So to Roland she said, Ohne Fehler, ohne Herz. No mistakes, no heart. We are marked by our fuckups. We are made from our fuckups. Anna wanted it to be true. And if she wanted it to be true badly enough, perhaps it would be.
But days came that the plain pain of memory ate through Anna’s understanding of her personal history. It was then that she pined for the hour exactly before she met Stephen Nicodemus. How different it all would be had I just gone home. Other days, it was such an ache that tethered her to joy. It was despair alone she owned outright. An indefensible comfort, but comfort nonetheless. The only thing she rarely felt was guilt. Love trumped guilt like rock won out over scissors.
“This is basic, class. Present tense. That which happens now. Future tense. What will occur. Simple past: what was done. Present perfect? What has been done.”
But how often is the past simple? Is the present ever perfect? Anna stopped listening. These were rules she didn’t trust.
ANNA SAW MARY OFF at the bus, telling her that by tradition, she took a solitary walk on her birthday during which she considered the previous year and reevaluated her priorities. She would walk the Zürichberg that day, she said. Anna pointed in the direction of Dietlikon. “I may even walk home.” It was a passable lie. She always wanted to hike home from the Zürichberg but never had. If she hadn’t planned to meet Archie that day, she might have made the hike. Mary gave her a final birthday hug and blew her ridiculous kisses from the window as the bus drove away. Anna shook her head and walked back toward the zoo. She met Archie by the ticket booth. He paid both admissions. “Let’s walk around a bit,” Archie said. “I want to see the animals.” Anna replied, “Sure,” but she meant Whatever.
They made a wistful pair, Anna knowing that it wouldn’t be long before she told Archie the fun they’d been sharing was over and Archie suspecting that was what she would be telling him. They walked without affect and moved through the exhibits and the habitats barely speaking beyond Look over here and Uh-huh. The tigers slept behind rocks and couldn’t easily be seen. The pandas were shy and didn’t come out at all. The monkeys wanted to be watched. They shrieked through their cages and shook the bars.
“YES, YOU DO HATE Switzerland. And,” Doktor Messerli paused for effect, “you love it. You love it and you hate it. What you don’t feel is apathy. You’re not indifferent. You’re ambivalent.”
Anna had thought about this before, when nights came during which she could do nothing but wander Dietlikon’s sleeping streets or hike the hill behind her house to sit upon the bench where most often she went to weep. She’d considered her ambivalence many, many times, and in the end, she’d diagnosed herself with a disease that she’d also invented. Switzerland syndrome. Like Stockholm syndrome. But instead of my captors, I’m attached to the room in which I’m held captive. It’s the prison I’m bound to, not the warden.
Anna was absolutely right. It was the landscape. It was the geography. The fields, the streams, the lakes, the forests. And the mountains. On exceptionally clear days when the weather was right, if you walked south on Dietlikon’s Bahnhofstrasse you could see the crisp outlines of snowcapped Alps against a blazing blue horizon eighty kilometers away. On these certain days it was something in the magic of the atmosphere that made them tangible and moved them close. The mutability of those particular mountains reminded Anna of herself. And it wasn’t simply the natural landscape that she attached herself to emotionally. It was the cobblestone roads of Zürich’s old town and the spires of this church and the towers of that one. And the trains, the trains, the goddamn trains. She could take the train anywhere she wanted to go.
But when she asked herself, Where to? her only answer was impossibly illogical: I want to go home. Ostensibly, she was already there.
“WHERE DOES FIRE GO when it goes out?” Anna asked. Stephen shook his head. The answer he gave was remote. “Nowhere, Anna. It just goes away. We’ve been over this before.” They had. And Anna still didn’t like the answer. Why does the fire ever have to go away? She refused to concede the point. Not when he said it and not—nearly two years later—when she remembered him having said it.