Nell Zink - The Wallcreeper

“Maybe you need scientist outfits, like functional microfiber outerwear.”

“God, Tiff,” he said. “You are so ignorant.”

“I was kidding,” I said.

“Yeah, right. So at the conference I keep asking these bright, intelligent questions, like I think an inquisitive amateur is what the world needs now. And they answer me with patience and fortitude like I’m a fucking four-year-old. Believe me, my suits are not the problem.”

“But you’re an activist running a media campaign. They know that.”

“I know I’m a self-styled activist promoting a slogan. You don’t have to remind me.” He looked down at his hands as if checking for dirt.

He was silent for three minutes, as long as the minutes of silence that pepper the conversations in Women in Love by D.H. Lawrence, and finally said: “The laws are all in place. The people are sovereign, telling the politicians what to do, which is to maximize economic growth without losing any copyrightable DNA. The politicians are doing their job. So it’s the investors you need to lobby, not the bureaucrats who are trying like hell to slow development down. And these are the guys who can sense that my experience is in inflatable stents. They can tell I’m on this delusion-of-grandeur mission to teach and inform them why they haven’t saved the rivers yet. To them, I’m the ultimate smartass, like some asshole from McKinsey. They hate me. The only thing they think laymen are good for is to supply emotional arguments that might make somebody put up with nature. But they know it won’t work. Because if you have a plant you don’t like the looks of on your lawn, or a bug that looks weird, you’re going to kill it, unless you’re a total sap. So all the nature lovers get this training and these jobs and make out like they’re master technicians of the ecosphere, but they’re just saps. Because nobody knows how the ecosphere works. It just wants to be left alone. Life is what happens when you leave it alone. It’s circular! But nobody wants to leave it alone. They want to love it. Love of nature is a contradiction in terms. It’s the thing everybody says nobody has enough of, and it’s this totally nonexistent personality trait. The myth of biophilia. Loving living things at your own expense, being happy that they’re out there somewhere, living their lives, where you never see them. Give me a break. What a fucking joke.”

“Like in the ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner,’” I said.

“What’s that got to do with anything? You never listen to me.”

“I mean about loving living things. It’s like when he says, O happy living things no tongue, their beauty might declare, and the albatross falls off his neck into the sea.”

“Albatross on his neck? Why doesn’t it fly away?”

“It’s dead. He shot it with a crossbow. That’s why the ship was under a curse. They tied it around his neck.”

“How did they tie it on? With the wingtips in front, like a cape?”

“They tied it on a string, I’m pretty sure. I know it’s a huge bird, like a turkey, but I mean, this is the British navy. They had punishments like keelhauling and confinement to the bowsprit. The albatross is nothing.”

“The albatross was dead.”

“But the water snakes were alive! He looks over the side and sees the slimy things that crawl with legs upon the slimy sea, and he realizes there’s nothing better in the world, and he says, O happy living things no tongue, their beauty might declare. Because the water snakes were alive, and he was alone on a ship full of dead people.”

Stephen paused and said, “The key word is slimy. If they hadn’t been slimy, they would have been lunch. I mean it. Disgust is a prerequisite for love.”

I was hurt. “Yeah, like you look at birds and think, words cannot express the vertiginous, retching horror.”

“I wouldn’t put a bird in my mouth.”

I remembered the long pointy bill Rudi was constantly cleaning bug bits off and his long toes like spider legs and said, “Me neither.”

Stephen added, “If people spent more time being disgusted, the world would be a better place. People might revolt. Like vomit.”

I began to speak, but let it pass.

“I give you your space, right?” His voice was tired. “I’m not one of those guys who comes in the bathroom when you’re taking a shit. I don’t want to know! And with the birds, I’m always giving them their space. I let them do their thing. They might as well be plush toys to me. I don’t even know how they breathe. Who cares what they want out of life? Slimy shit to eat, probably. So I’m minding my own business and letting them mind theirs, and everybody’s happy. And I’m going around thinking I’m the ultimate bird-lover, but then when I talk to real activists, I feel like this.”

He held up his hand as though giving me the finger, but the only finger raised was his pinkie.

“To them,” he continued, “every bird is unique, with different needs, incredibly complex, and nature is gone and never coming back. They’re just fighting to get more wells in the game park. They want all the animals to have some water rights and maybe live past tomorrow in subsidized housing. They don’t give a shit about game-changers like let’s bomb the Rhine back into the stone age, because you can’t predict what the results will be. They’re like, let’s use this public policy instrument to expand this puddle over here and attract some waders. And I realize the point of running a media campaign is A, to delude like-minded people into thinking there are other like-minded people and B, to make them think things are way better than they are. Like, people of Europe, decide your future! Make your choice, whether you want to have wild rivers! But there’s no democracy and no wild rivers. Whether or not everything gets fucked up beyond all recognition is going to be decided by the same people who decide everything else. Rich companies. And they can’t put their money to work without fucking shit up. When they try, like by investing in something nonexistent like credit default swaps instead of something tangible like renewable energy, we rag on them even harder. When the Taliban blew up the giant buddhas, the mistake they made was saying they did it as a matter of principle and not as an investment. Principles are inherently dead. They’re based on past experience. If you say you have principles, you’ve just admitted you have no hope of ever getting rich.”

As for Birke, he had gotten as far as Banja Luka, the bar in Kreuzberg where he was supposed to meet her. The weather was cold, but the outside tables were open for smokers. There he saw her with another man, and he became very, very angry. In his rage, he realized he had never really been attracted to Birke. What fascinated him was the vulnerability of European rivers.

I asked who the guy was.

“That guy you’re so into. The harmless guy.”

“No way,” I said.

“Yeah, what a weasel. But you know Birke. Anything for the cause.”

People talk a lot about midlife crisis, the momentary stress that arises when you finally slack off. The sublime flash of greenish light as the curtain of the sanctuary rips, when poets start reviewing books and programmers take jobs in quality control.

It has nothing on unrequited love. Stephen stopped sleeping. He spent his nights staring at the TV with the sound off. He took Provigil so he could go to work. He looked weak and ashen as a ghost. On my knees by the couch, I begged him to take a few weeks off.

He quit his job. He abandoned the stent and the stock options as if he had never heard of money.

I tried to take it philosophically. I had enough cute clothes to last ten years, if I washed them carefully in the soft water they have in Berlin.