Lights Out in Wonderland

by DBC Pierre

  It’s early morning on Anhalter Strasse. City and sunlight hit us together like a cymbal crash. Up the road our car sits waiting with a new driver. And here I’m struck by an epiphany so monstrous in its scale, so blinding in its effect that I feel my skin has turned inside out under the sun, that my innards possess magnetic qualities able to call vast fortunes together. And it’s this: anything can happen if I want it to.

  The Master has blasted all my doubts to hell.

  A decadent banquet at Tempelhof—why not?

  “Gleisdreieck!” sing the girls. “Gleisdreieck!” And we leave the basket and fly across empty streets until prairies of sand and scrub roll out of nowhere, then woods, overgrown railroads, and crumbling stations, abandoned since wartime, somehow forgotten in the heart of Berlin. The city disappears, replaced by these lands of the Gleisdreieck, once the main rail junction for the Reich. With our senses off their leash, our shoes forgotten in Himmler’s jungle, we swoop chattering and laughing on abandoned relics, over dunes, between tracks, following signs to places long vanished, till the morning becomes a montage, a sundance caper where we finally collapse panting in a vast chaparral, dusty as cowboys, there to caress till we’re damp again with sex.

  Lying after a certain time under a grassy ridge, feeling the breeze, watching it stir the hems of skirts and tousle hair—one of the girls suddenly yawns.

  And the night clicks off as if by a switch.

  We quickly age in the light, denizens trapped in the shallows. Long shadows warn us off the chaparral. Skies grow blue, nature’s agents must surely be gathering to kill and maim each other. We pick our way along the tracks, past old freight warehouses, until finally, down a last sandy bank, the city reappears. An avenue passes ahead and I see that it’s Yorckstrasse. We’re in Kreuzberg. Within a minute the Mercedes purrs up and we fall inside, the girls sprawled giggling across us; and in the hush of the car their decaying scent makes me want to take one home and doze with a box of cakes. But I feel it won’t happen. A sadness. They’re girls who can just come and go.

  I rest my head against the window, looking forward to my bed, till after a while I feel the car slow and turn, as if snaking close to an address. I open an eye. The Zentral Flughafen looms beside us like a battlement, still unlit by morning.

  “Remember I’m staying in Prenzlauer Berg,” I croak.

  “Eh?” Thomas’s eyelids flicker: “But let’s see our complex.”

  My pulse bangs to life.

  “We’ll call the Basque from here. You have keys, don’t you?”

  16

  “I never said a wiener cost nothing. I’m saying if we get nothing for it, then better wiener than bockwurst. That’s like eighty cents she gives away.”

  “And this is the bockwurst that last week was sixty cents? They get more expensive as they turn green, then, that’s how things must work in Gerdland.”

  “Ach, Gisela, Gott.”

  Through the door I see Thomas waiting in the car, a girl dozing on each shoulder. Necessity is the mother of folly, and I told him to wait ten minutes while I assessed the safety of an inspection. If I don’t return in that time, he’s to drive away and we’re to make contact late this evening. This was something he accepted, maybe even a little chastised for having imagined we’d barge in like a frat party.

  I tremble out of sight by the entrance. Sickness drenches me inside, my bare feet siphon cold from a kilometer of stone. My hair’s damp and plastered down my face. My coat has bonded with nature, collecting leaves and twigs. Some of them crawl. And the only brain functions open at this hour are the Jesuits that inhabit the border between bacchanal and hangover, spinning nightmares from innocent things. They point out what’s happening: a collision of worlds. Absolute worlds unto themselves, but incoherent to each other. In the Mercedes one world, in the kiosk quite another.

  And me in between, with growing issues.

  “Come on.” I hear Gerd across the empty lobby. “If you cook them they’re perfectly okay. My mother would still eat them for days yet.”

  “She should know, after twenty years dead.”

  “Ach, Gott. Why are you being so difficult?”

  “Difficult? I’m calculating how much they’ll be worth next week, these bockwurst. We might retire to Italy.”

