(novel extract)<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Lungs on fire. Thighs on fire. Love on fire. I leapt two steps, three steps at a time up the stairs to the platform as I heard the train come to a stop. I\u2019d known it was her climbing the platform for that eastbound train one stop earlier because I knew the shape of her body more than I knew my own hands. I\u2019d memorized it, painted it and sculpted it and archived it in a library indestructible by the elements every time she stood before the wardrobe with her back to me as morning light tore through the sheer threads of the vine-embroidered curtains by the bed where I would lie and watch her dress. After a shower, when the water on her back evaporated in the morning light as she threaded her limbs through her underwear or reached high above her head for a long sweater on a wardrobe shelf for those nights when we would sit across from each other in the restaurants and let the noise cloak us like thieves, let the candlelight illuminate the lines around her eyes that I would kill a man to camp inside today. And so I knew by her face, by those eyes as green as a wild Irish mountainside, which I swear met my own before she disappeared at the top of the stairs of the platform, that it was her. I knew by the outline of her body high above me as I struggled to fit my old bicycle among the dozens of others in the snow-dusted racks outside the platform, that it was her and no one else and when our eyes met for those few moments, my body froze, and all time, in every corner of the universe, froze with me. I could hear the commuter train arriving at the platform and in the commotion of people rushing up the stairs to catch the train, I lost her. I knew the only way to catch up to her was to make it to the next stop by bike. It was a piece-of-shit bicycle which rattled and clanked but I yanked it from the rack and pointed it to the next station, riding it recklessly with fat sizzling in the quadriceps as wind burned my ears cold as I rode. I wove through pedestrians, over tram tracks, over the sidewalk and cutting off cars to reach the next station at Jannowitzbr\u00fccke as the brakes screamed to a\u00a0slow stop along the tracks overhead.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I dropped the bike at the bottom of the stairs, barely able to breathe, and scrambled through people coming down, scanning each face for hers and when I made it to the platform at the top of the stairs I wedged my arm between the sliding doors and screamed as the pain shot through my elbow, shoulder, and neck as the door closed on the abscess on my forearm. I was able to wiggle into the car as it departed. I hadn\u2019t moved like that in ages and it felt like someone had taken a flamethrower to my lungs. But finally, finally, after all this time, after all these miles travelled, oceans crossed, or cities ransacked, over the benches I\u2019d made my bed when walking became impossible, after the airports, train stations, and run-down hotel rooms, I finally came face to face with her, on the other side of the glass, walking alone down the platform, the last off the lead car, and I, the last on the end car as it slowly pulled away from the station. I slammed my hand against the window to get her attention and I swear that for a second, she saw me too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cBut it wasn\u2019t her,\u201d Hissel said, with his scratchy voice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cIt\u2019s never her,\u201d I said. \u201cI see her everywhere and she is nowhere. I look everywhere and find nothing. The back of her neck as she descends the stairs to the subway, the blue vein threaded over the tendons in her wrists that poke beneath her jacket as she leans down to lift a suitcase before boarding a train. But I am always too late and she is never there. It was crazy to think it was her \u2014 my vision is bad and getting worse. This whole city is a blur now and I can barely tell one face from another anymore. But still, I know I saw something.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I stayed on the train and when it reached the last stop, I stayed where I was as others got off and when the lights went out in the train I found myself trembling, my tears propelled by the exhaustion of years searching for her. I closed my eyes and cursed that red S-Bahn commuter train, one more in the brutal sum of one-way tickets on busses, trains, and planes, of nights standing alone at gates and on platforms hoping the next ride would finally be the one that led to her. I added that empty, run-down wagon, where my lungs now ached from the race to get to her, to the mountain of suitcases packed hastily in the night, to the rides in the back of taxis, to the countless times staring out the window with an empty seat beside me without her head resting on my lap. I\u2019d lost track of how many nights I\u2019d spent in trains