Morning. Or, at least, there was light coming through the window next to the bed. I opened an eye. A bad mistake, as the very act of attempting to reemerge on Planet Earth was accompanied by a migraine of classic proportions. I touched my lips with my tongue and tasted the vile flavor of dried vomit. I tried to move but felt that enervating chill and fever that come with sweating profusely throughout the night, as the sheets were sodden and also stank of nausea. Standing up took some work—my equilibrium virtually nonexistent. Each step forward was an experience in disorientation. When I reached the bathroom, I nearly began to retch again, as I saw the remnants of my handiwork from the night before. Splattered vomit everywhere.
There are moments in life where you just simply want to curl up into a ball on the floor, press the palms of your hands against your eyes, and will away the after-effects of your stupidity. But Dad’s Marine Corps legacy—the way he always insisted that I make my bed at home with perfect hospital corners and keep my shoes well shined, and clean up any mess I made—forced me to stagger into the kitchen, put my head under the sink’s tap (didn’t I also do this last night?), and allow all that arctic Berlin water to snap me into reasonable consciousness. Then I withdrew from the tall kitchen cabinet the mop, a bucket, several rags, rubber gloves, and a bottle of the German equivalent of Mr. Clean that I had bought when first moving in here. Over the next hour I mopped up the mess I made, disinfecting the entire bathroom, making certain that no visual or olfactory traces of my stupidity remained. It was slow, grubby work, during which I told myself: now you know why they call it dope. The events of the night before began to reassemble in my head. You’re lucky to have just gotten away with projectile vomiting and the mother of all hangovers. Once the bathroom was spick-and-span and smelling of lemon disinfectant, the bed stripped and remade with clean linens, my body placed under a very cold shower, my teeth brushed repeatedly, two cups of coffee ingested (and held down) . . . after all this imposition of order upon personal chaos, I proceeded to spend the next hour getting all the gory details of last night down on paper. Only halfway through this exercise—in which I was thoroughly merciless—did I remind myself that I still hadn’t bothered to check the time. Glancing at my watch, I saw it was two thirty in the afternoon. Jesus Christ, much of the day lost. I immediately began to map out what I would do to make up for it. Finish the diary entry. Head out to the local laundry with the soiled sheets. A very late lunch at the Café Istanbul. Then back here to start editing the essay—though I also told myself that, given the current state of my brain, it was best to simply read through the piece and consecrate tomorrow to whipping it into presentable shape.
Discipline, discipline. The only antidote to life’s helter-skelter tendencies. But the more I pushed forward in my notebook with my account of that crazed, lost night, the more I also knew that I was so damn pleased to have bumped into such mad decadence. Just as I also couldn’t help but wonder what everyone who had assembled there were ultimately looking for. On a certain level it was simply a fix, a fuck, communal inebriation, and a general flaunting of society’s standard operating mores. Der Mond Über Alabama was all about collective subversion—and embracing the sort of sybaritic things that would land you in jail outside of its confines. I was pretty damn certain that the majority of my fellow attendees were as bourgeois in their backgrounds as I was. As such, I couldn’t now help but wonder if we were attracted to a place like Der Mond Über Alabama for precisely the same reason everyone there had also chosen West Berlin as a place of temporary or permanent residence. Here you didn’t need to be meeting the right people at the right parties. Here you didn’t have to push yourself onto the world. Here you could sleep with whomever you wanted and not have people talking about it. Here you were ignored, as everyone was ignored in Berlin. We were separate and isolated, and I sensed that you only stayed here if that suited your temperament.
I finished my diary entry on this thought. As I recapped my fountain pen I noted that my general physical condition had upgraded itself from catastrophic to merely terrible. I gathered up the bag of soiled sheets and clothes I was going to drop off at the laundry. I put on my coat and opened the door to head downstairs. But as I began to descend I heard two noises that threw me: the ca-chink, ca-chink, ca-chink of a needle stuck in a record groove, and the more profoundly disconcerting sounds of someone moaning in pain. But the moan was so low, so guttural, it was almost as if they were gagging on something. Like their own blood.
