As Dirk stood at the door—box in his arms filled with plates and forks, in a tank top patterned in the neons of a victory flag—Michael realized that he hated him. Dirk hadn’t talked shit about him or lied or given him crabs. But he deployed control in the guise of kindness. Used reliability as a service he expected payment for. So when Dirk showed up at the house Michael had inherited from Udo only weeks dead, a house Michael hadn’t invited him to; as Michael pulled himself away from a home improvement show where sisters got to remake each other’s houses—one certainly hating the other for the paint colors she’d chosen; as he moved to the door when the knocks wouldn’t quit and peeked through the window, confirming his suspicion that it wasn’t one of the errant flower deliveries that still showed up, Michael’s hate swelled. He imagined punching Dirk. Michael had never hit anyone.
“Housewarming presents,” Dirk said, bags on either side of him.
“I’m not having a housewarming,” Michael answered. Dirk kissed him.
Michael had been in the hotel pool a few months back when he’d realized that the man in the next lane was racing him. Even before he’d seen the face that turned out to be Dirk’s, he’d fallen for his legs, the shifting heft in his Speedo. Now his cousin and best friend was dead, Michael having thrown a fit when he’d found out Liesl had had Udo cremated before he’d been able to see the body.
Dirk invited himself inside.
“Jesus,” Dirk said.
“Is dead,” Michael answered.
Dirk’s handsomeness—which Justine called unsurprising—suddenly made Michael cringe. He wanted chipped teeth, crowds of tattoos. An ass that had never seen the sun.
The main floor was empty except for the sofa and television. Apart from the guest room where Michael now kept everything he owned, he hadn’t changed a thing. Plastic cups filled the sink. Milk in the fridge hardened to curd. Unimportant notes Udo had written cluttered the counter, and a calendar stayed on the wrong month. Taking out the trash had been Michael’s one concession.
“Oh, Michael,” Dirk said at each turned corner.
“Yes?” Michael asked, and Dirk looked at the walls, the cabinets’ handles.
After Udo died, Dirk had made sure Michael ate and brushed his teeth. Forced him to watch silly movies, some of which Michael wept through. Dirk watching him cry felt like more debt, his tally blocks long. They stopped in a hall. Dirk shone with the tamped-down joy of reimbursement.
“I have hooks,” Dirk said. To hang yourself, Michael thought.
Hating Dirk filled Michael with so much energy that, for a moment, he was able to see beyond mourning. He wanted Dirk to say more stupid things. To crumple the notes Udo had written, which were useless to hold on to, though Michael would anyway.
“And candles for the smell,” Dirk went on.
“What smell?” Michael asked.
Dirk’s look—of constipated pity, of rescue to bill Michael for later—was the last straw.
“I’m sorry, Dirk,” Michael said. Anger’s energy shifted to something bulky and dull.
“We’ll just clean it up and do some home improve—”
“I don’t want home improvements,” Michael said.
Dirk’s smile tightened. On television, one of the sisters painted a wall.
Seven minutes later, Dirk said: “My friends were right.”
“That I’m a dick,” Michael guessed.
“Exactly,” Dirk said, and moved toward the door.
Perhaps Dirk wasn’t as calculating as he’d imagined, but liked Michael too much. But being called a dick livened him again. Michael knew Dirk would call his friends to commiserate. Dick, they’d say as they sat at one of the city’s lesser bars. Clinking glasses, wishing him shit.
“I’m a dick,” Michael said, though it no longer seemed to mean anything.
* * *
One night years before, Michael had been in Berlin. Early spring rain chewed through the snow. He’d gone home with a man who lived in an old flat in Prenzlberg. Graffiti lined the stairwell. A shower sandwiched in the kitchen. He and the man fucked fast and napped briefly. When the man went to refill the apartment’s coal oven, he left its door open for a moment so that its light projected giant versions of them across the wall. And, in a routine he’d probably done before, he pushed his pelvis up, the shadow of his cock a risen person. “So big,” Michael said. “I don’t know how I’m supposed to put that anywhere.” Though it had been cold, Michael opened the window. Rain shocked the crook of his elbow. And he felt lucky, for this city with men whose beds he might lie in, the maze of crooked streets, bars with men who’d glance at him and keep looking.
