The car lurched in late-afternoon traffic. Trout’s palms were stuck to the seat. The driver frowned into the mirror, talking into his earpiece; she couldn’t tell if he was unsure of her expression or displeased by his conversation. The highway was flanked by condo towers, then warehouses, then the grey and black rectangles of business-traveller hotels. Beyond the shoulder, flashes of short stiff grass.
◆
At the airport she searched the screen for her flight, counting her breaths. Her suitcase listed on its broken wheel as she dragged it to her gate.
Step onto this walkway.
Into this line.
Through this sliding door.
Lift your arms.
Take off your shoes.
Take off your watch.
Relinquish your wallet and your passport to a series of strangers.
The airport was a mysterious city. The openness was an illusion, the terminal was full of unseen corridors, suitcases moving along interlocking plates through tunnels, then tumbling into vast plastic bins, transformed, when separated from their owners, into something potentially threatening. Towers, searchlights, painted lines. The implausible lift of the plane itself. The brightness and the glass and steel and gleaming plastic all seemed like empty reassurances, promises that she must be a fool to believe in. It made no sense to believe in them. She would have to believe in them. She counted her breaths.
Standing in the security line, Trout looked around her, wondering if anyone else was resisting an urge to make a make a sudden movement or scream or run. Like waiting for the subway and wanting to leap into the path of the train, not from wishing to die, not anything so final, more from a startled moment of perceiving her own obedience as arbitrary. Terror but also freedom. She hoped this journey might unlock her, wasn’t that the purpose of a journey?
◆
Trout was going to visit her friend, Strawberry, in Berlin, and considering leaving her husband, Tim, though she had not yet admitted this to anyone: the trip was partly a thought experiment, an opportunity to pretend she had already left. Tim didn’t know Strawberry well, and had met her only once, when she had shown up at their apartment in Toronto more or less unannounced ten years earlier and stayed for three weeks. He hadn’t spoken much in her presence, though Trout suspected he was privately peeved by Strawberry’s failure to notice the things other women admired. His self-effacement, his attention to the housework, his demonstrations of regard for Trout’s time and opinions. Whether or not a man gave equitable notice to a woman did not interest Strawberry. She talked mostly to Trout, mixed drinks that slopped from their glasses, spit over the railing of the back deck onto the grass, wiped her mouth on her sleeve. She referred to Tim as your husband with mock solemnity, as though a husband was a silly thing to have. After she left, Tim had pointed out the track marks along Strawberry’s left arm; Trout hadn’t even noticed. He asked that Strawberry not stay with them again, which was one of Trout’s first glimpses into a kind of lack in him. He told Trout she was naïve, but she thought that he was naïve in a different way, with his demands for appropriate boundaries, his limited sense of what was acceptable. He was right, of course. She was naïve. But she would rather be naïve than cruel.
◆
Trout and Strawberry had been born in the same week, in the same commune, into a world that smelled of mildew and dope, of compost and rubber boots, wet wool and sacks of weevilled flour, still used for bread, money being meagre. Trout’s mother had hemorrhaged and been driven to the nearest hospital down potholed country roads in the dawn. Trout’s first milk had come from Strawberry’s mother, who’d sworn the two babies held hands, reaching across her heavily veined breasts. Trout didn’t believe that anymore. So much of their life in that place had relied on signs that sometimes the signs had to be fabricated, to shore up their strenuous dedication. Trout’s mother had been pronounced malnourished and sent back home, where she had eaten tofu and drank the last of the goat’s milk, sitting hip to hip with Strawberry’s mother in the old loveseat on the farmhouse porch, the two babies dressed in threadbare sleepers, yellow paint daubed on their bulging foreheads to represent the opening of the third eye.
◆
When Trout was ten her mother had lifted her into one of the old cars and they’d driven away in the night. Trout remembered the fried eggs that her mother bought her when they stopped at a roadside motel, but she couldn’t remember if she’d known they were leaving for good. Her mother cleaned houses in Toronto, cut her hair, cut Trout’s, eventually got a job as a receptionist, wearing large blue glasses, her feet slung into chunky high-heeled shoes. She adopted an ironic flirtatiousness in her dealings with what Trout thought of as the hostile world, which made Trout feel that this new life was not quite safe, it was so at odds with who her mother had been. Barefoot, unsmiling. A person incapable of capitulation. Trout, reluctantly enrolled in the local school where she stood at recess with her hands wound through the chain-link fence, would let herself into their basement apartment in the afternoons and draw at the table until her mother came home. Her mother used to steal pens and paper from the office where she worked, lifting them out of her bag and passing them to Trout conspiratorially.
