Girl with the Red Balloon (The Balloonmakers)

by Katherine Locke

  But we hadn’t gone out in almost six months. In January, the protests had resulted in mass arrests and Rainer closing Phantasma, afraid that some of his people who were arrested had been outed by Stasi informants in the club. When he reopened, he did it so quietly that I heard the club was empty the first couple of weeks. He probably lost money trying to keep it stocked.

  He was going to lose his shit when he saw us. Mitz and I used to be a couple of his most frequent customers. It was one way to blow off steam. Lately, we had taken to midnight conversations in the kitchen, pushing a bottle of vodka back and forth between us while Ellie slept above us. The girl could sleep through anything.

  And then, she could take the edge off me in that quiet way of hers. She had no idea. Mitzi was contagious like the glitter she wore. Wherever she went, she made people sparkle because she sparkled. Ellie calmed people because she was calm.

  “What does your shirt say?” Ellie asked, turning her head to try to read my shirt as we walked. I stopped to let her read it under the streetlight. I’d worn it as my own little protest, safer than Mitzi’s slogans written on the skin and as daring as I’d get with Ellie here. I watched her mouth form the word sehnsucht. Then she peeked up, puzzled.

  “Sehnsucht,” I said, pronouncing the word slowly for her. “It means…ah, like a deep longing, but for something that can’t really be defined.”

  “That makes sense,” Ellie said, her bottom lip jutting out as she thought. I wanted to touch it, kiss it. I looked away from her. She said, her voice hesitant, “Mitzi said you have fernweh and—weltschmerz?”

  “Similar ideas.” Not exactly. Fernweh, maybe. A longing for a home that didn’t exist. Too many outsiders thought of us Romani like that. Like every human needs the solidity of a place. I didn’t need a place. I wanted the solidity of my own mind, whether or not that required the solidity of a place. Weltschmerz, or a world weariness, I’d argue with, but Mitzi often called me this to my face. She liked to think that she was the bright to my dark. I guess she was.

  Phantasma was lights and bass and a floor that shook hearts in their rib cages. It was too many people trying to be alive at the same time. Half the time, like tonight, you could barely hear the music through the blasted-out speakers shaking dangerously overhead, and god only knew what Rainer paid to have the neighbors and police ignore the noise at nights.

  Rainer probably had some shady smuggling deals going on. As long as I didn’t know about them, I didn’t really care. Phantasma was like coming home. At the door, Rainer—all five foot three of him with his slippery smile and his odd eyes, one brown and one blue—got off the stool and shook my hand, slapping my back. He hugged Mitzi and kissed both her cheeks, repeating the process with Ellie, who blushed. Of course.

  “Long time, no see,” Rainer said, flashing a gold-toothed smile. “I thought you were going to stay away forever.”

  “Giving you some space,” I said. “Others return?”

  I didn’t mean the general public, and he knew it. Rainer was one of the only outsiders to know about the balloons. He knew because he’d sent his wife and daughter over to the West on them. He didn’t want to leave yet. He said big things were coming, and he wanted to be a witness. If I told one person what Ellie had told me about the wall coming down, I’d tell Rainer. He was one of the good ones.

  “Sure,” he said. “Christian, Trina, Klaus, Heinz, Jules, Paloma, Bernadette…Just you two holding out.”

  Mitzi said, “Life got busy.”

  “You mean your fake boyfriend here got a new girl,” Rainer said, jutting his chin at Ellie. “Who are you going to play hetero with now, Mitzi, my love?”

  Ellie’s hand tightened around mine, and Mitzi smiled wolfishly. “Heinz owes me.”

  Rainer threw his head back and laughed. “I bet he does. Little ass.”

  I unfurled a West German note from my pocket and pressed it into Rainer’s hand. “We’re good?”

  He didn’t even look at it. He could tell by the feel, rubbing it between two fingers as he slid it into his pocket, that it was genuine. He once tried to teach me to feel the difference between counterfeit and genuine notes. I lacked whatever special senses he contained in his fingertips.

