Lights Out in Wonderland

by DBC Pierre

  “Unexpressed forces! Don’t be so tragic! Express them! If you feel the species has an enemy, gather comrades and go after it!”

  “Hm? Unexpressed forces?” I feel a prickle of heat in my chest, a spark growing into a flame, and before long, fed by a gust off the lake, a ruthless blaze. “Unexpressed forces!” I cry: “Unexpressed forces!” I shout it again and again till I hear the other voice come with a different tone, a stronger one now, and I feel the quality of numbness change in my limbs, as if a weight falls off them.

  “Watch out for him, now,” says the voice. “He has a hard life at the moment, and no real friends. He’ll probably need a drink—but not too much of a drink.”

  Then comes another voice: “I win, you owe me a brandy.”

  “A brandy?” I try to open my eyes. “A brandy?”

  “Shh,” goes the voice. “I’m talking to Specht.”

  “A brandy?” says Gerd. “Or was it just a beer?”

  “Don’t try and get out of it,” says Gottfried. “I bet you for a brandy—that an Englander like this won’t pick the closest lake. He’ll pick the second closest.”

  WONDERLAND

  BANQUET

  A different kind of bond exists between men who pull each other out of lakes. Within two hours of Gottfried hauling me out I confess my life to him. Confess the banquet to him. Make a comrade. Make a pact.

  It’s October twenty-fourth.

  Enthusiasms have spoken.

  The leading edge of the banquet arrives like the slap of a storm. Gottfried and I step from his workshop into a flying drizzle, minding the kitten at the door.

  “Typical Gerd.” He stops to button a jacket over his work clothes. “Whole day in the Rubens Café, then he calls us bad friends for not finding him. Who goes to the Rubens to get drunk? There’s too much good food there.”

  We part ways at the corner of Mehringdamm, where he pauses to say: “Thanks for our little talk. I had all but one thing worked out. See you for end-play. I’ll be at the airside tunnel after dark.”

  I head straight for the airport, skin tinged gray and blue, hair stiff behind my head like a flame in the wind. The sky is fast-

  moving, leaf debris escorts me tumbling up the street to the wagon, where I find a host of new faces.

  Didier Le Basque is here, I catch him hurrying between trailers in a blur of whiskers and coats. He ushers me into a command post where, from the speed of his gaze and the jot of wine he pours, I sense the meeting will be short.

  We raise our glasses: “To the exquisite and the strange,” he toasts. “This is it, uh. Hope your costume fits well. And I should say thanks—without even knowing it you gave us a genius idea for the signature dish. The best we’ve ever had. I won’t spoil the surprise—you’ll see soon enough. As to your schedule, remember the closing alarum is at eleven fifty-five precisely. You must exit within four minutes of that. Lights-out will begin the countdown, uh? I’ve told the doorman to watch you, he’ll activate the light switch. You appear, lights out, and then bon voyage.”

  I nod. “Very good.”

  “Bon, allez. The bookkeeper pays your fee at the exit. Then I suggest you leave the building quickly and don’t return for at least a few weeks, although anyway the place will be closed. Thomas will leave before lights-out with two of the trailers, the kitchen stays until the end. Aircraft engines start at eleven-fifty. So—uh? Timing is everything.” He dangles his hand to squeeze. “Good luck, my friend.”

  Outside I find Thomas near a closed kitchen trailer a few meters away, and we stop to share a cigarette on the street behind it. Anti-closure protesters are beginning to arrive, adding to the throng. In hushed tones, Thomas relays news from the kitchen hotline, a reliable telegraph the world over: that tonight’s guests are inbound from Hotel Le Meurice in Paris and comprise extreme high-flyers from those quarters of banking and commerce responsible for the global recession, on a shindig before vanishing in advance of government investigations.

  According to the kitchen only two are not billionaires.

  As we smoke I overhear a chef on the phone inside: “What the fuck am I supposed to do with that?” he bellows, and my heart turns for Smuts, who should be here. While it remains a question whether the Basque will come through with his end of our bargain, I’ve anyway decided to fulfill my part, and have taken the matter of chastising the true culprits behind Smuts’s detention into my own hands.