◆
Strawberry and her parents remained, stubborn in their voluntary poverty, or too stunted to imagine an elsewhere. She secretly wrote letters to Trout in Toronto and Trout wrote back, sending her letters to the post office in the town where they were collected by Strawberry’s mother, breaking a no-contact pronouncement out of love for her child and telling no one, not even Strawberry’s father. Strawberry’s letters were effusive, Trout’s restrained: she could not tell Strawberry she missed her even once. It would be like telling her mother how unhappy she was.
When Strawberry turned eighteen, she stole all the money from the tin on the farmhouse fridge, walked into town and bought a bus ticket to Pittsburgh, where she found her grandparents, who had not heard from their daughter in twenty years. She sent a letter to her parents saying she wouldn’t be returning, got a job as a waitress, saved money for an adventure that would kick-start the rest of her life, and flipped a coin between New York and Berlin. Her grandparents helped her get a passport, she found her people in a squat in Prenzlberg and became the lover of a well-known artist twenty years her senior who gave her heroin and paint. The artist overdosed, cementing his reputation, and her status in his life launched hers just enough for her to remain in view, find buyers, get clean eventually, give eccentric and sometimes brash interviews that hinted at a depth of childhood catastrophe beyond anything Trout felt either of them had actually experienced.
She tried to give Strawberry the benefit of the doubt: children hide things, though it seemed to her equally true that adults, reflecting on childhood, allow themselves to make a story that follows the rules of stories for and about children, with clear villains, clear central characters, a direct line between cause and effect, creating a framework that will explain their dissatisfactions. Strawberry was her own material. Her subject, officially, was fairy tales (a battered copy of the Brothers Grimm being one of the books the children in the farmhouse were allowed to read), her first success an installation of raw pig-gut looped with human hair: the female body, the umbilical cord. The gut grew iridescent, decayed slowly in a glass case with round openings through which the spectators could smell. This was followed by a series using dolls, with keys or branches for hair, casts of open mouths with knives for teeth, in one (Trout had leaned into the image Strawberry sent her, fascinated), a tiny boat poised on the doll’s jabbing tongue, which was made from a wooden ice cream spoon. The boat held a pinhead-sized child of blown glass, clinging to the prow. Strawberry then moved to paintings, always sending Trout the exhibition catalog afterwards. The girls in the paintings were not generic: Trout recognized Strawberry’s face, and her own. Girls in bloody slips, behind which indeterminate figures loomed. Odd dashes of white, like birds or ghosts above their heads. Though suspicious, Trout conceded to the force of the paintings. What could have been posturing had the potency of songs, of authorless stories. My mother she killed me, my father he ate me.
◆
In Berlin, Strawberry used a roster of names. Fictional girls: Matilda, Pippi, Madeleine, appearing as illuminated signatures in the corners of her paintings. Only Trout still called her Strawberry. Her work, grown a little old-fashioned, was still successful enough for her to support herself from it. She was upholstered in fabric, her body thin and plucked of all hair, except complicated knots and shaved patterns on her head. A tree of life, tattooed along her back, sent roots winding down her legs, branches disappearing into her hairline. The red birthmark over her left eye that had inspired her original name was accented by brown eye shadow. Trout sought out her photograph in art magazines or on websites, which accompanied the profiles that occasionally appeared. Strawberry didn’t smile in the photographs, as if she didn’t want to risk exposure, though she often appeared naked, her arms crossed over her breasts, her face expressionless as plaster.
◆
On the plane, Trout sat very straight, waiting for the first streaks of light to appear. The year they left, she’d fallen out of a tree and broken her leg, which sometimes twinged, especially when she travelled. John, the leader of the commune, older than most of the other members and at that point rewriting the Bible, was in a new phase in which doctors were Pharisees who did not understand Primal Love, and so he visualized healing over her leg while the bone set itself, knit together. She walked with an almost imperceptible limp.