  We slipped down the stairs, brushing by people smoking on the steps. I kept a tight grip of Ellie’s hand until she whispered that I was hurting her and I quickly released her hand. Her fingers touched the small of my back, and we made our way through the mess, people reaching out to touch us, offer us drugs, drinks, music, sex. Anything. It was fair game inside Rainer’s club. It was an escape from aboveground. This was underground. This was subculture. This was what we all dreamed about when we fell asleep at night. Some people practically lived here because it was easier than being up there. For anyone with a work ban, it was also the safest place to be.

  The music hit us two floors down into the dark of the club, a throbbing steady bass that cut through my chest, making my heart feel tight. I turned around as the lights passed from red to green to blue to black lights and back to red again. In the changing lights, Ellie looked even younger, a little overwhelmed and a little scared. I stopped her on the bottom step and had to put my mouth next to her ear to be heard. At least, that’s what I told myself.

  “We don’t have to be here,” I shouted. “If it’s too much.”

  It smelled like pot and sweat and dampness, like the basement never dried out from night after night of sweaty bodies trying to dance away their own weltschmerz. I couldn’t hear her reply, but Ellie stepped off the last stair and past me into the chaos. I followed her and Mitzi through the crowd to the bar. Phantasma had one drink. You got whatever they served you that night, and you didn’t ask questions. The bartenders wore bras and miniskirts, their stomachs painted with rainbow stripes and occasionally a flag of united Germany. It was risky. The last thing anyone wanted was something permanently on their body that was against socialist government.

  “Brigitte,” I said, lifting a hand to greet a dark-haired girl with a bar through her lower lip. She probably didn’t hear me say her name, but she definitely saw me. She leaned over the bar and slapped me so fast I didn’t have time to deflect it. The sting wrapped around my head like tendrils. I winced, bringing a hand up to my hot cheek that was tingling as feeling returned to it. “Hi.”

  “You broke Karolina’s heart,” yelled Brigitte over the noise as she poured us drinks out of a brown pitcher. At my elbow, Ellie’s eyes were wider than plates, going from my reddened cheek to the drinks, to Brigitte where they lingered over the piercing. It wasn’t even the strangest piercing Brigitte had, but I wasn’t going to tell Ellie that right now.

  “To be fair,” I said, “she broke up with me. And then slept with my best friend.”

  Mitzi shook her head. “Don’t involve me. I didn’t even know you guys were a thing until after she broke up with me. This was different than that Marie debacle.”

  Brigitte poked me in the chest. “Because you wouldn’t commit. You are lucky I did not spit in your drink.”

  I smiled. “You have my eternal gratitude.”

  She shook her head and then glared at Ellie. “Who are you?”

  “Ellie Baum,” Ellie said promptly and held out her hand.

  I hid a smile as Brigitte scowled at her and gingerly took her hand, shaking it slowly. Ellie kept smiling, and Brigitte glared at me as she poured Ellie a drink. “She’s too happy. Where’s she from?”

  “Here. She just doesn’t get out much. You’d be happy too if it was your first time at Phantasma,” I told her.

  Brigitte snorted. “I’d be happy for my first time of anything back.”

  Ellie sipped the beer and made a face. “Oh, this is some awful beer.”

  “Socialism tastes like shit, sweetheart,” Brigitte said in return, rolling her eyes.

  Mitzi leaned over the bar and whispered something to Brigitte that made Brigitte’s eyebrows go up. She glanced at Mitzi, her eyes traveling up Mitzi’s body. It was really st
range sometimes, seeing someone check out your best friend so blatantly. Brigitte nodded and said, “See you after?”

  “Looking forward to it,” Mitzi sang over her shoulder, taking Ellie by the elbow and steering her toward the floor. I once again trailed after them, realizing quickly that I was the third wheel of the Mitzi and Ellie Show.

  The middle of the dance floor felt like the middle of a war zone. Bodies and lights and sound made the room tilt. I steadied myself with a hand on Mitzi’s hip, instinctively reaching for her. Ellie turned around and shouted something to Mitzi that I didn’t hear, but both girls cracked up, spinning around, their drinks to their mouths, starting to dance and drawing me toward them. If this was a bad trip, it was the best bad trip I’d ever been on. I let the music rock through me, taking over my body, watching the lights play out on everyone’s faces, hands touching and reaching out.