  “Why have you messed with the menu?” yells the chef. “Well, the guest has no palate. Why invite someone without a palate?”

  I tune out the call as half a dozen new faces file into the trailer, and in the opening and closing of its door I could swear I hear babies whining and gurgling inside. I turn to Thomas for clues, cocking an ear to the wagon; but his face remains blank, and after a last pull on his smoke he passes it over and walks off.

  The weather clears toward evening, and this last Friday afternoon of a monument, a history, a dream, and a limbo comes to be graced by autumn sun. At first the glare hides behind buildings, throwing cool shadows, lighting the sky chalky blue. People come and go through these shadows, chrome glints from passing traffic, even Gottfried lurks in his work wear and gloves, sometimes posing beside the bistro, sometimes prowling. At a certain point a golden light bursts over him, and he looks to me without smiling—but I know it’s a smile. The sky and its empty treetops grow clear and still. The road is quiet, but not too quiet. And there comes a moment when Thomas, dressed in black evening wear, returns to fold himself next to me on the curb, in the gap between command post and kitchen. The street before us suggests no gaiety or abandon, has no neon lures, no gushing enticements, no glare of trinkets or frippery. This Berlin street is dull and closed in a way that holds no promise of future openings. Its dwellers are upstairs. Businesses in ground floors don’t scream or shout or even mention their trades.

  And here, waiting for the greatest bacchanal since the fall of Rome, waiting for the feast of Trimalchio, Des Esseintes’ last stand, Dorian Gray’s big night out, waiting for the spirits of Salomé, Abbé Jules, Caragiale, Baudelaire, Hlavácˇek, Mirbeau, and Tonegaru, we smoke cigarettes at the curbside and bask in cool sun.

  “So, my man.” Thomas eventually squints into the sky. “This is it. Wonder how many souls we’ll send to heaven.” He punches my shoulder for luck.

  I feel a shiver. The air is electric, all the more so for the scrape of cheap shoes on the street, the dull chime of truck engines. But the night is about to begin.

  At sundown walkie-talkies start to crackle around the Columbiadamm side of the airport. I watch a rangy Frenchman swagger underground: the lookout with his starting pistol. Thomas introduces the bookkeeper, a small bearded man like a gnome. He shakes my hand and goes underground to take up his position, then another man passes whom Thomas seems more purposefully to introduce as the “courier.”

  Finally, in my flowing black cape, tricorn hat, and white half-mask, I get the call to move up the tunnel to the airfield. A stiff breeze strikes the tunnel mouth. The sky over Tempelhof is tiger-striped, gray over evening blue. A handful of stars already twinkle, and these are soon joined by flashing strobes and Gottfried’s wheezing breath as he emerges from shadows alongside me. We watch a jet land and make a long taxi in profile, shrieking and sparkling, crouched like a predator. Gottfried’s tongue stirs in his mouth. His eyes shine clear, almost white. Then he nudges me:

  “Look at it gleaming. Some machine. Like a Porsche—eh?”

  We pause to exchange a glance, then he melts away behind me. I shield my face as the jet bears down with its lights. Shadowy forms glow in the cockpit as it bounces to a stop, whistling and whining, its stairs already starting to unfold.

  Seven guests descend in tailcoats and human masks. I pull my cape across my chest and spin about-face to lead them through the tunnels to Wonderland. But within sec
onds I find myself irritated by the men: they dawdle along, loudly talking shop, seeming not to care about the location, as if walking from their office to a sandwich bar. It makes me realize the Zentral Flughafen has become another secret Miguel, another friend, and I suffer the march listening to the men’s echoes growing louder and more fractured as we penetrate the complex. Along the way I hear the following:

  “Ask him,” says one man. “I think it’s third-generation theory.”

  “You mean like stochastic? A kind of Black-Scholes spin-off?”

  “No, no,” another says with a cough. “It’s not about volatility, it’s a consumer model. Trades on the fact that half of consumers are influenced by coupon offers, but only ten percent send the coupon back—it’s that margin applied to manufacturing. For example, cut product quality by half, but a lower fraction will return the product. That margin is the market.”

  “Ah, working on the basis that cost of return is equal to repurchase, like with low-value goods? But then half the game must lie in making it impossible to return the merchandise, no? You’re talking about the ‘too hard’ market.”