Which is exactly what was happening—as Alaistair was lying in a broken heap on the floor, blood cascading from his mouth, his breathing irregular, contorted. His studio had been subjected to a cataclysm. Paint had been splattered everywhere, brushes snapped in two, his worktable turned upside down, a window smashed, and . . . this was too devastatingly awful . . . the three big canvases he had been working on shredded with what must have been a knife.
“Alaistair, Alaistair,” I hissed as I made my way toward the debris toward him. But the pool of blood was engulfing him, making it difficult to get even close to him. I was instantly charging down the stairs, racing out into the street, into the corner shop, screaming at the startled man behind the counter.
“Polizei! Polizei! Sie müssen sofort die Polizei rufen!”
The man did as ordered, and when he informed me that the dispatcher at the emergency services said that an ambulance would be there in three minutes I ran in helter-skelter fashion back up the stairs, ascertained that Alaistair was still breathing, then dashed into his bedroom, opened the drawer on the bedside table where I knew he kept his heroin gear, ran into the kitchen, found a plastic bag, rushed back to the bedroom, dumped everything—his needles and hypodermics and tourniquets, a burnt spoon and three little packets of white powder—into the bag. Then I threw it all out the back window. At that very moment there was a pounding on the door. The paramedics and the cops had just arrived.
What happened next was wildly choreographed confusion: the paramedics diving in to stabilize Alaistair and stanch the flow of bleeding, the cops immediately deciding that, as I had phoned in the crime, I must be the perpetrator. They shouted innumerable questions at me, demanding to see my papers, demanding to know what my relationship with this man was. When I explained that I had been asleep upstairs, they demanded to know how I could have slept through such an assault. Ever smoked skunk? Instead I tried to explain that I was a rather heavy sleeper. And no, I had absolutely no problems, no issues with Fitzsimons-Ross, no past history of violence, no entanglements with the law, no . . .
“For God’s sakes,” I finally yelled at the cops. “He’s my friend. I found him here ten minutes ago and ran screaming into the shop downstairs. Ask the guy behind the fucking counter.”
“You watch your mouth,” one of the cops shouted back at me.
“Then stop fucking accusing me.”
“You want to be arrested?”
The officer grabbed me by the shirt and began to shake me.
The other cop—the older of the two—put a restraining hand on his colleague’s arm and said in a manner that made it clear it was an order, “You go downstairs now, corroborate his story with the guy in the shop. I’ll stay with our ‘friend’ here. What’s your roommate’s name?”
“Fitzsimons-Ross. Alaistair Fitzsimons-Ross.”
“You hear that?” the officer asked his colleague. “You find out if the guy in the shop knows Fitzsimons-Ross.”
As soon as the other cop had headed off at speed, the officer asked me manifold questions about Fitzsimons-Ross: his nationality, his profession, his lifestyle. I painted a fairly benign portrait, saying that he was a well-known painter, quiet, low-key, and that our friendship was not one where we knew intimate details of each other’s lives.
“But surely the fact that you were living here . . .”
I explained that we kept different hours, had very separate lives.
As this interrogation was going on, another two officers were scrounging around the apartm
ent, pulling open drawers, pulling books down from shelves, heading upstairs to my lair to undoubtedly search everywhere. Thank Christ I had managed to get all evidence of his addiction off the premises—and was quietly holding my breath, wondering if Alaistair had stashed away some other drug paraphernalia (or, worse yet, the junk itself) elsewhere.
In the middle of all this, one of the paramedics shouted over to the cop that “The patient is stabilized” and they were going to move him.
“Will he make it?” I asked.
“He lost a lot of blood, but we have managed to stop the hemorrhage. If you hadn’t have found him when you did, he’d have died ten minutes later.”
