Lights Out in Wonderland

by DBC Pierre

  Nobody turns to look at me. Perhaps a refinement of the old East, where eyes grew in the side of the head. Present are an older, probably Turkish couple; a tall young man in a large urchin’s beret; and a waxy old monolith of a man with bulbous features and a cigar. His eyes are challenging: bulging milky blue eyes that sit facing the kiosk like marbles. They must be able to transmit messages without moving, because Gisela tosses her head at the nuisance of them and gives the man a beer. At this, in isolation from the rest of his enormous head, the bottom lip dips open to grunt.

  Gisela spots me as this goes on. Although I can’t say she acknowledges me, much less shows me any warmth—she doesn’t show contempt, and I feel it a small triumph. I step closer to the group, which makes the Turkish couple look up and nod. We’re in a loose-knit club, then—a dismal one so far, given the needs of the night, but still. It has at least one younger member, and in a beret, which suggests something more jaunty than sitting around the kiosk all night. Also I reason it’s early for any truly wild bacchanal. I’m no sooner thinking this when another, even younger figure appears through the door along the hall. A petite young woman who wears jeans under a woolen coat, and has her black hair in a bob. She carries a tiny bag, in contrast to other handbags around,* and her steps are short and quick, almost squirrellike in their levity. It’s the girl Anna. A reflex makes me blush, as if she might guess my dream of this afternoon.

  I watch her through the corner of an eye, because classmates also come under new light at a sports day. She’s a girl whose features border on the plain—despite large algae-green eyes and small, well-cut lips—but they’re features rescued by a kind of determination, the kind you see in certain six-year-olds stoically queuing among adults. This sense of purpose, seen in a lack of coyness, a straightforward gaze, mingles with lip gloss to make her appearance here like that of a firefly in a cave. But as I warm to these beginnings of potential, thinking it won’t take many more such arrivals to meet the minimum for a small party, she smiles at the lad in the beret, they wave at the group—“Tschüss!” they sing, “Tschüss!”—and step away into the eve.

  “Have a good night,” calls the Turkish Frau. “Stay warm.”

  After the hissing has subsided which always follows the young—“Where will he take her, surely he’s not into poetry as well?”—“No she’s taking him to some showing of old pamphlets up Karl-Liebknecht-Strasse. I can think of better ways to pass a Friday, he must be keen”—“He’s hardly a kindred soul, poor girl—she’s so earnest, but I feel it must be loneliness, I’m sure that’s why she’s so aloof”—only rasping breath and the creasing of clothes remain. Within minutes a new couple arrives, also older, with centers of gravity up near their chests, then another, shorter pair, of identical height and girth like salt-and-pepper shakers, and with square heads.

  And following them comes a chubby man. While I take in his balding head, his blond, rather sparse mustache compared to Gerd’s, his shining face—one thing about him rings the final bell of the night’s endeavor:

  The man wears a sailor’s fancy dress costume.

  He also carries an electronic keyboard of the type producing little rhythms and chords via buttons labeled “Samba,” “Bossanova,” “Quickstep,” and “Foxtrot.” His sailor’s cap hangs from the keyboard, trailing ribbons.

  My spirit has mostly fled by the time Gerd enters.

  In fact I must pause here, friend, and frame the scene that follows. It makes no sense to note my sinking heart, my plunging fortunes, as instances would be too numerous and their tenor too bleak for words alone. Instead, and as you well know my position, I recount the following just as I watch it unfold:

  Gerd enters in a naval captain’s outfit too small for him, and with too small a hat, which perches on his head like a pie. He grins with his long, yellowing, bristlelike teeth, to a murmur of approval from the gang around the kiosk.

  Within nations and societies, in cities, districts, streets, and even buildings, it can sometimes happen that human groups form a backwater which over time comes to fester with a nature of its own. This has happened here. With perfect clarity I realize that nothing I might witness next is necessarily common to Germany or to Berlin, nor to Tempelhof or even to humanity itself; but rather that I have stumbled into a small and brackish pool outside life’s tidal flow, where drips occasionally echo, where shapes lurk, and where warmth in the water can merit suspicion.

