“This may have been my favorite thing to see in all of Berlin,” I told Constance when we finished following the cobblestone path and went to get a drink at last. “I find it fascinating. I don’t know why exactly, but I do.”
“It’s a sad chapter in history.”
“You can’t fence things in or out. Not really. Not for long. That’s what Checkpoint Charlie says to me.”
“Let’s get you a drink and bowl of soup.”
I nodded. Something about seeing Checkpoint Charlie reaffirmed my desire to travel. To understand the world, you needed to see the world. For the first time in a while, I felt the rightness of my career, my job, the plan I had made for myself. As corny as it sounded, I wanted to be a citizen of the world. I was okay. Everything was okay. And when a little later in the café two German boys came up to us to ask if they could buy us a drink—boys the age of Peter Fechter—I told them no, no, they couldn’t, because Constance and I were demon lovers, and we were here on our honeymoon, here without need of male company. It was the best way I knew to get a man to leave you alone.
* * *
I woke at 1:37 in the morning, thirsty and a tiny bit drunk still from the two martinis I had consumed the night before. My phone informed me it was 1:37, then 1:38, then 1:39. I checked for messages from Jack. Nothing. I checked for texts. Nothing. Nancy in HR at Bank of America had sent me an emergency contact form. I didn’t read it carefully. I slid it into a folder marked Bank of America. I didn’t examine the folder when the new file took its place among the other unanswered requests. I blamed Jack for losing my focus. I blamed Jack for making me ignore the requests and information coming from Bank of America. Jack the jackass.
Jack was not my true. He was just another boy.
I clicked the phone to sleep. I listened to the breathing around me. Constance’s steady exhalations soothed me. Two other girls, both from Ireland, had come in late at night and fallen asleep with drunken murmurs.
I thought of the word murmur. I thought of it sounding like a word that sounds like itself. That did not exactly make sense, but it seemed clever at 1:41 in the morning. Sludge was another word that sounded like itself. Sludge and murmur. Sludge had to be sludge. Murmur expressed its essence perfectly.
I leaned out of my bunk and dug through my backpack until I found my water bottle. I unscrewed the top and drank a long time. I kept the water bottle next to me and considered going to the restroom to pee. But I didn’t want to leave my bunk. I didn’t want to wake up completely. My earlier buzz spun like a saw at the foot of my bed, and I slowly moved toward it on a conveyor belt.
I made a mental note to block all thoughts of Jack. Sealed tight. It was not difficult, and I felt proud of my new resolve. I had other fish to fry. Many other fish. I had Bank of America in my skillet and a new apartment and New York City and Japanese contacts and travel and Mr. Periwinkle, the world’s oldest cat, and Amy and Constance and a dozen other friends who would be starting their careers. Looked at with realistic perspective, Jack was small potatoes. He just was. He was not going in the skillet. He was banned from the skillet.
Besides, I realized, we were not well matched. He was a freer spirit, impulsive and romantic, while I was steadier. He was correct about that. I was more career oriented, I told myself, more tortoise to his hare, more ant to his grasshopper. It didn’t make either of us right or wrong, or superior or inferior, but merely different. That was a tidy way to look at it, and I felt pleased finally at getting a handle on it, a comfortable way to regard it.
“There,” I whispered aloud, my voice surprisingly loud in the tiny bunkroom.
No room in the skillet. Too much in the skillet already.
21
The next morning, I spent some time in the bathroom holding my breath.
It’s something I had always done. When I was a little girl, I went to the pool with my mother all summer long, and my favorite thing to do—the thing that brought me peace and serenity and a sense of calm—was to sink below the clear blue water and look up. By holding my breath, I could silence the world. I could hear the blood moving around in my body. My heartbeat became the sound of something big and important, and the world, the hustle and nuttiness of the everyday, faded backward like a concerned mother, coffee in hand, staring down in the water to check on her child. There I lingered, serene, breathing in check, the crystal ridges of water casting shadows down to the black lines of the deep end. It was punctuation. It stopped the world. So in the hostel bathroom, I closed my eyes and tucked in a deep breath, then opened my eyes to see the world drifting upward and away.
It worked. It always worked.
I stayed under. I looked up and saw the gnarly ceiling tiles above the sinks, heard the groan of a pipe somewhere below me, but those things did not concern me. I was a water creature, a manatee, even an oyster, and I watched the world slosh above me and recede, and it was okay, everything was okay. The sun pushed down into the water, and I felt the pull to go deeper, and I let my breath ease out in a long, tight whoosh as one of the Irish girls suddenly appeared, her hair wild, her pajamas turned almost sideways on her body.
“Meditating? That’s ballsy,” she said, clanging her way through the door. “All I can manage most mornings is a good, long pee, but I’ll be out of here in a second, don’t you mind me.”
I nodded and held my breath again. A turtle, I thought. That’s what I was.
