Читать книгу Oval - Elvia Wilk - Страница 13

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MOST MORNINGS SHE WOKE UP WITH A PAIN IN HER NECK. THE symmetrical tension was always there, clenching on either side of the vertebrae where muscle broadens to clasp neck to shoulder. She could feel the supportive tissue protesting against bone. The morning soreness had always been there, before Louis, before Howard, before anyone else had ever been in her bed. She hadn’t properly evolved, something was missing in her spine’s supply chain upholding her skull. She wasn’t accurately constructed. It was a fact.

Usually after waking up she did a special set of stretches on the yoga mat permanently unrolled at the foot of the bed, while Louis was still asleep.

That morning she woke to find him already on the mat himself, doing some kind of bastardized yogic movement. She dangled her head over the bed, tilting it sideways to watch him as he leaned forward and tried to maneuver his elbows into the triangle of his groin.

“When I was little, my sister used to tell me that if I could lick my own elbow I’d turn into a boy,” she said to him. He flinched and glanced up, surprised for some reason to see her.

“Did you ever get there?”

“Nope.”

“Maybe all that trying is why your neck always hurts.”

Sometimes he massaged her neck, which helped in an emotional more than a physical way. She thought of asking, since she was feeling particularly out of sorts, but he was busy on the floor forcing his forearms further into his crotch.

In the bathroom she switched on the radio above the toilet before unscrewing the shower nozzle to give permission for that morning enemy, gravity, to slowly empty the bladder of collected rainwater in a shower-like drizzle. An upbeat German voice spoke from the radio. Reassuring weather words. Mostly sunny all day, calm, sun showers in the afternoon. Wholly untrustworthy and untethered from reality. She couldn’t remember when the discrepancy had expanded from acceptable error to flagrant contradiction. In Dam’s mind, the inaccuracy of all official weather reports was not an accident, but a surefire conspiracy on a massive scale. Whose conspiracy, he was not so sure. Sometimes the news stations, sometimes the internet service providers, sometimes the city government. Anja found it difficult to muster the paranoia to get behind any of his rotating hypotheses, but she also had a hard time coming up with another, less sinister explanation. Dam wasn’t the only one speculating; there were plenty of others staying up late on Reddit swapping theories. There was something pitiful about hanging life’s meaning on the borrowed scaffolding of the conspiracy plot, but Dam did give it a certain poetics. She remembered his blast from the night before. friendly skies, calm waters / immense gratitude / 30º

She tuned the radio to NPR. This was the second element of the morning ritual after her stretching. Louis said the English-speaking voices reminded him of morning car rides to school, harkening nostalgically back to a swiftly disappearing kind of neolib Americana. The sound of NPR was a message in a bottle from the homeland, written by someone who would only have had to pay attention to the content of the message to know the medium of its transmission was no longer valid. And yet the voices still carried on in genial two-minute news segments, even now, even here in Europe, reassuring generations of expats that the hegemony of the English language would endure and that at least All Things would still be Considered, whether those things were true or not. There’s nothing inherently immoral about nostalgia, Louis had said in defense of his radio.

The water was lukewarm and didn’t smell quite right. Anja cut the shower short and enacted element three of the routine: tracing an emoticon with her finger in the shower mist on the mirror. She drew a face with a question mark for a mouth :-? When Louis’s shower fogged up the glass again, the face would reappear, and this way he would know her mood of the day, even if she’d already left the house by the time he woke up. She toweled off carefully and left the radio on for Louis, noting that the seeming remoteness of the American voices was compounded by the bad reception in the bathroom.

Thursday. It was only his fourth day home, and already they’d rope-led each other back into mornings as usual. Howard and Laura may have reassured her—Laura more than once—but Anja was still unsure that normalcy was the best policy in the wake of tragedy, vexing herself with the worry that she was repressing Louis by not talking about it. It wasn’t like he’d said so—but he was undeniably different now, whether he admitted it or not. His body was a different body: a body without any parents. There must have been a physical trace, a scoop missing out of him somewhere, but she couldn’t identify where it was.