  “Frederick, you made it! Haa—and with your shoes!”

  I watch Gerd’s cap bob down the steps while Gisela closes up the kiosk. At this our motley band files across the concourse after the captain, not to a vast colonnaded venue but to a small canteen tucked into a far corner of the terminal. Its counter is shuttered, its chairs are upended on their tables. Against a wall stands a trestle sideboard with some bottles of cheap wine, a bowl of pasta salad, a plate of cold sliced sausage, a basket of bread rolls, a small tower of plastic cups, and a waste bucket.

  Gerd sits me next to the stony man, who I now suspect was the man sweeping here on my first visit. “Gottfried Pietsch,” he says, and to the man: “Gabriel, von England.”

  “Ah, so,” Gottfried grunts. “Er sient aus wie ein Walross.”

  “Haa—he says you look like a walrus.”

  I look down at my coat: “Hm—ha ha.”

  Gottfried smells strongly of body odor and beer, and gives a sense of being able to take in all the world through the edges of his gaze. After a few moments, finding the other tables taken, an almost spherical old doll comes to join us. Her name is Magda, and she perches on the edge of her chair like the dutiful widow who once followed a husband around, probably for decades after uncovering the full horror of his character, because she’s now able to convey her body to a place without admitting being there. She neither stays nor leaves, neither smiles nor doesn’t.

  Neither sees me nor not, nor probably cares to.

  I soon excuse myself to feign interest in the keyboard. As Gerd sets up a small stage, measuring lengths of cable between his hands, I note a relaxed swing to his movements, not despite but because of older age; his body doesn’t arch and torsion up its length anymore, but rather pivots from the pelvis like a crane. Maturity supposedly has its rewards, and maybe pivoting is one of them, though I’ve yet to hear it described.*

  “Gabriel, this is Dieter Strassmann.” He presents his fellow seaman, then leans close to hiss: “Tonight we’re watching out for Gottfried, in case you wonder—he has a hard life at the moment, and no real friends. So he needs a drink, but not too much of a drink, you know?” His gaze shifts over that lonely figure. “If you get talking to him he might try converting you to socialism, I tell you now. But otherwise he’s fine, a really clever man, you should see what he builds in his workshop.”

  “Ha,” says Dieter, “old Gottfried, still recruiting.”

  “Shh.” Gerd looks away, loudly adding: “And later we try your wine, eh? Great. An Australian wine, Dieter, from Gabriel. And look—something special.” He points out the pasta salad and, seeing Gisela skulking near the back, calls out: “Was ist das—?”

  “Italienisch,” she calls back.

  “Italian,” he proudly says. “Gisela’s a great cook.”

  Liquid slowly pools in the salad. The keyboard launches a squelching accompaniment of tuba blasts, knocks, squeaks, and drumrolls.

  “Did you ever hear of Klaus und Klaus?” asks Gerd. “Famous duo from Hamburg.”

  “Nee.” Dieter frowns. “Klaus Baumgart is from Oldenburg.”

  “Ja, okay, but the duo is from Hamburg. Or else why are they dressed in sailor clothes and singing about the North Sea coast?”

  “Oldenburg is next to Bremen—what coast do you think is close to Bremen?” Dieter rolls his eyes and shakes his ruddy head at me.

  “I was going to tell you Dieter was in a famous Klaus und Klaus t
ribute band in Leipzig. But suddenly he’s also a professor of world geography.”

  “Ja, ja,” scoffs Dieter, “as if Bremen is such a far-world place.”

  Taking pity on my foreignness, a gentle old lady at the nearest table clears her throat to say: “Quite beautiful, Bremen—you must have heard of the university? Famous even as far as China. Bremen’s really become a center of excellence.”

