of dating. It was the fault of their living situation—which was Anja’s fault. They were deadlocked about where to go after the impending loss of the garden house, which they were living in illegally and which was on the verge of demolition. The whole age-old Schrebergarten was going to be flattened for an apartment block as soon as a final piece of paper got stamped somewhere deep inside the Ordungsamt. You could complain about losing history and heritage, but you could complain louder about the lack of affordable housing, and so the development had moved forward with very little protest.
Their garden allotment was just inside the S-Ring, which demarcated the limit of the conveniently livable part of the city. Once upon a time, the thousands of subdivided gardens had been built as urban escapes, chunks of nature scattered across the city where hearty children could be set loose. But when food was suddenly in short supply during the first war, the little gardens were quickly converted into urban farms, amounting to an ur-sustainable-living movement. Later, when the war ended and the embargoes were lifted and the bombed-out city was temporarily left to its own devices, displaced people set up camp in the gardens. Sheds became homes. Temporary visitation became habitation. But before anyone could get too comfortable, the next war emptied the gardens again and the spaces were left to grow wild, reverting to real nature for the first time in maybe a thousand years.
In the next postwar phase, the period of grand division, some gardens were sliced down the middle and became portals for smuggling among the overgrowth. Eventually, Wall came down, or rather Wall was torn down in bits by thousands of hands and machines; city was once again an enormous expanse of empty real estate; gardens were once again parceled and converted into weekend leisure destinations; and the forebears of urbanites like Anja and Louis started to show up. One by one each tiny garden and all its historical baggage became a sliver of private vacation property. The whole thing, meaning the whole city, was going in circles, history looping and tangling itself like hairs clogging a drain.
By the time Anja arrived in the city, when rents everywhere inside the S-Ring were at an all-time high, the central Schrebergarten had all been renovated and taken over, not overdeveloped like most city blocks but rather their miniature charm canonized into tiny overpriced rentals for urban getaway “experiences.” Only a few of the far-flung gardens beyond the periphery were still neglected and unregulated. Anja had discovered hers on a long weekend walk due south. Far from any train station, she came upon the fenced-in cluster of twelve little houses separated by scraggly hedges, which all together occupied only two city blocks. Most of them were squatted, but three were empty, and one of those had a decent roof. After coming back a few times and sniffing around, she’d found the woman who seemed to be improvising administration and paid her in cash for six months upfront.
After the six months were up, by which time Louis had moved into the garden with her, they couldn’t decide what to do. They agreed that the house was unlivable for much longer, the roof becoming less decent by the day, but finding and paying for a real apartment seemed impossible. Anja was making ridiculously little money at the time, still technically a RANDI intern, and she neither wanted to tap into her trust fund to contribute half the rent for a new apartment nor allow Louis to pay for the majority himself. Louis didn’t care if he had to pay (he could easily cover the rent for a new place with his ballooning Basquiatt salary), he just wanted to get out of the wet, crumbling, doomed garden house. And yet Anja was adamant that letting him pay would create an unhealthy dependency. They couldn’t agree on how to move forward; they were teetering on the edge of a breakup.
Out of nowhere, the six-page formal invitation letter to join the new socio-environmental living experiment had arrived at their post office box. It was written in complex bureaucratic German, which Louis had tried to plug into Google Translate before Anja got home, which caused him to panic, thinking it was a notice saying they were about to be evicted. Scanning the first page, Anja immediately understood who was responsible.
(Howard was well aware of the garden house’s ramshackle condition, having slept there a few times himself in the pre-Louis days. Its shabbiness appealed to him, as it offered tangible proof that he was having sex with a twenty-six-year-old. Being with her on the floor mattress made him feel open-minded.)
The letter was an ostentatious display of magnanimity, whose scale alone—the number of social and professional levers Howard must have had to push and pull to accomplish the feat—practically billboarded his history with Anja, while boasting the extent of his influence. She understood the submessage easily. Howard was a mature adult who did not hold grudges. He had not only bestowed on her a free place to live, loaded with cultural and ethical capital, but a place for both of them to live: Anja plus Louis, the guy who had replaced him. Had she expected petty jealousy or vindictiveness?
She’d hesitated to take the offer, but Louis was firm. The eco-village was too good to pass up, no matter how it had come about. Jealousy was not an issue for him, which, overall, she decided she was grateful for.
LOUIS HAD NEVER BEEN GOOD ON THE PHONE. HE WAS IMPERSONAL and distracted, always as though he were speaking from a room where he didn’t want anyone to overhear him. It was typically mannish and not the worst thing. The only reason it still bothered Anja was because it reminded her obliquely of her parents’ inability to telecommunicate. Weeks without checking in, unreachable in a jumble of time zones, and then suddenly a slew of intrusive voice messages: Are you ok??? Answer us??? And then, just as quickly, going dark again.
After leaving Howard’s, she decided to text instead of call Louis, waiting to have the conversation later when he was his full embodied self. But after she texted him with a short update her phone rang straightaway. She was just getting balanced on her bike and had to put the kickstand down again, then remembered to unplug the headphones when she heard his voice so close in her ears.
“This is the best!” He sounded like he was smiling into the phone. “They finally recognize you!”
She frowned. “It’s not like I’ve just been waiting around to be recognized.”
“Don’t be so modest.”
“I’m not being modest. I just don’t feel like I’m in a position yet to—”
“You were going to get here eventually. It just came sooner than expected.”
“But I didn’t expect. Being a consultant is not what I was ever going for.”
“You have to own it! It’s your destiny,” he said, laughing. “We’ll be a family of consultants.”
“I wanted to keep doing research.”
“You can keep doing research.”
“I don’t know. This is real consulting. You know what I mean. I’m not an artist like you. I’ll have to do efficiency studies and audits and all the rest.”
“Every job has red tape. You know I spend half my time in my inbox. But in the rest of your time you’ll be able to do what you want. You can look at what needs to be better and just make it better. How many consultants does RANDI have right now? Only twenty or so? This is huge!”
As he went on encouraging, his enthusiasm seemed to have less and less to do with her. She felt embarrassed by it. She derailed the compliments and asked about his return to work. He promised to bring home one of the bouquets he’d been gifted. His inbox was legendarily full, the backlog seemingly impenetrable; he’d set the interns on it like a pack of dogs.
“Prinz says hi, by the way.” So Prinz was with him. This wasn’t unusual, on the surface; Prinz was always lingering around.
“What
