In August my sister was supposed to show up in Berlin, but I ended up visiting her in Tukwila. It happened because I went to Albania with Stephen in July. He said that with me to look over his shoulder he’d think twice about even ordering a beer.

There are only two ornithologists in Albania, so prospectors are welcome. You can get a feel for what’s out there by checking the market stalls in Shkodër, assuming you can identify birds without hearing their calls or songs, or seeing them stand up, or fly, or with their feathers on.

Organizing the hunters might have helped save habitats. But in Albania only the foreign investors were organized. The Moraca Gorge, for instance, was slated for destruction, with hydroelectric turbines that would theoretically (or rather: impossibly) churn through more water than is in all of Lake Scutari’s tributaries combined. Birke would have been ranting a blue streak. But Stephen just sat there, motionless by the river for days, counting birds on feeding flights. Then he sat by the lake and counted birds in the littoral zone the dam project will eliminate. Fighting entropy the only way he knew how, with tick marks in a notebook.

Now, day trips to the Berner Oberland are one thing, and long weeks of inaction in the piping hot hills of Albania quite another. Nothing against birds, but I had gotten used to moving around a lot. I couldn’t do lazy anymore. Even the helpmeet act was getting old. And Stephen didn’t need my help carrying stuff if he never moved.

Finally we went down to Ulcinj in Montenegro, where he could do the start of fall migration (honey buzzards) in the salt works and I had English tourists to talk to. And there one of them got me pregnant—a slender, girlish thing of nineteen, funny and whimsical. It dawned on me too late that such things are not always masters of coitus interruptus. I suddenly missed the no-fault abortions of the land of the free. In Germany, it’s illegal to discriminate against someone for having the wrong father, so you have to whine about how childbirth would be mental cruelty. Even Albania makes you get counseling. I was hoping for the kind of clinic where you buy a ticket from the cashier and hand it to a nurse’s aide without saying a word.

I told Stephen flat out why I wanted to go to Tukwila. He said he didn’t care whose baby it was. But I cared, a lot. I flew from Podgorica to SeaTac, which took a while, involved layovers in Bucharest, London, and Atlanta, and was no fun. I got my period on an airplane toilet. I disembarked pale and limp, and that was that.

There are terrible things that never get easier, and there are things even more terrible that get easier with time and repetition. Tukwila is one of the former, a staunch bulwark of defiance against the forces of rationalization that would shred the fabric of the universe to lint. I caught the bus from the airport with a young woman whose hair was lacquered into a ponytail as hard and shiny as a shrimp. Her telephone conversation with her mother revolved around small change that had vanished from her pants pocket the last time her mother did laundry. In addition, her boyfriend owed her eleven dollars, which didn’t make her mother’s malfeasance any easier to take—au contraire!

You couldn’t call it poverty, not of the spirit, anyway. There was nothing slatternly about her. Her look had been designed and executed as precisely as any Caduveo matron’s. She chose every word with care, and eventually came to an understanding with her mother, who agreed to lift the disputed amount from the boyfriend’s wallet the next time he came around. Her fingernails were glossy claws. Her skin was nearly as shiny as her hair. Her voice had the same stentorian sheen. She may have been twelve. Coming from a subculture in which a pose of stubby-pawed, forthright naïveté is held to embody youthfulness right up to death from old age, I couldn’t tell.

My sister had been happily in love with a loaded doctor, but she was way too big a feminist to be a parasite like me. When they broke up because she wasn’t making enough money to go skiing in the Andes with him on weekends or help him buy a house on the sound, she ended up in a former motel on Eastlake. But the city had no jobs for classics majors, so she got a job in Tukwila. Eventually she moved there to save gas money.

Her apartment was on the ground floor, next to an access road. It had high, slot-like windows like a spotter’s tower, creating the impression (from inside) that she lived in a basement. It was for security, I think; but I could have kicked my way into her apartment, if I’d put on her platform boots. I mean right through the wall. It was paneling over styrofoam over paneling, with studs every three feet. It was no more solid than a yurt. The floor was moist carpet on a concrete slab. In winter she blasted the heat, and in August she blasted the air conditioning. It still took her outfits days to drip-dry.

Doing extra shifts at the strip club totally stressed her out. She was making enough money to think of visiting Berlin on her own, but she had to dance in a much more athletic manner and almost continually, and the guys were closer than they were in the coffeehouse. Right up in her face, as she put it.

Eventually I had to say something, although I am her little sister and not entitled. I said, “You just spent two entire minutes complaining about how your coworkers are bringing down the neighborhood by getting old. Do you have any idea how that sounds?”

“Give me a break, Riot Grrl,” she said. “The T&A industry is not about self-determination. It’s a market. I’m in direct competition with these old biddies, and we share responsibility for maintaining each other’s value. You have to remember that a stripper is a commodity fetish. You can’t have sex with me. I exist to be looked at. So the problem is my legs.”

“What about them?”

“Look at them.” She stuck her leg out at a high angle and waved it around near my head. “Look at my leg. What do you see?”

“It looks fine,” I said. “You have pretty legs. Look how little your kneecaps are. They’re almost concave.”

“You don’t get it,” she said. “On stage, you need long legs. Pretty works on video, but I don’t want to make videos. I want to make tips. But I can’t, because I’m short. Unless I make a video. Then I can be a headliner. My boss wants me to make a video.”

Being even shorter, I pondered her tragedy abstractly and could think of nothing to say.

