I didn’t tell Stephen I had broken up with Elvis, because I wasn’t really sure he didn’t think it had been over a while ago. So I kept quiet and signed up for a German course. High German. A language with actual books. I was tired of chlütterle. I had to do something, because the minute I broke up with Elvis, I fell in love with him. I loved Stephen’s disinformation dumps, but they wore me out. I missed Elvis’s scattershot stupidity. It had been like a dalliance with a sixteen-year-old shepherdess, and my marriage was starting to feel like an exercise in opportunity cost.

I knew from reading The Joy Luck Club at the tearful insistence of my mother that sex is legal tender for all debts public and private, while husbands should be exploited to the max and beyond, but without Elvis coming over anymore, I couldn’t even sit in my bed and read without being overwhelmed by memories. I couldn’t even call them memories. Actually I was painfully turned on. I felt like a cat in heat with hallucinations. I thought, Wow, love is as strong as death! I never understood that before, and now I know it! And all because I—as in me, personally, of my own accord—ordered Elvis to stop coming around. I felt like generations of bluesmen whining about women they shot to death.

Then I realized that if I was looking for a sixteen-year-old shepherdess, I didn’t have to look farther than my own black, jagged heart, and I picked myself up and went to class.

Word of Rudi’s location spread like a slow fire in a coal seam. Birders called confidentially and conspiratorially to get permission to come by. After a while he was pretty much trained. I would put him on the crown molding and he would drop and fly back up while cameras whirred and lenses purred, each worth more than our car. A feature appeared in Gefiederte Welt. I had been afraid of turning into a poster child, but once they saw Rudi, no one looked at me anymore. Long before it was time for him to leave for the mountains, there were voices calling for a GPS transponder. Stephen and I liked the idea. We could go visit him in summer, assuming he wasn’t hanging around in some inaccessible chasm. Maybe meet his family! Or at least see him collect nesting material. The transponders they have now are little tiny things, no more burden than, say, a quarter in my pocket would be for me. That’s what they told us, and it sounded plausible enough. It would increase his body weight, but given how much better he ate than most wallcreepers in winter, he ought to be able to handle the strain.

Stephen had undergone a subtle but perceptible emotional shift from thinking of the wallcreeper as Tichodroma muraria to thinking of him as our unique and irreplaceable friend Rudi. You might think now would have been a good time to build him an aviary and buy bird toys. But his coal-black chin, his restlessness, that ceaseless shrieking—his tiny sex drive was reducing him to a gemlike flame. Our instincts were sufficient to find him attractive, delightful, and guilt-inducing, but not sexy. He had to go away. But not entirely away. That was our plan. The ornithologist gave him three colored bands and a chip on the small of his back.

One Saturday we found him. Stephen drove almost to the edge of a chasm, set up the scope, and scanned the rock wall below us. Finally he said, “There’s Rudi. Hey, Rudi! Hey, he’s got a nest! Way to go, Rudi! Check him out. He’s hiding. Mother fuck!”

I got my binoculars focused on Rudi in time to see the tiny hawk raise his head wet to the nostrils with Rudi’s blood and plunge it again into Rudi’s chest. Rudi’s beautiful red and black wings with their absurd white polka dots twitched, twitched again, and died. The hawk ate his heart and flew away.

Stephen sat down and hyperventilated. Rudi’s wife hopped once and flicked her wings. Then she, too, flew away. I suspected her of leaving nestlings to die because she was too damn lazy to raise them alone. “Fucking bitch,” I said.

“I hope that motherfucking bastard dies,” Stephen said. “If I had a gun I would shoot every motherfucking sparrowhawk in the whole goddamn Alps.”

When Rudi died, Stephen stopped raising his eyes above the horizontal. He stopped going out at night or to the marsh. He read every word of the newspaper, offering lengthy, cogent commentary on the financial news as if he had been asked to join the president’s council of economic advisers. He enlightened me on the relations between oil-producing and -consuming states as if he were grooming me for a position on his staff. His personal interests were sub-rogated to those of the mass media, and he began to seem like a nearly normal person. He stopped shaking. He never got excited. When he went to bed his face turned into a slack, unhappy mask and he never looked at me before he closed his eyes.

Stephen’s grief humanized him. I began to fall in love.

While Stephen was out on Saturday morning buying ingredients for a salad, Omar’s wife appeared at our door excited and trembling. She blew her nose and told me Omar had applied for a transfer to Topeka and she couldn’t imagine life without us. “Now I’m sorry I never touched your red-hot husband,” she said, flopping down on the couch.

It was clear that she meant to imply that her failure to seduce Stephen created a major obligation on my part. She could easily have taken him, who was my sole and only meal ticket as far as anybody could tell, but she hadn’t and now I owed her one.

“I didn’t realize how much you meant to me until Omar’s news came through,” she said. “My heart just tore in little pieces. I couldn’t figure out why. I felt so forlorn and disoriented. I ended up walking around until I was standing under Stephen’s window at the lab, just hoping to see him. That’s when I realized you’re the only people I care about in this town. I’m going to miss you both so much!”

Stephen’s lab was a solid car ride away and his office was on the ground floor of a modernist R&D-campus building that overlooked a compensatory wetland like an amphitheater, so what she said made no particular sense. She had probably tried to get his attention through the window because she couldn’t get past the security at the doors in her jogging outfit, and probably eight hundred guys saw her, and so much for Stephen’s plan of professional advancement via the chi of an irreproachable family life. Maybe they had been sleeping together, before Rudi died and Stephen withdrew from everything and everybody? Or did it make more sense if they had been doing it afterwards? Stephen had been very distant.

“That’s a shame,” I said. “I can’t speak for myself, but Stephen’s definitely a very special guy. It’s sweet of you to think you’ll miss us.”

“Oh, Tiff. The truth is, Stephen means the world to me.”

I shook my head.

“Don’t worry,” she added. “It’s unrequited love. I don’t think he knows I’m alive.”

I shook my head again, mostly because I couldn’t imagine an adult woman claiming to be in love without having slept with the guy first. But you never know. Maybe she was the kind who feels guilty when she commits adultery in her heart?

“Omar is a wonderful man,” she explained. “But you know how sometimes one person can, what I mean is, I think my relationship with Omar was working mostly because Stephen was giving me something Omar just can’t give me. I mean Stephen’s way of talking, that sort of wild side he has. Omar’s a very conventional guy. Sometimes I feel like he’s kind of two-dimensional.” She stumbled along, obviously unused to explaining her actions or motivations to anyone and therefore making them as transparent as frog spawn. She wasn’t up to prevaricating with every word, the skill she so admired in Stephen. It takes a lifetime of practice. She had found her master, her teacher, too late. She simply knew she was about to lose something valuable, and like anybody else, she wanted to take the next logical step to make it her own: She wanted to fuck it.

