by Elvia Wilk
“Resort wear!” Louis called approvingly from the bed, while texting someone. He was wearing his hair in a long fishtail braid and had a leather jacket hanging around his shoulders. He never really put coats on, as in actually threading his arms through the armholes, but swung them over his back with the empty chutes dangling from his neck as if he were a coatrack.
Louis could wear anything. It was incredible. He could wear tasseled loafers, he could wear board shorts, he could wear a pin-striped blazer. This was disconcerting when you first met him—the randomness of the clothes and also that he didn’t have the affect of the heavily ironic person you’d expect to be wearing them. He didn’t have to. Aesthetic trump card was always the body, and the sheer quality of the skin of the forehead, the long fine nose, the exquisite divot above the top lip, the trapezoid of the torso, those ropey legs—you forgot all about the clothes; they only threw him into relief. Tweed jacket, white sport socks, hair tied back with a piece of rope. It was awful and it was ostentatious, and next to him, carefully curated men looked shrunken and pretentious.
Anja worked hard for a coherent appearance. With each outfit she tried to present a delicate, well-balanced constellation of interconnected nodes. The selection usually went according to a single theme from head to toe. Squeaky Fabrics, Grunge, Business Uncasual, Yellow, Branded, Unbranded, Denim with Silk. She was aware that she had small, sharp facial features protruding from extremely accurate coordinates on the map, and she aimed to replicate that physical precision with her outfits. Louis had told her once that her face in profile was noticeably incongruent with its frontal display, which fascinated him. It was as if she existed in two separate planes.
Her resort wear was appropriate for the weather in the house, but it was the wrong choice for the weather in the world, which had become suddenly chilly, the humidity frozen in midair, sticking to everything in a dust of frost. It became noticeably colder as they descended, as if the mountain were generating its own microclimate. In a sense, this was true; their houses probably gave off extra heat as they tried to regulate their internal temperatures. They were halfway down the mountain when Anja had to run back up to the house for a jacket. “My little fashion victim,” Louis said to her affectionately when she met him at the bottom of the mountain. She noticed he had put his arms through the sleeves of his jacket.
In front of the tiki bar, Prinz was planted on a tall stool. Sara and Sascha were perched on either side of him. Anja looked at Louis. She had not expected the Event Planners to be there. He shrugged. Sara and Sascha could be a drag—Louis agreed, though in that case Anja couldn’t understand why he loved Prinz so much, when to her, Prinz, Sara, and Sascha were birds of a feather. The thought had crossed her mind that maybe characteristics like gossipy, petty, and manipulative were more permissible when exhibited in men.
The floor inside the tiki bar as well as the sidewalk in front of it were covered in a thin layer of loose sand. Ace of Base was playing from a speaker above their heads, badly equalized and causing the sand to quake slightly. Anja clambered onto a stool and Louis went inside to order a round of mai tais.
Conversation clicked into German in his absence.
“The weather!” said Sara. “Right?”
“Sorry,” said Sascha to Anja. “We didn’t know it was going to get so cold. Wrong night to tiki.”
“No worries,” said Anja. “It’s so hot in our house that it seems kind of nice outside.”
“Are you coming out with us later?” said Sara, right on cue.
“Last time was so much fun. You have to come with us this time,” said Sascha, as if someone had pushed a button on her forehead. “Prinz has guest list.” Sara and Sascha reliably spoke about events that had happened or were about to happen, with minimal interpretation of those events. The simple fact that events happened and that Sara and/or Sascha knew about them was their reason for having conversations at all. The secondary goal was to create a constant strain of anxiety on your part (and possibly on each other’s part) that there could ever be something happening to which you were not privy. Left unchecked, they could carry on forever with preemptive or retroactive scheduling talk, especially if you let on that it made you uncomfortable.
“Sure,” said Anja. “Louis was talking about going to the Baron.” Prinz nodded and confirmed they could all get in with his bounty of plus ones.
S and S clapped their hands approvingly. They were wearing different colors of the same mesh top. Seeing Anja glance back and forth, Sara said, “I know, so embarrassing. We both got them at work today and didn’t compare outfits before leaving the house.” They worked at a clothing store in Mitte together, while pursuing master’s in something. Art history. Sociology. Feminism? The top looked better on Sara.
