by Lauren Oyler
The bar was packed and smoky, with a greenish light and rude bartenders. He bought me a beer and explained that it was called a Berliner Kindl. I said yes, I could read, is it special? He said yes, it’s cheap. Ha ha, ha ha, jokes about my worth as a date.
Until we left the bar, the focus was on me; I had never, even with the sweetest, most generous of men, been asked so many questions about myself, my desires, my fears, my history. Despite Kasia’s attempt at sisterhood it wasn’t until then that I began to get truly suspicious—achieving the audience I’d staked out all evening was scarier, less satisfying, than I’d thought it would be. Was he buttering me up for some kind of obstacle I’d have to slip through? A sexual fetish? Though I often tried to imply libertinism, the truth is that anything beyond feet would have stirred in me serious soul-searching, and even that would have been a leap. Might this night become a sad blog post? Or worse? I checked my bag when I went to the bathroom to make sure he hadn’t stolen my wallet. I reminded myself that I had pursued him; if he now had any criminal ideas, they were unpremeditated. Unless getting me to pursue him was part of the plan, and the pub crawl a handy way for a sociopathic charmer to find new victims, the kind who neither knew the city nor possessed the wherewithal to organize their own nights out in the global capital of nights out, the kind who generally think they are supposed to meet new people while traveling and so would always come to him? And what if this was not actually a real bar but a lair of some kind? I came out of the bathroom and noticed he was still wearing the tour-company polo shirt. I said I’d like to get my hands on one of those shirts. He said, Whoa whoa, we just met. Ha ha, ha ha. Would I prefer he go home to change? No. We decided to move on and bought beers at a Späti, he taught me the word Späti, and we took the beers to a little park a few blocks away. As the conversation turned away from me I accepted that I was not being kidnapped or somehow duped but rather having a fun night with an unusually attentive person who was interested in me, and that it was additionally cool this was happening in Berlin, where you can drink outside and the weather was, at the time, really great. I resented my mother and online feminism for making me so paranoid.
What we talked about is mostly lost to me now; I had accessed by then much more of my true self and sent the neurotic minute-taker of my thoughts to bed. I remember a lot of twentieth-century poetry—no recitations, thank God, just discussions, though I later learned he had it in him. But surely we didn’t talk about John Ashbery for hours. I remember being impressed that a painter could discourse so confidently on poetry but then thinking that this was how college dropouts always were, especially those whose parents were, e.g., professors: smarter. I think I told him some stories about working at the mall as a teenager; he talked about what Berlin was like (good but not at all good), how he felt like a fraud for living there but also how he felt there was simply nowhere else to live, and how it was foolish to believe that cities in the past were better than they are now but nevertheless David Bowie, Nick Cave, Nan Goldin, etc. Even the GDR, he said, though the regime was . . . was something he wished he could have . . . how to put this . . . he didn’t want to be insensitive but he wished he could have seen it. I didn’t know anything about Berlin at the time, so I didn’t think to question why his protonostalgic fantasies revolved around fleeting expats and not German punk or techno; instead, his brief monologue had the effect of making me feel like I didn’t know anything about anything at all, putting me, I suppose, in a somewhat vulnerable position. I remember asking what his paintings were like and him evading by saying that he was, ha ha, taking a leaf out of David Lynch’s book and refusing to explain his work to other people. I said I wasn’t asking for an explanation, just information. Like: Are they oil or acrylic? Large or small? Abstract or figurative? Bad or good? At the last he laughed and said, They’re OK. This I appreciated, a lot, because he didn’t say it in a falsely modest way, or in a powerfully bemused way, the way a celebrated artist who knows you haven’t heard of him and thinks that’s precious might say his paintings are OK; he said it as if it were sadly true. Why would I want to fall in love with an admittedly OK painter? Well, I spent a lot of time with unadmittedly OK writers, and around them self-awareness seemed like the only personality trait that could not be learned, no matter how much it could be mimicked.
At around five in the morning, after I had pretended, outside a McDonald’s at a train station where we’d used the bathroom (former East), to be only a little bit wowed that the sky began to get light at three thirty, we went to his apartment. I was on my period, information I provided as a courtesy, and he said, breathily, that he didn’t care, as if that would make him seem especially sensually in thrall about the female body and not like every man I’d ever slept with before. That I could see through things like this, things that many men, mostly unbeknownst to each other, do, made me think I might understand him, that I might have the upper hand. And since he’d performed so well over the course of the night, withholding at some moments to suggest he might not be as interested as I suspected he was, showing off at some moments to demonstrate that he possessed all the good qualities (smarts, worldliness, humor, etc.), I caught myself tallying the score, wondering which of us was going to come away the more eager and therefore less attractive, forgetting I suppose that we lived in different countries and that truly smart, worldly, funny people have one-night stands in foreign cities without imagining who would “win” in their hypothetical relationship. He had a full, deep laugh, head occasionally thrown back, that I wanted to capture and keep as a pet. The sex was typical drunk first-time, a little too fast, too inevitable, the kind of open-and-shut case that clouds in memory whether genitalia made contact at all. We slept, but he had no curtains, apparently a local custom, so too-few hours later he got up to use the bathroom and came back with a considerately minty mouth, and that time I made myself come the way I usually do, on principle. I know it’s tempting to read a lot into sex, but pace yourself, you still have a lot left to read; all that really matters in the beginning is can he kiss, does he make an effort, and is his sexism overt or merely residual.