* * *
For twenty-seven euros, I bought a day pass to a gym a woman at the hostel recommended. It was the last thing in the world I wanted to do, but I felt poisoned inside by the martinis, and I knew I needed to work out. To sweat. To put my mind elsewhere, preferably deep inside a tedious, repetitive hour of muscle expansion and contraction. Next to holding my breath and pretending to be underwater, exercise almost always helped.
Besides, Constance had calls to make. She had decided to take a miraculous morning off from perusing more art and history and saints.
As I navigated the exchange at the front desk and listened to the explanation of what machines I could use, I made a small cultural note: gyms looked the same, more or less, the world over. This gym, called the Worker, if I did my translation properly, had wide factory windows and two dozen exercise bikes lined up to look out on the passing street. Bikes were bikes, I realized, German or otherwise. I climbed on the second from the right, set my levels to an easy pedal (gradually gaining pretend altitude up, up, and away), and began the drudgery of motion.
I drank water. I pedaled. I pulled up some Checkpoint Charlie information on my phone and read that. I shot Amy a text and told her I missed her. I told her I missed her a lot. I wrote my mom and asked her to give Mr. Periwinkle a kiss and a brush out. I asked her to please play string mouse with him. I read more about Checkpoint Charlie, including a short essay on what it was like to go through all the paperwork and police interrogation to travel from East to West Berlin.
In a while, I had a good sweat going. My ponytail swept the back of my shoulders. A blond woman, German, smiled at me as she climbed on the bike beside me. I smiled back. She was about my age. I checked to see if she wanted to out-bike me, show off her stamina, but she didn’t seem that type. She seemed relaxed and willing to let the time pass peacefully. She also had a ponytail. Hers rode higher on the back of her head than mine did.
At one kilometer, I smelled alcohol in my sweat. I rubbed a white towel across my neck and down my arms and kept going.
At two kilometers, I had to stand on the pedals to get up a pretend hill. My heart began pumping, and I wondered, for an instant, if my heart had decided to explode. But I kept going, and the virtual bike rider on the handlebar screen wobbled a little but kept up a steady pace.
At three kilometers, I saw Jack.
Sort of. I had to stand up straight on my pedals and look down, down to the street, and I had to squint. Jack did not simply show up, I told myself. Jack did not materialize out of nowhere. Maybe, no joke, I was having a stroke. Maybe I was hal
lucinating. I slowed my pedaling and looked at the woman on my right. She had a Kindle open on the reading rack in front of her. She did not pay any attention to me, but I needed her to be there to make sure I was not seeing things.
I counted to three, then four, then ten, before looking back down.
For some reason, I thought of Mad Max. Absurdly. I thought of people appearing out of the desert, the heat waves obscuring their images for a time before their growing proximity rendered them knowable. That’s how Jack appeared. His image was not obscured by heat waves but by the everyday bustle of street traffic.
He had his eyes up on the building, watching. And he leaned against the most beautiful automobile I had ever seen: a tiny silver Mercedes convertible, its hood ornament so well polished that it glistened when the sun hit it right.
I got off the bike and stood next to the window and called him on my cell. I watched him click his phone and bring it close to his cheek. He smiled up at the building, but I didn’t think he could see me.
“What are you doing here?” I asked. “What the hell, Jack?”
“Hello to you, too, Heather.”
“Question unanswered.”
“I’m here to see you. I’m here to apologize.”
“How did you know where I was?”
“Constance told me.”
“You’re stalking me, Jack.”
“I’m not stalking you, Heather.”
I didn’t say anything for a moment. I leaned closer to the window in order to see him more clearly. I put my forehead against the glass of the window.
I hated him a little for finding a cute sports car in Germany. And I hate-loved how he looked leaning against the car, because it was just a little unfair to see his killer handsomeness beside a topless car, his hair mussed, a navy sweater with holes in the elbows keeping him warm.
“What do you want, Jack?”
“To see you.”
“What if I don’t want to see you?”
“Then you tell me you don’t want to see me, and I go away. It’s not complicated, Heather.”
“You were a complete jerk, you know?”
“Yes, I know. To make amends, I brought you this.”
He reached into the car and grabbed something from the passenger seat. I couldn’t make it out at first. Then gradually I realized what it was.
“Is that Ben and Jerry’s?” I asked.
“Chocolate Fudge Brownie. Your favorite. That’s what you said one time. See? I listened.”
“So you show up with a Mercedes and Ben and Jerry’s and you expect everything to be forgiven?”
“What I hoped is that you would know I’m trying.”
“Trying what?”
“Trying to say I don’t want us to be over.”
Finally, he spotted where I stood in the window. My father used to ask: Are you on the bus or not? Sometimes life came down to choices as simple as that. Are you on the Jack bus or not? The answer wasn’t in my iPhone, and it wasn’t anything I could study and then regurgitate on a test. It wasn’t anything I could manage by understanding trends or market analysis, arrange, set up, calculate, scribble on a pad of divided paper with pluses and minuses on either side.
Are you on the bus or not?
