Wenn

Los Menores, above Costa Adeje. Spring, 2041, morning.

Klaus took his coffee on the terrace at seven, as he had taken his coffee on the terrace at seven every morning since 2020, because routine was what separated a man of standing from a man who had given up. The coffee was the last of the second-to-last bag of Italian beans he had stockpiled in 2026, Lavazza Tierra Selection, and he ground it himself in a hand mill because the hand mill was also what separated a man of standing from a man who had given up, and because Sonja had broken the electric grinder in 2031 by an act he still suspected was deliberate.

The terrace faced south-west, down across the slope toward Playa Paraíso. From this elevation, on a clear morning, you could see five resorts: three dead in the official sense, two dead in the slower sense of being progressively eaten by people Klaus referred to, in the privacy of his own German, as diese Lumpen. Those tramps. The scrappers.

They were already at it this morning. He could see them, if he focused the binoculars correctly, which he did. Two figures on the roof of what had been the Hard Rock (though he did not call it the Steel Thunder Rock Resort & Casino, because that was the official rebranded name from the failed 2024 acquisition and Klaus had opinions about that acquisition that he had stopped sharing because Sonja had developed a tic when he started) pulling copper wire out of an HVAC unit. They were laughing.

Diese Lumpen.

Klaus muttered it into the rim of his coffee cup. The cup was Wedgwood, original to the villa, salvaged from a set of twelve of which only four still survived, the other eight being casualties of either Sonja's cleaning standards or, in two specific cases, Sonja directly.

He swept the binoculars left.

There, in the foreground, between the villa and the dead resorts, was the unfinished shell of the Playa del Bienestar Wellness Thalasso. His Bienestar. The project for which he had bulldozed the headland flat above the old Hippie Beach in 2017 and signed, in good faith, a fourteen-million-euro construction contract, and which had ground to a halt in 2020 when COVID closed the borders and was, in the spring of 2041, exactly where it had been: three stories of poured concrete, no glass, no fittings, the rebar still showing where the fourth story was meant to start. It had been twenty-one years. The rebar had begun to rust in a pattern that, from the terrace, almost looked like a drawing.

Klaus did not see the rust pattern. Klaus saw what the Bienestar would have been, as he saw it every morning. The infinity pool with the sea horizon. The cypress allée on the south side. The signage in matte bronze. The opening gala with the deputy minister of tourism, the small champagne fountain in the lobby. Klaus could still tell you which architect had designed each detail. Klaus could tell you who the Italian glass supplier had been, before the Italian glass supplier had stopped returning emails in late 2026.

"It will all come back," Klaus said aloud. He had taken to saying this aloud at some point in 2032 because saying it in his head no longer felt like enough. "Wenn the trade routes restart. Wenn Madrid sorts itself out. Wenn the petrol comes through reliably again. It will all come back."

From inside the villa, in the large open kitchen that Sonja had taken over in 2030 because Klaus had decided certain tasks were beneath him, Sonja said, "Wenn the dead start walking. Wenn my mother sends a postcard. Wenn."

Klaus did not turn around.

"Good morning, Sonja."

"Good morning, Klaus."

"Coffee is ready."

"I made coffee at six. With the chicory you do not approve of."

"That is not coffee."

"It is what coffee has been on this island for fifteen years."

"That is what coffee has been for some people on this island for fifteen years."

Sonja did not respond to this. She came out onto the terrace anyway, holding her own cup of the chicory blend and a cigarette she had rolled herself from tobacco she had grown in pots on the back of the villa because she had stopped being able to reliably trade for the imported tobacco Klaus had still been buying her in 2027. Sonja was forty-six. Klaus was sixty-eight. They had been married twenty-two years. She wore a pre-Quiet linen dress that had survived because Sonja, unlike Klaus, washed her clothes carefully and did not act surprised when carelessness destroyed things.

She looked at the binoculars on the tripod.

"They are at the Hard Rock again."

"I am aware."

"They will finish that roof by Tuesday."

"I am aware."

"And then where will you look, Klaus."

He did not answer. He focused the binoculars again, more carefully this time, on the figures of the scrappers. One of them, a young woman with a faded green bandana, was now sitting on the parapet of the roof eating something. The other one had gone back through a hatch.

"They eat up there," Klaus said.