speeding past in the night, how many horizons where the sky was just breaking that I imagined this would be the day that broke on me finding her only to search and find nothing. I\u2019d searched everywhere for her. Turned over every rock, kicked in every door, shook down everyone I thought might have answers. I lost count of the number of times wanting to give up but not being out of love enough to do it. I wiped my face as the lights came back on the train. In my shit vision I could squint and at least make out a single-digit number on the board so I knew the train would leave again soon enough and head westward back to the city. I stayed in my seat with my eyes closed until I felt the train start again. A few stops in, a young couple in their teens or early twenties boarded and sat across from me. I stared across the aisle at their wiry young frames as the train jolted us from side to side as it slowly entered the city, past the large and monotonous plattenbaus, past the clusters of schrebergartens, the cottage communes scattered throughout Berlin dotted with satellite dishes and the flags of local football clubs. Eventually the Spree River came into view. I was strangely at home in Berlin. It was alive and dead at the same time. Berlin was a city of ghosts, where there was nothing that couldn\u2019t keep on living somehow. Amusement parks and airports died and were reborn here and military no-man\u2019s lands a generation ago were now wide-open fields alive and ornamented with bodies entwined on picnic blankets amidst the low hum of a far off portable stereo speaker and the popping of caps off cheap night-market beer bottles. The young couple across from me were oblivious to me. They were listening to music, sharing a set of ear-buds they each had in one ear. I knew that soon they would devour each other because I\u2019d once sat in that very seat before. With gangly legs, and gangly arms, with a smooth face and a jacket pocket full of cassettes, rolling papers and a dry ball of hash in a matchbox, enough change for a bus or a corner-store beer and yet still feeling the wealth of an emperor. I admired them, safely close enough to the end of my own life to feel anything resembling envy. They didn\u2019t need money or property when they had the vast landscape of each other\u2019s bodies. They were like two low-flying comets with the city passing so quickly in the window behind them, enveloped in that sacred orb of youth, which for a short time is impenetrable by the past or future, until both make an endless meal of it. But for now, it was a beautiful sight. Somewhere along the ride the two young lovers vanished, crashing to the earth in the bed of some basement apartment beneath blankets that would go unwashed till spring when they emerged and their skinny legs would walk them, with a bedsheet or picnic blanket in tow, to the windy fields along the abandoned airport runways in Templehofer Field where the grass goes uncut for ages and the sun takes forever to set. I was exhausted and starving when I finally arrived back at my flat but I was too tired to eat. I was thirsty but too tired to reach for a glass. I held my lips to the kitchen faucet and sucked in cold water. My ankles, knees, and hips ached so I walked to the bathroom, peeled off my clothes, ran the water in the bath and climbed in immediately.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I reached my arm forward to turn off the water when the bath was finally full and through the fog of the water or my exhaustion, I saw Hissel there, with those eyes again, sitting across from me, as though we were back on the train. I saw the Reichstag through the window behind him, its geodesic dome faintly lit beneath the low hanging clouds. I saw that long beard of his. The jean jacket he never unbuttoned once. The sweatpants and builder\u2019s boots. I felt them in the tub against my naked feet and saw the tears running down his cheeks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I close my eyes, lower my ears beneath the water in the bathtub where my breath feels as loud as waves crashing on the coast. Through the water I hear footsteps in the courtyard through the open windows and that click click click of a woman\u2019s shoes on the sidewalk becomes the tick tick tick of a bedside watch as the stray dogs chase away cats and the chickens in the cantina below in a time long before now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Where am I now? Where is this thick air, this tropical humidity that makes the sheets stick to my skin as I roll on to my side? The thin white drapes twirl in the breeze as the small engines of motorbikes, the motor of the unrepaired fridge, all hum and clang amid and the low drones of the fishing boats outside. It could be any day. I hear the taps squeak shut and the door is open a crack in the bathroom. Enough to see your dark limbs and narrow waist, the long soft ridges of your ribcage as water