Lights Out in Wonderland

by DBC Pierre

  Anna only speaks when I ask to use the bathroom.

  “Down there.” She points to the hall: “On the right. I’ll make tea.”

  I pad down the hall, slowing past an open bedroom door. Above a pile of clothes, a poster of a giant tortoise is pinned to the wall. “Solitario Jorge,” reads a caption beneath. Everything in the apartment seeps into me and weighs me down with feeling, until finally the smell of economy soap quashes me flat. Worse, it’s Gerd’s soap, a six-pack from the discount market. Not that economy itself is dampening—I’m glad to wash my hands, and do it thoroughly, as if my troubles stained me. But the scent combines with gray light through a window to smack of hard reality.

  Which is the smack of defeat. I hurry from the bathroom.

  “Sit.” Anna pulls out a chair at the kitchen table. Cakes have been put on a plate, and she passes a mug of steaming dirty water.

  “What is it?”

  “Sage tea. It’s what you need.”

  I pick up the tea box: “Says here it’s for symptoms of menopause.”

  “Exactly. Gisela won’t mind.”

  And so we sip, and toy with our mugs. Our exchanges come roughly the same distance apart in time as the apartment’s knickknacks sit in space. A clock ticks somewhere, and in the general quiet, watched by those knickknacks, conversation becomes irrelevant. Slurps of tea mix with soap smells and despair to boom juicily through the air. Economy soap is too intimate a thing for daylight, I decide. I kill an impulse to imagine Anna under her clothes, lest a small romance of the mind take hold, which would be a bitter taunt at such a moment.* In fact, unable to salvage any workable plan from the day’s developments, and even foreseeing a ruinous collision of worlds up ahead, my life’s horizon has shortened to minutes. One more setback, one more untoward revelation is all it will take to wrap up the odyssey. This, after all the false endings, all the dashed hopes and sudden twists—is the point of the cone.

  “I might have to go around nightfall,” I say. “Will you be okay?”

  “Pff—better than watching you drink.”

  “I’m not going to drink.”

  “Then I definitely don’t need to know. Anyway, better here than with Herr Pietsch.”

  “Gottfried? He’s suddenly quite a character. His face is even starting to move.”

  “Lately he comes every morning for coffee. I’m the one who opens the Imbiss in the mornings. He just monitors you.”

  “Old habits die hard.”

  “I wish they would die. Have you been to see Stasi headquarters? Not to say anything bad about Herr Pietsch, he can also be sweet, and I know he’s just lonely. But at the Stasi museum they all look like him—scary old farm boys with animal eyes.”

  “They’re still there?”

  “In photographs! And the headquarters are just as sad. When you see the quality of things they made in the GDR it’s pathetic, like schoolchildren’s work. There were no incentives. If you tried to do better than the lowest comrade, you’d make him look bad and everyone would hate you. So you worked to the lowest common denominator.”

  “The free market does that for profit.”

  “Ja, and of course that’s worse, and only sends wealth to

  the top. At least under socialism you got a high education and some kind of job. But there has to be a better collective model than the GDR. So depressing. In the museum they still keep the pads they used to put on chairs during interrogations. They bottled the smell of your nervous ass, so they could send dogs to hunt you down.”

  “So,” I muse, “poor Gerd slipped through that education net.”

  “Eh? ‘Poor Gerd’ is a physicist. Particle physics, I think. Gottfried has a degree in engineering. Gisela is a speech therapist.”

  “What?”

  Anna’s gaze slowly narrows to a glare. “Oh, I see—just because you don’t find us laughing in a Porsche you think we must be peasants!”

  “No!”

  “Look at you! First you’re surprised to find personalities behind our straight faces, then—oh, my God!—you find education under the sausages and coffee! Soon we start to look equal to you! It’s a crisis! Eh! Mr. Superior Decadent Vomiter! Eh! And I suppose you come with a Nobel Prize in medicine?”

  “Honestly, no—I just wasn’t thinking.”

  “Eh! Or a triple doctorate in molecular biology! Or are you too big to study?”

  “I studied classics, but listen—”

  “Pff, you see? A lady’s degree, doesn’t even get you a job as a teacher.”

  “Well—I never quite got the degree.”

  “You see! Oh, my God! Now the empty-faced rabble start to look even better! So what do you do? You must curate the national museum! You must direct the state theater! You must play concert piano!”

  “Hm.” Things dawn in rather a new light. “Nothing at the moment. I was a cook. Mostly sausages—ironically enough.”

  “Ha!” She throws a cry to the ceiling: “Ha! O Doctor Vomiter from England! O Professor Bleeder from the Great West! You make the GDR look like high civilization!”

  “God, you’re a hard girl,” I eventually say. “You don’t actually like me, do you?”

  “Do you have any likable qualities?”

  “I used to think so.”

  “What were they?”

  During this pause, one I suppose is always destined to sit here, I foolishly decide to fish for a softer ending:

  “And why doesn’t Gerd practice science? If someone works in a kiosk you don’t immediately take them for a particle physicist.”

