Threshold Page 15

  I found Linda dancing on the lower floor, a joint in one hand and a beer bottle in the other, a head shorter than the guys around her. The beat rumbled in my viscera as lasers lanced through the darkness. I sank into a tattered leather chair at the back of the room to watch: when Linda dances, there is no one cooler on the planet. She had not changed much in the years since we’d last met – but why should she change? These days she lived alone, on the tenth floor of a GDR-era high-rise in Lichtenberg. A fierce intransigence of character – along with a prodigious sexual appetite – had meant that traditional monogamous relationships were never going to work out for her, and now she dwelled in a wise, relaxed zone somewhere between polyamory, self-sufficiency and openness to the possibility that things might yet play out differently. She still took photographs, was active in radical politics, smoked weed every night after work, and cared nothing for what anyone thought of her. Seeing me sprawled on the armchair, she smiled from amid the dancers. Then she turned back towards the sound system, silhouetted in white strobing light.

  Early on Sunday morning we were still out in the city with my friends Conor and Stavro. I took no more MDMA, but the high left a glow that lasted not only through the weekend but long after the chemicals wore off, so that in a sense I never really came down. There was more to it than drugs, and yet there was something in all this I had forgotten: taken at the right time, MDMA can effect a shift that is not ephemeral nor merely chemical. A gloom is dispelled. The world becomes altered, brightened, clearer – an unjadening occurs.

  As life got its colour back, my attention flowed outwards again. I recorded my days methodically, as if the life I was living were the first draft of the great Berlin techno novel, and all I had to do was get it down. There would be no plot, but the book would carry itself on pure tone, buoyed by my happiness at living in the city that, as Nietzsche had once said of Paris, was the only home for an artist in Europe. Most evenings I attended art openings or parties with Stavro, or drank with him and Conor in Tannenbaum, their favourite bar. At weekends I took to the club scene with the zeal of a twenty-five-year-old, like the one I had been on my last visit to the city. When I was out dancing, high on drugs I consumed in reasonable, mid-thirties dosages – unlike the over-dosages I’d caned with Linda a decade earlier – sentences would appear fully formed in my mind, or would lengthen throughout the night, becoming increasingly complex and beautiful, clauses linking elegantly amid the laser lighting and subwoofer quake. I quivered in the tension between wanting to be present in the moment and standing perpetually outside of it, projecting myself into a future in which I would sit at my desk and distil what was going on here. Now and then I would leave the dance floor to shut myself into a toilet cubicle, anxious to jot down a phrase before it vanished in my brain’s neuronal hum. When I left the toilets – concealing my notebook in shame at my compulsion to record – young clubbers would enter in pairs or threes, pulling baggies from their pockets before the door shut behind them. These ecstatic nights out nourished me with insights that felt desperately poignant, and this poignancy would ramify through the recognition that I had become so alienated, so cut off from the natural outflow of empathy I recalled from childhood, that I needed drugs to feel that way again.

  In December the famous Christmas markets started sprouting up around the city. Or so I heard: I hadn’t the slightest interest in visiting them, and their existence to me was a matter of hearsay. Meanwhile, I moved apartment. Stavro helped me find a sublet in the Kottbusser Tor area of Kreuzberg. ‘The most excellent neighbourhood in the best part of town,’ he insisted. Stavro was biased: like everyone in Kreuzberg, he venerated the area while nurturing a disdain for Friedrichshain, Kreuzberg’s rival neighbourhood across the Spree and formerly across the Wall.

