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 can’t expect a person to suffer all the time. He has to compartmentalize if he’s going to survive a death.”
“Survive a death,” she repeated, remembering that Howard’s dad was gone, had died a long 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