After graduating from college, Henry found a job in Stuttgart, a city whose industries had been updated, in German fashion, to combat the onset of globalization. It was 2009 and his parents had seen their 401ks disappear when the economy crashed. He had student loan payments to make, had gotten no other job offers, and didn’t need a visa; his father had passed on German citizenship from his grandparents, who’d arrived in America long before ‘subprime loans’ was a phrase people knew. 

He’d found, applied to and accepted the job in one panicked motion, believing that at the very least, it would lead to one he actually wanted, preferably in somewhere like New York or Chicago. But once in Stuttgart he regretted not studying the German phrasebook he’d brought from home, or learning what exactly his role might be. The company was staffed by mostly older German men with families. He had an office to himself in which he wrote up reports for their American investors and crunched numbers. In meetings, his colleagues spoke German and rarely smiled, while he smiled too much and nodded vigorously, hoping they thought he understood—the job listing had said German was not required, though clearly, it was—and wondering where the cars were that they were supposed to be manufacturing. Each morning, the woman who lived next-door berated him forcefully for not sweeping his walkway, though he was the only person who used it. 

“At least you have a job,” his sister Jess invariably reminded him when they Skyped. She had been laid off a few months before from her advertising job in New York and was speaking to him from their childhood home in Edina. She was sorting through her options, their mom liked to say, as if she were choosing paint colors rather than living through an economic downturn. In New York, she’d been addicted to Adderall and now she jogged, ate real food and slept more than five hours.  In Henry’s opinion she’d never looked better. “Unemployment suits you,” he said to her once, to which she’d told him to fuck off. 

“Peter Janaski is back working at the gas station,” she continued. 

“At least Peter can communicate with his colleagues,” Henry said. He squinted at the grainy image of his sister. “I don’t think I’m cut out for this.”

“Give it time,” Jess said. “Find an activity. Learn German.”

Henry didn’t learn German, though he did procure a tutor named Aldo who met with him once a week. They usually spent about five minutes speaking in German before breaking down and switching to English. Aldo’s English was good, but he liked to sprinkle his thoughts with out-of-date expressions, saying things like “that’s the way the cookie crumbles” when Henry expressed negativity about the weather or his bosses. Henry also took up rowing with a local group first on the river and, when it got cold, erg-ing in a gym. He took a certain masochistic satisfaction in watching the skin on his hands break open and callus over. Henry liked to masquerade as a dilettante, but over the past few years he’d become disciplined and self-denying.  

To help his parents out after the crash, Henry had transferred from Oberlin to the University of Minnesota, and switched his major, from history to economics. At Oberlin, he’d mostly smoked weed with his roommate Ethan who was from New York and had a record player. Together, they’d gotten into Marxism and one night in a fit of anarchic or adolescent rage, they, along with a crew of Birkenstock-clad boys, had set fire to a rusting car that had been parked behind the library for as long as anyone could remember. Watching the blaze, Henry had felt powerful and free, clarified by collective action. Ethan, whose parents were psychiatrists, had diagnosed this as his id revealing itself. “You got some shit out,” Ethan said, pushing his tiny spectacles up his nose. “I’m proud of you man.” Because it was Oberlin, they didn’t get in trouble. Henry felt anointed by the cultural elite, and had begun hazily envisioning a PhD; he would question received historical narratives, write big books, shape young minds!  

Then came the downturn, his mother’s panicked calls (his father’s ashamed silence), and suddenly he was in a dorm room in Minneapolis, his roommate a guy who’d spent time proselytizing for the Mormon church, his parents too close for comfort, and his affluent friends still in Ohio, their families unaffected and possibly the cause of the crash. He felt a profound sense of dislocation and injustice, but his new friends weren’t the type to question the system. They talked about starting their own businesses or going to law school as if these were sparkling and possibly out of reach prospects. Henry knuckled down, stopped returning Ethan’s calls and graduated Summa Cum Laude in economics. 

In Germany, he had the time to regret all his decisions. Becoming practical, he told Jess, felt like wearing a hair shirt. He was lying on the floor of his office, the blinds shut, holding his phone at arm’s length. 

