Delayed Rays of a Star

by Amanda Lee Koe

  On the way, he listened to Rank on his Walkman, the Smiths’ latest.

  The Smiths was Ibrahim’s favorite band.

  Johnny Marr played a clever guitar, but Morrissey wrote lyrics that could stand up and walk off the page unassisted by a melody, emotional and cynical in equal parts. When Ibrahim grew up, he wanted to be his own Morrissey. Too literate to be concerned with modernity, he would locate for himself just the same autodidactic noblesse in rebellion. Morrissey had been born into a working-class Irish Catholic immigrant brood and was bullied for all of those things in Manchester, where he’d grown up in social housing with a poster of James Dean on his bedroom wall and all the Oscar Wilde books he could borrow from the public library. If Morrissey had made it through, Ibrahim thought maybe he could, too. Ibrahim had read in a fanzine that when Morrissey was eighteen, even as an unpopular loner with no friends who was flunking his way out of school, he’d written in his diary:

  I want to be famous NOW

  NOT when I’m dead

  A fair number of visitors were milling around the Sachsenhausen concentration camp memorial when Ibrahim reached the premises in his American disguise. There was a visor-clad Japanese tour group, whose guide held up a little white flag with a red circle in the middle of it. There were skull-capped Jews. There were actual Americans in Bermuda shorts and waist pouches. Some had their cameras out, pointing them at their companions, who put on pensive expressions against the backdrop; others had their hands clasped before or behind them in studied repose.

  At half an hour before closing time, Ibrahim slipped under one of the replicas of the slatted bunk beds that prisoners slept on, five to a bed. When the ushers closed up, he tucked his legs in and held his breath, but they didn’t even walk his way. He waited several hours more, napping intermittently, before he wiggled out quietly.

  With no one around, and the lights turned off, the camp felt more real to him. It was no longer a photo opportunity or a simulacrum of calamity. There was an austere coolness to the compound. The ARBEIT MACHT FREI sign was not as highly mounted on the gate as it had seemed, and Ibrahim could reach it without much difficulty. He set up his stepladder and held the diamond-blade reciprocating saw to the sign at a forty-five-degree angle. The noise from the saw meeting the iron was stark and angry, amplified in the dead of the night in pastoral Oranienburg. One corner gave. Ibrahim held on carefully as he started working on a second corner. When he saw bright headlights approaching, he jumped off the stepladder, as two officers got out of the car and gave chase. In detention at the police station in Oranienburg, Ibrahim was asked: Who paid you to do this? What would you have done with the ARBEIT MACHT FREI sign if you had removed it? Are you working with other accomplices or organized networks? Do you have neo-Nazi or white power affiliations with any individual or organization in Germany or Europe?

  Because he was of mixed descent, the accusations of neo-Nazi were not as strident as they would otherwise have been, but those of poor migrant integration were surfaced. As he was not yet eighteen, he was tried in juvenile court back in Berlin.

  Reporters visited his university.

  Everyone was quick to claim a degree of familiarity with Ibrahim: Pighead reads Saussure, digs the Smiths! No one could trace a clean motive for his action, though one reporter went so far as to dig up and quote from a term essay Ibrahim had turned in, which ended with the words “history is not a teleology.”

  The reporters’ questions after the trial Ibrahim ignored or answered this way: If I said my gesture was formal and not moral, would you believe me? Or would it be easier if I told you I was bored? Yes?

  A pretty journalist shoved a mic under Ibrahim’s nose as he left the courthouse. Ibrahim, you say your gesture is formal. Can you tell us something about your ideas on form?

  Her heels clacked as she ran after him.

  Before he was made to duck into the police car he managed to say: Form follows fascism. Ibrahim smiled at her as the police shut the door. She caught her breath and waved good-bye. What a pretentious prick, one of the other reporters, a fat man in sports shoes, said.

  The pretty journalist glared at him.

  * * *

  —

  FORM FOLLOWS FASCISM became a headline that week.

