by Lauren Oyler
I hate it when people sign emails with their first initial because it seems pointlessly literary, but I also wanted to convey a curt yet ultimately unbothered seriousness, so I didn’t sign it.
The temptation to sit with my computer and wait for a response was great, but I remembered I had paid money to travel to Berlin to see sights and experience culture and that having a hangover and being tired and yearning pathetically for a particular email from a relative stranger were not excuses not to do this. I shut the computer. I had gotten three WhatsApp messages from the Brazilians over the course of the morning, asking me how it was???? and if I wanted to eat 1) lunch or later 2) dinner with them. Because the messages popped up in preview on the home screen of my phone I was able to avoid opening them, and therefore avoid making the little gray checkmarks that signified to the sender that his messages had been delivered turn into little blue checkmarks that signified to the sender that his messages had been read, and therefore avoid the Brazilians. They will not be back. I opened my computer again and searched for an important sight to see and decided to walk to the Berlin Wall Memorial nearby. Looking at it didn’t take as long as I’d hoped, and afterward, thinking I should “just explore,” I walked up a hill into the first café that looked sufficiently bourgeois, ordered a coffee, and asked with the forced nonchalance of an unskilled grifter for the Wi-Fi password. Because I didn’t understand the way the barista was saying the letter R, I had to ask for it three times. I was logged in before I sat down and tried to be calm as I waited for my email to load.
Under promotions for several clothing stores and a response to my news from one of the female confidantes there was the desired Re:. He was so sorry. He felt really terrible, truly. He had had such a good time, but the thing was that on the pub crawl he usually had an awful time, so predictably bad a time that in fact he had never anticipated ever having anything close to even an OK time, and he certainly had never anticipated having a good time due to the presence of someone who had paid 8 EUR to PARTICIPATE in the pub crawl, the pub crawl which was so bad, the pub crawl put on by a company which owed him actually over 2,000 EUR; he did not envision that the Venn diagram of “people with whom he might have a really nice time” and “people who would come to Berlin and decide that the best way to partake of the city’s bars would be to pay 8 EUR to have a guy in a polo shirt lead them around Mitte shitholes, some of which only opened for business when they could trick striving companies into paying them to do so” would involve any overlap. Anyway because he worked this job as he’d mentioned three times a week and because it can get boring introducing yourself and what you do and where you’re from to the same boring types multiple times a night three times a week, he and the other guides tended to do this thing where they made up different lives for themselves each time, playing characters, usually not straying too far from the believable but messing around with it a little bit, coming up with stories more interesting to develop than “I’m from L.A. and went to art school,” though sometimes they did swap personal histories to amuse one another, and anyway the point was just to manufacture some variety out of their Groundhog Day nights. Because of his incorrect assumption that he would never be interested in having a legitimate conversation with a pub crawl participant that continued after the Matrix, he initiated this game with me pro forma, and by the time he realized he was interested in having a legitimate conversation with me that continued after the Matrix it was too late, he had already said all that sentimental bullshit about Italian nannies and dropping out of college, and he felt that if he told me he had made it all up I would think he was a psychopath. Given that I was a tourist and presumably going home soon he had decided at the time that not telling me would be the best course of action, because it would allow us to have our purely nice night together and remember it fondly, but after I left him at the front door of his apartment building he realized that giving me his email address had been stupid because if I were as internet savvy as I seemed (not in a bad way), the email address would probably eventually become the negation of our nice night and therefore render in vain all his increasingly acrobatic lying about his background. He became so upset that he told his roommate, who being British tried to console him by making him a cup of tea. He knew this all sounded ridiculous and that I had no reason to believe him but it was the truth and if I thought it was a good enough explanation I could meet him at the bar Transit on Schlesische Strasse the next day at six. If I did decide to do that I shouldn’t confuse this bar with the two Thai/Indonesian restaurants of the same name that were located on other streets in different parts of Berlin. Sorry again. —Felix.
People often say my generation values authenticity. Reluctantly I will admit to being a member of my generation. If we value authenticity it’s because we’ve been bombarded since our impressionable preteen years with fakery but at the same time are uniquely able to recognize, because of the unspoiled period that stretched from our birth to the moment our parents had the screeching dial-up installed, the ways in which we casually commit fakery ourselves. We are also uniquely unwilling to let this self-awareness stop us. I had thought, then, before accountability became a word everyone used, that explaining oneself and one’s motives was an appropriate addendum to an apology, that an explanation was almost better than an apology, because an explanation gave you something to do beyond accept or reject; it allowed you to understand. I found Felix’s story compelling, too particular to make up and too hastily written to counterfeit, and today I still believe he was being genuine, that what I’ve described above is really what happened when we met. That it might have been both honest and a cloud on the horizon, a little cartoon cloud with a face drawn on that doesn’t know it’s about to join a storm but is waving a little red flag just in case, is probably the best explanation for its significance in this story, but that’s also a bad analogy because clouds have no agency, they are created and moved by external forces, part of a system, and that’s not something I want to suggest about Felix, at least not entirely, as it’s since then become clear that I do not know much about what external forces were or were not acting on him. All I mean is that I know what it’s like to have your past experiences and well-established tendencies converge into a new behavior or idea, and it isn’t something you or any divine creativity planned from the start. I assume I’m dwelling on this because as in most relationships the beginning was for us the best part. I’m told I don’t have to try to justify love, which contains at least a small percentage of unsolvable mystery, but I just can’t stand the thought of seeming irrationally carried away by emotion and unable to freestyle my way back to the calm waters of reason. I believe it hurts the feminist cause. And, worse, makes me personally look bad.
