time ago. They’d never really talked about it. She contemplated flipping the conversation around on him. It wouldn’t work.
“There’s no predicting what’s going to happen or what he’s going to need,” Howard said in his reassuring voice. “Just be patient. Trauma works in mysterious ways.”
“But aren’t there also universal things? It’s just categorically bad when a parent dies. Even if you’re ambivalent about them, or you hate them, it’s just overall bad when they die.”
“Maybe it’s not that bad for everyone.”
“If my parents died I would want everyone to act insane, burning shit and ruining everything.”
“But it didn’t happen to you. It happened to him.”
She sucked air in, then opened up all the way. “I know I’m not supposed to map my own feelings onto him, but I don’t want to be waiting around, unsuspecting, when he snaps.”
“He might never snap. Life is just easier for some people.”
“Do you seriously think that? That’s privilege speaking.”
He circled his face with his finger. Look at me. A minority.
“Oh, come on. You know about privilege.” She circled the air more widely, mimicking his gesture, indicating the renovated Altbau kitchen, with its blue ceramic sink and stainless-steel dishwasher.
“All I’m saying is, Louis is in some ways an uncomplicated person.” The not-so-subtle digs at Louis were piling up. She ignored them. She had asked for advice; she had to take what came with it. “You tend to get overly involved in the lives of people you care about,” he said, “which is very endearing and commendable, but doesn’t always serve you. Put on your own oxygen mask first.”
“All right. That’s enough paternal advice for the day.”
“It’s just the accent that makes me seem condescending.”
“You always say that.” They smiled at each other, and then she asked: “And how are your—things? Do you have any of your own issues?” The classic false overture. They both knew their dynamic. It was off-kilter, but it was stable. His knowing her was what she knew about him.
He leaned forward slightly, a barely perceptible shift that wouldn’t have been possible to construe as anything meaningful by anyone watching, but which transmitted a message all the more intimate precisely because it was so stunted.
“Since you ask, we are having a bit of a PR crisis at the moment,” he said.
“Oh?”
“Just between us.”
“Okay.”
“Not even for Louis.”
“I get it.”
“To be perfectly candid,” he said, placing all his fingertips on the table, creating little tents with his palms, “some of the problems with the Berg aren’t just tech issues.” She looked at him blankly, worried for a moment that he knew about their cheating with the trash. No one was watching, she reminded herself. Just the silent, rotating lens of the cameras. “There’s been some infighting among the consulting architects, the engineers, even PR. Things are stalled because of the disagreement.”
“Disagreement about what?”
“They never officially agreed on how much tech should actually be on the mountain. Some of the architects don’t think you guys should be so comfy. Some of them don’t believe it’s really authentic for you to have climate control, for instance.”
“But the climate-control system is independent of the central grid. It’s a thousand percent carbon neutral. It’s not doing any harm to the environment.”
“Obviously. I’m on your side. It’s always an arbitrary decision, what you call natural and what you call artificial. Those choices are all symbolic, and they each represent a political position.”
“But if someone decides that our heating and cooling are unnatural, what’s next? Then someone will decide that clean water is fake, and then someone will decide that LEDs are fake, and then someone will say we can’t eat anything we don’t grow ourselves. Who actually decides these things?”
“That’s sort of the other problem. A group of the architects have quit. They’re upset that their plans were treated like suggestions and not blueprints.”
“And nobody knows about this.”
“Thus the PR element. It’s a lot of work for me to keep a lid on this. We don’t want to freak people out.”
“You don’t seem worried about freaking me out.”
“I think you can handle it.”
“I can handle it. But what are we supposed to do? We can’t wait forever in that place. You got us into this, you know.”
“Oh, be patient. As soon as they make some executive decisions, the solutions are simple. To fix the heating, I think they just have to reconnect some severed wires to the beating heart, or whatever they’re calling it, the CPU thing.”
“You really don’t know anything about the tech.”
“Not even a little. I stick to politics. I mean PR.”
Her sister was the one who had convinced Anja to stop seeing Howard. “He’s projecting an imaginary fantasy onto you,” Eva had said. “How old is he, forty-five? He wants someone permanently young. He thinks you’re fine with being a piece on the side. He’ll never commit.”
Anja hadn’t been looking for Howard to commit—actually, that was exactly what she hadn’t wanted—but the idea of being a “piece on the side” (on the side of what?) in the eyes of anyone else was bad enough to convince her to end it. Somehow unable to cut things off, she managed to trick herself into feeling rejected by him, leading herself down a tunnel of body dysmorphia. She convinced herself that Howard was looking for some ideal of girlish perfection that any lump would disqualify her from. It couldn’t be that she was maybe not that interested in him romantically; no, that was not an option; he was a powerful person; the only option was that she was inadequate.
She let herself be consumed by self-doubt, shielding her arms, her calves, her breasts in his presence, becoming volatile and causing increasingly embarrassing scenes. At the low point, she accused him of grabbing the fattiest parts of her body during sex. He’d said, “Obviously, I like them best,” and that was the end of that.
Of Louis, Eva approved. “I found his picture online,” she said. “He’s hot. See, it only took you a month to find someone better. You should think more highly of yourself.”
Anja decided not to listen to Eva on these topics anymore. She’d decided that before and always relapsed, but with Louis she finally managed to stop feeding Eva details; Louis was going to stay a sacred space, free from probing. “You must be serious about him,” Eva had said. “I never hear a peep. Is he taking advantage of you? I just read an article online about this thing called mansplaining.”
She