  “Kind of—but next-generation. We found a measurable acceptance factor over time. For example, who remembers a shoe that doesn’t leak after ten weeks? A mobile phone that doesn’t die? The market now accepts that they do, returns are down year-on-year. We calculate rate of acceptance based on units returned, then project it. Now a third-generation model applies to all markets—diminution of cost, rate of acceptance, increase in price. In seven years we could sell empty packaging.”

  “I guess it bit you, though, or you wouldn’t be here.”

  “The model didn’t bite, it was a corporate capital issue. But it won’t break surface until at least the next quarter—I’ll be on the nineteenth hole.”

  Something prickles me, listening to the men, something in their utter detachment from the world around, in the insulation of their jargon from human touch, and in the humdrum of their voices plotting such guaranteed dismay:

  It’s the shadowy forces themselves.

  A thrill squirts through me as we round the last corner. The warbling strains of a close-harmony ensemble start to shimmer through the air as we near the salon, a chorus rising as if from history itself. The tune is sublime, quite modern, and somehow familiar—after a bar or two I recognize it as “Night and Day” sung in German, “Tag und Nacht,” by the Comedian Harmonists, banned by the Reich in the thirties. Imagine the scene as it grows unreal, a pod of masked men in evening wear led by a sphinx in a cape through a tunnel of music. The salon door then opens onto a muslin-lined chamber awash with rare fabrics, where guests pay the bookkeeper a fee in diamonds. With the clank each one makes in a tray he passes a chunk of fruit to a splendid green bird hanging in a cage of gold and jewels.

  “Feed the bird,” he chants, “feed the decadent avian.”

  After they’ve paid the fee I follow guests through a curtain into the next chamber. There two attendants stand waiting in tails with a man-sized carousel of seven wedgelike cabinets between them. Seven naked persons bend head-down inside, trunks and limbs tucked away, sexes straining up through cushioned holes, a jamboree of vulvas and loins as diverse as faces, each with its nature and charm. The voluptuary’s roundabout follows Didier’s theory that hormones should simmer to a lusty boil during the course of a meal. Fleshy petals, curled lips, shy crevices, even two willowy cocks with their sacs invite delectation, while trays beside each juxtapose oysters, fruits, snails, cocaine, cheese, raw ham, and truffle, conjuring pubic musks of quivering rarity. From the carousel’s crown, crystal glasses of infants’ tears cleanse the guests between courses. I note that the men at this pudendum degustator can’t disguise their individual natures, some skimming, others plunging and slurping, still others hovering in the hazes above.

  After this the footmen lead them into Wonderland.

  The concourse of arches overflows with rugs, cushions, plants, and entertainments, with a long table running under dazzling chandeliers. My gaze zooms through the arches to the painted sideshow creatures at the end, while through an arch to the right, nestled in a blast of foliage, sits a fountain of Marius. Light plays on its spout, glimmers in ripples across its black pool. At the table boys and girls wait with trays of abalone, cheese of human breast milk, pomegranates, and honeycomb, while maidens bear a beluga sturgeon on a bed of sea snails, scooping caviar from its gut with their hands.

  With the guests seated, the time comes for me to withdraw, though as I sweep out of Wonderland I meet the bookkeeper, who in a spirit of crew camaraderie invites me to peer through his curtain whenever I want.

  “The bird isn’t the best company,” he says with a shrug.

  Kitchen attendants pass me in the bahn tunnel with a course of steaming broth, attended by maidens whirling and naked beneath frocks. As they disperse I see a group of pretty figures in bathrobes beside the railway tracks, chattering and smoking in the shadows—surely sex organs on a break from the carousel.

