Last Human Artists

Last Human Artists

1.

Elena

For Elena, the idea that in a parallel universe another version of her is living worry-free and happy is both repulsive and appealing.

Repulsive because then she’d have no grist to give voice to her writing, and appealing because then she’d have the comfort of family and the horrible thing with Tobias would never have happened.

At her writing desk facing the window, chin propped in one hand, she chews on this conundrum. Across the river, dulling sunlight chases ripples left by a passing boat. Something about the changing light makes her skin feel too thin, like she’s porous to the air. Like she could reach out and touch a different her in another universe.

An email notification pings on her laptop, startling her from the absurd reverie. The subject line claws at something beneath her ribs. Curiosity first, followed by the slow crawl of dread.

Urgent! Your work will be stolen if you don’t do something.

She places a calming hand at the centre of her chest, pushing away the irrational panic. It’s ridiculous sensationalism. And the sender has the same name as her. Elena Kugel. Spam. Clickbait. Still, the skin at the back of her neck prickles. What a strange coincidence that she was just thinking about other hers, writing a novel set in parallel universes, and this lands in her inbox. She almost laughs. There’s a name for that, isn’t there? When you think about red cars and suddenly they’re everywhere. Frequency illusion. Pattern-seeking. The mind mistaking coincidence for meaning. She clicks her fingers as the name surfaces. Baader–Meinhof phenomenon. She tells herself that’s all this is.

Her phone, lying face down on the desk, tinkles with a text message. Almost grateful for the diversion, she picks it up, her mood softening.

Tobias: In case you forgot, it’s the 31st. Come swim. The lake calls. Don’t let us be tragic indoor poets. And bring wine.

He knows exactly how to bait her. Soothing water, trees tingeing to orange, old jokes. A superstition, ever since they were teenagers. If they swim on the cusp, the coming season will turn out well. And she needs it to be successful.

Her gaze flicks to his painting hanging beside her desk. He’s a better writer than painter, but she likes his ‘little hobby’, as he calls it. The woman, blurred at the edges, half-faces away. Outlined around her are Plattenbau apartments, windows like data grids. People think it’s about erasure, but she knows better. It’s about defiance. His way of reminding her to keep writing. She sees him presenting it to her over a decade ago for her twentieth birthday. For your big city move, he’d said shyly. And so you don’t forget me when you’re at university.

Across the Spree, the East Side Gallery glints, the remnants of The Wall glossed over with murals. Nostalgia tourism repackaging trauma as an Instagram backdrop.

It’s unfathomable how she chooses to torture herself with this view, the reminder of how those slabs once split her family in two, her parents on that side, Oma on this one. If she turns the desk side-on, she’d have a clear line upriver to Oberbaumbrücke. She snorts at her idiocy. That’s hardly better. The bridge’s red brick twin towers are all pomp and fairy-tale arches, a set piece for a reunification musical no one asked for. And it’s constantly crawling with linen-clad tourists holding Riesling spritzes to catch the last light, oblivious to the bones under the pavement.

Below her apartment, Berlin rejects the idea it’s fading into autumn, ice cream dripping down children’s wrists, lovers touching like the weather won’t betray them tomorrow.

Scowling at her laptop, she repositions her hands on the keyboard. One chapter to fix. One. She should stay here and work. By tomorrow, the manuscript will be done and emailed to Suzanne for final editing. Then she and Tobias can swim. One day won’t make a difference.

A sharp knock on the front door has her fingers skidding across the keys. Whoever it is hasn’t buzzed from downstairs. It must be a neighbour, maybe Frau Miedbrodt from next door, wanting to borrow some obscure spice Elena never keeps. Elena suspects she’s checking in on her, the way she used to check in on Oma. Well-meaning, but today she can do without the disruption.

She crosses the room to peer through the peephole. Jesus, it’s Liv, balancing a basket on one hip, all perfectly winged eyeliner, artfully knotted vintage scarf, and layers of chiffon seduction. She hadn’t considered Liv an option at nine in the morning. Pushing down a frisson of irritation, she opens the door, stepping back to let her in.

