There, on that island, a scrap of land in the Baltic Sea measuring ten square kilometres, she meets a Dutch artist who spends his days collecting seeds. Armed with a pair of tweezers, he plucks the seeds out of strawberries, tomatoes, radishes, and dandelions until deep into the night. She keeps him company in a rocking chair on the veranda, shares his bottle of Jim Beam. Sleep is impossible, the days last forever, the island intimidates her in a way she finds so mystifying that she gives up on attempting to describe it before even trying.
She is interested in the artist’s doggedness, his extreme focus on those seeds. She knows nothing about seeds, trees, species. Like a monk, he sits bowed over a little bowl of berries picked earlier that day, placing each in turn under a magnifying glass. His body is lumpy, his hands large and pulpy, skin stuffed with mince, fingers like pale fat sausages on the verge of bursting out of their skins. She can’t stop looking at those fingers, the tweezers they’re holding, the precision work they are still somehow capable of doing.
When he isn’t working on his seeds, she can’t abide him. He talks too much, gets too close, imposes his opinions on her and on the rest of the group, but especially on her. He has, it seems, read her book. He has found much to deplore. The next time, he says, it would be better to write about something else.
One morning, he asks her to come along on one of his foraging outings. She doesn’t know why she agrees; she’d much rather wander about the island by herself. They get bogged down immediately in an argument about the film they’d watched the night before with a few of the others in the group—someone had brought a portable projector. She thought it was great, he thought it was kitsch. He says: you were fooled by the soundtrack. She says: I can’t believe you can’t see that the film’s sum is greater than its kitschy parts.
She’d spent the entire night thinking about it. Those aliens inside their gigantic eggs, spread out across the Earth. Not eggs—huge stones, rather, hovering just above the ground. Flintstones, prehistoric hammer stones, but smooth, as if they had been lying on some river bed for decades (centuries?) Silex. So majestic and calm, reaching up to the sky, she could have spent hours just gazing at those things.
There was nothing aggressive about the arrival of those aliens, that was something you knew from the start. The linguist who is sent to decipher their language knows it too. As military bases all over the world mobilize their entire arsenals in order to destroy the aliens, she discovers they have a language that’s fundamentally different from the human one: circular, lacking chronology. Learning their language, the linguist discovers, involves far more than simply decoding and translating. Learning that language turns her whole consciousness upside down, her sense of time becomes circular, so that the past, present, and future blend completely and thus cease altogether to exist. It turns out that this is why the aliens have come: to gift humans with this language, a new perspective on the world that may save them from extinction.
Ridiculous, says the artist, a complete misinterpretation of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.
She knows he’s about to explain the hypothesis to her. She knows he is going to teach her about linguistic determinism, which may sound attractive to writers and would-be intellectuals, but which she knows was already refuted back in the nineties by linguists like Chomsky. That film, he’s going to say, is totally unrealistic. The idea that a new language could scramble the workings of your brain might be a nice little thought experiment, but in the end it’s laughable nonsense. Or perhaps not even that laughable, if you think about it, since the whole idea behind it, that it is language that defines human thought, absolves one of one’s individual responsibility to . . .
Go away, she thinks, leave me alone, go bother someone else with your unrealistic. They walk on in silence, she a short distance behind him, the path is narrow, almost non-existent, she hasn’t been paying attention, doesn’t recognize the route, where are they?
The artist stops in front of a tall tree, puts his hand on the trunk. He says: this is a dawn redwood. Originally found only in the Shui-sha valley of Central China, but spread around the world by seed merchants in the 1960s. The only metasequoia left from the Tertiary period. A living fossil.
A living fossil?
He takes her hand and places it on the living fossil. The bark feels flaky, surprisingly delicate.
Just think, he says, this tree already existed sixty-five million years ago; at one time, entire forests of these trees blanketed the northern hemisphere.
She kisses him, or he kisses her. His hand between her legs, then inside her pants. Very slowly he slips his ugly finger inside her, she’s wetter than ever, how is that possible?
One afternoon she smacks him. Her open palm on his cheek, hard. It happens after the umpteenth time he’s said something condescending in that tone of voice, as if she’s given him no choice. She asks him if he hates women, or if he just happens to hate her. He stomps off, offended. An hour later, he barges into her room without knocking, with a cup of tea. She doesn’t want any tea. He sits down next to her, too close. Something suddenly flares up inside her, a hot current of air over an icy sea, and in a reflex, she slaps him.