“At least you got some useful vocab out of all those history classes,” she replied.  

“I’m suffering and you’re not helpful,” Henry said. 

“I suffer. You suffer. We all suffer,” Jess replied. 

Henry sighed and said he had to go. He hung up the phone and got up from the floor. He sat down at his desk and moved his mouse to wake up the screen. A spreadsheet stretched across his field of vision. The sight made him feel tired. He minimized it and opened Facebook. In the corner, there was a notification. It was Zoe Miller’s birthday.  

Henry had known Zoe in high school before her family moved away, to a different, nicer suburb. That summer, he’d seen her again at a mutual friend’s party and two days before he left for Stuttgart they’d met up in the back garden of a local bar in downtown Minneapolis. He learned she was studying Art History at Macalester and that she’d taken a year off to live as a ski bum in Colorado. “My ex was going,” she said, when he asked about it. “To be honest, I wanted to spend more time with him, so I went. Obviously, that didn’t work out.” She laughed, baring her very white and straight teeth. She was more attractive than he remembered. They drank their first drink quickly and on their second beer Zoe seemed looser, less shy. He felt calmer knowing she was nervous too. 

“Do you think there’s someone for everyone?” he’d asked.

“Like a soulmate?”

“I wouldn’t have used that word,” he said. “But yes.”

“No,” she said, but she was smiling in a way that made him hopeful. 

After a third beer, they returned to his parents’ house, who were out at a friend’s. 

It was still light outside and they were drunk. He watched her take off her clothes, the light casting shadows across her collarbone, underneath her breasts and from one smooth thigh to the inside of the other. She reminded him of the babysitter his parents had hired to pick him up from school. She’d been in college when he was in middle school. He’d loved watching her pull her shining hair carelessly into a messy knot. Zoe seemed to realize the effect she had on him. She smiled at him without shame. 

They had sex in his childhood bed. Her body was soft and warm under his. He was pleased when she came just before he did, arching under him and pressing a fist insistently into his back. He drove her home at eleven thirty before his parents got home.

When they arrived in front of her house, she asked when he was leaving.

“The day after tomorrow,” he said.  

“Too bad,” she said, opening the car door. “Not enough time to find out.”

“Find out what?” 

“If we’re soulmates.” He opened his mouth, wanting to reply, but already she was out of the car. As she walked to her door, he took in the porch and the garden, the new-looking Prius parked in the driveway. 

Now, in his office in Stuttgart, the air stale around him, he began to write her an email, first wishing her happy birthday and then updating her on his life: “I find myself moving in and out of my days as if in a dream,” he wrote. “The reality of school and home are like ancient memories stuck beneath the hum of electronic lights and fast cars. I’ve yet to discover what it is that anyone does in the office, and though I worry I will not discover it, I am also content to sit and watch people and soak in the sublime terror of adult life. We graduate college with the idea that there is a there, somewhere where something is happening. One soon realizes that there is no there there, there is only there, the place in which one is consigned to wait for the future.”  

After hitting send, he got up from his desk and opened his blinds. Friedrich, a colleague who had just had a baby with his very young-looking wife, waved at him sleepily. The adrenaline from sending the email faded a little. No one in the office seemed to care what Henry was doing. In school, Henry had been motivated by competition; speaking and writing better than his peers had pushed him to try harder. Without this contrast, it was difficult to locate a core sense of himself. He had tried; the weekend before – a yawningly empty Saturday in Stuttgart – he’d begun an application to teach history at a high school in Minneapolis. But he’d stopped halfway through, his father’s voice echoing in his head. While to Henry, his family’s financial fall seemed like evidence of an unruly and fundamentally chaotic world, his father had doubled down on his preexisting ideas about hard work and the belief that enjoyment could only ever be negatively correlated with money. When a family friend had said their child was teaching, Henry had overhead his father ask: “Why would anyone want to do that?” Henry never finished the application and even deleted his browser history, a leaden feeling filling up his chest.   