  “I think he couldn’t afford to. It’s a specialist field, and you can guess that East Germans didn’t bring a reputation for high achievement. He came into his marriage direct from a crisis with the club, with debts, and couldn’t spend time building a career. He stayed owing his wife’s family. The kiosk was meant to be a short-term solution, a launching pad for better things—but it never took off.”

  “Well,” I say, “surely you know I never put myself forward as better than anyone else.”

  “Oh, no! Making theories about the natives and their facial expressions! Discovering they might be little ‘characters’ behind their hard faces, with their folkloric little ways—do you even know who this ‘character’ Herr Pietsch is? Let me tell you who this is, your new little friend from your holidays—this is the product of his mother’s rape by a Russian soldier after the war. Who was left in the toilet of a hospital, and raised with a shaved head by the state. As a boy he played chess, and people noticed him, because chess mixes young with old, men with women, rich with poor—in chess the minds of players meet each other alone, in purity. And his mind was clear and brilliant. He worked hard and got a scholarship to study engineering. He won prizes for his thesis. He worked in Moscow and it’s said that nobody there could beat him at chess. He impressed enough people with his mind that he started to mix with senior communist officials. He was a committed Marxist. When he returned to East Germany his party liked him and they moved him into a trusted position in the Ministry of State Security. And there they discovered that your little ‘character’ was the most gifted interrogator. Every secret that was locked in a room with him came out. He knew the corridors of the mind! His was always a long, slow game, an end-play. And he always won. For years he was responsible for determining the truth at the highest level. And at that level interrogation is the greatest spontaneous oratory art. It uses the maximum of timing, composure, acting, and argument. It takes down the walls of a man’s reality brick by brick, and builds them back in a way he will accept. And an interrogator at Berlin headquarters would also be dealing with intellectuals, with equally great minds. So don’t think he was interested in collecting smells. He was the right kind of socialist, he believed in people. But towards the end of the German Democratic Republic a new kind
of bully came on the scene. Your little friend said something wrong and for his last years of service was moved back to listening duties, sitting all day and night alone in a hole, switching a tape recorder on and off. With his gigantic mind. And to stop himself from going crazy he memorized great works of German and Russian literature. Even today you can play a game with him, just mention a sentence from a work, do it anywhere, suddenly, across a room—and without thinking he’ll continue to recite from that sentence, forward or back, as you wish.”

  Anna pierces my gaze, makes sure I feel it pierced. “When the state collapsed he was too old to compete for work. He turned his mind to fixing things. He made his shop where he repaired bicycles. But then bigger shops with money and shinier bicycles came, and he was forgotten. This is who you had the honor to meet. A man with a life, doing exactly what he should do with it—create an environment where his gifts can serve what he believes in.”

  She leans closer: “And you? Can he possibly match your high achievements? He never had a week in Spain. He missed every series of Big Brother. He never learned to send a text message, never even got a mobile phone. He doesn’t vomit when he drinks. He doesn’t bleed. A person consists of what she or he actually does. Herr Pietsch doesn’t need to make a theater of his face, he’s not out to seduce you or misrepresent himself.”

  “You read me all wrong. I like everyone very much, and look up to you all. Rather you’re the one judging me on first impressions.”

  “They’re the impressions you give us! If we can’t trust them to be accurate, then why do you give them? If that’s not you, then what is? It illustrates exactly what I say—your world is reversed, facial tics are all you have left. You come from a cult of appearances, and underneath is a chaos that can only respond to medication.”

  “Pff, look—”

  “Pff? Pff? Now you make fun of me!”

  “Sorry, unconscious. Ach, but listen—”

  “Ach? Ach?” She glares.

  “Sorry, sorry—but listen, these are very wide-ranging accusations, come on. You have shops in Germany—look at IKEA.”

  “It’s a question of need and want. Here few people ever own an apartment, for example. Why would we, when the law protects us to rent? What’s the point of an apartment after we’re dead? We don’t live on credit, the economy doesn’t run on shopping, we don’t accumulate things to make us feel worthwhile. If you take away what we have, we don’t change. Can I say the same for you?”

  “But I don’t have anything.”

  “Exactly—and look at you!”

  Whoosh.

  23

  A wind has risen, sending hands of water into my chest which gently push me back. I loosen my tread in the sand and let them push. At first the cold is a problem, then I grow accustomed. Then it becomes a problem again, then I grow numb. Soon the shivering will stop. How gentle it all is.

  Ah, well, my friend; every wish I made came true and this is the result. But at least I got to know who I am before the end: I am the Master Limbo. Every protein of me is a market force, hungry to be filled. I am the Master Limbo and here I am with nature, with weeds lapping my shirt, crawlers at my shoes.

  Parasites upon parasites upon parasites.

  Because we are one and the same force.

  Glorious, perfect, innocent nature, doing all that life does, which is simply to do all that it can, no matter how it finds a way.

