Gypsies

    

Veering into the sun before his sunbrella went up was like having a frying pan in full sizzle put flat on his cheek. The bulgey curve of the station wall had a sharp collar of shade around it in which sat the gypsy with her accordion, playing the dolorous tango they all played within a laughable range of capability, from not at all to mastery. She gave him a look as he veered out into the sun because she blocked the very narrow path the shadow protected, sitting cross-legged on a collapsible chair with a shoe tip burning in light. The look she gave him contained a library of philosophical treatises, a look at once aware and detached, worldweary-yet-playful, dismissively flirtatious, seductively bored and suppler than thought itself. It took him somewhat aback. She was in the same cruel league of beauty as his obsession Margarethe, though she was just a gypsygirl and he was late for dinner.

Margarethe in a printed dress as tight as a chocolate bar’s wrapper handed him warm wine and introduced people who were milling around the room hungry and browsing her paintings, examining the work with what struck Van in some cases as almost hostile diffidence, as though the paintings were untouchable meals reserved for richer guests due to arrive much later. As he’d often said his ex-wife Margarethe was the best bad painter in the world and he thought of her near-perfect copy of van Gogh’s self-portrait in front of the easel, 1888, showing the darkling feral head and retardedly intense blue eyes but in her version he’s smiling and hoisting a condensation-bejewelled bottle of Coke. She said,

“Van, this is Taylor and Scotty and you know…”

“Konrad.”

“Exactly,” she grinned.

A large-ish American with short shiny hair stood up from the couch and introduced himself as Bartholomew, pointedly ignoring nearby Taylor and Scotty, who were Queers from London. Fucking Heteromanic American.

The air in the flat was dense with meat. Her new husband Konrad was clearly no vegeterian but a well-built, distracted-looking German in formal attire with red hands and a peeling nose which propped up big square black-rimmed glasses. From time to time he’d nod or grunt with disgust or amusement despite the fact that no one was talking to him. He prounounced “ski” in the old German manner: she. He peeled some skin off his nose and said aprés she as he went ahead to his place at the dinner table, Margarethe rolling her eyes at his back.

She confessed with rue that one has to climb so high to find natural snow these days that one wears a Lycra space suit on the slopes. The men get tremendous hardons. The glasses Konrad was wearing may or may not have been connected, though Van had noted that Konrad sported them in the manner of the blind, face beatifically elevated in an unfinished smile.

Something sharp-toothed and furtive squealed flaming to cinders in a trap in one of the rooms under renovation and Van could see it for a moment and then he couldn’t. He blinked.

When Margarethe announced dinner with a clap of her hands they formed a pilgrim’s procession of low chatter and crossed the apartment through a long, over-lit wing of plastic sheets and scaffolding. Up some plaster-dusted stairs they went leaving shoeprints and Van straggled behind studying the pretentious sepiatone images on the wall in a hallway, pictures he’d taken with the antique Hasselblad Maggie had given him their first Christmas. Gypsies of unvarying facial expression hefted arched accordions over their knees like gulls with broken backs.

Margarethe laid a hand on an arm each of Scott’s and Taylor’s as she lead the procession, walking between them, and said, “I had the most ghastly nightmare again, darlings.”

Konrad was chewing and laughing at something on the ceiling as they filed into the diningroom.

Bartholomew with his wide, flat, not fat at all body, waved a finger at various points around the dinner table at which Van found himself seated among the others having their chunky pork soup ladled into exquisite porcelain bowls. Van only heard what sounded like the sea in a very big conch shell as the American droned on, a prime examplar of the effect of the loss of empire on a disoriented consciousness. The dining room felt airless lit only with candles feeding mostly on Bartholomew’s breath and Van wanted desperately to open a window but he was no longer the flat’s master. Bartholomew had no plate set before him; no knife or fork or water glass. No food.

Konrad exhibited open-eyed signs of REM.

Someone was saying,  ”I suppose in the latter category you’ve got the theory of Relativity and smoking will kill you and an embryo is conceived when an egg cell meets a sperm cell in the womb and so forth.”

Bartholomew was rocking in his seat.

Second course was blood pudding.

Konrad noted suspicious gas leaks in Istanbul and Crete, hundreds dead or unaccounted for.

Van recognized the spider, limbs fanning long and tenuous as internet links, in a high corner. The spider or its descendant. He’d been separated from Margarethe for over two years and divorced for a year yet every single thing about the apartment was the same as he’d left it, minus the meaty veil of odors. He recognized the faint pattern of stains on the tablecloth, the brown-tinged continents on a medieval map of the known world.

He glanced at Margarethe with her high forehead and incongruously Croatian nose and the peuter ringlets of her hair. Memory provided the glistening plum of her kissable buttocks which had in turn been provided by her superblack boy-diddling bishop of a sweet-breathed father late of an almost blackless Capetown. Due to whom she pronounced black as bleck.

Van heard, “The fear of looking stupid is what keeps the intellectual in line.”

Playfully, he imagined Bartholomew as a big blond gypsy with a ring in his ear wrestling an accordion in the shadow of the station begging for coins instead of dispensing unsolicited pontifications at the dinner table. Van edited the gypsy girl into Bartholomew’s place, seated beside him at the table, slyly embarrassed by her decadent plateful of fatty meats. He found himself hoping she’d still be on that stool at the station wall when it came time to leave but it was New Year’s so of course she’d be at the Brandenburg Dome with the others, picking pockets or playing that same hideous tango with champagne-oiled ease.

Konrad had Bartholomew’s bright hair in a knuckle-grip and jerked hard, hacking through pulpy fat neck with a serrated blade, though no one else seemed to notice.

Fingerbowls were distributed.

Margarethe was blowing kisses at someone, mouthing Kiss ma bleck aws, while Taylor indulged in the so-called New Nostalgia with the repeated use of the phrase, “The Tolerable ‘20s.”

Maragarethe was saying, behind her hand while she chewed on gristle, “It was that nightmare about Bartholomew again, I’m afraid, I hope he calls,” but Van never heard this. She was hoping to get a rise out of her insufficiently jealous husband.

She was playing the drollest of hostesses and staring into her wineglass, the bowl of the wineglass magnifying her eye into a batty black goldfish, telling Van that Taylor was a Money Artist. That is, she clarified, Taylor works in the medium of money. The national gallery has a room of his elegant displays, each display featuring a fluctuating digit synched to an enormous amount somewhere. You see he started his career with artifactual lucre…didn’t you, Taylor…crisp bundles of Euros and dollars, arranged on plinths…though his breakthrough came when he finally grasped money in its most spiritual form.

Critics call his new work cleaner.

Konrad quoted an article to the effect that the art market is the biggest money laundering operation on the planet. He told a joke in a halting cadence that ended with the punchline the sweet smell of sock sex.

After a haunting gypo film in the screening room about transvestites (Manche Mogen’s Heiss), Margarethe, rubbing her eyes like a waking child, excused herself with a cautionary remark about dessert and Van, glancing at Konrad, offered to help in the kitchen, so down a dark hall and with the vented door still swinging he lay a finger athwart her woodgrain arm and moaned how he missed being the only black couple at the opera.

He said he missed the way she kicked in her sleep and commented too mordantly and far too loud in the theater and buttered both sides of her toast or snatched at her bushy cloud of pillowed hair like a honeybear in a cloud of bees when he used to go down on her.

He pulled her towards him and she laughed offering a modicum of resistance saying don’t. She said,

-Van, your words are lovely as ever, and you’re a good Christian, truly you are, but as a woman grows older she responds less to words than to deeds, and deeds aren’t done without power, and, as you know, Konrad has an inherited seat on the Ministry of the Interior…there’s more power in one of his ash-colored eyelashes than in the whole of that big carbon dick of yours.

-Ha! That old white devil be damned.

-You’re talking about my husband, darling.

-I’m your husband.

-No you’re not. Not any more you’re not.

-In the eyes of God.

The first punch stunned her and the second one brought her to her knees.

When she swept in from the kitchen with sugar-free parfaits on a tray of hammered tin from Morocco that Van, trailing behind her with half a dozen neon aperitifs, had forgotten giving her for their second anniversary, the shifty mass of her sheathed bosom as she lowered each parfait to every spot around the table was so milk-maidishly servile that it made them appear to be overdressed black help. This pleased Van perversely and he handed out the aperitifs with a shamingly servile flourish.

Scott turned to Taylor and said, not quietly enough, “I’m having that headache we talked about.”

Margarethe stamped her foot with winning petulance and said but it’s almost midnight!  Her plan was to gather on the balcony after dessert and watch fireworks and greet the majestic change of centuries with upturned faces of child-like wonder.

A meth-massacre in Phuket. Konrad joked from the corner of his mouth that it takes a child to raze a village.

They sweated the proximity of the sultry night and watched animated neo-classical constellations like Diana the archer and Pegasus flapping his wings and the stars-and-cross of the Anglo-Germanian union scintillate then shatter into hundreds of jiggle-boobed goose-stepping showgirls in turn becoming great pinwheels lilting like funereal Lillies to Earth. After which, rainbow-colored cubes representing the six colors of the union rolled across the sky unfolding into crucifixes larger than any skyscraper. Crucifixes ringing the ecliptic, pulsing to Die Walküre and foreshortened towards the galactic hub.

Van was distracted by the scene he watched instead. Down there on the sidewalk, two stories below the balcony, near enough he heard their pleas for mercy. Handsome theatergoers surrounded and doused by a broken circle of gypsies and put peremptorily to the torch, dancing away from each other in flames towards opposite ends of the street trailing rich black streamers of skinsmoke. Reflections of the flames shrank curving across bubble windshields and Van was clutching his throat, suppressing the nausea, unsure of what he was seeing.

Konrad shouted U-Nasa with conclusive evidence: Asgaard settlement extinct. The others on the balcony merely oooh’d and ahhh’d with patriotic boredom at the immensity of the crucifixes stainglassing the sky.

Van knew it now. He was bewitched.

2.

He rode the near-empty train to its endstation. He gasped at the foretaste of heat that rolled under the platform’s baked awning as he stepped from the train. It pulled away as he shuffled in his bright white flapsuit and widebrimmed hat, a Pierrot in blackface shuffling to platform’s end then down the hundred stairs in his two-legged tent, the handrail untouchably hot, bracing himself to emerge from the station into the noon’s blast furnace, slower than wading through oil.

Entering Gypsytown at high noon was the only way to sneak into the city.

He pictured them snoring in dark rooms while he stalked the blinding streets at noon, a striking lone figure, something from a dream, and he realized that he was thinking about himself again, as he often did, and the tight cap of his mossy black hair itched.  He was thinking of himself as a museumpiece, a rare collection of features gathered in the vitrine of his flat-nosed face, so broad across the cheekbones and heavy in the jaw, a public monument trusted to his own irresponsible stewardship. What if a gypsy punched him in the nose, ruining something of priceless rarity?

The rare blacks allowed back on the continent had been welcomed grudgingly under the stainless-steel wing of the Church. He was thinking of Margarethe’s father, Bishop Siss, or his own great-grandfather, the influential Christian theoretician famous for Multiple-Christ Doctrine, the original Vanross Olubodon, a remote and frightening figure. Not for one moment since birth had Van…or anyone from the small colony of blackies and darkfacers in Berlin…felt welcome.

Most of them, as in the case of Margarethe’s family, had commenced immediately to exobreed out of the color with almost any whites who were mad enough to fuck them. Margarethe had nieces and nephews who were already as light as the palms on her hands, or no darker than the inner folds of her navel, but, still, there were tests you were required to take at a certain age. Forms you had to fill out. You’d get Homo sapiens africanus stamped on your license for all to see, though perhaps one might keep it a secret on all but the genobureaucratic level.

Van’s family was an oddity. Both for having been in Europa for so many generations and for breeding almost exclusively black for the duration. Many of his people were priests; Van wasn’t a priest but he was a prominent theologian. The family members who weren’t in the priesthood, who were out there in the game of life, competing for love and money, were running out of black non-relatives to mate with. And with Van’s recent loss of mostly-black Margarethe, what would he do? Write his amateurish sonnets and masturbate on whores in blackface until the end of all time?

The station was a ziggurat of limestone steps on a dusty peninsula of asphalt. Across a weedy road were the vacant lots of the western edge of Gypsytown and beyond the vacant lots, a fifteen minute walk over rubble and weeds, queued the first of the white buildings, the coated buildings like walls in a low maze, each building decorated with its check of foil, foil over all the windows, the abandoned vista of an ancient millennial film project.

Set on the very edge of the asphalt before the broken road there stood a longish tent full of stacked bundles of newspapers and a sinewy bearded troll. The tall troll was seated crosslegged, dressed in the altogether save a suet-colored loincloth and sandals and sipping from a vintage bottle in the open shade of the tent. The man had the shaggy blonde sea-burned look of the Viking about him. But he was very thin.

As Van approached the tent in order to cross the broken road behind it the Viking put down his bottle with great care and slipped into a hooded cape which hung from head to knees. The cape had weight to it and concealed a dagger no doubt. He stepped into the sunpressure towards Van wielding a newspaper and Van recognized the paper as the Cassandran Standard and formed preemptive noises in his throat, shaking his head, but there was no way the tout would be put off, for Van was probably the first non-gypsy to cross his path all day…all week, possibly. Despite being momentarily flummoxed by the impossible blackness of Van’s face, he smiled and followed across the broken road with his spiel:

“Get your Cassandran, get your Cassandran right here, your sweet Cassandran Standard, all the news you were never supposed to know, reported at great risk to all involved, no gratitude necessary…top stories: the facts are in…average life-expectancy down by thirty percent in less than a century…top stories…the Asgaard Settlement alive and well and preparing for war against Earth…top stories…fish return to the Persian Gulf…you’ll read it here first…the news you were never supposed to know…all this plus the usual tasty all-color supplement: they’re fresh, they’re female, they’re Pagan…five dollars and the truth is yours to filter as you see fit….”

But when Van gave him a stainless steel dollar in hopes he’d scurry off the tout secreted the coin in the voluminous cuntfolds of his cape and said, wonderingly, after licking his lower lip, “You’re black.”

Van stopped walking and sighed. “That’s right.”

“I’m honored. They call me Gregorius. Is it true that blacks think not in words but in pictures, Sir?”

“I can only speak for myself when I say no to that question.”

“Ah.”

Van nodded.  Gregorius pointed at Gypsytown. “You are not going in there alone, are you, Sir?”

“Why shouldn’t I?” He glared from the grottoe under the wide brim of his hat.

“For one thing, there are no street signs…they took every single one of them down, Sir. The gypos are dead clever. You’d find yourself hopelessly lost in minutes. In heat like this, for more than an hour, no shelter…that can mean heart failure, Sir.”

“You’re advertizing your services as a guide.”

“Not just a guide. There are horrors greater than being lost…”

“Horrors.”

“Not many know that the gypsies are provided by The State to operate under their own rule of law and governance, Sir.”

“I’m well aware of that fact.”

“But do you know the tone or timbre of these Laws of theirs, Sir? The codes and statutes? Run afoul of them and it could mean your happiness, to say the least. And then there are ravenous crowpacks to deal with and bandits…”

“Alright.”

“Five steel dollars an hour. Payment on the hour.”

They shook on it and continued across the weedy terrain of the vacant lots, Gregorius just slighty ahead. What does he have in that cape, wondered Van. A telescope? A rifle?

Without turning to face Van he called out, “What are you looking for, if I may ask, Sir?”

“Who.”

“What?”

“Who, not what. I’m looking for a gypsy girl. A gypsy girl I saw this New Year’s Eve just past.”

“A gypsy you saw at the Dome, was it, Sir?”

“No. Earlier that day. At the Charlottenburg Station.”

“Charlottenburg Station? Performing there or just travelling, Sir?”

“She was performing.”

“Fair or dark?”

“Dark.”

“Young?”

Van shrugged. “Not old.”

Walking backwards at Van’s pace, Gregorius stared a good long time before finally turning to point far off, lifting the edge of his cape. “That’ll mean she lives over there, on what was formerly known as Bergmann Strasse, then. The other end of Gypsytown.”

Van laughed.

“Sir?”

“The way you pronounce ‘Strasse’. “

“Strasse.”

Van laughed again. “Strah-suh. You even talk like a gypsy. You speak it?”

“Fließend.”

“What?”

“Fluently, Sir. Fließend means ‘fluently’.”

Van was pleased. He felt he was getting his money’s worth.

Flickered shadows now and then swept them over and up they’d look to see clouds of suntorched crows tumble headlong as though hurled from an invisible mountain and Gregorius would crouch low and dip one shoulder as if ready to swing hard at whatever came at them but the shadows flew onward, falling sidelong away at great speed. The nearest tree was kilometers distant.

Van and his taciturn page (what was he brooding on?) exchanged nary a word until they were well into the city-within-a-city, with its uniform myriad six-storey flatblocks and narrow treeless immaculate streets and sidewalks. No trash or thick brushstrokes of dogshit or mosaics of smashed glass forever. Nor rusting hulks of cars or trucks or gutted refrigerators. So unlike Berlin proper. He could have licked the griddle ground and left it hissing with spit with no fear of dirt-eating.

“It’s all so clean,” marvelled Van, breaking the silence at such a low volume, just slightly above the striding rustle of his garment, that breaking it was barely worth it. His unwieldy white flapsuit. He was exhausted.  He longed for his sunbrella.  “It’s cleaner than any street I’ve walked on!”

“Of course it is, Sir. The Gypsies waste nothing.”

“Not even merdes…”

“They make fuel with it, Sir.”

“You’re very well-spoken for a man who lives in a tent, Gregorius.”

“There was a time, long ago, I participated in the world, like you. I gave it all up to do the noble work of selling the Cassandran. It’s a hard life but I sleep well every night and my gypo wife supports me. And I don’t live in that tent, you see. We live in a flat like any other.”

“I suppose it’s a myth that they steal, as well, then, Gregorius?”

“An ugly and ignorant myth, Sir. No offence.”

Van chuckled. He said, “So if one had a peek through a gypo flat…”

“One would most of all see books, Sir. Every gypsy lives with more books than he has stories to tell…a gypsy aphorism.”

Van curled his lip. Even he couldn’t afford more than a few books, and those he kept in a vault. “Books?”

Gregorius continued, “In point of fact they make nearly all their money as infobrokers.”

“Infobrokers?”

“Spies, Sir.”

“Spies?”

“Is there anyone less visible than a gypo? All dressed alike, all playing the same…”

Van scratched at his nose and grunted. He did not believe this, nor the other thing about books. He said, “Possibly.”

“May I ask why you speak so softly, Sir?”

Van lifted his chin at the building they were just then shuffling past and said, “They sleep in the heat of the day, as you know. It’s prudent…one speaks in certain tones…”

“Another falsehood, Sir,” Gregorius said, wearily. “Ironic, too, considering that they’re all awake and been doing business for hours when the rest of Berlin is still yawning over its first bitter coffee! It is true, these buildings have no power to offset the heat, but the cellars of the buildings are dark and cool and…”

“This is astonishing news…”

“…the gypsies have connected all the cellars in a kind of underground city.” Gregorius stopped in the street and touched his bare red chest with a flourish of his cape. “And I know the safest point of entry to the system.”

“But I must,” pleaded Van, revealing his desperation suddenly, “I must find this gypsy girl! She has bewitched me!”

Gregorius pointed at the cracked black skin of the three-hundred-year-old road.

“You’ll find her there.”

Looking at the road where he had been directed to, Van watched as Gregorius’ shadow appeared to raise a long dark sword to the sky, gripping the hilt with both hands as though he might fly away on it.

There was a roaring silence as Van stared blinkless into the white skull of the sun without being conscious of ceasing to.

3.

A temperate breeze poured in over the tall grasses of the Auroran Savannah and clattered through the blinds and windchimes on the front porch and the naked prospects of the sunrooms above it and pushed open, with one polite hand, the curtains of the attic window.

The servant stooped polishing wood in the attic bedroom happened to look out the window at that moment to glimpse through the curtains the procession of secondhand government Zils coming in on the long approach paralleling the canal, like a funeral, though she knew for a fact it was only a lunch.

The master was still drowsing in his hammock on the porch. Drowsing as indolent in the summer’s long day as he was frenetic during the winter’s long night of restorative darkness, and though she felt the giddy impulse to hurry downstairs to wake him, one of the others would probably see to it, so she kept at her polishing, waltzing the soft fat cloth over the loops and whorls of the wood’s exquisitely ancient fingerprint. The chest of drawers she brought to its hard gleam predated her language; her people; the city of Aurora itself. Centuries of breath had trapped spirit-words in the microscopic chambers of the wood and she felt the furniture breathe as her palm swirled over it.

She expected at some point after lunch that the master would gather the barefoot staff in the kitchen in order to introduce them to the overfed guests, as ever, and charmingly perform his favorite trick of naming their various tribes: Aleuti, Russo Lapp, Samoyed, Swedish Tungu, Dane and Red Yankee! All living together under one roof, he would exclaim. A boast of his taste, his benevolence.

And all sharing one bed, she was always tempted to add. The two boys among them were even prettier than the black-eyed girls.

Lieutenant Governor Mey and the trade delegation from the North Atlantic States looked mortified in their youth, clustered together in the center of Stark’s library, waiting obediently for lunch. Stark was still drowsy and rumpled in his patrician, couldn’t-be-bothered away, scratching his belly through a fine garment. He knew history well enough to relish this sensation of intimidating elected officials with anything more subtle than an army. Their sincere diffidence was innocence and a luxury that wouldn’t last more than a few generations before sophistication, with the renascent persistence of evil, returned again to the world. But for now a breathing space. An Eden.

Stark drew their attention to two black heads on a recessed shelf in the wall beside the book case. The floor-to-ceiling, wall-wide case was emblematic in itself of staggering wealth, but they couldn’t begin to calculate the value of those heads.

“Very beautiful,” nodded Lieutenant Governor Mey, hands clasped behind his back, because otherwise they’d be shaking. “May I ask how you got them that color?”

Stark laughed. “Jahweh gave it to them.”

“Jahweh?”

“The super-being they both believed in, while they lived. The man in the sky who created the Earth and the Heavens. In the beginning he is said to have said to let there be light, and there was light.”

The trade delegation chuckled politely.

Stark touched the male head with a collector’s awed affection. “Preserved eternally with a process that renders the flesh incorruptible without changing its natural composition. If you care to touch here…very carefully…you’ll find that it is indeed flesh, flesh like yours or mine…at room temperature. Not even particularly cold. Though they’ve been dead for centuries.”

“Anyway, it’s a lost technology. We couldn’t do anything close to it.”

With a cupped hand Stark rounded the cheek and delicate jawline of the female head, her ear bending and springing from under his touch. The gesture was so like a lover’s postcoital caress that two of the delegates flinched. The head was so beautiful, so life-like in its preservation, yet so strange in its blackness and shining shaved skull that they expected the eyes and mouth to pop open with a scream when Stark had finished fondling it.

“I call the two of them the world’s greatest love story. I also call them the gypsies, because they’ve been all over the habitable world, seeking one another in death. The facts are really quite extraordinary.”

“Before I explain how I acquired them, I’ll let you in on the amazing fact that I know quite a lot of detail about their social status, their manner of dress and eating habits and even the specific circumstances of her death. His death I know less about.”

“I inherited him, you see. I grew up in a house that counted him coyly among its treasures, though he was kept in a locked case in the attic. I didn’t get a look at him until my father died and I inherited the estate. We were doing an inventory of the art treasures and he sort of popped up. As it turns out, he was worth more than all of the other paintings and sculptures combined.”

“He’s the only known example of a fully intact head from the species Homo sapiens africanus…what they called back then, rather obviously, a black. Interestingly, the black species thought only in pictures but not in words as we do. Otherwise, they were both shockingly different and uncomfortably similar to us.”

“I only regret that in preserving the head they’ve shaved the hair off, you see, because his hair was just as unique as the rest of him…very tight little kinks, very short, rather mossy…imagine, possibly, a cross between moss and wool.”

“The female’s hair was a bit different…imagine a cross between his hair as I’ve described it and yours or mine…because she’s not a purebreed, you see; her mother was a Homo sapien. Look at the nose.”

“Anyway, for years I’ve had him here in my library, the guardian of my books. Then one day, on a trip through Romana, to pay my respects to the ancestors, as one does…and also because I love French sweets, and France is right across that border, as it happens…”

Stark could see he was beginning to bore them. Time to spice up the story.

“I was offered the chance to bid on her by a private collector of ill repute. Of course I couldn’t refuse…money was no object. I felt I owed it to my black Adam to provide an Eve.” The Biblical reference went over their heads but he forged on. “The broker I purchased her from informed me that she’d been quite the celebrity of her era…married to a rich, powerful official…back when those three words together weren’t oxymoronic, gentlemen…back in that barbaric era…”

“He was rich and powerful and rather psychotically jealous. It seems he beheaded her lover and fed the lover’s corpse to her guests at a dinner party! Only a few weeks later he killed her, too. Beat her to death…most luckily sparing the face. The interesting thing about all that is how little punishment he received for his crimes; I’d dare say any of you would face more bother over a parking violation than he did for double murder. He lived to be a ripe old age and dined out, no pun intended, on the legend of his atrocity.”

“It was only after bringing Eve home to Adam, and setting them beside one another on that very shelf, that I began to wonder if they might have known one another in life. I wondered if there was some connection…perhaps by a few degrees of separation at the least. I knew they were from the same part of the world…I knew they were from the same era, vaguely…”

“Peeling off the tiniest amount of flesh from the back of our Adam’s neck, a technician had his genetic numbers checked against the oldest known database.”

“You won’t believe this, gentleman…but I assure you that what I’m about to say is true. It turns out…I’m getting goosebumps as I think about it…it turns out our black Adam and Eve were once married.”

“Let that sink in for a moment.”

“They were married, divorced, met their separate deaths…were separated as artifacts by thousands of kilometers for centuries…different countries and continents…now reunited on that shelf.”

Even Lieutenant Governor Mey was obviously moved. There was a catch in his throat when he asked, pointing to a small oil painting set in the center of the book case…asking, perhaps, merely to diffuse the intensity of the moment…”Can you tell us who this is?”

Stark drew himself straight with awful pride, but spoke with self-satirizing pomp.

“This? This is Iseult Tsurak, mother of the modern nation of Romana, hero of the Gypsytown rebellion, intellectual architect of the Pax Romana and the founder of the immense fortune that nourishes the Stark family to this day, even as far north as we’ve drifted. Stark is an Arctic modernization of the name Tsurak, you see.”

“She’s my great-great-great-great-great-great grandmother.”

“What a look in those eyes, eh?”

“What a look.”

Poem of The Weak

 

The drive up was tense not only because of the tritely appropriate drama of the rain but also because if he got lost on the way there was no one to call to for help. No safety net. He was forbidden from square one to store the information on a device or to print the directions on paper.

      *

The directions appeared one morning in an audio loop that disabled itself after ten or fifteen minutes, a loop accompained by a black screen, a loop in the form of a sonnet. He’d been chanting it to himself for forty eight hours with an eerie pride in knowing that medieval illiterates had done it in much the same way. Further back than that, too, because songs in the fog of unmetered time had been less often used as entertainment than mnemonic devices of desperate importance. Didn’t antediluvian Asians in birchbark canoes navigate the Aleutians to landfall on North America using chanted sea maps? Or something.

      *

He was roughly a third of the way through the sonnet and maybe two thirds of the distance to the compound and all of the clues had worked out very smoothly. But what if they hadn’t? He’d been on the road for seven hours. His team was up for an Emmy. He had inside information that the world would end before they won it.

      *

Of course he could have cheated and written the directions down but he hadn’t wanted to. He longed for that new beginning. He hungered to start afresh. No more lies or cheating. Lose weight, no television, early nights and mornings. Stop masturbating. He had less than twelve hours, driving from several states away, making rest stops to eat and/or relieve himself, to get there before the others took steps to block the old dirt access road. To make the place impenetrable. If you can’t stop cold turkey, cut back to reasonable levels, at least. He thought of a cool title: Get fit at the Apocalypse Spa.

The new kind of man he was to become was not the kind who’d find himself bashing his Amherst-enhanced brain for four days against three lines of sitcom dialogue, of this he was certain. Like a chain of hyper-haikus from the sinisterly dumb future, various versions were branded on the soft white flesh of his consciousness.

Lola Beedo: I just love that dress you’re wearing, darling!

Elke Hall: (warily) Why, thank you, doll.

Lola Beedo: (beat) Tell me, does it come in human sizes, too?

      *

He thought of a picture someone had posted on the message board in the production team’s lounge. The multi-Emmy-award-winning production team’s lounge. A photograph from 1905. The young Ludwig Wittgenstein in a class picture from his days in the Realschule in the city of Linz and there, a distance of one or two students to the upper right (a knight’s move, as Nabokov would have put it), looking resigned to his fate, is Ludwig’s classmate Adolf Hitler. The fact being that nothing Wittgenstein had subsequently done as a philosopher, no great strides in ethics or logic or the lyric aprehension of mathematics, amounted to a hill of beans compared to the contribution he could have made had he taken the opportunity to act decisively during the long walk home from school one day and crushed young Adolf’s skull with a paving stone. In other words, not only thought but direct action is required of us at certain pivotal moments. And not only action but a little prescience helps too.

      *

Hamilton Gold, the head writer, always said name me what’s funnier than decapitation. But, he’d say, let’s see if the audience is there yet. He’d looked over the bit quickly on Monday, flipping the pages in that idiot-savant scan of his and immediately picked out the three lines they’d been having trouble with and shook his head, I like the bit but fat jokes are dangerous. Fat is our demographic, don’t forget. How about substitute fat with slut? Slut is funny.

      *

Gold propounds a theory that sitcoms govern Congress. What people laugh at is exactly how they will vote. Americans can’t bomb a country until they’ve laughed at it a little bit first. Maybe he took the sentiment more seriously than Gold had intended but pretty soon he was feeling like J. Robert Oppenheimer in that porkpie hat hearing the phrase comedy has known sin and he’s on the internet at 3:14 in the morning, looking for absolution.

      *

No one knew that he’d based the popular character of Elke Hall on his mother. He had inside information that it was the end of the world and he hadn’t even notified her.

      *

Beyond the rain and the ticking of the clock, drama or any sense of a grand doomsday epic on the road itself was sorely lacking. No roadblocks or frenzied hordes or menacingly black or fluorescent sunset: just zonked-out commuters in start-and-stop traffic on the long way home from the daily deathsentence of work. Most of these people were only vaguely aware of things, if at all, and the precious few who considered the situation anything to lose sleep over had lost sleep over so many looming catastrophes of the past that this recent matter would strike them as little more than more of the same. Tonight they would go to bed after a starchy meal, vacuous television and perfunctory sex per usual. A couple of pills and out like a light. How typical to be wrong the one time it counted. The one time it counted in a thousand years, you dumbshits. You call your wife to come out on the porch to have a look and less than a second later you’re all dead.

      *

What gave him a kind of vertigo when he contemplated it was how close he had come to being just like them. Before that life-changing night on the internet which fanned into a dozen online conversations, each conversation in turn fanning out into a hundred others, and all of those but the crucial one petering out…the crucial one connecting to his special contact to the man whose vision he had now irrevocably made himself a part of. Yes, thinking back on it, it was amazing…how cloaked in the ordinary it had all once seemed. How something appeared in the inbox of a personals account at a no-hoper’s dating site he’d signed up to pseudonymously because it was free and therefore relatively untraceable: a message exactly two sentence fragments long. Two months later, after visiting god-knows-how-many encrypted sites and exchanging deepcover spam mails and vital details in chatrooms he found himself paypal-ing a mindboggling sum into an account set up in a Biblical name.

Eighty acres of land and five years of provisions for twenty three people (they’d done their best to balance male with female but visionary survivalism is not, strictly speaking, a female interest, so nine females and fourteen males. But their unflinching honesty about this state of affairs reassured him). No couples or families or friends. Only loners with college degrees…professionals older than 27 and younger than 55, disgusted with mainstream politics, wary of organized religion, environmentally friendly but not averse to the occasional bar-b-que. All strangers to one another. All white.

      *

Sid Caesar.

      *

Radio was out of the question, in case some catchy tune came on and drove the sonnet out of his head. What he had was seven hours of motordrone and rubberhum and occasional rainfry sizzle on the roads. That and talking to himself. He supplied his own commercials. He thought of the Man from Glad, that futuristic Aryan hovering in a jetpack to shill ersatz Saranwrap to sexually frustrated newlyweds. He thought of The Beatles’ rooftop concert and George switching his amp back on in open defiance of the bobby. He thought: of course the whole thing could be a clever scam.

But the verisimilitude of the finework of paranoiac details like emailing strategies such as using spam prosodies for deepcover (mploy *black anal virgin* n subj. line & spyprgs wnt rd ur eml) had convinced him. Or how the ambiguously allusive chats he’d had with the man himself, the chats on the gratis personals site, had been regularly scheduled for 3:14 in the morning, based, he realized, on the value for pi and he wasn’t exactly sure why but that last detail had soothed him. Assuaged his fears.

      *

I’m cuckoo for cocoa puffs.

      *

When traffic slowed to a crawl he took the opportunity to peek into other cars. All those faces in profile, innocent with impatience or boredom. For the first time in his adult life he found himself loving humanity.

The automobile beside his to the right was a bruise-blue vintage Ford with a cream-white top, a big old iron box of a thing, perfectly preserved, its contour suggesting a jut-jawed crewcut profile and containing, as it happened, two male passengers with just that style of haircut. The driver could plausibly have been the father of the boy in the passenger seat. They both had brown hair…the guessed-brown on a vintage b&w picture tube…and they were so animated in that hatefully cheerful and perfectly postured way you’d expect in the kind of midcentury film the car and their haircuts seemed keyed to. You can’t see two males like that without automatically picturing the female that belongs with them. The bandana and the oven cleaner. The bubble bath and the shapely leg and the drawer of “female items” you aren’t even allowed to open in your mind, forbidden as the Arc of the Covenant in the cabinet under the sink.

He wondered, for a bemused moment, if he weren’t hallucinating, or if such types in just such a car weren’t obviously time-travelers. Terrorists from the future, because that’s what they will look like, although, wait, he keeps forgetting that the future has already arrived. Would he be crossing state lines with a trunk full of firearms otherwise?

      *

Lola Beedo: I just love that dress you’re wearing, darling!

Elke Hall: (warily) Why, thank you, doll.

Lola Beedo:  (beat) Tell me, did Bill Clinton design it? 

He’d never known a girl named Amanda. He’d never been slapped in the face. Why was he sad about these two facts?

In the script margin Gold had scribbled, Bill who?

      *

They had a regular skit called “Poem of the Week” that was supposedly topical. In the memoes Gold had taken to referring to it as Poem of the Weak and the written phrase had acquired a poignance and profundity all its own. He swears he saw Gold’s assistant-to-the-assistant wiping her eyes and sniffing furtively after reading that phrase. Honey-baked boobs out to here.

      *

The dream he held both dear and sheepishly for its foolishness was the dream of the girl who is waiting for him, waiting at the compound, one of the nine, the most beautiful of the nine, the barefoot heroine in rustic clothing without whom he had been rudderless, unmated, bereft for all these years. She’ll step intuitively out onto the porch of the rambling woodframe house in order to watch him drive up, her tomboy heart quickening to the recognition. She’ll smile tentatively as he greets her with an ironic salute, lugging his trunk of munitions stiff-legged towards the front steps, winded but amused by the exertion, shrugging off her offer to help him carry the massive thing. Golden-haired, curly-haired, of solid pioneer stock. She’d say, the others are inside.

-I’m the last?

-We thought you weren’t coming. We were preparing…

-To mine the road.

-Yes.

She’d hold the door open for him. She’d search his face as he squeezed his way past the woodland aura of her health into a sort of vestibule that opened into a large, high-ceilinged room, a room with a rough, honest look to it: a gathering place for the strong, the wise, the bravely sad. Oil paintings of country life on the walls, maybe. Old bay mares. Or, no, something ironic like Victorian portraits or blue period Picasso. A dynastic sort of fire snapping twigs in the hearth. Quiet conversations here and there tapering off as he sets his clanking trunk at his feet and senses her feminine presence gather force at his side as he takes everyone in while catching his breath, the late arrival at a party in honor of the end of the fucking world. Peripherally he’d feel her delicately hawk-eye him for the subtlest reaction to everything as though her self-esteem depended on his acceptance of the new reality. As though she’s putting herself in the picture with him and hoping there’s a fit.

      *

Then it hit him who She was. She was Donna Douglas aka Ellie Mae Clampett and only then did the improbability of the fantasy mock him and he leaned on the horn and spoke in the precise duration of the car’s grievance as a motorcycle cut in front of him. He realized in a fleeting panic that he couldn’t remember the name of former president Jimmy Carter’s brother; if that went, could a key line from the sonnet be far behind? He then wondered in a morphed extention of this panic if he’d left the shower on. Which extended and morphed yet again into the awful realization that he’d left all his speed in a fannypack in the gym bag on top of his bedroom dresser. How was he supposed to get through the Apocalypse without his vitamin S?

      *

He considered turning back for it.

      *

The howdydoody Ford lurched forward and fell behind in the maddening traffic. Lurched forward and fell behind. It caught up again in a fanfare of horns he added his note to and he saw with self-perplexing irritation that the father and son were indifferent to the agonies of the traffic jam. Just chatting away. Even their windshield wiper seemed relaxed in the offhandedness of its gesture and the two reached up all smiles and lowered their sun-shades as an errant beam levered under the lowered lid of the late-afternoon rainmass with gospel brilliance. The beam illuminated them grinsquinting at eyelevel, goop-haired and adam-appled, a hit show, monster ratings from 1957 broadcast straight into the traffic beside him.

He pictured the mom, coifed and trim in her gown in a pensive pose smoking in the living room window, the young trees in a line in the front yard doing the Watusi and all the televisions off, the radios off, the wall clocks off, the power dead and the Frigidaire silent in the tabernacle of the kitchen. She’s awed by the roiled heavens and so moved by the glory of God’s vast hand as it shapes the wind and the waters and green leaves plucked living from the trees that she forgets to worry about her own boys on the road at the mercy of it, the mystery of life and her place in it. And the man out there, the survivalist, the comedy writer, the agnostic visionary out there in her Christian storm, a half-Jewish Noah saving the world one shaky ego at a time.

      *

Lola Beedo: I just love that dress you’re wearing, darling!

Elke Hall: (warily) Why, thank you, doll.

Lola Beedo:  (beat) The perfect outfit for a decapitation!

Azura’s Gift

 

 

Like many young prostitutes in Berlin, Azura had a dayjob. Due to reasons too numerous to go into here, the fee a prostitute could typically expect in exchange for the usual requests had withered, over the decades, to a paltry fraction. A young prostitute of today could expect the kind of money a middle-aged whore would have been disappointed to earn in the 1970s.  

Middle-aged whores were now limping up and down the Kurfürstenstrasse, the scarred habitat of tattooed junkies and African exchange students, offering the total inventory of their butchershops for a pittance. Like the feather-sprung, peg-legged pigeons these damp women shared the curb with, time appeared to be dismantling them with extraordinary impatience. There was even a rumor that one of the oldest had been selling off toes and now fingers to pay for bigger implants. 

Four days a week, Azura worked as an intern for a fledgling film production company called Auslandish Films, on Rosenthaler Strasse in the Mitte neighborhood. Her wage as an intern was miniscule…barely “drink money”…but she believed she was getting her foot in the door of the film business. She resembled a film star herself, in a 20^th century way, with a defiant posture that her customers at the brothel interpreted as a challenge. 

Azura’s boss at Auslandish Films was a soft-spoken Afro-American expat named Mr. Jeffries, fluent in German, with an arrogant wife and three cookie-colored children, the oldest, a boy, not much younger than Azura. The boy was trouble, but he rarely showed up at the office. When he did, he made such an exaggerated show of ignoring Azura that it was the same as staring. His hair was in soft slow shoulder-length loops the color of dirty butter, floating in the invisible currents he seemed to move through. His own lazy ocean of Balthazar Jeffries. 

Saturdays were the only days on which Azura worked both jobs, stopping in at Auslandish in the morning (opening up with her own key and code to the alarm) to deal with the overnight mail and important answering machine messages and then riding her scooter far across town to the neighborhood of Charlottenburg, on Blissestrasse, where Lady Luck, her brothel, took up the second and third floors of a grand old building that had dodged aerial bombs during the war. 

On the Saturday morning in question Azura inadvertently intercepted a private message from Balthazar Jeffries to Mr. Jeffries on the answering machine. It was the last message on the tape and was so long, in fact, that the tape ran out in the middle of a sentence. She played the message more than once, hugging herself in the cozy gloom of the office with its steel shutters still down over the windows and sun slashing through like a razor. She recognized immediately Balthazar’s deep deep voice. 

“Hi, hello, this message is for the big man, the guy who knows everything. Yeah, Mr. George Washington Jeffries the third, now that’s a name, isn’t it? I don’t think you really want to listen at this little message with your co-workers in the room, George, so I suggest you give them all a nice long lunch break. You see that pause button? I suggest you press it.”  

He went on in a far-ranging monolog to say horrible things about his dark-skinned father Mr. Jeffries. There were almost no gaps between the words in his Gregorian chant of a diatribe and Azura knew from experience which drug was involved. Balthazar hinted more than once that the message was a suicide note. Tell Mom and Becky and Gladys and so forth. Azura realized that she had to come to a decision as to whether or not to delete the message before re-activating the security system and locking up shop and driving across town to the brothel. If the message was all merely the inhuman animus of a drug in oration, Balthazar would be profoundly relieved to discover later that his poor father had never received it.  

Azura dwelled on her decision, and the implications of her decision, the rest of the rainy afternoon in the brothel. 

The truth is that the most lucrative services weren’t about sex at all. Azura’s colleague Lilly, for example, had consented to an incision (local anesthetic) about four inches long, in her abdomen, not far from the left kidney, which the medical student who considered doing this a refined pleasure then carefully sutured, returning a week later to undo the threads (local anesthetic again) and probe gingerly, with a sterilized implement, the smiling wound. For this Lilly received two payments, the first much larger. And Azura herself had once complied with a request to make dirt discreetly into a chasteningly expensive triple-gusseted flapover briefcase. Real alligator. A perfect little shit like a milkdud. This month’s gas, water, phone and electricity bills all neatly despatched with a grunt. 

All this happened in the neutrally-decorated chambers of Lady Luck, a converted gerontological clinic, where Azura paid rent for a smaller room overlooking the courtyard. In the courtyard twisted a chestnut tree whose flowered arms reached up towards her window, nagging her about the past, wagging its finger when she bent over the little bed or mounted it on all fours with her face to the window. 

Every weekend during her happy childhood, Azura had slept at her grandmother’s. Some nights she’d sit up in her little bed crying. Her Nana was a woman from a small country of ritual and habit who only took her hair down when it was bedtime, before her prayers and after her milk and a magazine, and she climbed the stairs to the room where the ceiling slanted down towards the window by Azura’s small bed and asked her Azura, with the militant compassion of a saint, why she was crying.  

-Weil der Neandertaler nicht in den Himmel kommen kann, the child answered, with a gulp after every word. Because the cavemen can’t get into heaven.

-Say again? 

-The cavemen, she repeated, miserable. You said they were born before Christ Nana so how can they can ever be angels and go to Heaven?    

-No, no, cooed Nana, softened by the truth, stroking Azura’s forehead with a trembling hand and confronting her blunder in this fine-cut grief. Bible stories were always distressing for younger children, who hadn’t yet learned to bend logic. In her diaphanous nightgown and shocking dark tumult of hair Nana resembled an excluded angel herself, cooing how the Christian God would never be so unfair like that, Azura. The good cavemen, they will go to Heaven. Don’t worry. Go to sleep. 

-Even if they didn’t know it was a sin to kill Nana? 

-Even so, said Azura’s grandmother, with somewhat less certainty in her voice but the persistent desire that the child should go peacefully to her dreams. She who was given to fevers and days on end of pretty speechlessness. Mother a stone and father an old suit in the closet.  

The next night Nana was drinking her milk and re-reading a magazine (the hypnotic offense of raw youth in proud clothing; the communists would never have allowed it) when again she heard the prayer-like murmur of abject misery in the attic. Up the stairs she climbed, lifting the hem of her nightgown with one hand and clutching the candle holder with the other. 

-The cavemen, Azura gulped. 

-They’re in Heaven. Don’t you remember? The cavemen are in Heaven near God. 

-Yes, answered Azura, but how can cavemen be happy in Heaven? They can’t talk with the others. They aren’t wearing good clothing! The others will treat them like animals Nana! How will the cavemen be happy?   

Nana had to admit that it was difficult to imagine cavemen with angel wings flying around a standard Heaven, brandishing their clubs.   

-The Christian God is wise, she responded, after thinking a while with her eyebrows so high they were straining. About such a problem he’s already thought, before creation, even. He has given the cavemen their own Heaven and there they are happy. 

-There’s a caveman Heaven? 

-Yes. 

-And no one else can go there?  

-No one else can go there, confirmed Nana. To point and laugh, she added, smoothing Azura’s astonishing hair. No one.    

Rainy days brought out the worst kind of customer, for it was usually the type of person who would otherwise have been occupied, enjoying the weather in a convertible with a beautiful amateur had the sun been willing. She preferred the business of the damp white cast-offs who skulked in out of a glorious day, mocked by the splendors of existence. They were very quick and predictable and rarely had the money to propose something frightening. But of course such visits only covered a few hours of overhead.

On rainy days, as Azura’s colleague Lilly put it, the snakes use the staircase. Worst of all were middle-aged men with perfect bodies who mentioned the price they were willing to pay before describing the service they intended to pay for. The good news/bad news technique of the novice oncologist or seasoned sadist.

Azura was curled on the bed, gazing through the rain-melted window at a sky like cold dishwater and dishwater’s buried shapes, recovering from her last visit, toying with the idea of opening the window to let the bad feelings out. It was suppertime and she was daydreaming about Balthazar Jeffries. She daydreamed a knock on the door; she daydreamed putting on a bathrobe and telling whoever it was to wait.

She’d cross the room in three strides and sit at the vanity, the light from the illuminated mirror the only light in the rain-darkened room, and reconstruct the impenetrable mask of her makeup. Once, a customer had pressed her prone to the bed with his knee between her shoulder blades with such force while he pulled himself to completion that a perfect portrait of her face like a shroud of Turin remained on the pillowcase when he freed her to breathe again. Or, yes, more like that Munch painting.

She’d answer the door and like a horrible miracle and a gift there would stand Balthazar Jeffries, angered by rain and shivering off mud from the riverbed.

The End of the World Club

Ginger toasts the young Turkish couple at the table in front of him. Unbeknown to them. He even raises his glass in the dark and it shines in the spotlight as the spotlight sweeps the stage. To a few heady months of compulsive sex and amazing self-righteousness, he smirks. The warmth of the dregs of his drink in his throat reminds him of a wino’s proximate sigh in an airport shuttle in winter. Benny is doing the twist and Ginger chuckles. Couple years ago Benny fell off a stage dancing like this, landing on a fat girl at a front-row table. Now she the band airbag, jokes Benny. Which wouldn’t be half as funny in the form of a grammatically correct sentence.

Benny sings Doo Wop with a backing group of old soldiers called The Midnighters and Ginger loves to listen, and he catches them when he can, if the gig isn’t at an inconvenient location. Usually, he hangs around until well after the last song, leaning on a sticky bar and buying Benny his syrupy drinks. Benny’s veiny black skull, muses Ginger, is a vault full of junk, mostly, but some precious heirlooms are underfoot of the headless blind mice in there, too. Propped on one elbow, his cheek in a palm, his dented hat crooked on his skull, Benny leans on the bar after singing for very little money for very few people all night and he remembers, smacking his lips on the syrupy drinks.

At a club called The End of The World Club in the far corner of the neighborhood called Neukölln, along a littered street that had once run up along the Berlin Wall, Benny became almost intimidatingly lucid one night, and announced, “Love songs are sad, man. You know that? They’re sad.” And Ginger agreed and bought him a syrupy drink.

Tonight he came to Benny’s gig early and got himself the perfect table to watch from, something center-left of the stage, not too far from the exit, half-hidden by a dusty rubber tree plant that may or may not be real rubber. This is the kind of club where the service is insulted if you speak to them in German so when the waitress came he asked for his drink like a man in a homburg in the kind of tavern his father used to disappear into all day, claiming to need the vitamin of the warm red light, starting with “Let me have a…” and ending with “Thanks, Baby.” The waitress is new and pretty, but he cannot for the life of him conjure her image after she leaves the table.

Ginger once had a conversation with a career soldier…funny little guy with bulging eyes and a Georgian accent… talked just like former President of the United States Jimmy Carter…referred to the military as the mil-turruh… in which this career soldier, Junie Haliburton, complained bitterly that the modern army wasn’t doing its job properly. At least as regards the combat soldier in a live theater of conflict (this was shortly after the time of the first Gulf War).

Junie Haliburton said: “A good soldier is already dead, see? That’s what the real army does, see, it pre-kills you so that nothing the enemy might could do to you don’t matter.” Madd-uh. “But this old pussy army nowadays,” puss-uh-ahmuh na-daze, “be so fine and recreational you sore afraid to die!” He went on to say “We seen a nigguh got tore up in Khafji looked like Emmet Till’s twin after them towelheads got done with him and so none of us was in the mood to fight. I mean, I’ll tell you the truth, brother, I started crying when I seen that boy cuz he was messed up…what kinda soldier gonna stand up there and cry? Wasn’t even my buddy. See, I blame the army for those bitter tears. Army ain’t doin’ its job.”

Ginger thought: Junie Haliburton is my Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Ginger thought: I remember catching my father waltzing out of one of those padded-red-door taverns before lunch with his arm around the waist of a slender black lady in a beltless bone-colored London Fog earning my father my eleven-year-old grudging admiration forever.

The name of the dive Ginger is in is HAPPY OURS, continuing in the amusing Berlin tradition of naming businesses after English-language quasi-puns that don’t add up. There’s a coffee place near Alexanderplatz called Drin Kup; an optometrist’s in Moabit called Clothe Your Eyes. Three or four salons around town called of course Director’s Cut. Happy Ours is on a corner deep in a neighborhood called Kreuzberg, opposite a very ugly vacant lot, on a street parallel to the green-watered canal that flows heavily through Berlin like absinthe (at noon) or motor oil (midnight). Berlin is very much a huge, creaking machine made of stone. A black-faced robot of unfathomable self-disgust and sadness. Which often smells of wet dog.

Ginger has been coming to Happy Ours off and on for many years because it is an excellent room for live music, unintentionally magnificent, acoustically; something to do with the weird voodoo of the shape of the walls and the height of the ceiling and the very old PA. It’s a warm sounding tummy-rubbing venue, sonically, and the waitresses don’t pester the clientele to keep drinking… the clientele is allowed to nurse a beer among themselves all night if need be. Fifty years ago HAPPY OURS was a thriving cabaret with a proper German name and evidence of that can be found in the PA and the lighting system, which were both fairly state of the art in 1957, but the original name (along with the original owners and clientele) are buried in the catacombs of the city’s collective memory.

He likes to sit and watch unknowns belt their souls out. Knowing that they are being paid in little more than drink tickets adds to the pathos of the material they usually choose to perform. Almost all of these unknowns who mount the stage to go a few rounds with old time popular music are American; it is that kind of club; and most of them are left over from the largely evacuated presence of the American Army that dominated Berlin from just after the Second World War until just after the obsolescence of the Wall. Cooks, drivers, doormen, hookers, masseurs, cha-cha teachers… what most of them have in common is that they are black and they can sing and that not many more than a handful of people in Berlin seem to give a damn when they take the stage and belt a few out at Happy Ours.

Earlier, Benny swept in on a cold breeze that made Ginger pull the collar of his coat up. It was an hour before show time and he shuffled straight for the bar to start with the stainglass-colored meds, tossing his hat on stage before settling on his corner stool in the three piece suit that Ginger is quite sure Benny sleeps in. Benny’s old derby (with a playing card in the hat band) slid to a halt a few feet in front of the drum kit and remained obediently in position while the guy at the light board experimented with the spots and some gels. Ginger liked the derby in devil red. Spectral blue was also good.

“Mr. Benny,” said Ginger, pointing as he approached him.

“Doctor,” Benny said, smiling through the bottom of a grasshopper-green drink.

“Tell me now, Sir, why is it you call me Doctor,” said Ginger, taking Benny’s drink-free hand, which was cold as Death, and giving it a squeeze, “if you’re the one who does all the operating?”

Benny got a good laugh out of that one. They were riffing on some vintage down-home repartee, but it was lost on the bartender, a German kid who only jerked beers for the sake of one day running his own piercing parlor with the same mephitic rue. Had more chrome in his face than the grill of an antique Caddy. Benny and Ginger are supposed to be having this witty exchange in a bar on the Southside of Chicago in 1973, but due to forces beyond their control, a rupture in the space-time continuum has stranded them in 21st century Berlin.

“Doc,” coughed Benny. “Do you believe in God?”

“That depends on who I’m talking to.”

“I been having trouble sleeping, lately. And since I can’t get any shut eye anyway, I use the time to think. I figure I’m doing about 40% more thinking these days than I ever done before,” he said, staring into his empty glass. Ginger, with the polite imperiousness of an American, signaled the bartender to provide another. “And I have come to some remarkable conclusions.”

“Sounds interesting. And do you believe in God, Benny?”

“Man, I’ll tell you something. I only believe in God when I’m in love. And I ain’t been in love in a long long time…”

The door opened again and another cold breeze blew in and circled the room, followed by the young Turkish couple who just stood there blinking in the dark for quite a while after the door closed behind them. Ginger knew the feeling: too cold and wet to want to go back outside, but, on the other hand, here inside is not exactly Caesar’s Palace. It’s hard to feign enthusiasm when no one’s watching. The interior of The Happy Ours is slightly more alluring than that of a hand-me-down orthopedic shoe.

“Tell me some of these remarkable conclusions you’ve come to, Benny,” said Ginger, turning away from the indecisive young couple to face Benny again. Benny smiled at his own reflection in the surface of the bar. The reflection was somehow the sharper of the two.

“You ever wonder how we know pain hurt, Doc?”

He let that sink in for a bit, then closed his eyes tightly and continued, “And how we know that feeling good…feel good? I been thinkin’ ‘bout that. If there ain’t no point to everything, if the whole world just an accident and nothing don’t mean nothing, how come we know that pain hurt? How come everything alive is always trying so hard? Runnin’, flyin’, hidin’, fightin’… lookin’ for love, buildin’ a nest, defendin’ its offspring… you wanna say that we all just been tricked into givin’ a damn? Is this here a planet of fools? How can that many livin’ things be wrong, man? How can a mosquito be wrong, man? It ain’t got enough of a brain to be wrong. But it be buzzin’ around all night, busy as hell, workin’ the kinda hours a Dominican would complain about! Why? Why a mosquito give a damn? Why don’t it just lay there and say to hell with it? You wanna know the meaning of life, Doc?”

Ginger answered with utter sincerity. “I’d love to.”

Benny slipped off his barstool and headed for the stage. “Ask a mosquito,” he winked.

In the middle of his disquisition, Benny’s band had arrived, filing in in their long dark column of air. Benny has a basic rhythm section… bass, guitar, drums… and his three back-up singers, The Midnighters… a six-piece, in total. Ginger fell into conversation with one of them one night; the guitar player; and asked how they could possibly be making enough money to support a six piece band. Were the drink tickets enough to keep them on the road? He giggled… a surprisingly girlish giggle out of a round black white-haired man… and said, “We do it for the pussy, man.”

He said it’s in their verbal contract with Benny that everyone gets two solos per set. “No solo, no pussy,” he giggled again. He continued, “I’d be lying if I said it’s like being on tour with Marvin Gaye. We’re not getting the type of girl that would make a fella like you envious…” Ginger laughed to acknowledge the compliment, “But choosing between pussy and no pussy, I’ll vote for pussy every time. And these German girls… they’re real sweet. Even the Oldies got Goodies! Dig?”

“Dig. Thanks for elucidating, brother. One more question. Why no sax?”

He winked. “Sax too popular.”

Benny is clearing his throat in the microphone and frowning into the spotlight, gesturing at his left ear for the sake of the sound man’s edification. Benny and his band count four and lumber into Why Do Fools Fall in Love? Frankie Lymon had a hit with it the first time around in 1957; Diana Ross did something big and silly with it again in the ‘80s. Compositionally, it’s a brilliant construction; the magic is mostly in the balance between short and long phrases in the melody. The pattern is too complex to have been a calculated effect… it must have been a gift from the composer’s subconscious. Ginger hasn’t heard the tune in many years; hearing it is just like being a teenager again. Singing an octave below Lymon’s version, Benny soars, nevertheless… clowning a bit like Satchmo through the bridge; clutching his chest and feigning a staggering heart attack through the start-and-stop drum break leading out of the bridge and back into the chorus.

It turns out that sitting at a table directly in front of Ginger’s new spot are the young Turkish lovers. They are very straight-backed and formal looking. They could be West-Side-Story-era Puerto Ricans in Brooklyn. He with his short black patent-leather hair, in his secondhand burgundy blazer and she with her black silk scarf of hair down the back of a sequined blue dress, hair tied high on her head with a single white ribbon. They sit at a formal distance from each other, but Ginger can see, on closer inspection, that they are holding hands under the table. Sitting as still and straight and proper as opera-goers above the table, below it they are conducting a passionate romance. Their hands are desperate and clumsy. Ravenous birds. Ravens.