  Kiwi & Hummingbird Broth

  with Porcini Agnolotti & Leeks

  INGREDIENTS FOR BROTH

  14 blue-capped hummingbirds

  (reserve cap feathers for decoration)

  4 brown kiwis

  50g mirepoix

  2 sticks of celery

  2 brown onions

  1 head of garlic

  3 sprigs of thyme

  10 white peppercorns

  3 sprigs of parsley

  2 bay leaves

  2 medium tomatoes, split

  2–3 juniper berries, crushed

  2 bunches of leeks

  INGREDIENTS FOR AGNOLOTTI

  50g dried porcini

  1 clove garlic

  1 dash of truffle oil

  1 tbsp chopped parsley

  100g leg meat from the kiwis

  500g egg pasta

  dry sherry

  egg white and flour

  For the broth, first prepare a mirepoix (finely chopped onion, celery, and carrot in a ratio of 2:1:1) and sauté until aromatic. Trim the kiwis and hummingbirds of their breasts and winglets and add all other trimmings and remaining ingredients to the pan. Once colored and aromatic, add the mixture to a pot of cold water and bring to a boil, skimming as required until the stock has reduced by half. Remove and set aside any leg meat and return the bones to the pot, continuing to cook until the broth is full-flavored. Finally remove and strain.

  For the agnolotti, steep the porcini in boiling water until soft, then strain and reserve the liquor. Finely chop the reserved kiwi leg meat, garlic, and porcini, then sauté the garlic in a pan, adding the porcini with parsley and a splash of dry sherry. Add the chopped leg meat and finish with porcini liquid, reducing until no liquid remains. Reserve in a bowl to cool.

  To make the pasta, roll the dough through a pasta machine on its finest setting and lay the sheet out on a cool, floured bench. Cut 7cm rounds and place a heaped teaspoon of filling in the center of each, brushing around the edge. Put lids onto the disks and seal from the center outward, then reserve on a floured board. Bring fresh water to a boil for the agnolotti, and heat the broth. Boil agnolotti until they float to the surface, then place one in each serving bowl with breasts of kiwi and hummingbird stacked on top. As the broth comes to a boil add finely chopped parsley with truffle oil and spoon over the breasts and agnolotti. Serve with parmesan shavings.

  SERVES 7. BON APPÉTIT!

  SEVEN O'CLOCK

  I pause by the stairwell to light a cigarette. Thomas grabs it to take a drag: “An attendant recognized two guests. One from the news last week, the bank that went under. The other one’s supposedly all over the papers too, she can’t remember why. Same kind of deal. Bad vibe off the table, apparently.”

  “The kitchen’s got ears.” I take a turn with th
e smoke.

  “It’s always the way. The wire’s hotter than usual here, the kitchen’s got more contact with service and front-of-house. Big show tonight.”

  “I’m surprised the Basque manages to keep it secret.”

  “Everyone’s tried and tested, that’s what makes his jobs such golden gateways for the crew. He has to keep them sweet once they’re in. Not that anyone really knows what goes on—behind the salon are other places where service can’t go. That’s where the real shit happens, I can’t even talk to you about it. But this is a perfect location, nobody can just wander in. Amazing venue, you really pulled a miracle.”

  “How the police aren’t all over us is the miracle,” I say.

  “Easy: there’s a big film set in the terminal. Crew’s just rotating up and down between here and there. Perfect cover, they’re all in costume. Local cop’s already been around, we gave him dinner. He thinks downstairs is wardrobe and makeup. Saw your other acquaintance up there too, with the mustache. Strange fellow, he was sitting on the steps in a sailor’s hat. Probably wants a part in the movie.”

  It’s Gerd. The image stabs me through the heart. Worlds have finally collided, one a voracious bottom-feeder devouring everything in its path, laughing over its shoulder, the other a world of simple pleasures, straight answers, and horses in hallways.

  An urge takes me to find Gerd and run to the Piratenburg; but I couldn’t face the pain. Instead I pull the night’s deadline into focus, deciding to take care of the last few details before it gets too late. I turn to Thomas:

  “Will you join me in a drop of Symphony?”

  “It’s in the fountain, we’re not allowed in.”

  “There’s some of my own left—wait here.”

  I hurry up the bahn tunnel and let myself into the kiosk store with the yellow key. Inside I unpack my kit bag, taking out the wine and my Bavarian suit. The Miesbacher hat makes me pause and remember my early days in Berlin, so recent but seeming like a lifetime ago, back when the mysterious Gerd Specht loomed so large. Innocent days, in retrospect. Limbo had a childhood, a middle age, and now falls away to its death. I feel it in a zeal for sleep, a new distaste for excess.