The Wonder of Us

by Kim Culbertson

  “Because I was wearing a muzzle.”

  Kiara takes a handful of cashews. “I think that’s part of the power of that scene. That you can’t really make out what we’re saying when we wear them. It adds confusion.”

  Tavin leans down to take a cup of tea. “Is confusion what you were going for?” he asks Jonas, and I can’t tell if he’s being sarcastic. After the last performance he saw with the milk cartons, Tavin expressed that perhaps Jonas’s work was the other stuff that comes out of cows.

  Jonas nods earnestly. “Yes and no. Theater should be about creating thought, which then creates change. When we perform, we add to a greater conversation, a greater social discussion. If it’s confusing, that’s okay. That’s still inspiring a kind of mental challenge, a thoughtfulness.” As Jonas explains this, I narrow my eyes at Tavin. I don’t always love Jonas’s pretentiousness, but he cares deeply about theater as social change. He’s the real deal.

  Tavin takes my hint. Sort of. “Well then, I think you have a winner.” He holds up his cup. “Prost.”

  Jonas holds up his cup in answer. “Prost!”

  The door bangs open and Jonas’s third roommate, Leo, stomps in with two girls in tow. Leo is in many ways Jonas’s opposite, a beefy, tattooed, found-objects artist who always seems to have two or three girls in his orbit. Which is not the problem. The problem is that the second girl who stumbles in behind him is Tavin’s ex-girlfriend, Rilla.

  “Okay.” Tavin plops his teacup on the tray, his eyes slipping to me. “I’m going to take off. Thanks for the tea, man.” He blasts out the door. Abby and I hurry to follow him. But when we get to the street below, he’s gone.

  Abby stares at me with wide eyes. “What was that about?”

  I scan the streets for signs of Tavin’s big frame. “That girl in the red top is Rilla. Or as I like to call her, Wreck-It Rilla. She trashed his heart about two months ago.”

  Abby looks worriedly up and down the street again. “Poor Tavin.”

  I sigh, more annoyed at Tavin’s disappearing act than worried. He’s ruining things with Abby before they can start. “Yeah, but he really needs to get over it.”

  I get a text from Kiara: ???

  I text back: gone.

  Kiara: come back up.

  Abby is yawning again but trying to hide it. I text back: i think we’ll call it a night.

  Kiara: :)

  Me: dream sweet!

  Kiara: tschüss.

  Later in my room, after we’ve both taken showers, Abby and I sit facing each other on my single bed. I’m painting my toenails on a towel and Abby texts with her dad, wet hair combed back away from her face. Finally, she tosses her phone on the bed. “Dad says hi.” She’s wearing a pair of my emerald silk pajamas that look pretty with her eyes.

  “You should wear that color every day,” I tell her, capping the nail polish and blowing on my toes as best I can.

  “Thanks.” She pulls out the glossy book she bought in the Pergamon gift shop but doesn’t open it. I grab a hairbrush, flip my head forward, and give my hair three quick strokes from underneath. When I come back up, Abby’s watching me. “You know I’ve probably seen you brush your hair like that a thousand times on your bed back home, but never in Berlin.”

  I lower the brush. “Wow, nostalgic much?”

  She sets the book aside and stretches her legs out in front of her. “Isn’t that the point of this trip—the grand nostalgia tour?”

  Her tone sounds sharper than it should. “You okay? Did your dad say something?”

  A dark expression clouds her face. “Ugh, I don’t want to talk about it right now. Too tired.” She climbs off the bed and starts digging through her bag on the floor. “I have travel fatigue or something.”

  I hesitate. “You sure you don’t want to talk about it?”

  She shakes her head. “Let’s talk tomorrow. Speaking of which, what’s next? Are we staying in Berlin for a while or off to somewhere else?” But she immediately holds up her hand. “Wait—don’t tell me. That’s the point, right? That I don’t know what the next day holds for us?”

  I nod, and she tries to smile, but that watercolor wash of sadness is back behind it. “I could tell you the whole plan. I just thought it’d be more spontaneous this way, more fun.”

  “It is fun.”