They’re from a culture he can’t begin to parse. American teens haven’t been this sexually repressed and socially circumspect in sixty years. Their postures are mannequin-like: their cheeks are glazed and their hair molded. He wonders if they’ve even done more than kiss yet; has anyone discussed with these round-cheeked, glossy, hormone-bedeviled teens what Americans half a century ago referred to as the birds and bees? Being a Turkish virgin, does she have any idea what a blow job is? Does she have any idea of the importance of the blow job… of its physio-philosophical function and its place as a lever attached to the vast clockwork of the male animal’s outlook on life? It goes without saying that her boyfriend eschews the Hercules trial of eating pussy. Ginger toasts them, lifting his blood-red wineglass into the sacred beam of the spotlight like an Arthurian chalice of bitter dregs.

Benny’s bassist is doing what’s normally the sax solo in the song, thwacking his E string with that big black paw, humping the instrument around the stage as with a fat drunk amorous wife. It isn’t even a half-full house by now, but there are two or three obviously single ladies in the audience and the whole six-piece is working hard to get their special attention. The spot light follows the bass until its return to its original position, at the end of the solo, behind Benny, to his left, snug with the drummer, and then Benny, wiping the sweat off his brow in another shameless steal from Satchmo, talks his way through a rough soliloquy on Love.

“Ladies and Gentlemen,” Laze an’ jennimin, “Why do fools fall in love?”

Ginger cups his hands around his mouth and shouts “You tell us, Benny!” Everyone in the audience turns to get a look when he does that but he doesn’t care… being German they don’t understand that he is merely doing his duty as a member of Benny’s audience. The band stretches like an old cat into a lazy breakdown: just a throb of drums and the mumbling bass. Benny, with a bewildered look on his face, shouts, “Why do birds sing so gay?” He then addresses the bassist, “Bubba, you know any gay birds, man?”

Bubba (because he has no mic of his own) does a comedic shrug.

“What about you, Sticks?” pleads Benny, shifting his attention to the drummer, who at this point is keeping the beat alive with the kick drum alone like a bus driver working the gas pedal in bumper-to-bumper traffic at rush hour. “You ever seen a gay pigeon on Amsterdam Avenue in Harlem, brother?”

Benny gestures at a fifty-something orange-skinned woman with a shy chin and upswept bleached-blonde hair, in a low-cut blouse and tight jeans, seated near a monitor, who has been calling attention to herself by clapping in time to the one and three of the beat in a way Ginger once saw teenagers do in a Frankie Avalon movie on his grandmother’s Magnavox console television one evening that had his aunts and uncles, gathered around the set, hooting and catcalling with high mockery.

With much coaxing, the orange blonde stands from her table and comes forward, waving her hands with giddy shame. Benny helps her onstage and in doing so has formally declared his bed for the evening. Picture it: Benny’s shiny black booty just pumping away; the blonde, like a self-hating vanilla pudding, bouncing under his semi-oblivious weight. Benny will invest as much passion in the act as a bear scratching his ass on the bark of an old tree.

2.

The unspeakable secret that Ginger holds dear to his heart is that blacks are different. They are something else entirely, the lost tribe of a bejeweled galaxy, possibly, and if that isn’t obvious in how they performed plantation physics on 17th century Calvinist Psalmody and came up with Thelonius Sphere Monk, it’s evident in how you can never just casually look at a purely black person. Skin so black it’s like ten thousand books printed in one novel.

Thursday night at the Happy Ours is not Benny’s night. No sign of any member of his back-up band The Midnighters either. Tonight on stage there’s just an older-looking woman singing her self-pitying cabaret-style blues, accompanied by a German pianist who sports the irritating affectation of a porkpie hat and with whom she has little apparent rapport. After Ginger’s temperate applause, at the finish of every number, the singer can be heard, off-microphone, to inquire, politely, “Can we do____?” and the pianist either nodding or shaking his head. The singer’s name, it says on a cheap little handout on every empty table in the deserted club, is Ms. Madrid.

Perfect, thinks Ginger.

Ms. Madrid, the b&w handout (in design reminiscent of a program for a Baptist funeral) goes on to say, has performed in the classiest venues of Europe-from The Midnight Son in Stockholm to Harry Chin’s in London’s SoHo and all points East and West in Germany. She has toiled in the business of show against the backdrop of many of the most momentous occasions of the latter half of the 20th century, from the Vietnam War and Watergate to Chernobyl and the fall of The Berlin Wall. Been through it all and still Ms. Madrid is here, the ambassadress for music’s uplifting message of let the rhythm take you and keep on keepin’ on! By any means necessary!

Ginger is of the opinion that Ms. Madrid resembles the late great Congresswoman and would-be nominee for the 1968 Democratic presidential candidacy Shirley Chisolm. She is wearing big round pink-tinted sunglasses and a white scarf over a black wig and dressed in a belted house dress featuring a green and yellow floral pattern. She’s shuffling around the stage in silver-buckled kelly-green flats, vintage 1973. She is tall and svelte and dull black as cold tar.

Ms. Madrid is old and perplexingly dressed but there is something seasoned about her performance. The way she shuffles rhythmically from one side of the stage to the other, singing down into the mic with her eyes closed, her glossy, tousled Supremes-like wig just ever so slightly out of alignment. It’s rather hypnotic. Her singing is very close to talking but not tart or acerbic or bitterly drunk in the manner of Nina Simone’s. It’s in the awkwardly intimate register of a widow talking to herself whilst conscious of being overheard. When a song ends she looks up, blinking, as though the hypnotist has snapped his fingers and she takes a bow to Ginger’s temperate applause. Even he can’t tell if he’s mocking her or paying his respects or making like a man in a seal suit at a bootleg circus.

Ms. Madrid is what Ginger thinks of as one of The Old Ones… blacks who are the great-grandchildren of former slaves. In other words they knew former slaves; former slaves were members of the family; former slaves featured in the boredom of daily life. What is a history book compared to that? Hear it all from the horse’s mouth: what burning tar hitting fear-cold flesh smells like; the special, rarely-heard character of a genuine dying scream. The reek, dimensions and appearance of the plantation shit ditch and so on. Ms. Madrid is singing:

I been so down
That sweet little hole in the ground
Sound like my mountain top.
I said I been so down
That sweet little hole in the ground
Sound just like my mountain top
When they finally lay me in it
I know I got my big jackpot

The waitress appears at Ginger’s side with another drinks menu, laying a bold little hand on his shoulder. Her coin-blonde hair is in pigtails. Ginger gestures for her to lower her edible-looking ear to his lips.

“The names of all the really expensive drinks are too pornographic for my virgin lips to utter.”

“Agreed. Why don’t you just order a beer, which you can sip until my shift is over, and then you take me home?”

“When is your shift over?”

“When you finish the beer.” She squeezes his shoulder and goes for the beer.

There is a sudden hush in the darkly glittered room (the mirror ball is piebald with the lacunae of great age) and Ginger realizes that Ms. Madrid is taking her bows for the first set. He claps. Ms. Madrid shields her eyes against the spotlight and addresses the audience. “Thank you, thank you lady and gentleman. We’ll be taking a little intermission now, restrooms are in the back to the left and please don’t forget to tip your waitresses.” She climbs down off the stage and shuffles towards Ginger’s table.

She removes her sunglasses. “I thought I’d come over and say hello to my audience. May I?”

Ginger gestures that she may and she sits. He says, “You’ve got a good instrument.”

She replies, biting the stem of her sunglasses, “Have I? I always thought of myself as more like a tour guide through the song, see what I’m saying? Like, ladies and gentlemen, if you look out your windows to the right you’ll see the chorus.”

Ginger finds the way she talks while chewing the stem inexplicably sexy, despite the fact that she must be about his mother’s age. “But,” she adds, “I’d be the last one in this room to deflect a compliment, Sugar. Much appreciated. Are you in the industry?”

“How could you tell?”

“You’re looking at me like you’re trying to figure out what you’d change.”

“I wouldn’t change a thing, to tell you the truth.”

“You wouldn’t? Not even my age, Sugar?”

“Your age is a part of the package.”

“Spoken like a true professional.”

“No, this is the gifted amateur you’re talking to now. I’m off-duty. And anything I say off-duty has a more… personal… meaning to it.”

“I hear that.”

Ginger leans forward. “You know what?”

“What?”

“I know I don’t know you from Adam but…I feel I can talk to you.”

“That’s probably because you don’t know me. And I don’t know anybody you know. So confessing to me wouldn’t…”

Ginger chuckles. “Confessing.”

“Whatever it is you’d like to get off your chest, Sugar. Ms. Madrid is all ears, and her lips are sealed.” She mimes locking her lips with a little key and dropping the key down the cleavage-free front of her dress.

“You don’t want to hear my troubles, Ms. Madrid.”

“Let me be the judge of that. Start with the easiest.”

“You’ll think I’m nuts.”

Ms. Madrid folds her hands in her lap and leans back. “How old do you think I am?” She assumes a stern expression. “Be honest now.”

“65?”

“Add ten to that. Ten and a half, technically.”

“Wow.”

“Wow is right. 75 years on this planet. Never dreamed I’d make it past 50. Born in Biloxi Mississippi, moved to Chicago with my family when I was still a child. Migrated, I mean. Six brothers and four sisters. I was not the youngest but I’m the only one left.” She raps the table. “And in that span of time I have seen a thing or two. And I’ve known some real nuts. Some were even world famous nuts.”

“Such as?”

“Ever hear of an eccentric fellow name of Dali?”

“The melting clocks? The mustache?”

“When I knew Sal, his favorite pastime was sniffing the pinkie finger on his left hand. Refused to wash it. If Sal wasn’t twirling the tips of his mustache, he was sniffing that dirty little finger. You’d try to shake his hand or hug him and he’d stick this finger out at you.”

“Charming.”

They both laugh and Ms. Madrid continues, “Lived in Paris when I was just a skinny young thing, even skinnier than I am now, and I knew them all… poets, writers, painters, aristocrats, spoiled expats, local madmen, pimps,whores and even regular old working class people. Because a tight little colored behind is always welcome, pardon my French. This was long before my flirtation with showbiz. Back then I dreamed dreams of an entirely different color, Sugar. Back then I had dreams of becoming a writer. Silly me.”

“Gave up on the dream?”

“May it rest in peace.”

“Why?”

“What’s a nigger gonna write about being a nigger that previous niggers haven’t already writ?”

“Aha.”

She says, with amazement, “There’s only the one damn nigger book in the world and they keep writing the tired old thing over and over again. Starts with abject poverty and ends with self-awareness. You know the drill.”

“I know the drill.”

“But I ain’t bitter.”

Ginger winks. “Why should you be?”

Ms. Madrid smiles teasingly with her chin resting on one big flat palm. Ginger hasn’t seen a nose this broad in thirty years. Nor teeth so large and white. He feels as though he’s made some kind of discovery. As a young man he would have considered this face as plain as a dusty boot in a junk shop, but it strikes him now that her face is something of strange and magnetic and militantly exotic beauty. She could be from another planet. With her long, attenuating fingers and elbow straw legs. She could be a Venusian. Her age merely adds to this impression. He imagines her in a foil suit, an ancient giantess climbing out of the charred husk of trowel-shaped pod in the side of a steaming iceberg. In a wig.

The waitress is making the trip back to the table with his symbolic beer on a symbolic tray and Ms. Madrid, aware of Ginger’s fascination with her face, nods towards the approaching waitress and says (quickly, softly), “Girlfriend?”

Ginger shakes his head. “Just… a girl.”

Ms. Madrid says, “Are you sure about that?” and smiles enigmatically as the waitress sets the bottle on the table. Ginger says to the waitress, “Ms. Madrid was just telling me about Paris after the war.”

“I want to hear it. But what can I get you to drink first?”

“A glass of white wine would be much appreciated.”

“I have to say that I am loving your voice. You sing and I want to be a baby in her cradle.”

They all laugh. Ginger puts a finger lightly to the waitress’s arm. “Hear that, Ms. Madrid? The young lady is highly attuned. And that makes two of us.”

Ms. Madrid slips her sunglasses on. “Why not make it three?”

The big surprise, when it finally comes, will make Ginger laugh and Benny, too, when he hears about it. The blond will be lots less amused.

Three Conversations, One Real

 

She walks against the wind like it’s some kind of trick staircase, in a headlong lilt like Arabic script towards the filthy Post Office. Everything is filthy: phone booths, convenience stores, sidewalks. Everything. Everything stinks of singed garbage and the revealed interior of the body. This is what they mean by that beautiful euphemism urban blight. She would chuckle but she does all her laughing on the inside these days for she has recognized the wisdom of not transmitting, of no longer being a sender. Instead she is a receiver…a perfect receiver of threat’s end-of-the-dial broadcast, out there where the satellites sing. Her peripheral vision is so sharp she can read the commercials on the sides of the buses as they fart by without even lifting her disgusted gaze from the filthy sidewalk. Gobs of spit like dissolving emeralds. A mound of hominid shit in a doorway.

It’s a long trudge against a devil wind during which she reflects on the twists and turns of her long life while also remaining vigilant to the obvious. That murder of little Negresses skipping rope at the corner. That bandana’d kid with the splintered pool cue. Where do these demons come from and why do they never leave? Trying to out-last them has been a futile project. She’s seen these same kids hanging around this block for thirty five years now and if you get close enough she bets the rope-skippers are wizened and wrinkled and smell of camphor, a notion that shivers in her shoes. You touch a face and the cheek crumbles off on your fingers. She used to buy peanut brittle in pound-sized buckets from a shop that used to be where that pimp is standing, talking into his hand and getting answers. She forgets what she’s carrying: is this a manuscript for her dead agent Cy?

She had waist-long hair kept braided and stuffed under a Chicago White Sox baseball cap for years due to vivid premonitions of being scalped but now she’s wearing an auburn wig and if any scalpers come she’ll just toss the wig at them as a diversionary tactic. This is the auburn wig that belonged to Lillian Hellman when the name Lillian Hellman meant something. In other words: take heed. Her deep-pocketed house coat is laden with teak-handled steak knives from a set someone gave her on some holiday nobody celebrates anymore which she absent-mindedly slips into one or the other pocket whenever she dons her scowl like a white visor and steps outside on these unavoidable errands in the too-bright realm of incipient harm. She is bent and a-clatter with cutlery. She is lugging a parcel…secondhand books for her son who is incarcerated in a foreign prison. He desperately needs some English over there.

She turns left on Woodlawn Ave and she figures she’s about a twenty minute walk from the old Stagg Field where that Henry Moore blob commemorates something about something that used to make her worried about walking near the spot on the way to her lectures and Georgie of course would run right towards it and the more she yelled get away from that thing the faster he’d run. And now, of course, he’s incarcerated.

More and more often she finds herself thinking in a forgetful fury of all those martyrs to emptiness, the women who died for the sake of nothing better than some man’s shitty orgasm. Three in her family alone: her big sister Eda who perished in a blind fever of complications from an illegal abortion she slipped off to with the very first night of the Ed Sullivan show as her cover…then the adopted daughter of one of her brother’s exes who was strangled and raped in that order…and Carole, of course. The Pill. The cancer. Oh Carole, Carole, Carole, Carole.

A young man with his narrow back to her, waiting for the light, twists for a wary glimpse as she approaches the curb intoning her daughter’s name. There’s a broken brown leaf like an Indian-head nickle stuck in his modest irregular afro and he is a lovely chiffon yellow like the young Smokey Robinson. In his dirty pink shirt and dress pants.

“I just finished reading Senelitá this morning,” he says, improbably enough, his softly puzzled face turning away from her. He scans for a gap in the cars coming.

“Svevo?” she responds cautiously, patting her coat pocket; rattling her knives.

He scratches an elbow but doesn’t turn again to face her, so intent is he in divining the traffic. She has to strain to hear when he says, “It was a bitch. A real disappointment. Not an inch of room in the whole book for yours truly the reader to decide what he is thinking about what Svevo is trying to tell you.”

“Listen,” she responds, with a shoo-fly gesture, “Don’t forget when he wrote it. Silent films were a dream of the future. Narrative technology…” But she catches herself. From the look of sharp disbelief the yellow black man turns on her before dashing across the street through a sudden gap in traffic she comes to realise that his half of this exchange never happened.

She had been about to say something regarding that famous scene from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey where a monkey tosses a tapir’s legbone into the sky and it matchcuts to a Pan Am space shuttle. She is less overwhelmed by embarrassment at making a fool of herself than crushed by disappointment that she won’t be finishing the conversation.

But then she thinks: why not?

2.

“It was like listening to a fucking mugging.”

“Jesus.”

“Like listening to your mother…my mother…getting mugged during a transatlantic…”

“Jesus.”

“Jesus is right. Tell me about it. I timed it. Have you ever had a six minute coughing fit? Two minutes seems long. Poor thing. But that’s not even the worst.”

They were driving along on a brilliant day at a leisurely pace behind a sleek modern hornet-yellow streetcar. In the back window of the streetcar sat a pretty young girl in a pink top, with strongly bleached hair restrained in a braid, showing them the studio portrait of her three quarter profile, appearing to stare with erotic anticipation at some mysterious subterranean point to the rear right of the streetcar. Mr. Rand found lapsing into a faint approximation of Mr. Bacon’s laddish speech patterns irresistible.

“Only a Berliner would do that,” said Hakim Bacon. “Sorry to interrupt you. About your mother and all. But only a Berliner would do that.”

“I mean,” said Hakim, putting the Mini in gear again with a grunt of disgust as the Strasssenbahn in front of them disgorged itself of a paltry two passengers and juddered forward, “How long we been following this thing? Six? Seven blocks? And her there posing, since the moment she became aware of us looking. Like Queen Victoria on a fucking stamp, she is.”

“Normal thing would be A, turn your back and forget about us or B, fuck it and wave or something. Make contact.”

“Oh fuck yes. Girl from Brighton? She’d've hopped off and importuned us for a ride by now. I was reading something recently.”

“Yeah?”

“Guess how many American tourists are struck by cars in the UK annually due to left-right flow of traffic confusion. On average. Guess.” Without waiting for Mr. Rand to guess, Hakim Bacon said, “Fifteen fucking hundred.”

“Surprising.”

“Well, it’s all kept very hush hush, innit? Fucking Tourist Board. That’s what I’d call a right conspiracy, mate. And it’s the fucking Tourist Board. Not exactly bloody Casa Nostra. I mean.”

“If the British Tourist Board is capable…”

“Exactly. Shudder to think what fucking Coca Cola gets up to when the moon is full. At the end of the day…”

“Or Microsoft.”

“Or Microsoft. Or the bleeding Pope. Look at her.” Hakim took his left hand off of the steering wheel and waved it facetiously from his window, wriggling his fingers. His long-fingered hand was huge in comparison to the diameter of his hairy bony wrist and the too-short-by-an-inch sleeve of his retro-futurist rayon red Nehru jacket.

“Ten quid says she don’t react. Just you watch. Ten quid if she so much as bats a fucking eyelid in response. See? Mount fucking Rushmore. Helloo! Helloo! Fucking chronic. So, then. Enough of that. What’s the worst?”

“The worst?”

“Your mother. If her coughing fits…if they aren’t…”

“Oh. Yeah. No, the coughing fits…if only they were the worst. Two weeks ago…”

Mr. Rand broke off and calculated. Was this something he wanted to share? He’d known Hakim for years but never closely. Hakim was just the guy you went to when you needed a problem fixed or a whim satisfied and you were willing to pay less than legal, but more than friendly, prices. If you needed a fake passport, expensive stereo equipment, or a child bride from Russia, you went to Hakim Bacon of Brighton.

Hakim was half German and half Pakistani but spoke with an accent so cynically musical that he inspired infinite confidence in his capacity to fix your problem for a fee. He’d seen and done and brokered everything. He was boney and tall and dressed in the manner of a DJ, and he always wore his sunglasses like a tiara…whether in the blinding sun of Ibiza or in the depths of a smokey cellar bar in the dead of a Berlin night, those big red sunglasses rode atop Hakim Bacon’s sleek black bangs with royal self-confidence. Did Mr. Rand want to open up to Hakim? This wasn’t some hilarious third party narrative about sexual humiliation he was dying to tell. This was Mr. Rand’s mother they were talking about. A story about terrible nakedness. A story about second-infancy’s sanity-free slapstick and dread.

“Two weeks ago,” prompted Hakim.

“I call her. The phone rings and rings and rings. It’s about 9 o’clock her time so I know she can’t be out. She has to be home, glued in front of her television…”

“Loudly agreeing with some big-haired video fascist who she thinks of as her only friend.”

“Yeah. The phone keeps ringing, and I’m getting worried. Finally, she answers, sounding. I don’t know. Strangely…detached? I go, Ma. What are you up to? She goes: I had an episode. I go: an episode? What sort of episode? She goes: you know, an episode. At this point she’s whispering into the phone, because she doesn’t want the neighbors to hear. It took me quite a while to get the story out of her.”

Mr. Rand cleared his throat. “Basically, she somehow just rolled off her bed, naked, and ended up pinned between her bed and the wall. She was lying there that way all morning, all afternoon, well into the night. Lucky the phone is on the nightstand, and the nightstand is right there where she was, between her bed and the wall. When I called, she managed to pull the phone by its cord off the nightstand to answer it.”

Hakim was frowning with distant concentration as he parked the car in front of SPACE BAR, which was a student café by day and a spiritual battleground for second-tier models by night.

“Blimey.”

“Blimey is right. Lock it?”

“Nah.”

They threaded their way between the tables laid out like the monotone squares of a madman’s chess board in front of the café, and found a free spot beside three plaster-dusted workmen, each wearing a dusty blue bandana as a hat and a pair of opaque white goggles like a necklace, staring at the street with dormant menace, protecting tall glasses of beer. Glancing at a menu and handing it to Mr. Rand, Hakim lit a cigarette and immediately stubbed it out.

“How’s your thing coming? With, uh. You know. The bird with the….” He made a facial expression with bulging eyes which  conveyed the concept of large breasts.

“Hannah?” Mr. Rand stuck the pointer finger of his right hand across his upper lip in simulation of a mustache. Simultaneously, but very subtly, he lifted the palm of his left hand upright at shoulder level in a fleeting salute.

Hakim laughed. “Right.”

After they had ordered, but before the table was cluttered with food, Hakim spread a map out on it. “As you can see,” he said, squinting contemplatively, “This is a map of Germany, the bit which is extremely near to the Polish border, and, lo, here’s a bit of Poland, too.”

He tapped the upper right corner of the tattered old map. “What we’re talking about here is basically a part of the world that the Silesians who dwell there like to refer to as Silesia. Silly old them. Used to be German, not really Polish now, and land there is fucking cheap. Which is where you come in with your grand American scheme, if I’m not mistaken.”

Hakim tapped Mr. Rand’s shoulder and Mr. Rand thought how pure whites never do that. “Bloke named Wenceslas Wenceslasovitch or whatever…right out of central casting…big red hands like raw hams…massive geezer with a yellow mustache…he wants to sell his portion of a parcel of land that is well nigh 50 hectares, mate.”

Hakim paused for dramatic effect and looked Mr. Rand in the eye.”Have you any idea how fucking big a hectare is? Really, have you? I doubt it. I hadn’t a clue myself, to be honest, till I checked up on it.” He paused again. “One hectare. Ten thousand square meters. Ten bloody thousand. That’s one hundred acres. To give you an idea: your average suburban plot of land is half an acre or one acre tops. Our friend Wenceslas owns 14 hectares of this 50 hectare plot and he wants to liquidate his bit, he wants to be rid of it, for a very reasonable price…you’ll laugh when you hear it. You’ll die laughing when you hear what he wants for his 14 hectares, mate, I guarantee it…joke of the year…and that includes three farm houses and a barn and a fucking well without a dead cat down it.”

Hakim lit another cigarette and sat back and took a long drag on it, acknowledging with a satirical nod the cement-cold stare of one of the dust-covered workers who happened to find himself in the path of Hakim’s second-hand smoke. Under his breath Hakim said, “Put on your gas mask and goggles if the smoke troubles you, darling,” and then, louder, to Mr. Rand, “There’s only one drawback, as I see it.”  

Languidly his head tilted back as his mouth opened and out came what appeared to be a  quivering x-ray of his skull. ”The other thirty five hectares of the property in question is owned by Wenceslas’s dear old mum and she’s firmly against having the land sold off in bits. There’s a bright side, though…and I wouldn’t be mentioning all this if there weren’t.” He stubbed out the just-started cigarette, winking at the dust-covered worker and his two chums, who hadn’t uttered a word or moved very much at all since Mr. Rand’s last nervous appraisal.

“Right,” said Hakim. “The bright side. Mother is at death’s door, innit? Cancer of the heart or something. She’s like 99, this bird is, 99 on stilts and the wind is kicking up. She falls dead, Wenceslas can do what he wants with the property. You give him fifty thousand in one cash payment, you give me seven thousand for my time and expertise, you pay certain fees and sign certain documents with the Polish government, and you’re suddenly the lord of all you survey. Hear it’s real nice in the fall. No neighbors to speak of. Wolves. Folk tales. Nice. Whatcha think, then? I get 33% of my fee up front before you contact the seller, of course. Refundable within thirty days if the deal breaks down. Which I can’t see happening, frankly.”

“So now we’re just waiting…”

“For a poor old lady…”

“To…”

Hakim winked and lit another cigarette and studied passersby on the street a good long time. A smile unfurled on his face. “Not that you have to.”

“Excuse me?”

“Wait, I mean. Not that you have to wait.”

Mr. Rand laughed with great care.

3.

Q: Now that you’re dying…we are, literally, between the first and second blow being delivered to your skull by the intruder’s blunt object (probably a watchman’s flashlight)…we wonder if you’d mind answering a few questions about life as you lived it?

A: Not at all.

Q: This photo. Who is it?

A: My sister and me. Surprising, isn’t it? We look like fashion models there, all dressed up, posing in front of a fountain. I don’t remember where the fountain was but you can see tourists milling around in the background so I’m assuming a world capitol. Maybe Paris. Our first trip to Europe.

Q: You are how old in this photo?

A: I’m afraid I can’t give you a precise answer but I’d say twenty, twenty one. Maybe twenty two. I think it must have been the early 1950s. The haircuts and the fashions have both come back, haven’t they? Everything always comes back but the people. Jean said that once and I thought it was sad and funny. I thought she was sad and funny. My little sister Jean.

Q: Can you remember for us what your interests were at the time of this photo?

A: The interests of any young woman of a certain class during the era. One had the feeling that things had loosened up after the war…there were cracks in the facade we thought we might squeeze through. People think of the 1950s as a particularly repressed era in American life for some reason but never in the history of the planet had so many non-aristocratic people been so well-educated and so ready to use this knowledge to make the world a better place. All of the seeds of the so-called counter-culture of the 1960s were planted during the 1950s and we thought it was a terribly exciting time. I even toyed with the idea of becoming an Abstract Expressionist painter. But maybe that was later.

Q: You say you toyed with the idea. Nothing came of it?

A: I’d like to say that I realized soon enough that I had no talent and so gave it up in a gesture of frank self-awareness, but it was worse than that. I think I realized that talent had very little to do with how far one might go with it, so to speak. I’m a very quick study in some cases and I made my observations and came to my conclusions. Art is just another facade we flatter ourselves with. The race, I mean. The human race. We flatter ourselves that we aren’t just herd animals with a pecking order, concerned mostly with power, food and, you know, reproduction.

Q: You were clear-eyed at a young age.

A: Well, not to seem too full of myself, but any so-called attractive young girl with enough of a brain in her skull picks up massive amounts of this information…call it the animal verities or the herd report…she picks it up at a very young age. The attention that’s paid and the nature of the attention and the kind of things one is punished for and the nature of the punishment. You learn it all in puberty. The lesson never really gets any more complex as you grow older and even more so-called attractive…it simply repeats itself until you finally really genuinely in all sincerity get it, like that Kafka story with the machine carving a sentence over and over again in the prisoner’s flesh. You get that aha moment.

Q: When did you first leave America for a substantial amount of time?

A: If by substantial you mean more than a few months I’d say in 1968. I was a grown woman, no children, money from a divorce settlement in the bank and nothing to keep me. There was a darkness in America…maybe the darkness was mostly in Philadelphia…but anyway I decided to sell my things and throw a party and just be done with it. But that was only my first escape. I came back with my tail between my legs two years later, having attempted to live as a single white woman in Morocco. Morocco was the destination of choice in 1968 for a certain crowd but for me it was a disaster.

Q: Cultural differences?

A: Yes, but not between myself and the so-called natives…between me and the expats. A more horrible group of people you can’t imagine. It was truly as though North America and pretty much all of Western Europe had systematically rounded up all the lotus-eating dilettantes and nouveau-riche snobs with a passion for throw-pillows and deported them to Morocco. It took me about a year to get myself permanently un-invited from every dinner party thrown there. Not that I minded. I very much enjoyed being alone.

Q: No problems at all with the indigenous culture? No incidents?

A: Well, if you call a near-rape an incident, yes. Once. It was very late and I was being foolish, singing to myself quite loudly. A man had me by the neck suddenly and I found myself in a sort of courtyard lit only by the moon. He had a knife that was not very big but it looked very sharp, glinting in the moon light and he kind of pantomimed that if I made the slightest sound he’d cut my throat. It’s very funny what happened. When he opened his robe and revealed his, you know…his erection, I suppose it’s okay to say…rather than struggle or look horrified I reached up and sort of gently…well, this is slightly embarrassing but there you have it. I stroked him there like a lover. And he was absolutely so revolted by the gesture that he shrank back from my touch and fled as though I were a witch. Not before spitting copiously on me, of course. But I had saved myself with my knowledge of human psychology and I was very proud of the fact and I even wrote home about it. I seem to remember trying to turn it into a poem or a short story but nothing came of it.

Q: When did you leave America permanently?

A: Lots of my friends and acquaintances claimed that they’d leave the country if Reagan won the election but I was the only one who made good on the threat.

Q: But you didn’t move straight away to Poland.

A: Oh no. There was a kind of a long filtration process at work. First I tried London. But I found soon enough that I longed for a certain quality that life in Morocco had had. That sense of perfect solitude one only achieves when surrounded by people speaking a language one is blissfully ignorant of. Even being literally alone, out in the woods or on a mountaintop, can’t match it.

Q: So you you tried Germany.

A: Yes, next came Germany. This is like the story of Goldilocks, isn’t it? But the Germans were too cold. And it was, what, only about forty years after the end of the war and there was just too much baggage. It was an extremely neurotic culture. Seven days a week and twenty four hours a day of over-reactions. You’d chide someone for cutting in front of you in a queue at the post office and he’d react as though you’d accused him of gassing Jews.Then, I met my future husband, and I suppose my head was turned by the fact that he owned and ran art galleries, and he was technically a count, a Polish count, this dashing blonde with a name it took five whole seconds to say in its entirety. I actually timed him saying it once. And he didn’t seem to mind that I was no longer, shall we say, thirty. Or even forty. Though I’ve managed to keep the same figure I had at twenty, which is one of the few advantages of being flat-chested.

Q: And you were happy?

A: Well, I didn’t expect to end up in a farm house in the middle of nowhere on the border between Germany and Poland on a plot of land too big for me to walk across in an afternoon, no. And I never dreamed that one day I’d become the stepmother to a forty year old drunk who likes to sun himself in his birthday suit even in the middle of winter…that’s a “no” too. But he’s a sweet-natured boy. I’m sure he’ll be devastated when he discovers my body.

Q: Thanks very much for your time.

A: You’re very welcome.

The Bad Czech (a novel)

 

Too bad it was always the men who were strong enough to leave her who always left her! Too bad it was always the men who were wise enough to resist her who always resisted her! Why did it always have to be the type who fell in love with her who…fell in love with her? She wanted for once to be wanted by a man who didn’t want her. Left by a man who would stay…

1.

Lola was smiling. It still hurt to.

On the way to the airport, waiting for the taxi in front of the apartment building I would never see again (fuck you, and goodbye forever, 3e, with your salsa music…3b, with your phony orgasms), I had seen a dead bird on the sidewalk. A sparrow. A breeze  ruffled the frizz of its breast.

I pointed it out to her but she rolled her eyes and looked away. But my point…or the point I was going to make…was that this dead bird was maybe the third I’d seen, inert on the sidewalk, since moving to California a few years before. And yet the trees and the sky are full of birds, millions of them, and they aren’t immortal. What’s the average life span of a sparrow, anyway? A few years? Shouldn’t the streets and sidewalks be thick with dead birdies? It doesn’t add up.

Just a thought. An airport thought, apropos of nothing. What does your mind get up to when faced with the higher-than-usual probability of Death? Imagine making a reservation, a month in advance, to play fifteen hours of Russian roulette. I was scared.

“What do you call these?”

Lola offered me half of a bear claw with a quizzical pout. She held it out at arm’s length and shook it at me, but I shook my head as well, and she retracted it. But I reached for it and tore it in half and stuffed it in my mouth.

She’s only offering what she doesn’t want, I was thinking. Food she was really interested in she usually started on quickly, insurance against sharing more than half of it, a habit I diagnosed as stemming from her foreign childhood. A childhood of the rationed and the ersatz. Self-sacrifice, even in a mild snack-related form, was not one of her moves. Her food in ‘our’ refrigerator had always been protected by red Ls of nail polish. Especially the chunky peanut butter; that was off limits. That was her lieblings snack. If you’ve never ejaculated in a jar of chunky peanut butter…

She said, “You said…”

“I said what?”

“Forget it.”

“How can I forget what I haven’t heard yet?”

Sigh. “Let’s not fight, baby, okay? Let’s just try to be nice…” she looked at the wall clock, “…for twenty minutes.”

“If you say so,” I said, but I was thinking two things. First: you can’t wait, can you? Second: when did you start calling me ‘baby’? Was that one of Harry’s words? Was she going to be running back to Harry as soon as I left the country? Harry the video game pornographer with racial dysmorphia. At least he’s rich. At least he isn’t a loser like me.

In any case I expected the worst. I didn’t expect Lola to be satisfied until she’d utterly ruined both of us. That’s how bad things had gotten with my Lola and me, but I was jumpy anyway, jumpy and fearful and therefore not very hungry at all, though I put away that bear claw quickly enough, holding my sugar-cursed hands at face-level afterwards.  Loath to touch anything.

Not long ago, Lola would have tended to them briskly, with a kleenex. Without us needing to exchange a word. Now, as I sat there, sticky-fingered and mildly wretched, there was nothing, no response, her once-taut sensors had gone slack. She was reading something of great interest and just…kept reading…as I sat there like a post-scrub neurosurgeon. She licked a thumb and turned a page and I finally wiped my hands on my thighs. The machine of our love, as we both already knew, was broken.

I turned my mind to other thoughts. I had fifteen hours of flight to get through, involving two connections and the monstrous underlying threat of the North Atlantic in November. The bottom of the North Atlantic is littered with travelers, both ancient and new. Lola was checking her lips in a little mirror.

There’s something so dispassionately technical about the way a woman looks at her own mouth, I was thinking. If only I could learn to look at a woman’s mouth that way. I licked a still-sticky finger pleasurelessly. Lola patted my arm. A plane took off.

“It’s only fifteen hours,” she said. “The first part is nothing.”

She gave me a thumbs-up and a wink: another Americanism she’d only recently added to her collection, like ‘baby.’ I watched a mustached businessman in a seat at the far end of the lounge staring at her, and his eyes went back to his Financial Times when he saw me see him see her do it to me.

Be my guest, sucker,  I wanted to shout across the lounge at him.

I looked at her as a stranger would…I looked at her as if I were graying in a distinguished fashion, paunching a little, unlovably (but reliably) mustached, peeking at a woman over the tremulous hedge of a Financial Times. A tall blonde with a fabulous body, a strikingly pretty face…yes of course. I’ll call my accountant. She would be easily worth the added expense…

“Only fifteen hours?” I said, after a very long pause during which Lola put down and picked up again our copy of Vogue magazine, the one we’d just gotten in the mail that morning. A potent symbol of life. I intended to use it to ward off any existential panics that were sure to bedevil me in flight. She wiped her hands of her own bear claw gunk and folded the Vogue open and held up a page to me, frowning.

“Do you think she’s pretty?”

The first part of my journey was the thirty minute flight from Lindberg Field to LAX, in a propeller-driven airplane that looked like a good vehicle for a cheap cinematic death when I first saw it waiting for me on the landing field. There were dings in the shiny fuselage from decades of rolling staircases being shoved by careless members of the ground crew against it. It was a sunny, windy day. Black gusts of jet exhaust blew across the airfield like windblown widows’ veils.

My fellow passengers that day were of two types: the ones who make the quick hop to L.A. routinely, with Wall Street Journals rolled in the nooks of their blazered arms, and the ones like me who were disconcerted to find themselves about to take a sweaty hike across a dusty landing field towards a thirty-year old propeller airplane with a hole in it. A hole.

There was a little round portal under the cockpit window, about the size of the hole in the ticket-seller’s window at a cinema, and the pilot was handing something to, or receiving something from, a member of the ground crew through it. It looked like a Magritte painting, the sight of that uniformed arm, with its gold-trimmed cuff, sticking out of that hole under the cockpit window of the little plane; or like a plane with an arm in a kid’s book. But that was a comfort, because what kind of kid’s book would tell the story of a plane with an arm and then let it crash?

Lola had her back to me, staring out the glass wall of the terminal. With the same mysterious part of her brain that she used in order to finish most of my sentences, or to retract her mouth and close her eyes with impeccable timing the very instant before I’d ejaculate, she managed to turn to face me the exact moment that I stood up, coat slung over my arm, ready to leave.

I said “Lola…” and she backed away with a detached smile. I took a step towards her and she backed away again. I sang, softly, “Lola,” and she shook her head, a finger over her lips to shush me, and waved me away, as though with the force of the breeze from her hand to push me through the terminal door and out across the patches of raw sunlight and oily shadows of the tarmac towards the plane.

The more I thought on it, blasted with grit and exhaust as I followed my fellow passengers up the rolling staircase into the fuselage, the more I realized that Lola’s goodbye had been perfect. And so the more I wondered why I was leaving her.

But there was no time to dwell on that, because my mind was busy shutting itself down with mortal fear. Before I knew it, I was compressing my eyelids with terror, sailing out over the Pacific Ocean in an exotic curve that I was sure would end with a sputter of the engines, a magical spate of silence and weightlessness and then death. Instead, we slammed softly through a few boulders of cold dense air before leveling off over the little white waves that scalloped the coastline. Seagulls glittered over the Pacific like confetti.

I had the Vogue on my lap, my hands palm-down on it. The cover was already puckered and warped with sweat, just fifteen minutes into the flight. The guy in the seat next to me, who bore an uncanny resemblance to George Harrison, was casually flipping his way through Screen Writer’s Monthly. A very tall, white-haired, George Harrison…with heavy black eyebrows.

“I see you don’t agree with flying,” he said in a voice that wasn’t George Harrison’s at all. It was absurdly deep, and he ornamented the end of the heavily-accented sentence with a hacking cough that I correctly placed as Eastern-European in origin. He was dressed in a modish suit with thin lapels, and a dark shirt with a strange collar, which added to the Beatle-esque aura he managed to project.

He was obviously too tall to sit comfortably on the airplane…his knees were not far from his chin…but he didn’t seem to be inclined to complain about it. My immediate thought was: He’s so glad to be in America, there could be a spike up his ass and he’d be saying ‘Please! Thank You! Make it a rustier spike, if you prefer!’’

He stuck out a hand and identified himself. His hand was hairy and bony-wristed and huge…I was hesitant to put my fingers in it. But he smiled when he said his name, and his too-white teeth were traced in black…a cheap or very old cap job…which for whatever reason made him seem less likely to crush my fingers. It’s funny how some forms of ugliness are seen as nice, and some as sinister, and likewise with beauty.

“Miro Pahnik. I’m in the Luck Business.”

I told him my name, shaking his hand, and added, “I’m a Starving Artist.” I gave him a look of what I considered to be hip resignation. “What do you mean by ‘the Luck Business’?”

He winked. “Movies. All of my filthy rich comrades…the directors and screenwriters and working actors…they all say, when explaining their fantastic success, ‘It was luck!’ Which is supposed to be taken as pure modesty,” said Miro Pahnik, leaning in towards me to make his point, “But really it’s the height of arrogance. Because what they’re saying by saying that all of their success comes from luck is that they are favored by God!” His eyes widened.

“Can you imagine? Favored by God! Likewise, when Oscar time comes and they get that statuette in their sweaty little well-manicured hands, who’s the first person they invariably thank? God! The same God who wouldn’t lift a finger to save an innocent Jew from being peeled like a banana in a Nazi experiment has bothered to help this movie star win an Oscar!”

I had never thought of it in that way before and told him so. He looked deeply satisfied to hear this. He touched a cigarette-yellowed fingertip to his temple. “How can one avoid eating shit if one doesn’t know exactly what it tastes like?”

I smiled and stared out of the window, slightly sick at the extreme plausibility of the sudden fantasy I was having…of Lola watching the news of my plane crash and hugging the television with demented grief, sobbing in German, looking sexy as hell with puffy red eyes and banshee hair and lips all glossy with snot and tears.

I was still rigid in my seat when the plane began lowering its belly like a dimwitted gull over Los Angeles, which looked like an entire country from the air, and I took the first deep breath that I’d taken in forty five minutes.

The journey across LAX, from one terminal to another, and then to the plane itself, was ordeal number two. I spent more time in a line for the check-in for my flight to Frankfurt, where I’d make the connection to Berlin, than I’d spent already in the air. It was an immense comfort to find myself strapped into my window seat in the Lufthansa jet, which was so full of people speaking German that I felt that I was already outside of the U.S. Both of the seats beside me remained empty as the plane taxied out on the runway, and I couldn’t believe my luck.

Which is why I was mildly surprised, and deeply disappointed, to feel someone lower himself into the seat beside me nearly an hour into the flight, as I lay my head against the chilly porthole with my eyes closed, trying to make time fly by ignoring it. The pilot had just announced, in three languages, that we were over the Grand Canyon. I opened my eyes and glanced to the right without moving my head, or uncrossing my arms from over my chest. It was George Harrison again.

“I had to get away from my first-class seat mates. I hope you don’t mind.”

I let a theatrically drowsy smile play across my face, hoping to discourage conversation by establishing, immediately, the ground rules for my version of the flight: reading; movie watching; sleep. “Not at all,” I said quietly. I yawned.

He peered at the Vogue, which was still in my lap and heavy as a Bible. “May I?”

I handed it over and he took it in his hands with relish. He was full of energy. He licked his thumb, the tic of inveterate readers of a certain age, and plowed into it.

“This is contraband stuff in my circle of friends, you see. Nothing is more puritanical than a repentant hedonist, and all of my friends are repentant hedonists. This includes my good friend the feminist with the breast implants. In her eyes, a man who reads a fashion magazine is just a tiny step above a pedophile.”

He paged through the issue…the decadently voluminous fall issue…with real pleasure, stopping to linger, now and then, on certain splayed-limbed poses, certain slack-jawed or pouty close-ups. He cocked an eyebrow at me, looking up from the magazine, though he was still rifling through it. “You subscribe?”

“Yes and no. It’s in my girlfriend’s name, but it’s for me.” I sat upright…the sleep-ruse was obviously pointless. I was blinking, looking around the cabin, orienting myself to the conversation.

“She must be quite secure in her looks.”

I held up a finger, meaning “hold that thought”, and unbuckled my seat belt. I then went through the foolish contortion required to dig my wallet out of my back left pocket. There was no money in it, but it was full of pictures of Lola…a telling metaphor. I handed him the wallet, and he slipped a picture (the picture of Lola at the nude beach in La Jolla) out of its hiding place behind a tamer photograph of the two of us together on a horse. As if he’d known it was there. I almost reached for it, the naked one, to save it from his fingers, but held my breath instead.

Her hair is boy-short and bright and sharp as metal in this picture. She’s squinting into the sun which is setting behind me as I aim the camera and my shadow is rippling over her like the diaphanous gray fabric of the most expensive dress in creation. Her unshadowed left breast seems to burst from the photo in contrast. It made me feel kind of provincial to feel so queer about letting him see that private image, private for reasons beyond the nudity of it, from back in the sweet days when Lola and I first enjoyed California together. The Czech studied the picture and nodded slowly, his mouth turned down at its corners.

“I can see you have problems with her,” he pronounced, like a Doctor thinking his way through a tricky prognosis. “She’s pretty, and you’re such a nice young fellow, so you can’t resist the unfortunate impulse to treat her like a princess,” he handed me back the photo and wallet separately, looking me directly in the eye as he finished his thought, “Which bores her to tears.”

I had a ridiculous smile on my face. “What?”

“She’s crying out for a little rough treatment, man…that’s obvious.” He went back to the Vogue, and turned the pages carefully, as though looking for an example in support of his argument. “Ha.” he said. “Look.”

He held up a picture of a doe-eyed blonde with a fat lower lip, posed between two po-faced Masai warriors, and she was as sleek and cool as a utensil in her vinyl dress and thigh-high white vinyl boots. “The first man who is man enough to fuck this girl in the ass will own her forever. He could be a cop or a garbage man, it wouldn’t matter. In fact, one of these big black gentlemen beside her in the picture would do nicely.” He chuckled deeply, blowing a raspy coalmine breeze on me from those dark lungs. He patted my knee. “I’ve offended you.”

“Not at all,” I said, clearing my throat, but I was thinking: you rude fucking refugee from a third world communist bloc country. “But you’re wrong. First off,” I began counting on my fingers, “She isn’t bored with me at all…in fact it’s quite the opposite, since I’m leaving her. Second, I’m not young…I’m thirty six. And third…” I lowered my voice, “I’ve already fucked her in the ass,” I lied, “and it really wasn’t a big deal at all. For either of us.”

He bowed a bit…a subtle inclination of the head that Dukes and Barons were always doing in screwball Hollywood comedies of the ‘Thirties…conceding my point. He closed the Vogue and set it carefully on his lap, studying the cover during the awkward silence that followed. Awkward for me, at least, but clearly not for him. His follow-up question was:

“And so you’re leaving her?”

“Yes. Flying to Berlin.”

“May I ask why?”

“No, you may not.” I tried to make it sound playfully sarcastic, but it came out sounding…terse. He chuckled deeply. His leather-lunged chuckle.

“Look,” I said, “I’m not trying to be rude. I mean, I don’t want to seem…”

Pahnik opened the Vogue again. “No need to apologize! You were only being frank. If only Americans, in general, would be so frank! As we say in Prague, ‘you can’t make a good soup with luke-warm water,’ and that’s all I get in L.A., day in and day out, on the beach, in the sauna, or at the sushi bar. Warm water! I miss burning my tongue a little, from time to time, in Europe. You Americans call it rudeness. ”

I yawned. I couldn’t help myself. “Pretty lucrative business, screen-writing?” The stupidity of the question was neutralized by the good will behind the gesture of asking, I felt.

“Oh, obscenely so, my friend.” He winked. “Obscenely so.” He patted the imaginary mound of a wallet in his jacket pocket.

“Do you have a writing credit on anything I’d know, like, er… ‘Heaven’s Gate’ or something?”

He shook his head. “Not at all, and that’s the trick. That’s the trick. I’m the author of well over one hundred paid-for scripts…I first arrived in Paradise in the early ‘80s, clinging desperately to the edge of Milos Forman’s flying carpet. He had done ‘Cuckoo’s Nest,’ and ‘Hair’, and was soon to have a major success with ‘Amadeus’. Anyway, as I was saying, I have written over one hundred paid-for scripts, and twice as many ‘treatments’, and the least I ever got for a script, counting the advance for the ‘treatment’, was $50,000.00, adjusting for inflation, which is peanuts, as you say. And not a one of those scripts became a movie! Not a one! And for that I thank my lucky stars and also a little skill on my part…but mostly it’s luck. As I told you earlier, I’m in the Luck Business.”

“But,” I said, “I don’t get it. You’ve written a hundred scripts in twenty years and not one became a movie. Isn’t that…I mean…wouldn’t some call that a kind of…how can I put this…”

“Failure?”

“Yes.”

“No worries! Don’t be afraid of the word! You’re showing your stars and stripes again! But, no. A failure it’s not. For two reasons…for at least two reasons. First reason: in Follywood, what you want, even more than to have a so-called ‘hit’, is to not have a so-called ‘bomb’…not having a bomb is even better than having a hit. Because a ‘hit’ is something to live up to…and while two or three hits in a row may be reasonably called a success, one hit alone…followed by a resounding silence…”

He drew a jagged-nailed finger across his ropey red neck…figuratively decapitating himself… with a disturbingly skull-like grin. Those big white teeth, traced in black grout.

“As long as you’re not having a bomb, it is possible for everyone to believe that you will have a hit one day, and the safest way to not have a bomb is to not even have the script made into a picture! Not to mention the fact that the rights to a script that isn’t made into a movie at some point revert to me…that’s in my contract…and so I can feasibly then sell that very same script again…for more, usually, than I did the first time! In fact, yes, there’s one script of mine…‘The Bad Czech’…that I have rewritten and sold more than three times already, in intervals of five years, doubling the price every time that I’ve re-sold it.”

He settled back into his seat, stroking a page in the Vogue (a vaselined black model with a shaved head and H-bomb tits was modeling for a line of clothing started by an aging rapper with a taste for rhinestoned panties) and looked quite deep in thought. He might have been Thomas Merton discussing an Augustinian paradox with me, or Enrico Fermi eulogizing the atom.

“I’m considered a hot-property as a screen-writer, because I’ve been on the scene for twenty years, longer than the Ice Age, and yet I’ve never had a bomb! That’s quite a track record! My asking price nowadays is quite phenomenal. Because I’ve never written an actual film that could do bad box office, and I’ve never had a so-called ‘hit’ to live up to, that means my perceived potential for writing blockbusters is…astronomical.”

“Still, of course, I’m not even in the top sixty percent. I’m little potatoes, as far as lunch in Tinsletown goes. But I might as well be Louis the bloody Sixteenth compared to some poor schlub of a college professor in Missouri, or some serf of a trauma specialist getting splashed with A.I.D.S.-infected blood on a daily basis in some roach-infested E.R. in the barrio.”

“Or some wretch of an artist living in a one bedroom apartment with a girlfriend he can’t afford in San Diego,” I offered, with a curled lip.

He waved my self-pity away jovially.

“And the beauty of this all is,” he concluded, in a lower tone, as if he really wanted me to understand the seriousness of his point, “is that I’ve been circulating the same scripts over and over again now for five years…I haven’t done a lick of work in all that time. And still, the money rolls in…these monstrous, sun-blotting waves…tidal waves of cash that I couldn’t stop if I wanted to.”

“Some life.”

He raised an instructive finger. I couldn’t avoid staring at that yellow, thick, and hacked-at nail on the end of it. It looked like something from an Egyptian tomb…the faded carapace of a scarab. “Though not, and you may well resent me for saying this…not as idyllic as you, having no money, might assume.”

“Oh really?” If there was one thing I was sick of, it was hearing rich people say that. Money can’t buy happiness? Fuck you. Try being poor. Resent him I did.

As it turned out, the finger he lifted was not instructive at all…he was signaling for the stewardess’ attention. While he was waiting for the tight-lipped girl to bring him a drink, he began to tell me a story that he swore was true.

2.

In the early part of the last decade, soon after the wall went down, Pahnik went to Berlin. He went, he says, out of curiosity and boredom. He had just pocketed a substantial wad of dough from the third rewrite of his perennially-rewritten (and re-sold) script “The Bad Czech,” and he was sick of L.A. Sick of sick palm trees, three-block limo rides, insincere blow jobs, and nouvelle cuisine. Without any pressing chores or relationships to hold him back, he hopped on a plane for Europe.

Why Berlin? In part because it still, after all those years, had somewhat of a reputation as a wild town, and also because he could get as close, in Berlin, to his Eastern European roots as possible without in fact running the risk of being in Prague or Warsaw when the Iron Curtain slammed shut again, something he always expected to happen in those days. So long after Glasnost it no longer seems as likely that the barbed wire and sentry towers will go up again, but just a couple of years after the Wall first came down, it was still by no means a certainty that the opening of the East was a permanent thing. It looked to some like a trick.

Pahnik was plagued back then with nightmares in fact. He’d dream that he’d flown back to visit his mother and brother in Prague (his only remaining relatives) and wake up the next day to sirens, and troops in square helmets marching ten abreast, and the police banging on his mother’s door to confiscate his luggage. And he couldn’t even remember how to speak Czech in this nightmare, but he’d wake up screaming in it.

Berlin had enough whiff of the East about it to satisfy his guilty need to “go home” without actually risking the real experience. He booked a room in the semi-posh Hotel Continental, on Budapester str, between the Tiergarten and the Zoo, and he lived there for a month.

He’d arrived in Berlin during the rainy season of its miserable winter, and so he rarely left the hotel, at first…his most adventurous attempt to do so saw him get as far as a block away, in a morning’s oblique drizzle of cloudy raindrops, before turning back. He did manage to travel much further afield than a block, eventually, but that was near the end of his stay, and is an important part of the story, and doesn’t need to be described in detail until later.

Stuck inside the hotel, he had to amuse himself with the materials at hand. What were the materials at hand? Television, fellow guests at the hotel, and the hotel staff. Those were his choices of amusement.

One day and night of television was enough to scratch it from the list of activities immediately, and forever. Television was dismal: dubbed re-runs of American sitcoms and cop shows; soccer, news; and the soft porn that German programming offered in the evening, which was beyond anything possible on American channels, but still not much more than interesting, once you’d made the comparison. In fact, if anything, watching television in Germany could have the adverse affect of making the sight of naked big breasts seem fairly boring, pretty quickly. And he didn’t want that.

He first turned his attentions to his fellow guests in the hotel. They were, for the most part, Americans, but there were a handful of Asians as well. The Asians were no fun…standoffish and unresponsive…they merely registered terrified smiles when he tried to spark conversations with them in the elevators, or at the front desk in the lobby. The fact that Pahnik was nearly twice the height of some of them may have been a factor.

The Americans, as advertised, were much more fun. They broke down into two groups…two distinct phenotypes: the easily offended, and the gregariously offensive. The former were intensely fun but only once; the latter were reliably entertaining if terribly predictable. He learned to identify the two types by their footwear. The gregariously offensive tended to stomp around the lobby in cowboy boots. Region was indicated by the style and condition of the boots. The further East, in America, that the businessman/cowpoke came from, the fancier and newer the boots looked.

“Howdy pardner!” Pahnik would call out, as he stepped off the elevator, spotting one of his Wyomingites, or Texans, or Michiganders, etc., collecting their mail at the front desk. But there was one in particular.

“Hey ho, Ivan!”

The most gregariously offensive American staying in the hotel that month was Charlie van der Roos. He was tall and fat and never once, during his stay in Berlin, removed his cowboy hat, a sure sign, in Pahnik’s opinion, that Charlie was going bald. His eyebrows were so blond that from the other side of the lobby it looked like he didn’t have any. His face was soft and pink and youthfully free of wrinkles, though he claimed to be old as Pahnik, who was a little older than forty then. His gleaming double chin, and the way he threw his head back when laughing, made Pahnik think of a huge pink seal.

He wore three-piece suits and bolo ties and hailed from Eden Prairie, Minnesota. He owned a chain of doughnut shops in Minneapolis, and its suburbs, called Le Dönut. Le Dönut, as Charlie put it, was a high-class doughnut bistro for people who liked croissant shops but didn’t necessarily like croissants. Business was so good he was thinking about going national. He foresaw a Le Dönut in every major airport.

He was working on “some tie-in synergy shit” in which he hoped to position the doughnut…as a concept…in a relationship with the Fourth of July the way that Turkeys were wedded to Thanksgiving. He’d complained jovially to Pahnik about it over the heads of three Japanese businessmen with hysterical smiles in the elevator one afternoon.

“Shit, Ivan, I’ve already dropped a quarter of a unit,” $250,000, “On an exploratory think tank on the goddamned concept and all I got so far is a new word for doughnut…a goddamned ‘freedom ring’! Would you eat a cinnamon-sprinkled freedom ring? But it’s gonna shit paydirt in the long run, you watch.”

Pahnik had singled Charlie out for companionship, out of all of the nouvelle rednecks available, because he was by far the most jovially rude of the lot, illogically referring to Pahnik as “Ivan,” while all the others called him “Mr. Miro” or “Mr. Pahnik” or “Sir”. Did Charlie think that Czechs were Russians? He once described his ideal girl, and in the same bold stroke identified himself as the soul of tolerance, by confessing to Pahnik that he dreamed of meeting a “chick with nigger lips, kike tits, jap hair, and a teen-age faggot’s ass,” and Pahnik had to admit that Charlie had a point. Who wouldn’t? Dream of such a girl.

Conveniently enough, Charlie van der Roos was staying in a room just three doors down from Pahnik’s, on the fifth floor, and by the second week in Berlin, Charlie’s room became the first stop of the day on Pahnik’s way towards the Hotel Bar every morning, where breakfast was an untouched plate of scrambled eggs and a petrol tank’s worth of beer.

One morning Pahnik sauntered down the hall and rapped once on that door, pushing it after hearing Charlie yell “Open!,” and entered the room to find Charlie sitting on the toilet, the bathroom door ajar, smoking a cigar and clutching a mammoth cellular phone as if it were electrocuting him. With barely controllable disgust, Pahnik deflected his gaze, out the window, which the slate-gray drizzle seemed to be tapping with affection. The whole city, or what was visible from the window, was the color of the rain clouds that darkened it methodically with murky water. East Berlin’s famous television tower, looking like Sputnik’s father, speared the sky-sized wheel of the clouds, and loomed over the monochrome map with rude Soviet glamour.