that trails from your hair down the entirety of your body glistens as it catches the sun. Why leave the door open? Because you want me to see you? For all you know I\u2019m asleep. But the answer is simple. The door is open on our youth. What are we now? Nineteen? Wearing our nudity with the innocence of children but our sexuality like stars on the shoulders of generals. We are refugees but we don\u2019t know it yet. Safe from the future we\u2019ve not yet been enlisted to die for. Free now, in the past, from a future we\u2019ve not even begun to consider. We eat for fuel that\u2019s spent beneath the bedsheets, torching molecules of carbon our bodies have chopped down from the food at roadside stands just to sustain an existence that for a burning short time feels utterly unstoppable. Our needs are shelter and privacy. A bed and a side-table are enough for furniture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The clothes are scattered and need to be washed. We\u2019re long before the slow march in furniture shops. We\u2019ll wash our clothes in the sink, sweat through the sheets, shower together, and spend the afternoon playing cards on the bed in our damp towels. We\u2019ll get on a plane and never look back once, get on a bus until the last stop, drink on trains and draw the curtains and sink into the darkness and each other\u2019s bodies and then hop off when we smell the ocean. We\u2019ll inhabit the present tense alone and never turn back to see how quickly the past just turns to mist. The fleet of beds an archipelago, our world beyond the everyone and everything, but as delicate as the threads of these sheets on the<\/p>\n\n\n\n
brink of tearing open a hole to an inhospitable future which we can both see awaits us. In time, this will all be over and we\u2019ll not be together. We both sense it but we say nothing. But it\u2019s there nonetheless, uncoiling in the silence whenever we dress, and so we almost never dress.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But these strange rooms will always be here. When time fissures and the past opens up again the way the earth cracks open and swallows men when the pressure beneath the surface becomes too great for even the mountains to bear. The window of the car flying down the highway where in the back seat you took my hand and slid it between your legs beneath your steel blue dress, is somehow always open. The window into our bedroom as we disappear beneath the sheets, is somehow always open, there for us to peer inside or crawl through when the hair is turning grey and the lines are getting deeper in the face and the body slows and the healing takes longer and the hangovers are so bad you just avoid the drink altogether, and the bedtime is earlier because staying up all night is arduous and avoided at all costs because there\u2019s nothing left in darkness of the night that hasn\u2019t already been discovered, and the meals are square and lungs are free from the tobacco and hash and we\u2019re packing the kids\u2019 lunch and we\u2019re stuck in traffic on the way to work and the bills are late and the eyes are heavier and heavier and you\u2019ve been gone for so long. And you\u2019ve been gone for so long.These spaces still live on in the cartography of love. These windows and doors always there to be open. Into a room where you\u2019re stepping out of a shower into a world that\u2019s long left us now and your hair is long and wet and there\u2019s no tomorrow or yesterday, just an ever-growing room bill and a warm Pacific wind twirling the drapes like the ghosts of a dervish as you open the door and you\u2019re just a silhouette behind the morning light and you open your mouth to speak but instead of words comes blinding light, a terrifying explosion and when I open my eyes again there\u2019s just the dim light from the candles and the flickering tiles in the bathroom and the hissing of a few spent fireworks casings set off by some kids in the courtyard.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It will be months before they find my body and it will not be a pretty sight. With the birdshit all around me. With mosquito eggs in my rotted nostrils. Any number of insects will have settled in my hair and ears to spawn their young. And in my decaying gaping mouth I\u2019ll hear the crack of pigeon egg as a hatchling sees light for the first time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
(novel extract) Lungs on fire. Thighs on fire. Love on fire. I leapt two steps, three steps at a time up the stairs to the platform as I heard the train come to a stop. I\u2019d known it was her climbing the platform for that eastbound train one stop earlier because I knew the shape […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":22679,"template":"","categories":[61,10],"class_list":["post-22740","stsp_text","type-stsp_text","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-issue-30","category-prosa"],"yoast_head":"\n