the new Irwin.”
“Probably not.” He looked away, toward the window, the total darkness outside. “You know what I realized when I was home?”
“What?”
“I don’t have any reason to go back to Columbus again.”
They had come full circle, as she had assumed they would. She could let him spin his hands in the air, drawing loops around concepts, following his own train of thought while she drew new loops silently on her own. Eventually he would return to base camp and she’d be able to decipher why he’d gone where he’d gone. The route was new each time—that was why she went along with it—but the method of leaving in order to return was so predictable, and so inefficient.
For the first time, she felt acutely annoyed that Louis had to leave himself in order to return to himself. If he could articulate the world, he should also be able to directly articulate his own being. Otherwise, what was the point of all that traveling in circles?
ON FRIDAY, LOUIS WAS ENTHUSIASTIC ABOUT GOING OUT. PRINZ was at a tiki bar in the west, and they were going to meet him. This seemed normal and fine, and Anja was fine with it. On the other hand, she felt soggy and incapable of small talk. All her clothes smelled like they’d been left in the washing machine for too long. She selected a damp knitted yellow top, white linen pants, and platforms with little plastic flowers separating the toes, then spritzed her whole body with a spray bottle of Febreze.
“Resort wear!” Louis called approvingly from the bed, while texting someone. He was wearing his hair in a long fishtail braid and had a leather jacket hanging around his shoulders. He never really put coats on, as in actually threading his arms through the armholes, but swung them over his back with the empty chutes dangling from his neck as if he were a coatrack.
Louis could wear anything. It was incredible. He could wear tasseled loafers, he could wear board shorts, he could wear a pin-striped blazer. This was disconcerting when you first met him—the randomness of the clothes and also that he didn’t have the affect of the heavily ironic person you’d expect to be wearing them. He didn’t have to. Aesthetic trump card was always the body, and the sheer quality of the skin of the forehead, the long fine nose, the exquisite divot above the top lip, the trapezoid of the torso, those ropey legs—you forgot all about the clothes; they only threw him into relief. Tweed jacket, white sport socks, hair tied back with a piece of rope. It was awful and it was ostentatious, and next to him, carefully curated men looked shrunken and pretentious.
Anja worked hard for a coherent appearance. With each outfit she tried to present a delicate, well-balanced constellation of interconnected nodes. The selection usually went according to a single theme from head to toe. Squeaky Fabrics, Grunge, Business Uncasual, Yellow, Branded, Unbranded, Denim with Silk. She was aware that she had small, sharp facial features protruding from extremely accurate coordinates on the map, and she aimed to replicate that physical precision with her outfits. Louis had told her once that her face in profile was noticeably incongruent with its frontal display, which fascinated him. It was as if she existed in two separate planes.
Her resort wear was appropriate for the weather in the house, but it was the wrong choice for the weather in the world, which had become suddenly chilly, the humidity frozen in midair, sticking to everything in a dust of frost. It became noticeably colder as they descended, as if the mountain were generating its own microclimate. In a sense, this was true; their houses probably gave off extra heat as they tried to regulate their internal temperatures. They were halfway down the mountain when Anja had to run back up to the house for a jacket. “My little fashion victim,” Louis said to her affectionately when she met him at the bottom of the mountain. She noticed he had put his arms through the sleeves of his jacket.
In front of the tiki bar, Prinz was planted on a tall stool. Sara and Sascha were perched on either side of him. Anja looked at Louis. She had not expected the Event Planners to be there. He shrugged. Sara and Sascha could be a drag—Louis agreed, though in that case Anja couldn’t understand why he loved Prinz so much, when to her, Prinz, Sara, and Sascha were birds of a feather. The thought had crossed her mind that maybe characteristics like gossipy, petty, and manipulative were more permissible when exhibited in men.
The floor inside the tiki bar as well as the sidewalk in front of it were covered in a thin layer of loose sand. Ace of Base was playing from a speaker above their heads, badly equalized and causing the sand to quake slightly. Anja clambered onto a stool and Louis went inside to order a round of mai tais.
Conversation clicked into German in his absence.
“The weather!” said Sara. “Right?”
“Sorry,” said Sascha to Anja. “We didn’t know it was going to get so cold. Wrong night to tiki.”
“No worries,” said Anja. “It’s so hot in our house that it seems kind of nice outside.”
“Are you coming out with us later?” said Sara, right on cue.
“Last time was so much fun. You have to come with us this time,” said Sascha, as if someone had pushed a button on her forehead. “Prinz has guest list.” Sara and Sascha reliably spoke about events that had happened or were about to happen, with minimal interpretation of those events. The simple fact that events happened and that Sara and/or Sascha knew about them was their reason for having conversations at all. The secondary goal was to create a constant strain of anxiety on your part (and possibly on each other’s part) that there could ever be something happening to which you were not privy. Left unchecked, they could carry on forever with preemptive or retroactive scheduling talk, especially if you let on that it made you uncomfortable.
“Sure,” said Anja. “Louis was talking about going to the Baron.” Prinz nodded and confirmed they could all get in with his bounty of plus ones.
S and S clapped their hands approvingly. They were wearing different colors of the same mesh top. Seeing Anja glance back and forth, Sara said, “I know, so embarrassing. We both got them at work today and didn’t compare outfits before leaving the house.” They worked at a clothing store in Mitte together, while pursuing master’s in something. Art history. Sociology. Feminism? The top looked better on Sara.
Louis returned with the drinks, and she felt relieved. He’d carry the conversation for her now. She could let the baton circulate without the responsibility of holding it for at least a half hour; he could say funny things on her behalf.
Everyone raised their glasses. The artificial taste of the mai tai brought back a scene from a poolside bar a long time ago. Eva, in a zebra-print swimsuit, stretched out on a lounge chair, her skin evenly tanned and glistening, stomach rising and falling slowly in the sun like the hairless belly of a Chihuahua. Anja wondered what Eva would have to say about this tiki bar. Disgusting, no doubt.
“When I was a teenager,” Prinz was saying, “I used to come to this bar all the time.” He’d grown up in Berlin and liked to tell stories that illustrated his unique claim on the urban space. “I drank some of my first beers here,” he went on, launching into a story. Anja zoned in and out, catching the gist.
One day an older friend told young Prinz that the waiter at the tiki bar sold weed, and that Fanta was the code word. Of course Prinz tried the scheme immediately. He cut class to make sure he ran into the right waiter, sat down, and when he was asked for his order he said the word slyly. The waiter looked him up and down and shook his head. We’re all out, he said. The refusal infuriated Prinz so much that he resolved to get amateur revenge. He spent
