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 couldn’t blame Eva’s bad advice when she and Louis hit a breaking point after only a few months 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