grew up in the States. I’m sure you watched TV when you were a kid.”
“Never. Pat wouldn’t let me.”
Interesting. This was a new fact for the pile.
Louis called his mother by her first name, that was a known fact. Anja had learned such facts about Louis incidentally, through osmosis. Unlike most couples, they had never done the background check when they first got together, that protracted period of revealing narratives of self, sharing biographical data and the resulting conclusions about their psychological makeup. From earlier relationships, even from her term with Howard, she had anticipated and even looked forward to this process, and she was disoriented when Louis showed little interest in learning details about her early life and evolution, mistaking it for a lack of interest about her in general.
But it was obvious that their conversations were infinitely more entertaining and enlightening than the predetermined kind from the relationship handbook; they were learning from each other and rewriting those stale narratives about who they were instead of reinforcing them. Generating new content, that was what they were doing. Did it matter what had actually “happened” to Louis before her? The web of references and jokes and ideas evolving in the present was more real than that cause-and-effect type of historical self-interpretation. They had more interesting things to talk about. They laughed all the time.
For two years they had sidled sideways together, allowing the steps of monogamy (exclusivity, going to parties as a unit, introducing their friends to each other, moving in) to arrive without fanfare. These were crab steps into logical territory rather than increments of upward movement, the kind Anja had heard many times referred to by women as some sort of accomplishment. And the steps were rarely discussed as if they were momentous decisions. Louis was capable of making plans, but he never made promises. He didn’t need to.
And yet—she did not try to resist the urge to piece together a basic biographical scaffolding for her boyfriend. She carefully gleaned facts that he tossed off incidentally, crusts from other stories. She compiled the facts carefully. It was important that she knew him better than anyone else.
Louis’s father had been a mechanical engineer who worked in a blue-and-gray office building across the highway from the diesel engine plant in Columbus, Indiana. Also the Sunday organist at First Christian Church, his father had contracted heart disease at some point when Louis was young (est. 10 y/o), and suffered a pulmonary embolism during choir rehearsal, dead right there on the stool.
Pulmonary embolism was the only description she ever received of the dad, not even a name, just pulmonary embolism, the face a round blot of coagulated fat and blood, arms dangling loosely at his sides, or maybe his lifeless wrists hitting the keys with a clang. All very morbid.
Mom, having been alive until recently, naturally had a name. Pat’s story began where the other parent’s left off. After three months deployed and eight months of rehabilitation, Pat arrived home from her tour of Iraq only shortly before the pulmonary embolism happened. She was still adjusting to her new legs when she was stranded alone with Louis—becoming a single mom into perpetuity. But she had also become bionic, superhuman: those remarkable mechanical limbs, which Louis had imagined would look like sausage-logs before he saw them, impressed him deeply. Pat took the loss of her legs, much like the loss of her husband, in stride (there was some evidence of hardness or apathy running in the family; Anja took note).
Through his teenage years Louis revered Pat and was desperate to impress her. He shadowed her in all her good-person activities. She worked for the veterans’ advocacy group, the city architectural board, the public library, the church cleanup crew. At some point she went from cursory Sunday hits of Episcopalia to mainlining the stuff four days a week.
That was how Louis ended up at Saturday School and Sunday School and After-school Choir and Fellowship Luncheon and Youth Raise Hands Camp and more than one Lock-In. He didn’t have to be prodded; church was a sanctioned place to play basketball and meet girls. He never once believed in God, but he did believe in those two things, and he believed in Pat. Pat had no interest in remarrying, from what Louis could tell, and carried on driving Louis to school and to basketball and to the movies in her fully automated, army-financed van, right up until he left for college. (That Louis hated to operate a vehicle himself became clear during that terrible road trip to Hamburg, when he veered off the autobahn.)
As soon as he made it to undergrad in New York, not the city but the state, Louis learned that having an army veteran for a parent did not carry the same moral heft it did in the Midwest. He learned to downplay his middlebrow upbringing, studying frantically to compensate—not his homework, which he could do with his eyes closed, but the highbrow references he had been so cruelly denied by his provincial origins (much as Anja acquired them now from him, second- or thirdhand). He was embarrassed by Pat for the first time in his life when she visited him at school, driving up in the brown van with veteran bumper stickers all over its rear end. She assumed he was embarrassed by her disability—though this was not at all the issue—and a period of distance ensued between them. She burrowed deeper into church.
During the two MFA years in California the shame of Indiana wore off. A lot of the friends he made in his program had emerged from similarly cultureless deserts, climbed the dunes of liberal arts, and surfaced at the top with the satisfaction of having overcome unfair circumstances. That shared climb from mediocrity was precisely what gave them the right to be artists—unlike all those jacked-up trust-fund sons and daughters of collectors and curators. Pat was welcomed back into his life as evidence of how far he had come.
In California, he started to produce artwork in earnest. He spent most of the second year on a single project, producing a series of tiny drone helicopters. The drones had wide-lens cameras, with which they could scout wide areas and zero in on telltale signs of poverty: dilapidated roofs, litter, distance from water source, proximity to dangerous waste. These factors were built into its image-recognition system. Based on what the drone found, it was hypothetically possible, Louis said, to determine the zones where development aid would be best spent. For his final thesis exhibition he showed wall-sized and remarkably high-resolution prints of an area the drone had captured from above and highlighted as a danger zone: the university campus. Crumbling buildings, piles of trash, and dangerous proximity to a chemical plant had identified the underfunded campus as a candidate for targeted aid.
His five-year contract with Basquiatt was already halfway over by now. They’d hired him onto the payroll straight out of his MFA, ticket to Berlin the week after graduation. He was the only one from his class to shoot straight to consultant. Many of his classmates would end up on that track, but they’d have to at least develop the pretense of having done something upon which to be consulted first.
(His Berlin period was pretty clear; Anja had lots of data on him from the past three years. Plenty of mutual friends to suck details from. There had been a few women before her, but only a few.)
These were the facts upon which she built her assumptions about what Louis’s return to Indiana for the funeral had been like, the story she told herself. Some information he volunteered—for instance, kidney failure. It’s a common cause of death for women over sixty, he’d said. She was over sixty? Fifty-nine.
So Pat hadn’t let him watch TV. The fact itself was information number one. But the detail also had secondary import: he was voluntarily bringing Pat into conversation now. He hadn’t mentioned her name since he’d gotten home.
“You haven’t mentioned Pat since you got home,” Anja said.
He nodded. “I know, it’s weird. I’ve barely thought about her. And I haven’t cried since the funeral.” He was fully dry from the shower now and was putting shorts on. She stared.
“You cried
