Red Pill

by Hari Kunzru

  There Monika stopped. Not much of an ending, she said. Not really an ending at all. I told her I thought I understood. That was why she went for walks by the lake—to feel close to her friend. She looked bemused. Why would she want to feel close to Katja? She was a Stasi bitch. She put some money on the table to pay for her share of the bill, and got up from the table. She told me I was sentimental. I was trying to help you, she said. But you’re soft and selfish. The world will chew you up and spit you out.

  AN APOCALYPSE

  AS A CHILD I experienced myself as a ghostly event in the world. It came first, this “self,” before everything, before thought or action. It was the place where I was, my present moment. As I got older, one thing that never changed was the conviction that exploring its luxurious particularity would keep me busy for the rest of my life, that I would never finish thinking myself through, and at a minimum it would be an honorable project, useful or at least absorbing, and however else my circumstances changed, it could never be taken from me. In Berlin, that came to an end. Now, what I think of when I think of my “self” is the atrocious waste of my years.

  To explain, I have to write about Anton. Firstly, what he was not. He wasn’t some kind of hallucinatory plus one. He never spoke to me or appeared to be physically present after the last time I saw him in Paris. That said, when I was on the island, I was also convinced that it was only a matter of time before he showed up in person. All the signs were there.

  I thought it was clever of him to use the island. He’d obviously walked the topography and knew precisely where to send me. The way I looked at it, since I knew what he was doing, and had no way of getting out, the best thing was to wait. I thought we would confront each other in some kind of third-reel showdown. Holmes and Moriarty, the Jets and the Sharks. I thought I knew where it would happen. At the northernmost point, following the path round the cliffs.

  Each time I try to find a point of departure, a place to make a stand and defend this part of my story, some narrative tentacle emerges out of the swamp, and I have to stagger back. I’m certain about some of the things that took place in the last days before I left Berlin. Others I suspect may have been interpolated wholesale into my memory, not figments of my imagination exactly. Not my imagination. Memories that derive from an external source. There is a third category, in between the two—the indisputable or at least subjectively experienced facts and the cuckoo-like alien fabrications. I think of them as shufflings—rearrangements or deformations of material that was already there. To speak about Anton in a way that has any chance of being meaningful, I have to mix up these different levels, to walk out on a metaphorical rope bridge with many missing slats or supports, willing myself to believe that my feet will not meet thin air.

  I am not sure in what category to put my conversations with Monika. Our relationship really was as brief as it appears in my notes. There was certainly no sexual charge. We sat down, I listened to her story, she told me I’d misunderstood, then she left. We never spoke again. I find it surprising that she told me so much about herself, given that she’d spent much of her life in hiding, and had reason to be wary of strangers. Nevertheless it is all there, in a transcript I made in Berlin.

  I do know that I really attended the party at the Konzerthaus, because I’ve seen a picture of myself there, one of dozens on a photo agency website. In it, I’m standing next to Anton, looking ill at ease. There is a woman too, a famous Russian model. The caption: Irina Titianova, Gary Bridgeman and friend.

  It came about because of Finlay. He found me. I was walking back to the Deuter Center, the evening after I had heard Monika’s story. I had spent the day walking agitated circuits of the lake, unsure what to do. He was with a young American woman I didn’t recognize, a film-maker well-known in some scene or circle that I didn’t follow, at least that was the impression I got from the way he introduced her, the slight emphasis on her name, a hint that I ought to recognize it and be aware of her work.

  It was done out of pity. Finlay forced me to admit, again, that since my arrival in Berlin I hadn’t once left Wannsee. His friend, who lived in one of the fashionable districts, Mitte or perhaps Kreuzberg, was appalled. We could get him in, she said, and Finlay agreed that they probably could. Ignoring my questions about exactly where they could get me in, they escorted me back to my room and instructed me to change. When I reemerged in a jacket and a crumpled dress shirt they assured me that I looked great, and besides, where we were going everyone would be too drunk to really care. They were in an expansive mood, raising their voices and making cutting remarks about this and that, and after a while I realized that they were high and I was part of a gesture, a dig at the organizers of whatever event we were attending. It seemed to be a fancy party, something they wanted to be at but not part of, to keep at an ironic distance. I wasn’t sure how I felt about this and made the first of several attempts to back out, but they wouldn’t take no for an answer. They had excess energy and needed me as an audience, or at least a receptacle, a sort of garbage can for their gestures and theorizing.