In Berlin, we saw each other twice more before I went back to New York. One thing led to another. Neither of us liked sports or believed in God. If I had to locate it precisely, I would say that I began to have the usual feelings, beyond charmed fixation, when we were at a Vietnamese restaurant. The too-soon possibility of being in love sat down across from me and waited for me to object. It was as if before meeting this person I had been living in a bubble, or a hole, or under a repressive religion, like my life was just beginning now that I had met him, like up until I had decided on a whim to join a trashy pub crawl in Berlin my personal history was hazy from total lack of consequence. I considered changing my flight to a later date, taking two more days off work, but ultimately decided against it on the grounds of frivolous cost and unwillingness to make a grand statement. Back in New York, I quickly dumped the boyfriend I had at the time, citing a mysterious change in feeling that was really tearing me up inside; he briefly cried, and when I finally extricated myself from the traditional despaired rehashing of the problems of our relationship four hours later, I had a string of short funny emails from Felix in my phone and a spring in my step. We talked about the breakup during our next call and discussed our retrospectively disturbing shared love of the fresh sense of liberation that ca
me after kicking someone to the curb.
The hilarious unlikelihood of our meet-cute sustained me for several months of distanced longing; I couldn’t help but feel, though I knew it was wrong, that we had been destined for each other, or at least that I had stumbled upon great material for life or art. Emailing him frequently, thinking of little but what might impress him, I looked around and realized everyone around me was boring, more boring than even the most boring person I could make up, so boring that it might have made them interesting if I could have stopped thinking about the world’s one interesting person who had rendered all the details and motivations of my life immediately clear. That this was how I felt every time I found a new boyfriend was something I recognized but did not care about. Women forget the pain of childbirth so that horrific memories don’t stop them from going through with it again; my brain dismissed all those previous experiences of falling out of love soon after I’d fallen in it, and I thought: OK, yes, this is singular. (In the end, I wasn’t wrong!) Let’s do it, I said, when he asked, “it” being something along the lines of “everything, all the time, together.”
There were tweaks of doubt, sure. His nihilistic opinions seemed to burst forth from nowhere, which made his usual placidity seem less the result of an easygoing personality and more the result of a cynicism so heavy that it calmed him like a weighted blanket. But was he angry? No. Nor was he rude, offensive, passive-aggressive, or spiteful. He kept to himself, even when he was describing himself and his problems, and although it could be frustrating, his refusal to allow anyone else to bear the burden of his presumably bad feelings seemed a kind of corrective to the tendency in our milieu to boast about being in therapy. Was it wrong to presume he had bad feelings? I’d thought it was the sensitive thing to do. There was a period, a day and a half, when we’d been communicating intensely on a couple of different platforms, flowing from instant messaging to video call to texting to instant messaging again to another call; we spent thirty-six hours together in a way, and then after that, I did not hear from him for four days. I assumed he just needed a break, because spending all day updating another person like that is tiring, the high of a new message, the anxiety of waiting in between them, the sick, gorged feeling of overindulgence, the guilt of neglecting everything else; I reckoned, too, that four days was not very long, especially because I spent them proudly waiting for him to text me when I could have just as easily texted him myself. Yet I couldn’t deny that I felt abandoned, that I thought he’d met someone else. Because we didn’t see each other very often—three visits during this period, him to New York twice and me back to Berlin once—these concerns were easily dismissed as the by-product of progress, getting closer, and I pretended, of course, to have barely noticed the pause. An advice columnist would say that the relationship’s inherent strangeness allowed me to play down other things that were off about it, and I would say in reply isn’t everything in life a little bit off? Isn’t that why it’s so hard? Our visits were cram sessions; we mostly stayed in bed. That, too, is a little off, but no one would say it isn’t great.
Six months after we met, around Christmas, Felix moved back to the United States, on the grounds that he would be able to earn money without having to scrounge for gigs on a foreign, worse version of Craigslist, and for a while it was novel to be able to see him anytime I wanted. We would leave each other sweet notes in surprising places, buy each other thoughtful gifts, share knowing looks across the room at bad parties that I was proud to bring him to because I liked to prove he actually existed to acquaintances who’d heard tell but never met him. I imagined that many other men—ex-boyfriends, editors at work, people I knew from social media and had never met in person—sought my affection, but as in the early stages of other relationships previously mentioned I thought only of Felix. We spent many hungover mornings in my bed, doing nothing but good-natured complaining, getting too hot, throwing off the covers, getting too cold, pulling them back. There was some intimating, too, of course; when I said I’d thought he was too cool for me at first, he said he’d thought my confrontation of him, about the lying, was the coolest thing that had ever been done to him, including “weird sex stuff.” Ha ha, ha ha. When I asked, wondering if I was insufficiently sexually strange, “What weird sex stuff . . .” he said he was just kidding, and that he had known as soon as he got the email that his aim should be to make sure I did not stop speaking to him, even if it was only platonic and across the Atlantic.