  Before we can say anything else, we hear the front door open, then close quietly. I scurry off the bed, and Abby joins me at the doorway, both of us hanging back in case it’s a crazed murderer with an ax or something. But it’s Neel. He tiptoes his way through the shadowed living room, holding his shoes.

  “We thought you were a lunatic with an ax!”

  He jumps at my voice. “Geesh, Riya, you almost gave me heart failure!”

  “Course we’d have preferred the ax murderer.” Crossing my arms, I lean into the doorjamb. I get a closer look when he falls into the square of light spilling from my room, at his rumpled clothes and exhausted expression. Abby and I exchange a guilty look. “You look awful,” I say to Neel. “Trouble in paradise?”

  “You should know since you started it,” he snaps. His black hair stands on end, as if he’s been running his hands through it for the past few hours.

  “We’re sorry about that, Neel. We—”

  I cut Abby off. “Oh, please. Moira started it years ago.” At the sight of his pained face, I swallow the rest of my remarks and take a tentative step into the living room. We were horrible to Moira, laughing at her in the bathroom, which was bad enough even if she hadn’t caught us. But she had. Which makes it mostly our fault if she’s now chucked him out of their hotel room. “Look, I’m sorry about Moira, too. But she’s such a pill, Neel. And by the looks of those phone calls you’ve been on the last week, we didn’t actually start it. Threw gas on the fire is more like it. I honestly don’t know what you see in her. What can possibly be in it for you?”

  He flops onto the couch, pulling the sapphire chenille blanket Mom keeps there over him. “Go to bed, children. I’m tired.” He throws an arm over his eyes.

  “Ugh, maybe you’re a perfect match after all.”

  “Are you still talking?” he mumbles from where he has his head turned into the couch cushions.

  “Idiot.” I shut my door, careful not to slam it. I wouldn’t want to give him the satisfaction.

  The next morning, we almost sleep through my alarm but force ourselves to get going before the day gets too hot to enjoy it. I leave Mom and Dad a note on the coffee table next to a snoring Neel, and we head out. I plan to fill our morning with some of the usual tourist spots, even consulting Lonely Planet to make sure I’m not missing anything. We start again at the Brandenburg Gate so we can follow the former course of the Berlin Wall south on Ebertstraße, growing quiet as we arrive at the Holocaust monument, the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe.

  It’s this sort of frankness that initially caught me off guard when I came to Berlin, but I’ve come to admire it; it’s a long cry from the California tendency to euphemize, well, almost everything. Berlin, as a city, has a tendency to hold your face up close to the glass of the past. In my time here, Berlin has never stopped reminding me that humans do horrible things and that it’s our job to put something worthwhile into the future to combat them.

  Abby and I agree to take different paths through the disorienting headstone-like blocks and undulating ground of the memorial. Within moments, I find myself alone in its isolating and towering maze. As I wander through it, I think about how Dad told me the last time we came here that the memorial has its critics; some argue it’s not specific enough, or it’s too metaphorical, or that children aren’t properly somber, playing hide-and-seek through its two thousand blocks of gray stone (which isn’t the memorial’s fault). One of my teachers at school told us she feels like it takes emphasis away from the Nazis with its passive title. I brought this up with Dad while we walked through it, and he told me that this sort of discussion is one of the important things about art: No matter what
, it should inspire debate and ideas.

  As I wander out of the labyrinth, I find Abby sitting on a low gray slab, something broken etched on her face.

  I settle next to her. “You okay?”

  She takes a ragged breath. “Not really. This is … intense, what it represents. I wasn’t prepared for this.” She swallows, folding and unfolding her hands in her lap.

  “You can’t prepare for it.” I put my hand on her arm, already warm in the late-morning heat. “It crushes me each time I see it or walk by it.” I follow her gaze as she watches a couple pass us, quietly whispering, their cheeks slick with tears. My stomach clenches. “It’s supposed to have that effect.”