"They are working. People who work eat."

"They eat on the roof of the Hard Rock, Sonja."

"It is a flat roof. It has a view. They are not unreasonable."

Klaus made the small sound he made in the back of his throat when Sonja said something he could not respond to without losing the argument. He swept the binoculars right and found, on the lower slope, a group of three children with a goat, walking up the access road that had once led to the Bienestar's planned employee parking. The goat was on a rope. The children were laughing.

"They are taking goats up the access road," Klaus said.

"It is a road. The road permits goats."

"The road was not for goats."

"The road is not for anything else now, Klaus."

He set down the binoculars. He picked up the small leather-bound notebook he kept on the terrace table and uncapped the fountain pen with which he made entries in it. The notebook contained his projections. The projections were updated each morning. They charted the date by which the resort economy would resume in the Adeje area. The original projection, made in 2031, had been Q3 2034. The current projection, made in March 2041, was Q4 2046. Klaus did not consider this a pattern. Klaus considered each updated projection as a sober realignment in light of new information.

He wrote in the notebook.

April 2041. Hard Rock dismantling continues. Estimated completion of stripping operations: Q3 2041. After which the property will, by my projection, sit fallow for approximately twenty months before redevelopment interest resumes. Add eight months for site clearance and re-permitting. Q1 2044 earliest, Q2 2044 realistic. The Bienestar can resume by Q2 2046 if Madrid restarts construction-grade material flows by Q3 2045.

He capped the pen.

He looked at the projection.

He underlined Q2 2046 twice.

Sonja exhaled smoke off the side of the terrace.

"Klaus."

"Yes."

"My sister sent me a letter in 2017, when I moved to Düsseldorf to be with you."

"I remember."

"She said you were a man who would never stop making projections about a future that had no interest in him. I told her she was wrong. I have, since approximately 2032, owed her an apology."

Klaus did not turn around. He said, in the calm, slightly hurt voice he used for these moments, "Sonja, you are uncharitable today."

"I am uncharitable every day, Klaus. You have stopped noticing the gradient."

She finished her cigarette, ground it out in the small ceramic tray they kept on the terrace for this purpose, and went back inside. He listened to her cross the open kitchen. He listened to the cupboard open. He listened to her start the kettle for the second pot of chicory she would drink before nine.

Klaus picked up the binoculars again.

The young woman with the green bandana was still on the roof of the Hard Rock. She was now waving at something. Klaus, irrationally, was suddenly worried she was waving at him, though there was no possible way she could see his villa in detail at that distance, and even if she could she would have no reason to.

He lowered the binoculars.

Then he raised them again, because if she was waving at him he wanted to be sure.

She was not waving at him. She was waving at someone in the access road below, possibly the children with the goat. Klaus felt obscurely insulted by this.

He set the binoculars down.

He looked, for a long moment, at the unfinished Bienestar.

He saw, as he always saw, what it would have been.

"It will all come back," he said, aloud, to nobody in particular.

The villa absorbed the sentence the way the villa absorbed all of Klaus's sentences, which was: completely, without comment, with the patient indifference of expensive concrete.

He slipped out of his clogs, into his house shoes, and went inside.

In the kitchen, Sonja was at the stove. She did not look up.

"There is bread," she said. "I made it yesterday with the flour from the cooperative. The one you do not approve of."

"Thank you, Sonja."

"You are welcome, Klaus."

He took a slice of bread. He stood at the counter and ate it without sitting down, because eating breakfast standing up was, in his current view, a form of resistance.

Sonja did not comment on this either.

Outside, on the slope, the scrappers continued their work. The goats continued up the access road. The Bienestar continued to not become a hotel. And Klaus, having had his morning, having made his entry in the notebook, having muttered his German, having maintained his routine, went to the small office at the back of the villa to begin the next phase of his day, which was: looking at the architectural plans for the Bienestar, in detail, until lunch.

The architectural plans had not changed in twenty-one years.

Klaus had memorized them. Klaus could draw them from memory, in the dark, on a cocktail napkin, if a cocktail napkin had been required. None had been required since approximately 2025. It did not matter.

The plans were the plans. The Bienestar was the Bienestar.

Wenn, Klaus thought. Wenn alles zurückkommt.

When everything comes back.