by The Blumhouse Book of Nightmares- The Haunted City (retail) (epub)
“Sir, while you see a ghetto of subsidized housing, I see the future site of luxury condominiums.”
“Brownsville is too far east.”
“Brooklyn does go beyond the first three stops on the L train,” the Broker said. “Do you want to be followers? Or do you want to be pioneers? Stake your claim in terra incognita. This isn’t just real estate.” The Broker gestured toward the housing projects and a spray-painted mural of Satan. “This is manifest destiny.”
I had always wanted to attempt a “year-long summer,” chasing the good weather around the world. This was probably a result of having grown up in the suburbs of Boston, where you spend a good part of the year in a deep freeze and most summer days are too hot, too humid, or too gnat-ridden to spend outdoors. Occasionally you would get a perfect summer day where you could enjoy a sloshball game (beer at each base) until nine in the evening, when it got too dark to catch fly balls. Then you’d stretch the perfect day into a night of hanging out at the movies or taking out your adolescent rage on a golf ball. It was those long, endless summer days that seemed to evaporate once I hit my thirties.
Summer in your mid-thirties meant working in an office, hoping to finish early enough to get in a workout or a bike ride. I missed summer—my Massachusetts childhood summer. I missed it desperately. I even missed working as a camp counselor wrangling screaming ten-year-olds, getting them ready for swimming or arts and crafts. I always got deeply depressed at the end of summer; there was nothing worse than that dreaded September Monday when you went back to school and the countdown began all over again. Just the name “September” still makes me feel like I’m in a cold, dark classroom stuck to a freezing metal chair attached to a plastic desk. I’d sit there half asleep, looking out at the early morning darkness, replaying my warm summer like a song on repeat.
This longing for summer was probably the reason I convinced myself I needed to live in Southern California, where it snows only in the mountains and kids skateboard to school in January. This, of course, was my fantasy, fed to me by a steady digest of cable television. The reality is that California is still a desert, and in the morning and at night you can freeze your ass off year-round. California felt like being in a lukewarm hot tub year-round.
I was getting bored with my life there. I was tired of my job. I was bored with the girls I was sort of dating. I was even bored with the money. Nothing seemed to add up. I was so much happier as a kid, suffering through those endless winters for a few days of perfect summer. Nothing was wrong in my life beyond a mild knee injury from overtraining. I had everything I thought I was supposed to want, but I wanted something more, something I couldn’t buy. I wanted to feel like a kid in summer again.
—
It was my friend Nico who finally convinced me to go to Chile. He grew up in Santiago with American movies and culture, so for all intents and purposes, he was American. But he wasn’t. He was Chilean, and as I learned, they’re a very particular type of South American. For years he had been telling me how Chileans go out until six in the morning and that Latin girls are way less uptight than Americans and don’t take offense when you hit on them at the gym (his words, not mine). Twenty-year-old South American girls couldn’t care less about a fifteen-year age difference. I told him that I preferred to date girls within seven years of my age, and even that was pushing it. He just shook his head and said, “You’re so gringo. It’s so sad.” I tried to convince him that technically Jews weren’t gringos, and that with my swarthy complexion I could easily pass for South American, but he didn’t buy it. “You can’t see it. Get your ass down here and have some fun. Your winter is our summer. Come in December; it’s the best time of the year.”
I had spent my previous summer traveling the Amalfi coast, and in September I decided I didn’t want my vacation to end. I quit my job and enjoyed the last breath of California summer in October and then in November flew to Argentina and Uruguay, finally working my way to Chile. I wanted to save the best for last, and Nico was determined to make sure his country delivered on his promises.
When I first arrived in Santiago, what struck me most was how much it looked like Los Angeles. A W hotel, Starbucks—there’s even Applebee’s if you’re really feeling homesick. It all felt like a cleaner, safer Los Angeles.
“San-hattan,” Nico boasted, waving his arms, proudly showing me the Santiago skyline from the rooftop bar at the W.
