Let him do his thing. Grief isn’t contagious. You don’t have any reason to be scared.”
Anja considered this for a whole minute. How odd. Fear, that’s what it was.
“Whatever else is going on, he loves you,” said Laura. “He’s a huge pain in the ass, but he obviously loves you.”
“Oh.” Anja smiled, in spite of herself. “I guess so. Thanks.”
She shook Dam by the arm and his eyes rolled partway open, looking up at her from her lap. “Dam. Are you going out tonight or what?”
He frowned. “Hell, no. I’m not going outside. Didn’t you notice how foggy it’s been today? There’s a weird smell in the air. I don’t trust it.” He found his phone in a pocket of his cargo pants. “I should probably send out a blast now.” He started typing without looking at the screen.
“How can you send a weather update without even going outside?”
He rolled his eyes. “Intuition. Rumors. People send me news from around the city all day. I just consolidate. Anyway,” he said, smiling, “I don’t feel like going out and I don’t want anyone partying without me. Might as well scare them with the forecast.” He glanced over at Laura, who was tipping her chair back against the wall. She’d undone the top button of her pants and was rubbing her full stomach. “Laurita, look at yourself. You’re acting just like Mom after she eats too much. Button your goddamn pants.”
heatwave dry / smell of decay / rec. stay inside w paranoid thoughts . . .
No sign of Louis when she heaved the door open at midnight. There were traces of others, though, some muddy footprints on the kitchen floor near the sink. Howard had apparently convinced somebody to trudge up the hill and pretend to fix things. Raw-ended wires were sticking out of the control panel drawer. They had only made a mess: the illusion of progress. She scuttled out of the kitchen, deciding to sleep or pretend to sleep until Louis got home.
She was used to him coming home late from the studio at Basquiatt. Nobody was forcing him to pull long hours, but if he wasn’t passionate enough to stay late, why did he even have the job? She wondered if she would be in the same boat now, a consultant without a real schedule. But she wasn’t him. He’d always been this way.
Basquiatt was not a large NGO, and it took on only one artist-consultant at a time—besides however many freelance, short-term creatives were needed on a project—so the one they picked needed to be a real “disruptor.” Louis was it.
His job was twofold: to generate press-garnering experiments on the edge of what could be called traditional corporate boundaries, and in the process to enhance the corporate culture and strengthen corporate values from within. He was not supposed to be tinkering with one specific issue in any specific area—say, urbanism in Lagos or sanctions against vaccines in the Philippines—he was not to make this place or that place a better place, but to make Basquiatt a better place and therefore to help Basquiatt make The World a better place. He showed the institution how to think better, how to critique its institutionality. He kept the institution hip and fresh just by being there. His creativity was both the means and the end.
Basquiatt retained its elite status via its closed and rigorous selection process for investors. Stock was not publicly offered: it was offered to targeted investors with track records of ethical practice, who submitted to several rounds of audits before being allowed to buy in. Every few years there was a scandal when a Basquiatt shareholder was exposed as a secret arms dealer or money launderer, but the purging of rotten apples was just part of the necessary routine to maintain the appearance of general purity. Every apple has a worm or two. Best to expose and expel them dramatically.
Anja found the new tablet under Louis’s pillow and slid her finger across the screen to unlock it. She swiped through the pages, games upon games, thinking it a healthy sign that Louis had left it behind in favor of other activities, and then remembering that he was out somewhere with Prinz. They had probably met up with some others and gone to a bar. She should have joined them, but she felt weak in the body. Louis’s lungs could withstand the secondhand smoke of social life better than hers could. She would get a sinus infection if she sat in a smoke-filled bar for more than a few hours. Berlin, the last place on Earth you could smoke indoors.
Automatically her finger opened the email app on the tablet. Seeing the entirety of Louis’s life splay open, she sat up, finger hovering, undecided. She felt around in herself for actual suspicion, for an urge to dig. He’d left the thing at home—unlocked—because he had nothing to hide. And what would be hiding in the machine? The single golden key to his emotional state? The password for feeling completely secure in their relationship?
If there was no secret, there was no reason not to scroll through the messages. They looked at each other’s screens all the time. That was what intimacy meant.
She limited herself to a casual perusal of subject lines. Plenty of internal Basquiatt emails. He had all the nonsensitive ones forwarded to his general inbox. It was pointless to artificially separate work and life like that.
Re: meeting weds.
PRESS RELEASE urgent :)
Condolences.
There were a few of those, from Basquiatt addresses and others. Sending hugs. b well.
There were plenty from Prinz, mostly without subjects, probably memes. There was one she very nearly opened from an address that looked like a law firm. Next steps: inheritance tax. This was something they had discussed very little. All she knew was that the assets were negligible.
An unopened message from that afternoon stopped her cold, finger hovering: 4 p.m. [email protected]. The address was commonplace in her inbox, but alien here. It sat among the other unread messages like a row of ripe cherries on a slot machine.
The subject line had its lips sealed. Feedback.
Her phone dinged and jolted her heart. Louis, on his way home. She exhaled, closed all apps, and nudged the tablet back under his pillow.
His pillow, impressed and indented by his head. His head on his pillow in their bed. The extra-wide bed you got to have if you were a couple. Anja knew they were just another banal pair nestled in their pocket of intimacy, convinced they were especially unique and worthy, when all around the world there were couples just like them, clutching each other smugly, identical in their uniqueness. Coupling was the most normative thing in the world. It was impossible to know whether you were coupling because it was available or because you really wanted it. Either way, it was a fundamentally unspecial thing to do.
And yet she had always suspected that they really were special, for reasons that had to do with Louis being special. Louis’s desire to do good for the world was constantly grappling with his desire for success at any cost—these threatened to merge constantly, but with her he couldn’t get away with masking the latter with the former: he couldn’t cloak his aspiration with moral goodness. Her job was to gently remind him of this, to disallow him from lying to himself. It was their love that held him to account, and this was important.
What did he do for her? Simple: he removed the pressure on her to perform. She was let off the hook. No performing her wealth, no performing outgoingness, no performing a grand vision for the world. These performances could be outsourced to him. She could spend her time under the bright lights of the basement lab, deep underground with the company of congealing and separating cellular matter, secure that he was performing well on her behalf, up above on land. If this arrangement happened to conform to traditional gender roles, so be it. Sometimes the stereotype was also the truth. (But is he a feminist? Laura had asked once, eyebrow arched. Anja had laughed. What did that even mean?)
She did not worship him, and she did not think he was perfect—he was missing crucial abilities, anybody could see that. Such as time management. Such as the ability to act on his own judgments by, say, openly disagreeing with people he didn’t agree with. But no one could be completely whole. Where he was underdeveloped she was overdeveloped, and vice versa, ergo they fit.
Those