Scooped out or not, the Louis she knew was aware of how to act in any situation, and this was not the way to act like a grieving man in touch with his feelings, who was supposed to be able to talk about those feelings. More than anyone she had ever met, Louis understood the patterns of behavior that kept consensus social reality running comfortably—he knew the rules so innately that he could mess with them as he saw fit, but he never broke the rules by accident. He knew what he was doing. He must have known that acting sad after the death of a parent was the way to act. He must have known that acting fine was not normal and that, even if he really did feel fine, he should give some indication of awareness that this did not match the expectation; he should act just a little bit sad. He was the one who was supposed to take the lead on these things, and without any real guidance from his side, she had no clue how to act, how to complete the pattern that he was supposed to lay out.

One possibility was that Anja was dead wrong about the social expectation here, and that acting fine was actually the right and normal thing to do. In that case, Louis was simply parroting being a man in denial. And if he was actually setting the pace, she should follow suit. What bothered her about this possibility was that a man parroting denial was indistinguishable from a man in denial. Even if he was faking denial, he was also in it.

The other possibility, which was much more disconcerting, was that Louis had really broken the script, that grief had plunged him so far underwater that he had lost the ability or the desire to adhere to the rules. In a circular way, she thought, this possibility offered the strongest evidence that he was in an unprecedented amount of pain.

She moved into the kitchen to start preparing smoothies, the final event in the morning series, and as she took out the blender, it occurred to her that her mental articulation of the morning steps was something new. She had never exactly conceived of the mornings as a routine; she was doing so now only because the routine had gained symbolic importance. She had become aware of the norm because she was on the lookout for any minor deviation. So concerned was she with the After resembling the Before, she was seeking a barometer for measurement.

This meant she was surely blowing the deviations out of proportion. That Louis had been awake before her that morning couldn’t really be significant. There must have been hundreds of mornings that also didn’t conform to the schedule. He must have woken up earlier than she had any number of times. But in that moment, smoothie machine grinding away at chunks of fruit flesh, she could not remember a single one.

She was finishing her smoothie when Louis entered the kitchen. He made a twisty expression with his mouth that was meant to resemble the face in the shower mist. He didn’t want the rest of the green material in the blender, he said, he wanted an English muffin. The spirulina will go bad if you don’t drink it, she was about to say, but caught herself and opened the toaster. At all costs, she would not let her obsessive thoughts out; she would not pressure him to drink a bad-tasting smoothie. He could never know that she was scrutinizing him. She must not take his coolness as a dare, because she had no empirical proof that he was daring her at all—because she had no empirical proof that he was in pain and hiding it. Pretending to be fine and being fine looked the same from the outside, and the outside was all she had. She must not admit she desired to see him in pain, for that would suggest that she desired for him to be in pain. Either desire was perverse. She had to focus on loving him, very normally.

A flash of pink appeared below her on the path as she turned at one of its many joints. There was no reason, as far as she could guess, for the path to curve around so much according to variations in the terrain, given that every centimeter of the mountain was designed and therefore could have been designed for a straight path from top to bottom. No reason but propping up the silly pretense of naturalness. When the path straightened out again, she saw Matilda, one of the neighbors, who was wearing a hot pink cardigan. Encountering Matilda was a surprise. It had been at least two weeks since she’d crossed paths with anyone ascending or descending the mountain.

“Hey,” Matilda called out, huffing slightly as she climbed toward Anja. In one arm she was holding a small, fat dog with yellow fur. Its tongue was poking out of its mouth, which was rimmed with a light froth of drool. “He gets tired on the hike up,” Matilda said as she walked closer, patting the dog. “I always have to carry him part of the way.”

“I feel the same,” said Anja. “I wish someone would carry me.”

Matilda stopped half a meter away, hoisting the dog so his nose was near her ear. “How are things? We haven’t seen you in ages.”

By we, Matilda meant herself and her husband, whose name Anja couldn’t remember. They were the Danish couple, in their forties probably, both very handsome. Stately, even.

“Oh, all good here. Minus, you know. A few house things.” She gestured upward.

Matilda rolled her eyes and they both laughed. “Well, we signed up for it, didn’t we?”

“We did.”

