Lights Out in Wonderland

by DBC Pierre

  A hand goes into my left pocket, fingers brush my leg through the cloth. They pull out my wallet and toss it onto the table. Then, after my cigarettes emerge from the coat pocket, there’s a wait while he inspects and sniffs each one before lining it up alongside the others. After pulling my passport and notepad from inside the coat, checking my face against the passport photo, and flicking through the notes—he moves to my right.

  Just as I feel his hand at my leg, the door opens. A face peers in. By its pallid, froglike appearance and ill-advised haircut, I judge it to belong to a plainclothes policeman. “Nerusan Smatosu?” He looks me up and down while this sinks in as “Nelson Smuts.”

  Behind him in the shadows lurks another figure, and as the view between us clears I see it’s Tomohiro. He first sees my notebook on the table, then recognizes me, leaning in to point and hiss to the officers.

  “Ah!” exclaims the plainclothes officer.

  “Oh!” My policeman steps back.

  For a moment all stand and examine me. There’s an exchange between them, followed by nodding as Tomohiro pushes into the room. And with this their frowns start to thaw. The interpreter blinks, and says: “You’re a guest—of the restaurant?”

  My scalp relaxes as a revelation looms. It’s a massive one, a breeze already flies off its towering and nacreous form, patrolled by bats.

  “This is the master of the kitchen,” she explains.

  “Yes, I know,” I say.

  “He asks that you forgive the incidents tonight. The man responsible is not part of the usual team. He hopes your meal was a strong example of their work, which has been called the finest in Tokyo. If not, he begs that you return and allow him to treat you as you deserve.”

  “Assure him I’ll remember the meal in the highest terms.”

  Tomohiro smiles at this answer, which anyhow is true.

  In the corridor behind him an officer passes with the canvas bag, stopping to ask a question. Tomohiro reaches for the bag and looks inside. For my taste, he looks too long, and I begin to tense. But he eventually hands it to me.

  “Perhaps this can balance some of your inconvenience,” interprets the lady. “Perhaps, the master respectfully asks—it can help you to recall good things.”

  The chef looks me in the eye, and as we bow my revelation crashes in—I’ve just been rescued by the parallel limbo of capitalism. Passing like a ship in my own waters, it widened a course to pull me off the swell into its humming interior. The free-market limbo—not a rustic single-celled limbo like mine, but a behemoth wired and plumbed across every inch of its hull with avenues and protocols of escape and reward—has taken aboard a sphinx, even though I’m a cohort of the suspect, and at very least complicit in the night’s events.

  It has done this thinking that I’m a food writer.

  And therefore able to influence profit.

  Whoosh—I’ve been taken up by the Master Limbo.

  Who knows how long I stand absorbing this, but I must look dazed because after carefully replacing my cigarettes, passport, and notepad, the policeman taps my shoulder and nods at the door.

  “You’re free to go,” the interpreter says with a smile.

  My limbo reinflates in an instant, its cone re-forms, Enthusiasms flood back. And I step from the room with a formidable ally—a mentor limbo on which to model my own.

  None less than the Master Limbo of capitalism.

  On a pretext of clarifying the name of my hotel, I ask to see Smuts, and they agree to allow it, briefly, in the company of an officer. I jot down the interpreter’s number before she goes, so I can contact the police station through her—then I wait in the corridor while Smuts is being searched in a neighboring room.

  I wait and savor the pain.

  It doesn’t sit well with me to leave people behind.

  One confidence I can share with you which might explain the strength of my feeling is this: when I was little my grandfather stayed with us for a few weeks. Tommy, as we called Grampa Brockwell, had a laugh up his sleeve at all times, one that sharpened his tongue to a wicked point and made it poke like a cuckoo from a clock. But when he was old his body started disobeying him, and his face grew unsure, and then frightened.

  He took a fall one day at our place.

