I panicked after I told Steven that I would read a story out loud at our next writing group meeting. I panicked even though I hadn’t promised it, a promise being, in my mind, reserved for those with whom I have established a relationship already. This didn’t apply to Steven: I had only just met him a few days earlier, even though I liked him already. I panicked because I didn’t have a story ready to be read out loud and because experience has shown me that I tend to freeze up when I have to meet a creative deadline, compared to, say, a business deadline. Perhaps this is so because there are no demons present, who, I imagine, get very excited when a writer has promised to finish a piece by a particular date. These demons are creatures made entirely of disappointed desires, punished passions and sickeningly anticipatable alliterations. They all look exactly like you on a bad day, and I’m not just talking about any bad day but one of those days when the light itself seems to be an insult.
I did what I always do with my terror: I took it out on the street. As soon as I get out, I’m overpowered by images and associations that drown out any feelings of inner angst that I may have had. It was hot. I wore flip-flops, thin black cotton pants and an army jacket. Looking at myself in the window I saw a crow stilting along, a bald head bobbing up and down, like a bird searching for a beak. I bought some chocolate with hazelnuts and then I walked to the mall. I went up the escalator, into the bookshop and leafed through the latest hardbacks: none of the titles and none of the covers spoke to me. Maybe, I thought, as I often do, no book would ever speak to me again. This idea didn’t bother me because I read on the faces of the other customers that we shared a fate: we were being buried alive by books, books without soul or story; we were being fed literary fast food dressed up as fancy delicatessen.
When I left the store, I felt a fierce loyalty towards life without literature. Suddenly, I noticed those small details that reveal everything though they seem like nothing: an obese young man in a loose shirt whose one good eye followed me around like a hawk; a woman in sandals who walked without intent as if she had to keep moving but didn’t know where to, as if something were wrong with her feet; a small black man in a suit holding himself very straight. He was humming. The pedestrian bridge above the platform looked as if an angry, grey-winged bird had settled on the tracks and was ready to take a dump.
When the train came, I got on and as it was pulling out of the station, a trembling electric finger, I thought of my agent whom I had seen earlier that day. I had shared my idea for a new book that began with a young man, my thinly disguised alter ego, who is obsessed with a neighbor, a woman, of whom he only ever sees half a naked breast because of the way his apartment is situated across hers. I thought of this setup as a kind of “Rear Window” with all the possibilities of a Hitchcock thriller. My agent didn’t like it. She reassured me that she still thought of me as the writer German literature needed to attain a level of excellence long dusted and forgotten in this country. But this, she said, wasn’t it. Not yet, she added. But it’s sexy, secretive and sensual, I argued. Isn’t that what female readers want? She laughed and let me see her new implants. My agent is sixty but looks like thirty. I’m thirty and I feel like sixty. Together we’re ninety. That’s the kind of algebra I apply to my work which may explain why I can’t turn in my tax reports on time.
Ninety years ago, the 1920s were happening in Berlin. Artists had taken over the town. The citizens were afraid that creativity and sex, its lush companion, might rule the city. So they threw facism into our faces and we burnt.
I have another idea, I said to my agent: what if a super-successful author is stalked by a much younger woman who is desperate to make love to him but he refuses because he must keep himself pure for his art. You need to get laid, I think, said my agent. She eyed me sternly but kindly, like my mother. When she said that she was looking forward to receiving one hundred thousand words of scintillating prose from me, her favorite client, I panicked.
On the train I stood next to the small black business guy. He had closed his eyes now. He looked very serene. He was so black that he seemed almost blue. I wondered if he felt cramped by the large youth standing right in front him. The small black business man opened his eyes again and stared me straight in the face as if he’d read my thoughts. He smiled and I took that as a yes to all kinds of questions that I’d never asked and never would. At the next stop we both got off. He was humming again or perhaps he’d been humming all the way, I don’t know. He seemed perfectly happy with his strangeness among all these pale Germans. I began to hum, too, and I felt blue all the way home.