  She folds her arms across her stomach. “I know people think I’m a big dork for loving it the way I do, but this is why history is so important to me. Sometimes, though, I get too comfortable in the distance of it. I mean, yeah, I read about things, but they are stats and facts, removed—it’s the past. This kind of place reminds me that history is happening around us all the time. Somewhere in the world right now, this kind of evil is still happening. It’s completely overwhelming when you let yourself think about it.”

  “I know.” I close my hand over hers and gaze at the western edge of the Tiergarten, at the neat green trees. It’s difficult to think that a city this beautiful holds such terrible ghosts. I squeeze her hand. “We studied this one-act play a few months ago at the Collective. It was set in a Japanese internment camp in Oregon during the war. In it, the father of the family made flowers out of scraps of paper for his son and daughter, because, he told them, they needed to know they could always find the beautiful parts of the world no matter what. It was such a sad, hopeful play. That part really stuck with me. That choice. To put any sort of beauty in the world is an active, maybe even aggressively subversive act, I think, even if it’s just for one other person to see. It’s one of the things I fell in love with most about theater.”

  Abby drops her head onto my shoulder, her hair tickling my chin. “I think you’ve always been that person, Rye. I mean, I’m glad you found this whole acting thing, but you’ve always been that person to me. When the world throws a Crap Party, you show up with awesome decorations and snacks. It’s just who you are.”

  “Thanks.” Her compliment warms me, but I can’t help but think that when she had the biggest surprise Crap Party of her life thrown at her, I sent chocolates and RSVP’d no.

  She clears her throat. “It’s hard, though.”

  “What is?”

  “To keep trying to put the good stuff out there. I mean, we can say over and over be positive or look on the bright side, but it’s tricky work to actually do it. I didn’t realize until this year how hard it is. Because the world keeps throwing stuff at you. Not just the big world stuff—but the smaller, individual stuff, too. My parents split up this year, and I joined the ranks of kids with divorced parents. I know it’s nothing special or new—”

  “Abby, when I said that I didn’t—”

  “No, it is ordinary. I know that. But it feels brand-new to me in this terribly extraordinary way. It’s hard to explain. One minute, we’re a family, and the next minute …” Abby makes an exploding sound and her hands become a puppet bomb. “People keep telling me things will be okay, that it will all work out in the big picture, but I can’t seem to figure out how to get out of the small picture.” She waves at the slabs in front of us. “Which is annoying, because it’s not like we were ripped apart by a fascist government or something. We did our own ripping.” She frowns at this. “I guess I still don’t even totally understand what happened to us.”

  “Maybe there isn’t a rational reason. People grow apart.”

  “Right. Kate says that, too. I mean, I know that intellectually, but I didn’t truly believe love could just do that. You think it’s something that sticks, but you’d be wrong.”

  I take her hand. “Sometimes, it sticks.”

  “But does it even matter? When we’re ultimately just a stat on some record book somewhere?” She swallows hard, and I can tell she’s a little embarrassed about her ramblings. “Ugh, listen to me.”

  I assure her she’s in the right city for this kind of existential reflection. “It matters. My acting teacher Niles says that in theater we tell both small and big stories, and that it often takes the small stories to understand the big ones. Yours is one of those small, important stories. This”—I motion out to Berlin—“is a big story, but there were millions of small ones inside it. It’s one of the reasons I want to be an actor, to tell those stories.” She nods but doesn’t say anything. We sit in the hot quiet of the sun for a moment. “Abby?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Did you really like the show last night?”

  She widens her eyes. “Of course I did!”

  “It’s just, when Jonas asked you, I wasn’t sure if you really thought so or if you were just being nice.” I hate how insecure my voice sounds, but I need to know she understood it, that she sees how important this is to me, that it’s not just a whim.

  She gives me a funny look. “Well, I might have missed some of it because it was in German. I didn’t even realize those puppets were made out of milk cartons until Tavin said something. They were just boxes with cows on them. I thought maybe the play had something to do with cows.”

  “It was about oppression and poverty!”

  “Bovine oppression and poverty?” She leans into me in that way that tells me she’s opened her heart too wide and needs to dilute the moment with humor.