Charlie put his hand over the telephone’s receiver and spoke from the corner of his mouth, pushing his cowboy hat back on his head and squinting on a finger of cigar smoke that rose to poke his eye when he spoke. “Grab yourself a beer, Ivan…be with ya in a Jew-York minute….”

He suddenly raised his voice, yanking the sodden cigar from his mouth, shouting “No shit, Sherlock!” into the phone. He finger-punched the off/on button like it was the eye of an enemy and smiled a painful smile at Pahnik and stared into the middle distance like a man about to make a philosophical remark, but grunted instead.

There was a pregnant pause, then a voluminous plop in the toilet bowl. Followed by a smaller one. Then Charlie’s sigh of relief. He winked, re-inserting the cigar in the corner of his mouth and settling back on the toilet seat in peace. With the puzzled expression of a man discovering an after-thought, he extended the phone towards Pahnik as far as he could reach without toppling from the toilet.

“You wanna make a call to anybody State-side? I can write it off on my taxes…” but Miro gestured a “no” so Charlie set the phone down in his lap and kept talking.

“I can tell by the way you never talk about how much shit costs,” he observed, “That you have some money. Am I right?”

Pahnik shrugged, pinching his nose shut. Was Charlie planning on flushing any time soon?

“Oh,” guffawed Charlie, “I guess your shit don’t stank! I guess your shit smells like perfume! I guess you mail it out to friends and loved ones every X-mas like the rest of us send fruit cakes!”

“Charlie,” said Pahnik, after grabbing a Beck’s from the little refrigerator beside Charlie’s bed, “Charlie Charlie Charlie.” He just had to laugh. “That’s not entirely the point, my dear American friend.”

“Uh-uh, the point is,” countered Charlie van der Roos, wiping himself perfunctorily and flushing the toilet and hoisting his pants up and buttoning his shirt and tossing his saliva-blackened cigar in the wake of his cigar-shaped shit in the vortex of the toilet, “You’re still here talking to me.” He swatted the air in front of his nose, activated the toilet’s exhaust fan, and closed the bathroom door behind him with genteel discretion.

“But anyway. I wonder would you be interested in a little wager? I mean, like, involving some hefty cash. And not,” he raised a hand, along with his eyebrows, “no fucking nigger fortune of a hundred dollars. I’m talking, like, a white man’s wager. Cut-your-throat-if-you-lose-it money.” He stroked his double-chin, and it reddened responsively where he touched it. It was clearly a pleasure to touch. “A briefcase-full.”

Intrigued, Pahnik sat on the edge of van der Roos’ humidly unmade bed. The serious stare he gave the soft pink giant encouraged the giant to keep talking while he dressed, slipping one boot on, then the other, while leaning against the wide screen television in the corner of the room, adjacent to the window.

He said, “I don’t know if you’ve noticed the new chambermaid for our end of the floor,” Pahnik had indeed, “But she’s quite a piece. Gorgeous chunk of pussy.”

Miro had in fact already begun lazily rehearsing a speech about flying her out to L.A. for a screen test or some bullshit like that the morning he’d first seen her, emerging from the service elevator like a very tall Audrey Hepburn with bigger tits, long black hair, and the ridiculous disguise of a maid’s uniform. And something in the eyes too…some kind of cleverness, or hardness, or even a hint of cruelty that made him fancy her being some version of a soulmate or other. Or maybe these impressions had been added retroactively…it’s hard to sift memory into individuated particles that fine, sometimes. Miro grinned at Charlie, but he was seeing the chambermaid. “Nigger lips, kike tits, Jap hair….?”

Charlie crossed the room and slapped the palm of Miro’s hand with delight. “And a teen-age faggot’s ass!”

Then he got a very unpleasant look on his face, did Charlie van der Roos. Like a man smelling burning flesh and liking it.

“Fifty fucking thousand dollars to whichever one of us can slip her a hard one first, Ivan.” He grabbed Pahnik’s crotch affectionately, making Pahnik jump, and added, “The standard of proof will be extremely high, of course. I’m thinking hidden video camera. Do we have a game here or what, buddy?”

3.

Pahnik interrupted the telling of his tale to accept his tray of chicken dinner from the mysteriously surly stewardess, and I chose to have the same, and we sat there chewing a few minutes in relative silence. The stewardess was one of those women that a frown seems to make more attractive, but I noticed, or seemed to, the flicker of some softening in her grimace as she leaned over Pahnik to pass me my dinner. As though to highlight the fact that her displeasure was specific to Pahnik.

He skipped his little pale brick of chicken, and the sweaty bed of rice it was interred upon, and went straight for the apple cobbler, and when he finished it he asked for mine, and I gave it to him, wondering why I had, until the reason gradually dawned on me. I gave it to him because he asked for it. There was something profound in that fact that seemed to hint to me why I wasn’t “successful” in the world, but it was still too simple a lesson for me to comprehend.

I watched him with sidelong jealousy while he polished it off (he certainly made it seem tastier than I’d have expected it to be) and I looked up as our stewardess backed her empty food cart by our seat, and muttered, “This must be the first rude stewardess I’ve ever had to deal with on an international flight.”

Pahnik grinned while he was still chewing and waved the very thought of her away. “She probably just got some bad news today.’ He shrugged. ‘No worries!”

“Anyway,” I said.

“Anyway,” he nodded, and continued the story.

4.

He liked the idea of a little competition with Charlie van der Roos, chiefly because Charlie was a filthy American blister of money…a classless monster of capitalism…who needed to lose in a way that would hurt his hidebound ego the most. And all the more instructive to lose to a Czech. But Pahnik had no intention of lowering himself to Charlie’s level by going at this girl wink for wink, innuendo for innuendo, and champagne glass for champagne glass with that gelatinous pink cowboy, who even as Pahnik sat in his hotel room contemplating the wager, was undoubtedly marching out of some flower shop up the street with a ridiculous bouquet of red roses to shove at the poor girl the next time he caught her with a Hoover in the hallway.

Even a late model mercantile shark like Charlie van der Roos suffered from trite delusions of amerikanisch romance that neither Pahnik, nor the shockingly pretty German chamber maid who trembled at the heart of their wager, could ever share or bother to fathom.

Charlie was going to do his hulking damnedest to woo the girl by way of a protracted siege of symbol and cliché that would take at least a week to show some results, and Miro was going to use his brains and get her into bed, and on tape doing it with him in every arcane or disgusting arrangement of limb and sphincter possible, that very night. In fact he momentarily regretted that he hadn’t added a stipulation to the effect that a little bonus of ten percent would be awarded on top of the 50,000 in the event that the winner could bed the girl that quickly. But then, that might have sensitized Charlie’s antennae to the true depths of the game afoot, and crashed the whole program, so, no, things were better as they were. It’s not as though Miro actually needed the money, in any case.

He couldn’t wait for the evening…or the chambermaid’s shift…to begin, because he was so well equipped for it. Being a rich tourist was reason enough, but being part of the Hollywood creative community made it all the more likely that he would have a very expensive video camera at his disposal, even that long ago, before average people had them. He laughed to himself as he set the camera up on a tripod in a discreet corner of the room, peering through the view finder at the big white bed. Charlie had even offered him the use of his own camera (“Shit, I got two or three of ‘em,”) in case Pahnik needed it.

“Of course,” said Charlie, “You ain’t gonna need one ‘tall cause the closest she’s gonna get to fucking you my friend is making your bed and slippin a mint under the pillow afterwards but I believe in giving you a fightin’ chance, Ivan!” Along with the traditional slap on the back.

Miro doubted, with a smug grin to himself, if Charlie’s camera had a credit-card sized infra-red remote like Miro’s did. Miro even went and sat on the edge of the bed and clicked the remote to test it. The green light beside the lens went on. A second click and it turned red again, blinking. A third click and it winked entirely off.

And then what did he do? He fetched a rubber-banded wad of hundred dollar bills from the sock drawer of the dresser and began to peel them free and toss them out over the bed, doing his best to simulate disorder, which took some doing.

His plan, which he was fairly proud of, considering how quickly he’d improvised it, was to douse himself in liquor, hang the “service requested” sign on his door knob, and sprawl on the money-littered bed like a total drunk on the verge of passing out. Then, when the chambermaid came in to do whatever cleaning she expected to do, he would babble out something to the effect that he’d just won all of this money in a card game…so much money that he hadn’t even counted it all yet, and thereafter lapse into his theatrical coma. Sooner or later she’d be tempted to steal a few hundreds while she swept in and out of the room with her rags and buckets…who wouldn’t? A hundred dollars was worth twice as many Deutschmarks. Who wouldn’t?

Just at the moment she was stuffing the cash in her pockets, Pahnik would seize her by the arm and make quite a stink. He’d threaten to take her to the Hotel Manager; he’d threaten to call the police. Just when he’d have her on the verge of jumping out the window, he’d surreptitiously finger the wafer-thin remote hidden under his pillow, check that the video camera’s green light was on, and propose to her a way out of the very serious trouble that threatened to destroy her career (her career in toilet scrubbing) forever. He even had a condom on hand to make the whole thing as antiseptic a transaction as possible. Fuck me, dear chamber maid, and we’ll forget the whole thing ever happened…you can even keep the bills you’ve pilfered.

He prepared the scenario with real glee. Five thousand dollars worth of hundred dollar bills were heaped on the bed (he never went anywhere with less than that in cash…his American friends, with their Armani pockets full of plastic, always found that quaint). He dabbed some cognac behind his ears, rubbed it in his hair, and gargled with some as well. Then he made a minor mess with wet towels and two bags of potato chips in the bathroom, hung the “service requested” sign on the outer doorknob, left the door ajar, and sprawled on the bed, humming Beatles songs with a drunk’s toneless gusto.

He had to wait that way for twenty long minutes, and just as he was about to get up to take a quick piss (and leave it yellow and unflushed as a detail for verisimilitude), there came a rabbit-shy knock on the door, a significant pause, and then the ravishing chamber maid pushed softly into his view.

First Pahnik saw the intrepid prow of her hard young bustline, and then that face announced itself like an astronomical event in the stratosphere of his room, the reverse of a lunar eclipse, and he had to remember how drunk he was supposed to be, because her black-haired beauty had sobered him like two hard slaps.

She was easily the most delicious girl that he’d ever seen. She had the same long-limbed awkwardness about her, as though she’d been born on the moon and Earth gravity was just too much, that all the great models had…that even the aging ones never quite lose…a tentative way of walking, and positioning herself vis-à-vis other objects, that was poignant and intimidating as well. What are you?, the simplest part of him wanted to shout at her. What fucking planet are you from? She glanced at Pahnik where he lay on the money-leafed bed and deflected her gaze as he opened his mouth to deliver his little speech and her shy avoidance silenced him.

She was in the bathroom, fussing with cabinets and turning the tap in the tub on, before he’d recovered enough to try it again. Damn! This was not going to be nearly as easy as he thought it might be, if even just getting his opening lines out in time was costing him such effort! How was he ever going to find the guts to suggest that she suck him off in order to keep her job…especially since it wasn’t necessarily inevitable that she’d take the bait and steal any money in the first place.

Pahnik just wanted to quit; he wanted to stop lying there like an idiot pretending to be drunk and gather the money up and straighten his pants and go have a seat in the bar while she tidied his counterfeit mess for him…he suddenly was entertaining a very lazy and post-adolescent fantasy of merely worshipping this unapproachable girl from afar. He’d buy her something nice on his last day in Berlin and leave it for her at the front desk. Maybe write a little note; leave his phone number; suggest that she might want to visit him in L.A. one day? Like any American college boy, smitten but chicken, using his country as bait. But he felt certain he’d be better equipped to deal with her in his territory, with that vulgar California sun pouring over his craggy features like pot-warmed honey softening a rock. And starlets and studio heads and producers all in a row doing that trendy hand signal with thumb and pinkie and mouthing I’ll call you from glinting convertibles parallel to his on Ventura boulevard, two and three and four lanes over, and…and…

The problem was it was no longer just a matter of not winning $50,000 from that Midas pig Charlie van der Roos…the issue was more did Miro really feel like losing that much? Which would really be like losing $100,000…the money he wouldn’t win plus the money that Charlie would. And not a single of Pahnik’s Hollywood friends, even the ones so much richer than Miro by orders of magnitude that they considered Pahnik poor…not a one of them was so rich as to sneeze at that much money, to write it off as a lesson or forget about the whole thing as a mistake he was sure to never repeat.

That much money might seem like a pittance to some starving Artist who’s constantly busy shocking himself with the amounts of money that the undeserving rich spend on imported olives for their cocktail parties alone, every year, but to anyone who really had some money, $100,000 was still a chunk. The paradox being that the more money one had, the stingier one became: didn’t Edgar Bronfmann of Seagram’s carry a brown bag lunch to work every day? Or was that some other Croesus? It didn’t matter.

Miro lay there singing his slurry version of “Baby You’re a Rich Man” and the chambermaid was dragging the Hoover across the bedroom floor to plug it in and Miro said, before the Hoover was on and roaring too loud to allow him to deliver himself of the complicated exposition his fiendish script called for him to orate, he said, “Er…”

He propped himself on his elbows, eyes half-shut, and said “Look a tall dish munny I won…” and she smiled at him, startled, and took a step back from the bed, “plane carz…hey doan be fray I woan by choo. Shit, I candeefin coundis high!”

Then he had a terrible thought: did she even speak English? Was she even comprehending a word of his script? Was she getting the exposition? To speak German with her at this point would seem too sober, too not-on-the-brink-of-a-coma, to risk it. All he could do was fall back with his arms akimbo and snore theatrically. His heart was thumping. The Hoover roared into greedy life again, huffing from the carpet his pubic hairs and dandruff and Charlie van der Roos’ stray cigar ashes and farting its ancient musk into the air in exchange.

The infernal thing droned on and on, roaring and wheezing, nearer and farther and nearer again, banging against the dresser, the bed legs, the wall in the corner. It sounded like a Soviet-era Hoover. It was a monster of boundless energy, and he wondered how long she would go on worrying the carpet in that particular area when he just happened to pop an eye open and saw that as she steered the vacuum cleaner past a corner of the bed, she very deftly fingered a hundred dollar bill from it (how long had that been going on?), with a facial expression so in every way different from the mask she’d first entered the room with, that two things happened: a) he found her far less beautiful and b) he fell completely in love with her.

He acted quickly, seizing her by the wrist. She yelped and stumbled into the bed, banging her shin and tripping over the Hoover’s cord and disconnecting it in the process. There was a dramatic silence, they stared into each other’s eyes, she struggled to wriggle out of his grip but he held fast. She looked very much like she was on the verge of bursting into a monsoon of desperate tears, while Pahnik himself was grinning like a pirate. Now, thought Pahnik, now.

The first sound she made was a high-pitched shrieking gasp that made him think she must be losing her mind; it startled him so that he jumped. It took him just a few seconds to realize that she was laughing. Laughing and laughing and laughing.

5.

We were over Greenland. I glanced at the little screen that was set into the back of the seat ahead of me when Pahnik took a break from the story, yawning and stretching as best as he could in his seat. He twisted to the left and to the right, and his spine made a noise like it was chewing itself. The little symbol of the airplane on the green and blue map was leaving a dotted line trail in the wake of its crawl above North America that was unnervingly un-straight.

“She was laughing!” repeated Pahnik, and he leaned back in his seat, eyes closed, and I could see him seeing it, his favorite scene from his favorite movie. “Cracking up! Tears were streaming down her face, her cheeks were red, and at some point I realized that she was laughing too hard to run anywhere, and I let her go. And she sat on the floor holding her sides and kept laughing.”

“She said, finally, ‘I can’t do it anymore!’ I had gone to the bathroom and gotten her a glass of water and handed it to her and she said ‘I can’t do it anymore!’ and then took a drink, which seemed to calm her down. She wiped her face off with the shoulder of her uniform and took another sip. I was very patient; I just sat there on the end of the bed and waited, because I suddenly realized that a new world was about to open itself to me. Intuition. My screen-writer’s intuition. Just as I can sit and watch a movie and tell you every plot twist before it happens…I can usually even guess most of the dialogue…I could feel a twist coming. A good one.”

“‘Most of them just come right out and offer me a few thousand deutschmarks to sleep with them,’ she finally said when she was completely composed. She was staring at the floor with this lovely half-smile. ‘You were the first,” and here she looked at me, and I was really flattered for some reason, ‘You were the first to come up with such an elaborate plan.’ Those weren’t her exact words, you know, because her English wasn’t that good yet. It was half Deutsch, half English. I’m just translating now. How is your German, by the way?”

I shrugged. “Nicht so gut.“

He gave me a slyly reproachful look and went on.

“’What in the hell are you fucking talking about, bitch?’ I said. Of course I didn’t really call her a bitch. And she started smiling at the floor again. She said one word like it explained everything. ‘Pookie.’ I said What? She said it again. ‘Pookie made me do it.’

“So what she confessed I could hardly believe. It blew my mind, man…I’m not kidding. I thought, as I was listening to her: this really is a movie!”

“The whole thing was a con! A set up! And as she detailed it to me I was thinking: of course! It’s so fucking obvious. I mean, think about it. What a ridiculous bet to make. Who in his right mind…who with enough money to actually bet $50,000 …is going to wager with some guy that he can bed a chambermaid at a fucking hotel in a foreign country first? I mean, who’s going to dangle that kind of bait in front of a fucking capitalist? Think about it. It’s ridicu-fucking-lous. Of course the first thing I’m going to do is think of a way to cheat. Of course an American businessman…they were all American business men…of course an American business man is going to go straight to the girl and offer her a few thousand Deutchmarks…even dollars if she looks too intimidating…to fuck on film and win the bet.”

I was squinting at Pahnik. “You mean that the chambermaid and Charlie van der Roos were a team?”

“A team?” Pahnik grinned. “They were lovers.”

“I don’t get it, then,” I said, scratching my head just like some comic book character expressing confusion, “Why make a bet with some guy knowing that he’s going to cheat and then win it?”

“Well,” said Pahnik, as though to a dullard, “What do you suppose the value of a video cassette of a married rich businessman fucking a hotel maid…what do you think it’s worth?”

“Oh. Blackmail.”

“Exactly. Businessman offers Sinead two thousand bucks to screw on camera. Sinead…”

“Sinead?”

He made a gesture to shush me and continued, “Sinead at first acts very shocked and virginal and the businessman starts getting frightened she might call the Front Desk on him but then she says something to the effect of…I don’t know…like, ‘Well, my saintly old Turkish mother does need a heart operation…’ and she dickers it up a little. Which is what Pookie called getting them coming and going…”

“‘Pookie.’ ”

Again he shushhhed me, “Because first our cheating businessman pays Sinead, the chambermaid, a few thousand dollars in hard currency to go through with the fucking. And later of course he gets hit for the blackmail. But here’s the brilliant detail: the whole time they do it…when they start the camera rolling and he starts screwing her she squirms and kind of acts like she’s fighting him off a bit…acts real virginal and shy and ashamed. She even says, so it’s audible, in her broken English, no! No, wait, stop, it is hurting me! Please stop, I am a virgin, wait…it is hurting me. But they never stop, never, nor even slow down, as she told me, it just eggs them on, it makes them hot to hear her whimper and cry, and often her pleading turned them a bit nasty; they got rougher, ruder.”

Then he gave me a look of theatrically pious sorrow and leaned in close with that enormous head, and tombstone teeth of his, and worried aloud, in basso profundo, “Are you ashamed to be a man yet?”

I shrugged and said “Anyway…” gesturing that he should continue. I was embarrassed to be sprouting an erection at that point of the story.

“Anyway, all this gets on tape. The tears, the crying, the hairy white business ass pumping away with flabby brutality.”

“It’s over in five minutes. Crying pitifully, and putting her uniform all the way back on quite easily, because it was never completely off, Sinead takes her money and flees the room in a well-acted counterfeit of shame. Her acting skills are impeccable. She’s every inch the deflowered virgin, though no blood is in evidence, but business man doesn’t notice or care!”

“He gets his pants back on in a sloppy hurry, grabs the video camera…the camera was often on loan from the diabolical Pookie himself…and runs gleefully down the hall to Pookie’s room. Knock knock! He’s ready to collect his $50,000 because he has videotaped evidence that he bedded this pretty maid first. There’s the day, the year, the hour right there in a corner of the screen. Hurray! He’s feeling like a pudgy little stud. This shit never happens to him in Kansas!”

“Pookie, aka Charlie, reviews the tape. He plays it back so the guy can watch the whole thing along with him…the gory details, as it were…the pleading, the crying, the clearly enunciated stuff about being a virgin…please stop, it hurts…he doesn’t remember it being that bad! Ouch! But yes, it’s clearly all there. ‘You win!’ says Charlie, ‘You did it you old hound dog! You sunnavabitch! You screwed her first! Shit, you practically raped that virginal little bitch, you super-stud! What is that between your legs, anyway, a chainsaw?’” And the Rube is nodding and grinning, proud of himself. Until Pookie says:

“ ‘But what would your wife think, not to mention the German police, about the fact that you just forcibly deflowered a Turkish virgin…and had the audacity to film it?’”

“Business man is standing there in Charlie van der Roos’s hotel room. He’s barefoot, red-faced, and cum is still running down his pant leg. He’s due to check out and fly back to America the next morning…Pookie has made sure of this…and suddenly this guy, this member of the Kiwanis Club, this Little League Coach, is facing rape charges in a foreign country! God knows what prison is like over here. There’s filmed evidence too…Christ, he filmed it himself!…and this guy…this big fucking guy who he doesn’t know from Adam…has got his hands on the very tape, because the culprit himself was jackass enough to deliver it to him!”

“Whatever empire-building venture he has come to sniff out in Berlin in the first place…and some of these speculative trips were funded by multi-national behemoths like International Harvester, or the 3M corporation…all of that is in fearful jeopardy. As is his life on earth. Holy Shit becomes his instant mantra. His heart, it’s pounding, his mind is racing. There’s a lot to consider. ”

“Then Pookie hits the poor sucker with a depth charge. An A-Bomb. Charlie is the fucking Enola Gay and the bay doors just swing open in his big belly and Little Boy comes tumbling out, whistling down through space, and it’s targeted for your balding head, Mr. Republican. Pookie reels off, from memory, the businessman’s home phone number! In other words, he, Pookie, has a direct hot line to the wife! To little wifey in her suburban nest. Little wifey and the kids! And how is this possible?”

Pahnik held up a yellow-tipped finger again, grinning fiendishly, clearly enjoying himself. “Because a day or two before, Pookie…I mean Charlie van der Roos…in a very friendly way, offered to let the businessman make a phone call, free of charge, on Charlie’s antediluvian cell phone. ‘By the way, any cawlls y’all wanna mayke? I kin rat it off in mah taxes, ya’ll.’”

“Free call? What greedy American could resist? It’s not so much that it will save the businessman money as it will cost Charlie an arm and a leg that they find so strangely irresistible. And because this free offer…this oh-so-casual free offer…was inevitably made in the morning, Berlin time, that would have made it late at night somewhere in the States. Between ten p.m. and one in the morning. Now, who is a decent American businessman gonna call, that late, Stateside, in front of a relative stranger and fellow American like Charlie van der Roos, but his wife? And yes indeed, they were always married…Charlie…Pookie…made sure of that. And it’s a simple matter to retrieve that number from his cell phone’s quaint little pre-pentium memory. And voila, Pookie has your home phone number. And he’s quoting it from memory to you as you stand there with a wet spot in your pants and your knees knocking together and your career and your marriage going up in flames before your very eyes! Whomp! Whoosh! Ker-Boooom!”

At which point a stewardess…not the one who seemed to dislike Pahnik so much…came down the aisle and leaned over us to remind us that some of the other passengers were trying to sleep. We apologized profusely…I’d never been reprimanded on an airplane before (I had visions of Federal Marshals waiting to arrest me at the Airport when we landed)…and Pahnik continued his story in a whisper.

6.

He sat there, on the edge of his bed, big hands on his knees, mouth hanging open, dumbfounded. The chambermaid, sitting on the floor with her legs folded up against her uniformed breasts and her arms around her short-skirted legs and her chin on her knees told him the unbelievable tale of her life with Pookie The Great.

They’d been together four years, having met when she was nineteen and Pookie himself was twenty nine. She was working in a café in Mazahn, deep in East Berlin, and he was driving an American car that was as big as a boat…not his own as it turns out…and she climbed in the car and drove off with him when he finished his beer. The Wall had just come down the previous Fall and the possibilities seemed endless.

And girls like her…girls that pretty…are best compared to those silver toy helium balloons clutched pathetically by children in a daze in the parking lot after The Fair, just waiting for a strong breeze to come along. Pookie was that breeze. Pookie was that hurricane.

Pahnik listened to her story squirmingly…he noticed that it was very much like enduring a crude punishment inflicted by a loved one, because she was, by now, he did, by now…he did love her. Listening to this tale, he was profoundly disturbed, transfixed by her face as it glowed like a funeral pyre ember with sexual nostalgia in the neutered gloom of his hotel room, disturbed to identify the agony of the jealousy that bit through his heart with its rancid red teeth as he learned about Pookie.

Jealous! This was a first! To be jealous of someone is to imply a frustrated yearning to exchange places with that person, and when had Miro Pahnik felt that about anybody? But now he was feeling it about that fat American slob Charlie van der Roos. Roos…ruse…very funny…

Pookie, explained Sinead, hadn’t always been fat, just as he hadn’t always been Charlie. He had once been lean and strong and beautiful, with a face like something on a thousand-year-old coin…the face of a hero, with fine blond wavy hair and cheekbones that cast shadows like shark’s fins, as from a titanic ‘Forties-era propaganda poster painted by Tamara deLempicka and plastered on the walls of an Ayn Rand metropolis. To hear Miro recalling Sinead’s telling of it, that is. Like she was eulogizing the Lost Continent of Atlantis in the form of a man.

“We live this time in B.A. pilot’s two bedroom flat in West Kensington London, on the Talgarth road,” she bragged. “It must normaleweise cost us nine hundreds pounds for month but we have ganze place for free for fucking year while pilot, Paki bastard, stay with tussi stewardess cause Pookie was give the guy guitar lessons, and saying him to think we can ficken when he play his cards so correct…by the time he cames with the nerve to leave note…a note he ask me do I sleep with him!…we move on.”

“Pookie make him falsch Russian religious ikonen and we sell this to wahnsin American tourist on Drotningsgatan in Stockolm cause I look me Russian with this too much eye shadow on; we standing on the steps of biggest cathedral in ‘old town’ but it’s Catholic shit church but how these crazy Yankees gonna know the shit difference? I wear me black velvet dress and biggest silver orthodox kreuz and say me the blah blah and Pookie ‘translate’ and we sell the ganze twelve…the all he paint that week. We staying with friend he got in Gamla stan and eating fruits and vegetables from clean garbage at day end at markt on Kungsgatan and we not us spend one shit nickel on a whole week we there; pure profit.”

Pookie the genius; Pookie the god. Oh he really hated Pookie; if Pahnik thought he’d disliked him as Charlie, he was moved to new heights of imaginary auto-de-fe-style violence contemplating this inexplicable new Pookie phenomenon. And then he had to hear about Pookie’s baguette-sized cock on top of it.

She detailed their sexual exploits…which took place in city parks, grocery stores, and cemeteries…with the same cool narrative intonation as she related the litany of cons and capers…couldn’t she see how far Miro had already fallen for her? Couldn’t she see Miro wincing?

And to hear about the silver liquid brilliancy of the orgasms that Pookie had induced in her by a certain counter-clockwise stirring movement of his genital cudgel in her little thing, along with a perfectly timed finger in her even littler other thing…but that wasn’t the worst. That wasn’t the killer. The killer was yet to come. A narrative morsel thus far withheld.

Because Charlie/Pookie was a Chinese box of identities…shapes within shapes…layers under layers. Every face had another face preceding it. Every name an antecedent. And it was the deepest layer that was grinning like a death’s head under the “Pookie” persona that had Miro Pahnik, successful Hollywood screen-writer, seriously contemplating the taking of a human life when he found out about it. Had him rehearsing, very carefully, with mannequins as props, the quick and Zen-smooth chopping off of a head with an axe. A real head, with a brain in it.

7.

Miro looked at me. His eyes were bloodshot; he voice was hoarse from whispering. He suddenly told me that he wanted to sleep, and I let him. He reached up and clicked off our over-head light, wrapped himself in the pathetically small blanket the airline gave him for the purpose (of course he could have been sleeping like a Duke back up in First Class where he belonged) and he was snoring within minutes.

I was ready about then for a break…you can only be overwhelmed with the details of someone else’ life for so long before you become eager to return to the business of dwelling on your self for a while again. I had my own twists and turns and losses to dwell on; I looked at my watch, still set to California time, and thought of Lola, just then probably drifting off to sleep with the television on, some soothing re-run of a show that it was our habit to drift off to together. Was she keeping to the left side of the futon, and therefore mourning my loss, or was she sprawled extravagantly across the full diagonal width of it…celebrating?

I was stricken with a sense of mistake that felt like a mild form of food poisoning. Why is it so hard to succeed; so easy to fuck up? Like the difference between flying, and falling down a hill. In a just world, wouldn’t it be as easy to glide over the tree tops as to trip down a staircase and break your neck? The fact that it isn’t speaks volumes.

Oh I was feeling sick; the kind of sick that says to you how badly you’ve fucked up. I was feeling like a little boy who had run away from home to prove his point, only to lose his nerve and decide to turn back at sunset, when the scenery gets weird and the chill sets in, only to suddenly notice that he’s a grown man, not a little boy, and that he can’t turn back because he’s trapped in an airplane headed for Europe. And whose idea was that? Is this, I mean. Proving a point is one thing; leaving the country is another. Which illustrates the primary pitfall of adult life: the ability to do things. It’s so much safer; so much wiser; to do nothing in most cases. Take a deep breath; take five; sit it out. Isn’t that Buddha’s gimmick?

Lola!

With the clear-mindedness of a man who has just swan-dived from the roof of a thirty-six story building, I could see that I had fucked up, I could see how essential she was. How I thought I’d ever come across a girl like that again in this life, I’ll never know. I even almost felt like crying, but found a strange pleasure in the suffering that turned my trembling lower lip into a smile. I guess you might say it was rue. I sat there for the better part of an hour doing nothing, in the half-light of a snoozing jetful of strangers, but looking rueful. Which is not, I eventually realized, with a shudder, a young man’s facial expression.

With Pahnik asleep, I was finally able to turn the full force of an appropriate facial expression on him for the first time since he first invaded the airspace beside me. I frowned at him. The frown meant: you obnoxiously entertaining lunatic. And as though the frown was the sharp slap on Pahnik’s cheek that I might have wished that it really could be, he woke up, one eye first and then the other, and started talking again.

8.

“Have you ever killed anyone?” he whispered, grinning. “No, don’t answer that, the answer’s too obvious. The question should be, have you ever wanted to kill someone so badly that it frightened you?” He nodded gravely and looked down his long nose and big teeth at me, reclining in his tortured-posture of sleep; the posture of a giant’s skeleton jammed into the smaller corner of a catacomb.

“Anyway, this is the part of the story where I become what we call in literature an unreliable narrator. You’ll have to decide for yourself, as the reader…or, the audience, I guess it would be…how much of what I’m about to say is strictly true. Or what I hope to gain, or what point I hope to make, by misleading you. If I am.”

9.

Pahnik sat on the edge of his hotel bed. He had listened to Sinead’s complete confession; felt himself wounded with jealousy to watch her perfect lips form words of praise for this Pookie character who had bamboozled the great Miro Pahnik into believing that he was a crass entrepreneur from Minnesota named Charlie van der Roos who had struck it rich with a chain of doughnut bistros. Le Dönut! Shit.

She was scrunched up in the corner, her toes digging into the plush white carpet (at what point had she kicked off her crepe-soled shoes?), and doing a kind of Eastern Bloc Scheherezade, spinning this fantastical tale and causing Pahnik to fall in love with her, one cubic centimeter at a time.

So it bugged the shit out of him to know how every bump and pore of her had been so gratefully marked by that chubby-fingered American grifter…as brilliant as he admittedly was. Still, if Pahnik had to have a rival, better it be an American than a German…he could just about stomach being bamboozled by a Yankee. It would have killed him to have been hoodwinked by some lead-footed, square-headed, tight-assed Kraut.

For the longest time she just sat there in the dimly lit room, giving off her own light like a magical child, and she smiled into the middle distance. Without speaking, so as not to break the spell, Miro offered her a bottle to drink from, and she did. And then the second half of the story commenced; the part that Pahnik enjoyed, up until a crucial point.

Yes, he enjoyed it, perversely; despite himself; only because it brought Pookie down from the mountaintop. Down from the mountaintop and into the cesspool! She vomited it all out, speaking rapidly, as if in fear that Pookie himself might break into the room and silence her.

She told, sadly, of how Pookie got bored, in time, with his little diversions…his scams, and with Sinead herself…how he grew bored, and disgusted with existence, somehow. Perhaps it was her fault: perhaps there was something inside of her that somehow depleted the joy in him, but it was sometime after the second year that it all went bad.

He drank more, drank harder; ate indiscriminately, gained weight….would come home from a bar after drinking all night and half rape her, whatever the hour, smothering her under his sweaty carcass, making her sick with his breath.

And if the rape was uncompleted, due to booze-induced impotence, he’d shove the dead thing between her legs for a while, cursing, and then beat her instead for not being pretty enough to get him hard. But really he preferred a kind of sexual torture…the only thing that excited him anymore…a sense of shame wouldn’t allow her to describe it. But suffice it to say it was an atrocity…war crime stuff.

She rolled up the sleeve on a skinny arm and stuck it out and showed Pahnik what appeared to be…cigarette burns. And she mentioned, too, in a round-about way, how much damage that big cock of Pookie’s could do if forced without lubricant into a situation in which it didn’t quite belong…and to add insult to injury (quite literally) he usually…grabbed her by the hair at the nape of her neck and forced her, afterwards…you know…he held her in place in order to finish in her mouth. And pinched her nose until she was forced to swallow it.

Here for the first time Sinead made direct eye contact with Miro as she talked, and her face had darkened, and cooled…a blue shadow seemed to pass over it…her irises glowing from the dark of some cave. She looked older, sadder, though still beautiful…but Pahnik could see how even telling this part of the story affected her.

But the Screenwriter in him couldn’t help thinking how sequence is everything. If the happy part comes first, and the sad part comes last: the story is a tragedy. But reverse it, and put the sad part first, and finish up with the happy part, and you have…Cinderella. Though the facts in both cases are exactly the same.

Take for example a widely-revered writer like Henry Miller, who not only, after years of obscure struggle in the chilly damp gulag of Art, found a world-wide audience in his sixth decade, but plenty of sexual attention too. He’d endured forty years of colorful struggle in New York and Paris, then basked in the reward of twenty years of money and fame in the idyllic setting of Big Sur, California…and finally, just at the very end…a few years before his death, he starts making a fool of himself by writing pathetically horny love letters to twenty-year old gimlet-eyed gold diggers who in turn humiliated him in public.

And it was those handful of years at the end that rendered Miller’s life a tragic one. Because he ended badly. Everything is a rehearsal for that last year…those last weeks. That terminal minute. Pahnik looked up from this fleeting reverie in time to see a flesh-colored tear…tear mixed with makeup…sliding down the eggshell of the chambermaid’s cheek.

The Pookie she’d originally known and fallen in love with…the chiseled Satyr whose tricks and cons were really just a kind of Olympian expression of the Genius of the Spirit of Play…this beautiful creature had disappeared from the face of the Earth. To be replaced by the chubby, money-mad ogre who nightly forced himself on her; forced her, even, from time to time, to sell her own ass (or mouth) for money so Pookie could have his nights in the local Kneipe…a seedy bar full of leather-clad trolls he kept thoroughly entertained with drinks on the house, and shameless tales of his woman’s decline.

They’d park on Joachimsthaler strasse. He’d sidle up to an American business man in line to buy a cheeseburger at MacDonald’s there across the street from the Bahnhof Zoo and say a few discreet words and then they would both come out, like old friends, laughing and talking, and get in the car…Pookie in the front seat and the business guy in the back with Sinead, who got right to business, no pun intended, unzipping his pants like she was shelling an oyster.

Down she’d go, holding her breath so she wouldn’t actually smell it, the thing she was taking into her mouth. Once, even, while the trick was wolfing down his burger, and using her hair (why should this; but it is; be the worst part of the story?)…as a napkin. While Pookie drove around the block to avoid a parking ticket. And what were her thanks?

“You’re just a slut anyway, and deserve it!”

That’s how Pookie put it. “A woman with any morals left at all would refuse to do this for me! Sell her cunt for a few dirty dollars? Just so I can drink?” That’s what Pookie had to say about it. She deserved it. “To think I ever fucked you!” But then he’d come around later that night himself, demanding his percentage…his freebie.

“It’s wirklich schrecklich…horrible…” she said, to Miro Pahnik, smiling, absurdly. “Machmal denk ich…sometimes I think…” and here she mimed, with her graceful fingers, putting a gun to her head. Closing her eyes. Pulling the trigger. Still smiling.

Pahnik cleared his throat. “Well,” he said to her, because he didn’t know what to say, but he had to say something, to break the evil spell of the dirge of silence that followed, “I must admit I never expected an American to be so damn…I mean, yes, of course, he’s very bad…but…so…damn…clever…”

At which point Sinead-the-chambermaid released her second big torrent of laughter for the night; her facial expression went from requiem to… cartoon…so quickly that he thought he saw two beautiful women in the corner, briefly: one haunted, the other on the verge of mirthful hysterics.

“American?” She gasped. “American? Pookie, American? Pookie isn’t American…” and here Pahnik felt his hackles rising…his mind jumped ahead a millisecond and came to the word she was coming to exactly one half of an eye-blink before she actually said it, and landing on the word was like having a rough-hewn spear driven up through his ass-hole and directly into the base of the stiff chunk of his brain, where the spear-tip lodged so firmly that it was clear that the spear would never come back out of the rectum again without removing the brain as well, with a liquid pop, or the onomatopoeiac sound-effect of… ‘Czech!’

10.

Pahnik looked at me, eyes narrowed.

“Czech.”

11.

In fact he was born in a little town not far from the little town in which Miro himself had been born. The two towns, Pookie’s and Miro’s, Prostĕjov and Blansko, were the Minneapolis and Saint Paul of Czechoslovakia, in more ways than one.

There was a rivalry between the two in which Minneapolis-like Prostĕjov considered itself more worldly, more hip and cosmopolitan, than Blansko, which was quiet, low key…Saint Paulish. Blansko, of course, considered Prostĕjov to be godless and crass in return. Choosing between Morality and Modernity, which way does a little boy’s heart incline? Especially if he has Artistic inclinations? Miro had often accompanied his father on shopping trips (on their horse-drawn cart!) to Prostĕjov, and felt the sting of the bemused gaze of those modern Prostĕjov boys and girls as Pahnik fils et pere, from the narrow roads and stone farm houses of Blansko, shambled up their main street in a humiliated parade of rural goodness. Sometimes, with cheeky grins, the well-dressed kids on the curb (in buckle shoes, and the girls in wide-brimmed hats) would toss coins in the cart as Miro and his father (and the nameless horse) clopped by. And now the thought…and now the thought. That among those smug little pigs had been a Pookie…

Was that a glaze of almost-tears in Pahnik’s bruise-blue eyes as he fixed them on me? Between his misting eyes and his manic, outraged grin, I suddenly felt the most sickening shock wave of…intimacy …it hit me, for the first time, that I was hearing something private. This story I’d been listening to all night: I was being shown a foot-long scar on some old man’s milk-white belly; I was watching a newlywed trying to cover her black eye with makeup; I was smelling the booze on the breath of a middle-aged priest.

Pahnik was staring at me, and then through me, expecting a response to this latest twist in the narrative. I cleared my throat.

“He was Czech?” I asked, politely.

12.

Sinead was still laughing as Miro crossed the room and kicked a stool in front of the dresser; the stool hit the bathroom door with a sharp crack. Then he turned and headed back towards the corner of the room where Sinead had folded herself, as if she were next, and her knees drew up and she lowered her head, in preparation for the blow. But of course Miro Pahnik wouldn’t have, couldn’t have, kicked a woman. Not even a female dog, or a cow. He wasn’t that kind of Czech; he wasn’t that kind of screenwriter.

“I want to kill him,” said Miro, wringing his hands like a fishwife, “I really want to kill him now.”

“I want you to.”

“I want to kill him painfully. I want to cut his…cut his ass off and choke him with it.”

“I want you to.”

“Or skin him alive and toss his wiggling raw body into a bathtub of salt. Or nail his tongue to one knee cap and his cock to the other.”

“I’d love that.”

Pahnik, who had been busy gathering his hundred dollar bills (with trembling hands) off of the bed while ranting, as if preparing to storm out of his own hotel room, suddenly stopped, sat himself on the edge of the bed, and stared at her for a long little time.

“Wait a minute. Are you…”

She nodded before replying. “Of course I am. I’m serious. I want him dead as much as you do. What has he done to you, compared to what he’s done to me?” Of course this was all said in German, the language of complaint, and therefore more moving to Pahnik than if he’d heard it in English.

First, he bit a fingernail. Then: “Say again.”

“I said,” she said, with patient bemused over-enunciated clarity, but softly, so he had to lean towards the sentence to make sure that he heard it, “ I-want-you-to-kill-him.”

13.

The plan they concocted together went like this.

Or, no, let’s cut to the chase: Pahnik is standing smoothly naked in a 19th Century wardrobe with an axe. He has shaved his body of all hairs so as not to leave forensic evidence; not even an eyebrow, not even a follicle: nothing will place him there. He was thinking: A moment comes…a moment in your life that reveals to you, finally, the meaning of your life…it tells you what your life was leading to, and therefore what it meant. Which you will never know until the moment arrives…whether it comes at fifteen, or eighty six. Or now.

It was a nice apartment in a bourgeoisie part of town; only someone with money and taste could have lived there. The high ceilings, ornamented in wedding-cake detail of plaster filigree called stueck; the parquet floors; the marbled bathroom. Pahnik liked being there…it was like acting in a Kubrick film.

He felt the dusty poisonous flutterings of evil butterflies in his stomach, but had learned long ago, the veteran of many a faux-impromptu speech at many a life-or-death Hollywood brunch, where a wrong word or a poorly chosen facial expression or spinach between your teeth could finish your career forever, how to turn that kind of terror into the most attractive breed of confidence.

The trick was adopting an inner pose of humbled arrogance and letting it soak out through your skin, making you shine with the rarest oil of Destiny. See, the trick was becoming a Vessel. As in: I’m deeply flattered that God has chosen me as the. It amazes me to think that The Almighty deems me worthy of. I’m pleased to know that The Creator has put me here to. Which was one of the lost secrets of the Old Religion, re-discovered with gusto in the late 20th century by Show Biz Luminaries and New Age Book of the Month Housewives and Muslim fanatics alike: blaming God for everything. This ‘Free Will’ bullshit was out. The other important secret of the Old Religion being something to do with killing.

And so that’s what Pahnik was thinking to calm himself, hiding in a priceless Restoration-era wardrobe in a good neighborhood on a tree-lined street in Berlin, optically naked in a clear vinyl rain coat, hefting an expensive birch-handled titanium axe featuring a blade he could have sliced bread with.

I’m so flattered that God has chosen me to lop your head off for you, he was thinking as he visualized Pookie with his fat pink back to the bedroom. And let’s face it, too: the situation was giving Pahnik an atavistic erection. Something good and acrid and a million years old in him had been triggered and it was thumping on the vinyl, demanding its due, potent as a bearded Nun. Gasping like a fish in the raincoat. Plus he’d stood there in his raincoat in the dry-rotted darkness and listened to Sinead being fucked badly by Pookie; her groans of bored discomfort and, at the very end, her gaggings and sniffles and gulps of disgust. Now he just had to wait for her to get her clothes back on and leave the room.

Sinead had prepared him for the scenario he could expect to face upon kicking the wardrobe door open. There wouldn’t be time to think; Pahnik would have to kick the door open and cross the room in two long steps swinging and do the job in one graceful unhesitant Samurai home-run swoosh if he expected to succeed (success being defined as a clean cut and a quick but leisurely and undetected exit from the crime scene), so Sinead had painted the picture for him with great care but also giddy frightened relish.

She walked him through it a dozen times. The bed is here, Pookie sits this way, the upstairs neighbor she don’t get home until after supper time, the church bell always starts ringing a few minutes after the fucking stops, etc. Then they practiced with scarecrows and mannequins. Scarecrows with melon heads, propped on the edge of a mattress-less bed frame in her run-down flat on Reichenberger strasse. It took 2 weeks of practice; thirty dollars in melons; Pahnik’s forearms and biceps started aching chronically in the good way of muscle development but also his wrists began to pain him and he worried he was suffering from carpal tunnel syndrome and he might have to go to a doctor and get silicone injections but then it cleared up the day before the Big Day and he felt he was ready.

And there he was, standing in that wardrobe, listening to Sinead ease her badly used body off of the badly squeaking bed, wordlessly grabbing the heap of her clothing and slipping out of the room, the whole time with post-coital Pookie seated contemptuously on the edge of the bed with his fat naked back to her (as Sinead had reassured Pahnik that Pookie always always always did), lighting a cigarette, staring out the window, and the bells of the too-close church would begin their deafening pealing (perfect for covering whatever noise)…and now they were pealing and God it was loud…Pahnik had a ridiculous vision of ten little Quasimodoes dangling up and down on the bell ropes with feet kicking and monstrous idiot glee…and Pahnik kicking the wardrobe door open and stepping into a long swing with a chin-up all-business Joe DiMaggio grimace…

14.

It was at this point in the story that I lost all interest in it, because we hit turbulence.

15.

It was bad turbulence, too. First a mild hiccup (it could have been a soccer hooligan seated behind me, unaccountably head-butting my chair back) followed by that portentously innocuous elevator bell that accompanies the understated on-blink of the seat belt hieroglyphic and then suddenly the plane lurched and bucked like it was being top-fucked by something very big and viciously horny, or having a seizure, or falling apart. Airborne earthquake.

A stewardess came and instructed Pahnik in a confidential tone to please return to his proper seat up front and secure his carry-on and buckle himself in quickly for his and everyone else’ safety. He rose wobblingly and saluted me and said ‘No worries!’ before climbing the aisle, but I was already gone at that point…taking the slippery slide-chute down into a cold white secret place of spiritual rage and nausea…and couldn’t be expected to interrupt the demanding work of owning and operating my terror just to do something trivial like acknowledge the nightclub’s worth of strangers with whom I was suddenly contemplating a massacre-messy death.

Basic turbulence is always more than enough, and here we were starting several notches above that, with an initial jolt that inspired an isolated scream (soprano) and a shy spate of embarrassed giggles and then a second jolt that got a chorus of screams (alto, soprano, tenor, bass) and no laughter at all. And a third, fourth, fifth, etc., nudging us all to piss or shit our pants, or douse ourselves with warm parsleyed vomit. How many good stiff shakes would it take? Was not-befouling ourselves immediately a kind of hubris that we would pay for with our lives? Could we propitiate the gods by shitting and puking en masse very quickly, and thereby avert disaster?

And I was thinking: what do they not tell you about plane crashes? What is it that the news (special report or update) won’t even handle with the latex glove of euphemism? They’ll show the catapulted loafer; the orphaned teddy; at a crash site…these were the videoclichés that the TV news thrived on (to such an extent that you had to suspect that any good reporter kept a couple of dolls or teddies in the trunk of his or her car just in the wildly improbable case that the tenement or trailer park or jumbo had been under-equipped with these details when the fire/tornado/impact had decided to make the news). The camera will close-up the dinky scatter of personal effects in the aftermath of a crash, but what about the shit everywhere? There must be shit everywhere.

With five hundred passengers on a good sized jet and ten pounds, on average, of compacted fecal material in each passenger (two pounds in some and eighteen pounds in others) that would be five thousand pounds of shit flying through the cabin as we snapped the tree tops off. Do crash sites stink? Is there every kind of shit all over everything when the euphemistically-named rescue crews arrive on the scene, slipping on it as they climb through the smoke-filled cabin? When they scoop the passengers up in twenty five gallon rescue bags, do they have to scoop all the shit up, too? After all, the shit is part of you…the shit was part of the transaction…a considerable part of the client who purchased the ticket in the first place. It was as much a human material as whatever brains had left the container, too.

16.

‘You’re disgusting.’

‘Sorry.’

‘Shit at the crash site!’

‘Well?!!’

‘Well, it would all have burned up in the explosion!’

‘French fried shit! Think so? Apropos shit, know what Doktor Effenkuhl greeted me with when I rang the doorbell? First thing he said was ‘welcome to Scatopolis’ which is the same as saying ‘welcome to Shitville,’ basically. Because of all the dogshit thawing out now after being frozen all winter I guess. I must admit I noticed an odor when I got out the taxi. The streets are covered with it, aren’t they, the dogshit, plus all of the buildings are shit-gray and shit-brown, and the coal-burning ovens reek of fart, blue farts. Like Kentucky. And the way these toilets are designed! These toilets! They don’t tell you about that in the travel guides do they?’

‘You’re so lurid. You are one lurid mother-fucker, pardon my French.’

‘I am, aren’t I? I am pretty lurid. I was a lurid kid. Being lurid was probably compensation for being poor. Although poverty itself is lurid. But I’m not even sure of the definition of ‘lurid,’ now that I think of it. Funny word, really, isn’t it? Lurid. I have to look it up when we get home. Are you sure ‘lurid’ is a word? I won’t know if I agree that I’m lurid until I look it up. At least I’m not boring.’

Studying her finger nails. Biting one. ‘Am I boring?’

‘You’re too young to be boring.’

‘Not much of a compliment, is it?’

‘What do you need compliments for? You have your youth.’

‘You make it sound like it’s everything. Being young.’

‘Only to the extent that Time is everything.’

‘Time is everything?’

‘Only to the extent that nothing is possible without it.’

‘Okay, so, and then what happened?’

‘Then what happened when?’

‘On the airplane.’

‘It obviously didn’t crash, if that’s what you’re worried about.’

‘No, I mean, with Pahnik. What did Pahnik say next?’

I shrugged. ‘Nothing, really. I didn’t see him for the rest of the flight. He stayed put in First Class. I saw him briefly when I made my connection at Frankfurt. I was going one way and he was going another and he kind of looked over the heads of some Japanese that were between us and said something stupid to me and that was the last I saw of him. I don’t even know if he continued on to Berlin. Maybe he stayed in Frankfurt. Who knows?’

‘What was the stupid thing he said?’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘Yeah, but what was it?’

‘I’m telling you, it won’t make a bit of sense.’

‘So? I’m curious! You know I’m going to drive you fucking crazy until…’

‘He said the wrong guy. Or something like that. The wrong guy or the wrong one. I’m not sure. I couldn’t hear him over the airport noise. I said what? And he just laughed and saluted me and disappeared. He was a nut. But a special kind of nut. I have to write about him one day, now that I’ve quit painting. But I’d change the story a little. You know, make it meaningful. That’s the thing about True Stories, isn’t it? They don’t mean anything. That’s the difference. Fiction means something. Or tries to. When are you going to make us both unspeakably happy and sleep with me again? Like the good old days? You used to love it.’

She laughed, squinting and blushing. The blush soaked down to her breastbone, like a litmus test, where the laughter made her boobs bob. She wagged a finger at me. ‘I used to like it.’

‘Lola, you know you’re dying to.’

‘I’ll let you know when the time comes.’

‘Well, just don’t hold back informing me about that for too long. Okay? Promise?’

‘Promise.’

The fantasy-Lola looked so…looked so sane. So clear. And we were so cute together; we said such witty things. She reached and we held hands. The Lola of seventeen years old, the Lola I never knew, the Lola before too many men had gotten to her.

It was a daydream I kept having. Over and over again. Polished with repetition, the script was becoming more and more complicated. More and more convincing. If. Only.

Reality is so… I don’t know. Awful?

17.

This was my second trip to Berlin, but the first in broad daylight. Riding into the city from Tegel International Airport, I had felt that I was entering a city in mourning, like it must have felt driving across Dallas the day after J.F.K. quit his human form to become a deity, his essence on the tips of two bullets. The Berliners I saw in their cars and along the streets weren’t wearing black arm bands, but they might as well have been, ashen and dour and eyes-averted, scowling, with drawstring mouths and labyrinth foreheads and gravity-degraded shoulders.

And of course it was kind of nice, but disconcerting, that cars passing or being passed weren’t massaging our kidneys with bass signal, but were, rather, as meek as cars in an old celebrity’s funeral cortege; that wild-eyed people weren’t fussing and fooling in crowds on the sidewalks or crossing the streets at anywhere other than the designated crossings; that the police were a sparse, utilitarian, introspective presence. That the Berlin police, even in their army-green uniforms and square-jawed enormity, seemed more like librarians than centurions. There to shusssh you, with a glance, from time to time, but not much else. What is it that William Burroughs said about a functioning police state? Not needing police?

‘Hey, you know what you were thinking, but were too ashamed of yourself to admit you were thinking, even as you were thinking it?,’ said Doktor Effenkuhl, one eyebrow like a circumflex, ‘You were thinking: this is what the U.S. would be like without the blacks!’ Ziss is vat ze Oooh Ess vood be like…’

‘I was thinking that? If you say so…’

‘Yes, and what you would have qualified that thought with, had you the permission to articulate it, would have been: for better or worse. Because not only have the kidnapped West Africans that you now call ‘blacks’ raised the temperature in the U.S. beyond anything possible in marble-cool Europe…and this heat is where Hollywood, and rock-n-roll, and the general concept of the great American export called ‘Cool,’ ironically, come from,…but they will also, these blacks, be the moral, intellectual, and political downfall of your country.’

He grabbed my very large trunk and hefted it out of the hallway and into the doorway of the little room, to the right of the flat’s entrance, which would be mine. It was a queer little room, long and narrow and high-ceilinged like a monk’s cell. It featured a normal-sized window at an abnormal height, too high for me to see anything but sky (and the black needle of a church steeple) out of, and a chain contraption for opening and closing it.

(Far) under the window was a desk with a brass lamp on it; along the wall to the right of the desk was a plain little pillow-less four-poster bed, mattress wrapped in a rough woolen blanket, a very large key on top of the mattress.

I had tossed my carry-on luggage on top of the bed, and Doktor Effenkuhl shoved my trunk into the room behind me, continuing his speech with his hands on his hips, huffing and puffing and purple-cheeked from the effort.

‘Cold-blooded Europe, with her baggy, blood-shot, old-woman eyes of a tortoise…will long out-live the virile American hare, with his racing heart. And that is why.’ Und zat iss vye. ‘It is all in the pulse rate.’ He pointed east. ‘Looking at China, the oldest one there is. The pulse rate is zero! I trust the accommodations are amenable, young man?’

‘Oh yeah. Perfect space to get a little thinking done,’ I said, pantomiming a panoramic glance of genuine assessment, and making myself look pleased as a result. I mean, I was pleased, if only to be out of California. Pleased also that Lola had known someone in Berlin I could stay with; an intellectual; a doctor.

I was still trying to work out if Lola had kicked me out, or if I’d left of my own free will. Had she pushed or had I jumped? Answers to these questions were crucial details for my love life’s CV, even though it’s common knowledge that everyone lies on these, padding the successes and understating the humiliations.

The lecture on ‘blecks in ze Oooh-Ess’ was the first lecture I had ever received from Doktor Effenkuhl, and I couldn’t have known at the time how relatively brief of an Effenkuhl lecture it was. I had simply pressed his door bell, the door had swung open, he had said ‘Welcome to Scatopolis; not my flat, I mean, Berlin itself,’ bade me enter with a huge gesture, and treated me to this lecture, in response to my ice-breaking comment about the funereal taxi ride from the airport. I had merely said, ‘Hey, the ride here was like driving through a ghost town…’

And he had replied, ‘Hey,’ (smiling to show that the mockery intended was gentle), ‘you know what you were thinking, but were too ashamed of yourself to admit you were thinking, even as you were thinking it?’ etc.

He also noticed that I say ‘If you say so’ a lot. He was enthusiastic about idiomatic American expression, excited to pick my brain for new nuggets. No Way Jose, Take a Hike, From Soup to Nuts, Spic and Span, Bug Off, and Holy Cow he knew already. But when I introduced him to the urbanesque ‘Baby Mamma Drama,’ he reacted as though I’d presented him with something wrapped in a fancy red ribbon. I was confident that I could come up with even richer locutions for him in the weeks or months (my very expensive round-trip ticket…how had Lola managed to afford it?…was open-ended) to come.

It was clear to me on that first day that Doktor Effenkuhl was a bit of an eccentric. He was funny.

He asked me: ‘How much do you weigh?’ and when I told him, he nodded, stroking his chin, and said, ‘Good.’

He said, ‘Name a place in North America that you have never been to, but always wanted to live,’ and I thought a while and answered ‘Manhattan?’ and he frowned with amusement and waved my answer away, deciding, ‘Out of the question.’

I was glad that Doktor Effenkuhl’s English was excellent, if heavily accented, since my German is nil…the closest I can come to speaking German, in fact, is speaking a comedic, heavily-accented English, like Doktor Effenkuhl’s, and there was a terrible temptation to do so. I was immediately ready to change all of my Ws into Vs, and make that cow-kissing face that Germans can’t seem to get through a sentence without. But the last thing I wanted to do was to offend my host, who I liked so much, immediately, in part because he reminded me of myself. And he smelled very good…an expensive cologne that hinted at vast, cold cities of stone.

