Every verb had a hundred likelihoods. Others were shouted out. Fragen. To ask. Nehmen. To take. Lügen. To lie. Laufen. To run. Sein. To be.
“Anna?” Roland looked to Anna for a word. She held a dozen in her mouth but settled on one. Lieben. The infinitive form of love.
For, Anna thought, if love is not infinite or eternal? Then I want nothing of it.
ANNA WALKED AT A casual, intentional pace. It’s time to think about the future, she thought. It is time to think about thinking about the future. Anna entered the Hauptbahnhof at the concourse. On Wednesdays it became the site of an enormous farmers’ market. Over fifty vendors set up stalls. Local growers, wineries, artisan cheesemakers, sausage sellers, crêpe makers, bakers—the list of merchants was long and varied. Anna tried to go every week. She bought organic olive oil and summer sausage made from highland cattle and as a usual treat she’d buy a cone of candied almonds or a Schoggibanane. At Christmastime, the hall was packed even more tightly with booths and stalls of seasonal foods and crafts all crushed around an enormous Christmas tree. That day the hall was empty and the stalls were gone. Everything echoed. A wind blew through. It made her cold.
And yet Anna lingered in the open emptiness comforted by the clipped, hollow complaint of her footfalls on the floor of the great, vacant room as she crossed it. She paused beneath the station’s guardian angel, that strange one-ton sculpture made from god knows what that pended from the ceiling beams. Christ, she’s ugly, Anna thought. It was installed ten years ago. Anna and the angel had lived in Switzerland for almost the same amount of time. She was pinheaded and faceless and clothed in a painted-on pushup bra and minidress. Her wings had holes in them. Her patterns were mismatched. And she was fat. Anna had read that the artist intended the angel’s lusty, robust form to evoke an equally full-bodied femininity, an attitude native to women who don’t give damns what others think. Modern art for modern women. Little wonder Anna couldn’t stand her. Nor did she care for the installation on the other side of the room: twenty-five thousand tiny lights arranged in a tight, three-dimensional square and hanging from the ceiling. They pulsed in shifting patterns of color, design, and depth. The tiny lights dimmed, then beamed, then stalled, then strobed. The effect was hypnotic and omniscient. The way light sometimes was.
As in the night before. How the kitchen had never seemed starker underneath the overhead fluorescent bulbs. No room had ever been so bright as that, Anna decided. Nothing stayed in shadow. It was awful. The Doktor had warned this was the most usual side effect of coming into consciousness, and the Doktor had been right.
Anna watched the luminous box above her. It pinkened. It yellowed. It blanched. Oh, Anna. A single lifetime and yet so many lies. The lights turned blue. I wonder which one’s the worst? Anna had never asked herself. But the answer was easy.
I’ve never been nearly as alone as I always say I am.
The truth was, there were people Anna could call. People she might reach out to. Her cousin Cindy, for example. As children they’d been as inseparable as sisters. Anna might have swapped her number for Stephen’s in her Handy’s contact list, but she didn’t throw it away. It was at the house somewhere. She could find it. Nevertheless, Anna hadn’t phoned her in years. And there was an aunt on the other side of the family with whom Anna had kept in moderate touch. Two years ago she passed through Zürich on a European tour and spent a weekend with the Benzes. Anna had almost forgotten that. How did I almost forget that? And the girls from the old neighborhood. They’d not spoken in almost two decades, but they grew up with one another and their families had been friends. An unexpected phone call to one of them would barely merit a blink. Even perhaps Anna’s favorite teacher, the high school librarian who one day found Anna hiding in the stacks, Anna’s rotten inner dejection attempting to consume her. She blotted Anna’s tears and bought her a soda and said (Anna remembered this perfectly), Honey, you don’t ever need to feel as terrible as this, which, in that moment, was enough. Anna had kept in touch with her through college. She came to Anna’s parents’ funeral. She attended Anna’s wedding. It had been over a decade but she could call her, couldn’t she? Of course she could. Anna could call any of these women.