◆
Trout’s husband was an actor, and he had that absorbent quality that genuinely talented actors have, always watching for what the other person wanted, adjusting himself to this want. This had been wonderful for a while, and so different from what she thought of as the fanaticism, the rigidity, that she and Strawberry were born into and had escaped. But now, lying awake beside Tim at night, she thought she had gone too far the other way, that his talent and his good nature obscured smugness, a lack of curiosity. He was not graspable. She had not grasped him. Perhaps she didn’t know how to demand anything; her life with her mother had not prepared her to make demands. Trout had been married for fifteen years. They had no children, though children had been at times talked about and she didn’t really think of herself as a childless person, more that she was still waiting for her life to begin, even as she knew, practically speaking, that it was half over.
She borrowed money from her half-brother, who was fourteen years younger and a real estate agent in Vancouver and paid their mother’s bills, and bought herself a ticket to Berlin, thinking that Strawberry, with all her cataclysms, knew, in a way Trout had refused to know, that life was not only casual or provisional, and that to believe that led to the kind of uncertain sorrow that Trout now found herself in.
A few years after Strawberry left, John had gone for a walk and been found two weeks later, both legs twisted under him at the bottom of a stony gully. Foxes and crows had eaten his eyes and tongue and part of one of his ears. Without him, the commune dwindled to only a few people. John had anchored them. He had claimed he’d had a vision in the desert as a young man, just after the Second World War, in which the life they shared came to him whole, in every detail. Trout thought that he’d been a mixture of conman and madman, promising a future that he almost believed in, enough to make other people believe, if they were sufficiently adrift. As a child, she had loved the singing and dancing, the penitential rituals and occasional feast days, cribbed from whatever tradition happened to take John’s fancy and made over to suit his rickety cosmology. She remembered her early life, even as she’d rejected it, as a happiness that nothing afterward had matched.
◆
Trout’s mother had early-onset dementia and was in an assisted living facility. Trout visited her every second day, biking from the theatre where she managed the box office, sitting with her mother as the light faded, helping her eat dinner. Her mother moved the food around her mouth, exploring it with her tongue, and needed to be reminded to swallow. Trout had suffered some pangs as she planned this escape to see Strawberry, but comforted herself with the thought that Naomi would probably not notice she was gone. Her mother had become a person outside of time, or at least outside chronological time.
◆
“Excuse me?”
A young man stood in front of her; she’d been looking down at her phone. She nearly ran into him. She’d waited in the arrivals area at Tegel Airport for nearly an hour, calling Strawberry over and over with no answer. She had an address but no directions, and her phone was dying. Her charger was somewhere in the depths of her suitcase. She couldn’t see any payphones. A patrolling security guard shrugged when asked for directions. She wanted to feel she was entering one of the great cities of the world, a place in which her life would become clear. But the airport was shabby, with gummy cracks in the concrete floor, and she was an exhausted middle-aged woman in danger of crying in public.
“Is it possible to help? You are lost?”
He was not German, she thought, and spoke English diffidently, as though she might reprove him. Perhaps she was unmistakably North American. Perhaps she’d been talking to herself. She looked around. The corridor was full of movement; she and the man were the only people standing still. He was young, in jeans and a pleated wool cardigan, his face obscured by a soft fall of brown hair and large silver-rimmed glasses. She imagined that if she pressed his cheek her thumb would leave a print, a small hollow.
“Is it possible to help?” he asked again.
She showed him the address, smiling apologetically. He peered at it, his hair hiding his eyes.
“Yes,” he said, pleased, “I know it. I know it.”
He handed the dying phone back. She didn’t know if she was supposed to say anything.
“I’ve never been here before,” she offered.
“This is near where I am going myself. I will take you there. Come.”
She protested. He kept smiling. She followed him outside. They stood side by side in the line for the bus. On the bus, he led her to the upper level at the back, directed her to sit by the window.