‘Are you unwell? You’re not supposed to exist at this hour.’ And certainly not looking like a Vogue cover. God knows how Liv does it. Elena catches her own reflection in the dark glass of the door, yesterday’s T-shirt, dirty blonde hair in a knot that says deadline, not boho chic. She doesn’t belong in the same frame.

Liv breezes past and down the hall, speaking over her shoulder. ‘I know. I’ve breached my natural habitat. But you haven’t texted in a week, and that is never a good sign. You look like you’ve been locked in here since the turn of the century.’

Elena closes the door, following her into the living room.

Liv fixes her with the look that has undone her since they were twenty and passing notes in Professor Erpenbeck’s creative writing class, part affection, part delicious bossiness. ‘I come armed with croissants, nectarines, wine, and moral superiority.’

Elena folds her arms. ‘I’m not sure I can do interruptions. I’m a chapter off finishing the final edit, and there’s a minor technicality in getting it to cooperate.’

‘Aha! I knew you needed me. Your brain will work better after a break.’ She pulls out a croissant and waves it about. ‘Neurological fact. You can Google it. You’ll solve it when you stop trying so hard.’ She takes a bite, speaking with her mouth full. ‘Sorry, I’m famished. Get ready, you’re coming with me. Picnic.’

Elena glances at her phone, at Tobias’s guilt-inducing message. The weight of the unfinished chapter, of her own expectations, presses at her. A year ago, after marking it up for editing and emailing it back to Elena, Suzanne had said, It will be even better than your first. The voice of the times. Right before adding, Don’t let me down. That kind of pressure can rot you from the inside if you don’t transmute it.

So Liv is right. Fresh air and stimulating conversation are probably exactly what she needs to sharpen the brain cells. And who’s she kidding? Tradition matters. If she must be pulled from the work—

‘Fine,’ she sighs. ‘But if I’m taking a break, you’re swimming. Tobias is expecting me in Senzig. At the lake. I’m sure he won’t mind if you come too.’ There’s a faint flicker in her belly as she says this. ‘You can borrow a bikini.’

‘Yay!’ Liv claps her hands like an overexcited child. ‘But only if it’s the gold sparkly one I gave you that you never wear. It’s criminal to keep that hidden. And the public deserves a little joy.’

That bikini is the exact opposite of how Elena moves through the world. Liv knows this. Elena knows she knows this. It came with a handwritten note from Liv that read, Dare more, fear less. It’s the kind of thing Liv wears without a second thought, hips out, chin high. The idea of sunlight catching on every sequin makes Elena’s scalp prickle.

Liv narrows her green eyes with a sly smile. ‘I can’t believe you’re finally inviting me to your annual tête-à-tête with your mysteriously reclusive friend.’

Neither can Elena. But it feels rude to fob her off, not when Liv has already arrived armed with good intentions and pastry. At least Liv’s a fiction writer. Some conversations you can’t have with civilians.

For years, Liv’s been angling to meet Tobias, to go to Senzig. To see ‘Elena’s roots’. To the lake. A seed of awful suspicion snags her thoughts, that knowing they always swim on the 31st August, Liv has unintentionally orchestrated this ambush of basket, croissants, and charm offensive. Elena curls her fingers into her palm. No. She lets her fingers relax. Liv doesn’t always make everything about herself. Elena is sure her intentions are exactly what she said they are. It wouldn’t be the first time Liv has engineered a rescue without calling it one. It’s probably something she should unpack with her therapist, this need to keep Tobias to herself.

She picks up her phone to message Tobias, and there is the notification for the spam email. She’ll open it and block this fake her. She clicks on it, and despite herself, scrolls to the body of the email.

‘You coming?’ Liv asks, and Elena has to force her gaze away from the screen.

2.

Nico

Berlin

To Nico, midday light is a liar.

Damn stuff sharpens everything to a false edge, thinning colours into something brittle. Under it, nothing breathes. Shadows are too clean. Flesh turns to paper. Late afternoon light is so much better for painting. The sun goldens and thickens the air, the colours melt into one another, shadows pooling like old blood. That’s when art speaks in subtleties. Not this.

The radiator clangs fitfully, and he only now remembers the coffee on his workbench. Blah! It’s long cold, and ringed with scum. He really must get a water filter.