Despite his professorial manner, he looked like he could have cleaned the kitchen floor with me, with his big hands and broad shoulders; evidence of Viking intervention in early Germanic breeding schedules. But his face belonged to the same family as mine. It was a little like looking in a warped mirror.

He couldn’t have been more than five years my senior, but he managed, with his Continental air (and adult furniture), to make me feel very young, and I assumed the aura of pupil while he lectured me with good-natured arrogance about the contents of my own mind, the meaning of my own thoughts, and even on the implications of my reactions to these observations of his.

Lola told me that Doktot Effenkuhl was a respected Psychotherapist who’d invented a new kind of treatment for something or other, but she’d forgotten what. Even such vague praise impressed me, because what had I done but spend my life preparing to do something? Doktor Effenkuhl and I shook hands, and his big red mitt was smooth and hot to the touch.

‘I’m Salter,’ I said. And he answered, again, that he was Doktor Effenkuhl. I handed him the package that Lola had given to me to give him and he looked pleased. In fact, he hugged me.

18.

My experience is that the dirty dishes will multiply to match your capacity to keep them clean. In other words, people can get pretty extravagant using the kitchenware, when they aren’t expected to keep it all clean themselves. A cup-a-day usage expands to a new cup for every drink; one plate and one fork for dinner every day turns into a plate and cutlery for every little snack, and suddenly the olive forks, cheese graters, and teaspoons are all in use again, and water glasses are being tossed into the dirty dishes pile in the sink after only one drink of water…but that’s okay.

In exchange for washing the dishes every evening (Doktor Effenkuhl liked to meet the morning in an immaculate kitchen), I was allowed to live in that peculiar spare bedroom in Doktor Effenkuhl’s large flat, rent-free. He usually saw three or four patients a week (patients I never met, but who I sometimes heard); his sessions occurring in a room at the other end of the flat while I slept.

My window was so high off the floor that I couldn’t even look out of it by standing on top of the desk under it. All I could see, from a low angle, was the sky, and the black needle of the church, and the occasional bird or cloud, traversing the window like a trivial thought.

I asked about this architectural eccentricity one night…my second or third night there…while washing the dishes. Doktor Effenkuhl informed me that the building housing his flat had once been a private residence, a one-family house for aristocrats, and that my room had been the room belonging to the autistic youngest child of the noble family the house had been built for.

This was an 18th century story, he said, and autism wasn’t treated then as now. There used to be shackles chained to the wall along which your bed is now, he elaborated. In fact, added Doktor Effenkuhl, grinning over his reading glasses at me, you can still see, if you look carefully, in the part of the wall that is now hidden by your bed…the dents in the wall where the screws for the shackles were secured.

Was it a girl or a boy, I wondered, but did not ask, afraid that such a question would sound too ‘American.’ But I soon found out without asking. My imagination then involuntarily projected Lola into the lead role of the story.

‘Sometime during her sixteenth or seventeenth year,’ intoned Effenkuhl, smiling into a middle distance as though recalling a personal memory, ‘this autistic daughter became pregnant. But how is this possible? the family wondered. No man had ever been closer to her than standing on the other side of the very thick door of her/your room, having no idea that there lay on the other side of it a beautiful half-nude teen age girl with the mind of a dragonfly, shackled by her ankle to the wall. This would have been something like the year 1790 or so, if you know what I mean.’

The Doktor gestured at me twice with the succulent thumbs of a tangerine before I realized he was offering me some. It was delicious, and the pleasure of it became a part of the story he told, along with the Bach, a suite of works for unaccompanied cello, that his kitchen radio was playing in the background as he talked. I stopped washing the dishes long enough to enjoy the tangerine, pieces of which he kept handing me, and listen.

‘Now,’ said Effenkuhl, ‘This floor of the building, where we are now, the ground level, was where the laundry and cooking were all done…here, the servants were most active. As you can see, there is not so much of sunlight. There was actually an Italian system of mirrors, derived from the camera obscura, rigged up in order to channel some sunlight from the tower to this lower level…terribly high-tech and expensive by the standards of the day.’

‘The autistic daughter’s cell was adjacent to a pantry, down the hall from the kitchen, in a part of the house that saw little noble traffic. The family was rarely down here…they did their living in the upper four levels of the building, and, as you have noticed, on the other side of the building, facing the walk that leads to the old church, the ground is higher, and there is an entrance on what to us is the second level, and this is the entrance that the family used, along with their proper guests, to come and go through.’

‘The three older children weren’t even aware that a younger sister existed. The parents themselves only made their appearance to her, in the presence of a priest, during the Christmas holidays, and it was on one such visit that they noticed the daughter was displaying a somewhat protuberant belly, which caused, as legend has it, the mother to faint when she felt a kick after placing a curious hand on it, thinking at first that the belly must be a gas bubble as a result of the poor child having possibly eaten apples intended for the horses. You know, they didn’t put it past someone to substitute horse food for the two daily aristocratic meals, including French wine, that were rightfully hers…they didn’t put it past some servant that she might eat these fine meals herself and let the strange poor child eat the worm-ridden horse apples instead.’

‘But that some galoot of a serf had seduced and impregnated this idiot savant of a virgin daughter? This taxed their ability to conceive of such a sin. Surely the Devil was at work, even in the mundane guise of a house servant.’

‘The priest and the father quizzed the old nurse in charge, who kept her bed in the scholars’ dormitory on the grounds of the adjacent church (the same church whose bells we hear so often) and was by day responsible for the child’s bathing, feeding, and toilet-making; only the old nurse was in possession of the big iron key to the girl’s door…the key you found on your bed, by the way, the very same historical key, in case you should ever want to lock your door for privacy one night…’ he winked at me ‘…and not even the father, the lord of the mansion, a former officer in the Prussian cavalry, with the saber scar and monocle and extravagant mustache to prove it…not even he had a key to his beautiful autistic daughter’s jail cell.’

I fantasized a barefoot Lola with shaved eyebrows and straw-littered hair, half into a dirndl and chained to the wall. I fantasized a saber-scarred father for her, creeping downstairs in a hooded cloak, letting himself quietly into his daughter’s cell with a frown of philosophical self-loathing.

Effenkuhl had paused to smirk wryly, as though enjoying the same fantasy. ‘No, not even the father had a key. Much to his relief, as it turns out. His wife would have put him first on the suspect’s list, no doubt. Anyway, the authorities tortured the old nurse energetically, to try to get a confession out of her…they were sure she’d been selling the shackled services of the daughter to craftsmen or seminarians or mercenary Prussian soldiers or whomever. But she never confessed. In fact, the old girl died of a heart attack on the fourth or fifth day of interrogations…by then it seemed quite obvious that she’d been telling the truth…whatever truth she could have mumbled, with her tongue crimped and branded, and all her bloody teeth yanked out.’

At that moment, the phone began ringing, and Effenkuhl excused himself and backed out of the room with a bow. It was 10 pm. I washed the remaining dishes while I waited for him to return and finish the story, but he didn’t, so I dried my hands, switched off the kitchen radio (enough Bach), put on my jacket and slipped out into the German night.

19.

Jet-lag reversed my sleep-logic, producing a photo-negative of the snapshot of my life as it had been in Southern California. Back there, I was up every morning, out on the daily walk to fetch Lola’s and my bakery breakfast, blinking at the bright marquee of the sorbet-and-acetylene dawn. And seventeen hours later, in bed again, back-to-back with Lola, tired and giving off a day’s worth of heat, re-converting quest into sleep as the moon pursued its parallel journey through the Pacific midnight’s absinthe.

I had a friend who liked to refer to So Cal sunsets as ‘Tijuana dinners,’ evoking the spice and splash of border town diarrhea. He’s an unpublished poet, living in an attic room in the house owned by his ex-girlfriend’s mother, and I was suddenly inspired to call him. The time difference would put it at about two in the afternoon in San Diego. Good old Ray. He always got a kick out of my adventures; he also had always wanted to fuck Lola, but how could I blame him for that? And thinking that made me want to call not Ray, of course, but Lola.

I walked up Uhland strasse in search of a pay phone. Uhland strasse is a wide long street of shops and cafes and bakeries, all closed at this hour, plus a handful of open-doored bars (kneipen), dark with leather upholstery and smoke and old denim and facial hair, and body-temp gallons of blood-colored beer. I walked by one every two or three blocks; I could hear the patrons barking and hacking over jukebox kraut-rock accordions, trying to make sense of the world by glugging a penny-flavored version of it. These are the real Germans, I was thinking. And I will never know one. They were frightening.

Just as I had never known a real American, because real Americans are frightening. The Americans I had known were all faux Europeans, faux Indians, faux Jamaicans, etc. And the Germans I would bother to know would be faux Americans; look at Doktor Effenkuhl, with his collection of Yankee catch-phrases.

Six blocks along, where Uhland Strasse crosses Berliner strasse, I found a pay phone…not in a booth, but on an aluminum post, under a flickering sign advertising the company that the equipment belonged to. Phone booths are on their way out, I guess; another obsolete corporate courtesy, like Customer Service. Fuck you in a rain-or-snow storm, is what Telekom seemed to be saying. Did I really want to use this thing? Then I noticed that the coin slot was jammed with backed-up pennies and the phone was unusable anyway.

I hurried up the street in search of the next one. The further I went without finding a pay phone, the more urgent my need to make that call, to hear Lola’s voice.

I became almost frantic, imagining that the call I might not make in time would have prevented Lola, for example, from answering a knock at the door from a handsome Mexican delivery boy with a box cutter in the back pocket of his too-tight jeans, who would find her alone in a bathrobe and seduce, then rape, then kill her.

Or, less horribly but more realistically, that my call would help her decide against falling in love with someone handsome, domineering and better than me who had begun already, in my absence, to insinuate himself into all the new gaps in her life…and if I didn’t make that call in the next few minutes…

The first time I ever saw Lola, it was a moment of déjà vu, because I had been expecting it for so long. She was sitting on the steps of the Opera house at Covent Garden, in London, smoking, and throwing bread at the pigeons. She wasn’t feeding the pigeons…she was throwing huge chunks of a hard baguette at them. She hit one and it staggered sideways, flapping with shock, and took off, and she cheered. She was the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen, with a boy-short platinum haircut, and big cracked lips. She was wearing a McDonald’s uniform. Then she took careful aim and hit another one.

I had been in Europe for three weeks at that point…still reeking of The States, but starting to get the hang of Europe, which struck me as one very large Bohemian neighborhood, after the suburbs of Minneapolis, or the open-air malls of Southern California. I had started by flying to Stockholm, hanging out there two weeks, then taking a ferry across The Baltic, to Germany. From Germany I flew to London.

Crossing the Baltic in a train was a thrill. The train, an old Czech monster, was loaded into the belly of the ferry at the port in Malmo late in the evening. I watched the loading with my head stuck out of a window in the sleeper car’s corridor. Flags were snapping and rippling from various masts and flagpoles that towered and teetered around the port. Stadium lights glared. We rolled on groaning wheels into the ferry.

I stood in the corridor and watched the procedure like a kid on his first train trip. I hadn’t expected this at all. I naively…Americanly…expected a bridge or a tunnel. But this: a train in a ferry. I was too surprised to be afraid. I didn’t think once of all the ferry sinkings I’d read about, or seen on World News. I just stood there in the narrow corridor with my head out the window, feeling free and alive for the first time in years. Everything seemed possible, and I had the feeling that sometime soon, I’d be meeting someone important. I can still remember the sense that the Future was rapidly approaching.

My compartment mate was out in the corridor with me. He was tall and thin, with the close-set eyes and beaky nose of a 40’s-era aristocrat; his mustache added to this impression; but there was something politely downtrodden, or washed-out, about him, that reeked of East German flat-bloc dweller. We never exchanged names, but made pleasant chit chat in a comradely fashion. He resembled the English actor Ralph Fiennes.

‘And how are you finding Europa?’

‘I’m finding the women sexy as Hell. You European guys are lucky.’

‘Lucky?’ He shrugged. ‘They aren’t interested in us.’

Our little sleeper compartment, equipped with dingy beds no longer than children, and with no efficient way for me to climb into my bunk without stepping on his, was a challenge that we faced together in good spirits. There was a tiny writing desk beside the curtained window that opened to reveal a sink (along with a stern warning in five non-English languages to avoid drinking the recycled water).

We stuck our heads out of the corridor window and breathed the eggy air of the Baltic, and I whispered a goodbye to Sweden, and a goodbye as well to the affair that had ruined the city for me. I purged my mind of the only Swedish I’d bothered to learn (“Jag pratar inte Svenska,” I don’t speak Swedish) and we rolled into the belly of the ferry and were swallowed by it, and its metallic groans and echoes, and the bluish odor of diesel fuel, and I was glad.

It was a good crisp night; I had been sweltering from Stockholm until Malmo, stuck in a sun-baked wagon with sixty other passengers and no air conditioning. I was relieved to change at Malmo, despite the burden of having to heave my large trunk off one train, and across the station, and onto the next. I left behind a Dane I’d been flirting with; a tall, young, bespectacled librarian with a razor-sharp wheat-blonde bob and a very pretty face that surprised me with the flattest profile I’d ever seen on a European. From the side she looked like a flaxen-haired Chinese giant. Was she The One I had come to Europe to meet?

We got off the train together and made our idle chatter, which shaded quickly into flirtatious adieu’s, when I was suddenly seized by an uncool panic because we were a hundred meters from the train and it dawned on me that I’d left my ticket on it. I stuck her there guarding my trunk while I dashed back through the crowd along the platform towards wagon number 2, seat number 17, which killed that fledgling romance. And it really struck me how easy a fledging romance it was to kill…one misstep on my part was enough to change the expression on her face. It was as though I had sneezed and left a translucent green web draped over my lips.

But then I felt fine, as I made my connection and rolled out of Malmo while hefting my trunk onto an overhead rack with help from Ralph Fiennes. I was now on a Czech-made renovated German-owned Mitropa train. I was suddenly infinitely more comfortable…I had stopped sweating and stinking of it…I felt more in control of my destiny; and the night, as I said, was crisp and clear and lit like a casino. We rolled into the ferry and could see only the industrial paint job of the belly of the ship, and the rivets in its seams, and stenciled specs and warnings.

I withdrew my head to avoid having it thunked by a girder we inched by and I ducked into the sleeping compartment to have a look at a brochure that had been placed on the little desk by the window. It was a menu, and I briefly considered spending Dm 7.90 on Sechs Nürnberger Rostbratwürstchen (mit Antioxidationsmittel und Geschmackverstärker) but thought better of it.

Ralph suggested we look for the toilets on an upper deck of the ship since the toilets on a train of this type are unusable if the train isn’t in motion over open track. We waited for the orange-vested brakemen to secure the train, and for the ship to slide into the Baltic, and then we stepped out into the floodlit container along a narrow walk beside the train. Everything was painted beige or red or black, and the ferry throbbed bone-jitteringly as the engines strained against the waves. There was nothing of the wobbly ride I had come to expect from using the little ferries that connect one neighborhood to another in Stockholm.

My bunk mate led the way, and shouldered through a heavy door that was stenciled with hieroglyphics referring to gift shops and casino’s and toilets, and I followed him up three or four flights of painted metal stair steps, and we let ourselves in to an upper deck that was full of people in casual clothing, strolling back and forth on dull red carpeting. We mingled with these people; the other passengers on the ferry.

Peculiar that I felt like a trespasser from steerage, since I’d crept up from the belly of the ship, when in fact I’d paid more for the ride then most of the passengers who’d boarded the ferry right there at the port. They were merely crossing the Baltic, whereas I had already covered a third of Sweden, and my journey was due to continue for hours after the ferry docked in Rostock. I was headed for Berlin, and had the rest of the night to go before the train was scheduled to ease into the Zoological Gardens, or Zoo Station, at around seven in the morning. From the Zoo Station I would have to find Tegel, where I was to catch a flight bound for London.

We found the toilet and separated with politely embarrassed smiles and vented our bladders. Outside the toilet again, we shook hands (a post-penis-handling shake, mind you) and I let him return to our sleeping compartment alone. He wanted to sleep through the crossing, but sleep was the last thing on my mind. I trusted him enough to let him alone for hours in that room with my backpack and trunk and most of my money, and I resolved to investigate the ship. It was unlikely I’d be crossing the Baltic again in the foreseeable future, so I wanted to make the most of my little adventure. It was funny that I should be coming from a state in America that was larger than most of the countries that my fellow passengers hailed from, and yet this ferry ride was my idea of a wild experience, while for them it was little more than an inconvenience of dreadful banality.

There were banks and banks of slot machines arranged along the promenade of deck seven, welded there cleverly to siphon off their coins, and heal their trans-Baltic boredom with simulations of Vegas.

In fact I sat there for a bit, in a row of chairs facing the slots, and watched some Polish auto worker in a pale gray track suit go from machine to machine, dumping in coins and winning jackpots. If he was a shill for the management I was the only audience to the spectacle, and I remained untempted to gamble, so the show was wasted on me. I just watched him pull the levers, set off the jingles of the jackpots, and slide on over to the next machine, with nothing more than raised eyebrows on his part to register the windfalls. It was either a miraculous night for him, or the jackpots are paid in pennies. I suppose I should have gotten a closer look.

Never having been on an Ocean Ferry before, I must admit I was uncertain about how to behave on one. I’d walk right up to the smudged glass doors that opened out onto the wind-washed deck but I’d content myself with merely peering through them at the blackness that seemed to rise up in an infinitely gentle curve above the ferry. Then I’d pace the concourse, and cross to the other side of the ship, and peer again, as tantalized by the outside elements as an insect in a jar. I was troubled by the fear that opening a set of these large double doors would set off an alarm, but then some sloppily dressed Russians with a moon-faced child in a slick red raincoat pushed through these very doors, squeezing by me, sauntering in from the prow of the ship, and set off no (audible) alarm.

It was fantastic out there. I was in California-style shorts, but bundled in a rubberized rain jacket, which features a hood, and it was perfect in the chilly weather of the Baltic. I had sweltered in the train from Stockholm wearing this jacket, and felt like a fool to have even brought it, but now I was vindicated. I was cozy and self-contained.

I had with me a British magazine…style and music and movies…and I found a deck chair beside a pair of teen age girls and settled in under the flood lights, and I began reading, or pretending to, running my fingers over the pictures but being too distracted to pay attention to the text. We were the only ones out there, the teen-aged girls and I. They were singing perfectly foreign pop songs in touchingly high and imperfect voices, and I couldn’t have been more delighted.

One was blonde and sweetly unremarkable and the other had her hair pinned-up and cheaply dyed a beet-red color that had been some kind of proletariat fashion statement in this part of Europe for fifteen years, and I relished the naïve energy that they blessed the prow of the ferry with. A thread-thin line of lights were dimly apparent on the German side of the water, looking like a hairline crack in the black flesh of the sky. The stars above us, unfortunately, were as invisible as anything at the bottom of the Baltic. But that didn’t keep me from being exhilarated.

In fact, there was another moment coming in which hand-made music and the night and bright lights would blend similarly to thrill me with a sense of life’s possibilities: a night in London, a week later, when I was crossing Leicester square on a Saturday night and I happened upon a combo of bryl-creamed street musicians…a sax and an upright bass and a guy thwacking a snare drum with brushes…playing the theme from A Hard Day’s Night in 5/4 time with un-ironic verve. Couples in white dinner jackets and evening gowns were flowing over the cobble-stoned square in droves, with British pomp-and-shyness, and London suddenly swung for me, if only for five minutes, but what a five minutes it was. I stayed up all night. I could feel it: I was getting closer. I was getting closer to whatever I had come to Europe for.

And now, here I was, watching this cruelly beautiful blond pelting pigeons with rock-hard bread. I felt it in my shortness of breath…the unsteadyness of the earth under me: this was Ground Zero. Fate rolled back the curtains with a drum roll.

She was It.

‘Now, that wasn’t very nice,’ I said, with a hungry grin, as I approached her. I had all the courage of a tourist. Pundits rarely cite that as the chief lure of travel, but I found it to be a powerful kick: the people in a foreign city don’t count, because they don’t know me, so I become fearless. And Trans-Atlantic travel is the world’s easiest acting job; just being there implies that you have the time to; that you have the money.

‘Nice is crap,’ she retorted, shading her eyes from the sun as she looked up at me. She spoke very slowly, with a voice as deep as my own, and an accent as thick and white as marzipan. ‘You are reminding me of someone.’

‘I am reminding you of someone good or bad?’

‘Bad. Very bad.’ She shot a chunk of baguette with a vicious flick of her wrist, ‘But I loved him.’ Wap. A pigeon slid sideways across the paving stones, blinking.

I sat down, reaching for some of her ammo, and tried my hand at hitting the pigeons. I wasn’t good at it, and soon wasted all of her bread, but it was a thrill, a nasty treat, just trying to hit one. I was born in Minneapolis. Minneapolis is the World capitol of Have a Nice Day. They’re nice to animals there. I sensed that she had something to teach me.

She stood up and excused herself, grinding out her cigarette, and ran down the stairs, disappearing around a corner before I could ask her her name. I thought: shit. Lunch break is over. I was paralyzed with disappointment until she reappeared five minutes later, another baguette tucked under her arm.

‘Fresh baguette,’ I observed.

‘Wrong. Day old. Cheaper! Harder.’ She broke it into brittle fifths, and stacked them in a pile beside her. Then she fastidiously swept the crumbs from the lap of her uniform. She was incredibly beautiful, even in that uniform. ‘I do this every day for the lunch break.’

I said, with a hint of incredulity: McDonald’s. She said, with a hint of incredulity: yup.

I watched her hit another pigeon, like kicking an old valise, raising dust. A very tall woman in a pink pant suit, stooping to hold the hand of what appeared to be a day-care-age albino in miniature Jesus sandals and overalls and over-sized cartoon sunglasses, was watching, too, from the other side of the square. Then she started crossing towards us with a frown, slowed in her progress by the rubber-legged child.

I said, while staring at the grown-up who drew inexorably nearer, ‘You’re not British. Why are you working at a McDonald’s in London?’

She shrugged and squinted. ‘Escaping.’

‘From?’

She closed her eyes. ‘Germany.’

‘You didn’t escape very far.’

‘Not finished yet.’

‘Escaping can be a life-long occupation.’

‘Escaping can be a life.’

‘That was a deeper philosophical remark than I would have expected from a girl wearing a MacDonald’s uniform.’

‘Yup.’

‘Do you understand it when I say complicated things to you in English?’

‘Don’t have to.’

‘You just say ‘yup.’’

‘Yup.’

‘Saying ‘yup’ to everything could get you into a lot of trouble, miss.’

‘I am aware what sentences not to say ‘yup’ to, sir.’ She grunted and the heavy crust she then flicked made a whiffling sound like an arcane Chinese weapon and hit a pigeon so hard that it flopped over, pedaling, like it was doing the back-stroke. ‘Any sentence with the words fuck, suck, horny, or we in it, I don’t say ‘yup’ to. Alles klar?’

I shrugged: seems reasonable! I said: I’m Salter. She said: Me Lola.

I’d never felt so free, and confident, and careless about consequences. I’d never even spoken with such a beautiful girl before, and she was making it easy for me because I was American, and could offer her The Grand Canyon, or Honolulu, or Hollywood, and I was naively up to the challenge. I cleared my throat and looked her dead in the eye and steeled myself against blinking. I somehow knew that if I blinked, all was lost. I said, loud enough for her to hear me at that distance, ‘Wanna get married?’

A couple of large plaid tourists were just then ambling by, and mistook my proposal for a romantic moment, a memory they could impose themselves on, so they stopped to gawk at us. Nosy Nebraskans. Bangor-based busy-bodies.

‘Come on now, honey, say yes to the man!’ urged the fattest of the two, the male, with a big-lensed camera slung from his neck like a Japanese dream penis. He hefted the camera and stroked the lens with a cajoling twist of his wrist as he aimed it first at Lola, then me. His wife in her tartan mu-mu had her hands on her hips, smiling with a frown of impatience. They were both wearing green sun visors. He gestured for Lola and me to sit closer together.

I flipped them a two-handed bird, and Lola pelted them with baguette, until they backed off and waddled away in a thigh-banging rush, hands up, making sounds like things with blow-holes, with shocked looks on their faces. Lola spat and said ‘I fed those two couch-killers a bucket of French fries already this morning’ and unpinned her McDonald’s name tag and tossed it at me.

Catching it, I impaled myself on its open pin; it was stuck. I pulled it out and a berry swelled in the palm of my right hand. I tossed the name tag away. I scooted up close to Lola and showed her my wound in a childish pantomime of suffering, like a test to call forth in her either the Virgin Mary, or the Magdalene, and it was the Magdalene that I got. The Magdalene took my hand, glanced at its stigmata, and let it fall. She lit a cigarette. She said:

‘That’s nothing, husband,’ and blew the smoke in my face. ‘Just wait.’

20.

She had such boyish hips that it made me feel homosexual, fucking her, especially with the low octave of her smoke-flavored moans, and also as I found myself fantasizing in a black fever that our doggie positions were penetratively anal in execution, rather than vaginal, though I didn’t have the courage to try that, stroking and clutching and shuddering over the pink missile of her soft body as I bumped my way into her. I fucked her the way the poor behave at a fancy banquet, stuffing their faces and coat pockets; never straying too far from the buffet; looking asinine with gratitude, guilt, avarice, fear.

Lola loved California, and California loved Lola.

Her breasts were so big, in comparison to the gamine circumference of her waist, that they embarrassed me, as though by just being a part of our sex life they had exposed something trite and crude and bovine in me, in my libido. I stared at those breasts, and, catching me staring, they accused me.

They accused me in a lather through the faceted glass of the shower when I took my long arcing piss every morning; they accused me on Black’s beach, the nudist Gay spot in San Diego where we spent most weekends sunning; they accused me from under one of her ragged t-shirts at the breakfast table, while also eroticizing the gray milk in her cereal bowl, and everything else in the room. Those swollen, dark, wide-apart and accusing eyes; the milky tears they would never cry. They accused me while Lola slept and I stealthily uncovered her. Leave me be! They pleaded. Stop staring! Those big unblinking eyes on her chest. Those touchy masses. Counter-weights.

It’s too much for a human to bear. Humans should be ideas, not objects. There’s a terrible tension between the human dream of being just that, an idea, a principle, and the terrible reality: that a human is really just a thing, a mass and a volume, perfectly described with handfuls of trivial measurements. A structure, with features; with systems and mechanisms; with equipment. What were Lola’s tits but equipment? Where did they end, and Lola begin?

I hadn’t at first even noticed them as she was wearing that over-sized McDonald’s smock when we met. Maybe I wouldn’t have had the courage to approach her if they’d been clear to me from the beginning. It was her face that mesmerized me initially; but then, when I knew her, the teats took over. Yes, I’m ashamed! Not of myself, but of them. Those inertial, alabaster, lavender-eye’d, blue-veined things. They were and are, literally, galactic.

I’ve always doubted the science behind the theory that men fancy big breasts because of an Evolutionary imperative (nursing copiously at the apparatus of a large-breasted woman, her offspring has a greater chance of survival, is how the reasoning goes): if preferring larger breasts is an Evolutionary strategy, why are large-breasted women the exception, rather than the rule? How could the gene for medium-to-smaller-sized breasts enjoy such overwhelming dominance, still, if higher survival rates rested, from time immemorial, on the side of mammoth knockers? (Though it’s true that human females have the largest breast-to-body-mass ratio in the entire mammal family).

The explanation for the Canonical Fantasy Dominance of the D-cup in contemporary Western Civilization, I think, is simpler: people always want what they can’t have. They dream what they don’t know. Most men are with women with medium-to-small breasts, because most women have medium-to-small breasts; therefore, most men want women with large breasts. Likewise, men with large-breasted women dream of small-breasted women; however, they don’t, in every case, act on the fantasy of exchanging the one for the other, most probably because of the status they enjoy in the eyes of men who have small-breasted women. It’s a vicious circle.

Or it could be that men didn’t start hankering after dirigible-class mammaries until the advent of color photography; of the mass-market glossy magazine; of sophisticated slo-mo effects in video.

I wish there were equally frivolous female aesthetical prejudices deforming a man’s ‘value’ in the mating game, but there aren’t. Women prefer men with money, which makes perfect sense, unfortunately. It’s a wonder that poor men ever get to fuck at all. And, of course, until the middle of the 20th century, they didn’t.

It’s fashionable for people these days to treat ‘The Sixties’ as a delightful but ridiculous era that ended up changing nothing…a mere glitch in the data stream of history. But The Sixties changed everything for the Poor Man…The Sixties was the Era in which the Poor Man was given the right to Fuck.

But wait.

An important detail that will surprise you. Two important details.

It took me two years to see Lola’s boobs naked; two years before I could fuck her. It took me that long before I hefted and harried and chafed and boxed and coddled and nursed and teased and wrestled and nuzzled her…them. The time span between the day Lola and I first met, when I proposed marriage on the steps of the Opera house at Convent Garden, and the day we met again, in America, was two years. A few weeks short of two. And until the day I saw her again, I’d heard nothing, not a post card, not a peep, and the very night of the day I saw her again, we were lovers. Before that, I’d almost forgotten about her. ‘Almost’ meaning not at all.

It was that gray-haired bitch in the pink pant suit; the bitch with the hemophiliac son; Mrs. Fortney, who fucked me up. Fucked us up. It was her fault. She’d seen Lola blasting the pigeons and so she’d crossed the square, I presumed, in order to give us a righteous tongue lashing on behalf of her son and the animals and all things helpless and innocent. Instead:

‘Not to be a frightful bother, but have you ever considered modeling professionally?’ Completely ignoring me.

Lola, shaking her head: ‘Are you the lesbian, lady?’

‘No, I’m not,’ she said, without anger, impressively unruffled, and added, ‘This is my son Roderick,’ and skinless pink Roderick ducked in pinker terror behind his mother’s pink pantaloons, ‘And my husband Simon and I own and run Black Forest Furs, on Oxford Street. Do you know it?’

Without waiting for a polite affirmative she continued ‘And the point is, it’s a frightful chore, really, trying to find a decent model willing to wear fur these days; the silly tits all suddenly think they’re animal rights activists! It’s such a bore, and I couldn’t help noticing…with those filthy birds you were tormenting just now…’

Lola coughed out several hacked-up lung-sized zephyrs of nicotine, laughing, ‘You saw me hurting the doves and thought, this girl, she don’t give a shit!’

‘Well, yes, quite,’ said Mrs. Fortney, stooping to scoop up her squirming little Roderick, ‘I mean to say, you’re hardly a card carrying member of PETA, now, are you?’ With her free hand, she handed Lola a silver business card. ‘Anyone who tells you it’s a ‘career’ is taking the piss, and no mistake. You enter at the middle and stay there; there’s absolutely no future in it. It’s money; piles of it, that’s all. It’s pots of cash for practically no work. That’s why it attracts the worst sorts, you see. Do it for five years and you can retire, if you’re smart. We need a new girl for our Fall campaign and you’ll do nicely.’ She nodded appraisingly at Lola, going hmmmmm and hmmmm, and then, to herself: ‘Oh, yes, this one will come up a treat.’

Mrs. Fortney stood straight, smoothing the wisps of her Roderick’s staticky white dandelion of hair, and prepared to say ta ta. ‘One thing: Simon, my husband. You will meet him, and the poor dear will try to make a pass at you. You’re his type. Just tell him no. It’s easy! I promise you he’s incredibly resistible. All men are.’ And here I could say that she smiled at me wickedly, but she never once bothered to glance my way.

‘Ta ta.’

And off she went, in a whirlwind of no-nonsense, bearing her Roderick away like an expensive bouquet of recessive traits.

Lola was busy methodically ripping the pockets off of her McDonald’s smock after Mrs. Fortney made her exit. Growling as she ripped the cloth. She boasted to me, grunting with effort, ‘Now I don’t…must to work…at McDonalds…or marry you, neither, so…I’m the lucky…girl,’ offering me a conciliatory cigarette from her box of Camels, which I declined, ‘But anyway leave your address in The States on the back here, just in case you never know.’ (Hard to believe this happened five years ago!)

She handed me Mrs. Fortney’s card; I took it obediently and printed my address in California on the back. I just happened to have a pen in my pocket, because that’s what I was doing at Covent Garden in the first place, trying to pick up girls.

And what was the second? The second surprising detail…about Lola…when she finally came to California to be with me, two years later?

She was a virgin.

21.

Three pay phones in four square miles, and all of them broken. By the time I found one, a phone booth, containing a phone that actually worked (apparently), I was lost, it was nearly midnight, and the booth was already occupied…by a black man. Which explains why I stood there, outside the booth, for the longest time, glancing at my watch and coughing, waiting. Though the man in the booth wasn’t even using the phone, but was standing there with his back to me, reading under a ditsy galaxy of gnats.

When he finally turned and noticed me, I had been standing there for ten minutes, feeling desperate. He swung the booth door open. ‘Waiting for the phone, man? Shit! I’m sorry! How long you been standing there?’

He was laughing. He was wearing what looked like a billowy dark pirate shirt, open to the navel, and a car key for an ear ring. Why is it that men who wear pirate shirts, open to the navel, always stand a certain way, with their hands on their hips, and their feet spread wide, like Gene Kelly?

He said ‘Sorry!’

I shrugged that it was okay and we exchanged places. He asked me if I’d be long (‘Gonna be a long one, he he he?’) because he was waiting for a call and I said, no, just a few minutes; I was calling The States and couldn’t afford to talk for very long anyway.

The States? He asked, with a hungry look on his face. Whereabouts? I told him California and he whistled, like I’d quoted an impossible sum. I closed the door and noticed that the booth was deep in his not unpleasant odor: sweat and roses.

After all that trouble, all I got was Lola’s answering machine, which needled me with a brand new me-less message, the outgoing message of a beguiling single woman, nobody’s doormat, grouching ‘I’m probably here but I don’t want to talk. Take your chances.’ Beeeeeep.

At least she didn’t sound happy.

‘That was a quickee, he he he,’ said my new black friend when I backed out of the booth. ‘No news is good news, right?’

‘I got the answering machine. Do you know Berlin pretty well?’

‘I uh got the path I always take to avoid the shit I always uh avoid, he he he.’

‘Because I’m lost.’

‘Hello, Lost, he he he.’’

He was very black, with a shaved head that gleamed like state of the art equipment, reflecting every single one of a row of street lights that hung over the dark little street we were standing on, a curving meridian of pearls in his skull, and he had hands like graceful birds. He was small but his gestures made him seem big. I could see that women would find him attractive without him having to work at it; that smooth vinyl chest to lie on; those graceful black birds to tease you. I assumed of course that his penis made mine look useless in comparison. He had the nerve to tell me that his name was Lord Johnson.

‘Don’t look at me, man, blame my parents. L-o-r-d Johnson! It’s on my passport; check it out! Not the uh freakiest name! But uh try being black and going through…Heathrow Airport with it! He he he.’

‘Ok, uh, the story behind the name. Pops told it to me when I was a kid and like I still don’t know if he was joking? Man, that dude was always joking. Hey, jokes are a form of abuse, too! What’s a joke but a funny lie?’

He shook his head sadly. Then he brightened up again; his eyes were like headlights.

‘Like, I was a natural child birth, with, uh, a Mexican midwife. Okay? I took my time coming out…I wasn’t stupid, he he he. Thirty six hours, man! My parents were black hippies who kinda hung out on the fringe of a, like, celebrity crowd in Santa Monica. Pops was what you’d call a black-light artist. Black light paintings of Bruce Lee and Hendrix and Pam Grier naked and whatnot. He trucked his masterpieces to headshops all along the coast in his, like, royal chariot, a VW Beetle van! What you’d call a cottage industry, he he he. Pops tried his hand at uh an underground comic which he financed with his own bread featuring this freaky uh Super Hero called ‘Not Quite Gigantic Man!’ Which, like, never caught on.’

‘My Moms was like a professional topless extra in various drive-in flicks of the 70s. She was in a big movie called ‘Cotton Comes to Harlem.’ Yeah? Plus stuff on television with all her clothes on after they started putting lots and lots of black folks on TV. She even made regular appearances on this show called ‘Mannix?’

‘Okay. ‘Not Quite Gigantic Man’ flops and uh Pops loses his grip. Accuses Moms of sleeping with ‘Mannix’!’, check it out! Pops goes AWOL, I guess I’m glad he didn’t, you know, honor kill her like a Muslim brother or some shit he he he. Five solid years, man, Pops was a no-show. I’m like, Mommy, where’s Daddy? And she’s like all, you are not to mention that word around this house, boy. Then, uh. He, uh. Comes back. Right? New walk, new haircut, new everything! Shit! We didn’t even recognize him!’

‘Anyway, my name. The story! It goes…drum roll…Moms is in labor, I’m preparing for my debut, the big entrance! And now, straight from a successful sold-out engagement in the womb…My mother screamed. You know: tight pussy; big head. Everybody just…uh…used to call my Daddy by his last you know…name. Johnson this, Johnson that. Like ‘Lenin.’ Dig? So I’m like squeezing through and she’s screaming and cussing…’

He tilted his head back and changed his face to imitate his mother howling on her back as she delivered him:

‘Lord, Johnson, what have you done to me!?’

Then he shrugged and winked.

‘And it…uh…stuck.’

22.

That morning I had a terrible dream that Lord Johnson was fucking Lola with a special method that everyone knew about but me, a technique from China that involved exotic spices, and specially applied steaming-hot towels, and if it was done exactly right, this method, then a woman’s arms, or her legs, would fall off. But the orgasm would be intense. It was obvious, in the dream, that Lord Johnson was collecting the arms and legs of white women.

I was pleading with Lola not to go through with this dangerous and crippling procedure, but she was adamant, completely under Lord Johnson’s sinister power, and she made me feel bothersome and ridiculous to be worrying them with my sad little nigglings while she and Lord Johnson, a real man, were in pursuit of this once-in-a-lifetime ecstasy together. Every objection to this grisly sexual procedure I came up with she mocked with baby talk, and I woke in tears, groping for her in the daylit room where the autistic daughter of 18th century German aristocrats had once been chained to the wall, pregnant.

23.

Every day in Berlin that went by uneventfully felt like a criticism; every week added to a mounting debt that I’d never be able to repay. Repay to whom? My own sense of self? A vacation is one thing, because it starts with a known limit, a terminus; the end-point gives it a shape, the shape makes it a pleasure. But here I was, in a foreign country, open-ended, floating. What was the point, the plan, the method? Did I have any goals in mind? What was my story? All I had was the pain in my chest over Lola. I wanted her ‘back,’ but had I ever had her? And my wanting her, I saw, was like any dirt poor American living in a rent-it-by-the-week hotel near a bus station and dreaming of hitting the big time one day. A flop.

I once sat on a bus in Minneapolis behind a grizzled scratchy couple who spent the whole ride describing what they’d spend the fortune on if they won the lottery, and the conversation ended in a nasty fight when the guy finally announced, with his nose up, that with his last million he’d buy a yacht that no one else, not even she, was allowed on. And now I felt like one of them, a pathetic dreamer, fretting over unavailable options.

I woke every day around six pm, thrummed like iron myself by the evening church bells, and went to bed again at ten the next morning, and rarely spoke to anyone but Doktor Effenkuhl, who was not always talkative after a day of administering his Psychotherapy. I did nothing but eat, walk, sleep, excrete, and wash the dishes.

Something seemed broken. Something was wrong with Time; it felt as though existence could only be discussed in the past tense, and that the world was a difficult memory exercise, or a jumble of old stories in the care of a halting, stuttering narrator.

What had once seemed like just one of an almost infinite variety of emotions or activities to choose from now struck me as being the only option: Nostalgia.

Memories were no longer being manufactured freshly, but only recycled. Nostalgia was a musty veil over everything. I couldn’t breathe. The permanent twilight and musty air and airless gasps of Nostalgia. Had this awful feeling been triggered entirely by my break-up with Lola? Was this an idiosyncratic misery, or a Cardinal Glitch?

I was on this particular dismal train of thought while washing the dishes one night. Doktor Effenkuhl was sitting at the kitchen table, reading a very old newspaper (his policy was never to read any newspaper that was less than ‘cured’ of the news, that is: at least six months old), when we both heard a terrible noise. It seemed to be coming from the upstairs neighbor’s apartment. Doktor Effenkuhl put down his paper and scowled at the ceiling, as though reading particularly offensive graffiti on it, until the noise repeated itself.

‘Frau Schivelbeiner,’ said Doktor Effenkuhl, disgusted. ‘Have you ever known a woman with more than one cat…who didn’t have a sexual problem?’

‘Was that sound Frau Schivelbeiner, or one of her cats?’

We both waited for the awful sound to repeat itself, and when it did, Doktor Effenkuhl nodded, but I was the one who spoke.

‘New boyfriend?’

‘Ah, but it’s always the same one, you see,’ he said, resuming with his paper. ‘And that’s why it’s so monotonous, although his name, height, color and age may vary. He does what he wants with her for two weeks and then leaves. Then he comes back, after a polite interval, with a new face, a new voice, a new joke, and starts all over again. And she doesn’t even have the imagination, or the decency, to invent a new name for him! She always calls him Schnecke!’

He said: ‘There’s an old joke. Women are shallow and cruel when they’re young, and clinging and bitter when old…and men are just the reverse.’

I picked up the dish towel. ‘Well, I hope she’s in love, at least…’

Doktor Effenkuhl stared at me over the hedge of his paper for a good long time before saying ‘That’s exactly like hoping she’s insane.’

He continued, ‘Using sex to express ‘love’ is like using a Porsche for a nutcracker.’

He said ‘Why do you suppose it is that the average woman has three times more reason to fear physical harm at the hands of her lover, in her own home, than from a complete stranger? A lover thinks: I want to own and control what you are, and what you do. A passionate lover thinks: as long as you are useful to me, I’ll let you live.’

I had my back to him, scrubbing an expensive pot. ‘Do you really see it that way, Doktor Effenkuhl?’

The Doktor ignored this question and continued, ‘Love is just a secular replacement for God. First, it was Secular Humanist Love, and then it was Romantic Love, and, now, Total Freedom is already gradually replacing both of those. Do you believe for one moment that human emotions are immutable? There were emotions available twenty generations ago that we no longer even have words for. A reptile climbs on a rock and looks at the sun: what ‘emotion’ is it experiencing?’

He put his year-old newspaper away, folding and replacing it in a stack on the cabinet under the kitchen window behind him. ‘That is the kind of purity I am interested in, ja?’

He glanced at his watch impatiently, and, within seconds, as though prompted, the phone rang, and he left the room to answer it.

24.

Coincidentally, when I let myself out of the flat for my nightly walk (my nightly attempt to phone Lola), clutching a sack of garbage, I met Frau Schivelbeiner in the stairwell. She was a tiny handsome gray-haired German woman with a wide, high-cheek-boned face, in black silk Pyjamas and stiletto heels. A rhinestone crucifix sparkled coolingly on the brown-to-pink papyrus of her breastbone. The freckles on her over-tanned skin looked like pepper. It looked like it would burn my tongue if I licked her.

I was twisting the key in Doktor Effenkuhl’s front door lock (he was out for the night) when she surprised me by speaking, clomping towards me down the stairs. German neighbors rarely speak to each other in the stairwell, is what I had gathered. But here she was, speaking! Unfortunately, her overture was in German, and I had to pantomime my perfect ignorance with a frown and a shrug. So she repeated herself in English.

‘Oh, excuse me. I did not realize that we had an American in the building! I only wanted to apologize just now for my cat. She is making an awful racket these days…’

Before thinking, I said, ‘That noise was your cat?’

She frowned. ‘Yes.’ She purred, fingering her crucifix. ‘Schnecke.’

25.

Frau Schivelbeiner’s daughter was home for awhile from college; back from an exchange program in The States; and Schnecke, a fourteen year old thirty-five pound Siamese with a bald spot on her shoulders (from squeezing under a low cabinet in the master bathroom for all those years), was jealous.

I said, because it was a safe thing to say: Yes: cats are like people.

Frau Schivelbeiner asked after Doktor Effenkuhl: was he okay? He’d lost so much weight, she said.

‘Really?’

‘Oh yes, he used to be quite heavy. Well, not fat, of course. But large. Larger than you.’ She looked at me closely. ‘Are you the brother in America?’

‘No. He has a brother in America?’

‘He said so once, yes. A brother, and a sister, in America. The brother is a writer, I think.’

Frau Schivelbeiner was standing beside me in front of the big blue dumpster in the back courtyard, her arms folded over her sparrow-like, elegant chest. She was a very fast talker.

‘But he’s lost quite a bit of weight. I was afraid that he was very sick. Not that we are friends, so much….’ She lowered her voice. ‘The people in this building are not so friendly. It is quite okay, of course, because everyone here is respectful. But I have lived in Philadelphia, with my ex-husband, Jenny’s father. He was American. And I became accustomed to the American way. One’s neighbors knew a certain amount of one’s business, and one knew a certain amount of theirs. It was friendlier, but sometimes awkward.’

‘For example, our upstairs neighbor, a Puerto Rican woman named Glenda Velasquez, knocked on our door at ten one night and asked to use the telephone. Hers had been shut off because of a big long distance bill from calling her father in Puerto Rico all the time that she hadn’t paid for in over three months. She said, very casually, that she just needed to make a quick call to a Recovered Memory Hotline because she had just remembered that her father had sexually abused her as a child, and then she offered me a quarter for the call! The memory had been triggered by a special report on the six o’clock news! What could I say? I must admit, at this moment I began to admire the German policy of respectful distances.’

Frau Schivelbeiner raised her eyebrows at me. She put a hand on my arm. ‘She told me that her elderly father had put things in her! A pickle! A Barbie Doll! Can you imagine confessing that to a stranger?’

‘I knew more about my American neighbors in Philadelphia after a few months living there than my own mother ever knew about my father the forty years they were married together! But that didn’t slow them down. On the contrary, it probably helped. I’m here, aren’t I? And I’m the youngest of ten children.’ She winked at me. She had conjured, in one innocent sentence, a montage of ten simultaneous tight-lipped fuckings. ‘Ten!’

I must have looked at her without blinking for ten seconds too long, because she looked right back at me.

I said, ‘Is your daughter upstairs?’

‘No.’ She kissed the crucifix. ‘She is staying with friends tonight.’

26.

Is self-awareness a form of insanity? Is culture an altar to madness? Animals are proto-rational, in that what they do always makes sense, unless they are badly damaged, mentally…and I wonder if animals who exhibit strong signs of neurosis are therefore, like man, self-aware?

Schnecke was growling and popping and hissing, from her vantage point at the top of a very tall chest of drawers, the whole time I was having intercourse with her friend Frau Schivelbeiner, who was sitting as straight-spined as a Yogi on me, gasping. We were balanced on the edge of her giant red bed.

Consequently, Frau Schivelbeiner frequently shouted ‘Schnecke!’ during the act, to admonish the cat, but her complaints sounded like cries of amorous abandon instead, punctuated with her gasps. I could see the top edge of the electrified black outline of the beast in the shadow just under the ceiling, but Frau Shivelbeiner’s back was to her, so her face was turned half away from me as she bounced on my lap, calling out ‘Schnecke!’ until it felt not a little like a menage-a-trois. And the raking red scratches in neat diagonal stripes down my back I finally walked out of her flat in the middle of the night with only added to this impression.

Despite her claws, she was a tiny, fragile, lovely thing in my lap. Her skin was smooth; she was fifty! Strangely, and grotesque in a sexy way, all of her wrinkles had furled to her groin, as though smoothed down from the top of her forehead with an iron, until her groin was as brown and hairless and wrinkled as a dune. Her breasts were just welts, and I bit them, and she bit mine; she tipped me back and rode me with her hair on my face like a veil, and I stuck my thumb in her arse, and she monkey-see, monkey-do’d this hospitable gesture until I cried out for her to stop. Or not to. Until I.

‘I’m sorry you couldn’t come,’ I whispered, while she ground my squashed penis into my belly with her sopping pelvis. I cupped her narrow waist between my hands, and her muscles shifted under her skin, under my fingertips, as though I was holding a snake.

‘But I was coming the entire time!’ she whispered back, biting my ear, and I loved this poetic lie.

‘May I spend the night?’ I asked gallantly.

‘No; my husband will be back in a while!’

‘Your husband! I thought you were divorced!’

‘I am…from my first two husbands. My third is still around. He won’t like this.’

I thought: Doktor Effenkuhl doesn’t know a thing about this woman!

27.

One night as I lay in Frau Schivelbeiner’s arms I could hear, under us, muffled shouting.

‘Almost every night,’ she whispered. ‘He is for hours on the phone…shouting, laughing…some times he weeps!’ She was talking about Doktor Effenkuhl. ‘And Always in English. This is what puzzles me.’

All we could hear of Effenkuhl’s shouting was the carrier-wave of anger…the words were smooth hot blurs that rose to his ceiling and squeezed, dissipating, through Frau Schivelbeiner’s floor. I couldn’t have said what language he was raving in.

‘How can you tell it’s in English?’ I asked, before lowering my mouth to a breast. She slid from under me and slinked across the moon-blue bedroom like a naked show girl, her silver bob seeming to float, a magician’s corny trick, and then she kneeled in a corner, pushing a chair, from which Schnecke had been glowering, to the side. Scnhecke pulsed out of the room as though yanked by a string. Schivelbeiner (she asked me to call her that…I still don’t know her first name) fussed with something that sounded like Velcro for a moment and then told me to join her on the floor. I followed in a crouch, dragging my snoozing penis.

In the baseboard was an opening, a rough-hewn rectangle the size of a post card, that had been covered with cardboard and duct tape. Schivelbeiner pressed her lips to my ear, holding my head with gentle hands, and explained.

‘A very long time ago, in another century, this building was all one house…a one-family dwelling for the rich. Downstairs, where your Doktor Effenkuhl has his flat, were the servant quarters…in Dokotor Effenkuhl’s bedroom especially it is very dark. In the old days, to channel sunlight to the lower floors…’

‘I know,’ I whispered back. ‘Camera obscura.’

‘Precisely. And the tunnels in this building which once carried sunlight, they now carry sound.’

‘And so you kneel some nights by this hole in the hall and listen?’ I said with a chuckle.

I could feel her turn red in the darkness…the spreading heat of it near my cheek. ‘One is curious,’ she smiled back. Then she put a finger across my lips.

‘Who is he?’ we could hear Effenkuhl shouting. ‘Tell me who he is so I can kill him!’

‘Don’t give me that bullshit!’

‘Oh, really?’

‘Yes, of course! Certainly!’

Then, after a long interval, ‘SPARE ME YOUR FAIRYTALES! DO YOU TAKE ME FOR ONE OF YOUR FOOLS?’

It was a turn-on, his rage…my penis stirred and stiffened to it. Having just finished fucking Schivelbeiner, I undertook to commence a second helping of her. I slipped behind her like a college wrestler, a hand on her shoulder, the other clutching her waist, and found new moisture under what at first seemed dry as an old river bed. Warm silt gradually gave way to the river Styx. The side of Schivelbeiner’s face was pressed to the cold wall, and the profile I could see looked almost alien with pleasure. But still I wondered, as I churned my steady beat in her, my slow blues, mining endorphins, if sex wasn’t really just something that women generously provided to the addicted gender, as opposed to a craving men wanted to believe we all shared.

Fucking her was like swimming upstream against all the years that were packed in her body…packed so dense that plugging and unplugging her the way I was doing…my cock in her pussy; my thumb in her ass; caused them to explode out over us. In the dark room I hallucinated a swirling stream of heat and color hissing out of her. In the dark her profile against the wall…with her eyes shut, her mouth open… looked so much softer, younger…more valuable. Any man who doesn’t feel at least a little love for a woman who does this for him, at least while she’s doing it, I was thinking…

Her ass was a fat fist at my groin, a fist with one knuckle, a fist with two holes in it. I pulled out of the lower hole and held her firm while adjusting, and then I tucked myself into the other hole, forcing my head with the flat of my thumb. Met with a sandy resistance initially. Deep in, I didn’t last five seconds before the shocking heat and her involuntary writhing slammed me with a stabbing orgasm that made us both howl, Schivelbeiner’s mouth just inches from the hole in her baseboard, a blended howl that sounded like a radical political slogan with all of the consonants sucked out, until Doktor Effenkuhl banged his ceiling with a broom handle.

Afterwards, back in bed (after I took a discreet trip to her WC to rinse two streaks of her shit off of my still-hard penis), we were talking, in chastened tones, about this and that.

Of course, I wanted to talk about Lola, who had become my great subject, but I couldn’t think of an easy way of broaching it; I couldn’t think of a polite or at least a smooth way to introduce another female into the conversation I was having with this naked woman with whom I’d just done so much. Where would I find the nerve to begin? But I was dying to.

I must have been leaving clues as we chatted, significant sighs and pauses, because, at some point, in the middle of an abstract philosophical conversation about ‘relationships,’ Frau Schivelbeiner suddenly said, in a didactic tone, ‘The day I crossed the line of becoming an ‘older woman,’ it became clear to me that a big part of my sex life would involve lying post-coitally in the arms of younger men, discussing younger women.’

She got up on one elbow.

‘It’s okay if one sees it as a natural law, I suppose. If one doesn’t take it any more personally than one would take the fact that exposure to air inevitably turns a sliced apple brown.’

‘An older woman is invariably a second choice, like a handsome man is the second choice for a woman who would have preferred a rich one, or a kind man is the second choice for a woman who would have preferred a handsome one.’

She thought awhile.

‘Or, honestly put, a kind man is always the third choice. My current husband, for example, is a kind man! My third husband is my third choice: this is very neat, and logical, because my first husband was rich, and when that didn’t work out, I tried my second husband, who was handsome. But I don’t feel cursed, because most women never do any better than to begin and end with the fourth choice, which is a man who is at least a man, and not a woman! So we all know what the fifth choice is…’

Here she laughed.

‘But I’m getting off the point. My point is, if you feel like talking about some young woman in your life for whom sex with me is the best substitute at the moment, feel free to; I have only one restriction, one demand.’

‘You can talk about her all you want, but you can’t say a damn thing about her looks, or anything physical about her. Only her personality. Nothing about her face or her body or even the smell of her hair in the morning! Nothing about the eyes or the voice, which men, feeling crafty, believe counts as somehow more spiritual features of the female to get horny about!’

‘Talk about your absentee goddess all you want, but restrict herself to what counts, which is her soul, her dreams, her special personality features, and I’ll be happy to listen.’

She lay back, flat on her back beside me, and said, ‘I’m all ears.’

After the extremely long silence that intervened, I got dressed, we hugged, and I tip-toed out of her apartment.

28.

I was beginning to hate Berlin, and I hadn’t seen a thing of it. The night was a cage, the bars of which were the German language. I never went shopping: Doktor Effenkuhl provided the food. I rarely saw daylight: I was sleeping through it. I never met people, but only shared dark side streets with nervous strangers who coughed as they passed me.

I needed desperately to speak with Lola, if only for a few minutes, but she never answered the phone. Worse: I didn’t even have the option of leaving a message anymore, because her answering machine had been disconnected. When I dialed her number, her phone just rang and rang and rang.

29.

I spent a week writing a story, a short story about Lola, and I mailed the result to her. Slightly more than a week after posting it, I began anticipating the arrival of the mail every day, waking to the postman’s heavy boots in the stairwell, the tumult of bills and catalogues through the slot, the sound of Effenkuhl lumbering out from the kitchen to nose a shoe-tip through the pile before stooping for the best pieces. And everyday the same awful news, announced in a merciless silence: nothing for me.

I went back to sleeping through the day.

30.

One evening I awoke slightly later than usual to find the flat empty, the kitchen radio on and playing Bach again. I entered the kitchen to turn off the radio and wash the dishes when I noticed, on the table, what looked like pages from a manuscript, with binder-ring holes along the left margin. Beside this document on the table was an almost-full cup of coffee with a cloud of cream floating in it, and a dish on which several cookies were stacked, as though Doktor Effenkuhl had left in a hurry, without having planned to, in the midst of enjoying a snack with his reading. On top of the first page, printed by hand in block letters, which I could read despite the fact that it was upside down to me, was: LOLA BAEDO.

Of course I was curious. And of course my curiosity was stronger than my civilized aversion to reading words that I obviously hadn’t been intended to read. I had a closer look.

Under ‘LOLA BAEDO’ it said, in a hurried scrawl: ‘police?’ And then, in another (very angry) hand altogether: Falsch! Falsch! Falsch! It had never occurred to me before that Lola’s acquaintance with Doktor Effenkuhl had been anything other than friendly and casual. Most of the text had been crossed out.

From her fifteenth year the patient (L.) has been subject to fainting spells. By
all accounts they come on usually after quarrels, disagreements or
disappointments. They are not accompanied by blanching, by clonic or tonic
movements of any kind, they last for uncertain periods ranging from five
minutes to an hour or more, and consciousness does not seem to be totally
lost. In addition she has vomiting spells, these likewise occurring when
balked in her desires. She is subject to headaches, usually on one half of
the head, but frequently frontal. There is no regular period of occurrence
of these headaches except that there is also some relation to quarrels, etc.
On several occasions the patient has lost her voice for short periods
ranging from a few minutes to several hours following particularly stormy
domestic scenes.

Physical Examination Aug. 20—L.–A well-developed, extremely ‘attractive,’ woman,
appearing to be about 20 years of age. Face wears an anxious
expression and she shuns the examiner’s direct gaze. Movements of the right
hand and arm are now fairly free. There is no appreciable difficulty in any
of its functions according to tests made for ataxia, strength, recognition
of form, finer movements, etc., in fact, she uses this hand to write with,
as she cannot talk at all. Such writing is free, unaccompanied by errors in
spelling, there is no elision of syllables and no difficulty in finding the
words desired. The face is symmetrical on the two sides. There is no
evidence of paralysis of the facial muscles. In fact, the cranial nerves, by
detailed examination, are intact, except in so far as respiration and speech
are concerned. The right leg is held entirely spastic, the muscles on both
sides of the joints, that is, flexors and extensors, being equally
contracted. It is impossible to bend this leg at any joint except by the use
of very great force.