  “Please face the facts: this is our last month of employment, we have to make the most of these last days. They should be big days, as the place closes down, full of tourists and who knows what. We could really make headway. Anyway, why should we give our best stock to Gunnar? Don’t policemen get paid? Is it a Mafia arrangement? Will he bomb the kiosk if we give him a wiener?”

  “Such a wurst tycoon. No wonder you can afford holidays.”

  “Ach, don’t say that. The trip is a treat for you, a break from everything. I thought you liked Kühlungsborn? It might not be Venice, but still the Brauhaus is lovely and we can walk on the seafront, have a beer. After this month it won’t be so easy, I thought we should live a little, while the kiosk has turnover. It’ll be romantic.”

  Bile rattles up my throat. I decide to chance crossing the lobby to the lavatory. But with my first step Gisela’s voice turns especially harsh, and I shrink back to the wall:

  “Oh, ja,” she spits, “so romantic, with Gottfried on the Baltic. For old times’ sake we even bring our own Stasi agent to monitor us.”

  “Gott, Gisela, shhh—he’s having a bad time. It’s not like he’ll be in our room, we’re just giving him a ride to the place. You know he’ll spend the whole day in a strandkorb with some brandy and a hunting magazine. This break was meant to cheer you up.”

  “And see me grinning like a honey-cake horse.”

  A whine works its way into Gerd’s voice: “I’m very sorry it’s not the night at the cinema you wanted for your life. Still, you seem to have survived. Life’s not over. The cinema’s still there, we can still try. I worked hard to see you had all you needed. Life’s not a dream, Gisela! Times are hard for the workingman!”

  “Oh, the big workingman, with his investment wurst. Fifteen years I spent heating Würstchen and washing cups, and now that it’s finished I have nothing. You have nothing. Not even the toaster, the oven, or the cups.”

  “We have a coffee machine. They’re not cheap.”

  “My father bought the machine, Gerd!”

  “But you’re not blaming me? Business is a risk. That’s how business is. A risk! Do you think I planned for us to get nothing? Is it my fault they close the airport? It could have been the other way—maybe Berlin decides this is the greatest airport and fills it with planes until we’re rich. Then what? You’d be every night at the cinema!”

  “Are you blind now as well? Look at the place! It’s a tomb! Do people get rich in a tomb? Or do they get buried there!”

  “Bah, come on.”

  “Come on? Come on! I took my risk too! I could have been out of here! You wish the wall was still standing so you could hide behind it in the East! Where you wouldn’t have to get anywhere in life! You and Gottfried and all your gray cronies could’ve just stayed there hissing about everyone else without having to prove yourselves any better!”

  “Don’t start with old times again.”

  “Old times? These are my old times! These ones! They were new times, and I was on my way out of this place like a bird!”

  “Bah.” Gerd’s face falls in the tone of his voice. “Well, why didn’t you just go, then?”

  “I should have done!”

  “You should have just gone, then. Why blame me years later for something you should have done, I can’t do it for you.”

  “Because I felt sorry for you!”

  Whoosh. Silence follows in shock waves.

  In the pause between this and the sound of cheap heels, Gerd’s eyes appear in my mind, perched on the edge of their socke
ts. “Where are you going?” he calls after her. “What about the trip? Should I just cancel it?”

  “Do what you want!” Gisela clacks out of the kiosk. I hold my breath as she passes. The Mercedes is still outside, but so fearsome is Gisela’s energy, such is the friction of her entry into the earth’s gravitational field, that it pulls away before she sears any paintwork. The figures in the back don’t stir. I watch the car turn onto Columbiadamm, a donkey’s ear of steam poking from the exhaust.

  With these departures a weight lifts off me. After some deep breaths, tuning my ear for sounds of Gerd, I set off across the lobby. In the terminal only a few moving forms mill about, older sorts waiting for something that mightn’t come. I descend the few steps, glancing around. The restroom is down some more stairs to my right, but as I turn for it something hot trickles to my lip.

  I touch it, and it’s blood.

  Stopping to dab my nose, I see a small figure cross the concourse. I only notice because it cocks its head in that questioning way of parrots and dogs. While I try to lick blood from my face, or wipe it onto my hand and lick that instead, the form moves into focusing range. It’s a young woman in a red coat and beret. She lowers a mobile phone from her ear and pockets it.