I more or less stopped listening and filled in for her. Stephen, I thought to myself, is like a comet in near-earth orbit whose magnificent tail, streaming in the solar wind, defies long-standing questions regarding its ultimate composition, and compared to him Omar doesn’t even seem quite human—I mean in the classical sense of being made in the image of a god or God—whereas Stephen possesses the indefinable divine spark that arises from friction between an infinitely complex universe and the unfathomable enigma of subjectivity, plus Omar is compulsive and getting seriously chubby from all the overtime he does. According to Stephen, he basically lives in the lab.

“I have a big crush on Stephen,” I said. “I can see where you like him. But I bet there are plenty of cool guys in Topeka. I mean, out there they don’t have any choice! People in Topeka can’t stumble around like culture zombies following all the latest trends. They have to get creative. You’re going to like the Midwest, I swear. There’s more real art going on in one square inch of Midwest than in all of New York City. We’ll come see you! Who knows, maybe Stephen will end up getting transferred there, too. What’s Omar working on?”

“The contraption. The regulatory environment is better in the U.S.” she said.

The contraption was somehow based on the stent, but I didn’t know it had anything to do with animal health, or even what it was.

She told me, if not in so many words: “The female-to-male transsexual market is much more lucrative when it’s not covered by health insurance. You know how the companies negotiate the prices down.”

“Right,” I said.

“And you can’t do experimental surgery on higher primates in Switzerland. It’s impossible. I mean, this place has a formal policy on the dignity of plant life!”

She wanted to be sardonic but conveyed only vain indignation. Incapacity for irony was another thing keeping her from coming across, where Stephen was concerned, as anything but horny.

“In Topeka they can probably get human volunteers,” I said. “They’re cheaper than pygmy chimps.”

“In my opinion the transsexual indication is one big smokescreen. The contraption is for everybody.” She held my gaze steadily. “Once it has regulatory approval, it’s going to be an off-label gold mine.”

I realized she was offering me an insider stock tip. I asked her how far the contraption was down the pipeline.

“It’s not even phase one, but it’s two years to launch,” she said. “It’s accelerated because the application is so exotic nobody cares whether it’s safe.”

“It reminds me of, like, a Kurt Vonnegut story,” I said. “No way it will sell to anybody in his right mind. I remember they tried to move Stephen to the contraption six months ago and he said no way.”

“I wish Omar were as smart as Stephen,” she sighed.

“Omar’s going to have a way bigger career than Stephen,” I assured her. “I mean, you already said this project has huge potential, right? And he’s got a lead position, right? So where’s he going to be coming off it? Looking pretty good! It’s definitely a step up from the beagles. You can kick back and play tennis in Topeka for a couple years, then come back here with vice president Omar and live the life of Riley! Stephen will still be futzing around doing God knows what when you get back. You’re not going to miss anything. His amazing brain isn’t going anywhere. He’ll be fat and bald with a heart condition because he never gets any exercise except driving and eating tater tots” (tater tots, known as Rösti, are a staple of the Swiss diet), “but trust me, he’ll be here.”

“Look at me,” she said. “I’m a woman.” Irony was truly not her forte.

“Stephen’s a stick-in-the-mud,” I said. “He’s heavy into inertia. It leaves him plenty of time to think, but it’s not something I’d be idealizing if I were you.”

“I just can’t imagine not seeing him anymore.”

“What I’m telling you is, Stephen is a creature of habit. He’s not sexy. There are a billion sexier guys in Berne. Just go to any bar.” I jumped up and put an end to the vulgarity of our conversation by moving toward the kitchen to get more coffee.

She raised her voice and said, “Omar is an amazing lover, by the way.”

That did it. I came back jittery. “God! Jesus!” I said. “What do you want from me?”

“Do you know about the Swiss law on divorce?” she said. “If Omar fools around on me, even once, I can keep the apartment. And alimony! It’s like the 1950s! I know you better than you think. Can you do this for me? I know Omar adores you. I know you’ll say he’s Stephen’s best friend, but that just makes it worse, as in even better!”

“You’re that scared of Topeka?” I said. “It’s not the South Pole!”

“I can’t survive another day with Omar. He’s driving me crazy. I’m going insane with boredom. I’m so in love with Stephen, and you don’t care about Stephen! Come on! It would mean so much to me to be able to stay in Berne.”

“Hey, I like Berne, too,” I said. “Plus I think Stephen likes me better than he likes you. As in, I’m not sure your odds are so great.”

She scoffed.

“I’ve come to realize,” I said, “that there’s generally something special about the person you would marry. It’s not like I ever married anybody else. But I married Stephen, and he married me. I still don’t know why it seemed like the thing to do, but I don’t regret it, and neither does he.”

She got to her feet. “My blood is on your hands,” she said. “I can’t feel this trapped and survive. You don’t love Stephen, and I do.” Her hands were pressed against her heart and she was taking the feeling of emptiness there very, very seriously—a hole in her heart only Stephen’s dick could fill.

“Lighten up,” I said. “Marriage isn’t a sacrament. It’s just a bunch of forms to fill out. It either works or it doesn’t. Do what you want. You’re grown up, and Omar’s a big boy. Get a job and stay in Berne! You’ll have a new boyfriend in like four minutes. Look at you.”

“But I want our apartment. Tiff, I need your help.”

“Me sleeping with Omar won’t give you Stephen. I don’t think you’d have much chance with Stephen anyway,” I said. “He’s weird.”

“What do you mean? Is Stephen kinky?”

I didn’t want to explain that he had delusions in which he had been chosen alone among men to live life to the fullest, so I said, “For one thing, he’s bi.”

A look of profound consternation flashed across her beautiful face, and I knew they had slept together without condoms.

I suggested to Stephen that we move downtown. If we had moved before, Rudi couldn’t have found us again, but now Rudi was gone and we could move.

Stephen didn’t answer. He said he’d been in touch with an Italian breeder. He rummaged through his messenger bag on the floor, produced a handwritten letter, sat down on the couch, and read aloud.

“About Tichodroma. I have had for thirty years always one pair, changing them every six years in good health. In March the male is strongly singing. The female is strongly seeking him. They are divided but one can see the other. Tichodroma never die except for special infective reason. But older they make worse thermo-regulation. A false microclimate will very much compromise the reproduction. Tichodroma is an absolute vagrant, seeking always those sunny days with a light fresh wind. He is using different environments always. There is no place where to have Tichodroma all the year.” He looked up and made eye contact.

Stephen had stooped so low as to punish me with a fable involving a cute dead friend. As he intended, I felt very, very guilty. I had assumed hurting husbands was a privilege of bad wives. Suddenly I realized it’s a moral shortcoming of good ones—good in the way I felt at that moment, in the sense of making a doomed, feeble attempt to be good, which is as good as it gets in the Judeo-Christian tradition where the imagination of man is evil from his youth.

