The Wallcreeper

by Nell Zink

  Berne was beautiful. It had colonnades like Bologna and boutiques like New York. On three sides of its grid, it fell away to a wild river in a gorge. The river enfolded the city like a uterine wall. Across the bridge bears stalked back and forth on the banks. It was too small to move through. All you could do was change positions in place. From the top of the church tower you could see all of it. Every speck. I went with my sister to cafés. She said she would marry Steve in a minute, but in Berne her eyes caressed everything and everyone. Everything in Berne had a delicious texture advertising a rich interior. Nothing was façade. It was clean all the way down forever and forever, like the earth in Whitman’s “This Compost.” I told Stephen I wanted to live there. He claimed in the old city you couldn’t have a washing machine because the plumbing was medieval.

  Our apartment was fifteen minutes from downtown Berne. Our trolley stop was next to a gas station, which is where Elvis the Montenegrin worked behind the counter, selling beer and candy. His shift ended around the time Stephen went to work. I bought the International Herald Tribune every day.

  Pretty soon Elvis knew I spoke English. Soon after that he knew what baked goods I liked and how I liked my coffee. He knew how to smile charmingly and ask for sex by name. The first time I invited Elvis to our apartment, I realized that even the hottest hot sex with Stephen had been all in my head. I had hypnotized myself because Stephen had a job that could support us both and secretarial work bored me. I saw that I had followed the chief guiding principle of the petty bourgeoisie in modernity and made a virtue of necessity in telling myself my husband was a good lover. Elvis raised my consciousness. But there are reasons they call it necessity, so I decided Stephen’s stability was good for me. Elvis was flighty. He had tight pants and a degree in superannuated theory from Ljubljana. He was always broke a week before payday. “I take what I want,” he liked to say. He was hopelessly in love with his own thoughts, watching them like a show on TV, zapping through the channels. But he trusted his eyes, which was nice. He would absent-mindedly taste my sweat, or try the weight and flexibility of my hair, comparing it to heavy gold as if he had pulled off the heist of the century. My eyes struck him as particularly expensive. Objectifying my body saved him from objectifying my mind. He moved gracefully through and around me like a wave. My thoughts were my business. I thought, Elvis is a good lover.

  Stephen unexpectedly announced that he had been to a music shop and acquired two telephone numbers. “I’m an operator,” he explained. Even his taste in music was news to me. When I met him, his things were already in storage, and by the time the container with his vinyl collection arrived from Rotterdam, I was in the hospital. “Why, why, why do the wicked ones rule,” he sang suddenly. He joined a sound system where everyone was younger than he was. I thought maybe something about his narrow escape from fatherhood had inspired him to become younger. He grew his hair an extra half-inch and started drinking energy drinks. He used headphones because his music might upset Rudolf, who was molting. I never had to go to their shows. Stephen said he needed his space, because we were going to be together for sixty-plus years.

  So his knob-twiddling was the first thing I found out about Stephen other than myself and birds. The birds were secret from his coworkers, but they were all I got.

  In March, Rudolf became very restless. He would climb his pegboards up to the crown molding, let go and drop to the floor, then flutter from room to room like an autumn leaf tied to a string. He stopped saying twee-twee-twee and started cheeping like a sparrow and crying out in delirium like a skylark. Stephen said Rudolf wanted to find a nesting site and sing himself a girlfriend. He definitely seemed very driven. One Sunday morning at dawn (we were going to Lake Biel) we opened the kitchen window for him. Rudolf flew out, then back. He clung to the stucco outside and looked at me. Stephen said, “Go on, Rudolf. This is Switzerland. You’re safe!” Rudolf climbed straight up in short bursts of fluttering and was borne away on the wind. Stephen told me we should try again to have a baby, right now.

  “What about zero population growth?” I objected.

  “My mother and father were only children,” he said. “That means I’m entitled to four to replace my grandparents.”

  “What about global warming?”

  “If it weren’t for global warming, we’d be under an ice sheet a mile thick right now.” He gestured toward the mountains. “But look at us. Earth as far as the eye can see. I love global warming! And I love you!”