“You know how my legs got like this?” she added. “You give up eating when you’re nine because you don’t want to be fat like your mom. But mom wasn’t even fat! My whole growth spurt, you know where I invested it? In my hips. My pelvis is so wide, I could give birth to a calf. At least you had the sense to get married the first time somebody asked you. You can sit on your ass and keep trying to have a baby until kingdom come. I don’t even want to know what kind of guy would marry me now. I was stupid to think I could do any job I wanted and it wouldn’t rub off. Now I’m starting to acquire the stripper habitus, and pretty soon I’m going to be forty-five, preemptively shoving my butt in my fiancé’s face so he doesn’t shine his flashlight at my tits.”

“A life laid waste before it began,” I said, quoting Stephen’s frequent references to the profoundly discouraging climax of the classic Icelandic novel Independent People by Halldór Laxness.

“I wouldn’t go that far.”

“No, seriously. You act like you’re trapped in Tukwila, but I bet your boss is surprised every time you show up for work. I bet your landlord wonders what’s wrong with you every time he gets a check! Tukwila is a place people walk away from and never look back.”

Tukwila, in my opinion, was the trap in the drain. Nobody lives there voluntarily except people who saw nothing but westerns before their grandfathers pawned their TVs. If your basis for comparison is the town Clint Eastwood paints red and renames “Hell,” you might like the suburbs of Seattle just fine. For me, even the city was a stretch. Easterners hear “coffee culture” and think of Vienna, not longshoremen idling their pickups at a drive-through. They don’t know the uniform polo shirts at Starbucks are the alternative business model for when you want women customers to let their guard down. They hear “beach” and think of sand, not prefab boathouses selling onion roses and buckets of beer.

Stephen claimed on the phone to be sad I hadn’t really been pregnant. “It’s true!” he said. “A baby from that needle-dick would have been cute!”

I said I would do my best not to get pregnant again until I saw him. Then I told him the really stunning news: Tukwila was swarming with little tiny birds called bushtits that look like long-tailed tits, only cuter, because smaller. Much smaller, and even cuter.

“No way!” Stephen said. “You told me Tukwila is like a trailer park on the moon!”

“I lied! It’s the heart of darkness! There are flickers all over the place! They’re nesting in the façade of H-Mart!”

“Flickers! Too cool!” Stephen said.

We had to yell because my sister didn’t have a landline or even a real computer. She had inferior versions of everything in the world on her phone—entire news stories that read “Italian Assassin Bomb Plot Disaster” or “Lindsey Surgery Denial Scandal About-Face,” Voice over IP, little tiny bushtit-sized e-mail messages from men saying things like “Busy tonight? Me, too” and “Can’t stop thinking about last March.” Her phone service was a joke, but the price was right. She would have been ashamed to use anything else.

We went out for karaoke that night with some of her colleagues from the coffee place. She sang “Because of You” and I blushed. I sang “Waterloo” and thought of Stephen. I got drunk and told them they should unionize, and my sister told me to shut up and sing “How Soon Is Now,” to which she cried.

Out in the parking lot, she said, “Watch me,” and waited until we were all staring. Then she ran a few steps and did an aerial cartwheel, landing neatly on the soles of her boots.

We stood dumbstruck and dumbfounded.

“Gymnastics is forever,” she said. “It’s like riding a bike.” She did it again.

We all began to laugh. The strength and beauty of what we had seen was so incongruous. My sister, dancing on air. Levitating like a crane. And without a conspecific anywhere this side of Chicago. I had to get her out of there.

In the car, we tallied her marketable skills. It was a short list: Latin, Greek, exotic dancing, coffee drinks. I said it was very promising. “You would get a job in Berlin so fast,” I said. “You would have such a good time. You would meet such cute guys.”

“I’m there,” she said. “I have nothing to lose.”

Most of the time, when people say that, they’re sort of kidding, but in her case it was literally true. My sister Constance folded her tents in Tukwila and bought a flight the same day as mine.

Stephen was up near Kossovo, counting fervidly. He had learned to identify birds of prey by the hairballs they coughed up and the precise arrangement of their victims’ feathers around a stump. He had a book about feathers and another book about seagulls and the many eerie transformations they undergo on their way from being indistinguishable to being basically identical. There was always something going on—some promising-looking habitat to map for its potential. But Albania wasn’t Wörgl. He seldom got close to a live bird. Albanians shoot to kill, and they kill to eat, which makes them less repugnant than non-hungry hunters but more lethal. Birds on the move were invisible and nearly silent. They knew better than to draw attention to themselves. They carried on their courtships like hustlers cruising a church picnic, and defended their territories like Beau Geste.

New migrants weren’t always up to date. Big flocks would land, or try to, then circle bewildered while one after another was mown down in a flurry of lead. Some liked the look of Albanian wetlands and decided to molt there—the last decision they would make in this lifetime. Birds were executed for the crime of tasting good or the crime of being stringy and gamy. But the hunters and their decoys and semi-automatics couldn’t be everywhere at once, so Stephen found plenty to count.

Or count and revise: thirty-five dunlins that landed, seventeen dunlins that took off, six dunlins that made it over the next ridge—an attrition rate that would clearly result in no dunlins at all one stop later, but maybe the hunters are all on this side today. The potential was what mattered. Even in Canton Geneva, there’s always the “first disturber,” the windsurfer in neoprene who heads out on the first sunny day in February to divest a lake of thirty thousand birds and leave you extrapolating what might have been. Counting bush meat in the market in Shkodër was just another way of acquiring a basis for extrapolation. If a species can’t show itself without being shot at, it’s comforting to think it’s timid. If no nests have been seen for the past ten years, it’s nice to know the species requires perfect isolation to breed. Without the tips of icebergs, humankind would already be very lonely.