After the sex it was 9 a.m., and I had to wait for Felix’s roommate to get out of the shower so I could ask her to borrow a tampon. When she found me sitting in her kitchen legs crossed in front of the stale-smelling ashtray he and I had used a few hours before she looked surprised but just said sure, they were under the counter. He took me to a café owned by, he claimed, one of the members of The Knife; on the menu among its traditional German basket breakfasts was a “park bench”: coffee, cigarette, shot of vodka. Neither of us ordered it, but I appreciated the gift of a good Berlin anecdote. We got along easily, which is not nothing, looking at each other and smiling at how well it was going, how surprisingly and nicely well, and though I can’t remember the conversation I remember the fluidity of it, the lack of uncomfortable pauses. Uncomfortable pauses don’t necessarily mean anything—sometimes things get uncomfortable because you are happy, for example, and unused to the feeling—but that’s another piece of wisdom I find hard to use. Like most people I much prefer an easy conversation to a hard one.
Knowing what happens next (you’re about to find out), and how he ended up performing as a boyfriend (you know some of this and will learn more), and what happens after that (this would be the conspiracy-theory thing, which you also know), and what happens after that (truly unbelievable, though in some ways not; you do not know this yet, unless you’re one of the people I’ve discussed it with), I would like to deny that I liked him very much by this point. To my credit I can’t identify with the past self who liked him very much by this point. That person seems like someone else, like one of my friends who is constantly getting into romantic scrapes, whose decision-making processes I just do not understand. One of these friends dated a mean clown—professional, not figurative—whom she met at a Balkan Beats concert. Unfortunately, my having liked him very much by this point is part of the historical record; I sent many pitiful messages to
my confidantes about it.
Pushing through the crowd back the way I’d pushed the night before, smiling dumbly at the wide stretch of unused train tracks and dirt underneath the bridge, I didn’t notice how strange it was that this open space in the middle of a city was not only huge but also harshly ugly, its steel and concrete expanding unapologetically to the east and west in seemingly random formations; when I came back to Berlin the sight of it was so shocking it was as if I’d never been there before. (Some of the pleasingly hideous construction would soon become an alienatingly hideous mall.) I crafted an email in my head as I threaded through the bridge’s daytime crowd and reflected on the clear signals of attraction Felix had projected, clear signals of attraction being some of the most appealing things to reflect on. Every instance of possibly prolonged eye contact counted as evidence, but I don’t know why I was focusing on these when I had in front of me the clearest signal of all, that when I dropped him off at his apartment on the way to the train he said, “Well, I guess we’ll never see each other again,” in a wistful kind of voice that suggested he might have been sad or he might have been joking, and then he gave me his email address. Already I was heading in the direction of fixation. When I met someone I liked I wanted him in my orbit, virtually or physically or mentally, at all times; I would want to know what he was thinking and doing and saying when I was not around; I would want to account for him. I’m aware this is considered unhealthy. I also suspect it’s normal, that it’s the aloof, pointedly independent people who should be checked on and deemed dysfunctional. The train came and I almost missed it because I wasn’t paying attention.
Sleepy and useless back at the hostel I placed my valuables in my locker and took a shower. As rills of shampoo flowed down my body I looked down in horror: I’d forgotten to wear the rubber flip-flops I’d bought in Vienna. (You did not look down in horror, the ex-boyfriends are saying, shaking their heads. You were not horrified. And even if you did get a fungus or whatever, you would be fine.) With wet hair I took my computer to the lobby and sank into the internet. Because it was a little after 6 a.m. on a Friday in the U.S., nothing worthwhile was happening on social media; I scrolled through my feeds distractedly, opening and closing the same site multiple times in quick succession. I was a lab rat assigned to a random trial with the lowest frequency of reward. I knew that, and more importantly I knew it was an unoriginal observation, yet I couldn’t stop myself from making it. I clicked on some news to try to add a useful element to my rotation but the article might as well have been in German because I couldn’t read it. I was tired and jittery. I wanted time to move faster until my brain recovered and a suitable interval had passed so I could send Felix the message I couldn’t stop thinking about sending, that I was definitely going to send, it was just a matter of when. I opened my email and wrote a bad sentence that I deleted. I wrote a summary of the night to a friend that incorporated a delirious number of ellipses and exclamation points. Across the room people speaking Spanish played Ping-Pong and at the opposite end of my table a good-looking man, my guess Greek, frowned into his own laptop, the tendons in his forearm flickering as his fingers hunted anachronistically around the keyboard. I became conscious of my staring, and as I turned back to face the unattended bar where cornflakes and muesli had probably been served that morning as part of the complimentary breakfast, inspiration struck: though I didn’t know Felix’s last name, I could search his email address. I had typed it into my phone but didn’t need to look because I had already memorized it.