Speech–There is complete loss of the ability to make any sound, either
voiced or whispered; that is to say, there is complete aphonia,– there is
loss of all voice. The patient understands everything, however, and writes
her answers to questions rapidly and correctly. She can read whatever is
written, there is no difficulty in the recognition of objects, no evidence
of any aphasia whatever.

The diagnosis–hysteria–can hardly be doubted. The history of headaches,
fainting spells without marked impairment of consciousness, vomiting spells,
hemianaesthesia, hemianalgesia, complete aphonia and an exaggerated
paralysis, not only of the right leg, but of the ability to thrust out the
tongue, while at the same time all other cranial functions were unimpaired
together with the apparent health of the individual in every other respect,
make up a syndrome hardly to pass unrecognized…

When Doktor Effenkuhl returned later, I was just finishing the dishes. He entered the room and stood behind me while I scrubbed a pot and he said ‘This is very awkward.’

He said ‘This was so careless, that I left this report on the table like so. You have no idea how disappointed I am in myself! You can’t be blamed for giving in to the most human of temptations and reading it, but, on the other hand, you must appreciate the gravity of the situation I find myself in.’

‘You know too much now, and I’m afraid I will have to kill you.’

The way he delivered this last line was so convincing that it made my heart race, despite the fact that it was clearly a joke. And how was I so sure that it was a joke? Because that line of dialogue was so bad that it had to be intentionally so, and therefore comedic. Still, it pays to reflect that in the entire History of the world, it’s safe to assume that almost exactly that sentence has been spoken more than once with absolutely no spirit of satire, and the objects of the sentence have died.

Effenkuhl smiled and gestured that I take a seat at the table and I did so. He cleared the untouched coffee and cookies from it and pulled a half-empty bottle of wine from the refrigerator, pouring us each a glass. He sipped his standing, leaning against the sink.

‘When Lola first came to me in the Fall of that year, almost ten years ago, she was in very bad shape. She was not at all the nearly perfect young woman you and I know and love today.’

‘Well,’ he asked, ‘did you always simply assume that she was born with a sturdy sense of self, and a rational system by which to make sense of the chaos of modern life? The Lola you knew was an effort.’

By the way he raised his eyebrows at the end of this sentence I took it to mean that the effort had been his.

‘What I’m about to reveal to you,’ he said, after pouring himself another glass of wine, ‘is of course not to be repeated to anyone…least of all to Lola herself. It will probably shock you. Possibly disgust you as well.’

‘When I first met Lola, introduced by a former patient, and began treating her, early in the last decade, she was suffering from a soul-destroying trauma.’

He nodded gravely at me. ‘Guilt,’ he said. ‘Terrible terrible guilt.’

Guilt over what? I asked.

He weighed the word a good long time before setting it down before me.

‘Murder.’

We both laughed. Another cliché!

And then, like the best comedians, he upped the ante.

‘And I was the victim!’ he added, with mock outrage. Yes, we laughed a good long time. Then he pulled his glasses off, wiping them on his shirt tails, and said, ‘But, seriously.’

He took one long step across the kitchen floor and back-handed me with a grunt, knocking me to the floor, chair and all. I saw stars, and then deep deep cherry-black space. I thought, just before the curtain came down:

This? This is it?

31.

At the age of 26, a year before she escaped Europe entirely and made it to America to join the American, Lola moved into a square room in Mrs. Fortney’s baronial flat on Talgarth road in West Kensington, a forty minute walk from ‘Black Forest Furs’ on Oxford Street. At 26, she was old for a model, but at the apex of her fragile powers as a Northern-European beauty, her naturally snow-blonde hair and eyebrows startling against her freckled ruddy cheeks and black irises, and perfectly offset by the mink or ermine or silver fox enwreathing her boyish shoulders, and lining her titanic cleavage, making Lola and not the fur itself seem to be the unaffordable product to die for.

In the brief bloom of opportunity before her Scandinavian attributes began wilting in the dry heat of Time, she had lucked into this job as the face of this almost invisibly exclusive furrier. Lola became Mrs. Fortney’s protégé, and a tacit ally in the metaphysical Cold War that Mrs. Fortney had been waging against her husband Simon since the birth of their son Roderick, as well as the mysterious face in a series of posters that had been plastered all over London to create what they still call a buzz.

Thankfully it was largely an absentee sub-population of American or Italian tourists who had known Lola as the best looking girl that anyone had ever seen selling French fries in a MacDonald’s. She had no History to pre-date the posters.

Some enterprising intern at the agency that Black Forest Furs used, in fact, had even placed the posters (tastefully, tastefully) in key locations around the Kensal Green, Kensington, Hammersmith, and Golder’s Green cemeteries. Like an angel on the monuments. And there was an amusing case that made the papers: a poster of Lola had appeared in the world famous London Zoo…on the rearmost wall of the lion’s compound.

Who is this half-naked stunner in furs?

London wanted to know. Without a word or even a logo (nor even fine print about copyright, etc) on the poster, the image became a puzzle, and the puzzle could only be solved if you happened to walk by the shop window at 23 Oxford Street and glance in at the gilt-framed twice-times larger than life photo of the same girl on an over-sized easle (purple velvet curtains as a back drop) in the otherwise bare display. By appointment only.

Lola became known, on the street, and then in trendy street-level mags and even on Channel Four (specifically the show ‘The Word’ as hosted by that Terry Whathisname prat), as ‘The Fur Girl,’ and then ‘Furry,’ until East End rhyming slang converted her smoothly into ‘No Worries’ and the sobriquet stuck like a stain.

She liked it! She liked her new name, her new identity, the alias that London had given her. Her escape from Berlin felt complete; she avoided speaking whenever possible, lest the sound of her own voice should remind her of Germany, and Germany remind her of all the horrible things she wanted to burn with a torch from her memory.

At night, in The Ball Club, a trendy disco just off Earl’s Court (walking distance from home), she was ‘No Worries,’ which was soon enough clipped to ‘Worries’ by the cooler blacker clientele. By day, after waking up in the afternoon in time to take a red-eyed tea with Mrs. Fortney, she was Miss Lola. Miss Lola was reeling, still.

‘Miss Lola,’ announced Mrs. Fortney, while handing Lola a dish of shortbread cookies, ‘Is not feeling well today, I see.’ Dryly. Mrs. Fortney knew all about The Ball Club. She sometimes went herself, in dark glasses. The thing about clubs, and this is why people like them so much, is that one’s presence on the premises is a tacit acceptance of the activities therein; walking through the doors is like signing a waiver. Which is to say: anyone seeing you there is just as guilty as you are. Of whatever it is. This is what Club Friendships are based on. And which is what marriages should be, but aren’t. Mrs. Fortney was frowning.

‘Simon,’ she continued, ‘Do stop standing there in the doorway like that and be of some use. Go polish the neighbors’ brass, or something.’

‘No need to be rude,’ grumbled Simon, as he slinked off, stoop-shouldered, with his hands in his pockets.

‘No,’ rebutted Mrs. Fortney in her most astringently disinfectant tone, ‘There is every need.’ She was saying it to Lola. She rarely addressed two remarks in a row to Simon, unless the second was a simple reiteration of the first, since the first remark was almost always a request for him to bugger off.

Lola was staring into her tea cup as if it were a television. Or as if she was a gypsy. She could still smell Split and other things on her upper lip, a smell she hoped the roof-colored tea would wash away as soon as it was cool enough to sip at. Someone, a concerned party, white, of course, had taken Lola aside…when was it? Three weeks ago. The very night she’d first met Split. Taken her aside, this jealous cheese-white ginger-haired purse snatcher with filed teeth and red-rimmed ass-holes for eyes, pulling her with his jagged smile off of Split’s arm for a moment and saying, ‘Ta. You do know why they call him Split, now, don’t you, Darlin’ ?’ And then miming, with his two hands, something as big as a good-sized fish. ‘Episiotomy, innit?’

Split. Lola let herself think about Split because she wouldn’t let herself think about the Other One, not yet; not until she’d had her tea. She looked up from the cup and saucer. She managed half a smile.

Mrs. Fortney was keeping a flinching Roderick in her lap, like a Bond Super villain stroking the pervy talisman of her mascot, and Roderick was doing his thing, personifying Fear, Nerves, Endangerment. Personifying Prey. He was the only child Lola had ever known who was afraid of her!

Other children; babies, even; had responded to her with the infallibly gullible eye that Innocence has for Beauty, grinning like old fools and reaching for her from the grocery trolley, from the stroller, from their grandmothers’ arms. But Roderick shrank from her; he shrank away in tachycardial terror when she sometimes reached to tousle his threadbare dental floss hair, or offered to put him to bed while Mrs. Fortney went out to the off-license for American videos and liquor. Lola would carry Roderick to his room like a tub drowning, his cheeks gone lapis with apoxia, his eyelids fluttering with fright. Or was it loathing?

She mulled that one over, now and again, with a secret thrill. She yearned for it…being loathed. Consequently, Roderick was the only child (Lola considered children to be nothing more enchanting or less useful than larvae) she could tolerate. Or even like. The way he shivered and sputtered and gasped and spasmed in his mother’s lap. Any minute, he’d go running from the room for the safety of the crawlspace under his bed, a hundred meters down the chandeliered corridor.

Mrs. Fortney was glugging her tea and telling on Simon…another one of her anecdotes about how dumb/useless/vain/irritating/unfaithful men/Simon were. The afternoon-ish late-in-the-year sun was making a surprise visit at the blinds, as red-eyed as Lola, striping the book case, the wide-screen television, and the side of Mrs. Fortney’s face with candy-colored exhaustion. To punctuate her diatribe, she kept singing, ‘More tea, Dear?’ though Lola hadn’t even tasted her first cup yet, staring down through its sediment depths instead. It made her think of diabetic urine. Not that she could think. She kept seeing all that blood.

She was still. Her mind was still. Fucked. About the previous evening.

‘It’s a kind of enforced banality, marriage,’ Mrs. Fortney was saying. ‘Like American culture.’

Last night, Split had cleared a path towards Lola at the bar and said, with infinite delicacy, steadying her by the shoulder and folding himself down to her ear, ‘There’s a perv wants to pay us four figures to do it in front of him in his hotel room. Should I say yes? We’ll divide it 60-40, because it was my connection. Right? He specified oral. Are you for it? Loadsamoney reckons he’s your biggest fan, I guess. What should I tell him?’

Lola had looked around the smoke-veined dark of the room while Split held her head to his lips, whispering the proposition. Split’s voice was no less penetrating than his dick. In fact she liked to straddle him while he whispered what he was going to do to her and then it was like a double-penetration, voice and penis, the tips of the two large inserts meeting somewhere in the region of her solar plexus and bumping noses there. She looked around The Ball Club, smiling on the tickle of his breath, wondering which the rich Perv was.

As usual, most eyes were on them, so she narrowed it down to the paunchy pewter-haired waist-coated guy in a blousy white shirt (he looked like a Snooker champion) by the cigarette machine to the side of the coat check, since he was one of the few who didn’t appear to be looking, which is another way of saying he was looking very hard. He didn’t seem dangerous, and, anyway, Split would be there, bigger than anything in the entire Hotel.

32.

It was a very nice Hotel, Georgian façade, royal-red window shades, in Knightsbridge, with a knock-off Beefeater under the red awning and everything. Red carpet. Split had the key. Squash-court-sized Persian rugs on the butterscotch-smooth parquet in the foyer. Marble drinking fountains. Deco sconces. They just breezed by the Reception Desk at 2 in the morning, popped in the lift, and went up. Creaky old lift for such a posh hotel, though…as though the posh was all just a mask, hiding a grimy reality of devilish old London-town horrors. She imagined age-green gargoyles pulling the chains in the elevator shaft. She imagined Jack-the-Ripper tools in the sub-cellar, rusting away in an inch of 19th century water.

Following her up the corridor, Split said, reassuringly, ‘Right. This is the drill. I’m going to chain you to the bed, right? Geezer’s in the closet, peeping. After I chain you to the bed, just follow my lead. Nuffing we ain’t already done, like.’

Lola’s first night in The Ball Club…her first five minutes in The Ball Club…she’d been approached by an American pretty boy with spikey blonde hair, dressed in a pink t-shirt and a striped green tie, and he’d tapped her on the shoulder and pointed out another blonde pretty boy in a Paul Smith suit, standing nearby, pretending to be preoccupied. ‘His name’s Rich. Guess mine.’ Grinning at her. Lola just gave him her blankest look. Soon to shade into boredom, then revulsion, then…

‘Poor!’ he said, shouting over the music. ‘My name is Josh Poor, swear to God! His name is Rich Kroft. They call us Rich and Poor, and the funny thing, he’s really Rich, really! The dough he spends parking his car every month is more than I pay in rent, girlfriend! His Dad owns a fucking helicopter! Ever seen London from the air? It looks just like Chicago!’

And Lola scanned the room and just then, Split entered, high-fiving (or low-fiving…he was twice the height of some) a receiving line of Clubland dignitaries. He was the largest man in the vicinity, and black as tar, with a grin like the grill of not the fastest car on the road but the biggest, in a canary-yellow running suit.

‘Excuse me, my fiance just arrived,’ and she left Josh Poor standing there, blinking, mouth hung open, as she crossed the room to intercept this Yellow Clad Slab of a Jet-Black Man. She put her arms around his waist and bent her head back on her neck until it just about snapped, looking up at him, and said ‘Act like my boyfriend.’ He was already sweating; the small of the back of his running suit was damp. But he smelled good, like a Tea shop. ‘Act like my boyfriend for a little while.’

He’d said, ‘Fair enough. Who’s the audience?’

‘Those two little fuckers by the bar. One’s in a suit.’

‘Oh, you mean Oasis over there? Two think they’re rock stars? They’ve had a thumb in half the pie in this room. One’s a Yank, right? Fairies.’

He pulled back and got a good look at her and whistled. ‘But why pretend, heart-breaker? Try me out. Maybe you’re ready to switch to a better brand.’ He pulled her close again and folded down to her mouth and kissed her, stretching her lips around his heavy tongue. It was purple, and throbbed with its own heart. She could feel that he was tasting her. He pulled out and wiped his mouth. ‘You a vegetarian? They call me Split. As in banana. As in at home in me closet I got ten of these identical yellow suits hung up. Wicked.’

After having been fucked by Split the second time (in a photo booth in the Picadilly Arcade), Split had told her that by his system of reckoning she was worth about 5,000 pounds an hour. He had a system by which everyone could be indexed according to their hourly value. Some were worth as little as seven pounds an hour (but everyone is worth something, a system which would do much to restore a sense of dignity and proportion in the Developing World). Only one woman in Split’s life had ever been worth more (Shoko Crane), at 6050 pounds an hour, but that was because she’d been half-Asian and half-Caribbean black and that’s just worth more. Paul McCartney, whom Split had never met, was worth 17,999 pounds per hour, by Split’s system, so there’s the scale.

He’d said, ‘Most have taken umbrage at all I’m about to tell you, girl…it gets up their nose due mostly I think to their inflated view of themselves. Right? But take it as the highest compliment…’ and here he zipped up with a little jig of adjustment as they stepped to match the speed of the down escalator, ‘that I’d put your net worth at no less than 5,000 pounds an hour. Fact.’

And now they were gliding down this dowager’s boudoir of a hallway (floramorphic Edwardian light fixtures; cupids in the wall paper and putti in the tiramisu-colored carpet) in a posh Hotel in Knightsbridge, headed for the last big porno scenario of their ‘relationship’ (three weeks; she was raw from it; she felt like she’d been in a dozen Kentucky Derbies), and it was nice that they were getting paid. 60-40. Was it ever 50-50? All men are pimps.

She’d soon have to quit attending The Ball Club, which was a shame because it was so conveniently located (saved her a fortune in cab fare), but it was rapidly filling with men she had fucked at least twice.

The good thing about Split was she wouldn’t have to give him a speech. She just had to disappear. Or worry about him killing her. Not that he hadn’t been the gentlest fuck ever. But it was different when they owned you, wasn’t it? It’s an unspoken agreement that you fully intend to violate, and they’re completely aware that you do: if they can’t have you, nobody can. Universal. A woman ignores this at her own peril.

Split liked to talk while he worked.

‘My my my,’ he said. ‘Look at that. Look at that lovely thing. Lovely. Lovely. Look at it. Smiling at me. Lovely! I think it wants some. Do you want some? Lovely little thing. Let Split give you a taste. Try that. Ah, lovely. You like? I think she likes it. Lovely! Listen, try a bit more. Yes. Yes. Lovely. Ahhh, yes. That’s the way. That’s it. Lovely…’

He was talking down to her mouth. He had a finger under her chin, elevating it to a certain angle, and she was blind-folded. He’d cuffed her to the brass of the bed, and she was kneeling beside it, topless and unshod, on the side of the bed that was furthest from the closet, the door of which was just ever so slightly ajar, the dark stripe of said aperture dotted with a Watusi-high and bloodshot eye. Blinking.

Split liked to take his time, and he also had a thing about taking his penis out of a girl’s mouth every once in a while and wiping it on her face, drawing it along one side of the jaw and then the other, that long black pipe of glistening eel leaving its track of spit and pre-cum on the angles and planes of the beauty mask, like some kind of survey, like some kind of hoary African naming rite. And talking at it, about it, the whole time, in the Sunday morning tones of the voice-over on a televised darts or snooker or golf tournament.

‘Look at that. Isn’t that lovely? Oh isn’t it. Incredible. Yes. All right…all right there, in black and white, lovely. Oh my. What a picture. Yes. National Geographic. Yes. Around the….yes. And there. Yes. Alright…open up again. That’s it. Up…up! That’s it. Lovely. Ah…’

Then Lola heard a floor board creak. And Split, languorously: ‘Ah, yes. Mate. Mate. Welcome to the party. Here…’

Split commenced pulling his penis out of her mouth; a careful extraction. He was stroking her hair calmingly (Lola was a thoroughbred, likely to bite if spooked; Lola was a bomb you wouldn’t want to cross the wires in defusing). Even after Split was out like the army, the hot black ghost of his largeness was still a weight on her tongue. Her lips were still shaped to the fit of it and humming with its vital throb of blood-fat jazz. She heard Split zip (think of how rarely you hear a zip-up from close range; Lola heard it often and knew that nothing else sounds like zipping up; nothing sounds as dismissive), then, softly, slowly, as to a child about to go on her first train trip to Granny’s alone, ‘Change of scenery time, Love. Don’t you move, now. Keep on doing what you’re doing. Right? Tip top. That’s a good egg. Do what the gentleman says, like. We aim to please. For services rendered. Satisfaction guaranteed. Lovely.’

And then, ‘Good one, Mate.’ She heard the wadded slip and shuffle of a quick-thumbed paper transaction of some density. ‘Cheers.’ And then a new body heat blotted Split’s old airspace near her cheek, an aura tinted with expensive cologne giving way to the acrid humidity, the pickle and tickle, of crotch.

Split eased himself heavily out of the hotel room and whistled ‘Strangers in the Night’ down the hall, and she soon found that another penis had berthed itself with bobbing imprecision in her mouth. Not much smaller than Split’s, in fact, a derrick angling in from the same approximate height. This guy was another skyscraper like Split. Well, this was a lot more than watching. Not that she was complaining. For this much money…

And then she knew in a sudden flash of hotly illuminating Cosmic Awareness that Split would not be splitting the honorarium for this job, 60-40 or otherwise, and that he’d probably be scarce around The Ball Club for a season or two, and how hysterically funny to realize that she’d been fucked by a man for nearly a month without ever having seen where he actually lived.

They’d always somehow ended up in borrowed flats (or in derelict cinema foyers) and she had to admit to herself that she had admired Split for treating her that way: like nothing particularly special.

Too bad it was always the men who were strong enough to leave her who always left her! Too bad it was always the men who were wise enough to resist her who always resisted her! Why did it always have to be the type who fell in love with her who…fell in love with her? She wanted for once to be wanted by a man who didn’t want her. Left by a man who would stay.

There weren’t enough in the world like Split. First Konstantin, then Split. And here she was, blindfolded, chained to a bed in a strange hotel, sucking a white (she could taste it) cock for free. Konstantin. She hadn’t let herself even think the letter ‘K’ since him. Since Konstantin.

What Lola liked about giving head was that she didn’t have to pretend to like it. It was just a mildly inconvenient favor you did if you felt like it, like writing someone a letter of recommendation. No one could accuse you of getting anything out of it. You were always owed if you sucked a cock. You didn’t have to pretend to like it, you didn’t have to pretend to be grateful, you didn’t have to pretend to be impressed. Most beautifully of all, you weren’t, for a change, expected to say anything. No one ever asked ‘Are you alright?’ or ‘how do you like it?’ or ‘what are you thinking?’ while their cock was in your mouth. And eye contact was on waiver, too. Really, the perfect sex act.

Her mind wandered pleasantly, as it sometimes could when she was lunching wood; woofing johnson…a holiday drive along that inner winding road of her mind: the tall trees, leafshadow and sunlight. The dappled woodland stream of consciousness. A majestic white swan gliding upstream. In my thoughts I have seen. Hypnotic. Daydreams. Rings of smoke through the. The alpha-waved lull of repetitive tasking; Lola on a pornographic prayer rug, davining away, om-ing her brains out on a glistening staff of life. She was thinking: what is dirt made out of? Seriously, she mused: what is it made of? She’d always just assumed…dirt is made of The Earth, isn’t it? The Earth is made of dirt. But what’s. Where does it.

This is the kind of thing that Konstantin was good at talking about. Or through, or at. Even after he’d turned bad on her, Lola had often been able to deflect his abuse by distracting him with what he liked to call a Cardinal Question. Like that time. After that one trick had paid with a counterfeit hundred! Oh Konstantin had been in a real mood to hit something that time. Already had her by the hair when she’d said…thinking fast…what makes sleep? What makes us sleep? What is it made of, sleep…how does it work? And pondering that one had stopped his raging.

The fatter he’d gotten, the more he’d raged. But she remembered how he’d been before he threw away his looks with Existential contempt: he’d been Jaweh’s most beautiful and rebellious Archangel…a retinal throb of lumens that could burn a girl all the way down through her heart. The first time ever she saw his face. The minute that man had walked in the door of the café that she was an indentured servant in (the café’s owner and her step-father were ‘business’ partners) she’d thought: I want to put him in my power. Meaning, her mouth.

She’d seen him walk into that wretched burnt-toast-perfumed and fly-speck-upholstered and sour-mopped café she was working in at the time and she felt, looking at him, beholding him, a sudden shocking uncharacteristic surge of racial pride in being European…the truth of the sexual nature of fascism slapped her…a country full of guys like that would have been the terror of Europe, she sneered to herself, growing heavily wet. Scare the shit out of us fucking krauts. Imagine a good version of Nazi, without the nasty wasteful genocide part, just, you know, the stylish bits, like, Nazism as basically the ultimate Nightclub experience. Sharp outfits and a wicked fucking door policy.

A nation of patent leather and bleached hair and cruel cheekbones. Just enough atmospheric S&M to eradicate the bane of her existence, that most wretched of American inventions: politeness. Imagine a world un-tainted by please and thankyou and most of all I’m sorry. This is a prince, she remembered thinking…how old was she? nineteen?…when first that pathetic bell dangling over the Kafé Kundera’s door in Mahzahn in East Berlin had ding-a-linged Konstantin Mirek’s entrance with comedic understatement and signaled, also, the next three or four chapters of Lola Beedo’s semi-miserable life.

Oh. Oh. Oh.

The man screwed tightly to the weighty cock she was slurrping was not old, clearly, by evidence of the nearly upright teakwood table leg the cock was capably imitating, but he was wheezing so, either asthmatic or a serious-about-killing-himself smoker, and then gasping and snorting and whispering ‘oh’ a lot, soon to catapult his tablespoon of liquid self down her throat, but it was strange. Something. It was strange like a fire alarm going off underwater…which would take you a beat to recognize this elemental noise of warning, but, even after you did, you’d still be disoriented for a fatal interval trying to figure out where all the water had come from, and how everything had gotten submerged, and, if everything was submerged, what danger could fire possibly hold for you at this point anyway, since you were about to drown?

Lola gasped through her nose and gulpingly un-swallowed the slick hard dolphining dick with violent aversion and half-stood and stumbled backwards, yanked by the handcuff that bound her to the bed, wheeling against it and banging her shin badly on the frame while a thin finger of cum grazed her cheek, and some still squirting, shooting off in all directions, scalding her hair and her arm, while the shooter laughed the toneless hiccupped spasm laugh of naughty orgasm, the sound neither giggle nor sob, Lola flaming red and spitting his spunk out.

And yelling PAHNIK, YOU FUCKER MOTHERFUCKER and trying to get the blindfold off and shouting PAHNIK. And even then she was seeing the blood again, all that blood, while Pahnik stood back and milked the pearly dregs of his pleasure down a pant leg with a fleetingly serious look on his face, all concentration now, all focus, being that the overall quality of an orgasm (and its afterglow) is determined by the handling of the resolving paroxysms. With orgasms, as with Life itself, it’s the final moments that count for everything.

33.

Pahnik was having a hot post-coital leak in the bathroom sink (old habit from water-rationing days in Blansko) and speaking over his shoulder to the girl who was handcuffed to the frame of his hotel bed.

‘I must say, it wasn’t very hard tracking you down, Sinead,’ he sing-songed, pinching the last strong cider drops from his plump and ruddy dick, that two-liquid dispenser (and that’s where nature, famously efficient, fucked up, in Miro Pahnik’s oft-mused-upon but never-voiced opinion: why not the third liquid? Why not milk?)…‘not that I expected it to be, girl with your looks. Hard to keep a face and body like that a secret, isn’t it? I’ve been in London, what. Two weeks? Not even.’

He sauntered back towards the bed, zipping.

‘I once dated a stripper in L.A.,’ he continued, with one foot on the bed, his hands bracing the small of his back, ‘Are you listening to me?’ Lola had her back to him, unspeaking, mostly naked, handcuffed to the bed frame, her legs curled under.

‘Dinah Sore; she was about fifty. That was her stage name. Dinah Sore! Old school. Did I ever tell you what I like best about Americans? The names they come up with for themselves? Poor little Dinah had been doing the pole dance on the club circuit in West Hollywood for thirty years, I met her in ’82 or so, which would mean she started dancing in the 50s. She of course augmented her hourly wage as a dancer with under-the-table jobs of the hand and mouth variety…who wouldn’t, given those circumstances? And what I liked about her…I mean, why I liked fucking her, was because it was so easy to be nice to her.’ He paused to let this sink in. Also to stare at the perfect back of Lola’s perfect head and marvel. You can always spot a woman that beautiful from behind, without ever needing to see the front to verify. Her swan-like neck.

‘She was grateful for anything. Little compliments. You have beautiful eyes, Dinah. Dinah, you have the hands of a thirty year old woman! Or holding the door open for her, helping her with her coat, or sliding the chair out for her…it made her blush with joy. Anything. Kiss her on the cheek and tell her she smells good, for example…do this after coming between her tits in the back of a checker cab. It made her so fucking happy, and it made me feel like Fred Astaire, and it was so easy. It was so easy to be nice to poor old Dinah Sore.’

Despite herself, Lola could see the saggy-breasted, henna-haired Dinah, saucer-sized nipples and a cowboy hat, twining around a pole with her shit-eating grin…just begging to be put out of her misery. Dating ever more dangerous Tricks. Hitch-hiking in slums. Pahnik had been an early attempt at picking an executioner, probably…she’d recognized the potential in him. Too thick to see it himself, Pahnik was getting the story all wrong.

‘If I’d met her twenty years earlier, of course, it would have been another story entirely. Oh Jesus. Thirty years earlier, and I couldn’t have met her at all. Time, old age, humanized her. It put her in my league…in my ballpark.’

Pahnik grunted and walked bouncingly over the bed like a gigantic 12 year old in his boots and stepped down to the floor on the other side, so Lola could face him, but she turned stubbornly away, twisting her neck to look back over the bed (at a ghost? A big fat ghost?) so Pahnik sighed and smiled. He was still relishing the sunburn tingle of what he had done to her, just now; what he’d done in her mouth. How ecstatically not nice, how atavistically impolite…and the weird paradox of the transaction, how he’d paid a large sum in order to steal something.

‘Thirty years from now, Sinead, or should I call you ‘Worries’…or just plain Lola, little Lola Beedo…Baby, you’ll be just like poor old Dinah Sore. Lola Beedo will morph into Dinah Sore. Grateful for any compliment, hungry for hungry male stares, you’re gonna find yourself…’

‘Christ!’ shouted Lola, eyes shut tight. ‘Unchain me.’ Her eyes popped open and trained their deadly pink particle beams on Pahnik, who smirked involuntarily to shield himself. She pointed a thumb at her platinum muff, which was bristling up out of a luminously pink satin panty. ‘I need to pee.’

Pahnik rubbed a forearm as though she’d bit him there, although he was smiling. It wasn’t lost on him that although he was the one who was fully clothed, nearly seven feet tall, with a pocket full of money, and still tingling with a lordly orgasm he’d stolen in her mouth…she was the one, bearing the aforementioned in mind, with the power to either crush or beatify. With a word, a smile. ‘You haven’t uttered a peep about what I just said, Sinead. That’s rude. That’s…’

‘Miro, please, either call the police and turn us both in…you as a murderer, me as your accomplice…or unchain me and let me out of this room.’

‘I can’t do either. Won’t, I mean.’

‘I’ll scream.’

‘I’ll kick you.’ He showed her the wicked toe of his boot.

If she called his bluff it would cancel the points he acquired in the orgasm, he realized. He could no more kick her than slash the Mona Lisa. That’s where Pookie had had him. That’s why Pookie would always be Her Man: he’d kicked her, punched her, fucked her in the ass. The best that Pahnik could hope to be, in her pantheon, was Curator, and he knew it. The Curator who gets to sneak the masterpiece into his study and lean it against the wall for a few hours after closing time for surreptitious gloatings, calculating his pleasures by the fey exquisites of custodial privilege…every once in a blue moon. Godammit.

Pookie would always be granted direct experience of her soul, of her vitals, and Pahnik would always be just some dick-bearing etcetera. Even though (or especially because?) Pookie was dead now, dead and buried; his head in a hatbox at the bottom of a hole in The Grunewald, his fingertipless torso last seen in the trunk of a stolen car parked in Neukoln. What else am I supposed to do? Pahnik wanted to scream at Heaven. I killed him and he’s still The King!

A one hundred and fifty kilo body holds a lot of fluid. All that blood. Blood stinks; no one tells you that. It smells like shit and ozone. Funny there aren’t black market workshops in body disposal, considering how large a potential market there is. A sloshing bathtub full of blood is something to cope with; a headless torso in three inches of its own thick cherry-black bubble bath. Pookie’s corpse had farted undignified bubbles in its own blood! The horror! The horror! Mr. Kurtz, he daid. Write a scene like that and the audience would…

‘Miro,’ sighed Lola. ‘Come on. Enough’s enough.’ She lifted the handcuffed wrist.

‘Enough’s enough.’ Mocked Pahnik.

‘Is this about sex? Is that it?’ She sighed. ‘You want to fuck me?’

Pahnik almost fainted with the…from the…from the enormity of…’Do I want to fuck you?’ His eyes bulged squintingly. ‘Do I want to fuck you?’ He kicked the bed, making Lola flinch. ‘I just did, bitch! Or hadn’t you noticed? I fucked your fucking mouth! I stuck my big cock in it and I came like fucking Secretariat, bitch! Bitch, didn’t you even notice? What are you saying?’

Yes, the next thing would be to find out that Lola could reverse the flow of time, resurrect the dead, make soggy old dollar bills crisp and new. Look! She had nullified Pahnik’s sex act (and the corresponding orgasm) with attitude alone. It had never happened, according to the look on her face. He couldn’t believe it. The awe he felt despite himself was crushing.

There’s no way out but suicide or murder, he suddenly thought. I’m trapped in the shredded cage of my own sick heart…I have to kill my way out of it. A woman like this…

A man, a man like Miro Pahnik, who had thought of himself for all those years as a success, a winner…anointed, blessed, favored by The Gods. A man like that…was nothing, a blip, mere junk and protoplasm…to a woman like Lola Baedo. The only safe way to view her was through a magazine, or on a television, or in a higher-class porno video, or even on the screen of a movie theater. She was a Medusa safely gazed upon in a mirror only…an obliterating super-field at the core of which hummed Desire’s encrusted red sphincter source. Parallel to that loony thought he was also able to think quite clearly: I’m losing it…

To make matters worse he then felt a tear-track salt his cheek…and a twin, on the other side…what could he do but cuff them, pathetically? His eyes had burst like grapes. A real nut job would have started laughing at that moment, to hide the horrific Grammar School shame of it.

Lola pretended not to notice he was crying, she was miming absurd concern with her toenails just then…she was suddenly so afraid… that her fear generated its own subset of paranoia…the fear that Pahnik could hear the awful pounding of her heart. If he detected that she was afraid, it wouldn’t be long before he correctly identified and then became what it was she was afraid of. It was the ‘non-violent’ ones…the ones who hadn’t really made a buddy of dumb rage during the course of their lives…who had no idea what to do with it when it came. They tended to over-react. Look what she’d been able to trick him into doing to Effenkuhl. And now…

Sniffing, blinking, Pahnik kneeled down towards Lola where she pretended not to notice his tears…where she was cowering, really…knowing that men were most dangerous just exactly then, when the tears arrived to announce that something was very very over. A limit had been reached and faced…a decision made…the tears came out to mark it. Middle Aged Tears were rarely a river twice-crossed. They could mean an end had finally been come to. By which I mean. A torment. A life. They could mean: do it.

One of Miro’s enormous mitts would circumnavigate Lola’s throat, fingertips touching thumb, if it squeezed hard enough; she wouldn’t even have a chance to scream before he strangled her. She’d be found the next morning by the chambermaid, another unremarkably kinky sacrifice to big city life in London, a purple-necked hooker’s corpse handcuffed to one of thousands of the metropolis’ unslept-in beds, and it bothered Lola the most to know that no one would ever guess that she’d done it for free, she hadn’t even received payment for it, she’d done it for Split. But there was some satisfaction to be had knowing that Split would find out about it; he might even cringe at the news. She would perhaps live in Split’s heart as a mild spasm of guilt, or regret, even, for a year or two after her body had become one with the Earth’s great garbage.

Lola then had a sharper-than-television vision of her step-father strangling a swan. The primal scene. The swan’s huge red feet peddling the air, the swan’s mad wings beating a sphere around itself and its killer with a blizzard of feathers, the whole scene eerily silent because little Lola was jamming her ears with her fists, her mouth open on an airless scream, as though her step-father’s coal-black hand was crushing her esophagus instead of the poor big flapping blinkless bird’s.

He’d been working on the car, that’s why his hand was so black. They’d driven up to the lake on a Sunday and there had been motor trouble; she could see the dented hood propped up…her step-father’s shiny black hand. She could not for the life of her remember the events between the car’s stalling along the road over-looking that serenely glittering, sunset-orange body of water…and the execution of the swan. She remembered only that the helplessly flapping bird had made her think of her sweet old granny Holzfuss. Was that a clue?

According to that fat old foolish fuck Doktor Effenkuhl, the strangling of the swan was a primal clue to the shape of Lola’s entire adult life. Guilt about the innocent bird’s death had driven her to sacrifice herself, time and time again, in the arms of brutish men with big hands who reminded her of her step-father? Lola was the Swan.

For example, the psychosomatic Aphonia she’d been suffering when first she came to him as a patient…her speechlessness was that of the swan with her step-father’s hand on its neck. But then, how seriously could you take the professional opinion of a man who had started trying to fuck her less than a week after their first session together? Lola had a joke for that: psychotherapist = psycho the rapist. She’d never bothered to mention…because she just knew he’d make too much of this…how much Effenkuhl resembled her step-father.

‘Du bist mein Dietrich,’ he would gasp over her, with his brown breath. Making her want to puke. She would just lay there, rolling her eyes while he settled his therapeutic weight on her, dredging away in her, scraping the walls of her pussy with his chalky red fossilized digger…the sensation that he was laying a sticky string of eggs under her skin (inspiring a nightmare about thousands of greasy black grasshoppers). She would never forget his smell…the sour old skin and tobacco lungs and teeth. And the babbling…pouring his long brown breaths of rancid philosophical catshit on her, justifying the fucking as part of some kind of…what. Transcendental? Cure.

Well, he had, in a way, cured her…but not with the method he would have preferred, probably. A radical new methodology! The irony would not have been lost on him. The elegant patient-kills-her-doctor cure. Really, all of her symptoms…the nightmares, the episodes of paralysis…cleared up when Effenkuhl’s wet head blumped the floor. It bounced. Pahnik vomited.

Effenkuhl’s naked headless body stood straight up, as though a Duchess had entered the room, before falling to its knees. They kicked it over and rolled it onto a tarp and hurried it like grunting ER orderlies into the bathroom. Motherfucker had had the nerve to invoke Hegel while working two fingers up her corn hole. The Analist. What is it with men and rectums? Another month and he would have been trying a fist in there…why merely fuck a woman when you could coax her into letting you rip her insides out, right? Fucking was just a foot in the door. So to speak.

Lola had let Effenkuhl do things to her. How his liver-spotted hands had trembled the first time he tugged her panties off of her! And then that repulsive gesture of kissing his bunched fingers like a gourmet praising a meal, gazing upon her pussy. She’d let him do things to her twice a week for two months, long enough to justify what she ended up doing to him. Konstantin had been the mastermind but Lola had been the spark. Konstantin had worked out the plan, the craziest, most complicated scheme in the history of pointless murders…but Lola had been the plan’s inspiration. The Muse.

Ah, but wait. This micro-second of reflection was over. Pahnik’s hand was on her throat, positioning her. What was he babbling?

34.

‘You haven’t heard a word I’ve been saying,’ sighed Mrs Fortney, with mock grief. Every thing she did was mock something. Her life was bracketed by ironic inverted commas. Still, she was doing something right. She had power and money and only seemed to fuck when it suited her, which didn’t appear to be often. And certainly not with her husband, whose sole apparent function (providing Roderick) had been so long-ago accomplished that it was puzzling that he could still be found, hanging around the flat.

There had been a time…in the beginning, nearly a year before…when Lola had toyed with the idea of wanting to be Mrs. Fortney, to end up like her. To that end, Lola had studied her, but had come to the conclusion, soon enough, that Mrs. Fortney had always been Mrs. Fortney, and Lola had and would always be Lola…they were two separate archetypes, she realized, and one could not become, or develop from, the other. Lola was a wolf, and Mrs. Fortney was a heron. In the middle of one of Mrs. Fortney’s carefully sculpted sentences, Lola suddenly looked up from her tepid tea and said, ‘A man tried to kill me last night.’

Mrs Fortney put a hand to her throat. Mock terror.

‘I mean…I don’t mean he tried and failed. I mean he thought about it and came close to doing it, but he lost his nerve at the last minute.’ Lola finally brought the tea cup to her lips. ‘He had his hand on my throat. I’m only here…’

‘Oh God,’ said Mrs. Fortney. ‘I knew it. One of those jungle bunnies they export in abundance to The Ball Club.’

Lola sipped. “No,’ she smirked. ‘He’s whiter than you. Whiter than Roderick.’

Roderick whimpered: the monster had spoken his name.

’Someone you knew?’

Lola gave Mrs. Fortney a certain look.

‘Ah,’ nodded Mrs. Fortney. ‘An Ex.’

Lola frowned.

‘A pseudo Ex,…a man you’ve known for a while but have never slept with, despite his fondest wishes.’

Lola bit a lip.

‘And by whom you were fucked for the first time last night…’

Lola took another wide-eyed swallow of tea. Feeling no need to clarify.

‘…under less than ideal circumstances. Does he know where you live? Where you’re staying?’ Before Lola could think about that one, Mrs Fortney stood up, lifting Roderick like a sack over her shoulders, and said, ‘Probably. We’ll have to talk about that.’ She headed for the hallway. ‘It’s time for Roddy’s afternoon nap…wait here for me, darling. Won’t be a moment.’

A baby is the mouth-piece of a family. If you want to know about a family, ask the baby. Because a baby cannot talk, it also cannot lie. The baby is a pure little indicator, a strip of emotional litmus paper, the meter on a family’s health, wealth, happiness, and potential. What had Roderick, as a baby, said about The Fortneys?

Sometimes, it took hours to put batty Roddy to bed. Mrs. Fortney had the power and concomitant leisure to lavish on her queer albino offspring the ultimate luxury, that of time. Like the rich farmer who can afford to have all the windows open and all the heaters in the farm house on in the dead of winter, she could let the meters…the things we call clocks…run and run. Lola sat in the drawing room with the cup and saucer in her lap for forty minutes, in no particular rush to get on to the next thing, whatever it might be, especially not in her current state, but still. After forty minutes, the wallpaper (hand-made by Milanese artisans, the endless motif of silver snowflake on deep blue backing was hand-painted, no two snow flakes were painted alike) lost its ability to amuse her.

The long hall connecting all the second level rooms, chez Fortney, was a study in Mrs. Fortney…dozens of framed pictures of her, from wallet to museum sized…from girlhood to girlhood’s apotheosis. There was Mrs. Fortney at 14, even more titless than now, in her danskin, scissoring herself on the barre. To the left : a little older, in a Beefeater’s blazer and jodhpurs and one of those silly hats, sailing over a five bar gate on a Cadillac-sized horse. Next: Uni-age, with a boyish hair cut and a mannish frown, leaning on the fender of a Porsche. Then a life-sized black-and-white studio portrait, the creamy over-heated noir of a Hurrell, featuring a string of pearls and a hard set to her mouth, looking all too late-30s, above a framed magazine photo of Mrs. Fortney being handed a weapon-shaped ceremonial something by a house-coated Margaret Thatcher herself. Adjacent to a red-haired, freckled, pig-tailed Mrs. Fortney, two front teeth mithing, head cocked, milk-ad smile. And so on. Lola could hear Mrs. Fortney commenting on all of it in a mordant drawl in Lola’s head: ‘I’m nothing but a type, you see. A cat-a-gory.’

Through an empty room, and another, she found Roderick’s. Mrs. Fortney was on a leather couch beside his baronial crib, cradling him, who was half in his pyjamas, naked leg danging off of the couch, to her unbuttoned frilly blouse. He was sucking in his sleep, purposefully, on one of her hard little tits. Mrs. Fortney acknowledged Lola with a distant smile, as if engrossed in a complicated passage of her favorite piece by Beethoven. Lola became Fortney for a moment and put a finger on her own lips to shush herself, crossing the room. She knelt at the creche of the couch and stroked so lightly Roderick’s white dandelion hair while moving in closer between Fortney’s leather-panted legs with lips parted in unthinking anticipation. But something stopped her. This was a bit much even for Lola…

“Shouldn’t we…I mean…shouldn’t he…”

“Why?” said Fortney. “It’s perfectly natural.”

The sweet surprise of milk. Roderick twitching awake. That immemorial hack, London rain, typing diligently on the stain-glassed window of Roderick’s empty play room.

35.

Dusty Springfield was belting a torch-lighting weepy of a hurt-me-but-don’t-desert-me ballad to Lola as the clouds parted. Lola was nodding off. The clouds parted to reveal the indigo engraving that was the acid-etched sky under the cloud canopy over El Ay. Luxopolis. The lights of the city were sickly, they were brilliant, they were blinking and sizzling like a short-circuit, they were hula-dancing from smoke-stacks like the stacks were zippo lighters, it was all a warped grid of giga-watts and black-outs that rolled over the black horizon, dripping light into space from the sharp edge of the flat earth. Here it was, the Anglo-Latin capitol of America’s giddy fucked-up future…the cock fights and lo-fat and optical processors…the sleek suits and face transplants and world-conquering leisure time activities. The majority of minorities. America itself was a majority of minorities. The jet was banking, stretching and yawning after the long snooze of trans-continental flight, and the sun was a wedge of dirty fruit floating in the Pacific drink. The Pacific drink was sloshing with its shocking ingredients, its goodies, its kingdom of dumped evidence.

Dusty lifted the melody to a pleading fourth…G to C… in the middle eight, and a gospel choir kicked in to testify on her behalf before the pilot, Captain Richard B. Sievers, cut in suavely to announce the time and temperature and estimated moment of touch-down, along with his super-sincere hope that Lola’s flight had been so pleasant that she would consider doing it again, and real soon, y’all, y’hear? If there’d been a Talk Back button, Lola would have slammed it and said something about shutting the fuck up. But no, she remembered…no…take a deep breath. Count to ten. She pulled off her head phones and reached for the Customs Form a stewardess was handing her. She glanced at it and wanted to sleep again.

The glass of the port-hole was cool on her cheek. Then her forehead.

Fifteen hours before, on the tube to Heathrow International Airport, Lola had seen something of importance. Epiphany. With impeccable timing, at 3 o’clock in the afternoon, entering the tube with a dozen other dour commuters, a middle aged woman, average height, a little wide, dressed like a clown. Totally done up as a clown, with the grease paint and red afro (crushed under a petunia-sprouting homburg); the cherry-tomato nose, the loony attire. Sat herself down on one of the long seats at the front of the wagon, scowling. Scowling like every other European on the tube, of course…that classical Beethoven scowl…that miserable fucking life-is-a-chore, don’t fuck with me facial expression…only here she was, in total clown regalia, scowling along with all of the others, down-turned mouth, without a trace of irony. Perfect. Goodbye to all that.

She was headed for the Land of Smiles.

There are two countries called The U.S.A., two nations in a state of dynamic superimposition, and the capitol of the one U.S.A. is L.A., and the capitol of the other U.S.A. is Manhattan, and trans-Atlantic refugees tend to have either one or the other in mind, depending on whether they are dreaming of Pleasure, or Romance, ultimately. Pleasure embodies within it also the selfish ideals of Power and Freedom, whereas Romance entails the worthless (in Lola’s felt but un-reasoned opinion) subsets of High Culture and Courtly Love. Refugees who miss both capitols and end up somewhere else in America (like Miami, the lo-tech L.A., or Chicago, the overweight Christian Manhattan) aren’t clear in themselves about the destiny they seek. Lola, whose will to live was distilled to a freakish intensity…for that of a Nihilist…was clear.

Her forehead pressed to cool glass under which El Lay seemed to be pinwheeling slowly on the axis of the tip of her nose, Lola saw her pale gold reflection stretched out over the sparkle and darkle of the megapolis…her face was a sky-sized mask of God. All those people down there, imperfect, broken, small, pathetic…clamoring. And Lola unblinking, gazing out over it, with the savage strength and ignorance of her young-ish thoughts, her Ayn Rand-ish thoughts and feelings, just smart enough to feel brilliant, not quite smart enough to wisely feel limited, incomplete, cautious in the claims she might make for herself…in separating herself…from all those inferior souls.

‘Do you have family down there?’

Lola looked and frowned.

‘In Los Angeles. Family. Do you have it? Is family a factor, or are you just doing the tourist thing? Sprekkin-zee English? Parlay Voo?’

It was Thing. Thing was talking to her.

For eleven hours, from Heathrow til now, the deeply tanned Asian male sitting in the seat next to the empty one next to her, the voodoo-doll guy with the tiny body and the big head, his hair like a Beatle Wig, wearing Roy-Orbison-styled sunglasses and a charcoal-colored three piece suit, hadn’t said a word to her. The three words he’d spoken at all, ‘Chicken’ and ‘No, thanks,’ had been adressed unlookingly to stewardesses.

He’d spent the whole trip hunched over a Gameboy thingy, or something beepingly similar, his thumbs dancing on it, its weird blue and violet christmas lights reflected in the ant-black mirrors of his shades. Lola had promptly classified him as Thing and forgotten about him. And now he was talking to her. Confusingly, his deep deep voice was coming out of a little girl’s mouth.

‘Hey,’ he purred, ‘Don’t worry. I’m definitely not hitting on you.’ Chuckling. ‘Anti-depressants. The little man is not a factor.’

He offered a little girl’s hand to her. His pinky was the size, appoximate color, and shape of a baby carrot (stewed). ‘Harry Chew.’

‘You’re not Chinese, ‘ scolded Lola.

‘Hey, I’m impressed! Good eye. And you’re not American. Americans can’t tell the difference between one kind of Asian and another. Americans think Bruce Lee did karate. The only Americans who can tell the difference between The Reverend Sun Yung Moon, and The Dalai Lama, are the ones who like sushi, and even they think Kuala Lampor is a cocktail.’ He spent a few seconds smiling at this.

‘Okay, my parents are Hmong. The have a restaurant in Orange County called Hmong Friends. It’s a great story. I was suffering from Racial Dysmorphia.’ He shook his head with amazed self-sympathy, a key American emotion. ‘See, I always felt like a Chinese trapped in the body of a Hmong, I don’t know why, it’s genetics. I changed my name, legally. It was like a flash bulb went off in my head, man! Name was definitely a factor…I never say my old name now…I’m living the dream, I’m prospering. Hey, my parents won’t speak to me, but I feel great. Or maybe I feel great because they won’t speak to me, huh? The anti-depressants don’t hurt, either.’ He covered his mouth, miming laughter.

‘Are you going to tell me your name or something, or do I have to keep babbling like this, like some kind of idiot? Not that I mind. Babbling. Hey, my babble makes more sense than most Harvard commencement addresses, if you ask me…but that’s just my opinion.’

After Lola said ‘Lola,’ Thing waved his thing, the little black tablet with silver buttons and a screen, in her face, saying, ‘Check it out.’

There, on the screen, was Thing, Harry, a Harry Chew video game character, Beatle Wig hair and Roy Orbison sunglasses and a three-piece charcoal-gray suit and everything, but two inches tall. In the background on the screen was a Post Apocalyptic urban filmscape not unlike the El Lay of Lola’s dreams, which was the one they were just then landing on.

36.

Thing had a pretty little face on that big head of his; you could see that when he took his sunglasses off. Impossible to guess his age, except to notice that his tar-black pudding bowl hair was probably a dye job, lacking a certain degree of lustre, hiding some possible gray. What would it be like to let a panting doll like this crawl on you? With his little girl hands and his cat-sized tongue? With his lipstick dick? Maybe not so bad. Anyway, Thing was perfectly sexless, and, therefore, no one for Lola to be worried about. Anti-depressants…the little man is not a factor. Good, because she needed a place to stay, at first, and why dip into the £27,000 she’d blackmailed from the Fortneys if dipping into it wasn’t absolutely necessary?

In Thing’s fancy car, it was like flying, all over again. Lola was already nostalgic for the days of standing still. Standing still, she grasped, was not going to be a common feature of her new life. Her new life was going to be all about movement or sleep, and she could imagine that there was going to be plenty of sleeping in cars and planes, too…movement plus sleep.

Whether they were really driving to Thing’s citrus-treed villa or not, the villa was obviously not where Thing lived. Maybe the villa was where Thing rested, but it was obvious that he lived in his vehicle, despite its fastidious upkeep. There were clues. Two or three sunflower seed shells on the carpet, for example. A lidless bottle of aspirin rolling around between her boot heels. Magazines in the door pouch and a pile of neatly folded clothing on the back seat. Lola didn’t know the half of it: there was a microwave oven in the glove compartment, too. Sometime during the course of the creative tension between freak mutation and Natural Selection, Kalifornium Erectus had adapted to his environment by evolving wheels. Homo Gyro.

But here they were again, flying.

The air conditioning had the stale hum of cabin air, and the road felt like it was 30,000 feet under them, with the occasional smoothed-over pot hole jolt no worse than the mild turbulence of skipping over a low pressure dent in the sky. This was not a car; it was a mothership. The street lights were a string of harsh moons against the outline of what looked like mountains in the great distance, but which were in reality flat clouds of pollution, back-lit by the low-watt stars. Thing had said he lived on a mountain. Lola mistook the jagged scrim of pollution on the horizon for the mountain Thing lived on: it looked like it was ten miles high.

They were sharing the road with trucks, mostly…horizontalized skyscrapers roaring on a town’s worth of wheels and lit like landing strips. Every trucker they sailed by, on Lola’s side, frowned down a tattooed bicep at her with the seriousness of a potential buyer. They were all either Stetsoned or ballcapped and every tenth was a woman. Or possibly the same woman, mischievously exploiting the interstate time warps that allow a driver to over-take, repeatedly, the same vehicle. With her poodle perm. With her chivalrous cap-doffing.

‘You know how they say the best way to get rich is to combine your job with your passion?’ Harry waved vaguely with his right hand, but it wasn’t a communicative gesture; it was a command. The car radio went on. ‘It’s only really true if your passion is making money.’ The Beach Boys were singing. Then The Byrds. What year was it, anyway? ‘See, even the slightest aversion to money-making will hold you back. If you’re not thinking about the stuff 24/7…right? If you don’t literally see dollar bills in your green salad, or feel a little tug whenever you walk by a fountain with a bunch of coins at the bottom of it…forget it; success is not for you.’

Lola was a little disappointed that she hadn’t arranged for a flight that would land her in California in daylight, in the middle of the molten belly of the mythic sun. Looking out over the sometimes low wall of the freeway that night, at the liquor store neighborhoods doing their best to hide their scuttling thoughts from the police helicopters that came and went overhead with the blasé regularity of taxis, she got the feeling of a kind of pre-show excitement, like it would feel in an empty auditorium in the early afternoon of the day of a Bruce Springsteen gig. The So Cal Sun would be taking the stage in less than five hours, for one of its legendary fourteen hour sets. Some die-hard fans were even camped outside in anticipation, curled up on bus stop benches, or in wide-screen television packing crates, sweating with unconscious excitement in the dog-mouth night.

‘Think about it,’ Harry looked directly at Lola, ‘Every interaction between living things on this planet is a transaction of some kind. Money, it just intangibilizes the degree of force involved, wouldn’t you say? And every transaction, in my philosophy, could be considered either a, let’s see. Pure, mediated, or, a, yeah. Conflicted…transaction.’

‘Say you’re hungry. Some guy with a hot dog stand wants a buck for a dog. He gets the buck he wanted, you get the dog you wanted, that’s a pure transaction. Okay, but say you want to be the prettiest girl at the ball. Bear with me…I know, I know…you are most definitely already the prettiest girl at the ball, no question. But for the sake of argument, you’re not. But you want to be. So, say you buy the same brand and color of lipstick you saw Cheryl Tiegs wearing…ooops. Showing my age. I mean…the same brand and color of lipstick you saw Gisele Bundchen wearing in Vogue. You buy it to look like her. Whether or not you end up eventually looking a little like her, that’s irrelevant, it’s still a mediated transaction. You’re not buying the thing itself, you’re buying a path to the thing. You’re putting a down payment on the possibility of having the thing you want. Not always a satisfying type of transaction…nothing is as satisfying as a pure transaction. But a mediated transaction is still not as bad as the third type of transaction. I can tell this is all deeply fascinating to you.’

A sudden break in the monologue. There was the breathy fizz of the air-conditioning and the jingle jangle of The Byrds shading into The Troggs on the radio and…some sniffing for a moment while Harry paused to sniff, pinching and wiping at his thumbnail-sized nose.

Harry was a Filibusterer, conversationally, but that was okay. Lola didn’t mind Harry’s exhaustive monologs, because A) she only understood every third word of them. And B) his deep deep voice was so relaxing…listening to it was like being a marshmallow afloat in the hot cocoa of his sound, or, no, like being a baby luxuriating in a velvet-black body-temperature poultice of figgy shit. That’s how good Harry’s larynx was. Even Harry was in love with it.

‘So. There’s this third kind of transaction, the least satisfying for all parties involved, the type of transaction most likely to end in disappointment, litigation, anger, violence, whatever. Which I call the Conflicted Transaction. The best every day example of a conflicted transaction I can think of? This’ll hardly shock you. Just think about it.’ He looked at her again, eyebrows up. A black word escaped his clinched teeth. ‘Sex.’

Sex? Lola knew that syllable. She stopped being relaxed and started paying attention. The stranger driving the car she was trapped in, on a freeway driving towards who knows where, really, had just said sex. Were there power tools in the trunk? Something heavy under his car seat to smack her with? Two rolls of duct tape and a postal sack with which to dispose…?

‘Jesus,’ he said. ‘Even I picked up on that.’

‘On what?’ Said Lola, surreptitiously feeling for the door handle. Then she started removing a black vinyl boot. It was thigh-high and massively wooden-heeled and she had to unzip it. ‘You picked up on what?’

‘How tensed you got when I just said the word sex. Look! You did it again! You tensed up…’

‘Ach, nein, it’s not…’

The smell of Lola’s warm sock, a smell like kittens, flooded the car.

‘No, but, listen…that just proves my point. You know? Conflicted transactions? It’s the very point I was making.’

Lola smiled, pretending to consider Thing’s theory while massaging a foot with her left hand, clutching a boot like a hammer in the right, thinking: if he reaches for you, smash his gott verdammt head in with this heel.

37.

On the way up to Harry’s palace in the mountains, they stopped at a roadside liquor store on the outskirts of a desolate town called Julian. To the right of the road was a widely spaced strip of video nooks, liquor stores, fast-food castles…all lit up like an open fridge in a dark kitchen after midnight. And on the left, away from the road shoulder, was scrub. Here and there, far out in the scrub, was an unlit billboard, or a ghostly shack or trailer. Plus millions and billions of unseen intelligences, of course, from e-coli to coyote in size, but they were not participants, they were outside the drama; they’d be surprised to get even this mention, since Life is voraciously inclusive and Art is the opposite. Emetically exclusive.