Nico had a number of businesses, the main one being club promoting and events. It all seemed kind of shady to me, even though it probably wasn’t. We had met years earlier in San Diego through a friend, and over the years that friend became less important because I realized that more than anything, Nico and I shared an identical sense of humor. Taking me from the airport to a rooftop welcome party filled with young models and telling them I was a photographer was his idea of a good joke.
This event was his attempt to show me how much better Chile was than America. It was working. The crowd was more international than I’d imagined: Spaniards, Germans, Brazilians, Argentines, and a few older gringo Americans who mostly stuck to themselves in the corner, gawking at the crowd surrounding our booth.
“Everyone’s coming to Chile, dude. Everyone. Europe’s falling apart and they’re all moving here. You know what they used to call us? Sudacas.”
I told him it sounded like tsadakkah. He had no idea what I was talking about. His friend Igal laughed. Igal was a Chilean Jew, one of the eighteen thousand living there. He got my lame pun.
“Sudaca. That’s what people from Europe used to call anyone from South America.”
“Is it an insult?” I asked.
“It’s like saying someone is black,” he explained. “Depends how you use it.”
A waiter handed me a pisco sour. “Our national drink,” Nico said proudly, and toasted me. “But now we have a term for all the Europeans whose countries fell apart and are now here begging for work. ‘Nordacas.’ And they fucking hate it.” Chile survived a tough dictatorship but had never lived irresponsibly and spent beyond its means, like Argentina. (Again, Nico’s economic assessment; I don’t claim to know anything about Argentina’s economic troubles.) “The Argentines think they’re in Europe,” Nico explained. “It’s fucking crazy. Do you know that to get an iPhone in Argentina it’s cheaper to fly to New York, spend two nights in a hotel, buy one there, and fly back? That’s fucking insane, dude. That country’s falling apart. We don’t even get our beef from there anymore.”
—
The warm December breeze felt nice. It was the beginning of summer, and everyone was throwing Christmas parties to celebrate. We spent the next two weeks going out almost every night to a different party, usually sponsored by a brand or company, on the rooftop of some hotel. My idea of Christmas mainly consisted of Chinese food, movies, hot chocolate, and ski lodges. In Chile they talk about who’s going to host the Christmas pool party that year. They celebrate on the twenty-fourth, open all their gifts at midnight, and then spend the twenty-fifth at the pool or the beach. We would probably do the same if we had ninety-degree weather in December.
After what seemed like our tenth night of consecutive partying (five a.m. was considered an early night), Nico and Igal took me to a club called Amanda. Tuesday night at Amanda was where all of Santiago was headed. Nico gleefully explained that the colleges had just let out for the summer and that tonight would be “packed with hot girls getting extremely drunk.” I told him that maybe at my age it wasn’t the best idea to be chasing college girls, which he took as yet another opportunity to make fun of me for being “super-gringo about everything,” and he reiterated that in South America the rules are different. “Nobody gives a fuck. Girls like older guys.” Not wanting to flout a local custom, I of course went.
Amanda was a mosh pit of sweaty teenagers, or at least they looked teenaged to me. I had gotten past the point where I could really tell whether a girl was fifteen or twenty-five. It all was starting to look the same. I had tried going out with
girls in their twenties but found it mostly boring because I like going to bed at a reasonable hour. But now was time to get out of my comfort zone, to push myself to stay out as late as I could every night and take advantage of whatever stupidity came my way. The parties we had been to were fun but mostly variations on the same theme. Amanda, somehow, had a different vibe. Everyone in the club danced, celebrating the end of school and the beginning of summer. I had forgotten the fun of that first night of summer. Of knowing you had no real responsibilities for the next ten weeks. I didn’t know most of the music, but it didn’t matter: girls would lip-synch lyrics to my face on the dance floor, making sure I got whatever it was Calle 13 was singing about. I don’t know what kicked in that night, but I finally started to let go. I didn’t feel judged, no co-workers’ eyes on me, no phones recording my every move. Just dancing with lots and lots of girls. In Chile you kiss on the cheek when you meet someone of the opposite sex. At my old job you could barely shake hands with a member of the opposite sex without a lawsuit. Here if you didn’t kiss them they got offended. So every girl I said hi to I kissed, and they’d kiss me back, warmly. I had no idea how old they were, and I didn’t care, and neither did they. It was summer. I was drunk, having fun, dancing. That’s when I noticed her.