It immediately shuts him up, he’s not just silent, but truly speechless, and so the whole sorry dance starts all over again, because when he’s like this, so whipped, she’s back to being able to tolerate him. She grows gentle again, and then she gets all turned on again, and then she needs to feel his hand between her legs and then his prick, so very different from her lover’s, shorter and thicker, or how to describe it—gnarled, she wants to say, uncouth, the bark of a deep-rooted tree, but of course there’s no way she can write that.
To him she says things like: do it, fuck me. She lies down with her back to him. She can’t bear looking at him. She sometimes thinks, what if I were a man, and he a woman; then I’d be a man who beats a woman, won’t look at her, hates her in fact, and gets turned on by it.
Of course the others are aware of it, this affair, especially one evening when he, tipsily and publicly, puts his arm around her. She feels the blood rush up to her head, ducks under his arm, walks a few hundred meters in the direction of the sea, pulls off her clothes and slips into the cool water. She wants to get back to her own life, which suddenly seems impossibly far away, a mirage rather than something with a concrete, tangible shape. Suddenly, she is absolutely convinced she’ll never get off the island. That her place on the mainland has been usurped by someone else, a woman who looks just like her, only without her faults, an unsullied woman who is just right, just right enough, a woman lying in her lover’s arms who doesn’t desire anything else. Without a trace of irony, she promises the sea and the stars in the sky and all the new dawn redwood seedlings in the world that she’ll become that woman, as long as she’s given the chance, the chance to leave the island, to get home, to repair everything with gold dust, the way the Japanese do, elevating the fracture lines to fine art.
*
They’re drinking white wine in the botanical garden and doing a crossword puzzle. We’re like a couple of old biddies, she says, except that maybe old biddies don’t toss down five glasses of wine sitting in the sun.
She butts her head into his armpit. As a matter of course, he puts his arm around her, his lovely healthy arm, skin smelling of muesli, grass, and laundry soap. A smattering of little moles on his upper arm.
On the island . . . she starts.
Enigma, he says, the word must be enigma.
They ride their bikes to the café with the oxblood red walls and there they drink more wine. They are very happy, and drunk. In this memory, the machine that dispenses salted almonds is still glossy red, and not, as in reality, black plastic. In this memory, their knees touch under the narrow table by the window. The chair she’s sitting on, the fine sand on the café’s wooden floor, the faded writing on the plate glass, her lover talking in his distinctive halting voice about his professor’s country house, complete with the free-range chickens that he evaluates as if they were the tyrants and chieftains of the conflict areas he writes about in his books, the beer foam on his upper lip, her finger moving instinctively to wipe it off—everything is real.
Couldn’t one write about this? she asks her lover. About just this, a mellow love, not circumscribed by hate or jealousy or envy? About the way it endures, two people continuing to live in harmony, and yet it’s still an adventure too?
Her lover considers it gravely.
No, he finally says, no reader would trust it. They would think it’s hiding something else, that the happiness is just a thin veneer, a phony facade. They’d be waiting, naturally, for the murder, or the suicide. Or, worse still, they’d think it’s all meant ironically. That the author isn’t writing about happiness, but that he’s commenting on happiness, so that its likelihood instead affirms its impossibility.
That night, in bed, they have wild, crazy sex, and afterward the woman has to throw up.
*
The artist invites her to the opening of his solo show at the gallery that represents him. And then to a group exhibition of ecological art. And then to the opening of a big art fair where his gallery has high hopes for his seed collection. She sees his name in the newspaper in an article about that fair’s up-and-coming artists, and later, in another paper, another article, this time with a picture. There he stands, with his seeds, his arms crossed like a bouncer outside a club, ready to use his fists if necessary. Quickly she shuts the paper and tosses the section into the recycling bin.
He emails her that he wants to see her. After three emails, he texts her asking if she’s seen his emails. He texts: I’ve left my girlfriend. He texts: I was at the Metropolitan Museum and saw the Aphrodite sculpture by Callimachus, she had your ass. He texts: just for a cup of coffee. He texts: is that too much to ask. He texts: bitch. He texts: sorry. He texts: it was a very difficult decision to break off the relationship but it’s better this way. He texts: she took it very hard. He texts: Jesus, is this it, then. He texts: are people just discardable items to you. He texts: hypocritical cunt. He texts: I do hope all’s well, I’m worried about you.