They would not talk about the specifics, that was clear. The neighbors were all private about their situations; there was no sense of camaraderie. Maybe she and Louis had just cut themselves out of the group, but she didn’t think so. Everyone had moved in at different times and had been briefed separately. “I’m glad everyone is trying to maintain the delusion that this is high-status,” Louis had said. “Campfires and barbecues would ruin the game.”

“We aren’t allowed to have any open-air fires here anyway,” Anja had pointed out.

Matilda and her husband lived in the house closest to Anja and Louis, maybe a hundred meters downhill. They couldn’t see each other’s houses from their own lots, due to the placement of the foliage, and it was easy for Anja to forget that anyone else might be within earshot at a given moment. Isolation by design.

“It’s partially our fault we haven’t seen you lately,” Matilda said. “We’ve been back and forth to Copenhagen a lot.”

“For work?”

“Yes, and family. Our daughter. We still have our place there.” She cleared her throat.

Primary residence was supposed to be the Berg, but of course nobody was going to chase them down and insist they stay there all the time. A lot of the others probably still had apartments elsewhere, places they could retreat to when tired of lukewarm showers.

“And you?” Matilda smiled. “Still working in biology?”

Anja nodded and said it was going very well, thanks. She wasn’t grateful for the reminder. She thought, with guilt, of Michel, who had been texting her with some regularity. This was the longest she’d gone in ages without seeing him. She’d taken his reliable Monday-through-Friday presence for granted. It made sense to talk to him about what was happening to them now, to him more than anyone else, actually, but she couldn’t bring herself to call him just yet. She wasn’t sure why. It also made sense to ask Matilda whether her garbage disposal system had ever worked, which she wouldn’t do either.

Matilda asked about Louis, and it took all of Anja’s powers of self-presentation to keep a placid face. She didn’t know Matilda well. She couldn’t just go around telling everyone.

“He’s fine,” she said. “Busy, like always.”

The conversation was boring and they were both glancing behind each other, signaling that it was time to move on.

“You should come over and see us one of these days,” said Matilda. “We’d love to make you dinner.”

“I’ll talk to Louis about what day would be best.” They both knew she wouldn’t.

Matilda took a step up the path and Anja took a step down the path and they said how nice it was to see each other. When they had reversed altitude, Anja now looking up to make eye contact and Matilda looking down, Matilda said, “Also, if you wouldn’t mind not mentioning Cheeto to anyone.” She lifted the dog again and let him wet the side of her face with his little snout. “He doesn’t normally stay with us. It’s just, you know.”

“Of course not.”

At night she had very little to report. The day had been spent rereading her contract and watching The Bachelor with Laura.

“Laura’s been watching too much TV” was her only conclusion. “She needs a job.”

“What’s wrong with watching TV?” Louis asked. “Does she actually need a job?”

It was around midnight, and it was predictably hot inside. He’d come home late, they’d had sex, he’d showered. She watched while he flicked water off his sides, air-drying. His outline was perfect.

“Yeah, she needs a job. But she’s treating TV like her job. She’s super deep in all these forums. Like she’s studying up for something. She was nonstop with the trivia today, and she was really, overly upset when her choice contestant got kicked off.”

“I didn’t know The Bachelor had contestants. I thought it was a dating show, not a game show.”

“Technically they aren’t called contestants.”

“Do they win money?”

“No, they just win a husband. But then they get all sorts of product sponsorships and talk-show-hosting deals, so indirectly, yes, they win money.”

“It’s always seemed off to me that Laura watches that shit. Didn’t she used to be some kind of anarchist?”

“Yeah, she used to be full-on black bloc.”

“Sound like the biggest cliché of disillusionment.”

“No, not exactly. She’s really anthropological about it. She calls it critical visual engagement.”

“Or maybe she just loves watching TV. I’d be more on board with it if she didn’t try to frame it as something intellectual.”

“You should be grateful Laura makes me watch so much TV, otherwise I wouldn’t understand any of your cultural references.”

“But I never watch TV.”

“You don’t have to, you grew up in the States. I’m sure you watched TV when you were a kid.”

“Never. Pat wouldn’t let me.”

Interesting. This was a new fact for the pile.