Standing back from the canvas, he rubs a streak of paint down his jeans. The figure still won’t resolve. A woman half-there. He’s repainted her shoulders three times, scraped them back four. The bones refuse to sing. Or scream.

‘Fucking hell.’

Babou, ears flicking, watches from the battered armchair by the floor-to-ceiling window. The cat’s mouth is suspiciously red, and Nico’s chest squeezes. God, it’s blood! The poor thing’s cut himself. Nico scans the floor, sagging in relief that turns quickly to annoyance. There – the bastard’s gnawed at another tube. Lake Red this time. Damned cat’s already chewed through viridian green this week, and the studio stinks of turpentine from that clean-up. Maybe it’s a mineral in the paint Babou’s lacking. He should take him to the vet and get him checked out.

Nico goes over and scoops up Babou, ochre-stained fingers stroking through the ginger fur. The cat purrs like a machine built for better days.

From the other side of the room, the VantaCorp piece glares accusingly at him, three blank panels and the one he’s struggling with, a woman. The face is wrong. The eyes are uninspiring. His agent thinks it’ll be a triumph, though how Silja knows this when he’s barely started is a mystery. He screws his lips tight. It’s a mausoleum waiting to happen. He hears the client notes from the commission brief; speak to the times, but make it inviting whilst, at the same time, challenging the viewer. Corporate morons.

But he needs this one to land. If he blows it, he knows exactly what’ll happen. The collectors dry up, the rent eats him alive, and he’s stuck teaching beginners’ oil classes to tourists who think painter means quaint pastoral scenes. Better to eat rats for dinner or move in with his parents at the embarrassing age of thirty-five. You’d think once you’d technically ‘made it’ in the art world, you wouldn’t have these kinds of problems anymore. It pisses him off more than he wants to admit. Financial considerations shouldn’t encumber art.

He runs a hand through his hair. Six months since the last one left. J— with her impossible skin and her even more impossible demands. She said he used her up and called it art. Maybe she wasn’t wrong. But the work was better when she was here.

Now it’s just him, a cat with a paint-eating addiction, and a studio that smells of impending doom if he doesn’t get his shit together.

His phone buzzes on the workbench.

Felix: Big event tonight. I need you there. No excuses.

Of course. Felix and his infinite calendar of urgent culture. Book launches, openings, salons. Anything that might feed his algorithmic BookTok followers.

Nico snorts, wipes his hands on a rag, and thumbs out a reply: What’s the event?

Felix: Book launch for one of our new authors. Big one. Probably find your next muse there… Jokes. This is me on my knees before you, grovelling like a pathetic peasant. You know I hate going alone. Please say yes.

Nico exhales through his teeth. A book launch. Hellfire and dried-out paint tubes! Rooms full of people, half of them trying to be clever, the other half trying to be seen. Maybe he should give himself a false occupation, should anyone ask. He stopped pretending to enjoy literary events somewhere around the time someone called him a visual poet for the third time, as if it were a compliment.

Visual poet. Christ. He’d rather eat a still-wet canvas. Every time someone says it, with that smug, reverent little nod like they’ve decoded something profound, it makes his skin crawl. As if what he does can be reduced to metaphors and mood boards. As if his work is some wistful sonnet in oil. He picks up a short palette knife and stabs it into a crack in the workbench where it twangs back and forth. They don’t see the rage in his brushwork, the violence in the layers, the sweat, the months of scraped-back nothing before the image finally gives in. He doesn’t compose his paintings like stanzas. He drags them out, kicking.

If they want poetry, they can sniff someone’s watercolours.

He slams a fist onto the bench because he won’t say no to the damned launch. He’s owed Felix since they were kids, since the one time Felix shouldn’t have had his back, and did. Since that night they never talk about. The one that carved a line through all three of them, and left only two.

Felix never once said, you owe me. He didn’t have to. It’s there, in the space between them. In the way Nico lets himself be hauled out of the studio for these things, even when it’s damned inconvenient and loathsome.

He rubs a palm down his face. Stares at the blank space where the woman’s mouth should be. His phone buzzes again.

Felix: Don’t flake. Wear something black. It’s all very noir tonight. 8 pm.