  They linked arms and half-carried me to the S-Bahn station, and we got on the first train that came along, the two of them jabbering at each other as we rode through the suburban night. Out the window, the darkness assembled itself into a city. A glimpse of elegant buildings in Charlottenburg. Yellow high-rises at Bellevue. At the Hauptbahnhof a three-piece Roma band got on and made an unlovely race out of “When the Saints Go Marching In.” As we got out at Friedrichstrasse I experienced something like awe. The lights of bank buildings shone through the glass of a canopy held up by steel struts and giant concrete shafts. I felt like a peasant visiting a temple, gawping at giant banners advertising Ritter chocolate and Social Democracy. To be among so many other citizens, bustling along the platform, riding up and down on the shining escalators!

  We walked out of the station and crossed Unter den Linden, passing the flagship stores of international brands. It became clear that the party we were going to was for a movie star’s foundation, and had something to do with the film festival, the Berlinale. In the darkness I caught a flash of pink sparkles, and saw a little girl in a parka and a pair of glittery tights, clutching on to the hand of a man who looked to be in his late twenties. He was holding out a paper coffee cup, begging for change. As we drew near, he caught my eye, and looked away. He didn’t ask us for money.

  We turned the corner onto the Gendarmenmarkt. Finlay was telling me something about how the buildings had been destroyed in the war, how the streetscape was fake, virtual reality something something, but I couldn’t concentrate on any of it. The young father had recognized me. And I’d recognized him. What were they doing there?

  We reached the party venue, and saw the famous Neoclassical façade of the Konzerthaus incongruously covered in orange life jackets. Finlay saw the bewilderment on my face and explained, as you would to a country cousin unused to the ways of the city, that the life jackets had been used by refugees, and the famous artist Ai Weiwei had recovered them from beaches on the Greek island of Lesbos.

  We had to pass under a rubber boat and a banner with a hashtag and I saw two women in ball gowns, smoking cigarettes, keeping warm in the February chill with the kind of foil blankets that are given out to disaster victims or runners at the end of a race. Finlay said his name to a young man with an earpiece and we were ushered into the aftermath of a charity banquet. The concert hall was a confection of gilt and white, and dozens of tables bore the wreckage of a big dinner. Seemingly everyone was wearing the foil blankets. They littered the floor. Men in black tie had knotted them like superhero capes. They were draped across the backs of chairs, jauntily wrapped like high-tech shawls around women in backless gowns. The guests had drifted away from their tables, members of the donor class like strange tropical birds, shy and awkward in the presence of humans, being soothed and coaxed by professionally gregarious service providers, friends or advisors
or coaches. We had just missed some kind of award ceremony. Here and there, Plexiglas trophies were being passed around, winners having their hands shaken, modestly expressing surprise. A waitress came with a tray of shots and I drank two, one after the other, staring numbly at the foil-wrapped crowd cosplaying as refugees.

  At the weekends, the Deuter Center’s dining room was closed, and though a few basic necessities were provided in a communal kitchen, fellows were basically left to fend for themselves. The supermarket was a fifteen-minute walk, slightly uphill, just far enough to be worth taking a bus if the weather was bad. One day I had wanted to stretch my legs and for once there was no wind, so the cold was bearable. I trudged up the main road, which in Kleist’s time had been a newly paved highway linking Berlin and Potsdam. In the supermarket I filled a trolley with bread, gherkins, cheese and fruit, basic things that didn’t require preparation. I liked cooking well enough, and my room had an electric ring and a microwave, but somehow at the Deuter Center I was never able to bring myself to do anything more taxing than breaking a plastic seal. In the drinks aisle I picked up a bottle of Scotch, added some beer, a lot of salty snacks, and went to the checkout to pay.

