City of Angels: or, The Overcoat of Dr. Freud / A Novel

by Wolf, Christa

  Toward the end of the day, the “future party” started in the CENTER: all the staff were invited and everyone had to dress up as someone or something from the future. All I did was look for the snake armband I had bought on a day trip to San Diego and put the brightly colored wooden snake on my shoulder. So the partygoers thought I was trying to be the Snake Woman, and some of the feminists knew that the snake was an ancient feminine symbol. Most of them had gone all out with their costumes, showing up in metallically glinting suits or draped in electronic devices, others wore hats or helmets with antennas, some came as rockets. They danced to futuristic electronic music and we ate bizarre food and drank fantasy drinks. Our cohort was represented most brilliantly by Pintus and Ria, a constellated pair: two little planets circling each other.

  I was surprised to see Peter Gutman appear, late and without the slightest hint of a costume, of course. But what do you mean, he said, he had the cleverest costume of all: He had come as a human being. A human being from the twentieth century. A scholar from the distant past, when there were still scholars. His costume was a hit.

  We met at the bar over a bright yellow drink called a Luna cocktail. Peter Gutman had me explain my snake to him.

  Aha, he said, Madame is withdrawing into the matriarchy.

  But was it a step back? I said, that’s the question. Besides, in the matriarchy I would have to be responsible for the whole tribe. Pretty stressful, I should think. I kept my eyes pointed straight ahead and sipped on my straw.

  Then Peter Gutman said: It’s an ancient rule—when you get deadlocked you have to take a step back and start negotiations over again from the beginning.

  Negotiations about what? I asked. Capital investments?

  You overestimate me, Madame. I am decidedly short on funds at the moment. And I doubt that in the era we all seem to be living in here there is even such a word as “capital.” The last dollar has long ago been shredded to pieces by the time machine.

  Are you sure, Sir? That was Emily, who had come in a fantastic costume, as Pythia, and was soothsaying left and right.

  Of course I’m sure, Peter Gutman said. Because if that hadn’t happened, if the dollar still inundated the world, then we wouldn’t be living in the future. But here we all are, nice and cozy.

  Then we wouldn’t, if it hadn’t, I said disapprovingly. Lutz from Hamburg, a star rider who said he represented intercontinental peace, commented: But he’s right. Clearly he’s right, but at the same time he’s a hopeless dreamer.

  Had I ever heard the little word “utopia”?

  Oh, man, that’s all I needed. Then Francesco came over too in his lavish Venetian costume with a devil’s mask—the devil would never die, Francesco had argued—and made the conspicuously gentle suggestion that maybe it was time for them to take the burden of utopia off of my Eastern shoulders and place it upon their Western ones.

  Unanimous agreement. What did that mean? That meant they all started talking nonsense. We had all had quite a bit to drink, of course, and the composition of the brightly colored cocktails remained secret but they brought about unforeseeable consequences, for example—our whole cohort had gradually gathered at the bar—Ria, the small shimmering planet, started going into raptures about a world where every person, especially every girl, was given a basic guaranteed income at fourteen and could separate from his or her parents. That would dramatically reduce the suicide rate among young people.

  Everyone guessed what prompted Ria to this vision but we all found it much too tame. Pintus in particular felt the need to contradict her, it struck me that he had been constantly contradicting her recently. We should be more ambitious than that, he said. Back when he was with the Maoists, they had believed that you could force people into happiness. And there was no question but that people’s happiness consisted in devoting their whole lives to the betterment of society, they thought. Which of course had to be fundamentally transformed, they thought. By any means necessary, including violence.

  And now? Lutz asked.

  Now, since we were talking about utopia, he pinned his hopes on people developing other needs, over a very, very long time. That someday they would strive for something besides money and power and consumption.

  But what? And how would it come about?

  Hopefully it won’t be because of a disaster, Lutz said. Hopefully we won’t become smart only as a result of some catastrophe. None of us will own our own car in the future, for example.

