Threshold Page 17

  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 question 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 t
hat 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 that 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.

  ‘That was insane,’ I said when I found Conor perched on a giant swing alongside a dozen others. ‘There was a guy down in the toilets who wanted to drink my piss.’

  ‘Oh yeah, the toilet guy.’

  I saw him again as the day wore on, in other toilets throughout Berghain, always alone, stalking the urinals with a fixed, pathetic cringe. Who was he? What had happened to make this his destiny – crawling through filth to drink the piss of strangers? He was abjection incarnate, a being who had sunk further into abasement than anyone I had encountered. I felt a sympathy, a tenderness, for him. He seemed to me both admirable for fully inhabiting his perversion, and terribly sad – he must have been broken to seek out such humiliation. I envisioned a childhood of rape in dank basements, a howling obscene mother. When the night outside synced with Berghain’s perpetual night, I sought out the dungeon urinals again, following narrow passages past rooms where men fisted, sucked and got as far inside one another as they could. I knew he would be there, and that he would come to me. In the dark toilets I unzipped. Immediately he emerged from the shadows, the same cringing face. This time I let him drink it all. It streamed over his mouth, his lips. He gulped, gurgled, his eyes rolled back in ecstasy. I pissed long and hot in his abject face. He swallowed all he could and the rest overflowed on his chin. As the stream relented, he glanced up and met my gaze.

  ‘Danke!’ he rasped. ‘Danke!’

  In the weeks that followed, the pages in my notebooks filled up more slowly, then stopped filling up at all. It was as if the experiential supernova of Berghain had nuked my will to affix a mesh of form on to the formless real. I kept going to clubs with Linda and Conor and other friends, but I no longer tried to remember anything, letting myself be swept up in the flux of dancing and techno. I registered the first inner shifts towards an acceptance that the great Berlin techno novel might be yet another write-off on the scrapheap of my ambitions, no more than the memory of a book I had once contemplated writing. During this blissful period it dawned on me that this was the book I had been writing all along: an anthology of the abandoned books that didn’t get written while I was busy documenting the rapturous decline I underwent while I was failing to write them, otherwise known as my life.

  The week before I left Berlin, Linda, Conor and I met on the platform at Alexanderplatz. We ate some of the magic mushrooms that Conor had grown the previous summer using a kit he’d bought online. We took a train out to the Grunewald forest on the edge of the city. It was a grey morning, the kind of sky that is always about to rain but never does. We marched through the forest, past the looming ruins of the old NSA listening post at Teufelsberg. A few kilometres from the tracks stood the ‘Cemetery of the Nameless’. Nico was buried out here, and Conor wanted to take a picture of her grave for an article he was writing about thanatos, the longing for death in popular culture. As we followed a narrow trail through the woods, I told Linda I’d given up writing, which meant I’d given up asking more from experience than itself. She said she didn’t believe me, and I replied that maybe it was more of a thought experiment.

  We came to the cemetery gate. A sign indicated that it was open daily from ten till four, but as there was nobody around for miles, the cemetery’s openness or closedness seemed to pertain solely in the minds of visitors. When Conor pointed this out I found it very funny indeed, which is how I knew the mushrooms were coming on. Nico’s grave, like that of Serge Gainsbourg in Montparnasse Cemetery, which I’d happened upon while visiting E. M. Cioran’s, was well stocked with offerings of wine, beer, joints and even what looked like a vial of speed or cocaine. Someone had left a red notebook in which visitors wrote messages: lyrics from Velvet Underground songs, expressions of gratitude, druggy soliloquies. Conor took a couple of mushrooms from his pouch and placed them by the headstone. Linda crouched down to write in t
he notebook.

  Conor began dancing, as if odd-shaped waves were passing through his body. Perceiving myself inhabiting the action instants before I did so, I leaned to pick up the notebook and read what Linda had written.

  Come, see real flowers of this painful world.

  It was probably some time later when Conor remarked that ancient civilisations showed admirable pragmatism when they equipped the dead with useful, quotidian items for their journey to the afterlife.

  ‘What should we put in your grave when you go?’ I asked.

  Conor considered this. ‘My headphones.’

  ‘I’ll need my coffee maker and some tobacco,’ said Linda. ‘No question.’

  They asked me what I would need. I settled on my steel-toecapped Doc Martens, which I’d been issued when I worked at the Dublin Mail Centre many years earlier. It would be important to have dry feet and look tough in the underworld, I said.