“Now you may see where we are going,” he said. It was raining. The highways around the airport gave way to the city itself, concrete ridges of office buildings, interludes of parks and public lawns, monuments. The streets became more crowded with people, more blotched with advertisements. Everywhere she looked she saw construction, orange cranes, cobblestones crowning piles of wet sand. The young man also looked out the window, his hands in his lap. He had no suitcase, only a small bag over his shoulder. She asked him where he was coming from. He was coming from Tartu, he said, in Estonia, where he had studied mathematics. He lived in Berlin now and wished to be a travel journalist. Once she had asked her single question he talked freely. He had gone home because his mother was unwell. She did not live in the city, he explained (Trout did not know that Tartu was a city), cities made his mother too anxious, and she had not visited him his entire time at university. He went home to her, where she lived in a small cabin in the woods, near the village where she had grown up. It was just the two of them, he said, his voice dropping as though this was a delicate matter, the two of them in the house in the woods. His father had been killed when his car went off the road before he himself was born, and Trout, who could not remember her father, caught the shame in this, laughter directed at the small boy by older boys, not old enough to want to be kind. He had never been to school before he left for Tartu, he said, and Trout was startled, thinking of herself, of woods, of tramping through the leaves. Maybe he was an angel. She had been taught to believe in angels. Maybe she’d met one at last. He had a lesson plan, he went on, which the school board sent, and which he completed on the computer. His heart was weak, he was frightened, his mother kept him home. The huge stone buildings of the University of Tartu were a shock to him. His life had not prepared him for anything larger than the clock tower in the town where they bought groceries. He stood with his hopeful little bag, dazzled by the lampposts, the faces of the other students. His first year, he said, smiling at the bus window, he almost never spoke. But now he wanted to go far, to see places and write about them. She didn’t ask how he intended to become a travel journalist or why he had chosen Berlin. She imagined him in a small, scrupulously clean single room with a hotplate, eating bread and jam, soup from a can, spooned methodically into his mouth as he tried to write.
She followed him off the bus, down into the U-Bahn. He walked directly in front of her, shielding her from the crowd.
“See,” he said, pointing to the map on the wall in the corridor, “it is simple from here. This line, and down. We will go together. I will walk you to the apartment of your friend.”
She demurred.
“I am not troubled. It is not trouble.”
It was louder on the train. He stopped talking, as if he had said all he needed her to know.
She wouldn’t let him take her suitcase up the stairs. She could see that he was hurt, as though she feared he might run off into the crowd. He walked more quickly and she thought he would vanish. But he was waiting at the top of the stairs, watching her struggle. She wanted to explain that she trusted him and then was aggravated that he would think she owed him trust. The whole episode was unnecessary. She could have found an info kiosk at the airport, she could have unpacked her charger and kept calling Strawberry, she didn’t know what had made her decide to follow him, she did not need to protect his feelings.
“Come now, come,” he said when she reached him, and patted her knuckles, whitened around the handle of her suitcase. It was a kindness, to touch her hand like that. She had been ungenerous. She would never see him again. About to thank him, she heard her name called.
“Oh fuck. Oh fuck me. I’m such an asshole. I thought it was PM. I was just going to get us food. I lost my phone somewhere yesterday.”
Strawberry kissed Trout elaborately on her forehead, cheeks, and the tip of her nose. Trout was caught off guard by how drawn she was, more than had been evident from the pixelated blur of Trout’s old laptop. Her neck was ropey, and spicy oils came off her skin. Her hair was dyed canary yellow, and she had a new vine tattoo starting behind her left ear and down across her shoulder, which was bare except for the strap of her purple dress. Her broad face was pallid, sunless, with slashes of pinkish bronze powder on her cheeks, her mouth painted almost white. She grinned, showing her crooked teeth, inflamed gums. Trout turned in Strawberry’s arms, looking for the boy, but he was gone.
She tried to describe him, waving her free hand, trailing Strawberry through the grocery store, her suitcase squeaking on the shiny tiles. Strawberry, not interested, produced string bags from her pockets (look at me, such a hausfrau), picked out fruit, dark bread.
“And meat! Meat! We’ll get everything. To honour the soy years.”
She pointed at marbled and swirled cold cuts, speaking in heavily accented German that made the man behind the counter switch to English, selected wedges of cheese, orange juice, cake, glass jars of milk and yogurt. She swung the bags in front of her as they reached the street.
“We’ll walk,” she said, “I want to show you where I live.”
There was green paint under her nails, blue on her collarbone. Trout knew she was working toward a solo show, which was three months away; Trout would be expected to see the paintings, was already preparing the mixture of praise and confusion that Strawberry seemed to require. She hoped she was up to it.
Four lanes of traffic sailed by, and Trout kept veering off the paved part of the sidewalk and toward the outer cobbles, the bells of speeding bikes trilling at her. Strawberry stopped walking and lit a cigarette.
“That’s my favourite bar, I’ll take you there tonight,” aiming her foot at a building with shuttered windows, lettering faded to pink on a white sign, a handwritten message on a wrinkled piece of paper covering the pebbled glass portal of the door.