She was blond, tall, with blue-green eyes. She towered over the other girls. She wore a white T-shirt with a gold cross necklace, cutoff jean shorts, and brown boots. She had lots of bracelets on her arm and a beautiful golden tan. She saw me looking (gawking) and smiled. I wound up near her at the bar and ordered another piscola (pisco and Coke). She heard my order and turned to me.
“Your first time in Santiago?” she asked, in English, much to my surprise.
“That obvious?”
She laughed. “It’s not hard to tell.”
“Well, look at you,” I said. “You look way more gringo than me.”
She shook her head no, waving her finger. “I’m Chilean.”
“What’s your name?” I asked, hoping for an excuse to do the lean-in kiss on the cheek.
“Sophie.”
“Nice to meet you.” I leaned in and kissed her on the cheek. She kissed back. “I’m not used to seeing blond Chileans.”
“I’m from Valdivia,” she replied. “That’s where all the blondes are from.”
Nico suddenly appeared, cutting between us and talking to her in Spanish. She was a model he had invited to a few of his events. I listened closely, understanding about a quarter of what they were saying but missing a lot due to the fact I don’t really speak much Spanish, and even if I did the music was too loud to hear anything. Nico was the greatest wingman a single guy could ask for. He knew every girl, he could break the ice with anyone, and he could tell instinctively that I was culturally out of my depth and had swooped in to save me. I heard Nico tell Sophie something about me maybe investing in clubs with him in Chile, which was total bullshit, but his stories seemed to be working. Sophie kept looking at me and laughing at his jokes. Nico ordered us more piscolas and handed us the drinks. He shook his head at me—“Valdivia, dude. All the fucking hot blondes come from there”—before disappearing back into the crowd.
—
I talked with Sophie awhile longer before she told me she had to go back to her friends. One of her girlfriends had broken up with her boyfriend that night, so they were out to cheer her up. But before she left I did manage to get her number and WhatsApped her.
“Nice to meet you” was all I could come up with.
“You too,” she replied, with a smiley-face emoji, and then a little face with a kiss.
—
Igal and Nico could not believe I didn’t hook up with her. “Dude, that girl is fucking hot,” Nico declared, as if I didn’t know.
“I know, but her friend was all sad. I got her number.”
“You’re such a fucking gringo! Why do you think she was talking to you? Get her back to your hotel room.”
Igal agreed. “It’s every Jew’s secret fantasy to fuck a hot Nazi.”
I laughed. “What do you mean, ‘Nazi’?”
“She’s from Valdivia, dude. Why do you think they’re all blond?” Nico said this as if it was the most obvious thing in the world, and Igal laughed. I couldn’t tell if they were joking or not.
Nico suddenly got serious. “Valdivia’s a weird place. Like, for real.”
Igal nodded in agreement. They had been there once for the film festival, and he said everyone was looking at him like he was a Jew.
“Even with all those hot girls, it was still weird?” I asked.
“The signs are in German. Like you’re in Germany,” Nico explained. Nico had tried to visit Villa Baviera, a village where only German is spoken, which has its own Octoberfest. “The menus weren’t even in Spanish,” he said, shaking his head. “Fucked up.”
I had always assumed the Nazis who fled to South America assimilated into the culture in some way, but Nico and Igal told me it was the opposite. An ex-Nazi named Paul Schaefer came to Chile and built a complete German town, going so far as to import the same German products he loved. He called it the Colony. Schaefer even went so far as to build a concentration camp–type compound, with barbed wire, attack dogs, and underground tunnels to use for torture. It was shut down in the 1990s and turned into a tourist village, but it left a lasting influence in the area. The remaining Nazis had moved into Valdivia.