  Something about the implied comparison made me nervous. I was pretty bad as wives go. Where Stephen was concerned possibly epoch-rending, world-destroying bad. But without me he’d be under an ice sheet, so maybe I was doing him a favor.

  It was plausible. It was also not enough. I said I wasn’t ready. But I had sex with him, feeling like a very dutiful wife.

  Soon after that I went out to dinner downtown with Elvis. It was the day after payday. He talked nonsense and made me laugh. We walked the colonnades and fetched up against the ramparts, facing in. You couldn’t look across the river. There was nothing there. Berne lived turned inward on itself. But it wasn’t self-sufficient; it was more like a tumor with blood vessels to supply everything it needed: capital, expats, immigrants, stone, cement, paper, ink, clay, paint. No, not a tumor. A flower with roots stretching to the horizon, sucking in nutrients, but not just a single flower: a bed of mixed perennials. A flower meadow where butterflies could lay eggs and die in peace, knowing their caterpillars would not be ground to pulp by the mowers. Continuity of an aesthetic that had become an aesthetic of continuity. That was Berne. I leaned against the city wall and Elvis kissed me, closing his eyes so as not to see the bears. It was dark and freezing cold.

  Birding in winter involves a lot of long car rides. (I saw Elvis a lot, so I didn’t mind spending time with Stephen on weekends.) One morning I got around to begging Stephen to tell me about himself. He turned out to be much better at talking when he was driving the car. The landmarks steadily passing by the side of the road functioned as encouraging responses, telling him to go on. The distractions filled all the little gaps with what seemed like conjunctions linking dependent clauses. “You know, there’s not much to say,” he said. “I mean, I’m going to have to drop out of this sound system because they want to go on tour. I’m trying to think when I started playing drums. I guess maybe sixth grade. My parents got me lessons. I had a trap set in the basement. A red Tama drum kit. Getting lessons helps. Guys play for ten years and can’t even do a snare roll if they never got lessons. My first band was Gold Purple Scarlet. We played this monumental Lovecraftian dark epic schlock,” he smiled, borne away like a boat against the current, “and we looked like hobbit vampires. I had long hair and I was so into drugs. Prescription painkillers. Our lyrics were like ‘Fear the vengeance of the blood dwarf, the moonlit trumpets ride,’ shit like that. It was white supremacist, among other things. I mean, you don’t know when you’re a kid railing against hip-hop and the backbeat whose hands you’re playing into. Whose freak flag, you know. My parents were in hell. Plus I was addicted to Darvon and sometimes codeine. But we had such a great time. It was like nothing existed outside of the band. We brought out an EP and two CDs, and then we broke up because Lydia, she was the singer, her parents got her put in the hospital, and when she got out, she was gone. She went up to Maine, like as far away as she could possibly get. She was walking silly walks from all the Prolixin. That’s when I decided to go to med school and be a psychiatrist. But I had this problem of shitty grades and mediocre scores, so I went to that work-study program at Temple instead. I know devices are cool and everything like that, but I wish I’d had the patience for chemistry. I was so fucking lazy. I could be working on cancer or HIV, and here I am making parts for alcoholic smokers. So it’s good I’m still doing music. And I have the cutest wife. Hardcore was never my thing when I was coming up. I was basically into anything where you wear black, the whole range from EBM to minimal techno. I was a lonely kid. My mom wa
s such a weirdo, like a scarlet macaw. She was always wearing scarves and big pants, like ‘flowing garments.’ Did I ever tell you she slept with Paul from Peter, Paul and Mary? I would basically listen to absolutely anything where you got to wear black.” He paused to make a left turn. “I kind of liked dub, you know, Lee Perry and Mad Professor and even goofy shit like Judge Dread, and I was really into Bootsy, plus like sludge and death metal, so that whole tight-ass rude-boy mod thing was not my idea of good. I liked psychedelics, but there was nowhere to get them. I was I guess eighteen when I did rehab. My dad was so mad at me. I thought he was going to kill me. I seriously thought he was taking me down to the clinic because he no longer trusted himself not to kill my ass. But my parents were pretty sweet to me most of the time. So anyway, it was when I got older and kind of settled down that I started getting into these heinous happy party sounds. You can’t be into downers and listen to dubstep. It’s not doable.”