“That says the bathrooms are only for customers. You’ll love it, it’s such a holdout, it’s got sawdust on the floor and it’s full of sweaty Germans who don’t speak English and don’t talk to me. I don’t know where these dirty old guys come from, this neighbourhood is totally spick-and-span now, but they still show up here, these guys, get pissed out of their minds. I used to think they were Nazis but the Nazis are dead with cute little grave markers, I can show you those too, these guys lived through the Soviets though, tough fuckers, real Berliners.”
Trout couldn’t tell what made the people walking past them unreal Berliners. Strawberry moved on, Trout struggled after her.
“The gentrification is insane, there was nothing like that when I came here, it’s sad this is the first time you’re seeing it. Look, just look! So clean, so nice-nice. I think it’s a plot to make all the cities in the world look like the same city, not even for tourists. This isn’t for tourists, these aren’t tourists, for people who live here so they can think they live anywhere. And everybody is so uptight! Tilting to the right like everywhere else, well not Berlin but maybe it’s just more subtle, having everything cleaned up is the thin end of the wedge.”
Trout, her spirits rising at the unfamiliarity of the street and the people, couldn’t see how this city was like any other city. She thought it was more difficult than that, to bleach out the particularity of a place, even if Strawberry had a right to her prissy nostalgia for what must have felt like her best times, when she was a precarious and avaricious young woman, sprawled in the mess of the former East, her eyes widening yes at anything on offer: art, sex, needles, history lessons. The world so much larger than she’d thought.
They turned down a side street lined with low-rise apartments, old stone beside new stucco, grafted together like repair on a ravaged mouth.
“Hurry up,” Strawberry said, “we’re just up here. I’m kind of street shy, don’t go out much. I get jumpy.”
She swung her bags jauntily, and one of them hit a pole. Glass cracked, yogurt belched through the netting.
“It’s okay. I bought two.”
She ignored the white spatter behind her and they stopped in front of one of the grey buildings. She cursed, searching for her key. Pigeons complained from the ledges.
“This is like the last un-renovated building in the city. I had to sleep with the landlord, practically. It’s all drywall and security codes now. I’m never leaving, they’ll have to carry me out.”
Trout followed Strawberry through the dirty lobby, the plaster pitted and the stone stairs chipped, and climbed to the fourth floor, passing by leaded windows as large as doors on each landing, which looked out onto scaffolding and a shared courtyard. On the third landing Trout could hear a woman in one of the apartments losing her temper. The open door showed a long hallway, shoe rack, navy blue baby stroller, coats hanging on carved pegs, kitchen shining whitely at the end. The neat apartment made the seediness of the building seem superficial, one of Strawberry’s self-aggrandizing pronouncements.
Strawberry led her up the final flight of stairs, prodded her through the door. Trout stood in the gloom as Strawberry kicked her suitcase to one side, put the leaking bag in the sink, mopped up the trail she’d left, only as far as the threshold, ignoring the drips in the hallway.
The apartment was smaller than the one below, though with very high ceilings, and still big enough that Trout could imagine running across it, toward windows that led to a small concrete platform with no railing. Several terra-cotta pots, empty except for dry earth, lined its edge. One large room, nearly unfurnished, broad floorboards splashed with paint. A small table in the centre, crowded with metal chairs. A mattress was wedged onto a wooden platform with a ladder up to it, and a second mattress, made up with touching precision, lay on the floor underneath. A couch, a few crates of books crowded overtop with scarves, junky ornaments, hardened spills of coloured wax. Fridge, sink, warped plywood counter along one wall. A folding door to a wobbly toilet and shower.
Covered canvases sat on easels or leaned against the walls. Ranging from taller than Trout down to the size of a portrait photograph, they gave the room the feeling of an abandoned factory. Or not abandoned, suspended for Trout’s entrance; she could feel the tension in Strawberry, the way she tried not to notice whether Trout appeared fittingly curious. Strawberry, turning away, smacked at a row of light switches. Trout touched one of the plastic sheets, which was ragged, paint-splattered.
“Don’t you dare. Those are for later,” Strawberry said over her shoulder, chopping fruit. She nicked her finger and stuck it under the tap. She must have covered them for Trout’s arrival.