But then something changed. When he moved back to the U.S. he was broke, having been stiffed those euros by the pub crawl company in addition to some other factors that seemed related to the flakiness of expat employers in Berlin, and because he refused my offers to lend him a couple thousand dollars and got downright mean when I suggested he ask his parents, who were as far as I’d heard well-off in Long Island (dad) and Los Angeles (mom), he got an overpaid job at a startup, through some connection or other, doing social media strategy and audience development, and the forced cheerfulness of the environment, plus the insipid teamwork robot vocabulary, made him hate himself. He didn’t want to admit that he hated himself, but he also didn’t want to admit that he wasn’t suited to the kinds of mealy shared apartments he’d been living in in Berlin, that he liked having money, and he expressed this internal tension as ranting directed vaguely at “capitalism” or the government but also often snapping at me. I think he convinced himself to blame his only secondarily manipulative girlfriend who never outright said, “Move back to your country of birth so we can be together!” but who was nevertheless not shy about saying things like, “Ugh, I miss you!” or “I had a great burrito for lunch . . . you know, the kind of thing you can’t get in Berlin.” He had wanted to renounce the U.S. and never come back, be transformed into a good artist by lifestyle politics and abnormal sleep schedules and elective struggle, but instead he came to believe that he had been forced, by the weather system of his strong and confusing feelings and therefore by me, to wait out our relationship in the comfort of a large paycheck, which he used to buy me dinner and decorate his apartment with intellectual posters. He talked about moving back to Berlin someday, with some of this New York Money, and though he would say this in a way that suggested I should or would come, it started to sound more like a threat, or at least an acknowledgment that we would one day break up and he would again be free. Donald Trump winning the presidential election gave him even firmer grounds for his belief, which we shared, that huge parts of the United States had nothing to do with him, but whereas I thought that even huger parts of Germany had nothing to do with me, he waved this off as “different.” He said, “America is the sound of someone stepping on a plastic crate and cracking it, and it never stops,” and while this sounded to me suspiciously familiar it was also sort of brilliant. You can opt out in Berlin, he’d say; you don’t have to worry about constructing a public persona. I found this obnoxious, the first part especially, and would often reply, Because you don’t speak the language? But I also hated my job, and was dependent on social media for a humiliatingly large percentage of my self-esteem, social life, and reading material, so even if I found his embittered watering of the other side’s grass irritating, I also knew exactly what he meant.
MIDDLE
(Something Happens)
ON THE MORNING AFTER OUR LAST DATE I WOKE UP WITH AN overpowering desire to make Felix pancakes. He didn’t really like pancakes, but that didn’t matter. The knowledge that he had been lying to me and, in a slightly different way, to the rest of the good innocent people of the internet continued to be a source of cruel pleasure; I kept it locked up in a little cage in my mind, feeding it sad meals on a tray in the mornings and evenings. Curiosity about his motives occasionally threatened, but I was able to fend it off by arguing that his motives were fundamentally inscrutable. There was nothing to be curious about. He was beyond the pale. Conveniently his being beyond the pale did explain why he was in the end so frustrating as a boyfriend, and why I was totally justif
ied in giving up trying to understand him. Though I did look at his Instagram account often, wanting to know what he came up with, seeking hints about his inner life in his misspellings and capitalizations. He posted every day, sometimes multiple times a day, and because I was so vigilant I usually saw a new image within ten minutes of its appearance. Sometimes I even checked the account while he was in the same room; once I checked while he was in the bathroom and the timestamp under his most recent picture (which warned of radio-frequency devices planted in the flora of every country on earth . . . except North Korea) said it had been posted forty-eight seconds before. I wondered if he scheduled posts in advance, as he often had to do for his job, or if he had gone into the bathroom to do it and we had been hunched over our phones looking at Instagram in different rooms at the same time, like a split screen in a very sad romantic comedy. His caption urged me to google “Silent weapons for Quiet Wars,” but he came out wiping his hands on his jeans, a telltale rectangle outlined in his front pocket, before I could. “Kara’s in Australia,” I said, as if my colleague’s kangaroo photos were what I’d been looking at while passing the fleeting seconds of his peeing. He did the only normal thing a person could do when presented with such information and said, “Huh. Cool.”
On weekend mornings before Felix moved to New York I would get up early to read and type or exercise; with Felix, I stayed in bed awake, doing nothing and worrying about it, as he slept on. Lying on my back with one of my feet against the inside of my opposite thigh in a figure four, I would hold my phone above my head and look at the websites of all the stores I liked and think about buying things. Or I would read articles: a commentary on the new president’s pick for whatever Cabinet position was being discussed at the time; an old profile of Andrea Dworkin; how to prevent going gray in your twenties. Going gray in your twenties was cool now, so what I really needed was an article about how to best make use of the gray hairs I already had, to make sure I either developed a fetching Sontag streak or went totally silver before I turned forty.