If you’re wondering why I would search for Felix online when I already had a method of contacting him, I appreciate your purity. For one thing, I needed some outlet for my Felix-oriented energy that didn’t involve immediately revealing it to him. More to the point, the chance of discovering some uncontained fragment of Felix’s self that he’d left lying around on the internet was too exciting to sacrifice for some notion of respecting boundaries or Golden Ruling. Would I be mortified at the thought of a lover perusing my contributions to the college newspaper and Facebook photo albums of my time studying abroad? Yes. Of course. I’d swaddled my accounts in layers of gauzy privacy that offered an enticing amount of information to the idle googler but limited any meaningful access to people I knew. Beyond these measures, though, there was, lurking on the third or fourth page of my search results, the unfortunate evidence that I had once been less judicious. My impulse to look Felix up was both greedy and calculating: I wanted to know everything about him, and I thought I might be able to glean from his internet presence an effective way to approach him for a second date. I was also curious to see photos of his art.
On Google nothing came up. Someone with an email address that began with the same five letters as his was to be contacted by those interested in signing up for a knitting workshop at OSU in 2010. Facebook returned a profile for “Felix Biberkopf” next to a thumbnail image of an overexposed white poodle with its legs primly crossed. I didn’t know the reference at the time so I assumed that could be his name. Even if I had recognized the allusion I don’t know that I would have been immediately concerned; many people, particularly Europeans, use cheeky pseudonyms on social networks—they’re more protective of privacy and less outraged by the idea of not getting credit for their idle musings. Anyway, at that point I believed Felix had lived in Europe for six years, so if I’d known that Biberkopf was taken from Berlin Alexanderplatz (and a mountain in the Alps on the border between Germany and Austria) and almost certainly not his actual last name, I might have assumed he’d adopted some of the continent’s social media customs and was innocently using them to showcase his taste in literature/film. If the not-I who had gotten this reference were to stop and think about it for a few seconds, she might have been a little alarmed that the literary character with whom her imaginary new boyfriend chose to publicly identify was a drunk murderer who struggles to resist the cruel pressures of a careening society and the draw of fatalism as he makes shambling attempts to turn his life around; however, if we’re being realistic here I’m going to say I doubt she’d have stopped to think about it for a few seconds, overcome as she would be by her yen for the scoop. Regardless, I was in the dark about the potential meaning of Biberkopf, so I skipped ahead to the About section, where I was soon noticing that the list of schools Felix had attended did not align at all with what he’d told me the night before. What’s more, this said he was from Los Angeles.
I couldn’t access the rest of the profile. I saved the poodle photo on my computer and searched the image—one of my favorite diabolical tips to share with less-savvy internet users is the fact that you can put an image into Google and search it—and found his Instagram account, which was not particularly active but did present further evidence that he had not lived in Berlin for six years, but probably about two. A caption revealed the poodle belonged to a friend in Boston whom Felix visited in 2013. A girlfriend-type figure took a series of photos of him the year before that, in the town where I now knew his impressive art school was located; her profile was private. The photos in which he was tagged demonstrated a casual hesitance to be photographed—he often, but not always, blocked his face, distorted it, or otherwise betrayed obvious discomfort—and it seemed he had a brother who got married in Italy, though the brother had no account.
After twenty minutes of this, I remembered my deteriorating posture and began to feel like a creep, and the fact that Felix had lied to me was only partially vindicating. I felt my high-level search-engine excavation skills were knavish and petty; they marked me as a member of a generation that grew up watching reality TV, without respect for fundamental principles of functional society and the human soul. What I was doing seemed to resemble, though I couldn’t say how, a kind of violation or even theft. Felix’s reluctant photos were evidence of pressure, from the dominant mode of contemporary life that required too much will to opt out of. If I’d been hacking, whatever that is, or even just digging journalistically, for some higher purpose, that would ha
ve been OK, but all I did online was assess the seemingly complex dynamics between people I didn’t know, skim headlines, and occasionally read archived New Yorker articles with a friend’s password; stalking was one of the most focused activities I participated in. I tried constructing hopeful analogs to the past to account for the time I wasted online, to convince myself that my drive to collect useless knowledge about strangers and acquaintances was not a new condition but merely a contemporary manifestation of a timeless problem, but any pre-internet activities I could come up with were in some way valuable: listening to the radio, tending a garden, anything classifiable as a hobby. Maybe before television and the internet people spent more time staring at the walls or ceiling, sort of depressed but really just absent. Reading? I certainly should be reading more.
But the problem was not attention span or gluttony; the problem was that I didn’t actually believe the knowledge I acquired online was useless. I sought it out purposefully, defensively, as if it would one day become vitally important, provide the clue to some threatening mystery of my social or professional life. I closed the windows and opened my email again, glad at least that I no longer cared about pinpointing the most advantageous time and tone for my email to Felix.
“Hi. I had a great time last night/this morning. So overtaken was I by the greatness of the time that I mischievously put your email address into Facebook, which was . . . interesting . . . Sorry to invade your privacy (?). I was going to ask if you wanted to meet again before I fly back on Monday night. I would still ask that if your explanation is good enough.”