  After I moved to Kreuzberg, Sylvia, a girl from Montreal who worked in a Paris wine bar, came to stay for a long weekend. We had met at a party in the autumn. That night she had worn gawky clothes, and later, when she took them off at her flat in the tenth arrondissement, the perfection of her body had stunned me. I’d told her this, that the perfection of her body was stunning to me. To which she had replied, abstractedly, that she had the same body as every other woman on the planet. The insight had confounded me: I suddenly felt I’d lived my life in thrall to a confidence trick, making myself ridiculous by panting and gasping in pursuit of an illusion. We both insisted we didn’t want a relationship, but we had been meeting ever since, either at hers or mine, never in public, as if we were having an illicit affair. Sylvia liked to be treated forcefully, which is putting it mildly. One night I’d fractured her finger by beating her too hard with my belt. After that we used a safe word: ‘creative non-fiction’. I suggested it as a joke, but she thought it was perfect. In Berlin we visited sex clubs, taking part in orgies with other couples. These nights delighted me in that they were free of jealousy and the dominance hierarchies that usually form among males when women are involved. The sex parties were characterised by generosity, playfulness, the pleasure of giving pleasure. At one, a man reached out to jerk me off as he penetrated his partner, while I parted Sylvia’s labia and slid my fingers inside her, and she licked the nipples of the other woman, who lay back on a raised seat, coming loudly. I had never been pleasured by a man before; it happened so fluidly that it didn’t feel like a first of anything. That night culminated with Sylvia squirting voluminously over the leather bed where she kneeled on all fours while I, and a man whose girlfriend I had made love to earlier, joined hands in a fraternal clasp and thrust our fingers into her dripping cunt.

  On her final night in Berlin, Sylvia told me she’d had sex with two men since we’d last been together, one younger and one older. The latter was significantly older than Sylvia and, she said, a serious pervert. As she described the things he did to her, rather than hatred or jealousy I felt a kinship with this man, a fellow-feeling that linked us across European capitals, he who was beyond all restraint in his will to suck the tit of life while it was still within reach. I imagined him wheezing and debauched, contemplating his end in some squalid hotel, a wrinkled condom slumped on his tired prick. In turn I admitted that I’d had sex with a prostitute – for twenty minutes at a cost of forty euro, in a brothel in Schöneberg. Sylvia insisted on hearing about the encounter in as much detail as I would provide.

  ‘It sounds humiliating,’ she said when I finished.

  ‘It was.’

  Sylvia flew home and then, a few days before Christmas, Stavro and Conor flew home too. On Christmas Eve, I visited Linda at her flat in the high-rise in Lichtenberg. She cooked pumpkin soup while I reclined in the hammock that bisected the living room at an angle, rolling one-skinner joints for Linda to smoke in the narrow kitchen while she told me stories about her travels and love affairs. To me Linda embodied all that was vital and underground in Berlin: when I thought of Berlin I thought of it as the city where Linda lived. But now she was thinking about moving away – at least, she’d had enough of the winters.

  ‘I want to go where there are hammocks out of doors,’ she said.

  ‘Tenerife,’ I said, before licking a cigarette paper.

  ‘Maybe Ko Samui, for the trance parties. But actually I want to go to Mexico.’

  ‘The place I want to go is Kyoto, though I like imagining it as much as I’d enjoy being there. They have temples, cherry blossoms, poems about the moon.’

  ‘Even in Kyoto, hearing the cuckoo’s cry, I long for Kyoto.’

  Drawing on a fresh joint, she told me she’d finally got round to reading my books. She said she found my writing brave. I shifted in the hammock and replied that it made me uneasy whenever someone described my stuff as ‘brave’ – it made me think I’d humiliated myself in ways I hadn’t quite intended. She asked me what I was working on, and when I told her, she wondered if I ever felt I was living a certain way only so that I could write about it. If Linda’s phone hadn’t rung just then, I might have told her that the time when I could have understood such a questi
on had passed, that I had long since solved the problem of authenticity, of making existence adhere to itself. I might have told her that my life was the research for the book I was writing about my life, and that this book, which was many books, would justify that life. Linda might then have smiled sadly, and concluded that writing was a symptom of the sickness for which it was also the cure.