This was Jack. He would always be impetuous, always be a moving target, always be a surprise—delightful or otherwise. He would always make me wild and happy and thrilled, and he would always challenge me and hurt me in ways he probably wouldn’t understand. He would show up without warning, and he would occupy far more than his share of my mental space. He would hand me a sword and tell me to fight him to the death. But even as my mind raced around all these thoughts, another part of me realized one simple thing: our eyes hadn’t left one another for a moment.
I held up my finger to tell him I would be a minute. I hung up and turned around to wipe down my bike. The German woman surprised me with a single English word.
“Men,” she said and shook her head.
* * *
“I was wrong, you were right,” he said, coming around the car. “And I apologize.”
“What was I right about?”
“Is this a quiz?”
“Maybe it is. Maybe it needs to be for the moment.”
“I didn’t study. This is a pop quiz.”
“Hardly. See what you can do, anyway.”
He was too damn good looking. I felt my gut flutter. It annoyed me that my gut fluttered, but I couldn’t help it. He smiled. It was a smile similar to the one he had when he fenced with me.
“Okay, Heather. I’m admitting that I sometimes act insensitively. I’m saying that I was wrong to bring up this whole New-York-is-a-prison thing to someone who is about to move to New York. I was a clod. It was a stupid thing to say, and it landed badly.”
“Yes, you were a clod.”
* * *
A few people on the street veered around us. We formed the proverbial rock in the streambed. We forced water to go around us. One old lady wearing a black kerchief over her head and carrying a bouquet of asters nodded as she passed and then moved down the street.
Jack stepped closer to me. I felt the back of my neck flush crimson.
“We can drive this one hundred miles an hour on the autobahn,” he whispered, bending forward just enough so I could have his breath in my ear. “Have you ever gone a hundred miles an hour? You’ll feel it everywhere. You’ll feel it forever.”
Then he pulled back. I stared at him for a ten count at least. He still didn’t take his eyes off mine.
“First say you’re an asshat,” I said.
“You’re an asshat.”
“No, say you are an asshat.”
“Okay, you are an asshat.”
He smiled. I loved his smile.
He knew he had me. He held up the Chocolate Fudge Brownie ice cream again.
“It’s going to melt if we don’t eat it pretty soon,” he said. “That would be a tragedy.”
“Where do you want to go?”
“I have a place in mind.”
“Where?”
“Give in to it, Heather. Trust me. You can trust me, you know.”
“Can I?”
“I could take that in two ways. Should you? Or are you capable of trusting me?”
“I like you, Jack, but that really sucked.”
“I know it did, and I’m sorry. I can’t say it won’t ever happen again, but I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
“I think maybe you did. That’s the part that scares me. That’s the part that hurt more than anything.”
He nodded.
I was crazy about him.
And I did the girl calculation. I didn’t like the way I looked. I didn’t have a toothbrush. I didn’t have a change of clothes, and I was sweaty.
My neck turned a hotter red. I felt it blistering the back of my shirt.
Taking a deep breath, I circled around the back of the car. At the passenger door, he turned me quickly and kissed me, and then an animal grew between us and I could not kiss him deeply enough, could not cling to him with enough force. It was the kiss we had experienced in the fencing studio all over again. He bent me back until I worried I would snap in half, and I nearly did. I put my hand out and braced myself against his chest, and suddenly nothing in the world mattered very much except Jack’s kiss, his body, his smell of wood and mud and rivers.
Then we kissed some more. And it took me a few more minutes to realize my back wasn’t snapping after all, but that the Ben and Jerry’s pint had pushed against my skin along my beltline and turned it cold.
22
I looked down and watched the speedometer push above 137 kilometers per hour. Jack sat in the passenger seat, the spoon he had brought digging down into the Chocolate Fudge Brownie.
“Oh, this is a good bite,” he said. “A really good bite. When I was a kid, we used to call a really good bite a Sing-Sing. This is a Sing-Sing for sure.”
And he fed me a bite. A Sing-Sing, whatever t
he hell that was.
I pushed the accelerator and brought the car up to 145.
“I’m going faster,” I said.
He nodded and went back to digging me another spoonful, digging for more Sing-Sings.
* * *
Somewhere around 161 kph in an open car, you feel the corners of your mouth push back. It’s one hundred miles an hour, and the car is a bullet and you are simply riding it.
You also realize that anything, anything at all, could flip you and kill you and you don’t care. You wait with your mouth open, the gorgeous taste of chocolate coming to you now and then like a divine explosion on your tongue, and you push more out of the car, give it gas, and you glance over and see that Jack, lovely Jack, does not cling to the hand rest or show any signs of nervousness. He is happy to go this fast, and he patiently doles out dabs of chocolate until you can’t help it, you scream out in some weird caterwaul, and you wonder how you have never thought to go this fast, to rent a Mercedes for a day in Germany, or have a man feed you ice cream while the countryside passes by like a blur.
* * *
I topped out at 172 kph.
It was enough.
Jack nodded as I brought the speed back to a normal range.
It felt like falling to come back into the world.
“How did that feel?” Jack asked, giving me the last spoonful of Ben and Jerry’s.
The Map That Leads to You Page 10