  “Wait, how did you get into birds?”

  “Oh, that was basically my scout leader. He also coached track, so we saw each other all the time. He had a house on the Chicka-hominy next to a marsh. It was brackish water, smelled totally anaerobic, but it got a lot of crabs. That was like paradise. We used to go crabbing all day. We’d go fishing in the morning in the pond back of the cove, fry bluegills and bass for lunch, tie up their heads on some string and go out and stand in the river barefoot, pulling in blue crabs. Then we’d build a fire and get this great big pot and some Old Bay and put a hurting on those crabs. I didn’t much get into birds until I was at least, I don’t know, sixteen? I wasn’t a kid anymore. It was when the other kids were getting into hunting, I guess, and I knew that was not for me. He was my math teacher, too, so he used to tell me about the special theory of relativity and everything like that. He liked clamming a lot, but I really hated clams. So my eagle scout project was to study the ospreys that were breeding and feeding in the cove.”

  “I thought you were addicted to codeine.”

  “Listen, man, I went to state running the mile. There are a lot of hours in the day when you’re a kid.”

  I had to admit the truth of that statement. I replied, “The most ambitious thing I did at that age was let these girls pierce my ears.”

  “I would have done anything in the world I thought would piss my parents off,” Stephen said. “Eagle scout was a conscious trade-off to keep my dad from killing me.”

  I realized that he was not like me at all. I only did things I felt strongly moved to do. As a child I consistently felt I had no options and was surprised by my parents’ strong reactions to the entirely inevitable things I did. My life moved forward in ineluctable leaps. The only smart leap I had ever made, in their opinions, was marrying Stephen. It was what set me apart from my sister, since secretary and bikini barista are not really such different professions when you get right down to it. I mean, I’ve served plenty of coffee in my day.

  “Were you in a band at Temple?” I asked.

  “No. Once I moved out of my parents’ house, I calmed down a lot. I just didn’t like having people breathing down my neck.”

  That made sense. It would be a reason to marry someone too shy to ask personal questions. It was also a way of saying: I wasn’t doing drugs when you met me and I’m not doing drugs now, but if you breathe down my neck, I’ll do drugs.

  “Isn’t it hard,” I asked, “getting up so early in the morning on weekends after you worked all week? I mean, it’s hard for me, and I’m just writing a screenplay.” (I had intimated that I was a writer with industry connections so he wouldn’t make me work.)

  “Oh, I feel great,” he said. “It’s great getting out of the lab. I feel exhilarated. I feel like I can concentrate for hours. I feel on top of the world right now. This is a really good time for me.” He reached out and clamped his hand lovingly on my leg. He was shaking.

  When we got to the river, I helped him set up his blind. It was a bit cramped, so first he would get in, and then I would hand him everything he needed before going back to the car to read.

  He saw a greenshank, linnets, and a poacher. He made me look at the guy. We took a picture through his spotting scope, but it didn’t turn out.

  It was soon after that that I started saying, if he asked me what I was doing, “Oh, breeding and feeding.” The majestic simplicity. It always made him laugh. But I couldn’t envy the birds. Their lives weren’t as simple as mine. My life was like falling off a log comfortably located somewhere light-years above the earth.

  At Elvis’s suggestion I took a course in Berndeutsch. I learned ten verbs for work: work hard (drylige, bugle, chrampfe, schaffe, wärche), get stuck with jobs no one else wants to do (chrüpple), work slowly (chnorze), work carelessly (fuuschte), work absent-mindedly (lauere). Stay at home and putter around doing little harmless chores (chlütterle). I learned fast and the teacher said maybe it was an advantage my not knowing any German. Then the ten weeks of the course were over and I didn’t know anything anymore, except that I would never look for a job. When people other than Stephen asked me what I did, I could say, “Chlütterle.” Another laugh line.

