The Recent East

by Thomas Grattan

  “You like to run?” he asked Michael.

  “Don’t know,” Michael answered.

  Udo pointed to the seat of his bike. As if given explicit instruction, Adela hopped on. Udo stood on its pedals, told Michael to follow on foot, which he did.

  They moved through ornate, crumbling neighborhoods, past small-windowed apartment buildings that lifted to ten stories. Udo pointed out the post office, the spot where a Western bank was rumored to soon open. An old man crossed in front of them, pushing trash out of his way with his cane. Seagulls floated in a nearby puddle.

  The three of them crossed into a neighborhood of warehouses and gas stations. The ache of running gnawed at Michael’s still-injured wrist. Each time he stopped to catch his breath, Udo and Adela waited for him.

  Getting to a garage, Udo fished out a pair of bicycles. Michael asked what this place was; Udo mumbled something about confiscations. Adela’s bike was blue, Michael’s green. A rusting basket sat above its back tire.

  Udo biked them to a place for currywurst. Showed them the store that always had bananas and lemons.

  “Yellow,” Michael said. No one answered him.

  Udo pedaled them past the school for smart people, another for everyone else. A wad of gum flipped across his tongue, Udo’s chewing reminding Michael of a cow from a picture book he’d once loved.

  In the city’s main square, people at an outdoor café held their napkins against the wind. On one side of the café sat a church. On the other, a row of buildings, intricately decorated but weather-beaten, like moldy confectionaries. Adela stopped. She squeezed her bike’s handlebars.

  “Why haven’t you visited us until now?” she asked, her underused voice a rusted hinge.

  Udo leaned close. His eyes were small. His neck as thick as a Doric column.

  “Vacation,” he answered, and explained that his mother had insisted that they go to the West for their trip, now that the West was an option. They’d gone camping in France.

  “How was it?” Michael asked.

  “Don’t speak French,” Udo answered.

  Michael smiled. Because Udo seemed ridiculous. Because he got them bicycles and got Adela to leave their neighborhood.

  When Udo offered to take them to the beach, Michael answered that he’d been already.

  “I haven’t,” Adela said.

  “Let’s go, then, good cousin,” Udo answered, and pedaled down a tiny street. Adela—who’d ignored the furniture Michael had gotten, who’d answered her brother’s questions about why she sat on the floor with something about glasnost, or a blank stare—followed him.

  * * *

  After that, Udo was everywhere. Michael came home that afternoon to discover him with Adela in their yard, plums they’d harvested cradled in their T-shirts. Biking to meet Lena a few days later, he encountered them riding back from the beach. Adela’s hair was kinky from the salt water. Her hands waved as she talked. Seeing Michael, Adela stopped talking, stopped pedaling, too. Udo wore only his bathing suit. His chest was giant, muscled and soft-looking at the same time. Curls of peeling sunburn sat on his shoulders.

  “Good cousin,” Udo said, “where are you going?”

  “To meet someone,” Michael answered.

  Adela brushed sand off her legs, mumbling to Udo that they were late. Their bicycle spokes clicked as they rode away. When Michael turned around, he saw that Adela had resumed whatever story she was telling, hands in the air, as if in praise. Michael had never seen her bike without gripping the handlebars, without a crouching grimace that made her look elderly.

  Out with Lena and company that night, Michael told them that he’d discovered a cousin named Udo Behm. After the initial shock of it (“But he’s giant and you’re not giant,” one friend kept saying), people shared stories of the stray dog that had followed Udo everywhere until one day it was gone and people joked that poverty forced him to eat it. Another about Udo getting so wasted at a party that he passed out at a bus stop. Someone else said he was a math genius.

  “Udo’s mother is my mother’s cousin,” Michael added.

  For the rest of the night, people argued about whether Udo was his second cousin or a first one, once removed.

  * * *

  Maxi Pad was everywhere, too, though he pretended not to know who Michael was. One time, Michael and Adela in their front yard, he biked past them.

  “Hi,” Michael called. Maxi kept going. He was so thin Michael could see his spine through his shirt.