But Zoe’s reply was quick.  “Henry, I’m glad to have heard from you,” she wrote. “I’ve just spent my twenty-second birthday at a surprise party my friends threw for me. There were Jell-O shots and even a Piñata, lol, no exactly sublime, but maybe as close as college can get. I may have drunk too much which is maybe why I’m writing you back now. Given aforementioned liquid courage, I’ll throw caution to the wind: are you flirting with me Henry of Stuttgart?”

She seemed so well-adjusted with her parties and liquid courage. Henry found himself attracted to this, but also jealous. Those late nights of carefree friendship were not his anymore and increasingly he believed they had never been his. After he transferred, he’d mostly kept to himself, spending more time at office hours and with his TAs than with his peers. When his girlfriend from Oberlin ended things, halfway through their first long distance semester, he’d become depressed, sleeping with girls after nights out only to forget their names, enduring their frustration when he saw them in the dining hall, their hurt and anger visible across their plastic trays. 

“I think Zoe is too young for me,” he told Aldo the next time they saw each other. 

“She’s immature?” Aldo asked. 

Henry thought for a moment. “Well, no. More like unaware of the real world.”

“Hmm,” said Aldo. “What’s your expression? Birds of a feather flock together?” 

Henry stared out the window at the grey sky.  He realized he was essentially paying this guy to be his friend.  

But Aldo turned out to be right. Their weekly emails became daily and soon Henry felt as if he was living in order to write the email, to share with her insights into his life and to read hers in return. Her notes were funny and warm and often pensive. She said she had started swimming at the local gym and was enjoying the experience of complete immersion; she felt focused and calm afterward, able to write her papers in one go. He carried that image around with him; her in the pool, and then at her desk, her wet hair darkening the back of her sweater. He was relieved to know her life wasn’t all parties and Jell-O shots. 

In a flurry of emails it was decided that she would visit when she could, which turned out to be a cold day in late December when her finals were finished. “Are you kidding?” Zoe said when he protested her missing Christmas at home. “I see my family all the time.” Plus she said she had a friend studying abroad in Berlin and this was an excuse to visit him too.

Henry’s own family had wanted him to come home, but returning only to leave again filled him with dread. His mother would need reassurance that he was doing well, and he wasn’t sure he could lie to her, tell her he was happy and healthy, when, besides Zoe, he felt lonely and confused.  

Now, driving to the airport to pick up Zoe, the white houses with red roofs on the outskirts of the city, he suddenly felt nervous. He’d only spent a few hours with her since high school, and he’d passed up Christmas with his family, who were at least a known quantity.  Zoe’s presence in his head and over email had made him feel like he knew her, but they had no real dynamic yet. What if she didn’t sleep at night, or was one of those people who left the door open while they peed? 

When he saw her, he forgot his doubts. She was wearing platform sneakers that made her almost as tall as him and she had an old Nikon slung over her shoulder. He was positive that everyone in the terminal had noticed how beautiful she was.  

“Hey,” she said and offered her cheek for him to kiss before nestling her head in his collarbone.  

“Is it really you?” he asked, hugging her and then pulling away, pretending to look her up and down. She laughed. 

“Henry of Stuttgart,” she said, at arm’s length.  “On y va.” 

Their plan was to go to Aachen first—she wanted to see the cathedral and the Christmas fare—and then drive to Berlin to meet up with her friend.  She was jet-lagged and fell back asleep while he drove. In Aachen, they lit candles in Charlemagne’s chapel and bought beer and bratwurst. He told her about Charlemagne’s use of architecture to symbolize the unification of the Eastern and Western power centers. He pointed out the flying buttresses on the cathedral.  

Night fell while they wandered the Christmas market and strings of tiny lights swooped across the narrow lanes between stalls, bright against the dark sky. A stall cradled an entire miniature town made from gingerbread. 

“This is Christmas on crack,” Zoe said, crouching down to examine the tiny windows. 

“Can’t you almost imagine the lives in there?” She tapped the top of the icing fringed church spire and dotted the fingertip on her tongue to taste the sugar. When she looked up at him, her cheeks were flushed.  

“Are you flirting with me Zoe Miller?” he asked. Her laugh hummed against his lips.