“That’s why their Chilean supermarkets are packed with foods imported from Germany,” Igal said.
“Is it still like that?” I asked. They nodded. They claimed there were still sections in Valdivia where people spoke only German, and they know right away when you’re an outsider. Especially a Jewish outsider.
I didn’t believe it. I had to see this for myself, but they had no interest in taking me. Nico was promoting a music festival that weekend and dismissed it as just another city that’s pretty but not that exciting; Santiago would be way more fun. I’d had enough with partying and drinking and chasing after twenty-one-year-olds who weren’t really that interested in me anyway. I wanted to find the Nazi town. Did it still exist? Was it filled with old Nazis, or had their Nazi traditions gotten passed down to the next generation? What happened to the people who lived in that compound after it was closed? Would they really know I was a Jew just from looking at me? Every Jew has the fantasy of going back in time into Nazi Germany and killing everyone in sight. What if that town really existed—today? What if there was a secret Nazi community of actual World War II Nazis hidden at the end of the world and I could go there and expose it? I had spent time in Berlin—they seemed to have far fewer Nazis than South America did. I felt safer as a Jew in Berlin than I had anywhere else in Europe; the Germans couldn’t have been nicer to me. This was different. These were people who not only didn’t hide their past, they proudly kept it alive. Nico told me some strange stories about people who went near the Colony and disappeared. They had their own rules, their own police—the German descendants controlled it all. Nico even alluded to Schaefer having dungeons in the underground tunnels, where he raped children. It was stuff only the Nazis could come up with. Nico just shook his head. “There are fucking Nazis there, dude, I’m telling you. It’s hard-core.” I had to see for myself.
The next day I took the train to Valdivia. I looked up a few hotels online and found one that seemed halfway decent and booked a room. The whole ride I tried to imagine what it was going to be like when I got there. I step off the platform and am greeted by German shepherds, then moved to a crowd for selection. I dive for a Nazi, grabbing his gun, killing as many as I can before they sic the dogs on me…Or it would basically be just another city filled with Chileans, some of whom happen to be blond.
It turned out to be the latter. I don’t know why I was disappointed that I didn’t get off the train at a concentration camp with German shepherds barking. I was probably the first Jew ever to feel that way. That said, Valdivia was a lovely city. I took a taxi out to Villa Baviera, which
turned out to be nothing more than a few German restaurants, a hotel, and a tourist shop. I walked around the old section of Valdivia, ate in a restaurant by the water (Peruvian, not German), posted some photos, and by late afternoon I was already bored and regretting having booked the room. The next train out was at 12:40 at night, but I decided to sleep there anyway since I had already paid for the hotel, and I found myself wandering around the town square. It was a warm summer night—a beautiful, bug-free evening, the kind I would have spent at the driving range drinking ice-cream sodas when I was seventeen years old. I found a pub that looked vaguely Germanic and was surprised to see that although the menu was in Spanish it offered a large number of German beers. I was sitting at a table, by myself, when my phone buzzed with a new message:
Look up.
I did, and right in front of me, across the pub at another table, a pretty blond girl waved to me: Sophie. She sat next to a larger, heftier blonde, who looked about thirty. I smiled and gave her a surprised look, and she waved for me to come join them.
“What are you doing here?” she asked.
“Well, I wanted to see where all the blondes came from. I was looking for the factory.”
I kissed her on the cheek, and she introduced me to the other girl, whose kiss was more polite than flirty. “This is my sister, Angela,” Sophie said. Upon closer examination, Angela looked like a heavier, frumpier version of her younger sister.
“Nice to meet you, Angela,” I said, putting on a calculated smile.
“She doesn’t speak much English,” Sophie explained. Angela went back to her phone. Sophie asked where Nico was, and I told her he was back in Santiago at some music festival. She nodded; a lot of her friends were there too.
“How come you’re not going?” I asked, eating some pretzels from a basket on the table. Her sister looked up from her phone, annoyed that this was not going to be a brief encounter. Angela was clearly accustomed to being the third wheel in groups with her model sister.