  I didn’t feel like walking back, and so I sat down under the shelter and opened a bag of chips. Across the road was a hamburger franchise, with signs in the parking lot advertising German twists to its menu. You could get a burger in a pretzel bun. You could get pickled cabbage. Behind the restaurant was a row of dumpsters and a small play area with a plastic slide and a garish polka-dotted horse on a spring, made for a small child to ride. A little girl in a hot pink parka stood beside the horse, maybe three or four years old, about my daughter’s age. She wasn’t playing, just standing there, her face framed in an oval of fake fur. I looked around for an adult, concerned that I couldn’t see one. Maybe her parents were eating and had sent her out to play. I wouldn’t have done that. It was winter and she seemed too young to be unsupervised with a busy road nearby. Still, she didn’t look distressed. She just stood, looking vacantly into the distance, patting the plastic horse with a little ungloved hand.

  As I watched, the lid of one of the dumpsters wobbled and a man climbed out, piking his upper body over the lip and swinging his legs to drop heavily down to the ground. He was younger than me, but the maneuver still cost him some effort. He was wearing a down jacket, sneakers and acid-wash jeans. He’d retrieved a plastic trash bag from the dumpster, and he squatted down and opened it, transferring some of its contents into a backpack. The little girl stood watching him, rocking from foot to foot. These were the people I had just seen again on Friedrichstrasse.

  It was the year they all came, more than a million refugees crossing Europe, massing at fences, drowning in the Mediterranean, hunted by vigilantes in the Bulgarian woods. On bright days in Wannsee you would meet them by the lake, the lucky ones who had made it to Germany, families pushing buggies, groups of young men taking selfies and horsing around. They had been housed all over Berlin, and the authorities were struggling to cope. On lampposts around the lakeside colony were stickers with English slogans: Refugees Welcome. No Borders. Other stickers asked Wieviel ist zuviel? “How many is too many?” Around the station, I’d seen some Antifa kids wearing shirts saying Kein Mensch ist Illegal—No one is illegal—and FCK AFD, an insult directed at the new right-wing party whose supporters had spray-painted Mut zu Deutschland—Courage for Germany—on the side wall of the Chinese restaurant.

  The father took his daughter’s hand and together they crossed the road to the bus stop where I was sitting. Seeing a car, he tugged on her arm, encouraging her to break into a run. They made it to safety, the pack bouncing against his shoulder. As he lifted her up and put her down on the metal bench beside me, we made brief eye contact and exchanged nods, the freemasonry of dark-skinned men who meet in white places. From their looks, I guessed that they were Syrian or Iraqi. He knelt down, and handed her something from his backpack. It was a hamburger, wrapped in paper. The little girl opened it carefully. She was a mournful creature, with a narrow face and big brown eyes. She pushed back her hood so she could eat, and I saw a head of frizzy brown hair, partially tamed by a plastic barrette. She ate slowly and contentedly, savoring each bite. The burger must have been stone cold, the previous night’s surplus thrown out at the end of the shift, but she didn’t seem to mind. Her father stared down at her with such tenderness that I had to look away for a moment and collect myself.

  When I looked back, the father was watching me. His expression was beyond defiance, a sort of exhausted appraisal of my reaction. He knew that I knew he was feeding his daughter from the trash. He was expecting to be insulted, was already protecting himself against my display of disgust. I rooted around in my shopping bags, and found a tub of cashew nuts. I asked, in English, whether I could give them to the girl. He nodded. She put them beside her on the bench and carried on eating her burger.

  After a few minutes a bus came. The man scooped up the girl, still eating, and carried her up the steps in the crook of his arm. With his free hand he showed some kind of pass to the driver. Though it was the bus I was waiting to catch, I didn’t follow. I sat there, rooted to the spot, as the doors closed and it pulled away. The tub of cashews was still sitting there.