After Michael ended things with Dirk, he fell back on sex’s purpose. He checked in at the bar and continued on to Hamburg. As that city’s skyline glowed, the Autobahn whirred through his opened windows. A few hours later he was in the apartment of a couple that laughed at everything until Michael stuck his tongue down the throat of one of them to turn things serious. He drove home early the next morning via a coastal road, though it took twice as long. In Kühlungsborn he stopped and swam and lay on the sand afterward. By the time he got to the house, he wanted only to plant himself on the sofa and watch television. He pulled into the driveway just as Mutti was leaving her house next door. In the decade since her brief marriage to Josef ended, she’d turned stout, her blondeness overtaken by gray. Mutti wore a dress like a sack. She tapped on his window.
“Did you send your friend away?” she asked.
“You like to spy on me,” he answered.
“I just look out of my window and see,” Mutti said. “You didn’t like that one, though.”
“I didn’t,” he said, and pictured Dirk at a store, getting Michael curtains and a broom. Pictured Udo on the water, so taken with sailing he didn’t notice darkness claiming the day.
Mutti fiddled with her necklace. Michael’s cheeks itched from the couple’s stubble. He wanted sleep, to hear Udo’s gruff timbre. Mutti kissed his forehead and drove away.
Michael used the spare key and went into Mutti’s house. He made himself a coffee, lay on her couch, and skimmed through magazines. Cindy, Mutti’s ancient cat, slithered out of the carrying crate she spent most of her time in. Her smell followed with a minion’s devotion. Cindy opened her mouth, let out something between a hiss and a meow. One of her fangs had fallen out. Her fur was thin, the skin underneath it the color of boiled chicken. “You hated Dirk, too, yes?” Michael asked, and her arthritic tail shivered. Cindy probably hated Dirk. But Cindy hated everyone.
* * *
Michael started swimming twice a day. He swam down the coast past towns he’d never been to, continued until his shoulders started to rebel. He texted the teacher he’d slept with in the past—a man who always talked about poetry and sentences—and wrote, I’m coming over. No talking. When they were done, sheets ropy around their ankles, the teacher asked, “What was the no-talking thing?” Michael kissed him and left. He drove to the bar. Moving inside its locked door, he jerked off. His free hand rested on the counter, which was sticky and collaged in stains.
Michael went back to Hamburg that night and met a man with a boyfriend at home who didn’t approve of sex outside the relationship. When it got late, they snuck onto the roof of the man’s building. Gravel gouged their knees. The man kept shushing him, telling Michael that his boyfriend had perfect hearing.
Afterward, Michael wanted Udo to talk to. He’d have laughed at Michael’s threesome story. Would have asked why he and the man on the roof didn’t put clothes between their knees and the gravel. Michael sat on Udo’s sofa. Coins were wedged between its cushions. Leaving the coins and notes and the sheets on Udo’s bed did nothing, but still Michael did it. Sometimes he sent texts to Udo’s disconnected number. Three men in one night, he wrote. I still have a crush on the shawarma guy. You have five euros and 42 cents in your sofa.
Michael found a man online in a nearby suburb. He was handsome, at least according to his pictures. His house neighbored a
potato field.
“You’re a potato farmer,” Michael said as he walked into the house, which was tidy and small. They were half undressed before they made it to the sofa. The man had a dog, which clacked across the floor. It was knee-high and wiry, with a wet, wide snout. It circled them, until the man gave it a look and it settled. The man moved on top of Michael. He kissed him hard, with skill. He was a great kisser, he could have told Udo. Has a thing for armpits, he would have added. Michael sank into the sofa’s too-soft cushions. The man’s tongue explored Michael’s throat. “Maybe the floor’s better,” Michael said. They moved, the dog again activated. The man’s mouth meandered across Michael’s stomach. The dog’s tail whipped his head. The man had a thing for eye contact. He was lovely or crazy, he would have written Udo, who’d have answered that Michael was lovely or crazy, or would have offered up the closest thing he gave to advice: Be not stupid. The man invited Michael to stay over. They moved to an attic bedroom. A round window, as if from a ship, crowned the bed. The man slid under the duvet. As Michael hesitated, the dog moved in, in his stead.