Louis called his mother by her first name, that was a known fact. Anja had learned such facts about Louis incidentally, through osmosis. Unlike most couples, they had never done the background check when they first got together, that protracted period of revealing narratives of self, sharing biographical data and the resulting conclusions about their psychological makeup. From earlier relationships, even from her term with Howard, she had anticipated and even looked forward to this process, and she was disoriented when Louis showed little interest in learning details about her early life and evolution, mistaking it for a lack of interest about her in general.

But it was obvious that their conversations were infinitely more entertaining and enlightening than the predetermined kind from the relationship handbook; they were learning from each other and rewriting those stale narratives about who they were instead of reinforcing them. Generating new content, that was what they were doing. Did it matter what had actually “happened” to Louis before her? The web of references and jokes and ideas evolving in the present was more real than that cause-and-effect type of historical self-interpretation. They had more interesting things to talk about. They laughed all the time.

For two years they had sidled sideways together, allowing the steps of monogamy (exclusivity, going to parties as a unit, introducing their friends to each other, moving in) to arrive without fanfare. These were crab steps into logical territory rather than increments of upward movement, the kind Anja had heard many times referred to by women as some sort of accomplishment. And the steps were rarely discussed as if they were momentous decisions. Louis was capable of making plans, but he never made promises. He didn’t need to.

And yet—she did not try to resist the urge to piece together a basic biographical scaffolding for her boyfriend. She carefully gleaned facts that he tossed off incidentally, crusts from other stories. She compiled the facts carefully. It was important that she knew him better than anyone else.

Louis’s father had been a mechanical engineer who worked in a blue-and-gray office building across the highway from the diesel engine plant in Columbus, Indiana. Also the Sunday organist at First Christian Church, his father had contracted heart disease at some point when Louis was young (est. 10 y/o), and suffered a pulmonary embolism during choir rehearsal, dead right there on the stool.

Pulmonary embolism was the only description she ever received of the dad, not even a name, just pulmonary embolism, the face a round blot of coagulated fat and blood, arms dangling loosely at his sides, or maybe his lifeless wrists hitting the keys with a clang. All very morbid.

Mom, having been alive until recently, naturally had a name. Pat’s story began where the other parent’s left off. After three months deployed and eight months of rehabilitation, Pat arrived home from her tour of Iraq only shortly before the pulmonary embolism happened. She was still adjusting to her new legs when she was stranded alone with Louis—becoming a single mom into perpetuity. But she had also become bionic, superhuman: those remarkable mechanical limbs, which Louis had imagined would look like sausage-logs before he saw them, impressed him deeply. Pat took the loss of her legs, much like the loss of her husband, in stride (there was some evidence of hardness or apathy running in the family; Anja took note).

Through his teenage years Louis revered Pat and was desperate to impress her. He shadowed her in all her good-person activities. She worked for the veterans’ advocacy group, the city architectural board, the public library, the church cleanup crew. At some point she went from cursory Sunday hits of Episcopalia to mainlining the stuff four days a week.

That was how Louis ended up at Saturday School and Sunday School and After-school Choir and Fellowship Luncheon and Youth Raise Hands Camp and more than one Lock-In. He didn’t have to be prodded; church was a sanctioned place to play basketball and meet girls. He never once believed in God, but he did believe in those two things, and he believed in Pat. Pat had no interest in remarrying, from what Louis could tell, and carried on driving Louis to school and to basketball and to the movies in her fully automated, army-financed van, right up until he left for college. (That Louis hated to operate a vehicle himself became clear during that terrible road trip to Hamburg, when he veered off the autobahn.)

As soon as he made it to undergrad in New York, not the city but the state, Louis learned that having an army veteran for a parent did not carry the same moral heft it did in the Midwest. He learned to downplay his middlebrow upbringing, studying frantically to compensate—not his homework, which he could do with his eyes closed, but the highbrow references he had been so cruelly denied by his provincial origins (much as Anja acquired them now from him, second- or thirdhand). He was embarrassed by Pat for the first time in his life when she visited him at school, driving up in the brown van with veteran bumper stickers all over its rear end. She assumed he was embarrassed by her disability—though this was not at all the issue—and a period of distance ensued between them. She burrowed deeper into church.