  At the party, I moved with Finlay and his friend through the crowd. I met a former child soldier turned rapper, and a Swedish artist who was there with her film editor boyfriend and wanted me to know, in confidence, that she felt uncomfortable. The money, she said. They bid so much. She showed me her program. At the charity auction, someone had won a recording date with Pussy Riot. Someone had won a case of 1989 “Fall of the Wall” Château Mouton Rothschild, with a label painted by Georg Baselitz. Finlay took me away and we got drinks at a champagne bar. Downstairs was another bar, and side rooms with dancing and cabaret. We watched burlesque dancers and a magician, introduced by a Weimar-themed MC. I was still thinking about the man and his daughter. I was visualizing myself outside in the cold, shaking a paper cup. How often had that man and that girl slept in the open, on a station platform or a beach? How often had it been a matter of life and death to hold on to daddy’s hand?

  There were more drinks and another chain of introductions—to a familiar-looking actor, an executive from one of the big European film distributors. Finlay’s friend floated us adroitly between conversations, and then somehow she and Finlay vanished, I think to do more coke, and I was left to make small talk with a Swiss festival director. By this time I was quite drunk, so I told her my theory that Kleist suffered from what we would now call PTSD, having fought at the age of fifteen in a Prussian infantry regiment during a war against France. He had what are clearly manic episodes. He once disappeared in Paris and was found near Calais, trying to persuade a conscript soldier to swap places with him so he could find death as part of Napoleon’s planned invasion of England. The festival director said she was sorry but she’d seen someone she absolutely had to talk to. Her target was part of a nearby group, and she reached out and squeezed his upper arm, not letting go until she’d drawn him towards us.

  As we were in a crowded space, the festival director was obliged to introduce me, and I shook the hand of a white American in his late thirties, “the writer Gary Bridgeman.” There was an exactness to his appearance, an aura of calculation that put me on guard. About my height, he looked physically fit, with three-day stubble and a hint of product in his fashionably cut hair. The festival director moved her body slightly sideways, subtly edging me out as she began to tell him flirtatiously why he simply had to do a panel at her event. I couldn’t catch precisely what was on offer, it was obvious that he didn’t want it. As she pitched, his face took on a mask-like rigidity. She was insistent, she really had him in her sights, and I watched him realize that he needed to find a way to shake her. Briefly he made eye contact with me, and he must have seen that I knew what he was thinking, because he used me to execute a nasty but unden
iably virtuosic social maneuver, which commenced with a brush of his fingers against the festival director’s cheek. As she reacted to the touch, visibly offended and—I thought—also a little aroused, her hand floating involuntarily to her face, he broke into a huge grin, as if responding to something said or done just behind her right shoulder, some phantom outbreak of wit. Between the sudden invasion of her personal space and the anxiety that she was missing out—or worse—that she’d lost her social bearings entirely and had somehow embarrassed herself, the director was momentarily disorientated. She turned to her right in a dazed arc, looking for the source of the inaudible bon mot, and in that window Bridgeman dipped left towards me, grasped my shoulder, steered me through a gap between two waitresses and out into a sort of pocket or bubble of open space. Keep walking, he said. Pretend to find me funny. His accent had a Transatlantic indeterminacy. The strange Brownian motion of parties spat us out into a corridor, laughing in a way that was fake at first, and then genuine, at least on my part, as I realized how rude we’d been. Two cheeky boys running away from mom. Only when we were standing at the bar did it dawn on me that I knew exactly who he was. And I was afraid.

  When you come face-to-face with someone you’ve googled, you feel instantly sly and underhand. I’d seen a picture of this man riding a motorbike through the Mojave Desert. I’d seen him on the cover of one of the Hollywood trades, posing against a burned-out car. Disruptor: How Gary Bridgeman’s Violent Vision Transformed TV. For that he’d been styled as a war reporter. Tactical pants and boots, a khaki bush shirt, a pair of dark glasses pushed up into his hair. A spray-painted mural was visible behind the wreckage, as if he were filing from the front line of the race war. He had a camera around his neck. He had a fucking notebook. Everything about that picture had annoyed me. And yet I’d spent so long watching his show. Hours and hours, watching his show.