Louis returned with the drinks, and she felt relieved. He’d carry the conversation for her now. She could let the baton circulate without the responsibility of holding it for at least a half hour; he could say funny things on her behalf.
Everyone raised their glasses. The artificial taste of the mai tai brought back a scene from a poolside bar a long time ago. Eva, in a zebra-print swimsuit, stretched out on a lounge chair, her skin evenly tanned and glistening, stomach rising and falling slowly in the sun like the hairless belly of a Chihuahua. Anja wondered what Eva would have to say about this tiki bar. Disgusting, no doubt.
“When I was a teenager,” Prinz was saying, “I used to come to this bar all the time.” He’d grown up in Berlin and liked to tell stories that illustrated his unique claim on the urban space. “I drank some of my first beers here,” he went on, launching into a story. Anja zoned in and out, catching the gist.
One day an older friend told young Prinz that the waiter at the tiki bar sold weed, and that Fanta was the code word. Of course Prinz tried the scheme immediately. He cut class to make sure he ran into the right waiter, sat down, and when he was asked for his order he said the word slyly. The waiter looked him up and down and shook his head. We’re all out, he said. The refusal infuriated Prinz so much that he resolved to get amateur revenge. He spent the rest of the day drinking colas at the bar, and then at closing time he went to a restaurant around the corner to continue consuming liquid. He didn’t use the toilet for seven hours. In the wee hours of the morning he returned to the scene of his humiliation and pissed all over the sand in front of the bar.
“That’s why you never want to come here?” asked Sara, who was staring intently down at the sand at their feet.
“I haven’t been avoiding it on purpose. I just always felt weird about it after that.”
“It hurt your pride,” said Louis. “Teenage humiliation can be very traumatizing. I sympathize with that.”
“Hey,” said Sara, “what if we order Fantas now? Do you think it still works?”
“Definitely not,” said Prinz. “Berlin has changed.”
“Amen,” said Louis. Everyone shook their heads in reverence.
“Where’s the next place, though?” said Sascha.
“I heard Dublin,” said Sara. “Or Vilnius?”
“No way,” said Louis. He put his arm around Anja and kissed her cheek. “This is the end of the line. Nowhere to go from here.”
black sun, definitive night / the shiver (–1º)
They wanted to take a cab, but there were five of them and it was Friday night and a big taxi under surge pricing was going to cost as much as three rounds of drinks, so they gave in and went to wait for the bus, standing huddled against the wind in two clumps: boys and girls.
Sara leaned in and stroked Anja on the arm. “Is everything okay with Louis?” She was oozing with concern. Sara glanced meaningfully over at Louis and Prinz, who were bleating with laughter.
“He’s fine,” said Anja. “He’s really doing okay. Thanks for asking.” She wasn’t sure if she should be grateful or offended about the breach of scheduling banter.
“He must be sooooo sad,” Sara said. “Is there anything we can do?” They both had their hands on
her. Their faces were eager, not to help but to acquire information, even information in the form of an emotional reaction. Anja shrank away. She felt herself diminishing in importance, nothing but a conduit. Death as gossip, death as currency.
“Don’t worry, he just wants to get back to normal,” she said. “You’re so sweet. Really, don’t worry.”
At the Baron they jumped to the front of the line, skipping the hour-long wait but still paying the cover. The bouncer was characteristically hostile, almost comically so. He inspected Prinz’s email, displayed on his screen, cross-checking the signatures with the list of people on his glowing tablet before waving them in. Anja focused on the familiar faded barbed-wire tattoo circling the joints of the bouncer’s fingers on his left hand. A spider crawled up the wrist of the other.
The Baron had been remodeled a few years back to look like a cave inside, complete with stalactites hanging from the ceiling, and it smelled like sulfur in some corners, maybe not artificially so. Once inside, Louis and Anja leaned against the bar and shared a cigarette with satisfaction. Smoking was banned on the Berg. People filtered by, smiling and stopping to chat occasionally. Louis put his hand on Anja’s back, and they whispered together about who they saw and what people were wearing.
