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.
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