“Move downtown by yourself,” he added. “I’ll pay your rent.”

“Does this have anything to do with Omar’s wife?” I asked.

I surprised even myself. I said it the way I might castle out of spite at not knowing anything about chess, just to prove I was in over my head.

“That bitch?” he said. “I wouldn’t fuck her for practice.”

“Is that why she’s in love with you?” I demanded. “Are you trying to tell me it’s your beautiful mind? She told me you did the nasty and Omar can’t get it up! And then she asked me to suck him off live on camera so she can get a Swiss divorce! It’s true! If he’s unfaithful to her she can totally clean him out, Joy-Luck-Club style!”

Stephen said, “Come over here so I can beat the shit out of you.”

I took his hand and lay down beside him, turning over to nestle up against his chest as if he had a brood patch. We looked over in silence at the wall unit where Rudi used to flit in and out of a shoebox twenty times a minute.

With the easy air of someone who believes he is gratifying a lover’s private obsession, Stephen confided in me that he didn’t believe the Italian guy was really breeding wallcreepers. “I think he’s selling birds he paid some climber to liberate. As in steal nestlings. You know some songbirds can be a real pain in the ass to breed. A lot of them are solitary except when they’re breeding, and everything has to be totally right or they never get in the mood. If you put them together the wrong day they do like bird jujitsu. You know how Rudi was always flicking his wings? That’s because it’s so loud next to these alpine streams nobody can hear him yelling. He was using his wings to say ‘Get off my property.’ But if he says it too much, his whole camouflage is out the window. It’s a fine line. It’s hard, trying to defend your territory and advertise your presence and keep out of predators’ line of sight. So I thought about it, and I thought, I don’t think I want to take somebody’s nestlings out of his nest, right when he finally found a cave he likes and somebody he can get along with. But the truth is, if you take their chicks, they just make more. They can lay thirty eggs a season. They’re set up for it. I mean, the reason chickens keep laying eggs is because somebody takes them away.”

“You want to get a pet wallcreeper to prove Rudi was a dime a dozen,” I said. “That’s cold!”

“That’s not true,” he said. “No wallcreeper is a dime a dozen. They’re lovely birds.”

“Like women,” I said. “Same-same but different.”

“Every woman is unique in her own way and most of them are pieces of shit. Whereas any wallcreeper is an avatar of the one true wallcreeper.”

“Name of Rudi,” I said.

He turned and lay on his back and said, “Fuck it. I mean it. We’re all fucked. Saving one single wild thing was more than I could manage, which means the whole world is fucked. But then I remember that you know how to look out for yourself, and I feel better. Like it’s not the weight of the world, just my own little column of air.”

I was happy. He had called me a wild thing.

Our new apartment was weensy. It was on the former second floor (the street had risen over the years) of a tiny medieval house and, according to the commission on cultural monuments, too historic to renovate. Replacing everything that needed replacing would have meant tearing down the entire house by slow stages from the inside out, clod by clod and pebble by pebble. Its pristine construction elements, dangerous and pointless as they were from a fire safety standpoint, were irreplaceable: intricately woven willow lathes, soundproofing made of rye chaff. “Soundproofing my ass, more like five hundred years of dormice. If you touch a hot crack pipe to this place, it’ll go up like a Molotov cocktail, so best behavior,” Stephen told me in the presence of the real estate broker, who blinked but said nothing.

The curved, crooked spaces were outlined with huge beams and armed with hyper-efficient Bauhaus cabinetry. The windows thrust out at odd angles into the street. It was like the captain’s quarters on a galleon. When the broker advised him to keep the vinyl in the cellar, Stephen smiled condescendingly, but on the other hand he was careful to line his records up along a bearing wall that had floor beams perpendicular.

A short time after we moved downtown, I ran into Elvis on the street. I had been gallivanting about doing nothing much, trying on silk dresses I could have shoplifted in a lipstick case and realizing that even for free they would highlight every drop of sweat like an airport body scan.

We stepped into a café so he could explain his recent doings in his habitual meticulous detail. “I live in Geneva now,” he said. “My baby is there. She is so much nice.”

“I understand,” I said.

“My life is like this. Things pass, and I do with. Whatever and whatever and whatever. Always something. First I am desolated with this pregnancy. And so I see a psychotherapist. We are doing—now—so much beautiful things together. First she take me to Venice, five days. We go also to Tokyo! I am visit her now, but she has a client, and I go walking. So nice surprise to meet you!”

I frowned. “Can’t she lose her license?”

“Who will tell them?” he asked. He seemed offended. “Always you think of the state. Always you think they are watching over you. You were born into capitalism! But I was born into chaos. Ah, Tiffany, you fail me. I close my eyes and always I am fucking you. When I see you, I cannot stop thinking this. Let me fuck you now? Why not? No one sees us. Not even you and me. We close our eyes. It stays a secret.”

He slipped his hand between my knees and for a second I believed him. I felt we could have done it right there on the barstool and nobody would have known.

I leaned forward and said, “This is exactly, precisely the mauvaise foi scene in L’ětre et le néant.”

It had never occurred to me before that people actually maybe do have sex they don’t want to have. I had always assumed those people had nothing holding them back but inhibitions. But I felt no inhibitions whatsoever. Instead I perceived a powerful longing in my innermost or outermost being (there was no difference, since I generally based appraisals of my affections on the momentary condition of my genitalia) to thaw, spread, and embody the essence of fecundity like a river in springtime.

Yet I also felt strongly that the time might have come to raise myself above the worms by a display of will. I worried that my lust was inhibiting my self-respect and not the other way around. (I was thinking of worms like Omar’s wife—she had put the fear of God into me.) In a world of intentional ethics, I was already squirming in a hotel bed with Elvis without a thought in my head. The potential consequences were nil. The risk was hypothetical: If Stephen had been God, able to see around corners, he would have wished to punish my sins. But if Stephen were God, I would have been walking on the other side of the street and Elvis would have made it back to his therapist’s office and fucked her instead …

The psychotherapist clinched it. “No, thanks,” I said as Elvis continued to caress my thighs and arms with great tenderness. “Not today and probably not ever again. Forget it. It’s not happening!”

He insinuated his hips between my legs, sighing poetically as his lips approached mine.

“Stop!” I said. I picked up my coffee cup. A mistake.

When the owner of the bar came out from behind the counter, I assumed she meant to come to my aid. But apparently she thought the two of us were bringing down the neighborhood. She asked us to leave. I tried to pay and she grimaced in disgust, waving me out the door with my wallet in my hand.