  That’s too bad, Francesco said.

  We will have developed alternative energy sources by then, and stopped the environmental catastrophe, said Maya, Lutz’s wife, in the flowing dress of an archaic goddess. Ines, cheekily dressed as a mistress, which there would always be in any imaginable future, added: Everyone will take responsibility for children then, not only the parents. —Not that! Francesco blurted out. But Ines informed him that people in the future would no longer be small-minded and selfish, but generous and, yes, well, smarter.

  You mean to say, said Hanno, our aristocratic Frenchman who had come in a kind of tuxedo as an executive of an interstellar travel company, you mean to say that people in the future will know more about themselves? And will want to?

  Silence.

  Knowing more about yourself can also lead to despair, said Peter Gutman, the person of the present.

  Spoilsport.

  Emily saved the situation. She raised her staff of wisdom, murmured her Pythian maxims, looked out our twelfth-story window far across the ocean glittering in the pale moonlight, and proclaimed: People will learn how to know everything about themselves and how to use that knowledge to help each other.

  How boring! Ria cried. They assured her that conflicts would not cease to exist, that in fact only then would there be worthwhile conflicts, namely, those between diverse individual people. Not just between rich and poor, high and low, believers and unbelievers.

  I knew that story already. Was everything starting over again, from the beginning?

  Francesco led us to a round table that was free, a bit off to the side, right in front of the wall of windows. Suddenly we had the noise of the party behind us and could talk as though we were in a separate room. I remember the big round stage-set moon describing its whole arc above the glittering ocean while we sat there, I never let it out of my sight.

  For the first time, Stewart joined us, the one black fellowship-holder, who had arrived at the CENTER later than the rest of us and had always kept himself apart, until then. I suddenly understood that we had been acting self-conscious around him exactly the way the others had recently been acting around me, out of insecurity. Suddenly I could come out and say it. Stewart seemed surprised, not insulted, almost amused; the others admitted that I was right. Stewart was working on a sociological study of the black community in Los Angeles and as he told us about his project he left no doubt as to his radically disapproving position on the social structures he was uncovering there. Now it was he who criticized me, from an unexpected direction: He didn’t want to pretend he didn’t know what was going on. He read the papers too, after all, and overheard conversations and rumors in the CENTER that didn’t find their way to me. That had to stop, he thought. And most of all, my creeping around had to stop.

  Everyone protested but not convincingly. Creeping around?

  Yes. I was acting like I had a reason to have a bad conscience. That made him angry.

  Bad conscience? That’s not it. —Well, what is it? —Okay, I feel like I have a reason to reflect. —Nothing against reflecting. But about what? —I want to figure out who I was back then. Why I talked to them at all. Why I didn’t send them away right at the start. The way I would have done a little later.

  Okay, good. So why?

  Because I don’t think I saw them as “them” yet. That is probably the first thing I said. Of course I don’t remember everything that was said that night, but I do remember that the ocean, the Pacific Ocean outside the window, and the moon above it were with me the
whole time. I noticed how difficult it was to connect normal, everyday words to the country I came from, which the newspapers my friends were reading categorically classified under the Evil Empire. I didn’t argue with a lot of what those papers said, but still, I lived in a different country than that one. And how was it possible to describe that?

  Facts lined up one after the other don’t give you reality, you know. Facts are not enough. There are many layers and facets to reality and the naked facts are only its surface. Revolutionary measures could be hard on the people affected by them—the Jacobins were not squeamish, nor the Bolsheviks. We would not have denied that we were living in a dictatorship, not in the least: it was the dictatorship of the proletariat. A transitional period, an incubation period for the new men and women, you understand? “We who wanted to lay the groundwork for peace / could not ourselves be peaceful”: I firmly believed in that. We were bursting with utopia, since that word has already come up once this evening. We didn’t like our country the way it was but the way it would be: THE WAY THINGS ARE WILL NOT CONTINUE, we were certain of that.