  “Ja, they make Beck’s beer,” says her man. “After two of them you feel excellent.”

  “Well, anyway,” says Gerd, “we’re a Klaus und Klaus tribute band—Gerd und Gerd. Sounds more credible than Dieter und Dieter, don’t you think? Although it takes us ten minutes of the act to explain why Dieter is also called Gerd.”

  “And,” says Dieter, “we’re not from Hamburg.”

  A stodgy rhythm takes hold, of tubas blasting left and right with drumrolls in between. As I return to the table both Magda and Gisela look at me strangely, I realize my face has twisted with horror, as if watching a puppy die. I straighten it and take my seat next to Gottfried. He grunts as I sit down.

  Then I set off drinking as heavily as I can.

  Through this blank face I watch a nimbus slowly rise in the terminal, which brings a problem of philosophy on top of everything: is a nimbus of small pleasures equal to the most ruthless debauch? What separates we who crave substances to lethal excess and those who relax with tuba blasts and wine? Who is more the master of their nimbus?

  The sailors explain in banter why Dieter’s also called Gerd, wine flows, and everyone sings along to “There Stands a Horse in the Hallway,” till the once-most-colossal structure on earth quivers with jollity. I turn to find Gottfried swaying economically, mouthing the words with a scowl. A security guard pulls up a chair and nods along, Magda’s brow rises between verses, and even Gisela’s boots step left and right, no doubt knowing that leisure aids health as much as tofu or an enema.

  Nimbus is nimbus and I struggle not to be swept up.

  Ah, the brutal Enthusiasms.

  There comes a break during which Gerd invites me to open his Marius. As I pour, Gottfried reaches for the bottle to examine, and his eyelids flicker quickly when he takes a first sip. He seems to freeze for a moment, and I freeze beside him; then his gaze swivels up. “Sehr gut—Dankeschön.”

  And so the evening passes, chatter rises and falls, food is picked to scraps, wit grows blunt, and jokes turn lame. My body glows with wine, buzzes with most of my last gram of nasal amusements. For everyone else, nimbus peaks and hovers for a while; not loftily but authentically, as if touched, like life, with the sadness that it must die before the morrow. And at the first couple’s departure, a milling of guests and a limbo of long goodbyes begins at the buffet. A flurry of whispers about who’ll see Gottfried home, or if he needs another wiener.

  And here I close the frame for this scene, dear comrade, yearning as I am for death, even wondering where to leave a last note. So ends the decadent Gerd Specht’s special party. You and I will feel much the same about it, I needn’t add anything else. And in any event a much more interesting thing happens next.

  The night delivers a stunning end-play.

  “Poet!” Gerd waves from the stage: “Come help me, I’ll show you something.”

  He folds the trestle table, bidding me help with the amplifier. Dieter grabs the keyboard and we cross the main hall, past a departures board that’s stuck on a flight to Saarbrücken, and into a stairwell where stairs descend three stories to a security door. Here in the monolith’s bowels Gerd pulls out a bundle of keys.

  The door clangs open.

  An underground highway stretches ahead of us, and beside it a railway, cobbled between its tracks, curving into the distance out of sight. I sway at the door, staring.

  Shivers run through me.

  “See?” says Gerd. “More than five kilometers of bunkers and tunnels down here, built for the Third Reich. Who knows where they go? Huge complex.”

  We drop the musical equipment in a store near the stairwell, where with my mind racing to digest what I’ve seen I scan the store’s shelves, trying to regain calm. The room is dotted with expendables for the kiosk—sachets of sugar, plastic forks, some mops and brooms, and a box with Chinese texts and starbursts.

  “Looks like fireworks,” I say, as much to hear if my voice still works as for any interest in the box—because it dawns on me that this can only be the complex Thomas expected to secure. Kilometers of sublime Gothic underworld.

  “Ja, fireworks.” Gerd nods. “For the airport farewell party.”

  “Rockets?” asks Dieter. “I’ll beg some for Heide’s birthday.”