  Elvis said he wanted to go dancing, which would involve staying out very late. Going dancing was his reason for being, and he wanted to share it with me. I wasn’t sure I could get that past Stephen, but I agreed to try. Stephen said, “That sounds like a date.”

  “It totally is a date. Obviously this guy wants in my pants. But I mean, when’s the last time you went dancing? For me I think it was my sophomore year. And I wouldn’t know where to go. He’s a nice guy. I’m sure you know him. The guy with the beard at the gas station. He’s totally harmless. He’s a disciple of Slavoj Žižek.”

  Stephen snapped the International Herald Tribune tight to turn the page. “That is the tiredest line in Christendom,” he said.

  “I know. It’s not his fault he’s a tragic figure. It’s never a tragic figure’s fault. That’s what makes them tragic. But he says he knows this really fun place to go dancing, not a disco but, like, a bar where they play all kind of ‘mixed music.’”

  “Do you need a chaperone?”

  “Would you please?” I said. I couldn’t really say no. We picked Elvis up at his place. I had never been there. It was farther out of town, up at the edge of the woods. An old house. He came out as soon as the car pulled up. The street obviously didn’t get much traffic late at night. Elvis directed us to the most pitiful bar I ever saw. Young men unlikely to be in the possession of Swiss passports danced with eyes half-closed, snapping their fingers, while women in various states of disrepair jockeyed into their axes of attention. Lumpy, lantern-jawed, pockmarked, bucktoothed, short, tall, or simply drunken women, here to pick up devil-may-care subaltern gigolos for a night of horror.

  I saw Elvis through new eyes. “You are so much beautiful,” he would often say charmingly as he worshipped at the altar of my body. Looking around, I could only think that a bar where I am the best-looking woman by a factor of ten is not a bar where I want to be, and that beauty is apparently relative. I felt both better- and worse-looking than before. Better because I was suddenly reminded that the world is not all college girls and secretaries and trophy wives, and worse because everything in the whole universe is contagious if you look at it long enough. Just opening your eyes puts you in front of a mirror, psychologically speaking. Garbage in, garbage out. Or rather, garbage goes in, but you never get rid of it. It just lies there turning to dust and slowly wafting a thin layer of grime on to every other object in your brain. Scraping the gunk off is not only a major challenge, but the chief burden of human existence. That’s why I keep things so clean. Otherwise I would see little flecks of Rudolf-shit everywhere I looked, from Fragonard to the Duino Elegies.

  “I am not staying here,” Stephen said. “Do you want to stay?”

  Elvis asked if he knew another place. Our next stop was called Mancuso’s Loft. It was running drum ‘n’ bass. The proprietor waved us in. Here I saw Stephen thr
ough new eyes. Then I ran to the ladies’ room and stuffed my ears with toilet paper. Stephen led me to the floor and yelled, “I’m going to dance a little bit!” He then proceeded to dance as if he had never seen me, or any other human being, before in his life. Cranes came to mind.

  Touching my elbow, Elvis remarked, “This club is so much beautiful,” and headed for the bar. Elvis was right. In Mancuso’s Loft, I felt below average-looking and quite conspicuously ill-dressed. My pants revealed nothing whatever. My shoes were comfy. My shirt had long sleeves so thick I was soon terribly hot.

  “I like your husband,” Elvis said. I said that was not really his assigned task. “No, he has something. Un certain je ne sais quoi. You know what I need? A girlfriend. By myself, I am never getting into this place. You think they let me in? A brown man alone, with a beard? Ha!”

  “You’re not brown! You’re lily-white anywhere but Denmark!”

  “Many times, I am standing in the queue outside clubs like this. And all the time, I think I am living in Berne. But I am not living in Berne. I am living in the Berne that reveals itself to me, okay, a white ‘Yugo’ if you please but with no connections, with nothing. A cashier in the petrol station, with nothing to his account but a few women. Yes, I say it openly. I have nothing to offer this town but my body. My body to strike the keys of the cash register, my body to find other bodies and search for warmth. My body is my capital. You, this beautiful woman, are my social capital. And then I was taking you, you particularly, to this horrible bar. I see now it is so very horrible, this bar.”