I didn’t fly on the day I had planned. Constance caught a direct flight to Berlin, and I sat in a coffee shop glued to a laptop.

Gernot had sent me a link to a news story that made my spine stiffen: flooding near Dessau-Rosslau. Destruction on a vast scale. Unknown perpetrators had caused the inundation of the Steckby-Lödderitzer Tree Farm, which was strictly protected, for the love of God! If oaks and alders were to drown, the article threatened, the potential damage would be in the zillions.

Gernot told me to take it easy, but legal issues feel different when you’re a foreigner. I imagined getting no farther than a cell in Schönefeld airport before being deported to a pit on Rikers Island. I had always thought major flooding came with the spring thaw. “Those are the Alps,” he corrected me gently. The Elbe trickles down from bone-dry sandstone. Its flow is more dependent on the central European rainy season, otherwise known as summer vacation—the reason Germans are to be found in such large numbers in July and August on Mediterranean beaches where it’s too hot to move or breathe.

“No baby birds drowned, did they?” I asked. Ground-nesting birds had been a particular concern of mine since I discovered their existence.

Gernot said late summer is bird happy hour, when birds fly around in adults-only flocks, and that I should stop beating myself up.

Mainstream environmental groups weighed in to say that while the execution was sloppy, it’s the thought that counts, and riparian forests by rights ought to be underwater every so often. Local people began writing letters to the editor, demanding to know why the dikes and cladding couldn’t be removed by the long-term unemployed at union wages. Olaf published an editorial pointing out that the would-be radical environmentalists had made fools of themselves by assisting in a reclamation-compensation measure that would soon be fully funded with attendant trickle-down effects—his usual blend of wishful technocracy and wheels-within-wheels irony, leaving at least one reader depressed, yet confused.

Others wondered aloud where the hunters and the WSA had been all that time. Somebody should have noticed something.

I agreed. We had both expected hunters to catch me red-handed. They’re under contract to hunt in the Tree Farm, which is mostly the no-humans-allowed core zone of a UNESCO biosphere reserve. Killing deer and wild boar helps protect young trees, rare fungi, ground-nesting birds et al., at least supposedly. But I didn’t see a single hunter all winter. Gernot claimed it was because the hunters aren’t allowed to feed the animals in core zones, so there aren’t any to speak of.

Except he was wrong. He circumscribed his movement to avoid disturbing the wildlife, so he didn’t know the core zone was crisscrossed with wild boar highways like a motocross park. I was secretly glad the pigs were afraid of me. I can’t begin to imagine what they all ate. Do pigs eat cannabis? There was lots of it growing back in the core zone.

I flew two weeks late, and arrived to find Constance in bed with Stephen, helping him drink a smoothie.

“We didn’t do anything,” she said. “He’s a complete mess!”

It was getting to be a pattern: blissful happiness in the Balkans, precipitous flight home, withdrawal symptoms. But he had no needle tracks or anything to really give me pause.

Constance had no interest in Stephen, she said. She was in love with Berlin. “This is my town,” she said. With the help of a few names he had given her, she already had a go-go dancing gig at the Berghain and was a ticket taker at SO36, an alternative discotheque only a hop, skip, and jump from our house.

I asked for a second opinion. Stephen said, “Obviously your sister is Venus in furs with bells on, but it’s you I love.”

I shook my head and rolled my eyes. “Obviously. She’s been perfecting her sexiness on a professional level for five solid years while I’ve been learning birdcalls! What did you expect? I mean, I’ve had better men than you, too, but it’s not your job to be the fuck of the century! We’re married!”

“That’s so true!” he said. At least we had that straight.

I offered to bring him breakfast in bed. While he was eating, he said, “Seriously, we should try to have a family and spread all this stability around. Share the love. And what better time to have a baby than when your sister is living with us?”

“Guess again,” I said. “If you think she’s going to be a huge help with a baby, you’ve got another think coming. She’s going to be a very popular girl and move out within a month.”

He sat up leaning on his elbow to steal foam from my cappuccino with the marmalade spoon, and I involuntarily reached over and petted his head.

“I sometimes think about how I used to just work and work and work like a workaholic,” Stephen said. “And the rest of my life was balancing my hobbies. Music and birds. Darkness and light. Did you notice how I’ve sort of slacked off with the music?”

“I thought it was because you found a way to combine birds and drugs.”

He lay back and groaned. “Jesus,” he said. “You’re right. So much for that.”

“So now you figured because you’re off Special K, I’d be all on fire to have a baby. As a reward for you being scared straight and not falling in love with the contortionist geisha.”

“That’s not it either. It was more like I had this whole theory about how, through my activism, I was uncovering the dark side of the birds, which is all the things threatening them. Because if you’re into wild birds and their lives in the wild, you can’t think of the danger they’re always facing as a threat. As darkness. You just can’t. There’s no point. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. Nobody dies except to feed somebody. All of us are somebody’s next meal. But with a river some asshole wants to turn into free money, the Lord doesn’t have anything to do with it. So that the absolute worst thing in life, which is death,” (he lay back on the pillows and spoke slowly to make sure I understood) “is the only bad thing you can actually ever really accept, because you have no choice. It’s never an acceptable option, so you just deal with it. You make a virtue of necessity. The way I’m dealing now with my body being a destroyed piece of shit after I treated it like I could just go down to the machine shop and get a rebuilt one after it wore out. I mean, I accept that I’m mortal, but I had to accept it anyway. What am I trying to say?”