“You’re really a potato farmer?” Michael asked, hoping to be a dick again, for this man to shake his head and let the dog stay.
“You like potatoes,” the man answered.
Michael excused himself, went to the bathroom, and turned the tap on. He jerked off in the mirror. At certain moments he looked handsome, at others he was an exaggeration of hollow cheeks and large chin. Water whirred from the faucet. Michael came. He cleaned up and climbed into bed with the man, whose name he’d forgotten.
The man fell asleep with his arm across Michael’s chest. In five minutes his leg joined in, sturdy from something that was probably not farming. Michael distracted himself with thoughts of this man in a field, hands the color of earth. The dog farted, and Michael tried to remember the man’s name. He couldn’t come up with a letter or number of consonants. Dog and man breathed in syncopation. Michael’s stomach and heart flipped as if one organ. With the first light, he got up. The dog’s tail thumped as Michael searched for his shoes.
* * *
Michael blamed the boat. The tiny, stupid boat Udo had gotten after his divorce from Angela. Once a few months had passed, Michael was able to say that the warm spell had tricked Udo as it tricked everyone. But when it first happened he was hit with a choking hopelessness. Michael blamed Udo, felt struck down by his own meanness, then turned so sad he would lie on the floor or cry behind the bar until Justine called him a cab. Mutti turned hands-on. She called Michael’s doctor, accompanied him to the appointment, where the doctor started by giving Michael a pamphlet on antidepressants, he and his mother arguing later as to when the best time to give a pamphlet was, landing on either never or the middle of the appointment. He remembered the clinic Udo had taken him to, the tests he’d known would turn out fine.
In those first days after he’d died, Michael found out surprising things about his cousin. Udo had a large amount in savings. He also had a will. Sitting in a lawyer’s office, Michael learned that Udo’s money was to be split between Udo’s half sister and Liesl and Mutti. His car given to Heinz. The lawyer looked down at her papers. “And the final thing,” she said. Her blouse was shiny. Her eyebrows and hair were different colors. “The house.”
Sadness caught in Michael’s throat, also a widower’s recognition. The lawyer shuffled papers. On her desk, tea steeped in a mug. “The house is given to Michael Haas,” she said. “And Adela Sullivan.”
* * *
It was Phone Tap Friday at the bar. Anyone willing would write down a secret they’d once shared over the phone, the thing they would have been most ashamed for the Stasi to have heard. It brought bigger crowds each week, and each week the risk of renting and transforming the bar fell further away. At ten, entries closed and Michael stood on the bar to read the confessions aloud. Once finished, he and Justine would choose a Shamed Citizen of the Week, who, in turn for their confession, drank free. The first winner admitted to fucking her boyfriend’s younger brother in a high school art room. Entries turned more sordid from there.
Michael and Justine mixed and muddled and poured. The iPod shuffled to a Kraftwerk song. “Stop the radioactivity,” the singer droned. “It’s in the air for you and me.” A customer ordered three Brainwash shots.
“So many people here.” Michael looked up to see his mother. Customers on either side of her held fans of money.
“A thing we do,” he said.
Justine saw Mutti and waved. As subversive as she cast herself, she still grew shy around elders. She called Mutti Frau Haas, though his mother had told her a half dozen times that her name was Beate. No one offered Mutti a seat; Michael found an extra stool and slid it behind the bar. Mutti sat and said she didn’t want to stay, though when he offered her a beer, she accepted.
“I have something to tell you,” Mutti said.
“Bad?” Michael asked.
As Mutti shook her head, she gave off a whiff of perfume. She’d told him once that she wore perfume to keep the smell of old people from getting into her clothes.
A large man leaned in to order, and the loss of Udo appeared in a sudden gust. Something in this man’s jaw, in how he slid his arms onto the bar, seemed stolen.