  Mitzi grabbed Ellie’s drink from her, nudging her toward me, and we came together, dancing and laughing, barely able to hear each other, but her fingers ran up my arms and my hands found the curves of her body.

  Forget time travel. And whatever way time works. Forget all of that. Forget every reason I shouldn’t be falling head over bloody heels for this girl with her summer-sky eyes.

  I bent my head and touched our foreheads together, watching her eyes flutter closed. I said, hoping my voice didn’t carry much beyond us, “Of all the people to grab a balloon, Ellie Baum, I’m glad it was you.”

  She smiled and tilted her mouth to my ear. This time, my eyes closed. She said, “I bet you tell that to all the time-traveling girls.”

  I grinned. “Only the pretty ones. Is it working?”

  “I was won over by the train tunnel expeditions.” She laughed and said, “That’s what she said.”

  “That’s what who said?” I asked, but my question was lost in the changing music, our bodies crowded together as people pushed onto the dance floor. Mitzi reappeared, her hands empty and totally slammed. She made kissy faces at us and then twirled off, dancing with some guy wearing only the top half of a tuxedo and washed-out jeans.

  Ellie brushed her hair out of her face and pointed over my shoulder at the bar. I nodded and took her by the hand, sliding back over there for a breather and something to drink. Brigitte rolled her eyes when we asked for water, but she managed to find some. We’d probably be the only ones asking for water the whole night.

  Ellie drummed her fingers on the backs of my hands, across the thin white scars on my knuckles. “I hadn’t noticed these before. Where’d you get the scar?”

  “Getting out of England. I keep thinking I’ll get tattoos to cover them up, but I haven’t yet.” I pulled my hands into fists, turning them toward her to look like I was boxing. “A sun and a moon. Duality. Both give off just enough light. I want to do that too.”

  She pulled my hands down and kissed me again. I didn’t want to be here anymore. I wanted to take her home. That was exactly the worst next step, but she sang my body alive. I wanted to sing her alive too. I tugged her off the chair to stand between my legs, kissing her smiling mouth.

  “Want to get out of here?” I asked her, half hopeful, half dreading the answer.

  “We just got here,” she whispered back, her lips brushing against mine.

  “I don’t care.” I ran my hand down the back of her sweaty neck, across the low back of her dress. She shivered.

  “Okay,” she said. “I’ll go.”

  I moved impossibly fast out of the chair, and then forcibly slow myself down, leading her through the crowd, my pulse drowning out the beat of the room. I gestured to Mitzi over the heads of everyone. She made a face at me when I pointed to Ellie and myself and then the stairs. That was fine. She had plans afterward anyway, and I was not interested in standing between Mitzi and Brigitte.

  We climbed the stairs, surfacing from the stink and the heat and the bass, and pushed open the door into the fresh air. Ellie shook her head and laughed, running a finger down her own arm in the sweat that clung to her skin.

  “Gross,” she said, giggling. She gave me a shy look. “Where are we going?”

  I didn’t know, but I didn’t think it mattered. The rooftop. The house. Anywhere. Anywhere with her. We waved to Bert, who scowled back at us, and headed down through the alley, back toward home. Ellie told me about the one and only time she’d snuck out of her parents’ house to go to a house party, which sounded wildly different than ours. I was laughing at her description of people getting drunk around a pool when we turned the corner and both came to a dead stop.

  Red balloons. Bodies. Everywhere. Littering the street. At first, I didn’t recognize them. I thought they were blankets, or people sleeping in the streets. Then my eyes and mind focused on the stillness of the body closest to us, the unusual clothing, the balloons, some still tethered to hands, others drifting down the street, floating up or down, bumping into walls aimlessly. I heard Ellie whisper something I couldn’t process. The stillness of the street became increasingly loud in my head, filling all the spaces that the club music had created inside me. Everything was too quiet. My training told me to think about danger, but all I could think was, There are so many.

  “Kai,” she said, squeezing my hand. “Kai, that guy. He has a cell phone in his hand.”