The woman at the desk of their hostel smiled when they came in and switched smoothly to English when they failed to respond to her German greeting. When she asked for their credit card information, Henry insisted he’d get it; “I’m the one with the job,” he said, a masculine and magnanimous feeling spreading through his chest. In their room, a hand-carved cuckoo clock was mounted on the wall.  Zoe flopped down on the bed and stretched her arms above her head.

“Aren’t cuckoo clocks Swiss?” she asked, covering a yawn. Inside the clock a wind and a thunk took place. A wooden bird popped out with a mechanized caw.

“What the fuck,” said Henry. 

“Welcome to Aachen, where we have a time fetish,” Zoe said.  

“We’re going to die here,” said Henry. Zoe laughed, reached out, and he moved to the bed and held his body above hers. “You have tiny gold flecks in your eyes,” he said.          

“Yeah?” she asked. “You’ve got tiny freckles under yours.”

They were cold and got under the comforter with their clothes on. He touched her waist underneath her t-shirt. She lay quietly while he moved his hand to her hip and then up to her breasts. She looked like she was sleeping but he could tell her body was alert. After a while she smiled and opened her eyes. “I like that,” she said and rolled over so that she was on top of him. She stared down at him and he had the thought that this was the real life he had been searching for. As long as there were moments like this, he had time to figure to out who he would be.

Driving the next day, they found a radio station playing music they recognized and she sang along to Avicci and Daft Punk. He found himself again trying to hold the moment in his mind: the clarity of her singing voice, the sun playing over her face. They bought beef jerky and pretzels with mustard in a huge and shockingly clean rest stop off the autobahn. They pretended to speak German to each other, making guttural nonsense words in the backs of their throats and laughing loudly, drawing the attention of stern commuters. He felt alarmingly strong feelings rise up inside him. Sitting on the plastic seats of the rest stop and eating their pretzels, she took a photo of him, adjusting the focus and aperture with practiced ease, while he played with the silver rings piled on her fingers, absentmindedly taking them off and attempting to rearrange them. Without their armor, her fingers were slender and long like the rest of her body. He brought one to his mouth and her cheeks reddened. He never wanted to go back to Stuttgart.  

“Do these mean anything?” he asked.

“Mostly not,” She pushed each one forward like change on a counter. She stopped at a Celtic knot. “This one my sister got me.” 

“I didn’t realize you had a sister.” 

“She lives in LA,” Zoe said. “She works in the ‘industry.’” She put her fingers up as air quotes. 

“What do you want to do when you graduate?” he asked. But then he regretted asking it. 

As a history major, people had often asked him what he planned to do, and as an Econ major he felt stereotyped, put in the same box as every other white guy with a short haircut. 

“I did a few internships at museums and galleries. I might try to work in the art world for a while, maybe go back and get my masters after a few years. I worked at the Institute in Minneapolis last semester and I really enjoyed it. Or I might go work on this salmon boat next summer and see where that takes me. I have a friend who moved up to Alaska to do that and she’s still there.” 

“Sounds practical,” he said. 

She laughed, surprised at his tone. “And you’re so practical yourself?”

“I’m working for a company,” he said. “I have a plan.” 

“What’s your plan then?” Her voice was still light. 

“Move to New York. Work for the firm that owns this one.” 

“I could see it,” she said. “Nice suit, corner office, apartment on Central Park West.” 

Defensively, he asked, “What’s wrong with wanting to do well?” 

“Nothing,” she said. “I actually respect that.”

His victory felt Pyrrhic. He stood up. “We should get going.” 

“Ay, ay Captain,” she said, mock saluting him. But he didn’t laugh. 

In the car, it was difficult to find a radio station. Static filled their ears and eventually Henry gave up. The road was flat and long in front of them. 

“Everything okay?” Zoe asked.

“Just tired.”

“Well, I’m excited for you to meet Tommy. I think you guys will get along.” Tommy was her friend in Berlin.

“What’s Tommy up to?” he asked.

“He’s taking a semester off; I think he has some kind of internship,” Zoe replied. “And he’s learning German. He’s dating a German guy.”

