Then he was buying more Sprite and crackers for the retirees. Emoji, emoji. Blaming the time difference, he never found a moment to talk on the phone.
The last time she had heard his voice was when he had called two weeks before from the departure lounge at Brandenburg to tell her the news. His mom, dead. His voice had sounded so unconcerned she had asked if he was joking. Apparently, he had booked a flight back to the U.S., left work, and headed straight for the airport, all before calling his girlfriend. Anja was sure he was in shock. She was the one who broke down crying when he called.
He hadn’t told her he was coming back to Berlin until he was already at the airport at the opposite end in Indianapolis. Just a one-line text message listing his arrival time, with hearts planted between the numbers.
Anja was waiting for him when his plane landed in the early afternoon. Arrivals, with its faceted glass ceiling, felt like a cramped greenhouse or the inside of an empty perfume bottle with foul mist trapped inside. Around her, families regrouped, Erasmus students came home from semesters abroad, one-night partiers without any luggage searched for the bus that would drop them off nearest the door of the club.
Anja was startled by how awful Louis looked when he emerged from the crowd. His physical appearance was at odds with the nonchalance of those text messages; he looked miserable. He didn’t make any jokes to apologize for his condition, just hugged her weakly, took her hand, and followed her to the taxi stand.
In the back seat of the cab he leaned his head on her shoulder and showed her a fruit-flinging game on an iPad he said he’d inherited. The tablet seemed to be the only new thing he’d come home with.
The driver dropped them off at the base of the mountain with an apology: it was too muddy for him to go any farther. The cable car that should have been waiting to carry them up was still languishing lifelessly in the dirt by the path, where it had been since they moved in. Anja helped Louis haul his carry-on up the sloping path, lifting it over the bigger rocks and puddles. By the time they made it to the house, they were both soaked with sweat, the underarms of Anja’s gray Lycra top marked with salt arcs.
“Like the shore of the Dead Sea,” she said.
Louis, winded, bent over his knees. “Buns of steel,” he said, as he always did when they reached the top. The familiar refrain didn’t reassure her. It made her uneasy. An echo across an uncanny valley.
While Anja dug around for her keys, Louis wiped his fingers across the damp wood grain of the front door. “She’s sweating, too,” he said.
The house had gained a female pronoun early in their inhabitation. Something to do with a made-for-TV movie Louis had seen as a kid, about a smart-house that went haywire.
Anja nodded. “She has been all week.” The interior was so humid that condensation had gathered on every surface, and now the untreated wood was engorged. “The window frames are too swollen,” she said. “I haven’t been able to open the windows to let the moisture out.”
He laughed. “Menopause? But she’s so young.”
Anja unlocked the door and heaved it open with her hip. “No, just vindictive. She’s sad that you left.”
It was too hot to sleep, and Anja woke up before it was bright outside, rolling over to find Louis sprawled out on his stomach. He was naked, cuddling the tablet in the crook of his arm and jabbing at zombies floating across the screen. She got out of bed, wiped her face with a towel bunched on the dresser, and found a T-shirt, feeling her way down the hall while pulling the shirt over her head. The porous floor was cool and slippery; she steadied herself with a palm on the wall.
In the kitchen, she knelt under the sink and pulled out the main monitoring system. It was supposed to transmit real-time home-climate statistics wirelessly to the unattractive tech watches they’d been given, but the metal casing of the drawer blocked the signal. They’d debated removing the drawer front completely to let the signal through, but Anja, imagining in-house tornadoes, had decided they shouldn’t fiddle with it themselves. The contract they’d signed before move-in had been very clear about tampering. Eventually, they’d given up wearing the watches and given up talking about it too.
She peered at the dim readout for a few moments and sighed, slamming the drawer back into place, then padded back down the hall, nearly slipping before reaching the bedroom archway.
She posed in the arch with one hip jutting out, a Carrie Bradshaw move she had once postured as a joke that had by now lost its original template and become a reflex. “The monitor says there’s too much waste under the flooring, and the rate of composition is too high. It’s hot in here, but the floor feels cold to me. Shouldn’t we feel the heat coming up?”
He laughed, still tapping his pet screen. “Too much waste? You’ve been here without me for two weeks.”
“I haven’t had any internal plumbing problems. All is running smoothly.” She ran her hand over the side of one hip.
“Cheeky.” He pressed the round button on the tablet and slid it under the pillow beneath his head, twisting his neck toward her. “So if we can’t blame your digestion?”
She nodded. “I’ll call Howard in a few hours.” She climbed into bed beside him. The top sheet, IKEA blue, was damp with sweat in two oblong patches: hips and shoulders. Avoiding her own imprint, she rolled halfway onto him.
He scrutinized her face. She scrutinized back. He looked like sweet, normal Louis. She frowned.
“Is everything okay with you?” he asked.
“What?” She was supposed to be the one asking that question. She pulled her face a few centimeters back. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine.”
“You seemed not fine yesterday.” She paused to allow it to slip from observation to evaluation. He nodded. That was a good sign. Self-awareness.
“I was just exhausted,” he said, shrugging beneath her. That was not a good sign. “Hey,” he protested. “Don’t give me that look.”
“I’m not giving you a look.”
“You are, a little.”
“It’s just hot rays of love.”
“Okay, but don’t burn me.”
She searched his face for traces of yesterday’s sadness. Yesterday had been Sunday. The day his mom usually called.
“I can’t go back to sleep,” he said. “I’m too jet-lagged.” He gestured toward the shower. “Should we start the day?”
She sat up beside him, pulling up her knees to avoid the sweat stains. “I never understand what it means when you say that. We don’t start the day.”
“Who starts it?”
“It just starts. The sun, the cosmic rotation.”
“My day starts in me.” He pointed to his stomach. “Internal rotation, the cosmos inside.” He got up and stepped toward the bathroom, grinning.
“Gross,” said Anja. She laughed. “Living in this house has made us too comfortable talking about our shit.”
At