  Whoosh: a wave dies on an outcrop, clapping over rocks to punctuate the moment. Not a mighty breaker, incensed and roaring, out to punish the shore; but just a ripple, straight and meek. This is the truth of my death. A lake pays no tribute to unexpressed forces, though they might seethe and boil inside me. I suppose because nobody knew they were there. As Anna would say—because no seething and boiling were ever actually expressed to pay tribute to. In fact, nothing ever issued from me to pay tribute to, though I lived feeling there were forces that could have. Things are as they should be, then, in the end. Just a minor sphinx, once a weasel, up to his neck in a lake. The lake meekly laps, swirling things painfully slowly.

  I had the foresight to beg an airtight freezer bag from Anna, so my notes might survive, for what they’re worth, also swirling in slow motion, really more like simply turning. And if nothing else there’s a drink recipe in here somewhere, and a warning about the Advance Saver fare on trains.

  I step farther into the lake till the sun’s last juices shimmer under my eyes. As it sinks so I sink, we die together as one, and the lower my viewpoint sinks, the more of the world I can see, till my vision takes all of it in, speeds across the surface of the water, across lush miles, over all its creatures and plants, its colored furs and mottled skins, its glistening seas and smoking peaks, and I see the truth unfurl in a flashing sky—that no grand design underlies us, neither perfect nor flawed, but that each thing tries to make its way as best it can, against harsh odds, under a thin gas wrapping the earth. All anything did throughout my life was feed off me, and our currency was money. My father came to Berlin because of it, left Berlin because of it, left his wife because of it, damaged me because of it. The action group formed because of it, was corrupted because of it, shunned me because of it, rehab admitted me because of it, chased me because of it, the train was late because of it, the policeman was there because of it, sandwiches were watched because of it, the taxi was slow because of it, Smuts is in jail because of it. Now the airport dies because of it, Gottfried languishes because of it, Gerd is unemployed because of it, his wife has left because my father came because of it, and left because of it.

  Then I came back.

  Because of it.

  I let myself fall, hear the tide clang over my ears. Life surely was a strange animal. I feel the lake break through my lips, feel my breath start to bubble.

  And whoosh.

  On this side, where cold turns to warmth and pink to gray and blue, I hear a voice, faint at first, maybe the voice of that god we carry within, perhaps even an objective god, an Enthusiasm come to attend my journey:

  “You worked it all out, then,” it says.

  “Yes, I worked it out,” I say, “finally.”

  “Finally, eh? That’s good, very good.”

  “Yes, it feels correct, after all,” I say.

  “So is the answer to live or to die, in the end?”

  “Well, to die, I’m afraid—I’m just an animal.”

  “Really? Well, shame. Just you, or is that all animals?”

  “Well, I can’t speak for anyone else. I think it’s me, for now.”

  “I see, I see. You don’t like it here anymore, then, no?”

  “Well, no,” I say, “things have gone downhill.”

  “Aha, yes, they have. Other animals, eh?”

  “Exactly—it’s wholesale carnage.”

  “But then—where are they?”

  “The other animals?”

  “Yes, not here?”

  “Well, no.”

  “So?”

  The dialogue seems perplexing, for a god; I shake my head, coughing and gasping. But after a moment it comes again:

  “Nothing else is swimming in its clothes. What does that suggest to you?”

  “Well—this isn’t swimming, the clothes are irrelevant.”

  “It suggests that animals don’t do this. Only you are doing it. What separates us from all creatures is that we have the choice to be like them or not. As a person yourself there are things you can do. In fact, there are things you must do, for honor’s sake.”

  At the word “honor” I feel my ear clang to the surface.

  “Tomorrow night, for example, two types of creature will gather in the caverns under an airport: one will be on a plate being eaten; and the other will be eating them and laughing. The critical question of life—which type are you?”

 
“Do I have to be either?”*

  “Then go make a third space at the table.”

  “It sounds to me like you’re trying to talk me out of the lake.”

  “No—you’re trying to talk yourself out of the lake. Do you really think someone intent on killing themselves would still be dragging through such an agonizing charade? You describe it as a limbo—well, let me tell you something: what you’ve snagged on here is simply adulthood—the most terrifying limbo of all. And make no mistake, all the notions of adults are limbos like yours—capitalism, communism, all are just weightless ideas. Still, you must choose one and work to improve it, or design an even better one. The moments before this shock were a sweet point in life, a childhood. But now it’s time to cross over. In case you hadn’t realized, crossing over is what you’re here for today.”

  “What? But this is a drowning. Do you mean to say—?”

  “It’s precisely what I mean to say. You are now at the sharp end of a ritual spanning every age of history, reaching every person, with a choice to make that can’t be reversed. Make that choice: do you want to die an infant—or an adult?”

  “Well—which one would it be if I stay here and drown?”

  “Infant.”

  “And to be an adult would involve—?”

  “Getting out and taking your chances.”

  “But half the reason I’m here is all the shit I’ve caused. My prospects are all in tatters, I can’t come back.”

  “Of course you can. In nature nothing ever dies. Leave your childhood in the lake, that’s what this moment is about. Rise again fresh and strong.”

  “But I’m exhausted. Where would the energy come from?”