“I don’t know.”

“Right. So these karst fields in the Balkans that they want to turn into hydroelectric projects, it’s unacceptable. Maybe you can accept a tsunami, but you can’t accept this. You can’t.”

“What are you trying to say?”

He sat up again. “That you were right to tear down those levees. I’m proud of you.” He put his arms around me and hugged me very tight.

At that point I should have realized that he had some kind of sabotage project in mind, cooked up in long hours of staring at empty skies over remote Balkan villages while coked to the gills on whatever, but I was too busy wondering who had washed him in the blood of the lamb.

Working the door at SO36, Constance met a German-American party girl from Minnesota via Bad Homburg who put her in touch with the principal at an English-language private school, and after about a month in Berlin she started working as a fifth grade Latin teacher. The school set her up with a work visa and even wrote her résumé. The kids loved her, the parents loved her. She said she could get me and Stephen a deal on tuition. She rented a sunny fifth-floor walkup in Prenzlauer Berg and started dating a management consultant who practiced Tibetan Buddhism. She was making maybe sixteen thousand dollars a year after taxes, but she wasn’t on welfare, so in Berlin she was solidly middle class.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What do you mean?”

“I was a virgin.”

“Are you serious?”

“You didn’t know?”

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

“And you married me anyway?”

“You were cute!”

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

“That’s crazy.”

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

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

“You can if it’s never been opened.”

“Don’t be crass.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yeah, and Olaf said he never touched her.”

“Well, there’s a reason.”

“Uh, to wit?”

“I was sort of off base about which guy you thought was ‘harmless.’ You told me you had the hots for a harmless guy. So the whole time in Lenzen” (that is, the half hour he and I were in the same room), “I keep seeing you with a Lutheran minister all into waxing poetic about ecological justice and frogs. You know the guy I mean. And you listening to him all ears and big Bambi eyes and I thought, whoa, Tiff’s got a brand new bag! I never thought you meant the fucking lobbyist!”

The little gears in my brain were grinding hard. “So after the Rhine Conference,” I said, “when you said Birke hooked up with my harmless crush, you meant Gernot?”

“I sure as shit didn’t mean the swinging dick lobbyist!”

I pictured Birke and Gernot together and laughed.

I kept laughing off and on for the rest of the day. I had another fit of giggling while falling asleep. I laughed cruelly at myself, thinking how I had huddled over the cookie-sheet stove in Breitenhagen. I pictured Birke in the rectory in Wittenberg, lounging by the fire on a tigerskin rug while Gernot brought her hot toddies.

Of course, as Stephen pointed out, they had something in common: rivers. They were both genuinely passionate about rivers. And I’m afraid we performed a number of improvised parodies of riparian hardcore porn over the course of the next several weeks.

I’d like to be able to say we invented riparian porn rather than merely satirizing it, but they say if you can think of it, there’s pornography about it, so we can’t have been the first. Somewhere out there, there’s explicit footage of after-hours goings on at Elbe-Saale-Camp. Which there isn’t. I mean, I can’t prove it, yet somehow I’m still certain, suggesting to my mind (via Occam’s razor) a corollary or rather alternative hypothesis: that all porn is about the same thing, a theme that is unitary, both able and liable to crop up anywhere and be juxtaposed with anything. Stephen had clearly invested a lot of energy in getting Birke to shut up about real existing rivers when they were in bed together—or at least he went to great lengths to include an element of surprise in his oral sex technique, something he had never done before—and found it personally rewarding to construct play-by-play rich in elaborately obscene riparian metaphor, particularly during oral sex when it was especially counterproductive. It all made perfect sense.

We went back to Albania in October. Instead of sticking to the coast, we headed up into the mountains by bus—the Bjeshkët e Namuna, the “enchanted” or “cursed” mountains, depending on your perspective.

You can get tired of Albanian buses if you value fresh air or your life. Two villages after Thethi, Stephen suggested horses. I found out something I hadn’t known. He couldn’t walk uphill. He would take ten steps up a mild grade and then wait.

That sort of explained why he had commuted so cheerfully by car between our first apartment and the corporate campus and didn’t like downtown Berne. And why he loved Berlin (flat as a pancake) and never visited my sister. And rented that place that was almost a basement, and drove up roads in Switzerland it had been totally illegal to drive up, and gave the appearance of being addicted to pills: Stephen had a bad heart.

I didn’t advertise how dull I was by sharing my belated insight. I just asked what was wrong with the southern coastal wetlands, like maybe Butrinti. He said Italian tourists hunt in packs and he would rather get into shouting matches with one gun-toting maniac at a time.

I favored renting a car. Neither of us knew how to ride a motorcycle. We couldn’t imagine making it up the grades with mopeds, but we could easily imagine tumbling to our deaths. Stephen thought a horse would be nice, like he had in Macedonia. Birds like them, and you can fuel up on whatever happens to be growing on the ground. But the scheme turned out to be impracticable. Trekkers had made the “horse” scene a seller’s market.

We compromised on a donkey. No ecotourist was heartless enough to ride a donkey, so the price was still relatively Albanian.