“I feel like a sponge,” said Anja. “So soggy.”
“The body is a porous interface,” said Louis, which made her laugh, although she couldn’t remember the source of the quote.
It seemed like everyone they talked to had come from an opening Anja didn’t know about, an open house at a Finster-owned publisher launching a new ebook series.
Process-based novel, she heard someone say. Net worth up by .07 percent. Third-quarter review.
Anja texted Dam repeatedly, wishing he were here, but he said he was out with the gays tonight, sorry. She was on her own.
Prinz snuck up behind them and whispered in Louis’s ear, who put his arm around Anja and pointed to the bathroom.
The drugs were suppositories—not exactly a social experience, but the three of them crowded into a stall together, Louis and Anja reaching around in each other’s underwear and giggling.
Prinz rolled his eyes. “Let’s get out of here, Snow White’s on.”
All three stumbled out of the bathroom and pushed to the front of the crowd encircling Snow White, who was squatting on a white plinth. He had on a Viking helmet with three plasticky blond braids tacked to the back of his head, and wore an electric guitar slung lamely over his shoulder like a useless, vestigial limb. He was bellowing a country ballad into a handheld microphone.
Snow White was Louis’s friend Andy. He was finishing his contract with O’Reilly this year, and he’d probably start right in somewhere else at the top. Finster was the current rumor. At O’Reilly, Andy’s presence had done little more than demonstrate how hopelessly out of touch the company had become. With his carefully designed disregard for rules, he stood out like a sequin from the company’s cadre of glassy-eyed Ivy League consultants, kids who’d never learned that fulfilling their terms of contract wasn’t going to get them anywhere—you had to subvert or disrupt something. You had to influence.
On the side, as part of his influencer brand, Andy cultivated a late-night performance persona. He offered a much-needed halftime act between DJ sets, a similar function to the squad of spangled gymnasts who leap out between the halves of a football game. He did Disney musicals, cabaret, concrete poetry, whatever the night called for. Probably because of his consistent presence at parties, Andy had reached the top rung of the ladder of local celebrities—he had transitioned, incredibly, to the status of minor celebrity outside Berlin. This was the ultimate goal of anyone who’d accepted a Berlin-based contract. To be successfully based in Berlin you had to be famous elsewhere.
The crowd was becoming fuller and people were yelling song requests up toward Andy. “‘This Kiss’!” Anja realized Louis was shouting. Was it the name of a country song? But Andy didn’t seem to be taking requests. He stuck to his repertoire. She tried to follow the lyrics, but she had trouble focusing on the words. The problem was that her hearing was becoming difficult to separate from her vision. The two senses were interfering with each other. First Andy’s face would zoom into focus, and then his voice. She noticed an O’Reilly sticker on his arm. The arm was waving in time to the music, but the movement seemed to be driving, rather than following, the sounds. She felt herself echolocating, like a bat.
Louis mumbled into her ear: “Did you know this bar used to be called Kit n’ Caboodle’s Mix-Up Joint? Back when this was East Berlin.”
She shook her head. That made no sense. Optionable options, variable variables. She asked him words with no voice, his soft eyes close to hers. Weighty propositions stuck on her tongue. Should we? How to? She was grabbing at him, to make sure he was still there. He fidgeted and stared rapturously up at Andy. Her knees were dead weights. They kept swaying in unison, as if her joints formed the balls of two pendulums. Her butthole was stinging, and she wondered if it was somehow conspicuous, if other people could tell she was thinking about it. She looked at Louis and wondered if that was why he was fidgeting so much, because he was thinking about his own butt.
She looked at him again and he wasn’t there anymore, so she wandered back over to the bar, put a forearm down on the sticky glass, and put her forehead down on the sticky arm. She felt a nudge in her ribs but didn’t budge, thinking vaguely that she might feel embarrassed tomorrow when remembering this moment of self-comprehension, the moment of realizing how flat-out high she was. The thought passed. That’s why she’d bought those purple packets of detox tea, for tomorrows like tomorrow. “It’s cool,” she said to no one, barely lifting her head.