Henry had developed an image of coming home and speaking to his father in German, impressing him with his grasp of the language. But four months in he could barely respond to Aldo’s basic greetings. At one point, Aldo had told him that dating a German would be the best way to learn the language, to “get out of your comfort zone,” but besides the wives of his colleagues, Henry had barely met any German women. He had believed that coming to Germany would allow him to understand his father better, but so far, the remove of the language and culture only mirrored rather than clarified his father’s own remove. 

“Good for Tommy,” Henry said. 

  “You’re acting weird,” said Zoe. “What’s wrong?”

“It’s just – I could never have taken a semester off. I couldn’t have afforded to.” 

“Okay,” Zoe said slowly. “I’m sorry, I didn’t realize that.”

This annoyed Henry. “It’s just hard for me when you’re making fun of me for wanting to make money, but at the same time you’re letting me pay for everything.”

“Whoa, dude, you’re the one who offered to pay for the hotel.” 

“It’s hypocritical,” Henry continued, as if he hadn’t heard.  

“I’m happy to split things. But my parents’ money isn’t mine.”

“It is, though,” Henry said. “You don’t even realize it.”

They were quiet and Henry wished he could sit down and write her an email, explaining everything; how his father had grown old in a year, first grey, then herniated disks six months later; how they had struggled to hold onto the house; how Henry had realized for the first time that he might not like the life he would live. 

But he couldn’t write Zoe an email; she was right here. 

In Berlin, Henry told Zoe he wasn’t feeling well and she reluctantly left him at the hostel to meet up with Tommy. But when she was gone, he felt worse. He sat on the bunk bed and looked at his hands. The calluses from rowing were fading. Outside the door he could hear people shouting, the sound of music wafting in from the street. Panic rose again in his chest. He fell back onto the bed and stared up at the ceiling. 

He picked up his phone and dialed his home number. He was hoping to get his mother or his sister but it was his dad who picked up the phone. “Henry,” he said. “Nice of you to call.” 

“Dad,” he said.

“How’s the trip?” his father asked. “You kids having fun?” His parents had been disappointed he was missing Christmas, but happy to hear he was dating someone. When his ex from Oberlin dumped him, no one mentioned her again, as if her visits to their house hadn’t happened, as if she never existed.

“Yep,” he said. “We were just in Aachen.”

“Did you see Charlemagne’s cathedral?” his father asked. “Those flying buttresses were used to symbolize—”

“Yeah,” he interrupted. “It’s been great, really great. Anyway, was just calling to say I miss you guys.”

“Don’t spend your time missing us,” his father said. “Soak it all in. What an adventure.”

Tommy’s hair was long and he wore a faded t-shirt and tight jeans; his eyes were rimmed with black. “Stuttgart, huh,” he said when Henry told him what he was up to. “A bit different than Berlin, I imagine.” He laughed and Zoe laughed too and though Henry felt like they were making fun of him, he laughed along. 

Zoe and Henry had spent the day at the Pergamom museum. There, winter light poured down through the skylights. He knew that the museum had been damaged during the Second World War, but as he stood staring at the blue-tiled Ishtar Gate, monument seemed like a more appropriate word than ruin. Sixth Century, the sign had said. He felt somehow buoyed by the time that had passed. In comparison, his life felt small, but in a way that felt good, manageable. There was Zoe, reading the sign closely, taking photos with her Nikon. He was grateful she hadn’t mentioned their discussion from the car and seemed to have forgiven him. In reality, he had no right to complain. In the scheme of things he was doing well. 

After the museum, they wandered around by the river, drinking beer and observing tattooed locals. Their breath made clouds in front of them as they walked and at one point Zoe wiggled her cold fingers inside the waistband of his jeans. 

Now Tommy was taking them to dinner and then to Sisyphos, a club he assured them was even better than Berghain. Henry hadn’t heard of it, but he remembered Dante’s Sisyphus, destined to roll the boulder up the hill over and over. He couldn’t help but think of his father, his early morning commute, the slump of his shoulders and unbuttoned collar when he got home, the monotonous repetition, day in and out.

At dinner Tommy and Zoe discussed a friend of theirs from Macalester who had won a prize for his thesis, but who’d gone into finance after graduation. “I don’t think I can forgive him, you know?” Tommy said. “It feels almost like a personal betrayal.”