  Instead, she told me a story in which she decided to have a child with a man in India, before realising, at a point when it might well have been too late, that this was imperfectly wise. The story surprised me, in that I had always viewed Linda’s commitment to childlessness as an inviolable element of her nature. This had intrigued me when we first met in South America. Moreover, I could relate. The difference was that, whereas Linda was concerned with political issues and worried about the direction society was taking, these days I appraised myself to be not only childless but childish – that is, I lived like a child, concerned exclusively with novelty and selfish delight, relating even to geopolitics and the prospect of planetary catastrophe as modes of entertainment. Sometimes I judged myself brutally for this, but even the self-reproach seemed a kind of decadence, an exquisite late-capitalist masochism. More often, I gave myself over to pleasure with ease of conscience, enjoying the spectral glow of what felt, on so many nights, like the twilight of a jaded civilisation. I seemed to myself nakedly symptomatic of a general decline – when an epoch started producing the likes of me, you knew the game was up. It was nice to live like a child, though – better than it was to live as a man. Being a man was a grim slog of duty and sacrifice and repressed desire. Men had built European civilisation, driven its expansionist phase, and now it fell to us – history’s children – to squander it.

  Linda and I talked for a few hours, then I went home. We did not have sex. This was hardly remarkable, yet it was striking too, because a decade earlier that had been all we did: have sex. We had never been explicitly in a relationship, so it wasn’t exactly that we had broken up and were now simply friends. Linda was getting older, and I was getting older too, at precisely the same rate. What had once been a raging blaze was now an affectionate glimmer. This was what ageing meant: you had less sex, even with those with whom you once had record-breaking amounts of sex. Lust waned and friendship blossomed. And this was okay. It was nice.

  Alone in Berlin, I spent Christmas Day wandering out at Tempelhof, where the Nazis had built a characteristically grandiose airport, its environs since repurposed as an immense city park. Kitesurfers and kite-flyers busied the grey sky, and I thought about Sicily, where the sky was blue, and kites flocked the coastal horizon at San Vito Lo Capo. I had gone to Sicily to write a novel – the great backpacker dropout novel, or something like that – but I abandoned it at the point when writing about my prior life had come to feel like infidelity to the vital present. Some Indians, or perhaps Pakistanis, played cricket on the airstrip, jumping on the spot to stay warm. I watched them until the cold moved me along.

  My friends gradually returned to the city, and on New Year’s Eve, Stavro invited me for dinner at his new place in Friedrichshain – ‘I’ve become a traitor!’ – along with Conor, an American DJ named Midge and a Swedish poet named Dani. The noise of fireworks intensified as the day progressed: by ten o’clock it was a constant barrage.

  ‘What is it with Germans and fireworks?’ wondered Midge, looking out the window at the illuminated skyline over the Spree. ‘It’s like they wage war on their own city every year.’

  Stavro had a theory. ‘It’s atavistic. The Germans love artillery, and this is as close as they can get in peacetime. They’re compelled to re-enact the Battle of Berlin, over and over.’

  After we’d been out to the bridge at Warschauer Straße to ring in the new year amid screaming rockets and machine-gun bangers, Dani told us it was a tradition in Sweden for each person to give a speech outlining their hopes for the year ahead. She stood on a chair and began: she hoped to finish one book – about loss – and start another – about krakens. When it was my turn, I surprised myself by admitting that in recent years an intense gloom had descended on my life. A confluence of appalling shocks had laid me low when I ought to have been at my happiest. But lately the gloom had dispersed, and I entered the new year with a cheerfulness – I realised this as I spoke it – that I had never quite known before. I said something vaguely Nietzschean about an open horizon, a clear sky, the necessity of living with courage. I was not used to speaking this way to people I did not know intimately and I trailed off, embarrassed. Next Stavro stood up – he is a mountainous man whose presence fills a room. He too spoke about courage – the chief virtue, he called it, the one on which all the others are predicated. He was talking about art, the life in art. We were all meant to be cynical and post-everything, he said, and we were discouraged from voicing thoughts such as these, but the truth of the matter was that art was a heroic endeavour, it was not for cowards. Every step of the way was beset by angst and uncertainty – about status and confidence, money and the future. You lived with the waves rolling above your head, fighting for air, and the struggle would never abate. When you committed to a life in art, he said, you had to accept that the only way it was likely to end was in failure and oblivion. The others spoke in turn, and afterwards Stavro poured us glasses of vodka and Mate for a toast.

