It is the apocalypse,” Dam said.

  “It was always the apocalypse,” Laura said. “You guys just didn’t notice until now.”

  Smoke still clung to the air in the house, but she’d slept with her face pressed into the grassy sofa, and momentarily it was all she noticed: the strong, now-familiar smell of simultaneous growth and decay. Her own sweat-soaked body was a part of it.

  Dam and Laura were asleep in the bedroom. After checking on them and then, out of habit, the little house in the box in the kitchen—an indecipherable mass of crusty material—she pulled on her boots and picked up Laura’s sweater from the floor to tie around her shoulders.

  Her eyes watered intensely from the lingering smoke. She walked slowly, blinking and trying not to rub them. The wind had picked up and dust rose around her in tiny tornadoes. Her abdomen contracted with a spasm of pain. A red line sped down her leg, curving around her knee and stopping as it soaked into the rim of her sock.

  The dream from the night before burst in on her suddenly. A red light shining in through the windows of the house. Louis standing in front of her, head tilted to the side. She knew it was him, but she couldn’t make out the features of his face. He was speaking, but she couldn’t make out the words either. The room was unbearably hot and full of fog, or smoke. Sweat dripped in her eyes and blurred her vision. His image would not resolve. She wanted desperately to reach out to him, but she was frozen. He had to come forward of his own accord. She waited and waited. Tried and failed to speak. Finally he came closer. His hands reached out to grasp the great messy ball of her face. But her face had no outlines—he couldn’t find the edge. She could tell he was there, looming in front of her, but they were both too out of focus. His face approached hers until it should have been touching hers, but he went through her, like a cloud—like they were two clouds. Then, in the haze, she felt a mouth open on her lips, and teeth came through. The sharp bite was what woke her.

  The force of the letdown hit her as she climbed. There would be no final confrontation, no closure. Closure was a myth. There was nothing to close. The object of affection was no longer itself. An orange that did not smell like oranges. A plum that did not taste like a plum.

  The bench was right where they’d left it at the top of the slope. Phantom Louis was there, arms spread wide over the backrest, waiting for her to enter his negative space and be hugged into his side. She sh
ook her head. The night of their last hike up here had been the beginning of the end.

  It was tempting to pause for a moment and replay the order of things again, to imagine moments she could have intervened and stopped the landslide, but the regrets were too plentiful to sort through. Egrets, as Eva used to call them. Long-legged birds with milk-white wings. “No egrets, Anja. Live your damn life.”

  The bench waited for her, flaunting its immutability. Everything else was in flux, but this dumb, silent bench was the same. She walked past it to the edge of the mountain, which was more of a cliff than it had ever been. The soil all along this side of the Berg had shifted and fallen, destabilized by the fire or the wind or the dryness, and roots jutted out from the dirt below her like hands reaching into midair. Below that, emptiness.

  A massive billow undulated to the north. In its wake, ash. The canal had not stopped the fire in its tracks; neither had the Spree. All those buildings, updated to meet environmental standards, stuffed to bursting with flammable organic insulation. Block after block flattened. Buildings gutted, reduced to skeletons, or toppled into each other. The wide artery of Karl-Marx-Allee was surprisingly clean and visible far to the north, beneath the shifting smoke and drifting white specks. She carved the path of the former wall with her stinging eyes, following its shape as far as she could. She knew the contours of the streets and blocks so well, but in the absence of landmarks it was hard to piece the coordinates together on this charred spread. One landmark oriented her sight: the TV tower had somehow survived, defiantly retaining the city brand through its total destruction. The magnificent Dome, the Gate, Museum Island—all gone, and the fucking TV tower was what stuck.

  She wiped snot from the indentation below her nose, where it had mingled with tears. Her eyes were streaming as much from the smoke as the shock. She wrapped her arms around herself, grasping her own shoulders, and told herself that most people must have gotten out in time.

  She looked for Dam and Laura’s house, knowing their blue building wouldn’t be there. It had indeed been at the epicenter: that was clear from the extent of the wreckage there. She searched for Howard’s place next, up north. Nothing. All that teak furniture exploding in the blaze. She followed the tram tracks to where she imagined RANDI had been. Nothing. She winced. But the lab would surely be frozen tight, air-locked belowground.

  She looked for Basquiatt HQ last. A monstrous pile of rubble, with jagged shards of glass jutting from the rocks and glinting in flashes of sunlight.

  “You got rid of me because I finally saw who you were,” she said toward the place where the glorious revised architecture had been.

  “You were so afraid that I would change that you changed instead,” the hill of ash, metal, and glass said back.

  Despite its expansion outward, the fire hadn’t closed in on the mountain. It had stopped at the base of the Berg. Maybe this was what happened when you reduced a city’s green space to a single hill, leaving the rest dry and brittle. As she tracked the dead city with her eyes looking for greenery, she realized that there hadn’t been any large public parks left to burn. Finster had justified confining all the city’s nature to the mountain, creating a giant fold in the landscape to expand the surface area of greenery, filling the percentage quota of the planning commission, while justifying leaving the rest of the city for development.

  But trees did burn. The mountain should have snatched the flames. Maybe this engineered nature simply wasn’t flammable. It was meant for another, more deliberate kind of transformation.

  She imagined the view at night from where she was standing. Where green had radiated out from the base of the mountain, there would be total darkness. Where there had been white lights on one side and yellow on the other, there would be total darkness. Darkness—and space entirely empty of all those attachments.

  They were fine, of course. Louis, Michel, Howard. They had to be. Those invincible men. They would always be fine. They were fine in the Before, and they were fine in the After. In the Post-After, there was no reason to expect they wouldn’t be just as fine.

  She looked down at Finster’s dead city of lost investments and smiled. In the Before and in the After, the city had offered nothing she could make hers. Nothing to buy that Louis couldn’t buy better. Nothing she wanted to own, nothing they’d let her own.

  Until now. There had never been such a good time to buy.

  Acknowledgments

  I have too many people to thank. Thanks to Theresia Enzensberger and Vincenzo Latronico, my first readers and my favorite writers. To Jenna Sutela, Martti Kalliala, Tamen Perez, Alex Turgeon, Beny Wagner, Anna Saulwick, Jessica Bridger, Sophie Lovell, and so many others, for being my Berlin and for several of the stories and ideas that ended up in this book. To William Kherbek, Josie Thaddeus-Johns, Jonathan Lyon, and Vijay Khurana, for years of generous feedback. To my parents, for endless encouragement. Most of all, to Clemens Jahn, who invented love.

  I am immensely grateful to Cynthia Cannell for her insight and support, as well as my brilliant editor, Allie Wuest, along with Yuka Igarashi and everyone at Catapult/Soft Skull. Many thanks to the Banff Centre, Rupert, the Helsinki International Artist Programme, and the Rabbit Island Residency, for providing the space and time for the book to be born and reborn.

  Finally, I am indebted to Mila Architects for their imaginary mountain, the Berg.

  © Nina Subin

  ELVIA WILK is a writer and editor living in New York and Berlin. She writes about art, architecture, and technology for several publications, including frieze, Artforum, e-flux, Metropolis, Mousse, Flash Art, Art in America, and Zeit Online.