◆
Trout slept after they ate, still in her clothes under the duvet. It was early evening when she woke, and the windows streamed weak sunshine. She sat up, knowing that she’d dreamed of the young man, not remembering what. Passageways and doors, leaves scudding along a street, a figure in the woods. In the shower, she scrubbed herself with expensive-smelling brown gels, gritty against her skin. Wrapping herself in Strawberry’s somewhat dank yellow towel, she walked to one of the paintings. Something red swirled underneath the sheet, and an uncovered corner showed a disk of blackened silver like an old coin. The latch clicked behind her.
“I got some wine,” Strawberry said, “I was going to take you out but I don’t want to. We’ll eat here. Stay in the towel if you want, I’ll crank the heat, it’s fucking freezing outside.”
Trout dressed.
Strawberry set the wine on the table.
“I didn’t get more food, can we just finish the lunch stuff?” she asked, already taking the containers back out of the fridge.
Trout pulled socks over her damp feet.
“I’m glad you’re here,” Strawberry said, sounding surprised, drawing out two cigarettes and lighting them, handing one to Trout. They smoked, each wondering what the next two weeks would be like. With one hand, Strawberry fanned meat and cheese onto a cutting board, opened older Styrofoam containers full of hummus, olives, and whitish slices of tomatoes, adeptly making the table beautiful, flicking a lighter and dipping it at a candle. The lights were off again, except for tangled strings of Edison bulbs running along the floor by one wall. The candle flame sharpened Strawberry’s face, and Trout wondered how long it had been since someone had sat with her at this table. Strawberry did not eat, drank wine from a mug, which left a dark stain on her mouth. She pulled a flap of skin from her lip, rolled it into a ball between her fingers. The curator was an asshole, this or that friend had been lost to domesticity, her rent was going up, the landlord was thinking of selling the building, she’d broken up with the woman she’d been seeing, again. Trout saw no need to answer. Strawberry must often talk to herself, working alone in this big cold room. Strawberry refilled her mug, tipped two inches into Trout’s. She had somehow worked herself onto the Baader-Meinhof Gang, lit another cigarette, inhaled clumsily, coughed on the smoke. Her skin tight across her forehead, slack at the chin, her eyes watering, her bravado stopped short. Trout, lightheaded from the cigarette (she hadn’t smoked in years), had a panicked impulse to text her husband that she loved him. But she couldn’t remember where she’d put her phone. She didn’t get up. She sinned in her heart.
◆
Sinning in your heart was a frequent accusation at the commune, meaning some kind of untenable ambivalence, a failure of courage. Trout’s mother was often accused and had to stand in the middle of the circle while each member stepped forward and enumerated her failings, and she wore a stern, patient expression that Trout admired and wanted to imitate.
Children were not included in this circle but gathered to watch outside it. Trout didn’t understand why her mother sinned in her heart: she was a hard worker, she did anything John asked without asking why. Then, when Trout was lifted out of her bed and carried to the car, she thought they must have been right, and her mother was not brave enough. Sometimes, in the care facility, Trout’s mother would berate, in scraps and unfinished sentences, Strawberry’s mother, and Trout would hold her breath, hoping for more; there was so much she had never asked about, believing that she preferred not to know, and now when she was no longer sure that was true it was too late for questions.
◆
“Did you know that one of the old Baader-Meinhof guys is a Nazi now, they keep him in prison because they just can’t risk releasing him, and all he does is write about the purity of the German race and the Jewish threat? It’s true, it’s true, I read about it. I want to paint him. I’d like to get permission to paint him. I’m really interested in the number of artists who were attracted to fascism because they thought it was strong. You know. Virile. It makes for terrible artists, terrible art, can’t produce anything except kitsch, it’s like the Soviets and socialist realism, that’s what you get when you have a totally stable and ideologically fixed conception of social relationships, you can’t actually make art anymore, you’ve cut yourself off. But at the beginning, all these artists really flirted with it, I guess they thought it was the next big thing. It fascinates me how that’s coming back. I know fascist gets thrown around a lot these days to mean anything you don’t agree with, but sometimes a fascist is really a fascist. I want to make a series of paintings after this one, something about that. I used to like watching Milo Yiannopoulos on YouTube—”
“Jesus Christ,” Trout said, supplying the expected reaction but also meaning it, “that—”
“Exactly, he’s like staring into the void. He’s puerile and he’s not dangerous—”
“Yes he is—”
“Don’t be such a goody two-shoes, I’m not finished, he’s not dangerous and attractive because he believes hateful things, he’s dangerous and attractive—don’t make that face, not to me—he’s dangerous and attractive because it looks to me like he believes nothing. I can’t figure him out. It’s like watching a performance art project and you can’t tell what’s satire and what’s serious because the distinction might not matter. I don’t think he knows anymore, if he ever did, he just hit a nerve and he likes hitting a nerve. Turns out a lot of people want to be told they can love power because it’s power and seek it because it’s there. Whoops! We miscalculated! It turns out we just want the void.”