  My father’s generation was the first to stop looking after its elders. My father decided it was modern to look after ourselves, you see, and not to get too weighed down with Grampa’s problems, because Gramps wouldn’t have wanted it. This was his modern approach. Except Tommy wanted caring-for. He took a fall and lay on his side, twitching like an insect. He looked up at us. But my father, on his new psychological health drive, had booked us seats at the cinema. A friend of Auntie May’s who used to be a nurse, was dropping by to mind Tommy while we were out.

  She hadn’t arrived when he fell.

  My father looked at his watch, asked Tom if he was okay, propped him against the bed, and left him there for the lady to find. Because otherwise the film would have started without us—and Tommy wouldn’t have wanted that. I remember looking back from his door. His eyes followed us out. It was true that in the days he had laughs in him he wouldn’t have wanted us to make a fuss. But those days were gone.

  Later that night we followed a quiet ambulance up the road to home. It spilled spotlight beams, checking house numbers. I knew it was for Tommy. He never opened his eyes again.

  The Piano was a glutinous and muddy film to me. That’s what we abandoned Tommy to see. And the same feeling is with me today. Crushing pain. I can’t leave another soul behind. I have to get serious. Standing here I resolve to confess everything to Smuts, right now, and to offer myself unconditionally for any mission he feels might help his cause.

  Limbo will have to stretch a little more.

  When an officer finally ushers me into Smuts’s room I find him sitting barefoot, huddled on a bench under a fire blanket.

  I sit beside him. The silence is heavy.

  “They let me go,” I say. “I’ll be better placed to help.”

  “Yeah, great help,” he grunts.

  “If you need a sworn affidavit or something—whatever you need, just tell me. I’ll call later when the dust’s cleared. Just tell me—whatever it is, I’m yours.”

  “You tell me—what the fuck you’re even doing here.”

  “Well.” I sigh. “I was in rehab. Actually this all started beforehand—but I ended up in rehab, and had to get away.”

  “Right, and Burger King pays enough for the Peninsula.”

  “It wasn’t a Burger King, it was a two-hundred-cover—”

  “You’re fresh out of rehab, burning someone else’s money. The only thing I can say: Tokyo qualifies as getting away, all right. My workplace in Tokyo qualifies as getting well the fuck away.”

  “Well, Berlin was the first idea. I thought we could go together.”

  “But you didn’t know anyone there you could mess up enough.”

  “I’m dismal with it, Smuts. I’m sorry.”

  “Doesn’t add up,” Smuts’s thinking-beak returns. “Tokyo or Berlin.”

  “Berlin adds up, you know my history. Remember Dad ran a club?”

  “So the choice was—clubbing, or mess up Smuts.”

  “No, no—Berlin was—”

  “Club—or Smuts.” A ball starts rolling in the brainatelle. “Clubbing or—”

  “It’s nothing to do with the club.”

  “So why say club? I didn’t say club, you said club.”

  “No, no, it’s just that my father—”

  “Berlin, club, your father.” Smuts’s lids flicker.

  The ball approaches a row of holes. The ruthless mechanism will decide something come what may, and I find myself running after the ball, trying to steer it:

  �
�My father was reminiscing, that’s all—said it must still be there, the club, run by his old partner. Massive, these days. The point is, he didn’t want me to go because the partner’s a very decadent type. I barely remember him. So anyway, I was in rehab, and—”

  Smuts holds up a hand: “Now you’re making sense. Was that so fucking hard? Big club, decadent man—he does food—uh?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  Smuts frowns. A fleet of balls sets off behind his brow: “Decadent club, no food, Smuts, Berlin—you’re launching food!”

  “No, listen—”

  “Massive decadent club—Smuts—food.”

  “Smuts, Smuts.” I shake his shoulder, but my tone calls the officer from the door. He checks his watch and waves me out.

  Smuts’s stare follows me off the chair. “I’ll do it. That’s what this is about, isn’t it? My move back to Europe? Mate—Berlin, executive chef. Fuck, that’ll move the game up a notch with the Basque, that’ll put some pressure on. The symmetry’s perfect! Why didn’t you say something?”

  “Smuts, we haven’t heard of this man in twenty years. Look—”

  “Mate—uh? Putain? You’re unbelievable.”