  So, I said, back when those young men approached me and I didn’t send them packing right away, I probably still believed that maybe they are necessary, maybe we need them. Just two or three years later I would not have let “them” into the room. I advised others not to talk to them either, advice they took.

  What had happened in the meantime? That’s what my friends wanted to know. Francesco thought that what happened was what happens to every illusion: it collapsed. Lutz countered that it was more than just an illusion, it was the framework for a new society. An alternative that we—he said “we”—desperately needed. Who had seen that more clearly than they had, the ’68 generation? And who had experienced more bitterly how this “we” crumbled? It wasn’t so different with you, he said.

  THE ARDUOUS PATH OF RECOGNITION, I said. And before that the long path of knowledge, of perceiving and learning. What didn’t we think was possible? What didn’t we want to believe? The hope crumbled, utopia fell apart and started to rot. We had to learn how to live without alternatives.

  Only then did I notice that our group sitting at the round table was all alone in the large room. The music had long since stopped, the bar had closed, the last couples had left, there was colored paper, plastic cups, and straws lying scattered on the floor, the decorations hung slack from the few lights that were still on. It was long past midnight. I was sorry I had talked for so long, or at all. I couldn’t escape the feeling that I had fobbed them off with the layers of my memory reservoir that lay closest to the surface but had not reached the real reality, not at all.

  How do you mean? Peter Gutman asked. I walked to Ocean Park with him, leaned on the railing a little while longer and looked at the nighttime ocean, the moon now all the way on the right, just above the Santa Monica Mountains, before we walked through empty streets back to the MS. VICTORIA. How do you mean?

  I know, I said, it’s all true, but that’s not what it’s actually about. —What was it about? —The question is still how I could have forgotten it. Why hadn’t anyone asked me that?

  YOU CAN SLAVE AWAY AT THE WRONG QUESTIONS TOO

  Peter Gutman said, and he was probably right.

  The following day I started to answer the truly noble letter a friend had sent me (“We have always known that the OTHER grows out of one’s own contradictory life”), which would take me a week and many sheets of paper and several nearly sleepless nights. I wrote my way down to a core that I could clearly feel but not put a name to until I was startled out of my sleep one night and saw written before my eyes the last phrase of a long speech someone had given me: THE OTHERNESS IN YOU. I was convinced on the spot; it fit. Or, I thought, maybe the foreign in me too: a foreign body I had felt the way you can feel a growth in your body. A doctor would perform a biopsy to determine the composition of this foreign tissue, or actually to ascertain just one thing about it: Is it malignant or benign? And answer the question: Operate or not? The danger being that the malignant tissue could spread to the whole body, which was itself healthy, and devour it.

  What happened to me is the one thing that shouldn’t have happened to me, I tell myself, and that seems right but I don’t actually know if at the same time a different text is moving in the opposite direction inside me, one that doubts this thesis. Something like curiosity about the steps I will take next. Or the next thoughts I will think. Even in the word “futility,” the word that rules my days and nights, I find a kind of satisfaction, the same kind I always feel when I have found the appropriate label for a condition.

  Rachel, the Feldenkrais instructor: I now regularly went to her tiny house to receive instruction. She was opposed in principle to violent actions. She had me feel the effects that slight changes in movement could have on the whole system. How habits that had worked their way deep into the body could block free movement. How releasing these blockages in the body could also release blockages in the brain, since in fact we do not consist of a separate mind and body—the division, suggested to us by Christianity, is false and catastrophic, Rachel said: it means we have totally unlearned how to see ourselves as a whole, with body, mind, and soul fused together in every single cell. You, for example, she told me after my third session, have always tried to control everything with your head. You’re still trying to. But you’re starting to see how it really works. You’re learning, and not only with your head. Your resistance is giving way.

  The overcoat of Dr. Freud, I said.

  Excuse me?

  You know, the coat that keeps you warm but also hidden, that you have to turn inside out. To make the inside visible.