“Don’t watch people like that. You’ll get lost.”
“Oh my darling. Oh honey. I am lost.”
Trout pictured Strawberry in front of the screen late at night, cigarette smoke gathered around her head like a thought bubble, no one coming home, no one telling her to come to bed, to think about something else. Trout wondered again where she’d put her phone.
“Maybe I like it because it’s so different from my parents, but in another way, not at all. They wanted to tear everything down, too. Fuck. Or that’s not right. They wanted to tell everybody else how to live. They were so sanctimonious about it. I get so angry when I think about that generation. You know, born after, will die before.”
“What?”
“You know,” Strawberry said tetchily, shaking her head, appealing to a shorthand Trout wasn’t aware they had, “born after, died before. Born after the war, dying before the shit hits the fan. We are the last generation on Earth that’s going to get old. We’re burning up.”
“Our work is guided by the sense that we might be the last generation in the experiment with living,” Trout quoted.
“What’s that?”
“The Port Huron Statement. Your dad put it up in the kitchen, remember?”
“I forgot! That’s funny I forgot. You know, I used to think I’d never get out alive. By the time I left. I thought he would lose it some night and think he was a prophet and soak us in gas. I was walking to town to go to the library by then. I knew about Jonestown. He was an okay father, sometimes, but I thought that was how we’d finish up. Just a fireball going up to the sky. When I got to Pittsburgh it was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen, this sad collapsed city. I got off the bus and my eyes stung, you never told me that, how your eyes sting when you aren’t used to pollution. When you live in the middle of nowhere in Maine. I wanted everything, everything, I wanted to get in a fight with someone, I wanted to get mugged! I wanted to break somebody’s nose! I just wanted everything that could happen to a person to happen to me.”
She stroked Trout’s palm absently across the table, and Trout closed her hand over Strawberry’s. Strawberry gripped hard and then withdrew, leaning back in her chair with her chin tilted at the ceiling.
“I keep having these dreams,” she said, quieter now, “where airplanes fall out of the sky because the world is ending. It’s final and calm, these huge airbuses falling. First it’s just one and I think, okay. That’s okay, one we can handle, one we can recover from. Even though I hate myself for thinking that, but then more and more fall, turning over in the air and landing in this field, I’m standing in the field, it’s marshy with a few trees. Small trees, maybe thorn trees, you know, small. And then I told some people about the dream and it turns out I’m not the only person having the dream. So I knew it was a sign. You know, maybe they were right, when they told us we had to pay attention to signs.”
She closed her eyes, moved by her own narration. Trout thought of the young man, somewhere in this city, and that he was a sign but she didn’t know what of and couldn’t explain this to Strawberry, who was only interested in her own signs, signs that had to have a fairly obvious meaning. Trout didn’t know what he meant. Was he required, as an angel, to mean anything? She imagined going out, down into the street, searching, finding him. Outlined in light from a window, holding his little soup spoon. She didn’t know what she would say or ask. Strawberry remained silent and Trout wondered at what she’d hinted at through all those imperiled little girls, and whether she resented Trout for having been rescued by her mother. For having a mother who’d opted for the compromised and the commonplace, for traffic lights and dental plans and the illusion of safety. She thought of her mother in her chair, tended by nurses, and Tim, who she might or might not leave, and Strawberry unnerved her enough to remind her how good it could be, how sweet, to have someone who prevented her from being alone with her own thoughts. She wondered if Strawberry not only resented her but had a right to, if she owed Strawberry some question or acknowledgment that she had never given her. Even with her modest, frozen life, she had been rescued and Strawberry had not. No one had cared to rescue her.
Trout wanted to say all this and didn’t. She was not good at asking questions, at saying what she thought; she so rarely knew what she thought. She tentatively reached for Strawberry’s hand again, and Strawberry moved her hand away.
Somewhere, down below, the young man was eating his soup.
Strawberry got up, stretched.
“Come on,” she said, “I’m going to show you.”