  “Who was that?” Adela asked.

  With her dark, tight ponytail, she looked like the Russian figure skater they’d watched in the Olympics, the two of them joking that a gold medal meant she’d get an extra ration of potatoes.

  Michael continued to wave. Maxi didn’t wave back. He felt embarrassed, annoyed at his embarrassment, as if it were something Adela had done to him. His sister was reading a book about Mielke. Michael pretended not to know who that was.

  “I guess he didn’t see me,” Michael answered.

  Udo arrived, carrying two folding chairs. Adela placed them in the kitchen.

  “I got us chairs already,” Michael said, following them inside.

  “You’re speaking English,” Adela answered.

  Udo ate a plum. His rubber-pink lips encased the entire, unwitting piece of fruit. Michael was shocked by the disgust he felt, relieved, too, that he had limits, when on most days he eyed every man he saw, hoping to spy a dick’s outline through his pants. He’d recently told Lena how he could find even the plainest men attractive. “Democracy,” she’d answered, then gave him an acetaminophen coated with codeine as they snuck onto a bus without paying.

  Udo whirred the plum pit out the open window.

  “I got nicer chairs,” Michael added.

  “I prefer these,” Adela said, and offered Michael a plum. He took it, though he wasn’t a particular fan, any kindness from his sister a reminder of the kindness they used to pass back and forth. He bit into the plum and complimented her on it, which he understood was strange as soon as he did it. Adela picked up a newspaper and asked Udo what a word meant. Udo tried explaining it with other German words. Michael’s wish then was to know its meaning, to say it in English as if it were nothing special. Adela seemed to get the gist of Udo’s mumbling and moved on. A minute later, another unknown word emerged.

  “It means fuck a duck,” Michael interrupted.

  Udo lifted up a different section of the paper, with photos of stateside places Michael had never been to—the Statue of Liberty silhouetted in fireworks, some small-town street lined with flags.

  “Happy Independence Day,” Udo said, in halting English.

  Michael thought of his former country’s calendar, no more relevant to him now than the books Adela buried herself in.

  “Not here,” Michael told Udo, and went outside. He wondered if he was being stupid, if with the desk Adela returned there was a warning he should heed. If her blank stares meant to show him what he didn’t want to see: that his newfound bravery would come and go, that in time he’d need her and feel stupid for thinking he wouldn’t. He and his sister as they’d been before rolled over him in a wave—the two of them hiding in a bedroom closet to see how long it would take their parents to notice, Adela running toward Michael in the cafeteria when boys called him a faggot or an idiot or some combination of the two. “Look who’s here to save you,” the boys would say. And though he knew he was meant to feel ashamed, listening to Adela cut these boys off at the knees with a few aptly obscene insults, Michael was always flooded with relief.

  He stood in the driveway, listened through the walls as Adela laughed at something Udo said. He wanted to walk back inside and tell her he’d take the furniture back, that he wouldn’t go out with Lena that night or the night after, either. But as he tried to make out their words through walls and windows, as a stray cat hopped onto his dolly, Michael realized that he didn’t want things to return to how they’d been before, but some version where he
could have both Adela and the empty houses, Adela and the parties, Adela and Maxi, whom Michael had seen at the grocery store that morning sneaking a bottle of soda under his sweatshirt.

  Udo came outside, a rucksack on his shoulder.

  “Independence Day,” Michael said.

  “Benjamin Franklin,” Udo answered.

  Though they’d known him for six days, Udo felt part of the fabric of this place, along with Lena and her reckless friends. And the version of the German Lady that walked when most people were sleeping.

  “Hold on,” Udo said.

  He opened his rucksack, stepped to Michael with the same directness Maxi had when he’d kissed him. Udo unwound the bandanna on Michael’s wrist so slowly, Michael wondered if this were a seduction. Udo pulled a bandage from his bag, wrapped it around Michael’s wrist.

  “Ice three times a day,” Udo said.

  “I didn’t realize you noticed,” Michael answered, pummeled with sadness, though he couldn’t say why.

  “Good cousin,” he said, and Udo nodded.