  If you say so, Rachel said. It’s enough for me when my thoughts, movements, and feelings are in tune with each other, the way God intended. She then told me, as though obliged not to keep it a secret, that all her other patients were Jewish. Peter Gutman had sent me to her. I didn’t ask anything further, she didn’t say anything further. I remember that that was one of the first bright, sunny afternoons after the long rains.

  My little red Geo was waiting obediently on the street in front of Rachel’s bungalow but I couldn’t get in because I had left the key in the ignition and the automatic doors had locked. I found the insurance card and learned that they actually did consider my mishap as falling within their jurisdiction. After twenty minutes, a competent and friendly mechanic showed up who was able to open the car without breaking the door, who had barely a tired smile for my inappropriate joke that he was in a good position to become a successful car thief, and who answered my heartfelt Thank you so much! with a convincing You’re welcome! I steered the car that was once again mine onto Wilshire Boulevard and drove into the sunset as the sun sank once again into the Pacific, in all its glory.

  Everything was as it should be: the three raccoons had survived the flood, the lightbulb over the entrance to the MS. VICTORIA was flickering like always, Mr. Enrico gathered up the papers on his desk and said a blissful hello, as happy as everyone else that the sun was shining on California again. I had bought groceries on the way home and I hauled the bags up to my apartment, drank my margarita, and ate bread and cheese, while the crew of the Enterprise once again saved an alien civilization, for which I was sincerely grateful.

  Unchecked thoughts ran through my head and suddenly the word “Schrecken” popped up—how do you say that in English, actually? I took down my Langenscheidt dictionary: “shock,” yes of course, that was probably right even though it didn’t exactly match Schrecken in German, whose meaning ranged from being startled to scared to horrified. For the first time in all those months, I happened to look at the back cover and saw that the dictionary was being marketed as “The most up-to-date, with new words from all domains”—one example listed was Wendehals. I wanted to see how they said that in English, so I looked it up and found: “Wendehals (Wende, Turn, the fall of the Wall, + Hals, neck), pol. GDR contp. [= contemptuous]: quick-change artist.” And at last I wa
s convinced of the untranslatability of words. Because the young colleague who first used that word in the fall of 1989—it was in the Church of the Redeemer in Lichtenberg, East Berlin, at the writers’ convention “Against the Sleep of Reason”—was doing nothing but reading, totally objectively, the description of the bird called a Wendehals, a wryneck, from Brehm’s Life of Animals, and there was nothing more he needed to do to make the behavior of the people eagerly conforming to the new revolutionary conditions look utterly ridiculous, and I myself had done nothing, I thought, but recite the same definition at the famous November 4 rally at Alexanderplatz.

  You were all gathered at the Church of the Redeemer in October 1989. They still didn’t assign you a large auditorium but they had stopped prohibiting your events and the church opened its doors. “Against the Sleep of Reason”: the motto could hardly have been better and the hundreds of people crowding into the church felt it as they listened to the dozens of speeches and performances from writers and singers that went late into the night. Stunned joy—that was the mood that night. You spoke freely, as though what you were saying were self-evident. No caution and consideration, no looking to either side, the words that lay on everyone’s tongues were unshackled—a feeling that none of you ever wanted to be without again. Your repeated demand in those days was for an independent investigatory commission to determine what had happened to the peaceful protesters on the nights when the Republic was celebrating its fortieth anniversary, and who had given the orders to use violence. (“On those nights, a sickness broke out in this society.”) Not long afterward, such a commission was indeed established.

  * * *

  Peter Gutman came by, unannounced but not unexpected. It was almost midnight and I showed him the draft of my answer to the friend’s letter. (“To learn from one’s mistakes is the hardest way to learn; how much easier to learn from one’s successes but that was not granted us.”) He didn’t say anything, and I gradually realized what his silence meant, but I didn’t care. I said I wanted to know what was wrong with me back then.