Zoe nodded. “I know. It’s depressing that everyone smart goes into finance or consulting.”

Henry was starting to feel annoyed again that Zoe had thought he and Tommy would get along. He agreed with what they were saying to an extent, but Tommy felt performative, like his ideas were filtered down from someone else. Tommy was still in school; what did he know about the demands of the real world? “You never know why people make these decisions,” he said. “Maybe he had student loans.”

“That’s a good point,” Zoe said.

“Is that how you justify it?” asked Tommy. “You’re allowed to cheat your responsibility to society because you have student loans? What about the recession? Those people aren’t even being held accountable.” 

“Let’s roll out the guillotine,” said Henry, though he partially agreed.

“Why not?” said Tommy. He wagged a finger. “Remember. The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”

“What?” said Henry. “That doesn’t even make sense.”

“Does it not though?” Tommy raised an eyebrow and Henry felt a little like he wanted to hurt Tommy, wipe the smirk off his stupid made-up face. Instead he took a sip of his beer and looked away. 

“I think we need to get your man a little something, loosen him up,” Tommy said to Zoe. He reached into his pocket and produced three little pills. Henry felt stiff with annoyance, but Zoe took one and so he did too, swallowing it dry as if to prove a point. 

At Sisyphos, the bouncer gave them a sticker to cover the cameras on their phones. Inside, a dance floor flashed and beyond it, Henry could make out a courtyard, and what looked like a sculpture garden, shapes rising into the sky. He came up on the dancefloor, lights flashing and the bass booming in his chest, loosening the fist that he hadn’t realized had clenched around his heart. Euphoria followed like a wave and the people around him blinked in and out in time to the lights. He felt dissolved, his skin made of the light and music, the same as Zoe’s and Tommy’s skin. The three of them danced, pressing themselves against each other and the strangers around them. He wanted to stay here forever in the pulsing warmth that was like a womb. He imagined he could see the souls of the people around him, hovering above their heads like nightlights. Zoe danced next to him, smiling blissfully and he saw her soul connecting with his own. Strings of light connected all these people to all their loved ones all over the world. He could feel one stretching across the ocean from his soul to those of his parents; he loved them so much, so much that it hurt. He touched his face and felt it was wet: tears were streaming down his cheeks.

“Feeling better?” Tommy asked in his ear. 

“This is incredible,” he shouted back. Tommy smirked and opened his hand to reveal another pill. Henry took it. 

Sometime later he was standing in the courtyard, a deep serenity filling his body with starlight, when he remembered Zoe and turned in a circle, searching for her. Where had she gone? He wandered through the crowd, the nightlights winking in a way that suddenly seemed less benevolent, and more proprietary. He passed two women kissing each others’ necks, their faces pointing in opposite directions. A man sagged against a wall, a beer bottle slowly tipping from his hand, dribbling foamy beer onto the gravel. Henry scanned their faces, searching for Zoe, or some sign of Zoe, his vision narrowing like a softly pulsing tunnel. The club seemed huge to him now. Panic grabbed hold of his lungs. 

And then he saw her. She and Tommy were dancing, and as he watched he saw Tommy’s hands move up her waist to squeeze her breasts and then he was leaning over her face.

Henry moved forward, grasping the back of Tommy’s T-shirt. He pulled on it, and the stupid vintage fabric ripped. Tommy turned, and in Henry’s head his face was a snarl. “What the fuck,” Tommy said. 

“What are you doing?” Henry asked.

“Dancing. What are you doing?”

Henry didn’t know. Had they been kissing? He looked at Zoe. She was looking at Tommy, shaking her head imperceptibly. He was the odd one out. His elation was turning cold in his veins. “I saw you kissing her.” he said.

“Don’t be a square,” Tommy said. Henry was paralyzed, and then he was moving, holding onto Tommy’s ripped T-shirt. And then the full force of his arms was swinging down, and he had never punched anyone in his life, but Tommy’s face was hard and then soft beneath his fist. Distantly he heard Zoe shouting that he needed to fucking relax, but he didn’t care what she was saying and soon there was a smear of blood, hot and thick, and still he couldn’t stop.