  More of Stavro’s friends bundled in from a different party. The music got louder, people began dancing. Now Dani and Conor were kissing, and Midge and I were talking about techno, and Stavro was wondering if he should move back to Kreuzberg. And so it was that a new year began, right where the old one ended.

  It was still a new year the following morning, when Conor and I pushed into the crowd that danced under a barrage of gut-shaking beats on the main floor at Berghain – the immense club in a former power plant by the river – for the last day of the epic New Year’s party. My euphoria at getting in – after a tense moment’s hesitation by the doorman – blossomed into wonderment at what this place really was. Throughout the New Year’s party all areas were open – including the gay-sex dungeon below ground, with its warren of crannies and dark rooms. Everywhere connected to everywhere else, so that you could simply walk in any direction and eventually get to wherever you wanted to be. Berghain was too much to have anticipated and too much to take in. Every freak in Europe had apparently converged here – the mutants of a weird emerging era. I left Conor dancing near a huge speaker and roamed the building. Naked men sucked one another off on couches by the heaving dance floor, or fucked in elaborate group formations atop tables, while women with bare breasts and fetish gear danced frenetically, each dancer distinct from the others and yet for the others, a gathering in ecstasy whose constituents, by conforming to no set way of dancing, formed a collective in beauty. This was why I loved clubs in Berlin, why dancing had become as needful to me as reading or laughing: the ease of access to a state of unselfconsciousness. There was always someone older or younger, nakeder or weirder than you, and the fact that photography was forbidden (they put stickers over your camera at the entrance) and there were no mirrors anywhere reinforced the ethos of participation over gawking, immersion over separation. In the crowd you lost any distinction between dancing and being danced, broke clear of selfhood right at the point where the self became exalted and sovereign. This did not feel like decadence – this was political. These men and women would go back out to the world empowered and awake. The assembly was like some rogue faction from Mad Max: Fury Road, a futurist goth convoy enjoying one last techno orgy before roaring into battle. The gloomy industrial interior – dark corridors, steel platforms, abyssal shafts – recalled not a film but a video game: the iconic nineties first-person-shooter Quake. On the main floor the music was menacing and intense – up here at the Panorama Bar, where the shutters let sunlight stream in whenever the beat dropped, it was celebratory and joyous. Techno was like contemporary art: the terrain was so vast that even if I tried to keep up to speed, I would always be chasing a scene t
hat shifted faster than I could track it. Techno in the twenty-first century was a self-replicating code in constant, restless mutation. The names changed as soon as you learned them, but it didn’t matter because it was all one ur-track, an expanding aural singularity that throbbed in bedrooms and squats and clubs and flowed through fibre-optic cables, which individual DJs tapped into and redirected through pulsating Funktion-One systems like these.

  ‘I’d forgotten, but I’d forgotten I’d forgotten,’ said Conor when we rested against a balcony above hundreds of dancers, surveying the scene. ‘It’s like when you take psychedelics: you get back to that place and you think, Oh yeah, of course! How could I forget? But you’re not able to not forget. The experience entails its own unrememberability. It’s like entering another dimension.’

  At some point in Berghain’s atemporal carnival, I wandered into the subterranean labyrinth, seeking the disco that was down there amid the dark winding tunnels. I stepped into a dim, tight room lined with urinals. The walls and floor were grey brick. I seemed to have crossed into a murky and haunted underworld because, as I stood over a urinal, a disembodied head floated towards me with eerie slowness. That was how I saw it: a head floating in the darkness, stopping inches from my cock. A man – topless and tattooed, in leather trousers – had crawled on his hands and knees across the slosh of piss and filth, and now he was kneeling at my crotch. His expression was urgent and solemn, as if we were performing a ceremony. I figured he wanted to suck me off and I shook my head. He gazed at the flow of my piss, entranced. As I was finishing, I waved it and splashed some on his face, over his lips. He grimaced in pleasure. As I zipped up, he withdrew and slithered back into the shadows with the same otherworldly slowness.