I looked at the cop after the paramedic said this. He merely shrugged and continued pounding me with questions: “What do you do? Are you working here illegally? Where can I see proof that you write books?” Meanwhile, the paramedics lifted Alaistair onto a gurney, a transfusion bag suspended above him, a tube connected to his ravaged veins. They pushed him toward the front door, the wheels streaking the floor with blood as they headed off.
“One last thing,” the paramedic told the cops. “Check this out.”
Lifting the sheet that was covering Alaistair, he pointed to the track marks that were running up and down the nook of his arm.
“A junkie,” the paramedic said.
“Did you know this?” the cop asked me, his tone now indicating that he was incensed.
“Not at all.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“It’s the truth.”
The cop shouted at his colleague to search the place even more thoroughly, as they were now on the hunt for Class A drugs. Then he turned to me and said:
“Show me your arms.”
I did as ordered. He inspected them carefully, clearly disappointed that they were so clean.
“I still don’t believe you didn’t know he was . . .”
But the officer was interrupted by the arrival of his colleague, together with the man from the corner shop. The accompanying cop pointed to me and asked him:
“Is this the man who ran in to your shop, yelling at you to call for the police?”
The guy knew me, as I made a point of stopping in there at least once a day to buy something. He was Turkish, in his mid-fifties, always downcast, but now wide-eyed as he surveyed the smashed-up studio and the blood that was everywhere.
“Yes, this is the man,” he said, nodding toward me. “He’s a regular customer.”
“And was this the man you saw returning with Herr Fitzsimons-Ross last night?”
“No, not him.”
“Are you sure?”
“I know the other man, because he is a regular customer, too. But this man wasn’t with him. In fact, I’ve never seen them together.”
“So who was the other man with Herr Fitzsimons-Ross?”
“That is his name?” the shop owner asked.
“You say he was a regular customer and you don’t know his name?”
“I don’t know the names of most of my customers.”
“Describe the other man with Fitzsimons-Ross.”
“Short, shaved head, with a tattoo on one cheek.”
“What kind of a tattoo?”
“Some sort of bird, I think. It was dark.”
“Was this the first time you saw this man with Fitzsimons-Ross?”
“I think so. The times I did run into him early in the morning he was usually with some man.”
Now the officer was looking at me.
“So Fitzsimons-Ross often picked up men and brought them back late at night?” he asked.
“As I told you before, though we were friendly, I had little in the way of contact with him.”
The officer shook his head, displeased with my response, while tapping my American passport against his thumb.
“Get a full statement from the shopkeeper,” he told his colleague. “And meanwhile, Herr Nesbitt, we will see what the search of the premises uncovers.”
A very nervous hour passed, while the two policemen assigned to the task pulled the place apart. Meanwhile, the officer took a full deposition from me. One of the officers came down with the one and only copy of my Egyptian book that I had brought with me—and showed the investigating officer my author photograph on the inside jacket flap. The officer also read my biographical sketch on the same flap and even opened the book to the first chapter and scanned the opening page.
“So you are who you say you are,” he finally said. “And you are evidently an observant man, given what you do for a living. That is, if you make a living at it. Yet you still try to tell me that you hadn’t a clue that Herr Fitzsimons-Ross was an addict who had the habit of picking up stray men and bringing them back here.”
“As you can see, sir, I live in a self-contained unit upstairs. I come and go at different hours from Herr Fitzsimons-Ross—and we barely see each other. But honestly, sir, I can’t say that I know much about the man beyond the fact that he is a very fine artist with whom I have shared a beer perhaps twice since I moved in some weeks ago.”
The officer wrote this all down, his skepticism still so apparent. When his colleagues finally finished their controlled ransacking—and informed their superior that the place was clean—I could see the officer’s disappointment was acute.
Again he tapped my passport against his thumb, pondering his next move. Finally he said:
“If Herr Fitzsimons-Ross survives, we will be naturally taking a deposition from him. If all this checks out, then you will be ruled out of our investigation, and the passport will be returned to you.”
“But as the shopkeeper has clearly stated I wasn’t with Fitzsimons-Ross.”
