Nell Zink - The Wallcreeper

Meanwhile, Stephen and I were reaching new heights of brokeness. George had noticed that Stephen’s activities bore only a tenuous relation to Global Rivers Alliance and hired Birke, who was nearly done with school, to replace him. I put in for another grant from the Tiff Foundation (that’s what I called my own money from before I got married) to cover my clothing allowance. I wasn’t eager to spend money on Stephen.

He suggested I get a job. Or rather, he said, “You know, that school where your sister works is K-12. If your sister can teach fifth grade, you can manage at least kindergarten, can’t you?”

“Fie upon you,” I said. I had been experimenting with hopeless attempts to muddle through Sir Walter Scott, but mostly getting nowhere.

“Seriously, man,” he said, “I need cash to go back to Albania for the international waterbird census. I mean, if Constance can go-go dance, can’t you do something slightly less humiliating? Like working the door somewhere? I know so many people who would give you a job.”

I put on a turtleneck with little owls on it, a blue cashmere sweater, and green gabardine slacks, clamped my hair into a bun, and went down to interview at SO36. I didn’t mention Stephen and said nothing about being Constance’s sister. They gave me a job anyway. I had returned to the world of work.

SO36 had a politically correct door policy. Even the drag shows were packed with minority guys who couldn’t get past the bouncers anywhere else. So it wasn’t long, maybe a month, before I saw a familiar face in the ticket window. It was Elvis, beaming with joy. He bounced up and down, he was so thrilled to see me. He said, “Tiff! Tiff! My love!” I said nothing. He plunked down five euros and I made change. “How are you? I think of you all the days. What you make now in Berlin? What you do later?” He extended his hand into my cage to be stamped.

I held his fingers and rolled the rubber stamp across the tendons of the back of his hand in slow motion, thinking, This is the man I had the best sex with of anyone in my entire life?

When my shift ended, I slunk out like a joker-slash-thief with my collar up and my hat pulled past my eyebrows. I woke Stephen to tell him I had quit my job. I distrusted my body for the first time ever.

Maybe my mind knows best! I thought. This unaccustomed thought shocked me. But I seriously considered it.

And I realized it was true. My body was swept away by the force of the thought like petals blowing off a rose. And there, at the center of the flesh, were the stamen and the pistil, sexual organs seeking not contact but exchange. Not to be pink and velvety-soft and oblivious, but to broadcast and receive spiky, irritating bits of information. The brain, wired to battle entropy with such resolve that anything repeated too often must become imperceptible or be violently rejected. Knowledge, an allergen. Boredom, the mind’s spring flood, the sole conceivable force for good, the sole means — for human awareness — of striving toward complexity. Diversity through flooding. Or something, because the allergy metaphor tended to make the spring flood be tears and snot, which couldn’t be right. I felt overwhelmed by a new mystic rationalism. I felt a great love for Stephen.

Stephen had a plan. Or rather, he had a desired outcome. The result of his efforts would be a Croatian conglomerate’s abandonment of a particularly sinister hydroelectric project in the Neretva Delta, and the plan was — was — he didn’t know.

“I could have told you that,” I said. “You can’t sabotage something that only exists on paper.”

His eyes lit up. “That’s it!” he said. “I have to go after something they’ve already built.”

After several days of reflecting, flat on his back in bed, he had decided on a target: Buško Jezero. He was in transports, overjoyed at his own ingenuity. He was going to build an absolutely huge bomb with manure and diesel fuel and blow up the dam, blocking the canal and disabling the hydroelectric plant so that the waters of Livanjsko Polje would fill the caves like they’re supposed to instead of powering techno bars in Dubrovnik.

“It’s sort of like what we did at the Steckby-Lödderitzer Tree Farm,” I conceded, “except we didn’t use a huge bomb. Somehow or other I think the public eye is going to look a little differently at any project involving a huge bomb.”

Stephen’s eyes glinted in a glassy way. He said, “I guess you’re right,” and rolled over.

He brought up children again. While slurping a rum and Coke in bed, he said dreamily, “I wish I had fathered a child by accident so now I could find out about it. Like, some cute fourteen-year-old would show up demanding to be told the meaning of life, and she’d be our daughter I didn’t know about. You have so many secrets, and my brain is like Swiss cheese, so why not?”

“It could happen,” I said. “Perhaps not with me, seeing as how I would have noticed if I had a kid when I was sixteen. It’s one of the advantages of being female. But maybe you have like six kids waiting to meet you in Philadelphia and three more in Tidewater, all lining up to collect child support. Maybe that’s why you were in such a hurry to leave the country.”

“Fat chance. When I met you, I was pure as the driven snow.”

“What do you mean?”

“I was a virgin.”

“Are you serious?”

“You didn’t know?”

“I didn’t know. I just thought you were lousy in bed.”

“And you married me anyway?”

“You were cute!”

He opened his eyes wide. “Do you have any idea how cute you were? I mean, everybody wanted you. You were the unapproachable princess.”

“That’s crazy.”

“Well, whatever else you were, you kept it quiet around the office. Everybody thought I’d won the lottery.”

I tried to think back and couldn’t. “You can’t judge a book by its cover,” I said.

“You can if it’s never been opened.”

“Don’t be crass.”

“I mean like in Four Quartets. The future is a faded song, a royal rose or a lavender spray, of wistful regret for those who are not yet here to regret, pressed between yellow leaves of a book that has never been opened. Like, you as a mom. That’s a book that’s never been opened. Most things never get opened and just depreciate down to nothing before you even know what they were. Which means life is a total write-down, as in pure profit, everything! Life has an infinite rate of return!”

He looked at me earnestly as if expecting me to know what he was talking about.

I let it pass, feeling I would understand in good time. “So you’ve had sex with me, Birke, Constance, and Omar’s wife. Am I missing anybody?”

“Hey, that’s a pretty good track record for a birdwatcher! I know guys with two thousand birds who’ve never gotten their pencil wet.”

“Yecch, Stephen. Where’d you pick up that kind of language?”

“That’s standard-issue geek-speak. Not really. But seriously, my grandfather got religion on his deathbed, and he made me swear I wouldn’t have premarital sex. And I didn’t, almost. Birke would have married me.”

“So, like, when you said Constance was the bomb,” I said, “you actually had no basis for comparison?”

Not long after, Stephen made another confession. We were perched on a barge on the Spree, enjoying a sunny day with a light fresh wind. We were drinking piña coladas and watching the coots sweep the water with bits of reed held in their bills the way they do, like little brownie scouts sweeping out a parish hall, inept and squeaking, and the DJ had put on Horace Andy (“Skylarking”).

“Do you remember way back when,” he began, “back in the day, when I saw Birke at Banja Luka with another guy and got all upset? And then I told you she hooked up with your boyfriend.”