I didn’t know much about donkeys. My boarding school had a “coon-jumping mule,” a term on whose origins I refuse to speculate, and I had ridden it plenty of times when we were giving the thoroughbreds a rest for whatever reason. It could jump over a four-foot fence from a standstill, like a jack-in-the-box. It had nothing in common with this diminutive stoic. With or without Stephen on its back, its pose was the same. Its general demeanor suggested that the burden of Stephen was no heavier than the burden of existence. On steep paths Stephen would dismount and hold fast to its mane, like a climber being short-roped by a Sherpa. It seemed strong as Godzilla. I named it Brighty.

Once I got used to the visuals, there seemed nothing odd to me about a rider whose sneakers almost dragged the ground. Stephen didn’t use a saddle, just a folded blanket to keep donkey hair from working its way through his pants. I held the rope and carried our stuff in a backpack, and we fit right in. Albania is the West Virginia of Europe. Single mothers there dress and live as men.

I identified with Brighty. Her humble patience, her long-lashed eyes, the graceful way she picked out a route to nowhere with her tiny feet. We were one. Stephen told me where to go, and I led Brighty, on whom Stephen sat. A trinity. Three beings with a single will. I had never envisioned myself wearing a backpack larger than my torso and leading my husband through ancient live oaks on a donkey, wowing each village in turn like Christ’s entry into Jerusalem, but then again, I never did have much imagination.

Stephen came clean about his Macedonian pony adventure. When he had decided to try riding, the one person in town who knew English and could answer his questions was a Catholic missionary, who referred him to a farmer who had a spare pony. It was spare for the reason that it hadn’t been ridden in years. Its shaggy pelt was caked with mud and its hooves needed trimming. Stephen cleaned and filed its hooves, brushed its coat to a fine gloss, and dressed its wounds. He decided it cleaned up pretty good, so he climbed aboard and rode across the fields into a swamp, where the pony panicked, never having been that close to trees in its life. It lay down and cowered, then rolled. He succeeded in calming it, but not himself, as hundreds of deerflies descended and began biting them both cruelly. He improvised blinders and a fly whisk from the surrounding vegetation and remounted. They moved forward. The woods were hot and damp, and they both sweated unconscionably. The pony was unhappy and so was Stephen, so that when it took to sprinting, determined to get out of the trees at any price, he gave it its head. He threw himself to the ground to avoid being killed by a low branch, but he held on to the reins, and the pony didn’t drag him more than maybe ten feet. Being Stephen, he then assumed that their relationship had nowhere to go but up.

Since there wasn’t much for Brighty to eat, we had to book her into overnight lodgings the same as ourselves. The farmers sometimes fed her armfuls of leaves ripped off the trees with pruning hooks. Their livestock was goats and sheep with long dreads and ferocious coin-slot eyes. Their cars were egg-shaped from running into rocks.

Albania was no wilderness; there were even marked trails. But it wasn’t exactly crowded. We were pretty much left to ourselves. On the way up Pllaja e Pusit, two American-looking guys whizzed past us on mountain bikes doing forty miles an hour without saying a word. They terrified Brighty and made us take an hourlong break during which we saw Fringilla coelebs and Motacilla alba, two birds you might consider noteworthy if they were to appear in flocks of one million plus or open their mouths and speak. The friendlier tourists were not much better. Without a language in common, no upscale traveler could adequately convey the native wit and creativity that had inspired him to take some travel guide’s hint to go to Albania before capitalism turned it into Montenegro. Finns or Tuscans or whatever would remark of Brighty, “Good car!” and we would say, “Good car for good roads!” Everyone would laugh, and they would pet her nose, causing her to stand still for upwards of fifteen minutes so we had plenty of time to discuss the location of the closest good town or good restaurant with good food while uninteresting birds flowed past in waves. We met a group of women from England, but they didn’t get the donkey-backpack-surrendered wife thing. We didn’t see any more English guys. They were scarce away from the waterfront bars.

Stephen catalogued bird after bird. The only ones you could see clearly were the big BOPs circling out of the range of gunfire. One toted a partridge—Stephen’s first and last partridge, it turned out. Most flitted past us like sparks arcing, emitting squeaks that identified them to Stephen but not to me. One day we got to a dead ewe in time to catch the goose-stepping of the griffon vultures arriving to deliver its breech birth along with everything else except its rumen, bones, and pelt. Before I closed my eyes, it sky-rocketed to first place on the list of the most repellent spectacles I had ever witnessed, lending a vivid symbolic figuration to events I had hitherto refused to name.

Stephen whispered that he was scanning the periphery for the white Egyptian vultures that specialize in crime scene cleanup, but the steppes were No Bird’s Land. Birds were willing to fly in from distant mountain peaks for a free meal, but they didn’t care to set up shop. Only the migrants didn’t know any better, to their sorrow.

We saw the moa a few times. Stephen would hear it shift its weight in the underbrush, mostly when we were having sex. He would put his hand on my mouth and whisper, “Listen. The moa.” He would prop himself up on his elbow and look around. The moa would stand up in the bush where it had been hiding and walk away, reviewing its cell phone video, assault rifle hanging low like a bass guitar.

When we couldn’t take the mountains anymore, we gave Brighty to a single mother who promised to feed her, and caught the bus headed for Pustec. Just inches from the lumpy rock, there’s a smooth, modern road. We flew down—that’s how it felt after all that time without wheels, like gliding—and alighted on Lake Prespa in the evening.

We got off at a lonely bus stop in front of an empty hotel. Walking felt cumbersome, like when you take off your skates after hours at an ice rink. We crossed the wide, flat plain of scrub where the lake had once been until we reached the shoreline. The transparent water was so smooth it seemed like a blob of mercury resting in a spoon. The orange sun dyed our shadows on the water blue.