  It was too epigrammatic for editors to resist, even though no one could say for sure what it meant. Working backward from each media outlet’s wildly differing interpretation of Ibrahim—Neo-Nazi acolyte; teenaged Kurdish delinquent; historical revisionist; anarchist proto-artist; attention-seeking youth—one could guess at their subjective disposition, which said more about them than about him. A right-wing paper expounded on the dangers of racial mixing and called for monitored repatriation of foreign workers and tightened border control. A centrist op-ed with a fancy prose style even made a big show, awkwardly finagled, of quoting Adorno’s “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” The pretty journalist infused her article with heartfelt staccato exclamations:

  Ibrahim Max Müller is not a neo-Nazi, nor is he a violent migrant. He is an aesthete! This is not a criminal gesture, it is an artistic one! The new gallery is not the white cube. It is history, it is bureaucracy, it is public memory! With one gesture, Ibrahim Max Müller has exposed our privileged hypocrisy.

  For attempted grand larceny of the ARBEIT MACHT FREI sign in Sachsenhausen, Ibrahim Max Müller was sentenced to paying repair costs, and three months in detention at the JVA. Because he could not pay, his sentence was extended, in lieu of payment, from three months to six. He was also expelled from his university. At the JVA youth detention center in Berlin, Ibrahim received a considerable number of offers of boy-on-boy hand jobs and even blow jobs, which, he soon discovered, seldom if at all carried with them an emotional implication, and that he accepted in any case without encumbrance. For a short spell he received a spate of fan mail, opened up by wardens before being passed on to him. Most of it was from young women who sounded like carbon copies of the pretty journalist. He’d known that type on campus. Girls who wore colorful knitted tank tops and pinned Antifa badges to their hemp shoulder bags but were snooty whenever he tried to start an actual conversation.

  There was one long letter from a man who introduced himself in sprawling cursive as “a failed contemporary artist who, alas, was compelled by principle to cease my socio-Situationist sculpture after participating in just one operation, an offshoot of the ‘Demonstration for Capitalist Realism’ action in the Berges furniture store in Düsseldorf several years before you were born. Ever since I have been every day reshaping the boundaries of my practice in my mind and through the daily tribulations of my lived experience, without so much as touching a lump of clay or a scrappy piece of aluminum wire for the last twenty-six years, to little avail. But hearing of your trial and your actions I was able to read them, very clearly, as a call to arms and a Ready-Made Social Sculpture.”

  The failed artist expounded on his opinion that Ibrahim was “nothing less than an incipient visionary.” He should not be unduly anxious about his incarceration. In retrospect, it would serve only to exemplify how his gestures could not be read in the time he was producing those gestures. Germany’s publics were not yet ready to reckon with him—“and that is only to say, my boy, that so many of us remain contemptibly unwilling to stand up to the refraction of our very own souls and mirrored selves at an oblique angle”—but the passage of time would vindicate him, showing Ibrahim “not merely to be a blazing frontrunner in the new plastic arts, but one who, despite tenderness of age, and recent trends in our wider cultural sphere toward the sterile veneer of bourgeois abstraction, is willing and able to engage, exultantly, within yet beyond our pockmarked history, with serious philosophical questions of humanity and art-making.” He ended the letter quoting Joseph Beuys in full lines, floridly scribbled, his handwriting growing larger and loopier as it reached the end: “Only on condition of a radical widening of
definitions will it be possible for art and activities related to art to provide evidence that art is now the only evolutionary-revolutionary power. Only art is capable of dismantling the repressive effects of a senile social system that continues to totter along the death-line: to dismantle in order to build ‘a Social Organism as a Work of Art.’ ”

  * * *

  —

  IBRAHIM FOUND THE letter pitiful—this man had not failed at art, he had failed to live—and posted no response. The days were monotonous, yet time passed sooner than he’d expected, and when Ibrahim got out of JVA, he took a transit train to Hamburg and hopped on a ferry to Manchester. In the club district he crashed his way through gigs, and at Hacienda midway through a New Order set, he found out from a Mancunian raver with a buzz cut that the Smiths had split up. More than a year ago, mate, the raver shouted over the ending of “Thieves Like Us.” Where were you, hey, out in the woods?