  I decide to let her, decide to help her lighten the mood. “You shouldn’t joke about it, you know? There are plenty of oppressed cows in the world.” I pull her to standing, and we start walking toward Ebertstraße. We can grab lunch in Potsdamer Platz before heading to Checkpoint Charlie.

  She links arms with me. “Well, I will be the first to buy a ticket to your Power to the Cow play.”

  “That’s actually a pretty good title.”

  After lunch, we walk to Checkpoint Charlie, which during the Cold War was the Allied name for the best-known crossing point between divided Berlin. In the sixties, a human activist established this controversial museum near the famous guard station. In it, I read the terrifying account of how the Wall went up in 1961, basically overnight, with soldiers unspooling rolls of barbed wire, and it remained for almost three decades until it finally came crashing down. I wander around the hot space of the museum. There are dozens of stories written in small, dense print, of families being trapped on opposite sides of the Wall, trying to reunite, of people disappearing, of fear and pain. As I read them, goose bumps crawl over my skin even though the museum is oppressively hot. The weight of it all threatens to overwhelm me, and my stomach churns and knots, beads of sweat breaking out across my face and the back of my neck.

  Riya notices. “You look kind of green. Hope you didn’t get a bad kebab at lunch.” When I can’t even laugh at her joke, her face shifts to genuine concern. “Seriously, you don’t look so good. Are you going to barf?” Her eyes dart nervously around at the other tourists. “Please don’t.”

  “I won’t,” I hurry to promise, and her face relaxes. We both know Riya’s fear of puking is a borderline phobia. She will do anything to avoid it or any proximity to it. I take a few deep breaths, the stories from the museum racing through my brain. I try to close my eyes against them, try not to think about how it feels like our own sort of wall went up between us this year, about how we’re still pulling it apart. The metaphor’s so obvious I’d be embarrassed to mention it to Riya. “It’s probably just a bad cramp,” I lie. “Like those stabbing ones I used to get when we ran twenty wind sprints in Ms. McGrath’s gym class, who never believed me, by the way, when I got them.”

  Riya puts an arm around my shoulders and leads me away to some shade cast by a nearby building. “I’m pretty sure she only had us run about ten of those, but glad to see you’re not hanging on to it.” She peers closely at my sweaty face. “You’re pro
bably too hot. It’s ridiculously humid today. We should go somewhere cooler.” She perks up. “I know! We can go to Galeries Lafayette.”

  Riya’s answer to everything. Shopping. “I don’t know—”

  “It will be nice inside. It’s like a ten-minute walk, but we could hop in a taxi.”

  “I’m okay to walk as long as it’s slowly.”

  As we move sluggishly up Friedrichstraße, Riya fills me in on some of the history of the Galeries Lafayette, an enormous French department store with a famous central glass-and-steel funnel designed by the French architect Jean Nouvel. I nod along, mostly concentrating on taking one step at a time, the cramp shifting like a knife between my ribs. Maybe it was just the kebab, and not that horrible wall. Either one of them.

  “You’re probably dehydrated.” Riya eyes me, keeping her pace slow. “Really weird stuff can happen when you get dehydrated. Have you had enough water?” I shake my head, wincing as I trudge alongside her. “See! Dehydration.” Without stopping our pace, she roots around in her bag, extracts an aluminum water bottle, and hands it to me. “Sorry, it’s kind of warm.” I drink it anyway, little sips, and it does help. “Yes? Is that better?”

  I hand it back to her. “Do they have air-conditioning in this city?”

  Somehow, I make it inside the Galeries Lafayette and downstairs to the upscale food court, the air a welcome change—not arctic in the way of many American malls, but much cooler than the humid heat outside. Riya deposits me at a blond wood table and disappears, leaving me to admire the French pastries in the glass dessert cases, and I start to feel better just sitting here amid the subterranean sweets.

  Riya returns with a glass of what looks like ginger ale and a plate with two butter cookies. “Drink this.” She plunks the glass down in front of me, and I take a sip. It’s delicious, with hints of lemon and ginger, but not too sweet.

  My stomach starts to unwind. “Thanks, Rye. I think I was too hot. Or maybe I’m just worn out. Too many intense things back-to-back. I’m such a bumpkin.”