Elvis was waiting at the next corner. I wailed uncharacteristically in despair and frustration.

“You have showered coffee on me,” he said blankly, tilting his head like a shy child. “I am sorry,” he added, “but I need a clean shirt for today, please darling! It’s so much important.”

I gave him a hundred Franken and he sauntered away. I saw him duck from the bustle of the colonnade into a men’s clothing store—I couldn’t believe it myself—and I turned and ran.

I think approximately seven hundred passersby, including ninety of Stephen’s coworkers, saw the handoff of cash and were confirmed in their belief that I was turning tricks to support an ungrateful pimp. But my estimate could be off by a factor of infinity.

The apartment was very close to Mancuso’s Loft.

Rave music was never my thing. Girls dipping their knees, boys pumping their fists. Too fast to dance to. I had seen Elvis waft across the floor like an air-hockey puck, and I assumed his Latin moves were the only way out. Stephen enlightened me as we stood at the bar sipping ginger ale through straws. “That girl with the head wrap,” he said. “Dancehall mouse.”

I looked over at a pretty girl with blonde dreadlocks done up in a carpet. Her body was obscured by a loose, longish dress over pants, as if she were doing her western best to conform with the dress code of Yemen. The beat was pushing one-forty, but her hips were circling extremely slowly.

The contrast between her movements and the music was startling. She wasn’t dancing to it. The soundtrack was a commentary that served to heighten and illustrate her butt.

“Is she hot?” I asked Stephen.

“Nah,” he said. “She looks mangy. I’d say she’s a tourist, conserving energy because she wants to keep going until Sunday.”

“She doesn’t want to pick you up? She looks to me like she’s disdaining the hoi polloi because she wants to take home the DJ.”

“Nobody who goes to clubs ever has sex. They don’t have the time.”

“Don’t they trade sex for drugs?”

“With who? These snuggle-bunnies?” He gestured with his head at the other men at the bar.

“Maybe if the guys had the contraption?”

“Who told you about the contraption?”

“Omar’s wife.”

“Trust me, they’re better off without it. Unless you want this place turning into a lake of body fluids like a dubstep party. It’s totally fucking disgusting. I think it’s going to change. I hope so. For now I’m taking it on faith that one of these days dubstep will rise above.”

“You’re so tidy and fastidious.”

“I’m attracted to control.”

“That’s an odd reason to hang out in discos.”

“I didn’t meet you in a disco.”

“Is this a virgin-whore thing?”

“I’m not talking about your songbird sexual mores. I mean your control over your body, the way you eat and dress and get your hair to lie down. You blow me away. It’s like you could spend all day at a pig roast eating chocolate ice cream, and then go caving, and come out looking ready to hit the Norfolk Yacht and Country Club.”

“It’s because I take time to preen,” I said. Which is true. My sleekness, when I put my mind to it, resembled that of the arctic loon. But we were both shiny bright as if we had just come out of the autoclave. Immaculate and smooth—as though clinically sterile—unlike his icon of sexlessness Miss Mangy Dread, who was now doing the lambada with a guy whose ad agency was on our street. (I wouldn’t have known this, but Stephen knew everybody in the club.) Probably she was his new intern. And I suppose Stephen’s look could be better described as fluffy, like a dabchick, which was going to make it hard for him to advance in his career in the cutthroat world of pharmaceutical devices, at least until his temples started to go gray, like a dabchick’s.

Stephen put his arm around my shoulder.

“Are we in on the contraption?” I asked.

“I have options that vest in four years.”

On weekends I was always home by one o’clock. Stephen would stay out until whenever and then sleep, sleep, sleep. He took a break from birding. I didn’t mind. There’s something nice about keeping quiet so as not to wake a fluffy man dozing in a fluffy bed. I read fewer novels and more bird books, learning something new every day. Always simple stuff that afterwards I was ashamed to admit I hadn’t known.

Like birds nesting on the ground. How was I to know they’re so dumb they would build a nest on the ground under a tree, instead of up in the tree? So that when the foxes come, the baby birds are doomed. It gave the concept of the Easter egg hunt a sinister new meaning. Hungry little kids out wandering around after a long winter indoors, scanning the ground.

I learned that power lines fry birds. Poof! They’re gone. Every time I saw an electric fence on a walk, I imagined little birds sitting on it and poofing into nothingness. That was before Stephen advised me to hold on to an electric fence for a while. It tingles once a second. It might kill a spider, assuming the spider was grounded. I was hard put to imagine why it would slow down a cow.

I learned that kinglets are the smallest birds in central Europe, with eggs no larger than a pea.

Once Stephen was awake, it became hard to concentrate. He had exploited the occasion of our move to hook up his monitors. Sometimes his music sounded like a container ship that had grounded on a shoal and was slowly falling over. Sometimes it sounded like a war movie equalized for projection on the moon. Notions of volume in the post-reggae world put grindcore to shame. Loose sheets of paper on his desk would rise and fall with the bass. If the house had been newer, the roof tiles would have rattled. But it was soft, with fungi and moss as integral elements in the construction, so nothing really rattled much except the glass aftershave bottles on the ceramic shelf over the sink.

We didn’t take a birding vacation that year. Without asking me, Stephen rented an apartment in Berlin for the month of June. He wanted to get serious about his music.

We took the slow train, a boxy Swiss IC where you could sprawl out and eat muffins. The German high-speed trains are cylindrical, like airplane fuselages, and you can’t open the windows.

In Berne you could always tell yourself, I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help. Berlin was huge and flat, repetitive to the point of bleakness. People were too rich or too poor, and there was nothing to buy. Tawdry crap for teenagers from the sticks, flagship stores, boutiques for Russians, espresso, and fast food. Families shivering in the dark shade of beer gardens, letting their kids run around to warm up.

I rode a heavy bicycle from our rental to the old Tempelhof airport almost every day to see the skylarks fight off the crows with their weapon of song. The crows walked spread out in teams like policemen looking for a corpse in the woods, turning their heads from side to side, staring at the grass with one monocled eye and then the other, but I never saw one eat a baby skylark. Or maybe I always lowered my binoculars in time.

There were lakes with swimmers, boaters, mallards, and coots. Out of town the lakes had grebes and divers, supposedly, but we never got around to leaving town. Stephen slept in. He almost never went to bed before noon. He was occasionally awake early enough to get down to Hard Wax and hear some new dubplate before it closed.

Exactly once, he convinced me to meet him at the Berghain at six o’clock on a Sunday morning. I didn’t get in. He had told me to dress for dancing, and I had sneakers on. The other girls in line (I was amazed that there was a line) were bouncing on their toes to keep from teetering on their heels, wearing dresses that would have showed the sweat if they hadn’t been so dehydrated their eyes looked like chalk. I hugged myself in my hoodie and shivered, obediently going home on request.