  Someone surfed past his head, white rubber toe of a dirty Converse sneaker splitting his lip as the irresistible electronic opening pulse of “Bizarre Love Triangle” dropped hard and fast. The whole floor went up in screams. His lip was throbbing. Without swallowing he tasted the blood. Watching magnetized bodies flail helplessly together to the beat—livid wrists and limp fingers detaching themselves from shoulders in the air, eyelids sewn shut to faces but still jumping, treacly hair slicked to backs of necks—he saw that he was the only one who was not moving. He was alone, and he had been alone for a long time.

  In the middle of the bursting club he began to sob.

  To hide the crying he tried to dance, pressing his body onto the girl in front of him. When she turned around, he managed to latch his mouth onto hers without even seeing her face. She froze, then struggled, and when he would not let her go, melted into him, before they were parted by the moving crowd. Very soon, the music became sharper and tighter, the band had moved on to the dark foliage of “Truth” with its polyphonic labyrinth of delayed amps and layered synths. Strobes began to flash, and they would not stop. Their pattern was senseless. Needing something to hold on to, Ibrahim reached out in front of him again. A fist went into his ribs, a Cockney accent practiced itself over and over on “Suck off, faggot, suck off,” and when he tried to stand up, the last thing he saw was combat boots and flannel pelting down before he was dragged out.

  For the next three days he thought: Ibrahim’s up and gone.

  He did not move, he was not hungry, and he could not be sure if he was asleep or awake. It was a pity that he was left with Max Müller. He was not sure what any of this meant, but for the first time in a long time he let himself miss his mother, without reservation. Each time he thought of her, he had been afraid to use up what he could scarcely remember. He was certain that every sight, sound, and smell had a limited, little life. Now he wanted to spend it all and be done. On the fourth day, he woke in the cardboard collection area behind a grocery store. He could stand, and walk in a straight line. He had not been stabbed or mugged. In a public bathroom he drank for five minutes straight from the faucet, checked out the purple-yellow bruises on his torso, washed himself up as best he could, and caught a ferry to Paris.

  The lights were brighter than they were in Berlin, and though it was prettier, Ibrahim found Paris slow and proud. He was walking behind a doddery white gent when the man tripped, and Ibrahim lunged to support him, clutching his elbow. The old man steadied himself, turned around, and tapped Ibrahim smartly with his cane. Don’t think I don’t know what you’re up to! He patted the shape of his wallet in his breast pocket. It’s because of you lot that I keep it here.

  Ibrahim pulled the cane from the old man, leaving him sprawled on the pavement.

  He hung around music venues in the 6th arrondissement, trying for a job at the Ritz and La Cigale, but they were too chi-chi. Once a shopgirl gave him a pat of butter for a bag of rolls he’d begged off a bakery at closing time, and he felt a disproportionate gratefulness. When a cross-dressing manager at La Java in the 10th arrondissement said yes, he could do with extra help, Ibrahim kissed his hands.

  Call me Le Tigre, the manager said.

  La Java was tucked in the back of a very old shopping arcade, below the curve of an art deco curved iron staircase in the basement. Le Tigre allowed Ibrahim to sleep in the liquor storeroom, told him to double up as the day watchman. With two duvets and a sheet of cardboard, Ibrahim bedded down on a tessellation of beer crates, listening to the Smiths. Because Morrissey delivered the lyrics slightly off the beat, his songs always sounded new to Ibrahim’s ears. Peeling themselves away from chord structures in 4/4 time, his words were never quite in the place anyone expected them to be, and they kept the squeak and scratch of mice in the walls at bay as Ibrahim fell asleep:

  I’d like to drop my trousers to the world

  I am a man of means (of slender means)

  * * *

  —

  I COULD BE wrong, Le Tigre whispered to Ibrahim on a quiet weekday night behind the counter, shifting his eyes to indicate a tall thin man with a bouffant hairstyle, but isn’t that David Bowie?