Climbing out of his matte-black mother ship, easing up from the busy cabin air of the mothership in order to be wrapped in the humid blanket of the night, Lola felt that she was finally setting foot on the North American continent; finally felt that she had landed. She stretched and yawned. It was too warm for even a light jacket at almost two in the morning, and the parking lot to the side of The Valley Spirit Depot had five evenly distributed neon-reflecting cars of radically varying value placed on it.

After the roar of Thing’s air-conditioner, the semi-circle of reddened light they walked across seemed resoundingly silent, an area of eerie absence, the effect exacerbated by the tense munch of gravel underfoot, and a cricket’s pining for his long-lost love from somewhere in the purple distance. One reason Americans shoot so much, she concluded…to fill up scary silences like these. How many American movies had she seen as a girl that contained the line I don’t like it…it’s almost too quiet.

I’m here, thought Lola. Here. Lola is here in America.

It was only when they entered The Valley Spirit Depot through an iron-barred side entrance five seconds later…that Lola adjusted her thoughts and the scale of her perceptions to think, after the shock wore off: okay, now I’m here. Now I’m. I’m in…

Jesus Fucking Christ. The dimension of the store was mood-altering. Outside had felt smaller than this. They could have driven up and down these aisles in the mothership, making u-turns where necessary, plenty of room for two-way traffic. Drive-through shopping. This was the first time Lola had ever been in a commercial structure that featured a visible vanishing point…the bottle-mad aisles were a study in Renaissance perspective. If this is what the small town road-side liquor stores look like here, what the fuck is a super-market? What the fuck is a mall?

For the first time since early adolescence, Lola smiled. She was seized with the giddy impulse to scream; do a cartwheel, smash something, but the sheer bigness of the New World didn’t horrify her…it didn’t vex or dwarf her…she felt, rather, her soul expand to fill the available volume, and like a rapidly expanding gas would, it cooled off…just a little. The change registered as a liquid click in her heart. Her smile stretched to its limit and twitched…the muscles involved were rusty. It hurt. It hurt a little to smile. She’d have to try again in a day or two.

‘Do some late night shopping,’ said Harry, rubbing an eye and walking away from her. ‘Want something?’

I am Philly Dawg

 

Before marrying Luddy, way back in what Luddy refers to disparagingly as Bobbi’s “interesting past,” Bobbi had been married, for not quite a year, to a boyish man named Charlton Diggins. This was back in Philly. Bobbi suspected from the beginning that Charlton was a guy of Jewish descent trying to pass himself off as a guy of Italian descent, and she’d liked that about him.

She’d suspected it was Charlton’s mother who was the X-factor, because Charlton was strangely evasive about both his mother and his mother’s side of the family. He said she was dead and Bobbi asked when, were you a child or already grown, because it might explain some things, but he’d seemed to need a few seconds to decide what was what before answering her. Or maybe it’s how your mind freezes when you’re talking to a Customs Official, but Bobbi wasn’t a Customs Official, she was Charlton Diggins’s newlywed bride, Roberta Gertrude Fortneaux Diggins, and he was obviously, touchingly, making it up, the line about his mother died in child birth. Charlton tried to pass off his three-second pause of invention as grief but Bobbi assumed it was shame and that Charlton’s mother was a Jewess maybe living right there in Philadelphia. He had that look about him, and Philadelphia was the kind of city in which you might lie about something like that in 1977. 

The black roofs of the gray row-homes in Germantown are slick as rain hats in the fog at daybreak. Mornings in Philly can seem like classical mornings in a seaport and you do glimpse errant gulls sometimes, spiraling over rotted weathervanes and the witchy black fingers of Prussian spires. Bobbi loved the 19^th century row-homes of Germantown with their bracketed cornices and flat roofs, built of Wissahickon schist. She tried sketching a block of these immaculately painted row-homes on a mostly black street from a corner bus stop one morning but found it was more pleasurable to look than draw. Three mornings in a row she tried and failed. The final morning of that little project she had an episode with some frisky black kids toting book bags shouting, “Draw me!” “Draw me!” “Hey lady, draw me!”

Three minutes felt like hours. They left Bobbi with a frozen grin and a racing heart when the SEPTA bus finally wheezed to a halt at the stop and took the little devils away. The blouse under her nylon windbreaker was soaking with sweat. Why did these kids scare her so? They were just kids. 

Bobbi was 26 when she met her future first husband, 26 and feeling old and anxious to get married. No lines yet on her face, hair still dense and shiny, figure Huck-Finnish if tall. She wasn’t living at home with her parents, she was set up in a leafy little back-of-the-building apartment on Penn Street about a ten minute walk to the three storey house of her birth, on Queen Lane, where she was expected to stop by a few times a week, vulnerable to the pressure to do so by dint of being single and without a career.

Bobbi just didn’t have it in her to pretend to be too busy to visit her depressing parents. All of her school friends had 5-year-old sons and careers and Bobbi had a part time job and an easel. She rarely watched television. She was trying to be a painter, devouring winsome biographies of Picasso and Chagall and Modigliani over canned ravioli for dinner and then painting in stinkless, unserious acrylic well into the strangely suburban Philadelphia night by candle light, listening to the thick shiver of the breezed leaves of the Elms and the hourly clatter of the number 26 trolley up Wayne avenue and the lonely attenuated bark of a dog in another neighborhood. The dog became her mascot and her familiar. You bark and I paint. We are faithful to our given tasks while the lockstep world is sleeping. 

Working in an art supply store, Bobbi was plugged into an endless source of children and old women with projects and hobbies but never had the serious art conversations with up and coming painters she’d dreamed of when applying for the job. Where were the up and coming painters of Philly buying their supplies? Were they all grinding their own pigments? She could well imagine that buying commercial tubes of paint was some kind of uncool capitulation in the eyes of artistic geniuses and that’s how she began to think of herself: the timid kind of amateur who not only used tubes of store-bought paint but had a part-time job in the store she bought them in.

The only thing Bobbi had going for herself artistically speaking was monomania. She knew that much about art, that monomanias are good. Versatility is show-offy and evolution is craftsmanlike but monomania bespeaks the psychological disturbances that average citizens and patrons of the art expect worthwhile artists to suffer. Over and over again she painted her hieroglyphic of the barking dog, mouth open and tail straight back. The dog was either barking or howling.  

Eventually she worked with Krylon spray paint and a cardboard stencil for iconic mass-produced accuracy, but the fumes indoor were too much so she sprayed outside, in the back yard, with the canvases propped against the hurricane fence, which began looking geometrically diseased with partial rectangles of various colors. Bobbi got the bold inspiration one humid, meteorologically backed-up evening to just keep on going through the fence gate and down the alley with the spray can and the stencil and do it on a nearby office building. Just an unobtrusive and enigmatic silhouette in black metallic spray paint on the building’s cornerstone, right next to the A.D. MCMXXXVII, the execution of which produced in Bobbi’s skull the soft pop of an artistic breakthrough orgasm. A middle aged (in her mind) white (to all appearances) middle class (irrefutably) graffitist. One of those things where it suddenly hits you you’ve been heading this direction all along. Your whole life.  

Spraying on public structures at 3am was an intensely sexual thrill for her…like a skin change operation she could undo every daybreak and re-do every night…it was like having Velcro’d genitals; a black set and a white set for night and day respectively. The black set of course male.The risk was distinct considering Frank Rizzo’s notorious graffiti-hating cops and here she was, suddenly engaging them on their territory, or at least trafficking in their milieu, while her old Main Line school friends with proper careers and lyrically named 5 year olds and nannies were only reading about the brutality and strife in the morning papers and tut-tut-tutting over their sectioned grapefruits. This city is becoming a multicultural trash basket. In a way her long lost school chums were all now hearing from Bobbi, picking up her vibrations in the ether as she added her note to the million-note chord of the streets that frightened them above and below the range of conscious human hearing.  

Something about becoming some kind of measurable graffiti presence in Germantown, Philadelphia, triggered in Bobbi thoughts more serious and curious about black kids. They scared the hell out of her, no matter how much safely-distant concern or affection she managed to scrape up for them from her wholly other sphere. Why? Black kids scared the hell out of her and scared the hell out of others like her as well as others unlike her and even other black kids, too. Part of it was just the fearsomeness of kids, period; everyone in America is afraid of American kids because kids have a worldview and a budget and spending power which dictates much of the look of the modern world, certainly commercial spaces, arguably private space also, and that’s power enough to be afraid of. And beneath that the deranged impulsiveness, the famous cruelty, the avid gift in the art of wounding truths…

Which would seem to sum it up but if you come across two or three white youngsters in an urban setting it’s not an intrinsically frightening experience. It’s frightening if you call them juveniles but not if you call them youngsters. But if you refer to black kids as youngsters you’re not being wholly sincere: what you mean is juveniles. And that is a scary word.

Black kids were by no means the majority of the population in that integrated neighborhood called Germantown but they were the main unspoken topic of discussion. Condensed vectors of guilt and anarchy. Once you’ve made a serious mark or painted illicitly on public space you never again look at public space the same; you find yourself seeing lots of unmarked, unused, image-ready surfaces where before you saw banal or forbidding municipal order. Crossing that line is liberating but also feels like mess-making and the constant struggle to rein it in. The sense of “public” versus “private” vanishes completely after the first few times you cross that line and Bobbi realized that poor black kids with cans of shoplifted Krylon had become the psychological landlords of massive tracts of real estate simply by labeling it. Without bothering to write doctoral thesises on the topic they explored the limits of appropriation, grasping with a collective intuition that property law is the white man’s graffiti and by writing over the writing they have amended it. The white man’s graffiti is fine print. Imagine graffiti all over the White House. It wouldn’t be the White House any more.  

Bobbi’s own self-esteem skyrocketed after she became a clandestine trademark on the blank spots of her neighborhood and as a side-effect acquired another valuable secret to add to her repertoire, becoming even less knowable to her mother and her friends and so much more knowable to herself. Not that she was as one with those juveniles with their gang code juvenilia, advertising in the glyph of the gonad. She was doing it in her own well-educated pretty white woman way with a neat little stencil and a smirk. 

Her apotheosis as a graffitist in her neighborhood of Germantown, Philadelphia arrived the Tuesday afternoon she’d hired two kids, two twelve or thirteen year old black kids who lived in her building and should have been in school but weren’t…kids just sitting on the back steps right outside her bedroom window making, what, trucks or motorcycles or super-heroes-battling noises…she hired them for five dollars apiece to come in and haul her old sofa bed out to the curb. Just to shut them up. Even though what would she sleep on before she bought the next one?

They filed in through her screen door with sheepish grins and asymmetrical afros, weirdly embarrassed, she guessed, to be alone in an intimate space with an attractive young white woman; they were over-polite yet precociously sexual; and she offered them each a glass of powdered lemonade mix before delegating who would tackle which end of the sofa bed. Yes ma’am, thank you ma’am, they said, and Bobbi entered the kitchen, a move that took no more than a sidestep, and she heard the taller, thinner boy say to the stockier darker one, in a stage whisper, “Check it out, she rippin’ off Philly Dawg!”  

Ripping off Philly Dawg. Bobbi peeped back into the living room, while the tap water ran, to see the boys stooped over the stack of her original barking dog canvases leaning against the radiator. She couldn’t believe it; her first acknowledgement; she did a little dance in the kitchen. Philly Dawg? 

When Charlton Diggins came into Germantown Graphic Supply the next day, Bobbi was still so jazzed in the unrevealed guise of Philly Dawg that she parlayed the man’s shy query about piñata-making (he was a substitute teacher) into coffee and cheesecake at the Maplewood mall, her treat. There was something about this gangling Charlton, she thought. Trying to pass himself off as Italianate when in fact he was almost certainly a Jew. She liked how vulnerable and literary that made him seem. She liked how open-minded it made her feel. She imagined saying with a breezy Norman Lear sitcom inflection, “Honey, I don’t give a damn if you’re a Zarathustran as long as you don’t pick your nose or wear my panties,” in response to his tearful confession. All in good time, she counseled herself. All in good time.  

Bobbi would stand in the autobiographies aisle of Paige Turner’s, the Chestnut Hill bookshop, one among a half dozen Madras-shirt-wearing graduate-school-age white women on the premises, thinking: I am Philly Dawg. 

The day before inviting master Diggins over to her apartment for the first time ever, she’d hidden all the art paraphernalia, hidden or destroyed all the old paintings, because she had an absolute horror of seeing herself as some kind of pathetic would-be artist through her man-boy’s eyes. Better to present herself as unapologetically shop girlish. Defiantly boho shabby genteel. An espresso-drinking, highly literate, flat-broke style snob. The barking dog stencil and the three or four cans of Krylon she secreted in a big canvas purse with a curved bamboo handle and vivid threadbare bowls of fruit stitched on each side her mother had given her after a Golden Wedding Anniversary trip she took alone to Nassau, in the Bahamas. The stuffed canvas purse Bobbi kept in the basement. 

After the wedding, Bobbi forgot all about her life as an irony-cloaked municipal art guerilla for all of six months, or until the honeymoon was irremediably over. It was definitively played out, the honeymoon, when the sex lost all of its unprecedentedness and entered the workaday schedule inked in for Monday evenings following CBS’s The Jeffersons. Once a week sex on a rigid schedule. At which point Philly Dawg soon found herself at it again, sneaking out at all hours of the night during her husband’s deeply effort-wracked postcoital sleep. Kicking and twitching. What inner-conflict was the poor wretch rehashing unresolved every night? At whose eidolon was he twitching and whimpering? Surely not Bobbi’s.

Sneaking out with an adulterer’s thrill, she claimed new buildings, new streets, and kelly-green awnings became attractive to her. Kelly-green, brick-red and royal blue. Hotels, pricier restaurants and funeral homes. She noticed that nobody had thought of doing the awnings yet and she did them so neatly that her work looked like discreet corporate logos on the projection flaps. In the beginning, she’d found faking orgasms with her newlywed husband to be an erotic experience but spraying projection flaps soon replaced that.  

She got to the point that the end credits reprise of the sitcom’s theme song made her shoulders tense and her vagina very dry. Knowing that her husband would soon be reaching across to switch off that little lamp on the night table on her side of the double bed. Conjugal duty: the phrase started life as a chauvinism-lampooning joke between them and morphed into something more hideous every time it went unspoken. Six months: it flew by like a week that took an eternity and turned out to be the actual extent of their marriage. Trial period. Bobbi began rehearsing that phrase. Philly Dawg began targeting the 26 trolley. Taking therapeutic risks.  

Therapeutic risks in the dead of night and Charlton’s interminable tales of Charlton Diggins, blue-eyed crusading substitute school teacher over dinner and The Jeffersons on Monday: that was her married life. This is what I got married for? She’d sit there nodding while he gestured emphatically. Relating in great anecdotal detail how dumb the kids could be while regularly gushing the liberal alibi of how smart they were. These kids are so smart, Bobbi. Running his hands through his curly ash-colored hair and then cupping his face in them. And that other liberal bromide that Bobbi takes exception to and wanted to correct Charlton over every time he uttered it: children are the future. No, children are not the future they are the past…the elderly are the future.

She found herself slipping more and more Yiddish into their dinner time conversations. She found herself placing a box of Matzoh on top of the refrigerator. A secondhand copy of the Bernard Malamud Reader on top of the toilet tank. She wanted that confession. She needed it soon. 

Even the shock of the size of Charlton’s penis had devolved from delight to dread via a transitory phase of familial boredom, and her childhood gag reflex came back in spades. She reminisced fondly about tongue depressors. She’d get cold tears in her eyes and see stars. Performing it felt like a sorority hazing.

The only value at all Bobbi could find in Charlton’s favorite show The Jeffersons was in the marriage of Helen and Tom Willis, secondary characters, television’s first interracial couple. They were metaphysically privy, in a Jungian sense, to Bobbi’s racial secret and she nurtured the imaginary rapport, turning their straight lines into insights. Charlton would belly-laugh at George Jefferson’s zebra taunts and Bobbi would narrow her eyes.  

Christmas Eve the year they married the sky was a low ceiling and the air was a loom of fluff, the flakes falling so densely they didn’t appear to be falling at all but rather stacked or even rising in air, muffling sound and holying the street and haloing the streetlights, and it was the scintillating spaces between the flakes themselves that seemed to be falling cold and invisible to earth. Bobbi put Charlton to bed early with goose and a handjob and bundled up and was out in it on the perfectly deserted streets in her Dostoevskian greatcoat, relishing the spectacle.  

Just her alone on the blinded streets, the padded cell of the night, everything cold and swollen and soft…the only intense little burning pattern of color coming from the traffic lights changing from green to yellow to red with post-apocalyptic poignancy. The only sound was Bobbi’s frosted breath and Bobbi’s crunching boots. Even that distant neighborhood dog, the prototype of her graphic mission, her lone inspiration and spirit familiar, was silenced out there in the fused horizon, painted out under blankness. She thought of the word Leningrad as she set herself like an italic exclamation mark against the crumbling wind as it picked up, tickling and numbing her face. Up Penn to Wakefield, south on Wakefield for thirty minutes straight to Garfield, north on Garfield to Wister Woods Park. It’s a Christmas Eve blizzard and the only marks in the deep snow besides Bobbi’s gashing footprints are clover-shaped rabbit tracks printing the path leading into the park’s southern entrance like a whimsical invitation from the spirit of the park itself.  

Entering the park from its north entrance is a tall, well-built 17 year old black boy in a brand new camouflage parka from the Army Surplus store on Chestnut Street, hood down, dark face vivid in the snowlight. The black boy outweighs Bobbi by a good thirty or forty pounds, as slender as he is (and as tall as she is), and if she were to find herself walking towards him on a dark street her dread of his approach would be incalculable and only properly described in physiological terms. But as it is she spies him from a comfortable vantage in a thicket on a hill, on her belly, laying up a snow dune in her greatcoat, bundled under the coat in itchy sweaters, peering over the top of the little hill. Watches him pick a fluff-upholstered bench under the white canopy of ancient oak and elm branches that half-shelter them both from the wind-shot snow. If she were a member of the Wehrmacht’s snow patrol and he were a Leningrad partisan she could lob a grenade over the thicket right into his lap.

The secret proximity to such a figure of terror is perversely delicious, even better than watching a panther in a zoo because here there are no bars and the panther doesn’t know he’s being watched. What’s he doing here? Sitting on a bench in a blizzard in Wister Woods Park. This big kid glowing black in the shadowed snowlight and the frozen trees making that occasional gun crack sound from the matrix of branches. He’s sitting there like Buddha in a snow globe. 

He is thinking. Thinking back over the events of the evening. Just sitting and thinking all alone in the park while snow falls and kids all over Philly are dreaming in the aftermath of A Charlie Brown Christmas or The Grinch or Rudolph (Frosty the Snowman doesn’t rate a mention; Frosty is bullshit) or whichever cartoon perennial was on tonight. Innocent little kids who play stick ball in the summer and toboggan on flattened cardboard boxes down hills like the hills in the park here in winter and know not a thing about the pleasures and terrors of the real world. You think tobogganing down a steep hill on a flattened cardboard box is terrifying? You think it’s fun? Kid, you have no idea. Trust me. Sleeping furiously after the cartoons through the unbearable suspense of what did I get on Christmas morning. Only the cartoons as the years go by will definitely mean more to you than the toys you got the next morning; more than the train set, the GI Joe, everything.

His favorite will always be the Burl Ives-narrated stop-animation Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer… due mainly to the character Clarice, the sweet little big-eyed reindeer with the white girl voice who remains faithful to the outcast Rudolph despite his freakishness. Despite the deformation of his glowing nose. Even Rudolph’s parents are ashamed of him and treat him like shit. 

High point of the show is when Clarice sings to Rudolph there’s always tomorrow for dreams to come true. He’s seen Clarice sing this song to Rudolph what…ten times? Once a year since he was seven or something. He missed it the year before last because he felt it appropriate at fifteen to have outgrown such frippery but sure enough the very next year his ass was on that corduroy sofa in front of the color television and he misted up a little, careful to hide the childish reaction, when it came time for Clarice to sing. Well this year he guesses he really was too old for Clarice’s song of hope because he missed the show not for psychological reasons but because he was too busy fucking his 54 year old aunt, and if that’s not too grownup for cartoons, what is? Knocking on the door to his room in her transparent nightie holding a candle and with no underwear on going Merry Christmas.  

The young man has a lot to think about. Even the categories of the thoughts he must think are many, from humorous (the way she’d kept whispering, gasping, with fake mounting panic, what are you doing? What are you doing? And he’d had a thought to shout I’m cleaning the rain gutters, what does it look like I’m doing?), to the philosophical (did he fuck her or did she fuck him?), to the scientific (what possible purpose could evolution find in making a 17 year old boy want to copulate with a woman beyond childbearing age?), to the moral (should I be ashamed? Should she? Should both of us?), to the legal (what if somebody finds out and reports it?). He imagines himself writing a love poem to his 54 year old Aunt and it makes him sick to his stomach. Well that’s the worst aspect of this whole situation. Nobody to write a love poem for. Nobody from whom to receive one. 

Bobbi thinks: what’s that sound? Is the big black boy sitting on that bench there in a blizzard in Wister Park with his shoulders heaving…is he sobbing? 

When her father revealed their secret to her while sitting among soft shreds of his own semen in the bathtub, 17-year-old Bobbi absorbed the news with only the slightest lurch of disorientation. This is a girl who could light a cigarette in a hurricane, she was thinking. She didn’t become suddenly and extraordinarily invested in Black History; she didn’t even become a self-hating Negrophobe in a wounded psychotic sense. She calmly folded the information about her particle of blackness into a corner of her deepest self for future delectation. It gave her strength to know that she and her father both knew what her mother didn’t know…both knew that her mother didn’t know.

For giving her that, if for nothing else, Bobbi was grateful to him, pathetic as his need for sedative bathtub handjobs was. All daughters crave a secret with Daddy they can call their very own and some think it’s incest until it happens but in Bobbi’s case the incest wasn’t a secret, it was part of the culture of their nuclear family. The real secret was so much bigger than that.

The kid is definitely crying. 

Being a veteran (she refused the word victim) of incest explained nothing about her. But being an octoroon explained the strange prettiness she couldn’t have inherited from any known member of either side of her family: her aptitude for perfect tans and her incongruously full lower lip and the rich thick wave of her buttery hair…it all made perfect sense now, solving a riddle she hadn’t even realized was driving her nuts. The mirror finally made sense to her. Her mirror finally fit. Bobbi, 27, would stand in line at the Whole Truth Co-Op with other Birkenstock-wearing white women buying lentils in three pound sacks, thinking, I am Philly Dawg.  

Belly-down in her great coat on the snow dune that night in Wister Park like one of Rommel’s soldiers in North Africa, only with chattering teeth and no binoculars, up on that little hill spying down on the big sobbing black boy, Bobbi was thinking I am Philly Dawg. How many years since she has thought that? 

Her first husband Charlton came stumbling up from the basement in a Eureka state one day while she was napping off lunch on the new sofa bed; he burst into the living room swinging the dusty old canvas purse from Nassau crying “You? It’s you? You’re Philly Dawg?”  

He’d been in the basement looking for stuff for a Valentine’s Day project, and Bobbi was horrified at how cutesy-fied she suddenly felt; how patronized; how utterly destroyed the meaninglessly cool thing she’d been devoting herself to for months became in her incompatible husband’s fuckface knowledge of it. How small. He knelt by the sofa bed and cupped his face in his hands and said, “I have a confession to make, too.” 

She divorced him soon after the revelation. Not, of course, because he’d confessed to being a Negro. But that was definitely her excuse. 

puppet in a tunnel

done

P. Qua P.

 

P. was British. Tall P., yellow-haired, green-eyed, slender and fit, was from the lovely resort town of Brighton. Nice thick 1970s-cut hair had P., and dimples, and big white teeth. A fading bottle tan rendered her skintone sweetly sallow. She looked good in white t-shirt, jeans and motorcycle boots and she was a little older than she appeared to be at first glance, but that was a plus, in his opinion…all the wisdom of those five extra years without the apparent wear and tear; forty years compressed into what looked like a thirty-five year old package. The wear and tear was on the inside. The wear and tear was in her skull.

“Excuse me,” she said, “Do you speak English? Where’s the next tube station? Will you walk me there?” In town for a Buddhist retreat or convention or something. Alright, okay: Buddhist. Better than Baptist, at least. What Salter liked most was the Eliza Doolittle accent that P. would put on, pronouncing “lady” as “lie-dee” and even trotting out a few “blimeys” from time to time for laughs.

It only took about four hours, gallivanting around Berlin like backpacking teenagers, for P. and Salter to develop a rudimentary system of inside jokes and catch-phrases and by the end of the day they were holding hands. When he put her on the train to Frankfurt (from where she’d be flying back to the U.K. the next day) they indulged in a lingering kiss goodbye. Walking home from the train station he was shadowed by an unexpected melancholy, but not because she was gone.

Salter did not kid himself that he was falling in love with her. What Salter and P. both seemed to be willing to settle for was a good-natured no-sweat mimicry of passion as they remembered enjoying it in their twenties. They’d both hit 40 with an aversion to drama. No risk, no fun is a German saying but the Germans hate risk and rarely have fun and he was feeling the influence of his environment. When he was young he was into beginnings just as now he is into middles: middle-age, middle-class, middle-of-the-road, fair-to-middlin’, etc., and none of the taxing passions (each representing a beginning and an ending with no middle) of the bad old days…those brief ecstatic super-highs he invariably paid for with shattering dunks in the slough of despond. P. felt much the same way but the trick was in not coming right out and saying it, or even being conscious of the fact…the trick was letting the subconscious hoard the truth as its terrible treasure. Salter liked P., but if he had learned, the very next day, of her Discount Jet failing catastrophically to land without incident, he would not have been moved to shed a tear. Which may or may not be chilling. But that’s what growing up is all about: crying less and less over the fate of others and more and more over the fate of one’s self.

What did Salter like so much about P.? She had a good body, a nice face, a pleasant enough personality. The value of his body’s stock was not rising. Grab somebody while we still can, his body was pleading with him. The Germans call it Torschlusspanik…the panic of the closing door. The Americans call it musical chairs,  which is exactly the kind of passion-free calculation that the young abhor in the wise. He visualized, without pain, the possibility of ending up in Brighton, patrolling the beach in a warm overcoat at dusk after a cozy dinner, white-haired and introspective and stripped of worrisome passions…or options…or that persistent nag: the Demon called Hope.

Over the following weeks they spoke on the phone every day, at exactly the same time. The aridity of the modern childhood creates that in us: a longing for rituals, for traditions. It was touching. She’d call him just as she was sitting down to eat her delicious microwave dinner while gazing out the big bay window upon the picturesque street angling down towards the brilliantined wrinkles of the sea. And all the bright bay windows across the street with none of their curtains drawn, either. Salter actually enjoyed the sound of her chewing in his ear over the phone. Chewing is a vulnerable, human sound. He’d had a lover once who couldn’t stand the sound of chewing: mixed nuts would have her sticking her fingers in her ears in the next room and a bag of chips would have her out on the window ledge. It could very well be that P. chewing in his ear on the telephone, and not minding to hear Salter chewing in hers, won him over against certain perceived debits in her personality and her history as well. A man seriously considers spending the rest of his life with a woman because she chews in his ear during phone calls.

He considered marrying her. Even after learning over the phone that she’d spent ten years living as an expat lesbian in San Francisco, earning good money as a stripper. She earned “pots of cash” in one of the oldest tit joints in the city, the anti-erotically named LUVLEE LADY, with its red velvet draperies and uncle-spunk ambience. Do they or do they not, wondered Salter, during the course of the conversation, turn tricks for quick cash backstage? Salter hadn’t seen her piercings, but when she spoke of them, and the stripping, and the physically abusive lover who had driven her (with sisterly kicks and punches) back towards the plausibility of a relationship with a man (“Making up after a fistfight with your girlfriend is kind of an anticlimax,” as she put it)…he was intrigued and lightly revolted. She was good on the phone and revealed a streak of Celtic garrulity when touching upon the topics of her booze-addled father (“imagine an English Richard Pryor…from Yorkshire…whatever that means”), her job (“Don’t get me started…”), and her experience with black men (“None, but open to edification, Darlin’.”).

“I mean,” she said, “what’s it like?” Loik. “Is it fat and purple or long and black or…what? Is it positively elephantine, like they say? God, you must think me an awful slag to ask!”

“Not at all…how will you learn things if you never ask?”

“Well…” he could picture her smiling coyly, “…I can think of one way I could learn: you could show me.”

“Love to.”

“And I could show you.”

“Show me what?”

“Hmmm.” She smacked her lips. “I could show you…my naughty little party trick.”

He had never much cared for the word naughty. His inner-voice reacted strongly to the word “naughty” and urged him to forget it; to call off the whole damn thing over this one word, pronto. But rational elements of his mind complained, quite reasonably, that you can’t just drop a woman for having used one wrong word. There ought to be dozens of them first. “Your naughty little party trick,” he repeated, with neutral inflection.

“Yep. My naughty little party trick.”

“How little?”

“Ever hear of a thing called female ejaculation?”

“Sure.” Salter cleared his throat. “Ever hear of the Loch Ness Monster?”

“Har har.”

“Tell me more about stripping.”

“What do you want to know?”

“Didn’t it make you hate men?”

“You’re putting the carriage before the horse, darlin’. And hate is too strong a word. I don’t hate anyone…I’m a Buddhist.”

“But you felt, shall we say, contempt for them.”

“My mum bought me a dehumidifier years ago. Right? I should probably warn you that I have mild asthma, by the way. Anyway, the dehumidifier sits unobtrusively in a corner of my living room, and it’s always just humming away. Naughty me, I’ve never changed the filter, if you can imagine…couldn’t be bothered, innit? I’m sure this dehumidifier is absolute shite at this point…good for nothing at all. But I’d rather not deal with it because of the thought of what’s going on under the lid…what with that grotty old filter and all…it gives me the heebie-jeebies just thinking about it. But it’s too bleeding massive to chuck in the bin, see. So I just…you know…it just sits there, where it’s always been, plugged in but useless. I don’t even really look at it any more…I vacuum around it a few times a week and that’s the extent of it. See what I mean? It’s just…,” he could hear that she was looking over her shoulder at it, “…it’s just there.”

“So…”

“That’s how I saw those blokes in the strip joint. I mean, it’s not like I was stripping for them. I was stripping ‘cuz my boss told me to, and I got paid for it, and no, I never turned a trick for cash…and you haven’t answered my questions about your dick, by the way.”

“I haven’t?”

“Not very comfortable talking about old dickie, are you?”

“It’s not that I’m uncomfortable…more that the topic…offends me,” he surprised himself saying. “You know: black male. Big dick. Blah blah blah.”

“Oh God…I’ve been racially insensitive, haven’t I?”

“Believe me, you ain’t the first, Honey.”

“That was cute.”

“What?”

“The way you just said ain’t. You know how you love it when I say blimey…well I love it when you say ain’t.”

When he didn’t respond to that she asked, “So then, how big is it?”

After chatting like this for almost a month they made plans for her to visit him in Berlin for a weekend, based on the grownup theory that three days in his flat together would be an accurate test of their compatibility. The morning she left for Stansted Airport (the cheapest route to that airport from Brighton took more than twice as long as the flight to Berlin) it was chilly in Brighton, so P. dressed accordingly. Which meant the baggy black running pants she’d painted her kitchen in, an old anorak and a ridiculous bobble hat.

He makes it to the airport quite early. He doesn’t want to chance being late and having P. get off the plane and walk through customs without him there to meet her. When he first finds the arrivals gate, no one else is waiting for the late flight from London. He is about thirty minutes early. This gives him plenty of time to think. One thing he keeps thinking about is how not excited he is to be awaiting P.’s arrival. He dwells on it, in fact. He’d much rather be in bed, alone, for example, preparing to watch the Grammies, which is being telecast live from Los Angeles that evening.

A crowd eventually forms in front of Salter, a small-but-intense crowd of people more eager than he is to peer into the arrival lounge as loved-ones disembark the plane with the dazed gratitude of the living and line up to yank luggage off the sluggish conveyor. The crowd consists of the usual: girlfriends, grannies, grandchildren, wives, best friends, hotel-sent drivers holding signs saying ZIEGELDORF, etc. Directly in front of Salter paces a serious-looking middle-aged man in creased gray trousers, dress shoes and a leather jacket, nervous or anxious as hell, glancing at his watch incessantly and clutching a significant bouquet of roses. This guy’s been thinking about this moment for days and weeks, thinks Salter. This guy knows the score: life is short, find someone, buy her roses, pick her up at the airport. When the plane lands and his lover gets off it’ll be Christmas for them, Salter nods to himself, enviously. She might be plain or old or downright ugly but it won’t matter because he obviously cares for her and that’s what matters; I bet they’ve been together for twenty years; I wish I had someone to care for. He sighs audibly. I wish I had someone to wait at the airport for with a bouquet of roses.

But Salter is far from prepared for what happens when he sees the serious beau (not much younger than Salter himself) see his girl with creases of joy at his eyes and he gestures excitedly through the glass at her and she is the most unbearably beautiful girl in a Navy Peacoat, a fine-boned brunette with lustrous hair and exotic eyes and an incredible pre-Raphaelite profile and she hurries on her long legs without luggage through customs and practically pirouettes into the arms of the middle-aged guy who drops the bouquet to catch her: a fair trade, a lyric metaphor, and the crowd around them smiles, the people all smile, and Salter is flooded with feelings of …its just unfair, is all, and he’s hurt and he knows it’s ridiculous but still it’s unfair and it hurts.

And then P. comes out in her bobble hat and baggy pants and anorak, red-nosed, walking with that foalish pigeon-toed gait; that asinine counterfeit of helpless youth she affects; looking befuddled and old nevertheless; mouth open…a caricature of dowdy British spinsterhood, dragging her wheeled plaid suitcase behind her…and it is all Salter can do not to slip through the crowd and run for the exit when she spots him and smiles and hugs herself and mouths its cold! No doubt she realizes how awful her get-up looks; maybe it had hit her on the plane, half-way over the black face of the North Sea: the obvious self-sabotaging provocation of dressing this way for what was essentially a second date. Why did she do it? Why did she get on a plane for Berlin as though dressed for a weekend of D.I.Y. in a rustic cottage in Cornwall? She wouldn’t have wanted her mother to see her in a costume like this, more the less an attractive man she’s been courting (or been courted by) long-distance for a month. Was the bobble hat a subconscious Sapphic protest or simple self-destructiveness or even simpler fuck-it-all-edness at this late stage of the game or what? She knows she’ll have to hustle to save the weekend and she does…she hustles, going to work immediately. She grabs Salter’s hand and leads him off in an arm-swinging walk towards the escalator saying “Cor blimey, Guv!” or some such cutesy exaggeration. “I got sumfink for you,” she sing-songs, improvising a grin. Salter does his best to play along.

“You do? What?”

“Save it for later,” she says, coyly, Soivit fa lighter, but really she doesn’t have anything for him at all; nothing in the suitcase but three changes of clothing, a bottle of baby oil, some candles and her meditation mat. Save it for later is a stalling technique, and her teasing tone is so ambiguous that she might be referring to sex, and heaven knows she’s completely willing to offer her ass as a virgin sacrifice to propitiate the gods at this point. Stupid stupid stupid…with a little lipstick and her cat suit on and those thigh-high vinyl boots (somewhere in the back of the closet) she’d have been the master of this situation. As it is she will probably have to resort to letting him do something to her she’d never before let a man do and with a dick probably twice the size of the legal limit and pretend to like it, too. She can already hear herself saying it’s funny, but I could never understand why most women I know seem to hate doing this…and it makes her want to puke. Most women hate doing this because it’s painful, unhealthy and perfectly degrading and they find themselves under constant pressure to do it, actually. She thinks of her pretty, tragically straight buddy Gladys back in ‘Frisco and accompanying Gladys one fine fall day under a sky of milk-smeared lapis to the free clinic in Haight over what turned out to be a cluster of rectal fistulas. Is that what P. can look forward to, now, after her strategic fuck-up? Holes in her ass-hole? But it’s so trivial, the difference between what she did and what she should have done…mother-effing lipstick? This is how a man decides on a life-partner? A fucking bobble hat and no lipstick is a make-or-break? What about my brain, the quality of my affection, the depth of my experiences? And it makes her angry and rebellious all over again and now she remembers the space she was in about an hour before leaving her flat to catch the bus to the train to the tube to the train to Stansted. She’d ransacked her dresser drawers and the closet and tried on about ten different outfits, something she hadn’t done since the age of twenty, and yet in none of the outfits does she look twenty, or even thirty five…in all of the outfits she looks tarted-up and old and garish and desperate and first in despair but then in anger she’d thought: fuck it. This is me. Take it or leave it. Like it or lump it. This is me.

They manage to fill the long train ride from Schönefeld to Salter’s neighborhood with neutral chatter; that is, Salter, in no mood to pretend to be pretending not to be in love, is at least grateful that P. is able to fill what would have been the uncomfortable silences. It is amazing to Salter that she has anything left to say after blabbing on the phone with him every day for a month; amazing that she can access this deep reservoir of emergency small talk; he gets away with nodding and smiling or nodding and frowning and the occasional interrogative grunt. It must look and sound hysterically funny to anyone in the seats behind them: this chatty animated white woman in the bobble hat and the all-but-mute brother beside her. From behind it must look like this has been going on for twenty years: she blabbing, he nodding. Not that his side of the trip isn’t full of rich interior monolog…covering everything from his first kiss to Dick van Dyke’s insufferable “Cockney” accent as the chimney sweep Bert in “Mary Poppins.”

The train passes through fifteen desolate stations in the blighted east before getting anywhere near where Salter usually hangs out in Berlin and he muses that the one single fucking advantage of sitting on this train with P. as opposed to with his dreamgirl (that vivacious pre-Raphaelite at the airport, say) is that if Neo Nazis should suddenly hop on the S-Bahn they won’t be particularly enraged to catch Salter with this dowdy Brit…the bobble hat is a tool of invisibility like Wagner’s Tarnhelm, protecting them both.

The train finally reaches his station and they embark on the fifteen minute walk to his flat in a misty drizzle. Not another soul on the street do they encounter as P. bumps the wheels of her wretchedly large suitcase over uneven concrete and cobblestones with a child’s passive-aggressive delight in unavoidable noise-making, the loudest thing for miles, he slightly ahead of her and grateful that it’s just cold enough outside to excuse his keeping both hands firmly in his pockets every inch of the way.

It’s better in his flat: at least it’s comfortable…cozy…a controlled environment. Salter opens the door and ushers P. in and takes her coat and hat with what they both play as jokey, English-butler-like froideur and offers her something to drink and goes right to the television, switching it on and wheeling it to the center of the living room: just in time for the Nth-annual Grammies. P. takes in the room with a furtive glance: high ceilings, immaculate parquet floor…minimal, roomy…some shelves, some gadgets, two tall silver floor lamps, two massive black faux-marble vases…nice…uncluttered but nice and it’s obvious that this boy is not averse to dusting. Men are far more likely to do the cooking than the dusting, usually…anything they can show off with they don’t mind doing.

They seem to have missed no more than the first third or so of the interminable award ceremony. There should be a Grammy given for Best Grammy Award Ceremony. The epic broadcast will give them something to talk about without forcing him to engage her directly on anything remotely personal …the television will be the third party, or buffer, or random arbiter for them that it is for most doomed, inarticulate marriages, no matter how brief or enduring. And the epic length of the show gives Salter some hope of putting P. to sleep without even having to fuck her.

What Salter likes about watching the Grammies in Germany is that the broadcast isn’t sanitized for German audiences the way it is for all those sensitive, shockable, immaculate church-going virgins in the U.S…whatever happens on camera, the Germans will see. Same with “live” White House press conferences…if a reporter asks an embarrassing question, the television audience in Germany gets to watch the entire question being asked as well as its entire shaky and or furious response from the President. When Germans cover big political news in America, the German audience sometimes gets to see normally suave tepid Congressmen blurt words like “bullshit” or “fuck” (both translated as “Scheisse”) and once heard Strom Thurmond spit a super-dipthonged “Niggra” so close to “Nigger” that a mass spectrometer couldn’t have discriminated between epithets. In many cases, not only are Americans blissfully unaware of what’s happening in the world in general…they’re less aware of what’s happening in their own towns, or up their own streets, than the TV audience in Germany is. Who was Spiro T. Agnew and what did he do wrong? More Germans than Americans can answer that question. Not that the Germans are driven by any force more noble than pedantic Schadenfreude. The Germans are no more a nation of ethical bloodhounds driven towards the warm odor of All Truth than any other nation on earth. There are thousands of German school kids who couldn’t come up with more than a factual sentence or two about Adolf Hitler, and hundreds who haven’t even heard of him. Tens of thousands, at least, who still use the word Jew as a casual pejorative. But about American malfeasance they are all quite hip and plugged in…they are all media cynics, these kids, monitoring the TV and the Internet the way Weegee used to monitor his short wave police scanner…

Earlier that week, in fact, an American scandal, downplayed in the stateside press, had made front page in all the left-wing papers in Germany: two rookie cops in Baltimore, summoned to a mall to subdue a family of three accused of shoplifting, were caught on several amateur videos brutalizing the family…a 32 year old black mother and her two daughters (14 and 11)…to the extent that a 235 pound fourth-generation Italian-American cop is seen resting his massive knee on the fragile bones between the shoulder blades of a prostrate 75 pound 11-year-old while handcuffing her as the mother screams in the background that her daughter is asthmatic and won’t be able breathe with his weight on her. To exacerbate the blinding halo of absolute injustice around the incident it later comes out that the three weren’t shoplifting at all; the items found in the mother’s purse were returns, all of which she had receipts for…she had simply wanted to exchange the three Danskins in her possession for others that fit better. Security had only checked Mrs. Broder’s Gucci handbag in the first place, minutes after the three entered the store (in an upscale suburban mall), on a “hunch”. The final twist is that the very black Broder family is not from the ghetto at all: the mother is a veteran reporter at a local television station, married to an in-house lawyer at DOW Chemicals, and the punitive damages against the city of Baltimore are projected by their celebrity legal team to be in the tens of millions. The story is surprisingly (or not) muted on stateside media.

Salter busies himself in the kitchen while P. sneaks the makeup kit out of her scuffed suitcase and does a quick, subtle job of rehabilitating her image before he returns with a big bowl of popcorn and two tall dark German beers. She has applied lipstick and blush and teased her short crop of gold-coin-colored hair with a switch-blade comb she stole from an ex-ex ex and checked her overall image pouting into the mirror of the bulging big screen of the television when the camera panned the Grammy audience and the screen went black segueing into a classy, Boomer-targeted car commercial. This is no time to make a political statement or prosecute mammal life on the planet for the way it should be as opposed to the way it is, to paraphrase her thoughts. Look pretty. Think of it as an investment in the future. Time is not exactly standing still. Commercial over, and The Rolling Stones’s live rendition of their bland new super-forgettable single gives Salter plenty to be funny about, and P. makes sure to laugh. She laughs, takes a deep swallow of beer, and laughs harder. She’s reeling it all back in. Almost lost him. The beer is helping.

“Mick!” he shouts at the screen, “why the collagen? You should be donating that excess lip fat to needy starlets, man, not injecting more of it!”

Okay, thinks Salter: it’s true. I’m feeling better. Call me shallow. She took the opportunity to apply a little makeup while I was making the popcorn and it’s not just that she looks better again but it’s also the fact that she is doing her best to please me that somehow…breaks the ice. It’s almost turning me on. I know it’s creepy…it’s some kind of caveman trip, wired into my medulla oblongata, I guess. What can I do about it? Did I fucking design the human brain? Did I write the fucking program governing the reproductive hardware? Am I the perpetrator of my preferences or the victim of them?

“Holy shit, am I nuts or does Keith Richards look more and more like a Strat-playing hemorrhoid every day?”

P. is meanwhile very stealthfully scooting closer to him on the leather sectional. Not to touch him, necessarily, but close enough for him to touch her when he’s ready. She knows how to do this: to control through abasement. It’s the same strip-club principle behind getting a Kotex of Thomas Jeffersons in your g-string as opposed to a Kleenex of George Washington. All her post-pubescent life she has oscillated between fearing men and pitying them and the thing is you can love someone you pity. Yes you can. She could love Salter…she could see it being worth it to love him. It’s just not the other way around: you can’t love someone who pities you, and that’s what she is truly alert to, as she grows older…that’s what she is rawly vigilant about: not so much being objectified, as in the days of yore…about being objectified she no longer gives a shit…human beings are first and foremost objects…but being pitied. Being pitied by some paunchy dick with halitosis even older than her is what she could kill over. Okay: cards on the table. A black man can’t pity her, can he? That might be this poor guy’s greatest theoretical attribute as a life-partner.

When it comes time to announce the winner in the category Best Rap Solo Performance, there are two presenters: a gangling black feller with a steam-shovel jaw and owlish glasses in a sable-trimmed cap-and-gown get-up…and his co-presenter: a petite, top-loaded platinum blonde so skinny she looks like a Scandinavian hieroglyphic. Or the letter P when she stands in profile. The juxtaposition of the black male and the blonde female makes a good visual while at the same time spuriously implying a broadly integrated society, though in reality, of course, the only black men she associates with are her body guards and the only white females he’ll talk to are prostitutes. The blonde, Sabreena, is channeling her nervous energy into glittering glissandos of glib giggling as she waits for the applause elicited by the mere fact of her presence to die down. The brother, MC PhD, also beneficiary of a big hand for doing little more than finding the lectern with the help of a generically pretty escort, seems agitated, and keeps biting his upper lip and adjusting his mortar board. Two Grammy ceremonies ago, he was the Best Rap Solo Performance and his debut album, Matriculator, has sold 14 million copies to date. The son of militant West Coast “black intellectuals,” he embarked on a serious career in music only after graduating with a degree in communications from Howard University and is known to be incisive and fluent on record, if not quite so while reading from a teleprompter in front of a live audience.

We learn that there are five nominees in this category, four of which are men and one of which is a woman, and the audience already knows without being told that the only female nominee is also the only non-African-American. E-Rex, the fat blind paraplegic rapper from Georgia whose mother died in the Fourth of July drive-by shooting that put him in his customized wheel chair, is heavily favored to win. After reading off an inspirational statement explaining that Rap is valuable to American and even global culture not only for its sheer vitality but also for its ability to enrich so many other art forms with the irrepressible wisdom of the streets, MC PhD leans on the lectern and reads a scripted witticism haltingly, waits for Sabreena’s canned retort, steps on her mispronounced retort with his leaden comeback, and joins her with, “And the winner of Best Rap Solo Performance is…” as Sabreena tears open the envelope.

“White Krissmiss!” squeals Sabreena. Cue: the chorus from White Krissmiss’s breakthrough smash “Tales of the Pale” as the lady herself, tall and bald as a 100 watt bulb and dressed in the Wehrmacht’s winter camouflage ski-suit (or something just like it) po-facedly storms the stage to take her Grammy against the sustained approving roar of the audience, more and more of whom are seen to be rising with benign reluctance into a peer-pressured ovation after she pimp-walks down the aisle.

“Shameless!” whoops Salter, who can’t help being delighted. It’s the greatest Grammy travesty since the Anita Kerr Singers blind-sided The Beatles by triumphing over “Help!” with “We Dig Mancini” for Best Performance by a Vocal Group in 1966.

“My God,” gasps P. “It’s Elvis all over again!”

But MC PhD isn’t having it. White Krissmiss, out of breath and smiling humbly, reaches for her Grammy but PhD, clutching it to the breast of his sable-trimmed gown, leans across the lectern again, taps the microphone thuddingly and says, “Whoa. Wait a minute. Wait up.”

He says, to the eight hundred and fifty formally-attired people in the audience at the Bob Hope Memorial Westinghouse Pavilion in Los Angeles, and the estimated 1.4 billion people (some of them in loin cloths) watching “at home”,

“Yo. This ain’t…that’s just…see, this ain’t the deal. You know what I’m sayin? Nuh-uh. It’s like, first Baltimore, now this? I don’t think so…and y’all…see, no disrespec to Krissmiss…okay? Know what I’m sayin? But we didn’t even…when I was growin up…I was hungry. Okay? I’m talkin’ ‘bout Oakland, okay? And we didn’t go stealin’ or robbin’ ‘cause my mama, she woulda…she woulda whupped our black asses with a belt. And that Sista and her family down in Baltimore, they coulda been…they wasn’t even shopliftin or nuthin…know what I’m sayin? …and that cop coulda killed that little sista with her asthma and now y’all wanna tell the other nominees…like, the brothas shouldna even bothered come down here tonight and y’all just…Y’all think y’all can even do that better…ya’ll don’t even want ya niggers black!”

And he goes on in this vein but the segue music swells up and it’s suddenly time for a commercial break and White Krissmiss herself has been standing to the side during the jagged verbal collage of MC PhD’s impressionistic sermon, head-bowed, hands clasped behind her back…nodding the whole time. And when she looks up and over at MC PhD she looks not as though she wants to throttle him, as well she should…she looks, instead, as though she wants to hug him and feel his pain and Salter thinks: are white people just smarter, or faker, or do they have ice-water in their veins, or what? Just like the android super-villain the hero can only hope to defeat through the miraculous intervention of sheer luck, he thinks. What would Isaac Asimov suggest? Every time a black somewhere loses control, flips out, gets loud…there’s a level-headed white somewhere waiting in the wings who not only benefits from the loss of control but benefits enormously…

“That was brilliant!” says P. She is by now pressed close beside Salter on the couch, with her hand between his shoulders, giving him a light, experimental, prefatory back-rub. “He really told it like it is; that took guts…I am so proud of him! Wow. That was inspiring!” She pats Salter on the back and repeats “I am so proud of him.”

If she could see Salter’s face at this moment she’d be shocked. Frightened even. On the television another classy car advert is playing out a Wagnerian scenario of soaring eagles and winding mountain roads bracketed between jump-cuts of black on the screen…black upon which the flickering white words elegance, then stature, then sensuality fade in and out…black like a mirror so P. glimpses a fleeting, distorted reflection of…but that’s not possible. She hasn’t done anything wrong, has she? But she feels his back muscles go rigid as a tractor tire to her touch and she removes her hand without even being conscious of removing it and he leans forward and turns off the television and says, without facing her, “Proud of what?”

Salter looks over his shoulder and sees: the proverbial frozen smile. He turns away again, cracking his knuckles. He has no way of knowing that her abusive ex-girlfriend used to crack her knuckles in much the same manner. “You’re proud of what? That clown in his cap and gown didn’t make one ounce of fucking sense.”

“I thought what he said was quite powerful.”

“Gotta love the irony, though…he’s standing up there in his fur-trimmed cap and gown and he couldn’t speak one complete sentence in English! Hey, and please don’t try to tell me…”

“But I don’t understand what you’re getting so upset about.”

“Please don’t try to tell me that if it was some white dummy up there being incoherent, you would have been proud of him, too!”

“But that’s just the point…there won’t be any white dummies, as you call them, up there …reacting with grief…genuine human rage and grief…over an injustice done to them by the black majority…because there is no black majority. And most of the injustices…the kind we’re talking about… are against blacks. Or am I a dummy too?”

“Look, I know you mean well. I really do. But liberal condescension does not help people like that…”

“People like that. That’s a funny way to put it. People like that…”

Salter gets up and grabs a jacket where it’s dangling from a door knob. “Oh, I see…I’m not allowed to make a distinction! Gee, thanks for reminding me of my roots, Miss Daisy…I almost got uppity there for a second!” He slips the jacket on and zips it. “Don’t wait up.”

“Jesus.”

He leaves the room, marches down the hall, and exits the flat, closing the door quietly behind him. Down the stairs. He feels better already. It’s only when he’s about a block away from the building that it hits him that now he’s being over-emotional, rather than coldly analytical…he’s doing just what he’d excoriated MC PhD for doing…he’s flipping out. I guess flipping out is just my fucking heritage…flipping out is my culture. I come from a long line of last-straw niggers; for us…everything is the last straw…we are born to flip-out, Jack…we emerge from the womb with our fists clenched and our eyes bugging out, little black hand-grenades, packed with the DNA of exasperation. Well, he sighs, at least I flipped out articulately…at least I can say that. Fuck it.

He hugs himself.

There’s the moon again. Very small, very cold, astonishingly incurious up there in its track in the cold sky over its humanity-infested paramour the Earth. All the little details, every day and every night without end: wildfires, volcanoes, the silver needles of jets and the warped quilts of farmland and the intricate gray circuit boards of metropolises and hurricanes like vast toilets flushing all over the equator…and Las Vegas a smashed re-molded disco ball and rhizome-like lightning illuminating the soil-like-air over the rusted industrial hubs…and satellites like glittering insects and sweet green pollutions like intercontinental perfume…all this…of zero interest whatsoever. Maybe there was a time when the moon was a dedicated witness, even a loving one, recording the surge and recession and resurgence of humanity’s Dorian-Gray-like self-portrait on the face of the Earth…those soft-as-cookies Mayan, or Elizabethan, or Igbo motifs…but then came the 20th century and it was all just too fucking much to look at…the paparazzi fusillade of A-bombs going off on the red carpet of the world premier of the modern age… and the moon is now catatonic or hysterically blind, lashed to its gravity track forever, a white-eyed corpse on a merry-go-round. What a sick thought, thinks Salter; I need another beer. A nice black Weizenbier. There is a tankstelle about four blocks from his flat, on Leibniz Strasse…

…the Tankstellen…the petrol stations…sell beer at night. In the old days, before the laws loosened, grocery stores could only be open between nine in the morning and six at night, and about four hours on Saturday and not at all on Sunday and that was the law. You’d end up doing most of your shopping in gas stations, especially if you fucking worked for a living. Every day at a quarter past five every grocery store in Berlin was packed with people dressed like businessmen and their secretaries…five or six check-outs in the bigger stores and aisles all jammed and the queues ridiculous. And if you couldn’t make it before six or you didn’t want to stand in a queue for twenty minutes or you wanted a snack, quite spontaneously, at three in the afternoon on Sunday…the petrol station. Beer, ice cream, road maps, porno magazines, wiener in jars, flour for baking, milk, wiper fluid, candy bars, and all kinds of beer. Weizenbier, translated literally, is wheat beer…he wants, he thinks, specifically: Hafer Weizenbier…yeast wheat beer. Buy it in a club or a café and they have to give you a very tall glass for it because of all the foam. The bartender rolls it on the bar to shake the yeast off the bottom of the bottle.

The Tankstelle on Leibniz Strasse is a grand one, a meeting place for night drivers, a small grocery store. Salter goes right to the corner behind the bottled water and grabs a big green and gold can of Pilsner (no more Hafer Weizenbier tonight) and gets in a line about six deep, guzzling from the can already, standing directly behind a very tall, very skinny, very blonde girl in a black vinyl raincoat and black vinyl cap and hair all the way down to the hem of her jacket, not quite reaching her ass, which is one of those asses where the jeans pull the cheeks apart under the coccyx causing a gap like the apex of a cathedral archway. Or an inverted saddle. She is drenched in a musky perfume that Salter guesses is an attempt to mask her own odor from herself…women like that are perpetually in heat or at least imagine themselves to be and ashamed of the condition, he thinks; they think everyone else can smell it. They are ashamed but also crazed by it…they are as easy to pick up as the bruised fruit in the shade around the base of the copious pear tree. The short-haired check-out girl (Peter Pan in her green jumpsuit) has a radio on behind the counter and Salter has heard, since getting in line behind Rapunzel, the very end of the Sid Vicious version of My Way, followed by Mr. Sandman by whoever did the original of that gem of Ike-era putrefaction and now it’s Golden Lady by Stevie Wonder… so of course Salter, very quietly but with great accuracy, sings along with Stevie. And of course Rapunzel turns around, glowing at him.

Oh, don’t stop, that is real entertainment, she says.

Her face is painted like a souvenir ashtray from Tijuana and she is no less than fifty five years old, with big red lips and blue eyes bleached of sanity, utterly free from any mood more moderate than lust or terror…she’s loony and sexual and fascinating, in fact, and Salter realizes: it’s The Moon herself. The Moon come down to visit after I invoked her spirit with boozy ruminations in my time of greatest need…it’s my Cherokee blood that enables me to call down The Moon. A talent my grandmother had. What was the Moon’s name again? What was her name? He used to know from reading all that Science Fiction. That’s it: Selene.

“I’m glad you like it, Selene,” Salter answers. Everyone in line ahead of them turns to stare because of the loud English but he doesn’t care…the beer has immunized him against self-consciousness. “I have to say, Selene…your hair is amazing.” Like ripped yellow silk. She reaches and touches his.

“Your hair also. It’s very unusual for a colored man. Where does it come from?”

“My grandfather. He was a…German Jew…” and here Salter shrugs with Yiddish resignation about a sentence he need not finish. A German Jew? Why not. This is how you flirt with old Germans.

She shrugs too. “Aha! My father was a very big officer. Ein Oberst. What is your word? General. So,” she smiles, “we have something in common.”

“No, nothing in common.”

“Ach.” She pouts. “You are very intelligent for a colored man.”

“Colored men are very intelligent, as a rule, but we have a weakness.”

“Blondes.”

“No: humanity. We’re too human. Colored men are far too human.”

“Yes. I have always thought the same. What was your…grandfather’s…profession before my father sent him like a carrier pigeon to his after-life, may I ask?”

Salter squints. “He was a sociologist. I don’t know the German word for it. Sozialoge? He studied people. Cultures.”