Sara was standing a few paces away. “I have faith!” she shouted to Anja. Sara approached and flopped over on top of her, conforming to her slumped shape like a flow of lava. Anja wondered if Sara had fallen asleep, but then Sara whispered, “He does this on purpose, I know he does.”
“Who?”
“He shows up when I’m high, late at night when I’m the most, when I’m, you know, like this.”
“Who, Howard?”
Sara lifted her head to look at Anja and gave Anja’s head a shove.
“Mahatma, obviously.” She straightened and shot a forlorn look toward the far end of the bar. Mahatma was standing there with a red bandana tied around his forehead, talking to some girl.
“Um, groovy,” said Anja.
“I know. The sex was just so . . .”
Mahatma glanced in their direction and then turned away to focus on the girl he was talking to.
“He shows up like this and doesn’t even come say hi to me, like he doesn’t know me at all. But he’s always looking at me.”
Sara had moved to Berlin following a boyfriend, who’d gotten famous within the span of a year and then dropped her for someone else, or many others. Sara had nonetheless held her grip on the dream of domestic coupling, seeking a cliché of straight romance and always pursuing the absolute worst men for the job. If you could look past her clothes, her outlook was fully conservative.
“Fuck him,” said Anja. “Find someone else.”
“There aren’t any,” said Sara. “All the good ones are taken.” She pinched Anja’s sides with both her hands, like pincers. “I guess you would know that.” She was glaring at Mahatma’s back now. He was moving in the direction of the bathroom, following a girl in front of him.
“Who’s Harold?” Sara shot out, then seemed to forget to wait for the answer and drifted away toward the receding red handkerchief.
The main dance floor was filling up and people lining up for the bar were brutely nudging her aside. There must be some retreat, a hiding spot, for times like this. Yes, she recalled that there was a void down at the end of the bar. The void was not just a hole in the floor. It had steps leading down to other subterranean depths. A cave below a cave. She peeled herself away from her roost and slunk down the steps, to the low-ceilinged
crawl space beneath the dance floor. It was lit by a single, flammable-looking yellow bulb, and there were six or eight people stashed among various cartons and boxes. It was extremely hot.
“Anja!” said someone, and she sought the source, spotting a claw-foot tub in a far corner with Didi’s head poking out. “Get in!” Didi was calling.
Where did she know Didi from? Was her name Didi?
Besides Didi there were two other girls in the tub whom Anja definitely didn’t know, all tangled together. Anja slid in close beside Didi, the other girls’ heads at the opposite end, their dirty spike heels crisscrossed around Anja’s shoulders.
“Sardines!” said Didi.
“Snakes!” yelled one of the girls.
“Sausages!” yelled the other.
Anja tried to introduce herself to the heads brushing against her feet, and names were exchanged, uselessly. “They just got to Berlin,” said Didi. “Summer internships.”
“Where are you guys interning?” called Anja, and one of them said, “PornPals!”
“PornPals has interns?” Anja asked Didi.
“Ya, why not. Social media, marketing.”
Didi pulled her shirt up high over her bra.
“Nice boobs,” said Anja.
“Thanks. How have you been? I heard about Louis’s mom.”
“Yeah.”
“I’m so sorry. Tell him I’m sorry.”
“Thanks, Didi. I like you.” She did like Didi.
Down toward her feet: “So do you guys have experience in porn?”
“Not porn, LIFESTYLE,” came a voice. The one with her hair in pigtails.
“Like vegan porn?” said Didi to Anja, laughing.
“Porn lifestyle is our thesis research,” said pigtails.
“That’s really interesting,” said Anja.
“I’m doing web statistics, I’m a MATH MAJOR.” One of them was now kicking her in the shoulder.
“I GET IT,” shouted Anja. “IT’S COOL.”
Getting out of the tub was infinitely harder than getting in; the sides of the thing had grown at least a foot taller. Anja used both arms to struggle out, gasping, her foot lodged under someone, like she was trying to pull herself out of a pool but her ankle was tangled in the lane-divider rope.
