The Ministry for the Future

on my ass, but that morning I caught the longest left of my life at Point Panic, with Bruddah Iz’s pair of tunes running in my head the whole time, what a wonderful world indeed, and I flew out of that wave just before it closed out, and up there in the air over the wave, suspended weightless with the offshore spray and not seeing the ehukai rainbow because I was right there in it, yes that’s when I felt it. Of course it doesn’t come on command or to a schedule, grace isn’t like that, it touches down on you in unexpected moments, a matter of accidents, but you have to be open to it too, so maybe that was it for me, a slight delay after the sacred ceremony, which maybe was the riding of that wave anyway— anyway I felt it then, hanging in the air, then I crashed back down onto the white hissing backside and swam head up, laughing out loud. Yes, it worked. Mamma Mia!

104

Back in Zurich, Mary told the Swiss that she was going to move out of her safe house. Retirement had changed her security status, she didn’t need to occupy a safe house that was probably needed for others, and so on. They didn’t object.

They didn’t want her to move back to her apartment on Hochstrasse, but neither did she. That faded blue apartment block was now part of her past, it wouldn’t come back. It was time to move on. And she had an idea anyway. There were housing cooperatives all over Zurich. She didn’t want to move into the one Frank had lived in; that too was the past. Anyway it was Art’s place too, and so for multiple reasons she felt it wasn’t a good idea. But there were other housing co-ops in Zurich, a lot of them it turned out, and so she spent some time visiting a few.

During these visits around the city, she realized that she liked her neighborhood. Fluntern, it was called, there on the lower slope of the Zuriberg. She liked it there. It was her neighborhood. So, in a less strongly felt way, was the district behind the Utoquai schwimmbad. She liked that part of town too. So she focused on those two neighborhoods, and then the area between them; they weren’t that far apart. Of course the whole city was compact.

There were some cooperatives that were all right, but most didn’t quite suit, and almost all of them had waiting lists that would take quite a while to work through to her. The more she looked, the more she realized how much she had liked her old place. But she needed to change.

Finally she found a place because Badim knew she was looking for one. Someone who had been working for him in the ministry had to move back to Ticino to care for her father, and when she heard from Badim that Mary was looking for a place, she wanted Mary to take it. It could be an informal arrangement, she said, a kind of sublease; the board had heard her appeal concerning this plan, and liked the idea of having Mary Murphy among them, and so had approved it. It was just several blocks from her old place, south past her usual tram stop at Kirche Fluntern and along Bergstrasse to an odd three-streeted corner where the co-op took up one wedge of the intersection. A little twenty-apartment co-op, four stories high, well-maintained like every other building in Zurich, all except for the old wreck across from the tram stop one down from Kirche Fluntern, which was some kind of special thing.

The woman subletting it to her met her at the door of the place. Trudi Maggiore, she said.

“Mary,” Mary said, shaking her hand. “I’ve seen you around the office.”

The woman nodded. “I worked two buildings down, but I took notes for Badim at a lot of your meetings. I sat against the wall with the other assistants. And I went with you on a trip to India.”

“Ah yes, I remember now.”

Trudi led her up the broad stairs of their stairwell. On the top floor she unlocked the door of her place. “It used to be the attic,” she explained as she opened it. “I hope you don’t mind. You get used to it.”

It had been a very small and low attic, Mary saw at once. It was a single room, tucked under the big roofbeam of the building such that only under the roofbeam itself could you stand upright. To left and right of it the ceiling sloped down until the walls to left and right were only about two feet high. The left side of the room did have an interior wall sticking out into the room, and a door in that wall opened on the bathroom, which likewise sloped down to a low wall. It was hyperclean, like any Swiss bathroom, of course, but as with the rest of the place, about half its volume was far less than head high. The toilet was located past the sink; kind of a woman’s apartment in that sense, in that you could sit on it, but if you stood before it you would have to duck.

“I like it,” Mary said. “It’s funny.”

Trudi looked pleased. “I like it too. I’m sorry I have to leave. But I’m glad you’ll be the one in it. I admire what you did.”

“Thank you,” Mary said.

She walked up and down the midline. Past the bathroom the room widened again to the left, and there lay the bed, set right on the floor. To lie down on it, it would be easiest to sit first on a short chair set next to it, and then roll on. Once in bed it didn’t matter how low the ceiling was, as long as you didn’t leap to your feet in a dream or something like that.

The kitchen was back against the wall