“And so his knowledge couldn’t save him.”

“He needed more proof.”

She laughs a smoker’s laugh and squeezes his arm and says “A long time ago I had a clever thought that I couldn’t tell anyone, a terrible waste, so I’ll tell you. Yes?”

“I’m all ears.”

“It is this. If we had said not that we are killing all the Jews, but rather that we’ve decided to be rid of six million of our fellow German citizens…like your American Civil War…there wouldn’t be so much for the Germans to feel guilty about now.” She squeezes his arm again. “Do you see? It’s just semantics. That’s why I can’t take this Jew business so seriously. Jew this, Jew that. Those Jews were first of all Germans, never forget. They would be the first to agree.”

She smiles and turns to pay for a liter of Diet Coke and a carton of Marlboros. She leaves in her caul of perfume and a creepily blank expression (dead eyes painted on) as Salter pays for his already empty beer can, handing it crushed to the cashier to please dispose of, and when he steps out to in front of the pumps he sees Selene in her silver Jaguar right there in front of him, sucking a flame through a cigarette while the engine revs, checking herself in the rearview mirror, the overhead light on, the bill of her cap shadowing dramatic cheek bones and sunken eyes. She sees Salter and her mouth opens, eyes jammed shut in a bowel-voiding ecstasy as if preparing to step forward bloodily and in a glistening slip of mucous from out of her own loose skin. Or maybe it’s just an old whore’s terrible yawn. He can see all the way down her throat…the rimey tonsils and her yellow teeth and a dozen gold fillings…and the pink and red and black plumbing…and the smoke rising out of her and filling the car like her guts are burning. Oh I would love to fuck that, he thinks. I would love to.

Salter hurries home like a paramedic delivering a vital organ on ice. At the front door of the old building with the moon at his back he shoulders the door open and crosses the courtyard and the moon peeks over the lindens. He slips into his hinterhof. Up the stairs. He’s hurrying as though he can apply the momentum directly to the intensity of a fuck, like the fuck is a wall he has to ram through. If she’s in his bedroom he’s going to fuck her without a word of apology or preamble. If she wants to be fucked, he’ll do it…if not, at the slightest hint of resistance he’ll abandon all efforts and sleep on the gold couch in the other room.

In the dark flat he listens. The significant silence not of sleep but of hold-her-breath listening. She listens for clues to his frame of mind. Listens for clues. She has learned to listen for clues. She can hear his breathing…the short stopped breaths of the surprisingly great physical effort of stripping. The awkward, quick, balanced contortions: try, just try, to do those slowly: that takes skill. First one shoe, then the other: already a rain-dance in and of itself. The roll and shimmy of his broad shoulders as he slips the confines of his jacket. Pants. Shirt. Socks. Briefs. All in a pile. We are so small in our words and our clothing. He imagines seeing his own image in the infrared as he pads down the hall, massive and dense with muscles but with this tip-toe delicacy that makes the image eerier. If he could but see himself it would be terrifying, he thinks. It’s not an implication of violence but the dawn-of-time shit that this would put him in mind of and make him leap out of his skin to see himself in his skin this way, two hundred pounds coming down that long white hall in the darkness. The missing link. He eases the bedroom door open and just a flimsy gray meringue of indirect moonlight gives faint shape to the bed on which he can just about make her out. The word is sejant: in repose like a sphinx or a lion. She’s breathing like a woman doing her best to stay calm. He can smell her; she has humidified the room. She moves…comes across the bed with a shift and rustle of the sheets…very good at this game. There will be no talking: finally, there will be no talking…

…after a few false starts at various awkward holds she is straddling him, pushing her sopping wet bush over his face like a sponge…rough scrubbing strokes…he has to hold her in place to keep her from crushing the bridge of his nose and banging his teeth with that asinine clit ring. That offensive ring in her clitoris: she goes oh every time she dings his front teeth with it like it’s a shared pleasure. He sees stars, green stars, every time she lands on his nose. He grips her pelvis and forces her down to a more congenial squat and keeps her still with great effort against her bucking and goes about the task of straining to eat a pussy he is manifestly not enamored of…he is only spurred by the desire to do a good job. He likes neither the way it smells nor how it tastes, her pussy. He reaches up to pull on her nipples and encounters hardware there, too: she has armor-plated her pussy and her tits. It’s not unhygienic or bad, her pussy smell, just alien. If he’d loved her then the pussy would appear to him as a big fat lovely dandelion to blow on with joy but not loving her it’s just very hard to resist the idea of abhorring this whole damn gig. It’s bad enough, that faint whiff of anus he’s getting, late in the game. Didn’t you even bathe before you got on the plane? So anal is totally out. This is too intimate. He feels a bit prissy about ingesting her substance at this point…the horror of the word juice in this context…demonstrably not the way it had been when he was young and eagerly gulping a girl he’d been dreaming about for months, because…

…sucking at the base of a girl you love or feel infatuation for is one of the great unrefined raw-sugar joys of youth but this is just drudgery. This is like being forced to eat several pounds of something on a wet toilet under fluorescent lights at gunpoint in the cold. And he does his best not to imagine the dozens of ugly frothing dicks she’s had jabbing around in there before; a whole history; a whole Decameron of hard-ons. Straight, bent, curved, runty, skinny, fat, pointed, huge, soft, sore and blister-red and all on parade. Tight little balls or hanging big loose ones or even those one-balled sacs with psoriasis…and some are ginger-haired or mossy-black or with blonde curlicues or pelted sleek like otters. Or picture a fat lesbian tongue with a coat on it going slurp like a basset. He’s licking a wallfull of wallpaper paste. He’s licking a seabed at ebb tide.

She’s making noise. Lots of obligatory noise. What’s interesting is how the kind of noise she is choosing to make probably reflects more a lesbian taste than a male one in fireworks, since she’s only recently switched back to males. Do lesbians prefer to simulate funereal wails of grief when they come? Apparently. Once Salter said to a girl right afterwards girl, you sounded like you were being skinned alive and she laughed I guess I know what men like and that remark bothered him for years. He definitely prefers the sound of grief to the sound of agony, if the sound of ecstasy is out of the question any way. The neighbors will get a kick out of this, he thinks, sardonically, wincingly, wincing to think that any minute a someone will bang with indignation on the wall and the last thing I want is for anybody in this building to see her on the stairs with me tomorrow morning. Ungghh…she says. Unnngh! She’s having a fit bearing down on his face…grinding with that brass-knuckled clitoris going Oooohhh…Ohhhhh…ungggh! Unnghh!

And the funniest thing happens. A miracle, in fact. It zooms up her pipe from the knot of stripped nerves at the root of her raw pussy and she tenses like a mare about to kick a bucket of suds and Salter feels her brace for the big one squatting down in herself and she grinds again and something…something squirts out! Holy fuck, he thinks, I slurped her so good she’s shooting! Female ejaculation! It’s not a myth! A little…a little squirt! Her naughty little party trick. Suddenly fascinated, in a way moved, definitely engaged and she explodes in a triumphant convulsion, twisting and…comes hugely, grabbing his face and holding him there and pouring on him…just gushing. It’s incredible. She’s gushing. Even he can’t come like this, no man can, not this much, not cups of it…it’s too much! He’s choking on it, spitting it out, swallowing what he can’t spit out…he’s drowning and he shoves her and rolls from under and jumps off the bed and she kneels on the bed with her hands clamped over her ears and she shouts:

“That is not piss, I assure you!”

Career Move

 

Wednesday evening at 19:00, Simon’s event at the North Coast Gallery, in association with Absolut Vodka and Virgin Records, is scheduled to open with a wine-and-cheese reception, followed by a learned discussion between Kahn-Meyers and five panelists, followed by the event itself. Simon is in competition for the lucrative and prestigious Stein Prize.

The North Coast gallery is a handsome space on Sophienstrasse in Berlin’s gallery ghetto, where there’s an opening every night of the week in the last warm period before the soggy beast of winter’s stomping return. Openings which feature munching crowds on the sidewalks in commingled clouds of German champagne, garlic breath and American cigarettes. The heated scramble for cred and/or authority in a comically under-funded milieu results in a bitter, bitchy lethargy that is part of the charm.

Simon feels that civilization is in conflict with itself and that it all goes back to the playground. We tell children, be good; do no wrong, but a child who turns in a wrong-doer is a quisling or a snitch. We tell a child, do not resort to violence, but a child who goes to a teacher for protection is a whiner or a crybaby and the kid who kicks the ass of a bully gets our eternal respect. Simon did not enjoy his time in primary school.

Simon’s submission for the Stein Prize this year is a tent. Simon has won the prize twice already, but not more recently than the year of the second Space Shuttle disaster, when he hung a gallery full of illegal Chinese skeletons dipped in dark chocolate and called it SUGAR COATING DEATH; the smell itself had been a statement. The current piece is a tent, deluxe model, weather-proof and kelly green, reeking of newness, big enough for two Yuppie camper couples with a wordly arrangement going, pitched in the middle of the gallery’s judging-you-white concrete 85 square meter floor. A cool spider of complex tracklighting stands on the tent, lightbeam-legs akimbo. Within the tent, in odalisque-parodying repose, is reputed to be Simon’s stunningly beautiful irony-naked 29-year-old Eurasian girlfriend Thy Trann, herself an artist (a “Wetter Künstler”), who will likely be ovulating (as the catalog attests that her gynecologist has attested) during the climax of the event.

As the catalog puts it on page ten, after recapping Kahn-Meyers’s illustrious CV and indulging in the requisite dense page of art-speak mumbo-jumbo, plus sponsor ads: any one of the six anonymous judges of this year’s Stein Prize is invited to sign a release form (at an undisclosed location) waiving paternal rights and responsibilities and be chauffeured via special limo to the gallery…to enter the tent (hooded) and impregnate Thy. If the insemination is successful, Trann and Kahn-Meyers have pledged to raise the resulting child in a kind of ongoing Performance Art that will, “hopefully,” as Kahn-Meyers put it, “long outlive me.”

The title of the piece is THE ANXIETY OF INFLUENCE and there is a giggly buzz in the usually demonstratively unimpressed crowd of both highbrow and boulevard press and cognoscenti and curious onlookers and free food parasites who meander around the outside of the mute tent with their plastic champagne flutes, their chatter kept at a curiously polite low level, as though in a room where a child is sleeping. The thought that the tent contains not only a beautiful naked girl but the artist’s girlfriend herself electrifies the evening with a kind of verisimilitude that hasn’t been generated since Warhol’s pioneering efforts at making decorum irrelevant in the midst of the decorum-hungry 20th century.

Not that Simon Kahn-Meyers reveres Warhol. He tends to deride the “Slavic hucksterisms”. Kahn-Meyers wants, first and foremost, to draw a line in the critical sand between Warhol’s conceptual moonings and serious work such as his own. Kahn-Meyers considers the post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy of received art history intolerably irksome and will assail this sloppy thinking with this his latest masterstroke, reminiscent of the work that immediately preceded it, the gently titled PLACEBO.

PLACEBO featured a fully operational vintage voting booth from the American state of Illinois containing a naked Thai (not Thy) on a chopped-legged stool in the booth offering oral pleasure to anyone who could produce a passport stating Artist in the blank reserved for “occupation.” In the catalog Kahn-Meyers refers to THE ANXIETY OF INFLUENCE as a “self-evident escalation” of PLACEBO’s intent: to blur the lines between public duty and personal compulsion. The only thing Simon fears now is German taste: they always confuse metaphysical with intellectual, these Germans, and Simon can never, he fears, get quite metaphysical enough for these Kraut fucking mystics and their prize money. Simon is thinking of his first major piece: a life-sized ironing board made of pure white wax called Irony Board; sold it for a pile. Heartbreakingly beautiful. Seems like a century ago.

At the far end of the gallery is set up a long table upon which are placed three microphones facing six empty seats. Facing the six empty seats, on the other side of the table, at a respectful distance, is a square of thirty six black metal folding chairs. Slowly, the thirty six chairs are filled. Those who stand do so with German Kultur rigor: chins up, hands clasped behind their backs. The difference between the overly-cerebral and the occult is what, exactly?

He takes his seat at the center of the table with a recondite smirk (as if contemplating the news of the humiliating defeat of an old rival) and the five other panelists straggle in from various conversations around the spacious gallery like staff at a private school, summoned by the principal to a disciplinary hearing. The panelists (in the order they take their seats): Yeon-Ju Bongiovi (video soap artist), Riley Klein (Kahn-Meyers’s gallerist), Simone Pohle (film maker/writer/art critic/clothes-designer/model), Siegfried Stummfeldt (photographer) and Sylver Goldin (self-proclaimed “self”-artist, patron of the arts, and prosperous local gender-ambiguous restaurateur, driven to the event in its trademark lavender Jaguar). The music being piped in over the gallery’s sound system (jazzy Bach) dwindles to a hiss as Simon taps his microphone.

“Before I begin,” says Simon, “although, how one can begin before beginning is not entirely clear…” he shrugs to acknowledge the titters this receives, “I’d like to say something to, uh… I want to address something to the artist Thy Trann, I’m sure you know and respect her work… who… uh… as you are aware is collaborating with me on this particular… piece.” He lifts his chin over the microphone and raises his voice. “Thy?”

All thirty six seated members of the audience and the dozen or so standing twist like licorice to hear Trann call out from the tent behind them, in her throaty trans-Pacific accent, “Yes, Dear?” which also receives titters. The un-amplified quality of her localized voice, in contrast to Kahn-Meyers’s Moses-like omni-directional amplification, serves to call vivid attention to her presence in the tent, while at the same time serving to subliminally support the visual imagination of her as stark naked therein. Not to mention providing, for the comfort of sensitive or militant lesbian members of the audience, confirmation, inferable from the casual music of Simon and Thy’s exchange, that Thy isn’t being coerced… wasn’t bullied, threatened, drugged or tricked… into performing this history-making “action”.

“Thy, I just want to make sure you’re comfortable in there. Are you comfortable in there?”

There is the sound of Thy punching a plush pillow or two. “Yep!”

“And you’re warm enough?”

“Yep!”

“Good. I just need… I just need for you to bear with our chatter for a little while… and, uh… yes. And then… you can… get ready to…” Kahn-Meyers’s gaze sweeps the audience carefully, almost accusingly, in order to complete the sentence in everyone’s head for them.

“A-okay!” Trann calls out, and the panel discussion can commence, granted the easy segue of generous applause for Thy Trann, this evening’s sacrifice.

So far so smooth, thinks Kahn-Meyers.

“Before I begin,” begins Riley Klein, Simon’s jowly American gallerist, pausing a beat for the laughs he anticipates being able to milk further from Simon’s inaugural witticism and getting one… from Simon himself… he continues, “I want to thank all of you for coming, as well as salute Simon and Thy,” more applause, “because we are all, each one of us, a part of this equation.” He clears his throat, plucks his glasses from a pocket in his dark tweed blazer, and hunches forward with the glasses on the end of his nose to read aloud a “provocative statement” from a sheet of paper on the table in front of him, his hands in his lap. He looks like a dutiful school boy and reads with the dutiful schoolboy’s abashed singsong.

After the statement (a long quote from Robert Mapplethorpe) is read and absorbed, the first panelist to speak, Simone Pohle, touches her microphone as if to give it pleasure and looks sidelong down the long white table with narrowed eyes and poses the question, pushing her white-blonde hair out of the way and displaying perhaps the faintest hint of piquant hostility, “Mr. Kahn-Meyers, what is it that you are trying to achieve here tonight?”

Kahn-Meyer’s blinks innocently at the audience and replies, stroking his neat white beard, “What am I trying to achieve here tonight? I’m trying to win an art prize!” And the audience loves it.

The Paracelsus of Hair Straightening

Across town, Sadie Olubodun is putting the finishing touches on herself to the sound of Les Negresses Verts, a horn-driven French ensemble that gallops out of the stereo with a loping gypsy beat; the music is a stupid dog dashing ecstatically between the man-sized speakers. There is an aura of romantic anarcho-collective about the band that Sadie loves, having herself been raised and schooled by Catholic nuns from Belgium. The music is very loud. There are intermittent floor, wall and ceiling  bashings from the neighbors. 

In the free-standing “bathroom” mirror (there are no walls around the toilet) Sadie is puckering her lips to paint them: a swollen strawberry into a deliquescing heart. She’s running a special comb through her very long hair; the very long hair she is very proud of. Staying stick thin is easy: pharmaceuticals take care of that. Flawless black vacu-formed skin and giraffe height and a spot-lit Steinway smile she was born with. But her hair is the Grand Project of Sadie Olubodun’s life.

Having just turned twenty seven, Sadie O has been busy with hair maintenance since the day she “graduated” (escaped over a chain link fence) from Saint Serifina’s Polytechnical Boarding School for Wayward Girls. She literally ran away, five barefoot miles down a dusty road at dawn to a bus stop, to make it to a model casting at a French hotel she’d read about a week before, by accident, after unwrapping Friday’s fish. Sister Berthe-Claudette is probably still shouting Sadie’s name during roll call every morning. Sadie Olubodun, that tall skinny shy girl with the modest afro. No longer!

Every three or four weeks for the past twelve years Sadie has gone to have her hair straightened first by the best black private hair stylist in West London, a dwarfish Gay Canadian named Horton Bard, nicknamed Hard-on Board, and then, after she’d escaped London, by the best black private hair stylist in Hamburg, a portly straight Senegalese named Monsieur who often worries about the fact that most of his clients are wealthy black Muslim ladies who procure his services at the risk of being stoned.  Sadie makes the trip to Hamburg monthly. Monsieur happens to be Horton Bard’s hand-picked acolyte; his initiate in the alchemical mysteries of hair straightening. Monsieur is the Comte De St. Germaine to Horton’s Paracelsus.

“Kinky hair,” says Horton “is merely asleep. We wake it up!”

Sadie has cultivated her hair to the point that it rivers down the macadam of her back, ending near the Lamborghini scallop and sudden twin convexities of black lacquered showroom ass. She calculates that her hair (rippling with windblown arabesques like Muslim devotional script)  has cost her, to date… she figures something like £30,000. Her hair is a statement and an investment and a way of life.

What she hates is when sisters of every nationality who go the cheap route and prance around in public with armadillo shells and coconut husks for hair. She’s ashamed for them. You’re not satisfied with your natural hair texture and so you fry it, pickle it in pigeon grease, stack it atop your lye-scorched skull like something scraped out of a drain? Sadie wonders what she abhors more, the lye-job conks or the… the thirty dollar polyester wigs from Woolworth’s. Honey (hah-nee), she wants to say, just shave it off… you might as well… have a little pride. Have a little dignity (deeg-NAH-tee).

If Sadie, a girl from a village (born in a semi-detached house with only two televisions) can afford to do it right, how are you going to persuade her that an American can’t? Sadie’s hair is a contrarian manifesto of equivalence that says: if a European (Your-OH-pee-ahn) can get her hair curled, I can get mine straightened! If she can wear blue contacts, I can too, or wear them red if I chose. For every hundred Your-OH-pee-ahns who pay for twenty minutes in a tanning salon, one Michael Jackson is allowed to bleach his skin! Or lop off his nose! Or whatever. Fuck off.  She kisses the locket on the gold chain around her neck, a thumb-sized engraving of Olaudah Equiano.

“Hey ho, let’s go!” she shouts and punches Siegfried’s ceiling-high, twenty year old rubber tree plant in the midsection on her way out of the flat, slamming the eight foot steel-reinforced door behind her. She can still hear Les Negresses Verts from a block away as she flips her hair in the wind and raises her arm for a taxi. The taxi over-shoots Sadie then screeches to a halt, that time-tested cinematic cliché.

Whoever Loves a Black Girl

Simon glances at his cheap watch as a heated argument between a panelist and a member of the audience stretches like an interminable surrealist ping pong game in which each side keeps serving a brand new unreturned ball. He’s never heard the name Tristan Tzara evoked so many times in his life. Tristan Tzara and the word paradigm. He can remember when it was synergy. Hell, he can remember when it was parameter; he can even remember back to the ‘50s when the artspeak word of choice was atavistic. 

Put one Englishman in a room full of Germans and the Germans will outdo themselves avoiding the speaking of German, because no one wants to seem provincial. Consequently, Simon has never lost an argument in Germany, though his rhetorical fire has been doused on more than once occasion in America (even, once, by a Mexican fucking clerk in a fucking Rite Aid ) with the dreaded un-trump-able… whatever. Only Americans could have invented “whatever”, the neutron bomb of heated debates. America, the looking-glass land where the children of slaves subsist on welfare and where being crippled is seen as some kind of advantage and where guns don’t kill people (people do); America the anti-abortion, pro-death penalty land of puritanical pornographers and pro-Israel anti-Semites where you can lose weight and save money by eating and buying more…

Simon rubs his eyes and has a vision of a mound of corned beef hash of infant pinkness beside a weighty brick of hash brown potatoes dressed in two fried eggs like a bikini top, an unheard of dish in Berlin and something he could have right now, or even at three in the morning (the hour he roughly calculates this ordeal will be over) if he were in Manhattan. But if he wants to keep his prices up in New York he has to keep his mystique alive in Europe and that’s why he’s doing this. Business has been bad since 9/11, a simple fact. He can’t help selfishly framing that act of terror as him being put out of work by a rival gang of faux naïf Event Artists with deep-pocket Saudi patrons.

He’s on the verge of calling the discussion to a halt (fifteen minutes to show time) when the discussion calls itself to a halt. Everyone in the back of the gallery to listen to the nothing-at-stake rhetorical jousting of the panelists is suddenly peering back to the front of the gallery where a taxi was just heard to screech to a halt and screech off again and there are curious murmurs and shiftings of attention and all artspeak has ceased, for the nonce. Art is so easily ignored when Real Life gets up off its ass and deigns to reclaim our attention. Simon stands up and gestures to Riley to put phase two into motion; he leans forward into his microphone and says, solemnly, redundantly, “Ladies and gentlemen, that concludes our panel discussion…if you will please move to the front of the gallery…” because they’ve already started moving that way.

Good God, whispers Simon.

Standing just within the gallery’s front door, having effected a grand entrance, is a six foot plus, on teetering Lucite heels, skinny-as-a-Giacometti alien. Universe-black, possibly female. Nude, at first glance, in a see-through vinyl raincoat. On closer inspection (Simon strides fearlessly her way) she’s dressed in a black bikini under the coat, which warps and pools the light from the ceiling across its dazzling surface. It’s like she’s walking around in a force field or a vertical swimming pool, this towering black alien with the ponytail tickling her flog-worthy ass.

Imagine owning one of those, thinks Simon, with survivable guilt. Those 18th century Yanks weren’t fools.

Ancient graffito from poor Pompeii: Whoever loves a Black girl is set ablaze by black charcoal; when I see a Black girl, I willingly eat blackberries.

She’s not stark naked, but the effect is the same and Simon nearly panics: the integrity of the event is being threatened: camera flashes have already started their scale model electrical storm around the gallery. She’s de-focusing his event.

He takes her by the arm and says, very softly, very deeply, “I’ll need you to clear the entrance, here, darling… would you care for some wine? Some cheese? Riley…” Riley is panting close behind, “Get this lovely girl some… sustenance. Smashing outfit,” he adds, squeezing her waist as he passes her to the blushing care of his gallerist, who takes her by the elbow as though he is wearing asbestos gloves.

“I would like to please draw everyone’s attention…” shouts Simon, then, at a lesser volume, “to the two gentlemen standing in front of the tent.” He has to work to get his timing back after the miraculous aberration of the alien (where is she? Near the back with Riley and that pony-tailed photographer clod; they seem to know each other). Normally, Simon lives for miraculous aberrations. But not now. He points and proclaims: “Elite members of a private security force.” From out of nowhere, two very large gentlemen, dressed in identical secret-service type suits, have materialized, anthropomorphic representations of the capital letter A in front of the tent.

“They are not. Not. Here to protect… Thy.” Simon strokes his beard as though weighing carefully the next remark. “They are here to protect… you. To protect… Art.”

Glancing again at his watch he asks, “What do I mean by that? What I mean by that is that art is a serious matter. I am not, as they say, fucking around. If one of the judges of the Stein Prize has the courage to take me up on my challenge, the question is… will I then have the courage to follow through?”

“Let’s be honest. The odds are not great that one of these so-called judges will climb into that specially assigned limo… have I mentioned already? That the limo… a vintage 1933 Hispano Suiza J-12…”

Simon pauses; several older art buffs stagewhisper Picasso… Picasso. Simon’s eyes narrow.

“I mean: I know that the likelihood is not great that I’m going to have to follow through on all this. But without at least the risk that we will all be involved in a life-changing event here tonight, can we call this… Art?”

“These large fellows,” Simon smiles, “are here to protect you … and Art Itself… by insuring that Simon Kahn-Meyers, the so called international art star, ” he says with very nearly misjudged vehemence, “Doesn’t get cold feet. That I don’t renege on a promise. If one of those judges has the courage and vision to take me up on the ANXIETY OF INFLUENCE challenge, there’s… nothing I can do to stop this thing from running its course… because these gentlemen have been pre-paid rather handsomely and instructed to physically restrain me from interfering with this event, if need be. They are under contract, in fact… should they fail to restrain me from ruining this event at a crucial moment, they are each legally liable for a considerable sum.”

“Thy Trann is now in a state of inner contemplation… she is deep in herself… she is creating this piece even as I speak… deep within herself in this tent. I was the conceptualist but her fertile body is the concept. We have agreed that she say nothing at this point… nor attempt to communicate with anyone until this event is formally over, whatever happens..”

As unlikely as anything really is to actually happen, Simon’s words and masterful delivery have mesmerized the audience. Lulled them into an eerie sense of traumatic relaxation, or anticipatory recovery. As though the event as described has already happened and his words have started a healing process; have started them on the road to recovery after all they’ve all been through. Though nothing has actually happened. But everyone could see it, somehow, as Simon spoke it. Could picture the old man flailing in a shamingly effortless headlock, screaming “No! Stop! Make it stop!” and straining against the merciless professional restraint that he himself has hired. So moved is the audience that they aren’t even sure of the etiquette of applauding, until a trickle starts (from a far corner less affected by the charismatic field of Simon’s presence, possibly) and then an ovation.

During which Simon does his best not to be caught peering furtively after the stunning, must-have Watusi from Mars who very nearly stole the show. She’s still in the dead bit of the gallery where Riley is keeping her. Riley and that ponytailed galoot. Simon sees, with satisfaction, however, that the alien is applauding him heartily, with all the rest. How to separate her from that Nikon-toting idiot (dressed in a Tuxedo jacket and camouflage battle fatigues) long enough to get a phone number or set a lunch date?

Hispano Suiza

The Vernissage has reached that point in the evening when all of the cheese is gone, the champagne is running very low, and the chatter is thinner but very loud. The contemplative low rumble of pseudos wallowing in the aural loam of their own pronouncements has become the boisterous deaf barking of drunks. The evening, which hasn’t even truly begun, smirks Simon, has been a mild success.

About twenty minutes ago, one of the somber giants standing with arms folded in front of The Tent was given a bottle of Evian to hand to Thy within it, for which gesture she was heard, by those nearest The Tent, to thank the guard, who had reached in without looking. About seventy percent of the original attendees are still present; the ones who have gone on (to home, or restaurants, or bordellos) are of no importance. The ones who have remained (Sylver Goldin, Simone Pohle, et al) are networking and therefore connected and therefore useful.

Simon’s already thinking of his next piece…either the Muslim thing he’d been conceptualizing of late or a technology gambit involving taking dead kittens and puppies and stuffing them with animatronics to get them gamboling around a gallery in all their cloudy-eyed rotting flesh. Which one he starts on next will depend on whether he wins the Stein Prize because those animatronix are expensive.

Simon makes his way to the back of the gallery and touches his gallerist’s arm and whispers “Riley, give that freakish black girl my cell phone number and instruct her to call me in exactly forty five minutes” and returns to a spot where he can hover in close proximity to The Tent. He is thinking, because he suddenly remembers the dread and pleasure of reciting it in his bed in the morning as a child, of:

Solomon Grundy,
Born on Monday,
Christened on Tuesday,
Married on Wednesday,
Took ill on Thursday,
Worse on Friday,
Died on Saturday,
Buried on Sunday,
And that was the end of Solomon Grundy.

There are about thirty people outside, smoking or cellphoning or smoking and cellphoning or cellphoning smokers, when the Hispano Suiza, huge and sinisterly well-kept in its antique ebony and white leather sleekness, in mass and value so like a cast-iron yacht, pulls into a long space marked by parking cones in front of the gallery, rumbling and hissing like a docking dirigible and scattering a dozen onlookers. The liveried driver climbs smartly out, circles crisply round the side, and opens a heavy door, chin held high, as one… two… three… six, finally, hooded men of various heights, weights, apparent ages and classes; two in tuxedos and others in business suits and one gangling fellow in a track suit; emerge from the limo, striding through the gallery door and stooping into the tent to gasps and then merriment from the crowd.

“Oh my God!” claps Simon. “All six of them! This is great!” He hurries to the front of the tent (where he is blocked, politely but firmly, by the two large gentlemen) and calls into it, hands cupped around his mouth, “Way to go, boys! Thanks for having a sense of humor about this!” He turns to a bystander and adds, “You see, deep down, maybe I was a bit afraid the judges were offended by my little stunt…” laughing “…but, you see, they’ve shown us all how classy…” he turns and gestures at Riley with a sweeping arm, raising his voice jovially. “Riley, get some Moet up here toute suite…”

But wait: evidence of struggle. Grunts and groans and what sounds like a compressed scream in an avid hand clamped over a mouth. Scheisse, comes a brutal male voice from within the tent, Sie hat Mich gebissen!

“Thy!” shouts Simon. He lunges for the tent but, as he had to expect, one of his Armani-suited security guards grabs him and holds him fast to a spot about four feet from the flapped opening. “Let go of me, you fucking ape… are you brain-dead? Those aren’t the Stein Prize judges in there!”

He squirms and punches out wildly but is headlocked with humiliating ease. The chiseled brute holding him doesn’t even look much bothered. He looks pleased. He obviously likes his job. What he’d really like to do in fact is kick the rich old Jew around the gallery floor for a few minutes but that would be a too-liberal interpretation of the range of his duties.

“Let go of me! They’re raping my girlfriend!”

Some of the bystanders are still amused, applauding, but an increasing number achieve a sense of giddy disquiet or even concern, frowning, approaching the tent from all sides, exchanging thrilled glances with a communal sense of having the historical luck of being present where some REALITY is taking place. I was there, many can already imagine saying, when that famous artist was raped in that gallery…

“Thy!” screams Simon.

What did he say to you?  hisses Siegfried to Sadie, after Riley Klein walks off, showing concern, towards the front of the gallery. Siegfried, ignoring the ruckus, grabs Sadie’s hand and pulls her to the dark corner of the gallery where the few remaining boxes of champagne are stacked. He sits her down on a box, hands on her shoulders, staring into her upturned face.

-What did he say?

-He gave me that art bloke’s number and said I should call him in forty five minutes.

-Kahn-Meyers? Simon Kahn-Meyers wants you to call him? And are you going to do it?

-Should I?

-Of course you should. Do you know who he is? Who he knows?

-Who?

-Everyone.

-You’re worse than the nuns. You’re just a pimp…

-You know how much I love you.

-Then why are you always giving me away?

-Because, otherwise, my love for you would destroy me.

-Oh Ziggy…

-You wouldn’t know what to do with me if I loved you the way you think you’d prefer me to. I could write you love poems and give you flowers every day, but you wouldn’t be happy…you’d be bored within a week…

-But how can you stand the idea of other men with their hands on me? With their lips on my lips? Their things… in my…

-It’s just like having a bad tooth. Have you ever had a bad tooth?

-No…

-No, you wouldn’t, not with your east African teeth…your east African teeth are perfect. But we Europeans, we have much experience with having a bad tooth. And when you have a bad tooth, I’ll tell you something strange… it gives you much pain, the bad tooth, but, somehow, biting down on it, and making it hurt even more…it feels good. So I give myself the pain of knowing that another man fucks you in order to kill the pain…

-Nonsense! You simply buckle under your perceived pressure of the responsibility of loving me! You want to spread the responsibility as thinly as possible… and if you can get something out of it, by pimping me to men you want something from…all the better. Or perhaps, deep down, you’re homosexual and giving your girlfriend to other men is a way, indirectly, to fuck, or be fucked by them and the sad truth is it’s probably a little bit of both explanations, and I’m a fool to put my heart at your mercy.

-Maybe you’re right. But what are you going to do about it? We’re stuck with things as they are, just like everybody else. Can you pretend that it would be better with other men? Can any woman?

Siegfried stares hard into Sadie’s eyes, blinking slowly, and Sadie looks away, then back into his eyes, then away again. And there’s nothing more to say or think on the topic. She stands, brushing his hands off, turns slowly and walks towards the front of the gallery, where all the shouting is, hugging herself in her transparent vinyl raincoat.

Aboveness

The first time Sadie Olubodun saw Siegfried Von Stummfeldt, he was sitting at the snaking long wrought-iron bar of some trendy nihilist cave-like club in a run-down neighborhood deep in East Berlin, reading Baudelaire and looking so above it all. The music was deafening and the disco lights were seizure-inducing and this guy is sitting there with a green glass of Absinthe reading Les Fleur du Mal with a smirk of genial boredom. Of course she had to talk to him.

He was wearing leather pants, sandals, and a tuxedo jacket over a hooded sweatshirt. Sadie was wearing a terribly expensive tiny kidskin backpack over a second hand wedding dress over thigh-high black vinyl boots and her hair piled in a tilted tower atop her perfect little black head. She stood behind him and spied on what he was reading, so close that she was literally breathing down his neck, but he played it cool and did not react and she spotted a fortuitous couple of lines near the bottom of the page, something that would go very well with the Absinthe, and she raised her voice, quoting it to him over the idiot throb of the music: Et dans ces bains de sang qui des Romains nous viennent, Et dont sur leurs vieux jours les puissants se souviennent…

He closed the book without looking up and finished the passage for her, declaiming: … Il n’a su réchauffer ce cadavre hébété, Où coule au lieu de sang l’eau verte du Léthé!  He gestured to the bartender to bring another glass, filled it about two thirds full from his bottle, and placed his own monogrammed spoon (the slot in it was like a snake, writhing in harmony with the wrought iron bar itself) over the glass, then a sugar cube in the slotted spoon and so forth. His preparation of her drink of wormwood was practised and precise and embellished with magician-like flourishes of his long-fingered hands. The satiny hands of a man who’s never done a day of manual labor in his life.

One thing Sadie truly abhorred was the hard-earned “character” of a workman’s paws. The pathetic scars and bulging knuckles and ugly calluses. She could never bear to be handled by mitts like that. Mr. Fleur du Mal’s face was merely so-so and his body was not the sexiest she’d seen, but she was instantly smitten with those aristocratic hands.

He handed her the glass and shouted, “Do you know the Café Slavia? It over-looks the Moldau. There is a painting in it of a good-dressed Bohemian fellow enjoying his delicious Absinthe and seeing this most lovely vision…” he touched the air above them with the glass, “…a naked, absinthe-green girl floating. But now I see…” he handed her the glass, “…that this floating dream girl, she was really very black and has come to life in front of me.”

Linking arms they sipped the Absinthe.

Things happened very quickly. They left the bar, ears ringing, and hailed a taxi and promised the driver a huge tip to defy the speed limit rushing to Siegfried’s loft where Siegfried practically kicked the huge door down and Sadie hiked up her wedding dress and commanded Siegfried to bugger her without much preamble right there in front of the kitchen sink. In her kidskin backpack there was a water-soluble clove-scented chapstick from The Body Shoppe that she favored and bending over and bracing her hands on her knees she’d directed Siegfried to fetch the chapstick out and smear it on liberally as a numbing lubricant. This chapstick she never used on her own lips of course but she’d been known to share it on location once or twice with various models and booking agents she didn’t much care for. When he’d slipped in with much gasping and groaning she asked him, firmly “Will you do as I say?” and in a very humble tone he said yes.

She said, “Good. Now, hold very still. I will do all the moving. You see?”

And he held very still with his hands bracing his back and his mouth hanging half-open with bomb-defusing suspense as she moved on him in the high-ceilinged gloom of his lit-only-by-a-tiny-fluorescent-light-under-the-buff-aluminum-kitchen-cabinets loft with an almost imperceptible corkscrewing of her serpentine hips. There curled a livid seam somewhere deep in her rectal lining just itching for the jab of a pointed dick. That irritable little seam was her ersatz clitoris. By slowly rolling and shifting and clinching and un-clinching she inched the tip of his organ towards that very spot, holding her breath, eyes closed, straining, knees weak, creeping up on a howl of satisfaction…

Without so much as discussing the matter with him, Sadie moved into Siegfried’s loft the very next week, bringing over a dozen suitcases in a taxi around dinner time, unannounced. He hadn’t eaten dinner yet and they went for a walk in the twilight along the Spree where the sun was warm butter on the cool green water as it set. Siegfried, with a massive old Leica hanging from his neck and dressed in the dashing vest and dented ball cap and worn khakis of a modern war correspondent, took the opportunity to lay out his Manifesto, seeing as they were now living together, and also to tell Sadie about his best friend Hansi Krauss…

…the I.P. photographer whom Somalians had beaten to death in the city of Mogadishu in 1993. Poor sweet little Hansi who loved black American culture like you wouldn’t believe and was executed by an African mob for his white skin. Siegfried described the weekend-long soul parties Hansi would throw in his cool pad on Wiener Strasse… described Hansi’s proudest possession: the old time American juke box stocked with mint-condition 45s… What Does it Take (to win Your Love) by Junior Walker and the All Stars and Give it Up (or Turn it Loose) by James Brown and Love On A 2-Way Street by The Moments, etc., but even better: three different versions of Mbube, that unrivaled Meisterwerk of African pop, by the late great Solomon Linda… the first version (1940 or so) of moan-inspiring rareness and scratchy as a recording of Edison’s voice and it had to be transferred from the original massive clay 78rpm disc to the “modern” 45 on vintage equipment in Stuttgart to even play in Hansi’s jukebox… that’s how much passionate love and tender respect Hansi Krauss could show towards African culture.

Second version, recorded live in concert in 1957 by a white group called The Weavers and also not the easiest artifact to come by was re-titled “Wimoweh” after a homophonic approximation of the refrain, and Hansi had that one, too. The third version of the song in Hansi’s jukebox was the one almost everyone knows: The Lion Sleeps Tonight, a Christmas hit for The Tokens in 1961, and this was the version that the drunks at Hansi’s soul parties would end up singing along with at three in the morning, cracking the glass in all the windows of the apartment block by singing the high parts en masse, though it was the original version, the version performed by its creator, the profoundly cheated Solomon Linda (who received less than one percent of what he deserved in royalties) that Hansi would insist on.

It just so happens that Siegfried was watching CNN the night they reported Hansi’s lynching and Siegfried was eating spaghetti with ketchup for sauce when he saw the footage… glimpsed a near-naked barefoot limp white corpse being kicked and dragged and spat upon, and it may have been Hansi or it may have been one of the others in his doomed entourage but the sheer magnitude of the injustice was surely greater than whatever happened to Solomon Linda. Siegfried spent the next two weeks shouting accusations at whatever confused little African students were unlucky enough to cross paths with him, no matter from where on that continent they’d come to Berlin.

Siegfried said to Sadie I must be completely honest with you… since then I have had two feelings… A) that I need to do whatever I can do to insure that such a misunderstanding never again occurs in this world and B) a certain ambivalence towards blacks.

Siegfried talked and Sadie listened. He talked not only about poor Hansi but also about Baudelaire and Lou Reed and Thomas Bernhard and all about the Artist’s responsibility to his own Aboveness… above Work, above Morality… which is why in ninety nine out of one hundred cases women can’t really be Artists because they are too firmly grounded in the quotidian… the domestic banalities of clothing and food and children… too grounded to know Aboveness… even if they let themselves float a bit they get an earthy reminder once a month that no amount of detachment will enable them to ignore… and yet any woman truly capable of Aboveness is such a freak that her presence would be repulsive and sexually intolerable and the Muslims would be right to stone her. This last bit was a joke. Wasn’t it.

He said, as they passed closely by plain or unattractive couples strolling in cautious or giddy hand-holding silence, these people aren’t even living. He said do you know what the great mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss said when he was told, while he was in the middle of performing a great calculation, that his wife was dying? Siegfried beamed at her and shook his fist with admiration:

He said: please tell her to wait a moment until I’m finished!

Intermittently, during that rambling inaugural lecture on the topic of his Weltanschauung… his worldview… Siegfried would halt… at a corner or facing a weird old Gothic Church or the streaky hand-lettered storefront of a Turkish Social Club (through which you’d see the men at various little round tables in their cheap boxy suits, smoking and playing cards) and snap pictures. Siegfried said: Sometimes I go out without film in the camera and snap pictures anyway, to remind myself that it’s the taking, not the having, that counts… after which he leered at her significantly. Sadie had just started thinking: yes, I could be happy doing this for a year or two when she noticed that Siegfried’s speech was starting to jumble and slur.

And his stride was getting. It was becoming slightly limpy then staggery and… was he being funny? But his breath. It smelled…  it began to reek… of chemicals. Acetone. Had he popped some evil powerful pill unbeknownst to her during the course of their conversation? One minute they were walking side by side like any slightly awkward man and woman on a date, crossing Berlin in the twilight, and the next thing Sadie knew this tall strange Siegfried was stumbling and ranting like a shit-faced belligerent drunk trying to walk across a trampoline.

He crumpled to his knees and then collapsed on the curb like a string-shorn marionette. This is not happening, she thought. Oh, okay: it’s a dream, yes? No. Her new boyfriend was thrashing about and screaming and foaming at the mouth and what was she supposed to do about it?! She barely spoke German!

He was having some kind of seizure right in front of the gates of a playground and kids from all over the little park ran to the gate to watch him flop and sputter on the sidewalk under the garishly cruel street light half-shaded by a tree and all Sadie wanted to do was back away… back away a few paces and turn and run because it wasn’t fair because he hadn’t even told her he was an epileptic! Or possessed by the devil or whatever the fuck his problem was. His lips were shiny black with blood and his eyes were vivid whites rolled up in his head and he was growling and banging his skull on the pavement as though refuting the untenable principle the pavement was intent on adhering to.

A cherubic redhead with a mouthful of corrective braces that made her look too young… in overalls with a two year old slung over her hip… calmly unlatched the playground gate and handed numb Sadie her squirming child. She knelt beside Siegfried and batted his flailing hands away and stuffed a Snickers bar in his mouth and even pressed his jaws together to start him chewing it. She glanced over a shoulder at Sadie and said, with a reassuringly competent British accent, “I’m assuming your friend never bothered to mention that he’s a diabetic.”

Sadie stared.

“I always carry a bit of candy in my pocket or a can of Coke or something in my purse just in case.”

Sadie blinked.

“A pretty good indicator is when they start behaving in an inebriated fashion.” Looking puzzled and shifting back on her haunches and standing up she added, “But then it got to the point with my Marco that I could always tell something was amiss when… he’d suddenly become this playful, affectionate… puppy, almost. Not like him at all, seeing as he’s a 14 stone Squadie. Funny, isn’t it? When he was being lovely to me it always meant something was wrong.” She stared at Sadie and said, “You poor dear.”

She handed down to Siegfried a Kleenex to dab his mouth with and fetched her child back from Sadie and looked on with tired benevolence as Siegfried sat upright on the sidewalk, moaning and looking very much like he’d fallen out of a tree. The lens on his Leica was good and cracked. There was the slow blue flashing light of an ambulance pulling up on the pavement. The redhead squeezed Sadie’s arm and walked back through the playground gate towards where another daughter was calling from the floodlit swings.

How many embarrassing and/or terrifying diabetic fits has Siegfried jigged through since that first one, her initiation, wonders Sadie. Twenty? Twenty five? The prize winner had to be the time his big fat mouth got him in trouble with a Prole in front of a Curry Wurst stand and he went into a seizure as Sadie pleaded and the Prole had him by the lapels of his jacket, preparing the head-butt. And yet he’s the one afraid of commitment! And if his racist Austrian mother has finally in some small way accepted the black African Sadie Olubodun in her precious son’s bed it’s only because Siegfried Stummfeldt needs a fucking nursemaid and nobody else, certainly no German bitch, is stupid enough to do this thankless job.

“Aboveness!” spat Sadie, pushing her way through the hubbub of the gallery and looking for Simon Kahn-Meyers, who was at that moment indisposed; working; wrapped up in the grand drama of his own design. She knew better than to interrupt just yet. She spotted his gallerist, Riley, instead, and shoved towards him and Siegfried watched her move, a Queenly silhouette, a head above the others… he watched from the safety of the darkness at the back of the gallery.

World Fame

Sadie is having her toenails painted with voluptuous care like a travesty of the famous scene in Kubrick’s Lolita where Humbert is abasing himself to his nymph. Heavily allegorical: rich wise old Jew in a bathrobe and lovely young Negress, nude.

Glistening.

Sadie reclines in a special throne of leather and chrome, a customized gynecologist’s chair re-designed for the purpose, her foot secure in a raised stirrup while Simon Kahn-Meyers, squinting into a jeweler’s loupe and squatting on a stool specially designed for the purpose, lacquers her nails from an expensive bottle of cardinal crimson. The scene is reminiscent also of Tintoretto… a cross between Suzanna at her Bath (c. 1560) and a detail from Christ Washing the Feet of his Disciples (c. 1547)… compositional elements from the former and psychological aspects of the latter, with Simon playing the part not only of Suzanna’s diligent foot-attentive servant but the voyeuristic elders looking on, as well… and Christ.

Sadie’s toes wiggle indolently. She’s thinking about tomorrow’s hair appointment in Hamburg. She’s not thinking about Siegfried at all. She gazes upon the speckled pate of the old man who is her transitional lover. A patronizing smile softens her calculating expression. She’s thinking that the next one will either be about true love or mind-boggling amounts of money. The next one will either be her soulmate or someone who owns a private jet. Simon is neither, but at least all he wants is to play with her feet. The money shot he spares her. Does it out of earshot (eyeshot) in the bathroom or somewhere. Maybe he can’t even get an erection any more. That’s fine with her. If everyone else in this world could only want what no one would mind giving them, this would be paradise, wouldn’t it?

Sadie wiggles her toes and closes her eyes and drifts off into semi-sleep. It’s so relaxing. She needs this. Simon needs this too. It relaxes him.

He didn’t win the Stein Prize. He didn’t win the Stein Prize. That beautiful Korean nut who calls herself NO won it, of course. She won with a simple-as-a-shit-in-a-bucket piece called YESTERDAY’S INSULTS ARE TOMORROW’S COMPLIMENTS. In which she sat casually dressed in a darkened room in a gallery watching a loop of old black and white Laurel and Hardy movies… crying.

Weeping, softly, non-stop for precisely eight hours and eight minutes. What the numerology of the piece was supposed to symbolize Simon has no idea but he knows that not only didn’t he win the Stein Prize with his infinitely wittier and more provocative installation (come on: a gang rape of the artist girlfriend of an artist competing for an art prize by the judges of the art prize? what’s not to like?) but he’s out a lot of money. That was an expensive fucking installation. From the rental of the Hispano Suiza to the security guards to the actress playing his girlfriend and the actors playing the half dozen rapist-judges and six cases of champagne and god knows how much expensive French cheese and crackers. The sponsors covered the advertizing, flew in a couple of the panelists and presented everyone of importance with a bottle of Vodka, otherwise it was Simon’s dime. Jesus. Meanwhile, how much did NO spend on her prize-winning schtick? The cost of a junkshop television. She probably didn’t even buy the TV. She probably borrowed it. It makes him sick.

Simon needs to relax. Simon needs to think. His real girlfriend, the “weather artist” Thy Trann, has been strangely evasive of late. Could be that she smells a plane crash. Could be that she senses that Simon’s stock is plunging. Simon’s problem is that he’s a British conceptualist, and his reputation is therefore ineffably bound to the public profile of Damien Hirst, who is being perceived as slightly passé of late. What Simon needs is for Damien to make another big splash and soon. Or Simon himself will need to do it.

But he’s afraid.

He first got the idea years ago, when those towelheads laid that career-making fatwa on lucky Rushdie. The death and destruction which Rushdie trailed in his wake (people forget: there were casualties of that particular fatwa, even if Rushdie escape unscathed… for now) put Simon off the idea for a few years, but then 9/11 happened and he was seriously tempted to go for it. But, again…

He was afraid.

And yet, what does Simon Kahn-Meyers fear more? Death or irrelevance? Which does anyone fear more?

Sadie has a dream right there in the chair in which every man loses his head over her. Their heads literally fall off. Their eyes go wide with panic and they point at their necks, gesturing frantically, as the necks turn black. And then their heads fall off.

Doonk.

Three hours later. Sadie announces loudly that she’s going to a dinner party. No answer. She’s already showered and perfumed and dressed in a gold lamé pantsuit and green velveteen slippers and ready to step out the door…she searches for and finds Simon sitting at a slanted work table in a back room in the flat and announces again quietly that she’s leaving for a dinner party.

“A dinner party? How delightful. I am feeling peckish.”

“Darling, it might be slightly rude to bring you.”

“Why would it be rude?”

“Darling… they aren’t expecting you. You aren’t invited.”

“Perhaps my arrival will be a glorious surprise. I am, after all, a known artist, Sadie.”

“Simon, I promise you, they have never even heard of your name.”

“How do you know?”

“I know.”

“But how?”

“Trust me.”

“But how?”

“I’m going to be late. If you insist on tagging along you had better get yourself dressed in five minutes.” Five MEE-nots.

“I am dressed.”

Sadie gives him a look.

“Okay, okay. Give us a minute. I’ll put on a fucking suit, for Christ’s sake.”

While Simon roots around in the armoir in the next room for his one serious suit, Sadie saunters across the studio and peers with blasé curiosity at the large sheet of drawing paper on the work table that Simon had been hunched over. Beside the paper are a drawing pencil and the wretched black rubber frying pan crumbs of a vigorous erasure or two. There is also a T-square and a plastic lettering stencil.

On the creamy sheet of paper, in roughly-sketched lettering, are two simple words in large block print; one an expletive verb and the other the name of a major religion. Two smaller words, in cursive, look more like notes or directions than sketches of the art itself. The two small blue-ballpoint words are the word green and the word gold… Sadie is struck by the coincidence: these are the colors she’s wearing. Kismet? The little word green seems to be a note about the color of the background. Gold is scrawled within the body of one of the letters of the two large words which are obviously meant to be the subject of the painting itself.

There are numbers across the bottom of the page: 22′ x 18′.  Sadie nods. That’s feet not inches.

 

 

 

 

Red Beard

Ginger Green stuck his thumb in the boiling water and counted to three, making sheepish contact with himself in the bathroom mirror by accident as he ran cold water over the blister afterward. Almost enough to inspire him to remove the mirror, but how would he shave, then? People would start calling him Red Beard. He climbed into the fireworks-colored Porsche that the most empty-headed song in his catalog had paid for and tried to stay off the streets that the hookers patrolled.

Long ago, before Europop or Miriam or his ex-wife or even Europe itself and all those ups and downs. Back into the clearer sounds and warmer colors of another age there had been Father Pat, the ‘Red Jebbie’, with his monkish beard the color of strawberry Kool Aid. The dayglo beard and the turtleneck sweaters and Jesus sandals slapping the concourse on hot mornings.

One day they were long-legging it across campus with Ginger scuttling hard to keep up. Pat would’ve called Miriam a succubus, thinks Ginger now. If he used that word for the homely girl who worked in the cafeteria he’d definitely have used it for Miriam, Miriam who was practically the clinical definition of the word and who had recently expanded operations to the province of Ginger’s dreams, though it had been eleven years since all that.

“I’ve got your number, Green,” Pat said, jovially. Father Pat was one of two foreigners on campus, the other being Gupta the math instructor. “You stopped believing in God approximately ten minutes after learning there was no such thing as Santa Claus, didn’t you? Worked it out for yourself and quite proud, no mistaking it. Why are you here with us, then? Off the record, of course. To what end?”

“My parents sent me, sir.”

“You’ll suffer for that honesty one day,” answered Pat, though it was clear he was pleased. “Gifted with all the requisite qualities but one: belief itself. Quite the irony, wouldn’t you say?”

“If you say so sir.”

“I’ll let you in on a secret when you’re old enough, Green,” said the priest, sneering affectionately at the boy whilst holding the cafeteria door for him. “Ring me up once you’ve started shaving and I’ll let you in on it. In you go. Promise?”

“Promise, sir.”

Probably dead by now, thought Ginger, sucking the tip of his thumb while steering. Ginger, after all these years, still wonders what Pat’s secret might’ve been, since he clearly hadn’t been Queer. Unlike others among the faculty of that shaper of men. If he’d been Queer there’d been ample opportunity to act. Ginger sucked the penitent blister. Der Weg ist das Ziel. It was Father Pat’s German that Ginger was regurgitating all these years later as a businessman in Berlin but it was Father Pat’s delicate sneer he felt his face deform into while doing things like doing his best to forget about Miriam. As though by stuffing his stained sheets into the washing machine or sticking his thumb into a pot of boiling water he’d exorcize her influence. The thought that she was still out there somewhere amazed him, even as the dream he’d had that afternoon during his middle-aged nap still tinted his imagination with blood.

What Pat had failed to perceive was Ginger’s thing for money. What young Ginger had seen all too clearly was Father Patrick’s poverty. Ginger saw the BP station at Bismarckstrasse and shuddered and within minutes he was parking in front of the sushi bar on Kant Strasse called Kuchi. The owners of Kuchi knew very well what a ‘kootchie’ was and that Immanuel Kant rhymes with ‘bunt’ but Ginger could only hope they had not as yet made Miriam’s acquaintance. He took a leatherette breath through his high-bridged nose and sighed.

She looked Celtic, Irish, not genealogically German at all. She could’ve been of Patrick’s tribe, as people often mistook the young Ginger to be, with his oxidized crewcut. She was pale as a coma and twenty seven or twenty eight years old when Ginger first met her. Just a few years off his own age. It all started with a phone call that jarred him swearing out of an intimate act with himself: the mood music; the candle; his ex-wife on all fours in contrition.

“Yes?”

“I have heard that you are the man who is looking for a singer?”

“Excuse me?”

“What you are needing is a girl who would like to sing?”

He turned off the lights and crossed to the big window at the front of his flat. The flat had been a storefront, a common architectural feature in Berlin, little shops built in the fronts of the massive old flat blocks. He peered through the blinds of the floor-to-ceiling window onto the empty street and at the playground across it: the jungle-gym, the sandpit, the see-saw and the swings. The swings rocked by the cold hand of the wind, out of synch, back and forth, forth and back, in the morbid electric glare of the streetlight.

“Who gave you my number?”

No response.

“I’m sorry, I’m not looking…for a singer right now.”

The line went dead. What an erotically pitiful voice.

The next morning came fierce cold sunlight and Ginger was crossing a bridge over the canal near Potsdamer Platz which was nothing but the huge muddy crater of the navel of the geographic center of Berlin. Impossible to imagine that this vast mess of trucks and pipes and cranes and girders would ever be anything but a deafening playground for hardhats to splash around in shrieking jovial obscenities. A playground for men. The phone in his pocket rang and he fetched it out and looked at the display and stopped walking and just blinked at it as though seeing an image of pre-Christian revelation emblazoned on the palm of his hand: NUMBER UNKNOWN. A motorcycle roared by, engine gunning, making him jump.

“Yes?”

Her breaths were shallow and (somehow he could tell this) sweet. “You are knowing a man who is needing a young girl who can sing?”

“Who is this?”

There was a long pause that made Ginger afraid she’d hang up again so he said, “Okay, it’s possible. Maybe I need a singer. It depends on how well she can…you know…do you have a demo or something? Are you gigging with a band I can catch you in?”

“No.”

Silence.

“Even a very rough recording…a cassette…”

“No.”

Another long pause and then, “We can meet us and I will sing for you?”

“Okay… sure. Okay. Let’s meet… let’s meet…at U-Bahnhof Wittenbergplatz, tomorrow, kurz nach fünfzehn uhr. In front of the tabak kiosk. But how will I recognize you?”

“I must recognize you,” she said, in her tremulous voice, and hung up.

At 3pm the next day, standing at a spot in a corner of the Wittenbergplatz U-Bahn station where he could observe the designated meeting place without himself being observed, Ginger was full of exhilarated dread, like a vintage astronaut in a leather helmet, squinting at the windsock through the porthole. He had a very good idea of what this girl would look like, if not in particularities then in magnitude, because of the way she’d handled him on the phone yesterday and the day before. Just being able to hang up like that…twice, now, very coolly…without even bothering to say goodbye. Only a certain brand of girl (if not strikingly beautiful then in possession of enormous sexual self-confidence) is capable of that. And of course those urgent calls of hers were ostensibly about music but urgent calls about music are really always about what music is about, which is sex. The offer or the request.

Ginger had been separated from his ex-wife for exactly a year and ten minutes when he saw, waiting in front of the tabak kiosk in the middle of the station, at five minutes after 3pm, a nervy slender girl with shoulder-length blonde hair in a soft pink running suit, looking surprisingly (embarrassingly) like a school girl, pacing and chewing gum with manic fervor in an unwittingly wicked satire of his own hysteria. Not as beautiful as he expected but much younger. If this were the puritanical States where the age of consent is eighteen, Ginger would smell a trap. He thought: How am I going to do this? She even appeared to be clutching a shield of school books to her chest. Ginger took a step towards her when he felt a tapping on his shoulder, fully expecting to see when he turned around a phalanx of gun-drawn American cops shouting halt!