  “I can’t split them, it’s a self-contained pyrotechnic show.”

  “Ah—where you just light the box?”

  “Exactly.” Gerd switches off the light. “Linked in series, they go off timed like a ballet. Really clever, there’s about sixty euros’ worth in there. We’ll set them off at midnight, as the airport’s finale. Have a last drink to the place.”

  “On my street a few weeks ago the Leftists lit one of these inside a Porsche,” says Dieter. “Jesus Christ, you should have seen it, blown to pieces.”

  “A Porsche? Just from fireworks?”

  “No, ja, unbelievable, I didn’t expect it either. What I figured out is that the car is so well sealed that the booms caused a pressure shock and blasted everything out. Then the whole thing caught fire. Some serious booms, we all came out to see. In ten minutes it looked like a nuclear strike, you wouldn’t believe it.”

  Gerd pauses. “And weren’t we supposed to be Leftists?”

  “Well—I thought we were Marxist-Leninists.”

  “And what’s the difference?”

  “Who knows? Maybe just the Porsche thing.”

  “Ja, well. If you don’t meet any Leftists before Heide’s birthday, Gottfried knows where to get rockets cheap if you need any.”

  “Ha—he could get a tank if we wanted.”

  “Though I have some crackers here left over from May Day.” Gerd locks the store and leads us back out into the bahn tunnel.

  “Thanks, I’ll look for rockets—size matters to Heide.”

  “And she ended up married to you? Haa!” We tramp up the highway to another metal door, which Gerd swings wide open.

  “And see”—he flicks on overhead lights.

  I reel on my feet. A mall stretches ahead through rows of heavy archways, arch after arch after arch, as if bounced between mirrors to eternity. Shadows off to the side promise more passages, more salons, out of view.

  It’s an underground Alhambra.

  “From 1935,” says Gerd, “a bunker for airport staff. Then you have the Lufthansa bunkers, women’s and children’s bunkers, American forces command centers—it’s an underground town, the complex even has its own waterworks and power plant, independent from the city of Berlin.” He leads us through a warren of salons. “Look—see the painting of the man getting drunk? See the lettering? Originals from the 1930s. Nothing touched here in seventy years.”

  On the wall a man is painted in profile, head back, almost vertically emptying a bottle into his mouth. I look without breathing.

  A nimbus icon.

  We return to the first mall, where archways form vaulted compartments leading one into another, on and on into the distance, each spacious enough for a dinner setting, a lounge setting, a dance floor, or whatever you will. Mythical underworld decadence, a Gothic palazzo, empty, soundless, windowless. As still as death’s mansion.

  With a nimbus idol.

  Whoosh.

  A wonderland.

  17

  The early bird catches the worm, thus quoth the Limbus Magister. So this morning I rise with birds, babies, baboons, and businessmen, even donning my suit to join these agents of unfair
advantage in bending the day to my will.

  The mission: to secure the keys to wonderland.

  Because something occurred to me in the night: that these aren’t just the keys to an underground Cockaigne. They don’t simply open the way for a secret banquet, a friend’s release, a luxurious death—but also unlock the limbo of modern capitalism at its deepest, most gaseous sphere. At its heart and soul.

  Market forces may have trapped Smuts and me, but angels, demons, Enthusiasms, and limbos now crowd to the point of this odyssey’s cone, arriving to stage an end-play. The keys open nothing less than a vein of Western God.

  Over a palliative wine I can’t see why Gerd wouldn’t loan them. I imagine three scenarios, depending on his response. If he gladly loans the keys for an indefinite period, I can call Thomas over and show him around the complex. That will seal my part of the bargain and secure Smuts’s release. If Gerd is more hesitant, loaning the keys for a specified while, I’ll rush to make copies in Kreuzberg, showing Thomas around later when the kiosk is shut. And if he only loans them for a moment, I’ll open the doors and foul their locks, prop them with cardboard for later entry.