  Michael pushed the dolly out of the driveway. His wrist was on fire.

  * * *

  After getting home one night to their windows lit up, Adela deliriously excited about the electricity Udo had gotten turned on for them, Michael went up to his room. And as he smoked a cigarette out of his bedroom window, watching cats go after one another with bitchy hisses, he saw the German Lady finishing up one of her late-night walks. She had on a dress she used to wear for holidays and parent-teacher conferences. An old man walked next to her. Mutti talked in such long stretches that her whole body rose when she stopped to breathe. Michael mimicked that breathing. This time, seeing his mother out didn’t leave him sad or confused. Because as she talked, he saw recovery. In the words that flipped from her mouth, he pictured a life when their house would look like a place where people lived, when she’d have friends and a job, perhaps even a lover. The man nodded goodbye, and the German Lady slipped inside. Michael moved downstairs.

  He found her in the kitchen, leaning under the faucet to douse her neck and face. Water dripped across her collarbone. When she noticed Michael, she held a hand to her chest, then smiled. Her dress was patterned in small flowers.

  “You look nice,” Michael said.

  “Just needed some air,” his mother answered.

  Michael flipped on a light.

  “That should have been my job, getting it turned on,” she said, and looked like she might cry. Michael turned the light off, flipped it on again. Went to another switch and flipped that up and down, too, until their kitchen turned into a crude disco.

  “Asshole electricity,” he said, the light bright, then gone, then bright again.

  “Michael,” she said. The room went dark. “Michael.” It turned garishly bright. In flashes, he saw her sadness gone, his mother trying to hold down a smile. And in that smile Michael understood that he was a part of her getting better. That in the things he brought home he was taking care. He stopped playing with the lights. Mutti touched his cheek with her damp hand. Michael wanted to lean into it, to tell her that he knew about the old man she walked with, that he didn’t care. To ask what she thought of the wingbacks he’d recently found.

  “Don’t stay up all night,” Mutti said.

  She took the back stairs noiselessly, her head, then dress, then narrow, sandaled heels slinking into shadow.

  “What was that?”

  Adela stood at the kitchen door. Michael wondered how long she’d been there. She held a book in front of her chest, squinting in a way that made her seem old. He wanted to grab that book, to hump it as he’d humped Elie Wiesel. Any sense of her knowing things he did not vanished, and he felt a relief that he hadn’t taken any furniture back, that he’d gone out with Lena that night and made her laugh so hard that she spit out her beer. Adela frowned, held the book tighter, and Michael understood that she was afraid, as he sometimes was. As the German Lady was, too, when she snuck out of the house, so regularly that maybe she was hoping for one of her children to catch her.

  “Electricity,” Michael said, and walked upstairs.

  * * *

  On the three-week anniversary of Michael’s arrival in Germany, Lena pierced his ears in the bathroom of a kebab place.

  “Schwul,” he said, as she hoisted hoops into his skin.

  “Kidney,” Lena answered.

  When they finished and Michael tried to order a kebab, Lena told him they were late for a party at her boyfriend’s.

  “Since when do you have a boyfriend?” Michael asked. His lobes stung.

  Lena went on about a bonfire she’d taken Michael to where her boyfriend, Bastian, had been. Talked about the joke Michael and Bastian had had about someone named Linda. Michael remembered none of it. He wondered about the drugs he’d tried, the drinking that had suddenly become normal, whole pieces of memory leaving him like ice cracking off a berg.

  Getting to the party, Bastian hugged Michael hard. He had a frog mouth and was shorter than Lena. Michael didn’t recognize him.

  A cat from outside slipped in behind them and Michael asked if it was a stray or … and he paused for the right German word, only to settle on: intentional.

  “An intentional cat.” Bastian smiled.

  An American song played. A German tried to rap along. Smoke hovered above the crowd like cartoon thinking.

  Bastian went to get them drinks. Lena and Michael moved into the living room. She told Michael that Bastian’s parents were in Berlin for the weekend, though it was a Tuesday. Sitting at the far side of the smoke-drenched room, sharing a joint with another thin boy, was Maxi Pad.