“Do you have any need for the passport immediately? Are you planning to travel in the coming days?”
“Not in the next week or so, no.”
“Well, hopefully, we will have this matter cleared up by then.”
He then reached into the pocket of his jacket and took out a hefty notebook. Opening it he wrote out an official receipt for my passport, informing me it would be kept at the Polizeiwache in Kreuzberg. And if he needed to phone me?
I explained that there was no phone here at the apartment, but that messages could be left at the Café Istanbul.
“Ah yes, artists do not need phones,” the officer said dryly. “We know where to find you when we need you, Herr Nesbitt.”
“Can you tell me to which hospital Herr Fitzsimons-Ross has been taken?”
“Not until we have interviewed him. Good day, sir.”
And he left, followed by his colleagues.
In the immediate aftermath of his departure, I found my head reeling. As my brain played cartwheels—a reaction to all the adrenaline that had been charging through my system from the moment I found Fitzsimons-Ross on the studio floor—another thought quickly took over: where was the essay I wrote for Radio Liberty . . . and why the hell hadn’t I made a Xerox copy of it at the local corner shop (and, by the way, God bless its owner for clearing my name)? The reason my fear about the essay so instantly flooded my thoughts was simple: if it had been torn up, confiscated, or destroyed during this search, it would have taken me another day or so to rewrite it. Or, worst yet, the police might approach Radio Liberty, informing them that this would-be contributor was under suspicion of a violent incident with his gay junkie roommate. Once word got around the studio, I doubted if Petra would even bother to say more than two words to me—“No, thanks”—when I finally got up the courage to ask her out.
So moments after the cops were gone, I found myself charging up the stairs to my apartment and moving immediately to the shelf on which I kept my typewriter. It had been moved to the worktable, the cover taken off it, several keys depressed—as the cops were evidently verifying the fact that I hadn’t secreted a small packet of some psychotropic substance inside its frame. My essay had been placed underneath the typewriter on the shelf—and though my first view of the empty shelf was just a little h
eart stopping, a quick glance at the floor showed that all eight pages had been randomly strewn about the place. I gathered them all up, reordering them according to page number and stacking them neatly on my worktable. Then I double-checked that all my assorted notebooks were still there. Again they had ended up on the floorboards—and several of them had been opened and rifled through. But these were not the thought police, interested in my perceptions of Berlin life. They just wanted to find drugs.
I spent the next two hours slowly putting my rooms back together again. All my clothes had been dumped out of the chest of drawers or pulled off their hangers in the wardrobe. Every kitchen utensil and item of cutlery and all the cleaning supplies under the sink had been haphazardly tossed around. Even my espresso maker and my kettle had been opened and inspected. At least they hadn’t done that cheesy Greek restaurant stunt of smashing up all the plates, as these had been stacked on the floor by the sink. Still it took time to rearrange everything, and tackle the medicine chest in the bathroom, given the fact that they squeezed out the entire contents of my toothpaste tube and smashed open a very ordinary bottle of body powder and dumped its contents on the floor, and emptied the entire can of shaving cream, and upended the shampoo, and everything else in which I might have hidden some sort of contraband.
And to think I had just cleaned the bathroom of all that vomit.
Still, nothing important was missing or damaged (they even left the batteries to my radio/cassette player near the machine itself). And I certainly hadn’t suffered the same fate as poor Alaistair. Coming downstairs, I saw that the walls were splattered everywhere with blood and paint, the worktable and chairs also covered with this amalgamation of gore and synthetic color. I walked into the bedroom. The attack had evidently started here, as the sheets were also stained crimson and the cops had just added to the chaos by dumping his clothes everywhere. I started surveying all that needed to be done here when I was taken aback by the sound of a key in the front door lock. Hurrying back into the front room—and grabbing a chair as possible protection—I found myself face-to-face with Mehmet. He was taking in the catastrophe and also eyeing me—and the fact that I had a chair in one hand—with alarm.
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