  A group of eccentrically dressed men sat on poufs around a low table, ordering round after round of dry martinis. I mean it would have been okay if Fassbinder had directed Just a Gigolo, the bouffant-haired man was saying to the group in English, but with Hemmings, it became a joke. Promise me you won’t see it, it’s my thirty-two Elvis movies rolled into one.

  What’s he saying, Le Tigre, who didn’t know any English, whispered to Ibrahim.

  That he was in a very bad movie, Ibrahim whispered back.

  It was horrible, the bouffant-haired man went on. There was a scene where Commies and Nazis fought over my body. The only reason why I said yes to the movie is because they dangled Marlene Dietrich before me. I never got to meet her, in the end. She wouldn’t return to Germany. She shot everything on a soundstage here in Paris, designed to look like our set in Berlin. An editor stitched it together—

  When I was still with the recording studio, a man with bushy caterpillar eyebrows interrupted, they had this fabulous idea of getting Dietrich to read translated German classics out loud, beginning with Rilke. Twenty thousand dollars a session. They give me her phone number. I call. Miss Dietrich’s residence, the person who answers the phone says. I can’t place the accent. Somewhere between Catalan and German. I explain my business and she says, Please hold. Then Marlene Dietrich comes on. Hello, she says, and I realize at once that she was the same person who’d answered the phone! Marlene Dietrich was pretending to be the maid so you wouldn’t think she was all alone!

  The whole table cracked up. A finger was lifted for more martinis.

  Le Tigre prepared a round, and Ibrahim served them up as the man with the caterpillar eyebrows went on reenacting his conversation: Miss Dietrich, I say. We hear your favorite writer is Rilke.

  Yes, she says. That is so.

  I reexplain my business and she asks, What of Rilke will you have me read? We had yet to decide, and of course the old broad is fudging, I’ll bet she’s never really read Rilke. I mention the only thing of his I recall. Perhaps, I say, Letters of a Young Poet? She starts to cough. A real, hacking fit. I’m on the line thinking, Jesus, should I call an ambulance? She is trying to spit something out between coughs. It’s Letters to a Young Poet, she croaks finally, not Letters of a Young Poet! Shame on you, she screeches like a schoolmarm, and slams down the phone. The table howled with laughter. Clearly the man with the caterpillar eyebrows was enjoying the attention. Having been sidelined, the bouffant-haired man remained silent.

  Could you do that maid accent again, someone said, that was gold!

  I might do better, the man with caterpillar eyebrows said. He clicked his fingers at Ibrahim. Is there a phone in this bar? Ibrahim brought them around the counter of the bar top. Le Tigre raised an eyebrow. The man took out a black notebook from his coat pocket and
put the phone on speaker mode. He nudged the bouffant-haired man: I’ll dial, and you’ll sing her a song. The bouffant-haired man said he wasn’t up to it. The man with the caterpillar brows took out twenty francs from his wallet and eyed Ibrahim. How about you, lad? he said. Every minute you keep her on the phone, you get a bonus ten francs.

  He tapped Ibrahim on the chest with the crisp twenty-franc note.

  Deal, Ibrahim said, watching closely as the man with the bushy eyebrows began to dial the number on speakerphone. No one knew if the number was real, but in a moment it began to ring. What could he possibly have to say to Marlene Dietrich, one of the men joked. “They stiffed on my tip today?”

  Hey, the man with the bouffant hairstyle said, don’t be rude now.

  The prank call went on for far longer than anyone expected. Ibrahim had managed to stretch it out to a full ten minutes. They’d all held their breaths when they heard Marlene Dietrich answer the phone, but the zinger was when Ibrahim broke into Rilke. By the time Marlene Dietrich got to “Do your industrialized soul a favor, don’t call again,” they were transfixed, and when the phone clicked, the room was silent for a good five seconds before the man in the bouffant hairstyle started to clap. Kid, the man with bushy eyebrows said, who are you?

  Like I said to her, Ibrahim said. Just a boy who reads. Now can I have my money?

  The man with the bushy eyebrows counted out seventy on the table. The man with the bouffant hairstyle topped it up to a hundred, pressing the additional thirty into Ibrahim’s hand directly, saying: You’ve got potential.