It was clear and cold. Stephen got in as far as his thighs and stood there being a wimp. He started walking forward again and lost his balance. He splashed around for a bit on his knees. He asked, “Is this necessary?” in a tone of irritation and was suddenly underwater.

I thought of sinkholes and underground rivers. He tried to pull himself back to his feet by using the surface of the water as a banister. He went under again. I reached him and pulled his shoulders up. He looked at me, demanding answers. I dragged him back to the flats and nestled his head in gravel. I ran toward the road and back again. I did CPR, which I had learned on a rubber dummy in school, but it was pretty much a joke, since he was mostly in the water, with water in his lungs. And at some point after that he was dead. Of a heart attack, I think, but nobody really knows.

A hunter helped me carry Stephen onto the grass. He called an ambulance while I put on my clothes.

I’m calling him a hunter because he had a rifle, but actually he was just a guy out riding around on a moped. It’s not like you’d call every Yemeni with an AK-47 a paramilitary. I mean, obviously he would have shot us if we hadn’t been human. That’s why you could go for months without seeing any animal other than a bird. Birds are braver than the other animals, because they have an ace up their sleeve: flight. Maybe Europe had flightless birds once, but nobody ever saw them because they hid instead of fleeing. And then they were gone, like the lavender in the book that was never opened. The marbled teal is almost gone. It doesn’t hide. It flies away, low and slow and in a straight line.

All in all, I have nothing non-symbolic to say about Stephen’s death and will stop now, almost. I had known that dying turns people into an incoherent jumble of meaningless forces that gets rolled round in earth’s diurnal course like rocks and stones and trees, because I read it in The Education of Henry Adams. Henry’s sister dies of tetanus after an accident, and he makes it abundantly clear that nothing could have been more pointless. I hadn’t known about ghosts and zombies. I thought they were pop-culture pseudo-folklore that turns up in B-movies because all you need is makeup. But Stephen kept breathing long after he was dead. Even his feet breathed. And after he was gone, he became a ghost. I would realize he was dead, and feel I’d seen a ghost.

Maybe if Henry Adams had written more about his wife.

Some nice nurse found Trajco’s number in Stephen’s wallet. Trajco, the amateur ornithologist with a thing for beaches. He arrived a day later. I was sitting in the hospital lobby staring at nothing. Thinking it might help me commune with Stephen, who had become nothing.

Trajco hustled me to a hotel. He more or less sat on me for a day and a night. He assured everyone I would be fine once I was back with my sister in Berlin.

Constance flew out to pick me up in Skopje. Her presence calmed me instantly. She had seen me in worse crises, like spankings for lying to protect her. She had that steadying family influence. So soothing, yet always unpleasant in one way or another. In her case the problem was intimacy and easy familiarity. She confessed that she felt seriously guilty for sleeping with Stephen. I said, Please don’t! He really enjoyed it! At which point she got all sanctimonious because whatever else her flaws, she wasn’t a swinger, plus she had been really attracted to him, unlike me. At the time it blew my mind that anybody could feel guilty about anything unless he had personally murdered Stephen. But she wanted to feel something; and regarding his existence as over, she went mining for feelings in their shared past and came up with not being sorry she’d fucked his brains out.

By the time we got to Berlin, I decided I’d had enough steadying and wanted to go home. But when I tried to turn the key in the door to our apartment, it kept slipping out from between my thumb and forefinger. I literally couldn’t get inside. I went back to Prenzlauer Berg and waited for Constance in a café.

She promised to deal with all the paperwork and so on related to the proper disposal of Stephen’s body. And she did. It took weeks. She became my hero.

Omar called. He said, after swearing me to secrecy, that the pump was an artificial heart and Stephen wanted to work on it and that’s why he was so desperate to get a transfer to Berlin.

At the funeral, I finally met Stephen’s mother. She looked at me with a hatred I’d only ever seen before on a caracal in the zoo.

Stephen turned out to have a major life insurance policy he had let lapse. If I had liquidated the Tiff Foundation to pay our bills in Berlin, I would have been a millionaire.

Gernot invited me to stay in Breitenhagen. Inside: peace and stillness, the cookie-sheet stove, his books. Outside the fields stretched to the horizon and laggard cranes plowed their heavy, slump-shouldered course through the sky, tootling as they went. The moon glazed the Elbe silver and I walked through the snow. Crunch, crunch. Physically, Breitenhagen was the anti-Berne. A world without end. To see a definite horizon, you had to go inside and pull the curtains.

On Boxing Day, while Gernot was at church, Olaf came to see me. He brought flowers and a store-bought cake and set them on the table. He looked older, just like me.

“I doubt you’re happy to see me,” he said. “I doubt you’re happy about anything.”

“That’s not true,” I said. “If I keep moving around, I’m fine, and if I wake up at night, I go out. Then I feel better.”

He suggested we take a walk.

I suggested we go to bed, occasioning a stricken look. I apologized.

“Really, it’s my fault,” he said. “I should have left you alone to think things through.”

“No,” I said. “Seeing you is a nice surprise.”

“Are you really okay here by yourself?” he asked.

I said, “It’s weird being alone. I thought I would be married to Stephen forever. It never crossed my mind that we’d ever split up. Not really. It’s like I was a part of him, and he was a part of me. We did that classic couples thing, where you delegate functions to each other and end up losing basic competencies, but we were always together, so it was no problem. Now I have to figure out what aspects of myself I let him adopt and represent, and what parts of me are actually him.”