Customers worked to catch Mutti’s eye as if she worked there. She shook her head, smiled. It was her younger self Michael still conjured when he thought of her, hair bright blond, so nervous at the looks from customers that she would have started making drinks though she didn’t know what was in them.
“Hold on,” Michael said to his mother, and climbed onto the bar.
“Hello, citizens,” he said into the microphone. He kept his face stony, voice clipped. Justine turned off the music. “We are here for the protection and betterment of our great society to share the shameful goings-on in our city. Let’s begin.” A few people giggled, likely those who’d written confessions down. “I once watched my brother drown a cat,” Michael read. “Short and to the point. That’s entry number one, comrades. Though that feels more like a public service.” Laughing and booing. Michael gestured to the booing person that he was watching her. Had Michael been in the audience, he would have seen this shtick as artless camp. “Number two,” he said. “Oh! I slept with my chemistry teacher in eleventh grade. For several months. I also started spying on his wife, who was a cow.” Candles lit customers’ faces. The next few entries focused on sex in strange locales. Michael’s own tales of public sex would have blown these out of the water. He finished reading and climbed down. Mutti looked at her drink. Justine looked mortified.
“Found it disturbing?” Michael asked.
Mutti shook her head. Her face had loosened in middle age. No matter how many times he saw her, this softer, graying version left him disappointed and relieved. Her shirt was the green of a cartoon frog.
“But what I had to tell you,” Mutti said.
Perhaps she and her on-again, off-again dentist friend had decided to move in together, though Michael had seen no evidence of him at Mutti’s house as of late. Their sort-of relationship had started when Mutti went in for a cleaning and he’d remarked on the quality of her teeth. “As if you were a horse for purchase,” Michael had said, her look telling him that he was terrible, also not wrong.
“It’s a bit busy,” Michael said to Mutti. “It’s urgent?”
He took two orders. He and Justine hadn’t decided on the Shamed Citizen yet. Part of him wanted to declare that there would be no winner until people had something real to confess. No one cared about fucking, about what your brother drowned. The man who looked vaguely like Udo moved toward the bathroom. Michael wanted to follow him.
“I’ll come tomorrow,” he said. “We can talk then.”
Mutti left, sliding past the bank of people leaning in to the bar. Michael winced down a whiskey. Customers waiting to be served watched him.
* * *
Unable to sleep, Michael went for a swim at first light, going for so long tha
t halfway back he dragged himself from the water to lie in the sand. Just after, he found himself at the bar. The cleaning crew, Albanian sisters with square torsos, saw him and smiled. “So clean,” they kept saying. The place burned with bleach. They stood on a ladder to dust poster frames. With each reach he imagined one of them losing her footing. Michael thanked them and left. He drove to a coffee shop below Dirk’s apartment. He hoped Dirk might stop there before work and see him and scowl. A dick and a fucker, Michael wanted him to say. You and that cousin deserved each other. Had Dirk said that, Michael might have wanted him again. He waited for Dirk to pass so Michael could tap on the glass, Dirk’s smile dropping as his middle finger rose. That would have been the best thing. Dirk did have lovely hands.
* * *
The government lawyer. The furniture dealer in the basement of his shop. The hairdresser who stank of cheap shampoo. Anton and his boyfriend the journalist. The journalist without Anton. Hand job from the one in the ski cap. Blow job from the one with dry lips. Markus, who was between jobs. Linus, who’d just come back from Thailand. After each one, Michael found a bathroom or a backseat or a copse of trees and jerked off though he’d just come, sex turning a fly into a hornet.
He and Wilmar moved into the woods off a hiking trail. Branches scratched their arms. Wilmar opened his mouth as though to swallow Michael whole and left as soon as they finished. Birds bounded through trees. Michael got himself hard again. His dick throbbed, but he kept on. When he emerged from the woods he came upon a woman walking a dog. Her look told him she knew what he’d been doing. He picked dirt off the bottom of his shoes and saw texts from the Potato Farmer, also from Mutti, saying she needed to talk to him: “Not a bad talk, just a talk.” He texted the Potato Farmer back to say he’d come over that night. He walked past two women who smiled at him. Michael smiled back. He wanted to apologize, to tell them it had been something he’d needed.
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