No one was sleek or fluffy in Berlin, not even me. In four weeks I didn’t see a single good-looking person on the street. Once in an upscale beer garden in a park I saw young moms and dads who seemed to have gotten some sleep. But everyone else was ashen, and too warmly dressed. It would be in the sixties, and the girls would be wearing army surplus overcoats and ski caps with pompoms, skin all wintry and sallow as if they had consumed nothing but nicotine and pasta for the last six months and lived in dungeons. The boys appeared even on chilly days in T-shirts, their faces flushed with beer. People routinely wore clothes that didn’t fit at all, with wrists and belly buttons hanging out.

Except for the space-needle-type TV towers, there was no place to look down at anything. You were always looking out and up until your gaze was arrested by the next moving car.

Every time we ate out we became mildly physically ill.

Accordingly, Stephen insisted we move there. He said Berlin was where he’d always wanted to live. Berne had just been a way of getting to Europe. He had met more interesting people in four weeks in Berlin than in three years in Berne.

Given that so far as I knew he liked nothing better than electronic dance music and shore birds, I had to believe him.

He said the company had a device in development in Berlin, a little pump that had potential as an artificial pancreas, spleen, gallbladder, pituitary gland or anything else you care to name. He said my visa wouldn’t let me stay in Switzerland without him unless I got a job all my own, which I would have to apply for from outside the country. Stephen held the keys to my heart.

But wanting to move to Berlin and actually being transferred there are two different things, even for an executive, and Stephen was a researcher.

At home in Berne, I went out to shop for food (a fun thing to do, because you can stroll down the arcades buying one vegetable from each stand) one evening and saw Stephen in a café, poring over papers, sitting next to a strikingly pretty girl with blonde ringlets. I started over, but when I saw she had tousled her hair with mousse to cover bald patches, I backed up and kept on down the arcade trying to find truly fresh radicchio, which is never easy. She looked like a cancer patient, maybe someone Stephen met at a clinical test of the pump, which ought to work for chemo—I had it all mapped out.

When Stephen got home I asked who she was, and he said, “Miss Mangy Dread.” That night at the club he had told her she looked like the alien in Alien, and the next time he passed the ad agency, the carpet was gone. He went inside to say hello. Her roots had suffered a bit, but she was confident her hair would grow back.

The most conspicuous thing in the shop, he said, was a poster: Wasserkraft Nein Danke. Hydroelectric power, no thanks. It was based on the perennial anti-nuclear campaign. But hydroelectric? And there Miss Mangy Dread, whose name was Birke, explained to him that the upper Rhine, since the 1950s, had been “massacred” with a canal and ten “dam steps” all the way from Basel to Iffezheim. The fertile floodplains, gone! High water into the cities of the Ruhr! Basins for holding back the water, but no wet meadows, no frogs, no storks, no life, and why? Because the power companies are taking a license to print money, earning themselves silly on this river! All the consequences carries the public, the taxpayer: flood protection for the cities, because now there are floods, since they build the dams. The loss of biodiversity, of the landscape, of the beauty of the countryside. It is no more a river, only a chain of lakes, and all emitting methane in tremendous quantities! Carbon dioxide is nothing, who cares about carbon dioxide? Methane is seventy, a hundred times worst! And the companies pay the turbines and the dam, nothing else! And they want to build five more steps, from Iffezheim to Mannheim! And all these dams together, they make only so much electricity like one modern gas electric plant!

Stephen resolved at that moment to become an environmental activist. Which of course had to involve getting information from Birke.

Stephen opined that Wasserkraft Nein Danke was mostly a way to draw attention to the ad agency. “Her boss is a marketer’s marketer. He’s good. He showed me a project they did where they got tattoo artists to offer this laundry detergent logo and thousands of people got the tattoo.”

“That’s pitiful,” I said.

“It’s out there,” Stephen said, “but I have to admit this selling stuff that doesn’t sell itself is interesting to me. With a medical device, all you need is an indication and some terminally ill hostages to lay back and let the money wash over you. Selling the idea that the Rhine should be looking like the Yukon is an actual challenge.”

“It’s man’s work,” I said. “It’s like you’re growing up and want to get a real job.”

“It’s not just the Rhine. There are all these stupid community initiatives advocating energy independence, wanting to put in little hydro plants. It’s not like you could even run a milk bottling plant off one of these things, but they chop up the streams into lakes with no way of getting from one to the other. The fish can’t get upstream or down. Did you know most fish ladders are dys-functional, and a huge number of fish die in turbines?”

I was starting to sense that Stephen found me uninteresting relative to Birke.

“I thought fish ladders work,” I said. “I mean, I saw one on the Columbia where people were lining up three deep to watch these huge salmon and steelhead leaping up the stairs.” I spread my arms to express the immensity of the salmon and trout I had seen.

“That’s it,” Stephen said. “You see anything smaller? You see any worms going up the fish ladder? Or even a young fish? Fish go where the current is strongest. Most of them don’t find the ladders, and on their way back down, they get mangled.”

“I see,” I said.

“I’m not sure you do,” he said. “People regard these bodies of water as rivers because they’re damp underfoot, but they have nothing to do with rivers!”

“All right!” I said. “I get the point!”

Birke was printing up posters one at a time on the agency’s gigantic photo printer, not sure what to do with them.

Stephen had definite notions. Trumpeting the message of defiance from bus shelters on main roads in every town along the Rhine from Basel to Rotterdam—that’s where the posters belonged. It would just take a little money, money that he and Birke would be happy to raise for her boss’s new charitable foundation, Global Rivers Alliance.

His first stop would be the bird-related organizations where he was a member. “They’re all loaded federal retirees,” he explained, “and it’s not like they need new optics every year.”

“But they’re geeks, and Birke’s campaign is with-it and happening.”

“That’s not true,” he said. “The campaign is styled to look cool, but de facto the only people willing to espouse unpopular positions are geeks. It’s stealth geekdom.”

I recalled that Stephen’s first appraisal of Birke had included the word mange.

Birke taught me to use the gigantic printer. It was slow, so it was fortunate they had a volunteer with a lot of time on her hands.

She told me about the Isar in Munich. It had been a straight, narrow nineteenth-century shipping channel until birders got together and secretly pushed through a very unpopular plan to dismantle the smooth green banks and let the river snake around at random. The stakeholders all hated the idea, mostly because you can’t hold a stake in something you’ve never seen. Then the river was restored, and everybody in the city went down to it and spread out a towel on a broad gravel bank and lay down in the sunshine. In the winter the birds fed and rested, and the fish romped and frolicked, and everybody loved the Isar now and had already forgotten that it was ever a ditch. Someday, she said, people will forget that the Rhine was ever a ditch, just as they will one day lose their selfish enthusiasm for the gravel banks of the Isar and leave them to the plovers.