“Hmm,” he said. “That sounds like a load of pop-psychological bullshit.”

“You have a wife,” I said. “You know what it’s like.”

“Had a wife.”

I acquired a stricken look of my own. The Olaf of my dreams was a married man and lived on the Rhine. This was the Elbe, and the day after Christmas. I looked down at the flowers. Pink roses. He clearly had something in mind.

He looked at them, too, and remarked, “That was probably the first time in your life a man turned you down for sex.”

“Not true,” I said. “Some guys can’t get it up after two drinks.”

While he was demonstrating his sobriety with a rhetorically impressive account of various inner struggles surrounding his divorce, it crossed my mind that, Stephen’s being an incubus aside, and beyond his haunting my waking nightmares as a hairy mass of suet in a universe that resounded with screaming, he had abandoned me for Birke and found quite extraordinarily high praise for my sister, while I had respected his privacy so much that I let him outsource his health to a donkey and die slower than Anne Brontë in Mrs. Gaskell’s life of Charlotte—i.e., like a dog. When it came to relationships, I concluded, I could possibly take tips even from Olaf. I admitted that what I had just said about being part of Stephen had been a pack of lies.

“That’s good,” Olaf said. “Because if I catch you being a part of me, I’ll give you somebody to be a part of.”

It was a proposal of marriage and children. I smiled. My future spread before me like a picnic. I would marry Olaf and study to be an expert on woodlands. He would smile on me beneficently as I grew into the role of well-informed conversational partner and competent working mom. I was liberated from all doubts of my self-worth and said not a word.

We had sex and went for a walk. I leaned my head on his scratchy tweed coat. A woodpecker bobbed up in front of us like an apparition, then tucked in its wings and fell away into the core zone.

Olaf said, “By the way, I live near Berlin now.”

I said, “That’s nice. I was always wondering when you’d figure out Bonn isn’t the capital anymore.”

“I work for Global Rivers Alliance.”

I couldn’t jump away. I pushed hard, but he kept his arm around my shoulder.

“They got a huge grant,” he continued. “They have some important donors, defectors from the WWF. It’s going to be a powerful organization. Birke’s a competent fundraiser, but she needed somebody with liaison experience to do the actual work. You can’t just raise money for its own sake.”

“No, I guess you can’t!”

“Are you upset?”

“Can we go home now?”

“Sure.” He turned us around.

“Are you sleeping with Birke the way everybody else is?” I asked.

He sighed. “No. You have a one-track mind. You think Birke needs my help? She’s doing me a favor, not the other way around. Life is not fair. Listen, I came here to ask you to move in with me.”

“I don’t think I can move to Berlin. For one, seeing that stupid twat get rich off Global Rivers Alliance would kill me.”

“The GRA office is in Berlin, and my place is in Lehnin.”

“Lenin?”

“Kloster Lehnin. It’s south of Potsdam. I have bullfinches and wrens. I have squirrels. Come on, say yes. I always wanted a girlfriend with a one-track mind.”

I stopped walking and stomped both feet in frustration. I actually hopped in place on the snow like an angry robin. I said, “I am through being people’s sex slave! I want to study organic forestry!”

He backed away from me and said, “You really mean it.”

“Birke majored in design. She wouldn’t know a river if it bit her on the butt. I don’t want to be that kind of activist. I want to be the kind that makes a difference! The kind with a policy job! I want an education! I was raised on art and literature, the opiates of the intellectually underprivileged” (here I used the term for the poor in spirit from the Sermon on the Mount), “but I refuse to go on fiddling while Rome burns!”

“The forest service is more hierarchical than the Vatican. They have two missions, to harvest trees and shoot deer. You wouldn’t last a week.”

“Germany has freedom of conscience! I’ll take it to the European Court of Human Rights if I have to!”

“What if I said I adore you? That I miss your fierce volubility every day?”

“What’s ‘volubility’?” (The German was over my head.)

“My life would be so much more fun if you lived in Lehnin. You can study something sensible in Potsdam. There are lakes everywhere up there. There’s a kayak in my shed. I have a big yard. Move in with me, you dingbat. It’s half an hour to Berlin. Nothing would remind you of Stephen. You wouldn’t even have to see your sister. Global Rivers Alliance is paying me serious money, at least for the first year.”

I said, “Okay.”

Gernot came to visit. He said he saw it coming. He said, “Olaf knows what he wants. That’s normal for a bird, but exceptional in a human being.”

“Olaf just wants to breed and feed like everybody else,” I said.

“You’re underestimating birds,” he said. “When he came to see you, did he eat or impregnate anything? False alarm. He came to sing his song.”

“Um, you could be right,” I said.

“When I tell my congregation there’s more to life than food and sex, I’m just singing my song. From over their heads, like a bird in the pulpit, and people respond. No information changes hands, but it doesn’t matter. Preaching really is like birdsong. If you find the melody, the fiction soars upward and joins the invisible truth. People respond to the truth in the lie. The way a bird responds when it hears its song. The males back off, and the females crouch down.”

I frowned and said, “The females crouch down?”

He continued, “Tiffany, you must try to understand that it takes conditions of artificial scarcity to make satisfying basic needs seem beautiful. Our society works hard to make food and sex as scarce as beauty and love.”

“You’re up to your neck in food and sex!”

“So what?” he said. “They can’t stop me from being afraid you’re leaving.”

“I’m not leaving! I’m going to Potsdam. It’s like half an hour.”

