She chewed her cheek, hard. “What does a knowledge manager do?”
“Whatever you want. You get a pay raise and go around telling people what to do. Threaten them if they don’t work fast enough. Do audits, interviews, suggest some restructuring where you think it’s needed. You know the drill.”
“How long?”
“I don’t know how long your first term is. Probably a year.”
“But why would they want to fire me from my job and hire me back to do nothing for more money?”
He raised his hands. “That’s how companies run. You do the time and you move up the ladder, if you’re lucky. Why all the questions?”
She swirled her glass of electrolytes without taking a sip. “Here’s a question. Since when did you become my boss? HR should be telling me this.”
He shrugged innocently. “I was on the phone with HR this morning, mentioned you were coming by, and they said I should go ahead and tell you myself. Call over if you don’t believe me.”
Howard had, of course, been involved marginally in her job at RANDI, her house—everything—for a long time. Finster was involved in all of it, and at some point Howard had become her main interface with Finster’s back end. Howard knew stuff, Howard was the cloud, that was the point of Howard. In that regard, his giving her this information was not surprising. Nothing was changing between them, not really. But she couldn’t ignore the feeling that this news he was bestowing upon her was more intrusive than some of the other ways he’d elbowed into her life.
“Am I being insensitive about this?” Howard asked. “You seem sort of subdued.”
“I’ll have to think about it.”
“Don’t be such a girl.” He smiled. “Man up. Take what’s yours.”
“I love it when men tell me to man up.”
“Just trying to boost your confidence. But take your time. Someone will email you a draft of the contract to look over. That’s all I know.”
“Thanks.” She tried to sound grateful. Guilt, gratitude: they were always twins. It was time to steer the conversation elsewhere. When Howard chose to play dumb there was no piercing the shell.
“Do you think they’ll let me consult on my own house?” she asked. “The Berg could use a scientist.”
Howard laughed. “I doubt it. The Berg is a whole beast of its own. How are things at home? I guess that’s what you actually came to talk about.”
She realized that, actually, she didn’t have a very good reason for having come here, any more than Howard had a good reason for being the one to fire and rehire her. Neither the technical malfunction in her home nor her job officially had anything to do with him. What she had really come here for was Howard himself: his signature blend of affection, approval, and authority. He would, as he always did, oblige her complaints in exchange for feeling depended upon. He liked to be needed; she offered an assortment of needs.
“I was just wondering if you have any sort of . . . overview about what’s going on with the mountain,” she said. “The temperature and everything is totally erratic. All the doors are swollen shut. People must be complaining.”
“Not as much as you guys,” he said, smiling. “Have you been talking to the neighbors?”
“A few.”
This was a lie. Anja and Louis never talked to the neighbors. At the start, Anja had spent a few afternoons with a middle-aged couple of Danish consultants who had befriended her, but they’d left for vacation months earlier and had never come back. Come to think of it, at least three of the houses were empty most of the time. One of them was used intermittently as a studio for photo shoots of some sort.
“I know you guys don’t like the whole community vibe, but you could be a little more outgoing.”
Her phone vibrated in her pocket and she checked it under the table. Louis: flowers on my desk this morning, for mourning. a touching bribe :)
She wedged the phone between her legs and looked up. “Neither of us signed up to live in a commune.”
“True. I’m just saying that it’s easier to handle if you all talk to each other. Everyone up there is figuring out how to deal with the same issues. Renewable energy isn’t foolproof; you can’t depend on it like clockwork. You know that. All the risks are in your contract.”
“I know. Sorry for freaking out. It’s just that”—a moment on the edge, wavering—“we’re kind of stressed right now.” With the “we” she’d let Louis into the conversation, and the real reason for her being here rose to the surface. She was handing the need to Howard on a platter.
At least she had a punch line, a shoe to drop: the death of Louis’s mom, how awful it sounded, how unarguable.
But Howard was already nodding in anticipation, “I didn’t want to intrude,” he said, “but I heard about Louis’s mother, and I’m so sorry. It’s really awful.”
This was the worst shock of the morning—an intrusive, many-layered shock. She’d thought the death was hers to tell. Only now that she’d been robbed of it did she realize how tightly she’d been clutching the news to herself. She’d thought many times already of how to deliver the news to Howard, somberly, using “passed away” instead of “dead,” blinking back tears. She remembered the dark thrill of saying the words to her own parents and his friends who “deserved to know,” the assuredness that she was the one entrusted to disseminate the privileged information.
Knowing before anyone else, knowing first, had been proof of something. The thinness of the proof, now disintegrated, revealed the pettiness of the need.
“How did you hear?” she asked, knowing before she had said it that the question was dumb. Louis had been out of town for two weeks. Nothing like this was ever a secret. Death unfolded private pain into the open.
“I was over at Basquiatt last week doing some consulting,” he said. “I’m sorry. I wanted to send my condolences earlier, but like I said, I didn’t want to intrude.” But of course he wanted to intrude. “How is he?”
“I don’t know. He’s fine.”
“It must be tough.”
“I don’t know what he wants me to do.”
“You just have to be there for him.”
“That’s what everyone keeps saying. But where am I supposed to be being? Where is there?”
“You know what it means. It means being present and attentive. He probably just wants to get back to normal.”
“That seems fucked up on some level, though.” She shook her head. “Normalcy seems cruel in this situation.”
“Maybe he needs to repress.”
“Everyone wants to repress! That doesn’t mean it’s a good idea.”
“You