I immediately saw the overlap between Stephen’s theory of geek supremacy and her anti-democratic, anti-participatory elitism.

And the arc linking them both to club music, the collective solitary trance.

Stephen’s plan of hitting up birdwatchers for money hit a snag. The bird geeks were pissed off at him. He hadn’t given them notice before he ditched the waterbird census, and he appeared to be implicated in the unfavorable outcome of their research into wallcreeper vagrancy. They insisted that the Aare—their river, the Rhine’s largest tributary, with its own share of bulkheads and methane bombs—ought to be a higher priority, since the Rhine was, qua river, a collective delusion.

Plus Stephen’s aesthetics were not persuasive to them at all one bit. He repeatedly asked Birke to design campaigns around slogans he had come up with, things like “Hydropower: Satan Meets Moloch Uptown” or “Fucked Without a Kiss” (in his view an utterly apt description of the Rhine), reaping nothing but the side-long look post-punks are always getting from Young People 2.0 that means, “You are so unprofessional.”

The movement was bankrolled by Birke’s boss, George, a princeling with a mane of wavy hair. To his mind, the electronics, chemicals, and paper he needed for his work were ethereal substances as abstract as the gas in his car. Just another form of energy. He was deeply committed, emotionally, to solar power and hydrogen fuel cells. He didn’t like wind power. Too oafish. Big masts and turbines plunked down in the landscape, whistling. Under his regime, the planet would lower its top and fly through space, converting sunlight into energy through the medium of the creativity of its passengers, who would all be his friends.

He hit on me, but I ignored him. He would stand behind me and guide my little hands with his big hands as I tugged huge sheets of paperboard out of the machine, whispering into my ear that I worked beautifully. Birke said he had been washed in all the waters, a German expression meaning he had been around the block as well as there and back. Stephen said he was related to a famous and aristocratic publishing family, but Birke said that was his marketing backstory and he came from a sawmill town in the Bavarian Forest and was older than he looked.

I paid little or no attention to George. Still, he took me swimming once. He put our clothes in one of those buoyant water-tight knapsacks the Bernese have, and pushed me into the Aare at a campground miles upstream. The river whisked us to the free public pool complex in Marzili. George saw me bearing right and hauled me out by force. There’s a dam with a power station downtown, and people who miss the stairway in Marzili die.

Again, I cannot explain why being clasped in his arms and swum across the powerful river did not turn me on, except that it was George. He was not unknowable. No mysteries. Not even a lie. He was bubbly. He shopped for superficial new experiences and shared them. He lacked an event horizon.

Stephen and Birke were always running off to international conferences together. They never claimed they missed me. But when it came time for the BUND Nature Protection Days in Lenzen, they specifically asked me to go along.

I think the idea was that they could work more effectively if Birke appeared to be single, or if Stephen appeared to be married, or something.

The BUND facilities in Lenzen differ from your typical convention center. They’re basically a room in a hotel, near the Elbe but not on it, halfway between Berlin and Hamburg, and hard to get to from either.

The benefits that might accrue to Stephen and Birke from going to Lenzen were obvious. BUND has half a million members. Maybe forty of them go to Lenzen. There’s an annual event of the same name in Radolfzell on the Swiss border in January that draws twelve hundred. So if you want to make a splash with the BUND movers and shakers, you’d be better off in Lenzen in September, where they make up a quarter of the attendees.

At first I couldn’t figure out how Global Rivers Alliance got invited. But Stephen assured me that just about anybody can give a talk if he’s willing to (important) go to Lenzen.

And Global Rivers Alliance had been a player from the word go. Ordinary organizations in the German-speaking world have names that tout their modest ambitions: Society for the Preservation of Natural Treasures in Strunz, Strunz Committee on Woodland Bats, Citizens’ Initiative for the Strunz Wilderness Playground. Not even “Friends of the Strunz Wilderness Playground,” so that you might be tempted to think you could donate ten euros without being enlisted to run a day camp.

Global Rivers Alliance was different. It was modeled on Green-peace and the WWF. You could donate without ever being asked to do anything but donate.

Prince Kropotkin based his entire theory of anarchism on the German habit of founding and running collectives with strictly limited aims, so we should all be grateful to the twenty-seven competing organizations in Strunz, yet somehow instead they were grateful to organizations like Global Rivers Alliance for lending them a higher purpose.

Birke had reserved a room for Stephen and me in Lenzen castle where the meeting hall was. She took a cheap room in the gun club at the other end of town. Stephen came back to the hotel for breakfast, to keep up appearances, or maybe because at the gun club he wasn’t entitled to breakfast. I don’t know. The whole weekend, we didn’t talk much.

I decided to rent a bike instead of attending the opening session, because someone at breakfast expressed surprise that I had no bicycle. On the Elbe, everybody has a bicycle. I was doing my best to fit in and be inconspicuous, so I decided to rent one on the spot.

The hotel reception told me the shop was right around the corner. I walked the streets of picturesque downtown Lenzen for twenty minutes reading signs, but I never did find the street where the bike shop was supposed to be. In the end I stopped into a hunting and fishing supply next door to the castle to ask.

Everyone there was familiar with the bike shop. One guy said it was on his way and he would give me a ride. He had a nice convertible. He pulled away from the curb, chatting amiably about birds. He knew what attracted women to Lenzen. Out in the open, the trees by the road flashed down on us in a pattern of golden light and green shade. The enormous meadows stretched to distant solitary oaks. After several miles he pulled over into a large gas station, the size of a small truck stop, behind which was an enormous bike shop like something in an American suburb.

No, not that big. More the size of a 7–11. Berne will skew your sense of scale. The man behind the counter said it was his mother who rented. We drove back into town, landing three doors down from the hunting and fishing supply in an old livery stable with an elderly woman who looked like she’d never been on a bicycle in her life and a few broken-down one-speeds with coaster brakes.

It made sense. Why would locals know where to rent a bad bike? They only knew where to buy a good one.

Renting a bicycle burned up nearly two hours. By the time I stairmastered my creaky bike up to the castle door, I had missed everything worth seeing. The BUND chairman had given a rousing speech, I was told, and the subsequent presentation on the fine points of Natura 2000 financing had been a nimble tour de force of understatement. But now it was lunchtime.

I ordered something that sounded like grilled fish and turned out to be unimaginably gruesome (lukewarm pickled herring), let it lie, and walked around back to the terrace overlooking the gardens, where there was a frog calling from every tree and a redstart hopping around the fountain. This sucks out loud, I thought.

A harmless-looking man followed me to the porch. He stood next to me, asking me what excursion I was going on that afternoon.

