The Moment (19 page)

“You like that shit?”

The voice belonged to a diminutive woman in her early twenties. She had insanely long hair—it stretched to the middle of her back and was elaborately braided. Her face was made up in an equally elaborate way—the left side in a Kabuki-like white, the right in Goth black. Her lips were tinted purple, or perhaps that was the effect of the fluorescent tubes and the two hits of the herbal trouble that I had just inhaled and that was now making me feel outside, this madly congested place, and which also had the effect of turning the music even more violent.

“It’s . . . interesting.”

“Have another hit.”

She passed me the pipe again. I drew down another small cloud of smoke. But this time I coughed it straight out again, the narcotic effect now robbing me of peripheral vision and turning all sound into an emphatic drone.

“What’s in the pipe?” I asked.

“Skunk.”

“What?”

“Skunk. Let’s go.”

She took me by the hand.

“Go where?”

“In the back.”

I allowed myself to be led by the hand through the crowd, all ambient noise now reduced to a surreal monotone. After spending several minutes negotiating our way through the crowd we reached the black curtain. My companion pulled me through. There—on a series of mattresses—were assorted couples, all naked (or, at least, from the waist down), in varying stages of what a Victorian pornographer might have described as sexual congress. Perhaps it was the effect of the skunk. Perhaps it was the extremity of this scene. Perhaps it was the fact that there’s a part of me which, even when under the influence of a mind-contorting substance, still backs away from the lunatic fringes of excess. Perhaps I am simply someone who doesn’t like having sex with a stranger in public—and amidst twenty-four other naked heaving couples (not that I was making an exact count). And perhaps there was also something just a little off-putting about this tiny young woman with the weirdly two-toned face. Was she a member of some would-be coven of Wiccans? Another thing crossed my now thoroughly addled brain. Petra. What was I doing, about to fall onto a grubby, much stained, much overused mattress, with this rather strange person, if my heart was elsewhere?

“Scheisse,”
my companion said. “No free mattress.”

I blurrily scanned the immediate vicinity. She was right. No room at the inn.

“Another time,” she said, and drifted out of this area.

Well, that makes things easier,
I told myself. Followed by another thought:
I really need to get the hell out of here
.

I don’t remember much that followed this decision to leave, except that, as I turned away from all those naked, heaving bodies, I heard one woman say in a distinctly American accent: “They won’t believe this back in Des Moines.”

But when I scanned the room, trying to put a face to this voice, all I could see was a darkened, expansive congealment of the naked human form. No discerning features, no individual characteristics. Just a copulative phantasmagoria. It was something of which I wanted no further part. Maybe that was the skunk talking as well, as I was beginning to feel actively paranoid. So I found myself pushing my way through the crowd, making it down that long, endless black corridor and literally falling out onto the street, whereupon I was certain that secret policemen . . . agents of the Stasi, who had somehow already read my thoughts about East Berlin . . . these agents were going to bundle me into the trunk of a car and speed across Checkpoint Charlie and hold me for months, eventually using me as a bargaining chip to get one of their own operatives out of CIA detention. Then, when I was finally exchanged, the agency would wonder if I had been brainwashed and turned into a Stasi stooge operative . . . and, oh fuck, that skunk was too damn potent, and the car lights so damn bright out here, even though I don’t see a fucking light in sight, and . . .

Suddenly, out of nowhere, a cab. I threw myself inside, managed to mumble my address—the driver, a Turk, getting just a little peeved when he asked me to repeat it three times—and then curling up in the backseat and beginning to sob like a fool. All the sorrows of my little life pouring out of me, all triggered by that insane substance I had inhaled into my lungs, and which had sent me over the edge of the emotional cliff, hurtling toward . . .