  It’s Anna from the kiosk.

  I go to draw my overcoat around me but find my fly broken open, my underwear missing, and my belt still undone. A lump of sick heaves into my mouth. When I try to swallow it, my nose starts to pour like a faucet. I spit the lump and hold an open sleeve under my nose, pretending to fuss with my hair, moving strands with a finger.

  Anna slows a few paces away, expressionless, finally stopping to look me up and down. She eventually points. “You missed a hair.”

  I lower my sleeve. Blood pours onto my foot.

  “Do you need an ambulance?”

  Before answering, I suck a wad back up my nose. It crackles well enough, but blood still splats to the floor and runs to my mouth. One drop hangs off my lip for a moment before falling. “I think I just need some cakes,” I croak.

  She nods slowly. “To eat—or to put up your nose?”

  Now adrenaline calls drugs back to life. I start lightly tripping, and end up absorbed in the spatterings on the floor. She stands staring till I begin to sway.

  “Is that a normal Thursday night for you?” she asks.

  “Pretty much. Though sometimes I go out for a drink.”

  I detect a minuscule rising of eyebrows. Not mirth. But not not mirth. And she says: “Gerd might have a cake for you. Can you find the bathroom?”

  “Yes, thank you. Thanks, Anna, for that.”

  “Pff.” She turns away, coat bobbing daintily like a bell.

  I stumble to the conveniences. They sit clean and empty in their underground domain, a cool oasis where you and I can regroup. The splash of my emptying body decks them with echoes—

  forgive me for that—then cold water stanches blood loss, and more or less cleans up my face. I sit for a while on a toilet, spinning, until the lack of cakes becomes an emergency. Gerd isn’t familiar with me day-to-day, I reason, so he mightn’t think my state unusual. He needn’t see me barefoot, if I approach along the wall. I button my coat to its full length and make my way upstairs.

  “Frederick.” He smiles through the glass—then: “Mein Gott—what happened? Where are your shoes? Come, come, sit down.”

  “I just need some cakes.”

  “Haa—already training for our little party? It might be a wild night tonight, eh? But you’re about twelve hours too early.”

  I see Anna smirk from the back.

  “In fact we’ll have another special party in a week or so, if you’re still around.” Gerd busies himself making coffee. “A bigger one, the last one before we leave Tempelhof. A farewell. Did you ever eat Berliner Kartoffelsalat? Gisela’s going to make some, totally authentic. Gisela’s a great cook, you know.”

  Sugars from a sixty-cent cake usher my system into a stable hangover. But one symptom is sentimentality, and my chest soon aches with Gerd’s attempts at lightheartedness, knowing all that just went on. I feel dirtied by knowing because I secretly pity him; the most weakening secret a person can have, and the most necessary to keep. In any event, unable to bear it, I make an excuse and limp out to a taxi.

  “Haa,” calls Gerd. “Hopefully we see you later, then!”

  I wave a hand and slink back to my bed, where a last feeble sugar in the brain resolves to attend the party. Because you never know. A wild party, you heard him say it. And that will call for more splendor than a kiosk. No?

  Still, I pray before laying down: “O Son of God,”* I croak, “great nimbal prophet, support this thy bacchanal. In your mercy let nimbus rage, let the party shatter all probability, let it swarm through palatial salons unseen since wartime and free for us to borrow on a whim.” My pathetic words soon crumple me onto the bed, where I plummet to sleep.

  Dreams touch down like tornado spouts.

  In one it seems I’m a nineteenth century patriarch with enough character to have made a family with Anna. She sits prim and reserved, the way those women do who were formally schooled in the conjugal arts. We must have engaged in polite intercourse, probably through an embroidered slit in a bedsheet, because two small babes lie in her arms; one is Smuts, the other is old Gerd.

  It falls to me to see about a holiday.

  “What nature of vacationment were you contemplating, sir?” the travel agent asks.

  “An oceanic vacationment,” I reply.

  “I see.” He opens a huge ledger, using fully outstretched arms to turn a page. “A crossing by steamship? There are some notable sailings coming up, both on liners and—well, if I may be so bold—freighters, sir.”