I said, “Grünes Band,” the green ribbon—the DMZ where the wall used to be. He said it was a good choice and very interesting. We had a pleasant little conversation in passable English.

Now, this guy was not what you’d call hot. But he was polite, and relative to the constant strain of life with Stephen and Birke, it felt like love-bombing from a cult recruiter. I instantly got a huge crush on him. I didn’t even care what he looked like. I wanted him to hold me in his arms, pat me on the head, and say, “There, there.”

He said his name was Olaf. He reminded me not to miss the excursion to see cranes in the evening. I said I would try to make it. I made the excursion to see cranes.

From the boondocks to the wilderness was a ten-minute bus ride. Someone had gotten to the observation tower before us, an old man with a telephoto lens like a howitzer. He glared at us for touching the balustrade. Instead of climbing up, the group continued down a dry, sandy road through woods and emerged into a clearing behind a windbreak.

The harmless man stood beside me as the sun went down, but the situation was not conducive to romance. There were thirty other people there, shifting their feet in the tedium of waiting for cranes, asking each other to keep their kids quiet or move away from the trees or please put on dark jackets over their white shirts. We stared distractedly at the darkening fen, slapping at mosquitoes that bit us right through our clothes. An unknown woman joined the two of us and began talking about a controversial infrastructure project, encouraged by the harmless man’s civility.

At last I heard the cranes. They announced themselves loudly, like geese, but with gurgling trills at the end and no melancholy. First eleven of them—for so long that there was a general consensus that no more would come that night; the guide packed up his scope, and people started back up the road—and suddenly hundreds. They dropped from the sky in dollops, braked, and vanished into the faraway reeds. The woman kept talking to the harmless man about rail-versus-road. I walked to the edge of the marsh and raised my binoculars.

If I hadn’t known what they looked like from books, I would never have guessed from seeing them at that distance. They were sock puppets with red heels poking over the reeds a mile away, dull gray in the dusk.

After the cranes had landed, the geese passed overhead in so many Vs that they merged into Xs and covered the entire sky like a fishnet stocking. My eyes turned damp. The harmless man smiled tenderly.

We returned by bus to the hotel, where I found Stephen and Birke in the lounge. They were chatting with a couple of new media types from Berlin who had designed a campaign to increase public acceptance of wild bees. The bees on their marketing materials were fuzzy, happy spheres—no thorax, no abdomen, no stinger, just a friendly ping-pong ball with tiger stripes. The people of Berlin had welcomed this animal with open arms.

Stephen and Birke wanted to get in on the secret of big government grants. They acted like gossip columnists sucking up to movie stars.

I drifted to the bar and listened to a long, one-sided discussion of tree frog courtship led by an aging softy in a clerical collar. Slain by half a glass of wine, I struggled upstairs to bed.

I woke at six, alone, and went downstairs to my bicycle, intending to ride out to the river. I wanted to see where the levee had been moved away from the river to make room for birds. It had been one of the excursions the day before, when I was taking in the glories of life in the DMZ. It felt unjust to have missed it, since it had an explicit Global Rivers theme.

It was pitch dark and foggy. I don’t know why that surprised me. The year had gotten away from me. Indian summer had fooled me into thinking six o’clock was already time to grab my boots and binoculars and run out before it was too late.

Stubbornly, it stayed dark. Whenever the bike stopped moving, the dynamo stopped turning and the light vanished, leaving me blinded from its former glare on the fog. I stood at the spot where the dike had been relocated (the sign by the road allowed no doubts) and saw that everything around me was black. Everything. But I could hear birds: geese grumbling and complaining like couples fighting over blankets, lapwings elbowing each other, a curlew begging God for blessed sleep. Something big passed over my head in near silence, just a whoosh of feathers. There were no songbirds, just the crypto-human voices of avian insomniacs, and I started to sob uncontrollably.

For the first time in years—or perhaps since infancy, when I hadn’t known other people existed—I was certain I was alone, and my prompt gut reaction was to abandon all hope.

Now, in town, you never know whether the neighbors are home. Even in the backcountry of Yosemite, there are those other people with a pass. Nearly anywhere you go, someone might hear or see you. But not on a levee by the Elbe two miles from the nearest town in dense fog at six o’clock on a Sunday morning in September. They say in space no one can hear you scream, but why would a person with a sense of dignity scream anywhere else?

Much later, reading a map, I noticed that the ninety-degree bend in the river—the reason they had moved the dike—had an old traditional name: “The Evil Place.”

Fifth wheels always cry! one might protest. But at the time, Stephen’s affair with Birke seemed perfectly fair to me. I hadn’t forgotten about Elvis. My relationship with Stephen was contractual. By coming along to Lenzen, I had signed on the wrong dotted line. It was my responsibility to face the consequences.

The first rays of the sun brought hope, if only that I might soon see something.

The second set of rays, after a brief glimpse of something horizon-like, lit the fog from behind, and the abyss-slash-void became a gray wall. I rode back to a place where there had been less fog, an island of semi-transparent air where it was warmer, and sat down next to the bicycle, waiting for the first trees to appear. They appeared. But sunrise was still a long way away. I gave up and rode back.

At breakfast Stephen wanted to know where I had spent the night.

“Don’t you remember?” I said. “We talked in the bar to those communication designers and then I went to bed? You are so on drugs.”

Birke’s talk was a triumph. The time was ripe for Wasserkraft Nein Danke. She could be as grandiose and radical as the day is long. She was not accountable. The privilege of youth. Men three times her age swore to borrow her idea and take the lead in implementing it. They had waited too long to make the dangers of hydroelectric power clear. Young people (why exactly twenty-somethings are considered so vital to protest movements, I never figured out, seeing as how they never vote and have no money) would follow the call, power companies would bend the knee, Birke would get free banner ads on everybody’s website.

Stephen and Birke held court at their information table, handing out exquisite pamphlets on visibly recycled paper (not the white kind), framed by the apocalyptic blue of a very large Wasserkraft Nein Danke poster. Behind them, water plunged from a spillway. That’s all the poster showed: water in a state of collapse—the real, existing state of collapse that every dam represents, the collapse of a river and its ecosystem. And posing in front of it, Stephen and Birke, ready to be swept away.

As I stood there drinking apple juice from the buffet and watching them, Olaf touched my arm.

We sat next to each other on the back porch and looked out and down at the walled gardens. He told me how much he enjoyed visiting the green ribbon, where nothing much had ever been built. He loved the stillness, the emptiness. It was something worth fighting for.

I had seen the emptiness, and I wasn’t sure I liked it. Or maybe it wasn’t all that empty where he was. I asked him whether he had children.

He claimed partial responsibility for a herd of rare sheep and explained that you need sheep to maintain the emptiness.

“What about the stillness?” I asked. “Don’t they wear bells and bleat?”