Finally, my front fucking door. I threw money at the driver, I staggered inside, upstairs, stripping off everything when I reached my bed, falling atop of it, shivering like the naked moron that I was, somehow negotiating myself up again and between the sheets, clicking off the bedside light, then holding to the pillow for dear life, as I was suddenly being taken on the roller coaster ride from hell. I felt the bed, the room, spinning out of control, sending me down a black slope toward a huge tree, the airborne pillow (don’t ask) just about dodging this fatal dead end, and sending me flying, then hurling me straight down toward the ground, and vomit rising in my gorge, and me on my feet and careening toward the bathroom, just reaching the doorway as, out of nowhere, I begin to projectile vomit everywhere, and the regurgitation going on interminably and spewing in all conceivable directions, and me staggering out of there and into the kitchen, and turning on the tap in the sink, and putting my face under its frigid stream of water, and cursing myself, and feeling so utterly toxic and beyond redemption, and staggering back to the bedroom, and falling face-first onto the bed, and then . . .

Morning. Or, at least, there was light coming through the window next to the bed. I opened an eye. A bad mistake, as the very act of attempting to reemerge on Planet Earth was accompanied by a migraine of classic proportions. I touched my lips with my tongue and tasted the vile flavor of dried vomit. I tried to move but felt that enervating chill and fever that come with sweating profusely throughout the night, as the sheets were sodden and also stank of nausea. Standing up took some work—my equilibrium virtually nonexistent. Each step forward was an experience in disorientation. When I reached the bathroom, I nearly began to retch again, as I saw the remnants of my handiwork from the night before. Splattered vomit everywhere.

There are moments in life where you just simply want to curl up into a ball on the floor, press the palms of your hands against your eyes, and will away the after-effects of your stupidity. But Dad’s Marine Corps legacy—the way he always insisted that I make my bed at home with perfect hospital corners and keep my shoes well shined, and clean up any mess I made—forced me to stagger into the kitchen, put my head under the sink’s tap (didn’t I also do this last night?), and allow all that arctic Berlin water to snap me into reasonable consciousness. Then I withdrew from the tall kitchen cabinet the mop, a bucket, several rags, rubber gloves, and a bottle of the German equivalent of Mr. Clean that I had bought when first moving in here. Over the next hour I mopped up the mess I made, disinfecting the entire bathroom, making certain that no visual or olfactory traces of my stupidity remained. It was slow, grubby work, during which I told myself:
now you know why they call it dope
. The events of the night before began to reassemble in my head.
You’re lucky to have just gotten away with projectile vomiting and the mother of all hangovers
. Once the bathroom was spick-and-span and smelling of lemon disinfectant, the bed stripped and remade with clean linens, my body placed under a very cold shower, my teeth brushed repeatedly, two cups of coffee ingested (and held down) . . . after all this imposition of order upon personal chaos, I proceeded to spend the next hour getting all the gory details of last night down on paper. Only halfway through this exercise—in which I was thoroughly merciless—did I remind myself that I still hadn’t bothered to check the time. Glancing at my watch, I saw it was two thirty in the afternoon. Jesus Christ, much of the day lost. I immediately began to map out what I would do to make up for it. Finish the diary entry. Head out to the local laundry with the soiled sheets. A very late lunch at the Café Istanbul. Then back here to start editing the essay—though I also told myself that, given the current state of my brain, it was best to simply read through the piece and consecrate tomorrow to whipping it into presentable shape.

Discipline, discipline. The only antidote to life’s helter-skelter tendencies. But the more I pushed forward in my notebook with my account of that crazed, lost night, the more I also knew that I was so damn pleased to have bumped into such mad decadence. Just as I also couldn’t help but wonder what everyone who had assembled there were ultimately looking for. On a certain level it was simply a fix, a fuck, communal inebriation, and a general flaunting of society’s standard operating mores.
Der Mond Über Alabama
was all about collective subversion—and embracing the sort of sybaritic things that would land you in jail outside of its confines. I was pretty damn certain that the majority of my fellow attendees were as bourgeois in their backgrounds as I was. As such, I couldn’t now help but wonder if we were attracted to a place like
Der Mond Über Alabama
for precisely the same reason everyone there had also chosen West Berlin as a place of temporary or permanent residence. Here you didn’t need to be meeting the right people at the right parties. Here you didn’t have to push yourself onto the world. Here you could sleep with whomever you wanted and not have people talking about it. Here you were ignored, as everyone was ignored in Berlin. We were separate and isolated, and I sensed that you only stayed here if that suited your temperament.

