(where everything had its place even though objects looked randomly strewn about), the glass of water she kept by the bed, the green seat cushions of the chairs on the back patio warmed in stripes of sunlight, Louis watering the vine climbing up the back of the house, Louis watching an instructional video about how to fold a fitted sheet—those were holy and they amounted to more than the sum of their parts. As an undergirding of the grandiose possibilities of their lives—his life—in public, what could be more sacred than the ordinariness of their love?
MOST MORNINGS SHE WOKE UP WITH A PAIN IN HER NECK. THE symmetrical tension was always there, clenching on either side of the vertebrae where muscle broadens to clasp neck to shoulder. She could feel the supportive tissue protesting against bone. The morning soreness had always been there, before Louis, before Howard, before anyone else had ever been in her bed. She hadn’t properly evolved, something was missing in her spine’s supply chain upholding her skull. She wasn’t accurately constructed. It was a fact.
Usually after waking up she did a special set of stretches on the yoga mat permanently unrolled at the foot of the bed, while Louis was still asleep.
That morning she woke to find him already on the mat himself, doing some kind of bastardized yogic movement. She dangled her head over the bed, tilting it sideways to watch him as he leaned forward and tried to maneuver his elbows into the triangle of his groin.
“When I was little, my sister used to tell me that if I could lick my own elbow I’d turn into a boy,” she said to him. He flinched and glanced up, surprised for some reason to see her.
“Did you ever get there?”
“Nope.”
“Maybe all that trying is why your neck always hurts.”
Sometimes he massaged her neck, which helped in an emotional more than a physical way. She thought of asking, since she was feeling particularly out of sorts, but he was busy on the floor forcing his forearms further into his crotch.
In the bathroom she switched on the radio above the toilet before unscrewing the shower nozzle to give permission for that morning enemy, gravity, to slowly empty the bladder of collected rainwater in a shower-like drizzle. An upbeat German voice spoke from the radio. Reassuring weather words. Mostly sunny all day, calm, sun showers in the afternoon. Wholly untrustworthy and untethered from reality. She couldn’t remember when the discrepancy had expanded from acceptable error to flagrant contradiction. In Dam’s mind, the inaccuracy of all official weather reports was not an accident, but a surefire conspiracy on a massive scale. Whose conspiracy, he was not so sure. Sometimes the news stations, sometimes the internet service providers, sometimes the city government. Anja found it difficult to muster the paranoia to get behind any of his rotating hypotheses, but she also had a hard time coming up with another, less sinister explanation. Dam wasn’t the only one speculating; there were plenty of others staying up late on Reddit swapping theories. There was something pitiful about hanging life’s meaning on the borrowed scaffolding of the conspiracy plot, but Dam did give it a certain poetics. She remembered his blast from the night before. friendly skies, calm waters / immense gratitude / 30º
She tuned the radio to NPR. This was the second element of the morning ritual after her stretching. Louis said the English-speaking voices reminded him of morning car rides to school, harkening nostalgically back to a swiftly disappearing kind of neolib Americana. The sound of NPR was a message in a bottle from the homeland, written by someone who would only have had to pay attention to the content of the message to know the medium of its transmission was no longer valid. And yet the voices still carried on in genial two-minute news segments, even now, even here in Europe, reassuring generations of expats that the hegemony of the English language would endure and that at least All Things would still be Considered, whether those things were true or not. There’s nothing inherently immoral about nostalgia, Louis had said in defense of his radio.
The water was lukewarm and didn’t smell quite right. Anja cut the shower short and enacted element three of the routine: tracing an emoticon with her finger in the shower mist on the mirror. She drew a face with a question mark for a mouth :-? When Louis’s shower fogged up the glass again, the face would reappear, and this way he would know her mood of the day, even if she’d already left the house by the time he woke up. She toweled off carefully and left the radio on for Louis, noting that the seeming remoteness of the American voices was compounded by the bad reception in the bathroom.
Thursday. It was only his fourth day home, and already they’d rope-led each other back into mornings as usual. Howard and Laura may have reassured her—Laura more than once—but Anja was still unsure that normalcy was the best policy in the wake of tragedy, vexing herself with the worry that she was repressing Louis by not talking about it. It wasn’t like he’d said so—but he was undeniably different now, whether he admitted it or not. His body was a different body: a body without any parents. There must have been a physical trace, a scoop missing out of him somewhere, but she couldn’t identify where it was.
Scooped out or not, the Louis she knew was aware of how to act in any situation, and this was not the way to act like a grieving man in touch with his feelings, who was supposed to be able to talk about those feelings. More than anyone she had ever met, Louis understood the patterns of behavior that kept consensus social reality running comfortably—he knew the rules so innately that he could mess with them as he saw fit, but he never broke the rules by accident. He knew what he was doing. He must have known that acting sad after the death of a parent was the way to act. He must have known that acting fine was not normal and that, even if he really did feel fine, he should give some indication of awareness that this did not match the expectation; he should act just a little bit sad. He was the one who was supposed to take the lead on these things, and without any real guidance from his side, she had no clue how to act, how to complete the pattern that he was supposed to lay out.
One possibility was that Anja was dead wrong about the social expectation here, and that acting fine was actually the right and normal thing to do. In that case, Louis was simply parroting being a man in denial. And if he was actually setting the pace, she should follow suit. What bothered her about this possibility was that a man parroting denial was indistinguishable from a man in denial. Even if he was faking denial, he was also in it.
The other possibility, which was much more disconcerting, was that Louis had really broken the script, that grief had plunged him so far underwater that he had lost the ability or the desire to adhere to the rules. In a circular way, she thought, this possibility offered the strongest evidence that he was in an unprecedented amount of pain.
She moved into the kitchen to start preparing smoothies, the final event in the morning series, and as she took out the blender, it occurred to her that her mental articulation of the morning steps was something new. She had never exactly conceived of the mornings as a routine; she was doing so now only because the routine had gained symbolic importance. She had become aware of the norm because she was on the lookout for any minor deviation. So concerned was she with the After resembling the Before, she was seeking a barometer for measurement.
This meant she was surely blowing the deviations out of proportion. That Louis had been awake before her that morning couldn’t really be significant. There must have been hundreds of mornings that also didn’t conform to the schedule. He must have woken up earlier than she had any number of times. But in that moment, smoothie machine grinding away at chunks of fruit flesh, she could not remember a single one.
She was finishing her smoothie when Louis entered the kitchen. He made a twisty expression with his mouth that was meant to resemble the face in the shower mist. He didn’t want the rest of the green material in the blender, he said, he wanted an English muffin. The spirulina will