  “Freighters, you say? Merchantmen?”

  His gaze narrows over his spectacles: “These can sometimes furnish a more—shall we say ‘intimate’ crossing experience. For those who perhaps more seek the solitude of the deep itself. So to speak, sir, of course.”

  “Yes, yes.” I slap the counter. “That sounds the sort of thing. Indeed. And would you by chance have any passages that don’t—how can I best put it—”

  “Don’t—return, sir? Don’t come back?”

  “Hm. Yes. Passages that might not, in a manner of speaking, entirely quite return, in the way that term is normally understood.”

  “I see.” The agent leans closer, blinking for a few moments. “I see, indeed. So really a—sinking, then, is it, sir, you’d like to book?”

  “Well”—I draw myself up—“in as many words, I suppose. If you put it like that.”

  The agent cocks his head: “Of course, this considerably narrows our choices. But, for instance, I can offer a sailing bound for—Maracaibo, sir.”

  “Ah—Maracaibo!”

  “Yes, sir. Maracaibo. Of course—it’s merely bound for there. If you catch my drift. The vessel will embark on that course. After which embarkation, by the grace of God, the Baltic being what it is, well. Ahem.” He clears his throat.

  “Yes, yes.” I stroke my chin. “Quite. And so all souls—?”

  “Yes, sir. Everyone, apparently. Quite tragic to say.”

  “So we’ll all just—hm?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  Whoosh—when I wake it’s nearly dark again. This will be a dream that’s hard to shake, whose memory will riddle me for a while to come. In addition I wake knowing that it’s the eve of my last chance. My end-play. After a few dodges, feints, and false starts, the cone finally reaches its point: tonight is do or die.

  Stirring onto an elbow, I lay out two lines, and ponder the question of prayer. Logic establishes that it’s wiser to acknowledge deities than to not. Salvation may or may not be probable, but it costs nothing to have a ticket, this is what the great thinkers decided. Anyway,
the marvelous prophet Jesus was a living figure in history, it can’t be denied. As proof of a force above humankind he brought the best wine to the wedding of Cana—in fact this was the very first sign of his supernatural gifts:

  “ ‘Everyone serves the good wine first and the inferior wine after the guests have become drunk. But you have kept the good wine until last.’ Jesus did this, the first of his signs, in Cana of Galilee, and revealed his glory; and his disciples believed in him.”*

  Yes: Christianity sprang from a wine nimbus. The prophet was gifted with such unearthly control that he let pass an entire wedding party, till the lightweights went home, the boors collapsed, and the hard core went scrounging for beer—before pulling out the best bottle. And lo, did they rejoice, and follow him.

  Deciding to wear the fur as a talisman, I flatten my hair and dab myself with Jicky before assessing my form in the mirror. The vision is unmistakably that of a phantom between shindigs. Gerd might be a modest man, I reason, but a party’s a party, and a wild party—indeed a special party, as he said—must be a debauch in any language. I take a slug of wine in the prophet’s honor, and prepare for this last gambit—but as I inspect my nostrils for snow the phone starts to ring, and I tense. After watching it tremble for a few moments I hurry out before it can ring again.

  Frosty night has fallen by the time I reach Tempelhof. The airport rises still and black against a lamplit sky, with few lights burning in her windows, just enough to give an emberlike glow. I pause, listening for pounding rhythms or laughter, or any wild hubbub at all. But there is none. Gravity sucks me swaying up the steps, and I find the lobby even quieter than usual. This means that the rasping breath of an older person, or even the creasing of clothes, can be heard from some distance away. And it just happens that such rasps and creasings can now be heard. They draw my attention to the kiosk side of the lobby. A handful of people are there in the half-light, older types, men and women, hunched at the tables. There’s no sign of Gerd. I stand wavering at the doors, ready to write the affair off. Even more so when Gisela Specht appears in the kiosk; she wears a leather jacket with a denim cowboy skirt and has a reckless crimson slash across her face, roughly where her mouth used to be. Her appearance brings the same mixture of wonder and disgust as the sight of our teachers did when we saw them in casual dress at a sports day; at once a fascination that they could so closely resemble real people, and a distaste that they should think fit to try.