  Conflict rages between my spirit, too touched by Smuts’s wild hopes to crush them, and my brain, too shocked at the delusion’s scale to let it pass. My voice falters trying to break into the bagatelle.

  Smuts’s gaze darts here and there. “No question, I’ll do it. Sell him on banquets, sell him on decadence. I know his type. Sell him on Michelin stardom. Masquerades, lobster tails. Sell, sell, sell. Mate? Mention Didier’s name if you have to. If I line up an awesome gig in Europe, he could intervene here, pull some strings.”

  “But listen—”

  “Fuck me, I’m back in the game. Can’t believe you let things get this far! Puts everything in a whole new light. Okay, so the night went to shit in the fish joint—but it’s because a scout came to pull me into a much bigger deal. An awesome gig in Europe! Of course it was messy, we’re not just talking any scout—it’s the son of the founder! Didier will understand that!”

  Before I’m able to mount an adjustment, the officer takes my arm and leads me out, pulling the door shut behind us.

  “Putainel,” Smuts calls after me. “Fix it up.”

  “Smuts—”

  “Yesterday I had things under control. Uh?”

  The officer points me to the bag of Marius and escorts me to reception. Tomohiro stands half through a doorway, watching. I look at him. A gentle clamping of lips is the only comment I can make. He returns it, and bows.

  With that, I leave the scene.

  Light floods the window at the Peninsula Hotel. I peer down through it as far as I can, checking, as all creatures do, how far there is to fall. My head slumps against the glass.

  It frosts with breath.

  Checkout time approaches and vacuum cleaners are at work in the halls. Nimbus has turned to nausea, Smuts is under arrest, an old man fights for his life, I’m not dead.

  And now I need a club.

  11

  While squirrels charm the parks of London, and karasu birds sprinkle Tokyo with cries—wild pigs threaten joggers in Berlin. This is the scale of whoosh we’re dealing with, my friend.

  Berlin has nothing to learn from anyone.

  From all I’ve read and watched in the years since I was there, sniffing news like a puppy, this is what I sense of her position: That if today London is a drinker on the verge of losing her keys, Berlin is one just woken to find herself still alive, and on a Sunday. That while her tallest hill will always be artificial, built from the rubble of some four hundred thousand bombed buildings, the new era that sprang from her bullet holes and bunkers is real. I sense that wherever trees and flowers didn’t grow, art and ideas sprouted in their place, till her iconic graffiti, her recent decor of Porsches ablaze at the curbside, her clubs that refuse entry to stars, her seething countercultures, anti-cultures, and stolid everyday folk now shout one thing:

  Berlin is not for elites—Berlin is for people.

  And their limbo is over.

  Marlene Dietrich’s city-state assembles out of forests and lakes beneath me as the flight shudders down through dusky cloud. I tingle inside. As we fall closer it becomes an orderly maze like the best foreign train set, a maquette of buildings, boxes, containers, and rigging that twinkles across marshy hinterlands toward the Polish border, still supervised by the blinking spire of the television tower at Alexanderplatz, a giant eyeball on a toothpick, once raised to taunt the West across the wall. Watching with my face pressed to the window, I reflect on the odyssey so far. In fact how mysterious that having called it an odyssey it then became one, complete with monstrous contests and decadent talismans, the likes of Jicky and Marius.

  I wonder what this stage will bring. As Berlin’s air fills the cabin, I’m rinsed in a mixture of dread and hope.

  Smuts’s brainatelle called the Peninsula before I left. I knew it was the brainatelle, the call was a monologue, sounding hopeful in the way madmen sound hopeful at the scene of a fire. It dictated this schedule: I’m to go direct from the plane to the decadent mogul’s club, whence I’ll call Smuts with offers he can relay to Didier Le Basque. Two hours is how long he allows, including time to explain the wine to customs and for the mogul to chuckle over how much I’ve grown.