During the two MFA years in California the shame of Indiana wore off. A lot of the friends he made in his program had emerged from similarly cultureless deserts, climbed the dunes of liberal arts, and surfaced at the top with the satisfaction of having overcome unfair circumstances. That shared climb from mediocrity was precisely what gave them the right to be artists—unlike all those jacked-up trust-fund sons and daughters of collectors and curators. Pat was welcomed back into his life as evidence of how far he had come.

In California, he started to produce artwork in earnest. He spent most of the second year on a single project, producing a series of tiny drone helicopters. The drones had wide-lens cameras, with which they could scout wide areas and zero in on telltale signs of poverty: dilapidated roofs, litter, distance from water source, proximity to dangerous waste. These factors were built into its image-recognition system. Based on what the drone found, it was hypothetically possible, Louis said, to determine the zones where development aid would be best spent. For his final thesis exhibition he showed wall-sized and remarkably high-resolution prints of an area the drone had captured from above and highlighted as a danger zone: the university campus. Crumbling buildings, piles of trash, and dangerous proximity to a chemical plant had identified the underfunded campus as a candidate for targeted aid.

His five-year contract with Basquiatt was already halfway over by now. They’d hired him onto the payroll straight out of his MFA, ticket to Berlin the week after graduation. He was the only one from his class to shoot straight to consultant. Many of his classmates would end up on that track, but they’d have to at least develop the pretense of having done something upon which to be consulted first.

(His Berlin period was pretty clear; Anja had lots of data on him from the past three years. Plenty of mutual friends to suck details from. There had been a few women before her, but only a few.)

These were the facts upon which she built her assumptions about what Louis’s return to Indiana for the funeral had been like, the story she told herself. Some information he volunteered—for instance, kidney failure. It’s a common cause of death for women over sixty, he’d said. She was over sixty? Fifty-nine.

So Pat hadn’t let him watch TV. The fact itself was information number one. But the detail also had secondary import: he was voluntarily bringing Pat into conversation now. He hadn’t mentioned her name since he’d gotten home.

“You haven’t mentioned Pat since you got home,” Anja said.

He nodded. “I know, it’s weird. I’ve barely thought about her. And I haven’t cried since the funeral.” He was fully dry from the shower now and was putting shorts on. She stared.

“You cried at the funeral?”

“Yeah, the way they’ve ripped up the church is fucking awful.”

“The church?”

“First Christian, where my dad used to play.”

Cross-check: yes.

“What’s happened to it?”

“They tore down the pulpit, which was this beautiful off-center wooden throne, because apparently it’s not hip for a preacher to stand still anymore, they’re supposed to walk around like Jesus’s salesmen. They installed a huge pull-down screen for movies and a stereo system for Christian rock. I guess nobody has the attention span to sit through a sermon that isn’t a multimedia experience anymore. What they don’t get is that this building is incompatible, it’s just not suited to become a megachurch.”

“It’s the one by Eero Saarinen, right?” Supplementary information, thank you, Google. Columbus, Anja knew, was a hotbed of modern architecture. A shining beacon of culture in the Midwest, its landscape was dotted with big names. Louis had returned to this topic many times before, rewriting its significance each time.

“No, Eliel, his dad. It was the first big architecture ever built in Columbus.”

“Aren’t there historical preservation laws?”

He sat on the side of the bed and pulled on his socks, which he usually slept wearing. “There’s a high-low twang to Columbus that’s really hard to explain. Architectural masterpieces are interspersed with strip malls and run-down garages and trailer parks. People don’t even notice the public library is an I. M. Pei, teenagers just know there are dark corners to make out in. Then there’s this huge ring of industrial buildings all around town, since the engine company paid for the fancy architecture but they never updated their own factories. So most people actually live and work in those shitty buildings, even though the town still looks nice to tourists.”

“The engine company paid for the architecture?” Scanning. No hit.

“It was a corporate philanthropy thing. One of the first corporate philanthropy things ever.”

She knew where this was going. This was going very far away from Pat, from emotional to intellectual content. And he’d accused Laura of masking her engagement with a pretense of academic interest. It took one to know one.

She went along, following the script. “What did the engine company get out of paying for the architecture?”