“You are Ginger?” Ginger who attended a Jesuit boarding school for intellectually gifted boys who might otherwise be juvenile delinquents. Yes.

She smiled weakly and reached to shake his hand. She looked as frail and gauzy as an immigrant’s ghost, with long cherry-red ringleted hair and a waist he could circumnavigate with one hand, almost. She looked unwell. Her skin was the color of blood smeared thinly over porcelain. Her forehead came no higher than his chest and the crown of her head smelled strongly (but not unpleasantly) of pillowed scalp. Her silk blouse was a size too small for her breasts, which strained like the blind in their cups. Over all that her black denim jacket was buttoned askew, the last buttonhole mated to the next-to-the-last button, calling even more attention to the inadequacy of the clothing to contain her. She thanked him for showing up, speaking so softly that he had to lean down to hear it like a priest collecting a shy confession.

That first time she came to his place and stood in his living room to sing without preamble, denim jacket unbuttoned, blouse unbuttoned to a strategic point, lacey red brassiere flashing, eyes shut, mouth open…

…the sound that came out was so pathetic, so hopeless and small and lacking in confidence yet defiantly clinging to life and tenacious with conviction, clinging to the air itself, like some kind of creeping vine it was just awful, not comically out of tune but inhumanly tuneless. Ginger can’t remember the song she chose to traduce for him as an audition that day but he remembers thinking that there was something, nevertheless, in there, some spark or sliver or flicker of some kind of talent or human potential worth salvaging or was it merely that he was already obsessed? Was it merely that he desperately wanted to fuck her? But, yes…no…there was something under all that bad singing. Something as moving and awful as the thing crawling under the silk blanket of Billie Holliday’s voice the first time she ever sang Strange Fruit in public. Something in this girl was crushed and buried. Biblically so.

He listened to her with as neutral a face as he could possibly manage, hands in his pockets, glancing out the window at the playground. Kids fighting on it. When she finished and looked at him with tremulous expectation he leaned against the wall, hands still in his pockets, and, marshaling a certain technique of encouraging bullshit he’d developed after years in the music business in a country where almost no one could sing he said, “You need a little polish. But it’s very good.”

“A little polish?”

“I like… the sound of your voice but you need… some technical skill. Breath control, etc.”

“Oh.”

“But I…” he looked at his feet and folded his arms. “I can help you. I can…”

“You will?”

“I’ll give you voice lessons. I’d suggest twice a week. I believe in your…talent.”

She crossed the room and put her head on his chest. He knew the move that was required of him in order to establish the nature (the give and take) of their working relationship and she seemed poised to accept it but. He couldn’t for whatever reason bring himself to execute it, despite the fact that those ballooning tits of hers seemed to be crying out to be handled. Like fragrant loaves they rose from the unbuttoned top of her black denim jacket and the silk wrapping of her blouse. But something, either a voice from within or a faint transmission he picked up from her; more of a plea than a command; said: don’t.

“Next Thursday we start your lessons. Every Thursday and every Sunday from three to four. Give me a year. In a year I can make you a singer.” Even as he was saying it he knew how ridiculous it sounded. She’s not even paying me! I don’t even know her! A year!

That Thursday, the day of the first lesson, the temperature had plunged unseasonably and there was a gray blown scurry of snow like shaved twilight on the streets and she came wearing a camel hair coat and a cranberry colored scarf and her runny nose. She stood in the middle of his living room and refused to remove either the coat or the scarf and seemed entirely unaware of the fact that a pale ingot of snot rested on the soft maxilla-protruded incline of the rosy flesh over her lip for the duration. What could Ginger do? Mentioning it could be a fatal embarrassment to her and ruin what little self-confidence she carried so he spent an hour trying not to stare at the snot. And plus it was not cold in his living room and yet she stood there trying a warm-up scale in that coat and with that scarf still knotted around her neck. Ginger asked may I take your coat and she shook her head. Ginger asked if he should turn the heat up and she said no, she was fine. For the longest time he stared at her with a transitional smile, stymied.

“Every time you make a sound in here,” said Ginger, gesturing at the bare walls, “I want you to pretend that you’re singing in front of a packed concert hall. You’re singing in front of three thousand people. Okay? Do you understand what I mean? I mean that you must mean it every single time you open your mouth. Even when you’re simply talking. People who make casual noises aren’t good singers. Don’t make garbage noises that any old monkey could make. Make all your sounds become valuable. Make it so people want to pay you to make your interesting noises. Even if you never go pro I want you to learn to think that way.”

He thought: do I say nothing about the coat and scarf?

“But I feel something must come out but it don’t wants to.”

He paced around her and her eyes followed him to a certain point but he continued beyond that point and found himself behind her. He said, “We need you to get in touch with your pain.” Father Pat always said the twists and turns of a profligate life all occur on a path as straight as a watchmaker’s measure.

“Pain?” she asked. He nodded at her back.

“Yes. Your pain. Whatever…” he took a deep breath. “Whatever is keeping you from singing, holding you back, we can turn that around and it can help you to sing, and it’s all about your pain. Before we can unlock the potential energy of your pain, we have to get in touch with it. We have to know where it is before we can use it.”

Miriam stands very still with her back to him, in a fluffy white angora sweater and tight leather pants the full ensemble effect of which is a bit of a torment. He sits down on his comfortable old leather couch and wants to fall asleep on it. Exhausted because he isn’t really giving voice lessons he is wrestling with the unknown unnameable. Even when she is long gone, after every lesson, god knows where and doing what, she leaves a few of her demons with him. Demons like invoices.

For every hour Ginger and Miriam spent together on those Thursday and Sunday afternoons their uncategorized feelings seemed to grow. They even established a romantic tradition. The tradition started at the end of the second lesson when Ginger just happened to have a bar of half-eaten chocolate with almonds in it on the kitchen table in its beautiful gold foil and offered it to Miriam when the hour was up. Yes I love chocolate, she said, gratefully, gobbling it like a child, and so every time after that he made sure to have a bar or two ready for her. He caught himself putting too much time and energy into it, in fact: hunting for new treats for her all over the city. He bought a bar from a confectionery on Frederichstrasse, near the Lafayette, half a kilogram, a very expensive joke bar for American tourists: just about the size of carry-on luggage. She turned and smiled at him after the lesson, searching the room with her childish, darting curiosity.

“Do you have something for me?”

He was delighted to produce it from a hiding place behind a big cushion on the leather couch. She squealed like a child and clapped her hands and bit a tiny corner off it and went about the business of chewing like someone who hadn’t eaten in days. Or more like someone for whom the chance of ever eating again had until a moment before seemed remote. Not in great haste but lingeringly, with a heart-breakingly introspective expression, she savored it. Which made Ginger’s feelings swell and spill over. At moments like this his heart went out to her, blotting out even the faintest notions of sex. She licked her syruped lips and fetched her purse and re-wrapped the well-made bar neatly like an heirloom or a nest egg and put it away and said, “And so we are finished today?”

“Yup,” he saluted her, “We are finished today.” He clicked his heels and bowed.

“Good.” She snapped the purse shut. “I must meet my boyfriend outside.”

“Ah. Your boyfriend.”

“He is waiting in his car. Every time we sing, he waits… I told him it is not his role to bother us. Today I promise him we meet his friends. So we go in a stupid club later.” She laughed. “But really, I am so tired! I only want to sleep.”

“Just tell him you can’t go, then.”

She smiled sadly and shook her head: now Ginger was the child. She crossed the room and hugged him a very long time, her heartbeat tapping his gut through the camel hair coat as he looked down at the pale lane of scalp and its fine white tributaries under the unwashed matrix of blood-clot-colored roots and the sweet attendant odor. That lover-odor of pillowed scalp rising to him. He breathed it in for several long cycles of meshed pulse, holding her. Her boyfriend, he thought. Her boyfriend! But Ginger had hidden his crushing disappointment well when she uttered it. Of course she didn’t mention a boyfriend before now. And yet: that lingering hug. That look she gave me when she left. But where does she go when she leaves? He had no idea and no way to reach her. After she was gone he realized she’d left her scarf and he masturbated on it. Webby sneeze of silver on the wool. To punish himself he stood in an ice-cold shower. Corpse-numbness finally came.

What am I looking for when I look in a woman’s face?

Because men are always looking at women’s faces. Looking from one face to the next, like they’ve lost something. On the U-Bahn Ginger is looking carefully at each woman or girl as she gets on. He’s standing on the packed train with an arm up, strap-hanging. The train stops and the doors pop open and women, dressed for winter, pour in with their shopping bags; girls pour in with their chattery friends. When he looks at the pretty ones he feels something that he doesn’t feel when he looks at the others, but it’s not a sexual sensation. This is what baffles and intrigues him.

“Senor Verde,” calls Father Patrick, from the door of his office. Wearing that grin he wears about which Ginger has learned to be wary. He’s clutching a rolled up Arte Fact magazine and directs Ginger to have a seat in the leather chair (musty and comfortable as an old giant African hand) in front of his desk, waving the magazine like a traffic baton. He unrolls it under Ginger’s nose and with his gnawed finger pokes a two-page spread… a kind of centerfold… of Fra Angelico’s 15th century The Deposition. A crucified Christ (with a puncture wound resembling a bullet hole) is lowered from his cross by five male figures (two of which are haloed-John the Baptist? Joseph the Beard?) choreographed in an X-like configuration while a vulpine, flame-haired Magdalene prostrates herself to the holy corpse.

“What do you think of this, lad? Be frank.”

“It looks… it looks like she’s sucking his toes, sir.”

Is this my punishment for going into show business instead of becoming a priest?

The next lesson, after the boyfriend revelation, Miriam didn’t sound any better than she had during all the lessons before, but at least she wasn’t wearing her coat or scarf while singing (the scarf Ginger had hand-washed and dried on a radiator and replaced the next day on the very spot she’d left it as though he hadn’t even noticed it in the interim), and she actually laughed a few times when Ginger did his joke conductor imitation to whip some vivacity into her performance. That was progress. She wasn’t even nearly approaching the moment when Ginger would feel she was beginning to sound like a singer; she was approaching the moment when he felt he’d be able to start teaching her. Right now he was simply teaching her how to be taught. How long? How long was this going to take?

After that session he switched off the lights and peered out the window and watched as she slipped into a sleek black hearse of a car.

How he thought he might get in touch with her pain was to have her singing a seemingly nonsense phrase he’d written with a simple three note melody… almost a Gregorian Chant… to the words I don’t want to, I don’t want to, I don’t want to… an idea he got based on the resistance he sensed in her posture and in the strained, weak, choked-off sound of her voice. He had her modulating that one phrase up one tone at a time a whole octave. And then back down the octave with a second phrase: please, please, please. That was the warm-up. Thinking this might loosen something in her. Maybe it was just amateur psychiatry. But after the warm-ups, then he would let her tackle whatever popular song she might choose if it wasn’t absurdly ambitious (R&B was off limits). Always starting and ending with: I don’t want to, I don’t want to, I don’t want to…please, please, please…

And this bit of rudimentary psychology on Ginger’s part seemed to be having some kind of effect, because two things began to happen: first, she sometimes refused to sing the please please please, which Ginger found significant, and second, she began making mysterious allusions to something she wanted to “tell to him” about. Some secret she thought he needed to know. The first time she referred to this secret he didn’t realize what he was hearing and he reacted flippantly. He didn’t think: aha.

“Something you should tell me? What? You’re not the Queen of England?” but she smiled like a sad little Sphinx and that’s when he realized that a mystery he hadn’t even been consciously aware of needing to solve had unfolded one torn petal for him. Even after the revelation that she had a boyfriend she still invoked from time to time this secret.

He never broke his code of courtly behavior while teaching her, not even when she teased him. Not even when she made shy double-entendres herself, which she did with greater and greater frequency, or gave him those enticingly lingering hugs. The word ‘maudlin’ derives from Magdalene. During the period reserved for eating her chocolate after every lesson she talked more and more about private things. About the parents who’d disowned her at puberty; the little sister with a drug problem; incest with cousins and run-ins with ghosts; the crime blotter of boyfriends and relevant litanies of physical intimidation and emotional waste. All of this information delivered with a neutral smile and penciled-in eyebrows raised to a working class altitude of acceptance. She also mentioned along the way that she was sterile due to some venereal tragedy that had left her permanently ruined “Down there” and about which she was still visiting various doctors. Ginger listened to everything she said with a tightening, baffled sensation. News of the medieval. News of gold and pussy.

Eleven years after finally breaking all contact with Miriam, Ginger had a horrible nightmare.

A long white van eases to a heavy stop at a British Petroleum station. He knows it’s BP because of the green and yellow. A panel door slides open and the van disengorges a small phalanx of the biggest, most square-jawed skinheads Ginger has ever seen, hopping backwards out of it like precision sky-divers. The light bulb skulls, stovepipe jeans, bomber jackets and high-laced steel-toed boots: the works. A half dozen of them are stretching (knuckles and spines cracking like distant sniper fire) out on the tarmac and then another half dozen creatures emerge demurely…

They look like fiercely blue-eyed nuns. But too young for nuns…with their teenage eyes; lashes and eyebrows so fair they’re invisible. Ginger imagines piles and piles of wild blonde hair under all that satin as everything but the eyes is swaddled in voluminous white burka and the eyes blink and flare like cold electronics under the mercury arc lamps. Nervous teenage eyes. Teenage European eyes in chador. And then Ginger sees it: a blue insignia in the shadowed upper right corner of the van. A crescent moon the tips of which are closing like delicate fangs on a swastika. Cloth-covered females go off in twos, heads bowed, to the gas station’s WC, around the far side of the building, while the men enter the store in an orderly fashion. One of the females is standing nearer the taxi… Ginger is in a taxi… and seems to have noticed him. The ghost comes nearer the window and with a deft flick of an arm from under the burka, exposes her face.

He jogs around the left side of the station, across the bright wet tarmac and behind a ziggurat of oil drums and into the blind rain, slipping on the gravel beyond the tarmac’s edge, sliding on mud beyond the gravel, steadying himself against the cold dark wall of the building. The tarmac; the gravel; the mud and even the wall: they all feel so real. So convincing. Each icy syllable of rain striking his face in a complex sequence is designed with such care and precision that he can’t help feeling an immense admiration for the craftsman behind it all. The instant she revealed her face from under the veil, of course, he knew it was a dream and he moved quickly to seize the opportunity. At the very back of the building he finds the WC door marked Herren. He eases the door open and lets himself in. He looks at his hands and wiggles his fingers. They look like a perfectly ordinary version of his fingers.

Just as he knew it would, the WC door opens and in steps Miriam in her burka, ultraviolet eyes darting, cloth billowing. She closes and locks the door behind her and removes her veil with cinematic intensity and pushes back the cowl to expose her shivering red ringlets; that blood cloud of hair he had always wanted to clutch. Ginger stands at one end of the WC and Miriam at the other and he contemplates the matter of his first words carefully before speaking.

“Who are you?”

“You know who sent me.”

“Father?”

“You never noticed the Devil wears red?” She sneers. “You’re such a dummy I wonder why he loves you so.”

She squirms out of the burka, steps naked towards him… steps naked in her terrible skeletal state… her skin twang-tight from bone contour to bone contour and translucent as a jellyfish… the breasts like melted lenses magnifying the fossil spider of her ribcage… and… in the harsh light Ginger can make out the slopped coil of her intestines… the rubber red wings of the lungs… the twin-fetus kidneys… the scrape-and-bruise-tinted sacks of stomach, liver, spleen. It looks like a shimmering 3-D body tattoo, an inverted illusion, as her organs shift and shimmer with parallax as they circle one another. Her pubic hair floats like ruddy kelp over the neck of the submerged amphora of her womb. Ginger stares slackjawed at her wincing heart in its Christ-struggle, jerking up and falling slack, jerking up and falling slack, over and over in its crucified agon and he will scream. She is the most horribly beautiful thing.

He produces from under the black wing of a cape he seems to be wearing a compact little pistol. He gestures with the pistol that Miriam should cross the tiled floor and bend over the bathroom sink. Ginger then uses the toe of his boot to kick Miriam’s feet so far apart that her thighs tremble, her bubble-gum-colored anus puckers and she voids her bowels with fear. The shit pushes out in black chunks like horse manure and splatters in a lopsided pile at the midpoint between her farspread feet. The odor is astounding and green-hot and she sobs quietly with shame. He is holding his breath as he crouches behind her and with his vivid thumb presses himself into the ghastly tight translucence of her body. He goes in, comes out with a wet pop, and plunges in again, deeper. A spray of blood diffuses on every impact, speckling the floor and the near wall and a corner of the mirror with thicker and thicker ooze. He is grinding her down to constituent elements; the rape is a chemical process of Christian alchemy… converting temptation into regret.

Ginger wakes with all the evidence of a wet dream on his belly but also in tears. A wet dream at 42! He boils a pot of water. Father Pat nods gravely. Erst kommt das Fressen, dann die Moral. Ginger scalds his thumb and craves sushi.

Three months into their story Miriam arrived for her lesson an hour late, which was very unusual for her, but she was full of energy and very open and said that her boyfriend had been gone on business for a few days and had just come back the previous night and so there had been wonderful sex and she joked that she could barely walk but it was so great to be sore this way because she loved sex so much. She had always loved sex so much.

She was blabbing effusively like an ordinary school girl and peeled off her camel hair coat and handed it to Ginger without hesitation and unknotted that cranberry-red scarf and tossed it to Ginger and removed also the black denim jacket she often wore under the coat to reveal that same old low-cut silk blouse that showed off her ponderous chest and very narrow waist and skinny little chalk-white arms to maximum effect against the grape-gray bruises on her white throat. She shook out her hair and it was like a billow of blood in the ocean. She stood at the living room window in a wide beam of spring sunlight with the contours of her improbable body in brilliant relief and her flesh like platinum and she did her warm-up exercises with a playful teasing smile singing I don’t want to, I don’t want to, I don’t want to… please please please with comical hula-girl beckoning gestures and winking. It was then he began to wonder who his professional distance was really in place to protect because he knew if he fell for this girl the fall would be hard; he would shatter into bits and pieces.

Ginger restrained himself from crossing the room and pushing his tongue so far down her throat that he’d taste the stains on the insides of her panties. He stood where he stood as though nailed to the floor, as far away as possible, chin raised, hands clasped behind his back in the role of the strict and sexless and protective father figure, her voice teacher, the man who had taken on the task of giving her a voice. Felt like Poitier in To Sir, With Love. Had to laugh. But honestly he was on the verge of making a terrible mistake and he knew it. But he also knew that for the short short time of the mistake itself it would feel more right than anything had ever felt in the history of the world.

And then it wouldn’t.

An Uncomfortable Moment at the Thirteenth Annual Delmore Schwartz Memorial Picnic

 

Grill smoke drifted like chalk drawings of tropical fish on the darkening air. A sudden calm suspended everything…the falling sun; Frisbees at apogee; the tiny crucifix of a jet dangling from the string of its vapor trail…in the mellow aspic of future memory. They all prepared to listen to Gregg read, conscious of the fact that many years into the unknowable they’d look back on this moment with intense affection. Affection for the city and the era and their former selves. Eric, Dave, Andy, Bill and Eric grinned open-mouthed with anticipated pleasure, their shadows long, as Gregg cleared his throat and lifted a finger of emphasis. All of Roosevelt Park, along with their future selves, hushed for a moment to listen. 

 “ ‘Two decades ago, with her sculpted features, Alaia-friendly figure, and a languid drawl that spoke of nannies and finishing schools, this rangy, patrician beauty (her uncle was a prime minister of Belgium) was perfectly cast to play artist’s muse.’” He peered up from under the corners of his tinfoil hat and affected a lisp. “‘They were a very, very glamorous couple,’ recalls the artist Peter Blah Blah, ‘He was this powerhouse of creativity and bravado and interest and talent. She was so intimidating to look at; a camera couldn’t capture her outrageous beauty.’” He closed the magazine and waited a beat.  “Now, I ask you…”  

Andy said, “Kinda makes you see the world through Charlie Manson’s eyes, doesn’t it?” 

Dave adjusted his tinfoil hat, which suffered from being a hasty construction, and said, “And for that I’m grateful.” He sipped beer from his family-size jug of Diet Sprite. Gregg handed Dave the Vogue and Dave put the sloshy jug down between his knees and paged through the magazine with one eyebrow raised and nostrils flared, a patented Dave expression. He passed the magazine to Bill, who would have preferred the jug. 

“Whatever happened to the peasant class, anyway? Why don’t we hear from any of them on stuff like this? Aren’t we long overdue for widespread rebellion?” 

“Revolution these days,” responded Andy, as Bill passed the Vogue to him, “is atomized, permanent and absorbed by the system. If we could somehow organize all the yuppie muggings that take place during one year in this country and concentrate them into one day and location, that would be your uprising right there. But the revolutionaries are all lone wolves now and they tend to have crack habits.” 

Eric reached for the Vogue. “Where did you find this thing?” 

“Wait,” said Bill, “You mean even bloody insurrection suffers from the same crisis of hot-dog individualism now plaguing the NBA?”  

 

“Gregg got a subscription for Christmas,” said Andy. Andy took off his tinfoil hat and looked at it with some interest. “Hey, am I just imagining it or are my thoughts a little…I don’t know…less staticky while I’m wearing this?” He put it back on top of his head. 

Gregg, with his perfect deadpan, said, “Now that you mention it.” 

“I don’t know about less staticky thoughts,” said the other Eric, “but I’ve had an erection since I put mine on…and that was at 5 in the morning.”  

“And they said he’d never screw again!” 

“Who said I’d never screw again?” 

“They.” 

 

“Oh, them.” 

“The same know-it-alls who said Christopher Reeve would never walk again, I presume?” 

Eric swatted Eric with the rolled up Vogue and Eric snatched it away and swatted Eric back and everyone laughed. A bumblebee lobbed over their loose circle in a wobbly arc as though it weighed a ton, and a beautiful girl in cut-offs and a vintage The Police t-shirt, oblivious in headphones, intersected the bumblebee’s flight path on her way to the water fountain. Eric and Eric had to twist on their spots to see what everyone else was gawping at. The denim lobes of her cut-offs appeared to inflate as she lowered her mouth to the spigot and she pulled her hair out of the way and slurped. 

Dave said, “Hey, in all seriousness, how are those burgers coming?” 

 

Bill crawled over to the hibachi on two knees and one hand, holding his tinfoil hat to his curly head with the other. He said, “The burger that’s directly over the one hot coal is getting there. The others appear to be incubating salmonella to varying degrees according to their distance from the one hot coal.” 

Dave chugged from his Diet Sprite bottle again and said, “I always thought that was the tastiest sounding food poisoning, you know? Salmonella. Salmonella spread, with pimento. I’d buy some of that.” 

Gregg said, “Let’s face it, it’s a major setback that our manliest member couldn’t make it this year.” 

Bill chuckled. “Manliest member.” 

“Mark,” said Dave, wistfully, “was, indeed, an idiot savant of the hibachi briquette fire.” 

“Is hibachi a Mexican word or a Japanese word?” 

 

“A skill he picked up as a pyromaniacal adolescent of the upper-Midwest, no doubt.” 

“It’s a Japanese word that refers to a heating device but not a grill, actually. The correct word is shichirin, but that’s too difficult for the average American consumer to pronounce, so they were marketed as hibachi.” 

“I love being forced to learn things.” 

“I told Mark he could bring Sadie if he wants.” 

“Well, the funny thing is it’s actually an ancient Chinese technology.”

“He obviously didn’t want.” 

“Will somebody stop this guy?” 

“Maybe he was afraid we’d covet her.” 

“Or frighten her with these hats.” 

“You asked and I told.” 

“Sadie. What kind of name is that, anyway? Is she a retired rhumba teacher?” 

“Next time I won’t ask.” 

“No, but I bet she refers to sexual intercourse as ‘relations’.” 

“He says they want to have kids.” 

“Quick, before the population falls under seven billion.” 

“Anyone ever notice that the blink-rate of a baby is only something like once every three minutes? My sister’s kid…” 

Bill jumped up and said, “Okay, who am I now?” He folded his upper lip under itself, exposing his teeth, and stuck his thumbs into his armpits, but before he could finish the impression a very large black woman loomed, wearing camouflage pants and a hooded black sweatshirt which presented a picture of Albert Einstein with his pierced tongue sticking out. She was large not only in the sense of fat but of tall as well and physically intimidating. She spoke with such abrupt loudness that Bill flinched, his upper lip still folded under itself. 

“Is this the thirteenth annual Delmore Schwartz memorial picnic?” She gestured with the classifieds section of the daily paper. 

“You advertized?” hissed Eric to Gregg. 

“I thought it would be fun.” 

“Well here’s your fun.” 

Bill said, “Yes it is.” 

She gestured at Bill’s tinfoil hat. “Is that supposed to be funny?” Before he could respond she added, “Is mental illness funny? Is suicide funny? Is the suicide of a gifted 53 year old poet grappling with the debilitating effects of an untreatable mental illness funny?” 

Gregg, with spell-breaking sang froid, said, “I’d prefer to conduct this interview in writing, if you don’t mind,” and Eric, Dave, Andy, Bill and Eric all laughed, grateful that he’d shown them the way. 

 

The Black

   Berlin (Reuters)-Police in re-unified Germany’s capitol announced today that a serial rapist targeting elderly women has been active in the Charlottenburg, Mitte and Moabit neighborhoods of that city. The suspect is described as a tall, well-built, extremely handsome dark-skinned black male of approximately thirty-five years of age who speaks English with an American accent and wears a dark blue woolen cap. The six reported victims of the alleged rapist are said to be between the ages of seventy two and seventy eight years of age and of a uniformly tall, handsome, aristocratic appearance. At least three of the alleged victims are of “blue blood” by birth, and the others by marriage, sporting the tell-tale “von” prefix in their surnames. Police are as of now unwilling to speculate on a possible motive, but have confirmed that the alleged victims display few signs of physical trauma as a consequence of the so-called attacks, and forensic experts have been unable to establish evidence of forcible entry at the purported crime scenes. Women who fit the victim profile are strongly cautioned to exercise heightened vigilance in the vicinity of individuals matching the description of the alleged perpetrator.

There is a secondhand English language book store around the corner. A basement shop. The Black feels like a man who has made a resolution to get in better shape and so takes the next opportunity to walk right up to…and then actually into…a Health Food Store, or a sports equipment shop, sucking in his gut and reading with great care the labels on year-supply tubs of vitamin E and Brewer’s Yeast and then hefting chrome barbells with a thought towards investing. But it’s his brain not his body he needs to improve and therefore a bookstore not a health shop he dutifully enters. He has to watch his head as he descends the steep concrete stairs into the sick fluorescent lighting. The dark wood floor is warped and paint-spattered and there are fat pipes (the color of the ceiling; the color of the spatters on the floor) racing across the ceiling and around a corner into the back room.

The not-entirely unattractive woman behind the glass counter, with unconvincingly jet black hair and not much chin, gives The Black the tolerant smile with which she means to put him at ease on the matter of whether she’ll hold against him his inevitable decision to circumambulate the store once and then leave without buying a single thing, never to return. Little does she know that The Black actually feels compelled to buy, and not only by her reassuring smile. He is on a self-improvement kick and hopes to walk out of this place with an armload of second-hand books because there’s no time like the present to start.

The Black read a few books in High School. There is a case to be made that Isaac Asimov is every bit the genius that Vladimir Nabokov is but even The Black suspects the case would be ridiculous. Where’s the literature he can lose himself in? Where is the book that isn’t merely a careerist tactic or an extension of the writer’s adolescent libido, rotten with clichés or sub-Joycean experiments in narrative and typography that invariably go dud? Where is the living, breathing and engagingly sincere literature? The stuff he can apply towards Life? The Truth Telling?

The Black picks up a handsome old volume with a photo of what looks like a sinister Edwardian chickenhawk on the cover and rifles the pages and puts it with vague reverence back. The Black hasn’t the slightest idea who Gertrude Stein is (although the name rings some kind of bell) and he has certainly never read Gertrude Stein’s Melanctha, the second story from Getrude Stein’s much-discussed Three Lives, so how could The Black possibly be aware of Richard Wright’s oleaginously positive assessment of Gertrude Stein’s Melanctha in this handsome old edition of the Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein?

“The first long serious literary treatment of Negro life in the Unites States,” is how the Negro writer Richard Wright praises Gertrude Stein’s Melanctha in this handsome old edition of Gertrude Stein.

“Rose Johnson was a real black, tall, well built, sullen, stupid, childlike, good looking negress,” writes Gertrude Stein about the character Rose Johnson in the Richard Wright-lauded Gertrude Stein story Melanctha. “Her white training had only made for habits, not for nature. Rose,” explains Gertrude Stein, “had the simple, promiscuous unmorality of the black people.”

Richard Wright noted: “I gathered a group of semi-literate Negro stockyard workers…into a [Southside of Chicago] basement and read Melanctha aloud to them. They understood every word. Enthralled, they slapped their thighs, howled, laughed, stomped, and interrupted me constantly to comment upon the characters.”

Later in this edition of Gertrude Stein’s Selected Writings, sui generis Gertrude Stein displays her mastery (a mastery which clearly vindicates what might seem simple and racist in such writings of hers as Melanctha) in a piece inspired by travel, with her mousy factotum, to Spain: It can no sail to key pap change and put has can we see call bet. Show leave I cup the fanned best same so that if then sad sole is more, more not, and after shown so papered with that in instep lasting pheasant. Pheasant enough. Call africa, call african cod liver, loading a bag with news and little pipes restlessly so that with in between chance white cases are muddy and show a little tint…(sic)

What The Black doesn’t like is the feeling (imaginary?) that the shop girl’s eyes are trying to steer him towards the colorful rack of celebrity biographies to the immediate right of the door, or the LARGE TYPE sports “literature” that stands in the rack to the left of it, forming a lowbrow gateway The Black had to pass through before discovering the musty nest of middlebrow paperback fiction lining a water-stained wall.

These same books are always waiting to be rescued from places like this, and they are as unappealingly poignant as mustached Romanian orphans. The kind of books that not only infest and depress second-hand book stores all over the English-speaking world but infest and depress junk shops, too. Something about these books emits an aerosol of salt peter for the literary boner. Something about the cover designs, the typography, and even the stylistic content…everything…turns The Black off to the extent that he suddenly wants to circumambulate the shop and leave without buying a single thing, never to return, despite his avowed intent to purchase an armload of brain-improving literature.

“I am liking your shoes.”

The Black looks up at the shop girl. She’s smiling at him over the top of a tabloid newspaper, the Berliner Zeitung or BZ. The headline on the cover page in 72pt bold screams SCHWARTZE RAUBTIER!?!

“Thanks.”

“They are pretty…nearly the woman’s shoe. You have small feet to be so big.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“That’s a good one.” She nods towards the book that The Black is just then pushing back in its place on the shelf, making him feel obligated to pull it out again and pretend for a moment to re-consider it. One of Anais Nin’s old things.

The shop girl sighs and says, “She was so free!” The Black stares at the self-absorbed face on the cover of the book, examines the back cover with equal intensity and slips it, finally, into its slot again.

“She didn’t care what the world is thinking. That’s the best way, I think.”

“Yes, I agree.”

Without warning, the shop girl erupts into theatrical laughter, covering her mouth and apologizing. The Black picks up another book and rifles the pages and says “What?” without looking at her.

“I’m sorry, but I look at you and I think: he has many girlfriends.”

“No.”

“What sort of book are you looking for?”

“A good one.”

“They are all good. Every book was once somebody’s hopeless dream…that’s what I say.”

“It’s a nice thing to say.”

“Thank you.”

The Black smiles back at her and gestures awkwardly that he’s about to retreat into the back room to check out a bit more of the inventory. “Enjoy,” she says, and pretends to go back to reading her tabloid. But she looks up again as he turns his strong broad back.

Is it him?

The back room is a catacomb. The 70s saw a fecundity blip of middlebrow paperback production and the output (from huge pipes at key points around the globe?) seems to have papered the planet three or four times over in self-regarding, clunky, sexually summer-campish fiction, for The Black has been seeing exactly these books on the Lit shelves of second hand establishments for thirty years now, across twenty American states and four European countries, though some of the books are surely by now eighth, ninth, tenth hand…with penciled-in prices erased and re-written and erased again on the fly-leaf in layers of embossed pentimenti. Interesting thing, in the books where the successive prices are crossed-out rather than erased, is how the values first show a steady decline until bottoming out well below a dollar (or Deutschmark), but then a weird bounce-back, post-Internet, as books more and more became the spinster’s luxury item…decorative artifacts for the shut-in’s night stand. This Gravity’s Rainbow, for example: the penciled-in asking price is €8, far more than its original cost (in 1972) of $2.98, though it cannot be considered a collector’s item…the cosmic joke being that no way did any of the chain of seven people who once owned and then re-circulated this fat gold tome ever read it.

Shockingly, a paperback of a non-70s vintage has found its way in the tight slot between Irving and Mailer and The Black digs it out. Yellowed pages and a dark blue cover sporting a grid of four headshots of the heroes of another era titled FOUR GREAT MINDS: A QUARTET OF MEN WHO SHAPED THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. Then, possessed of a sudden inspiration, The Black seeks the piously cloistered “ethnic, gender, disability” section to the far left (as much as he hates to) and finds one miraculous copy of a book he hasn’t much thought of in almost forty years: MANTAN in LILY LAND by Napoleon Fanon. He digs it out with trembling hands and experiences an instant erection. The book is like Viagra for him. He taps Fanon’s name on the cover.

Despite the considerable embarrassment of obviousness he must endure (a black man buying a book about black issues by a black writer; why not a Frenchman in a striped shirt and black beret in line to buy a baguette?), The Black marches right up to the shop girl and plunks down the money for this 1968 first edition paperback of ManTan in Lily Land (with its lurid, racist cover). The shop girl waves goodbye. Her heart is beating so hard that she can barely catch her breath.

Once he is home, the light on everything else around him in the room seems to dim as the book emits the melancholy glow of erotic nostalgia. Dusty, perched on the windowsill, closes her eyes when he catches her watching him caressing it. The laminated cover of the paperback, though yellowing and cracked, gleams with the image of a black giant’s gaudily be-ringed, kong-like hand as it grasps a creamy doll-sized nude blonde. Her pubes and nipples are tastefully hidden behind giant black fingers and the expression on her face is compellingly ambiguous. Her mouth is open. Her eyes are half shut. Terror? Rapture? Her hair is done in the big blonde aeronautical style of the late ‘60s, a platinum nose cone. ManTan in Lily Land. As a blurb has it, the shocking narrative of an urban pilgrim’s progress from stuttering Negro to bold Revolutionary…

The Black’s bedroom is high-ceilinged (the ceiling ringed with the 30s-era ornamental plaster-work called Stück), with tall windows, white walls, and a hardwood floor. The floorboards are separated by quarter-inch gaps where some kind of putty used to be, and down between the boards, in these deep dark grooves, is the shoe-deposited stratified compote of twentieth century Berlin (dried cum and blood, dog shit and dandruff) along with a sprinkling of the desiccated essence of the 19th and the 21st centuries, too. This is an old old building, as rooted in the brittle block of Kant Strasse as a stone molar. Still, no unfamiliar ghosts have bothered to trouble him here, despite the various moans and howls and gasps these bedroom walls have absorbed during his tenacious occupancy.

He did, however, one Sunday morning, glancing up from a crossword, get an adrenalized glimpse of a hawk with a wingspan the length of a man’s body taking lunch in the linden outside that window…so close that The Black could’ve swung the window open and leaned on the sill and dared to tickle the bird’s wingtip with his finger…so close that The Black could see the baked dirt on the pale scruff of the creature’s wide neck where no contortion of beak was possible to preen it. With one talon the hawk clutched the headless body of a pigeon ( an old unraveling sock), tearing off red bits and shuttering its big black Pentax of an eye at The Black …there was something of Herbert Von Karajan in the hawk’s profile as it took him in through the double-glazed window…and it did seem to give The Black a glance of disdain before lifting back off into the merciless grandeur of its natural element…but the ghosts he expected to haunt him in Deutschland…livid Aryans and mournful Jews and plaster-dusted, eyeless waifs…they never did materialize.

Though someone once put to The Black the chilling proposition that a certain percentage of the pale, poorly dressed and dour creatures one comes across in Berlin every day…on the streets and in the U-Bahn, in the bakeries and grocery stores…are, in fact, corporeal ghosts from the War. A casual removal of their dingy jackets or stained skirts would reveal the noose burns or perforations of ancient machine-gun fire. Why were these spectral scowlers still hanging around? They had nowhere else to go, rejected by the afterlife itself, having made the bizarrely stupid error of persecuting the Jews in a Universe run by the father of a world-famous rabbinical student.

The sun is setting. The sun has set.

Dusty is staring out the bedroom window with an unreadable expression as twilight suffuses the sky with dark blood and the courtyard lights click on, casting unvarying shadows in the high-walled courtyard. The black imploring shadow hands of three old leafless trees stretch across the grass and red brick tiles and stand up on the dirty stone wall under The Black’s windows like a creepy etching by Otto Dix. Across the courtyard, visible through gaps in the high foliage, life of a sort is evident in random windows, bright or dim, under the pearly folds of Europa’s view of the Milky Way.

A too-tall blonde in an evening gown is ironing pillow cases. A pacing man with vivid black hair is lecturing (with broad gestures) a white-haired straight-backed couple seated on opposite sides of a kitchen table, making his passionate case for Euthanasia, perhaps. Two white-capped guys in overalls are painting an empty room, under a bare bulb…a portable television is placed atop the third step-ladder. The movie on the portable television is full of explosions and the screen blossoms repeatedly with orange blooms of fire and digital debris intercut with close-ups of a small-eyed, blank-faced starlet and her swollen, parted lips.

Near-naked in his dark bedroom, spying on the well-ordered mystery of German existence through a wind-shifted scrim of moon-blue leaves, what The Black misses most at this moment is… cricket song. Cricket song, and the smoke from the incense they bought as kids for two a penny and called punk and burned to ward off mosquitoes. Cricket song, punk, lightning bugs and talcum powder. Oh, and adolescent armpits. And autumn leaves, burning in damp piles, and Doctor Pepper, or Wint-o-Green Life Savers, on a pretty girl’s breath. Laundry flapping on the line, both the sound and the smell of it. Hose-water hitting hot sidewalks.

And the ruckus of a two-blocks-distant, contentious game of twilight stickball and the hiss of traffic on a Sunday morning after a light rain and the bright orange taste of a Dreamsicle and the deep smell of Vaseline on his anus as the rectal thermometer slid in…he was sickly as a child and that rectal thermometer was always sliding in. Burnt pancakes…don’t forget burnt pancakes. Don’t forget the menacing odorous glow of RCA tubes through the grille in the back of an old timer’s radio. And the clank and roar of a coal-burning furnace and the pagan dance of the flames as his grandmother snatched the grate open with a hooked poker to shovel more in. A grass-covered gasoline-smelly lawn mower parked in a damp hot garage on a puddle of oil on the garage’s cracked floor. A box of stale coconut macaroons, too. Garden-fresh tomatoes and green beans in two dirty buckets. The pulse of windshield wipers versus the throb of tires across the steel matrix of a drawbridge and their doze-disturbing properties. The crackle of ozone from the loosely connected tracks of an electric train set. A brassiere from the dirty clothes hamper. The sharp black reek of a chicken coop. The electrifying odor of a brand new Schwinn bicycle, freshly stolen from the shop. Wet cardboard. Wet bandages. Wet dog. Paper-thin cicada song above a vacant lot. The smell of cornpone baking…

The Black caresses the cover of ManTan in Lily Land…

With two flicks through the pages of the thick-as-a-porterhouse paperback, the pages red-edged as rare steak, he comes right to the most familiar passage of the book, as though the copy he holds in his hand is the one he read from originally, in the library, Chicago, 1968, Harriet Tubman Elementary…

“What do you want with me?” she demanded, her eyes aflame with hatred. No Negro had ever so much as made eye contact with this proud daughter of America’s Anglo Saxon ruling class, this much was clear. That I dared not only to stare her down with an equal hatred, while seizing her wrist in a grip whose strength had been forged in everything from the Memphis workhouse to the brutal stockyards of Chicago, but also to address her in a tone that the Master reserves for his servant, was beyond the pale.

I twisted that fragile white wrist until she was down on one knee, and, truth be told, the expression I showed her then would have frightened even me, had I seen it, for it meant only one thing, and both of us knew it. Still grasping her wrist with the one hand, I back-handed her with the other, and she sprawled at the foot of the king sized bed in her parent’s master bedroom, overlooked by a framed, crocheted American flag. The symbolism was striking. She touched a finger to her bleeding lip and wept softly as I unbuckled my belt.

“For centuries,” I growled, in a voice devoid of emotion,”what’s about to happen to you has happened to innocent Negro women at the hands of your rapacious forefathers…”

Doomed from the Beginning: a review of On Chesil Beach (5/15/2007)

On Chesil Beach Ian McEwan

Jonathan Cape, 166 pp 

Ian McEwan is the gothic poet of British class anxiety. Over an arc of novels including The Innocent, Black Dogs, Enduring Love, and Atonement, McEwan has polished a talent for giving his readers nasty and sometimes bloody surprises when the classes interact on too intimate a level. His most recent, On Chesil Beach, however, is both a perfect specimen of McEwan’s hardening suavity as a prose stylist and the latest example of an ongoing renunciation of his greater gift. As Saturday did before it, this novella-length book promises much, initially, but ends up being deeply unsatisfying before its conclusion. A necessary catharsis has been frustrated for the sake of a decorous treatise on the grim predestinies of class.  

The book’s unhurried narrative anchors to the first few hours of a marriage between Edward Mayhew and Florence Ponting, shuttling between the “now” of their honeymoon supper (and its aftermath) and earlier points in their lives and their relationship. The presiding metaphor is on view from the French windows of their honeymoon suite: the “infinite shingle” of Chesil Beach, on which “thousands of years of pounding storms ha(ve) sifted and graded the size of pebbles…with the bigger stones at the eastern end.” Edward, a lower-class rustic educated above his station and faintly embarrassed about his background, is, in practically every way, Florence’s inferior. He’s even a chronic masturbator.

Florence’s upper-middle class parents are a neurasthenically haughty Oxford don and a prosperous businessman so competitive that he’s nearly an anachronism (or an American). Florence is a chaste, disciplined and accomplished violinist in possession of an IQ 17 points higher than Edward’s, as he discovers by having a “peep” into her school report folder; even this peep indicates a moral inferiority on Edward’s part. As if his congenital disadvantages weren’t enough, an accident during his childhood has left his mother brain-damaged and the Mayhew household dark and filthy as a consequence, in schematic contrast to the Ponting’s Victorian villa, sterile with the hard light of eminence. While Florence’s mother is friends with Iris Murdoch, Edward’s mother is friendless. Clearly, Edward and Florence are like the pebbles on Chesil Beach, widely separated by the work of thousands of years of merciless grading.  

McEwan’s schematic stacks the deck with the force of stereotypes so entrenched they feel like empirical laws of a natural science. Making the upper class female love-object in this novel superior in almost every way may feel like an expression of the author’s (unconscious? Self-hating?) class prejudice, but it’s also the de rigeur chivalry of the post-feminist celebrity, as it would be difficult to imagine a writer with McEwan’s following getting away with making any of the males in his couples more intelligent than their invariably attractive wives or lovers. Hewing obediently to this unspoken stricture is a minor failure of nerve that doesn’t, on its own, threaten the integrity of the work. But as McEwan ages and his stature grows and he devolves towards the artistic cul-de-sac of Elder Statesmanship, other strictures…other obediences to the sensibilities of his auditors…undermine his mastery. A certain squeamishness sets in.  

In the disappointing Saturday, the bloodletting centers on a broken nose for a prig and a tumble down stone stairsteps for a bad man of the lower class variety. Even in Enduring Love, the beginning of McEwan’s spiral descent from the previous heights of his Grand Guignol, the virtuoso set-piece is dispensed with in the first chapter of the book, as if to step clear of childish things before getting to the mature business of the rest of the story, which being a report on the dangerously unhinged behaviour of a lower-class person and the effect of said behaviour on his betters. 

On Chesil Beach consists chiefly of interlocking character studies of fair nuance; as ever, with McEwan, we are privy not only to dossiers of the telling vignette for the folksier players on the page but rifle through papers written, curricula mastered, books planned and theories mused upon in the service of fleshing out the rich interiors of the brainier players as well. Edward’s and Florence’s story (and the story of their story) is about ideas when it isn’t about sex, and most of the sex is a phantom dreaded or a vision longed-for but not a physical fact. Tension accumulates as the mounting effect of preparatory exposition indicates the McEwanesque relief of a shocking twist, foreshadowed in carefully-seeded references to Edwards’s potential for violence. 

The narrative tension created by putting this poorly-matched couple in the wedding night’s bed is further amplified by the tamped-down sexual hysteria of the era; it’s 1962, after all, and Kenneth Tynan hasn’t said “fuck” on television yet. The explosive pressure of the era’s sexual tension is recapitulated in Edward’s having “saved himself” for the big night by an unprecedented fortnight of autoerotic chastity. He’s fit to burst and, as it turns out, his brand new bride is frigid as a fjord. His legal right to Florence’s body can’t even guarantee him a sensual kiss, so something has to give.  

In classic McEwan, the build-up always resolves to a horror, a corpse, some blood-letting…the uncanny moment around which the rest of the book swirls as towards a sucking drain. The horror revealed will be a set-piece of cinematic power; a short, sharp shock to cure the abiding malaise that has crept with the pace of a wasting disease into the mind of the reader for the duration of the book: the proletariat German corpse rolled up in a baklava of glue and carpet, then sliced, in The Innocent; the (perhaps apocryphal) rape of a French beauty by Nazi-trained Alsatiens in Black Dogs; the “head on a thickened stick” of the good samaritan who fell to his death in Enduring Love; the rotting extremities of parents exposed in their cracking tombs by the slack workmanship of their children in The Cement Garden.  

With On Chesil Beach, however, we climax with an anti-climax…with nothing more shocking than a flesh-crawling joke as McEwan exerts his superb technique to alienate the reader from something only slightly more dramatic, and less common, than a sneeze.  

In the perfectly functioning McEwan novel, the suffocating horror of class is just the beginning; we are made to suffer it to the limits of our readerly tolerance (knowing how far to stretch this limit, which veers dangerously near to boredom, is the mark of mastery), at which point McEwan saves the day by producing and then describing with rejuvenating relish a human corpse, for Death trumps class every time. There are no upper or lower class corpses. In On Chesil Beach, however, McEwan provides the reader with no such twist or violent redemption. McEwan’s novella reveals itself as a monograph on socio-economic kismet in the United Kingdom.  

The final movement of this book is a queerly compressed postmortem that violates the pace of all that came before it; roughly ten pages for the next forty years of the life Edward has tossed away merely by blowing his chance to remain married to a disciplined, ambitious, upper class girl. Edward, it seems, was doomed from the beginning, but not in the way a loyal reader of McEwan’s might have hoped.

AOD

 

A figure in a hooded lapis running suit rounded the northernmost curve of Lake Pleasant. It veered up the leaf-strewn incline to Pleasant Lake Road and cut a diagonal across the asphalt. A pantheon of street lights looking more distantly curious than protective craned over the runner as it ran under the unblinking eye of one after another in a long row before taking a sharp right up Plymouth Circle Drive.

She jogged the road’s middle as it curved into the heights of Pleasant Hill, canopied by elms as old as the city itself, a grand continuum of elms whose thoughts were obvious, though immemorially misinterpreted by tone-deaf humans as the meaningless rustle of leaves. She remained on the dotted median of the road, keeping the late model imports a good distance to her right. She exhaled in punchy syncopation with the soft slap of her excellent shoes on the pavement and when the moment was perfect she enjoyed the sensation that the world was a treadmill rolling with slow majesty beneath her feet. To top this pleasure she ran for a mile with her eyes closed, chin up and arms out-stretched like a child becoming an airplane.

In contrast to the corona of dead brilliance around the lake, the Pleasant Hill sidewalks were lit with genteel inefficiency by electric faux gas lamps themselves so old they had become authentic antiques. The neighborhood was lovely yet theoretically dangerous, too, so dark and moneyed and full of hiding places, though statistics continued to indicate that violent criminals remained remarkably reluctant to commute. Such criminal activity as could be found on ‘The Hill’ was merely quaint: leaf-burning; low level tax evasion; residents of a certain age keeping rubber-banded stashes of ‘ganja’ in mysteriously marked coffee cans on high shelves in their two-car garages.

The higher along the pretty spiral of Plymouth Circle Drive the runner ran, the more impressive, and stand-offish, the houses became. Parked cars thinned out and then disappeared from the curb entirely except for the occasional Beetle or half-restored vintage muscle car indicative of home-for-the-holidays offspring, and picket fences replaced hurricane fences and hedges replaced picket fences and the hedges grew lusher as she put on some speed. The hedges intensified into crennelated battlements, mutated into topiary fantasias and resolved into the simple-yet-vast, this last example being a description of the stately, ten foot tall, six foot deep hedge around the Van Metzger Estate. A moat wouldn’t have looked out of place around the hedge.

She slowed as she approached the grand green citadel of Gus Van Metzger’s corner. She loved this part of the run. As the neighborhood’s demographic shifted she was up here with decreasing frequency but later in the decade, in fact, she planned on paying old Van Metzer himself a visit. The air was creation-fresh and hung like a gallery with decorative lanterns of fireflies that winked out, one by one, as she reached to touch them. The sheer diversity, she marveled. The inaudibly low octave of far-ranging insect systems in the soil. And then the next order of creatures for whom these ‘tiny’ insects were armour-plated dinosaurs. And the bacterial super-communities of minds even smaller than that, whose thoughts were individual atoms. And so on.

If you looked from the bluff where the street ended, one block on from the Van Metgers’s, in the little roundabout called Plymouth Circle with its central boulder featuring a commemorative plaque of two loin-clothed indians and a white man in a preposterous hat, the view presented was a toy metropolis’s downtown as it fit in the soft box of the valley…the diamond bracelets of southbound traffic and northbound necklaces of rubies and the pearls of municipal lighting. She stood for a moment on the ledge of the bluff, checking her pulse.

On her way back down the spiral road, she took the detour up the alley behind the Van Metzger property, pulling her hood off in order to look less like the kind of character some might fear would spring from the bushes. Heaven forbid she should scare some dogwalking old lady to death. Her afro expanded in the dark wet air and she felt, with a wry smirk, like intelligent topiary.

“Merriam?”

Upstairs at 5727 Humboldt. The house had settled into itself for the night with an asthmatic wheeze from the central heating. To the left and right and across the street and behind the alley were noveau mansions in the understated Scandinavian style, but 5727 was a bungalow in comparison, the oldest structure in the area. 5727 faced its mainstreet sideways and the soft-edged roofing over the attic dormers sagged in a way that made the old house look fraught with worries. The j-shaped walk from the gate in the hedge, curving across the yard to the front door, was broken-backed where roots cracked the old concrete. The roots were also responsible for muddy bald spots all over the yard and the owner of the property, Mrs. Gustafson-Davis, had been meaning to remove the offending tree since forever. Inside the house, the master bedroom had that flickering, morbid luminence her husband Marcel always associated with blue balls. Blue balls and palpitations.

Merriam was wearing her gargantuan wireless headphones and watching The Mitch vs Spectre Hour, immune to her husband’s extremity in all three senses of the word. His nightly stations of the cross. Marcel Agonistes, is how he put it. Merriam, who prided herself on the fact that she and Marcel hadn’t had a voice-raising argument in twelve years, feigned to fail to notice that it had been exactly that long since the marriage had heard a voice raised in laughter or ecstasy, either. She had discovered wireless headphone technology and could do almost anything on either the first or second floor of the house without severing a connection to the ongoing narrative of the outside worl, or having to listen to any distracting, vaguely irritating, or embarrassing sound that Marcel might make after Merriam got home from work.

“Merriam?”

In those headphones she appeared to him, laying there on her side in her pyjamas with her back turned, to be sporting Mickey Mouse ears that had sagged and slipped halfway down her head in late middle age. Still, he longed to have his knowledge of her sketchy cunt hairs refreshed; he wondered if they had all gone grey. Her husband lay there fretting while Merriam’s breathing synchronized itself with erotic empathy to the cadences of television personality Nate Mitchell’s voice.

Mitchell was handsome and blonde in the manner of an ambrosia-fed Liberal and his partner/opponent Spectre looked wonderfully-well described by his name: white-haired and gauntly Conservative. His head wobbled, a la Hepburn, when he rose too high in the saddle while on the charge viz certain topics: abortion, school prayer, The War. The show was ostensibly a balanced presentation of Left and Right worldviews in the form of an ongoing debate, with the audience voting the ‘winner’ by call-in touchtone menu at the end of every program. Merriam had been a campaign volunteer in every Presidential election since Jimmy Carter’s. Marcel had yet to register to vote.

“I’ll register to vote,” he said, externalizing the conversation in his head, “when they put something relevant on the goddamn ballot.” He’d vote against professional sports, Fourth of July fireworks, recreational water vehicles and Nate Mitchell in a New York minute.

Nate Mitchell, who never got flustered on camera. His brow never creased nor wept with perspiration and his voice maintained the gratifying temperature of pot-warmed honey on an oven-fresh banana nut bran muffin. Just imagine those two Liberal Aryans start talking politics together, thought Marcel, who considered politics to be a trivial affront to the majestic intangibility of the human spirit. He hadn’t had a paying job, other than the ongoing project of painting the garage, in twenty years. He hadn’t even graduated from Art College.

He could hear the Van Metzger’s neurotic border collie Apollinaire barking in the dead of night at the crickets and/or squirrels again. The VMs were at the other end of a very long alley but it was such a quiet neighborhood and the acoustics of the alley were so peculiar that on summer nights with the bedroom windows open you could hear Apollinaire whimpering and farting in his sleep. Could Apollinaire, conversely, hear Marcel whimpering and farting in his sleep? Marcel frowned: the batty dog was barking louder and harder than usual. Possible sign of a coon in the garbage cans. They could be scary animals if backed into a corner.

“That damn dog is going to have another heart attack,” said Marcel, before remembering, immediately, for the Nth time, that Merriam couldn’t hear him. She used to point at the headphones to indicate that she couldn’t hear him, but she no longer bothered with that. The isolating boundaries of their marriage had hardened into tacit structures.

“Merriam,’ said Marcel. “What’s sadder than an old man and an old woman in a bed they never use together? A hard cock they never use? A cunt they never use? I know you have possibilities, still, Merriam. You don’t have to tell me. Bag boys at the grocery store still look at you, sometimes, oh yes, for a fleeting moment, those moments I guess you live for, without even thinking you’re old. Maybe they don’t care that all that gray hair is dyed gold and the big droopy never-used tits are strapped up and plumped together in a wonderbra and a third of those big white teeth go in a glass overnight. Maybe they don’t even know it. Maybe they’re blessed with the ignorance of youth. I mean, of course they are. They see the surface. They don’t know what surfaces hide, dear. You know what the surfaces hide?”

Marcel moaned and shifted his position.

“I have a confession to make. Merriam, do you remember the last big piece I did? Before I quit Art, I mean? Years ago. Twenty years ago. I was driving around town, collecting old futon mattresses. Rolling these dusty old things up and stacking them in the back seat of the station wagon, I was kinda affected by hugging all of those…you know…sponges of intimate experience. Think about it: all those soaked-up fuckings and droolings and fartings and fevers and dreams. I hugged them to myself and frog-marched them out of strange buildings but maybe they were a bio-hazard. Maybe I got the disease then. This loneliness thing.”

“I turned down a few for being too gross, even after driving all the way to the other side of town, ringing the bell, jogging up flights of stairs and being met at the door by a person too bleak looking or filthy. I wasn’t about to hug that nasty history to myself, and drag it to the car, and nail it to the gallery wall. Most of the mattresses I bought were from couples, or single women…that old prejudice. Didn’t want to touch a mattress a man had been crying on, I guess. I never told you that the one I paid the most for I bought from a beautiful law student named Amina. She had described the color, lapis, over the phone. It was queen-sized and stainless. Consider this my confession, Merriam. The closest I ever got to infídelity. Close up, you could see the futon was covered with her super-long kinky hairs. It was beautiful. The faded lapis and the delicate hairs. Been dreaming about that girl ever since. Twenty year old Muslim law student with a spectacular afro.”

“I’d end up with three or four mattresses rolled up in the back of the station wagon in a day, the classified section of the newspaper on the seat beside me, and this complicated odor…the body-nostalgias of total strangers…. It amazed me the number of people who weren’t ashamed to sell me futons with big urine or period stains on them. But that was the theme of the exhibition.”

“And then I was thinking of the irony of going around buying these old futons, rejecting the really gross ones, the ones from the really repulsive owners, when we had, you know, the previous year, sold someone a bed set, including a mattress, on which…okay…on which you had the miscarriage. Sold it without disclosing this information. Well, I had considered keeping it for whatever historical reason. But you said: no. Like you were disciplining a puppy. No no no, Marcel! No Marcel! No Marcel! No…Amina…”

Marcel gasped a telescoping gasp…it sounded as though he was having a coughing fit backwards. He went rigid on his pillow.

Nate Mitchell’s startling blue eyes, set in a bronzed mask that briefly changed the color scheme of the entire bedroom, seemed to follow Merriam as she rolled out of bed and slipped, while lowering her pyjama bottoms, into the master bathroom, door open, headphones still on, in a cruel parody of a marital post-lovemaking pee.

The jogger jogged back down towards the lake, slipping the hood up over her afro, and Marcel, slightly confused, jogged behind her.