He admitted that even birds, tempting as it may be to stylize their presence as stillness, are actually pretty loud.

We walked down into the lower garden and sat on a bench. He looked into the pond and remarked favorably on the lack of goldfish. I thought of all the spawn-guzzling carp I had admired in the past and felt abashed. I shrank at the vulgarity of raptures over beauty, nature’s most irrelevant and unnecessary quality.

That is, I couldn’t quite approve of the way the harmless man looked, but I was ready to follow him around like a puppy. He was that reassuring.

I stood up to escape back into the hotel. He remained seated. As we shook hands I couldn’t help noticing how close his wedding ring (Germans wear them on their right hands) was to what Allen Ginsberg called the center of the flesh, and I realized I had a problem.

After Global Rivers Alliance’s successful Nature Protection Days, Birke proceeded to Berlin. She vanished into her accustomed social milieu, whatever that was. Her internship in the environmental movement was about to end, and Berlin was where she was in school, studying media design. She had to visit old friends and see about a sublet.

Stephen and I returned to Berne without her. He looked spent and weary.

When Birke reappeared in Berne to pack her things, he cheered up, but her going-away party may have included some kind of unpleasant scene. Perhaps their parting.

A week later, he went to visit her and cheered up again for several minutes. I mean the minutes between when his taxi arrived from the airport early Monday morning and when the alarm went off so he could go to work. He was down.

The posters went up in three languages in bus shelters all the way to Rotterdam. Birke gave interviews to curious reporters. A magazine devoted to social entrepreneurship and social investment labeled her one to watch.

“Social entrepreneur” meant something different in old books than it does now. The new definition didn’t fit Birke. There was nothing capitalistic about Global Rivers Alliance. The impact investment community would sponsor a project if you promised them thirty percent, and pat themselves on the back for not actually drinking your blood. They couldn’t get their head around rivers.

But they liked Birke. She gave great interviews, effervescing with ideas. In person she was pretty enough to surprise people who had only seen the publicity photos. She became known.

Stephen didn’t become known. He was the pale figure with pale hair in the background, barely distinguishable from the wall. Stephen and I had about twenty fights, all including the following exchanges:

“You’re going to work for your girlfriend.”

“No, she’s working for me. I’m the executive director.”

“Geschäftsführer is an administrative post. She calls the shots, and it’s George’s money.”

“I’m the one investing. My labor is worth more than George’s money.” (I had to hand it to him for that one.)

“You’re throwing away your life to move to a town with dubstep [tone of contempt].”

Baleful glare, followed by allusions to migratory waterfowl.

“Why not wait for your transfer to come through?”

“How long do you think I’ve been waiting already?”

Our fights had a strange new quality: earnestness. Regular contact with the environmental movement had turned Stephen into a man who spoke his mind clearly and purposefully.

Before Stephen turned earnest, we never had fights.

Berne, my beloved Berne, was looking to the earnest Stephen more and more like a cobblestone prison yard. He began saying the stent was antiquated and that his coworkers were intellectual midgets now that all the good people had been transferred to Topeka or Berlin. And all the while the Rhine climbed higher, rolling and writhing in its corset of stone, moaning to be free. Ships bobbed through its lifeless locks, electric power flowed from its bloodstained turbines, the river had been dead for eighty years and there wasn’t a goddamn thing anyone could do about it, except work day and night and see Birke on weekends. She was more than willing to marry him. Her political persuasions admitted of no other stance. “No human being is illegal!” she would insist, as though she had picked up Stephen in a camp in Chad. She thought marriage would solve all their problems. He could live with her, collect welfare, and save the world.

The fights went on until he got a scholarship to study chemistry. George could supposedly only afford to pay him six hundred euros a month. That’s plenty to retire on in Berlin, Birke had assured him, but it’s illegal to be that poor unless you’re a German or married to one. Stephen had staged fights with me to ease the pain of deep-sixing his career. After the letter from the Technical University arrived, he remarked that taking a few years off to get a master’s would be a gap on his résumé, but not nearly as bad as working for Global Rivers Alliance.

Birke had no chance against me. By staying at home—as I had done from the beginning (I seldom slept with Elvis anywhere else!)—I had made plain to Stephen that I was the type who stays at home, come what may. Better, worse, sickness, health, all the various combinations that can go either way depending on who’s pushing harder. If you believe in marriage as an institution the way Stephen did, one thing you definitely don’t want is to try it more than once. If Stephen married Birke, the marriage would end, because for her it was one option among many. Whereas if he stuck with me and saw her on weekends, he and I would one day share a headstone. Game, set, and match Tiffany.

But Stephen didn’t give notice. He kept holding out for a transfer.

In November, he refused a transfer to Topeka. When I suggested he call Omar and ask what Topeka is like, he laughed. In return for his refusal, the company issued him a C-class Mercedes and a little tiny handheld computer. He had been tested for gumption and not found wanting. Or maybe it was a bribe.

He sold the Volkswagen without telling me. It was weeks before I knew where the Mercedes was parked. I was never allowed to touch the computer.

I was desperately unhappy. I remembered the cranes and even the fog on the levee as though remembering the land of lost content. The Housman heaven: I see it shining plain, the happy one-way highways. And the Bialik heaven (as per T. Carmi): the distant islands, the lofty worlds we saw in dreams that evict us to dwell under the open sky (as absolute vagrants, seeking always those sunny days with a light fresh wind) and make our lives a hell.

Stephen looked haggard. Mentally, he was unrecognizable. “Birds are quantum,” he would say blandly. “If you can even figure out where they’re hiding, it’s too late to see them as they truly are. There’s no such thing as birdwatching. It’s an illusion for stupid people.”

During the week, he worked full time and then some. He had to clock as many hours as colleagues who spent Saturday afternoons at the lab, all while running Global Rivers Alliance in his spare time. Most nights he went straight to bed before eleven and thrashed around while he slept. On weekends he flew to Berlin. The round-trip by train would have eaten up twenty hours. My pin money was going down, down, down.

On weekends I was alone. I tried snowshoeing. It was too loud, too raucous, too much hilarity, too much money, plus Stephen said I might accidentally squish grouse. The Bat Society (I tried them next) was on winter hiatus, its bats snoozing away in cellars and caves. The women in hand-knit mohair sweaters and silk scarves assured me that bats are soft and clean with wings like kid gloves and that I need not fear them. The astronomy club seemed more promising. I spent an evening standing next to a goon huffing steam in the cold and saw the red spot on Jupiter, which looked just like on TV.

My misery was firm and unshakable. The old city of Berne was my natural habitat. It was where I felt at home, where I wanted to be. I didn’t want to leave. Berne was where I could become most completely myself—possessive, shrewish, lonely. There was nothing to retard my self-actualization.