  I remembered her telling me about cell phones, tiny portable phones. She let go of my hand and approached the first body. She crouched by it, her fingers trembling as they took the body’s pulse. She looked over her shoulder at me, lips pressed together, and shook her head. She pulled the cell phone out of his hand and pressed a button on the side.

  She shook her head again. Her German stumbled for the first time in weeks as she tried to find words from her time that I’d know. That was a strange realization, and it almost caught me off guard in this moment. “It’s got a code on it. I can’t see inside it. I can see the date though. Kai, they’re from the future. Again.”

  I swallowed and took a deep breath. “How many of them?”

  We began to count, but when we got to nine and saw more bodies down a side alley, Ellie put her hand on my arm, making me jump. “This isn’t for us, Kai. We have to find Felix or Ashasher or someone.”

  “Get Mitzi,” I said. “Quick.”

  She slipped the phone into my pocket and scooted off into the dark, leaving me in a street full of bodies. Full of dead people and their broken magic balloons.

  Chapter Twenty–Three

  AMEN

  East Berlin, German Democratic Republic, May 1988

  Ellie

  Mitzi wrapped her arms around herself. I was too worked up to feel the sweat drying and cooling on my skin. I’d be cold later, I knew. But right then, I was numb to it. The turning of the corner and bodies scattered everywhere. Everywhere. Like a scene out of a movie after the killer virus went through a mall or something. Not all the bodies looked like they were from the same time period though. Some of them wore clothes I recognized, or had iPods or cell phones. I was half hoping as we turned the corner that Felix would be there, fixing things.

  He wasn’t. Just Kai, slumped against the wall. He stared at the ground, his eyes shimmering, and said, “Sixteen. Sixteen bodies.”

  Mitzi swore colorfully, stomping down the alley. She stopped at each body, feeling for a pulse. I followed her, unsure of how to help. She didn’t look up at me when she said, “You know where to look on these people. Find any ID or anything else that can give them away as time travelers. We’re not going to get the bodies off the streets before the Stasi find them.”

  So behind her, as she checked for a pulse, I stripped the people of their ID, phones, iPods, medical ID tags. My stomach turned when I saw someone was an emergency room resident, another with pictures of her children in her wallet, and another…another from Pittsburgh. Her address on her driver’s license was right around the corner from me, but I didn’t recognize her. I wondered if there were signs up around the neighborhood with her face. I wondered if there were signs up with
my face.

  These people would be among those missing people who are never found. They went for runs and disappeared. They stepped outside for a smoke and disappeared. These people…I had read about them in the news. And now I was one of them. How long had balloons been acting out and killing time travelers?

  And why had I survived when everyone else was dying?

  The whole process took fifteen minutes, especially once we fell into the rhythm. We didn’t expect to feel a pulse. I stopped waiting for Mitzi to feel for one before I began to feel for a wallet or purse or anything to take with me. One of the girls from a few years after my year—time was getting complicated in my head—had an enormous bag, so I started stuffing everything in there. By the end, it was biting into my shoulder from the weight of it all.

  One woman had fallen at a strange angle, and from a distance, for a moment, I thought it was my mom with her short, curly hairy and her favorite sandals on. My heart stopped in my throat, and I stumbled over the sidewalk toward her, falling to my knees. My hands shook as they brushed her shoulder. Tears filled my eyes as I brushed the woman’s hair back against her ear, her skin dry and cold, as cold as the pavement.

  It was not my mother. I pressed my hand to my mouth and closed my eyes, trying to breathe. Mitzi squatted next to me and said, “Okay?”

  I nodded and took a deep breath. “Yeah. Yeah, fine. I just thought—”

  Mitzi said, her voice dropping low, “Don’t think. Just hurry. We can’t dawdle.”

  I reached into the woman’s purse and picked out her wallet. An appointment card fell out. She must have been on her way to a doctor’s appointment when she saw the balloon. My stomach twisted in my gut, and I shoved the wallet and the card into the bag on my shoulder. I couldn’t look at the woman anymore. I bit my lip and glanced up at the sky, anywhere to get my eyes off her face. I brushed the hair back over her face. She deserved a little peace and anonymity here.