  Smuts’s boss Yoshida still hadn’t been interviewed when I left. It means Smuts could be freed if the right enticements came to bear on the boss, for instance from Didier Le Basque. Despite such pressure I was buoyant about the mission for the first hour out of Tokyo. I foresaw Smuts and me laughing in the tumbledown alleys of East Berlin. Then I had a line in the restroom and my visions went away. An intoxicant reversal happened. Reality suddenly shone more than hope.

  With this shock I set to examining reality and hope, those treacherous riverbanks of existence.* Because in reality I’m landing without much money to find a man I met when I was a child, and talk him into opening a restaurant for a friend in jail. Whereas in hope, a vast hospitality empire awaits where I’m fondly remembered by a back-slapping grandee who makes deals on the toss of a coin.

  These shades of potential filled the long flight to Munich, and much of the shorter one to Berlin. Somewhere between those potentials lay possibility, but I had trouble deciding where, and that indecision, that loss of bold face, shifted me from phantomhood into a simple category of deranged person who travels around at random on someone else’s money with a single change of clothes. This is the lens of reality: watch out, friend, I warn you. I became a type of person usually seen much later in a Hawaiian shirt with more than one Thai marriage behind him.

  All this took a while to get over. It took some Courvoisier and club soda, and a few idle screaming matches in my mind, over money, with someone called Thong, before I felt I could afford hope. And in reality I feel there are hopeful signs. While my father’s calling the club massive may or may not be accurate after twenty years, his reluctance to let me come on account of the partner’s decadence—that bodes well. Why else would he be so reluctant? It speaks of real excess. It speaks of a rich and venturesome libertine, exactly who we need to find, someone at least in sympathy with our position. And maybe it’s not such a crazy position. Perhaps within a context of limbo it’s pure commonplace. Because aren’t the greatest inspirations brought to life on a whim? Aren’t they a snatching of chance from thin air? Such an arena is native terrain for Smuts. Perhaps our debauch merely sharpened his instinct, made him see these possibilities around us. After all, the zigzag of his career came entirely from whims like this. Why not Berlin? It wouldn’t be the most miraculous thing to ever happen to him.

  All this had to churn through me before I could return to the question of my death. Then that brought new qualms. Surely I couldn’t die leaving Smuts in jail. Under nor
mal reasoning it would be unthinkable to die leaving a friend in jail. But under an inverse ethic it would be desirable—because if my living causes such harm to others, even landing them in jail, then my death prevents further harm.

  A eureka moment. And most powerfully, having found a way to move forward, I regain limbo’s reckless tools, the better to actually help Smuts.

  It is, to quote from the market itself—a win-win situation.

  I quickly copy the ethic’s wiring into my own limbo. Suddenly it’s a toddler limbo, with its first little sophistication.

  And with this in place I step from the plane in command.

  Ah, the Enthusiasms. Why not Berlin? For Smuts’s sake I’ll give the performance of my life. I’ll use limbo for all it’s worth. And, thinking about it, there’s even my father’s share to barter with. He did say he abandoned a share in the business, you can vouch for that. Yes! I’ll commandeer his share—surely this Gerd Specht will feel the debt heavily, and go along with any plan. Banquets in Berlin—why wouldn’t he agree? And for Smuts’s purposes the scheme doesn’t even have to be running, it just needs a nod, a few details, an interim pedigree to impress the sponsor.

  How stupid were my fears in light of reality!

  I sweep off the plane and fidget, waiting for my bag. It doesn’t take long, Berlin Tegel is a sensible airport shaped like a doughnut, where every gate has its own immigration, baggage reclaim, and customs, barely a few steps from the roadside, without a hint of threats, abuse, or shopping.

  As if someone simply wanted me to pass through.

  So it is that within five minutes I stand on the pavement under an evening sky, earmarking a bottle of Marius to impress the voluptuary Specht. Over a cigarette I even consider taking wallpaper to erect a makeshift White Room. That’d show him what we’re about. While I ponder where I might find wallpaper at this hour, an old cabdriver heaves my bag into his taxi. I climb inside, watching him with that awe that can attach to the first locals of a mythical place.

  “Pego Klub, bitte.” I study his Prussian jowls.