  “That’s the Maxi who kissed me,” Michael whispered.

  “That one?” Lena answered. “But he believes in God.”

  Michael remembered Maxi’s hand on his waist, the hiss of his breathing.

  “Maybe you’re confused,” Lena went on. “You didn’t even remember Bastian.”

  “But I remember that,” Michael said.

  “Maybe,” she answered.

  Bastian returned with drinks. He and Lena moved into the dining room, Bastian smacking Lena’s ass to the beat of the song.

  Michael smoked one cigarette after the next, trying to capture Maxi’s attention while also acting as if Maxi were the last thing on his mind. After avoiding eye contact for minutes, Maxi glanced at Michael. His glances soon graduated to stares.

  Maxi went upstairs. Michael followed.

  “Jesus, America,” Maxi said when Michael walked into the bathroom behind him.

  “You like to pretend that you don’t remember me,” Michael answered.

  The bathroom was small, with the same cheap cabinets Michael found in the houses he’d gone into. The shower door was opaque from soap. The room smelled of farts and toothpaste.

  Maxi gave Michael a look that may have been mean or pleased. But he didn’t ask him to leave. Michael closed the door. He bit the edges of his tongue as he undid Maxi’s belt. Maxi a shower after many days of camping. A bird to let the Pilgrims know land was near.

  “Take these off,” Maxi said, pointing to Michael’s pants.

  “Stand here,” Maxi added.

  Michael stood in the bathroom’s corner, each hand on a different wall. Maxi found lotion in the medicine cabinet. Michael pretended he didn’t know what it was for until Maxi put it on his dick, then Michael’s ass, and began.

  Every part of Michael—from his ass to the back of his throat—burned. Then the pain ebbed, was replaced with strange changes in pressure, a sensation so good that Michael let out a choke at its discovery. He lifted a hand to touch Maxi. Maxi placed it back against the wall. He finished with a burst of grunting, ball-slapping thrusts. Imagining the look on Maxi’s face, Michael came, too.

  Maxi rinsed off in the sink. A constellation of acne circled his belly button.

  As Michael began cleaning up, too, he found blood, felt a scraping ache. Only then did he consider the condom they hadn’t bot
hered with, Maxi’s scabbed face some symptom he’d chosen not to see.

  “I’m not even fourteen,” Michael said.

  Fear grazed Maxi’s face for a moment. Then he answered that he was sixteen, that they weren’t all that different. Maxi’s mention of them as similar was a gift for Michael to keep as he biked home, as he fell asleep on his floor.

  But when he woke up the next morning, a complete, churning terror swept over him, Maxi one in a series of bad decisions Adela had tried to warn him against. Michael rushed to the toilet. Adela was in there. He knocked once, again. When she finally emerged, book under her arm, Michael felt too much relief to be mad at her. He ran inside and slammed the door.

  5

  When they started coming home alone together in third grade, Adela and Michael often found their apartment a mess. Dishes dirtying the counter. Dad’s clothes everywhere. It left Adela feeling stuck. Michael seemed to sense this and made tidying up a game. “Look what the boys did,” he’d say, and these mythical boys became their enemy, sneaking in to undo their apartment’s invented order. Adela would turn the radio up as they scrubbed and complained, her brother in rubber gloves, dancing the vacuum from room to room.

  In this house, though, nothing game-like between them remained. Adela felt more stuck than she’d ever been. Michael saw this, smiled, and continued on his way. “Look what the boys did,” she said once after he and his dolly rolled down the driveway, Adela too unsettled to read or remember if she’d eaten that day. The certainty that had been her sixth sense had vanished. The more she tried to bury her new uncertainty, the more it leaked out. Sometimes it came with the same dread that walloped her as the plane had rattled down the runway. More often, it felt like being underwater. Everything but what was closest to her wobbled. Words she’d have been able to hear or say above the surface turned to swallowed vowels. And when her brother, then mother, snuck out at night, it felt as if they were swimming into something deep and dark she didn’t have the breath to follow them into.