I’m afraid I kind of have a stalker, she tells M. They’re standing in M’s kitchen with three other people in her commune. M heats some milk in a saucepan, then sticks in a little vibrating appliance that’s supposed to make it foam.
She tells her the story, kind of. I went to bed with him once, she says, one time, I was drunk, it was an accident (she really is a hypocritical cunt).
I don’t care how many times, darling, says M. On no account should you text him back. This is someone who, when you stick out your finger, doesn’t just grab your entire hand, but drags you through the shit into a cesspool for good measure.
I’m afraid, the woman says, that he’ll do something crazy.
Just don’t write back, says M. She divides the whipped milk among two cups and then pours coffee over them. Here, coffee, and stop feeling guilty. As far as I’m concerned, people can have all the affairs they like.
It wasn’t an affair, she says. Went to bed with him once, wasted.
Sure, says M, fine, fine.
She is booked for an appearance one night in a provincial city close to the German border. She drops her bags in her room at one of those ubiquitous red-accented, beige-hued hotel chains, and gets changed. A vintage Cacharel shirt of the finest white cotton, with mother-of-pearl buttons and a round collar. A pair of tight-fitting jeans, her favorite metal-heeled boots. Hair in a bun, severely pulled back. Gobs of makeup, for her. She lets herself fall backward on the bed, pictures herself four hours later reentering the room, when she can finally take off her boots and can stop talking. Ok, she says out loud, time to go play author.
The hall is bigger than she expected, about a hundred people, perhaps a hundred and fifty even, and yet she spots him at once. He has a look on his face that says: this is a public space, I have the right to be here, I am an interested attendee. A chill spreads from her chest to her toes and to the tips of her fingers. She feels her heart pumping her cold blood around, her face is on fire, she hears how thin her voice sounds as she assures the organizer that she’s had a good trip, hears herself giving the answer as if it’s someone else, an outer shell that keeps functioning mechanically while on the inside she’s in the throes of a climate crisis. You should just consider it a test, a third body tells the two other bodies, exterior and interior, from somewhere above them both, a test of your professional composure.
When it’s time for questions, the man seated next to the artist gives a rambling discourse disguised as a question. She barely dares to look in his direction, keeps her eyes down as if she’s listening to this blather with great concentration.
Afterward she signs a few books. Out of the far corner of her eye, she sees him leaving the room. The organizer pours her a glass of red wine up to the brim, a rather sweet Merlot that reminds her of the supermarket plonk of her student days. After a few gulps she feels her body beginning to coalesce back into a more or less coherent whole. She tosses back her glass greedily, and says sure when her hostess asks if she’d like to join her and a few of her society colleagues and board members at the café around the corner.
He’s sitting at the far end of the bar. She wants to turn and run but she can’t, she is hemmed in by the society women, who are already taking their seats at the big round table reserved for the group. He turns his head, they stare at each other. It isn’t him, although for just a second it seems to her that it is him anyway, but with a seriously distorted face. The stranger smiles at her and makes a half-hearted gesture of raising his glass.
She quickly sits down among the women, there’s another glass of wine in front of her, the women talk and laugh loudly, they call her “child" and “ sweetie," and after another glass she feels like leaning on them—these tough women with their brightly colored glasses and professionally dyed hair, these women with their families, everyone has their cross to bear but they manage to bear it all, their husbands who can’t even boil an egg, their children who demand money well into their forties, their grandchildren with ADHD, bouncing from one school to another.
Here, among these women, everything is pleasantly purged of mystery. She remembers the writer who once said his goal was to write honestly about life as it really was. She’d thought it ludicrous, hopelessly naïve, and sentimental to boot. Whose life, then, for God’s sake, she’d wanted to ask him, whose life for God’s sake? But maybe, she thinks, maybe there is still something like life as it really exists, and it is to be found here, in this small town at the German border, in this café, around this table. Her unease from before has ebbed away. Suddenly it seems implausible that the artist was in the hall that evening. Maybe she can’t trust herself as much as she thinks. Maybe she has paranoid tendencies.
The hostess drives her back to the hotel. I wish, she says, that I’d been born of your generation. Then I’d have done everything different, everything.
