kitchen drain. He pulled out a long, thick strip of blue-and-brown paper. “What is this, a shopping bag from the mall?”
“I just used it to carry my other trash in. Jesus, it’s not like I was shopping at the mall.”
He stared at her, dangling the wet strip. “You brought home a random bag from a fast-fashion store, which you only used to carry your other trash in, and you put it down our drain.”
“Yes, that’s what I did. I used the bag. Ergo, it’s part of my waste output.”
He frowned. “I think the waste thing only applies when you’re at home on the mountain.”
“No, I don’t think it’s spatial. It’s about what you waste in your whole life, as a human consumer. The whole point is to cancel us out completely.” She realized she was clasping her hands earnestly. Without meaning to, she glanced up toward where she knew the camera was, nestled above the cabinets.
“Right, that’s what it says on the website. But everyone knows we’re just supposed to be making it seem like the house works. We’re trying to prove that it’s possible to live sustainably and not be such a freak about it. Which means not carrying your trash around everywhere.”
Anja unclasped her hands and then reclasped them. “But throwing waste away in other places is cheating,” she said. “If the house can’t handle all my waste, then the designers didn’t do a good job, and they should fix it.”
“They obviously did not do a good job, Anja. Nothing in this fucking house works. I’m not going to drag all my trash home every day. It’s just not realistic—you want me to save the packaging from my lunch? Where does it stop? Am I supposed to wait to shit until I get home?”
“Wait, why are you eating lunch with disposable packaging? I bought you a lunch box!”
Eventually Louis’s practicality had won out, as it tended to. He was right: Anja couldn’t wait to shit until she got home, and she couldn’t keep track of everything she used; trying to do so had led to an ontological breakdown on the microlevel of her daily life. Were eyelashes and skin cells on par with hair ties and coffee cups? Were paper coffee cups on par with a mug that had to be rewashed using graywater from the house, which cost energy to pump? She couldn’t bring herself to ask the neighbors how they were handling things, convinced that everyone else automatically understood the rules. To reveal her confusion would be to reveal all, including her doubts.
That had been only a few months ago, but lately, as more elements of the system were getting clogged or bogged down, the two of them had started to perform exactly the opposite of what Anja had originally done: they carried their trash down the mountain and disposed of it clandestinely in orange trash canisters on the street. At first Anja felt ashamed marching down the slope with a backpack loaded with a bundle of trash flattened against her laptop, but Louis reassured her that they were just doing what was expected of them: putting a good, clean face on sustainability. Eventually, bringing trash off the mountain seemed just as responsible as bringing trash onto it once had.
ANJA SKIDDED DOWN THE SLOPE, WHICH WAS BECOMING MUDDY from overuse by feet. It still hadn’t been paved or even scattered with gravel, since Finster didn’t want to admit that the state of the pathway could no longer reasonably be called temporary. Rather than upgrade the provisional solution to make it slightly more functional in the interminable interim, it was ignored, as a signal that something better, something great—the best possible path—was coming.
Louis likened this situation to a general societal problem. The refusal to improve a nonsolution with a makeshift solution, he said, was the attitude that left most of the world a muddy slope in need of repair. Making exactly this argument had in fact consumed a lot of his time in his first year at Basquiatt, the NGO where he worked, which he believed was overrun by an ideological insistence on grand solutions that would be forever unattainable instead of small-scale, implementable compromises. “Let’s be realistic” was his self-parody catchphrase. “What can we do right now to make things better?”
“Why do you think refugee camps are never outfitted with proper infrastructure?” he’d asked Anja just a few days before he’d been yanked back to the U.S. They were hiking up the mountainside in the rain toward their apartment, torsos harshly angled against the incline, sneakers slipping in the mud, dragging grocery bags; it was pathetic.
“Muddy scenes of neglect,” he shouted downhill at her, intent for some reason on having this discussion right at that moment. The worse things had gotten in the house, the more he’d taken to ranting. “The mud is meant as a message that the bad situation isn’t going to last forever, no matter how long it’s already lasted. They want you to think the camp is just temporary, so nobody actually has to take responsibility for it.” His voice rose as she lagged farther behind him. “The quality of the now,” he yelled over his shoulder, “is sacrificed for the ideal. Know what I’m saying?”
Of course she knew what he was saying. “But you realize you’re comparing the Berg to a refugee camp, right?” That had ended the discussion.
Today she was carrying only a few avocado peelings in the pockets of her vinyl windbreaker. The whole apartment was a hot, puffy bruise; she didn’t dare force anything down the drain. She waved to a group of electricians in blue coveralls, who were standing, bored, around a post that was supposed to be supporting one of the vine-cables of the cable car. They had raised the car onto a stack of wooden pallets. One of the workers dropped a cigarette butt onto the exposed end of a vine-cable half-buried in mud, and it let off a sorry spark.
Unhitching her bike from a post at the bottom of the slope, she saw that Louis’s racer was still locked to a tree. He must have taken the train. She plugged her phone into the charger between her handlebars, checking it for messages. Dam had already sent out his first weather blast of the day: dry 35º / lavender / wet west gust.
She checked her phone’s weather app for comparison. High of 24 degrees, calm, clear. The gap between the official version and Dam’s version—the real version—shouldn’t have still bothered her, but it did. She slotted an earbud in each ear and began the long ride up to Prenzlauer Berg, to Howard’s. It would normally take half an hour, the length of one podcast, but she was lumbering on the pedals today, swinging from side to side with each push. She was exhausted, and, true to Dam’s forecast, there was a hot wind coming from the west. The sky was purplish with stratified layers of clouds, each like identical, faded copies of one another. Add a layer. Add a layer. Duplicate this layer. Flatten visible.
She listened to the podcast with one part of her brain, thinking with another part about what must have been happening in the lab at that very moment. She was mildly anxious to be missing the morning there. She probably should have asked Howard to meet in the evening after work instead.
The week before, the simulation she and Michel had been hard-coding for weeks had finally authorized cell culturing; today would be the first day in at least two months that they’d be liberated from their screens, finally doing tiny things with their actual hands in an actual polystyrene dish. It was strange to look forward to an action while knowing already without a doubt how it would unfold. They had seen the routine perform itself again and again in high-definition render; the airtight predictability of the chain of events was the only reason they were allowed to make it happen in a dish at all.
She saw the animation in her mind. One cell membrane swelling to accommodate a new blot on its periphery—for one freak moment an egg with two yolks—then, the new blot forcing itself outward to the splitting point, when the