Black. Like Nico’s mood. He shakes his head. Picks up the tube of Lake Red Babou hasn’t quite killed. Might as well give the woman on the canvas a mouth, even if it’s the wrong one.

And after that, fuck it. He’ll go.

3.

Elena

They catch the S-Bahn south, Liv swinging her picnic basket, Elena’s bag sagging with towels, swimwear, and the vague hope that immersion in cold water might shock something loose: prose, her plot, her sense of self.

The train presses them into the rhythm of movement as forest blurs past the window, thick, indifferent, dark at the roots. Elena tries to lose herself in it, tries not to think about that disturbing email, but her mind keeps circling back to it. It can’t be real. It has to be spam. Get it out of your head.

Liv, in the window seat, provides the perfect distraction. ‘Did you and Tobias ever have a thing?’

Elena decides she deserves a halo for not rolling her eyes. ‘Liv. Not every man is a potential sex toy. Some of them are – radical concept – just friends.’ But even as she says it, she hears the edge in her voice, the protest in it. How defensive it sounds when you’re not entirely sure yourself.

Liv humphs, dragging her gaze back from the trees. ‘Doubt it. He carries a torch. You should take advantage. I mean, you haven’t had sex in, what, a year? That’s probably why you can’t finish the novel. All that repression clogging your narrative arc.’

Elena opens her mouth to retaliate, but nothing elegant arrives. Her face burns. It’s not the sex comment. It’s the novel. The reminder of how stuck she is, how empty her sentences feel lately. The timing couldn’t be worse.

She stares at her reflection in the window, blurred by motion, ghosted over forest. A face she almost recognises. A woman with a bag full of towels and no ending. And Liv’s wrong. Tobias doesn’t carry a torch for her. Not that kind. What he offers is loyalty, ballast, quiet companionship that asks for nothing and notices everything. After what happened with that psychotic idiot last year – God, even thinking his name feels like stepping on broken glass – a relationship is the last thing she needs. Affection, sure. Friendship, yes. But anything more? She’s still peeling that wreckage out of her.

Thankfully, the train rattles into Königs Wusterhausen station. It’s all faded signage, greige concrete and a platform clock that’s never wrong, even when it’s wrong. The station exists in defiance of time, refusing to modernise out of sheer East German spite. They haul their bags past a clutch of taxi drivers, through the sour-smelling underpass slick with damp, and up into the gravel-scarred carpark.

Tobias pulls up in the ancient Trabant his father rebuilt, faded aqua blue, rust biting the wheel arches, the engine emitting its familiar pfut-pfut-pfut like a two-stroke cough. It smells of oil and tired rubber and old, proud stubbornness. A smile flickers at the corners of her mouth. Some people arrive and your body simply knows you’re safe.

Liv raises an eyebrow. ‘Seriously? This is our chariot?’

Elena shrugs. ‘My parents had one too. They run like a tank.’

Tobias climbs out, threadbare grey jumper, sleeves pushed up, faded jeans, boots dusted with pine needles. What the hell has he been doing to himself? His face is thinner than it was a few months ago when she last saw him. The hollows under his eyes seem carved into his skin.

Liv steps forward in a whirl of scent and swish, oversized sunglasses despite the clouded sky, today’s version of effortless chaos. She grins at the Trabant, at Tobias, like they’re both exotic props. ‘Hi. I’m Liv.’

He sticks out a hand, deadpan polite. ‘I’m Tobias. I’ve heard a lot about you.’

Elena’s pulse edges faster at their handshake. Tobias’s voice is smooth, but there’s a flicker behind his eyes, calculation, defence. He’s braced, already taken Liv’s measure.

And Liv, so bright, so charming, so oblivious to his insight, leans in with that little tilt of the head she uses when she smells intrigue. ‘All good things, I hope.’ Her tone lands somewhere between flirt and test.

Elena exhales. Here we go. She flips the passenger seat forward to let Liv into the back seat. Once Liv is settled, she flips the seat upright and slides into it, the vinyl warm beneath her thighs. The dashboard is a relic of another life, the radio knobs stick, the clock doesn’t work, but the tape deck has Tobias’s usual mix of Leonard Cohen and Nina Simone.