“That’s the thing about corporate philanthropy, it’s not obvious what you get out of it. You do it for a lot of reasons, like public image and employee morale. But also in a bigger sense, it’s one way big business convinces people that you don’t need the government to support public services. If corporations are benevolent and investing in plant-a-tree day and nice buildings then people won’t pressure government to do its job and interfere. Philanthropy is the cornerstone of neoliberalism, as they say.”

He walked back into the bathroom and came out again with his toothbrush in hand. “Wait, how long has The Bachelor even been running? I thought it came out twenty years ago.”

“Longer than that. It’s the longest-running reality show ever. Aside from maybe Big Brother.”

“Hard to believe,” Louis said, back in the bathroom, brushing his teeth.

She called out: “How does an engine company get into modern architecture, though? Seems like a bit of a niche interest.”

“There was a mastermind at work,” he garbled back. She listened for the spit, the drain.

“A mastermind, you say.” He emerged from the bathroom and perched on the side of the bed.

“Yes, a mastermind!” He pulled back to look at her. “J. Irwin Miller, the proto-ethical CEO of the future.”

She laughed. “Would you care to tell me the whole story?”

“A bedtime story. Let me think for a second.” He mimicked stroking his chin, obviously not needing to think about anything. He was born prepared. “Let’s begin in the 1940s.” She laughed again.

“It’s the middle of World War Two.”

“Okay.”

“J. Irwin Miller, a native of Columbus, takes over the Cummins Engine Company when his uncle dies.”

“Okay. Then what?”

“The company isn’t doing so well. But even though he doesn’t know anything about running a company, he turns it around really fast. He’s naturally a great manager and everyone loves him. He’s a humanitarian and a Christian and he’s developed this fetish for the working class while he was away in the Navy working alongside the masses. He’s all for workers’ rights. He actually helps his own workers unionize.”

“What’s the catch?”

“No catch.” Louis smiled, half-serious, as always. “He’s a good Christian. So eventually the company has grown so much that the size of the whole town has doubled. None of the schools or public buildings are big enough anymore, and the government is building all these shitty buildings really fast to try to fit people. So our hero, J. Irwin, decides to use company profits to pay for real architects to come design them instead.”

“He pays for the whole thing?”

“He pays the extra on top of the government budget that it costs to get a good architect instead of a prefab thing.”

“So he builds your church first.”

“The church is his own special project. It’s kind of a test run to convince the town that modernism is okay. The backwater Midwesterners don’t ‘get’ modernism until he shoves it down their throats via religion. He convinces the congregation to do it by making them feel involved in the design process. He asks them what they actually want in a church.”

“Participatory bottom-up spatial praxis!”

“Exactly.” Louis laughed. “So ahead of his time.”

“How do you know so much about this?”

“I wrote a paper in college.”

“What was the paper?

He cleared his throat and mimed pushing glasses up his nose.

“Well, I argued that Irwin invented the creative city concept, by building architecture to suck smart young people to the middle of nowhere to work for his engine company. He built up the town’s cultural capital and he got to hang out with famous architects. And all the while he created this elaborate tax dodge. He invented corporate philanthropy as an advertising scheme and a way of getting out of taxes. He made public, private, and personal interests align. The perfect trifecta.”

“What’s Cummins doing today?”

“Nothing really. Diesel’s not a thing anymore. And after Irwin died they stopped innovating. No money left to build new architecture or keep my church in shape.”

My church. An odd indication of ownership. Ownership arising through lack.

“Maybe they need a new Irwin,” she said.

“The world needs a new Irwin.”

“Maybe you’re the new Irwin.”

“Probably not.” He looked away, toward the window, the total darkness outside. “You know what I realized when I was home?”

“What?”

“I don’t have any reason to go back to Columbus again.”

They had come full circle, as she had assumed they would. She could let him spin his hands in the air, drawing loops around concepts, following his own train of thought while she drew new loops silently on her own. Eventually he would return to base camp and she’d be able to decipher why he’d gone where he’d gone. The route was new each time—that was why she went along with it—but the method of leaving in order to return was so predictable, and so inefficient.

For the first time, she felt acutely annoyed that Louis had to leave himself in order to return to himself. If he could articulate the world, he should also be able to directly articulate his own being. Otherwise, what was the point of all that traveling in circles?