“Of course. And what about when GRA assigns Olaf to open an office in Brussels? I wouldn’t be surprised. Do you speak French?”

“Brussels!” I said. “I always wanted to live there!”

“My love, you have the attention span of a fish.”

“But I’m going to improve it in school in Brussels. I bet they have international programs in English. In ten years I’ll be really educated and purposeful. I don’t mean with a one-track mind, like I have now, but a force to be reckoned with, like Olaf or Batman.”

He shook his head and let go of my hands. “A butterfly among the birds,” he said.

I sat up straight. “Do you mean I remind you of the wallcreeper?”

“No. I meant Olaf is going to feed you to his young.”

He picked out two walnuts from the bowl on the table and broke one against the other using both hands. He ate the weaker walnut, then tested the strength of the remaining walnut against a new walnut. It was something I’d seen him do dozens of times. At first I thought he was doing it to kill time in the silence, but after the same walnut won eight rounds I sort of got the picture.

“The strong walnut is boring,” I said. “It might as well be a rock.”

“It flatters itself that the nutcracker finds it especially attractive,” he said, reaching for the nutcracker.

“You’re unhappy because I’m marrying Olaf,” I said pointedly.

“I’m bitter,” he said. “All growing things are bitter.” He picked a thin lobe of grayish meat from the ruins of the especially hard nut, turning it this way and that, and set it down again. “Summertime is sour. What is mature turns sweet and falls, like your Stephen. You’re in love with endings now. And you believe that for Olaf, you’re the end.”

“I don’t expect him to love me forever. Just long enough to raise a couple of kids.”

“Aha. You admit openly that he loves you the most right now. Because you will never be younger, more playful, or more obedient. With luck, your children will supplant you and he will go on loving you for their sake. This is love as a deflationary spiral. A never-ending buyer’s market.”

“You really are bitter,” I said.

I went back to Berlin and gave notice to the landlord. I went through Stephen’s stuff. I took everything we owned (meaning almost everything but my clothes) down to the flea market by the Landwehr canal and priced it to sell. When evening came, I walked off and left it. I embarked on my new life.

There’s a bird called a nutcracker, but it lives on pine nuts. When a bird wants to crack an actual nut, he drops it a long way on concrete.

I.e., Olaf lost interest in sex the minute I moved in. He said it was me, and that being around a grieving widow was bringing him down. When I tried to strong-arm him into taking the Brussels job, he called me a harpy.

I felt I’d never liked him and never known him. And all because he never bent over backward to please me, even though we were together. I had thought that’s what boyfriends did. He started spending weeknights in town with Birke. Once she called me up, sounding excited, wanting to have a serious talk between old friends. It was mortifying. I realized they were both complete assholes, and if not for the one, I would never have met the other.

Then he moved out and left me alone in Lehnin. The yard was mostly sheds filled with junk. The neighbors stared at me. The kayak had a big crack in the hull, exacerbated by incompetent repairs.

For months I lay like a windfall peach contemplating its own bitter almond.

Then I got up and called Gernot. He sounded delighted. For reasons that resist examination, I began by proposing marriage.

“I will never, ever marry anyone, least of all you,” he said. “But you can live in Dessau rent-free if you redecorate. I’ll pay for the materials. Isn’t that what women want?”

“I could kiss you!” I said.

“Women are all the same,” he said. “Inscrutable guardians of inexpressible passions, and sentimental about money.”

“I didn’t ask you to pay my rent,” I pointed out. “I just need you to save me.”

“A universal error of women,” he said. “True sub-proletarians, always giving themselves body and soul because they have nothing else. In gratitude for crumbs of power and security that fall from others’ tables, helping those who need it least. Helping strong, successful, sexy men, for the love of God.” He sighed.

“Isn’t letting me live in the house you helping me?”

“Thanks for the compliment, darling, but you are mistaken. Where that house is concerned, I am the poorest of the poor. No private citizen can afford German craftsmen, and if I hire migrant laborers tax-free like a normal person, I lose my pension. To frame tax evasion as civil disobedience is difficult. Until retirement, I am tied to Wittenberg with chains of steel. The house must be lived in. But I can’t rent it out. It’s too big. It would need to be to cut up into apartments, and that would break my heart. To sell it would likewise break my heart.”

“Can I take up the carpeting?”

He sighed again. “Here is my final offer, Tiffany. Stop following orders. Do what you want. Work selfishly. Without the experience of control, you will never have the experience of creativity. Stop giving yourself away, and you will have more to offer than your body and soul. Keep them and cultivate them. Learn, learn, and once again learn!” He said that last bit in Russian, quoting Lenin: Uchit se, uchit se, uchit se. I said I would take it under advisement.

After a while, I decided he might be on to something. I had been treating myself as resources to be mined. Now I know I am the soil where I grow. In between wallpapering, I wrote The Wallcreeper. Then I started on the floors. Then I took up playing the piano. I went back to school in Jena and graduated in hydrogeology. I worked for a while at the Federal Environmental Office (it was moved from Berlin to Dessau in 2005, presumably to decrease its influence), and quit to found an ecological planning bureau. I am proud to say that my environmental impact statements have helped make dredging the Elbe prohibitively expensive. It is now silting up and winds lazily among shifting sandbars, very good for canoeing. Children wade out to the islands. The house just keeps getting nicer and nicer. I pack it with furniture to keep Gernot from bouncing around. The movie version ends with a montage of Stephen in bed with different club kids (almost all girls) in Berne. Soundtrack: “Oh Very Young.”