I finished my diary entry on this thought. As I recapped my fountain pen I noted that my general physical condition had upgraded itself from catastrophic to merely terrible. I gathered up the bag of soiled sheets and clothes I was going to drop off at the laundry. I put on my coat and opened the door to head downstairs. But as I began to descend I heard two noises that threw me: the
ca-chink, ca-chink, ca-chink
of a needle stuck in a record groove, and the more profoundly disconcerting sounds of someone moaning in pain. But the moan was so low, so guttural, it was almost as if they were gagging on something. Like their own blood.

Which is exactly what was happening—as Alaistair was lying in a broken heap on the floor, blood cascading from his mouth, his breathing irregular, contorted. His studio had been subjected to a cataclysm. Paint had been splattered everywhere, brushes snapped in two, his worktable turned upside down, a window smashed, and . . . this was too devastatingly awful . . . the three big canvases he had been working on shredded with what must have been a knife.

“Alaistair, Alaistair,” I hissed as I made my way toward the debris toward him. But the pool of blood was engulfing him, making it difficult to get even close to him. I was instantly charging down the stairs, racing out into the street, into the corner shop, screaming at the startled man behind the counter.

“Polizei! Polizei! Sie müssen sofort die Polizei rufen!”

The man did as ordered, and when he informed me that the dispatcher at the emergency services said that an ambulance would be there in three minutes I ran in helter-skelter fashion back up the stairs, ascertained that Alaistair was still breathing, then dashed into his bedroom, opened the drawer on the bedside table where I knew he kept his heroin gear, ran into the kitchen, found a plastic bag, rushed back to the bedroom, dumped everything—his needles and hypodermics and tourniquets, a burnt spoon and three little packets of white powder—into the bag. Then I threw it all out the back window. At that very moment there was a pounding on the door. The paramedics and the cops had just arrived.

What happened next was wildly choreographed confusion: the paramedics diving in to stabilize Alaistair and stanch the flow of bleeding, the cops immediately deciding that, as I had phoned in the crime, I must be the perpetrator. They shouted innumerable questions at me, demanding to see my papers, demanding to know what my relationship with this man was. When I explained that I had been asleep upstairs, they demanded to know how I could have slept through such an assault.
Ever smoked skunk?
Instead I tried to explain that I was a rather heavy sleeper. And no, I had absolutely no problems, no issues with Fitzsimons-Ross, no past history of violence, no entanglements with the law, no . . .

“For God’s sakes,” I finally yelled at the cops. “He’s my friend. I found him here ten minutes ago and ran screaming into the shop downstairs. Ask the guy behind the fucking counter.”

“You watch your mouth,” one of the cops shouted back at me.

“Then stop fucking accusing me.”

“You want to be arrested?”

The officer grabbed me by the shirt and began to shake me.

The other cop—the older of the two—put a restraining hand on his colleague’s arm and said in a manner that made it clear it was an order, “You go downstairs now, corroborate his story with the guy in the shop. I’ll stay with our ‘friend’ here. What’s your roommate’s name?”

“Fitzsimons-Ross. Alaistair Fitzsimons-Ross.”

“You hear that?” the officer asked his colleague. “You find out if the guy in the shop knows Fitzsimons-Ross.”

As soon as the other cop had headed off at speed, the officer asked me manifold questions about Fitzsimons-Ross: his nationality, his profession, his lifestyle. I painted a fairly benign portrait, saying that he was a well-known painter, quiet, low-key, and that our friendship was not one where we knew intimate details of each other’s lives.