◆
She made Trout stand in the centre of the room and close her eyes. Reddish darkness, grown brighter as a lamp was switched on. With her eyes shut, the room grew. She heard the hiss and soft scratch of a plastic sheet being carefully pulled away, the rustle as Strawberry dragged it across the floor, tucked it into a corner. Pauses, Strawberry’s concentrated breath as the sheet caught on canvas corners or the edges of chairs.
“Okay, you can look,” Strawberry said.
She’d only uncovered the largest, which was beside the window. It was a triptych, set on hinges. The standing lamp beside it was trained to the floor so that the light didn’t hit the images directly. Strawberry was already talking at her, near her left ear, about influence, about Hieronymus Bosch and photographs of repossessed houses in Texas and Christopher Wood’s paintings of houses and Kristeva’s writing on female defilement and how she’d used her own blood as a pigment which was what that shade of brown was and how the root of the word haunted was the Old Norse heimta, to bring home, to fetch, and Trout wished she would stop even if Strawberry was talking in order to pretend that Trout didn’t frighten her as much as she frightened Trout, as the only person still in her life who could remember what she remembered, contradict it, correct it, magnify it. Hearing Strawberry monologuing she thought, with guilt and guilty satisfaction, that she was still the person Strawberry most wanted to give an account of herself to, the person whose judgment she most feared. Trout knew that she shouldn’t find this so gratifying, but she did. It helped her feel she really existed.
The central image was Trout’s mother, standing in the middle of the circle, the faces around her contorted in accusation, but their rage was not satisfying to them. It looked like pain. Trout’s mother was wearing a white dress, a wreath of blue flowers, and an expression Trout did not remember from that time but recognized from her mother’s present face. Muddled, like a faithful kicked dog. As if she had been forced out instead of deciding to go. As if she had begged to stay. Maybe Strawberry had seen that then, and remembered it. Maybe Strawberry had been told that. Maybe the people who remained wished that had been true, though, looking at her mother’s face in the picture, Trout went a step further and thought that Strawberry had seen something that was true, if not literally, something Trout had missed completely, willfully, the hurt in that face, the sincerity. She had thought of Strawberry as seeing only herself, but there in the picture was Trout’s mother: someone who could be forgiven, or at least understood, and Trout (she didn’t want this feeling, she wanted it to stop now) had not tried to do either, not enough.
To the left was the car, leaving, with Trout’s ten-year-old face pressed to the back window but drawn blank, a pale oval like a hole. In this imagining, a horde of people followed them, carrying shovels, pitchforks, torches, guns. Each person their own recognizable self, even though some of them had been rendered as animals: roosters, goats, pigs. Trout wondered how many of them were dead, or coughing softly in rooming houses or prison cells, or whether, like her mother, they had eventually found their way back to repudiated families, to flush toilets and clocks.
Then she saw the figure standing in the path of the car, arms stretched out, barely sketched, with the road and the pricking stars visible through the torso. It was Strawberry as a child, barefoot, wearing a ripped t-shirt and no pants, rescuing Trout. She would stop the car and drag Trout back and keep her so they would have the same memories and the same secrets and the same futures, as if it were possible to continue as they had been, as Trout, recalling, could feel in her stomach with the force of an unexpected blow. Strawberry’s breath on her face, their arms and legs tangled together, sleeping in piles of hay in the henhouse, each of them making do with each other as protector and second self.
The picture to the right was, like Trout leaving in the car, something Strawberry had never seen, only heard about, and Trout couldn’t tell whether she was angry at the presumption or amazed at how closely Strawberry must have listened, even when she seemed incapable of paying attention. Trout’s mother sitting up in her reclining chair, with her attendants thrusting objects (tubes, food trays, charts) at her that she didn’t want and was not allowed to refuse. Hieronymus Bosch made sense: this was a vision of hell, teeming and endless, punishment for whatever her sins might be. She was wearing a pale blue hospital gown and matching high heels, the kind of shoes she hadn’t worn for years and had never worn well, work shoes, kicked off with a theatrical sigh when she came back to the basement apartment where Trout was stirring the soup she’d heated from a tin, after drawing two girls which she’d tacked on the wall with the other drawings, though when they moved in with the man who was briefly Trout’s stepfather her mother threw the pictures away, hoping, as she always had, for a new start. Strawberry had finally stopped talking, looking at Trout. Trout, who was weeping, found it difficult to interpret her mother’s face in this last picture, since both her hands were clamped over her mouth.